“Whose law?” he asked.
It was a fair question.
“Well, the Americans, anyway,” I said.
“It won’t help here.”
“The money will.”
It was about a thousand dollars.
He eyed it, slowly relenting, and then I told him that no one would know it was from me. He was safe.
“You’re a fisherman?”
He said he worked the coast at certain times of the year.
“You must see all the yachts that come and go. I heard they were mostly return visitors.”
“They are.”
“They’re buying drugs, aren’t they?”
He could sit on the sea wall and watch the small boats plying their trade between the beach and the yachts. The rich and the poor united by Acapulco Gold. That morning, however, he was preparing his boat to go hunting lobster. He was on the beach at 3 a.m., and there had been a small storm earlier in the evening. The sky was clear and the moon shone brightly.
“There was a big yacht in the bay and the lights were on.”
“Was there a party on board?”
“Nothing of the sort. There didn’t seem to be anyone there. After an hour I noticed the man washed up in the surf. I went down to see who it was.”
“Señor Zinn?”
“Not at all. I went down to look at him and I saw it was a dead gringo filled with water, and I dragged him up onto the sand.”
The man had been dead for an hour, he thought, although he was no expert in things like that. He was in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, and had a gold chain around his neck. A man in his sixties maybe, with thin limbs and close-cropped white hair and tattoos on his arms. Since the palapas were long closed, he was alone there with this body, and he admitted that he went through the pockets to see what he could find. He wasn’t trying to steal. He just wanted to know who it was. He looked over to the yacht and made the obvious connection, but there was no one on deck, and although the lights were on there was no other sign of life. He found a waterproofed packet in the shirt’s chest pocket with ID, a credit card, and some cash. They were all dry. He knew something was awry and that these items might be useful or valuable down the line. He asked me if he had been wrong to think that. I told him he had used his wits and used them quickly. But why, I said, had there been ID or a credit card there at all? He must have just carried it around with him all the time, as people do.
“Then you have it here,” I said.
“The credit card, I didn’t take. I didn’t take the ID either. I knew it would be trouble. I left those. I took the cash—I admit that. I thought they wouldn’t miss it. They couldn’t prove it hadn’t been lost in the sea.”
“So you hid all the way up here because of the money you stole?”
“No, Señor.”
For a moment the wind battering his walls was louder than the sound of his own breathing, and his eyes took leave of their sockets. No, he said again, he hadn’t taken anything except the cash, but he had looked at the ID carefully and indeed it was Señor Zinn, but he was sure the man in that small photo was not the man on the beach. It was a different face, a different person entirely. He was so sure of it he decided to go to the police up on the road and tell them, which is what he did. But he waited awhile first. He said he sat on the beach and tried to think what he should do. Then, as he sat there in the dark, the yacht’s lights went off and it began to move off toward open sea. In a few moments the yacht was gone. He got up and walked slowly up the road. Still he hesitated. No one but him had seen the body, but he was worried about the cash he had taken. It was possible that the soldiers at the roadblock would search him and find the two hundred dollars and then things would take an ugly turn. Nevertheless, he went. It was still dark when he approached four men at the roadblock and told them what he had found. They asked him to take them to the spot and he did. When they arrived there they made him wait by the palapas while they examined the body, turning it over with flashlights and talking among themselves. I asked him if he had mentioned to them the discrepancy between the ID and the real face, and he said he had not. He waited for them to notice it themselves.
But they did not.
They called out on their radios, and he thought about the money in his back pocket. They could easily search him and arrest him for theft and for tampering. But for a while they seemed to forget he was even there. At last, though, one of them came over to where he was sitting in the sand and asked him if Rubio knew who the dead gringo was or if he had taken anything from the body. With a straight face he answered that he didn’t know the guy and that he hadn’t taken anything from him.
“If we search and find dollars, we’ll take you out, you understand that, right?”
Rubio held his ground.
I said, “You only took the dollars?”
He nodded, but then he added, “Well, there was something else. But nothing valuable.”
He said that while he was going through the dead man’s pockets he had found a slip of paper in one of the back pockets of the shorts. It had not been protected from the water and so it was sodden.
He got up and walked to his kitchen and pulled a book out of the cabinet there. It was a telephone book. Returning to the table, he opened it and I saw inside a small piece of paper, a receipt from an ATM machine. He had pressed and dried it and now it was almost legible. I picked it up and put on my glasses. It was dated from June of the previous year, in the town of Colima. It showed an amount drawn from the machine and the name of the cardholder who had withdrawn it: Paul A. Linder. The letters had almost faded away, but they were still decipherable.
I looked up to Rubio, and I saw at once that all the meager guile in his eyes had drained away.
“Paul A. Linder?” I said.
“That’s what it says.”
“You didn’t show this to the soldiers?”
“No. I had a feeling that I shouldn’t.”
“So then what happened?”
“The soldier took me back to the road.”
When they got there, he told Rubio to disappear and never come back. The soldier knew Rubio had taken the money from the dead man, but he didn’t care—it was a way of getting rid of him. Rubio had walked down to the coconut grove behind the beach where he kept his motorbike and had driven south without waiting. It was still not yet dawn. He had not gone back since, and thought that his silence might be more important than he had once realized. So he kept his shotgun loaded and only went into Nueva Italia every couple of weeks to buy supplies. And now I had appeared and paid him a thousand dollars for a slip of paper from an ATM machine. He was on the brink of seeing the funny side of it.
“Mr. Linder,” I said, “was the man dead on the beach at three in the morning?”
“He might be.” Rubio shrugged. “He must be.”
But there was no “must.”
It was possible even that Rubio had misunderstood everything himself and that I had just paid him for nothing.
“Either way,” I said, “you never saw that guy before at Caleta de Campos?”
“I never saw either of them.”
“Zinn and Linder. Two German names. That’s kind of amusing, isn’t it?”
“If you say so.”
I left the money on the table and blundered my way back through the door and into the blinding light and dust. He didn’t follow me, or call out a farewell. I imagine he just sat there until all sound of me had receded, and then reached out to the roll of banknotes tied with a rubber band. His windfall had come after all, just as he had planned. I went back to the car and felt ashamed that I’d thought I’d need to use force against a sap like him. It was he who needed bullets, not me.
A mile from his shack I stopped and got out again. I wanted to see if he had come out to watch me leave, and so he had.
I waved, and he turned back to the gloom of his shack. Back on the narrow road that wound its way north I stopped yet again and looked at the map. I realized I had no idea what to do now. Go back to the coast or press onward. It had to be the latter: whoever had abandoned his ID on a body in Caleta de Campos would never go back to the scene.
He would go in the opposite direction, inland, and maybe on this same road, though there were others. Had he passed this same lake surrounded by burned hills? By afternoon’s end I was in Pátzcuaro, in a comfortable hotel on the town’s main square, courtesy of Pacific Mutual. As dusk fell I went down to the lake and took a boat across to the island called Janitzio. I walked around it on the path that circles the whole island, passing under drying fishing nets and stopping to eat the fried fish of the lake they eat there. Pescado blanco. They look like little monsters. In this way I was thinking all the while, and yet I hadn’t thought enough to find a way out of the forest of signs. It was sitting here, however, and watching the lights come on along the mainland, that I had the idea that Paul A. Linder was still, so to speak, alive and well. Zinn had now become Linder and was walking the earth with his former employee’s name, a simple transfer that Zinn could use for a while until I caught up with him. He had slipped into his new identity so easily, and in a country where he was a foreigner anyway, that only I had noticed it. But he himself must have suddenly had the feeling that another man was walking over his grave.
NINE
The hotel front desk was able to send up a guide to Mexico’s luxury hotels, and over the next two days I called all 207 of them in the top bracket. It was time consuming and clumsy, but I had the time and I had the money, and the town itself was a pleasant place to waste a few days. At each hotel I asked if I could please speak to a Mr. Paul Linder, and for the first 168 of them I was told that no such person was staying with them. Something told me that it was only a matter of time before a receptionist answered my request with a different reply. It was at the Hotel Morales in Guadalajara. When I asked for Señor Linder the receptionist said, without hesitating, “I think he checked out this morning. Let me verify for you.” A minute later she returned to the phone and asked who was calling.
“Señor Washington,” I said.
The second absence was longer than the first, and this time she said that Señor Linder was certainly not at the hotel now.
“Has he checked out?”
“Yes, Señor.”
“What a nuisance. How can I get a hold of him?”
“Is it urgent?”
“In a way it is. I don’t suppose you know where he has moved on to?”
She should have balked at a request like this, but it was a young girl, we were chatty and she forgot her hotel etiquette.
“Let me ask someone,” she said.
I opened the map on the bed while waiting for her to find out where he had gone, and opened a red marker.
The receptionist returned to the line. “We think he drove to a place called Mazamitla.”
“Is that a town nearby?”
“It’s a village in the mountains. It’s south of Lake Chapala.”
“Wait a minute—let me find it.”
With my glasses on, I did so. It was indeed a small village lost in the high hills with a single road leading to it. It was about a hundred miles from where I was sitting right then, and there were back roads that led to it from Pátzcuaro. An easy drive.
“Is there a hotel there?” I said.
“One or two. People go there for the waters.”
“The waters?”
“There are swimming cenotes in the forests there. They’re supposed to be healing.”
“Are they?”
“Yes, Señor.”
“Maybe he wasn’t feeling well,” I said.
There was a pause.
“He said he was feeling a little under the weather and I think our concierge recommended Mazamitla to him. It’s a popular destination.”
If he was driving down to Mazamitla from Guadalajara I calculated that it would take him almost as long as it would take me. It was then about ten in the morning. I went down to pay the bill and then returned to my room, where I spent half an hour dyeing my hair dark brown. It was the moment to adopt a disguise, to follow my prey more subtly and at a close distance. By now, accordingly, I had also grown a small trimmed mustache, which I colored with a lighter dye. The effect was disfiguring, but disguising. I looked like a grifter who likes the grift, a bum down on his luck. At midday I checked out of the hotel and drove north out of town toward a place called Zacapu, from where the westward route toward the great lake was fairly straightforward. When I was on it I relaxed a little and put Sinatra on the tape deck. My hands were sweating freely now and the predator in me had reawoken. Some of the juice of the glory days had come back with the music, and I remembered a thousand other road trips just like this one, voyages by moonlight during which I’d catch my eyes in the mirror and think, not bad, you jelly bean.
Clouds gathered overhead as I parked in the main square. There was not a soul in sight. Just a church with tiered towers infested with jungle birds. I saw a hotel nearby but decided to wait before going in and getting a room. It was likely that Zinn—now a harmless Señor Linder—was staying at the same hotel, though there was no rental car parked in the square other than mine. What had brought him here? Mazamitla was little more than a frontier outpost among the hills, indio to the core, a hamlet of old men like myself, of weary cats and a few dozen oil paintings of Father Hidalgo.
The hotel had an inner courtyard that had obviously once been a stables, the rooms laced with dark beams, with rough-hewn log railings along the first floor. It was run by a group of women who were probably related. I asked them if the hotel was really as empty as it looked and they said, with some surprise, “No, Señor, esta lleno.” But there were two free rooms and I took one of them. I asked if they had seen any Americans wandering around the village, and they replied that they hadn’t seen any at the hotel either. So it was possible that he wasn’t there at all.
That would be inconvenient. I waited in my new room while the rain hammered on the roof and then went back down to the square when it had abated a little. The church itself was closed, so I walked instead out to the edge of the forests, where the ladies had told me the path down to the cenote lay. I took my Minox camera with me, ready to turn a lucky moment into physical proof.
On the downward path I passed gangs of woodcutters toiling away in the glades. They were silent as they swung their oiled axes in clouds of shavings and gnats. Their donkeys were tethered to the pines and at the bottom lay the sleepy pools and, as I’d been told, a waterfall. As I struggled along with my cane, one of the woodcutters came up to me, a child of about twelve, and asked me if I wanted to pay him to help me.
I had an idea. I gave him a dollar and asked him to go down to the cenote and see if anyone was swimming there. I sat against a tree and waited for him to return. When he did, he said that there was an old man alone in the pool swimming in his underwear. A gringo? Perhaps, the boy said. I said I would wait here for the man to come up on the path and let him go. There was only one path. But an hour passed and no one came up the path as I’d expected. The rain had stopped when I reluctantly gave up and went back to the village. I felt almost a fool. The same boy followed me up there, as if I were a possible source of more dollar notes, and he told me that people sometimes camped out down by the pools instead of staying at the hotels. I went into the church, now open and overflowing with white lilies and old ladies, and he followed me. But as we came into the nave, I saw that among the old ladies was a white man in a windbreaker sitting in the front pew with his back to us, apparently lost in his own thoughts.
“Es el!” the boy said, pointing, and slipped away again.
Instead of approaching him there, since a church is no place to make a scene, I we
nt back outside and waited in the square. When the gringo exited from the church he was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and ambled across the square and into one of the streets that rose away from it. I followed him and soon the two of us were alone in the alleys, the cats scattering around us.
He was about my height but more stooped, inconspicuous in his windbreaker and baggy pants, and he seemed to know where he was going. I hung back, and eventually he turned into a doorway and entered a house.
I took a photograph both of his back and of the door, then went back to the hotel. I was still not sure whether it was Zinn. I could afford to tail him for a while until I was and had all the photographs I needed, at which point I could probably just fly back to San Diego and have done with it. I slept calmly at the hotel that night and got up early in order to eat my huevos rancheros in the courtyard with the ladies, who told me that the rain was going to continue all day.
From the hotel I could see everyone crossing the zócalo, the town square, and so it was a good vantage point, but by midmorning the old man of the night before had not reappeared. I went around the streets again looking for a car that might be his, but there was nothing. Then it occurred to me that there was also a local bus stop and there a few people were waiting in the rain for the next bus to arrive. Across from it a few men sat at a cantina; I asked them if they had seen an old gringo get on one of the buses that morning. Sure enough, they had. The previous bus that had left for Tuxpan two hours before.
I suddenly realized that he was trying to shake me, that he knew all about my call to the Hotel Morales and had taken off on a bus to make his trail go cold. Whoever he was, he might not know that I had followed him to Mazamitla, but he knew that someone was looking for Paul Linder.
I arrived in Tuxpan in the early afternoon. The weather had completely changed: a hot sun beat down on the Nevado de Colima volcano in the distance. The road passed by the silver mine, the hard hats walking home from their shifts along its edges. The corn milpas stood with a motionless attentiveness, glistening and juvenile, as if the plants had grown overnight. Here and there were men in tall hats, walking slowly down the lines of corn. A pale cloud clung to the tip of the Nevado, equally motionless and new. At Tuxpan’s center stood a worn-down stone cross not unlike a Celtic cross in a village in Ireland, covered with what looked like runes. The cantinas were closed. A fair wind ruffled the dogs. In the town park there was a Volcano Eruption Warning board set up in the middle, with three color-coded alerts. That day the Nevado was “mildly active.” To one side, a line of abandoned train cars lay rusting on their tracks, a horizontal slum. Again, I was confused by a random stop in a random place. Zinn could as easily have hopped onto another bus from here.
Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 7
