Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

One Hundred Candles by Raymond Steiber

© 1998 by Raymond Steiber

On the book jacket of one of Raymond Steiber’s mystery novels, renowned mystery editor Joan Kahn wrote, “We’re not going to tell you anything about the author — because he’s not telling.” That was many years ago, but the retiring Mr. Steiber, who currently lives in North Carolina, hasn’t changed his view of self-promotion. We’ll let his work speak for him.

Her high heels were clicking along the sidewalk of a narrow street near the Plaza Municipal when she first saw them. They were in the front seat of a shiny black Jeep Cherokee and they both wore jet black sunglasses. The one on the right turned his head and stared at her. It was not the usual male stare, the kind that quickly slipped below the neck and appraised the body. It locked on her face and as the Jeep passed followed her, not to catch a glimpse of the dress twitching across her rear end, but to make sure — to mark her.

She turned the next corner as rapidly as she could, and only her own sunglasses disguised the fact that she was nearly in tears. Tears of fear, anger, and dismay.

The dogs have come, she thought.

But then Patricio had said they would.

But why now — when her mind was on other things? The dry heat of the Sonoran afternoon. The feel of her body against the fabric of her dress. The look of herself as she was reflected in this or that store window — good-looking, yet a little hard. Why now, when she’d managed to put the very possibility of them — at least for this day — out of her head?

She turned into a bar — a working man’s cantina — no place for a well-turned chica to find herself alone. It was dark after the glare of the street, and fortunately empty. She knew the bartender — that was why she’d sought refuge there. He was a friend of Patricio’s — assuming Patricio still had any friends in this place — anyone who could afford to be his friend.

She put her hands on the bar, and her gold bracelets jangled against the formica.

She said: “Do you want me to tell you what a madrina looks like?” Her voice was higher pitched than usual and sharp with sarcasm.

Justo, the bartender, gazed at her with eyes that seemed asleep.

“Tell me,” he said. He didn’t ask which sort of madrina.

“He has a black suit and a black tie and he wears sunglasses as dark as night. And he carries a fold-up cellular phone in his pocket and he drives an air-conditioned Jeep Cherokee with tinted glass all around. It must be like riding in an aquarium — hey? Or at the bottom of the sea.”

Justo raised his shoulders. “It could be anyone.”

“No. It was the madrinas. They looked at me and they knew who I was. That’s Barbara. See how she’s tried to make herself look like a norteamericana. But she’s one of us anyway and no amount of hair dye will hide it. What will you say if they come here?”

Justo took a limonada from under the bar. He popped the cap and put it in front of her along with a glass. The Jeep Cherokee cruised by on the street outside. She could see it reflected in the spotted mirror behind the bar — dimly because of her sunglasses and the dirty exterior window — like a vaguely threatening image from a dream.

The limonada fizzed in its bottle. Justo looked at her and said nothing, but his expression was infinitely sad.

“Just what I thought,” she said.

She turned on her heel and click-click-clicked her way down the bar and out the back.

In the street the glare of the sun seemed to leave her naked. They would know where she lived, and it was many hours till sunset. She took to the alleys. Once, passing the open back door of a coffee bar where the young gathered, she heard the blare of the latest narco ballad — how Juan Orozco had flown high on yanqui drug money and how in the end the white dress of the muy linda Maria had been spotted with his blood. She wanted to scream then — not with terror or anguish but with hot flowing anger.

She reached the wasteland at the edge of the town and removed her high-heeled shoes and stockings and stuffed them in her shoulder bag. Then she set out across the arid landscape.

There was a tienda along the dirt road that ran out to the fishing village beside the Gulf. She reached it in half an hour and filled a burlap bag with this and that from its shelves. Matches. Patricio had particularly insisted on matches. Then she drank a cola in the shade of the eaves and set off for the hills.

She was supposed to have brought the old Ford Fiesta — the one with one fender a different color from the rest and a cracked windshield. The key for it was on a chain around her neck. She could feel the metal of it against the skin of her breasts — warm now, almost a part of her, where in the morning it had been cool and alien.

There was a place where she was to have left the car, then gone on foot several miles across the hills. Now she’d have to walk all the way. Maybe the madrinas would know about the Fiesta. Maybe they’d watch it and not realize she’d already gone.

Madrinas, she thought, and spat. Bridesmaids. Bridesmaids of death. They were assassins of a special sort. Rogue members of the federal police who hired themselves out to the new breed of narco bandits as hit men. But that’s Mexico — hey? The poor get ground into the dirt and the police sell themselves to the drug traffickers. And the Big Pockets in the capital want everyone to respect them! But no one respects them — not even their new tame friends in Washington.

But how were she and Patricio any different? Hadn’t they also seen their chance and grabbed for it? As if they didn’t know how it always ended for people like them. With pretty Maria wailing over the body of her slaughtered bridegroom.

She emptied her mind and continued walking. When her mouth grew dry, she took an orange out of the sack and cut a notch in it and sucked on it. The sun climbed down the sky and threw her shadow before her and reddened the hills. Then a rusty orange dusk settled and she found the path she was hunting for. It took her into the hills, and at last there was the abandoned village. A dozen adobe houses, their roofs long gone, their walls pocked by ancient gunfire — bullets from the time of Villa and Zapata and the Revolucion.

He came out to meet her in the dusk. The white teeth showed in his sun-darkened face and the blue eyes — eyes she loved because they were so different from the other eyes she knew — seemed to smile at her.

“Barbara,” he said. Then again: “Barbara,” but this time the way an Anglo would say it — as if he were practicing.

He took the burlap bag from her and they embraced.

“Your mouth tastes of oranges,” he said.

“Never mind how my mouth tastes. The madrinas have come.”

He continued to hold her. But he didn’t look at her.

“Well, it was expected,” he said after a moment.

“Someone will talk. They’ll come here.”

“No one knows where I am.”

“This is Sonora — everyone knows and they whisper it everywhere. And when the time comes they’ll whisper it to them.”

He let go of her.

“Did you bring the Ford?”

“I couldn’t. They saw me. They knew who I was. I didn’t dare go near it.”

“It would have been a gamble anyway, that old car. Come, sit down. And if there’s bread and cheese in this bag we’ll make a modest meal.”

“How can you take this so calmly?”

“I’m filled with fear. Doesn’t it show? I don’t want to be the subject of one of their ballads. I don’t want them talking in the cantinas about how I fell on my knees when they came and begged for my life.”

“You’d never beg.”

“You don’t think so? But yes, I think so. It’s so painful, Barbara, to give up this life. But it won’t stop them. No, they pull the trigger all the faster if you beg. It encourages them.”

They were seated now on an old stone bench outside one of the ruined houses. He had a jug of water there and poured some into a tin cup for her.

She drank, tasting the tin and the cool of the water.

She said: “Is there no way you can square things with Jorge?”

“Ai — but we’ve talked about this before, Barbara. Jorge’s feet are no more solid than mine. In this business a man has a run of three, maybe five, good years, and Jorge’s had seven. He has to show the Big Pockets that he’s still a serious hombre, that he knows what to do about an underling who loses a shipment of the wonderful white powder the yanquis like to stick up their noses. Never mind that it was the police themselves that grabbed it and are now selling it on their own. And never mind either that I was outgunned and barely escaped with my life. When big money’s lost, somebody has to pay — that’s the rule. And who’s the peon around here?”

“We never should’ve got into this business,” she said sharply.

“What other way was there for us to make a few pesos? Maybe if my father had been a real father to me — but truly he was as worthless as the rest. And anyway, you’re not in this business, I am.”

“What happens to you happens to me.”

“I hope not. Because those madrinas are surely going to fill my belly with lead.”

“Don’t talk like this.”

“What other way should I talk? Here, eat something.”

“I can’t eat something. Not when you’re like this. Patricio, you were always so smart. Figure a way out of this.”

“How smart was it to get involved with Jorge? You know what his friends, the Big Pockets, say NAFTA stands for?”

“I don’t care what they say it stands for.”

“They say it means Narcotics Are Freely Transported Anywhere.” He paused and stared off at the horizon a moment. Then he spoke again. “They’ll come for Jorge one day, those madrinas. The Big Pockets will grow tired of him. Not that it’s any consolation.”

He ate some bread and cheese, washed it down with water from the jug. He still has an appetite, she thought. That’s something anyway. But he’d always been a good eater, a big fork man, and yet he remained slim and sinewy. “Like my father,” he’d told her. The Irishman who’d given him his blue eyes.

The night came down. He said: “Did you bring the matches?”

“Yes. Did you think I’d forget?”

“Come. I’ll show you what I need them for.”

There was a church at the other end of the village — little more than a chapel really, roofless and abandoned like everything else. He took her hand and led her to it through the darkness. It still had a wooden door, but one of the hinges had gone and it sat at an angle. He pushed it aside, then lit a match.

“It gets cold up here at night, Barbara, and I only had the one blanket. Then I found these in the basement — there must be a hundred of them down there — and figured a way to keep warm.”

He bent and applied the match and a candle came to life. Then he bent and lit another.

“The Zapatistas used the basement here to store weapons. Not these new Zapatistas with their Subcommander Marcos, but the original ones who followed Emilio in 1913. They’re the ones who must have left them here — a whole sackful of them.”

And all the time lighting new candles until the whole floor seemed covered with them — all but a blank space right in the middle.

“That’s where I sleep,” he told her. And she felt like screaming because he must look just like a corpse as he lay there — as if he were practicing the role for the madrinas.

“You’d be surprised how much heat these candles put out. But what’s wrong? You’ve gone white as a sheet.”

“Put them out!” she screamed. “Put them out! Don’t you see what you’ve been doing? You’ve been laying yourself out for a funeral!”

He grabbed her and held her while she shook in his arms.

“Put them out,” she whispered desperately into his shoulder.

He extinguished the candles and took her back to the place where the food was. Then he covered her with a blanket and lay down beside her and held her till she grew calm again.

“Those candles,” he began.

“I don’t want to hear about them,” she said sharply.

“But you’d better. But maybe later — hey?”

“Never.”

He continued to hold her. She was in one of those rare moods when she didn’t want to talk but she wanted him to talk just to hear the sound of his voice. Oh, how they knew each other and how to respond to each other. Since children almost — hating and loving and then only loving but fighting anyway because that was their temperament. Or maybe only her temperament though she’d never admit it.

So he talked about anything that came to his head, and she shook sometimes and was ashamed of it. Ashamed that she wasn’t strong when he needed her to be strong and not a burden. He pretended not to notice, but the way he held her, the way he caressed her, said that he was aware of every tremor.

There, under the open night sky, he began telling her about his father, the wild Irishman who’d sired him without bothering to marry his mother. A painter who’d sold what canvases he could to the turistas in the plaza, then, in drink or despair, slashed the rest with a palette knife. He’d heard them moaning sometimes in the other room, his mother and that man who never paid any attention to him, and wondered if that was how they’d sounded the night they made him. “He had one great friend — an old Hungarian who’d come here after World War Two for the sun and to forget the past. They drank as much as they could, whatever they could get their hands on — cheap wine, aguardiente, hard American liquor — and the more they drank the wilder my father got but the more calm the Hungarian became. So at the end of the night it was always he who brought my father home, like a kind uncle caring for a simpleminded nephew.

“Then one evening the police came and the Hungarian with them. They showed articles of clothing to my mother and asked her to identify them. They’d been found in a rocky place along the shore where the current was swift and the water deep, and there was some sort of drunken note with them that made no sense in either Spanish or English. This man has suicided himself, the old Hungarian said. There can be no doubt. But small as I was, I still saw that there were no shoes in that pile. And why would a man intent on drowning himself leave behind his pants and shirt and underwear but no shoes? The Hungarian sensed that I had seen something and got me outside and took me to a nearby store where he bribed me with sweets. And I thought: At last I got something from that bastard who sired me. I got these sweets.

“Later, until he died himself, the old Hungarian would slip me money and pretend that it came from my father. But it came from him — my father never gave me nothing. Well, maybe he gave me two things, both of them by mistake. And if I get lucky maybe I’ll use those two things to outfox the madrinas. They’re only hired killers, after all, but I’ve got the blood of Toltec warriors and mad Irishmen in my veins.”

He lapsed into silence. She slept some, came awake, slept again. But always he was awake and staring out into the starry night and his mind was working, working. She could almost feel it trembling within him like a motor. But what it grappled with — the madrinas or the past that had brought him to this place — she could not know.

Once he spoke again, more to the night than to her. “I don’t miss it — the bright new car we had to get rid of because the madrinas were sure to spot it, the hard American dollars. I don’t care to be a saint, but at least I understand now why they went out into the desert. To free themselves, hey? Well, I’ve done the same thing.”

Then she heard it on the edge of her dreams — and he heard it, too, and touched her and woke her. An engine growling along in low gear. He got to his feet and she rose up, too. He stood there, chuffing his breath as if someone had hit him a great blow. Then his wits seemed to remember who their master was.

He grabbed the burlap bag and dumped part of its contents on the ground, just cast them there like a sign. Then he thrust the bag into her arms and gripped her shoulder.

“Remember the place I showed you above the village? The depression beyond the lip of the hill?”

“I remember.”

“Go there and lie low. Here, take the jug of water, too.”

“What if it’s not them?”

“Then it’s somebody else. What difference does it make? You must be out of here. This is my affair alone.”

“No. I’ll stay. I’ll help you.”

“You help me best by getting out of sight. If they find you they’ll use you. Don’t you understand? They’ll use you against me. And afterwards God knows what they’ll do to you.”

“Rape? Do you think I’m afraid of that when they might kill you?”

“Ah, rape — that’s not their style. But who can repair a bullet in the brain? Now do as I tell you — I beg you. This is difficult enough.”

He turned away, and after a moment she turned away, too. She found the path up the hill and followed it in the starlight. Far down the track she could see the red wash of the brake lights of the vehicle. And amber too sometimes. They were driving up on their parking lights so as not to alert them — as if the sound of their engine wasn’t enough. Ai — it was them all right. Who else would trouble to come out here? And what other vehicle but a four-wheel drive Cherokee could climb the steep track? Certainly not that joke of a Fiesta.

When she reached the top of the hill she paused to look back at the village. Patricio’s dark figure was moving among the abandoned houses, doing this thing and that, she didn’t know what. Then he was at the door to the church. He went inside, and a moment later the first candle flared. Then more candles — a perfect blaze of them. She had a premonition then that he was going to lie down amongst them like a corpse — just as she’d imagined him — and wait for the madrinas. That would be his gesture, the way he would be remembered in the ballads.

She stood there trembling. She wanted to run back to the village and pull him out of there. Then the Cherokee arrived at the top of the track and there was no more time.

She found the depression and dropped into its shadow. Then she peered out over the rim. Down below, the madrinas had already climbed out of their vehicle. They stood on either side of it, alert, but sure of themselves as well — as if they owned this place. One of them had his teeth clamped around a small cigar. He puffed on it and the tip glowed red.

Their coats were open, and now the one on the left took a big, gleaming pistol out of his belt — yes, even in the starlight it shone silver and deadly, like one of those movie guns that Schwarzenegger and Stallone carry. The other one took out a similar pistol and worked the receiver and chambered a round. The awful, metallic sound it made — she wanted to stop her ears. This was real, this was happening.

Her eyes swung back to the church. Patricio had closed the door and no light showed. But if you were high above, as she was, and could look down somewhat, you could see a faint interior glow.

The two men spoke to each other in low tones. They might be confident, but they still didn’t like this place. There were too many spots for their quarry to hide and all the dark hills in the world for him to run away to. But Patricio had chosen to stay, and now he made that point clear by sending something to the ground in one of the abandoned houses.

Instantly the two men were moving. One crouched beside the Cherokee and thrust his weapon straight out in front of him. The other flattened himself against a wall near the stone bench. Patricio had left the church then, but where in all those shadows was he?

The men were listening to something — a rustle of cloth maybe — at any rate, some faint sound of movement. They made hand gestures to each other. Then in another moment they were in motion again. They went through the doorway of one of the houses, one high, one low, their pistols covering different portions of the single room beyond. Nothing — for an instant, two instants — nothing at all. Then a flash at the glass-less window and the whang of a shot — like a hammer coming down on a metal sheet.

Her heart stopped. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it seemed to stop for an entire minute. Then a dark figure moved like a shadow between two of the houses. The madrinas boiled out of the doorway. One circled left, one circled right. Now the houses hid them from her, and they hid that shadow she’d seen as well.

She tried to remember a prayer — any prayer — but her mind was as dry as her throat.

Shuffling sounds amongst the houses. Feet sliding sideways without lifting themselves from the ground. Then silence. Absolute silence. She could feel the blood pounding through her head. Feel it in her eyes so that they seemed to throb with the strain of watching.

I should’ve got my own pistol, she thought. I should’ve killed those dogs in the street the first time I saw them and spared myself this.

And still no sounds in the village below as the seconds attenuated themselves like wires being stretched to the snapping point.

Then there was the whang of a shot. Then two whangs in quick succession. The flash of the muzzles threw brief light into the dark spaces between the houses. Flash and gone — like that. Then flash-flash and the metallic echo carrying across the hills.

A figure detached itself from the shadows. It ran crookedly across the open space before the church. When it reached the door, it more or less collapsed against it. One hand went to the adobe wall for support and left a splotch there like blood. The door was shoved aside, and the tiny flames of the candles — dozens and dozens of them — threw light out against the darkness. The figure rolled inside, disappeared. And now the madrinas came loping — dark hunters with silver weapons in their hands. They threw themselves up against the wall on either side of the church door. One of them pointed out the splotch and said something. The other nodded. They went through the door — same as before — high, low, pistols pointed in opposite directions. They fired almost instantly, but this time the flashes were lost in the candlelight. Each shot brought a sob of pain from Barbara’s throat.

They came back out. Inside, candles had been knocked over, probably by Patricio in his mad flight. Now a blaze had started — that old wooden floor and anything else that would burn. One of the men stood guard a dozen feet from the door with a pistol in his hand. The other took a foldup cellular phone from his pocket and extended the antenna. Soon he was talking into it in low tones.

The fire spread. The interior of the church became a mass of flames. The one on guard put away his pistol and took out a cigar. He made a rude joke and the one with the cellular phone laughed.

She rose to her feet, not caring whether she was seen or not. She was trembling in every limb and tears of anger and despair coursed down her face. He was in there. He was dying — and there was nothing she could do about it.

Then a hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her back down into the shadow, and another hand closed over her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out.

“It’s me,” a familiar voice whispered. “Did you think I didn’t have a plan?”

Then added: “I just wasn’t sure it would work.”

She saw the madrinas one last time. It was in the side mirror of a bus idling away in the Plaza Municipal. They were seated halfway back, her in a scarf that hid her hair and him in a funny hat that made him look like a turisto.

The madrinas had just come out of an expensive restaurant and were hitching up their pants and lighting cigars. They’d done their job — hey? Now it was time to enjoy themselves.

From where Patricio was seated he couldn’t see them, and she didn’t tell him that they were there. On the hike into town he’d explained about the business of the church. How he’d deliberately slashed the palm of his left hand — it had a white bandage on it now — so he could leave splotches of blood where they’d see them. “So they’d think they’d wounded me,” he’d said. Then he’d huddled like a man in pain at the top of the broken basement steps, waiting for them.

“Those big-caliber pistols — they’ve got a kick. It’s very hard to hit anything with them more than a few feet away. So I took a chance and didn’t roll backward till they fired. And at the same time I banged down the steps I yanked a line I’d rigged and the candles went over like ninepins. I’d poured paraffin from my camp stove all over the wooden floor and right away there was a terrific blaze. Those damned madrinas didn’t know what happened. They thought they’d put hot lead in me and that if I wasn’t dead yet the flames would soon make me that way. But the Zapatistas had made an escape shaft and I used it to get out of there. I did to them what my father had done to me and my mother. Made myself look dead and then walked off in my own shoes.”

He showed her something else that related to his father. “The damned fool signed his name to my birth certificate. He must have been drunk at the time because he surely never meant to acknowledge me. And a year ago, thanks to that, I obtained this thing.” An Irish passport with his real name in it — the name that father he despised had given him. Patrick O’Hearn — the same as his own.

“We can go anywhere with this.” He laughed. “Even Ireland itself.”

“But what would we do there?”

“We’d do something. Isn’t that enough?”

The bus began moving. She glanced a final time into the outside mirror. The madrinas were still standing on the sidewalk with their cigars. One of them had removed his sunglasses, and his eyes were narrowed against the glare. He looked like a well-groomed rat blinded by the sun.