"But it could be cracked," I said.
"By someone resourceful enough who found it worth the cost," Santiago said. "So far I have not."
"But I might," I said.
"Perhaps."
The car stopped at an intersection, then turned left. We passed an abandoned gas station, the pumps gone, the glass out, and the doors to the repair bay gone. Inside, a group of men gathered around the empty pit where the lift used to be. They were boisterous and excited. Above their excitement were the sounds of animals.
"Dog fight," Chollo said.
"Si," Santiago said. "They put them in the pit and they bet."
"Fun," I said. "What do the dogs get out of it?"
"The winner lives," Santiago said.
We drove on. At the top of the small rise, at the intersection of two silent streets, we stopped. Across from us was a complex of three-storied, flat-roof tenements. Most of the windows were boarded up, though in some there were small openings as if someone had cut a square in the plywood. The clapboard siding on the buildings was probably painted gray once, but it was now peeled down to its weatherstained wood, warping in many places. The windowsills were beginning to warp and splinter as well.
"Those four buildings," Santiago said, "are Luis Deleon's castle."
The alleys between the buildings had been closed off with plywood so that the four buildings formed a kind of enclosed quadrangle. I wondered if Lisa was in there. If she were, it was a different living arrangement than she'd had in Jamaica Plain in the squeaky-clean condo with the Jenn-Air stove and the Jacuzzi.
"If he has the Anglo princess," Santiago said, "he has brought her here."
"But you don't know if he has her," I said.
"It pains me to say this. I know almost everything that happens in Proctor. But this I do not know."
"We need to know," I said. "And we need to know under what circumstances."
"Circumstances?"
"We need to know if she's there because she wants to be, or she's been kidnapped," I said.
"You think an Anglo woman would not wish to come here, with a Latin man?" Santiago said.
"They tell me she would have once," I said. "I need to know if she did now."
"Take more than love for me to move there," Chollo said.
Santiago shrugged. Beyond the derelict tenements, eastward toward the ocean there was a loud clap of thunder, and after it, the shimmer of lightning against a dark cloud that piled high above the roof tops. The rest of the day remained vernal.
"Vamanos!" Santiago said to the driver.
"Let's go," Chollo translated for me.
"I sort of got that one," I said. "Especially when we started right up."
Chollo said nothing. But his eyes were amused.
"What do you think?" Santiago said, facing back toward me.
"You figure if Deleon were out of the way, someone could unite all the Hispanic people into one effective block?"
"Yes," Santiago said. "I do."
"And whoever did that could control the city and the dead whale would be all his."
"Not a pretty way to say it, but this also is true."
"You got anybody in mind to play Toussaint L'Ouverture?"
"Of course it is me, Senor."
"So if I took Deleon out for you it would be a considerable favor."
"You believe you could?"
"If I have reason to."
"You are a confident man."
"I've been doing this kind of work for a long time," I said. "But I need to know what the situation is in there."
"And if I were able to tell you?"
"I wouldn't believe you."
"Be careful what you say to me," Santiago said.
"Nothing personal," I said. "But you know as well as I do that you could crack that place in an hour. You don't do it, because you are working really hard on being the hero of Hispanic Proctor, and you don't want to screw it by blowing up same of your own people. On the other hand, if you could find a few tough gringos to come in and do the job…" I shrugged my best impression of an eloquent Latin shrug.
"It would be cost effective," Santiago said.
"Yes it would, so if you tell me Lisa St. Claire is in there, and being held against her will, and I get her out and dump Deleon in the process, it comes out Jim Dandy for you. So why wouldn't you lie and tell me she is in there?"
"I told you I didn't know," Santiago said.
"Yeah," I said. "This helps your credibility. But a good hustle starts with letting the sucker win a little, doesn't it?"
Santiago smiled.
"So you won't trust me?"
We were out of San Juan Hill now, heading back south, toward the river. The streets were a little wider, but just as shabby. The black car behind us had dropped back a little.
"As one of our great leaders put it," I said, "trust, but verify."
We were getting close to Club del Aguadillano. I had the rear window down a little and the sour chemical smell of the river drifted in. I could hear the sound of the falls in the distance. Santiago smiled pleasantly, without any warmth.
"And just how do you plan to… `verify'?"
"Lemme get back to you on that," I said.
There was no natural day and night for her. She slept, she woke up. He was there, he was not there. This time he was not there, but there was a tray in the room, sliced tomato, a warm tortilla, and a thermos of coffee. Coffee. It must be morning. She sat on the side of the bed wearing pajamas supplied by him, slightly oversized, like the kind Doris Day wore in Pillow Talk. The video monitors were playing soundlessly. She had no idea how they turned on or off She saw herself naked in the shower, and then walking naked from the shower straight into the camera. It played over and over again. There was always something playing on the video monitors. The shower scene, the scene of her bound in the back of the truck, the earlier scenes of herself and Luis at the beach. Scenes of her in her flapper costume, scenes of her asleep, all looped to play over and over, beacons of captivity in the darkened space. I need a weapon. On her breakfast tray was a spoon, fork, and butter knife. Nothing very deadly there. She'd read about people in jail making weapons out of sharpened spoons. She picked the spoon up and looked at it. She looked around the room. She had no idea how she would sharpen it. She poured some coffee and put in two spoonfuls of sugar. Outside the building she heard a rolling thunderclap. It excited her. It came from the world outside this room, away from the monitors. A world of movement and color, of sound and possibility; a world going sanely about its business, ducking into doorways, turning up coat collars, opening umbrellas as the rain began.
"You son o f a bitch," she said aloud. "You can't keep me here."
She ignored the tomato and picked up the tortilla.
She folded it twice and took a bite and began to walk around the room, chewing, looking for a weapon. The lamp was too puny looking. He was very strong, she knew. There was a floor lamp, but it had a skinny shaft and a wide, heavy base and was too unwieldy to be useful. She got down on her hands and knees and looked under the. bed. There were bed slats holding up the box spring. They were a possibility, but they were rough, flat pine boards that were hard to swing or even hold. On her feet again, she finished the tortilla. The wardrobe was full of clothes on wire hangers. The theater flats that decorated the room were mostly plywood and canvas. Nothing she could pull off and use. Behind the flats, the walls they were concealing were crumbling plaster over lath. In many places, wide patches of the plaster had crumbled away entirely, exposing the scaly gray-white lath beneath it. Here and there, in the diminish light from the lamp and the monitors, she could see vestigial scraps of old wallpaper, some several layers thick. Besides the roach powder, she could smell the tired mildew scent of an old building. She went into the bathroom. The back of the sink was bolted to the wall. The front rested on two chrome front legs. She felt one of them; they felt solid; she tried to wiggle it; nothing happened. She wished she knew something about how things
were made. How would they attach those legs? She turned it. It gave a little. She turned again. Of course, they screwed on, that way they could level the sink. She carefully unscrewed it, and when it came away from the sink, she found that it was an iron pipe, encased in a chrome sleeve. She hefted the pipe. Yes! Then she carefully propped the chrome sleeve back up under the sink and took her iron pipe and hid it under her mattress. "Now we'll see, you bastard," she said. But she said it soundlessly.
Chapter 28
Chollo and I sat in my car in the easy spring sunshine, drinking coffee and looking at Luis Deleon's redoubt. There was a bag of plain donuts on the seat between us. "What you think you'll see?" Chollo said.
He was slouched in my front seat, one foot propped against my dashboard. He always looked comfortable, even in uncomfortable positions.
"We got three possibilities," I said. "She's not in there at all. She's in there under duress, or she's in there not under duress. If she's in there and she's not under duress, I figure sooner or later she'll come out. Go for bread, buy a dress, go to a restaurant, walk the neighborhood, soak up the ambience."
"I been in jails got better ambience," Chollo said. "And if she is under duress-man I love the way you gringos talk-she won't come out."
"Right."
Chollo drank some coffee and rummaged in the bag for another donut.
"And if she's not in there at all, she won't come out."
"Right."
"So we see her, we'll know something."
"And if we don't, after a while, we'll have narrowed the possibilities from three to two."
"So how long you figure we'll sit here?"
I shrugged. Chollo found his donut and took a bite.
"How come it takes you all that time to find the right donut?" I said. "They're all the same."
"No two donuts are alike," Chollo said. "You had Indio blood you'd understand."
We looked at the house. A tall guy with a Pancho Villa moustache wearing a faded tan windbreaker and a San Antonio Spurs cap on backward leaned in the doorway. Chollo put his empty coffee cup on the floor and opened his door.
"I'm going to reconnoiter," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "Use that Indio blood, look for a sign."
Chollo got out of the car, closed the door, put his hands in his pockets, and strolled toward the tenement compound. I sat and worked on the coffee. Decaffeinated, with cream and sugar. If you drank some and then took a bite of donut, it wasn't so bad. In a while someone came to the door of the house and replaced the guy with the Pancho Villa moustache. The new guard was a fat young guy with a shaved head and an earring I could see from across the street. He was wearing unlaced high top black basketball shoes and a hooded red sweatshirt with the hood casually hanging to highlight the earring, and baggy pants with an extreme peg and the crotch at about knee low. The sweatshirt gapped over his belly and I could see the handle of an automatic pistol showing above his belt. As they changed places both guards looked over at my car. I didn't mind. If I stirred up interest maybe something would happen. Anything would be progress. Nothing happened.
I ate another donut. Susan had explained to me that they were not healthful, and while I was in favor of healthful, rice cakes and coffee didn't do it on a stakeout. Susan had explained to me that it didn't have to be rice cakes or donuts. Why not bring along a nice lettuce, tomato, and bean sprout sandwich? I told her if Chollo reached into the bag for a donut and found a bean sprout he would shoot me, and she'd have only herself to blame for her sexual deprivation. She smiled at me sadly and began to talk to Pearl.
The door opened and Chollo got back in. He reached into the backseat for the big thermos and poured himself some coffee.
"This is the real stuff, right," he said. "In the tan thermos?"
"Yeah," I said.
I tried not to sound sullen. The decaf in the blue thermos was very satisfying.
"Place is a quadrangle, four tenements, all of them three stories, all of them connected by walkways from the third-floor back porches. The alleys between are walled up with plywood, and there's sandbags behind the plywood. There's some sort of wire fencing around the roof. It looks like they're growing plants up there. The windows are boarded up, with gun ports in them. There's a guard on one of the back porches, can see the whole interior of the quadrangle. There's at least one guy on the roof."
He sipped some coffee and made too much of how good it tasted.
Then he said, "I can hear kids in the yard in the center of the quadrangle. I could smell cooking."
"So it's not just pistoleros," I said.
"No."
"Doesn't make it easier," I said.
Chollo shrugged. We sat and looked at the tenement complex. Every hour, the guard at the front door changed. Each time, the new guard and the old one stared at the car for a time.
"Sooner or later," I said, "they are going to have to come over and ask us what we're doing."
"Sure," Chollo said.
We looked at the tenements some more. We were out of donuts and the coffee was gone. In the front seat beside me Chollo was quiet, his eyes half closed, his hands folded in his lap. I imagined myself from some distant perspective sitting in the car in the spring in a destitute city with a Mexican shooter whose full name I didn't even know. I also didn't know if I was looking for a runaway wife, or a woman who'd been kidnapped. Of course it could be neither. She could have been murdered, or died accidentally, or suffered a sudden stroke of amnesia. She could be in the tenement in front of me wearing black lace and serving champagne in her slipper, or chained in the cellar. Or she could be on a slab in some small town morgue. Or she could be in Paris, or performing with the circus in Gillette, Wyoming. All I knew for sure was that she wasn't sitting in my car with me and Chollo eating donuts.
Across the street a tall, thick-bodied man with a ponytail and a dark moustache came out onto the porch and talked with the guard. They both looked at my car. Then the thick-bodied man started down the stairs with the guard.
"Here they come," I said. "Sooner."
Chollo didn't stir, though his eyes opened slightly. "Want me to shoot them?" he said.
"Not today."
"We going to talk to them?"
I started the car.
"No," I said. "Maybe next time. This time we'll run and hide."
"Okay," Chollo said and his eyes slitted again.
I put the car in drive and we left the two men standing in the middle of the street looking after us.
Chapter 29
I was in an eighteenth-century historical reconstruction called Old Sturbridge Village with Pearl and Susan. We were getting ideas for rehabbing our Concord house. Or at least Susan and I were. Pearl's interest seemed focused on several geese on the mill pond near the covered bridge. She went into her I-am-a-hunting-dog crouch and began to stalk very slowly toward them, freezing after each step, her nose pointing, her tail steady, one foot off the ground in the classic stance. "What do you think she'd do," Susan said, "if we let her off the leash?"
"She'd stalk closer and closer and then she'd dash in and grab one by the neck," I said. "And give it a vigorous shake to break the neck and when it was dead she'd tear open its belly and begin to feed on its intestines."
"The baby? That's barbaric."
"Blood lust," I said.
Susan bent over and gave Pearl a kiss on the snout. Pearl gave her a large lap. Susan put her hands over Pearl's ears.
"Don't listen to Daddy," Susan said.
We took Pearl to the car after a while so we could go into the houses and other displays. There was a sign which said any dogs brought into the buildings had to be carried. Pearl weighed seventy-two pounds, and tended to squirm.
"I could carry her," I said.
"Of course you could, sweet cakes, and you wouldn't even break a sweat. But she likes to sleep in the car."
"Oh, all right," I said.
It was a cool, pleasant weekday and there were busloads of children shepher
ded by too few adults, jostling through the still village lanes, and milling around waiting for the snack bar in the tavern to open. A guy in breeches and boots and a white shirt and a high, crowned, funny-looking straw hat was spreading manure in a ploughed pasture.
"You want me to get one of those hats?" I said. "I could wear it when we made love."
"Depends on where you were going to wear it," Susan said.
We went into a large white house with clapboard siding.
"This is the parsonage," a lady said to us. She was wearing a mobcap and an ankle-length dress and seemed to incarnate eighteenth-century farm life.
"If you lived here you'd be the parson of that church there on the hill," she said.
"That would be a mistake," I said.
"Pardon me?"
I smiled and shook my head.
"The parsons were stern men, but good men," the woman said.
Susan smiled at her and we went into the parlor and looked at the way the blue-painted paneling was finished around the brick fireplace.
"You think all the parsons were stern?" I said.
"Of course," Susan said.
"And all of them were good men despite their sternness?"
"Absolutely."
"Did any of them get to sleep with a sexy Jewess?" I said.
"Nope."
"No wonder they were stern," I said.
We went down the back stairs into the kitchen. It had a massive brick fireplace with a granite lintel. There was a fire on the hearth and a huge black pot on a black wrought-iron arm was swung out over the heat. I smelled cooking. Another woman in a mobcap was putting bread into the beehive oven next to the fireplace. I remembered Frank Lloyd Wright's remark about the fireplace being the heart of a house. Susan and I stood quietly for a moment, feeling the past creep up behind us briefly, and then recede. I looked at my watch.
"Twelve-fifteen," I said. "Tavern's open."
"Yes," Susan said. "You've done very well. I know it's been open since eleven-thirty."
"Hey," I said. "I'm no slave to appetite."
"Umm," Susan said.
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