“Oh, I see,” I said slowly. “Yes, of course. There was no Mr. Harrington. Eleanor’s son Allen was born out of wedlock.”
“What’s past is past,” said Colin and ordered another drink. It was only nine in the morning.
You could be a drunk anywhere, but it must be more pleasant, and cheaper, in San Andreas.
Allen Harrington drove up at noon. Did I have a reason for assuming he’d be white? Only my own ethnocentrism. He was a compact, dark-skinned man, darker than his wife, with startling green eyes.
“What a nightmare,” he said, as he paced around the room. “What a way for my mother to die. Have they found out anything more about the man who killed her? I’m going down to the police station in a few minutes. I’ll make them take this seriously.”
Don’t overdo it, Allen, I thought.
Isabella tried to soothe him. “I’m sure the police are doing all they can.”
“But what kind of a country is this, that people can’t check into a motel room without being robbed and murdered?”
“The police seem to think she knew her attacker,” I said, and Lucy stared at me to hear such a bold-faced lie.
“They do?” Allen shouted at his wife. “You didn’t tell me this. Who killed my mother? Juan? Your worthless cousin Pedro?”
For answer, Isabella turned on her heel and marched out of the house.
“That was a harsh thing to say,” said Lucy.
Allen stared at us a moment and then, unable to defend himself, he burst into agitated tears.
When he calmed down, he said, “I loved my mother. I know she wasn’t a particularly good person. In some ways, I admit, she wrecked my life. But she was still my mother.”
“Who was your father, Allen?” I asked.
“I don’t know. My mother may not have known herself. She came down to Mexico when she was nineteen or twenty for a few weeks of partying, and ended up getting pregnant. By the time she realized it, she was too far along for an abortion. The Harringtons are a prominent family in Houston. The agreement was that if she stayed in Mexico, they’d set up a trust fund for her, and she agreed. It was a crazy mix of shame and pride that kept her here. She loved Mexico and she hated it. The only way she could stay here was to stay separate and to bond with the other white expatriates. She never felt quite accepted here though—that’s why she sent me away to school.”
Allen looked at his arm, which was the color of walnut. “She couldn’t ever really see me, see who I was. When I wanted to marry Isabella, she said, ‘You can’t marry a Mexican.’
“‘Mother,’ I said. ‘I am a Mexican.’
“‘No you’re not,’ she said. ‘You’re white. You don’t even speak Spanish. You have dual citizenship. You belong in America.’
“I didn’t speak much Spanish then. Meeting Isabella changed me. I learned Spanish and found a job that would let me travel in Mexico.”
“Isabella said you were in Cancun.”
He looked at me oddly, and almost aggressively, with those brilliant green eyes. “You need proof? You think I was somehow involved in this?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” broke in Lucy calmly. “Cassandra was just asking a question.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, calming down. “I apologize. And now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said. “I also need to apologize to my wife.”
Dr. Rodriguez, Antonia Rodriguez, the head doctor at the local clinic, had said Lucy seemed to be suffering from exhaustion and a slight case of anemia, nothing more. But she had sent a blood sample to Mexico City anyway. Meanwhile she didn’t exactly say no to Lucy helping her out a couple of hours every morning. The clinic was seriously underfunded, unlike the private clinic that the expatriates all went to.
“It makes me feel better to do something,” Lucy said. “Otherwise I’d go crazy here.”
But even working two hours was tiring to her, and when she came back to the small hotel where we’d moved after Allen arrived, she usually lay on the bed reading Agatha Christie.
I kept waiting for the police to announce that Allen Harrington had killed his mother. Who else would have known she was stopping at that motel? Who else would have persuaded Eleanor to open her door to him?
But days passed and no murder suspect was named.
The next issue of the local English paper came out with an angry editorial by Colin Michaels and with letters to the editor that bemoaned the days when San Andreas had been a safe little town. “I left Los Angeles because of the crime…and what do I find here?”
There was a small notice near the back of the paper that made me pause. It said that the bulk of Mrs. Harrington’s estate would go toward expanding the arts center. An auditorium for readings would be added, and a new library specializing in English books. Colin Michaels, president of the board of El Centro Artistico, expressed his pleasure and said that, in honor of Eleanor’s bequest, the new center would be named after Mrs. Harrington.
I decided to visit the little newspaper office and asked for the managing editor.
“I don’t know what their relationship was,” she admitted. “I’ve only been here a few years, and Colin and Eleanor went back thirty years. You might talk to one of the past editors. Dora James started the paper in the early seventies. She remembers everything.”
“Oh, they had quite the feud going once,” Dora James said. “Eleanor had the money, but Colin had the name. He was one of the biggest names to settle in San Andreas. Not that he was so incredibly successful anyplace but here. But that’s one reason people settle here, you know. In the States, Colin was just another mystery writer; here he was famous. They both wanted to control the arts center. This year Colin was president, but last year she was. It was essentially harmless, their bickering and wrangling. Though I must admit, I’d heard that the victim in Colin’s latest novel, The Cassandra Caper, was an unflattering portrait of Eleanor. He must feel terrible now. Especially since she left the arts center all that money.”
Well, at least I knew now that Eleanor really had been rich. But where did her giving most of her money to the arts center leave Allen?
Dora James shook her head. “Have you ever read any of Colin’s mysteries? They really don’t improve. I always end up feeling as if I’ve missed something crucial in understanding the plot. But it’s usually because Colin has forgotten it himself. What he needs, you know,” she smiled, “is a good editor.”
I found Allen with Isabella in the house, where they were packing up Eleanor’s things. “Yes, I know about the bequest,” he said. “The house is mine though. We’re giving it to Rosario.”
I asked him if his mother ever talked much about Colin Michaels.
“Oh, old Colin,” said Allen. “They were lovers all during my childhood. They had a terrible fight sometime during the seventies. They’d helped create the arts center together, you see. But they couldn’t agree how to run it. The last I heard, Mother was going to pull all her money out of it. She told me she’d been talking to a lawyer in Mexico City. I didn’t believe that she really would. It was just something she used against Colin. Her feud with him had been going on for years. But the arts center really meant something to her. And judging from her will, she really did want almost everything to go into expanding it.”
I didn’t know how to ask for the name of the lawyer, but he gave it to me anyway as he went on, “One of the maids at the motel where my mother was killed says she saw a man with a black mustache and dark hat slipping down the corridor sometime late in the afternoon that day. I thought maybe it could have been my mother’s lawyer, Jorge Salinas, because he has a big black mustache, but his secretary confirmed he’d been in his office all day. It was probably just something the maid made up to make herself sound more interesting.”
When I called Jorge Salinas, he admitted that Mrs. Harrington was his client, and that she had talked to him recently, but he couldn’t tell me about what. They’d had no appointment the day she was murdered, he told me. His records could confirm it
.
I pressed further. “I know you can’t tell me what you and Mrs. Harrington discussed. That’s confidential of course. But let me pose it this way, so that you can just answer yes or no. If there was someone who had an interest in keeping El Centro Artistico alive and that person found out that Eleanor Harrington planned to pull her money out of it…”
“This does not sound like a simple yes or no question, but go on.”
“Wouldn’t it have been in that person’s interest, given the will, if Mrs. Harrington died before she could financially withdraw or change her will?”
He was silent.
“Let me put it this way. Given the circumstances, and given what you may know about the people in her life, did Mrs. Harrington’s death come as a complete surprise?”
“No,” he said finally. “No, it did not.”
It was time to go to the police. Delgado was skeptical. “Señor Michaels has an alibi for the time Mrs. Harrington was murdered. He was here in San Andreas, reading to a large crowd, in a program that had been arranged for weeks.”
“Mrs. Harrington left San Andreas at ten in the morning. At a little before two she checked into the motel. You think she died around six. But what if she died earlier, at three? That would have given him four hours to get back to San Andreas.”
“It’s a possibility,” Delgado allowed. “But there are no witnesses.”
“Get a search warrant,” I said. “It can’t do any harm. If Colin is the mystery writer Dora James says he is, he will have made a mistake in his plotting and forgotten some crucial little element. He’s no Agatha Christie.”
At first I thought I’d made a bad mistake. The police searched Colin’s house and car for four hours and found nothing incriminating. No weapon. None of Eleanor’s jewelry. No telltale copy of a will that she was carrying to her lawyer. It was only by chance that one of the cops happened to open the freezer. There, back in the corner, was a false black mustache, that for reasons of vanity or foolishness, Colin had not been able to bring himself to throw away.
The maid identified him and even though he never confessed, insisting that the mustache was a joke left over from Halloween, Colin soon found himself in the courtroom and then in prison, a place he’d always described from the outside. The Harrington Arts Center expanded without him, though apparently he continues to write murder mysteries from prison while appealing his life sentence.
I heard all this from Lucy, who made a fast friend of Dr. Antonia Rodriguez, the doctor at the San Andreas clinic. Lucy visits her regularly, on her way to and from the refugee camp on the Guatemala border, where she now spends three months every year.
Wie Bitte?
QUICKBORN.
Schlump.
Poppenbüttel.
I stared at a map of Hamburg’s subway system. My destination was one stop beyond Schlump, Marianne had said. Marianne Schnackenbusch was a translator acquaintance I’d run into at the Frankfurt Book Fair a week before. When she heard that we were both translating Gloria de los Angeles’s latest collection of short stories—she into German, I into English—she’d generously told me that I must come to stay with her in Hamburg after the fair. She and her partner Elke had loads of room, and I could stay as long as I liked.
It sounded perfect. I had a brief engagement in Paris first, but after that I was at loose ends. My translation was due at the end of November, and I didn’t have the money to go anywhere splendid to finish it. Certainly I could have stayed in my small attic room in Nicola’s house in London, but in truth I’d been rather avoiding Nicola since the arrival of the Croatian lesbian commune last summer. How was I to know that my blithe offer many years ago to reciprocate their hospitality in Zagreb meant that all six of them would turn up on Nicola’s doorstep in July?
Marianne and Elke’s flat was in an old area of the city called the Schanzenviertel. Leafy streets, tall graceful apartment buildings, graffiti, bikes everywhere, Turkish and Greek shops just opening up. I’d taken a night train from Paris and it was still early.
Marianne embraced me heartily at the door. “Please sit down, sit down and eat. You must be starving, all night on the train. You should have told us when you were coming. We could have picked you up.”
She was a big woman, with a mane of hennaed red-purple hair around a broad, eager face. She was barefoot and wearing a red silk robe. I knew from our brief talks at bookfairs that she was the daughter of a German Communist who had fled to Chile before the war, and a Chilean mother. She had told me that in addition to translating she also was a lecturer at the university in Latin American literature. I could see from the hallway that translation and teaching must pay better in Germany than in Britain: the flat looked enormous and was full of Oriental carpets and big leather sofas and chairs. There were bookshelves up to the tall ceilings.
“She’s a bit overwhelming,” my friend Lucinda in Paris had told me. “A combination of Latin American vivacity and Prussian forcefulness. But she’s generous to a fault; she’ll take care of you well.” Lucinda was as poor as I was and knew the value of visits to people with washer-dryers and fax machines. Lucinda sublet a studio about the size of an elevator carriage, and practiced one of the few literary occupations to pay less than translation: poetry.
Elke was already sitting at the kitchen table, which was spread with a huge number of plates of meats and cheeses and jars of spreads and preserves. She was much frailer-looking than Marianne—and older too—with narrow shoulders, short gray-blonde hair and round small glasses. If you didn’t see her wrinkles, she would remind you of a boyish Bolshevik in a Hollywood film about the Russian Revolution.
“Just coffee for now,” I said.
“No, no,” said Marianne, pushing all manner of things toward me, and settling herself. “No, you must eat. This is so exciting for me, having Gloria’s English translator here. There’s so much I want to talk over with you. I’m enjoying the stories so much; they just go like the breeze.”
I looked across the table in astonishment. We hadn’t had time in Frankfurt to discuss the literary value of Gloria’s work. I had only assumed she felt the same ambivalence I did. “Well, I always find Gloria to be fairly easy to translate,” I said cautiously. “There is a certain…similarity in all her work.”
“Yes,” said Marianne, delicately spreading layers of soft cheese on half a roll and then devouring it in a gulp. “That’s what I enjoy so much, how you can always count on her to write so lusciously. Other writers seem dry next to her, while she is sensual, opulent, rich, and vivid. I just sink into her books like a big feather bed, like a warm bath with perfume.”
“They do tend to have something of a bathetic effect,” I murmured.
“Yes, exactly,” said Marianne, but Elke said, “Cassandra means they’re sentimental drivel, my friend. And I’m afraid I agree.”
“No, she doesn’t mean that,” Marianne said good-humoredly. “After all, Cassandra has translated all Gloria’s books into English.”
Elke fortunately changed the subject. “I must be off soon to work. I wish I could stay and help Marianne show you around the city. But we have some problems at work that are rather worrisome.”
“Not just the usual problems between the bosses and workers,” said Marianne indignantly. “Threats. Terrible threats.”
“But don’t you work in a bird-watching society?” I asked, uncertain if Marianne had given me the right information or if I’d understood it properly.
“Yes, yes,” said Elke. “Well, that’s what it was when it was originally founded. Sort of like your Audubon Society in America, I think. But you can’t watch birds nowadays without seeing how they are threatened by the loss of their habitats and so forth, and that has made some of the members very activist. We are trying to purchase land and writing letters to the politicians, as well as planning a big demonstration in two weeks. And of course some members are nervous about all this activism, which to them is like confrontation with the state.”
“But
who is threatening whom?”
“Our whole organization got a threat in the mail, several threats. The first two weeks ago, and another last week, and yesterday one more. It’s about the cause we are working on now, trying to save a stretch of the Elbe River. It used to be that this section, not so far from Hamburg, marked the boundary between East and West Germany, and so it was never developed. If you go there, you see old farms and very little else. But now, with reunification, they want to build on either side, and worse—from our point of view, from the birds’ point of view, that is—they want to dredge the river to make it deeper, and make concrete sides and so forth, for shipping.”
Elke got up. “We don’t want this to happen, of course. There is very little left in Europe of undeveloped land, especially wetlands. So we’re fighting.” She wrapped a scarf several times around her neck and put on her jacket. “And someone doesn’t like it.”
As soon Elke left, Marianne began talking about Gloria’s writing again. “Just now I’m translating the story of the servant girl and the colonel,” she said.
“Oh yes, that one.”
“What a sly sense of humor Gloria has, don’t you think?”
“Well…”
“But that’s what I admire so much about Gloria. She is capable of slyness and subtlety, and also of great exuberance and broad strokes. She has such a large talent.”
“Broad strokes, yes,” I said weakly.
Marianne polished off the rest of the rolls and several more cups of coffee, chattering all the while about Gloria. She then showed me to my room, which was large and light. It overlooked an interior garden where the lindens and ashes were turning gold and yellow. “Here is the desk where you will work,” she said. It was old-fashioned, of walnut, a desk I had always dreamed of, with green blotting paper and a desk lamp with a warm brown paper shade. A tall bookshelf along one wall was filled with novels in French and Spanish. There was a red Turkish rug on the floor and a daybed covered with pillows.
The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Page 10
