by Ronil Caine
RonilCaine
The Coin
Ronil Caine
Coin
© 2017 Peter Z Zelnik
Cover Artwork: Ronil Caine
Edited by: János Untener
Proofreading: Roger Scaife
English translation: Ágnes Körmendi
Special thanks to Katalin Cs. Fehér
for editing the Hungarian manuscript.
2017 Budapest
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
or actual events is purely coincidental.
The cities and some places are real but they are only sceneries to the story.
ronilcaine.com
Good luck seldom walks in pairs, but bad luck never walks alone.
(Song Jiang)
1
Luis Moreno stepped out of the office and opened his umbrella. The wind immediately caught it and turned it inside out. Luis cursed, closed the umbrella and opened it again, but this time he took care to point it windward. It was raining cats and dogs in Mexico City. Heavy rains were not uncommon in the month of February, but this year was worse than usual. Everything was flooded, cars had to inch along carefully, which made the traffic jams in the crowded city more frustrating, the shouts and honking angrier.
Luis went to work on foot. His office was a half an hour walk away from his home. Sometimes it was pleasant, but that day it did not look very promising.
The skies darkened the day before and it started to rain at noon. By the time he left for home, around seven, there was water everywhere. Luis huddled under his umbrella. He pulled it down to his head as much as he could and started to walk home.
The houses and the neon signs lost their colours in the rain and the otherwise colourful city seemed to dull like it was reaching the final hours of its life. The people on the streets were struggling with their umbrellas, running from cover to cover to take refuge from the rain, already drenched, or they were watching the streets, the cars, the creaking trees and the millions of fat raindrops exploding onto the concrete from the shelter of a roof.
As Luis got closer to home, the tall buildings of the business quarter gave way to rows of one- and two-storey houses. Stores, barber shops, cantinas, car repair shops followed each other, though the majority of them already closed for the day. Ramshackle houses, newly opened car salons and gas stations, then a line of broken down buildings. In Mexico City, Luis thought everything was diverse, eclectic, and at the same time, endlessly boring. He loved the city and yet he wanted to leave it. He had many good things that kept him here—and just as many pushing him away.
The water was rushing on the side of the road like a miniature river, gushing into the sewers with mindless rage, sweeping along the trash and dirt it found. Mexico City was one of the dirtiest cities and even though this area was considered to be relatively clear, they said that breathing this air was as bad for the lungs as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
Overall, this part of the city was safe. Luis lived here for twenty years and he did not encounter a single incident. Sometimes he read about a robbery or a fight, but that was negligible compared to the more dangerous quarters.
He was just a few streets away from home. He knew his wife, Camila, and their young son, Marcos would be waiting for him by the window as usually. He was cold despite his coat; his shoes were drenched and he could feel the cold water squelch in his socks. By now, his trousers were wet, too. On the other side of the road, a fat man was smoking under a shade. He was only wearing a vest, even though it was just 15 °C. He did not seem to care about the rain or the cold.
Rain had always reminded Luis of his father. It was raining when he died and it was raining when they buried him. They did not spend too much time together. His father was always on the road, travelling South-America; he was involved in all sorts of businesses and investments. He managed to eke out a living but never made enough to live well and Luis did not have a real father. Then on a useless day such as this, a stroke killed him.
Luis reached the final corner. He would round it, pass two more gates and then he would be home. A dog passed him with its head hung low, its wet fur hanging in clumps. It passed Luis, repeatedly looking towards the road as if waiting for the moment it could safely run across it. It stopped and started to walk back towards Luis, still keeping an eye on the road..
Luis fished his keys out so he would not have to bother with them when he reached the gate. The loose change in his pocket jingled and the wind tore at his umbrella, leaving his head exposed. His hair got soaking wet in a matter of second. At this very moment a lorry rounded the corner.
Luis lifted the umbrella above his head again, but that made him drop his keys. He started swearing again. The water trickled from his dark hair into his eyes. He wiped it off and leaned down to pick them up. Something caught the light on the road. Something small, carried by the water, bobbing up and down as it was swept towards the sewers. Luis grabbed his keys and looked at the tiny, shiny object. All he wanted was to get home and get out of his wet clothes, and yet it caught his eyes. There he was, bending forward in the rain with his keys in one hand and his umbrella in the other. The rain enveloped him, the wind tugged at his wet coat like a sail, and he was staring at a small, glittering something on the road.
It was a coin. Now, having already bent down to get his keys, it was just a step away from him. If he did not reach out for it, it would be carried down into the sewers and remain there until corrosion ate it in a matter of centuries.
Luis took one step sideways. The coin reached the sewer grille half covered by the carelessly spread tarmac of the road. The sewer opening looked like a flat, inert mouth greedily drinking dirt and rainwater. The coin got stuck in a small crevice between the grille and a crack in the tarmac. Luis reached out for it and grabbed it.
Suddenly, he heard a dull thud from behind, followed by an agonising howl. He looked up and saw that the lorry struck the dog just a few feet away from him. The driver was leaning out of the window and shouting something, but the rain and the wind dragged his voice away. The animal limped to the other side of the road and lay down on the pavement. Luis jumped onto the pavement; his shoes squelched on the concrete. The driver seemed to be shouting at him, perhaps asking what he was doing on the road, but Luis did not care about him. He hurried to his house, unlocked the door, stepped inside, and pulled the door closed.
The patter of the rain smoothed into a gentle whisper, the wind was cut off, and only his coat dripped fat drops of water on the pavement. Luis leaned against the wall to catch his breath. He felt as if he had been running away from something for hundreds and hundreds of yards.
That was close, he thought. That dog was run down right behind me. If it hadn’t been there, maybe I would have been hit and limped off to collapse on the pavement in the rain. He tried to convince himself that the driver would have certainly noticed a human, but the dog was just a few feet away from him. Would the driver really have noticed him? “What matters is that I’m at home now. Finally!”
He opened his palm and studied the coin for a moment. It was not small change, at least not a peso. It looked more like a memorial coin, the kind people press for themselves in front of museums and monuments, although it looked too valuable for that. Maybe old money from a collection. Maybe it was worth something. It had no numbers on it, so perhaps it was going to be a memorial coin after all. He pocketed it and rushed up the stairs to the second floor. He entered his flat, and as soon as he felt the spicy tomato smell of dinner, he forgot about the whole affair. The dog, the lorry, the rain, and the coin. He was at home
; it was warm and peaceful here. His son, Marcos, ran towards him and climbed into his arms.
2
The rain had stopped overnight and the following day was gloriously sunny. Luis was so happy about the weather that he completely forgot about the coin. He remembered it only when he had to use his coat again a week later. He spent a few moments staring at the shiny piece of metal in his hand and odd thoughts popped into his head.
He spent the previous week thinking about all the unexpected things that happened to him. He was given an important client because neither of the two other advisors could handle it. One of them had a nasty fall with his scooter and broke his collarbone, the other had to take a few days off to take care of his divorce proceedings. The new customer came with a serious bonus, not to mention that Luis could finally prove his mettle, which was something he always dreamed of. Some could say he had a lucky streak, but Luis felt his time would have come anyway. He had been saying that for twenty years and now—eventually—it did come.
One morning as he was about to leave for a meeting with the board of executives, he spilled his coffee as he reached for a document on his desk. The coffee swiftly flooded the desk, soaking a few sheets of paper, getting under his keyboard and dripping down over the edge of the desk. But it did not stain either his shirt or his trousers. That was lucky, Luis thought, but then he wondered how often people have luck without even noticing it. Had the coffee spilled on his clothes, he would have remembered it for a long time, but this narrow escape was something he would soon forget.
A year earlier he invested a largish sum of money in a company whose shares had kept falling ever since. A week after finding the coin an international concern bought the company and the price of the shares skyrocketed. Luis’s money paid the highest possible dividend.
Luis sat down in a park before going home. He was looking at his coin. The past week went very well. More good things came his way in that one week than in the six months leading up to it. Perhaps more good things than in the past twenty years of his life, with the exception for Marcos’s birth and Camila. All things considered, everything was great since he found that coin.
He started to laugh. He was not a superstitious man, he never even went to the Día de los Muertos celebrations. How could a coin, something made of copper and iron, maybe silver, have any effect on a man’s life? Maybe it was he who had changed. Maybe he simply passed some sort of a tipping point and started performing better. But he could feel this explanation did not hold up.
“So could it be a lucky charm?” he asked himself. “A lucky dollar? A lucky coin? Let’s put it to the test!”
He bought a scratch card on the way home. He scratched off the coating with the coin. He won 28,000 pesos; this was the jackpot, the highest prize available for this kind of card. If things went on like this, he could stop working altogether. He would try the national lottery the following week. This was crazy!
He did not tell his wife: unlike him, Camila came from a deeply religious family, and even though she did not adhere to the traditions very strictly, she was somewhat superstitious and God fearing.
He spent his winnings on a weekend in Acapulco. This was their first holiday in years. They missed the bus to the airport and Luis cursed himself for it; himself and the coin. Was it a lucky charm or was it not? It was only when they returned from their trip that they learned there was a shooting on the bus they missed: several people were injured, two American tourists and a Mexican man were in critical condition. The gunman was arrested following a failed suicide.
When Luis returned to the office on Monday, he was told one of his co-worker’s brother was on the bus. He was one of the critically injured. He was shot and they still did not know whether he would live.
Despite all of this they did catch the airplane to Acapulco due to a computer problem that delayed the check-in process. They spent a wonderful weekend by the sea. Luis, Camila and Marcos were happier than ever, together in Acapulco.
When they got home, they heard that the previous night their upstairs neighbour was robbed and the burglars took all her savings. The house was swarming with police and relatives all day long.
Another week passed. Luis won the Lotería Nacional as well. It meant twenty million pesos. Nobody in his family even saw such a sum at once. He decided not to tell anyone and stop playing before they charged him with cheating, the media started to hound him, or the wrong type of people found out about his luck and kidnapped him to extort his money.
A few days later an SUV ran over Luis’s cousin, Andrés, in Puebla. He was killed immediately. However, it was not the tragedy that made Luis come up with new ideas about his coin, but a much smaller accident that happened soon after.
Camila was frying eggs one morning whilst Luis was reading the news on the internet. They heard shouting from the street and then the kitchen window shattered with a loud crash. A rock flew in across the kitchen and hit the wall a few inches from Luis’s head, fell to the ground and disappeared under a cupboard. Camila was so spooked she flipped the frying pan. Hot oil splashed on her legs and burned her badly.
Luis helped her put a balm on it, then fixed breakfast for the family. Then he sat down and took the coin in his hand. If it truly had magic powers, was it attracting good fortune or bad? This was the question he asked himself. It seemed to him that whenever he had good luck, something very bad happened to someone. And not just anyone, but people around him. His colleagues, his neighbour, his cousin—poor Andrés!—and now Camila. And maybe even that dog in the rain, the one which got hit by the lorry in his place. The luckier he got, the more misfortune fell on someone else. But was it even possible? Or was it all just coincidence, and was it just him who thought it was driven by a coin and its magic powers?
Luis was getting worried. If his luck really had its price then he could not be sure his family would live to see the New Year, even if he never bought a lottery ticket again. There was this affair with the frying pan. Would have Camila burned herself even if the rock had hit Luis? Presumably, yes, but they would never know the truth. Or the bus, the one they missed; he did not even know they were lucky and his colleague’s brother had to pay for the consequences.
Luis decided it was better to get rid of the coin before it caused more trouble. He had won quite enough and his job looked stable, too. He would not be greedy. He would stick with what he had. He would get out before the one million dollar question and run with the smaller prize. He was afraid that if he threw away the coin, he would lose everything he had won so far, but even that would not have bothered him as long as his family was safe.
Luis walked down to the street where the policemen were still questioning the locals about a fight in the morning, the same fight that sent that rock flying into Luis’s kitchen.
He found the drain where he saved the coin from wandering in Mexico City’s sewers for all eternity, and dropped it into the opening. The coin disappeared with a muffled tinkle.
“So that was it,” Luis thought. Or rather, he thought now he would see if the coin had anything to do with the peculiar nature of recent events.
He decided to test his luck in a casino that evening.
3
Luis bought tokens for 10,000 pesos and an hour later the manager invited him to a private dinner at the VIP lounge of the casino to get him to leave the establishment before he bankrupted it. The VIP lounge was just a fancy excuse for holding suspects until the casino’s team went through the footage of the security cameras to see if they could prove foul play. They did not find anything. The director apologised and told Luis they could not pay any more of his winnings.
Luis left the casino with a check for half a million pesos. The fortune coin was in his pocket and he was no longer certain he had thrown it away in the morning. He remembered the tinkling sound it made as it disappeared in the sewers, but perhaps it was just his imagination. He started to suspect the coin belonged to him now. There was a bond between them.
Another
man arrived at the casino that night, an hour after Luis left. He was fired from his job that day, diagnosed with lung cancer a week before, and he had next to no chance of recovery. He did not tell any of this to his wife and their two children. Desperate as he was, he decided to take all his savings and shares to a casino and try his luck to have something to leave to his children. He lost 16,000 pesos in twenty minutes. It was all he had.
Luis read about this four days later. The man shot himself in the head right by the very roulette table of the same casino Luis had nearly bankrupted.
“Jesus Christ!” Luis said to himself. He could not get rid of the feeling that he was responsible for this tragedy. He did not know this man but he sat in front of his computer utterly desperate. But what could he have done? How could he have known? And it did not matter, either. The important thing was that he realised that fateful consequences followed his luck and so he decided to stop the coin somehow.
He sat down by his desk, which served as a kitchen table during the day, put a reading light on it and carefully studied the coin in the stark light.
He saw an ornamental frame on one side, a repetitive folk motive, probably the work of an Indian tribe, which ran around a star-like central image. The coin was worn and the patterns were blurred by the iron grasp of time. The star was just a blob, an amorphous protrusion, but when Luis looked at it more closely, he saw it was a winged beast. A bird, perhaps? He turned the coin over.
There was a pattern around the edges as well; it was different than the one on the other side, but represented the same style. There were scratches in the middle of the coin.
Writing! Luis thought. It could be writing, though it is really worn. He strained his eyes so much they started to hurt, but he could not recognise a single letter or a sign. It’s not Spanish, he thought to himself. If it is indeed writing, it does not use the Latin alphabet.
