At a twilit bistro on the west side of the plaza, she orders coffee, opens a newspaper, puts it down. A woman she knows happens by, a middle-class Mexican woman, a retired real estate agent from Guadalajara a good few years older than Ariana and much given to hammered silver earrings, sandals and the beautiful shawls that you see less and less commonly on the Purépecha women who can still remember how to weave them. Ariana smiles blandly as they chat. She is certain the men at the next table are eavesdropping. Or are they? Just in case, she speaks loudly. She doesn’t want them to miss a word of what she’s saying, if they know English at all. Adelida asks routine questions: Will they be coming to the opening for the Purépecha women’s craft exhibit next Thursday. And where is Schuyler this evening? Ariana whips out her cover story. “He went up to the States, to Connecticut, to be with his sister.” This stirs curiosity, as intended: “Problems in Connecticut?” By which Adelida means to determine whether the sister’s problem is her health or a marital crisis. “Yes, she hasn’t been well, lately” Ariana is tempted to leave it at that, denying Adelida what she’s dying to find out. (What kind of cancer?) But Ariana is practicing a noisy kind of volubility, for the benefit of the two men who may be eavesdropping:
“Hodgkins,” she says.
Adelida: “Oh my goodness. But that’s become treatable, hasn’t it?”
“We hope you’re right.”
Adelida moves on. Ariana pulls out her cellphone on the chance that she’s got enough of a signal to check her email. The men at the next table are talking again. She decides to walk up to Lupita’s for a light supper, with her newspaper for company.
Crossing the plaza, she takes a queasy glance toward the portal where she envisioned the white SUV stopping and absconding with Schuyler. She continues half a block up the street called Cuesta de Don Vasco de Quiroga and pushes through the restaurant’s saloon-style swinging doors. Lupita’s is normally quiet this early on a midweek evening.
Instead of the expected murmur and clink of a quiet restaurant evening, she is all but overwhelmed by a throng. Shrieks, chatter, the spin and mingle of gringos — mostly gringos — drinks in hand against a backdrop of Broadway show tunes picked out on a piano-sized electric keyboard by a retired Los Angeles session man named Jerry Orff. In her distracted state, Ariana had forgotten that tonight is the monthly “gringo cocktail party” (50 pesos at the door and your first drink free). The quiet, private mood in which she was nursing her worries is shattered — mocked, really — by hugs, outstretched hands and greetings from the people already liquored up enough to be relaxed around each other and getting loud.
Ariana sucks in her cheeks, feigns ebullience and sweeps into the crowd.
Two friends lean in on her to say hello —co-trustees with Schuyler of a drug rehab clinic that has opened in service to Patzcuaro’s burgeoning population of opioid addicts, Mexicans and gringos alike. It takes Ariana a few seconds to collect herself and remember the cover story she has cooked up to explain why he’s not with her. And the weirdness is truly wrenching: to be standing around with a gorgeous smile on her face, her anxiety level surging and subsiding as she wonders if her spouse of 20-plus years is dead or alive.
The gringos run the gamut. There are the old-time lefties who came down here fifty years ago dreaming of la revolucion and imaging they might somehow be part of it, then never left when their fantasies turned out to be just that. There are the middle Americans, the pensioned-off insurance executives attempting to “go native” in ways that would have got them laughed out of the Grosse Pointe Country Club. There’s a younger cohort of trust-fund babies who have declared themselves film-makers while they try to finish a script and then figure out what to do with the rest of their lives; there is the State Department careerist who took early retirement and enjoys hinting that he was no mere embassy attaché. CIA? He is insulated against further inquiry that might disclose a more mundane reality. (“I’d love to talk more about what I did, but the work was classified; I really can’t go into it.”)
She touches the phone in her jacket pocket. Surely I’ll get a call any minute now, she thinks. Schuyler will tell me he caught a ride to Morelia with some friends — a movie and dinner, so don’t wait up. La llamada? Really? It must have been a hoax. She imagines the huge flow of relief that will spread through the coils of her soul like that first shot of mezcal. She’ll end the call, grab the nearest friend — anyone — and unburden herself of the strange thing she has just been through. The fake llamada, the Connecticut story she cooked up to cover for her missing husband. Maybe she’ll add this: “But you know something? We really need to work out protocols for handling the real thing, if, god forbid, it happens to any of us.”
Her cellphone remains silent.
Trapped in cocktail-party mode, she spends a few minutes attempting idle chatter with a couple — Bill and Ginny Euler — much given to talk of herbal cures and high colonics. Their bed is pitched at a 25-degree angle toward the headboard, they tell her. Blood washes over the brain while they sleep — a preventive against dementia. The implication is that anyone not doing the same is ignorant, if not a fool, and well on their way to early-onset Alzheimer’s.
She turns away and, for a moment, stares blankly at a woman just far enough from her not to realize she is being studied. To signal fascination with whatever is being said by her chatty companions (three men), the woman has opened her eyes wide and furled back her lips, baring her teeth. Her face is frozen in what Schuyler would call “the dropped-jaw gape.” A practitioner of the dropped-jaw gape means to express delight in what the others are saying, also to signal that she is aquiver with something she wants to jump in and say herself — like an Olympic swimmer tensed at pool’s edge just ahead of the starting gun. Unfortunately, in this instance, the dropped-jaw gape recapitulates decades of silver-gray dental work, and Ariana can’t help wondering if, with a mirror in hand, this aging doll might have looked for a less toothy way to feign girlish enthusiasm.
Ariana retreats to the wine table, manned as usual, by the taciturn — sullen? angry? — Efraim Ochoa. The young Mexican is a fixture at expat cocktail parties and smaller gatherings of the tribe. The Lupita’s wait staff puts up with him, an intruder, because he hauls in the boxes of wine and sets up the table, freeing them to concentrate on dinner customers and the bigger tips they usually leave. Ariana knows Efraim better than she might because, since the very start of their Patzcuaro years, his mother, Gabriela, has cleaned for her and Schuyler, first in the house they rented, and now at their own place on Madrigal. And, if they have guests, Gabriela also does cooking. When Efraim was in his early teens, there was nothing exceptional in his tagging along with his mother — to rake the patio or haul trash down to the curb for her. Now that he is nearly twenty and the father of three — or is it four? — his availability to his mother seems less like filial loyalty than inertia. When Efraim got his girl pregnant the first time, he had been enrolled in a trade school in Morelia, thanks to Ariana who was paying the tuition, a few hundred a year. Efraim left school to take a job, but rather than cut him off, Ariana said he should use the allowance she provided for better food and to buy a crib and a stroller and some baby clothes. Gabriela swore they would be sending the girl back to her village with the baby as soon as was seemly. She was pregnant again within the year — twins girls — and Efraim, a husband and father for good, was done with his studies.
He smiles and trades a glass of wine for the ten-peso coin Ariana drops into the tips jar. They speak briefly and she can not help wondering if Efraim’s sense of his own inadequacies as a provider isn’t compounded by a deep hatred of the men and women acting, on this occasion, as though they are not his masters but his friends. Ariana strikes a confidential tone, implying that, while it’s good to see you here, Efraim, I am not really a big fan of these gringo cocktail parties and may leave soon.
And then suddenly she is haunted by a memory: an encounter like this, except with Schuyler at her side. They had become
briefly chatty and Schuyler had mentioned to Efraim that he was on his way out the door. “Basta! I’m out of here,” he had said. “Enough of these gringos.”
Efraim had smiled, amused, as he was meant to be, by a gringo embracing the pejorative and calling himself a gringo. “Debe de cuidarse,” he said. (“You should be careful.”)
It had taken Ariana a few beats to realize Efraim was paying her a compliment: telling Schuyler that he was foolish to leave a pretty woman to get herself home on her own at night. As Schuyler strode back into the crowd with his drink, Ariana had lingered at the bar for a few moments.
She had deflected Efraim’s awkward attempt at a compliment by extending it to the town they shared. “Patzcuaro is safe, Efraim. Compared to U.S. cities … ? It is safe. Don Schuyler walks home at all hours of the night. So do I.”
Had a comment so innocuous planted a seed in an angry young man’s mind? It takes Ariana a second to realize she is merely paranoid. She needs to be on guard against fear. Schuyler’s absence is getting to her. She must not let it cloud her judgment.
She has worked back through the room and is nearing the door, preparing to extricate herself from the party, when a bony, silver-bangled hand emerges from a small knot of people and an elegant woman clutches her wrist. A few seconds pass before Margaret Aldrich turns her attention from the people talking to her and more directly acknowledges the woman — Ariana — she is clutching. Rich, widowed, Margaret has been coming to Patzcuaro forever and is something of a doyenne, a grande dame, within the expat community. Ariana places a continental kiss on the cheek Margaret has turned towards her, and as she does so, Margaret pushes her puckered lips out into the air.
“How are you, darling?”
They gossip a bit, about this and that, about Alyssa Quigley, poor thing. (Alyssa and Margaret are quite close.)
Margaret speaks of The Troubles, raising her fingers to scratch air quotes around the words.
Irony is meant to signal that there is less reason to get all worked up about the local “troubles” than the bloody years in Northern Ireland that went by the same name.
“The killing, the violence — it’s like with the blacks up north,” Margaret opines. “The cartels pick on their own kind. They are Mexican but for the most part so are their victims. Mo Quigley’s situation is terribly sad, but it’s so much the exception.”
Is it really necessary to go into all this? That seems to be the subtext of what Margaret is saying. Can’t we leave well enough alone? You pick up on that sentiment among old-time expats, the ones who have been coming down here for years, the ones who know that this, too — these troubles — will pass. Meanwhile, you live with it — like the bad water and the occasional dose of turista. It’s Mexico.
It’s an attitude that leaves Ariana faintly suspicious of Margaret. She seems to know more than she lets on. In Ariana’s wilder fantasies, Margaret is somehow implicated in the shadow world that she dismisses as not worth discussing. How could she not be, with all that money?
Margaret signs off on her brief conversation with Ariana: “Come by some evening, would you, darling. The two of you. Just as soon as Schuyler is back from Connecticut.”
“He would have loved the Monday meeting,” Margaret adds. She puts her hand by the side of her mouth and whispers a mock confidence: “Harvey Winston qualified.” This is, of course, a minor breach of AA rules, mentioning the name of a meeting goer, in this case the one who, in the jargon of the organization, “qualified” — took the rostrum that evening and told how he found his way to sobriety after a descent into the abyss. But Margaret could assume that Schuyler would already have mentioned to his wife that Harvey was turning up at meetings these days. In fact, Harvey, a rambunctious socializer, has begun to talk freely about AA himself.
In time to say nothing at all, Ariana registers on the real import of Margaret’s remark: not that Harvey Winston showed up at Monday’s meeting but that Schuyler didn’t.
day two
Fourteen hours have passed since the extortionists reached Ariana. She rises at dawn. She drinks coffee. She can not eat, which makes the coffee more jangling. She is beyond anxious, but that is not the same thing as panic. She has an innate confidence that Schuyler, wherever he is, will somehow survive this outrage. She needs the extortionists to get on with it. The suspense, the silence from their side is proving to be almost as harrowing as that first phone call. Ariana walks down through the Plaza Grande to the smaller, more workaday Plaza Bocanegra and displays herself at one of the four tables on the sidewalk out front of the Gran Hotel. The Gran is something of a fleabag, but it’s a fine place for another coffee, for watching the world go by, and for being watched. The tables are served by a generally competent waiter, but they are kind of an afterthought. His primary responsibilities are to the restaurant customers inside. That part of the restaurant, the indoor part, doubles as the hotel lobby for those few patrons willing to hazard the upper floors of the building in search of sleep or sex.
She orders a café Americano and is leafing distractedly through La Jornada when a passerby who knows her pauses to swap pleasantries. Mercifully, the passerby is in a hurry and cannot accept Ariana’s perfunctory invitation to take a seat. Shortly, she settles the bill and is pushing back her chair when the gentleman at the next table sets aside his paper (El Financiero), pushes his glasses up into a sketchy hairline and rises as well. Ariana has turned the corner onto Calle Mujica when she notices that he is still with her and, indeed, closer to her side than even a close friend would be on a similar excursion down Mujica in the direction of the open-air market, the mercado central.
“I have a gun in my hand,” he says under his breath. “It is in my jacket pocket about six inches from your left kidney.“ He speaks quietly; his English is only slightly accented, which — like the bright sunshine and the animated bustle of the Mexican street — makes the threatened violence only more bizarre. “Keep walking, and if we pass someone you know and must greet, say I am your friend Rogelio from Uruapan. Rogelio Quintero.”
She is terrified, but also strangely relieved that the mandatory silence has been broken, presumably — but not for sure — by one of the predators who imposed it.
They encounter no one that Ariana needs to greet and shortly “Rogelio Quintero” steers her into a shoe store, one of many along Mujica just opening for the day. The place is empty but for a sales clerk kneeling before an elderly man and trying to ease his foot into a cheap dress shoe. The clerk glances their way and says nothing. Quintero nudges Ariana past a drape at the rear of the showroom, up a short flight of stairs and into an office of some sort. Two men have tipped back their chairs and put their feet up on a small table in the center of the room. Their hands are cupped behind their heads. They gaze curiously at the gringa. Neither one would be mistaken for a shoe-store manager, least of all the one who now lets his chair thud back onto all four legs, rises abruptly and slaps Ariana’s face. A violent hatred of this man competes momentarily with her fear of him. She does nothing to stanch the thin stream of blood trickling from her nose.
“El dinero. Donde está?”
Stupidly, she seeks refuge in logic. Haven’t they got the sequence of events out of order? She has agonized for a 24 hours waiting for a ransom demand. Shouldn’t that happen before they start slapping her for non-payment?
She overrides a tremor in her voice: “How much are you asking? Cuanto dinero? How can I get the money ready if I don’t know how much you want?
“That is for you to decide” — this from the coffee-drinker who reads El Financiero and carries a gun in his pocket. His cigarette adds to the airlessness of the room.
“You will bring us as much as your husband is worth to you. Your gift to los Caballeros will determine whether he must suffer pain, more pain, to compensate for your stinginess.
As this man speaks, in strangely ornate English, Ariana’s mind flees the room and she finds herself tuning in the sounds in the street: the honk of a taxi
, a bell tower tolling the quarter hour, one man shouts to another he has recognized at a distance. The bursts of early morning sound drift above the street like helium balloons small children have forgot to hang onto. That they are so ordinary makes these sounds surreal.
“You’ll have a day or two to think this over,” says the one who told her to call him Rogelio. “We will find you. Contact your DEA agents, your embassy, fuck with us in any way at all, and it will be as if you asked us to put scars on your husband with a fisherman’s blade. I hope it will not be necessary to ruin his sex life for good with that blade.”
There is nothing more to say. The other man gestures toward the door, then checks himself. He pushes a box of Kleenex toward Ariana. She dabs at her nose. On the street, she has gone a block or two before her brain thaws enough for anything like thinking.
A do-it-yourself ransom demand? So this is how they are going to come after us, Ariana thinks to herself — dip a straw into their assets and suck? Siphon off the possible comforts of their old age (if they live that long)? Ariana has never heard of anything like it, but she has to admire the cartel for its craftiness — if indeed the thugs above the shoe store really are Caballeros, not just a trio of freelance extortionists who have got wind of Schuyler’s disappearance and are making their move before the cartel does. You hear about things like that. And what better way to get a feel for Ariana’s financial capacity than to make her put the first number on the table.
Ariana makes it down Calle Mujica and into the Plaza Grande. Her head rings like she is coming down with something, her nose has stopped bleeding but her mouth is parched and her pulse still races. She crumples onto one of the plaza benches. The stone is cool against her back. The paper cup of coffee warms her hands. She bought it at the Plaza’s self-service Oxxo convenience store so she wouldn’t have to talk — if she were capable of it — to a waiter or cashier at one of the cafés where she’s a regular. She begins to decompress, letting the routine sights and sounds of the plaza wash over her, soothingly.
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 3
