Strachey's folly

Chapter 19

In the icy depths of an abnormally frigid Northeastern winter in the mid-1980s, Timmy and I had fled Albany for the tropics and ended up spending ten mostly happy days exploring Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula. We observed the cliche of tourism in Mexico and got sick. But that hadn't lasted, and as refugees from the glaciated Hudson valley, we found the Yucatan heat and dust as therapeutic as the sober hospitality of the Yu-catecan people.

Now I was on a plane on my way back. I was eager to revisit the big, flat limestone shelf that had been home to a pre-Columbian civilization that worshiped a rain god, ripped the hearts out of its enemies, excelled in stone architecture and astronomy, and understood the concept of zero when the Europeans, apparently working backward from ninety-nine, were still stuck at about six. The Yucatecan Caribbean coast had only in recent years been developed, and it lacked the charm of the inland colonial-era population centers such as Merida and Valladolid. But except for Canciin, a teeming monument to soulless industrial tourism, the coastal strip down to Tulum was still relatively un-Hyattized, I'd been told. And most of the beaches were so pure and sparsely trod upon that it was possible to imagine this turquoise coast as wild-eyed Cortes had first viewed it in 1519- I hoped my visit would be more congenial than his had been, and briefer.

I had in my possession on the flight from National to Miami, and then on to Cancun, directions to Los Pajaros, the small town where Betty Krumfutz had told Timmy that Jim Suter was living with his boyfriend Jorge. I also had a photo of Suter that Peter Vicknicki had provided, and a bathing suit, T-shirts, and sandals I'd picked up at a mall near the airport. Otherwise, I was traveling lighter than light.

The information from Betty Krumfutz was now suspect, of course. Why would she tell anyone where Jim Suter might be found if her thuggish employees Heckinger and Sweet (assuming they were Mrs. Krumfutz's agents) adamantly refused to do so? So I was as uncertain as ever what to expect in Los Pajaros, which in Spanish meant "the birds."

I wondered if, avianly speaking, I was in for some Audubon or Aristophanes or Hitchcock. I hoped it was Audubon. I knew Los Pajaros existed-I'd found it on the Yucatan road map I'd brought along-but I did not know if, when I arrived there, anyone would have heard of Jim Suter or Jorge Ramos. Before flying out early Wednesday morning, I asked Timmy to do some digging while I was gone on Heckinger and Sweet and to learn, if he could, from Maynard or Bud Hively or from Vicknicki and Dormer, who these two characters were, what they did for a living, and who they did it for. Timmy also planned on contacting Carmen LoBello at the Bureau of Mines and feeling him out on the quilt panel and the panel vandalism.

As the American Airlines 737 bumped across the top of some Gulf of Mexico fall thunderstorms, I got out the photo of Suter and studied his face. It was not hard to memorize. As had been widely attested to, Suter was a looker. In the head-and-shirtless-torso shot Vicknicki had lent me, Suter was muscular and trim in an appealingly natural way-both gym-slave obses-siveness and pectoral implants seemed unlikely-and he had a subtly sculpted Botticelli face topped with the notorious golden curls.

Maynard had referred to Suter's looks as those of a sensual Harpo Marx, and while I saw in his face the logic of the comparison-the gold, the glow, the obvious capacity for worldly delight-there was nothing shy about Suter's look, and no hint that, like Harpo, Suter might choose to express himself chiefly with a musical instrument or by honking a horn. Suter's gaze was direct and inviting, and in the photo his mouth was open slightly, as if he were about to tell you something you very much wanted to hear. What I wanted Suter to tell me was the truth, but I could not read in this single photograph whether I was likely to hear it from him or not.

The Yucatan's summer-fall rain-and-occasional-hurricane season was largely spent by mid-October, and as the plane came in low over the resort island of Isla Mujeres, the early-afternoon, mile-high, billowing clouds had spread apart and the sun was streaming through. This was off-season for tourism in the Yucatan, and the plane was less than half-filled. As the sixty or eighty passengers filed off at Cancun airport, I tried to spot Milton Kingsley, the D.C. police captain Chondelle said was traveling to Cancun around the same time I was.

I saw no one fitting Chondelle's description of Kingsley- "George Foreman underneath a toupee that looks like a sleeping hamster"-and if Ray Craig had anyone else tailing me, there was no way of my knowing who on the flight it could have been. I half expected to detect Craig's scent in the airport, but had he been there, his odor would have been masked by the tobacco smoke in the poorly ventilated building, which could have been doubling as an air terminal and a Government of Mexico Ministry of Health emphysema research project.

I bought five hundred dollars' worth of the depressed local currency-NAFTA, a net plus for Mexican business, had not saved the peso from one of its periodic bungee jumps (the cord being the U.S. Treasury)-and stuffed the wad in my pocket. I picked up the rental car I'd reserved, a GM maquiladora assembly-plant product called, I think, a Chevy Outtie, and turned south. Making my way through the unmarked, chaotic road-construction area below the airport-driving in Mexico, as in Italy, Nigeria, and Boston, was not for the faint of heart-I headed down the Caribbean coast.

The air was heavy and hot, and my heart swelled with pleasure over being back in the tropics. Before I'd met Timmy in untropical Albany, two of my best love affairs had been with men in cities well south of the tropic of Cancer. The first was with sweet and exuberant Mike Akenjemi in Lagos, during a summer work-study program after my junior year at Rutgers. Two years later it was Ted Metzger, in that period when my government announced that it needed me and I concluded that two dangerous years in Saigon were preferable to any kind of a lifetime in Winnipeg.

I later heard from a decent and conscience-stricken friend who went there that summers on the Canadian plains were fiercely hot, too. But for me a hot climate was not a cultural advantage, just a circumstance under which I had twice somehow found romance and sweaty erotic joy.

None of that was about to be repeated, I was sure. For Jim Suter, despite his famous physical allure, sounded to me like a deeply problematical piece of work.

Also, I had long since ceased sexual meandering, much to Timmy's relief. Both of our rare ex-tramonogamous erotic adventures consisted of two-or-three-times-a-year, joint visits to far-from-home gay bathhouses-in Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco-for some no-exchange-of-fluids, happy carnal comingling with others that was as harmful as a couple of farm boys in 1927 attending the hootchie-kootchie show at the Nebraska state agricultural fair, and far more wholesome.

Those excursions pretty much satisfied the urges in both of us for sexual variety.

So, the Yucatecan jungle heat notwithstanding, I expected that in the department of erotic temptation, my meeting with the allegedly irresistible Jim Suter would be- in the words of a droll Mexican I'd once met who liked to imitate the speech of gringo touristsnoproblemo.

About halfway between Playa del Carmen and Tulum, just north of the resort complex at Akumal, I saw the road sign for Los Pa-jaros. It directed me off Route 307, the two-lane blacktop that ran the length of the coast from Cancun down to Chetumal on the border with Belize.

A third of a mile off the highway, behind a strip of jungle thicket, Los Pajaros consisted of an assortment of perhaps a hundred small houses along a scraggly network of muddy streets. Most of the houses were cement, but there were a couple of traditional Mayan palapas, too, made of sticks and palmetto thatch, and it w/as the palapas that looked the most inviting in the midafternoon wet heat.

Few people were out and about, just some kids kicking a soccer ball around the grassy town square and a woman in a white Mayan huipil toting what I guessed was a bucket of cornmeal down the main street. A cow was tethered under a shady scrub oak in front of one house, and a skinny dog that looked as if it might have been the source of the term hangdog expression sniffed at some trash in a front yard.

The few remaining older towns on the coast had Mayan name-Muchi, Pamul, Chemuyil-and I figured that the newer Los Pajaros had been built to house workers at the same time the nearby beachfront resorts went up. The central plaza had nothing identifiable as a Catholic church, just a one-story community center with a ramshackle arcade and some faded endorsements by the PRI, the forever-dominant Mexican political party, of former presidents who now were dead, fled, or under indictment somewhere.

Away from the highway, the only sounds in Los Pajaros were of the soccer-playing kids exclaiming in an unfamiliar language I took to be Mayan, and the recorded hymns, in Spanish, coming out of the front of the Seventh-Day Adventist meetinghouse. I recognized "Onward, Christian Soldiers," although on this torpid Wednesday afternoon no one in Los Pajaros was marching as to anything.

I had a hard time envisioning the scintillating Jim Suter in this place and wondered if maybe Timmy hadn't been misinformed by a wily Betty Krumfutz. I found a small tienda that was open, and using my combination of phrase-book and hazily remembered high school Spanish, I asked the elderly proprietress where I might find the norteamericano Jim Suter. "Laplaya," the old woman replied.

I asked her if she was acquainted with Senor Suter, and she gestured vaguely in an easterly direction and repeated, "En la playa." I took this to mean that she did not know Suter personally but that all the North Americans in Los Pajaros lived over by the beach and not here in the village. She explained to me where to find the beach road. I bought a two-liter bottle of aguapu-rificada and swigged from it as I drove another mile down the main highway and then turned onto a road marked by a small sign that read Playa.

So as not to damage my Outtie's tender underbelly, I drove slowly and carefully down a potholed muddy road with thick, low jungle on either side of it for half a mile. Then the thicket ended and the road swung sharply left and ran parallel to the beach. The first house I came to was a big, two-story, L-shaped, white stucco job, between me and the sea, with terraces on either side of it, a terra-cotta-tile roof, and lots of big, louvered windows thrown open. A small satellite dish pointed skyward from the roof, although I saw no electrical lines and I wondered what the house's power source was.

A chest-high stucco wall crawling with vermilion bougainvil-lea wound around the house on three sides. It was interrupted by a gravel driveway that led up to a two-car garage and a smaller outbuilding. The only vehicle visible was a blue Chevy Suburban with muddy fenders. From my vantage point, some flowering trees obscured the front door, so I pulled my tiny Chevy up alongside the big one and climbed out into the bright heat. As I shut the car door, a couple of grass-green parrots shot out of the flame tree next to the garage and careened into the jungle squawking. So here were some actual pajaros.

Then the afternoon air was quiet again except for the sound of the light surf beyond the house. Off to my left the beach road continued on northward with other similar large, nicely designed stucco houses along it every twenty-five yards or so. I meant to ask at this house where Jim Suter was staying. But that wasn't necessary, for when I walked around the trees and approached the front door, it was already open and a man in cream-colored running shorts and a powder-blue tank top was standing just inside the doorframe grinning out at me.

"Don Strachey?"

"I am he."

"God, where have you been all my life?"

"That's an awfully tired line, Suter."

"It sounds as fresh to me as it did the first time I uttered it more than twenty years ago. It must be you who's jaded, Strachey. "

"Not jaded, just well informed-about you and your habit of seducing and abandoning men."

"Oh, and you're too frail for that?"

"Not frail, just not interested." He was radiant, and now I saw why otherwise rational men had lost their senses in Suter's presence. Trying hard to keep my voice steady, I said, "Anyway, we've got more urgent matters to discuss, no?"

Suter gazed at me, his mouth open slightly, for a long moment, before indicating with a little toss of his golden locks that I should follow him into the house. He turned then and shut the door behind us. He said, "I take it you came alone.

There are people who want me out of the way, as I know you know."

"I know that that's what you said in your letter to Maynard."

"Right. God, I am so, so sorry about what happened to Maynard. I hope you can believe that."

"He's lucky to be alive. And you're lucky he's alive, Suter."

"I know. You're right. Poor Manes. He was just in the wrongest possible place at the wrongest possible time. That poor guy has been to Beirut and back, and what does he do but get shot in the gut on E Street. Talk about unfair."

"Yes, it was unfair. Who shot him?"

"I don't know," Suter said, shrugging. "Honestly I don't. You're going to have to go back to Log Heaven, Pennsylvania, for the answer to that question. Log Heaven or Engineville. But I'm confident that after you hear what little I can tell you about all of these recent disturbing occurrences, you'll decide on the spot to dig no further and concentrate instead on doing the one thing you can do safely, and that's helping Maynard get back on his feet. And don't worry, he won't be in any danger from here on out. His getting shot was nothing more than an absurd misunderstanding."

"So you're telling me that the Krumfutzes were involved?" "We can talk about that," Suter said with a little shake of his ringlets. "There's a lot you're not going to hear from me because there's no way in hell I can get away with telling you or anybody else. You're just going to have to take my word on that score. But I will tell you what I think I can, and then you can decide where you want to take it from there. I'm confident that you won't want to take it anywhere at all.

Meanwhile, Strachey, why not bring your bag in and plan to spend the night? As you can see, we've got plenty of room. You won't have to share a bed with me if you decide not to."

"A lot of people know I was headed here. If anything happened to me, they would know where to look."

He started to crack a smile, then didn't. "So, what do you think might happen?

Are you afraid you might have your heart ripped out, old Mayan style, and your body tossed down a cenote — either actually or metaphorically? Believe me, for you the greatest danger is of the latter."

"Of getting thrown down a sinkhole?" "No, of having both happen, but only figuratively speaking." "Jesus, Suter, you just don't know when to quit, do you?"

He grinned again, showing me his perfect teeth.