I went back towards him. He didn’t move. I reached him and said:
“Want something?”
He hardly came up to my shoulder. His spotless denims were a weak blue from many washings. He didn’t look more than fifteen or sixteen, although he was certainly older. He was beautiful the way so many Indian boys are—like a girl, but tough, too.
He shrugged.
I repeated: “Want something?”
Still watching me from dark, wooden eyes, he flicked the newspaper from under his arm and opened it. In the V at the bottom of the paper, I saw a few shabby postcards of plump females dressed only in stockings with a flouncy, rosetted garter. I grinned and said:
“No quiero filthy pictures.”
He shut the paper again and put it back under his arm. He looked away from me, but made no attempt to move. A family group, all dressed in black and all carrying large bunches of orange marigolds, which are the traditional flowers of the dead, marched lugubriously past towards the Chapultepec trolley on their way to the cemetery.
I thought it might be interesting to go out to the cemetery myself and see what happened there on the Day of the Dead. As I turned to leave the boy, he changed his position, leaning against a street-light in a way that made his right hip jut out under the slung sack. The sunlight gleamed on a small area of metal which protruded from his pants pocket. I recognized it as the handle of a revolver.
I started to wonder. Young Mexicans in old denims don’t carry guns. Guns are a luxury there. Even a knife is a major investment. Something—maybe the vague recollecton he had stirred or maybe a hangover of uneasiness from Yucatan—made me think of Halliday. In any case, I didn’t want to hang around a little boy with a gun. I left him, going down sidestreets towards the Avenida Chapultepec. I reached it. A couple of blocks in front of me was the trolley-stop. A crowd of Mexicans, all carrying orange-flowers or gay rush baskets stuffed with food, were waiting for the tren.
Once I had reached them I looked over my shoulder. The boy with the empty sack had turned the corner and was moving stubbornly after me.
At that moment a battered yellow trolley came rattling down the tracks and pulled up with a jolt. It was already twice as crowded as any New York cross-town bus in the rush hour. I let the throng on the street jostle me deep into the mass of humanity inside. The timing had been good. While the boy was still half a block away, the trolley started forward. I was squashed against one window, and I caught a glimpse of him as we trundled down the track. His inertia had completely gone. He was peering anxiously up and down the street.
I knew then that the anatomical photographs had been an alibi. He was following me for some more important reason. Probably because he had been hired to follow me. My thoughts of Halliday grew. Had he, in fact, been the sinister figure I had half suspected him of being: Had he tried to steal my suitcase on purpose? Was he now having me followed by a boy with a gun?
I didn’t care. I had already bowed out of the affaire Deborah Brand, and I had only a couple more days in Mexico. So long as they didn’t start using guns, any boy could tote one and follow me all he wanted. But I felt curious and angry, too. I didn’t like the indignity of having to duck into a crowded trolley to escape from a pretty little boy with a face like a flower.
Although I had shaken him off, and although I told myself I wasn’t interested, some of the old Yucatan feeling was alive again. The unfamiliar quality of my trolley companions gave it added emphasis. Orange-flowers of the dead, with their tart, autumn scent, were pushed against my face. An old woman, who looked more than eighty, with a black rebozo over her head, was clinging to the handrail next to me and muttering an incessant stream of Aves. Somewhere, deeper in the hot mass of bodies, someone was strumming a guitar and singing a gay ranchero song. Religious gloom and fiesta raucousness were evenly matched. The air reeked of beer and garlic and flowers and sweat.
As the trolley clattered forward, people catapulted against me: the old lady, her Aves uninterrupted; a girl with knee-deep lipstick and an American sweater; a studious young man who managed, with a concentration I admired, to go on reading a medical textbook illustrated with drawings of livers and kidneys.
Every now and then there was a shout of “bajando”. The trolley jerked to a halt. A spasm, which reminded me of a worm turning over in a box of bait, ran through the crowd. Someone somehow managed to get out. I made no attempt to do anything until we reached the end of the line. I was hurtled out with the rest of the passengers. I hadn’t seen the destination of the trolley when I boarded it. But, as I suspected, I had arrived at the Pantheon Dolores, the largest cemetery in Mexico City.
All the Latin-American world seemed to be concentrated on the terraced sidewalk outside the main gates. Indians squatted in the street beside huge piles of orange and purple flowers. Behind them improvised wooden stalls were selling fruit, tacos, great hunks of roast meat, finicky coloured jellies and live chickens. Furtive dogs darted in and out. A radio screamed from a beer-parlour. Behind, revolving slowly against a clear blue sky, was a ferris wheel with a carnival ground at its base. As always, Mexico was mixing life and death so inextricably together that one could hardly tell which was which.
I had forgotten the boy, and was beginning to enjoy myself. I joined the crowd filing towards the high iron cemetery gates. A band of travelling musicians in musical-comedy costumes moved past. We reached a canopied stand which sold religious images and candy. Beyond it, on the street, squatted a group of denim-clad Mexicans selling birds in cages.
As I passed, something in the smooth curve of the cheek of one of the men attracted my attention. He moved his head a little, and I saw the dark, flower-like profile. It was against all reason, but there was no doubt about it.
My boy-friend from the Avenida Chapultepec was squatting there among the birdcages.
One of the birds started to sing—a sweet, spring-like sound in the babel.
The boy turned and looked straight at me. Long, black lashes dropped demurely. My annoyance came back. So did my curiosity.
The bird was still singing.
The boy put his hand in his pants’ pocket.
VIII
The only way the boy could have beaten the trolley to the Pantheon was by car. No Mexican boy in denims owns a car. He’s lucky if he owns a second pair of denims. Unless he has been hired by someone else, he certainly hasn’t the price of a taxi fare. The enigmatic shadow of Bill Halliday seemed very close.
I played with the idea of pushing through the bird-cages, giving the boy a sound spanking and sending him home. The gun didn’t bother me in this public place. And he was small enough to be thrown over my knee with one hand. That would probably have been the smartest thing to do. But I didn’t feel smart. I felt curious.
The knowledge that I had so short a time left in Mexico made me feel casual about the whole affair. If he wanted to follow me, okay. I was interested in knowing what he was after.
The boy was ignoring me. That was his brilliant idea of how to be a good shadow. Don’t look at a guy, and he doesn’t know you are there. I let him think I hadn’t noticed him, and drifted with the celebrants of the Day of the Dead towards the cemetery gates. In spite of myself, I was starting to think about Deborah Brand as I had thought of her in Yucatan—a frightened kid flying from some danger into a trap. If there was something in the boy’s following me, then there had been something in my theory about Deborah.
She had been a fugitive.
Were they trying to make a fugitive of me, too?
At the gates policemen were confiscating all food brought by the Indians and were checking it in a roped enclosure. The Department of Public Health must have passed an unimaginative law against feeding the dead. I moved inside. The front area of the cemetery was chill and formal with bombastic memorials to national heroes. A few tired flowers had been scattered on their illustrious tombs, but there they were receiving little attention. Everyone was streaming past to greet his own particular cherished c
orpse.
Behind the monuments the cemetery stretched as far as the eye could see. Under quiet shade trees and flowering oleanders thousands of modest graves drowsed in the early sunlight. The mild air smelt of dead leaves and sadness. But there was none of the cloistered serenity of a New England cemetery. The place was quivering with activity, loud with human voices and garish with flowers.
I started down one of the broad paths. A cement hole, like an open grave, at the path’s edge was filled with dirty water. A woman with a scarlet shawl and long Indian pigtails scooped out water in a kerosene can and splashed it over a nearby grave. A man, with a cigarette drooping from his lips, was repainting a name on a wooden cross. They worked in a casual, humdrum manner, just as they would have worked around their own houses.
I knew the boy was still following me, the way you do know those things, as if there was some area of sensitivity at the back of my neck. I didn’t look around, but I played with the question: Why? If Halliday was behind this, what did he want from me? If he had murdered Deborah, obviously she had been carrying something he wanted, some actual object or some information. Maybe after they’d killed her they hadn’t found it. Maybe because I’d been with her they thought I was her associate. Maybe they even thought she had given me this hypothetic thing.
I knew I wasn’t her associate, and I knew she hadn’t given me anything except a twenty-five-cent detective story. Murders weren’t committed for the ownership of a book. But Halliday hadn’t known that she’d given me nothing, and he hadn’t known either that the red pocket-book had sunk with Deborah in the cenote. Maybe he thought I’d picked it up and taken the “thing”—whatever it was—that had been in it. I thought of Deborah’s room key, too. She’d given it to me. If Halliday knew that, there was a pretty good reason for him to consider me as a highly implicated character.
There were quite a lot of angles to this. My interest was growing.
With Mexican patience, a woman was decorating a little picket-fence around a grave with pink carnations, snipping off individual heads and tying them to each upright.
I glanced over my shoulder. The boy in denims was padding leisurely after me. He still carried the burlap sack over his shoulder, but he had discarded the newspaper. In its place he was carrying an empty birdcage. I wondered whether the cage was another of his world-shattering ideas for camouflage, or whether he had just happened to need one and had seized the opportunity to buy it. He was beginning to get on my nerves. The pursuit was so brazen. I started to think of the gun.
And the sack, too. Somehow I didn’t like the sack.
I had reached a little square in which stood a stone building with a staircase winding up its façade. A path led through the graves to a door in the building’s side. A slat was broken out of the door, and a girl was stooping down peering into the interior.
My gaze settled on her in surprised recognition. Even from the back there was no mistaking those moulded ballet legs, the silver-fox cape and the tall Cossack cap.
As I approached she straightened from her inspection of the building’s interior and came down the path towards me. We met. The black wool lashes batted over her eyes. Then she looked at me again, and a great, warm smile broke her face.
“Ah, already I see you,” she said in English. Her voice was rich and heavy as a Russian cigarette. “You are the man in the cake place. You eat the dead bread, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “I noticed you, too.”
She was as pleasant a thing as anyone could want to meet in a cemetery. I saw I could use her, too. It would at least be a precautionary measure to confuse my hanger-on by acquiring a companion.
She brandished the arm with the fur circlet, indicating the cemetery as a whole. “You like it? Graves. Flowers. Corpses. Quaint, no? Pictureful.”
“Very.”
She pointed at the door through which she had been peering. “I look inside. There is a great slab. A door with hinges. I think it is—how you say?—crematoria. Slide in the corpse. Pouff. Burn him up.” She sighed. “You look. You think: One day she comes to me, too. Death. So sad.”
She couldn’t have looked more alive. I had never seen anyone so burstingly full of vitality and vitamins.
I said: “There’s the Russian coming out in you.”
The great eyes rolled. “You tell I am Russian? How you tell?”
“How can I tell the Kremlin’s Russian?”
She laughed, and it was like a bell ringing in a Rimsky-Korsakov opera. “Ah, so you think this of me? I am the big, old, tired Russian monument.”
She was young and very luscious, and she knew it. That, I thought, was why she laughed. Because it was nice to be young and beautiful and pretend to be crazy about death.
I didn’t have to encourage her to stay with me. Completely unselfconscious, she slipped her hand through my arm and suggested:
“You come with me, yes? To be alone I hate. Bored, bored, bored, all the time bored. Together we see the pretty people fix their tombs.”
The silver-fox cape brushed against my shoulder. It reeked of tuberoses. I glanced back. The boy with the sack and the bird-cage was still stubbornly following.
A large family, dressed in deepest mourning, was collected stiffly around a very small grave. Near them a lonely woman was kneeling in front of a grave where four white candles, decorated with white satin ribbons, gleamed palely in the sunlight.
The girl leaned closer against me, and her red lips parted in a ripe smile. “You tell me your name? It is fool to walk with the man and not to know the name.”
“I’m Peter Duluth.”
“And me. I’m Vera Garcia.”
“A Spanish name?”
“Only my husband.” She gesticulated with the furry arm. “I am ballet-dancer. A great artiste of the ballet. The critics they say that I work, work, work and become more better than this Markova and this Danilova. I am much younger than these old women.”
So my diagnosis of her profession was right. I wondered if there ever had been a young ballerina who wasn’t a thousand times better than all the great stars rolled together?
“I guess Mr. Hurok’s just pestering you with cables,” I said.
“Me? Pester me?” Her eyes flashed. “He had better not to try. The ballet—by me it stinks. All the time the foot on the bar, up in the air, up on the toe, down. Tired, always tired.” She slouched her shoulders to indicate extreme exhaustion. “No fun.” Her face lighted. “Two years ago we come here, the ballet, to Mexico. And here is this man. This politico. He is old, old and rich. So rich! And he wishes me for his wife. He gives me everything, he says. The house here, the house in Acapulco.” She shrugged. “The dance? The critics? I should worry me of the critics. I marry.”
Two small, very dirty children, were playing tag around a group of graves, and one of them let out with a piercing: Hyoh, Silvaire. Vera Garcia’s eyes were darting everywhere, not missing a trick.
I said: “And you’re happy with your old husband?”
“Happy? All the time I am happy, happy.”
“He’s good to you?”
“He is dead. Three months from the marriage he dies. Pouff. From oldness.” She nuzzled against me. “Now I am a widow. And rich, rich. The rich widow.”
“That’s cozy,” I said.
“Cozy?” She reflected. “What is this, cozy?”
“Nice,” I said.
She nodded naïve agreement. “Yes, very nice.” She pointed crudely with her thumb over her silver-foxed shoulder towards the area of elegant tombs. “To-day I bring flowers to the grave of the poor old man. Over there it is. The great marble thing with an angel. Many, many tuberoses I bring, and lilies. I pile them on the grave. Pretty? So pretty. You think he smell the flowers, that poor old man? Always he hate it, the smell of tuberoses and lilies.”
Uninhibited joy of life poured out of her like heat from a fire. She was a wonderful remedy for the gloom of the cemetery.
But she didn’t solve the problem
of Junior with the light-blue jeans. Now I had something better to do. He was beginning to pall. Every now and then, as unobtrusively as possible, I glanced behind us. He was still following. Once when I looked, Vera imitative as a monkey, looked back, too. Several minutes later when I paused, ostensibly to study a grave, she said suddenly:
“You worry, yes? All the time he comes after us, this boy with the cage of the bird.”
I was surprised at her acuteness. I wasn’t going to confide what little I knew of the truth to her, but I could hardly deny a pursuit as obvious as his.
“Seems that way,” I said.
“Ah, these Mexicans.” The grey-black eyes flashed ominously. “I fix.”
She swirled round and swept towards the boy. When she reached him she poured out a flow of words from which he visibly cowered. Once he waved the bird-cage half-heartedly, but Vera Garcia shook her fist at him with Russian abandon, and he turned tail, scurrying away through the graves.
She came back to me, her high bosom falling and rising with indignation. “The cage of the bird!” she exclaimed. “He say he follow us to sell the cage of the bird. What are we, I ask? Two parrots that we need the cage of the bird?” She linked her arm through mine, throwing up her ravishing smile. “When I am mad, I am terrible. I scare him. He is frightened, frightened.”
I was impressed by her show of ferocity, but I didn’t, for a moment, imagine that I’d seen the last of Junior.
For a while we wandered through the graves, and then suddenly she said:
“Of the dead I am bored. From here I go to Los Remedios—to the shrine of the Lady of the Miracles. Every year I go to ask for the poor old man my husband a beautiful angel in heaven. Outside I have the car. You come, yes? Together to the Shrine of the Remedies.”
That seemed to me like an excellent idea. Once again it killed two birds. I’d see more of Vera and, if I handled the exit from the cemetery satisfactorily, I should see the end of Junior.
I guided Vera down a narrow, shrub-lined path back towards the main gates. If possible, she talked more than Mrs. Snood, and as we strolled, she was lost in a flow of weird, emphatic English. When we reached the open arena around the Monument of Heroes I kept my eyes peeled for Junior. But he was nowhere in sight.
Run to Death Page 6
