Robert nodded at Helmut. “Your husband?”
“No.” Her tone dared him to make something of that as well.
“He always drink like this?”
She sighed. A faint line worried itself across her forehead. “This is his third car wreck in four weeks.”
“Whoa.” Robert recalled her limp, wondering if she had been hurt in an earlier wreck.
The waiter returned with their drinks and a glass for Ana’s beer. When she had poured a little, Robert lifted his in a toast: “To Paco’s friendly neighborhood bar.”
She took a sip, observing him closely. “The Hotel Victoria, it’s up the hill, isn’t it?”
“Too far to walk. The shape he’s in anyway. We’ll get a cab. I’ll give you a hand.”
“No,” she said quickly. “That won’t be necessary.”
“Suit yourself.” He added his money to the pesos she had placed on the table, then settled himself, one arm over the back of the chair, slouching comfortably. “I mean, if you want to get this fellow on his feet and haul him out of here with two pieces of luggage, then get all that same baggage in a taxi all by yourself, that’s fine by me. On the other hand, I’m leaving anyway.”
“Thank you,” she said coolly. “But I can manage.” She drew both bags in close, then placed her hand on Helmut’s arm. “Helmut?”
Helmut muttered and pulled away.
“You’re not going to let him sleep it off a bit?”
She ignored Robert, leaned over Helmut, called his name again. “Helmut—”
Helmut’s elbow shot back and popped her on the nose.
“Hey!” Robert half stood out of his chair.
“No, no! Please! He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Ana blotted her eyes with tissues, dabbed at a drop of blood leaking into the little indention above her upper lip. Again people had turned to look.
Robert eased back down. “Here,” he said, holding out a clean handkerchief.
She shook her head. “Thank you, though.”
“You’ll excuse me for offering an opinion but I’d leave the son of a bitch here to rot.”
Her eyes went glossy. She bent forward, face pressed into the tissues.
Helmut snorted and began to slip sideways. Robert caught him and held him in place. “This won’t do,” he said. He knelt, hooked Helmut’s arm around his neck and hauled him out of the chair. Helmut made a surprised whistling noise in his throat.
“Come on,” Robert said. “You’ll have to carry both bags.”
The entire bar turned to stare, and for a moment only the impassioned lament of the mariachis filled the lull as Robert dragged Helmut sagging and stumbling across the floor. He glanced back, then proceeded, seeing that Ana looked to neither side, but pulled the extended handles out of one bag and carried the other by its side grip. She wrestled the bags clattering down the steps after him.
On the street a Volkswagen bug whipped in at the curb, TAXI lettered on the door.
“How much to the Hotel Victoria?” Robert asked.
“Twenty pesos.” The driver’s gaze rested on Helmut. “Thirty pesos,” he corrected.
Ana climbed in and helped wedge Helmut in after. Robert set their luggage in the front footwell, then sat on the floor where the front passenger seat would normally have been and leaned back against the bags.
The VW groaned up the hillside. Moonlight flattened the narrow cobblestone street and the stone walls on either side into simple patterns of silvery light and blue shadow. Helmut grunted and drooled down his shirtfront. The driver maneuvered the VW into the driveway near the hotel’s office.
Robert gave the driver forty pesos and stood both bags upright on the tarmac. He caught Helmut by one arm, but Helmut flung him off and folded over on the seat against Ana. Robert took hold of Helmut’s belt and one wrist and dragged him out onto the asphalt.
“Don’t hurt him!” Ana said sharply. “Be easy.”
The driver looked on, smiling. “Buenas noches, señor. Gracias.” He lifted the money in salute and drove away.
Robert hooked Helmut’s arm around his neck and hauled him up again. Ana followed as Robert dragged Helmut stumbling to the office. The door was locked. Through the door glass, beyond the vacant registrar’s desk, a pale light shone through a shuttered door at the end of a hallway. Robert pushed the doorbell. It dinged somewhere inside. He held Helmut upright and pushed the button again. After a moment he banged on the door with the flat of his hand.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Anybody back there?”
Silence.
Ana pushed her hair back, a nervous gesture. “We’re putting you to a lot of trouble,” she said.
“No trouble.” He hammered the door again. “Hey! Customer out here!”
Silence.
He tried a few more times, then bent and drew Helmut up over his shoulder like a sack of grain. “Okay. Come with me.”
Ana blinked. “Hey…what’re you doing?”
He took one of the suitcases in his free hand. “Come on. My room has two beds.”
She stood back. “Oh no you don’t.”
He paused. “Got a better idea?”
She stood for a moment, looking down the darkened street where the taxi had disappeared. Insects made a sustained whistling noise from the surrounding night.
“Listen, I can’t stand here holding this big tub all night.” He turned across the lot toward the hotel units. “Don’t worry,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m not dangerous.”
She hurried after, the under-wheels on her luggage grinding over the paving. Robert climbed the stone steps, then doubled back along the veranda to his room on the end. Helmut’s body felt damp and disgusting, his arms and upper body sagging against Robert’s backside. Robert hoped he wasn’t going to throw up.
Robert let the bag down and keyed the door open. He switched on the light, then carried Helmut around and dumped him on the double bed, springs groaning. Helmut raised himself on his elbows, looked wildly about, and then sank back, mumbling incoherently. Robert caught his ankles and swung him around lengthwise on the bed.
Ana lingered in the doorway, looking about.
“Relax,” Robert said, straightening. “Damn. How much does that old boy weigh anyhow?”
She set her suitcase just inside.
Robert went back and brought Helmut’s bag in. “How’s the nose? Still bleeding?”
She touched the tissue to her nostrils, inspected it, shook her head.
“Come morning this old boy’s going to have one big-time headache.”
“I’ll get him undressed. He’ll be fine.”
“I’ll give you a hand.”
“I can do it.” She took Helmut’s shoes off.
Robert rolled him to one side and turned the covers down, Helmut mumbling. “To hell with his clothes,” Robert said. “Let him sleep in them.”
Ana drew the sheet up over him.
“Let me brush my teeth and get my stuff out, then the bathroom’s all yours.” He washed up and came out carrying the pants and shirt he had rinsed earlier on wire hangers, the .380 under his shirttail.
Ana stood before the French doors looking out onto the patio. She held a plastic zip-case and nightclothes from her bag.
“There’s a clean towel on the shower door,” he said. “Bottled water to brush your teeth.”
“Thank you.” She went in and closed the door. He heard the lock snap, then the shower running.
He hung his still-damp clothes on the shutter by the single bed. Then he took an apple and a pack of cheese crackers from his bag and placed them on the nightstand by the double bed. Helmut’s face hung slack alongside.
Robert repacked his clothes and shoved the bags under the single bed. He turned the covers down and then took the brandy and a plastic water glass out onto the patio.
He settled himself in one of the wrought-iron chairs at the patio table. Pinpoints of light glimmered throughout the town below. A wash of stars spilled across the silve
ry night sky. The notes of a plaintive Mexican ballad drifted up the mountainside. A goat bleated from somewhere in the distance.
He watched through the French doors as Ana came out of the bathroom wearing a light robe over pajamas, hair wrapped in a towel. She spotted him and came to the door, hesitant.
“You want a drink, bring the other glass,” he said.
She stepped out and stood looking down over the town. “Such a lovely view,” she said
“I put cheese crackers and an apple by your bed. Not much but it’s all I have.”
“Thank you. Frankly, I’m starved.” She went back inside and returned with the apple and crackers, a hairbrush tucked under her arm. She placed everything on the low table, then turned her chair at an angle in order to see the panorama below.
Robert picked the brandy up from the floor and set it on the table. “Help yourself.”
She leaned forward, peering over the parapet.
Robert’s gaze followed hers. Where the same view earlier in the afternoon had evoked a feeling of loneliness, now it struck him as wonderfully pleasant. Even the constant mono whistling grind of the cicadas seemed to compliment the distant Mexican music as if ordained to do so. The night air was warm, fragrant with the smell of honeysuckle and jasmine.
As certain as he was that Ana and Helmut were following him, he was just as certain that Helmut was dead drunk and that Ana was genuinely nervous, though she seemed to have relaxed a bit at the moment. The thing was to play the gracious host, keep his wits and a wary eye.
Ana picked up the apple. “Would you like half of this?”
He shook his head. “I washed it earlier, but you might want to wipe it down again.”
“Where’s your home?” she asked absently, her gaze on the town.
“Here and there. I sell boats so I’m on the road a lot.”
“Boats. I see. You have family?”
“You travel a lot too,” he said, ignoring her question. “If I recall, indigenous arts and crafts.”
“Sometimes. More than I might like.”
“You two work together?”
She looked back at him. “Oh no. He has his work, I have mine.” She placed the apple on the table, unwrapped the towel from her hair and then hesitated. “Do you mind?”
“Mind?”
“Me, brushing out my hair. Very bad form.”
“Not at all. I kind of like it.” He reached for the bottle and poured himself another splash. “Here. Get your glass. Have a drink. Relax.”
She fixed him with a look. “I don’t get drunk, if that’s what you have in mind.”
He settled back in his chair, grinning a little. “Well, usually when I want a woman I don’t want her drunk.”
She put the brush down. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Anybody ever suggest that you’re kind of hard to talk to?”
She studied him a moment, then stood up from the chair. “Yes. I’m afraid I’m not very good company. I’ll go in now. I’m awfully tired.”
“Wups. I didn’t mean to run you off.”
“Not at all. I’m sure we’ll both feel better after a good night’s sleep.”
“Switch the light off in there. Or leave it on if you’re afraid of me.”
She hesitated again. “Afraid? Should I be?”
He shook his head, a vague gesture of hopelessness, and lifted his glass to her. “Sleep well.”
She gave him a lingering look, then went inside and on into the bathroom, her limp barely discernible, something sexy in the slight shifting of her hips. She came out after a moment and shut the light off and he heard her getting into bed.
He steeled himself against the warm slushy feeling that had overtaken him. The brandy, he told himself. Yet he couldn’t help but recall the light in her eyes, the pleasure she had taken in the view.
He sat for a while, listening to the night, thinking, contemplating again the improbability of Ana and Helmut accidentally stumbling onto him here in Taxco. Obviously they were tracking him electronically, and since Fowler had only had access to the video equipment that had to be where the bug was. He would give it a good going over once he got rid of Ana and Helmut.
Something about the whole setup had disturbed him from the beginning. True, the stakes were huge, but the operation seemed excessive, all this runaround between Mexico City and Acapulco. But then, Fowler was big on layering, covering his tracks—his insistence on degrees of separation.
Robert finished his drink, then went inside and felt his way to the bathroom in the ambient light from the town below. He brushed again, pulled on his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, then shut the bathroom light off and made his way out to the smaller bed, little more than a cot. He slipped the .380 under the thin cotton mattress and settled himself under the sheet. Soon his eyes adjusted and he could make out Helmut’s shape in the bed, the smaller form of Ana on the other side.
A cricket chirped in the room. Good luck, he recalled. According to the Chinese anyway. Or was it the Japanese? They kept them in little cages.
Nick’s hermetically sealed room came to mind.
11
Travel Arrangements
ANA OCCUPIED THE bathroom. Robert sat on the terrace, torn between watching the sun edging over the mountaintop, lighting the orange tiled roofs on the hill above the Hotel Victoria like a burning wick, and watching Helmut through the French doors. Helmut sat on the edge of the bed, holding his head in his hands. After a moment he found his glasses where Ana had left them on the nightstand, fumbled them on, and sat looking about until his gaze came to rest on Robert through the open doorway. Helmut sat perfectly still. Then Ana emerged from the bathroom.
She surprised Robert by joining him on the terrace, ignoring Helmut. But then she ignored him too. Wearing a green cotton shirt and faded jeans cuffed above tanned ankles, she stood at the parapet, her back to him. She had brushed her hair and wore it pulled back and clasped at the base of her neck with a silver clip. She wore several finger rings now, including one on her left thumb, which struck him as erotic. Even the little spots of peeling nail polish on her sandaled toes touched off a small shiver he felt all the way to his scrotum. He smiled to himself, wondering if he were developing a foot fetish.
“You were up early,” she said without turning.
“Yes, ma’am. You sleep okay?”
Now he was torn, not between watching the sunrise and Helmut, but between Helmut and Ana’s butt, perfectly compact in her jeans.
Helmut looked about, probably wondering how he had gotten here. He found his bag and took a laptop from it. Then he sat back on the bed and opened it on his knees—an odd thing to do on first waking, much less with the kind of hangover he must be wearing.
“My apologies for last night,” Ana said. “If I was rude.”
“Well, I couldn’t very well pull your hair. Not at our age.”
She half turned.
He grinned. “Little boys, when they like a little girl they pull her hair.”
She continued to watch him, coolly aloof.
“Then the boy runs and the girl chases him and throws him down so they can wrestle.”
Her gaze lingered on him a moment, solemn. Then she turned her back again.
Helmut, looking remarkably alert, closed the laptop and plugged it into a wall socket, recharging. He assembled a clean change of clothes, took another look at Robert through the doorway, then flat-footed his way to the bathroom. Just as if he were at home.
“I’ll wash up when he’s done,” Robert said. “Then we’ll go to breakfast.”
“I won’t argue that.”
“I owe you an apology.”
She turned again, meeting his gaze.
“I left them out,” he said, nodding at the pitted apple, at the cracker crumbs in the tattered packaging on the patio’s slate floor. “I spooked you so bad you didn’t eat. When I got up earlier, the grackles were at them.”
THE RESTAURANT’S CASEMENT windows were cranked ope
n. The perfume smell of flowers drifted in on the sun-drenched air mixing with the smell of coffee, refried beans, bacon and eggs.
Helmut lifted a yellow rose from the tiny glass vase on the table and presented it to Ana as they seated themselves. “Fur mein Liebst,” he said with a curt bow.
Ana accepted the rose with a surprised half-hearted smile.
“Romantic,” Robert said, working up a wry grin.
Ana’s eyes flickered hotly. She opened her mouth to speak, but Helmut took her hand and pecked it with a kiss. She hesitated, her expression registering further surprise.
Helmut ignored Robert and spoke to Ana in German around the cigarette jutting between his teeth.
“Please,” Ana said. “Don’t be rude. Speak English.”
The waiter set their plates on the table. Eggs and bacon with tortillas and sliced melon.
Helmut stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and began to eat, keeping up a steady monologue in his guttural spitting German.
“Gets over a drunk pretty good, doesn’t he,” Robert said.
Ana went greedily at her breakfast and ignored them both. When finally she mopped up the last of her eggs and salsa with a last scrap of tortilla, she called the waiter over.
“No, I’ll get the check,” Robert said.
“The check? Oh, no. That’s the least we can do in return for the accommodations. But I only asked for two oranges and two bananas.”
“Oh. Well. That and all the breakfast you just put away, that should hold you till lunch.”
“The fruit is for the bus.”
“The bus. You’re going on then? To Acapulco?”
“Of course.”
He thought that over. “You do know I’m going to Acapulco myself?”
“Congratulations then,” she said distantly. “I assume your client came through.”
Helmut looked from one to the other, attentive now.
“What I mean is,” Robert said, faking an indifferent shrug, “I’m driving to Acapulco if you two want to come along.”
Ana gauged him coolly across the table. “Thanks, but I don’t think so.”
“No? Why not?”
The Dogs of Mexico Page 7
