The Jaguar

32

The walk back to the Castle was brief. Some of the men who recaptured her were the same ones who had kidnapped her from home nine days earlier, which led to some muttered recognitions. Heriberto seemed embarrassed. The day after her performance with Los Jaguars, he had sent to her room a shallow bowl of floating gardenia blossoms, very fragrant, with a note in Spanish praising her singing. Erin knew she had gained esteem in his eyes and that it displeased him to force her back into captivity. He patted her for weapons, lightly and respectfully, not touching her most personal places.

They stopped at the cenote to rest. The men speculated about where Saturnino might be, but they didn’t ask her directly and they didn’t seem to genuinely care. She glanced out to the middle of the pool several times, but she could not see him. She wondered if she should confess, so as not to spoil the water supply. She decided not to. He would float up soon, right? They’d fish him out and in a few days the water would be clean again. Right? Maybe he was down there hot-wiring the Corvette. Maybe he’d never come up.

A few minutes later the jungle parted and the Castle loomed from the hillside and Erin trudged up the road, across the spacious courtyard to the limestone steps of the great entryway. Heriberto opened one of the iron doors and waited for her. The lepers came and watched her from the third-floor landing, and she saw the black faces of the servants behind the windows, and there were sicarios everywhere, even up on the balconies, dark boys with machine guns loitering half-hidden in the riotous potted flowers.

Armenta stood waiting for her in the big foyer. He wore slacks and a floral print shirt that was lumpy around the waist with weapons and phones. He was unshaven and unkempt. The bags under his eyes were dark. “Did Saturnino find you?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you see him?”

“I saw no one.”

“I think he was pretending to be loco.”

“I haven’t seen him since that night.”

He studied her while he unholstered a phone and listened, grunted, and punched off. “Where did you get the key?”

“I have no key. The door is broken. It hasn’t been locking on the inside for three days.”

“It locked for me two hours ago. And Father Ciel says his key was stolen.”

“You should never have given him a key to my room. You know what he is. You know what he does.”

He sighed softly and linked his fingers below his waistline, watching her. He nodded and considered. Then he brought a different phone off his belt and worked the numbers without looking at them. A moment later he was cursing fast and soft in Spanish and Erin could see the anger in his face. He told someone to go to hell, then slid the phone closed and put it back in his carrier.

“I do not see things as you wrote them in ‘City of Gold,’” he said.

She said nothing for a long moment. Heriberto quickly departed. Beyond Armenta she saw the servants pretending to work, not watching them but listening.

“I can’t help that,” she said.

“When I look at myself I see only a will to survive in a world that is cursed. To me, this will you write of is a neutral thing, something any animal has in its possession. It is not dignity. It is not to be judged. You wrote as if there was strength and even a small goodness in me.”

“I see your world as cursed. But look-you created Gustavo. You made someone beautiful.”

“Yes. And in your song, Benji grows strong in a cursed world. He is true to his friends and his family. He speaks violence because that is the language of his time and place. All of this means that I am pleased by the song.”

She nodded and looked down at her shoes. The eyelets and seams were still crusted with jungle sand and there were small green burrs stuck to the laces. The Cowboy Defender was irritating her. “I can do better.”

“Oh?”

“It was my first corrido.”

“It is good.”

“It’s crude and obvious.”

He wrinkled his brow and his gaze bore into her.

“Has the money arrived?” she asked. “Am I free? Have you heard from Charlie Bravo?”

He shrugged effulgently, then shook his head. “Lo siento.”

“You’re sorry? Because your son is going to flay me? How do you think I feel?”

“Charlie Bravo has two more days, yes? The agreed day was tomorrow. And I gave him one more day for the song that you wrote. I do not regret it. But we hear nothing from him. He heats the plaza. He has broken the pledge.”

“Then I’ll write you another song. A better song. If you’ll give Charlie Bravo one more day.”

And one more day for Bradley, she thought. Two precious days to find her. Two and a half, counting today! I’ll come to you by moonlight. Like in your song.

His dark eyes roamed her face. They looked intelligent but wild, like the eyes of the jaguar in the Castle.

“How badly do you want your money, Mr. Armenta?”

“Money? Yes, always the money comes first.”

“But you want another song.”

“I want this song too.”

“Do we have a deal, then? Another song for another day?”

“Excuse me.” Armenta turned his back to her and yanked one of the phones off his belt and somehow dislodged a pistol that clattered to the floor at his feet. He picked it up and looked at her. Then he straightened and, holding the gun at his side with one hand, brought the cell phone to his ear with the other and launched into a Spanish tirade that Erin could scarcely understand. Traidor! Pinche Carlos Herredia! Exterminar!

It went on and on. She watched his hair fly and his eyes bulge and the big vein on his neck stand out and she heard the furious rush of words and spittle and his hurried breath.

She turned her back to him and considered the big iron doors and wondered what it would be like to just walk out through them, free and heading home.

She only became aware of the silence when he broke it.

“I am sorry for the activity.”

“What’s wrong? Why are there gunmen everywhere?”

“This is not of your business.”

“Okay, then do we have a deal or don’t we? One more song for one more day.”

“I agree to this.”

“Good. I’m tired and dirty and hungry.”

“We will dine early. At six.”

“I’d rather eat alone.”

“You will dine with me. I have much, much more to tell you that will make your writing very easy. About Veracruz when I was a boy. There was a pig that could do advanced mathematics. And a curandera who raised the dead not once but three times. And a two-headed girl who argued with herself. And a moron named Francisco with a very thin head who could crawl through the windows of the prison at Ulua to find treasure. And my lovely Anya-you should know more about her.”

“I won’t be good company for dinner. Kind of a big day for me, you know?”

Armenta waved over one of the female servants and handed her a key card and ordered her in Spanish to accompany Erin to her room and prepare a bath and bring whatever she might want. He stood straight and extended one hand toward the elevator.

They sat in Armenta’s formal dining room, which faced east and caught a warm breeze off the ocean. Because of the slowness of the elevator and its mystifying arrangement of buttons she had not been able to tell whether they had gotten off on the fourth or fifth floor. She wore a long blue dress that covered the derringer lashed to her calf with a bootlace. The dining table was koa wood, long and wide, and Erin realized she could cross her leg under the table and get the gun loose with one hand and without Armenta knowing.

Through the eastern window she could see part of the loggia and the courtyard below. The sun was setting behind her, but she saw the orange glow on the stone columns and the paver tiles and on the facets of the broad-leafed jungle flora. Shot with gold, she thought. Shot. She saw the surprised look on Saturnino’s war-painted face. She saw his pathetic pawing in the cenote as he tried to swim. She saw his blood rising in the clear water and the green dye melting off his hair.

A few hours ago, in her room, she had taken the longest, hottest bath of her life and still she felt filthy and stained and she knew that she had been forced to surrender something she would never get back. He had finally raped her after all. She wondered if she could kill his father also. On the same day, even. Why not? She had proven experience. She had done things here she had never imagined and this made her feel unreal and unpredictable even to herself.

Looking down she could see the sicarios loitering in the courtyard and among the columns of the portico. Things were wrong here. She felt the tension and nerves in the still subtropical air, surely as she had felt them when she marched back here a few hours ago. At first she thought it was because of her escape, or Saturnino’s disappearance. But it wasn’t about either of them, she thought now. Something had happened or might happen. His greatest fear is of being betrayed by his own men. She looked down to the driveway where Heriberto, a rifle slung over his shoulder, stood talking to one of the young gunmen. Just minutes ago, on the way here to the dining room, they had passed two more gunmen in the foyer and one standing midway down a long hallway and another who was likely stationed just out of eyeshot outside the dining room entry. Erin wondered if Armenta was protected by them or surrounded by them.

He sat at the head of the table with Erin on his right but they were far enough apart to be strangers sharing space in a cafeteria. Overhead the ceiling fans turned at low speed, their blades bending the candle flames.

Armenta had shaved and his hair had been cut and styled. He wore an expensive looking black silk suit and a white jacquard shirt with small black hummingbirds flying through the weave. The tailored clothing hid his bulk and the haircut revealed a strong neck and a face of intensity and intelligence. She saw Saturnino’s handsome roughness and she pictured his face on the night he attacked her, coming into view on the window of the Cadillac as it shut on her.

A servant opened a French Pouilly-Fuisse and set the cork before Erin, who knew nothing of French wines but smelled it and nodded and tasted the wine. It was cool and light and it offered pleasure, which collided with her fear for Bradley and her worry over Hood and her anger over the killing she had done.

“I’d drink this whole bottle if I wasn’t pregnant,” she said. “And being held captive by a cartel kingpin. I could use a night of forgetting about all this. Maybe a lifetime.”

“I see the unhappiness on your face.”

“This was one of the worst days of my life. I’ve had several of them since I met you.”

He nodded tersely. “Why did you run? Where were you trying to go?”

“Away, away and away.”

“Mexico can be dangerous.”

She actually laughed.

He glanced down distractedly at the courtyard, then turned his attention back to her. “Father Ciel found his key. He had misplaced it. Apparently. Maybe your escape was one of opportunity and not planning.”

“Either way is just fine with me.”

“Do you hate this place very strongly?”

“I’m going to be a mother soon. I can’t describe to you how genuinely awful it is to be a prisoner here. Can’t you imagine what Anya would have felt like if she were going to give birth to Gustavo and your enemies were holding her thousands of miles from home? Planning to skin her alive? How can you not understand this? Is your heart that small?”

He looked down and away. The waiter set out bowls of ceviche and guacamole and chips, and refreshed the glasses of wine. “I hope not to remove your skin.”

“Saturnino will actually do it. So, no worries for you.”

“I never wanted to skin you, of course.”

She choked down the mouthful of wine and coughed into her napkin. “From the beginning? A bluff?”

“Oh, no bluff. No, no. I kidnapped you for business and to punish an enemy. And because I wanted to meet you. I was a fan. I love musical talent and skill. I intended to skin you only if necessary. But when I met you my perceptions changed. There is more in you than musical talent and skill. There is something that you have and it is only you. I see it. I understand it. My heart sees it. So I want now very much not to skin you although I have given my word and my word is who I am. I want my money. But I want you to write. And go free. And have your child.”

“But you will skin me?”

“I must, if Charlie Bravo fails you.”

“You…Saturnino has done this to other people?”

Armenta raised his eyebrows and cleared his throat softly and continued to look out the window.

“Jesus H. Christ,” she said.

“H?”

“It’s a saying.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning can you just please fly me out of Chetumal tomorrow? Can you let me go home?”

“Impossible.”

“Why is it impossible? You’re the most powerful man in Quintana Roo. Aren’t you?”

He looked at her again, nodded and smiled proudly, then his face fell into a scowl. He unbuttoned his jacket, brought a phone to his ear and listened for a long time.

Erin looked down at the loggia colonnade melting into the darkness. The driveway was a pale swatch through the black of the jungle. The sicarios were just dabs in the background now, difficult to see but not quite invisible. Her mind was alive with images of the day and she wondered if it was possible to unsee the seen or forget the unforgettable.

Finally Armenta said bueno and reclipped the phone to his belt with an apologetic shrug.

“I think you’re lying about Charlie Bravo,” she said. “You’ve misled him. He won’t be here with the money tomorrow because you don’t want him here. Right?”

He shrugged and looked at her, then abandoned his pretense and nodded.

“Or have you killed him?”

“No. He is alive, but not here. He is off course but he has my money.”

“How long do you propose to keep me prisoner?”

“I have given this thought. My wish is to own a collection of songs that you have written and recorded for me. Enough to form a body of work, on compact disc. The recordings will of course be basic vocal tracks and you will accompany yourself on guitar and piano. Let us say, twelve songs in all. It will not be sold. This is not commercialism. It is for me only to possess.”

“Then you’ll fly me home?”

“You have my word.”

“But your word isn’t true. You’ve sent Charlie miles from here, haven’t you? You’ve gone back on your own deal.”

He looked morose at his honor being doubted. “But you are compelled to believe me. Charlie Bravo and his one million dollars are not here. Your weak and fearful husband remains hiding in California, useless to you. These are factual truths. Twelve songs.”

Twelve songs, she thought. Time. Time for the baby inside me to grow. Time for Bradley and Hood. I could write the songs and lay down the vocals in a week. A week! Earn my own freedom.

“You already have one of my songs.”

“But you must record it.”

“Then you mean eleven.”

“Eleven more written, twelve recorded.”

“They could not all be epic corridos.”

“They will be what you want them to be. I do not have to be the subject. Write whatever you want to write.”

She sipped the wine and studied his hopeful face. An idea presented itself to her, and although she had no time to examine it, she felt confident that it was good and workable.

“I know you,” she said. “You’ll take the million dollars from Charlie Bravo whenever you want to take it. After seeing the treasures in this place, I know this is true. To you, this million dollars is only filthy paper. But it means a lot to me. It belongs to me and my husband and the baby inside me. I earned some of it. So I want it back. I will not write the songs unless you send me home with Charlie Bravo and the money.”

His frown broke into a smile. It was the first smile she had seen on him and it was wide and robust and genuine. “Would you like to be a part of my organization? I will give you cocaine and mota distribution in Los Angeles. The plaza will be yours. The money is very tremendous. And with your contacts, all of the musicians in L.A. will remain high forever and produce wonderful works.”

“How about no? No works for me.”

“I am kidding you. A joke for you.”

“That’s very funny, Mr. Armenta.”

“I agree, then. And you agree to eleven more songs to be written and twelve recorded. At the end you will be flown home with one million dollars, and this Charlie…what is his last name?”

“Bravo.”

“Brave. Of course. Very brave when he killed my Gustavo. I had forgotten his bravery. But I now promise I will send him home with you.”

“Not to the tigers?”

He shrugged and avoided her eyes.

“You ordered your people not to feed them.”

“Agreed. Not to the tigers.”

“I will be finished in one week. I believe in you as a man of your word.”

Now he seemed to vet her like a taste of product, a pleased look spreading across his face.

“Also,” she said. “I need the freedom to leave my room when I want to. With no one to watch me. I need to be free to walk around in your Castle and on your property. Except the third floor, of course. I won’t run away again. I give my word on this, and it is every bit as good as yours, and you know it is.”

He smiled again but this time there was something amused in it, as if he’d just been told a good joke. “Of course this is impossible!”

“Impossible why?”

“Because I don’t trust you. Now the truth is exposed. Neither one of us trusts the other but we are making deals like powerful capitalists in the back room! No. You may have limited freedom but only when Owens is with you. Or you will run away. I can see this happening very clearly.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay.”

Looking down through the last rays of daylight she could see that the outside gunmen were gone now, having vanished as they sometimes did to places unseen, and for reasons not apparent.

The waiter brought a tray heavy with plates of seafood and beef, and another piled with tamales and Yucatecan mango-topped enchiladas. He set out dishes of hot sauce and wedges of lime and baskets of tortillas.

Armenta lifted his wineglass to her and she took up her glass but did not acknowledge his gesture. “I am worried about Saturnino. He is never to leave here without telling me.”

“He’ll probably show up.”

“You never saw him on the trail to the cenote?”

“I told you I never saw him at all.”

“Then maybe he was not acting loco. Maybe he truly is loco and he has taken off for Merida or Veracruz or…who can know?”

She said nothing and watched his face crinkle into a scowl. He set down the wineglass and lifted a phone to his head again.

When he stood and cursed into it Erin heard the gunfire erupt outside, short urgent bursts in the darkness. She saw a ragged flash of orange from the jungle, then came the answering shots from somewhere down in the courtyard. A round whinnied through the night, then another.

Armenta stashed the phone and slid a large holstered pistol around his belt until it hung in front. Then he came around the table toward her and when she stood he put both hands on her shoulders not roughly and he guided her to the floor and under the big table.

“Stay down and the bullets will go over your head.”

“Who are they?”

“The same as they will always be.”

He went to the armoire that sat along one wall and pulled out an assault rifle and swung the strap over his shoulder and chest. Next came what looked like a shotgun, short-barreled and pregnant with a drum of shells. He looked back at her once then marched from the dining room and Erin could see the silent bodyguard leading the way from the suite. He was an older man like Armenta but they moved lightly and spoke to each other though she couldn’t hear the words.

Then the generators went silent and Erin heard gunshots replace their insistent drone and these came from inside the Castle, below her, nasty little rattles that seemed to be arguing with each other. The darkness was sudden and deep. She lay in it with her back to the floor and lifted her knee and worked the Cowboy Defender loose from her calf. When the gun was free she looked to the window and saw below the rim of the tabletop the quarter moon high in the east and the lights of what might have been a commercial jet blipping up and away from what city she couldn’t say.

She rolled over and crawled out and peeked over the window frame. The drive below was lined with solar lights set in decorative concrete frogs, turtles, fish, and crocodiles, and in their modest light she saw two men sprawled on the drive and two more moving slowly toward the Castle from the trees. Two heavy booms and a fusillade of lighter reports erupted from downstairs. Where in the Castle? she wondered. Had Armenta made it outside? Were all those sicarios trying to protect him, or kill him? A flare was launched from the foliage and flew into the courtyard out of her sight. She could see the bright red light of it washing the pavers and the columns of the portico and when the two men ran from the jungle onto the drive they were cut down by fire she could not trace. One of them lay still and the other moaned and rolled back up onto his hands and knees but a furious chatter of fire pocked the sand around him and sent him down absolutely and he did not move again.

The glass above her blasted apart. She slumped down against the wall and felt the shards raining down on her. The main battle seemed to be taking place on the drive right below the dining room but she heard other shots and shouts farther down the driveway and from the nearby jungle where Saturnino had attacked her and from the far side of the building. She crawled back to the table with the glass pricking her hands and knees and the derringer held absurdly in her teeth. She stood and tried to tip over the table but bullets whizzed past her and smacked into the wall and she fell to the tile and rolled flat to the floor under the table. Outside she heard the sound of boots on the crunchy sand of the driveway and men shouting and a scream ended by a volley of fire. The flare light burned into the night from the courtyard and she saw the gun smoke rising into it, then felt the concussive explosion downstairs within the Castle. A grenade, she thought, or a bomb of some kind.

Then she heard vehicles on the drive and more shouting and automatic weapons, and the roar of engines. The bullets twanged against the vehicles and she wondered if they were bouncing off or going in. Then an abrupt silence fell. She lay curled in a ball in the dark hugging herself and talking to the baby inside her about some of the beautiful things he would get to see in his life, beginning in just a few short months. In fact, you will open your eyes to the sky and the moon and stars and Daddy’s and Mommy’s faces and the faces of toy bears and lions, and there will be music too, beautiful music, and even though you can’t see the music it will make you imagine things that you will see whenever the music plays and sometimes even when it doesn’t. She felt her heart thumping and the cool of the tile against her flank and she could smell the festive smell of gun smoke wafting in through the broken window. She put a stinging finger into her mouth and sucked at the blood.

Men shouted. Then another shot, just one shot, somehow forlorn and final, followed by a silence that to Erin seemed to go on for hours.

She heard muffled sounds downstairs, voices and doors slamming. This took her back nine days to the invasion of her home and she wondered if she had entered some new dimension where violence was the beginning, middle, and end of everything. And she thought if the safe room in Valley Center wasn’t enough to keep her safe then this table sure wasn’t. She battled against a flood of terrible ideas: that Bradley had been caught and executed just a few miles from here, that Hood was being manipulated and useless, that Armenta was dead and the men who would soon find her here would be a thousand times worse than he was. She told herself and the baby to ignore such thoughts. She heard the voices again downstairs and more from outside on the drive and through the window she could still see the light of the flare thinly red against the dark. She closed her eyes and listened to the strange disturbing melodies emerging from the voices and the sounds and she made up words to be carried by those melodies. The tunes merged and changed and returned but the one constant in them was the dependable beat of her heart.

A few minutes later the generators groaned to life and the lights came on. She took the derringer and crawled out trying to avoid the glass and when she was away from the window she stood. Voices came from within the Castle and from the driveway and she didn’t recognize them, though she thought she might have heard Heriberto down by the courtyard.

She stole out of the dining room and across a softly lit living room with old-looking area rugs and paintings on the walls and a fireplace where a gas flame flickered between artificial logs. She stood in a foyer and opened the door and looked up and down the hallway.

She heard the elevator approach and bump to a stop, then the release of voices from around the corner. She backed into the foyer and trotted across the living area and went back to the dining room.

At the window she stood in the broken glass and looked down toward the courtyard. The flare light was gone but the floods were working again. It looked like a forty foot drop from here, plenty enough to break her bones and kill her baby, she judged. Through the French doors was a balcony heavy with vessels and flowers and two monkeys that sat on the wrought-iron railing as if they’d been watching the shootout, cracking seeds and dropping the hulls to the driveway. Down on the sandy drive lay four bodies on four blankets of blood. Two black SUVs waited, doors and liftgates open, engines off and headlights on. Four men she did not recognize emerged from somewhere below her and when they came to one of the dead they took his feet and hands and dragged him to the rear end of the closest SUV. There they swung the body four times, each time higher, and on the fifth heave they let go and she heard the thump of him hitting the cargo space and the waddle of the SUV on its struts.

Erin turned away and her eyes were caught by the bounty of untouched food on the table. Suddenly she was very hungry. She knew this was impossible after seeing everything she had just seen, but what did that matter? No other laws seemed to apply here, so why should any law against appetite?

So she sat back down where she had sat earlier. She put the Cowboy Defender on her lap and the soft cotton napkin over the gun and pulled a warm tortilla from its straw keeper and filled it with shrimp ceviche and thought: if I’m going out I’m going out with a full stomach and a little class. I can do no more in this circumstance. Melodies swarmed her, many with lyrics already attached. She thought of her parents, sticklers for manners, and she straightened her back and raised her forearms so as not to rest on the table. The Pouilly-Fuisse was still chilled in its clay cooler so she poured a little and took a sip. Outside she saw live men carrying dead men to vehicles and slinging them aboard. Like bags of potting soil. She could not tell the loyalists from the assassins, the good guys from the bad, except for Heriberto, who seemed in charge. Maybe there is no difference, she thought. She could see the lepers peeking from behind the courtyard balustrades. The Castle dogs were newly emboldened and they slunk back into the light to investigate. Occasionally she heard distant pops from the jungle and she avoided conclusions as to what they meant. A few minutes later the men slammed the doors of the vehicles and got in and drove away. Where do you take ten dead men on a hot evening? she wondered. To an air-conditioned funeral home, of course. The Pouilly-Fuisse really was good.

The voices of the men from the elevator got louder until they were right outside in the hallway. Then they went silent. She waited for some murmured discussion or the clank of cocking weapons or for them to crash through the door, but she heard nothing. She loaded up a plate with tamales and small lobsters and dug right in. They could not have tasted better, even if they were hotter. Truly fantastic, she thought. Unbearably delicious. Last supper. Heaven can wait. What do you think, down there, little guy? Good stuff? Too bad your father isn’t here but we’re only here because he fucked up.

She heard the front door open and close and someone walking across the tile toward her. She made sure her back was straight and her shoulders were not slouched. Armenta came into the room with the shotgun slung over his shoulder. He had a bottle of tequila in one hand and in the other a heavy gunnysack tied off at the top. His face was dotted with blood and so was his shirt so it looked like the hummingbirds were zooming through red rain. His new coif was ruined. His gaze went from her to the shattered window then back to her again.

He slung the gunnysack into the far corner of the living room where it landed with a thud and skidded on the tile. In the kitchen he washed his hands. Then he walked into the dining room and set the gun on the floor beside his chair and plunked the bottle of reposado to the table at his place. He stripped off the bloody shirt and threw it into the kitchen. His undershirt was white and clean.

He looked at her, then sat. For a long moment he stared at his wineglass, then he lifted and swirled it up at the light and sipped. “Can I now tell you about Veracruz?”

“I would especially like to hear about Francisco, the mentally challenged boy with the narrow head.”

Armenta smiled. “When we were boys we used to crawl into the fortress at San Juan de Ulua. This was very early morning, or later in evening, after the tourists had gone away. The soldiers did not care if we offered one bottle of good rum. We would go far and deep into the vaults and storage rooms in search of the pirate treasures that were certainly still there. But we could not get into the torture chambers or the cells because the Ulua windows were cut into the stone in such a size that no man’s head or even a boy’s head could fit through them. There were never bars at Ulua. It was a form of mental torture that no prisoner could fit his head through the open windows and escape, yet there was the window, open and with no bars. So also, we could go no further in search of the gold and jewels that were there. But the head of Francisco? It fit easily, as did his narrow shoulders. He was an imbecile, but still he could pass through. So, one day we pushed him through the window and into one of the dungeons and…”