“It’s all about keeping a low profile, “Margaret says, on the drive back up the sierra to Patzcuaro.
“An Aldrich keeping a low profile? An Aldrich with a thousand acres behind big gates?”
“Well, all right. Maybe ‘low profile’ is the wrong way to put it. ‘Appropriate profile,’ how about that? The gate was put up by the Mexican who sold us the place — absolutely routine for this kind of holding. Mexicans love their gates. What am I supposed to do — take it down? Replace it with a split-rail fence and potted geraniums? Like I’m trying to deny that I’m rich? The cartels know who I am because the government knows who I am. Show fear, get into a defensive crouch and they’ll be all over you trying to find out what you’re afraid of. They’ll worry that rivals are getting a jump on the business of separating me from a chunk of my cash. And you definitely don’t want your local sicarios worried and getting nosy. Keep an appropriate profile and they’ll have to think twice before they strike. They’ll have to spend a certain amount of time wondering if figuring out what I’m really worth is worth the hassle.”
Ariana flashes again on the guard by the gate to Villa Mujica and then on Mario, the driver. He is extraordinarily good at fading into the settings to which he delivers Margaret Aldrich. whether it’s the mercado central or an art exhibition or a film screening. He has spent time in the States, Margaret tells Ariana, making him one of how many hundreds of thousands of undocumented Mexican workers who, before the crackdown of the Obama years, slipped through and back across the porous membrane that divides two worlds, two economies, two cultures. At cocktail parties he knows how to pass for a guest. If anyone tries to chat him up, he is Doña Margarita’s driver. The magnum stays hidden in a shoulder holster under his suit jacket. (Ariana saw the glint of it once when he was helping Margaret into her coat.) She is about to ask why he isn’t with them now, but thinks better of it. No doubt Mario is another factor in Margaret’s balancing act, the tightrope between flaunting her social and financial clout and hiding it for fear of drawing undue attention to herself. She plays her hand intuitively, not by a strict playbook. She has decided that Mario doesn’t have to be with her wherever she goes, even in la tierra caliente. So far this approach seems to have served her well enough.
On the drive back up to Patzcuaro with the $20,000 in cash, Margaret tries to buck up her friend. “Ariana, darling, we’re going to work this out. Years from now it will be only the most astonishing of the tales from your years in Mexico, the place where surrealism will never fall out of fashion.”
Ah, surrealism, Ariana thinks to herself. Surrealism has been a buzzword, a motif, in expat talk about Mexico at least since André Breton passed through Pátzcuaro in the 1930s with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, a point of local pride even if the rusty iron cross above the gate to a church courtyard in Erongaricuaro wasn’t actually made by Breton.)
“This hasn’t been fun for you,” Margaret continues, “but the fat lady has yet to sing. This is going to sort itself out. There’s just no predicting how.”
“Yes, as Alyssa Quigley would surely agree.”
“I prefer to think about Alejandra Morrison,” Margaret interjects defensively. “Do you remember how that went for her?”
Alejandra Morrison was briefly Ariana’s and Schuyler’s landlord after her father, Jack Morrison, passed away? How could she forget? But they had a drive ahead of them, and Ariana was prepared to hear Margaret’s version of the tale:
“Alejandra’s the one whose daughter— Lucia—faked her own kidnapping. The girl’s boyfriend was in on the scam. They suckered Alejandra into paying a thirty-thousand-dollar ransom. I think the boyfriend took off with it. In any case, Alejandra got her daughter back, but not the thirty thousand.”
Ariana had this to offer: “There’s another, less well known subterfuge in Morrison family annals.
“What do you know about that little stint in prison that Jack did?
It was years ago, but the incarceration came as a surprise to people who knew the man because, for the last third of his life, Jack Morrison had been a pillar of the community. A bohemian out of the American Midwest, he had come down to Latin America, fallen in love with Mexico, married a Mexican woman, gained real stature as a regional artist, and acquired the goodly amount of residential property he rented to gringos and passed on to Alejandra.
Margaret said she was aware that there was a shadow over his past.
“But do you know why he did time?”
Margaret: “Wasn’t he trafficking in pre-Columbian artifacts and stolen altarpieces? Selling them out of the country. That’s a no-no. At least that’s the story I heard.”
Ariana: “That was the official version. We rented from Jack before we bought the place on Madrigal. Schuyler and I got to know him pretty well. And one night — I guess he’d come by for the rent and we poured him a nightcap — he was in a storytelling mood. He seemed to want to set the record straight. Maybe he knew the end was near, which it was; he died a year or so later. Mind you, by now the jail term is decades ago. He’s a collectible artist, respected by both Mexican and U.S. buyers, and quite prosperous what with the real estate — not just in Patzcuaro, by the way. Plus Maria’s antiques business — Maria, his wife.
“What he told us was this: He hadn’t been trafficking in pre-Columbian anything. He had been making fakes. Fake Aztec figurines, fake colonial-era altarpieces. And then selling them to collectors back in the States. And some of his regulars were mobsters. Mafia. Devout Catholics, as Mafiosi tend to be, but men not to be trifled with.
“Jack decided he would take the rap and do time for trafficking in the real thing rather than incur the wrath of the not-so-gentle capos he had duped. And so he did. The irony was that doing time on false charges actually enhanced the value of the pieces he faked. They gained a distinguished provenance. Your Jersey mobster didn’t just have a nice old altarpiece, he had one of the ones so rare and ancient that they cost his dealer a jail term.
“Jack, as you know, was otherwise as corny as Iowa, which is where he hailed from, an all-American guy who had achieved the dream of a beautiful “native” wife and the cultural integration so many expats dream of and fail at. A generation later, comes Alejandra’s daughter and her treacherous boyfriend, with their faked kidnapping.”
“Like father, like granddaughter,” Margaret says. “And it’s all so very Mexican, those particular feats of chicanery and deception. But I must caution you. The part about Jack faking his wares makes a wonderful tale, but I’m pretty sure the ‘confession’ he made to you over a nightcap was, shall we say, incomplete. Yes, he managed to fob off some fakes on his more ignorant customers. But the reason he was able to attract customers in the first place was because he had also been dealing in the real thing, stolen pre-Columbian artifacts and then those colonial-era altarpieces. ”
Perhaps so, Ariana thinks to herself. It had taken three generations, but an Iowan’s assimilation into the mysterious culture south of the border was now complete.
Margaret: “There’s your book, Ariana, your documentary, whatever it is you’re thinking about. Forget poor old Alyssa Quigley.”
day twenty
Something is going on. Schermerhorn hears shouts and the heavy thud of a truck door closing. Through the chinks in the troje wall he sees men running to and from the part of the compound where he is being held. One man, roused from his bed, drags a half-dressed woman by her forearm. He is shirtless and, like his woman, barefoot.
A raid — federales? rival sicarios? Could Schermerhorn be the focus of this frenzy? He doubts it. Maybe he will be forgotten altogether as the kidnappers abandon the compound. But no — the thought of his being abandoned has barely taken form in Schermerhorn’s mind when the metal bar is lifted and the door to the troje thrown open; he has not been forgotten. One of the sicarios strides toward the bed, an unfamiliar face — not Quiróz, not one of the ones who bring him his beans and tortillas and swap out a fresh chamber pot
each morning. He pulls Schermerhorn to his feet and roughly cuffs his hands behind his back. He shoves him toward the open door and then through it with another shove, kicking at his feet to hurry Schermerhorn along — as though it weren’t hard enough to keep your balance with your wrists locked behind your back. There is a pickup idling near the troje, Schermerhorn’s coop for the past … how many days? He has lost track.
The pickup careens through a gate at the back end of the finca and along a lane that cuts through a hedgerow of brush and pine and then across an open field. They reach a paved road within a mile or so, or rather they reach the ditch that runs parallel to it. In a hundred yards, the ditch rises closer to the adjacent road surface, and Schermerhorn is thrown hard against the right rear door as the truck’s left tires heave up onto the pavement, followed by another lurch and then the other two. Only now does one of the men remember to blindfold Schermerhorn. The job is done in haste and poorly. If he tips his head back a little, Schermerhorn sees a sliver of light from underneath the lower edge of the blindfold. The truck has barreled down the highway for maybe five miles when they reach a hamlet and, within it, a house on a shabby back street. An alley runs along one side of the property to a small rear yard fenced with chain link. A gate swings open as they near it and is closed quickly behind them. Schermerhorn is bustled inside the house and tossed onto a mattress in a windowless room. The door clicks shut behind the sicario who locked him in.
Hours pass before the sicario, now reeking of liquor, remembers that Schermerhorn’s wrists are still bound behind his back. He stumbles into the room and finds the captive prone on the mattress, face to the wall, his wrists proffered behind him as if folded in an ass-forward prayer to the devil. The sicario releases the handcuffs and slams the door behind him again, this time forgetting to lock it. Schermerhorn will lie there for an hour or two, sifting the clamor beyond the door for clues to his fate: the shouts, maledictions, the crescendoing arguments. The few words he can understand carry less meaning than the cyclical rise and fall of the men’s voices.
The din has risen in one of its periodic fortissimos when he hears the heavy tread of people coming towards his room. Three men burst in on him, one bearing a knife. He grabs Schermerhorn by the hair and pulls him up off the cot and onto his feet. The knife presses against his windpipe
“Mátalo!” – one of the men calls out.
“No! No lo mates!”
The meaning of these few words is exactly clear to Schermerhorn. Two of the men are arguing. One wants him dead. The other, for whatever reason, is warning against it.
The one opposed to his execution pulls out a gun.
“Si lo mates, voy a matarte.”
(You kill him, I will kill you.)
Man with knife: “Well, what the fuck are we going to do with him.”
He presses the blade only harder against Schermerhorn’s neck and begins to edge it sideways.
A fusillade of fists erupts against the rear door to the building. The man with the knife flings Schermerhorn back onto the cot and the trio barrels out of the room.
Whether true of a drowning man — that your whole life flashes before your eyes in the moment before your death — this was what Schermerhorn experienced as the blade pressed into his neck and the pressure against it intensified and then slacked off. It was like a film clip of his sixty-some years projected at warp speed: the idyll of his childhood along the Hudson, the misery of an education grooming him for a world he despised and wanted to escape, The birth of his sons. New York and the years with Ariana. Their serially treacherous experiment in freedom, her betrayals of him, his of her. He flashes on the weird moment, now two weeks ago, when Ariana’s voice came over his captors’ cell phone and she was told he had been seized. (He had tried to cry out to her, only to be punched in the gut and an extra wad of cloth pushed between his teeth.)
And in that split-second recap of all he has known and done in this life, he glimpses a possibility that he has not reckoned with before, at least not consciously: that Ariana, whether by design or unwitting error, might well have become the agent of his demise.
He feels a bolt of something like magma — blood? cranial fluid? — course the length of his spine and crest against the dome of his skull. And then as his rage subsides and the fluid flows back down to wherever it normally pools, he is suffused with a sense of peace.
We will all die someday, he tells himself. What’s wrong with now. It would be a death exquisitely well calibrated to burn forever in Ariana’s memory, a death that would reduce every other amorous adventure of hers to triviality.
It would be the betrayal from which there could be no turning back, no rapprochement, no pillow talk, no more rounds of What if? … At least not this side of the great blue beyond, if such a place exists. Now, left behind in the house, Schermerhorn touches his neck, unsure whether he will feel the last ounces of his allotted five pints pulsing through a deep gash. He touches instead the place, already scabbing over, where the sicario’s knife only knicked him.
Perhaps he is alone in the house. If so, he should make a break for it. This is his chance. But the mere possibility that an opportunity has presented itself drains an already exhausted man. He sinks back onto the stained and lumpy mattress, trying to sort out the ambient sounds of what must be a small village. And shortly, he has drifted into sleep. He wakes up a few hours later, deeply refreshed — or is he dreaming.
In a world of angry, unwashed men, he is astonished to find a woman sitting beside him. She has let her long hair fall loose on one side and, holding a hank of it in her fingers, is touching it to his face, his lips, his lashes. He quickly shuts his eyes so as not to end the dream.
If this woman even exists, Schermerhorn assumes she is a strategic asset, a whore deployed to swap intimacies: sex in exchange for his guidance on how to resolve the impasse over the ransom demand. He has no doubt that this is a last chance. If she fails, they will find hideous ways to make Ariana capitulate to their demands.
It is the woman’s voice that brings him to full consciousness: “Oh my god, Señor Schermerhorn. Oh, my god.”
He realizes that she is weeping, which may be why for several seconds he can not quite place the voice.
“This is not how I meant it to be.”
A minute or more passes, before he surfaces fully from sleep and opens his eyes.
The woman throws the hank of loose hair back over her shoulder. She puts her hands on his cheeks. The tips of her thumbs touch below his chin.
“This was not supposed to happen,” she says.
He is stunned. Now he recognizes her, a woman with whom he was involved for a time: Fatima, one of the drug counselors from the rehab center that he and a few other gringos had been helping to fund.
“How are you here? I mean why?” he asks.
She sobs openly now and presses Schermerhorn’s head to her chest.
In that instant, he knows the answer to the question that has been gnawing at him since his first encounter with Armando Quiróz, why it was that he looked vaguely familiar.
Helping fundraise for the rehab center had been Schermerhorn’s one concession to gringo etiquette, the gentle pressure to get involved in charitable work, to “give back,” as some put it; to “pay it forward,” as others preferred to say. Or just to “stay active” in retirement. There were those who ladled beans and rice once a week at a diocesan feeding station. Others — Ariana among them — dropped by the orphanage an afternoon a week, to play games with the kids or work with them on their English. Drawing on his book-learned Marxism, Schuyler had scorned these efforts to stay busy. To him, they were politically myopic exercises by guilt-ridden liberals that only perpetuated the deep poverty of the people they served. But some of the busy-ness is just plain fun, Ariana had argued. Besides, the revolucion you’re waiting for may be a long time coming. We have something to offer right now.”
Fatima had been one of the more poised and attractive of the rehab center staff and
Schuyler was a connoisseur of good-looking women. It seemed possible that now and then she cast an encouraging glance his way. One afternoon, he had been sitting at a café off the Plaza Chica, waiting for the library to open, when, suddenly, she was leaning over his table, talking in urgent whispers:
“You know me from the center, but you don’t know me. This is very difficult for me, but I need help. My mother … ”
He cut her off.
Fatima needed money: a thousand pesos — about a eighty-five dollars. This was a huge sum to be asking in broken English from a near stranger, but rehab centers were accustomed to confessions of urgent need, and, after all, Schermerhorn was known for his own ability to ask prospective donors for money.
In cutting her off, he had thought better of finding out what financial crisis had emboldened her to approach him. She would mention a sick relative or an implacable landlord. Maybe it would be true. Maybe not, and what difference would it make? There would be no sense in his denying a stubborn fact: even a dirt-poor retiree from the States (and he never claimed to be one) would have more to squander in an afternoon than a Mexican of her station had to live on for a month.
Schermerhorn had two very different responses to begging and never knew which one would kick in. One was to brush past the outstretched hat, with its nest of small coins and the occasional twenty-peso note, or the legless accordion player with a small plastic cup on the ground beside his seat. Any generosity on his part would only entrench them in their wretchedness and keep the church or the municipal government from doing what they should to alleviate the misery. The obverse reaction was to drop a few coins because — what the hell — it was easier than avoiding the beggar’s gaze and pretending he hadn’t noticed the pleading look.
We Have Taken Your Husband Page 13
