“No, but the belief in fate is much older around these parts than the Church and its teachings. In pre-Conquest times, when my ancestors fought their wars, the point of battle was not to kill the enemy but to capture him, so he could have his heart torn out atop a pyramid. And for the sacrifice to be perfect, the victim had to be almost uninjured, save for some ritualized cuts. This is why they were called the striped ones. Therefore, when a warrior was cut in this way, he would surrender and resign himself to that fate. They were outraged when the Spanish murdered them in their thousands and even more outraged when the Spanish fought to the death rather than surrender. The Spaniards were ruled by an entirely different story, the story of chivalry, knights fighting for glory and sacrificing themselves, do you see, and not their captives. A more compelling story, perhaps, but, in any case, that narrative was victorious. Though not entirely victorious: the two stories blended and became Mexico, and that is why, although we have had white knight after white knight—Hidalgo, Morelos, Zapata, Madero, Villa, Cárdenas—crusade after crusade, still everything remains the same. No, I tell a lie—things are not quite the same. Now we tear out people’s hearts figuratively instead of literally atop a pyramid in Tenochtitlán.”
“That’s a little cynical and bitter for a priest, don’t you think?”
“No, you mistake me, sir. I am neither bitter nor cynical. I remain interested, indeed fascinated, by the story that is playing out. I have hope. Miracles occur, to be sure, and perhaps you are one of them.” He looked past Marder and added, “And here is your beautiful daughter coming down the street. Of course the knight must have a beautiful daughter. A beautiful daughter and an ugly sidekick—it is almost a requirement. Not to mention that the beautiful daughter can transform herself into a man and do man’s work when needed. This is also in the legends, the magical girl.” Then, to the girl, “Good day to you, my dear. What have you in that bag?”
Statch greeted the priest and took from the fat plastic bag she was carrying a cheap prepaid cell phone. “The tower is up. I’m giving out cell phones.”
Father Santana studied the thing, turning it over in his brown hands, an expression of delight on his face. “A marvel rather than a miracle, I think, but it will do for the present. I have been meaning to get one of these, but they’re so expensive here and the reception is so bad. Now I can please my mother and annoy the bishop. Thank you, Señor Marder and daughter!”
Marder did not know how many cell phones had been distributed in the casa and the colonia, but through the remainder of the day he observed nearly everyone he encountered walking in the way that characterized modern man, with a hand pressed to the ear and a faraway look. While he understood the benefits, he found it made him a bit sad.
He was therefore somewhat withdrawn at dinner, saying little, while Statch and Skelly were almost antic with their success, trading jokes about their exploits and about the phenomenon of José the Telmex nerd, about how the cultures of nerd and machismo had produced a being who managed remarkably to be both at the same time, like a torero with Asperger’s.
Marder went to bed early and checked in with both God and Mr. Thing, praying orthodoxly to the one and superstitiously to the other that if tonight was the night, it should be done completely, not leaving him a husk or impaired, and if not, then that would be preferable for the moment. Marder felt stupid when he did this, but he always did it. He didn’t think that feeling stupid was such a bad thing.
Another ritual at bedtime was to stand naked in front of the window and look out past the terraces to the sea. A half-moon hung low in the cloudless night, making a stripe of cold fire on the backs of the waves. He used to do this in his loft and at various places where he spent the night, vacation lodgings and so on, and on many of these occasions his wife would come up soundlessly and embrace him from behind and kiss him at just the height her lips could reach between his shoulder blades. He never heard her coming, it was always a delight and a surprise and a prelude to a particularly wonderful kind of sex.
Chole’s ghost tiptoed out of the bathroom, and he felt her lips on that spot and let out a cry and whirled around in terror. An enormous moth. Still trembling, he urged the creature out of the window and closed it, then dived into bed and pulled the coverlet up to his chin, like a frightened child.
Marder awoke in the dark to gunshots and a shrill scream. He rose sluggishly out of a dream in which both he and Skelly and a man whose book he had edited twenty years ago were behaving inappropriately with Lourdes Almones. Shaking himself awake, Marder stumbled into shorts and slippers, grabbed his pistol, and ran out of his bedroom.
The screams continued, and he recognized them as coming from Lourdes and their location as the wooded area below the terraces and above the beach, where palms and cocolobos grew. Someone turned on the outside floodlights, and Marder therefore did not break his neck crossing the terraces and descending the stairs that led to the beach. There, in a sandy clearing in a grove of palms lit weirdly by slats of light streaming through the fronds, he found the source of the screaming. Lourdes, her face and hair covered with blood, was shrieking curses and beating at Skelly, with him blocking blows and chanting calming phrases at her to no great effect. Lying on the sand was a young man. He was crying out too but more weakly, declaring his undying love even to the point of actual death. Marder knelt down by the man’s side. Marder assumed this was the expected Salvador Manuel García and so addressed him and asked him how he was, promising help was on its way. He’d been shot twice through the torso, one high, one low, and he did not look good, although he had clearly looked quite good previously—a slim, handsome guapo with the cropped hair and the tattoos. When he registered who Marder was, García uttered a string of curses. This was all Marder’s fault, it turned out, and García pledged fearsome revenge, describing the excruciations that Marder would undergo at the hands of his compadres in La Familia, interrupting the dreadful catalog only to shout out the name of his beloved.
People were arriving now, from the nearer areas of the colonia and the house. The indispensable Amparo was one of these, dressed in a robe and slippers. She took in the scene, yanked her niece away from Skelly, delivered two slaps like whip cracks to the girl’s face, and dragged her weeping away. Marder organized some of the men to carry Salvador Manuel up to the house and used his new cell phone to dial 060 and request an ambulance.
When this was done, he turned to Skelly. “What the fuck, Skelly?”
“He was going to cut her face. As it was, he gashed her scalp pretty good, as you saw. I yelled for him to get away from her and drop the blade, but he raised it again and was going for another swipe when I shot him. This is García the boyfriend, as you probably gathered.”
“Yes. And why did he decide to cut her, do you know?”
“From what I overheard, she was trying to let him down easy, on account of having to go to Defe for her career, and he went nuts and said it was because everyone knew she was fucking you and he was going to kill you and cut her face off, and then he pulled out the knife.”
“So you saved her and she attacked you?”
“What can I say—it’s Mexico. They’re living out their parts in a narcocorrido. Speaking of which, how are we going to play this?”
“Just a second—how come you were out here?”
“I get up every night to check the perimeter. We don’t have enough guns to mount a full guard with our guys, and I don’t exactly trust the Templos. I was walking the beach—where we’re wide open, by the way—and heard voices, so I walked up the steps to check out what was going on.”
A plausible story, and the darkness kept Marder from reading Skelly’s face. A little too plausible, he thought, but that was a side issue at this point.
“Give me the gun,” Marder said.
“Why?”
“Because it makes a better story if I’m the shooter. I’m a Mexican citizen, and you’re here on papers that won’t stand up. You can have my Kimber, and it’d be a goo
d idea if you went back to your room for a little while, just until the cops have done their business. And before you do that, I’d like you to get with Statch—I don’t want her involved in this. Tie her down if you have to, but keep her away from the cops.”
Skelly started to protest but then grasped the wisdom of this solution, exchanged pistols with Marder, and disappeared in the direction of the beach. Marder climbed back to the house.
The men had rolled a chaise longue out from the terrace, laid García on it, and covered him with a blanket. He was unconscious now and looking gray. Marder went up to his room, dressed, splashed some water on his face, cleared the pistol, picked up his wallet and Mexican passport, and went downstairs, just as sirens announced the arrival of the ambulance and the cops.
In the servants’ apartment, he found Amparo tending to the now-exhausted girl. Amparo seemed to have stopped the bleeding and had cleaned the blood from Lourdes’s face. Marder explained the new story of what had happened and why Lourdes had to confirm it if the police asked. Lourdes nodded her agreement; of course one lied to the police—how else could one live?
That settled, Marder went back to the front of the house and watched García being loaded into the ambulance. When this had departed, two men in good-looking business suits and handsome shoes approached him; both of them were light-skinned with good haircuts. They showed their credentials—federales, it appeared. They also announced their membership in the elite drug police: officers Varela and Gil. Varela had a mustache and Gil did not, but besides that they could have been brothers, so similar did they appear. Or perhaps, Marder thought, it was fatigue and the late hour. Marder showed them his Mexican passport and explained who he was.
“We know who you are, Señor,” said Gil, glancing without much interest at the passport. “Perhaps you can explain what happened here, how the young man came to be shot.”
Then Marder told his convenient lie to a pair of blank faces. They asked no questions, nor did they seem interested in talking to anyone else. Marder thought this was a bad sign. When Marder had finished, Gil said, “This is a serious crime—you’ll have to come with us.”
“Can’t it wait until morning? I own this property. Do you think I’m going to flee because I shot a trespasser who was trying to kill one of my servants?”
“Your girlfriend,” said Varela, and the two of them moved closer.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” said Marder, but they had already grabbed his arms, cuffed his wrists, and forced him into the back of their SUV.
14
For as long as Marder could recall, his singular horror was being tied up, confined, or physically helpless. When he was a small boy, a pair of older cousins—sadists in the usual way of older cousins—liked to play cowboys and Indians with him, the climax of this game being little Rick bound and gagged in a dark closet in the basement of their Brooklyn home. He would become hysterical and wet himself when they did this, which only added to the fun. During his time in Vietnam, Marder’s chief fear was not death or maiming but being captured by the enemy, trussed up, stuck in a tiny cage. He’d resolved that he’d never surrender, he’d fight to the death. This resolve had been tested back then: after what happened in Moon River, Marder had not, in fact, surrendered.
Now, handcuffed in the back of a car, in the custody of men who, if not actual sadists, certainly meant him no good, Marder felt the beginnings of that hysteria pluck at his vitals. He took deep breaths and wished he had paid attention to the YouTube clips on how to escape from handcuffs in fifteen seconds.
Quite aside from this particular neurosis, Marder was conscious of something wrong about the current situation. He had never been arrested before, but, like every American, he’d seen fictional representations of thousands of arrests, and he’d edited several true-crime books, and these officers were not acting like any officers he’d ever learned about, fictional or real. Perhaps they weren’t officers at all. He braked this morbid speculation with a conscious effort. There was something wrong, but it was more complicated than a simple assassination. What, for example, were the federal drug police doing investigating a crime of passion? And if they were corrupt, why hadn’t they suggested a bribe?
The car drove along for what seemed like hours to Marder, but he knew that was an illusion. The windows had been darkened so heavily that he could not see where they were headed, but the sounds that penetrated had changed from rural to urban. They must be somewhere in Cárdenas. The car slowed, turned sharply, and halted.
Gil opened the door and pulled Marder out. They were in what appeared to be a parking space under a building. Marder did not ask where they were or what was happening, because he knew they wouldn’t answer and that he would lose dignity by being ignored. The two federales (if they were) led him up a few steps onto a landing, through an unmarked steel door, then up two flights of concrete steps and through a glass door marked “213.” The light in the office was bright enough to make Marder squint, and it was uninhabited by office workers or policemen so far as he could observe. They frisked him efficiently, removing his cell phone and wallet and popping both into a plastic bag. He was relieved to see them do this, because if they had pulled the cash and dumped the rest, it would have been a different kind of Mexican arrest and not good news. Then they placed him in a small room containing the canonical table and three chairs and left him alone there, sitting in the chair with the wall at his back, still with his hands cuffed behind him.
The room was small, stuffy, and windowless, but it did not look like an official interrogation venue. For one thing, it lacked the expected and useful one-way mirror. Also, neither the chairs nor the table were fixed to the floor. Time passed, and after a while Marder allowed himself to be amused. Mr. Thing had rendered him helpless, and he had thrust himself into a life-changing action to regain control; now here he was helpless again. In any case, he was not particularly fearful, and the experience seemed to have finally scotched his childhood trauma. Rudy and Stan were the cousins, and he recalled the schadenfreude he had felt on learning their adult fate, which in both cases consisted of dull and unremunerative jobs in the nearer suburbs of New York. He still got an annual Christmas card from Stan, picturing him smiling stiffly out of his fat, together with a hefty wife and a number of unusually unattractive children. Marder had run into Rudy on the street in the city about fifteen years ago; Rudy had been effusive, wanted to go for drinks, renew the family connection and so on, but Marder had begged off, hoping he had kept the disgust from his face.
As Marder drifted throught this litter-and-graffiti section of memory lane, a man with the soft, pleasant, and neutral face of a suburban pedophile walked through the door and sat down at the table opposite, followed by Varela, who closed the door behind him and took up a position against the wall just out of Marder’s sight. The man opened a folder and read it for a minute, turning pages in silence. Then he looked up at Marder and said, “Well, Richard—or do you prefer Dick? Ricky?” He was speaking English, with a flat midwestern accent.
“I prefer Mr. Marder. Who are you?”
The man shifted his gaze to a point behind Marder, and Varela hit Marder behind the ear with something solid enough to rock his head and make his ear ring but not hard enough to knock him off his chair or, apparently, to wake Mr. Thing up from his slumber.
“That’s what happens when you ask questions, Ricky. You need to let me ask the questions. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. First question: What are you doing in Mexico?”
“I’m a retiree. I was a book editor in New York, and I used my savings to buy a house and some land in Playa Diamante as a retirement home.”
Varela hit him again. It was not a devastating blow but nicely gauged to be painful and humiliating, and Marder understood that the man was prepared to keep it up all night. After a while, as with the boxers and football players you heard about, there might be some brain damage. In his own case, there was pr
obably less “might” involved.
Marder said, “I think you should know that one reason I moved here is that I was recently diagnosed with an inoperable brain aneurysm. If your man keeps slugging me like that, it’s going to pop and I’ll die. You may not care about that, but there are people who will, including Pepa Espinoza. She might wonder why an offfical of—I’m guessing here—the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was presiding over the torture of an American citizen that resulted in his death.”
The man’s glance flipped up past Marder’s head and he must have received a signal from Varela, because he smiled again and said, “No one is torturing anyone. You haven’t got a mark on you. Let’s go on. Maybe you can tell me why a retiree would go into business with Servando Gomez, a known drug trafficker.”
“I’m not in business with Servando Gomez. It’s a protection racket. He’s shaking me down for five grand a month. I thought it was worth it because the previous owner was murdered.”
“Really? Then why haven’t you gone to the police?”
“That’s an excellent idea,” said Marder, and twisting his neck around, added, “Señor Varela, I am being extorted by the criminal Servando Gomez. Please make him stop.”
Varela hit him again, but not quite as hard.
“Nobody likes a wiseass, Ricky. So you’re a poor extorted retiree. Who just happened to bring a heavily armed gunslinger with him. Why don’t you tell me a little about Patrick Skelly.”
“He’s a friend of mine. He’s in the security business, and when he heard I was coming to Michoacán, he insisted on coming with me to provide security.”
“A security consultant, eh? That’s a job description that covers a multitude of sins. Who’re his other clients?”
“I have no idea. We don’t discuss his other business. In fact, I believe confidentiality is an important consideration in that field.”
The Return: A Novel Page 27
