Now I saw how useful the masks must be for the hosts. It was hard to find them, and who knew if they were even there at all. The lights were on in the hacienda’s second floor. Perhaps they were up there watching us.
I went into the garden, where a vortex of beautiful women, Americans and locals, swirled together to the strange music of Tina Turner. Between the cypresses, lawns rolled down into the dark, and here and there people lay with paper trays of cake and champagne flutes looking up at the stars. They looked like candy wrappers that had been tossed aside by a giant child. For a moment I wondered where I was, and why I had come, and yet the shots were there to enjoy as well as canapés and empanadas. I went through the crowd looking for Donald and yet I didn’t find him.
I went from room to room. Some of them were painted pink and blue, with trompe-l’oeil marble panels and bookcases that had clearly been there a lot longer than the new owners. I asked around. But was he called Donald or Paul? I tried “Señor Linder” and some said they had seen him earlier giving a speech to his guests.
On one of the long corridors that connected the various parts of the house, its walls hung with modern paintings, a man came up to me and cried, “Norman!” He grabbed my arm, half spinning me around, and behind him appeared a woman who was clearly with him. They were drunk and the masks had begun to slip on their faces. They asked me if I had seen Linder.
“He’s around somewhere,” I said.
“It’s a pain, the way he asks us here and then disappears. What do you think of the house?”
“It’s a palace.”
“No kidding,” the woman said.
“What happened to your arm?”
“Lawn mower accident.”
Suddenly the man gave me a second look.
“Say, wait a minute—”
I moved off and they decided to laugh it off.
“I could have sworn that was Norman,” the man bawled.
“Leave him be, Roman.”
The woman stared after me but I was gone, back into the smoke and the crush of bodies. I came out into the main hallway and it was curiously deserted but for the maids and waiters who had obviously been hired only for the evening. From there a grand spiral staircase rose to the second floor like something from Gone with the Wind. No one minded me going up it. The corridors here were hushed and the rooms still submerged in their privacy. I looked behind myself down at the hall and noticed one of the waiters staring up at me in confusion. I put a finger to my lips and he melted away. The inoffensive fossil look gets me off a number of hooks these days. I plunged into the first corridor and saw that there were lights under the doors. If anyone stopped me I’d say I was drunk and looking for the bathroom. Soon I could hear voices behind the doors. A man and a woman talking. Their tempers were rising, the man was already shouting. There was the resounding sound of a smack to the face. The woman sobbed. The man shouted a few vile things. He stormed about. Suddenly one of the doors snapped open and a masked male head popped into the corridor’s darkness and the eyes revealed by the slits glittered with a mixture of fathomless anger and disequilibrium.
“Who’s there?” he barked, and saw only me tottering with an outstretched hand (I had left the cane downstairs with the staff). A woman appeared behind him and asked who and what it was.
“Do I know you?” the man barked again.
“I was looking for the bathroom,” I said.
The man turned back into the room and his tone was acid.
“He says he’s looking for the john. No, he’s not drunk.”
“But I am,” I corrected him.
He gave me a second look and the purple mask he was wearing seemed to shine brighter with its silver sequins.
“There’s one at the other end of the landing, old sport. Don’t fall down the stairs on the way.”
“I’ll show him,” the woman said, and I recognized her voice at once.
“No, leave him be. It doesn’t have to be a humiliation.”
“I can go.”
“Shut up, and sit down. I’m not in the mood for a conference.”
“I’ll find it,” I said, muffling my own voice and retreating back to the stairs. The woman stepped out into the corridor and watched me go. My voice, she must have recognized my voice. But they were also tipsy, their voices slurred and slippery. They had the high-wire arrogance of the intoxicated.
I went back down the stairs and waited in the garden. So I had found them alone in their bedroom where they were probably doing lines of coke by themselves. I no longer had my miniature camera, of course, but I went from room to room then, making a mental inventory of everything in them. Antique furniture, rugs, mirrors, modern paintings, glassware, jade Indian art, the loots of continents and centuries assembled hastily by amateurs. It was a palace filled by magpies.
It was a little after ten, and so in their terms the night was still young. I decided to ask a young lady to dance, and seeing my crippled arm and tattered shoes she accepted. Sexual noblesse oblige. We waltzed on the lawn and the hours went by. The stars, however, still held their positions.
It was not yet midnight when I went back into the house, found a bathroom to lock myself in, and took off the mask. My face had turned red underneath it. I ripped off the elastic band, then went back out into the hallway and collared one of the waiters. Showing him the broken mask, I asked for a replacement.
The new one was dark green and gave me a fresh look, and I ventured out again a new man. In the main salon, a crowd gathered around a grand piano and there the mask from the room upstairs, easily recognizable, was seated to play. He was belting out some Artie Shaw number which I recognized, and it was only a few bars in that I realized it was “Blues in the Night.” But how was it that he knew it as well and could play it so comfortably? I sat down to listen and began to feel cold all over. From across the room, the player looked tall and slim, athletic almost, a suave impersonator from someone else’s nightmare. Why was he playing music from the forties? Then I remembered that he was almost the same age as I was, and there was no reason why he shouldn’t. I got up and went out into the garden. A few minutes later he came out as well, surrounded by a gaggle of women. They hadn’t noticed me seated in a gazebo and went to the pool that lay adjacent to a terrace and sat down on the grass around it. I waited until they had settled down, then quietly joined them. There was no sign of the wife. The man who appeared to be our host lay sprawled among his beauties, smoking from a cigarette holder and exposing the black socks he wore under his slippers. And here was the astonishing thing: they were dark-blue velvet Alberts with gold crown embroideries, just like the doctor’s. Linder wore them, however, with greater effect and they seemed to work as certificates of his success. I sat down behind him, unnoticed at first, and observed the white hair that the elastic strap of his mask traversed. I was sure it was Donald. But then, the fantasma had nothing solid about him. He was made of air. Nevertheless, sensing my presence, he turned suddenly and smiled. He hadn’t even seen me; it was a fish sensing another fish using its lateral line. He leaned forward and as he did I could see his chin below the mask; it had the tense set of the cruel and feckless. He was onto me, and in some way he didn’t mind. Perhaps it was even more of a game to him than it was to me.
TWENTY
“So you found the restroom, I assume. I was worried about you. Ah, the bladders of the old. But here you are again.” His voice was that of a female opera singer on a night off, a voice smoothed with lavender oil and just as high as it had been when I had first heard it. “You changed your mask, but your shoes are the same.” He laughed. “Can we get you a drink?”
“I’ll have a shot if you’re having one.”
The waiters around us sprang into life.
“Get the man a shot and one for me, too. Dos shots, okay?”
Nothing surprised me about him yet; the phanto
m I had been chasing for days was now in front of me without any fanfare. He wasn’t extraordinary at all. His California accent, his expensive seven-fold tie were all as simple as pieces of clockwork in a mechanism that ticked and performed their functions. It was incredible that he was the con that he was, but his physical presence wasn’t larger than life. He even looked a little small. But then I remembered what Dolores had said about his blue eyes and I found that they were indeed the blue of minerals from deep in the earth, and terrible because of it. He spoke a few words to the women and, magically dismissed, they melted away into the larger party. He sat up and suggested we sit on the metal chairs at the edge of the terrace. He asked my name. I said I was Norman Petty. He said he was Paul. He also admitted that he was the host and that it was funny that I didn’t know that.
“Of course I don’t know everyone here,” he said affably as we relocated. “I don’t think I know you. Were you invited by a friend?”
“I came with Roman.”
“Ah, Roman. So you know Roman? I loathe Roman myself, but my wife always insists on inviting him. How do you know him?”
Now was a throw of the dice, but it had to be done.
“I met him on a yacht down in Manzanillo.”
“There you go. Everyone meets everyone on those damned yachts. I swear to God we even look the same these days. Do you fish, Norman?”
“I’m a marlin man myself. How about you?”
“There’s no point being anything else!”
The shots came on a tray and we knocked them back. A second round was poured.
“I do like slugging shots with a stranger,” he said. “It’s so refreshing. You get so tired of the people you already know.”
He added that he was happy to get away from his wife for a while.
“She’s a terrible harpy, Norman. Why do we always marry harpies? Or do we make them into harpies? I can’t tell anymore.”
“Maybe it’s us who are the harpies.”
“Quite true, Norman, quite true. Now tell me, where do you like to fish marlin?”
“I go to Mazatlán, like everyone else.”
“It’s the best.”
“It’s the best place in Mexico for marlin.”
“That it is. But Guanajuato has the air. Don’t you love the air here? I guess you must be retired here, like us.”
“I’m just looking for a house here, actually.”
“Are you now? Well, you’ve come to the right place.”
We sank the second round and he asked me if I liked to smoke weed. It was one of his hobbies and he had a veritable library of the stuff. But I passed. I said it always made me too courteous. He looked up toward the house and his mouth grew harder. He wanted to know what line of business I was in, and I said that once upon a time I had been a newspaper reporter for a paper in New Jersey. After that, I had retired and taken up ikebana. That was Japanese flower arranging.
“No shit,” he murmured.
Yes, I said, I found it relaxed me during my empty hours. I hated flowers, but I loved ikebana. Had he ever tried it? It was a shame he hadn’t. Now that he was retired—
“I didn’t say I was retired,” he smiled. “What gives you that idea?”
“It’s a hell of a place to be working from.”
“Well, all right, we’re retired, since you mention it. Say, Norman, what do you think I paid for this pile?”
“That’s a tough one—a million?”
“Damn good guess. But why do you assume we bought it?”
The accent was becoming even clearer now: the desert Californian townlets, the air bases, the monotonous irrigated farmlands and the border saloons. According to my researches, his father had run a flour refinery back in the day. They say the flour would sometimes combust in the warehouses and make explosions that sounded like bombs in the middle of the El Centro nights. I’d forgotten who had told me that. It wasn’t Bonhoeffer. Perhaps I remembered it myself.
“I didn’t assume a thing,” I said, as coldly as I could.
“It’s just as well. So you came with Roman? Shame we can’t find him and have him over for a drink. Do you loathe him as much as I do?”
He called over one of the automata.
“Go and see if you can find Señor Roman for me. A friend here who wants to invite him for a drink.”
“Yes, Señor.”
He turned back to me:
“Never could learn the damn language. It just gets on top of me and smothers me.”
“You should try Indonesian.”
“Well, I won’t be going to Indonesia anytime soon.”
“I wonder what brought you here, then.”
He stretched his legs and tiny slivers of white shin appeared above his socks.
“I like it down here. Don’t you?”
He broke into a grin that offered, to my surprise, no malice whatsoever.
“I might even get a place,” I said. “Do you know one for sale?”
“I’ll ask Roman when he comes. He knows all about that sort of thing.”
Yes, the elusive Roman. It was now that I had to get out of there before it was too late. I tried a glance at the watch, but he wasn’t buying it.
“You can’t leave now,” he said. “Not when Roman is about to join us. He’ll get upset and cry.”
By the way, he added, what had happened to my arm?
“Lawn mower accident.”
“You should go see an American doctor. I think they’ve patched you up wrong.”
“Patched is patched.”
“You know what Mikhail Kalashnikov used to say? He said, ‘I wish I’d invented a lawn mower.’ He said that having invented the world’s most famous automatic rifle sometimes made him sad and he wished he’d invented something more useful. Something to mow the lawn. See what I mean?”
He looked up and over my shoulder, and all the cruelty came back into his blue eyes. I turned. It was Roman, unfortunately, escorted by the waiter and without his wife, and there was something nervous and disagreeable about the way he carried himself, as if he had been hustled down there against his will. Looking over at me he at first didn’t recognize the changed mask, but the arm in its sling jolted his memory and he remembered our little meeting in the corridor all those hours ago, now perceived from the far side of a wall of drugs and alcohol.
“Oh,” he said.
“Sit down, Roman. I believe you know our masked friend here. Norman’s been telling me all about himself. I told him that maybe you can help find him a house out here. Roman is our local real estate shark. Aren’t you, Roman?”
“I don’t know about that.”
He sat, but he had already given me the mocking eye.
“I’m glad you invited Norman,” Donald said. “Because otherwise I wouldn’t meet any new faces. And I always like to meet a new face.”
“I invited Norman, but I’m not sure—”
The three of us in our masks were so absurd that I couldn’t help a quick laugh.
“We look like the Three Musketeers,” I said.
“What are you not sure about, Roman?”
“At first I thought—he looked like Norman. But now I’m not so sure.”
“Not sure?”
“He’s got a mask on, hasn’t he?”
“You can see through a mask. Roman here seems to think you might not be Norman. Isn’t that funny? Maybe you should take your mask off and we can determine the matter. I’d say that was a fine idea at this point. I’m sure Norman would agree if he was here.”
“I thought there were rules about that.”
“But if Roman isn’t sure that you’re Norman, neither am I.”
Roman tried to laugh his way through it.
“Come on, it’s not a big deal. Maybe he is Norman and he just so
unds different. I don’t care if he is or not. Hey, buddy, if you say you’re Norman, you are.”
“I don’t want complete strangers wandering around my house calling themselves Norman. Either they’re Norman or they’re not. Friends of friends only.”
“But I am a friend of a friend.”
“Oh?”
I straightened myself up and gave him the eye.
“I’m a friend of Paul Linder. I believe you know him, too.”
Not understanding, Roman prolonged his chimplike grin.
“That’s funny.”
“You know,” Donald said, his legs uncoiling slightly in their velvet slippers. “It’s been a long evening and sometimes we have to bring long evenings to an end. It gets confusing after a while. Maybe you should tell us what your real name is and we can leave it at that. We can call you a taxi if you’d prefer.”
Two men were walking across the lawn toward us, and they weren’t Boy Scouts running to the rescue.
“Is that the departure committee?”
“They’re the departure boys, yes. But I’d like to know your name first.”
“Philip. Do you know any other Philips?”
“I don’t understand,” Roman protested.
Donald turned to him.
“You don’t know him and neither do I. Are you out of your fucking mind?”
I got to my feet before the Boy Scouts arrived, but I wanted to ask him before I was hurled out of paradise how he knew Paul Linder and what he had done with him. But there wouldn’t be time.
“Paul was a nice guy,” I said. “Last time I looked. But the funny thing is he disappeared. They say people can’t disappear.”
“Disappeared?” Roman cried, staring, I supposed, at the only Paul Linder he knew or would ever know.
Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 15
