The Scared Stiff

27

The next few days at Mamá and Papá’s house were, I suppose, restful, but also unsettling. The problem was, I now slept in the bed where Lola and I always sleep together when we visit, so the night memories got really intense.

I preferred the days, where I now had a new persona. My name was Felicio, and I was a friend of Arturo’s from San Cristobal, and I’d had a recent terrible tragedy that nobody would talk about — a death for which I held myself responsible was hinted — as a result of which I had taken a vow of silence. This story was not broadcast all over the place but was brought out as necessary for the consumption of neighbors and friends.

Arturo had more phone conversations with Lola, and the insurance situation continued to go along smoothly. And he’d found me some recent American magazines, to help pass the time.

Monday afternoon, I spent an hour alone in my bedroom, reading those magazines, until I got bored, so I got up and opened the door, and in the living room were Arturo and Mamá and Papá seated with a man whose back was to me, but who was somebody I was sure I didn’t know. He wore a suit and tie, in all this heat and humidity, and he had a clipboard on his lap and a pen in his hand. He looked like an American real estate salesman, but he was speaking fluent Spanish. He was asking questions. About me?

Arturo saw me in the doorway and did a quick urgent head-shake: Stay out of here. I stepped back, retreating into the bedroom, and quietly shut the door.

What was this? Something to do with my death? Or something else entirely? What should I do?

Mamá came sidling in, shutting the door behind her, putting her finger to her lips. I looked at her, full of questions, and she pointed at me and then pointed at the window.

What? This is the second floor. She wanted me to go out the window?

Yes. To demonstrate, she picked up my magazines and tossed them out the window. Then she came close and whispered, “The insurance!”

“Insurance investigator?” I was appalled. Everything was supposed to be going so smoothly.

She nodded, pointed urgently at the window again, and went over to stick my suitcase under the bed.

Every bedroom I’m in, sooner or later somebody wants me to go out the window. While Mamá smoothed the ruffled bed, I went over to look down at the magazines strewn on the hard ground eight feet below me.

Damn it to hell. All right, all right. One leg over the sill, then the other, lower myself more slowly than Mamá likes. I dangled a few seconds, then dropped and hit the packed earth, first with my feet, then my knees, then my elbows. My forehead landed on Newsweek.

I was at the back of the house. Beside me was the enclosed part of downstairs, the fuchsia-colored vertical slats behind which were the freezer, the hot-water heater, some guns and fishing poles, and Madonna, the brood sow.

And me, until the insurance investigator went away. Rising, I became aware of a whole lot of new pains in my body, including my head. When I stooped to pick up the magazines, I felt briefly dizzy. Carrying the magazines under my left arm, I went around the corner and under the house, into the open part with the concrete blocks and old truck parts and vertical plumbing pipes. The door to the enclosed section was under here, and that’s where I headed.

As I went, my mind was full of questions. What had gone wrong? In her last two phone calls, Lola had thought this was almost over, that everything was going along exactly according to plan. Was this somehow just a formality, down here in Guerrera? Wouldn’t that be awfully expensive, to send a man all this way? We’d been counting on it being too expensive.

Could it be that the insurance company keeps a man in South America to run a simple check on cases like this? Or maybe a bunch of insurance companies share the expense of keeping the guy, to cut down on fraud? Exactly the kind of fraud that comes out of little countries with less than first-rate record-keeping.

But that’s why we’d been so thorough. How could there be any question of fraud in this case? There were all those eyewitnesses, there was the death certificate, there was the funeral, the grave, the undertaker’s bill. For God’s sake, there was videotape of the funeral, this whole huge family all in mourning. What more could they possibly want?

I plagued myself with all these questions while I hurried around to the door under the house that led into the enclosed area. When I opened that wood-slat door, Madonna snorted a question of her own: What’s with you, buster?

“Pay no attention to me,” I muttered, shutting the door. “Go on with what you were doing.”

Madonna snuffled her disdain and rooted around in her straw, pretending I wasn’t there. It was dim in here, but not dark. Two very dusty windows gave illumination, one at the side, over Madonna’s pen, and the other facing the street. While Madonna, a thousand-pound bloated white sausage almost seven feet long, grumbled about this intrusion into a lady’s boudoir while refusing to look at me or acknowledge my presence, I worked my way around all the stored (and forgotten) crap in here to the front window and looked out. Would I be able to see the inspector when he left?

Oh, good, it was perfect. From here, looking at an angle, I could just see the bottom of the stairs down from the living room. And across the street, that white Land Rover must be his vehicle.

There was someone in the Land Rover, at the wheel. He looked as though he was reading a photo novel. A chauffeur? He wore a white panama hat, not very chauffeurlike at all. Then he lifted his head to look over toward the house, and I flinched.

The cop. Lola’s cop, the one she’d had to punch in the nose. Rafael Rafez.