The Second Saladin

15

They discovered quickly that he was dead. Reynoldo Ramirez, killed by assailants in his own establishment in the prime of life, the newspaper said. What assailants? The newspaper was silent; so was the Departamento de Policía.

“They’ve been paid off,” Speight said ominously.

Come on, thought Trewitt, but he didn’t say anything. He had taken an almost instant dislike to Nogales — to Mexico. Blue and pink slum shacks hanging on the stony hillsides over a cheesy turista section of souvenir stalls, bars, dentists’ offices and auto-trim shops. He hated it. A different quality to the air even, and the jabber of language that he could only partially follow did not ease his anxiety. Trewitt just wanted to get out of there.

But Old Bill sniffed something.

“I want to see Reynoldo Ramirez’s grave,” he said. “I want to know the man is dead.”

Oh, God, thought Trewitt.

But they had hailed an Exclusivo cab and journeyed to the grave site. The place nauseated Trewitt. No clean Presbyterian deaths in Mexico: the cemetery was a kind of festival of the macabre, primitive and elemental. Crosses and sickly sweet flowers and hunched, praying Virgins painted in gaudy colors. And skulls.

Trewitt shuddered. He’d never seen the naked thing before, and here it was lying in the dust. Or rather, they: bones and heads everywhere, spilling out of vaults in the dusty hills, clattering out of niches and trenches. A wind knifed across the place, pushing before it a fine spray of sand that stung Trewitt’s eyes and whipped his coat off his body like a flapping cape. He leaned into it, tasting grit.

“There it is,” shouted Bill.

They stood by the elaborate marker, even now buried in dusty flowers. A weeping Virgin knelt over her fallen son amid the weeds. Trewitt was standing on a femur. He kicked it away. Looking out he could see scabby Nogales, hills encrusted with bright shacks, sheer walls over bendy little streets; and beyond that the fence of the border, like a DMZ line cutting through a combat zone; and beyond that, American Nogales, which was a neat and pretty town.

Trewitt looked back. In stone the marker read:

“There it is,” he shouted. “Dead end.”

Speight studied on the thing, looking it over.

“Wonder who brought the flowers?” he said.

Who cares, thought Trewitt. It would be dark soon; he wanted to get out of there. He looked across the boneyard to the Exclusivo cab awaiting them, its driver perched on the fender.

“Look, it’s all over,” said Trewitt. “He’s gone. There’s no link back to the night Ulu Beg came across. Let’s get out of here.”

But Speight stood rooted to the ground.

“Anybody could be down there. Or nobody,” he finally said.

Trewitt didn’t say anything.

“Maybe we ought to check out that joint of his,” Speight finally said.

“Mr. Speight, we’re not even supposed to be here. Now you want—”

But Speight did not seem to hear him.

“Yep,” he said, “I think that’s what we’ll do.” He started toward the cab, full of purpose.

Trewitt watched him go, and then realized he was standing alone in the cemetery and went racing after.

Several hours later he found himself undergoing a most peculiar torment: a deep self-consciousness, an acute embarrassment, a sense of being an imposter, all cut with a penetrating and secret sensation of delight.

The girl kept rubbing his thigh, the inside of it in fact, with her palm, dry and springy, knowing, educated in a certain way, and was simultaneously whispering of intriguing possibilities into his ear in Pidgin English.

“You got some nice money?”

“Ha, ha,” laughed Trewitt uneasily, sipping gently at what was supposed to be a margarita but was most certainly warm fruit juice and ginger ale at eight bucks a crack, gringo rate. Other girls worked the floor of what was now called Oscar’s. They were all tarts, but this one — Anita, just like in West Side Story — was all his, or he hers, as if by treaty or diplomatic agreement. No one impinged and he was trying to draw this out as long as possible, while Speight made inquiries. It occurred to him that maybe he ought to be asking the questions; after all, it was he who had unearthed this Ramirez, had unearthed this whole Mexican thing. He looked about uneasily, however, over fat Anita’s shoulder, and saw in the darkness a sleazy room full of American students and Mexican businessmen. His loafers stuck to the floor; the odor of some kind of industrial-strength disinfectant lingered everywhere.

“You got some money. We go upstairs, baby?”

“Well, ahh—”

No, let Speight handle it. Speight was the old hand, Speight had been around, knew the ropes. And where was Speight? Trewitt had seen him talking to a big boy with a moustache. Had he disappeared?

“Come on, baby. Buy Anita a little drink. A little drink for Anita, okay, baby doll?”

“Uh, just a sec.”

There. There. There was Speight, still with the moustache, talking animatedly at the back of the room. Give it to old Speight: he may have been peculiar in his ways, but he got things done. A pro.

“Come on, baby. Buy Anita some champagne.”

Even Trewitt knew enough to nix the champagne — sure to be flat Canada Dry at $200 the jeroboam — and instead okayed something called a Mexican Hatdance: it looked like warm lemonade with a pale pink — did they use the same one over and over? — maraschino cherry in it, at only $12.50 a throw. At this rate he’d have to cash another traveler’s check before long.

“Is okay?” asked the bartender.

“Fine, pal.”

“Is Roberto.” Roberto was a thin, handsome youth — he could not have been twenty yet — with a wispy moustache and soulful eyes.

“Glad to meetcha, Roberto,” barked Trewitt, heartily el turista estúpido to the hilt, and commenced a little detective work of his own.

“Say,” he said, “some fella was telling me you all had some excitement here coupla weeks back. A gunfight.”

“Oh, sí,” said the bartender eagerly. “A man, he was killed right here. Our boss Reynoldo. Bang-bang! Right almost where you are standing, señor.”

“Shot down?”

“Just like the television. Real fast. Bang-bang.”

“Wow.”

“Roberto,” said the girl in Spanish, “you stupid pig, keep your mouth shut, you don’t know who this asshole is,” then turned to Trewitt with a sweet Indian smile.

“What’d she say?” asked Trewitt.

“That you are the handsomest American she ever see.”

“She’s a fine-looking woman herself,” Trewitt said, squeezing her flank.

Anita smiled at the compliment, revealing her remaining teeth. Yet Trewitt felt a strange attraction for her. She was so low. Somewhere deep inside his brain a tiny inflammation erupted; an image flashed before his eyes. He tried to banish it; it would not leave; in fact it became more exact, more perfect, more detailed. What drew him on was her offer of perfect freedom: for money you can do anything. It was simple and liberating. Anything. Against certain temptations he knew he was helpless. He could be pretty low himself. He was not a virgin and had twice been engaged; in each case he had made a goddess out of the young woman and fled in horror upon learning she was human. Yet here was a creature so human, so fleshy, so real, so authentic, she was driving him a little nuts. Here was freedom; here was escape. He thought of young nineteenth-century men who fled the hypocrisy of Victorian society and lost themselves in the privacy of the frontier, pursuing freedom and debauchery in the same impulse and, coincidentally, building an empire. American, British, Dodge City or Lucknow, it didn’t matter; it was the same process. And here he was on the same sort of frontier, and here before him was a treasure of the frontier, his for the taking.

Trewitt shook his head. He could actually see her nipples beneath the clinging white top she wore. They were the size of fifty-cent pieces.

“Who did it, Bob? Gangsters?” Trewitt tried to get back on the track.

“Did what, señor?”

“The bang-bang. Poor old Reynoldo.”

“Rest in peace,” Roberto said. “Bad men. Evil men. Reynoldo has lots of enemies and even some of his friends—”

“Shut your mouth, stupid one,” snapped Anita.

“What did she say?”

“She say she like you very much.”

“Well, I like her too. A lot.”

“Come on, baby,” said Anita, running her open hand up the inside of Trewitt’s leg, letting it linger warmly high up, “make Anita a happy girl.”

Oh, Jesus, it felt good.

He swallowed, licked his lips.

“Anita make you real happy. There’s a nice hole for you — take your choice.”

Trewitt glanced about. Speight had vanished.

Trewitt thought, Well, if he needed me he would have gotten me, right? He just disappeared. What am I supposed to do now?

“Baby, we can do anything. Anything,” she whispered. “I treat you real good. I make you real happy.”

Oh, Jesus! Trewitt fought until he felt quite noble and then surrendered to his darker self meekly, without a whimper.

“Upstairs,” he croaked.

“Anita must wash your thing. It’s the rule,” she said.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Thing, she called it. He winced.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice so quiet he had trouble hearing it himself. He tried to relax on the small cot but looked up to a Day-Glo Virgin on black velvet. It was only one of several religious gimcracks strewn and taped about the room: pictures, little painted statues, crucifixes. Was this some kind of shrine? His pants, meanwhile, were bunched around his knees, although he still wore his coat and tie and shirt; and a man with a coat and tie on whose balls are hanging out feels sublimely ridiculous. He gripped his wallet in his right hand.

Oh, this is a rotten idea. This is a really rotten idea. You ought to get out of here. You just ought to get the hell out of here. But he could not figure out how, and besides he’d already paid.

No door, of course. What did he expect, a Holiday Inn, complete with shower and Magic Fingers vibrator under the bed? Only a curtain sealed the dim little room off from the corridor and although the lights were low, the traffic in the hall was considerable. A regular rush hour. Now and then a peal of Mexican laughter would rise through the odor of disinfectant — it smelled like a hospital up here — and a man would swagger down the hall.

“I be back, baby,” Anita said.

She dipped out the curtain and returned in a moment, holding a wash basin brimming with soapy water and a rough cloth.

“Rub-a-dub-dub,” Trewitt joked bleakly.

She began to scrub him. She rubbed and wiped and grated without mercy to cleanse his tender equipment and though he had not been exactly fierce with desire in the preceding few moments, under this humbling assault he felt himself shrinking ever further.

“Be careful,” he complained. Was she trying to erase it?

“It’s nice, baby,” she said. “It’s not real big or nothing, but it’s real good shaped, and clean. And gringos been trimmed.”

Trewitt smiled tightly at this wonderful compliment.

She dried him roughly and then pulled back in triumph, flipping the towel into the hall, where it swirled to the floor.

She stood above him, an absurdly plump woman of nearly thirty-five, in a cheesy dress, all cleavage and density, an infinity of circles, globs, undulating horizons. She smiled hideously. Backing off, she reached down for her own hem, grabbed it and peeled upward, the dress constricting her flesh as it was yanked until she popped it off with a final tug and stood in cotton drawers, great gushy, floppy breasts with those enormous dark nipples wobbling across her front.

Now she’d step from those drawers next — panties was too modest a word for a garment of such magnitude — and a part of him was disgusted and debased, while at the same time another part, recovering, became entranced. She knelt to divest herself of the drawers, pivoting to deposit the huge filmy things on the table under the Day-Glo Virgin, and turned to face him, her bush a blot of darkness that seemed to separate her bulging belly from her thunderous thighs, without which the whole mass would collapse upon itself.

Yet the very peculiarity of the image — a huge Mexican prostitute standing above his pale gringo body, ribsy and stark — commandeered his imagination. The contrasts were vast and enticing: her hugeness, his frailty; his reluctance, her greed; her expertise, his clumsiness; his repression, her earthiness. His penis picked itself up in salute to the intensity of the moment.

“The mouth,” he commanded hoarsely.

She knelt, obedient to his wishes.

Speight waited out back, beyond the sewer, in the yard of the shop called Argentina. He could smell the sewer, the suffocatingly dense odor of human waste, and hear water trickling through it. It was quiet here in the junky, walled yard but beyond, on the street, he could see whores prowling in the pools of light from the intermittent overhead lamps. The old fieldman in him looked for escape routes, just in case; but there were no escape routes, no real ones. Sure, he could hit the wall if things turned ugly, but at his age there was no way he’d scale ten feet of brick if somebody was shooting at him. So it was a simple, no-option proposition: he was lucky or he was not lucky.

He knew he should have briefed the boy — what was his name? It escaped him for just a moment: Trewitt, Trewitt. But Speight never knew what to say to such youngsters — there were so many of them these days, and he knew they thought him an old fart, long out of it, a relic, an antique. And what could the boy have done anyway? Covered him? With what? No, he would have complained and groused and second-guessed. Trewitt filled Speight with depression. If he was the future, the future was bleak. Speight didn’t think Trewitt would work out.

He glanced at his watch. Oscar Meza had said fifteen minutes and twenty had passed. Speight coughed nervously, picked some scum off his lips, and wished they’d get there.

Five hundred dollars.

That’s what it would cost for a chat with Reynoldo Ramirez, a chat with a dead man.

Oscar Meza, proprietor of Oscar’s, formerly El Palacio, had wanted a thousand. Speight had thought more in terms of $300. Five hundred was all right, though he knew he’d have a tough time sailing it by Yost Ver Steeg if he didn’t come up with something nice and solid. In the old days there was always enough money. You wanted it, you got it. No questions asked. In those days the outfit went full-out, first-class. Now, nickels and dimes and young smart kids who thought you belonged in a museum or a paperback novel. He knew he thought too frequently about the old days. Now —

The car swung into the yard. Speight crouched, watching. It was an old Chevy, a ’58 or ’59, rusted out badly. There must have been thousands of them in Nogales, rotting Mex cars, with broken windows and lead-painted fenders and doors from other vehicles.

Come on. Let’s go, thought Speight.

The driver killed the engine. It died with a gasp and the car ticked hotly for several seconds. Speight could see the two men scanning the yard. They couldn’t see him behind these crates. He could just sit there. It wasn’t too late to forget it.

But he knew he couldn’t forget the $500.

The $500 was now running the show.

Oh, hell, Speight thought.

He stood, stepped out.

“Over here, amigos,” he called.

Now he was finished. He’d done it, or rather, had it done. He remembered similar moments from books — Rabbit Angstrom rising from the whore Ruth, Stingo from his Sophie — but they were no help at all. His experience was of a different denomination, with fat Anita on a dirty bed on a sticky floor in a room that smelled of Lysol, under the eye of a glowing Virgin. Yet he felt rather good. In fact he was astounded by his bliss. The actual moment, the actual ultimate instant, with the hulking woman down beneath him, working hard, his own hands gripping something, his muscles tense, his mind pinwheeling: yes, indeed. He smiled.

“Round the world, baby? Only feefty more dollar?”

“No. Oh, uh, no, I don’t think so,” Trewitt said dreamily.

“Come on, baby. We can have some more fun.”

“Ah. I don’t think so. I appreciate it, I really do. I just don’t think so.”

“Sure, baby. It’s your money.”

She retrieved her underpants and pulled the dress over her head and there she was, presto chango, the old Anita. It was as if nothing had happened, and he realized that for her nothing had.

He pulled up his pants, tucked in his shirt, and fastened his belt.

“Ten dollars, baby.”

“Ten dollars! I already paid. Hey, I paid you a fair amount!”

“Rent, baby. You gotta rent the room. Is not free, nothing free. For the towel, the clean sheets” — yeah, fresh out of the dryer sometime in 1968 — “It’s for the big boss. He beat me up if I don’t get it.”

What was the difference? But this was costing a fortune. He was counting it out in ones when he heard the siren.

He raced down the steps two at a time, almost spilling out of control at the end as he lurched into the now-empty bar. The boy Roberto quietly polished glasses and nearby Oscar Meza sat at a table talking with a bulky policeman in a crisp tan uniform with a yellow tie — yes, yellow, canary yellow, screeching yellow — whose beefy shoulder was looped with a final ludicrous touch, a gold braid.

Trewitt tried to gain command of himself, but the cop looked over to fix him with a set of dead eyes.

Trewitt smiled casually, and tried to shuffle out.

He heard the word gringo, and the two men broke into laughter.

Trewitt reached the door and stepped into the night. He could see nothing except the railroad tracks beyond the street and beyond that, Oscar’s competition, the Casa de Jason, another nightclub. Trewitt descended the steeply pitched parking lot to street level and turned. Five hundred yards ahead, beyond an arcade of canopied shops adjacent to the railroad tracks, lay the border; he could see it in lurid light, and the beggars and cabdrivers collecting there, a cruel, high fence, a traffic jam, booths, and a fortresslike bridge of offices overhead. He could see no flag; but, beyond the fence, he saw something perhaps more emblematic: the golden arches of McDonald’s.

Then he saw the crowd. It had gathered just up the street at what seemed to be a bridge at the corner of Calle Buenos Aires and the Ruis Cortina. Indians, a few Americans, Mexican teenaged girls in tightly cut American jeans and blouses, but mostly policemen. Three or four gray pickups had been parked nearby and by their uniformity Trewitt realized they were official vehicles.

Warily, he walked into the crowd; he could hear, among other things, the trickle of water.

It smelled here. Something? What? The odor was overwhelmingly familiar. His nose picked it apart but could not identify it — too many other odors were woven into it. But it was disgusting.

The crowd had gathered at the bottom of the street. It was a cobbled, climbing street that traveled up the side of a hill, lit intermittently by overhead lamps. He could see signs of the shops that ran partway up the hill, before the road disappeared into darkness: a dental clinic, a TV and stereo shop, a small food shop on the other side of the street, and a few others. But Trewitt pushed his way through the crowd and came soon enough to the wall, where he stood by three policemen who were talking rapidly among themselves. Lights — there were lights back here. He could feel the warmth, the human warmth, of people all around. He was aware that the blank brick wall that stared back at him twenty feet away was the wall of Oscar’s, of the whorehouse; the gurgle of water was very strong indeed, but he could not quite get to the edge, to look into the — the whatever it was that lay before him and had drawn all these people.

He gave a last, mighty shove, and broke through two men and came to the edge.

The scene, in fact, was a phenomenon of light. The Mexican faces, fat and slack, Indianesque in their unreadability, almost Asian, and the pencil moustaches; and the indifferently blazing headlamps from the police trucks, throwing beams that cut this way and that through the crowd, and a jumble of shadows on the wall beyond. And the Spanish, against it all, the Spanish in a thousand babbling tongues and incomprehensible dialects, jabbering, spiraling through the air. And the odor: he now recognized it for human waste, the stink of cesspool, of outhouse, of backed-up pipes, the smell of the toilet, the urinal, the smell of defecation. Miasmatic, it covered him like a fog, drilling through his sinuses; he winced at its power, feeling his eyes well with tears.

Bill Speight lay on his back in the sewer. Trewitt, at the edge, could just now make him out. Three or four different light beams pinned the old man against a cascade of stones and beer bottles and rusty pipes and assorted junk. The police were talking about las botas, Trewitt overheard as he stared at old Bill in the sewer.

Boots.

That was it: there was a delay until some high rubber waders could be found; no man would descend into the muck without them.

A flashbulb popped and in its brightness Trewitt could see that the old man had taken some kind of heavy-caliber or big-bore shell in the left side of the face. Shotgun, perhaps. The features had been peeled back off that side of his head; yet on the other, astonishingly, the old Bill prevailed. The vision so diverged from Trewitt’s assumptions of human anatomy that he could make no sense of it.

Speight was soaked by the rushing water from a pipe. A shoe had come off and floated downstream, where it wedged against a rock. It was an old Wallaby.

They’d blown the side of his head in and thrown him into a sewer behind a whorehouse, Trewitt thought dumbly. He accepted and did not accept it. Only yesterday, as he sat throwing down rum-and-Cokes, old Speight had numbed him with an endless tale of the Korean War, an account that could have been in a foreign language, so full was it of obscure references, improbable characters, unlikely events. Halfway through, Trewitt realized he must have missed something important, for he had no idea what the man had been talking about. Now he was dead. In a sewer. Shot in the face.

Trewitt gripped the bricks before him for steadiness. Oh, Jesus, poor old bastard. He realized he was trembling, that he was cold. He looked again at Bill. Bill had been so alive just a few minutes ago. Trewitt thought he might be sick. He didn’t know what to do. He could hear the police asking questions.

“Anybody know this old bird?”

“He was with another gringo in Oscar’s. A young one.”

“Where is he?”

“Still with his girl friend.” There was some laughter.

“They get those boots yet?”

“Yes, they just arrived. Who’s going down there?”

“Call Washington. Have them send a vice-president.” More laughter.

Then something occurred to Trewitt.

They — whoever they were — killed Speight for trying to find out about Ramirez.

He, Trewitt, had been with Speight.

He, Trewitt, had asked about Ramirez.

And then, and only then, did he panic.