Hydra Head

38

I HAVE WRITTEN the most accurate report possible of everything Felix Maldonado told me during the week he spent recuperating in my home. I have imposed a certain order, for he told his story the way memory works, in disjointed fragments. Felix’s memory, as he had already told me over the telephone, had certain rights. And mine as well.

I have transcribed with complete fidelity his feelings of the moment, his descriptions of people and places, events and conversations, as well as the occasional reflections evoked by these events. Some — perhaps too many — peripheral comments are exclusively mine.

I realize as Rosita types my notes that I have accumulated over two hundred pages. The girl with the head like a woolly lamb is an excellent typist, though she doesn’t enjoy her secretarial tasks; she feels they are beneath her dignity as a budding Mata Hari. Her Emiliano is much more docile, eager to learn. He is reading with intense interest the pages Rosita transcribes.

The case we, and the triple agent Trevor/Mann, call Operation Guadalupe richly deserves his curiosity. It was the first operation of our embryonic intelligence organization. The lessons we learned from this pilot experience will be of the greatest usefulness in the future.

I came to know Felix Maldonado well some fifteen years ago when we were both postgraduate students at Columbia University in New York. Although we were of the same generation, we hadn’t been friends while we were enrolled in the School of Economics at the University of Mexico. Our poorly labeled “maximum house of study” favors neither study nor friendship. The absence of discipline and any entrance standards prevents the former; an indiscriminate mass of two hundred thousand students makes the latter difficult, at best.

Besides, social differences separate the wealthy students from the poor. I came to the university in my own car; Felix, on the bus. Wealthy students like me didn’t want to fraternize with poor students like Felix, nor they with us. It created too many problems, we all knew that. They were embarrassed to invite us to their homes; we were uncomfortable at their uneasiness in ours. We spent our weekends in our houses in Acapulco; they, if they were lucky, might get as far as the public bathing beach at Agua Hedionda in Puebla. We had our dances at the Jockey Club; theirs were held in the Clair de Lune Ballroom.

There was also the problem of girls. We didn’t want our sisters and cousins to fall in love with them; and they, even if their parents were of a different mind, didn’t want theirs swept off their feet by our money.

Felix’s case was somewhat different. Everyone knew of his loyalty to the professor who taught economic theory, Leopoldo Bernstein, and of his love for one of our classmates, a Jewish girl named Sara Klein. And this was an additional barrier. Toward the end of the fifties, Jewish families in Mexico still hadn’t been accepted in “good” society; the parents spoke with thick German or Slavic accents, it was suspected that their daughters were too emancipated, and, above all, the families weren’t Catholic.

Distance spontaneously breached all these barriers. The privileges I enjoyed at home impressed no one in New York; on the other hand, Felix accepted them naturally, but he saw no reason why two young Mexicans living in the United States should perpetuate social divisions; it made more sense to become friends, to share jokes and memories and language.

Felix was overwhelmed by the film series at the Museum of Modern Art, and became infatuated with the art and history of the medium. Several times he invited me to go with him in his explorations of Griffith and Stroheim and Buñuel. I never told him I’d seen them all in Mexico at the Instituto Francés on Nazas, where twice a week we sat in religious silence before the fluid undulations of Swanson and the iron control of Potemkin, and then listened as a svelte young Spanish poet with prematurely gray hair gave some three hundred of us lucid lectures on cinematic culture.

As for me, I discovered the theater, and Felix’s passion for the movies was equaled only by mine for Shakespeare. I devoted an entire summer to the Ontario Shakespeare Festival and what was called the straw-hat circuit in summer theaters along the New England coast. I invited Felix to go with me, and overcame his reluctance by suggesting that he be my guest at the theater, and I his at the movies.

So we sealed our friendship, and when in September we began our second year at Columbia, we decided to share a room; we rented a small apartment at the Century Apartments on the outmoded west side of Central Park. Felix set one condition: that I limit my monthly allowance to the amount of the fellowship he received from the government. I agreed, and we moved into our furnished apartment, one room, plus bath and kitchenette. We shared the Castro Convertible that was by day a sofa and by night a bed. We worked out an arrangement to entertain girls only in the late afternoon and to hang a sign on the door when we didn’t want to be disturbed. We stole a public-works sign on Sixty-eighth Street that read MEN AT WORK, and used it as a signal.

We talked a lot about Mexico, sitting before the view that was our only luxury: the Hudson at dusk from our window on the twentieth floor. Felix’s father had been one of the few Mexicans employed by the foreign oil companies. He’d worked as a bookkeeper in Poza Rica for the El Aguila Company, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch.

“My father went to the superintendent’s office twice a month. But he never saw his face. Each time my father entered, this Englishman was sitting with his back to him. That was the custom; you received Mexican employees with your back turned, to make them feel they were inferior, like the Hindu employees of the British Raj. My father told me this years later, when his humiliation had been transformed into pride. In 1938, Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated the English, Dutch, and North American oil companies. My father told me that at first they hadn’t known what to do. The companies had taken with them their technicians, their engineers, even the plans of the refineries and wells. They’d said, drink your oil and see how you like the taste! The capitalist countries declared a boycott against Mexico. My father says they’d had to improvise to keep going. But it had been worth it. No more White Guards, the company’s private army, stealing land and cutting off the ears of rural schoolteachers. And most important of all, people looked one another in the face.”

This is all a well-known fact of modern Mexican history. But to Felix it was a personal and moving experience. He insisted heatedly, as I laughed, that he’d been conceived on the eighteenth of March, 1938, the day of the nationalization, and born exactly nine months later. But if he’d been born nine years earlier, he’d have had none of the advantages he’d enjoyed, the schools Cárdenas created in the oil fields, the medical services that hadn’t existed earlier, social security, and pensions. His parents hadn’t dared have children before; but Felix went to school in Poza Rica, and his father was promoted and became Chief Accountant in the main offices of Petróleos Mexicanos in Mexico City. Felix was able to pursue his studies and go to the university. His father retired on a pension, but active men die when they stop working. Felix venerated his father and Cárdenas; they were almost one in his imagination, as if their shared humiliation and dignity and destinies, inherited by Felix, were inextricably linked.

He told this story with great warmth and feeling, more than I can recapture here. I didn’t offer a similar confession. My life had always been easy, and I was embarrassed to admit that my family, too, owed everything to President Cárdenas. My father’s small pharmaceutical factory expanded and diversified following the expropriation, until it became a powerful petrochemical empire. And, along the way, my father cornered a number of concessions; our gasoline stations were strategically located all along the Pan-American Highway between Laredo and Valles, and thanks to all this, I attended not only the university but also the dances at the Jockey Club.

In a way, I envied Felix the vividness of his experiences and emotions; but at the same time I realized they’d marked my friend with a certain eccentricity. I don’t mean our religious differences. Where religion is concerned, I’m the one who might be considered an eccentric in a society where everyone claims to be Catholic but only women and children go to church. Felix was the product of socialist schools. I wasn’t a Catholic simply because of tradition, but by conviction, and my conviction was based on the very reasons because of which Felix rejected the notion of God: that the Creator could not have created evil.

“But evil is necessary only because there is a God,” I argued during one of our discussions. “Imagine all evil accumulated on God’s shoulders and then you can comprehend His existence; only then will you feel, will you know, that God never forgets us. If He is able to bear human evil, it is because we matter to Him.”

When news reached Felix of his mother’s death, he rejected my company and hung out the warning sign on our apartment door. I came home as late as possible, but the sign was still there, so I spent the night in a hotel. By the following morning I was worried, and I ignored the sign and went in.

Felix was in bed with a very pretty girl. “Let me introduce Mary. She’s Jewish and she’s Mexican. Last night she lost her virginity.”

The girl with the violet eyes didn’t seem perturbed. I felt uncomfortable and, I confess, jealous. As long as Felix respected our arrangement and I didn’t see the girls that passed through our bed, it didn’t matter to me. But Mary’s physical presence disturbed me. I rationalized that it was the fault of my good — or bad — training. I would have taken a plane to Mexico City for my mother’s funeral. But secretly I also realized that I regarded Felix as somehow mine, the brother who’d lived the hard life that hadn’t touched me, the platonic lover who lay beside me every night in the convertible sofa-bed recounting extraordinary films that had never been filmed, or rather, ideal films pieced together from bits he particularly loved, a face, a gesture, a situation, a place immortalized by the camera.

“Who’ll pay for the stained sheets and mattress?” I asked grossly, and left them.

I walked to St. Patrick’s; Felix wasn’t going to pray for his mother.

During the last two months of the life we shared in New York, neither of us again hung the sign on the door.

We returned to Mexico together and promised to see each other often; we exchanged telephone numbers, and went our separate ways. All our good intentions to continue our friendship failed. Felix found a job with Petróleos Mexicanos; his family connections and his Master’s from Columbia paved the way. I went back to my old social circle and gradually took over my father’s affairs. I heard that Felix was spending a lot of time with the Jewish colony. Sara Klein had gone to live in Israel, but Felix was going around with Mary. Then she married a rich Jewish businessman and Felix married another Jewish girl, named Ruth.

My business affairs prospered, and when my father died, I expanded them even further, but the rewards seemed empty. Because of my two years at Columbia, my friendship with Felix, my love for English literature, I deplored the world of bourgeois Mexicans, ignorant and proud of it, wasteful, voracious in their appetites for accumulating money without any greater purpose, totally lacking in the least measure of social compassion or civic conscience. I held a similar opinion of the government officials I came in contact with; the majority were struggling to amass enough money in a few years to be able to move into bourgeois circles and live and act and think like them.

These two aspects of my life came together in my sister Angelica’s marriage; she had all the vices of our class, and the man she married, Mauricio Rossetti, an impoverished aristocrat making a career in government service, had all the defects of his. I imagined how it might have been if Felix had rescued my sister from the idiotic life into which she was pouring her half of our inheritance, only to humiliate her husband. At the same time, she was goading him to profit from government corruption and free himself from her humiliation. I’m not sure, but deep inside I may have resented the fact that Felix hadn’t come along, fallen in love with Angelica, and saved her …

I cultivated the few exceptions I found, the few lawyers, economists, officials, and scientists who were intelligent, honorable, and, above all, concerned about the future of a country that was needlessly condemned to poverty, corruption, and nonsense. I bought a large old house in Coyoacán. I filled it with my books, the paintings I’d begun to acquire, the music that meant more and more to me as I became resigned to bachelorhood. Almost out of inertia, my business thrived, and I came to be considered a nationalistic entrepreneur.

But always, just beneath the surface, lay those conversations held in a small apartment with a view overlooking the Hudson, when a young student of economics told me what had happened on the day he was conceived.

That day, Mexicans had looked one another in the face.

Following the political and economic crisis of October 1973, my constant recollections of Felix became a real need to see him again. The Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil embargo coincided with the discovery, at a depth of some 4,500 meters beneath the soil of Tabasco and Chiapas, of a large quadrant containing a potential two billion barrels of oil.

It wasn’t difficult for the owner of a large petrochemical empire to perceive the warning signals, to measure the greed aroused by the discovery of such enormous oil deposits, as well as the role those reserves might play in an international crisis. I became aware of some things that on the surface seemed quite innocent: the comings and goings of our former professor Bernstein, who claimed to be raising funds for Israel, the contacts he established, the questions he asked; the relation of the Director General of the Ministry of Economic Development with the diplomats and hierarchs of Arab countries. My sister Angelica’s indiscretions were incalculable, but I didn’t really need them to experience the full pressure exerted upon my own empire to associate with transnational companies and become a part of enterprises that would in the end divest us of our control over our own resources.

I imagined the day when we Mexicans might cease to look one another in the face.

39

I GOT IN TOUCH WITH Felix and made an appointment to see him one evening at my house in Coyoacán. We compared appearances, after thirteen years of not seeing each other. He was unchanged, Moorish, virile, the image of the Velázquez self-portrait, and tall for a Mexican. I, on the other hand, had changed considerably. Relatively short, with a head too large for my small, slim body, I had begun to go bald, and that only emphasized my stature, I attempted to compensate with a thick black moustache.

Without going into great detail, I sketched out what I had in mind. I didn’t want Felix to form too many preconceptions. I knew that Felix was motivated solely by personal emotions, not abstract political arguments. Oil was his father’s life, not an ideology. He reminded me that he wasn’t orthodox but he’d converted to the Jewish faith to please his wife. He asked me whether I’d ever married, he’d completely lost track of me. No, I was a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor. Maybe someday.

We set up a simple code, quotations from Shakespeare. I rented a room in the Hilton to serve as a kind of honeycomb to attract bees of all breeds, and there we carefully planted false documents that had every appearance of authenticity.

Felix objected. “You’ve given me very little to go on. I may make mistakes.”

“It’s better this way. No one but you can carry out this mission. When something surprises you, you always react with imagination. When you’re not surprised, you act routinely. I know you.”

“Then I consider myself free to do whatever I think best.”

“Agreed. Our premise is that we have neither information nor plans to forestall the ambitions of those who are a threat to us. We will act alone, our only principals those who deserve our confidence; our only resources, my own personal fortune.”

Felix looked at me oddly; at times, memory disdains its true name and becomes clouded with emotions that are nothing more than vague recollections. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Yes, Felix. Very good.”

“We were good friends, real friends, weren’t we?”

“More than that. At Columbia, they called us Castor and Pollux.”

I used the moment to attempt an intimate, personal overture. I placed my arm around his shoulders, hoping some tremor would betray his emotion.

“I’m prejudiced,” he said to me. “I’m married. To a Jewish girl. I have many connections in that area.”

I removed my arm. “I know that. I also know that the English superintendent at Poza Rica turned his back on your father.”

“That can never happen again.”

I gazed at him gravely, sadly, intentionally mixing personal and professional relations. “You’re mistaken.”

“But you know I’d do anything to keep it from happening again, don’t you?”

I answered his question indirectly. The sentimental blackmail I was subjecting him to had to be implicit. “Listen to this.”

I ran my fingers over the keys of the recorder I always carry in an inside jacket pocket; I pressed one key and my voice emerged. Felix didn’t seem to be any more amazed than if I’d been a nightclub ventriloquist, until the moment another voice with a heavy North American accent responded to mine: “… in Tabasco and Chiapas. The United States requires six million barrels per day of imported oil for internal consumption. Alaska and Venezuela assure us of only two-thirds of this supply. Mexico will have to send us the missing third.”

“Whether or not we want to?”

“Well, it would be better if you did, wouldn’t it?”

“Do you think a new war will break out?”

“Not between the great powers, no, because the nuclear arsenal threatens us with either the terror of extinction or a new balance of terror. But the small countries will be the arenas of limited wars using conventional arms.”

“And also limited skirmishes using equally conventional economic weapons.”

“I was referring to the weapons we used in Vietnam; they’re all tied to your profession, you know that; limited and conventional wars mean a boom for the petrochemical industry, you know that, too, napalm, phosphorus, defoliation chemicals…”

“And I was referring to even more conventional weapons, blackmail, threats, pressure…”

“That’s the way it is. Mexico is highly vulnerable because she’s dependent on the three valves we can close at our whim: imports, financing, and the sale of replacement parts.”

“We’ll drink our oil, then, and see how it tastes…”

“Ugh. Better to adapt to the future, my friend. Dow Chemical is eager to associate itself with you. That means guaranteed expansion and earnings for your empire, I promise that. In the eighties, Mexico can count on a reserve of 100,000 million barrels, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Saudi Arabia in the world. You can’t sit on it forever like the proverbial Indian sleeping on a mountain of gold…”

I stopped the tape. It amused me to wag my index finger under Felix’s nose, like the gringo when he visited me in my offices.

“We’re on the razor’s edge,” I said to Felix. “We may wake up some fine day to find all our oil installations occupied by the United States military.”

“They’d have to occupy the entire country, not just the wells and refineries,” Felix replied, pensively. He looked as if he’d just heard a ghostly dialogue between his father and the English superintendent of Poza Rica.

“You’re right.”

“I understand why you came to me, you know my sentimental weakness, my father’s story,” he said without a trace of cynicism. “But you? Why are you doing all this? You should be a conservative.”

“I am, Felix. Call me a nationalistic conservative, if you want. I’d like to conserve that, keep the oil ours, and prevent outsiders from playing games with us.”

“Will I be in contact with anyone besides you?”

“No. Only me. I’ll send help when necessary. Money. Friends.”

“There are others involved?”

“Only the bare minimum. They think like us. We’re few, but we’re not alone.”

“What shall I call you?”

“Timon. Timon of Athens.”

“Why not? We saw that play in the open-air theater in Connecticut. A man of enormous wealth who also buys affection. Isn’t that what Shakespeare says, something like that?”

“You’ll have to reread the plays so we can communicate.”

“You know something? I wouldn’t have recognized you on the street.”

“I know, Felix. But don’t forget my voice. All our communications will be by telephone. We won’t see each other until the end. Trust no one.”

“But I have my prejudices. Bernstein was my teacher.”

“Do you know what the Irgun Zvai Leumi was?”

“No.”

“An organization of Jewish terrorists as bent on terrorism as any of the PLO.”

“You mean they were fighting for a homeland against the occupying British. Listen, I saw how the British went about things in Poza Rica.”

“That isn’t true. You hadn’t been born.”

“My father saw it. That’s the same thing.”

“The Palestinians are also fighting for a homeland. The Irgun didn’t limit itself to acts of terrorism against the British; they also exterminated any Arab they found in their path.”

“It all seems very abstract.”

“I’ll give you a concrete example. On the ninth of April of 1948, our Professor Bernstein took part in the slaughter of all the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassim. Two hundred dead, most of them women, children, and old men. This happened three years after the death of Hitler.”

The information had no effect on Felix. It lacked the personal element; he would have to know that Bernstein had achieved what he had never tried to achieve, and never had achieved, become Sara’s lover. He would have to know Sara’s death, the torture of the man called Jamil, Harding’s murder, before he understood my parting words, after we’d agreed on the broad outlines of Operation Guadalupe and he was for the first time on his way to the room in the Hilton. “You will learn that no one has a monopoly on violence in this business.”

He would have to know the extermination of Simon Ayub’s family by Palestinians in Lebanon, and the death of my sister Angelica at the hands of Trevor/Mann and his ally Dolly.

40

I HAVE WRITTEN Felix’s version of these events. Now I will give my own interpretation, the broad perspective that Felix lived but only partially understood. My task was made more difficult because Felix — though he never said so, but since he supposed I hadn’t left my library at any time during the preceding ten days — thought that, as a participant, he knew more than I. And, once again, he seemed to be the one called upon to play the difficult role, while everything was made easy for me.

More than once during that week in my house, I was afraid that when Felix looked into the mirror and saw his unfamiliar, savaged face his reaction would be anger and self-pity. Knives and fists had played with his very identity, as if it had been modeling clay. I was also afraid that he, recognizing the physical manipulation, would see something even more insulting, moral manipulation. Emiliano and Rosita had told me of Felix’s wounded pride when he learned he wasn’t my only confidant. And, finally, I feared that his underlying resentment might explode or, obscured by the very real affection that unites us, be turned into grief.

Felix Maldonado’s grief takes strange directions, I’d learned following his mother’s death. That night he’d deflowered Mary in our bed. And the night he discovered that Sara was Bernstein’s lover, he’d physically assaulted the professor in Angelica and Mauricio’s home. Grief, followed by the exhaustion of grief, always diverted Felix from his duty, as when he’d made love to Mary, or visited Sara in the mortuary.

I was mulling over these things one evening when we were comfortably settled in my library having a drink, listening to Rubinstein, Szeryng, and Fournier play Schubert’s glorious E-flat trio. Only then did I attempt to draw some conclusions from our experience. Ours, I say; for Felix, it was his alone.

“It has nothing to do with the music,” I had said, “but as I listen, it occurs to me that everything you told me sounds melodramatic, you know? But at the same time I feel there’s an additional element, possibly something tragic, because neither side is exclusively right; both sides are right and both sides are wrong. Do you know what I mean?”

Felix stared at me a few minutes without speaking, a glass of cognac in his hand. Then, as if to dispute what I’d said, he hurled the glass against the painting of the martyred San Sebastian above the fireplace. The glass shattered and liquid trickled down the painting into the fire, as the flames danced.

“Son-of-a-bitch! I’ve been here seven days,” he said, “I’ve told you everything I know, and you’re still sitting there with your goddamned placidity, listening to your Schubert, quoting your Shakespeare, with your glass of cognac getting as empty as your words.” Repeatedly, he thumped his chest with his thumb. “I ran the risk. I stuck out my neck. I have a right to know.”

“Where do you want me to begin?” I replied tranquilly.

Felix smiled, and went to pick up the pieces of broken glass from the hearth. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “For God’s sake, Felix, between you and me…”

“Very well. Begin with the part you like best, those grand generalizations, get that out of your system. I understand that both sides wanted information about the Mexican oil reserves, and I’m sure the ring was connected with that. But the performance in the Palace, what was that all about? What did each side have to win?”

“If you’ll allow me, I’ll try to be systematic. As soon as the record’s finished.”

With the last chords of the allegro moderato, I folded my hands and lowered my head. I didn’t want to look Felix in the eye. “Both sides wanted the information. That’s central. That’s where everything begins. Why did they want it? For obvious reasons. They didn’t know — and thanks to us they still don’t — the extent, the precise location, or the quality of our new fields. In case of a new conflict in the Middle East, several things might happen.”

“Trevor outlined the hypotheses in Houston,” Felix said impatiently. “I know the bottom line: in every case, Mexican oil could be the unexpected ace in the hole. What else?”

“Their specific motivations.”

I got up and walked toward Felix. I leaned down. I knew I couldn’t expect any intimacy from him; perhaps I thought I might instead provoke the discomfort — the incipient fear — that can result from unemotional physical proximity. “The Arabs wanted the information in order to put pressure on Mexico; our coming into OPEC would strengthen that organization but weaken Mexico. We can support OPEC, but shouldn’t join it. We’ve owned our oil since 1938; the Arabs, no. We don’t share earnings with any foreign country; the Arabs do. We’re capable of managing for ourselves all the stages of oil production from exploration to exportation; the Arabs, no. To join OPEC would be to let ourselves in for battles we’ve already fought and won. And, incidentally, we’d lose the benefits of the United States Trade Bill. The Arabs know all this; the gringos as well. Result: the even greater weakness of Mexico. For its part, Israel wants to ensure that Mexico doesn’t commit its oil but continues a policy of massive exportation in competition with OPEC, directly or indirectly assuring supplies to the Jewish state. Hence the Israelis’ and the North Americans’ need to know exactly what reserves the Western world could depend on in case of a new conflict. For it if comes to war, never doubt it, Washington will turn all the screws to make Mexican oil the answer to Arab oil.”

“You haven’t answered my question about what happened in the Palace.”

“Just this. The Director General decided to speed things up. He’s an old fox; his intelligence is equaled only by his boldness, and one feeds the other. He’s the most dangerous of them all. He realized there was a serious possibility of a more or less disguised surrender of Mexican oil to the United States and Israel. This would be fatal to the Arabs. The Director General decided to risk everything on one throw of the dice. Once he learned about you, you became the ideal candidate for his plan. He suspected that you were working for an unidentified intelligence agency. Furthermore, you were a converted Jew. He decided to kill two birds with one stone. Or rather, three. Because what he was planning was the assassination of the President.”

I placed my hand in my pocket and caressed the hidden.44, cold and black, as innocent as a bird in its nest.

In his agitation, Felix ignored the movement. “What was his plan?”

“He stationed his people in the Salón del Perdón. As the President approached you, a marksman was to shoot him. In the general confusion, Rossetti would place the pistol in your hand. Like this.”

I whipped out the.44 and placed it in Felix’s surprised hand; he took it automatically.

“A simple reaction. You would have accepted the gun the way you did just now. You might have dropped it immediately, but in any case you’d have been incriminated.”

Felix offered me the gun. I waved it away. “Keep it. You may want to use it later.”

Again, I saw flare in my friend’s eyes the fear of being blindly manipulated. I countered that threat by frowning, as if planning what I was going to say — though I knew that perfectly well. “The plan was daring,” I added hastily, “but had it succeeded, the whole country would have been saying what the Director General wanted them to say: Israel had ordered the assassination of the President of Mexico. He calculated that the inevitable reaction would be Mexico’s alignment with the Arab world. In any case, the political crisis would insure that the government would be crippled, and in those muddied waters the Director General counted on being a better fisherman than his rival Bernstein.”

“But the plan failed; it failed for the simple reason that I fainted. Why?”

“Because I made sure you would faint.”

“You?”

I glanced at the pistol in Felix’s hand. This wasn’t yet the moment I feared. He wouldn’t use it, because his astonishment was still greater than his anger.

“Felix, the pharmaceutical house I inherited from my father is thriving. The manager of the Hilton told me the exact hour you’d ordered breakfast for. I was in the hotel.”

“You?” He laughed, not scornfully, because amazement still ruled his other emotions. “You who never leave your house…?”

“I’d been in the hotel since the previous evening. I myself placed the precise dosage of propanolol in your coffee. Would you like to know the exact formula? Isopropyla-mine-1 (naphthyloxy-(1′)-3 propanol-(2)). Yes. It’s an anti-adrenaline compound. Ingested with food in a quantity of no fewer than fifty milligrams — the amount I placed in your coffee — it works along with the digestion. I knew the hour of the ceremony. The drug would take effect as you were digesting your breakfast, at the moment you were about to speak with the President.”

“That’s impossible, it would require split-second timing.”

“The mechanism exists: the drug is activated two hours following ingestion as the flow of adrenaline encounters the blocking drug. They served your breakfast at 8 a.m. The ceremony took place at ten. You may have confused the signs of hypotension — sweat and general nervousness — with the emotion of the moment. What we know is that as the three factors come together — digestive juices, the drug, and adrenaline — the effect is instantaneous: the blood rushes from the brain to the stomach, and the subject faints. That’s what happened to you. And that’s how Plan A was spoiled.”

“So he activated Plan B.”

“Exactly. The real assassin didn’t have time to fire.”

“Who was he?”

“It doesn’t matter. One of many killers on the Arab payroll. The Director General’s instructions were absolute: all or nothing. All it took was a slight accident, an unforeseen event, to thwart Plan A. You were that accident. While the Director General was explaining to the President what had happened, his people put you safely out of the way in the clinic on Tonalá. Rossetti was in charge of that; you worked in the same branch of government as he. You’d just fainted, he would take you home.”

“But if Plan A hadn’t failed, I wouldn’t have been taken to the clinic but to the Military Camp, and from there to the cemetery.”

“No, the Director General was perfectly honest with you. All he wanted was your name, to fire up official hostility against Israel. He wanted you alive so you, the new you, could escape from the clinic and lead him to me.”

“But I still don’t understand. Ayub warned me at the Hilton not to attend the ceremony. When I woke up in the clinic, the Director General was berating me for having showed up at the awards ceremony. He said all he’d wanted was my name and that my presence had spoiled his plans; he accused me of meddling and told me that if I hadn’t been there, as Ayub had warned me, everything would have worked out the way he wanted.”

“They know you too well. They knew you’d do exactly the opposite of what you were told, because you’re proud and you’re stubborn. The fact was that your presence was indispensable for their plan.”

“So why did they keep saying that in the clinic, after it was all over?”

“If you believed them, you’d be diverted from the truth The Director General doesn’t want people going around saying he tried to kill the President. Not even as a theory.”

“Is it more than a theory? Is there any proof?”

I nodded nonchalantly. “Mauricio Rossetti is free. He’s been extradited. In this case, Mexican justice was expedited. He says Angelica’s death was an accident. Trevor’s charges didn’t stick. Rossetti has been reinstated in his position as the Director General’s private secretary. He owes everything to his chief and he knows why: he’s the only one who knew about Plan A. The Director General procured his freedom in exchange for his silence, and he’s not worried about blackmail. Rossetti would lose something more than freedom if he talked: his life.”

“But don’t forget, Ayub told me not to go. You say by his chief’s orders. But Ayub despises the Director General; he’d have been pleased to have Plan A fail. It would have been his revenge against a man who imprisoned his family in Lebanon and then ordered them killed.”

“The Director General ran that risk. But his boldness, I repeat, is always balanced by intelligence. If Ayub hadn’t convinced you, the Director General wouldn’t have given a damn for Ayub’s life, or his family’s.”

“He didn’t give a damn.”

“Try to convince a man condemned to die tomorrow that it would be better to die today. That happens only in the folk ballad ‘La Valentina.’”

“I suppose I should be grateful. That sinister old bastard has been pretty decent with me, comparatively speaking.”

“That’s true. If Plan A hadn’t failed, he would have given you what he promised in the clinic: passports, tickets, and money for you and Ruth.”

The pistol was pointed at my heart, but I knew that Felix’s anger wasn’t directed toward me any longer.

“Goddammit, then who was shot in the Military Camp and buried the next day in my name?”

“Buried, but also exhumed.”

I was distracted by the San Sebastian above the fireplace, a good example of sixteenth-century colonial painting. Felix’s face may have resembled Velázquez, but his body was that of the martyr — with words as arrows. Deliberately, I returned to my chair and again buried my face in my hands.

“You know, I did a little work myself, Felix. Everyone in this country uses his influence, that’s the law of the land. So I was given permission to exhume the body buried in your name.”

Felix grabbed me by the shoulders. “Who is it?”

I unclasped my hands and stared into his eyes. “A young Palestinian. A schoolteacher in one of the occupied territories. He fell in love with Sara Klein. He was tortured. The Director General’s agents located him and told him Sara was in Mexico with Bernstein, the man responsible for torturing him and his mother. They told him that Sara was Bernstein’s lover. The boy went mad. An impassioned Palestinian is passion itself, Felix. The Director General got false papers for him, smuggled him into Jordan, and from there the boy flew to Mexico. Maybe he wanted to kill Sara, or Bernstein, or both, I don’t know. He didn’t have the chance. They killed him first and placed him in a cell at the Military Camp, saying it was you, unconscious. You know the rest of the story.”

Felix released me. “Jamil.”

“That’s what Sara called him on the recording. His name was Isam Al-Dibi. He looked quite a bit like you. He would have been the ideal murderer of Sara Klein. But the Director General didn’t see that far ahead. You can’t have everything. He had enough on his mind following you to get the ring. He didn’t get it. That’s what’s important.”

“But he did find out about you and the organization, everything that…”

“I wanted him to find out. I wanted it because it’s important for both sides to know of our existence. The rule of political discourse is duplicity. That of diplomatic discourse multiplicity. Espionage is the combination of the two, both double and multiple.”

Felix dropped into the chair beside mine, as if to interrupt a conversation about events that were more exhausting to listen to than to have lived. In a daze, he stared about the room, studying the antique mirrors, the coffers with iron corners and iron keyholes, the rich marquetry, the molding, the ironwork and inlay, the hand-turned table legs and chairs of this mansion I’d bought from the heirs of an old millionaire named Artemio Cruz.

Finally he spoke, his voice as hollow as that of the man he unconsciously imitated. “Then the Director General murdered Jamil.”

“Isam Al-Dibi, yes.”

“But he was a Palestinian, a man who suffered…”

“I told you that no one has a monopoly on violence. Or injustice. Much less, morality.”

He stared at me absently: “How do you know all this, the Director General’s plans, Jamil’s death…?”

I hesitated. I was afraid of my answer. But for every subjective reason, even the most objective reasons, I was compelled to tell Felix Maldonado the truth. “Angelica told me. You know how she was. Much too nervous. She couldn’t bear feeling guilty. Even less, thinking she’d failed. She told me for one reason: her scorn for Rossetti. She talked a lot. You know how she was.”

“Why did you want both sides to know about you? I don’t think they’re frightened. They know we’re a small group, pygmies alongside them.”

“Exactly. They will think we’re less significant than we really are, or will be. They will continue to underestimate us.”

“In spite of the fact that you ended up with the ring?”

“Yes. They’re convinced it’s of no value to us. First, because we know the secrets it contains. Second, because they don’t think we’re capable of deciphering its contents. So they’ll go through the same routine, and we’ll win a second time.”

Felix didn’t seem convinced. “That’s what Trevor said in Houston. I can imagine what was in the ring. But how did you decipher the information, if you did decipher it? There’re a lot of things you haven’t told me.”

I laughed. “Felix, you have to have everything explained to you. You don’t figure out anything for yourself, because you’re too wrapped up in yourself. When you get over that, you’ll be a really good agent.”

“Who said I want to be one?” He was laughing at me.

I ignored his impertinence. Felix deserved a little self-congratulation, and that would allow me to slip into a neutral topic. He still held the pistol, but it was a toy in his hand.

“It’s a devilishly ingenious technique,” I explained, and invited him to go with me to the chapel.

41

I WALKED to a bookshelf and pressed the brittle spine of my folio edition of Timon of Athens; the shelf swung upon its hinges, revealing a passageway to the ancient chapel of this colonial mansion. Felix followed, still carrying the pistol. I closed the concealed door behind us and turned on the lights in the tiny whitewashed oratory whose only furnishing was a metal stand.

The floor was paved with red volcanic rock; the wooden altar was painted white, with strips of gold molding. Above the reliquary and the tabernacle hung a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

I opened the tabernacle and removed the water-clear stone from Bernstein’s ring. Holding it between thumb and index finger, I showed it to Felix. “Inside this stone are two hundred images reduced to the size of pinpoints. Each one is printed on extremely thin film of high contrast and high photosensitive resolution. But these are not simply photographs that record the differing light intensities reflecting from the object, they’re holograms that retain information about all phases of the light waves emanating from the object photographed. In contrast to normal film, if the hologram is cut or blemished, it retains the image of the whole in each portion of the film. This is because the light recorded is not located in one area of the film but is disseminated throughout the space between the object and the hologram.”

I placed Bernstein’s stone on the revolving top of the metal stand and turned off the lights. I returned to the altar and asked Felix to stand beside me. From the reliquary I removed an electronic control sensitive to the touch of my fingers. I warned Felix not to look toward the light projected from behind us toward precise pinpoints in the ring as it rotated in response to my controls. “What’s beautiful about this is that since the prints are made by laser beams, they can be re-created only by light projected from another laser. Look.”

I pressed the control and a ray of light as thin as a razor’s edge beamed from the left eye of Our Lady of Guadalupe to penetrate the surface of the ring. I pressed the control for rotation.

What we saw on the whitewashed wall was the virtual re-creation, in color and three dimension, of expanses of land photographed from the air. Each image bore the name of the region where it was located, followed immediately — with hallucinatory reality, seemingly so close one could reach out and touch them — by images of the limestone rock corresponding to the region: living reproductions of the electric, magnetic, gravitational, and seismological records of the subsurface; refractory readings of high-velocity beds; pressures and temperatures; holograms of the stereographic projections of the beds and the mathematical calculation of the quantity of fluid each contained: a splendid and frightening portrait of subterranean Mexico, the technological descent of the laser into the mythological hell of Mictlan, an ebullient photograph of the arteries, intestines, and nerve system of a quadrant of land explored meter by meter, as if plumbed by the hundred horrifying eyes of Argus.

Cactus, Reforma, La Venta, Pajaritos, Cotaxtla, Minatitlán, Poza Rica, Atún, Naranjos along the shelf of the Gulf, from Rosarito in Baja California to the plains between Monterrey and Matamoros in the north, from Salamanca in the center of Mexico to Salina Cruz on the Pacific; the complete network of oil, natural gas, propane, and other petrochemical pipelines, platforms for undersea drilling, all the plants for absorbents, lubricants, and cryogenics, the batteries of separators, refineries, and operating fields.

Not a single place, not a single fact, not a single estimate, not a single certainty, not a single control valve in the Mexican petroleum complex had escaped the fluid stone gaze of Bernstein’s ring; whoever possessed it and deciphered it had all the necessary information for utilizing, interrupting, or — depending on the circumstances — appropriating the functioning of this machinery, the fertile Hydra head the Director General had referred to, which now was being projected on the wall like the shadows of reality in Plato’s cave.

Again I touched the control. The light in the Virgin’s eye was extinguished and the stand ceased to rotate. I turned on the lights. I removed the clear stone from the stand and replaced it in the tabernacle.

We returned to the library in silence. I pressed the spine of Timon of Athens and the bookshelf returned to its customary position.

42

“ANYTHING ELSE you want to know?” I asked, arching my eyebrows as I offered Felix a cognac.

He refused; his hand was toying with the pistol. But he answered my question with another: “Who killed Sara Klein?”

He gazed into my gray eyes as coldly as I gazed at him. “Ah, but that’s the only thing I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll have to find out. Do you know who the nun is?”

I sighed deeply, shook my head, and quickly sipped my cognac.

“I told Emiliano and Rosita to ask you to get the license number of the convertible the kids were driving when they serenaded that night…”

I took a piece of paper from my pocket and handed it to him.

“Who does the car belong to?” he persisted.

I thrust my hands into the pockets of my pin-striped suit. “I don’t know. The plates are registered to a one-peso cab.”

“What’s the driver’s name?”

“A Guillermo López.”

“My friend Memo,” Felix murmured, and for the first time he stared at me suspiciously.

Feigning indifference, I walked to the fireplace, picked up the fire tongs, and poked at the dying fire. I allowed Felix an opportunity to look at my back, the cut of my finely striped suit.

“Anything else, Felix?” I asked, my back still to him.

“Ruth,” said Felix, like a sleepwalker. “I ought to see Ruth. How am I going to explain?”

“You must see her. You won’t have any problems. I promise. She’ll be happy to know you’re alive. Believe me. And after you’ve seen Ruth, what do you plan to do?”

“The Director General said to call myself Velázquez. He told me I have an office, a secretary, and a salary,” said Felix, with a forced laugh that was far from humorous.

“Accept his offer. It suits us.”

“It suits us?”

“Of course. Felix Maldonado is dead and buried. Diego Velázquez is the ideal replacement. No one is looking for him. No one recognizes him. He has no past. He has no outstanding debts.”

I heard Felix’s footsteps behind me, muffled by the thick Oriental rug. Then his heels clicked on the stone hearth. He seized my shoulders and forced me to look into his eyes. His gaze was dead; it was also deadly. “You’re repeating what the Director General told me…”

The fire tongs crashed to the warmed stone.

“He was right. Let me go, Felix.”

He released his grasp, but remained menacingly close.

“You’re more valuable to us than ever,” I said through tight lips. “It’s to everyone’s best interest that you forget Felix Maldonado and take on a new identity. The perfect spy has no personal life, no wife, no children, no house, no past.”

I spoke phlegmatically. Again Felix responded with the Mexican counterpart, Indian fatalism. “I don’t understand you. It doesn’t matter about me. But I don’t understand your game. They’ll gather all the information again and everything will begin all over.”

“For you, it began in a taxi, remember? That was the moment of no return, Felix, that unknowing step from reality to nightmare, the moment when everything that seems real and secure in your life slips away and becomes uncertain, unsure, and phantasmagoric. Do you believe you can simply return to your former life, assume an irretrievable reality, be an obscure bureaucrat and Don Juan and husband named Felix Maldonado?”

I took Felix’s hand, though it was a risk; he would feel my dry, lizardlike skin. “I need you, Felix. And you’re right. The game will begin again. It’s like two cowardly and imperfect knights jousting in a dark labyrinth. The next time, however, they’ll find that their adversary is stronger and, what’s more, different. And so on and so on. That’s why I wanted them to recognize me this time; they won’t the next. And you will need me, because I’m the only person in the world who will still call you Felix Maldonado.”

“Ruth…?”

“No, no, don’t answer. You will offend me deeply if you underestimate me. Don’t make the mistake our enemies made. Don’t underestimate me, or my ability to disguise myself. You know, baldness can be an advantage. I simply put on a gray wig with an unruly lock of hair, I shave off my moustache, thicken my eyelids with makeup, add a few wrinkles, make my nose a little more acquiline, speak with any one of the many English accents I learned watching Shakespeare with you … Although at times I prefer to quote Lewis Carroll. Welcome to Wonderland.”

“Trevor.”

“And you, my friend, would have to take on the role of the March Hare…”

“But Angelica was your sister…”

“Poor Ophelia. No, hold my hand, Felix, even though my skin repels you. Add a neutral Colombian accent, interjections from the 1890’s, poppycock, pip-pip, balderdash … Are you following me, Felix?”

“But you were acting for the Arabs in Houston…”

“They know me as Trevor, an English homosexual expelled from the Foreign Office as a security risk. The Israelis and the CIA know me as Mann, a mercenary agent whose cover is a traveling job with Dow Chemical. You know me as Timon of Athens, your former classmate and owner of a petrochemical empire in Mexico. I serve them all so I can use them all, and so they will fear me. I’m not sitting in my library waiting for your telephone calls, Felix, while you risk your neck. I received your call in Mexico City telling me about poor Ophelia — that’s the only time you really surprised me — and three hours later I was in Houston looking like a Roman senator and giving a passable imitation of Claude Rains; tomorrow, after a four-hour flight, I’ll be in Washington presenting myself to the CIA in Langley as the questionable Mr. Mann, with a slight German accent and another passable imitation, this time of Conrad Veidt…”

I released Felix’s hand only because I’d run out of breath and couldn’t talk, only because I couldn’t touch him if I wasn’t talking, only because I wanted him to have his hands free to do whatever he pleased. I was giving him that freedom. Finally I had demonstrated that I, too, took risks, that he wasn’t the only one living dangerously. I’d finally canceled that debt from our youth.

“But Angelica was your sister,” Felix repeated, his voice, his eyes, his body, unbelieving, the hand with the pistol hanging limply.

Now I could look at him calmly. “Felix, what do you plan to do when you leave my house?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. Go to Ruth.”

“Yes. And then?”

“I told you. I have to find out who killed Sara.”

“Why? Sara Klein died twice, once as a girl in Germany and then as a woman in Palestine. Her murder in Mexico was a mere formality.”

“You didn’t love her.”

“Would you compromise our whole operation to rush off on an idiotic chase that has nothing to do with our project? Would you jeopardize everything we’ve achieved just to satisfy your injured vanity, to avenge the death of an Israeli whore who never went to bed with you but cuckolded your platonic love for her with an old Jewish professor and a young Palestinian terrorist?”

Felix pointed the gun directly at my heart. “You didn’t love her, you son-of-a-bitch.”

“Shoot, Felix. Give one more turn of the screw to the legend. This time Pollux kills Castor. Only one has the right to be immortal, remember? Not both.”

“You didn’t love her, you son-of-a-bitch.”

I approached him and took his hand, this time the hand with the gun. I took it from him; our faces were almost touching. “Ah, passion again rears its fearful Hydra head. Cut off one, and a thousand will grow in its place, isn’t that right? Call it jealousy, dissatisfaction, envy, scorn, fear, repulsion, vanity, terror; probe into the secret motives of any of us who participated in this comedy of errors, Felix, and give to his passion whatever name you will. You will always be wrong, because behind every label there is some unnamable, obscure political or personal reality — makes no difference which — that justly or unjustly — makes no difference which — compels us to disguise as action what is actually passion or hunger or suffering or desire or a love nourished out of hatred or a hatred nourished out of love. You think you’re being subjective? You’re nurturing objectivity. You think you’re being objective? You’re nurturing subjectivity. Just as the words in a novel always end by saying the opposite of what they mean.”

“But Angelica was your sister…”

“And Mary your lover, and Ruth your wife, and Sara, I don’t know, something bigger than you, something you’ll never be able to understand or give a name to. Go. Come back someday and tell me everything. Maybe then I’ll tell you how Angelica died, and why.”

“I know how. Dolly pushed her out the window.”

“But you don’t know why. All the better. Don’t try to explain it. Not that; not anything.”

“Did she know you were Trevor?”

“Of course. When we were children, we used to dress up and pretend to be other people. It was a continuation of our games.”

“But she didn’t know this game would be fatal.”

“No. She thought Rossetti was the one who’d be killed, that we’d get rid of him once and for all. Poor child. Rossetti is harmless, he’s useful because he can be controlled. Not Angelica, she was too impulsive, and she talked too much. It’s your destiny to be used blindly. Don’t complain. Truly bad fortune tends to be monotonous. Passion, without imagination, as you live it, is more entertaining.”

“Imagination, without memory, as you live it, is to be pitied. I feel sorry for you.”

“I’m a Catholic, Felix. I know that when one lacks passion he can be saved by grace. One day when we were young I told you that in my opinion sin and judgment are equally sterile. I prefer to eliminate punishment. The obligation of love is much better than any condemnation. Rossetti didn’t deserve love.”

“Is that how you loved Angelica?”

“I owe you no explanation. Understand. I have no quarrel with you. I love you, too.”

Everything I’d dreaded I saw in Felix’s eyes.

“Of course. I understand. There was one thing that powerful Timon couldn’t buy. A heart. ’Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon’s purse.”

I hoped that wit would disguise my hurt, and I continued the game. “You’re a dog.”

“Thy mother’s of my generation,” Felix replied. It was the first time someone had called me a son-of-a-bitch by quoting Shakespeare.

My stupefaction was short-lived. I hurled myself on Felix, insulted, angry, wounded by what he was insinuating, robbed of my perfectly phrased, measured, premeditated justifications. He wrested the pistol from my hand, but it didn’t matter. I’d been stripped naked by this man, my brother, my enemy, whom finally I held in an embrace of hatred, a struggle in which the bodies that had never touched in the sofa-bed in New York were now locked together in rage — my impotent rage, invalidated by the sweating, straining, passionate proximity of Felix, his hand jamming the pistol into my armpit, his arm braced against the pressure of my torso, his leg thrust against my testicles the impassioned rejection of a body that didn’t desire mine. He scorned my passions, having discovered the most secret of them all, transforming me into a living but lifeless shell for Felix defended himself against the aggression of my love coldly, the way someone defends himself against a mosquito. Even though my love meant nothing to him, he loved me as he always had, his true friend. His memory had no grief. I wanted him to love me, but I wanted him to fear me more.

I dropped my arms. I’d been defeated, but I saw in his eyes that he didn’t claim the victory. For him, it was a draw. I sat down to get my breath back. Felix, too, was panting, standing beside the fireplace, the.44 in his hand. San Sebastian was dying his eternal death, his gaze vacant, arrows piercing his body and filling the sky.

“Go, Felix. You’ll forget. You’ll recover.”

He smiled, an unwelcome smile. “No. I’m Mexican. I’ll forget, but I won’t recover.”

I didn’t want to see him any longer. “Understand what I did, Felix, so I can understand what you’re going to do.”

“Thirteen years is a long time.” His voice was lifeless. “We don’t know each other any more.”

He was leaving, perhaps forever. No, in spite of everything, I was sure that someday he’d return to tell me what he’d done after he left my house. “Felix.” I raised my voice. “I understand you, and I know what you’ve lost because of me. Tell me, please. Did you gain anything?”

“Yes. I found a father in the dry docks at Galveston.”

I thought he was going to laugh, but if he did, I didn’t hear it. I wouldn’t have liked it. He was gone. Again I savored the cognac on my tongue, and licked my moustache. Felix was still a long way from being a good agent. In his own words, he’d told me that Trevor didn’t have a moustache. Several times he’d described the tight lips clean as knife blades. No moustache grows in four days.

I sighed. I should be compassionate. Felix Maldonado had been living a nightmare. My breath caught in my throat. After thirteen years, we no longer knew each other. But that wasn’t the worst; one thing hurt me even more. I remembered what Bernstein had told Felix. Felix really didn’t see me, because he wasn’t looking for me. He didn’t have the least idea how I looked at forty; he remembered only how I’d looked at twenty. That’s what remained in his mind. I didn’t exist in the present.

I spent the remainder of the evening leafing through my edition of Shakespeare. I reread the plays of murder at the castle of Dunsinane and of the murder of the Prince of Elsinore. Without interrupting my reading, my thoughts kept pace, weaving in and out among the sentences, sometimes obliterated by the words, sometimes drowning them out. Yes, Felix Maldonado was a bad agent. The James Bond of underdevelopment. But I had to build my organization with whatever Mexico had to offer: Felix, Emiliano, Rosita. Ashenden and Richard Hannay had behind them the heritage of Shakespeare, my poor agents had Cantinflas in The Unknown Policeman.

I tried to justify my cruel deceptions of the night. As I deceived Felix, I’d been discovered by him. I told myself that had I not offset the frailty of my human resources and done what I’d done — establish a principle of hierarchy founded on fear — my undertaking would have failed. The base for any action in the future could only be the fear I inspired in my friends and my enemies.

I closed the Oxford edition with bitterness. I could derive only one lesson from this first adventure of the Mexican secret service. Terror is universal, justice is not. Every intelligence organization, however it might strive toward the goal of justice, is perverted by its means — terror — and finally it becomes the servant of oppression, not the instrument of justice it set out to be. A tiny cell of fascistic structure, espionage, which is intended to protect society, finally becomes a cancer that infects the society in which it takes root. All its heroes are reactionaries, from Ulysses to James Bond. Which explains the exhaustion of its heroism, as ravaged as the plastic features of Howard Hunt.

But as I turned off the lights in my library I was confident that, in spite of everything, Felix Maldonado, my unconscious hero, saddened and exhausted, would return to tell me what he’d done after he had left the refuge of my home.

I thought about him as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom. Oh, if only one day I might compare my probable scenario with Felix’s real version. Where would we coincide? Where would we differ? Which of the two endings would be the true one: the one I was preparing to invent, or the one he was preparing to live?

These thoughts went whirling through my mind as I removed the false moustache before my mirrored dressing table. The gum arabic pulled at the real moustache growing beneath the false one.

I placed the luxuriant black moustache neatly in a box of carefully arranged hairpieces: beards, moustaches, eyebrows, and sideburns of various colors, denoting various ages. In the mirrored dressing table and cabinets, I was surrounded by wigs, by new suits and old suits, polished shoes and scuffed shoes, shirts and undergarments and jackets with labels attributing their origins to shops as distinct as Lanvin in Paris, Gath & Chávez in Santiago, Harrods in Buenos Aires, Austin Reed in London, Hart, Schaffner & Marx in Houston, a branch of Marks & Spencer’s in Riyadh, the Arrow shirt shop in Tel Aviv, and El Borceguí shoestore in Mexico City.

I stood before the mirror prepared to declaim Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in Act V, scene v, but I felt ridiculous. The sound and the fury had ceased, along with my hour on the stage, even though as I crawled into my loveless bed the night truly seemed a walking shadow.

43

INEVITABLY, he will return to the Suites de Génova and will ask for the same room, the room where Sara Klein died, where he made love to Mary Benjamin. The beds of Felix Maldonado are always occupied by some woman, living or dead. They know him at the hotel; he gives good tips; he’s an eccentric; they’re not surprised that he’s returning with no luggage after a week’s absence. I myself had telephoned them: Licenciado Velázquez had been called away unexpectedly and hasn’t had time to pack his things, would they please keep his suitcase for him?

“Your usual room, Señor Velázquez?”

It is raining outside my house in Coyoacán. In August, the storms of the high plateau beat against the mountain peaks, spill down the slopes of the ancient snow-topped volcanoes, and in the late afternoon or early evening, like clockwork, unleash their yield, before giving way to the hurricanes along the Gulf, which rage until the onset of autumn — on the Feast Day of St. Francis, when, as they say, the saint’s cord-belt lashes them into quietude. Then a luminous and uninterrupted peace consecrates our winters. But soon the crystal of cold sun becomes clouded with the dust of prolonged drought, and the winds of spring raise suffocating dust storms, veritable screams of agony from the dry, cracked tongue of the earth.

Soaked with rain after waiting for a taxi to come along Calzada de la Taxqueña, Felix arrived at the hotel without luggage. The Indian concierge wrapped in a gray sarape recognized him — why wouldn’t he? — and waked the night clerk, who’d fallen asleep watching a movie on the kitchen television.

“Your usual room, Señor Velázquez?”

“If it’s available,” Felix said to the thin, sleepy, hollow-eyed young attendant.

“For you, señor, it’s always available.”

“I thought by now everyone would have forgotten about the murder.”

“Sir? The President of Petroquímica Industrial del Golfo personally called and asked that the room be kept at your disposal.”

“He’s very considerate.”

“Oh, of course. He’s one of our most distinguished clients. He sends all his foreign guests to us.”

“I know him. He’s very careful about details, a real puppet master.”

“Sir? Shall we bring up your suitcase, Señor Velázquez?”

“I don’t need it. Send it tomorrow.”

“As you wish, sir. Here’s your key.”

He slept uneasily. They brought his suitcase at ten, and after he shaved and ate breakfast, he walked to the Plaza Río de Janeiro. It was recess time in the neighborhood schools and he had to make his way through hordes of happy, yelling children. Red and yellow and blue balloons shone against the glistening leaves of the palm trees. Felix walked to the entrance of the red brick building with the slate towers and pushed open the gate into the dark passageway.

He knew that Memo was working. Lichita might have gone back to work in the Hospital de Jesús, or she might still be on vacation, enjoying the benefits of her service to Ayub and the Director General. He hoped no one was home; he could search at his pleasure, and Memo wouldn’t be able to lie to him.

But no. Licha opened the door. Her makeup was streaked and she seemed half asleep. The lace-edged silk robe covering her small, firm breasts clamored for a trip to the dry-cleaners. She seemed stunned, not knowing whether to shut the door or leave it half open and talk with Felix.

Before she could decide, he stepped into the room. Licha threw her arms around him. “Sweetie pie, you’re a sight for sore eyes, I thought you’d forgotten me, oh, I’m sorry, I’m a mess, why don’t you come back in an hour? let me slick up a little, you go away and come back in a while, hmm?”

She kept her arms around him, trying to push him out into the hall, but Felix planted himself firmly in the doorway. Then she tried to turn him so he couldn’t see the bed.

“Did you miss me, honey? I missed you a little, well, that’s not true, I missed you more than I can tell. Kiss me, sweetie.”

“Where’s Memo?”

“Working, where do you think?”

Felix glanced toward the bed and then toward the man’s clothes draped carelessly over a chair. “Tell him to get up. I want to talk to him.”

“But, sweetie, I just told you, he’s working…”

“Then who is that in your bed?”

“Shhh, honey, it’s a girlfriend. She had a terrible case last night, a dying man, and it was too late for her to get home from the hospital, her house is way out in Azcapotzalco. I told her she could spend the night here, honey. Why don’t you come back in a while, mmh?”

“Tell your girlfriend she needs plastic surgery.”

“Ha, ha!” Lichita forced a laugh. “Are you going to throw that in my face? I wasn’t the one who sliced you up; I took care of you, handsome, and if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have come out looking so good.”

“It isn’t her face, it’s her body. Your friend’s all out of shape. Things don’t seem to be in the right place.”

Felix ripped the sheet from the bed; a naked boy stared at him in horror. His erection wasn’t sanforized. Immediately, his expression changed to anger, and he turned toward Licha.

“Look, stupid. Can’t you get your schedule worked out? You said your old man went to work at six this morning and that we wouldn’t be interrupted before one.” He covered himself with the sheet.

Licha tapped her foot and crossed her arms. “Get going, Sergio. This is serious. See me some other day.”

“Hell, no. Let this guy leave. Or stand in line. Makes no difference to me.” Sergio settled back with a crooked little smile, his hands clasped behind his head.

“Never mind,” said Felix. “Where’s your husband’s record book?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Licha’s foot was still tapping.

“The law requires him to keep a record of his fares. If he doesn’t, they take away his license plates. A cab hauls passengers, you know, not oranges to market.”

“Uh-hmm,” sighed Sergio. “If he hasn’t had them lifted, he’ll lend them to you. Memo’s a real sport with his friends. If you pay him enough. He’ll lend you anything. Even his wife.”

Lichita whirled, to stare at him with fury. “You shut your mouth.” Then immediately she stroked Felix’s lapels and gazed at him tenderly. Licha could change expression the way you change stations on a radio. “I’ve been so lonesome, honey.”

“I can see that.”

“No, I mean it. Did you hear about Simon?”

“They killed him.”

“Ooooh, baby!” Sergio laughed from the bed.

The nurse nodded repeatedly, tears in her eyes, her head resting on Felix’s shoulder. “I told him. That man with the funny eyeglasses doesn’t fool around. I told him. He shouldn’t have gone to the Hilton that night to tell you not to go to the Palace. He double-crossed old Four-eyes; he wanted to be sure you were there at the ceremony with the big shot. I told Simon to go easy, Four-eyes always collects his debts…”

“You think that’s why Ayub was killed?”

“Sweetheart, you didn’t even ask me, but I’m telling you the truth, I want to tell you everything, so you’ll love me just a little…”

“I already know what happened,” said Felix, listening to Licha but looking at Sergio; another blue-eyed blond, short and fair. Obviously, this was the type Licha favored, but this boy wasn’t a poor dupe like Ayub. Felix looked more carefully at the gold-buttoned blue blazer tossed over the chair, the gray-flannel trousers, the shirt with the Pierre Cardin label, the black Gucci loafers.

“He didn’t have anyone in Mexico, I was his only friend,” Licha whimpered.

“I know that, too. How did he die?”

“They left him here for me to find. As full of holes as a sieve. They propped him against the door, so when Memo opened it, he fell into his arms.”

“Why here, Licha?”

“I told you, he didn’t have anyone else, old Spooky knew that…”

“And you think the Director General’s shut all the mouths that might talk. Don’t kid yourself.”

Suddenly all Licha’s defenses crumpled; she stopped sniveling, her foot stopped tapping, her jaws began to move as if she were chewing gum, but the gum was her face, dirty, gray gum.

Felix put his hands around her throat. “I want his record book.”

“I swear…”

He pushed her away and began to rummage through the drawers. He looked in the drawer of the linoleum-covered table, and all the drawers in a kitchen improvised from a hot plate on a battered table, two saucepans, a frying pan, a mortar, empty beer and Nescafé containers, and chipped clay utensils decorated with flowers and ducks.

Licha didn’t move a muscle. But Sergio threw off the sheet and jumped out of bed, reaching for his clothes. “You’re right, Lichis. I’d better be going.”

Felix pushed him back onto the bed and bent over the telephone Memo kept hidden like a treasure in the pillows. Beneath the telephone was a hardcover notebook with marbleized binding.

Licha laughed. “Oh, is that the notebook you meant? I’m so dumb! That’s where Memo jots down the addresses of his customers when they call. Is that called a record book? Excuse my lack of ignorance, as they say.”

She was talking to Felix, but looking at Sergio. “What are you looking for, sweetie?”

Without speaking, Felix riffled through the notebook. Simultaneously, Licha pressed Felix’s hand and shook her head at Sergio. “What’s the big mystery, sweetheart? Memo just does the normal things. He works his two shifts, usually from six to three and six till twelve, except when a customer hires him by the hour or wants him to take him out of town, you know, a little pleasure trip…”

He showed Licha the paper I’d given him. “Is this Memo’s license number?”

“Ye-es…” Licha sounded hesitant. She looked at Sergio. “I think so, that kind of thing never sticks in my mind.”

“The night of August 10, Memo lent his plates to someone. It isn’t entered here. Who did he give them to? Your little Goya Majo Nude here already admitted that Memo was in the habit of lending his plates if you paid him enough.”

The three of them stared at one another, glances caroming like billiard balls. It was Sergio’s shot; he laughed a short, nervous laugh. “That was a joke, man. Old Memo rents out everything, his license plates, his old lady’s ass, all of us know that…”

“What ‘all of us’?” Felix asked.

Sergio narrowed his eyes and scratched a nipple. “Look, are you from the cops, or what? All fuzz are bastards, but you’re the champ. I came here to get a piece, not to answer your fucking questions.”

“Fine,” said Felix, and walked to the door with the notebook under his arm. At the threshold he paused to say to Licha, “Too bad, beautiful. You’ll wake up some morning and find that cute little Bunny body’s been skewered, but not the way you like it, and not by the persons you like.”

Felix turned and left the room. Licha ran after him into the dark, dank hallway. She caught him by the sleeve and again threw her arms around him. From the bed, Sergio watched with amusement.

“Sweetheart, I know what you’re after, wait, please.”

“You’re reading my mind.”

“Wait. You want to know who killed that girl in the Gayosso Mortuary, don’t you?”

“I told you, you’re a regular fortuneteller.”

“Sweetie, I’m going to get him out of here, stay here with me, love me a little and I’ll help you find who killed her. I promise. How about it, come back in, put down the notebook, and we’ll make love, the way only you know how.”

“Your baby’s waiting, Lichita.”

“Don’t judge me, sweetie. Everyone has to scratch a little. The centavos don’t go very far … Come on. Give me the book. I swear it doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re looking for.”

“Then why do you want it?”

“I’m thinking of my poor old Memo, he’s such a good man. He’ll be ruined without his list of customers. Why be hard on him? What did he ever do to you? Come on, sweetheart, you don’t have to…”

Felix pushed her away. Her streaked face stretched into a grimace as she bared ratlike eyeteeth. She leaped at Felix, scratching and clawing; she didn’t care that her bathrobe fell open, revealing small, firm breasts, or that curses spewed from her twisted lips. “You bastard, what do you know about us? What the fuck do you know about anyone who has to work their ass off to keep from starving, you shiteater.”

Felix could hear the whistles of the balloon vendors in the plaza. Licha collapsed in his arms like a deflated balloon. Playfully, he tweaked her red nose. “There, there, Licha. After I get this business over with, I’ll come back and see you.”

“Honest, sweetheart? You swear it, honey? I’m so crazy about you.”

“What is it you want to know, Lichita?”

“You’re the one asking all the questions, not me.”

“Because you think you’ll find out how much I know by what questions I ask.”

“Why do you want poor Memo’s notebook? You yourself said there’s nothing in it…”

“Two heads are better than one, Lichita. Maybe I won’t understand what’s in this notebook, but the Director General will.”

“You’re not going to show it to him?”

“Of course. Those dark glasses will spot in a second why you’re so interested in recovering a notebook that doesn’t have any entry for the tenth of August.”

“I swear it doesn’t have anything to do with Simon, or with old Spooky.”

“You’re that afraid of him?”

“You should have seen Simon, like a Swiss cheese…”

“Make up your mind, Lichita. Either all this is tied together, you, Memo, Simon, the Director General, the girl’s death…”

Licha could only shudder. “No, honey, oh, honey, no, I swear on my mother’s…”

“Or it’s two separate things. Make up your mind.”

“Oh, yes, honey, it’s the way you say. I went to the hospital as a nurse, as Simon’s friend, I didn’t know what it was all about. It doesn’t have anything to do with Memo’s taxi, I swear by my mother, it’s like you say, two different things.”

“Stop trembling, Lichita. If you’re telling the truth, you don’t have anything to be afraid of. But the police might believe differently. They might think it’s all part of the same affair, you know? That you and Memo know something about an attempt against the President’s life, understand? And the Director General doesn’t fool around, you know that, don’t you? He knows how to shut people up forever.”

“Sheee-it!” Sergio exclaimed, leaping from the bed and scrambling for his undershorts. “I just came here for a good lay. What the fuck’s going on?”

“Think about this, Licha,” Felix went on, as Sergio flew into his clothes. “The girl who was murdered was the lover of the Director General’s mortal enemy. He’s going to figure everything out and then come around to ask for an accounting.”

“Not that, honey. Oh no, sweetheart, do anything you want, but don’t sic Four-eyes on us…”

“Listen, you dumb bitch, what is all this?” Sergio tripped as he tried to put his legs into his trousers. “What kind of mess are you getting me into?”

“All I want is the truth,” said Felix, ignoring Sergio.

“But, sweetie, I owe everything to Memo. I told you that already. Don’t make me tell on him. I told you, we have to scratch for a living.”

“Sometimes the pay is death.”

“I’m scared of the old man with the glasses, honey, I’m scared of him!”

“I believe you.”

Sergio was knotting his necktie. Licha looked at him, and hung her head, defeated. “Tell him, Sergio.”

“I don’t know anything about anything, you bitch.” Sergio was buttoning his blazer.

Felix examined the small, elegant young man with interest. “You’re the one who used Memo’s plates on August 10?”

Sergio tipped his ridiculous blond head to one side, small even for his small body. “Look, man, you’re getting all worked up over an innocent prank. Look how you’ve upset poor Licha. Okay, be seeing you, Licha.”

Felix grabbed his arm.

“Careful, ape-man,” said Sergio. “I don’t like being pawed.”

“Tell him, Sergio,” Lichita repeated dejectedly. She had collapsed on a plastic chair. “Tell him, or even though we’re not guilty of anything — I swear it — we’ll both end up full of holes.”

Sergio stroked the sleeve where Felix had seized him. “An innocent prank,” he said, and smiled. “That’s all it was. A few of us asked Memo for his plates so we could have a little fun that night. We were chasing some blondes, gringas, who were staying at the Suites de Génova. We’d promised to serenade them, you know how they are. They expect to find romance in Mexico and didn’t want to leave without a serenade. What’s so bad about that?”

“Nothing,” said Felix. “But you wouldn’t have had to change the plates for that.”

“Oh, man. You don’t understand. Like everyone else, my old man keeps me on a short rein. The way things are, he says, don’t get in any trouble, don’t call any attention to yourself, or we’ll be kidnapped by the Communists. So what could we do? Just a little fun without letting the old man know, you understand now?”

Sergio lighted a cigarette, dropped the match on the floor, and stared cockily at Felix. He thought he was looking good before Licha, and his vanity was stronger than his fear. “My old man has a lot of influence,” he said smugly, with more than a hint of a threat.

“I wouldn’t think so, if he can’t handle a little racket with some mariachis in front of a hotel in the Zona Rosa. What’s influence for? To scold you if you eat a piece of candy before dinnertime?”

Again, Sergio’s eyes narrowed. “I said it once before. I never saw a cop that wasn’t a bastard, but you top them all. If you don’t want to understand…”

“You put on a good show. No, I’m not from the police. I’m a member of the Communist conspiracy. Tell your old man to watch out.”

Sergio’s lips curled in contempt. “Someday we’ll pick up where we left off, Lichita. Ciao.”

He left, whistling “Blue Moon,” and Licha closed her sleep-heavy, love-heavy, fear-heavy eyes. “Stay a while, honey,” she murmured.

She opened her eyes. Felix walked toward the door with the notebook in his hand.

“You know the truth now. Leave me the notebook, sweetheart.”

“But I’m getting more and more interested in Memo’s customers,” Felix said. “So long, Lichita. When this is all over, I’ll take you to Acapulco.”

“Honest, honey? I’m not asking for anything fancy. I’d rather see you steady, once a week, that’s enough.”

“Can you work me into your schedule?”

“You bastard, I told you the truth. On my soul.”

He left her with the sign of the cross on her lips.

44

ON DURANGO, he saw a mustard-colored Mustang pulling away from the curb. He jotted down its license number in Memo’s notebook, just below the date August 10.

He returned to the Suites de Génova and asked room service to send up roast beef, salad, and coffee. He studied the notebook carefully. Then he picked up the telephone and asked for the central police station of the Federal District. He reported the theft of a mustard-colored Mustang and gave its license number.

“This is the owner speaking, Licenciado Diego Velázquez, Chief of Cost Analysis at the Ministry of Economic Development. Let’s not lose any time on this.”

He received obsequious assurances. He looked at his watch. It was three o’clock and the morning sun had disappeared behind heavy, slow-moving clouds. He had time and he needed to rest. He slept until five, with the tranquillity that had been missing the previous evening. He was sure now. Now he knew.

He checked the.44 and placed it in an inside jacket pocket. He walked the block from Génova to Niza and bought a raincoat at Gentry’s. The downpour began as he left the men’s shop; traffic was snarled and people sought refuge beneath awnings and canopies. He put on the coat, a good Burberry trenchcoat, too new to reflect satisfactorily the image in his subconscious. He smiled as he walked through the rain toward the Paseo de la Reforma. If he hoped outwardly to resemble Humphrey Bogart, inwardly he felt ridiculously like Woody Allen. He remembered Sara Klein in the mortuary, and his smile faded.

At the corner of Hamburgo, he stopped to wait. He had five minutes. He preferred to be exactly on time. He was the most punctual official in the entire Mexican bureaucracy, even though his appointment wasn’t with a more or less friendly Under-Secretary but with a more or less savage criminal.

At a quarter to six, the taxi stopped before the Cronopios Boutique on Niza and honked insistently. Young Sergio emerged, laughing and waving goodbye to the employees. He opened the rear door of the taxi and got in. Felix followed closely behind him. He pulled out the.44 and pressed it against the ribs of the small and elegant youth. Memo looked around with alarm.

“Don’t worry,” Felix said to the driver. “I have bullets for both of you. It depends on which of you wants to die first. Now, let’s take our young gentleman to the place you take him every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at this hour. One false move and Lichita will be a widow.”

Greasy sweat broke out on Memo’s furrowed brow. He didn’t say a word. The taxi crawled at a snail’s pace through the congested traffic on Niza toward the Avenida Chapultepec. Felix kept an eye on Memo’s neck, but pressed the.44 to Sergio’s ribs.

“How’s your papa?” he asked the boy.

“Screwing your mother,” said Sergio. His pupils were dilated, and he licked his lips.

“No,” smiled Felix. “He’d have to be very influential to do that. And millionaires’ sons like you don’t work as clerks in swank boutiques. They just manage to dress like sons of millionaires. It isn’t the same thing.”

“Don’t go to the usual place, Memo, this guy’s full of bullshit. I know him…”

Felix smashed the butt of the pistol against Sergio’s mouth. The boy screamed and sank down in his seat, wiping blood from his lips with the back of his hand. The taxi turned right on Chapultepec and accelerated slightly.

“The only reason I didn’t destroy that big mouth is because I want you to use it to talk.”

“Then I’m as good as dead, shitass,” spit Sergio.

“You think your chief will protect you? What does he do for you, besides lend you a Mustang to cover his tracks when you act as his messenger boy?”

“I have protection.” Sergio smiled crookedly.

“I knew a little pretty-boy like you. He thought he had protection. He ended up full of holes, stacked like a side of beef at a taxi driver’s door.”

“I just follow orders,” muttered Memo. “I go where they tell me.”

They moved slowly along the colonial aqueduct that parallels the avenue.

“I know that,” said Felix. “I’m grateful that you were so diligent in keeping a record of your calls. Isn’t it interesting? Three times a week at a quarter to six you pick up a certain Sergio de la Vega, a supposedly wealthy young man who serenades lady tourists.”

“Don’t be so thickheaded. I explained that. It was a prank.”

“Two pranks. A nun comes to ask for a contribution to her charity and a bunch of boys with mariachis comes to serenade. These two pranks serve to create a distraction in the street while the third prank is taking place inside the hotel.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, friend.”

“I’m talking about your chief’s prank. The murder of Sara Klein.”

“The name doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

“Maybe a bullet in the kidney will mean something.”

“You scare me. I’ll piss like a sieve.”

Felix pressed the muzzle of the.44 against the driver’s neck. “Your friend’s close-mouthed, Memo.”

“I don’t know anything, chief.” Raimu’s double trembled. “They pay me to pick them up and bring them back.”

“Memo, the rich can buy protection, but a poor bastard like you would get life as accomplice to a murder.”

“Don’t tell him anything,” said Sergio. “The head man’s more powerful than this bastard. He doesn’t know anything. He’s bluffing. Ignore him. Don’t go the usual route, I tell you.”

“I know the route,” Felix said tranquilly. “Memo put down the address. I know where we’re going. And I know who we’ll see.”

“It won’t do you any good. The chief’s a super big shot.”

“Like your father?”

“Screw your fucking mother.”

“I’ll say it again, little boy. We’ll see whether you believe he’s a big shot after the judge sentences you.”

“Don’t make me laugh. For what? For serenading? For using someone else’s plates? Where’ve you been, dummy?”

“No. For driving a stolen car.”

“The chief registered it in my name.”

“It’s parked in front of your house. By now, the police have located it and are waiting for you.”

For the first time, Sergio was sweating like Memo.

“What are you worried about, Sergito? You can prove your big man gave you the car. No sweat. What will they find inside the car? Is that what’s worrying you? Is that why your chief put the car in your name, so you’d have to take the rap? Is that the protection you were bragging about?”

At the corner of Melchor Ocampo, the taxi turned onto the main highway around the city, following the sign toward Querétaro. Sergio tried to open the door of the taxi. His head snapped back as Felix grabbed him around the neck; he choked, gagged, and fell heavily to the floor. Felix pulled him up by the collar like a rag doll. Between coughs, in a hoarse, pained voice, Sergio gasped, “She didn’t have time, I know she didn’t have time.”

“We’ll see whether she’s waiting at Cuatro Caminos,” Memo said nervously.

“Don’t stop for her,” Sergio croaked.

Again, Felix pressed the muzzle of the pistol to Memo’s neck. In his fit of coughing, Sergio resembled a tubercular cupid.

No one spoke again until they reached the Cuatro Caminos bullring. A rebozo-wrapped fat woman with a basket over her arm was standing on one corner, waving her free hand at the taxi. She seemed the mother of Indian gods, a stone Coatlicue, imperturbable beneath the rain.

“Don’t stop!”

Memo stopped the taxi. The fat woman opened the front door and peered in. When she saw Felix, she paused, but her impassive expression didn’t change. Not even when she saw the gun pointed straight at her broad, dark face.

“Get in, señora.”

The fat woman sat down beside Memo. She smelled of damp clothing and re-fried beans.

“What do you have in the basket?” asked Felix. “More chicks? Give it to me.”

The fat woman turned to hand some keys to Sergio. “Here. I couldn’t get to the trunk. The law were all around the car.”

Felix took the keys to the Mustang. “The basket.”

The fat woman raised the basket to show him the contents; it was filled with lettuce. She hurled it in Felix’s face. The woman leaped out with unexpected agility. Sergio tried to follow her, but was stopped by the gun in his ribs.

Memo drove on. Felix and Sergio struggled for an instant, but the boy soon gave up. Behind them, Felix could see the motionless figure of the ancient Aztec goddess fading into rain as gray as the earth she stood on, enveloped in a mist that seemed to emanate from her body.

Felix picked up the basket. Under the lettuce, he found the waterproof packets whose contents weren’t what they seemed, not flour, not sugar.

45

THE TAXI DRIVER slowed before the Ciudad Satélite Supermarket. Through sheets of rain, the slim, triangular columns designed by Goeritz resembled the coral sails of a sunken galleon. Felix ordered Memo to stop where he parked every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He drove past the main entrance of the huge empty establishment, surrounded at this hour by empty parking places, turned, and parked by the delivery entrance, away from the highway.

“Get out,” Felix ordered Sergio, then followed him, pressing the pistol to his back. He left the basket on the rear seat.

Memo stuck his head out the window. Rain plastered his thinning hair. He stared at Felix with the gaze of an ancient priest, humble but dissolute.

“What about me, chief? That night, you promised me you’d pay me double, remember?”

“I’m paying you triple,” Felix replied. “Take off, Memo.”

“And the stuff?” Memo jerked his tonsured head toward the back seat.

“That’s the first prize. Do whatever you want with it. Hand it over to the narcotics bureau and collect a reward. Or sell it through some other channel and take Licha to Acapulco. You both need a vacation. That’s your second prize. And the third is that you’re getting out of this alive and happy.”

Without a word, Memo drove away.

Sergio looked at Felix with curiosity. “Then you really aren’t a cop…”

“You’ll soon see who I am. Open that door.”

“Only the head man can open it, from inside. It’s an electronic gadget. I have to call over the intercom.”

“All right. Listen, Sergio, remember that your chief isn’t going to protect you. He’s leaving you on the hook with the Mustang and the snow.”

Sergio’s dilated pupils danced. “What’s happened, big talker? Now it’s two against one, right?”

Sergio pressed a button, three short and one long. Over the intercom a voice said, “Come in.”

The rolling steel door began to rise electronically.

Sergio hesitated an instant, then shouted, “No, chief, don’t open it, they’ve got us!”

Felix rolled beneath the security door and fired three shots. He wasted two bullets; at the first shot, the small blond youth twisted his lips for the last time and fell face forward onto the wet pavement. The third bullet hit the silently closing steel door.

Felix got to his feet in the darkness of the storeroom and started toward the door that communicated with the sales area of the supermarket, guided by the glow of fluorescent lights beyond it.

Before he reached it, the lights were extinguished. Silently, he entered the vast, dark, reverberating cavern. His first thought was that this hangar ought to smell of food, but there was only an overpowering stench of antiseptic. The silence was deafening. Every step, every movement, was amplified in the echoing emptiness. Felix heard his own footsteps and then a distant cough.

He groped his way along high shelves; he touched tin cans and jars and then he shouted, “The game’s up, do you hear me?”

The echo resounded in liquid ripples, like waves on a pond after a pebble strikes the water.

“The police have the Mustang. The fat woman gave me the delivery. Sergio is dead outside. The game’s up, you hear?”

The answer was an uncannily accurate bullet that burst a bottle next to Felix’s head. He heard breaking glass and then smelled whiskey. He crouched down and, still bent over, crept forward, his face almost touching his knees. He moved like a cat, but he told himself this was a battle between bats, a battle in which all the odds were against him. His enemy knew the terrain, he owned this supermarket. Felix collided with an obstacle, tumbling a pyramid of tin cans; the crash of metal was drowned out by a burst of bullets directed at the precise site of the mishap. Felix threw himself to the floor behind a protecting row of shelves.

“Keep talking,” a voice said. “You’ll never leave here alive.”

Felix tried to locate the point from which the voice was originating. It came from a higher level, and he remembered that sometimes the offices in a supermarket are on a second level, from which employees can observe the customers. He removed his shoes. Scattering everything in his path, he ran behind a row of shelves between himself and the trajectory of the bullets — right to left, from a higher to a lower point, and always straight ahead. His rival’s advantage was also his limitation. He was hunting from a besieged tower.

“You laid your plans carefully. You registered under an assumed name. You could always say that you were meeting a lover. Actually, it didn’t matter if someone saw you. You had the best alibi in the world. You were with your wife. You went together to the Suites de Génova. No one asks questions in a place like that. Tourists and lovers make up the clientele.”

Again he was silent, as he ran to a different location. The buckle of his raincoat struck against a shopping cart; he fell to his knees as shots rang above his head. He crawled to the end of the row of carts and took off his raincoat; he draped it over the handle of the cart and gave it a push with his foot. A rain of bullets followed the cart as it careened down an aisle; it struck a display and the barrage was repeated. Felix flattened himself against a sheltering shelf.

“Your wife had challenged you. Why didn’t you go to a hotel like lovers, to make it more exciting? But she wanted to add spice to the broth. She said it wasn’t enough simply to go to a hotel. Even then, you didn’t turn her on. You were furious. She admitted that only when you were jealous were you slightly more attractive. But since you were constantly jealous, even that device was wearing thin. You proposed a new challenge. You asked her to find some way to make you more jealous than ever the night you planned to be at the hotel. She laughed and accepted the challenge. She told you that the night you went to the hotel she would sleep with me before she came to you. She even gave you the number of the room of our assignation, 301. She asked you to reserve a room on the same floor, as close as possible to 301. With luck, you might be able to hear our moans of pleasure.”

“You know Mary,” the voice said. “Keep imagining.”

“Sure, Abie,” Felix replied, moving silently along the rows of shelves, being careful to avoid brushing the crinkly cellophane bags with his shoulder. “Mary chose that room for our supposed date because she knew Sara Klein was staying there. You found that out, too, and fell into your wife’s trap. She wanted you to know it, so you’d think the challenge was real, so you’d have doubts. Was I taking advantage of my friendship with Sara to use her room for a rendezvous with your wife? Why not?”

Again he ran to a new location, nearer the steps to the upper level. Abie taunted, “Do you know who told Mary that Sara was staying at the Suites?”

Felix again sought protection against some shelves, and said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m married to a Jew. I know the tribal customs. It’s a tight little community. Everyone knows everything about everyone.”

“I know,” snorted Abie. “Do I know.”

“But you didn’t know who you were going to kill, your wife or me, or both of us. Your mind was running along two rails, one calculating, the other emotional. Yours and Mary’s challenges were like a game of ping-pong. She challenged you, saying that she would sleep with me right under your nose. You returned the challenge with a question: What time did she plan to deceive you? Laughing at you, she set an exact time. Exactly twelve o’clock midnight, the witching hour for Cinderella, something like that, it’s her style, right?”

The roar from the upper level was that of a wounded bull. For the first time, Felix fired in the direction of Abie’s voice; it was time to let him know that he was armed.

“You prepared your diversions for precisely twelve-thirty. Sergio and his friends with their mariachis would stop before the hotel and sing the serenade. The nun would come by to ask for charity. The police interrupted the serenade and ordered Sergio to keep moving. But you had achieved what you desired. The concierge would remember the two unusual happenings, and the police would pursue two false trails. You were protected. Memo’s plates were on the Mustang. Apparently, the police didn’t take down the number. A serenade’s a normal event; just a prank that interrupts traffic. Sergio slipped the policeman the usual bribe, and didn’t even get a ticket. No trace of the Mustang. And you were sure of your people. Memo thought it was a joke, and since no one bothered him, he forgot about it. Sergio was your slave, your drug runner, an addict himself. He never asked questions, he did as he was told. Perfect. Your allies were in the dark, and only you knew what you planned to do.”

“And the nun?” The voice laughed. “Do you know who the nun is?”

“No, but you’re going to tell me, Abie.”

“I might, yes, since you won’t be leaving here alive.”

Crouched low, Felix moved still closer to the steps. His stockinged foot struck a step. He looked for the nearest cover. His hands touched the icy window of a freezer. He leaned against the cold surface. He was safe from Abie Benjamin’s bullets, the staircase ascended alongside the freezer.

“A little before midnight, Mary left the room in her bathrobe. Again, she was both insulting and seducing you. She said she was coming to see me and that she’d be back in half an hour to make love to you as never before. She permitted herself the luxury of a final defiance; she threw the key to room 301 on the bed.”

“You’re very close. Be careful. How did Mary get the key to Sara’s room?”

“I don’t know, but I can imagine. In that hotel, the rules are easily bent. Guests visit each other constantly, and receive unexpected visitors at all hours of the day and night. The concierge is used to that. But the most obvious answer is the true one. Mary went down to the desk and took the extra key to Sara’s room from its pigeonhole. The concierge was outside, with his back to the lobby. The clerk was sleeping, or watching television in the kitchen.”

“Oh, yes, you know her, you bastard. She was a virgin until she met you. You had her before anyone. Before I did. A nobody like you.”

“It didn’t matter to her. A woman’s virginity matters only to the men in her life.”

“You’ve been my nightmare, Maldonado. You’ve destroyed my happiness. She was always holding you up to me, you, her first man, the only man, the one who really excited her, not me, she wouldn’t come near me, you, a goddamned nobody…”

“I was to be the victim that night.”

“Yes. I was going to rid myself of the ten years you’ve been there in my bed, between my wife and me…”

“But when you opened the door to 301, the room was dark. You approached the bed. All the rooms are identical. You groped in the darkness. You touched a woman’s body. You heard the music of the mariachis in the street. You didn’t care that I wasn’t there. She was there. Mary. One way or other, you would avenge yourself for the humiliations of your marriage, and I’d appear to be the guilty one. You’d kill two birds with one stone, Abie. You pulled your straight-edge razor from your pocket, you put your hand over the woman’s mouth, and you slit her throat.”

“Yes.”

“Trembling, you returned to your room and found Mary lying on the bed, laughing with delight. She began telling you how once again, as usual, she’d tricked you; she’d followed you down the hall and watched you from the public bathroom; she’d seen you enter Sara’s room, and…”

“Yes!”

“Her smile congealed when she saw the razor you still held idiotically in your hand. Fool, she said, nothing but mistakes!”

“Yes.”

“You made two mistakes, Abie. You didn’t kill me. And you didn’t kill Mary. You killed Sara Klein. You killed the wrong person, you son-of-a-bitch!”

Suddenly all the lights in the market flashed on. Felix closed his eyes in pain and surprise.

“I’m coming after you, Maldonado. It’s time for a showdown.”

He heard Abie’s footsteps slowly descending the few steps from the balcony to the ground floor.

“This time I’ll make no mistake, Maldonado. You wove your own noose. Tomorrow they’ll find your body and Sergio’s together in a dump. The Mustang’s in his name. There’s nothing to tie me to him or to you. Did you grieve over Sara Klein’s death? Then it wasn’t for nothing. I knew it would hurt you, and you know what? I felt no remorse. It was the same as killing you. Now I’m going to kill you a second time, Maldonado, before I kill you forever. The third time’s the charm, they say. And never again will you say anything or hear anything or fuck another man’s wife. You know who told Mary Sara was staying at the Suites de Génova?”

Pressed against the freezer, Felix saw the tip of Abie’s shoe appear, only a few feet away.

“Ruth,” said Abie.

Felix felt the unremembering, unhating tension of a leopard. The instant Abie moved into his line of vision, Felix leaped on him, but prevented his falling by throwing a hammerlock around his neck. Abie’s back pressed against Felix’s chest; each grasped a weapon in his right hand. Felix pulled the trigger and the gray-haired, black-moustached man screamed and the pistol fell from his fingers. Felix dropped his own.44, opened the door to the freezer, and pushed Abie inside.

The man with the coarse, ugly, ruddy face fell to the icy floor in the midst of hanging sides of beef and extended his beautiful, imploring hands toward Felix.

Felix slammed the freezer door. He knew that those doors had no opening on the inside — as if the slaughtered steers might slip from their hooks and escape their icy tomb. No one would arrive before six o’clock the next morning. Nine hours at a temperature of fifty degrees below zero is a long time.

He looked at Abie, locked inside the freezer, the floridity and aggression gone forever. In his eyes, the cold of terror anticipated the cold of death. He pushed aside the sides of beef, rose, slipped, and fell forward against the frost-framed glass door.

With his bleeding hand, he scratched six letters in the frost of the door. Felix read them in reverse, red on white, as with a grimace of terror Abie placed his hand over his mouth, closed his eyes, and remained kneeling, like a penitent in Antarctica. He had managed to scratch nun eht.

46

THE BURBERRY SCARECROW had more life than Abie Benjamin. Felix Maldonado retrieved his trenchcoat from the shopping cart and put it on. He went upstairs, where he found Abie’s control panel on the desk. First he punched the key marked SECURITY DOOR, STOREROOM. He depressed it for an instant only, enough to allow him to leave as he’d entered, on his belly; he didn’t want to arouse suspicion by leaving the rolling door wide open.

Next he turned off the fluorescent lights. The antiseptic cathedral sank into an almost sacred darkness; only the frost in the freezer glistened dimly, like tiny votive candles.

He squeezed beneath the steel door and then returned once more, dragging Sergio de la Vega’s rain-soaked body. He didn’t want Abie Benjamin’s vacation in the snow to be interrupted because of this Cardin-shrouded corpse. He propped the body against some cartons of Ajax and derisively bade him farewell. “Tend the store for Abie.”

For the last time, he wriggled through the opening between the rolling door and the concrete floor. In the rain, he walked to the Mexico City — Querétaro highway and, without much hope, stood waiting for a taxi or a bus. Clusters of men wearing sarapes and sombreros trotted along the highway, numb with cold. A city of thirteen million, Felix thought, and not even the most elementary means of public transportation. The horse and the wheel had come late to Mexico, after centuries of foot travel. Now a man without a car was a pariah, a peasant condemned to repeating the journeys of his ancestors. As he watched them jogging stolidly by, he recalled the figures he’d seen the night of his last meeting with Sara Klein, the figures resembling the paintings of Ricardo Martínez. He’d been unable to describe them, because he hadn’t dared approach those creatures of misery, compassion, and horror.

The unremitting rain washed from his trenchcoat the emblems of honor won in the joust against Abie Benjamin: dust, mud, and grease. It wasn’t much of an accomplishment, but for the first time since he’d accepted this mission in the name of his father’s humiliation, Felix felt free. Finally he had done one thing on his own, without orders from me, without finding himself in circumstances where he was forced to follow my wishes, believing he was acting on his own. He had avenged Sara Klein. And he had not compromised the humble, Memo and Licha and the fat woman.

Automobiles and trucks ignored him as they roared by on the road. Alone beneath the rain, his own host, he conceded that Abie was right, Felix Maldonado was a nobody, the kind of man who achieves certain outward signs of prosperity, without being rich. But that is the secret of modern societies: to make the greatest number believe they have something when they have nothing — because the few have everything. He looked across the highway at Abie Benjamin’s market, a modern-day cathedral. Again he thought of Sara Klein, of her enormous faith in the egalitarian society of Israel and the efforts of its people, in the democracy of that land where a Communist lawyer could defend a poor man like Jamil. Sara herself had compared all this to the inequality, the injustice, the tyranny of Arab countries.

Now that he was alone in the rain, facing the red and yellow and blue columns of the Ciudad Satélite, he remembered my warning: no one has a monopoly on violence in this business, much less truth or morality. All systems, whatever their ideology, generate their own injustice; perhaps evil is the price of life, but you cannot stop living because you fear evil, and for Felix on that night, at that hour, in that place, that awareness was truth. He bestowed that truth upon those who demanded life above every other thing, even if the price were evil: upon the boy Jamil, who’d loved Sara more than Felix had; upon the Palestinians, who, because they had no life, countered with evil the lives that denied theirs.

A long, low, black Citroen stopped before Felix. A black door opened and a pale hand beckoned. Automatically, Felix got in. The Director General glanced at him, smiling ironically. He gave an order in Arabic over the intercom, and the coffin-on-wheels drove away.

“I’ve been looking for you, Licenciado Velázquez, mmh? But you’re soaking wet. I’ll take you to your hotel; have a warm bath and a good rubdown and a glass of cognac. You’ll get pneumonia. That would be ironic, after surviving so many dangers.”

The dry laugh was a spider’s thread cut suddenly by invisible scissors.

“Why were you looking for me?” said Felix, again defeated, thinking how much he preferred his freedom beneath the rain to the warm comfort of the Director General’s automobile.

The Director General laughed, stopped laughing, and spoke with grave deliberation. “You were very unwise to say the Mustang was yours. The police found twenty kilos of M & C, morphine and cocaine, in the trunk. They immediately contacted me, since you’d identified yourself as an official in my Ministry. But it worked out well. The matter’s settled; they attribute the contraband to a certain Sergio de la Vega; the car was registered to him.” He gazed at Felix with an intensity ill-disguised by the dark pince-nez, and smiled with an expression appropriate to the skull-shaped candies of the Day of the Dead.

“Yes, it worked out very well, n’est-ce pas? Now you’re identified forever with Licenciado Diego Velázquez, Chief of the Bureau of Cost Analysis. And such good will must be rewarded, mmh? A very special invitation for day after tomorrow awaits you at your hotel. Please be there.”

“I’m not going to a hotel. I’m going to see my wife. At last, I can do that.”

“Of course, Licenciado. First, I shall take you to your home.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m going to stay there. I live there, with my wife.”

The Director General issued a new order, then immediately turned to Felix. “Your invitation awaits you at the Hilton.”

“You’re not making any sense. My things are at the Suites de Génova.”

“They’ve been moved to the Hilton.”

“With what right?”

“The right of the person whose influence saved you from a charge of trafficking in drugs, mmh?”

“I don’t want to hear another word about influence.”

“But it’s the supreme law in Mexico, n’est-ce pas? You will return to the Hilton. The same room. It’s a perfect front.”

“You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying,” said Felix, with the irritation of exhaustion. “The matter’s finished. I did what I had to do. I did it, without anyone’s help.”

“I just came from the market, mmh? You have too much faith in the fatal powers of refrigeration. Señor Benjamin is growing cold. But forever this time. He’s resting comfortably with a bullet in his skull.”

Felix felt sick; he doubled over, nauseated. He didn’t want to choke to death on his own vomit. The nausea subsided as the Director General spoke again with the velvety voice of a snake charmer. “I don’t know what motives you attribute to the dear-departed Benjamin. You’re a very passionate man, I’ve always said that. How I laughed at the mischief you played on poor Simon, and Señora Rossetti in the swimming pool, and Professor Bernstein! That takes much culot, n’est-ce pas? Come, Licenciado, the time for violence between us is past. Let go my lapels. Let us be calm, mmh?”

“Are you telling me that Abie didn’t kill Sara because he thought she was Mary? Jealousy wasn’t the motive for the murder?”

For once, the Director General’s laughter ran its course. He laughed so hard he had to remove the pince-nez and wipe his eyes with his handkerchief.

“Sara Klein was murdered because she was Sara Klein, my dear friend. No one confused her with anyone else. What is it Nietzsche says about women? That man fears a woman in love because she is capable of any sacrifice, because anything not related to her passion is despicable? That is why a woman is the most dangerous creature in the world. Sara Klein was one of those truly dangerous ones. The name of her love was justice. And this woman enamored of justice was prepared to suffer everything for justice’s sake. But also to reveal everything. Yes, the most dangerous creature in the world.”

“Her love was named Jamil; you killed him.”

The Director General shrugged off the commentary with belligerent indifference, as if to say, anything goes. He spoke with no attempt at self-justification. “When I visited Sara at ten o’clock that evening in the Suites de Génova, I warned her to be on her guard. I told her that Bernstein had killed the man called Jamil as Jamil attempted to kill Bernstein. In itself, this was credible; there was more than sufficient reason for Jamil to murder Bernstein, and vice versa. But I nailed down my version by asking Sara to call the professor. She did so. Bernstein admitted he’d been shot that evening, following the ceremony in the Palace. Someone had attempted to kill him but had succeeded only in wounding him in the shoulder. Sara cursed Bernstein and hung up the telephone, shaken with sobs. She believed what I had told her.”

“But Jamil was already dead and as good as buried in a military cell in my name. Who shot Bernstein?”

“But of course, he was superficially wounded by Ayub, who was following my instructions. It was to exacerbate Sara, to force her to break the last threads of her shattered fidelity to Israel, and to get her to talk. Quel coup, mon ami! A militant Israeli like Sara Klein passing over to our side and making sensational revelations about torture and concentration camps and the military ambitions of Israel. Just imagine, mmh?”

“She was planning to return to Israel. She had the tickets. She told me on the recording.”

“Ah, a true biblical heroine, that Sara, a modern Judith, no? She told me, too. She would denounce Israel, but from within Israel. Such was the morality of this unfortunate but dangerous woman. I gave her some cachets of sleeping drugs and told her to rest. I would come by for her the following morning to take her to the airport. I arranged a guard in front of the Suites de Génova. My agents took note of everything, the serenade, the nun. But no one suspicious entered. The Israelis deceived us. Their agents were already inside the hotel. Their names were Mary and Abie Benjamin.”

“But Abie admitted that my version was correct…”

“Of course, it suited him for you to think that passion was the motive for the crime. Not so, the motive was political. Sara Klein had to be silenced forever. They succeeded. But do not torture yourself, Licenciado. Abie Benjamin is dead inside a freezer, and you have your revenge, n’est-ce pas?”

Although he couldn’t see out, Felix knew that they were driving through Mexico City. The two men did not speak for a long while. Felix’s depression annulled an anger that lay beyond his fatigue, like the city beyond the curtains of the car.

“You robbed me of my only act, my one free act,” Felix said finally. “Why?”

Deliberately, the Director General lighted a cigarette before responding. “The Hydra of passion has many heads. Ask yourself whether Sara Klein deserved to die as you imagined it, because of mistaken passion. You should have realized, that crime hid other mysteries, like those Russian dolls that grow in number as they diminish in size. No. Believe instead that in the end Sara Klein died the death she deserved. Othello’s passion would not have suited Sara. Macbeth’s passion, yes. All the waters of the great god Neptune will not erase the blood from our hands, Licenciado. I know that. Sara died with clean hands … But I believe we are almost there.”

The Citroen stopped. Felix opened the door. They were in front of his apartment house in Polanco.

“I shall wait for you here,” said the Director General after Felix got out.

Felix crouched down beside the door to peer toward the ghostly outlines of the man in the cushioned darkness of the French automobile. “Why? I’m home. I’ll be staying here.”

“Nevertheless, remember that I shall be waiting.”

Felix closed the door and looked up toward the ninth floor of the building. He could see lights, but only from the dimmest lamps in the apartment.

47

IN THE ELEVATOR, he thought about the last time he’d seen Ruth. It seemed a century ago, not three weeks. He remembered his wife’s expression: she’d never looked at him just that way, her eyes filled with tears and tenderness, slowly shaking her head, her brows knit, as if for that one time she knew the truth but didn’t want to offend him by speaking it.

“Please don’t go, Felix. Stay here with me. I’m not playing games now. I’m asking you sincerely. Please stay. Don’t jeopardize yourself.”

Tender, sweet Ruth, neither as intelligent as Sara nor as beautiful as Mary, but capable of sudden rages sparked by jealousy and cooled by affection. A freckled Jewish girl, she disguised her freckles with makeup, drops of sweat gathered on the tip of her nose, Señora Maldonado was a pretty Jewish girl, charming, active, his faithful Penelope, and now he was returning defeated from the wars against an invisible Troy. She was the woman he needed to solve all his practical problems, the woman who always had his breakfast ready, his suits pressed, his suitcases packed. She did everything for him, even putting in his cuff links. And all she asked was patience and compassion.

He took out his key ring. The keys to his home. Patience and compassion. He hoped Ruth would be patient and compassionate. They needed both more than ever before if they were to rebuild their relationship. She thought he was dead, how would she receive him? She knew him well, she remembered him with sadness, but she wasn’t looking for him. Would she recognize his altered face, very little changed really, but enough to create doubts. Was it he or was it another? Would Bernstein be proved right?

He looked at himself in the hall, honestly believing the reproduction of the Velázquez self-portrait was a mirror. How would Señora Maldonado react to the fact that from now on she would be called Señora Velázquez? How would she handle the practical details, the documents, the family, the relatives? Neither the Director General nor I had explained that. Then Felix must have shivered: in the same way we had changed him, we were transforming his wife. Only a little, but enough to induce error, to provoke doubt. He felt like Boris Karloff about to touch the electrified fingers of Elsa Lanchester.

He heard a voice that was not Ruth’s. It was coming from the living room. The double doors between the hall and the living room were ajar. He felt ridiculously melodramatic; how long is it before a young widow receives callers? When does the first suitor call upon Penelope? What is his name?

He paused with his hand on the doorknob. The living room was in deep shadow, only the dimmest table lamps lighted. No. It was a woman’s voice. Ruth’s visitor was a woman. It was late, almost eleven, but there was a normal explanation; Ruth was lonely, she needed company.

He listened to the voice of Ruth’s visitor. “I had left you to follow him. But I had followed him to fulfill a duty he himself had pointed out to me. It was no easy job for Bernstein to take your place, to offer himself in your place, to dilute my sense of duty by adding to it a love different from that I’d sacrificed, your love, Felix…”

His hands were burning as he entered the living room, seeking the origin of the voice, blind to everything except the reality of that voice, Sara Klein’s voice.

The tape whirred peacefully in the cassette. Felix pressed a key, the tape shrieked and spun forward. “That night, we went to bed together. With Jamil, all the frontiers of my life disappeared. I ceased to be a persecuted little German-Jewish girl…”

He pressed the stop key. Only then did he hear the rhythmical sound of a rocking chair.

He turned and saw her sitting there, rocking, unspeaking, dressed in a nun’s habit, scattered rosary beads in her lap, tense hands gripping the arms of the chair, long black skirts hiding her feet, a white wimple framing an overly made-up face, enough to disguise the freckles but not enough to dissipate the drops of sweat gathered on the tip of her nose, rocking, rocking, in the shadows.

“You were never really converted, were you?” asked Ruth, rocking, rocking, with a torturously neutral voice.

Felix closed his eyes. He wished he could close them forever. He left the room, his eyes closed, he knew by heart the arrangement of his own home. He reached the front door and, as he opened it, opened his eyes. He had kept them closed for fear of seeing himself in the self-portrait Ruth and Felix Maldonado had laughingly bought one day in Madrid. He ran down the stairway, skipping steps, crashing against the handrail, pressing the sweat from his hands against the cement walls of the stairwell. Asphyxia — he needed air, air from the street.

He was on the sidewalk, panting.

The door of the Citroen opened.

A pale hand beckoned.

48

AGAIN IN HIS ROOM in the Hilton, he slept twelve hours. The Director General had accompanied him to the room and given him sleeping pills and a glass of water; he stayed with him as he fell asleep. Felix Maldonado could barely stammer his last question; his tongue was thick and his teeth felt as soft as hominy. “I give up, I give up,” he said with a calm delirium that the skull-faced man observed with curiosity. “Who is it who has this power, this power to change lives, twist lives at his whim and make us someone else? I give up.”

The Director General was incapable of feeling compassion; when he felt a twinge, it was instantly converted into scorn. But he had said it once before, he preferred cruelty to scorn. “There is one question you haven’t asked, even though it’s the one that should most disturb you.” In spite of himself, his intended cruelty took on overtones of pity. “Why did Sara Klein return to Mexico? Why did she travel from Tel Aviv to be here only four days?”

He didn’t know whether Felix heard him; Felix was quietly delirious. True madness, thought the man with the pince-nez as violet as Mary Benjamin’s eyes, is always serene madness, madness that doesn’t interfere with what one calls normal life, madness that rises, bathes, eats breakfast, goes to work, eats, returns home, brushes its teeth, sleeps, and again rises at the sound of the alarm clock. The madness of someone named Felix Maldonado.

“She came here to see you, can you hear me? That’s the only reason she came, to see you one last time. That should matter to you, but you never asked yourself that question, you never tried to find out. She loved you more than you loved her; her love for you was real, not nostalgia, or an equally impossible promise. Do you hear me?”

But Felix was sinking into sleep, repeating the question, I give up, who is it who rules the world? What can I do? I can’t fight them, who are they? Who do all of you obey? I give up.

He would never remember clearly the words of the Director General. I would repeat them should he come again to my house in Coyoacán, if he ever decided that, after all, I was the lesser evil, the friend from his college days and the Museum of Modern Art film series and the Ontario Shakespeare Festival, the Castor who with Pollux shared the sofa-bed in the Century Apartments overlooking the Hudson. I would repeat exactly what the Director General had said that night as Felix Maldonado, a serene madman, sank rapidly into sleep, the sleep/dream that with all its powers, when it is dream and not merely sleep, rêve and not merely sommeil, can transform man:

“You are but one head of the Hydra. Cut off one and a thousand will replace it. You are governed by your passions, they defeat you. The eagle knows that. The two-headed eagle. One head is called the CIA and the other, the KGB. Two heads, but only one body. Almost the Holy Trinity of our age. Whether we know it, whether or not we want it, we cannot help but serve the ends of one of the two heads of that cold monster. But as it has only one body, in serving one head we serve the other, and vice versa. There’s no escape. The Hydra of our passions is trapped in the talons of the bicephalous eagle. The bloody eagle that is the origin of all the world’s violence, the eagle that murders a Trotsky and a Diem, that attempts more than once to assassinate Castro and then weeps crocodile tears because the world has become so violent and the Palestinians violently demand a homeland. At times, it is the beak of the Washington eagle that cuts off our head and eats it; at times, it is the beak of Moscow. But the intestines of the winged beast are the same, and the excretory passages are the same. We are the excrement of that monster. When the Russians supported the creation of the state of Israel in the forties, Bernstein served the KGB. He served the CIA as long as the North Americans gave unconditional support to the Jews. Now he is playing one against the other and hopes to use both as both use the Israelis: Soviet tanks so that Israel can suppress the Palestinians in the south of Lebanon; North American oil so that Israel can combat the Arab armies with North American tanks and planes. The Director General served the KGB during the period of Arab-Moscow cordiality, and the CIA when El Rais Nasser died and Sadat sought Yankee support and the Saudis and Kissinger reached an accord to create the oil crisis. Any day, the alliances can change radically. The two-headed eagle laughs and devours, devours and laughs, digests and shits, shits and laughs at our Hydra passions…”

The face of the Director General was disappearing behind the veils of sleep, until only two eyes of black glass glittered deep in a white skull.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, a waiter entered without knocking and wakened him. He was pushing a wheeled table with covered breakfast dishes, a newspaper, and an envelope. He left without speaking.

Diego Velázquez got up, dazed, coughing and sneezing. He pulled the table to the bedside. He drank the orange juice and lifted the cover from the steaming plate of eggs with hot sauce. The eggs nauseated him and quickly he re-covered them. He poured himself a cup of coffee and read the inscription on the envelope, Señor Licenciado Diego Velázquez, Chief of the Bureau of Cost Analysis of the Ministry of Economic Development, Hilton Hotel, City. He removed the card. The Mexican Academy of Economics is pleased to invite you to a colloquium to be held on September 31 at ten o’clock in the morning in the Salón del Perdón in the National Palace of Mexico. The President of the Republic will honor us with his presence. You are requested to arrive promptly.

The newspaper was open and folded to an inside page. In a black box beneath the Star of David was the announcement of the regrettable death of Abraham Benjamin Rosenberg. The burial will take place at 5 p.m. in the Jewish Cemetery. His wife, his children, and other relatives share with you their profound grief. Hebrew rites will be observed. The family requests no flowers.

At five o’clock, Diego Velázquez joined the hundred or so persons gathered in the chapel at the cemetery. They stood in line to file past the body of Abie Benjamin, incessantly chanting Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod. That morning, Abie’s body had been washed, his fingernails had been cut, and they had combed his hair over the hole burned in his head. He looked serene in his shroud, the yarmulke on his head, the tallith he’d worn the day of his wedding covering his shoulders and face, the cotton stockings hiding his icy feet. Diego smiled at the thought that this man was being buried in a pocketless white shroud so as not to carry with him any of the wealth of this world.

The person standing behind Diego Velázquez nudged him gently as he lingered before the body. Diego left the line and sat down to wait for the procession to the grave. He saw Mary’s veiled, bowed head in the first row of mourners. There were no flowers or wreaths in the chapel.

He waited until everyone had left to follow the black sheet-draped coffin borne by ten men. Then he followed. A black-bearded man dressed in black and wearing a black hat was sweeping the ground behind the coffin. Perhaps he’d bought the broom in one of Abie’s chain of supermarkets.

They reached the empty grave. The rabbi, a heavily veiled Mary, and the couple’s children recited the Kaddish. Then Mary removed the black sheet and the coffin was lowered into the grave. It thudded dryly, then settled into the mud of the summer’s intense rains. Mary took a handful of earth and threw it onto the coffin. Then the gravediggers took over, spading vigorously.

When earth completely filled the grave, the rabbi cleared his throat and began his eulogy of Abie Benjamin. Only then did Mary lift her dark veils, and her eyes with the golden sparks shone more brightly than the silvery sun of the hazy but rainless afternoon. At the last moment, God had been merciful to Abie. The heavens did not weep. The God of Israel is compassionate only when He is severe.

Mary sought the eyes of Diego Velázquez.

They stared at one another for a long moment, deaf to the rabbi’s eulogy.

Mary smiled at Diego; she ran a moist tongue over her palely painted lips and half closed her violet eyes. She didn’t move, but her body was that of a black panther, lustful and now pursued, beautiful because she was pursued and because she knew it. In spite of the black dress buttoned to her neck, Diego could imagine the deep décolletage of her brassiere, and the oil between her breasts to make the cleavage more noticeable.

He turned his back on Mary and walked slowly from the cemetery.

49

AT NINE O’CLOCK, he crossed the lobby of the Hilton and walked to the parklike grass-and-cement strip in front of the University Club to wait for a taxi. It was the worst hour. Taxi after taxi passed without stopping, ignoring the uplifted finger that signaled he was waiting for a one-peso cab.

He had waited ten minutes when a yellow taxi broke away from the orderly line of one-peso cabs and worked its way to the curb, honking. Diego stopped it and got into the rear seat. He was the only passenger. The driver tried to catch Diego’s eye in the rear-view mirror; he smiled, but Diego had no desire to converse with a taxi driver.

When they reached the Hotel Reforma, a girl dressed in white, a nurse, stopped the cab. She carried cellophane-wrapped syringes, vials, and ampules. Diego slid to the far side of the seat to make room for her. He felt as if he were coming down with something, and wished he could ask the nurse for a shot of penicillin.

Just before the traffic circle at El Caballito in front of the Ambassadeurs Restaurant, two nuns calmly entered the taxi. Diego knew they were nuns by the hair tightly drawn back into a bun, the absence of makeup, their black dresses, the rosaries and scapulars. They chose to get in the front with the driver. He treated them like old friends, as if he saw them every day. “Hel-lo, Sisters, how’s it going today?”

The taxi was held up by a long red light. A nondescript man had run to the cab and attempted to get in after the nuns, but the driver shook his finger “no,” and drove off against the red light.

He managed to slow for an instant beside the newspaper stand at the corner of Reforma and Bucareli to avoid a violation. The warning light flashed on, but at the moment the taxi started to move, a student ran toward them with his arms crossed across his chest, running lightly in his tennis shoes in spite of the load of books he was carrying; a girl emerged from behind the newsstand and followed him. They got in the back, and the nurse had to squeeze close to Diego, but she didn’t look at him or speak to him. Diego ignored her.

The driver left the mandatory taxi lane and drove with more than usual speed in the direction of San Juan de Letrán. Once again, with difficulty, as he had in front of the University Club, the driver worked his way back into the line of one-peso cabs. On the corner of Juárez and San Juan de Letrán, in front of Nieto Regalos, stood a fat woman in a cotton dress; she had a basket over one arm. She signaled the taxi; the driver stopped as the light changed from yellow to red.

The woman thrust her nose into the taxi and asked them to let her in, all the taxis were full, she’d be late to market, her chicks were about to roast in the heat, be good to her. “No, señora,” replied the driver. “Can’t you see I’m full?” As he crossed the intersection, Juárez narrowed to become Madero. The woman with the basket was left behind, shaking her fist, her voice drowned out by the mounting roar of traffic.

“Why didn’t you let her get in?” asked Diego, immersed in the silence of his fellow passengers.

“I’m sorry, señor,” the driver replied, unperturbed, “but I’m running full, and if I picked her up, the cops would put the bite on me. They’re just waiting for the chance.”

Diego exchanged glances with the nurse, the student, the student’s curly-haired girl, and the two nuns, who had turned around to look at him. Incomprehension and coldness alternated in their distant, hostile eyes.

“Stop! Stop, I tell you!” shouted Diego, without conviction. They were all staring at him as if they’d never seen him before; they were all counting on the absence of memory, as if there were some time warp between Diego and the rest of humanity, like bad sync between an image and a voice on a movie screen.

Now the driver caught Diego’s eye in the rear-view mirror and winked. An indecent, offensive wink that implied a complicity that had never been sought or agreed upon.

“All right,” said Diego, exhausted. “Stop. Let me out here.”

“Five pesos, please.”

Diego handed the wrinkled bills to the driver and got out in front of the Hotel Majestic, almost on the corner of the Plaza de la Constitución.

He walked faster. He crossed the Plaza and presented his card to the Palace guard, beside the elevator. He was told to go to the Salón del Perdón, where the meeting was to be held.

Many people were milling around the great brocade-and-walnut Salón dominated by the historic painting consecrating the nobility of soul of the rebel Nicolás Bravo. At a distance, Diego saw a myopic Leopoldo Bernstein using his handkerchief to wipe the sauce splattered on his glasses from his breakfast eggs. He replaced the glasses, saw Diego, and smiled amiably. In one corner of the Salón, he saw the Director General in violet eyeglasses, visibly suffering in the bright daylight, the flashes of the press photographers and television lights; beside him, Mauricio Rossetti, staring straight at Diego and whispering into the Director General’s ear. There was a moment of heightened whispering, followed by an impressive silence.

The President of the Republic entered the Salón. He advanced among the guests, greeting them affably, probably making jokes, pressing certain arms, avoiding others, effusively offering his hand to some, coldly to others, recognizing one man, ignoring the next, illuminated in the steady, biting light of the reflectors, intermittently divested of shadows by the flashes. Recognizing. Ignoring.

He was approaching.

Diego prepared his smile, his hand, adjusted the knot of his necktie. He sneezed. He removed his handkerchief and discreetly blew his nose.

Bernstein observed him from across the room, smiling ironically.

Rossetti was making his way through the crowd toward Diego.

The Director General waved his hand in the direction of the door.

The President was within a few steps of Diego Velázquez.