“This is worrisome,” he said, “but there’s something funny about it too.”
“I’m somehow missing the humor in this.” I realized now my doubts about being involved with this were gone. When the situation reached into my studio, it became personal. It felt like war.
“No, I mean the message. You notice it didn’t say FORGET ABOUT TOBEY. It said FORGET CERAMICS. Somehow that’s the issue here. This guy has helped us out, in a costly sort of way. If we knew where Tobey got the ceramics we might have a lead.”
“Then we’re back to finding the office.”
“Right. I think the ceramics must be high-powered stuff. Museum quality. I haven’t seen any of them,” said Cody, “but he had the reputation of only selling the best. I can’t imagine how anybody can get them out of the country.”
“I haven’t seen anything better. Maybe he’s only selling to the expatriate crowd, maybe it all stays here in San Miguel, or perhaps among the beach house crowd along the coast. There are quite a few Americans with money in Guadalajara as well.”
I hung about the studio for a while, poking around in my supplies, making a few notes of things I needed to buy on my next trip to Lagundi, the art supply store on Umaran a few blocks past Tobey’s gallery. It was time for another tube of cadmium red, the old one was nearly flat. I wondered for a moment if there were fingerprints on that tube of paint. But I didn’t want to involve the police. They would only try to shut me down. It was better if they didn’t know what I was doing. Not that I did, beyond knowing that now I’d be doing whatever it took.
At nine Cody picked me up and we left for Pozos, an old mining town about 50 miles away. I’m not sure why we picked Pozos, but neither of us had ever been there, and we had to start somewhere. Maya had already taken the artmobile back to Dolores Hidalgo. She was going to do more research for the professor and then spend the afternoon looking for 132. I was still too upset to paint.
Chapter 6
In the 12 years I’ve lived in San Miguel, Pozos was not a place I ever heard much about. But lately, I’d been hearing more.
Most people knew some of its history. It was a mining town that went back to the fifteen hundreds. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a boom town and had enough ore to stay booming until around 1900, when it went into a sharp decline, as a lot of mining towns do as the ore runs out. At that point the population had reached about 70,000, similar to San Miguel today. By the 1920s, the population had fallen to a fraction of its peak, and it continued to trail off for decades. Today it was thought to be about 4,000.
During the last year I had heard of several gringos moving into Pozos, without fanfare, and buying up property for renovation. Several people told me it was going to be the next San Miguel.
Cody and I discussed this as we drove through dry but decent looking farm land on the way there. It rarely rains here in January, but some fields were green with broccoli and corn and that meant the farmer had the capital for irrigation. After about 40 miles Cody turned north and we began to climb into the hills.
“I’ve heard there’s a renovated hotel,” he said. “Hotels mean visitors. Maybe this place is really coming back. There certainly is a backlash against property prices in San Miguel. It wouldn’t surprise me to see people start buying out here.”
“Must be huge numbers of things for sale,” I said. “There’s been no property market there for years. Marisol said Tobey was in some kind of financial business before the antiques. Maybe he had real estate experience. Would it be a surprise if he were looking for a place some distance away to set up an office and picked Pozos for its potential?”
“It’d be a fair commute, though.” It was about an hour’s drive.
“It would, but how often would he need to go? I wouldn’t think that in his business he made more than one or two sales a week. Most invoices were probably big, and I’m sure his markups were too. He could have received shipments in San Miguel and carted them out to Pozos. Or maybe he had an agent in Pozos to receive shipments for him.”
The road got steeper over the next few miles and then went into a sharp curve. When it evened out we were on an urban street, but none like I had ever seen. Had Pozos been built with wood-framed houses and stores, like most towns in the States, it would have long ago rotted away when the roofs fell in. But like most Méxican towns it was built of stone and stucco and adobe brick, and so for block after block it still stood, melting away, edges rounded and crumbling. It was all the same dusty grayish ochre, a perfect match for the unpaved streets.
Most of the doorways and windows were bricked up and the roofs must have fallen in behind. Here and there an isolated house was still occupied, some toward the center were even being restored, if you call starting from virtually nothing restoration. Driving along we heard the occasional chicken, just like in San Miguel; a homey touch. No firecrackers, though, the celebrations would have ended some time ago, not within living memory.
After five or six blocks we came to the plaza, a smallish affair, but surprisingly well maintained, compared with what we’d seen coming in. If there was a restoration effort getting started, this would most likely be the focus of it. Half a dozen people were in view. On the south side stood a church in decent repair that looked as if it were still operating. On two other sides was a mix of small active stores and abandoned fronts, and on the fourth side a two story, white, freshly restored building with a sign reading “Hotel Montana.”
Cody parked in front of the church and two dogs came hopefully over to us and sniffed our cuffs as we got out. He pulled a bottle of water from the back seat and locked the car. Everyone in view had paused to look at us.
“Not much cover here,” he said.
“Cover? You think we’re going to have to shoot it out? I don’t own a gun.”
“Not likely. I meant for Tobey. If his office is here, everything he did would have been on view. I’m not sure he would’ve wanted that, even if he had made a good real estate buy. Let’s circle out from here. I don’t think there’s any reason to separate. This isn’t going to take that long.”
We walked along the front of the church and continued down the street. About three blocks further the street climbed a hill to the ruins of a larger eighteenth century church. I tried to imagine the sound when the dome had collapsed. It probably felt like a minor earthquake. We turned left every couple of blocks, winding outward in a spiral from the square, but what soon became clear was there were almost no street numbers, even on the few inhabited houses. They had ceased to matter. We turned back toward the plaza.
“This is one dollar’s worth of sweat that is not going to return a dime’s worth of anything,” Cody said. “Let’s get back in the car and make a circuit of what’s left.”
We zigzagged through the town, seeing a few more people, a lot more dogs, and another small square, this one covered with blue plastic tarps as if it hosted an occasional market day. At the northern edge of town a large brick school building stood alone, now walls only with empty windows. Beyond that the terrain became hilly and we passed among seven or eight ruined mining haciendas, all stone and all roofless, usually surrounded by perimeter walls.
“Let’s get lunch,” said Cody. “I think this is the saddest place I’ve ever seen.”
We found our way back to the Hotel Montana.
“There is no way this is going to be the new San Miguel within the lifetime of anyone now living or even contemplated,” I said. We pulled up in the same place in front of the church. The same dogs met us as we got out and they were still hopeful. No one else was, except the owner of the Hotel Montana. Maybe she knew something the rest of us didn’t.
Inside, the hotel was pristine; the kind of restoration that had to have been done by someone who knew where to go, and had the deep pockets to get there. From the condition of the rest of the town I could imagine what the starting point must have been like. Inside the restaurant the exterior walls were exposed stone and the inside walls mage
nta on smooth plaster. Arched windows overlooked a serene garden and above the wall the view took in blocks of ruins.
We ordered lunch with a couple of Negra Modelos.
“Aside from the transcendental sadness of this place, is conducting a search usually so boring?” I asked.
“Usually, and the scenery’s not as strange or as interesting. Then, every three weeks or so, there’s 20 minutes of excitement and 30 seconds of terror where, if you have time to think at all, you’re wondering if you’re going to walk away at the end. That’s pretty much it, aside from writing all the reports.”
“And you did 30 years of this?”
“Yup. You just have to pace yourself. Otherwise you’re asleep when the terror starts. You don’t want that. It makes for a short career.” He sipped his beer.
“And a lot of years of pension for the widow.”
“Hard on the department budget. I think we can scratch this town off the list,” Cody said, reaching for a toothpick while I paid the bill. “I wasn’t too hopeful anyway, but I guess we had to come.”
“Lovely ruins, though.”
“Something a painter would say. How far were you on that Maya picture?”
“About three quarters. I only had the foliage left.”
My cell phone went off. I pulled it out of my pocket and read the caller ID number on the screen.
“It’s Maya,” I said.
“I’m here now,” she said, “I found it! I’m sitting at Tobey’s desk in Dolores Hidalgo. Nice leather chair, tasteful old engravings on the walls. I think one is of Cortés’s palace in Cuernavaca. A new-looking Apple computer behind me--so much for the guy who never used one. Ceramics and pictures stored in the room beyond. It’s Tobey all the way. Pretty good stereo too. I put on some Mozart. It’s like you say, bingo.”
I covered the phone as we walked back to the car and leaned over to Cody. “She’s there. She’s found 132 in Dolores Hidalgo.”
“So you used the same tactic we used in San Miguel?” I asked her.
“Exactly. It was on the fourth street I tried. But Paul, someone’s been in here. I can’t tell if anything is missing, but the bars are loose on the back window. Tobey could never have lived with that. And there are all kinds of boxes and crates still here. They seem to be full, but I didn’t check everything. Can you guys come now? This is making me nervous.”
“Give me the street name and stay right there. I think I know the number. It might take us a while.”
In an hour and half we were on the outskirts of Dolores Hidalgo. The town is widely known for its ceramic tableware and sinks. Numerous shops lined the highway as we approached. Dinner sets, candle sticks, bird baths and fountains, anything that could be made of clay. Brilliant and startling colors. We had caught a break and we blew past them all.
We found the square, facing the church where Padre Hidalgo had uttered his cry to revolution in 1810. We picked up Calle Independencia at one corner and five minutes later pulled up before a narrow, nondescript green building. The facade featured only the door, with no windows to the street. You could walk by it a thousand times and never notice it. We had to park around the corner next to what appeared to be an old mansion converted into a school. The artmobile was across the street. Maya opened the door to us, beaming. I hugged her.
“It’s inventory time,” said Cody, kissing her cheek and looking around. “I don’t think we should take anything away with us. Just list everything that’s here. Find some disks and copy the computer records. Try not to leave any fingerprints and keep everything in its original position. The police will get here sooner or later. Maya, I hope you wiped off anything you touched.”
“I was careful,” she said. “I’ll do the computer.”
The case was finally in motion. Cody began going through the desk, using a pair of gloves he’d brought along. In the back room nine large wooden cases held pictures. All had been opened. They were the usual seventeenth and eighteenth century stuff, portraits and devotional work, all framed, and already restored. I wondered who did Tobey’s art restoration because they couldn’t have looked like this when he bought them. I copied the return addresses from the labels and noted the contents. There were five or six different points of origin, all but one from México, and the odd one from a convent in Guatemala. The final shipping labels all said, “Mercier” with an address in México City. Although I thought I knew, I made a note to follow up on Mercier and see what they did for a living.
Eleven smaller crates stood in a line on the floor. They had all been opened as well. Each contained a carefully packed ceramic piece in the Mayan style, in a condition that would bring a museum curator to his knees. They were at least as good as what Perry had and similar in style and quality to what I had seen at Galeria Cruz. Tobey was connected. I began making a list. I didn’t know what to call each piece, so I settled on a brief description. The odd thing about this group was that the return addresses were all the same. In a small neat hand they read:
Ramon Xoc
14 Calle 29
Izamal, Yucatan, México
I didn’t know Izamal, but Ramon Xoc had to be an unlicensed excavator of extraordinary skill and insight. And luck.
Beyond the crates a work table held a few tools to open cases, a magnifying glass, a hammer, and a powerful lamp with a goose neck. Next to it was a leather apron. A shelf held packing materials. Tobey had been nothing if not neat. All were systematically arranged and I did not move anything. A few empty cases stood against the far wall. I added them to the inventory and wrote down the return addresses. Most of them were also from Ramon Xoc, a Mayan name approximately pronounced “shock.” Beyond this there was only a good sized paper drum for trash. It was empty, which was too bad. Trash can be revealing.
When I returned to the office Maya was still downloading files, labeling each disk. She had a pencil tucked in her hair over one ear. Cody had finished the desk and with his pocket knife was slitting the paper backing on the framed engravings from the wall. “Can’t be helped,” he said. “The police will know someone has been in here anyway from the window grid in back. They just won’t know we were here as well.”
Maya put the computer disks in her tote bag along with our notebooks while I turned out the lights and we innocently slipped out the door, locking it behind us. The sun was angling down into the western horizon over Dolores Hidalgo; it was after six o’clock. Traffic was thick and no one paid any attention to us. Just a couple of gringos, one of them awfully big, and a brown eyed girl with a tote bag and a wide, friendly smile. Possibly even a triumphant smile.
I drove back with Maya in the artmobile and we all reconvened in our dining room where we could spread out our findings on the long refectory table. Maya set up her laptop with a printer at one end and began printing all the documents in duplicate. None was encrypted; we needed no passwords. Tobey must have felt safe in Dolores Hidalgo. It was San Miguel that did him in.
“I thought about this all the way back.” Cody said, poking the eraser end of pencil into his cheek. “The building at 132 had already been entered. But the antiques were probably not touched, so the question is that if it was a straight burglary, why not take everything? And if it isn’t, what’s the motive? Information? Did someone else download the records? The expense files and all the odds and ends that you didn’t find at Marisol’s were there. The only missing things I can think of is that there’s no Rolodex and no sales ledger, but the sales info would most likely also be on the computer.”
“It is,” said Maya, feeding more paper into the tray “I’m making you a copy.”
“Good. Then there’s the phone; wouldn’t there be a Rolodex next to it? He’s not going to want to boot the computer every time he needs to find a phone number.”
“How about one of those personal organizer things?” I said.
“A PDA? I didn’t find one in the office,” Maya said.
“And I didn’t find one at the gallery when I went through his desk,
and Marisol didn’t mention it among the things the police took, so it’s probably safe to say that the burglar was most interested in the customer list. But, oddly, he doesn’t have the antiques themselves. I mean, we can’t be sure how much was in the back room when he broke in, but there’s still a lot. What’s he going to sell to the customers if that was the reason for his visit?”
“Maybe you are backwards,” said Maya. “Maybe he’s a thief and gets more inventory from the customers and stores it there? That’s why he wants the customer list.”
“Then it’s a warehouse for him too. That’s possible, I guess.” Cody rubbed his bristly chin. “Then we might see more things piling up in Dolores Hidalgo. Plus, we’d hear about the burglaries, if they came from San Miguel. But I’m not sure that explains why he left all that stuff there. He must know the police would be looking for the place because of Tobey’s death. There would be no reason for him to think Tobey had kept it secret. I don’t think it’s his warehouse.”
“But maybe he hasn’t thought that far and now it is. I can check 132 again when I go back to the archive,” she said, “just to see if anything has been added.”
I opened my notebook. “Here’s an interesting thing. The pictures in back came from a variety of sources. Four even came from churches on their way to Mercier. I think that must be fairly normal. But the ceramics all came from a single address in Izamal. A guy named Ramon Xoc.”
“The yellow city,” said Maya, “A very old place. I’ve been there. It’s in the middle of the Yucatan. Street after street is all yellow. And suddenly anywhere there are ruins mixed in with the regular buildings. Mayan ruins. It’s like the new city is built right over the old, but the old still sticks out everywhere, like bones.”
I told them about the Ramon Xoc address. “I don’t suppose we should call him, it would warn him.”
Twenty Centavos: A Mystery Set in San Miguel de Allende Page 8
