by Richard Ford
“That demands that someone is killed,” Zago pronounced solemnly, staring up at him without blinking.
“Not to me it doesn’t,” Quinn said.
Zago let his thick hand rise and fall back on his thigh in exasperation. “Your friend is a goddamned son of a bitch,” he said. He caught a look at the flickering screen.
“I can’t help that,” Quinn said.
“He steals two kilos of Colombiano from me,” Zago said, still engrossed by the set.
“He says he got something in a hotel room and the immigration police took it off him at the airport. He said he doesn’t know how much was there.” He felt uncomfortable standing in the room with the old man paying only broken attention. It was another waste of time.
“Why would you be here, Señor Quinn, if that was so?” Zago said patiently. He placed his hand on his chest. “He received four and two are not at the air terminal. I am not wrong.”
“It’s not what he says,” Quinn said.
“And that is why you are here, Señor. Because what he says is not the truth. And you must help him.”
“Maybe your kid only delivered two,” Quinn said.
Zago looked at him and at Bernhardt, who had not uttered a sound. “No,” Zago said wearily and shook his head. “Not possible as a thought.” He sighed. “Do you want to get your brother out of the prisión, Señor?”
“That’s why I’m here,” Quinn said. There was nothing else to say.
Zago tampered with a knob below the TV screen. The picture flopped sideways, then went right. “Then you must tell your brother to return the Colombiano, ahorita. Quickly.” He nodded at his own words.
“What if you’re wrong?” Quinn said.
“Then your brother will be in the prisión until someone kills him. And that will not be too long.” Zago’s fingers fidgeted on his legs. “Señor Bernhardt is a good lawyer. But he cannot make miracles.”
“What about Deats?” he said. He was trying to locate Bernhardt in the transaction now, figure just when in the scheme Bernhardt had come to seem like a good idea to Zago.
“Mr. Deats has difficulties,” Zago said softly. “He can go on with his difficulties or we can stop them tonight. Depende.”
Zago was going to kill Deats no matter what, he could just take his time or hurry. That was all it came to. Whether Zago hurried or didn’t hurry. It was simple.
“And what if I don’t convince him?” Quinn said.
“I think he will be reasonable,” Zago said. “He will speak honestly to you. I have convinced him.” Zago stood. He wasn’t as big as the impression he gave sitting down, he was only slow and heavy-boned. “When I am young,” he said expansively, “I am myself a socialista, like you, like my wife.” He smiled as if the thought both pleased him and amused him. He put both his hands under his suspenders. “It is in my heart. But I found out it is necessary to work to live. My son is now at Stanford.” Bernhardt was opening the door behind them. He had not spoken. Zago extended his thick hand. “Happy dreams, Señor.” He smiled. “Y buena suerte.”
Something had been decided, and he wanted it clear. “What about Deats?” he said.
“Do not worry about Señor Deats,” Zago said consolingly. “He is no longer your problem. He is mine, now. And I will protect you.” He held out his hand and Quinn put his in Zago’s large warm palm. Nothing felt under his control. All his choices were made for him. Sonny had the only option that mattered anymore, and that was exactly, he figured, the way God intended it.
20
RAE STOOD BESIDE the Mercedes, waiting for Bernhardt. Quinn stood in the middle of the court, watching the garage door. There was a chill now that the floodlights couldn’t warm, but he didn’t want to get in the car yet. He was working through Sonny in his mind, figuring just exactly what the responsibilities were, at what point you had to bolt. Sonny was stringing it all out and he was having to put it back right. And that made him feel stupid and mad.
“Zago’s wife fucks Bernhardt,” Rae said calmly, tapping her fingers on the hood of the car.
“Is that it?” he said.
“It’s like he wants to believe she won’t surprise him anymore,” she said. “Except it worries him. It’s real queer. Maybe it’s just Mexicans.”
“Did you like the paintings?” he said. There was no use talking about it. If Bernhardt wanted to put that up as earnest money he could. Somebody always fucked somebody else, but nobody gave a shit.
Rae thought about the paintings for a moment. “They were just therapy,” she said without an edge. “She wanted to know if I loved you. She asked me if I thought love was visible and uncontingent. Isn’t that sweet?”
“What was your opinion?”
Rae turned toward the open end of the court where nothing was visible in the darkness. The question seemed to have an extra dimension. “I told her it was. I didn’t really take to her.” Rae seemed isolated in the court, almost unreachable. “What was Zago like?” she said.
“A grocer,” he said. “A fat old grocer.”
“His wife’s much younger,” she said.
The door opened and the Mexican in white shoes leaned out, holding the knob. Bernhardt emerged after him, and Quinn began walking toward the car.
“Sonny’s such an asshole,” Rae said. She was looking at where the stars should’ve been.
“We’re way past that now,” Quinn said.
“But I want you to know I know it,” she said and took his arm. “My motives weren’t very pure; you’re aware of that, aren’t you?”
“I’ve always suspected it,” he said. He opened the back door to let her in the car.
The lights at the army inspection had been turned out. Soldiers still lingered in the shadows, drinking mescal and gazing into the dark. Low lights glittered across the fields where the marginales had settled. Their effect was of great inertia, of no life, like a photo negative held to a dim light.
Bernhardt took a drink from his bottle and gave it over. The air in the car was cool. Rae had gone to sleep on the back seat.
“What is it like to wait?” Bernhardt said. He seemed at ease and drove with his elbow out the window.
“It’s boring,” Quinn said, “mucho boring.” The mescal made a warm place in his gut. It was smart to use it now. It would make him sleep without pills. Mescal was the pure distillate of drunkenness, and that’s what he wanted. It was worth risking bad dreams.
“Fastidioso,” Bernhardt corrected and smiled. “In Spanish, means to be too careful. Maybe you are too careful, see too narrowly.” Bernhardt looked out at the black highway. He was cheerful. “Your wife is beautiful, you have nice memories together, your senses are engaged, you should take pleasure in what’s pleasurable, not be bored.”
“Is that what you do?”
“If I can,” Bernhardt said agreeably. “It is a way to take perspective on good and evil.”
“O.K., so what’s evil?” Quinn said.
Bernhardt looked at him as if he should know the answer. “Feeling so bad,” he said and smiled.
“And what’s so good?”
“Not feeling so bad,” Bernhardt said, smiling more broadly. “I don’t think that’s the way you see it.” Bernhardt looked at him as though it was a joke.
“Was it tough finding me?” Quinn said.
The car neared the first confluence of city streets. Vapor lights drifted up the periférico, but there was no traffic. The empty boulevard opened wide and gaseous into the distance. The city was sealed. Bernhardt took his pistol from under the dash and put it inside his shirt. “You found me, I think,” he said. “No?”
“I want to know what your part is in all this, all right?” Quinn said. He wanted, for once, to see all the lines run back to origin. It was just a matter of seeing it done. That was all you could get out of it now.
“I am like you,” Bernhardt said briskly. He fingered the frame of his glasses so that they sat higher on his nose. “In by accidence.”
“You
’re not Zago’s man?”
“I work for you,” Bernhardt said confidently. “You find that impossible?”
“You didn’t know Sonny was asshole deep in with Zago? I’m supposed to conclude that?” He had hoped Bernhardt wouldn’t run it back this way.
“You pay me for what I know, Mr. Quinn,” Bernhardt said. “It’s possible to know a thing, suspect a thing, but not to be compromised.” He looked across the car amiably.
“Why make me see that boy, then?” Quinn said.
“For me,” Bernhardt said quietly. “I told you. You are in Vietnam, but this is a different thing. You need to see what you are involved in here. It’s better.” Bernhardt’s eyes were bright and glimmering. He took another strong drink of mescal. “You say you like to see things. You should trust me,” he said and smiled.
“Why did Zago zap him?” Quinn said.
“Señor Deats,” Bernhardt said authoritatively.
“Then how did you even know about it?”
“Someone says to me, there is a boy who is injured in the cabañas, I should be interested. It is a gesture. Señor Deats and Señor Zago have difficulties. I don’t know about them very much.”
“So what’s the mechanism?” Quinn said.
“Señor Zago trusts you,” Bernhardt said. “Your wife’s brother will be released, put to an airplane, and you will return to Señor Zago what he asks for. No holdups.”
“I trade myself, then,” Quinn said.
Bernhardt seemed sympathetic. “Sí. But. Then you will be asked to trust your amigo and not the dueño. He understands that. That is better too.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Then you should leave the country now,” Bernhardt said. “I wouldn’t blame you. You owe nothing to me.”
It seemed like the point he’d been working down to the whole time, the point of taking Sonny’s place, some necessary penance.
“Do you recognize the woman?” Bernhardt said. He seemed pleased with himself.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quinn said.
Bernhardt looked at the periférico without interest. “In the mansión. The woman there?”
“I didn’t recognize anybody,” Quinn said.
“Bueno,” Bernhardt said, and turned off the periférico up into the dark streets toward the Centro. They passed the calle de putas. Rae was sleeping still. Bernhardt glanced sideways, but the street was empty, and there were no lights burning along the little block of whores’ cribs. “But you do see what I risk for you, though. You see that? It’s as if we are friends.”
“Sure,” Quinn said. “That’s great.”
“That’s all that matters to me,” Bernhardt said. “That’s enough. Tell me what you dream about, Señor Quinn.”
“Getting out of here,” Quinn said. “I don’t have room for anything else.”
21
TWO WOMEN SAT in the Portal de Flores, drinking beers and talking in the blue fluorescence. They looked like English women. Something in the way they sat in their chairs, too straight, holding their beers with their fingers extended. The Centro was empty except for a few police and the soldiers in campaign coats shadowing the street corners. As they passed it, Quinn peered in through the pink, Moorish arches of the Monte Albán, where they would be in an hour. He thought, for some reason, he might see Deats there. Lights inside were blue and filmy, and he could see into the atrium, the skeletal dining tables set in lines. Nobody moved and there was nothing else to see.
“I need to telephone,” Bernhardt said in a businesslike way. “Then I drive to get your luggage.”
Bernhardt didn’t notice the soldiers. He turned past the university buildings up Cinco de Mayo and rolled noisily up the cobbles.
The streetlights here were pale and gauzy. A dim, prestorm clarity froze the façades and made the sky flat and seamless. There were no cars on the street and no one was walking. When the Mercedes stopped, the street was silent and Quinn listened for sounds in either direction and heard nothing until the air softly began a low sibilance that covered everything, like the night expiring.
“Momentito,” Bernhardt said. He smiled at Rae on the seat, and got out. He unlatched the steel shutters on his office, pushed up the door, and walked inside, switching on the lights.
The rooster and the carne carbón were gone. A scrim of papers was wadded against the façade, with the rock that had kept the rooster in its place used to hold the papers down. He watched Bernhardt at his desk, dialing the phone, looking silently out at the car. He could remember catching a frog in the saw grass along the Boardman River and bringing it home while his mother slept and letting it sit a long time in a pan of water on the back porch of the first house his father rented when they left the farm. He let the frog stay in the pan until late afternoon, when the frog had accustomed itself to the house air and grown calm. And when the frog stopped paddling and began to sit still for minutes at a time, he carried the pan in the house and down the hall to the kitchen and set it on the gas and lit the ring at the lowest flutter of flame and stood beside the stove and waited. The water in the pan began to heat at once, though the flame was low and the change was gradual. The frog sat in the water and looked up at him calmly and didn’t move. And little by little, he turned the knob and watched the flame fatten and turn bluer and the frog sit in the warming water looking out, blinking and breathing, though never moving, until suddenly a fizz sparked the edge of the water, and he saw that the frog would sit and stare out past the time when it could move even if it needed to, and he took the pan off the flame and held it under the kitchen tap and watched the frog blink and blink, its mouth opening a little and closing, beginning to paddle about until it could escape if the danger was from drowning and not from boiling. He thought later the frog in the pan was an illustration of how people let certain things they’re used to go on so long that they don’t know that the things they’re used to are killing them. And he wondered now, sitting in Bernhardt’s car, just when that point exactly was, and how you knew when it was close to you, and in the rare event you did know or could guess right, just what you did to keep yourself from getting burned.
A campesino turned the corner two blocks up Cinco de Mayo and started slowly down the hill toward the Centro. He was a small man in duck pants and a straw hat woven to give the brim a deep-swept country flange. He watched the man, noticed the way his feet moved near the ground, his gait regular and effortless as if he was accustomed to walking long distances. The man reminded him of the farmer with the goat in the palacio court the day before.
In the office Bernhardt had begun speaking into the telephone, watching the open door, his eyes moving. He picked up the letter opener and held it by the blade while he talked. There was no way to guess at the call, or its importance. It could be something else, and Quinn looked back at the campesino, who had crossed the Avenue Absalo and stopped under a lamp, gazing back up Cinco de Mayo as if he was searching for an address he had lost. The campesino had a rough beard, but his shoulders were loose and his head was erect and he was young. He stood in the streetlight ten meters ahead of the Mercedes, peering disconsolately back up into the darkness of the avenue, and Quinn could hear again, then, the low sibilance in the street, the soft ventral suspiration of any city, Chicago in the blue morning. Detroit deserted at the moment the sun set. It was the sound of sleep, and it put you at ease.
The campesino started suddenly toward the Centro, his sandals slapping the pavement quickly, though as he came in front of Bernhardt’s office his head turned as if he’d been surprised by the light, and his hands seemed to move excitedly under his poncho. There was a sudden loud expectoration of noise then, and the campesino was wrenched forward barging into the open door. The view to the office became lost then, but the light licked out either side of the man, printing him in the doorway as if he had stepped behind a shade. Quinn yelled into the whacking of the machine gun, but the campesino seemed to get smaller and kept the gun pointed in the off
ice the entire time. There was a fountain of metal shot away from the man’s body, and then suddenly it stopped. And for a moment, almost a leisurely moment, there was no movement and no sounds anywhere, and it was as though what had happened, something he hadn’t even seen or been sure of, hadn’t happened, and everything remained the way it had been just a moment before.
Rae was crawling across the back seat on her knees, trying to reach the floor. He grabbed her head, losing his breath, and caught her front and back and squeezed until he could feel movement go back in a shudder down her spine. He put his face in her face and shook his head no. Rae’s eyes were large and expanding, her hair was falling around his hands, but she understood and went limp.
When he looked back the campesino was up Cinco de Mayo running toward the streetlight. He turned the corner onto the Avenue Absalo, where he had stopped a minute ago in the light, and disappeared. On the pavement there was half a gun of some kind with a long clip out the side and no stock, something Quinn imagined at that moment would be very hard to fire well. It had a length of cord tied to the barrel and the trigger guard, and it was rocking back and forth on the clip butt. There was a heavy odor of eggs fried too long on dry metal. And the time seemed to pass in a kind of dreamy slowness. Bernhardt was still inside the office, though the light there seemed much brighter and the air in the street too warm. Bernhardt had moved from where he had been. He was against the back wall and to the right, nearly out of the door frame. His pistol was lying in the middle of the floor in front of the clients’ chairs. His shirt was torn across the front and he was bleeding onto his arms. His face seemed unperturbed, but he was lying in a strange leg-over-hip position that Quinn recognized, and that no one who was alive would try to maintain. Bernhardt’s hand was tapping the tile floor spastically, but that movement didn’t mean anything.
He had squeezed Rae’s face until it was cold and there was a heavy faintness on her he could smell and that suddenly seemed suffocating. He shoved her up and toward the car door and said, “Out, get out,” and began struggling to get himself into the street.
