Twenty Centavos: A Mystery Set in San Miguel de Allende

by John Scherber

  “This is very lovely,” she said. “It looks more real than ours, and that bamboo going up the back wall is great. I wouldn’t like to give up our views, but we’re so...above it all, you know? I’m not sure it feels right.” She wore a pale green halter top and jeans, cut very low on the hip. “I didn’t wear much make up, like you said on the phone. Just some lipstick and a touch of eyeliner.”

  “Are you sure Perry’s going to sign off on this?” I asked her.

  “You mean, does he know it’s a nude? Of course, darlin’. He doesn’t own me, he only leases me.” She gave me a bright smile. It made me wonder what his payments were.

  The studio is on the second floor of our house and has the traditional north facing glass, but in this part of central México (we are in the Bajio, just south of the Tropic of Cancer), during early summer the sun goes far enough north to shine in directly. At that point I draw the thick curtains on the north windows and move the easel to the south. If the sun shines directly into the studio, the balance of contrasts is destroyed. The common wall against the guest bedroom has built in storage for canvas rolls and stretcher bars, as well as finished pictures, going from one bank of windows to the other, and opposite is a wet bar and a small refrigerator with a counter where I can make coffee or sandwiches if I’m in a long session. Beyond the studio on this side, a staircase separates the studio from our guest bedroom. It leads both down into the living room and up to a roof garden covering the top of the entire second floor. Our view from there frames the towers of the Parroquia, which dominate the town. This is the quirky pink limestone church of San Miguel de Allende, and it faces the dense green of the pollarded trees in the Jardin.

  I led Barbara up to the studio and pointed out a screen at the end by the south windows. “You can change there. There’s a robe on a hook, I think.” There was the sound of clothes being pulled off and she emerged a moment later in Maya’s silk robe and stood by the easel. Then she untied the robe and dropped it to the floor.

  “What do you think?” She held out her hands.

  “Stunning.” I was pulling out tubes of paint. “What were you thinking about for a pose?”

  “Stunning? Just like that? I’m standing here naked and you just say, ‘stunning’? Don’t you want to...you know, touch me just a little? Maya isn’t here, is she? I hoped we could have a little rendezvous.”

  “Barbara,” I said, squeezing out some titanium white onto my pallet, “please don’t think I don’t appreciate you. You’re really gorgeous. But painting is just not an erotic activity for me. I tend to look at the human body as a kind of landscape; a few hills here, some valleys there, an outcropping or two of bush.” I meant this.

  “Look at me.” There was an edgy, demanding tone in her voice.

  “You may not realize it yet, but I’m going to be looking at you more thoroughly than anyone ever has before, believe me. This process may not be sexual, but it is intimate. I am literally going to recreate you.”

  “I thought you wanted me. I saw how you looked at me at the party. That’s how I got this idea, don’t you see that?” She stood with her hands on her hips, her chin thrust outward.

  “Who wouldn’t want you? The Pope would want you, for Christ’s sake. But this isn’t about that.” She shuddered. She had probably never dated an old Polish guy with red shoes. “But that’s another issue. You can relax, I’ve done this dozens of times. Maybe you’re just feeling a little vulnerable because you’re undressed?”

  “Never. That’s when I’m strongest. I’m just used to more of a reaction.” I paused without one, flexing the ends of a few brushes. “Is it because of Maya?” she asked.

  “Of course it’s because of Maya. I love her, and she’s given me more of herself than any woman I’ve ever known. Is that what you’re offering? Or is it 20 minutes on your back?” I was getting angry now. This was my turf and I was used to being in charge. I don’t like people messing with my studio process, and this was getting messier by the moment.

  “It could be more than 20 minutes...and it doesn’t have to be just on my back. I also like other positions. Besides, I was hoping you had an arrangement.” She was holding her arms folded now.

  “We do have an arrangement. I don’t fall into bed with other women and she doesn’t stick a knife in my heart while I sleep. It’s worked out well so far.”

  “It sounds so inflexible.”

  “Sometimes these little certainties can be good.”

  She looked at me for a moment and then the stiffness went out of her.

  “How should I stand? I just don’t know. I want it to be classy, you know? Not cheap, but still sexy. Can you do that?”

  “Do you know Manet’s Olympia?”

  She nodded. “I saw it in Paris.”

  “I’ve always wanted to try something like that. Maya isn’t right for it. Just lie on your back on the day bed with your face turned toward me. Do you think Perry wants big? I’ve got a canvas that’s about 40 by 56 inches or so.” She reclined on the day bed and gave me a winning smile.

  “Perry would like big. Perry would like to be big, aside from his business.”

  I ignored this. It sounded like more than I wanted to know. “No teeth,” I said. “I don’t do teeth. Just a more subtle, yet welcoming, look. That’s it.” I set up the canvas and started mixing some washes. “Wait a minute. Let’s get a prop.” I dug around in one of my cabinet drawers and came up with a midnight-blue velvet choker with a small stone set on the overlap at the end. “Would you wear this?”

  She tried it on and I gave her a mirror. “It’s perfect,” she said.

  “It makes you look more naked. Artists always say nude, but in your case I would have to say it’s naked. That’s part of what Manet was saying in Olympia. That this girl was no Greek goddess, and this picture is no classical fantasy of nymphs and satyrs. This is a just a street girl with no clothes on. He was blowing up the phony mythology thing that the Victorians used as an excuse to ogle naked women. Not that you’re a street girl.”

  We didn’t talk for a while. I was more comfortable not talking. Once I started it was just landscape, after all. I had the masses and contours where I wanted them, and I had blocked in the foreground shadow where her body met the day bed. The picture was anchored and normally I would go on to the face but I was captured by the curve of her left thigh as it rose above her right knee. I would save her face for the next session. Faces take a good deal of focus and sustained effort and I wasn’t sure how much energy I had left.

  “Are you comfortable?’

  “Very. This is my natural state.”

  “Well, it’s not a demanding pose. It’s not like your arms are going to get tired.”

  When I had finished her left thigh and knee I had run out of gas. Later, I walked her to the door. We left it that she would call me for the next session.

  “I’m sad we didn’t do it,” she said, holding my hand. “But at least you know what you’re dealing with now.”

  “I think I do, but it’s those little denials that make life sweeter,” I said. What crap. I could rationalize the feathers off a goose. At the entry she kissed me on the lips. I felt it all the way to the soles of my feet. I was flattered that she was interested in me as a diversion, but all the same I was irritated at the casual way she thought she could disrupt my studio process. It had developed over years and it was why I was any good at all at painting. There was an implicit egotism in Barbara thinking that I would just fly into her arms. Maybe no one had ever rejected her before.

  After she left I was restless and, as Maya wasn’t likely to be back before evening, I called my friend Cody Williams and asked him to meet me for a beer at La Vida around four. I left a note for Maya in the kitchen, in case the meeting turned into something more than a beer.

  Cody’s a beefy guy in his late fifties and about six-three, who still has most of his ginger colored hair. He cashed in his 30 years as a detective in the Peoria police Department for a pension that lets
him live pretty well in San Miguel. His wife had stayed behind; she didn’t like México.

  La Vida is a little out of the way, down on Ancha de San Antonio past the Insitituto Allende, one of our two big art schools. It’s a neighborly kind of place and it’s fun to sit at the horseshoe-shaped bar and watch the action, not that I needed any more today.

  “Hey painter boy, whatcha workin’ on now?” Cody slid in beside me at the bar.

  “Nothing much. Just a bit of landscape.” I don’t tell everything.

  “I ran into Bill Frost yesterday. He said you’ve been sniffing around at something besides paint fumes. Like the late Tobey Cross.” The bartender came up. “Negra Modelo,” Cody said, “por favor.”

  “Maya’s close to Marisol Cross, and I got pulled into it. What could I say?”

  “Did she ask you what your qualifications might be for the job?”

  “She said she thought a painter might see things differently, things the police had missed or chosen to ignore.”

  “Sure. Like Picasso saw things differently. In that way?”

  “Well that, but I also told her I knew you.”

  “I figured that. You want to tell me what you know so far?” The bartender set down a beer in front of him.

  I gave Cody the whole thing, from the call at the Santa Monica right up through the pointless trip to the bus station. I showed him the key. He looked carefully at both sides of it and flipped it on the bar top.

  “Well, this would never be a locker key anyway because the number is so crudely stamped on it. With a locker key the top is going to be made to hold a tab with a variety of numbers. I would have to guess this is a key to a rental property, run by someone who only has a few to manage, otherwise he’d never do his keys this way. It’s too inefficient. He’s got a set of dies and he’s just hammering on the numbers one at a time. And if it was somebody’s house key it wouldn’t have a number. People know their own address.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Maya come up behind Cody and put her arms around his chest. They barely met in front. His hand with the beer in it stopped half way to his mouth. “I think that would be my favorite Latin American author. Next to Garcia Marquez, that is. How are you, sweetheart?” he said.

  She came around and kissed him on the neck. “It’s been like one hundred years of solitude since I’ve seen you.”

  “You are the best. Thank God my wife’s still back in Peoria. She couldn’t bear this.”

  “Will you two stop now?”

  “I saw your note,” said Maya. “The archive closed early in Dolores Hidalgo. And I had an idea. The 132 key maybe is not from San Miguel. It could be Atotonilco, or Santa Teresita, or Pozos, or Dolores Hidalgo, or even Querétaro. If Tobey hid his gallery business, then maybe he hid his office in a different town. That way no one who sees his comings and goings knows who he is or what he’s doing. Not like here.”

  “So we’re supposed to search all those towns, and maybe more? I hope it’s not Querétaro. There are probably a thousand 132’s there,” I said. “There must be over a million people in that place.”

  “That’s why they say, a dollar’s worth of sweat gets you a dime’s worth of information,” said Cody. “It’s always more sweat than genius.”

  “I’m increasingly thinking it’s none of the above. The only thing I felt when I was going through Perry Watt’s stuff at the party was that it was unworthy of me. I should confine myself to painting.”

  They both stared at me in silence for a moment, and I took a long pull at the beer.

  “So then just because you’re good at one thing that’s all you’re able to do?” Cody said. “How about learning new skills in an area where you already bring part of it to the table, your ability to see and remember detail?” Maya was nodding now. “To help someone out who asked for your aid and is possibly getting the short end of the stick? As an ethical issue, I think stepping up to the plate here trumps being a sneak.”

  Now it was my turn to nod. “OK. I see it. I’ll be a principled sneak, working to avenge the death of an antiques dealer I didn’t know very well.”

  “You’re also doing this because I asked you,” said Maya, giving me a pointed look.

  “Good,” said Cody. “That’s probably as comfortable as it’s going to get for you without a badge. And since you bring it up, how well did any of us know Tobey Cross? Isn’t he the real starting point? Where’s he from?”

  “I think Minneapolis,” said Maya. “His family, anyway. I didn’t know him very well. But his wife, Marisol, we are like sisters.”

  “Seesters?” I said.

  “I didn’t say that. My English is good as yours.”

  “All right, all right. I still know some people in the Chicago Police Department. Let me make some calls. Do you think his real name was Tobias?”

  I shook my head. “It could be. Why not run it both ways?”

  “Makes sense. But one other thing. You don’t know who you’re dealing with here, and you’re not carrying the firepower of the police. You two have got to watch your backs. Word is out that you’re looking into this. If I heard about it, then a lot of other people know it too, because I don’t go very far out of my way to keep my finger on the pulse of this community. I’m retired now.”

  We had made so little progress it was hard to think we’d put ourselves at risk. Who could be threatened by what we knew?

  “How about a girlfriend?” Cody asked. “Maybe an irate husband did this.”

  Maya was already shaking her head. I hadn’t thought to ask Marisol about this, but in the circumstances it would have been awkward to bring it up.

  “I mentioned it when you were upstairs looking at his clothes,” Maya said. “She had never seen any sign of it.”

  Cody didn’t comment. We were probably both thinking that Tobey would have been trying hard to conceal it if he was unfaithful, so Marisol having seen no sign of an affair meant nothing.

  At about eight o’clock we came out into the street. Cody went home and we walked back up Hernandez Macias into el centro, where we paused to watch the action in the Jardin. I always thought of it as San Miguel’s living room. Three or four groups of mariachis were circulating around the square looking for work as the paseo began. In the paseo the boys of the town circulated three or four abreast in one direction around the Jardin while the girls passed in the opposite direction. They eyed each other with interest. The parents, seated among the benches, eyed them with interest too. When we reached home I stuck the key in the lock, but the door was not locked. I looked at Maya.

  “Did you leave it open?”

  “Never,” she said. “I know I locked it.”

  I pushed it open and we stood there in silence. There were no sounds from within and no lights were on. I flipped on the entry light to avoid being blind-sided and we slipped off our shoes and walked in. Everything looked normal. Nothing was changed in the living room or the kitchen. We checked the loggia and the garden, then went upstairs, turning on lights as we went. The studio door was open. No one was inside.

  The Barbara Watt picture was still on the easel and I realized that in wrestling with my misgivings I had forgotten to tell Maya about it. The Maya painting leaned against the coffee bar, not where I had left it. It had been slashed from corner to corner both ways. Maya gasped and touched my arm, pointing across the room. On the wall behind the bar in red paint were the words, in Spanish, PINTA QUADROS Y OLVIDATE LA CERAMICA . (Forget ceramics, make more pictures.)

  I took a few steps toward it. The painting was unsalvageable. Maya and the Maize God had been finished and only the jungle background remained. The only time I had ever seen a picture of mine destroyed was when I did it myself, and with good reason. I felt sick.

  Maya had paused behind me and stood now before the easel. “It’s the güera, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I was going to tell you but I forgot in the bar.”

  “What is that on her neck?”

  “The choker.”<
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  “I wore that, a long time ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she wear my robe too?”

  “Very briefly.”

  “You didn’t....”

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “Is she going to buy it?”

  “Perry is, for four thousand.”

  “Four thousand dollars. Yes.”

  “We need the money. I’ve got to do six more pictures for the Maya series before the show. Excuse me, seven pictures, now.”

  “I should be practical, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. I’ll be practical. But I can’t like her, not like that.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “I will not be screaming now.”

  “Good. You know it’s only paint.”

  We were quiet then, for a while. There was large mound of cadmium red squeezed out on my palette, and a number 12 hog bristle brush lay on the floor, full of the red paint. Cadmium red from Winsor and Newton is a series four color, the most expensive level. Naturally the intruder couldn’t have chosen something cheap, like black. Cleaning the brush and scraping the paint from the palette, I felt violated. I soaked a rag in turpentine and began to scrub the wall. Maya’s hand was on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This shouldn’t happen. Cody was right. We need to watch our backs. I’ll get us a brandy.” She went downstairs and locked the door.

  Later we sat and sipped the brandy but there seemed little to say. I called Cody to let him know but there was no answer. I left a message for him to call me. I didn’t want to say in a message what had happened. After a while we went to bed and slept fitfully, tangled in each other’s arms. I dreamed the Mérida show started tomorrow and I had no pictures finished. Not my standard art opening dream, but close. Usually it was the buyers who were absent.

  In the morning I pulled the staples from the ruined canvas and threw it away, saving the stretchers. I couldn’t look at it. I stretched clean canvas over the frame but I didn’t have the heart to start work on the picture again. When I tried Cody again he picked up on the first ring. I told him what happened.