The Scared Stiff

30

“Backseat, tourist.”

“Oh, right.”

I got into the back of the Impala, Arturo got behind the wheel, and we drove away from Mamá and Papá’s house. I said, “Where are we going?”

“Up by Marona.”

A long way, nearly two hundred miles, up where the Siapa River, for which the local currency is named, meets up with the Conoro River, the one my rented Beetle belly-whopped into.

There was pretty country up around Marona. The Siapa is the cleanest and freshest and fastest of all the waterways of Guerrera, tumbling north out of the mountains of Brazil. There are nice resorts and rich people around there.

Come to think of it, that was also where my undertaker, Ortiz, came from. That wasn’t the idea, was it, to have me hang out at a mortuary for the next couple of weeks?

Then a worse thought occurred to me. Was this instead of Madonna? As casually as I knew how, I said, “Where by Marona are we going, Arturo?”

Instead of answering, he said, “Take a look in the seat pocket there, the hotel brochures.”

The back of the front passenger seat had a wide pocket, like a kangaroo’s pouch. I reached into it, and it was full of different kinds of brochures and pamphlets, hotels and tourist attractions. All because of Arturo being a sometime cabdriver, I supposed. “Got them,” I said.

“Take a look at Casa Montana Mohoka.”

I leafed through them and found it, and it was actually Casa Montana Mojoca, but pronounced with that airy j. “Got it.”

“Look it over.”

I did. It was an expensive full-color brochure that opened out to eight pages, and what it described was a pretty snazzy-sounding destination resort. A golf course. Tennis. Olympic pool. Full gymnasium. Meeting facilities for conferences. Private airstrip and helicopter pad. Nature trails. World-famous orchid-viewing walk. Horseback riding. Rafting the Siapa.

What a place. This was the kind of resort being built all over the world these days, in out-of-the-way locations where the costs are low and the regulations nonexistent. Corporations use them for all kinds of conferences, and then the corporate executives come back and use them for their vacations. They fly into some little country like Guerrera, go straight to the resort, spend their three days or their week, fly back out, and they’ve never been anywhere at all. Corporate people love that kind of place, because it comes with a guarantee of the removal of all doubt and danger. A vacation with no surprises: what a concept!

“Look,” Arturo said.

We were just passing the church, going through the plaza, and out ahead of us to the right was the white Land Rover, stopped in front of Club Rick. We drove on by, and the Land Rover was empty.

“Asking questions,” I said.

“You got it.”

I looked out the rear window, and that white vehicle just sat there in the sun, as innocent as an ice-cream cone. Then we were through the plaza, and it was out of sight, and I faced front again.

This brochure, Casa Montana Mojoca. I said, “Is this where I’m gonna stay?”

“Right.”

“But, Arturo,” I said, “these people don’t take some bum in off the street. I don’t mean I’m a bum, I mean I don’t have any ID, I don’t have any money—”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s all taken care of.”

We were leaving Sabanon now, thank God. I said, “You mean, this person Dulce?”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Dulce and me,” Arturo said, “we go back a long time together, early schooldays, know each other forever. Shit, she might even have been my first, I don’t remember. I think I was maybe hers, too.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Haven’t seen each other in years,” he said. “Except, every once in a while, if I got a fare out to Mojoca — when I’m being a cab-driver, you know, not wasting my time with you — sometimes I see her out there, say hello. We get along.”

“She works there?”

“She’s the assistant manager,” he told me. “It’s a big company owns it, you know. From London, I think. So the top-guy manager, he’s an American, but she’s number two. Makes a shitload of money, I think.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“I told her your story,” he said, “and the first thing she ask me, Are there any kids? And I say no, this isn’t whaddayacallit—”

“Child support.”

“That’s it, that’s what she calls it. It isn’t any of that, I told her, it’s just this ex-wife she’s a greedy bitch, so that’s why you gotta stay out of California till the judge does his decision.”

“California.”

“Yeah, you’re a big movie producer in Hollywood. That’s why you just got to hole up, not use your real name, not show your passport to nobody, not even let the staff know who you really are, ’cause somebody gonna tip off the newspaper; you know, the celebrity newspapers.”

“Arturo, that’s wonderful!” I said.

“So the deal is,” he told me, “you’re goin’ in under an alias, she’ll fix it all in the computer, give you a room, you don’t have to pay nothin’ till the end, when it’s safe to use the credit card. And you come to ask me for help ’cause I drove you other times you been down here, and you know my gringo brother-in-law that died, and you gotta move outa Rancio because your ex-wife traced you there.”

“Boy,” I said. “It all ties together, doesn’t it?”

“It better tie together,” he said, “or you’re in shit.”

Madonna. I said, “What’s my name now?”

“Well, she just had a cancellation,” he said, “so she put it back in the computer, because they got all the records on that guy. So your alias is, you’re Keith Emory.”

“Keith Emory,” I said, and spelled it. “Like that?”

“I dunno, she didn’t spell it out. She’ll take care of you, don’t worry.”

“And what’s my real name?” I asked. “When I’m in California, producing movies?”

“We didn’t get to that,” he said. “You can pick that one for yourself. You got two — three hours to come up with somethin’.”

“Okay,” I said.

I looked at the brochure some more. Casa Montana Mojoca. A vacation with no surprises. I could live with that.