The Lemon Thief's Ex-Wife's Third Cousin

by Tom Lichtenberg

  Hernan was satisfied with his meal, but said little throughout both our stroll and our dinner. I tried to gain some more insight into his state of mind, but made no headway. I thought he looked sad, but he denied it.

  "I'm just tired." he said, so we had an early night of it. I watched a little television but the local news made no sense to me. I had never heard of the places or controversies they mentioned. It was as if we were not just a few hundred miles away and in the same region of the country, but thousands of miles and way across the globe. I turned it off, and fell asleep with the idea that tomorrow would probably be at least as puzzling as today had been.

  Chapter Nine

  Hernan was quiet and spacey at breakfast the next morning. He had followed me out of the room, down the elevator, into the street and over to the cafe more like an obedient puppy than a grown up living man. He sat across the table looking down at his huevos rancheros as if they too were part of a not especially entertaining show. I tried to remember whether this kind of behavior was typical of his pre-freakout phases, but realized once again that my historic lack of focus was letting me down. The little details of any situation tend to escape me. They pass me by. I see them and take note but the note doesn't stick, it never saves to my memory banks or if it does, it locks them down in an inaccessible region. I like to imagine that my brain is full of junk data, mirroring my DNA, whose purpose is unknown and unknowable but probably contains all of the secrets of the universe.

  "Not hungry?" I asked as I scarfed down my buttery corn tortillas. The place was pretty good, I thought, although I could never describe it to you now in a way that would make it come alive. I could tell you that the tables were red and the benches were brown and worn, that the waitress was professional and prompt if not memorable, and that the name of the place was Luxor Cafe, and that it was on Misterkeefe Street, one of the main arteries in the center city. We sat inside where it was cooler, a relative term in that region. Cooler on an early Monday morning in August meant anything under forty degrees Celsius.

  I had set the alarm and woken us up in order to keep the appointment that "Ricky" had made for "Nando". Hernan seemed to have no recollection of or interest in that plan. I had told him where we were going and he had merely nodded and picked at his food. He eventually did manage a forkful or two, and did drink his double extra dry cappuccino and a small glass of orange juice. I rushed him a bit, felt guilty about his nutrition and whether he would get enough protein, as if he were my own son. My child-rearing days were long past but that sort of residue remained. I wondered why. Nature prepares us for certain roles and even when we've fulfilled them, the training does not relapse. Then there are the tasks it doesn't care about, such as our particular professions, and those habits never seem to burrow as deeply. Keeping appointments, however, was one of those things Nature had driven into my blood as if the future of the species depended upon it, and it didn't matter if it wasn't even my appointment or had anything at all to do with me. I hustled him into the car and drove us off. I had taken over the driving since it seemed to me that my friend would be a danger on the road in his current state.

  "Like a ghost," he muttered as we drove along. I turned to look at him and saw that he was once again staring out the window at the passing scenery, or rather past it as if it weren't there.

  "What's that you say?" Hernan cleared his throat and took a while to respond.

  "I feel like a ghost in a body," he said. "In my own body, but not my own."

  I noticed he was looking down at his hands, just as I had done the previous day when Mrs. Handke had made me feel a little like that.

  "Are you having those memories again?"

  "New ones," he said. "I mean old ones. My daughter is nineteen, did you know that? And my ex-wife is living with some distant relative now, some guy. I don't know who he is. I think he's her great-uncle's grandson, or something like that."

  "Magdalena is still at your house," I reminded him, "and you guys never had any kids. You do know that, right?"

  "Molly," he said. "Not Magdalena. My other ex-wife. Molly."

  "You mean Izbetia?" The chronology was getting confusing. I could see how he could possibly have a daughter who was nineteen by now. That could add up, but I was pretty sure it never happened that way. Of course, they say you never really know someone, so it was possible. Or maybe he had a second life going on all that time. Some people do that. They have a wife and family in one city and another wife and family in another. I've heard of people who had even more than two. Traveling salesmen, usually. It's a good cover. How they manage to keep it up, or why they even want to, is something I can't quite understand. Maybe once you start down that road it gets harder and harder to turn back. I had time to think these thoughts because Hernan had stopped talking and didn't answer my question. When I got around to asking it again, he said no, not Izbetia, Molly. He wasn't sure he even knew who Magdalena was.

  "She's the one who kicked you out after you gambled away her car," I reminded him. "The one you'd just promised you'd never do anything like that again. Remember?"

  "Not really," he sighed.

  Chapter Ten

  The zero-hundred block of Misteranibal Street was packed with cars and trucks when we arrived. The lot at number 44 was responsible. At least twenty people were gathered there, some working, some just standing around. The floodlights on the side of the building were on, adding to the morning light as well as the morning heat. As we walked toward the front path we could see a couple of men in red visibility vests descending into the hole wearing hard hats with bright lights on them as well. A few other men in suits stood along the perimeter peering down. Two police officers flanked the gravel path and stopped us.

  "State your business," one of them said in a sleepy tone as if he really didn't care what we said in turn, he would just cross us off his checklist anyway. But it was a good question. I started to say something about the postcard but realized it would sound kind of crazy, so I held my tongue and tried to think of a more useful response. I never came up with one, but it didn't matter. One of the suit-wearing men had noticed us and come down from the excavation.

  "There you are," he said to Hernan and pulling him along by the arm added, "Now maybe you can explain all of this."

  Hernan seemed content to be led, and as I appeared to be with him the policemen stood back and let me go along although I hadn't been invited. The man leading Hernan seemed angry but did not say another word until we had joined the others of his group. They formed a semi-circle around Hernan and took turns asking mysterious questions.

  "Where is the secret entrance?" asked one.

  "How long has this been going on?" asked another.

  "Tell us about the lemons," demanded a third.

  "We know it was you," the first man, the angry one, asserted.

  Hernan didn't say a word but stood there as dumbly and meekly as he had sat at the Luxor Cafe less than an hour before.

  "Wait just a minute," I said, speaking up for the first time. The men all turned to me.

  "Are you his lawyer?" One of them asked.

  "I'm his friend," I replied. "And I have to tell you, neither of us have any idea what's going on around here. We've never been here before, not until yesterday that is. We don't even know whose house this is."

  My little speech met with a baffled silence for a few moments, but then the angry man - I keep calling him that because that's how he continued to strike me, with his narrow sweaty face and the furious knotted eyebrows that turned his face into one red scowl - nearly spat in my face.

  "Somebody get this joker out of here," he ordered, and the next thing I knew I was being shoved aside by a couple of burly men with hard hats and vests. They didn't push me far, though, just out of the circle which now formed closely around Hernan. I could hear them clearly as they shouted their nonsensical questions at him, provoking the same silence in response. They moved in closer and closer to him but he never flinched or even changed the blan
d, empty expression on his face. I was about to try and worm my way back in there when a new guy showed up, a small but determined fellow who somehow got right in there and by waving his arms and yelling managed to make the suited guys back up a bit.

  "Okay, Ricky," said the angry man, "You try and get something out of him."

  "Nando," said the newcomer, turning to face my friend and putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Where you been, man? Everyone's been so worried. Haven't seen you in a few days now."

  Hernan looked at Ricky and studied his face closely.

  "Cardoval?" he asked in a whisper. "That really you?"

  "In the flesh, man," Ricky told him. "In the flesh. Why you look at me like that? What's the matter with you, man? You look like you seen a ghost."

  "I am the ghost," Hernan said.

  "Come on," the angry man shouted, "We ain't got all day. This ruse has gone on long enough. We know about you, Kaitel! We know all about you. Time to fess up. You're going down."

  "Don't bust a vein, Carfax!" Enrique Cardoval turned and laughed at him. "You got nothing and you know it. Whyn't you grab a seat or something. Me and my bud got things to sort out."

  With that, as the men in suits stood back and let them pass, Cardoval led Hernan - who was used to being dragged around by this point - out of the circle and over to the remaining front steps of the half-ruined house. I also walked over and tried to introduce myself to this Ricky fellow, but he didn't look up at me or acknowledge my presence in any way, so I just stood back and listened in. Their conversation made less and less sense to me as it went on. Ricky rattled off a list of unfamiliar names, each one evoking a shake of the head from Hernan. Ricky listed places and numbers but nothing registered as familiar to my friend. Ricky leaned in closer and started whispering so I couldn't hear. Frustrated, I turned away and headed back toward the hole, hoping to get a better look at the thing.

  It was odd. The hole was in the shape of a cube, about twelve feet by twelve by twelve, and it contained a perfectly intact if rather dusty living room. Two reading chairs surrounded a wrought-iron lamp on one side of the room. Behind them bookshelves were built into the wall and were filled with old-looking books. A nice oriental carpet covered the floor in front of the chairs, hosting a small table with what looked like an old record player on it. On the wall behind that hung a few pictures of sailing ships. The walls were covered with a pale-orange patterned wallpaper, and a cabinet on one side containing an assortment of nick-knacks, seemingly a collection of little trinkets someone had picked up from tourist traps around the world; a small stone elephant, some green glass kittens, a miniature Eiffel Tower, a personally engraved license plate bearing the name Lola propped up on a stand made of toothpicks, a dark metal cast of some snow-covered mountain range, a smooth wooden mouse, and a miniature porcelain tea set. The whole thing looked like an old lady's visiting room.

  "It was just like this when they found it," somebody said. A young woman in a yellow vest was standing next to me, looking down into the room.

  "Can you believe it?" she asked. "What a treasure trove!"

  "Really?" I said. It didn't look like anything that special to me, more like my grandmother's house. I half expected to smell a pumpkin pie at any moment.

  "Just imagine," she turned to me. She was very excited and I noticed she was holding a clipboard full of paper in one hand, and a pen in the other. "This room's been hidden for over a hundred years. Completely blocked off. It was underneath that house," she added, pointing at the old brick ruin.

  "Somebody had built right over it. We've been pouring through the records down at City Hall. Look!" She flipped through the notes on her clipboard. "It's all here," she announced though I couldn't tell one form from another.

  "Patterson, Gibson, Maryvale, Homer, all the previous owners as far back as we can get. The place was due for re-beautification a couple of times but somehow skipped it til now. Shouldn't even be here anymore. Anyway, here they came and started tearing down the old wreck - hideous, wasn't it? who does brick? - and bam, there it was, perfectly intact, right under the old floorboards below the kitchen."

  "But underground?" I asked.

  "Right!" she said. "But it didn't used to be. This whole area's been built up. Used to be waterfront. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, right? The river was entirely redirected away from here, oh god, decades ago. It's like a mile away now. Can't even see it. Used to be right here though. So they piled up the landfill to make it even with the highway over there," she gestured vaguely in some direction. I had no idea what she was talking about. "Must have been then it happened," she said. "They built right over it. Now the whole thing's headed for the history museum. That's me, by the way,” she said, handing me a card, “Claire Stoll. Contemporary Archaeologist. And you are?"

  I introduced myself as a friend of that man over there, pointing out Hernan, and she turned kind of somber and said it was a shame about him.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "It should be like he won the lottery," she told me, "what with this priceless discovery and all, but instead it's only got him into even more trouble than usual."

  "What trouble?"

  "The lemons," she said, as if that should have been obvious.

  Chapter Eleven

  "What lemons?" I asked. This was the second time I had heard them mentioned. Claire pointed down into the hole.

  "Those lemons," she said, indicating a small wicker basket in the corner of the room, on the floor next to one of the reading chairs. At first nothing seemed unusual about them. There were maybe three or four of them in the basket. I assumed they were ceramic or stone.

  "Yes," she said. "They're real lemons, and they're fresh, and they've got his fingerprints all over them."

  "I thought you said the room was completely concealed."

  "Exactly," she said. "That's the problem, you see. That and the fact they were stolen."

  "The lemons?" I asked, incredulous. Who would care about a few stolen lemons? They must have cost a dime apiece. Lemons were hardly scarce in these parts.

  "Same as the jewels," she said. I looked around for those but she laughed and said,

  "Of course they didn't find those! Not yet. But that's what it's all about."

  Now I got it. Those men in suits, they were detectives. The police presence, the angry man, now there was some glimmer of explanation in the midst of all this nonsense.

  "Hernan's no thief," I said to Claire, as if that would helpm but she was only there for the artifacts.

  "Excuse me," I added, and started walking back toward the steps where Hernan and Ricky were still huddled in conference. Carfax got in my way, though, and stopped me.

  "I need to ask you a few questions," he said.

  "Sure," I replied, "go ahead."

  They turned out to be more than a few. Carfax delivered me into the hands of two of his associates, the ones who'd already enjoyed pushing me around, and they hustled me off into an official car, slapped some handcuffs on my wrists and drove me to their office, where they had me sit in a bright, white-tiled room for several hours before remembering I was even there. Then they had me state my name and business and recent whereabouts. I remained in that room for another hour or so while they apparently made some phone calls and checked me out, because then they let me go without a word. I had tried to get them to tell me what this was all about, what they wanted from me, who they thought I was, what about Hernan, what about the lemons, but all of my questions were met with silence. I wasn't even told to mind my own business.

  I had to take a taxi back to Misteranibal Street and by the time I arrived it was already getting late in the day and everyone was gone. The hole was once again covered up in black plastic and all the warning signs were back in their places. It struck me that anyone could simply go right in and take all that stuff out of the pit if they really wanted to, but then I realized that, historical as it might be, all those things were just useless crap, not worth bothering abo
ut. Besides, there were probably surveillance cameras, so any intruders would only end up becoming implicated in the mess my friend was somehow suspected of being involved in.

  I only wanted to know what had happened to him, where he was now. I thought I'd probably have to go back to the police station and see if I could find out from them, but then I realized they weren't likely to tell me anything. I had little to go on. I considered stopping by Mrs Handke's house next door and asking her, but dismissed the thought. Why would she know? Only one person could help me, I decided, that Ricky character. Enrique Cardoval. I would have to get a hold of him somehow.

  Chapter Twelve

  I had a little trouble tracking Ricky down. The directory had him listed at 212 Misterable Street, but the people there told me he'd moved last re-beautification, almost two years previously. They still had the redirect sign, though, the one that had been posted on the fence informing the world that the Cardoval family could now be found at 1130 Misterharrison Court. The people at that house were also very nice, but they weren't the Cardoval family. As far as they knew, Ricky and his wife Belinda and their two darling little girls, who weren't so little anymore, as the husband reminded his wife, nor that darling these days, she recalled in turn, they might be still living at 26441 Mistercarlton Terrace, which was all the way on the other side of the city. I had already driven through the east side and into the south, and now headed west, my hopes dimming but undeterred. Ricky Cardoval was option one, two and three on my list.