He stopped in front of me and pointed down at me. “You! Have you got any cowboy clothes? Hat, shirts, boots?”
“Nothing.”
“Buy them tomorrow morning. Get high heels on the boots and a big high crown on the hat. I want you seven and a half feet tall. I want you looked at. I’ll bring the eye patch. He’s dead, but they won’t know that in the Yucatan, will they?”
“Is that a question?”
“Hell no. Shut up. Let me think.” And he went back to pacing.
Finally he dropped into a chair and clapped his thick hands together. “It’s a chance, but maybe the only chance you got, McGee. Bring money. A good chunk of it. Can you bring fifty big ones?”
“To where, for what?”
“You and me, we’re going on a buying trip.”
“I thought you were up there on the policy level, Browder.”
“Hell no. I’m third or fourth string. If I want to go buying and have a source, why should they stop me? They let people turn a dime. They don’t want them to get greedy and foolish. I had been working on the idea they came over from Veracruz or Tampico. If it was from Chetumal, and they made a buy, I know the name. It had to be through him or somebody close to him. I know the name but I don’t know how to make the contact. We can’t roam around asking. I think I know who can tell me how to make the contact. What you do, McGee, you stay low. Buy the cowhand clothes. Wait for a call from me day after tomorrow. I think we’ll be taking the Monday or Tuesday afternoon flight on AeroMexico to Cancún.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said.
“Save the funny routines. This can get us both shot.”
“If you take more than five thousand out of the country, they …”
“Fifty big ones makes a pack of hundreds this thick.” He held up a hand, thumb and finger about two and a half inches apart. “Got a passport?… Good. I’ll take the money in. Pack a carryon with what you’ll need for three or four days. I don’t know this minute if it’s on or off. Maybe they think so much of me they don’t want me to go out on a buy because I could get picked up coming back. On the other hand, if I’m coming up with the money and they’re getting their percentage when they buy back from me for the wholesale market, what is there to lose? I’ll let you know.”
“If it happens,” I asked, “who am I supposed to be?”
“I never heard his real name. They called him Bucky. Didn’t look much like you. He had a round pink face. But tall. Real tall. He lost an eye in a bar. He walked into a dart game. Drunk. He didn’t say much. He smiled a lot. He could do a pretty good John Wayne imitation. He did a lot of field work, so all the sources knew what he looked like. Word gets around. They called him the Estanciero. It means the Rancher. Bucky was never on a ranch in his life except the night he got killed. It was a routine landing on a ranch strip in Pasco County and Bucky was there with a van to off-load the product and take it up north somewhere. Birmingham, I think. Some locals tried to hijack the load but they got cut down. Two of them got it. One of the others fired from long range, in the dark, probably just aiming in the general direction of the airplane, and took Bucky right in the throat. So one of the two people off the plane took the truck north, after the two of them had loaded Bucky and the two dead hotshots into the cabin. The pilot took it fifty miles out over the Gulf, put it on automatic pilot and heaved them out. What happened hasn’t exactly been advertised. I know because it is part of my job to find out things like that, and the pilot likes brandy.”
He looked at his watch and stood up. “Got to go. Look, I don’t want to make you nervous. There’s very little rough stuff going on these days. I’ll be in touch.”
After he had been gone ten minutes I said to Meyer, “If he is after my fifty thousand, that’s the most elaborate con I ever ran into.”
“I think he’s real,” Meyer said.
“Is that the right word?”
“Probably not. The man is basically unreal. But he’s what he says he is.”
“You’re saying I should do it? I should go with him?”
“Do you think that’s the kind of decision I should make for you?”
“Why do you keep answering a question with a question?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Okay, Meyer. Seriously. Life is full of signs and portents. Something hides in the shadows and keeps trying to tell you things you should know. But the language is never clear. You aimed a finger at me a while back and said, ‘Bang, you’re dead.’ It is so unlike you to do a kid thing like that, I get the feeling something was trying to talk to me through you.”
“It was just a dumb impulse.”
“I guess the whole situation is making me too jumpy.”
“And if you stay right here and make no moves at all, you’re going to get jumpier.”
“Probably.”
“But be very, very careful, Travis.”
Eleven
Browder and I bought tickets, open return, at the AeroMexico counter at Miami International on Monday afternoon. It was still the busy season for Cancún, but there were a lot more coming back than going by this seventh day of the new year. We were put on standby, but after we were bused over to a newer building, Browder quietly bought us the top slots on the standby list.
The old fat jet was jam-packed. There was a holiday flavor, an anticipation of vacation aboard. There were a couple of tour groups, shouting back and forth to each other. It reminded me of the time Meyer and I had flown down to the Yucatan, the time when we found the man we had looked for over a long time. At that time we were hunting, and this time I was the hunted. That time I was with Meyer, and this time with a man I did not know. Reason said he could be trusted. But the phone identification could have been rigged. This time I would not return with a prize as rare as the one I had brought back to Lauderdale the last time. I told myself to relax and roll with it. But I could not shuck the moody, twitchy feeling. Besides, I felt like a clown, even after I had stowed the tall pale nineteen-gallon hat in the overhead compartment. Browder had brought the eye patch, one of those small black shiny ones with a black elastic band that was a little too tight, so that the edge of the patch pressed against the bones around the socket of my right eye. My shirt had pale shiny buttons, my pants were too tight in the crotch and the high boots of imitation lizard hurt my feet.
When I had asked Browder in the airport what was going on, he told me we’d talk later. He approved of the way I looked. He was not impressed with how much the boots hurt. I towered over him in the terminal. He leaned back and looked up at me like a pedestrian checking the stop light. In past years I had exaggerated my height as a method of disguise. But this time it bothered me more. I was a figure of fun. My clothes were too new. And I wondered if anybody wanted to do harm to the Estanciero.
One of the overworked flight attendants, charged with serving a hot meal on the short flight, smiled at me and said, “Hello there! We haven’t seen you in a long time, Bucky.”
“Nice to be aboard, ma’am,” I said. The recognition made me more uncomfortable. She paused and looked back at me, with a small frown. And that didn’t help either.
Also I felt uneasy when I thought of the fifty thousand. I had handed it in a rubber-banded block in a brown paper bag to Browder. He had taken it into a stall in the men’s room. When he came out he led me into a quiet corner of the terminal and showed me his hard-cover Spanish/English dictionary. He had divided the cash into three packets and placed them inside the hollowed-out book. He kept the book closed with a red rubber band.
“Won’t they look in that?”
“They don’t hassle the tourist business. And if they do check us and if they look, and if they find it, the going mordida is five hundred bucks. You and I are going through the clearance separate. Don’t sweat it. It’ll be fine.”
Several other big passenger aircraft had landed at Cancun ahead of us, and a couple more came in right after we did. The modern airport is, for practical purposes, divided in
half. The departure area with ticket counters, departure tax counters and security inspection is three times as large as the arrival lounge. Not a lounge. Long, long slow lines piled up at high counters where bored and indifferent little bureaucrats, male and female, glanced at passports and stamped tourist permits which had been filled out on the flights. I was able to stroll right on out of the customs area into the outer area of the arrival section without interception. The customs counters were unmanned. But several attentive men stood back by a wall, and every now and then one of them would step out and flag down a passenger and check his luggage.
Beyond the glass wall was total chaos. Passengers were finding their tour group, and the place to stand for their hotel buses. Avis, Hertz and Budget were doing big business. I looked back through the glass wall and saw Browder in there, working his way through the crowd toward the doorway. People charged into me, then backed off and stared up at me in obvious astonishment. I saw a whole pack of chubby people of indeterminate age, all wearing name tags with tridents on them, and I realized they were all destined for Club Med. They had that look, a batch of lone-some loners who had decided to try to take a big chance in the sunshine.
“Let’s go,” Browder said, pushing at me. I do not like being pushed at. He went ahead in a half trot and I followed along, walking carefully on sore feet. He stood in the Budget line and, after he spent five minutes at the counter, we went out to the far curb, walking between a couple of the tour buses parked in a long line at the first curb. It was bright and hot in Cancún. The buses stood there snoring and stinking, big beasts drowsing in the heat. The drivers sat high behind the wheels, wiry little brown men with that same look of apathy and cynicism you see on the faces of big-city cabdrivers.
It was ten minutes before our rental car arrived, a dark blue Renault 12 with eighteen thousand kilometers on the meter, a mini-station wagon with four doors. Browder got behind the wheel. If I could have fitted there, I couldn’t have worked the pedals with those boots on. I tossed the big hat in back and took off the eye patch.
“You gotta wear that at all times!” Browder said.
“And off come the boots too, friend. You just drive the car.”
“You getting smart-ass on me?”
I knelt on the seat and reached back and slipped the dictionary out of his carryon and put it in mine as he turned and watched me.
“If two of us are going to run this,” he said, “we are going to run it into a tree.”
“Get out of the crush here and park a minute.”
He drove out of the airport proper and turned onto the long wide road that led out to the main highway that runs from Puerto Juárez all the way down to Chetumal, the capital city of Quintana Roo (pronounced “row” as in “row your boat”). He pulled way over to the side and turned the engine off. No air conditioning, and the dark car was like a convection oven when the windows were open and it was moving, and like a barbecue pit when it was standing still.
“Now what?” he asked.
“We are a long way from anything,” I told him. “Up ahead turn left and we’re fifteen or twenty minutes from Cancún. Turn right and you’ve got a batch of sixty miles of nothing. So who are we seeing, where is he and how do you get in touch?”
“It will unfold as we go along. Okay?”
“Not okay.”
He studied me for a few moments. Sweat ran down his thick red cheek. “So I’ll hold your hand, McGee. We’ve got two singles at the Sheraton. We locate a pool attendant, a towel boy named Ricky, and we tell him that we’ve come to do some business with the banker. We give him a room number and sit tight. Somebody will get in touch.”
“Soon?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We just wait and see.”
At the hotel restaurant near the pool, I excited so much awe and interest I doubt anyone noticed Browder. The employees wore little name plates above the shirt pocket. No trace of any Ricky, and Browder didn’t want to ask about him.
He was there in the morning, on Tuesday. He was a tall sallow Mexican lad who had dyed his hair yellow a couple of months back. It was half grown out, a startling sight indeed. He wore a gold snake bracelet around his wrist and a bangle in his ear.
Browder roamed until he could intercept Ricky out of earshot of the other employees and the tourists. He came back angry. “Christ, I don’t know. I told him, and I told him the room number. Son of a bitch is asleep on his feet. He yawned at me. He needs dental work. From now on one of us is in my room at all times.”
It was a relief to spend a little time away from him. In spite of his objections, I discarded the hat and boots for the time being. At his urgent request I kept the eye patch on until I bought some swim trunks and used the pool. Water kept getting behind the patch. So I left it off while swimming, put it back on when I knew I’d be seeing him. When I was out, he had to stay in the room. Whoever was in the room could watch the junk television from the States on the satellite disk, if they so chose. It’s a funny thing about television and cigarettes. Hardly anybody I know anymore smokes cigarettes or watches the tube. One stunts the body and one stunts the mind.
I went and looked at the little Mayan ruin north of the hotel. The hotel itself is like a segment sliced out of a giant flat-topped Mayan pyramid. They are building condominiums nearby, the same size and shape. I wandered over and took a look at construction. Mexico is full of magic buildings. You never find anybody hard at work but the buildings go up.
Wednesday afternoon when I took my fast laps in the pool, there was more of an edge in the northeast breeze. I had tucked the hard eye patch on its black elastic cord into the locker-key pocket of my swim trunks. When I climbed out of the pool and tried to put it back on, it slipped out of my wet fingers and, propelled by the elastic, went skittering off behind me, across cement and tile, way over to a line of sun cots positioned five or six feet apart. It was under the second cot. I said, “Parm me,” knelt and retrieved it and stood up to put it on.
“At least wipe it off,” said the woman on the sun cot, reaching out to me with a Kleenex.
I thanked her and wiped the plastic patch off and put it back on. She looked up at me with a skeptical frown. She wore a swimsuit but looked as if she could manage a bikini nicely. Brown hair, blue eyes, a three-day tourist burn.
“Why are you wearing that thing?” she asked.
“How do you mean?”
“You take it off to go in the pool and put it on when you come out.”
“What I’ve got is some kind of hypersensitivity to light.”
“I bet you have.”
“You sound as if you don’t believe me.”
“Maybe because it’s the wrong kind of patch. I had a friend who had to wear one of those. That’s what you wear when the eyeball is gone.”
“Mine is still right here.”
“I know. So, well, it made me wonder. We put out a lot of spy novels.”
“We?”
“I write copy for a publishing house in New York. And right now I’m just about as far away from it as I can afford to get. For ten whole days. But my mind is still in the shop, I guess. That patch is like a clue or a signal. I had to ask or worry about it forever.”
“Try to think of it as an election bet. Will that help?”
She frowned, sighed, checked the degree of burn on her shoulder. “I’ll have to make do with that, won’t I? Because you’re not going to tell me anything else.” She stuck her hand up and said, “Nancy Sheppard, New York.”
I took it and said, “Travis McGee, Florida. Happy to meet you. I might be having a drink later over at the …”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said. “I just wanted to know about the patch.” And she rolled facedown on her sun cot in total dismissal.
So the patch was on and I decided to keep it on at all times. If people from publishing houses could nail me that easily, I was probably being stupid about the patch. And probably the boots and the hat. But everything hurt except the hat.
<
br /> Nancy Sheppard’s observation had jolted me out of a curious listlessness I had felt ever since the awareness of being hunted for reasons no one would or could explain. As quarry, I was acting much like the persons I had hunted. Aware of pursuit, they do not become more sly. They become careless, random, disheartened. Easier to bring down. They seem to welcome the end of the play, just to find out what is going on. So I was being precisely that kind of a horse’s ass. Out of control.
I had been in control when I had gone hunting the Sundowner. I found it and then the world turned upside down. I had not reacted this way when I had been hunted other times in other places. But then I knew who was after me and why. For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty. And it was something I could use, if I survived to use it. In Kafka’s story The Trial, the prisoner disintegrated because he could never find out what he was guilty of. So I vowed to tighten up. By being a fool, I was handicapping Browder.
Word came on Thursday afternoon. I was on room duty. I wrote it down. There was no point in going to find Browder. He came back a half hour later. He read my note.
“What kind of a voice?”
“Male. Heavy and deep and slow.”
“Accent?”
“Some, but not Mexican. More like German or Scandinavian. But slight.”
“Okay. That’s not our guy. So we’ve got to go to Tulum. Hand me the map.”
“Right down the road past the airport, say eighty-five miles from here, two hours to be safe.”
“You’ve been there before?”
“A while back.”
He looked at me and when I didn’t continue he shrugged and said, “Suit yourself. You have any Spanish?”
“Kitchen Spanish, without verbs. And not much of that. I’ve noticed you do a little better than that.”
“A little. So to make it by eleven we leave at nine.”
“Unless you want to get there earlier and look around.”
“I don’t want to do anything to make the birds fly.”
The Lonely Silver Rain Page 10
