“Well, here it is. You were right about the age of this thing; it’s fifteen years old.”
“Could you send it over by messenger?”
“I’d feel better if Carl were here; if he had mentioned it to me.”
“I’m sure he just forgot, Angie. He’s got a lot on his mind. If there’s any question at all, I’ll take the blame.”
“Okay, Neil, if you say so. It’s on the way.”
A young man in biking shorts, black leather gloves, and headphones that didn’t quite connect with his ears showed up shortly with the contract. It was an interesting document, fifteen years old, a profit sharing incentive plan and an option agreement. When the mine made a profit, Monogal received a percentage, and that percentage was applied toward an option to buy the place; he had fifteen years to come up with the full purchase price. It seemed generous enough: the manager was encouraged to manage and rewarded for his efforts eventually with ownership of the mine. It was drawn up at a time when nobody thought a remote gold mine in Lagrima would be worth much, when gold mining was pretty much a gentleman’s hobby, interesting maybe on a portfolio, but not where the big ones were made. Of course, it would be impossible to estimate the value of anything fifteen years in advance, so the agreement said the price, to be determined at the time the option was exercised, would be “fair market value.” In other words, whatever a ready and able buyer was willing to pay.
The fifteen years were just about up—they ended tomorrow, in fact—and Esterbrook had his buyer, the federal government, ready, willing and able to pay several million dollars more than Monogal could. It was a lot of money, but they had it, and they were getting a unique property, one whose geological formations supposedly made it suitable for storing nuclear waste forever. There weren’t many areas like that around, and hardly any where the locals would welcome a nuclear dump for a neighbor. If they didn’t like Peter’s price, the government could probably have taken the property by the law of eminent domain and gotten it for less, but it would have been a lengthy process and this way they had that consummate politician, Carl Roberts, on their side.
******
The Mother Lode was the right place at the right time for the element of the nineteenth century (gold) to be replaced by the element of the twentieth (plutonium), and Andrew Monogal had just about lost control of it. This is what it all came down to, the basis of so many law practices: real estate and greed. It must have been option money already paid that Peter had so generously agreed to give back to Monogal yesterday in his study: it wasn’t enough.
I picked up the phone and called the shop. “Could you do a job for me, Kid? It’s a favor, but it’s still a job. You’ll get paid for it, and well, too.”
“You don’t have to pay me. I do you a favor anyway.”
I explained what I wanted, but that he’d have to figure out how to do it. “You’ll have to leave immediately,” I said. Lagrima was two hundred twenty-five miles away, but the Kid could make it in three hours without even working up a sweat. “And when you get back be sure to report to me right away.” I told him where to look if I wasn’t home.
“Don’t worry, I find you.”
He didn’t ask how much he’d get, although I knew he’d do it. But why? For love?
“For the adventure,” he said.
Next I dialed the number of the Mother Lode office in town and asked for Monogal.
“May I tell him what the call is in reference to?” his secretary asked.
“He’ll know,” I replied.
Monogal came on the line. “Well, well. Ms. Hamel.” He must have had one of those speaker phones that you can stand and yell at from across the room. It made him sound like he was speaking from the bottom of a tunnel. The echo effect emphasized the coarseness of his voice and an accent that he hadn’t bothered to lose. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“I’d like to talk to you in person.”
“How about this evening? This evening will be an excellent time to meet you, the best of all possible times. Be here at six. I am on Uptown.”
“Where? In the Darth Vader building?” It was a recent addition to the Albuquerque skyline, a slab of black glass that reminded some people of Pueblo pottery.
He laughed. “Next door. The Mother Lode Building.”
18
I DICTATED MY suspicions onto a tape and left the tape for Carl. I pushed papers around for a while and at five forty-five I put them back in their files. It was a fifteen-minute drive to the Mother Lode’s office. In fifteen minutes I could have been out of the city, heading due west on I-40, out there where painted mesa meets celluloid sky, a quarter of an hour closer to Arizona. In fifteen minutes the Kid would be waiting near the gold mine and Carl would just be arriving. In fifteen minutes I could be right where I was now, .25 hours of billing time closer to Judy Bates’s first divorce. In fifteen minutes I was in the lobby of the Mother Lode Building, pushing the button for nine, the top floor. Somebody had to.
The elevator opened directly onto the reception area and that room alone would have swallowed up Hamel and Harrison whole. The walls were paneled in dark wood with decorative moldings and a carpet of Sherwood Forest green. The receptionist’s desk had a brass lamp with a green glass shade. The remaining light came from an office that opened onto the reception room, and through the open doorway I could see a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling peach and lavender New Mexico sky.
“Good evening,” Andrew Monogal said from the depths of that offíce.
He was sitting at his desk, silhouetted massive and jowly against the setting sun. It hurt looking into the sun, so I turned toward the wall, where I saw a map of the Mother Lode and next to it glass shelves full of ore samples, hunks of rock: red rock, black rock, brown rock, petroleum green rock; lined and flecked and mapped with gold. It was as if Monogal had ordered the sunset just to illuminate the gold.
“This is my favorite time of day. Be seated, please,” he said, playing with a pencil stub, rolling it back and forth between his thick fingers.
It wasn’t necessarily mine. I like to watch sunsets, but I don’t like them looking at me. The New Mexico sun finds years you haven’t even thought of yet. Every time the sun illuminated another vein of gold it etched another year on my face. The longer I sat on the other side of his desk, the older I felt. I lit a cigarette and added a few more years now, a few subtracted down the road. “Do you think you could close the drapes?” I asked.
“The sun will be gone in a minute, but for now take a look at the gold. You see, in the morning, when the sun is on the other side of the building, those rocks are just rocks. It takes insight to see the gold.” His accent was just as unpleasant in person as it had been over the phone.
“You love the mine, don’t you?” The sun slipped a little lower in the sky, climbed a little higher up the wall.
“It has been my life for forty years. Look at that.” Just then the sun climbed to the top shelf and illuminated a dazzling hunk of ore.
He would lose all this—the grandiose office, the magnificent view, the alchemy in the afternoon. The sun climbed off the ore up to the ceiling and dropped behind West Mesa. He went from a gray silhouette to a gray human, surrounded by gold that had turned to stone.
“You and Peter Esterbrook go back a long time, I hear.”
“A long, long time.”
“To your childhood in Austria?”
“Yes. We were distant relatives, but I was the farm boy. Peter grew up in the village, more privileged than I even then. I became a Nazi. Does that surprise you?”
A man with his looks and charm? “No.”
“Peter could have had a brilliant career in the Third Reich. He was blond, handsome, well educated; he had the temperament for it. He probably would have become a general while I remained a soldier, but he saw the writing on the wall and he got out in time. Peter has a knack for getting out in time.” Monogal was in a talkative mood, provoked by something. I wondered what: the twilight atmosphere,
an attentive audience, a sense of accomplishment in a job well done? “Peter thought the Nazis were doomed to fail,” he continued. “He saw the opportunities in America and he abandoned his country. I stayed, I served, I watched Austria die. When the war was over, I followed the path that he had made across South America and I tracked him down here. I was penniless; he was already successful, with a beautiful wife, a mine, an import-export business. I went to work for him at the mine. I worked there for him for almost forty years.”
With a past like that, there probably wasn’t much else he could do.
“But I don’t suppose you came here to talk about my youth, did you?”
Maybe I had: the golden boy, the awkward friend; the greyhound and the bulldog; the runner, the latcher-on; the envied, the envious. Forty years in the shadow of Peter Esterbrook could ruin anybody’s disposition.
“Has anyone ever told you that you, um, resemble a bulldog?’’ I said.
He smiled. That is, he rolled back his jowls and revealed teeth that were stubby and broken off, as if he had bitten down on something often and hard. “I have been called that on occasion. But we all have pet names, don’t we, Ms. Hamel? Sometimes we like them, sometimes we don’t. Now, just why did you come to see me?”
I didn’t get to do it very often, but I still remembered how. In every cross-examination there is a time to parry, a time to jab. I went for it. “Because you killed Señor Menendez-Jimenez,” I said.
He tipped the pencil up and began tapping the point against his desk. “Menendez-Jimenez, indeed. And what makes you think that?”
“You had the motive, you left the trail. On April seventh, when Peter was away, Menendez called Esterbrook Farms and talked to you.”
“April seventh. Why would I remember that? Do you remember what you did on April seventh?” He smiled another stubby-toothed grin.
“As a matter of fact, I do. Menendez told you I was coming to see him and you had to find out why. On April ninth right before I went back to his office, he was killed. Your name was on his desk calendar, and you were the last person he saw.”
“My name on his desk calendar? I don’t believe that.” Tap, tap, went the pencil stub.
“El perro dogo. That means the bulldog, in case you didn’t know.”
“Is that so? How very interesting. My Spanish, I will admit, is not very good, but I never saw the necessity to learn when there are people like yourself to interpret for me. You can hardly consider what you have told me as proof of anything.”
Maybe, but he stabbed at the desk so hard just then that the pencil point snapped and broke off, as it had when he wrote the notes.
“You wrote those notes,” I said. “When Menendez saw the note he connected it to you—something in your writing, maybe, your style—and he guessed what you were up to. That’s why he asked me back that evening, to tell me. You killed him so he wouldn’t reveal your sick scheme to me or to Peter.”
“I didn’t know you had such a strong imagination.”
“And just what do you know about me?” It gets dark quickly in New Mexico once the sun has finished its dance. Shadows were already creeping into the room.
“Enough.”
“More than enough. I’ve been followed, you broke into my apartment and stole the file from my office, and then you tried to run me down in Bailey’s parking lot. The ‘chick’ doesn’t much enjoy being pressed into the pavement, you know. The gold mine was your baby, wasn’t it? And it was being stolen from you. You knew if Carl were scared out of running, the government would be in no hurry to negotiate with Peter. Carl’s campaign was the leverage Peter had with the government, the cog in his machine. Carl is the only candidate in favor of WIPP. The government might be able to push the project through without him, but it would be a whole lot harder. With Carl in the race, Peter insisted that the deal be consummated now, because it would be unseemly for negotiations to drag on while Carl was campaigning, or, even worse, after he was in office. So Peter used Carl’s campaign to get a bid from the Energy Department, a bid you’d never be able to match, making it impossible for you to exercise your option. I have a copy of that option, and I see that it expires at noon tomorrow.”
“Where did you get that?” he snapped. The lights of Albuquerque began coming on one by one. People were going home, turning their TVs on, putting dinners in the microwave.
“I have connections. You worked very hard at that mine, didn’t you? And it almost paid off. Who would have ever thought that ‘fair market value’ would turn out to be nine million dollars? Who would have thought there would even be another buyer? Peter probably found the only one in the world willing to pay big bucks for that place. You had fifteen years to come up with the money, and if you had only had the foresight and ability to do it before WIPP came along, you might be the one negotiating for nine million dollars. Your old buddy screwed you, and in return you left the door to Shep’s pen unlatched, knowing he was Peter’s most unreliable dog. You thought saving Eduardo would divert any suspicion from you and maybe scare Carl out of running and that Peter would reward you with what you thought you deserved. He said he’d give the money you’ve already paid back, but it’s not nearly enough, is it? Not when he’s getting nine million dollars.”
“Very inventive, Ms. Hamel. Any more suppositions?”
“Just one. I think you will try to prevent the mine from changing hands tomorrow.”
“Most interesting of all. And how do you propose that I will do that?”
“I imagine in your long career you have learned something about explosives. But if you think you are going to damage anyone at the mine, if you think you are going to make Celina the heir and then convince her to turn it over to you, you are wrong. No one is going to set foot in there tonight. I’ve seen to that.”
Monogal was a volcano that had lain dormant for too many years; he was about to erupt and spill hot lava all over whatever got in his way—the desk, the blotter, me.
“You bitch,” he said. “You meddling fucking bitch! That man has everything, and what have I got after forty years? That mine belongs to me. I was the one who made it work. I offered Peter a reasonable price, I offered him everything I had, but it was not enough. He’s selling it out from under me. However, you should be careful what you begin Ms. Hamel; you never know where it will end. You think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”
No, I didn’t. There were too many pieces marked gold mine in this puzzle, too few marked Nellie, not one marked little boy. “Not everything,” I said. “Why, for example, did your scheming revolve around Eduardo?”
He flicked a switch on his desk and a sharp, little light pushed the gathering shadows away and crowded them into the corners of the room. “Because Edward is Peter’s son,” he said. “Does that surprise you?”
The perfection of the father visited on the son. It didn’t please me, but it didn’t surprise me, either.
“The mother is Elena, a girl in Mexico, the most beautiful of all of Peter’s girls. Being a Christian has never stopped Peter from liking girls. He talked her into giving up the boy. He told her Eduardo would have a better life in the States, but he didn’t tell her that he was giving the boy to his own daughter.”
“You’ve told her that?”
“Not yet. He is a very handsome boy, isn’t he? A great joy to Peter. Peter had everything in life but a son, until Eduardo came along. Now he has everything.”
I looked at the clock on Monogal’s desk. Peter and Carl would be at the mine by now and the Kid would be waiting for them. It would be three hours before they got back.
“Maybe you’ve ruined my first plan, but I still have an option, you know.” He was rolling the pencil stub again, back and forth across the desk.
No one would be at Esterbrook Farms with Eduardo but Celina, Emma, and Lupe. No one between Monogal and his “option” but me.
“You can’t be considering that.”
“No? And why not? It’s very simple, I have wha
t’s his, he has what should be mine. He can turn the mine over to me, or I can take Eduardo back to Mexico to his mother. The choice is Peter’s now.” It was a twisted scheme, but what could you expect from someone who for one brief, shining moment thought the Third Reich was Camelot? “I’m not going to let you stop me, you know.”
“There are people who know where I am: my partner, my friend. I left a tape for Carl.”
“By the time he gets it…”
That’s why he had bared his jealous soul: I was there to listen, but I wouldn’t be leaving to tell. He opened his desk drawer. Bulldog also happens to be the name of a pistol, and he had one of those, too—shiny, blue-black, snub-nosed and ugly.
The time had come to pull out my weapon, but all I carried were my powers of persuasion, my quick tongue. “No,” I said, “don’t.” It wasn’t enough.
I pushed myself out of my chair in time to meet the pistol butt on its way down. The blow reverberated inside my head and sent me spinning into a starry void. The last thing I heard was a demented chuckle; the last thing I saw was his broken-toothed smile.
19
I WOKE UP in a hard, dark place tight as a shell, with no room to stand up, roll over, or even to pound on the wall and scream. Any part of me that didn’t hurt was numb. It was tight and claustrophobic in there and I wanted out, except that it didn’t sound too good on the outside either. At a distance at first, and then closer, I heard the shrill yapping of nervous and excited dogs. Caught between a hard place and a snarling dog, I sank into unconsciousness again. When I awoke my shell was bouncing and shaking, slamming me against the walls, sending ripples of pain through my head. It was moving, at a reckless clip, too, but at least it was taking me away from the dogs. I’ve always hated the sound of barking dogs; I hate it even more now.
The movement stopped. Then the shell jerked and popped open suddenly and I was exposed, a shucked clam, slimy and dull. A flashlight was shining in my face.
North of the Border Page 14
