The Jaguar

by T. Jefferson Parker

  She took a deep breath and knelt down and vomited into the toilet. Then again. She felt sick all the way to her soul. When the retching stopped she wadded the medical tape in a ball and wrapped it in toilet paper and put it in the trashcan. In the mirror she saw her face, pale and glistening, her pupils black pits.

  25

  ARMENTA WAS WAITING FOR HER when she came out. She forced herself to look at him and noticed that he had tried to comb his hair.

  “Come see some of my other accomplishments.” He turned to lead the way and she followed with her hands folded in front of her, inches from the gun, but this was an awkward way to walk and she couldn’t shoot him in the back anyway. You didn’t do that. She had just let her hands swing free to walk naturally when he turned around and looked at her. He had a suspicious expression on his face, but said nothing.

  He led her through a spacious kitchen where two white-clad women were preparing a meal. She wondered if, dressed like they were, she could pass as one of them, just long enough to make it from the Castle to the cenote. What if she found one of them on the path? Wouldn’t she have to stop, and speak, then be discovered? Here in the kitchen their faces were almost hidden by their gauzy rebozos but their eyes smiled at Armenta as he paused to lift a pot lid and peruse the simmering chicken. Erin thought she might get sick again so she focused her attention on the chains of garlic cloves that hung in the opening of a pass-through. Garlic, she thought, save me.

  She followed him down a short cool hallway to another room. Through the shawl she touched the gun but could not draw it. He turned on the lights and Erin stepped in. The lights were fluorescent, jittery and sharp, and the smell of marijuana was clear. The room was large but unfurnished except for several large tables that were piled with larger bricks of several colors. Beneath the tables were more stacks. Against the walls still more. These bundles were roughly the size of shoeboxes and they were wrapped in different colors of plastic.

  “Are you sick?” he asked.

  “I feel good.”

  “You are white and perspiring.”

  “I am pregnant and feeling it.”

  “My wife was sick every day with Saturnino.”

  She denied the nausea. “I’m sorry he turned into a monster. No, that’s none of my business. I’m sorry. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  “He has visions now. The curandera gave him scorpion poison mixed with chocolate and goat’s milk. To make the visions stop.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “Edema of the brain. He ate one entire box of children’s cereal this morning, soaked in tequila.”

  “I’m sorry, but…well, I thank you too. For saving me from him.”

  He looked at her uncertainly and pointed to a table. “Here, look and see this.”

  Erin looked down on a pallet-sized mountain of bundles wrapped in blue plastic with lightning bolts on them. There were bundles in yellow plastic with bumblebee designs and the word “BUZZ” on them. Beside these were blue packs with Homer Simpson’s face and below his face it said, in Spanish, “I’m Getting Smuggled—What of It, Man?” The next bundles were packed in clear plastic and she could see the swirls of green herb compressed within.

  There was another, smaller great room in this part of the flat and Erin saw the hooded children sitting on the floor by the big TV watching a Disney video, and the women just now bringing plates of food to the dining table. This room too had a dramatic chandelier and a high ceiling but the paintings were not of saints but of Mayans and jaguars and birds and snakes. They walked past two men playing chess, and in their white hoods and loose white clothing they looked like ghosts or angels but when one of them looked at her, Erin saw that his nose and lips were gone and only some of his bottom teeth remained, staunch as headstones. She felt herself rising as if levitated and she knew she was fainting. One foot in front of the other. I will be there, Bradley. I will be there. Touch the Cowboy Defender. Saint Cowboy Defender.

  A young woman came in from one of the hallways that led into the great room. She moved with an easy grace and she wore the white dress of the lepers but not the rebozo. She looked cautiously at Erin, then walked over and sat with the children in front of the TV.

  Armenta motioned Erin toward them and led her over. The woman stood as they approached. She was very pretty and her face was pale and smooth and peaceful. Her hair was honey blond, wavy and fine.

  “Erin McKenna,” he said. “This is Dulce Kopf.”

  “Very nice to meet you,” said Erin.

  “I heard your performance from my room. I had the window open to the rain and wind, so I could hear you. I hope you are enjoying your stay.”

  “It’s been unusual.”

  “I must get back to the children. There is always so much to be done with children.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s what Gustavo would have wanted.”

  “Oh?”

  “We were young then. The Americans killed him without a reason or a word.”

  She glided back among the youngsters and took her place among them. Armenta signaled her and they walked down another hallway.

  “Does she have leprosy?”

  “No. She feels good with them. This I cannot explain. She has not been out of the Castle since Gustavo. Two years. I try to do what she wants.”

  “I feel dizzy and bad.”

  “We are almost finished.”

  By then her sense of direction had failed. She had no idea even of north or south, or which part of the floor they had already seen and which part remained new. The next room was filled with bricks of cocaine and the next with heroin and another with methamphetamine. There was another room they could only walk halfway into because the rest of it was filled with bundles of American cash, floor-to-ceiling, taking over almost the entire space, denying them entry. In each of these rooms guns lay about like housecats, not organized and not stowed in any orderly way, mostly just sprawled on the drugs and cash or propped in corners or laid out on the floor where there was room. Many of them were gold or inset with gold, and some had jewels and mysterious inscriptions, and some had images of Malverde, Patron Saint of Narcos, etched onto the butts or stocks. She was pretty sure she was looking at handguns and combat shotguns and assault rifles, as well as exotic sniper guns and grenade launchers and shoulder-launched rockets. She’d seen them in movies.

  Erin stood in the doorway, weak with fear, inhaling a world of cash and drugs and guns. She felt the Cowboy Defender ready in its place but it seemed a hundred miles away.

  “And my favorite of all the rooms,” said Armenta, walking quickly down another hallway now, turning to wave her on.

  He pushed open a door and found a light and Erin stepped in. At first she thought she’d walked into the New World before Columbus. The room was crowded with jade statues and masks and mosaics, quartz carvings of gigantic frogs and strange gods, a huge stone crocodile and an enormous limestone shark carved in meticulous detail, and hundreds of pots and calendars and tablets covered with Mayan writing. Wooden carvings of birds and monkeys and fish and turtles hung from the ceiling. But there were also tables heaped with modern brooches and watches and rings and earrings and necklaces, and there were wooden bins of loose emeralds and diamonds and rubies, some still uncut, and strings of pearls draped through the shutter slats, and chains of gold and silver that had fallen from the slats and were now heaped upon the floor like something that housecleaning would have to deal with, and crystal vases of loose cultured pearls and freshwater and small black pearls. On the floor stood small golden humanlike figurines and more circular golden calendars, and there were silver suns the size of dinner plates leaning against the walls, and Erin saw a silver jackal standing nearly life-sized, its open jaws draped with thick golden chains, and she saw a silver coiled cobra with its head raised and its hood flared, and a flock of jeweled silver birds sitting on a rod fixed above one of the windows. Most of the things were New World creations but she recognized pie
ces that came from Asia and Africa and the Middle East and Europe and Polynesia. Plunder from around the world, she thought, the treasure of everywhere.

  Armenta smiled and folded his hands behind his back and took a formal step toward her, as if he were going to ask her to dance. “Do you like all of this?”

  “So much.”

  He nodded as if her answer didn’t matter. His face was lugubrious and his black eyes threw the sparkle of the jewels at her.

  “You are looking to be sick,” he said.

  “Can I sit down?”

  “Here.” With one stout arm Armenta swept a bin of rubies off one of the tables. They clattered brightly across the floor and Erin backed herself to the table and hoisted herself up. There she sat and hung her head and through the curtain of red hair stared down past her boots at the twinkling city of gemstones above which they dangled.

  “The most scared I’ve ever been before coming here was when all these tarantulas came crawling across the ground toward me. It was like they had sprouted out of the desert. They weren’t there and then they were everywhere. The males come out of holes looking for a mate. I don’t know why they all get to feeling that way at once. Like a bunch of guys heading for the honky-tonk after work on a Friday maybe. And every one of those spiders you had to multiply by eight on account of how each leg articulates slowly and separately when they walk, which divides your attention eight ways, which makes you eight times as scared. This was in Arizona. It reminds me of here. Every time I look at something I get scared more.”

  Armenta said nothing for a long while. He was moving from table to table, looking down at the booty. She could hear him toeing the fallen rubies or whatever other treasures had ended up on the floor. He was humming a Lila Downs song. She knew that this was the time to draw the gun and when he came closer she would shoot him. She edged the shawl away to free the gun and she willed her hand to take it, but her hand did not move.

  “Did a tarantula bite you?”

  “No.”

  “When I was young in Veracruz another boy kept a tarantula in a cigar box for an amusement. The boy was older and somewhat cruel. This was a black and red spider, and large. His father worked the docks and he brought Fernando a monkey and several birds and snakes and many exotic insects. Fernando carried it around in the box and he would hold it in his hand if you paid him. He dared me to hold the tarantula so I held my hand out and he carefully picked it up from the box and set it on my hand. It simply stood there. And then Fernando commanded the spider to bite. He said, morder! and the tarantula bit me. On the palm. Two marks. It did not hurt but I was very surprised. Fernando looked surprised too. My father said tarantulas cannot hear but I had proven him wrong.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I flung the spider into the air and beat Fernando with much force. I took my money back and all that was his also. After that, we were friends.”

  “I made friends with a girl who talked trash about me, but I never trusted her.”

  “In my business loyalty is often tested. And if a man or woman fails the test it is always obvious. In that way it is an honest business.”

  “I don’t like backstabbers. Maybe I can get into your line of work.”

  “I have one more thing to show you. But first I want you to choose one thing from this room and bring it with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Please just choose one thing you call beautiful. You will find this to be interesting.”

  Erin looked around and spotted a plate of what looked like solid silver, inlaid with black hummingbirds that might have been obsidian or onyx. It was propped up against the wall near a corner stacked with assault rifles. She wondered fleetingly if the assault rifles were loaded.

  “The silver plate.”

  “Taxco. You may pick it up.”

  She walked to the corner and knelt down and picked up the plate. When she straightened she again unwrapped the shawl and she felt the cool fresh air on her skin. My skin. The skin he will take. The plate was perfect cover, but she could not make her free hand move to the gun.

  “I’ll take this,” he said, picking up a silver candlestick that had rubies and the patina of history upon it. “Come now.”

  He led her from the room and down a hallway she didn’t recognize, and she saw the lepers’ quarters neat and organized. The lepers mostly ignored them but some looked up and acknowledged their benefactor, and Erin saw that some of their faces were untouched and others incomplete and there were missing fingers and missing hands and feet and a stillness about them that suggested preoccupation of the highest order.

  She followed him down the outside stairway and into the courtyard and he pushed open the sun-gate. He had been right, Erin saw—even in the moonlight the stainless steel shone hopefully. With the candlestick in one hand he led her across the sandy road and onto a jungle trail that wound through the trees.

  The trail to the cenote, she thought. Where Bradley would be waiting the day after tomorrow to steal her away from here. Then they could get word to Charlie. And he could do whatever he needed to leave this place alive. Money or not, she thought. The money wouldn’t matter. It was like God himself was showing her the way so she couldn’t miss it. A rehearsal. The day after tomorrow!

  The trail was easy to follow because it was white and the jungle was close and dark. She felt the smooth touch of the sea grape leaves and the tickle of ficus and she heard the shallow crunch of her shoes on the sand and the steps of the man up ahead. The trail branched once to the left then once to the right, as on Bradley’s map. They climbed a slight hill and the path went left again and then it ended in a wide flat clearing. In the middle of the clearing was an almost perfectly round body of black water. It shimmered in the heavy air, a ribbon of moonlight across its center.

  Just like on the map, she thought. I am here. I will be here in two days and we will escape.

  “It is very deep,” he said. “Thirty meters. The water comes up from the ground century after century. The Maya used it for drinking and irrigation and for sacrifice. The sacrificed person would be weighted with stone and jewels and gold and silver so the offering was more valuable to the gods. The gringo who built the Castle used breathing devices to remove some of the treasure. He did not want to sell it or give it to the government, so he buried it near the guard house. My workers discovered it when they dug a new trench for the sanitation system of the Castle.”

  “The statues and calendars and plates.”

  “And the chains of gold.”

  “The lepers watch over it.”

  “But I try to add to the treasure, not to take away from it. I like to make it grow. I like to multiply the sacrifice. I have thrown kilos and kilos of the treasure back into this cenote. And not only the original treasure, but gold watches and diamond rings and gold-plated pistols. The WBA welterweight belt belonging to Manny Mendez is down there. And the super-lightweight belt of Julio Serro. There is a gold-top Les Paul guitar once belonging to Carlos Santana that I purchased for a great price. There is a microphone used by Bonnie Raitt that I bought also. There are many Cartier and Rolex and Patek watches that have been paid to me. And one yellow Corvette that belonged to a beautiful American outlaw I admired. All in the water now.”

  “Why?”

  “For balance.”

  Armenta stepped closer to the ring of black water and he flung the silver candlestick high into the air. Erin saw the faint turn of it in the moonlight then heard the splash. She tried to draw the Defender, but her will was not enough. She watched the rings expand across the water. And she realized that in spite of the fact that he was evil and she was not, he was the stronger here and now. In spite of all the life she had to give, and all the life he had taken, he was the stronger for it.

  “Throw in the plate,” he said.

  She held the plate in both hands, testing its weight and balance, then reached back and unleashed it like a flying disc. It sailed briefly then sliced into the water and was gon
e.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “There is bad news about Charlie Bravo.”

  She felt her anger spike and her exhaustion return, but she said nothing.

  “He was difficult to understand on the telephone. Evidently he became lost in Mexico. He mistook Monterey for Merida and now the hurricane has closed the highways. So he cannot be here on the agreed day. Of course, he cannot get on an airplane with such money. He begged for your life.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Mrs. McKenna, I have never in my life been untruthful to a promise.”

  “So, on that day you kill me.”

  He looked at her for a long moment but his back was to the lowering moon and she couldn’t see his face. “However I am now willing to negotiate with you.”

  “So, negotiate.”

  “I will give Charlie Bravo one additional day to get here if you will write and record the song. It is to be about me and this time and place in which we live.”

  “I’ve never written a song in three days.”

  “The studio would be yours.”

  “The greatest narcocorrido ever written. In three days.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if I fail? What if you don’t like it?”

  “I ask for a work of your heart. Not for the heart itself.”

  “Or you take my skin.”

  He nodded as if annoyed. “Maybe you would like to walk from your room to the studio when you desire. Then go back to your room when you desire to go. You would have Owens to be your escort for these small journeys. And perhaps this freedom would help you write.”

  Erin felt emotions trying to form—hope, joy, gratitude, exultation. But they were only partial, still paralyzed by her fear. One more day to live was one more day to escape. One more day for Bradley to get here, if he was having any trouble at all. Take the day, girl. “You leave me no choice. Yes.”

  “I am very pleased. We shall now celebrate with a very good dinner. You will tell me about being a girl in Texas. And I will tell you about being a boy in Veracruz. Did you know that Veracruz means true cross? Because Cortez landed there on Good Friday in fifteen-nineteen. Four hundred and ninety-three years ago—the first European city in Mexico. Cortez brought flamenco and folklorico and violins and cellos and guitarons! Or, perhaps these came later. We will talk and talk and talk. Then you will begin the writing.”