Hydra Head

28

FELIX BOUGHT a white fiber hat at the Coatzacoalcos airport and took the first Mexicana flight. In Mexico City he caught a Pan-American Airlines flight to Houston. He had a visa for multiple entries into the United States, and the immigration officials saw no discrepancy between the photograph on the passport and the moustached face of the man wearing a white hat and black sunglasses. Bernstein was right; these men weren’t looking for him.

In Houston he rented a Ford Pinto at the airport Hertz desk and got on the highway to Galveston. He had a day to kill; the Port Authority at Coatzacoalcos had told him that the Emmita made no ports before Galveston; she was carrying a cargo of natural gas from Mexico to Texas, and in Texas she was taking on refined products destined for the East Coast of the United States. It was her normal trading route, and she called in at Coatzacoalcos every two weeks except in the winter, when the northers held her up a little. Her captain was named H. L. Harding, but he hadn’t made this run because of illness. And no one had seen a woman go aboard.

The August heat on the barren plain between Houston and Galveston is unrelieved by hills or woods or aromas — except that of gasoline. Felix was grateful for the long, straight highway that allowed him to drive without major distractions and see before him, instead of the dirty Texas sun, the opaque moon of the face he’d glimpsed in the porthole of the Emmita, a face he’d always compared to Louise Brooks’s in Pandora’s Box; the more he thought about it, the more the cinema buff in him substituted a second, the stark white face of Machiko Kyo in Ugetsu Monagatari, the flesh consciously artificial in its mortuary whiteness, the false eyebrows tracing an arc of conjecture over the real, shaved-off brows; the phantom gaze merging into the vigilant sleep of Japanese eyes, the painted mouth a rosebud of blood.

Felix was dizzied by the contrast between the daylight scene of the reverberating Texas plain and the nocturnal vision of Japan, a misty moon following a rain, a night of ancient spirits and sorceresses who take possession of the bodies of virgins in order to effect a festering revenge, visions echoed in the night he’d spent in Coatzacoalcos, the bloody beef carcasses, the vultures, and dovecotes installed in the ruins of a fire, the silvery cupolas of the refinery, Bernstein’s room, the rococo hotel, the cambujo … and the white profile of Sara Klein glimpsed against the darkness of the S.S. Emmita.

The vision was so confused and so powerful that he felt ill and had to stop the car; he crossed his arms over the steering wheel and rested his head; he closed his eyes and repeated wordlessly that from the beginning of this adventure he’d sworn to be wholly accessible, ready to respond to any situation, to be led by any suggestion, to be open to all alternatives, and — and this was the most difficult of all — to keep his mind razor-sharp, assessing the deliberate or the chance accidents others created for him, to be aware of them, but never to prevent or avoid them.

“For a few weeks, you’ll be living in a kind of voluntary hypnosis,” I’d told him as I explained what he might encounter. “If not, our operation may fail.”

“I don’t like the word hypnosis,” Felix had said, smiling his Moorish smile, so like that of Velázquez. “I’d rather call it fascination. I’ll allow myself to be fascinated by everything that happens to me. Maybe that’s the fulcrum between the exercise of will you’re asking of me, and fate.”

“No parking on the expressway.” Someone was tapping Felix on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t feel well,” said Felix, raising his head from the wheel to see the beefy arm of a State Policeman.

“You a dago or a spick? You people shouldn’t be allowed to drive. I don’t know what this country’s coming to. Ain’t no real Americans left. All right, get going,” said the patrolman with the broad, red Irish face.

Felix drove on. A half hour later he was in Galveston, and drove directly to the offices of the Port Authority. He asked for the date and the hour of the arrival of the S.S. Emmita, en route from Coatzacoalcos under the Panamanian flag.

The shortsleeved clerk told him, first, to close the door or the air conditioning wouldn’t do any good, and second, that the Emmita wasn’t going to arrive anywhere, for the simple reason that she’d been undergoing repairs in dry dock. Why didn’t he speak with Captain Harding who was supervising the work.

There is no more insolent sun than one struggling through a veil of clouds, and the thermometer was hovering around 98 degrees when Felix located a bare-chested old man standing beside the disabled hull of the S.S. Emmita, Panama. A frayed cap with a worn leather visor protected him against the burning sun. Felix asked if he was Harding. The man nodded yes.

“Do you speak Spanish?”

Again the old man nodded. “I’ve been in and out of the ports along the Gulf and the Caribbean for thirty years.”

“And you never get sick?”

“I’m too old to get the clap and too tough for anything else,” Harding replied good-humoredly.

“I saw the Emmita weigh anchor last night in Coatzacoalcos, Captain.”

“The sun’s pretty strong,” Harding replied kindly.

“It’s the truth.”

“Dammit, my tanker isn’t the Flying Dutchman. Look at ’er, no wings.”

“Well, I have wings. I flew here today from Coatzacoalcos. Your tanker left the dock at midnight and should reach Galveston tomorrow afternoon about four.”

“Who spun you that fairy tale?”

“The Port Authority, and a freckled sailor who promised to kick the shit out of me here.”

“You’re sick, mister. You better get in out of the sun. Come along with me and we’ll have a beer.”

“When will your ship be repaired?”

“We sail day after tomorrow.”

“For Coatzacoalcos?”

The old man nodded, scratching the white horsehair mattress on his chest.

“They said you weren’t aboard because you were sick.”

“The bastards said that?”

“If what I’m telling you is true, can I count on your help?”

The old man’s eyes flickered like tiny stars in a sky of wrinkles. “If some bastard’s knocking around the Gulf using the name of my ship, you wait and see, I’ll be the one who’ll knock the shit out of the whole kit and caboodle, damn pirates! Maybe they fooled the Mexican authorities and they’re headed for another port.”

“I don’t think Freckles was lying. He said Galveston all right. He saw my machete and thought I was a drunken Indian.”

Felix accepted Captain Harding’s hospitality and spent the rest of the afternoon asleep on the sofa in his little gray wooden house by the slick, oily waters of the Gulf. Harding left him, and returned about ten that night. He’d hurried the repairs along, and had brought beer, sandwiches, and a list of all the tankers due to dock the next morning in the port of Galveston. They read it together, but the names told them nothing. Harding said they were all names of legitimate ships, but if those buccaneering pigs were changing names in every port, there was no way they could find out.

“Do you have any way of recognizing her if you see ’er, fella?”

Felix shook his head. “Only if I see the man with the freckles. Or the woman on board.”

“Never had a woman on my tanker.”

“That’s what they tell me. There was one on this one.”

“It’s hard to tell one tanker from another. We don’t get rigged up for a carnival like the cruise ships and all those fag outriggers on the Caribbean. All a tanker has to do is change her name.” Again he read the list aloud: the Graham, the Evelyn, the Corfu, the Culebra Cut, the Alice …

Felix slapped the captain’s strong, age-spotted hand. “The Alice!” He laughed.

“Yessir, and the Royal and the Darien … You always so tickled at the names of ships?” Harding, slightly annoyed, interrupted his reading.

“Bernstein’s lapse.” Felix laughed, striking his knees with his fists. “‘What a curious coincidence, as Ionesco and Alice would say.’ Really. Curiouser and curiouser…”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” said Harding, again afraid that Felix was either crazy or sunstruck.

“What time does the Alice dock tomorrow, Captain?”

29

AT FOUR O’CLOCK on the afternoon of the following day, the S.S. Alice docked beneath low-hanging clouds in Galveston. The Stars and Stripes drooped above a bow proclaiming Mobile as the tanker’s port of origin. Harding had situated Felix in the best place to see without being seen. The freckled sailor was freeing the chain to drop the gangplank, calling to the stevedores on the dock.

Leaning against the steel side of a warehouse and hidden behind a latticework of similar columns, Felix watched a tall, elegant man in white walk the length of the dock toward the gangplank: Mauricio Rossetti, the Director General’s private secretary. He stopped and waited for the completion of the docking maneuvers.

Aided by the freckled sailor, the false Sara Klein descended. She saw Rossetti and ran happily toward him. She started to kiss him, but he discreetly declined, took her arm firmly, and led her toward the exit gate. The woman was closer now and Felix could see that the imitation, if an imitation had indeed been intended, was crude, and appropriate only for deceiving fools like him hopelessly in love with women unattainable either in life or in death. But there was no mistaking the intent: the Louise Brooks haircut, the powder-whitened Machiko Kyo face, the slate-blue tailored suit.

Angelica Rossetti had studied Sara closely during the dinner party the previous week in the San Angel home filled with paintings by Ricardo Martínez. But everything about her was false; the only truth was the clear stone ring sparkling on her finger, an inter-stellar combat of luminous pinpoints in the dusk. The mounting was new. Felix rubbed the stoneless ring in his pocket.

He followed the couple from a distance. As he passed the tanker, his fingertips brushed the flagrant scar inflicted by his machete. Felix, never taking his eyes off the Rossettis, raised his arm, and Harding, who had been awaiting the signal, rushed the ship with three port policemen. The freckled sailor watching from the rail dropped his rope and disappeared into the ship. Harding and the police went aboard. Our stubby friend Freckles won’t have an ounce of shit left in his body, Felix thought.

Angelica’s only luggage was the dressing case she was carrying. She and her husband got into a Cadillac limousine driven by a chauffeur sweating beneath his gray cap. Felix climbed into the Pinto and followed them as they headed directly for the expressway to Houston.

The Rossettis’ limousine came to a stop before the white elegance of the Warwick Hotel. Felix drove to the nearby parking lot. Suitcase in hand, he entered the refrigerated comfort of the hotel. The Rossettis were registering. Felix waited until a clerk had led them through the lobby and along a row of exclusive boutiques. That meant they’d been given one of the rooms on the large crescent ringing the swimming pool. The sweating chauffeur delivered the Rossettis’ suitcases to the doorman; they still bore the Mexico-Houston luggage tags. As Felix reached the desk, the clerk was instructing the bellboy to carry Señor Rossetti’s suitcases to room number 6. Felix told the clerk that he enjoyed an early swim, and requested a room by the pool.

“It’s nice at night, too,” the Chicano clerk told him in Spanish. “The swimming pool’s open till twelve midnight. And we have facilities for parties in the cabanas.”

“How about 8, is it free?” Felix was betting that rooms facing the pool all had even numbers.

The Chicano said yes, the room was available. The bellboy carried Felix’s suitcase to his room and opened the heavy drapes for the guest to admire his private terrace and view of the swimming pool. He left, after explaining how to regulate the thermostat.

Felix undressed, but even though his body felt as sticky as a sucked caramel, he didn’t dare shower. He stood near the communicating door between his and the Rossettis’ rooms, hoping to overhear something; nothing but the clinking of glasses, muffled footsteps, drawers opening and closing, and once, the strident voice of Angelica, no, not now, not after the way you greeted me, and Rossetti’s inaudible reply.

Then the door of the adjoining room opened and closed. Felix half opened his door and peered down the hall in time to see the tall and elegant figure of Mauricio Rossetti. Felix was paralyzed with indecision. If Rossetti had the stone with him, it wouldn’t be impossible for Felix to recover it, only more difficult. He hurried to the bed and pulled on his swim trunks, preparing to follow Rossetti; after all, he knew where Angelica was, but the private secretary was leaving the hotel. As he leaned over, he saw a reflection in the sliding door to the terrace.

On the neighboring terrace, two hands grasped the light blue railing, unaware of the game of reflections facilitated by the sudden darkness. On the finger of one of those hands shone the ring with the clear stone.

He waited. Maybe Angelica would take a nap, and he would only have to vault the low parapet separating the two terraces. Again the Rossettis’ door opened and closed. Felix watched a white-robed, barefoot Angelica walk toward the pool; after making sure no lights were on in his room, he stepped onto the terrace. Angelica Rossetti was wearing a bikini beneath her robe; she dived into the water. Felix hurriedly donned the white robe hanging in his own bathroom, placed the room key in the pocket, and ran toward the pool.

Angelica emerged from the water and climbed onto the diving board. Again she dived. Felix tossed aside the robe and plunged into the opposite end of the pool.

The water was overly warm, the pool illuminated with submerged lights. In spite of the chlorine, Felix kept his eyes open; he saw Angelica, eyes closed, cleansed forever of the mask of Sara Klein, moving toward him in the water with regular strokes of arms and feet.

Felix rolled slightly and seized Angelica by the neck; she uttered the strangled cry of a wounded shark; the water shattered like crystal around them, a Laocoön-like figure shot toward the surface, though in this case each must have believed the other the serpent.

Felix could only imagine the terror in Angelica’s eyes. He clamped his hand over her mouth and again thrust her beneath the surface, her body yielded, and he was reminded of a woman who for a moment resists an overture for the sake of appearances, then suddenly surrenders. He grappled for Angelica’s hand and tore the ring from her finger. In other circumstances, this strong-minded, athletic woman, who went swimming every day with Ruth at the Chapultepec Sports Club, would have defended herself better; she now seemed incapable of offering resistance, and Felix’s arms again embraced her, this time to lift her from the pool.

The contact with the almost inanimate body excited him; some women are at their most beautiful at rest, and Angelica, normally aggressive and very much the lady, now resembled a goddess rescued from the sea, proud, solitary and sensual, as Felix left her almost lifeless beside the pool.

He dressed hurriedly, left the hotel, and drove off in the Pinto. Once on the superhighway to Galveston, at moments when the lights from a passing car allowed it, he held the stone round as a marble, clear as the waters of the swimming pool, and sparking a thousand lights of its own, between his thumb and index finger to study it, seeking its secret, its flaw. He was driving ninety miles an hour, and had no time to stop.

When he reached Captain Harding’s gray cottage, he tested the stone in the mounting of Bernstein’s ring; it fit perfectly, and he replaced it in its original setting. Even as he did so, he laughed at himself; how many mountings had it enjoyed, this indecipherable object, whose secret, he was sure, would turn out to be as obvious as Poe’s purloined letter.

Harding was waiting for him. He recounted without dramatics how the captain of the Alice and the freckled sailor had been arrested and charged with conspiracy, illegal exercise of authority, fraud, and misrepresentation; they’d thrown the book at them, he said. No lack of charges. And Harding added that he’d even managed to punch Freckles in the mouth when he admitted it was he who, suspended on a painter’s rig somewhere between Coatzacoalcos and Galveston, had changed the white letters on the stern of the ship. The Emmita would sail in the morning at six and within forty-eight hours be in Coatzacoalcos. Could he do anything for Felix?

“Would this ring fit your finger, Captain?”

Harding observed the stone with some reservation and tried it on his finger. “Fits all right, but the boys’ll have a good laugh. I’ll look like a Lolla Palooza sporting a rock like this.”

“Like who?”

“Guess you didn’t read the funny papers? Forget it. Before your time. Don’t worry. To think they insulted me that way, my ship, my name, my reputation, everything. They retire sick old men, you know. My friend, I love the Emmita like a woman. She’s everything I have in the world. It’s like those bastards buggered her. Who do I give the ring to?”

“Do you know The Tempest?”

“I’ve known ’em all.” The old man laughed.

“A boy and girl will be waiting for you at the dock at Coatzacoalcos. They will ask you if you’ve come on behalf of Prospero, and you’ll tell them yes. They’ll ask you where Prospero is, and you’ll say in his cell. Give them the ring.”

“Prospero,” repeated Harding. “In his cell.”

“The sea has its sadness, doesn’t it, Harding?”

“Like a mother who outlives her children,” the old man replied.

30

HE HAD NO DIFFICULTY identifying the sounds in the Rossettis’ room. When he returned from Galveston, he left his door ajar and called me in Mexico City to relay the quotes from The Tempest. Before hanging up, he added with the blend of defiance and humor so typical of my friend Felix Maldonado: “Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.”

“Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,” I replied, first because I wasn’t willing to be outdone by Felix, but also because it was my way of letting him know that, as with him, my personal emotions occasionally became entangled with my professional obligations, and that, like me, Felix must learn to keep the two separate. “And therefore I forbid my tears.”

Felix held the receiver to the open door so I could hear the movement of doctors and nurses and resuscitation equipment; apparently, he even expected the odors of antiseptic and medication to flow through the telephone lines from Houston to Mexico City. It was I who hung up.

Felix slept peacefully; he had sufficient evidence that Angelica was the dominant one and that Rossetti wouldn’t make a move until his wife had recovered. A drowning person either dies instantly or is instantly saved. Death by water admits no twilight zone; it is black, immediate night, or day as luminous as the one Felix discovered when he opened the drapes. A wind from the north was sweeping the heavy gray clouds toward the sea, washing clean the urban profile of Houston. I, on the other hand, dreamed uneasily of my dead sister, Angelica, floating in a river like a sylvan siren adorned with fantastic garlands.

About three in the afternoon, the Rossettis left their room, Angelica leaning heavily on her husband’s arm, and entered the Cadillac waiting at the hotel entrance. Felix again followed in the Pinto. The limousine stopped before a building soaring toward the sky like an arrow of copper-colored crystal. The couple got out, and Felix double-parked, so as not to lose sight of them, and hurried into the building, just as the Rossettis were getting into the elevator.

He watched to see where the elevator stopped and then consulted the building directory to match the stops with the names of the offices on those floors. His job was facilitated by the fact that the Rossettis had taken the express elevator that served only the floors above the fifteenth. But he couldn’t complain of lack of variety: investment brokers, import-export companies, architectural firms, the private offices of lawyers and insurance underwriters, businesses serving the shipping and port industries, petroleum technologists, and public-relations firms.

The elevator had stopped on the top floor, the thirtieth, and Felix considered that the Rossettis’ mission might be important enough to have taken them to the penthouse executive suites. But that was the simplest deduction, and surely those two had thought of that. Felix read the names of the offices on the twenty-ninth floor. Again, lawyers’ names in lengthy lists strung together by chains of hierarchical snakes, & & &; Berkeley Building Associates; Connally Interests; Wonderland Enterprises, Inc.

“Is there a communicating stairway between the thirtieth and twenty-ninth floors?” he asked the Chicano doorman.

“Right. There’s an inside stairway that serves the whole building. With fire-retardant paint and everything. This is a safe building with all the latest. It’s only been open about six months.”

“Thanks.”

“For nothin’, paisá.”

Felix took the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor and walked to an opaque glass door with the painted sign WONDERLAND ENTERPRISES, INC. He was struck by the old-fashioned glass door in such modern surroundings; all the other offices discreetly announced their functions with tiny copper plates on doors of fine wood. He entered an ultra-air-conditioned reception room furnished with light leather couches and dwarf palms in terra-cotta pots. Presiding over all this from behind a half-moon desk was a blonde with the face of a newborn kitten, a kitten precariously teetering on the brink of forty. She was reading a copy of Viva, and she looked Felix over as if he were the centerfold in living color.

More than her question, her look invited him. “Hello, handsome. What’s on your mind?”

Felix looked in vain for a mirror, to confirm the receptionist’s compliment. “I have something to sell.”

“I like things free,” said the secretary, grinning like the Cheshire cat, and Felix took as a good sign the blonde’s unconscious literary allusions.

“I’d like to see your boss.”

The feline blonde pouted. “Oh. You’re really on business, are you? Whom shall I say is calling?”

“The White Knight.” Felix smiled.

The secretary stared at him suspiciously and automatically slid one hand beneath the desk; her magazine fell open to a nude man sitting in a swing. “Bossman busy right now. Take a seat,” the blonde said coldly, hastily closing her magazine.

“Tell him I’d like to join the tea party,” said Felix, approaching the receptionist’s desk.

“You get away from me, you dirty Mex, I know your kind, all glitter and no gold. You ain’t foolin’ this little girl.”

With his best James Cagney grimace, and wishing he had a grapefruit in his hand, Felix Cinema-buff flat-handed the dish face of the jittery blonde, now more humiliated than Mae Clarke; he pressed the button she was trying to conceal beneath a freckled hand that revealed both her age and her intention, and the leather-covered door swung open. The secretary shrieked an obscenity, and Felix entered an office even colder than the reception room.

“Good afternoon, Señor Maldonado. We were expecting you. Please close the door,” said a man with a head too large for his medium stature, a leonine head with a lock of gray hair falling over a high brow. Fine, arched, playful eyebrows lent an air of irony to icy gray eyes, brilliant behind the thickest eyelids Felix had ever seen outside the cage of a hippopotamus. The body was strikingly slim for a man of some sixty years, and the blue pin-striped suit was expensive and elegant.

“Please forgive Dolly,” he added courteously. “She’s stupid, but lovable.”

“Everyone seems to be expecting me,” said Felix, looking toward Rossetti, still in white, perched on the arm of Angelica’s light leather chair. She was disguised in black sunglasses, her hair hidden beneath a silk kerchief.

“How did you…?” said Angelica in alarm, her voice harsh from having swallowed so much chlorine.

“We were very careful, Trevor,” Rossetti said, hoping to divest himself of any blame.

“Now you know my name, thanks to our friend’s indiscretion.” The man with the thin lips and the curved nose of a Roman senator spoke with edgy affability. Yes, that’s what he reminds me of, Felix thought. Agrippa Septimus & Severus fortuitously dressed by Hart, Schaffner & Marx.

“I thought you were the Mad Hatter,” said Felix in English, in response to Trevor’s unidentifiable, too-perfect Spanish, as neutral as the speech of a Colombian oligarch.

Trevor laughed and said in an impeccable, British public-school accent, “That would make him the Dormouse and his spouse a slightly drowned Alice. Drowned in a teacup, of course. And you, my friend, would have to assume the role of the March Hare.”

His smile was replaced by a tight, unpleasant grimace that transformed his face into a mask of tragedy. “March Hares are easily captured,” he continued in Spanish. “The poor things are trapped between two fatal dates, the Ides of March and April first, the day of fools and dupes.”

“As long as we stay in Wonderland, I don’t give a sombrilla what the dates are.”

Trevor laughed again, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his pin-striped suit. “I adore your Mexican sayings. It’s true, of course. An umbrella is of very little value in a tropical country, unless one fears sunstroke. On the other hand, in countries where it rains constantly…”

“You certainly should know; the English even sign their peace treaties with umbrellas.”

“And then win the war and save civilization,” replied Trevor, his eyes invisible behind thickened eyelids. “But let’s not mix our metaphors. Welcome to Wonderland. I congratulate you. Where were you trained?”

“In Disneyland.”

“Very good. I like your sense of humor. Very like ours. Which undoubtedly explains why we chose such similar codes: we, Lewis Carroll, and you, William Shakespeare. On the other hand”—he stared scornfully at the Rossettis—“can you imagine these two trying to communicate via D’Annunzio? Out of the question.”

“We have Dante,” Rossetti countered weakly.

“Oh, be quiet,” said Trevor, the threat underlined by the immobility of his hands in his jacket pockets. “You and your wife have done nothing right. You overplayed everything, as if you’d wandered into an opera by Donizetti. You completely missed the point that the only way to proceed secretly is to proceed openly.”

He reserved particular scorn for Angelica. “Disguising yourself as Sara Klein so no one would know you’d left Mexico, and hoping everyone would be racking their brains looking for a dead woman. Bah! Balderdash!” Trevor’s Spanish was curiously archaic, as if he’d learned Spanish watching comedies of manners in Madrid.

“Maldonado was in Coatzacoalcos, and getting close to the ring. He’s a wild man, Trevor; you should have seen him in my house the other evening, the way he treated Bernstein. He was mad about Sara, I only wanted to stir him up a little,” said Angelica, with strident and artificial energy.

Trevor withdrew his hand from his pocket and slapped Angelica squarely across the mouth; her jaw dropped open as if she were again drowning, and Rossetti jumped to his feet with all the indignation of a Latin caballero.

“Imbeciles,” said Trevor, through tight lips. “I should have chosen more efficient traitors. My own fault. The lady allows the ring to be taken from her while she’s imitating Esther Williams. The gentleman doesn’t dare strike me because he’s hoping to collect three ways, and the money means more to him than his honor.”

Rossetti, pale and trembling, resumed his position beside Angelica. He tried to put his arm around his wife, but she shrugged him off.

Trevor turned to Felix as if inviting him to a cricket match. “My friend, that ring holds absolutely no value for you. I give you my word of honor.”

“I place about as much stock in the word of an English gentleman as in that of a Latin caballero,” Felix commented with the counterpart of English phlegm — Indian fatalism.

“We can avoid many disagreeable scenes if you return it to me immediately.”

“You surely don’t believe I brought it with me.”

“No. But you know where it is. I trust your intelligence. Try to get it back for me.”

“How much will my life be worth if I do?”

“Ask our little pair here. They know that I pay better than anyone.”

“The stakes may go up,” Rossetti managed to say with painful bravado.

Trevor looked at him with amazement and scorn. “Do you think you can collect four times? Greedy little bastard!”

Felix observed the Director General’s private secretary with interest. “That’s right, Rossetti. You can collect from the Director General because you convinced him you were informing on Bernstein’s activities; you collect from Bernstein because he believes you were his accomplice, and for revealing the Director General’s plans to him; you collect from Trevor here by informing against your other two benefactors. And if you really want to sing, I’ll pay you more than the other three together. Or are you planning to return to Mexico, inform on us all, and get out of this with both your honor and your bankroll intact?”

“You bastard, why did you have to get in our way?” Angelica’s question was rhetorical.

“How much is the famous ring worth?” Felix asked her, his voice equally neutral.

Regaining control of himself, it was the private secretary who answered Felix, ingratiatingly, as if he’d discovered hitherto unseen virtues in this obscure chief from the Bureau of Cost Analysis. “I don’t know. I only know that Bernstein had arranged everything in Coatzacoalcos so that Angelica could take it to the United States.”

“And instead of delivering it to Bernstein’s accomplice, you double-crossed him and brought it to Trevor.”

“It’s true,” Trevor interjected before the Rossettis could respond, “that my friends the Rossettis, how shall I say it? diverted the course of normal events to bring the ring to me. Alas, you intercepted it. Whatever the case, Bernstein’s consignee must be biting his nails somewhere on this vast continent, awaiting our Angelica’s arrival on another ghost tanker we’ll call, shall we — not to deviate from our previous allusions — the Red Queen. You know, the one who demanded the head of the Knave of Hearts for stealing her tarts. I must ask that you take us to the missing ring, Señor Maldonado.”

“I repeat, I do not have it.”

“I’m aware of that. Where is it?”

“Traveling, slowly but surely, like Alice’s Mock Turtle.”

“Where, Maldonado?” said Trevor, his voice steely.

“Paradoxically, to the very place that Bernstein intended,” said Felix, not flickering an eyelash.

“I told you, Trevor.” Angelica’s voice was guttural, and hysterical. “He’s a convert to Judaism; it’s not for nothing I’m one of Ruth’s good friends. He was bound to align himself with the Jews. He’s Bernstein’s former student, he knows Mann, and he’s sent him the ring. He already knows Bernstein didn’t kill Sara…”

Trevor feigned resignation before Angelica’s unrestrained babble.

Rossetti attempted to soothe his wife. “Don’t say more than you mean to. Please be more discreet, darling. We have to go back to Mexico…”

“With Bernstein’s money, and Trevor’s, we have enough to live somewhere other than that land of trained fleas,” retorted the ungovernable Angelica.

“I promised you that we’d go wherever you wanted, darling.” Rossetti was kindlier by the minute, though more than half his kindness was reserved for himself.

“I’m sick and tired of watching you crawl up one bureaucratic step every six years! What will you be in twelve years? Bill collector? Milk inspector? What?”

“Angelica, we should at least spend a few months…”

“Don’t you ever get tired of living off my money … you pimp!”

“I said a few months, until everything gets back to normal. That’s only prudent, Angelica, we’ll have plenty of money…”

“But Trevor slapped me. Who’s going to repay that, you ball-less wonder,” shrieked Angelica, tearing off the black sunglasses to reveal her chlorine-streaked eyes.

“I will, if only you’ll shut up,” said Felix, and buried his right fist in Rossetti’s stomach at the same instant the private secretary took a knife from his pocket and pressed it to release the switchblade.

Rossetti’s gaze glittered with every imaginable threat, as, moaning and doubled over with pain, he fell on the sofa. Felix picked up the knife and pressed down the blade between a nail file and a corkscrew.

“Perfect.” Trevor smiled. “Neapolitan technology. Clean nails for the body beautiful, along with a sure way to open bottles in airplanes without fear of being poisoned. Right up Rossetti’s alley. What do you think, Maldonado? Was he going to slit Angelica’s throat or demand that I hand over the promised money?”

“He was going to pin back my wings like a butterfly’s,” Felix replied coldly.

“Oh, yes?” Trevor lifted arched eyebrows. “May I inquire why?”

“First, because I was witness to his wife humiliating him.”

“As well as I.”

“You’re not Latin. It’s a matter of clans.”

“And second?”

“Because I’m the only person who might betray him. All the rest — you, Bernstein, the Director, Angelica — have good reason to keep his secrets.”

“You’re sure of that? Well, it doesn’t matter. We must be grateful to our friends for this edifying conjugal scene.”

“You’re a bachelor?” Felix smiled.

“Witness my good health.” Trevor returned the smile.

“He’s a fag,” spat Angelica.

“Politics has no sex, my dear, and because you believed the contrary, you have allowed yourselves to become embroiled in futile passions. Let’s get to the point, Maldonado. If you’re lying to me, you’re wasting your time. The ring is useless to your side. First of all, to use it requires something beyond Neapolitan or Aztec technology. Examine it to your heart’s content, the ring will tell you nothing. If you shatter it, you automatically destroy the information it contains. And, finally, you already possess the information.”

“Then it won’t matter if the stone is destroyed,” said Felix, wondering why Trevor was telling him all this.

The Englishman provided the answer. “You’re not interested in knowing what we want to know about you? Don’t be so elementary, my dear Maldonado.”

“The ring will be delivered to Mann,” said Felix, clutching at the straw of Angelica’s gaffe.

“Blast and damn!” exclaimed Trevor, with another of his Wodehouse comedy expressions. “To whom?”

“To Mann, Bernstein’s accomplice,” Felix repeated.

Trevor’s laugh was forced. “Man, not Mann. But you speak English.”

“Don’t let him fool you, Felix. Bernstein told us we were to take the ring to Mann in New York,” cried Angelica, totally disoriented in her allegiances, divided in her excitement between menace and alarm, pity and scorn for her husband, the misdirected attempt to blackmail Trevor and her confused belief that by punching Rossetti Felix had somehow avenged her for Trevor’s slap. Felix had a vision of Angelica in a mental hospital. They’d be afraid to admit her.

“All right,” said Trevor before Angelica could speak again, and, moving diagonally like a Bishop in a chess game, countered, “The lady wants to be paid and be on her way, is that it?”

“Exactly!” cried Angelica.

All four stared at one another in silence. Trevor pressed a button and Dolly appeared.

“Dolly, the lady is leaving. I hope her husband will follow her. They are very tiresome.”

“I’ll make you a present of him,” said Angelica, motioning toward the groaning figure of Rossetti. “I’ll take the money.”

“But you didn’t do your job, Angelica,” Trevor chided. “I don’t have the ring.”

“What about the risks we ran? I was nearly drowned. You promised us the money, no matter what. You promised, Trevor. You said the risks involved merited it.”

“Yes, Angelica, you are correct.”

Trevor opened a drawer, removed a fat envelope, and handed it to Rossetti’s wife. “Count it carefully. I don’t want any complaints later.”

Angelica greedily thumbed through the green bills, her lips moving silently. “Very well, Trevor. Business is business.”

“And your husband?”

“Get him a job in a pizzeria,” said Angelica, and, following Dolly, exited with her usual arrogance.

31

“WELL.” Trevor inhaled deeply. “Now we can talk in earnest.”

“What about him?” Felix nodded toward Rossetti.

“Have you ever asked yourself, Maldonado, who the one guilty party in all this might be?” Trevor sighed.

“Guilt seems to be the one thing in this affair that’s evenly divided,” Felix replied without humor.

“No, you don’t understand what I mean. Gather together all the guilt, yours and mine, the Director General’s and his boy Ayub’s, Bernstein’s, plus that of the lady who just left us. That adds to a lot of guilt, don’t you agree?”

Rossetti was shaking now, and starting to rise to his feet.

“No, Trevor, no…”

“The wise thing, the clean thing, would be to pile all the guilt on one head, to make one person responsible. I’m looking at that person right now. Do you see him, too?”

“It’s all the same to me,” said Felix. “But there is one thing I don’t want you to make Rossetti responsible for.”

Trevor took Rossetti gently by the shoulder and forced him back on the sofa. “Ah, yes. And what is that?”

“Angelica, Angelica,” Rossetti was mumbling grotesquely, his face hidden in his hands.

“The death of Sara Klein,” said Felix. “I’ll take care of that.”

“Agreed. Now listen to me. Look out those windows. Houston isn’t a beautiful city. It’s something better, a powerful city. See that blue glass skyscraper? It’s the headquarters of the world’s most advanced petroleum technology. It belongs to the Arabs, and it cost them five hundred million dollars. See the Gulf Bank sign? Eighty percent of their transactions consist of managing petroleum dollars for their Arab clients. Did you see the names of all the legal firms in this building? All working for Arab money. I invite you to take a stroll through any company in this building. Every one is dedicated to a single proposition, participation in the development programs of Arab countries; they’re gambling two hundred billion dollars. Stop blubbering, Rossetti. What I’m saying should be of interest to you.”

“Angelica…”

“You’ll be joining her soon. Be patient. First, you’ll have to justify my having given her the money. Half of all the commercial transactions between the American private sector and the Arab world are realized in Houston: four billion dollars annually. From here flow pipelines, liquid-gas plants, petrochemical technology, agricultural know-how, even university professors, to the Arab world. One single firm of Texas architects has signed contracts for six billion dollars of exports annually from the United States to the Arab countries.”

Trevor clasped his hands behind an impeccably tailored back and contemplated the face of Houston beneath the newly cloudy, dirty, hot sky, as if he were observing a field of cement mushrooms nurtured by black rain. “This building, right here where we are standing, is the property of the Saudis. Do I bore you with my statistics?” He turned and directed his tight smile toward Felix.

“If you’re trying to impress me with your audacity, I admit you’re succeeding,” said Felix.

“Audacity?” Trevor inquired sarcastically.

“You’re the one who said it,” Maldonado replied. “The real secrets are those that are open secrets. Houston is an ideal site for an Arab secret agent.”

Both Trevor and Rossetti laughed, and regarded Felix like a pair of wolves regarding a lamb.

“Tell him the truth, Rossetti,” ordered Trevor, more than ever the Roman senator.

“Bernstein told me to deliver the ring to Trevor,” said Rossetti, more sure of himself now. “Mann doesn’t exist. It was a code name.”

“Madame Rossetti earned her ‘bundle’ in good faith.” Trevor smiled. “The ring, therefore, is not on the way to the mythic Mr. Mann in New York.”

“The things you learn.” Felix’s voice was drowsy but his internal clock began to tick more rapidly. “I didn’t realize that Wonderland had its capital in Jerusalem.”

“I lend my professional services,” Trevor said in a velvet voice.

“To the highest bidder?”

Trevor extended his arms in an expansive gesture rare to him, as if embracing the office, the building, the entire city of Houston. “There’s no mystery. On this occasion, and in this place, I represent Arab interests.”

“But Bernstein sent you the ring.”

“Don’t recriminate against your former professor. He knows me as an Israeli agent, and made me the ring’s recipient in all good faith. He doesn’t know that I practice the virtue of simultaneity of allegiances. Can you distinguish between Tweedledum and Tweedledee?”

“I know that if you crush one, the other will fall like Humpty Dumpty.”

“Except that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would have to put me back together again. I’m too valuable to both parties. Don’t try to crack the egg, Maldonado, or you’re the one who’ll end up as an omelette. Remember that if it were my wish you would never leave this room alive,” said Trevor, pacing like a cat on the thick office rug.

“You can’t kill me,” said Felix.

“Poppycock! Are you immortal, my dear Hare?”

“No. I’m dead and buried. Visit the Jardín Cemetery in Mexico City someday and see for yourself.”

“Do you realize that you’re proposing to me the ideal way to kill you without leaving a trace? Who’d be looking for a ‘dead’ man who’s already dead?”

“But if I die, no one will find Bernstein’s ring.”

“You think not?” said the Englishman, his face more innocent than that of a Dickens heroine. “All I have to do is retrace, link by link, the chain of events you so imprudently ruptured. The actors in the plot are perfectly interchangeable. Particularly the dead ones.”

Felix couldn’t control his pounding blood, the invisible enemy betraying the impassivity of his face. He was grateful for the scars that helped sustain the rigidity of his mask. Felix had had no physical contact with Trevor, but now the Englishman was affectionately patting his hand, and Felix flinched at the dry, sweatless touch.

“Come now, don’t be afraid. Consider the game I’m proposing. Let us call it, in honor of the Holy Patroness of your nation, Operation Guadalupe. A good Arabic name, Guadalupe. It means river of wolves.”

Even without intending it, Trevor’s features assumed a lupine expression. “But let us not dwell on philology; let us consider, instead, probable scenarios. Perhaps brutal scenarios. Combine the elements in any way you desire, my dear Maldonado. The perfectly calculated pretext of the Yom Kippur War and its equally calculated effect: the rapid acceleration of oil prices; Europe and Japan brought to their knees, once and for all stripped of any pretense of independence; Congress’s granting funds for the construction of the Alaska pipeline because of the oil panic, and the multiplication by millions of the earnings of the Five Sisters. Listen, and marvel: in 1974 alone, Exxon’s profits rose 23.6 percent, as compared to 1.76 percent in the ten previous years; those of Standard Oil rose 30.92 percent, compared to 0.55 percent during the preceding decade.”

He relinquished Felix’s hand and turned toward the window. “Look outside, and see the evidence of petrodollars. Let’s say we play Israel against the Arabs and the Arabs against Israel. Houston is the Arab capital of the United States, and New York the Jewish capital; the petrodollars flow in here and out there. Does anyone know for whom he’s working? But let’s confine ourselves to our game. All scenarios are possible. Even — or especially — one for a new war. Depending on the circumstances, we can close the New York valve and suffocate Israel, or close the Houston valve and freeze Arab funds. Follow the moves in our game, please. Imagine an isolated Israel plunged headlong into a war of desperation. Imagine the Arabs refusing to sell oil to the West. Choose your script, Maldonado; who would intervene first, the Soviets or the Americans?”

“You’re speaking of a confrontation as if it were a good thing.”

“It is a good thing. The present state of coexistence was born of the confrontation in Cuba. Conditions resulting from being on the brink of war provide the necessary shock that prolongs an armed peace for fifteen or twenty more years. A generation. The real danger is that the peace is weakened in the absence of the periodical crises that revitalize it. Then we enter the realm of chance, stupor, and accident. A well-prepared crisis is manageable, as Kissinger demonstrated at the beginning of the October War. On the other hand, an accident brought about by the simple material pressure of accumulated arms that are fast becoming obsolete is something that cannot be controlled.”

“You’re a perverted humanist, Trevor. And your imaginary scenarios appear every day in newspaper editorials.”

“But also in the councils of the nuclear powers. What is essential is that we take all eventualities into account. None must be excluded. Including, my dear friend, the nearby presence of Mexican oil. That’s more than a scenario, it appears to be the only solution at hand.”

“And is Mexico not to be consulted?”

“There are collaborationists in your country, just as there were in Czechoslovakia. Some are already in power. It would not be difficult to install a junta of Quislings in the National Palace, especially during a time of international emergency, and in a country without open political processes. Mexican political cabals are like amoebas: they fuse, divide, subdivide, and fuse again in the obscurity of the Palace, without the slightest awareness on the part of the public.”

“From time to time, we Mexicans awake.”

“Pancho Villa couldn’t have resisted a rain of napalm.”

“But Juárez could, as Ho Chi Minh did.”

“Save your patriotic exhortations, Maldonado. Mexico can’t sit forever on the most formidable oil reserves in the hemisphere, a veritable lake of black gold stretching from the Gulf of California to the Caribbean Sea. We simply want to be sure that Mexico profits from it. For the good, preferably. All this can be done without disturbing President Cárdenas’s sacred nationalization. Oil can be denationalized, by Jove! without changing appearances.”

“It won’t please Our Lady of Guadalupe that you’re using her name for this musical comedy.” Felix was only half joking.

“Don’t be difficult, Maldonado. What’s at stake here is much bigger than your poor corrupt country drowning in poverty, unemployment, inflation, and ineptitude. Look outside again, I beg you. This once belonged to you. You did nothing with it. Look what it’s become without you.”

“That’s the second time I’ve heard that song. It’s beginning to bore me.”

“Listen to me carefully, and repeat everything to your chiefs. The contingency plans of the Western world require precise information about the extent, the nature, and the location of the Mexican oil reserves. It is vital that we anticipate every possibility.”

“And that’s the information Bernstein was sending from Coatzacoalcos?”

Perhaps Trevor would have answered, perhaps not. In any case, he was denied the opportunity. Dolly burst into the office, her kitten face transformed, as if she were being chased by a pack of vicious bulldogs. “Oh, God, Mr. Mann, a terrible thing, Mr. Mann, a horrible accident. Look out the window…”

Felix couldn’t see the look exchanged between Trevor/ Mann and Rossetti. Dolly opened the window and the conditioned air flowed out, along with the momentarily frozen words of the double agent; the three men and the weeping woman leaned out into the sticky Houston air, and Dolly pointed with a poorly manicured finger.

In the street, a swarm of human flies was gathering around a body sprawled like a broken puppet. Several police cars were parked nearby, sirens howling, and an ambulance was threading through the traffic on the corner of San Jacinto.

Trevor/Mann slammed the window shut and told Dolly in a nasal Midwest accent: “Call the cops, stupid. I’m holding the dago for the premeditated murder of his wife.”

Mauricio Rossetti’s mouth dropped open, but no sound emerged. Trevor/Mann had an automatic in his hand and was pointing it straight at Rossetti’s heart, but it was an unnecessary gesture. Rossetti had crumpled on the sofa, and was weeping like a child. Trevor/Mann ignored him, but held on to the pistol. It was ugly in his scaly hand.

“Console yourself, Rossetti. The Mexican authorities will ask for your extradition, and it will be granted. There is no death penalty in Mexico, and the law is understandingly benign when a husband kills his own wife. And you won’t talk, Rossetti, because you’d rather be considered a murderer than a traitor. Think this over while you’re luxuriating in the Lecumberri prison. And consider, too, that you’re well rid of a terrible harpy.”

Trevor waved the pistol in Felix Maldonado’s direction. “You may leave, Señor Maldonado. Bear me no rancor. After all, you’ve won this round. You have the ring. I repeat: it is of no value to you. Go quietly, and ruminate on how Rossetti gathered facts little by little, partially from the offices of the Director General, partially from Minatitlán and other centers of the Pemex operation, and delivered the raw information to Bernstein. It was your professor who put everything in order and turned it into coherent cybernetic data. Don’t worry; Rossetti prefers the responsibility of a crime resulting from conjugal problems to one caused by political indiscretions. On the other hand, our unfortunate Angelica, now united with her homonyms, will not be enjoying her customary privilege of unbridled chatter.”

“And what about me, aren’t you afraid I’ll talk?” said Felix, with sinking spirits.

Trevor/Mann laughed, and again assumed a British accent. “By gad, sir, don’t push your luck too far. Talk is precisely what I want you to do. Tell everything. Transmit our warnings to whoever it is who employs you. Allow me to demonstrate my good faith. Do you want to know who killed Sara Klein?”

Felix could only nod, humiliated before the assurance of the man with the features of a Roman senator, the stubborn lock of hair, and the anachronistic interjections. Merely by mentioning her name, Trevor/Mann was verbally pawing Sara, the way Simon Ayub had physically pawed her in the mortuary.

“Look to the nun.” A veil like ashes masked his gray eyes.

“And another thing, Señor Maldonado. Don’t try to return here with bad intentions. Within a few hours, Wonderland Enterprises will have disappeared. There will be no trace either of this office or of Dolly or of myself, your servant, as you Mexicans say with such curious courtesy. Good afternoon, Señor Maldonado. Or, to quote your favorite author, remember when you think of the Rossettis that ambition should be made of sterner stuff, and when you think of me, remember that we are all honorable men. Pip, pip!”

He bowed slightly toward Felix Maldonado.

32

AGAIN he was driving toward Galveston, pursued now by a black angel of presentiment but also driven by the desire to put the greatest possible distance between him and Angelica’s horrible death. He had been assured in the offices of the Port Authority that the Emmita would dock punctually in Coatzacoalcos at five o’clock on the morning of August 19. Captain Harding’s schedule went like clockwork. Felix drove by the little gray house beside the exhausted, oily waters of the Gulf. The door was unlocked. He went in, and smelled tobacco and beer gone flat and scraps of ham sandwich in the garbage. He resisted his longing to spend the night there, far from Houston and Trevor/Mann and the Rossettis, one very dead, one a walking corpse. He was afraid his absence from the Hotel Warwick might cause suspicion, so a little after midnight he returned to Houston.

For the same reasons, he decided to stay at the hotel through Wednesday. He bought a return ticket to Mexico City for Thursday afternoon. By then, the Emmita would have reached Coatzacoalcos and Rosita and Emiliano would have received the ring from Harding’s hands. Felix engaged a cabana by the swimming pool, sunned, swam, and had a club sandwich and coffee for lunch. He went in swimming several times, hoping to cleanse his memory of Angelica, but he kept his eyes open underwater, afraid he would find her broken body at the bottom of the pool.

Everything seemed normal in the hotel, and the Rossettis’ room was quietly emptied of their belongings and occupied by another couple. Felix could hear them from the balcony; they spoke English and were talking about their children in Salt Lake City. It was as if Mauricio and Angelica had never been in Houston. Felix faded into the protective coloring of the hotel and took advantage of the dead hours to try to order his thoughts, an undertaking that led nowhere.

Thursday afternoon, he left behind him the burning plains and humid skies of Texas. Soon the sterile earth of northern Mexico dissolved into dry, dark peaks, and these yielded before the truncated volcanoes of the center of the Republic, indistinguishable in form from the ancient pyramids that perhaps lay beneath their petrified lava. At six o’clock in the evening, the Air France jet hurled itself down into the circle of mountains half hidden in the lethargic haze of the Mexican capital.

Felix took a taxi to the Suites de Génova, where they asked whether he wanted the same room. Thanks to his memorable tips, they fawned over him as they led him to the apartment where Sara Klein had been murdered. The thin and oily employee ventured the comment that Felix looked very well after his trip. As he removed the white sombrero he’d bought in the airport at Coatzacoalcos, Felix confirmed in the bathroom mirror that his hair was beginning to grow back thick and curly and his eyelids had lost their puffiness; only the scars from the incisions were still noticeable. Somehow his moustache was obliterating the memory of the operation and returning to him the face that, if not exactly his own, more and more resembled the face of his private joke with Ruth, the Velázquez self-portrait.

Thinking of Ruth, he almost telephoned her. He’d forgotten her all the time he’d been away; he’d had to put her out of his mind; if not, that most intimate and commonplace of all relationships might have diverted him from the mission I’d commended to him. He was also restrained by the fact that to his wife he was a dead man. Ruth had attended the burial in the Jardín Cemetery organized by the Director General and Simon Ayub. The widow Maldonado had not had much time to accustom herself to her new role. As Felix had felt he must reserve a sacred moment with Sara’s body, he felt now he must reserve a special moment for his reunion with Ruth. A disembodied voice over the telephone would be too much for such a domestic woman, a woman who solved all his practical problems, who prepared his breakfasts and pressed his suits.

His feeling for Sara, living or dead, was a different matter, something akin to the sublimation of adventure itself. She was the most fervent, but also the most secretly guarded, motivation for his actions. My instructions had been clear. No personal emotion was to stand in our way. There is no intelligence mission that does not inevitably evoke one’s emotions and weave an invisible but inescapable web between the objective world we set out to control and the subjective world that, whether we wish it or not, controls us. Had Felix realized during this strange week that, no matter how wide-ranging, events never move us far from the place where we are our own hosts, and that no external enemy is greater than the one residing within us?

Later Felix told me that as he was dialing my number after his return from Houston he remembered the joking way he’d announced Angelica’s death before it had occurred: “Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.” I’d set aside my personal feelings, although at that point Angelica’s role in this intrigue was ambiguous. He felt he didn’t need to say anything more when he telephoned me from the Suites de Génova, didn’t have to find a quote from Shakespeare to tell me that, instead of drowning, Ophelia had died a broken doll upon the steamy pavement of a Texas city.

“When shall we two meet again?”

“When the battle’s lost and won.”

“But tell us, do you hear whether we have had any loss at sea or no?”

“Ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, land-thieves, and water-thieves.”

“What tell’st thou me of robbing?”

“The boy gives warning. He is a saucy boy. Go to, go to. He is in Venice.”

I hung up. I had noted with uneasiness an impatience and reticence in Felix’s voice. I had the feeling he was hiding something from me, and I feared that. Our organization was very new, it was testing its wings, and no one, not even I, could pride himself on having the tough skin of our Soviet, European, or North American counterparts. That accursed subjectivity was, irrationally, seeping through the cold sieve of the means which should have been identical to the ends. The Golden Rule of espionage is that the means justify the ends. I couldn’t imagine a single individual on the long list of those we emulated, from Fouché to Ashenden, perturbed by any personal emotion; they would brush sentiment aside like a mosquito. But it was also true that no Mexican spy would ever come in from the cold; the suggestion, climatologically speaking, was ludicrous, and I imagined my poor friend Felix Maldonado looking for a refrigerator to crawl into in Galveston or Coatzacoalcos.

I lighted my pipe and, not in the least at random, opened my Oxford edition of the complete works of Shakespeare to the graveyard scene in Hamlet. As I began to read again, I told myself that was the only thing I could do, to begin again where I had left off when Felix telephoned. Laertes is telling the Priest to lay Ophelia in the earth so that from her fair and unpolluted flesh violets might spring. The Priest refuses to say the Requiem for a suicide; the soul of Ophelia will not depart in peace. Laertes rebukes him; Ophelia, he says, shall be a ministering angel when he lies howling. This fearful curse is followed by the equally terrible action of Laertes. He asks the earth, that of the grave, and also that of the world, to hold off a while till he has once more caught his sister in his arms. He leaps into the grave beside the body of Ophelia. Hamlet, in spite of his emotion, watches this scene with strange passivity, the usual passivity of this actor who is the always distanced observer of his own tragedy. The whole of the Renaissance is contained in this scene. Man, in his world, has discovered an excessive energy that he hurls like a challenge into the face of the heavens; at the same time, he has discovered his insignificance within the gigantic cosmos, and knows he is smaller even than Providence had augured. Only an impassive irony like Hamlet’s can reestablish the equilibrium; others judge him mad.

I watched the curling smoke ascend toward my library ceiling. In spite of her name, I could not imagine Angelica dispensing the favors of heaven to man. But, in this story, which of the women whose threads were always broken before they reached my hands deserved divine favors? Of Sara and Mary and Ruth, all Jewish, which would look into the face of God? If Angelica were not Ophelia, which would be our Ariadne? If I were an inglorious Laertes, would my friend Maldonado know to be a Hamlet with method in his madness, or would he lose himself within the labyrinth of modern Minotaurs?

It was one of those moments — and there were many more than I imagined then — in which Felix and I were on a telepathic wavelength. Sara was present, dead or living, mysterious in the persistence of her reality, strangely close in her absence; so, too, Ruth, whom we must not frighten by telephoning, even if she suffered a while longer; when the time came, we would explain things calmly, to the degree that explanation was possible. And Mary, why hadn’t we been thinking of her?

I feared I was falling into the greatest of detective-novel commonplaces, cherchez la femme. I closed my book, and my eyes. There was so little time. I thought about my sister, Angelica.

33

ON THE OTHER HAND, Felix did not check his second impulse; he dialed Mary Benjamin’s number, and a servant answered. “The señora may be busy, may I say who’s calling?”

Mary was the one woman who could take it: “Felix Maldonado.”

She was listening on the extension; a light click had betrayed her presence on the line, and immediately he heard Mary’s irritated voice. “Whoever you are, I don’t appreciate your sick jokes.”

“Don’t hang up,” said Felix, with an affectionate inflection Mary should recognize. “It’s me.”

“I told you…” Mary’s voice was still irritated, but slightly tinged with doubt and fear.

Felix laughed. “You sound a little shaky; this is the first time I ever heard that from you.”

“There’s always a first time.” Mary was struggling to compose herself. “Felix was very big on black humor, wasn’t he?”

“Prove it.”

“Don’t be stupid, I don’t have a televiewer on my phone yet.”

“Génova Suites. Room 301. Eleven-thirty tonight. Be there. The last time, you stood me up.” Felix hung up.

Italian restaurants abound in the Zona Rosa. The Ostería and Alfredo’s, facing one another across the arcade between Londres, Hamburgo, and Génova, sounded too Roman, and the Focolare on Hamburgo, too generic, so Felix walked toward La Gondola on the corner of Génova and Estrasburgo. He says he was thinking of me. For the first time, he had deliberately betrayed my instructions. He needed a woman, too much adrenaline had been pumping through his body the last few days; he hadn’t had a woman since Licha. It meant coming out in the open, but after ten years without touching her, he wanted to go to bed with Mary Benjamin. Mary Benjamin was exactly what he needed, a hot, passionate bitch, and if he’d consulted me, I would have racked my brain to come up with a quote from Bill Shakesprick to tell him to get himself a call girl in one of the hotels in the Zona Rosa. But Felix had other things in mind.

There weren’t many people in La Góndola that night, but it was filled with penetrating odors of tomato and garlic and basil. Emiliano and Rosita sat facing each other, hands clasped, elbows on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. Felix sat down beside the “saucy” boy who was bringing him a warning, facing the girl with a head like a woolly black lamb. The young couple’s faces betrayed their uneasiness, they could dispense with the preliminaries.

“Did Harding give you the ring?”

They shook their heads.

“What happened?” asked Felix impatiently. Mary was boiling in his blood, a soft, warm Mary was clasped between his thighs. “Did you forget the code from The Tempest?”

“We didn’t get a chance,” said Emiliano, dropping Rosita’s hand. “The old man was dead.”

“They killed him, Emiliano, tell him,” said Rosita, playing with some toothpicks, not daring to look at Felix.

“When?” Felix asked, paralyzed within a triangle of stupor, impatience, and disbelief.

“After the tanker docked, this morning,” said Emiliano, helping Rosita in the construction of a toothpick castle.

“How?”

“A machete, in the neck.”

“Where was he?”

“In his cabin, probably getting ready to go ashore.”

“And the ring?” Felix asked carefully; he could hear his voice rising.

“It wasn’t there.”

“How can you be so damn sure, my beardless friend? Did they let you search the old man? Did they let you in the cabin?”

“Hey, Feliciano,” Rosita interrupted. “We’re on the same side, what the hell’s with you?”

Felix ducked his head to acknowledge the rebuke, and Emiliano continued. “We thought the scene was coming down pretty heavy, so we got in touch with the chief. Within a half hour, the cops were swarming all over the Emmita, searching everything. Not a whiff of the ring, man.”

“Tell him, Emiliano, tell him about the girl.”

“The mate thought the cops were looking for something else. He told them Harding kept an old silver locket hanging over his hammock, with a faded snapshot of a girl in it, signed Emmita. He couldn’t believe they’d waste the old guy for such a nothing thing, though sometimes at sea they tell tales of feuds that last to the grave.”

“The locket wasn’t worth a penny to anyone except him,” Rosita said excitedly, covering her mouth with the napkin. “It was gone, nothing but a faded circle where it used to hang.”

“The fuzz pulled in the thief almost before he could turn around. They found him a little after six, drunk out of his mind, in one of those all-night bars on the docks. He was carrying a big roll and the locket was around his neck.”

“The snapshot was gone, the bum’d thrown it away,” moaned Rosita. “He was trying to con some girl into going to bed with him, telling her she’d be his new sweetheart and he’d put her picture in the locket.”

“They put him in jail, but when they searched him, he was clean. He said he’d found the locket on the dock, and that he’d never been on the Emmita. The hiring agent, though, said they’d been shorthanded and he’d signed on the cambujo part-time as a stevedore.”

“The cambujo?” Felix interrupted.

Emiliano nodded. “Yeah, he usually worked in the Hotel Tropicana. He does a little bit of everything, though, even butchers beef sometimes in the market. They call him El Machete.”

He looked at Felix with pride, like a student who’s passed his exams with honors. “Old Bernstein packed up lock, stock, and barrel, and checked out of the hotel a half hour after the Emmita docked.”

“The sea had its sadness,” murmured Felix. He removed one toothpick and the whole rickety structure collapsed on the tablecloth.

“What?” said Rosita.

Felix shook his head. “Have you been watching Bernstein?”

“He’s back home. His servant girl has orders to say he’s very busy preparing his courses for the fall and he can’t receive any visitors. We found out he’s leaving for Israel tomorrow morning. An economy-class round-trip ticket, good for twenty-one days.”

“Did the Coatzacoalcos police interrogate the cambujo about his connection with Bernstein?”

“The chief said it was hopeless. The prof had paid him off. Besides, El Machete knows he’s well covered, and Mexican justice being what it is, he’ll be out of the tank before you know it.”

“Well, Bernstein has the ring, that’s the one thing we can be sure of,” said Felix.

“He wasn’t wearing it.” Rosita laughed.

Felix remembered the man who’d called himself Trevor, and Mann, and God knows how many other aliases. The only way to proceed secretly is to proceed openly.

“The chief has men watching him night and day,” said Emiliano.

“Since when?” Felix inquired skeptically.

“Since before he left for Coatzacoalcos.”

“Then the chief’s up on everything, my brief adventure in the Tropicana, my fight with the cambujo on the dock, and the connection between El Machete and Bernstein.”

“Don’t be a masochist, man,” said Emiliano, looking at Felix’s face. “The situation’s very fluid, and we’ve all got to work together. The prof hasn’t made a move we don’t know about, he hasn’t sent any letters or packages, and he hasn’t communicated with anybody. He even stopped paying his telephone bill a couple of months ago, so they’d cut off his service.”

“We had to go to his house and talk to his servants; we said we were students of his,” Rosita added.

“He’s really putting it on that he’s living like a hermit and has nothing to do with anything. He must be scared.”

Emiliano was interrupted by the waiter, who placed a plate of lasagna under his nose, and a plate of spaghetti bolognese in front of Rosita.

“He even went to the Basilica to light a candle in thanksgiving for getting well so fast.” Rosita laughed. “And him a Jew and all.”

“He went to the Guadalupe shrine?”

Felix glared at the waiter, who was asking for his order. He’d looked the same way at Bernstein during the eyeglasses incident. The waiter, as if he’d lost his last friend, scurried away to whisper with the cashier.

“Right. When he got back from Coatzacoalcos, he went straight there from the airport,” said Emiliano. “He got a candle and lighted it to Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

“Does the chief know this?”

“In spades, and he’s busting his brain. Always with the culture, you know; he says in Mexico even the atheists believe in Guadalupe, but not the Jews. You know what he meant?”

“I think so.”

Felix pushed away from the table and regarded their faces in the strange light of the Góndola Restaurant’s Venetian stained glass. “Keep an eye on Bernstein’s departure tomorrow. If the ring leaves Mexico, it will go with him.”

“Son-of-a-bitch, man, that’s a big operation and the chief’s going to have a fit if you aren’t there. We’re greenhorns.”

“Like you said, my boy, it’s a question of teamwork. No one’s indispensable.”

“Is that what I tell the chief?”

“No. Tell him I’m following a different trail. At any rate, with the ring or without it, meet me at ten.”

“On my word, man, Rosita and I aren’t hungry for glory, we don’t want to take anything from you, you know? We’d never take the ring to the chief without seeing you first.”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“The Café Kineret. I’ll treat you to a kosher breakfast.”

As he left, he wasn’t thinking about Bernstein but about the old man who’d told him he loved the Emmita like a woman: “She’s everything I have in the world.”

34

THE DOORMAN at the Suites de Génova came on duty at 11 p.m. Felix greeted the somnambulist-faced, ancient Indian wearing a navy-blue suit shiny from wear, as he opened the door. He never smiled; and his expression remained unchanged when Felix handed him a hundred-peso note and told him he was expecting a lady at eleven-fifteen. The doorman nodded and tucked the money in his pocket.

“Do you remember me?” asked Felix, attempting to penetrate the drowsy gaze.

Again the doorman nodded.

Felix pursued the point, handing him a second hundred-peso note. “Do you have a good memory?”

“They say I do,” said the doorman, his voice both guttural and melodious.

“When was I here?”

“You left about six days ago, and just came back.”

“Do you always remember people who come back?”

“The ones who come often, yes. The others, only if they’re nice people.” He didn’t hold out his hand, but it seemed as if he had.

Felix handed him the third hundred-peso bill. “Do you remember the nun, the night of the murder?”

The doorman studied Felix through veiled eyes and realized there would be no more bills. “Yes, I remember. Sisters never come begging for charity that time of night.”

“I want you to tell me later whether the woman who’s coming in a few minutes looks like the nun.”

“Sure. Whatever you say, chief.”

He never smiled; but the leathery wrinkles around his eyes twitched slightly. He gave no other indication that he hoped there would be more tips later.

Felix had just showered, shaved, and sprinkled himself liberally with Royall Lyme when he heard the tapping at the door. It was a little after eleven-thirty.

He opened the door. In the film library of Felix’s memory, he had always equated Mary Benjamin with Joan Bennett, after she’d changed the color of her hair to distinguish herself from her sister, the adorable blond Constance, as well as to compete with the sensational, exotic Hedy Lamarr. Now he would have to add another impression to the layers of masks; like Angelica on the docks by the Gulf of Mexico, Mary had combed her hair like Sara Klein, the bangs and crow’s-wing hair of Louise Brooks playing Wedekind’s Lulu in G. W. Pabst’s cinematic version. For an instant, he felt that a silver screen separated him from Mary; he was the spectator, she was the projected image, the threshold was the dividing line between the inadequate dreams of the movies and the pitiful reality of the public who dreamed them.

But the violet eyes were Mary’s, also the deep décolletage and the oil between her breasts to emphasize the cleavage. Especially it was Mary because she moved like a black panther, lustful and pursued, beautiful because she was pursued, and because she knew it. The panther entered the apartment, asking, “You’re the one who says he’s Felix Maldonado? You’ll have to prove it to me; I knew Felix Maldonado and I attended his burial at the Jardín Cemetery on Wednesday the eleventh of August, more than a week ago. Besides, this room is registered to a Diego Velázquez. Is that you?”

She looked around the room, adding that they were all the same, what lack of imagination. Hadn’t Sara Klein died in an apartment like this?

“This is the room where Sara was murdered,” said Felix, speaking for the first time since Mary’s arrival.

She stopped, obviously disturbed, as she recognized Felix’s voice. A motion of her hand accompanied the forward swing of the crow’s-wing hair from neck to cheek, barely revealing a flushed earlobe. Felix realized that, in keeping with Professor Bernstein’s theory, well proved by now, Mary didn’t recognize him because she was looking for him.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, feigning coolness. “This is a hotel for tourists and lovers.”

“And I’m a dead man,” Maldonado replied tonelessly.

“I’d hoped you were a lover.” Mary laughed.

“Do you usually come when a stranger calls on the telephone?”

“Don’t be an idiot, and offer me a drink.”

She walked to the small bar set into one of the walls, opened it, and took out a glass. From that distance, she stared at Felix curiously, waiting for him to pour her drink.

“A vodka tonic,” she said as he approached her.

“I see you do know the place,” said Felix, when he’d located the bottles.

He opened a bottle of quinine water. Mary picked up the vodka and measured a shot into her glass; Felix added tonic until stopped by Mary’s finger, a snake imbued with a life of its own.

“Yes, I’ve been here. On the rocks, please. The refrigerator’s under the bar.”

Felix knelt to open the refrigerator. Pulsating odors from her sex assaulted him, without passing through customs. When he turned his head, he was looking directly at her crotch.

“Yes, you’ve been here before,” Felix repeated, still kneeling, squeezing the ice tray to loosen some ice cubes.

“Mmmh. And many places like it. The motel beside the Arroyo Restaurant, for example. You’re the one who stood me up.”

“I told you. I had an important appointment.”

“I’m the most important appointment, always. But then, you’re a crummy little bureaucrat who has to go wherever his chief orders. I prefer men who are their own bosses.”

“Like your husband.”

“You’ve got it.”

“But he doesn’t satisfy you, and the horns are on your pitiful Abie, not on the yearlings he pretends he’s fighting.”

“I take my pleasure where I want and when I want. Can you hurry up with the ice? I’m thirsty.” A tapping toe underscored her impatience.

“You must think you’re Tarzan’s mate, Mary.”

She thrust the glass under Felix’s nose, demanding ice; her smile could have substituted for it. “I’m my own Technicolor dream, baby, wide-screen and stereophonic sound, and if you don’t believe…”

The sentence was interrupted. Felix thrust his hand up her skirt, stretched the waistband of her tiny bikini, and dropped in two ice cubes that instantly began to melt on her burning pussy.

Mary screamed, and Felix rose and took her in his arms. “I’m like you,” he said into her ear. “I take my pleasure with the woman I want when I want. And, I told you, I want you only when I can have you quickly, nothing must come between my wanting you and your body, Mary.”

With Mary’s body, Felix exhausted all the cat-and-mouse games of the past week, all the pretense, all the chance moves and predetermined events. He’d been prepared to be led and deceived and misled, but at the same time he’d been forced to maintain an impossible rational reserve, to ensure that the chance of his actions coincided with the will of others only when his will triumphed. Even at that, it was not his own, his will belonged to an embryonic organization, to Angelica’s brother, his chief, the captain, Timon of Athens in code, the second knight in the joust, the man who didn’t always acknowledge Felix’s importance, who put his faith in beardless youths, who used quotes from Shakespeare so transparent they were obscure, or vice versa. Felix’s mind whirled, he was thinking at random, thinking of anything he could to keep from coming too soon, hold back, make her come first, with his scarred face buried between the moist thighs of the suddenly docile woman, the new hair on Felix’s head blended with Mary’s soft, foamy curls; he made love to her slowly and brutally, with all the soft force his hungry man’s body could summon, thinking, thinking not to come, to give her pleasure twice, knowing that the woman is loved only when the man knows she has pleasure less often than the man, but always more intensely than the man.

His face was pressed between her legs. Mary came, and on Mary’s body Felix avenged with fury the death of Sara Klein, in Mary’s body, the operation in the Arab clinic and his humiliating impotence before Ayub and the Director General, for Mary’s body he re-created the struggle with the cambujo on the dock at Coatzacoalcos, and with Mary’s body he liberated himself of the desire he had felt for Sara’s dead body and Angelica’s unconscious body beside the swimming pool, in Mary’s body he buried his grief for Harding and Harding’s love for a vanished girl named Emmita; he assaulted her physically as he had wanted to assault Trevor, he kissed her as he had wanted to crush a grapefruit in Dolly’s face, he thrust his finger up her ass to cleanse himself forever of his revulsion for Bernstein, he licked her breasts to erase forever the taste of Lichita, and they came together as he came for the first time and she for the second, and she said, Felix, Felix, Felix, and he said, Sara, Mary, Ruth, Mary, Sara.

“No, stay in a minute, don’t get up, please; please don’t rush to the bathroom like every other Mexican man,” Mary begged.

“When were you here before? Who were you with?”

Mary smiled docilely. “You’ll laugh. I was here with my husband.”

“You don’t have beds big enough in your house?”

“We hadn’t gone to bed together for a long time. He suggested we meet here secretly, like two lovers. He said it would be exciting, the way it used to be.”

“Did it help?”

“Not a bit. Abie disgusts me. It’s worse than physical revulsion. What I can’t take is boredom, and not being jealous. That’s worse than his disgusting face, always nicked and cut because he insists on shaving with an ancient razor that belonged to his grandfather.”

“He isn’t jealous of you.”

“No, I’m not jealous of him. He’s jealous, yes. He makes terrible scenes, but even that bores me. To excite me with jealousy, you have to have a little imagination. He doesn’t even have that. I should have married you, Felix. Ruth is too mousy for you. You’d have got ahead with me, I promise you that. Besides, you had every right. You were my first man.”

“Have you told Abie that?”

“It’s one of my weapons. I torment him with it, and he goes up the wall. He’s a moron, really, rich, but a moron. But he knows I’ll never leave him, because of our four children. And he’s loaded, and since he never does anything about it, I’ve got used to sleeping around wherever I want. What drives him mad, though, is for me to say anything about you. You’re a dreary bureaucrat who doesn’t even have a condominium in Acapulco. I dare him to give me something besides piles of money, but he doesn’t know how to do it. It nearly gives him a stroke.”

“I’m happy I can be of some use to you, Mary.”

“Well, it’s just my way of turning forty without losing my mind. What the hell. I like the way you screw. I enjoyed the roll in the hay. Technicolor and wide-screen.”

“We can roll it again. Doesn’t cost a thing.”

“No. The price is too high, and tonight we both paid.”

It was she who left the bed and walked toward the bathroom. “The other day at my anniversary party you told me you like touching me but never desired me. Tonight I think you did. And I didn’t like it, because that means the show wasn’t free the way it used to be. I’d rather you screwed me without wanting me, not like tonight, because you did want something and I was just the way to get it.”

Felix sat on the edge of the bed. “I paid for it, too. Desire doesn’t come cheap.”

“Or bitterness either, Felix. I only came here to insult your other women. You said their names as you came. And you don’t even realize you hurt me. That’s the only reason I came here. To humiliate that miserable little Ruth and to tell your marvelous Sara that she’s dead while I’m fucking with you.” She closed the bathroom door.

It was almost two when Felix walked her to the entrance of the Suites de Génova. The concierge opened the door for them. Mary said her car was in a parking lot on Liverpool and she’d rather walk alone, she didn’t want to be seen with Felix at that hour. Felix replied that young drunks in convertibles often wandered around the Zona Rosa, and sometimes they had mariachi bands to serenade American women at the hotels, but Mary made no comment.

They embraced, indifferent to the ancient Indian wrapped in his gray sarape, shivering in the cold, who held the glass door for them.

“Ten years is a long time, Felix,” Mary said affectionately. “What a shame we’ll have to wait another ten, until we get all the poison out of our systems. By that time, we’ll be over the hill.”

“Do you know anything about my death?” Felix asked with a twisted smile, his hands on Mary’s shoulders, turning her so the concierge could see her clearly.

“You saw that I didn’t ask you anything.”

“You recognized me.”

“Did I? No, Señor Velázquez. That’s what I enjoyed about our adventure. I don’t know whether I went to bed with an impostor or a ghost. The other possibilities don’t interest me. Ciao.”

She walked down the street like a black pantheress, lustful and pursued.

“Is she the nun?” Felix asked the concierge.

“No, the sister had a different face.”

“But you’ve seen this woman before?”

“Oh, yes.”

“When?”

“She spent the night here about a week ago.”

“Alone?”

“No.”

“Who was she with?”

“A man with sideburns and a moustache and a face like a ripe tomato.”

“Do you remember the date?”

“Of course, señor. It was the same night the lady was killed in 301. How could I forget?”

35

IT WAS EXACTLY ten o’clock. As Rosita entered the Café Kineret, Felix, with an expression of excessive religious zeal, was biting into a bagel with cream cheese and lox.

He had no time to speculate about the absence of Emiliano or about the girl’s extraordinary attire. Rosita didn’t seem to realize — or perhaps intentionally ignored — that her perennial miniskirts and laddered stockings gave her a slightly dated look, but styles always arrive late in Mexico City. By the time they’re accepted in Lomas de Chapultepec and bubbling on the back burner prior to being accepted in the Colonia Guerrero, light-years have passed and Ungaro is showing his new Siberian or Manchurian line. Today, however, the girl with the head like a woolly black lamb was dressed in the coarse, long, flowing habits of a Carmelite penitent, with a scapular flowing over breasts hidden for the first time.

She had washed her face and was carrying a black veil and a white breviary and rosary. She didn’t give Felix time to speak. “Hit it, Feliciano. The taxi’s waiting.”

He left a hundred-peso bill on the table and followed Rosita to the corner of Génova and Hamburgo. As they entered the taxi, Felix peered into the rear-view mirror to see if he recognized the driver. It was not Memo, of recent happy memory.

“The maestro didn’t take the plane,” said Rosita as the taxi pulled away.

“Where is he?”

“Don’t worry. Emiliano’s been following him ever since he left his house.”

“When did he leave?”

“Very late. He’d never have made his plane.”

“Where are we going?”

“Ask the driver. Where would you go, Felix?” Rosita’s smile was gloomy.

“To the Shrine of Guadalupe,” Felix directed the driver.

“But, yes, señor,” the driver replied. “The sister already told me, the Sanctuary of Our Dark Lady. I can’t go any faster.”

Rosita didn’t preen herself in her triumph. She pretended to read her breviary, as Felix caught a glimpse of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, enclosed in a glass oval, swinging back and forth over the taxi driver’s head. He burst out laughing.

“You know something, Rosie? The first time I met you two, I said to myself the chief’s picked himself some strange assistants.”

“Right-o, Feliciano,” said Rosita. She kept her eyes glued to the pages of her breviary and thrust her rosary under his nose. “See how well-strung the beads are? No loose ends.”

They pushed their way through the throngs that came daily from all parts of Mexico to the place that, along with the National Palace (and perhaps even more than that seat of more or less transitory political power), is the fixed center of a country fascinated with its own navel, perhaps because its very name means “navel of the moon,” a nation anguished by the fear that its center, and the pinnacles of that center, the Virgin and the President, might be displaced and, angered like the Plumed Serpent, might flee, leaving us bereft of the protection only that Mother and that Father can provide.

They walked among the slowly advancing penitents, many of them on their knees, their arms spread wide in a cross. Little boys hoping to earn a few centavos kept ahead of them, placing newspapers and magazines under their knees to protect them from the rough pavement. Some wore crowns of thorns and cactus leaves upon their breasts; many were simply there for the sights, and because you had to visit the Virgin, whether or not she’d answered your prayer made back there in Alcámbaro, Acaponeta, or Zacatecas. Sweethearts were drinking Pepsis, and families were having their pictures taken before canvases painted with the image of the Virgin and the humble Indian to whom she’d appeared. Native dancers attired in plumed headdresses and sandals with Goodrich-tire soles were playing Indian flutes; hawkers were selling holy cards, medals, rosaries, books of devotions, votive candles. Rosita purchased a yellowish, short-wicked votive light, and Felix preceded her into the flying saucer anchored in the center of the plaza, the new glass-and-cement basilica that had supplanted the small, slowly sinking, red volcanic-stone church with baroque towers that stood to one side like a poor relation.

Emiliano saw them enter. He jerked his head toward the altar with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe miraculously imprinted on the coarse fiber cape of a credulous Aztec gardener whose faith was rekindled at the sight of a handful of roses blooming in mid-December; and suddenly the millions of pagans subjected by the Spanish Conquest were converted to Christianity, hungering more for a mother than for gods: Madre pura, Madre purísima, Purest of Mothers, intoned by the thousands, the humble, as faithful as the first believer in the Dark Virgin, Juan Diego, the secret model of all Mexicans. Be submissive, or pretend to be, and the Virgin will shelter you beneath her mantle; you will never know hunger or cold, nor will you be a son of Cortés’s whore Malinche, but a son of the immaculate Guadalupe.

Bernstein was kneeling before the altar. He lighted a candle and, still on his knees, approached a retable covered with hand-painted ex-votos, prayers granted, thank you for saving me when the Flecha Roja bus went into the barranca in Mazatepec, thank you for returning the power of speech to my little sister mute from birth, thank you for the big one in the lottery; covered, too, with offerings to the Virgin, religious medals, Hearts of Jesus in silver and in tin, rings and bracelets and necklaces. As Bernstein reached out to pluck the ring hanging from a hook among the other offerings, Felix seized his soft, flabby arm.

“I didn’t recognize you without your skullcap and Talmud,” said Felix.

Bernstein’s fingers curled as his fingertips brushed against the ring with the stone clear as water. “Welcome to our sacred Beaubourg, Felix,” the professor replied with forced good humor. “Release me, please. We are not alone here.”

“I see that. There must be three thousand people here.”

“And one of them is named Ayub. Release me, Felix. You’re a Jew like me. Don’t betray us to our enemies.”

“My enemy is Harding’s murderer.”

“It was the cambujo. I told him I didn’t want any blood. Stupid idiot.”

“The captain was a good man, Professor.”

“That’s beside the point, Felix. Something more important is at stake.”

“Nothing is more important than a man’s life.”

“Ah, at last you’ve found your father. You’ve been searching for him for years, as long as I’ve known you. First it was I, that’s why you became a Jew; then Cárdenas, that’s why you defend nationalized oil; then whoever happens to be President, that’s why you became a government official…”

“And you found a mother in the Guadalupe, right?”

“Release me…”

Bernstein’s vanilla-ice-cream face was melting down the drain of a false smile. A Carmelite penitent with a black veil over her head and a lighted candle in her hands was approaching the Retable of the Miracles on her knees, crooning and repeatedly crossing herself. She paused just long enough to take the ring, and still murmuring, “Oh, María, madre mía, oh my comfort and my joy,” Rosita buried the ring in the candle wax—“oh, protect me, give me shelter, and conduct me to the Lord’s celestial court”—rose to her feet, and moved away from the altar, head lowered, the candle in her hand.

Bernstein struggled desperately to escape from Felix’s grasp. Felix released him with a shove, and ricocheting like a punctured balloon, Bernstein staggered wildly toward the multitudes approaching the altar from the opposite direction. He crashed against a crystal casket containing a recumbent Christ: the wax face and hands were bathed in blood, the body covered by a gold and velvet mantle.

The stunned amazement of the faithful turned into silent menace. Bernstein was sprawled on the glass coffin shattered by his fall; a streak across the glass seemed an additional wound on the sacred body. A wall of black, bovine, impenetrable eyes glared with hatred into the drowned eyes of Bernstein, as clear as the stone of the ring that was irrevocably disappearing with the Carmelite nun; shawl-draped women, white-shirted men, and children in jeans jostled each other, surging forward to gaze at the benevolent image of the Virgin — but, instead, finding in their path this mountainous, befuddled foreigner who had profaned the altar, the very death, of the Virgin’s son.

Felix observed the instantaneous transformation of the masks of faith and devotion and submissive good will into something resembling the collective face of violence, horror, and solitude. Several hands seized his shoulders and arms. He smelled the perfume of clove, the warm and aromatic breath of Simon Ayub, who whispered into his ear, “I told you, you bastard, I owe you one for the dirty punch.”

A group of Knights of Columbus clad in tailcoats, their plumbed tricorns tucked beneath their arms, intoned in authoritative voices, “We are Christians, we are Mexicans, we will wage war against Lucifer.”

36

“YOU’RE a real big man now, you fucking midget.” Felix managed to spit out the words before Ayub silenced him with another blow to his already bleeding mouth. Felix was tied to a chair, facing a hooded light that burned into eyes held open by toothpicks broken in half and inserted between the upper and lower eyelids. Two thugs stinking of beer and onions relieved Ayub; they repeatedly beat Felix in the stomach and kicked him in the shins, until the chair tipped over, and then they kicked him in the kidneys and face as he lay on the cold cement of a room stripped bare of any furnishings but the chair, and the hooded light and the men.

The gorillas tired quickly and went back to their beer and sandwiches. Felix could see nothing because he saw too much through propped-open eyelids; his sight was hazy, his mouth was filled with blood, his ears buzzed and he scarcely heard Ayub’s half-whining, half-defiant refrain. Stripped of self-pity and cursing, Ayub’s words were reduced to the fact that he’d been born in Mexico and felt himself to be Mexican, but not his parents. They had had to go back to Lebanon; they wanted to die in the land of their birth. And they’d taken Simon’s little sister with them. The girl had become a militant Phalangist and fallen into the hands of the Lebanese Palestinians. The old people had gone to look for her and all three had ended up in a Muslim village, where they were being held prisoner.

“The Director General said it in the hospital; he has me by the balls. ‘You do what we tell you,’ he says, ‘or we’ll send you the heads of your pappa and your mamma and your sweet little sister.’ Old fools, they should have gone alone, they never should have taken my sister. But how could they leave her here at fourteen? That’s a bad age. You’re a Mexican like me. I just wanted to be a Mexican and live a quiet life. Why do you have to go around sticking your nose in things that aren’t any of your business? Everyone tells you the same thing, the Palestinians and the Jews. ‘This is our land, it belongs to us!’ They’re going to end up killing each other. There won’t be anything left but desert when they stop the bombing, and putting people in concentration camps, and smuggling arms that end up in the hands of their enemies. Don’t you know that, you shitass! Both sides blindly machine-gun old people and children and dogs and you and poor bastards like me and … what the fuck…”

As if from far away, Felix heard the Director General’s voice, accompanied by the slamming of a metal door, and then by hollow footsteps on a cement floor. “That’s enough, Simon. It’s useless. He doesn’t have the ring.”

“But he knows where it is,” panted Ayub.

“And so do I. It’s useless, I say. Pay off your gorillas and turn off that light. Your friends offend me as much as the glare.”

“I wanted to make him talk.”

“You wanted to get even. Untie him. Don’t be afraid. In that condition, he’s not able to strike you.”

The Director General was mistaken. Grumbling, the hired thugs left, carrying their sandwiches. As Ayub untied the ropes binding Felix’s legs to the overturned chair, Maldonado kicked him in the testicles. Ayub screamed and doubled over with pain.

“Don’t touch him,” the Director General ordered, moving like a cat in the shadow. Dexterously, he untied Felix’s hands, and carefully removed the toothpicks from his eyelids.

“Help me,” he ordered Ayub, ignoring his whimpering. “Help me seat our friend correctly.”

“Our friend!” Ayub scoffed, still bent over, offering only one hand to help his chief. It was the hand with the rings; Felix would always remember the metallic taste of the scimitars.

“Oh, yes,” said the Director General, softly. “You’ve been invaluable to us, and you can still be so, n’est-ce pas? It’s your vocation, what can we do! A case of love at second sight, pas vrai?” He laughed, a laugh interrupted at the peak of its merriment.

He stared somberly at Ayub through his purplish pince-nez. “You may leave us now, Simon.”

“But…”

“Go … Your … ‘buddies’ are waiting for you. Tell them to share their sandwiches with you.”

“But…”

“But nothing. Go…”

Felix felt as if his eyes had been torn from their sockets, and he tried to hold them in place with hands that had become nursemaids to his ruined sight. He could almost believe the hands weren’t his. He was distracted by Ayub’s swift, receding footsteps and the clanging of the opening and closing of the metal door.

He kept his hands over his eyes. Why try to see if there was nothing to see? Only the photophobic Director General could see in that darkness, but Felix was grateful. In that one moment, they were alike.

“Poor devil,” the hollow voice commented. “His parents and his sister died last week in a miserable Lebanese village. That’s the fate of hostages. The Phalangists and their Israeli allies had killed ten Palestinian hostages in the south of Lebanon. So it became the turn of a similar number of Maronite hostages held by the Fedayeen.”

The skull-like face loomed close, as if to ascertain the gravity of Felix’s beating. “Such a shame,” he went on. “I’ve lost my hold over Ayub. He doesn’t know that yet. But in this all-too-small world someone will soon tell him. It would be better, n’est-ce pas? if that disagreeable pair took care of him once and for all. Exit Simon Ayub. And such a shame for you, too, Licenciado Velázquez. Ayub steadfastly believed that you are the man named Felix Maldonado. No one else believes it.”

The Director General stood for a long moment with his arms crossed, awaiting a comment from Felix. Finally, he shook his white porcupine head. “Dear me! It is definitely true. Every time we meet, you are unable to utter a word. I recall our poor departed friend Maldonado one afternoon in my office, the strutting cock. So talkative, yes? Just the opposite of you, the very essence of taciturnity. Dear me. But you mustn’t worry. I am a patient man. Here, take my handkerchief. Wipe the blood from your mouth. We’ll simply entertain each other for a few moments until your speech returns. When it does, try to avoid the obvious, n’est-ce pas? Our people have been following you ever since, with all the flourish of a Dumas hero, you fled the clinic on Tonalá. I regret that you resorted to such melodrama. A fire! I expected a bit more finesse. But what could we do? We were at the mercy of your caprice. What was important, n’est-ce pas? was that you escaped believing you were truly escaping, never suspecting we fervently desired your success.”

“Why?” said Felix, through blood and saliva.

“Hallelujah! In the beginning was the Word!” the Director General exclaimed with delight. “‘Why?’ Memorable first words from Licenciado Diego Velázquez, the new Chief of the Department of Cost Analysis of the Ministry of Economic Development.” The Director General licked his knife-thin lips as he pronounced the name and the accompanying titles.

“‘Why?’ asks the brand-new official. Because someone was spoiling our plans and we didn’t know who. Because someone unexpectedly transferred Felix Maldonado from Petróleos Mexicanos to Economic Development. Because, it turns out, this modest official, who cannot afford to have children until his salary and position are advanced, allows himself the luxury of a permanent room in one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Because all this awakens my legitimate doubts, and because, following a summary investigation, the information contained in the late Maldonado’s files in the Hilton turns out to be false, placed there purposely to make us suspect everything but learn nothing. But, as in any war, two can play at the war of nerves. Our opponents lose their agent Felix Maldonado, but as we are not niggardly, we counter with the gift of Diego Velázquez, who baptizes himself to save us the headache, n’est-ce pas? and who one fine night escapes from a clinic because we want him to escape.”

“Why?”

“Your curiosity is becoming monotonous, Licenciado. Because we needed an innocent carrier pigeon to lead us to a hidden nest. From that nest, a not-at-all-innocent vulture whom we both know intends to swoop down and thwart our plans. Ah, you smile roguishly, Licenciado. You say to yourself that your friend the Shakespearean buzzard has won the game and has the ring in his hands. It is for good reason you call him Timon of Athens. What is it the immortal Bard says in scene i, Act I of his drama about power and money — rather, about the power of money?”

The Director General, his arms still crossed, threw back his head, as if his reverie could illuminate the darkness behind his pince-nez. “See how all conditions, how all minds tender down their services to Lord Timon: his large fortune dues and properties to his love and tendance all sorts of hearts. Do I quote badly, Licenciado? Sorry. My training was not Anglo-Saxon like yours and your patron’s, but French, and as a result, I prefer the Alexandrine to blank verse.”

“You’ve confused your birds,” said Felix, spitting and licking his lips, testing his tongue against his teeth and lips. “Shakespeare compares Timon to the flight of the eagle, bold and forth on.”

“Do not be overly eloquent.” The Director General laughed. “I merely wish to indicate that if Timon is powerful and pays well, we are more powerful and pay better. I admit freely, yes, that your patron has the ring. But its loss is secondary. This little drama, you see, has two acts. First act: Felix Maldonado inadvertently foils our mission. Second act: Diego Velázquez, equally inadvertently, leads us to the den of an espionage ring that, in spite of all our efforts, we have been unable to locate or connect with any official branch of the Mexican government. With the result that all sins, yours and mine, will be pardoned in the end, because, thanks to you, we obtained something better than the ring: the thread that leads us to Timon of Athens.”

“You have good telephone taps, but nothing more,” said Felix, his face resigned and impassive. “Anyone can record a telephone conversation and play with proper names.”

“Do you want proof of my good faith, friend Velázquez?”

“Goddammit, stop calling me that!”

“Ah, that’s a proper name I don’t dare play with. It is too serious a matter. You will see that, my friend. But let me repeat. Ask for proof of my good faith, and I shall gladly give it to you.”

“Who is buried in my name?”

“Felix Maldonado.”

“How did he die?”

“I’ve already told you that, in the clinic. Why insist on replaying the first act? Consider the second. It is considerably more interesting, I assure you. Be more daring, my friend.”

“Why did he die?”

“I also told you that. He tried to assassinate the President.”

“Not a word came out about it in the newspapers.”

“Our press is the most easily controlled in the world.”

“Don’t be a fool. Too many people were there.”

“Be careful what you say. Your mouth is ugly enough. We can make it even less pretty, n’est-ce pas?”

“What really happened that morning in the Palace?”

“Nothing. Just as the President approached, Felix Maldonado fell into a faint. Everyone found it funny except the President.”

“What was your plan?”

“The one I outlined to Maldonado in my office, mmh? To borrow his name. Only his name. We need a crime, and a crime needs a man’s name. You, with your stupid swooning, were the obstacle. So there was no crime, even though there was a criminal.”

“What you mean is that you intended to kill the President and hang the death on me.”

“You will forgive me, n’est-ce pas? if I fail to answer such an irrelevant question?”

“You asked for difficult questions. I’m asking them.”

“Very well, but you won’t refuse me the elegance of an ellipsis, mmh? I showed the President the.44 Maldonado was carrying in his pocket. It’s an effective weapon, easy to conceal.”

“Which appeared like magic; Rossetti slipped it in Maldonado’s pocket after he had fainted and been carried from the room.” Felix hoped his logic was both unexpected and on the mark, but the effect was spoiled by the quaver in his voice as he referred to himself in the third person.

His apprehension did not escape the Director General’s attention. “If you say so. Something had to be rescued from the disaster, n’est-ce pas? We remarked to the President that Felix Maldonado was a converted Jew, and that converts feel a compulsion to demonstrate their zeal in order to be clasped to the bosom of the new family. I cited the reverse instance, recalling the conduct of the Spanish Jew Torquemada after his conversion to Catholicism.”

“What did you gain with that gambit?”

“You ask me that seriously?”

“Yes, because I doubt very much that the President would have swallowed that kind of crap.”

“It was not our primary intent. But Maldonado had wrecked Plan A.”

“To assassinate the President.”

“Passons. We immediately applied Plan B, which was to sow a simple suspicion in the President’s mind. Had Israel actually paid an agent to eliminate the President of Mexico?”

“Why would they? Generally, a tourist boycott by the North American Jews is sufficient when they want to tighten the screws.”

“You’re at liberty to imagine all probable scenarios.”

“But, in all of them, Felix Maldonado appeared to be the ideal sacrificial lamb.”

“I repeat; only the name, not the man. But, en fin. You know as well as I that in Mexico there are no checks and balances to absolute Presidential power. To exercise that power without regrettable excess requires great equanimity. But how does the poor man know what actually is happening? He lives in isolation, his only information that furnished by the sycophants who surround him. Presidents who listen to the people are very rare. The general rule is that, little by little, the court isolates the President, and gradually and inexorably, n’est-ce pas? the President becomes accustomed to hearing only what he wants to hear. From there, it’s only a step to totally capricious rule.”

The Director General sighed, as if he were delivering a lecture to an exceedingly slow student. “The first rule in a political system as baroque as that of Mexico is this: Why do things the easy way if they can be made complicated? Thence, the second rule: Why do things well if they can be done badly? And third, the perfect corollary: Why win if we can lose?”

Deliberately, he removed the pince-nez and, with them, the resemblance to Victoriano Huerta. However, the effect was opposite to what had happened with Bernstein; without his glasses, the Director General’s gaze did not diminish; if anything, the greenish slits of his eyes gained in intensity.

“The North Americans follow Thoreau’s counsel: simplify, simplify; as well as its corollary that nothing succeeds like success. For good or evil, their political system is transparent, a mode accepted by men as disparate as the stupid, well-meaning Eisenhower and the perverse, satanic Dulles. But he who seeks to imitate Machiavelli finds himself drowning in Watergate, n’est-ce pas? In contrast, no Mexican politician is disposed to believe that simple things are simple; he suspects something fishy. We Mexicans are, understandably, defensive. Mexico, to continue our ichthyological metaphor, is a fish that has too often taken the bait. One must suspect everything and everybody, and that means that everything and everybody is complicated, hélas!”

“Was it the President’s orders that I be jailed, shot while trying to ‘escape,’ and buried?”

“That wasn’t necessary. A cabinet member who was present at the ceremony requested an investigation of Felix Maldonado. That caused an Under-Secretary to run to the hot line and order the Chief of the Secret Police to detain Maldonado. We, oh so happily, handed over an unconscious man to their agents, and they, with a small assist from us interpreted the President’s intentions in their own manner. In view of the enormity of the crime, they tossed the hot potato to the authorities at the Military Camp, saying those were orders direct from the ‘Orifice’ of the President — if you’ll forgive the pun. Of course, I was the, shall we say, source, n’est-ce pas? That night I went to Military Camp Number One and spoke to the officer of the guard, a mere commandant, and told him — I have sufficient credentials — I had come on behalf of the President of the Republic to speak with the prisoner. We went to the cell where Maldonado was resting.”

He interrupted his account to emphasize the verb. “I choose my words carefully when I say resting. The poor man was dead, wrapped in a coarse blanket scarcely worthy of a recruit. Imagine the confusion of a minor officer who finds he has the corpse of a presumed Presidential assassin on his hands. I suggested that in such instances one must make a virtue of necessity, and that he might distinguish himself if he shot the corpse in the back and said he had been trying to escape. Naturally, he interpreted my suggestion as an order from above. En passant, the fact that the prisoner had been shot while attempting to escape relieved me of any responsibility in Maldonado’s death; that was transferred directly to the officer of the guard and, thus, to the entire National Army, ah, well … The death was a public secret, but everything was clarified and accepted in the higher spheres: a discreet burial the following day, after advising the next of kin of a sudden heart attack, et cetera, et cetera. Finis, Felix Maldonado. Malicious tongues will always say he was struck dead by the emotion of seeing the President at such close range. And that is the felicitous journey that takes us from a simple suspicion voiced in the President’s presence and picked up by one of his cabinet, to the brutal decision of a minor army officer — before we are elevated to the plane of appropriate grief at the ceremony at the Jardín Cemetery, mmh?”

“What is the name of the poor devil all this happened to?”

“Felix Maldonado. Felix he wasn’t, if you remember your Latin. He was a miserable mediocrity. A mediocre economist, a mediocre bureaucrat, a mediocre Don Juan. Yes, a miserable fellow.”

The Director General stared at Felix with judicious ferocity. “Velázquez, place on one side of the scales that miserable, insignificant Maldonado, and on the other an internal crisis with international repercussions. You will see we have no reason to weep over such a man.” He replaced his tinted pince-nez. “On the other hand, we must concern ourselves with Licenciado Diego Velázquez. Felix Maldonado did not accept our offer and you have seen what happened to him. A whole world awaits Diego Velázquez: a position with a considerable increase in salary, juicy commissions, trips abroad with generous per diems, everything he could desire.”

Felix felt as if his facial muscles were tied in knots. “But I have a wife, remember?”

He could only guess that the Director General’s invisible eyes were intrigued. “But of course. And now you can have all the little ones God chooses to send, n’est-ce pas?”

“Right. A litter of fucking little sons of bitches, all named Maldonado!”

The Director General didn’t resort to striking Felix. Rather, he leaned close to him; his deeply furrowed, greenish skin, taut over salient bones, was the image of death, if not death itself. The breath expelled from the flaring nostrils and fleshless lips thin as stone knives issued from a cavernous tomb that spoke a threat worse than any beating.

“Listen carefully. The only certainty in this adventure is that you will never know whether you are the true Felix Maldonado or the one who took his place by our orders. You still deny you are the man buried in the Jardín Cemetery? Reflect upon the moment you awakened in the clinic, and ask yourself whether you can be sure you knew who you were. There will always be a before and an after in your life, separated by a chasm you will never be able to span, do you understand that? From this time forward, what you can recall of your past may only be what we, out of the goodness of our hearts, wish to teach you. Can you be sure of the truth?”

“Ruth…” Felix murmured, hypnotized by the deathly voice and eyes and movements of this man as elusive as an oiled serpent.

“I promise you,” continued the Director General, ignoring Felix’s mumbled allusion to his wife, “that every time you think of Felix Maldonado’s past you will be remembering something I taught you while you were unconscious in the hospital. And as you are living Diego Velázquez’s life, you will remember of him only what I tell you. Every choice will lead to its impossible antithesis. If you were the man you were yesterday, can you be sure where your today begins? If you are the man you are today, can you know where your yesterday ended? There’s no way out for you, do what you do, go where you go. Felix Maldonado was a nobody who frustrated my perfect plan. Diego Velázquez will bear the curse of that guilt.”

From the intensity of the words, Felix knew there must be sweat on the Director General’s brow, but like his breath, his brow was mortally cold. The official composed himself, and stood straight, no longer crouching over Felix. “Our poor Maldonado is the ideal man, not because of his debatable virtues, but because he doesn’t exist. He will remain dead so that we may continue to profit from his services. His chief agrees.”

He gestured disdainfully, inviting Felix to stand. “Follow me, Licenciado. I am going to take you for a ride in my automobile.”

Felix got to his feet. He felt dizzy and weak. For an instant, he supported himself by holding on to the back of the chair. The Director General turned away and with deliberation lighted a cigarette, his hand shielding his eyes from the unbearable brilliance of the flame. Felix dropped to his knees, plugged in the light Simon and his cohorts had used to torture him, and the sudden glare — congealed in the room like the breath of the man lighting his cigarette before the lidless eye of the reflector — blinded the Director General. He screamed with anguish and clapped his hands over his eyes. The lighter fell to the cement floor, followed by the cigarette, dropped from his unfeeling fingers and dripping a tiny trail of lava down the Director General’s chest.

“Right behind you,” said Felix, crushing out the cigarette with his heel.

The Director General suppressed the trailing notes of his cry of agony. He stooped down and groped for his lighter, found it, and again rose, his dignity completely recovered.

“Be my guest,” he said to Felix Maldonado.

37

THE METAL DOOR closed behind them and they walked along a glass-and-iron gallery ventilated by draughts of cold night air smelling of the recent rain.

They descended iron stairs to a garage where an ancient long, low, black Citroen was parked. The Director General opened the door and gestured Felix to enter.

Felix climbed into the luxurious imitation coffin. His host followed and slammed the door. He settled back with a sigh, and took the black mouthpiece hanging from a metal hook.

He gave orders in Arabic, and the funeral carriage drove off. The interior of the Citroen was upholstered in black velour; the windows were covered with black curtains, and two sliding panels of black-painted metal separated the unseen chauffeur from the passengers.

Felix smiled secretly, imagining the conversations that could take place between his host and him in this place and under these circumstances. But the Director General was too occupied to talk, absorbed with the drops that would alleviate the pain of the sudden glare. He replaced the bottle in a case fitted into the back of the divider facing them, and with closed eyes leaned back against the cushioned seat.

He spoke with extreme courtesy, as if nothing had happened during the preceding hour. One might think the two men were on their way to a banquet, or returning from a funeral. In tones of modulated affability, the Director General recalled his life as a student at the Sorbonne. There, he said, he’d formed indestructible bonds of friendship with the elite of the Arab world. Doors had been opened to a sensibility that made the Western world seem crude and impoverished. Without the Arabs, he added, the Western world would not be enjoying its own culture; the Greek and Latin heritages had been destroyed or ignored by the barbarians, preserved only by Islam and disseminated from Toledo throughout medieval Europe. The sons of wealthy Palestinians studied in France; through them, he came to understand that their Diaspora, because it was current and tangible, was worse than that of the Jews begun two thousand years before. The Palestinians were the contemporary victims of colonialism in the Promised Land, and were living a destiny Jews could only recall, a destiny that never would have gone beyond a vague Zionist nostalgia had not Hitler once again martyred them. But, while the Jews were rich bankers, prosperous businessmen, and honored intellectuals in pre-Nazi Germany, the Palestinians were already victims, fugitives exiled from the land they, and only they, had truly inhabited.

“The Middle East is an impassioned geography,” the Director General murmured. “One need only go there to share its passions — including violence. But the violence of the modern Occident is different from all others because it is programmed, not spontaneous. Western colonialism introduced that violence into the Middle East; the Zionist project prolonged it. Palestinian violence is a passion. And passion is consumed in the instant; it is not a project but a living thing, inseparable from religion and all it implies. In contrast, Zionism is a program that must separate itself from religion in order to be compatible with the secular project of the West whose violence it shares. Consider, friend Velázquez. Palestine was a land already inhabited. But, for the Jews of Europe, anything that was not Europe was, as it had been for European colonialism, land to be occupied. That is to say, colonized, mmh? The Jews forced the Arab world to pay the price of the Nazi ovens. The result was fatal: the Palestinians became the Jews of the Middle East, the persecuted of the Holy Land. But Israel’s penance is in its guilt. Little by little the Israelis are becoming Easternized and, like the Arabs, entrenched in a struggle that has become religious as well as secular, passionate and instantaneous. The Easternization of Israel makes a new war inevitable, perhaps many successive wars, since Oriental politics can only conceive of negotiation as a result of, never as an impediment to, war.”

Felix didn’t wish to reply. He was reaching the end of an adventure in which he couldn’t be sure whether he’d been following some plan — either his own or another’s — or whether he’d been the blind instrument of chance, completely divorced from will.

The Director General tapped Felix’s knee. “Bernstein must have given you his arguments. I shall not persist in mine. You, like poor Simon, must believe you’re a Mexican, and what does all this have to do with you? You carry out your assignment, and that’s that, n’est-ce pas? But your friends are right. Mexican oil is becoming a more and more important card to be played in the case of continuing war in the eastern Mediterranean. Hence all our efforts, n’est-ce pas? One cannot isolate oneself, Licenciado. History and its passions sift through the universal chinks of violence. Did you study Max Weber? The decisive means of politics is violence. And as each of us, personally, possesses a more or less controlled measure of violence, the encounter is fatal; history becomes the justification for our hidden violence. You may think I quote Weber only because he expresses my own view. But think about it. At this moment you are exhausted, all you want is to bring this to an end. I understand. But I urge you, ask yourself, don’t you have a reserve of personal violence completely separate from the political violence surrounding you? Don’t you intend to use it to find out the only thing you want to know?”

Felix and the Director General took each other’s measure in silence; Maldonado knew that his own gaze was empty, opaque, uncommunicative; in contrast, the two lenses of the Director General’s pince-nez glittered like black stars in the black bosom of the ancient Citroën.

“Well.” The Director General smiled. “I believe we are almost there. Forgive my chatter. The fact is, I had only one thing to say. Cruelty is always preferable to scorn.”

He drew back one of the window coverings and Felix saw that they were approaching the stone bridge of Chimalistac. The Director General again laughed, and said the Spanish had learned from the Arabs that architecture should never be in conflict with the climate, the landscape, or the soul. Such a shame, he added, that modern Mexicans had forgotten that lesson.

“All Mexico City should look like Coyoacán, in the same way that all Paris, in a certain sense, is like the Place Vendôme, n’est-ce pas? One must multiply the beautiful, not isolate it, or destroy it, as unfortunately we do.”

The auto stopped, and the Director General’s voice again became hollow and dry. “Rest. Relax. When you feel well, return to our office. We will be waiting for you. The same office. Malenita is waiting eagerly. Poor thing. She’s like a child, she needs someone who will be a father to her. She will cash your checks punctually, and you won’t have to go out of your way or stand in lines. And every month, come by to see my secretary Chayito. Special perquisites aren’t processed through the Ministry’s public accounting office.”

He opened the door and waved his hand. “Please get out, Licenciado Velázquez.”

“There’s one thing you haven’t explained. Why did you tell me in the clinic that Sara Klein had attended my funeral?”

For an instant, the Director General’s eyes were as vacant as sand. Then he sighed. “Recall my words. I said that Sara Klein, too, had attended the rendezvous with dust. In this carnival of lies, Licenciado, allow a small metaphorical truth, mmh?”

A wedding ring glittered on the finger of this man with an unimaginable private life. It occurred to Felix that the eight wives of Bluebeard, including Claudette Colbert, had no reason to envy the wife of the Director General.

“Get out, Licenciado Velázquez. I’m going on. And tell our friend Timon of Athens to reflect upon the words of Corneille, with the necessary geographical adjustments. ‘Rome, to my ruin, is a monstrous Hydra head; it will, when severed, grow a thousand in its stead.’ You see, I, too, know my classics.”

Felix got out without offering his hand. But, once outside the car, he turned and thrust both hands inside, the palms with their signs of life, fortune, and love almost touching the Director General’s tinted lenses. He said with rage: “See. You’ve forgotten one thing. My hands. I have my fingerprints. I can prove who I am.”

For once, the Director General did not laugh. “No. We thought of that. We decided not to slice off the tips of your fingers this time, Licenciado. One must always have an ace up his sleeve. And cruelty must be gradual. But I’m sure you won’t want to expose yourself a second time to our surgery, n’est-ce pas?”

He closed the door and the Citroen pulled away. Felix was standing before the door to my house in Coyoacán.