The Return: A Novel

by Michael Gruber

  But in fact her father had purchased a large property from his former, or maybe not so former, girlfriend, said property located in her mother’s hometown. The whole transaction stank of weirdness, of crazy male menopausal hijinks, the kind of life-destroying error that dutiful daughters were supposed to save their batty dads from. And where did he get that money? Ponzi schemes and embezzlements—these went with the evidence of a secret life with Señora Ibanez. Her stomach lurched as she contemplated the notion that the beloved dad was not what he seemed, perhaps was a hidden monster like you read about in exposé biographies.

  To distract herself from these disturbing thoughts, Statch called Karen Liu at the lab.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m still in New York. Anything going on at the lab?”

  “It’s been insane. Schue got us all together today and said we’re going to reboot the whole project, or at least the transport part of it, and convert to moxel surfaces. He was foaming in his teeth, Statch. I never saw him like that before.”

  “At the mouth. He was foaming at the mouth. What’s everyone else doing?”

  “Oh, tearing their hairs. We have an initial design for the moxel unit sketched out and we are waiting for the first prototype. You really should be here. Schue is unhappy with you, I think.”

  “Well, yes, but I have this family crisis that I can’t get out of.”

  “Yes, family is the most important. I would leave in one minute if it was my family having bad times.”

  “Yeah. Look, keep me informed, okay? Email me the designs, and if you have any problems you want me to work on, let me know.”

  Crazy, she thought after she’d ended the call; I have to get back there right now. But in the event, it turned out that the Marder apple had not fallen far from the tree after all, for when she reached Kennedy that evening, instead of taking the Boston shuttle she had the driver take her to Mexicana, and she bought a seat on the first available flight to Mexico City. She had only the one small bag, but she had to check it because of the gun.

  * * *

  Marder told Señora Montez that he would be happy to have her and her children stay on and that whoever else was living on the property could stay where they were for the time being. She smiled at that, immediately shedding years from her face and showing herself to be a remarkably handsome woman. The señor inquired whether some food could be prepared. The woman looked embarrassed, smiled, nodded, and Marder felt stupid. Of course there would be no food in the house suitable for such grandees. Marder pulled a thick wad of thousand-peso notes from his pocket and pressed it on her, telling her to stock the house with food and keep the rest. She stared at him, at the money, started to say something, then left.

  Marder and Skelly spent the rest of the morning jacking the camper off the Ford, unpacking all their gear, and stowing it in their rooms. After that, Marder sat down to his first meal at his own table, a meal cooked by Amparo Montez and served by her and her two children. These were Epifania, a thin, dignified-looking girl of twelve, and Ariel, a boy of ten. It was a good meal, built around posole, a corn and meat soup that requires a pig’s head and pig’s trotters and a laborious processing of each kernel of corn to remove the germ so that it will blossom like a kind of popcorn and give the soup its characteristic texture. The labor, Marder understood, was a compliment and a promise. He praised it enthusiastically. “This is a very ancient dish, Skelly,” said Marder. “The Aztecs used it to consume the victims of human sacrifices. The Spaniards made them substitute pork. Apparently they said it tasted pretty much the same.”

  “It does,” replied Skelly darkly, “and this is pretty good, but I thought food down here would be hotter. I can never get food hot enough in New York. Thai places, Mexican places, they see I’m a white guy, they hide the good stuff.”

  Marder said, “There are different kinds of heat, right, Amparo? This has guajillo and ancho chilies in it, I think. But I’m sure you have something hotter in the kitchen, if the señor desires.”

  Amparo smiled and sent Epifania off to the kitchen. She returned with a small unlabeled bottle containing an oily golden liquid and set it before Skelly. He took a soup spoon, filled it from the bottle, and supped it down. The three Mexicans goggled at him, Amparo with her hand over her mouth in shock.

  “That’s getting there,” said Skelly, his face now brick red and glistening with sweat, and they all laughed with amazement and admiration. In a lower voice, and in English, he added, “Speaking of hot.”

  This was in reference to Lourdes, Amparo’s niece, a teenager so stunningly beautiful that, when she walked into the dining room wearing cutoffs and a purple tube top, neither of which entirely confined her remarkable young body, both Marder and Skelly had paused with spoons in air and nearly gaped. She’d come in with a bowl and clunked it unceremoniously down in front of Marder and then exited with a rolling strut, as if she owned the place.

  Skelly added, “That’s trouble.”

  “She’s a kid, Skelly,” said Marder, who had begun to study the serving bowl as the girl had leaned over to place it on the table, so as not to have to study the flesh on display six inches from his nose. “This is interesting pottery, don’t you think?”

  “Fascinating. And I believe the traditions of Old Mexico almost require you to take a piece of that before you marry her off to a fine young lad.”

  “This is really good food, don’t you think?” said Marder heavily, to change the subject, and then discoursed briefly on the remarkable sophistication of Mexican cuisine, which had as little to do with Mexican restaurants in the States as chop suey joints did with what they used to eat in the Forbidden City. It was nearly the only survival of the deep pre-Columbian culture of meso-America, conveyed by example and advice by women to their daughters across thirty generations since the fall of Tenochtitlán. In Amparo’s kitchen there would be dozens of different clay pots, each designed to perfectly cook a single kind of food, and the number of ingredients—many of which existed nowhere else—was enormous.

  And so it was a fine meal: crema fría de aguacate, followed by tamales de harina and a real atole negro with real toasted cacao peel and an unfamiliar steamed fish covered with crushed macadamia nuts. The younger children served him silently, with the occasional shy smile when they looked at him. Marder had eaten food like this all his married life, and eating it again struck at his heart as much as it satisfied his belly, but it was different being served it this way, like a hacendado by his servants. He felt like a fool and an impostor, but also, parodoxically, as if he was where he belonged.

  Skelly was not big on food in general, but he said he could get used to this, and they talked in an easy way about meals they had enjoyed, or not enjoyed, around the world. Their conversation paused only when Lourdes drifted through the room, as people will stop talking when there is an explosion or a rain of frogs.

  “I notice the dad is nowhere around,” observed Skelly, after one of these passages. “In fact, this whole place seems unusually devoid of the male sex. I wonder why that is.”

  “A lot of them probably went to El Norte. Another chunk is likely engaged in the narco wars or has been killed in them. But most of them probably are hiding.”

  “From…?”

  “Us. No one told Amparo that the place had been sold to a gringo. When I showed up, she thought I was los otros, the gangsters. Which means los otros pay regular visits. I think we should stroll around the grounds and make smiley faces at the locals.”

  They set out north from the main entrance of the big house and passed the servants’ quarters, a long, low one-story concrete-block structure connected to the big house by a breezeway. The former owner had intended to build a small holiday resort on his land and had started ten good-sized concrete, tile-roofed bungalows in an uneven line along the high ground at the center of his island, these separated by thick ornamental plantings. The first few were completed shells, the next few were roofless walls and the last ones were mere founda
tions, like a museum demonstration of how to construct cheap vacation homes. The squatters had used the typical inguenity of the barrio to improve these, using the piles of construction materials that lay in drifts all around the property. Some had built actual walls with mortar and block. Others had used plywood and studs, or even what looked like driftwood, to complete their homes. The roofs were a miscellany of tile, corrugated tin, tar paper, mud brick, and plastic tarpaulin weighted with rocks.

  “They call this bricolage,” said Marder as they strolled through what had been devised as an ornamental path but had become by default the street of a small hamlet. “The use of materials for purposes other than the intended one. That tennis court, for example.”

  The four-court tennis court, whose markings could still be faintly seen, had been turned into a barnyard. Shelters had been thrown together for goats, pigs, and chickens.

  “All in all,” he continued, “I think it’s an improvement over tennis. Or don’t you agree?”

  Skelly wasn’t listening. He was staring at the surroundings with a dark look on his face. He doesn’t like this, Marder realized. He fears this kind of village. It was a village like this that broke his heart.

  They greeted a large woman in the dirt yard in front of her house; she stood over a plywood table on which sat a blue plastic bowl of masa. She looked at them calmly, as if making tortillas was more important than they were. They introduced themselves and she did the same.

  “I am Rosita Morales. Are you going to take my house away from me?”

  “I am not. You can stay here as long as you please.”

  “So I have heard, but I didn’t believe it. The former person wanted to make vacation houses for rich people here and get a lot of money. Why don’t you do the same, Señor?”

  “Perhaps money no longer interests me.”

  “Then you must be insane or a saint,” said the woman, and laughed at the thought of someone uninterested in money, showing large crooked teeth.

  Marder laughed too and said, “I’ll let you decide as time goes by. Good day to you, Señora.”

  Skelly had walked through the village and emerged at the far end of the built-up area. Beyond lay the rest of the island, a stretch of undulating Mexican tropical dryland scrub: thorny low bushes, chaparral and various kinds of cactus, with some larger trees rising up above the tangled green mass. The edge of this growth was scarred by an aborted attempt at a road, at the end of which a small yellow Komatsu bulldozer sat crookedly, as if taking a break.

  “He was going to put a golf course in here,” Marder remarked.

  “A good thing someone shot him, then,” said Skelly. “How big is this place anyway?”

  “A little shy of three hundred acres, including the beach. They used to call it Isla de los Pájaros, Bird Island. Guzmán was going to call his operation Isla Paradiso, but I think we’ll retain the original name. That’s a boojum tree over there. They call it cotati around here, or cirio. It has honey-scented flowers in the summer.”

  “You’re full of information today. Hitting the Google key, are you?”

  “No. When I was in this area the first time, Chole took me around and taught me the names of all the plants and animals. Let’s take a walk through the woods.”

  They walked along the path toward the bulldozer, Marder pointing out the various trees: the gumbo-limbo, the manzanita, the jicaro, or calabash, the acalote pine. The land rose slowly, and soon the vegetation became mere scrub and they were looking down a cliff at a perfect oval of sand that capped the island’s northern point.

  “Let’s go,” said Skelly, and began to pick his way down the crumbly rocks. Marder followed him reluctantly, but there was a reasonably accessible path. They climbed over rocks and waded briefly and soon they had reached the island’s main beach. They stared at the glittering Pacific for a while and listened to the thump of its surf. “A nice beach,” said Skelly. “A nice break too. I should have brought my board.”

  “Yeah, it’s a terrific beach—the whitest sand for miles.” Marder stooped and let some of his property sieve through his fingers. “It’s practically pure quartzite—that’s why they call it Diamond Beach. If we walk south for a little while, we should be able to see the harbor breakwater and the mouth of the river.”

  He set off, walking on the damp sand. Marder had always liked the sea. He liked it in all seasons and had always taken his family on seaside holidays, renting houses on Long Island or the Jersey Shore in summer and taking occasional winter trips to the DR and Antigua. He and his wife used to laugh about this, the whole personals-ad cliché about loving long walks on the beach, but they did; they took long walks on the beach, she often stooping to pick up things mottled or faded by the sea and keeping them on a particular shelf in their office. The first of them must have come from this very beach—not this particular island but farther south, on Playa Diamante proper. Without warning, Marder was seized with a blast of emotional pain so strong that it clouded his sight and he stumbled. He would have fallen had not Skelly grasped him by the arm.

  “You okay, buddy?”

  “Yeah. I had a stitch in time. A flashback, if you want to call it that. I was walking on the beach with Chole, but it was now—I mean, I was with her but I knew the future, that I was … that she was going to die. Shit!” He shuddered like a horse. “You ever get flashbacks, Skelly?”

  “Only nightmares,” said the other, but did not expand. Instead, he pointed ahead to where they could see the tip of the long breakwater, with the red-lit channel marker, and beyond it the greeny-brown stain made by the outflow of the Rio Viridiana.

  “There’s your boat basin,” said Skelly, pointing. “Like you said, it’s a nice location for running drugs. Quiet little port, a boat channel, good communications inland. It tends to explain the torso in the plaza and raises once again the question of why you chose to spend your golden years in the middle of what looks like a narco war. Would you care to illuminate?”

  “Not really,” said Marder. “There should be a set of stairs just ahead.” They continued walking, found the stairs, and climbed them to find themselves on the lower of the two terraces that lay beneath the house. This was lined with young mango trees, bearing green fruit, and there was a hammock slung between two of them. From the south side of the terrace they could see where someone (perhaps the late Guzmán) had built a pair of docks and dredged out a tiny bay to make a miniature marina. There were no boats in it.

  “We should get a boat,” said Skelly. “There’s supposed to be terrific game fishing off this coast. And also…”

  “What also?”

  “To be frank, we’re basically on an island with only one way off. I like to be in places with two ways out, or more.”

  “Okay, find us a boat. I like boats too.”

  “Not a sailboat, Marder. Something with legs.”

  “Hey, get a guided-missile frigate. Whatever will reduce your paranoia.”

  * * *

  They strolled back across the terrace. Upon the adobe walls that rimmed this on the ocean side, posts had been implanted and heavy wire strung between them to act as a support for bougainvillea and trumpet vines, although these had not flourished. The wiring on one side was completely bare.

  Skelly twanged a wire. “We could hang cards on this and shoot. Since there’s no golf course.”

  “Yeah, we could have a rematch of the Moon River Invitational.”

  “I’ve got cards. When I win, will you tell me what the fuck we’re doing here?”

  “When you win,” said Marder.

  Skelly went off and came back with a deck of cards and a basket of clothespins. “The señora had all the necessities,” he said, and attached a row of cards to the wire strand that faced the sea.

  “Too bad if anyone’s on the beach when we shoot,” said Marder.

  “Fuck ’em. It’s a private beach. And it’s Mexico. Want a round now?”

  “I think it’s siesta time,” said Marder. “You’ve waite
d forty years for this; it’ll keep.”

  He turned and climbed the broad stone steps that led to the upper terrace. There a pool shone with the aquamarine of advanced chemistry.

  “Now that you’ve circumnavigated your kingdom,” said Skelly, “you look pleased.”

  “I am pleased. It wasn’t what I expected to find, but it’s kind of neat. I don’t have to wait for my next life to be a feudal lord.”

  “Yeah, but if you don’t have them move the latrines from where they are now, you’re going to have medieval levels of cholera. The subsurface flow has to be from the river, and the shitters are upstream from the well. In fact, you should put in a septic field if you want all those people to stay.”

  “You know about this, do you?”

  “Yeah, the army cross-trained me in field engineering. It’s part of the wonder of Special Forces.”

  “Well, we’ll consider it mañana, as they like to say around here. First our nap.”

  Skelly laughed and said that some rack time sounded good. After he’d gone, Marder contemplated his pool and thought about his daughter and wondered how she was getting on. This line being too painful, he had changed his wonderment toward the question of who was maintaining a pool in an empty house so well when he heard young voices and saw the two Montez children trotting across the far side of the terrace.

  “Hey, kids,” Marder called out. “Who takes care of the pool? Do you have a service?”

  The children stopped and stared at him. The girl, Epifania, said, “No, sir. We do it ourselves. We take the leaves out and put in chemicals, and Bonifacio makes the machine work when it breaks. But it only broke twice.”

  “We don’t swim in it,” said the boy.

  “Not even when no one is looking?”

  “No,” said the boy fiercely. “We swim in the sea only.”

  They disappeared, whispering to each other.

  As he walked back to the house, Marder heard a less innocent noise, a rattling in the bushes below the wall overlooking the lower terrace, and a gasping male voice. He peeked through an oleander and saw Lourdes in a clinch with a guy who had to be twenty-five. He was trying to get his hand into her pants and was kissing her neck, and she was laughing and fighting him off but not all that seriously. Marder walked down the steps, making noise. More shaking foliage, panicked whispers, and the sound of retreating people, fading around the side of the house. He’d have to deal with that situation but not just yet.