“I’ve ruined my life, I can’t go on, I want to die,” I sobbed at one moment, when I could articulate something more than insults, pleading, and swear words. Olympia grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to look her in the eye, to focus, to pay attention, to listen to her: “Who told you it was going to be easy, girl? Endure it. Nobody dies of this. I forbid you to talk of dying, that’s a sin. Put yourself in the hands of Jesus and you’ll live decently for the seventy years you still have ahead of you.”
Somehow Olympia Pettiford managed to get me some antibiotics, which cured the urinary tract infection, and Valium to help me with the symptoms of withdrawal. I imagine she brought them from the hospital with a clean conscience; she counted on Jesus Christ’s forgiveness in advance. The cystitis had gone into my kidneys, she explained, but the injections she gave me got it under control in a few days, and she gave me a bottle of pills to take for the next two weeks. I don’t remember how long I was agonizing through withdrawal; it must have been two or three days, but it felt like a month.
I gradually began to emerge from the pit and peered at the surface. I could swallow a spoonful or two of soup or oatmeal with milk, rest and sleep a bit; the clock mocked me, and one hour stretched out into a week. The Widows bathed me, trimmed my nails, and deloused me, cured my inflamed injuries from needles and from the cords that had cut through my wrists and ankles, gave me massages with baby oil to loosen the scabs, got me clean clothes, and watched over me to keep me from jumping out a window and going to look for drugs. When I could finally stand up and walk on my own, they took me to their church, a shed painted sky blue, where members of the tiny congregation gathered. There were no young people. All of them were African Americans, most of them women, and I knew that the few men who were there were not necessarily widowers. Jeremiah and Olympia Pettiford, dressed up in violet satin robes with yellow trim, conducted a service to give thanks to Jesus in my name. Those voices! They sang with their whole bodies, swaying like palm trees, their arms raised to the heavens, joyful, so joyful that their singing cleansed me from within.
Olympia and Jeremiah didn’t want to know anything about me, not even my name. Freddy having brought me to their door was reason enough for them to take me in. They guessed that I was fleeing from something, and they preferred not to know what, in case someone asked them compromising questions. They prayed for Freddy daily, asked Jesus to look after him, to help him through detox and to accept help and love, “but sometimes Jesus is slow to answer, because he receives too many requests,” they explained. I couldn’t get Freddy out of my head either, worrying that he’d fall into the clutches of Joe Martin and Chino, but Olympia had confidence in his cunning and his amazing capacity for survival.
One week later, when the symptoms of the infection had cleared up and I could stay more or less quiet without Valium, I asked Olympia to call my grandma in California, because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was seven in the morning when Olympia dialed the number I gave her, and my Nini answered immediately, as if she’d been sitting by the telephone for six months, waiting. “Your granddaughter is ready to go home. Come and pick her up.”
Eleven hours later, a red van pulled up in front of the Pettifords’ house. My Nini leaned on the horn with the urgency of love, and I fell into her arms before the satisfied gaze of the householders, several Widows, and Mike O’Kelly, who was getting his wheelchair out of the rented vehicle. “You little shit! If you only knew what you put us through! How hard could it have been just to call to tell us you were alive!” was my Nini’s greeting, shouted in Spanish, as happens when she’s agitated, and then: “You look awful, Maya, but your aura’s green, the color of healing, so that’s a good sign.” My grandma was much smaller than I remembered. She’d shrunk in a few months, and the purple circles under her eyes, which used to be so sensual, now made her look old. “I told your dad. He’s flying back from Dubai and will be waiting for you at home tomorrow,” she told me, clinging to my hand and staring at me with owl eyes to keep me from disappearing again, but she abstained from overwhelming me with questions. Soon the Widows called us to the table: fried chicken, french fries, breaded and fried vegetables, fritters, a feast of cholesterol to celebrate my family reunion.
After dinner, the Widows for Jesus said good night and left while we gathered in the little living room, where the wheelchair could barely fit. Olympia gave my Nini and Mike a summary of my state of health and advised them to get me into a rehabilitation program as soon as we got back to California, something Mike, who knows a lot about these matters, had already decided for himself, and then she discreetly left the room. I brought them up to date briefly on what my life had been like since May, skipping the night with Roy Fedgewick in the motel and the prostitution, which would have destroyed my Nini. As I told them about Brandon Leeman, or rather, Hank Trevor, the counterfeit money, the murderers who kidnapped me, and all the rest, my grandma writhed in her chair, repeating between clenched teeth, “You little shit,” but Snow White’s blue eyes shone like the headlights of an airplane. He was delighted finally to find himself in the middle of a real police investigation.
“Counterfeiting money is a very serious crime, with longer sentences than for premeditated murder,” he cheerfully informed us.
“That’s what Officer Arana told me. I better phone him and confess everything. He gave me his number,” I suggested.
“Great idea! Only my idiot granddaughter could come up with such a brilliant plan!” exclaimed my Nini. “Would you like to spend twenty years in San Quentin and end up in the gas chamber, you silly girl? Go on then, run and tell the cop you’re an accomplice.”
“Calm down, Nidia. The first priority is to destroy the evidence, so they won’t be able to connect your granddaughter to the money. Then we’ll take her to California without leaving any trace of her time in Las Vegas, and then, once she’s recuperated, we’ll make her disappear—what do you reckon?”
“How are we going to do that?” she asked him.
“Everyone here knows her as Laura Barron, except for the Widows for Jesus, right, Maya?”
“The Widows don’t know my real name either,” I said.
“Excellent. We’ll go back to California in the van we rented,” Mike decided.
“Good thinking, Mike,” interjected my Nini, whose eyes were starting to twinkle as well. “To fly, Maya would need a ticket in her name and some form of ID—that leaves a trail—but we can cross the country by car without anybody finding out. We can return the van in Berkeley.”
In this simple way the two members of the Club of Criminals organized my escape from Sin City. It was late; we were tired and needed to sleep before putting the plan into action. I stayed that night with Olympia, while Mike and my grandmother stayed in a hotel. The next morning we got together with the Pettifords for breakfast, which we stretched out for as long as possible, sad to say good-bye to my benefactors. My Nini, extremely grateful and in eternal debt to the Pettifords, offered them unconditional hospitality in Berkeley—“My house is your home”—but to be on the safe side they didn’t want to know my last name or our address. However, when Snow White told them he had saved boys like Freddy and could help the kid, Olympia accepted his card. “The Widows for Jesus will look for him until we find him and then we’ll bring him to you, even if we have to tie him up,” she promised. I said good-bye to that adorable couple with a huge hug and a promise that we’d see each other again.
My grandma, Mike, and I headed for Beatty in the red van, arguing on the way about how to open the locks. We couldn’t put a stick of dynamite in front of the door, as my Nini suggested; if we did manage to do that, the explosion would call attention to us, and besides, brute force is the last thing a good detective resorts to.
They made me repeat ten times the details of the two trips I’d made to the storage lockup with Brandon Leeman. “What exactly was the message you were supposed to give his brother over the phone?” my Nini asked me once again.
“The address of where the bags were.”
“That’s all?”
“No! Now I remember. Leeman kept insisting that I should tell his brother where his El Paso TX bags were.”
“Was he referring to the city of El Paso in Texas?”
“I suppose so, but I’m not sure. The other bag was just a regular travel bag, without any logo on it.”
The two amateur detectives deduced that the combination to the locks was in that brand name, and that was why Leeman had been so insistent on me getting the message exactly right. It took them three minutes to translate the letters into numbers, such a simple code that it was disappointing; they were expecting a challenge worthy of their abilities. All they had to do was look at a telephone: the eight letters corresponded to eight digits, four for each combination, 3572 and 7689.
We stopped to buy rubber gloves, a cloth, a broom, matches, and rubbing alcohol, then went to a hardware store for a plastic container and a shovel, and finally to a gas station to fill up the tank and the container. We went on to the lockup, which luckily I recognized, because there were several in the same place. I found the right door, and my Nini, wearing gloves, opened the locks on her second attempt; I’ve rarely seen her more pleased. Inside were the two bags, just as Brandon Leeman had left them. I told them that on the two previous visits I hadn’t touched anything. Leeman was the one who opened the locks, took the bags out of the car, and locked up again when we left, but my Nini thought that since I’d been on drugs, I couldn’t be sure of anything. Mike wiped all the surfaces where there might be fingerprints with alcohol, from the door on in.
Out of curiosity, we glanced inside the crates and found rifles, pistols, and ammunition. My Nini suggested we should leave there armed like guerrilla fighters, since we were already in the criminal world up to our eyeballs, and Snow White thought it was a splendid idea, but I wouldn’t allow it. My Popo never wanted to own any firearms. He said the devil loaded them, and if you had one, you ended up using it and later regretting it. My Nini believed that if her husband had owned a weapon, he would have killed her when she threw his opera scores in the garbage, a week after they got married.
What the members of the Club of Criminals wouldn’t have given for those two crates of lethal toys! We threw the bags in the van, my Nini swept the ground to erase our footprints and the wheelchair tracks, and we closed up the locks and drove away, unarmed.
With the bags in the van, we went to rest for a few hours in a motel after buying water and provisions for the trip, which would take us about ten hours. Mike and my Nini had arrived by plane and rented the van at the Las Vegas airport. They didn’t know how long, straight, and boring that highway was, but at least at that time of year it wasn’t the boiling cauldron it is in other months, when the temperature goes up over a hundred degrees. Mike O’Kelly took the bags of treasure to his room, and I shared a king-size bed in the other room with my grandma, who held my hand all night. “I’m not even thinking of running away, Nini, don’t worry,” I assured her, collapsing with exhaustion, but she didn’t let go. Neither of us could sleep very much, so we made use of the time to talk. We had a lot to say to each other. She told me about my dad, about how he’d suffered when I ran away, and repeated that she’d never forgive me for having left them without news for five months, one week, and two days. I’d destroyed their nerves and broken their hearts. “Forgive me, Nini, I didn’t think . . .” And it’s true that it hadn’t occurred to me. I’d only thought about myself.
I asked her about Sarah and Debbie, and she told me she’d attended the graduation of my class at Berkeley High, invited by Mr. Harper, with whom she’d become friends, because he’d always been interested in how I was doing. Debbie graduated with the rest of my class, but Sarah had been taken out of school and had been in a clinic for months, in a terrible state, weak and skeletal. At the end of the ceremony, Debbie went over to my grandma to ask her about me. She was wearing blue, looking fresh and pretty; nothing remained of her goth rags or deathly makeup. My Nini, annoyed, told her I’d married the heir to a great fortune and was in the Bahamas. “Why should I tell her you’d disappeared, Maya? I didn’t want to give her the pleasure, after all the harm she did you with her awful habits,” announced the unforgiving Don Corleone of the Chilean mafia.
As for Rick Laredo, he’d been arrested for something so stupid it could only have occurred to him: dognapping. His operation, very badly planned, consisted of stealing some pampered pet and then calling the family to demand a ransom for the mutt’s return. “He got the idea from the kidnappings of Colombian millionaires, you know, those insurgents, what are they called? The FARC? Well, something like that. But don’t worry, Mike is helping him, and they’ll soon let him out,” my grandmother concluded. I pointed out that it didn’t worry me the slightest little bit that Laredo was behind bars. On the contrary, I thought that was his rightful place in the universe. “Don’t be so hard on him, Maya, that poor boy was very much in love with you. When they let him out, Mike’s going to get him a job at the Animal Shelter, so he’ll learn to respect other people’s puppies. What do you think?” That solution would never have crossed Snow White’s mind. It just had to be my Nini’s idea.
Mike called us from his room at three in the morning. We shared some bananas and rolls, put our meager luggage in the van, and half an hour later left in the direction of California with my grandmother at the wheel. It was very dark, a good time to avoid the traffic and the patrol cars. I was nodding off, felt like I had sawdust in my eyes, drums banging in my head, cotton in my knees, and I would have given anything to sleep for a century, like the princess in Perrault’s story. A hundred and twenty miles up the road we turned off onto a narrow track, chosen by Mike on the map because it didn’t lead anywhere, and we soon found ourselves in a lunar landscape of utter solitude.
It was cold, but I warmed up quickly by digging a hole, an impossible task for Mike from his wheelchair or for my sixty-six-year-old Nini, and very difficult for a sleepwalker like me. The earth was stony, with creeping dry and hard vegetation. My strength was failing. I’d never used a shovel, and Mike and my grandmother’s instructions just increased my frustration. Half an hour later I’d only managed to make a dent in the ground, but since I had blisters on my hands inside the rubber gloves and could barely lift the shovel, the two members of the Club of Criminals had to be satisfied with that.
Burning half a million dollars is more complicated than we imagined; we didn’t factor the wind into our calculations, or the quality of the reinforced paper, or the density of the bundles. After several attempts, we opted for the most pedestrian method: we put handfuls of bills in the hole, sprinkled them with gasoline, lit them on fire, and fanned the smoke so it wouldn’t be seen from far away, although that was pretty unlikely at that time of night.
“Are you sure all this is counterfeit, Maya?” my grandma asked.
“How can I be, Nini? Officer Arana said that they normally mix fake bills with legal ones.”
“It would be a waste to burn good money, with all the expenses we’ve got. We could save a little bit, just for emergencies . . . ,” she suggested.
“Are you crazy, Nidia? This is more dangerous than nitroglycerine,” Mike said.
They carried on a heated argument while I finished burning the contents of the first bag and opened the second. Inside I found only four bundles of bills and two packages the size of books, wrapped in plastic and sealed with packing tape. We ripped them open with our teeth and fingers because we didn’t have anything sharp and we needed to hurry; it was starting to get light, dark gray clouds sweeping across a vermilion sky. In the packages there were four metal plates for printing fifty- and hundred-dollar bills.
“This is worth a fortune!” Mike shouted. “It’s much more valuable than the money we’ve burned.”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“According to what the police officer told you, Maya, Adam Trevor’s counterfeit bills are so perfe
ct it’s almost impossible to spot them. The mafias would pay millions for these plates.”
“So we could sell them,” said my Nini, full of hope.
Mike stopped her with a cutting look. “Don’t even think about it, Don Corleone.”
“We can’t burn them,” I interjected.
“We have to bury them or throw them in the sea,” Mike decided.
“What a shame. They’re works of art.” My Nini sighed, and proceeded to wrap them up carefully to keep them from getting scratched.
We finished burning the loot and covered the hole with dirt. Before we left, Snow White insisted on marking the place.
“What for?” I asked.
“Just in case. That’s what they do in crime novels,” he explained. I had to go find some stones and make a pyramid on top of the hole, while my Nini paced out the distances to the nearest reference points and Mike drew a map on one of the paper bags. It was like playing pirates, but I didn’t feel like arguing with them. We did the trip to Berkeley with three stops to go to the washroom, drink coffee, fill up with gas, and get rid of the bags, the shovel, the plastic container, and the gloves in different garbage cans. The blaze of dawn colors had given way to the white light of day, and we sweated in the feverish steam of the desert; the van’s air conditioning didn’t work very well. My grandma didn’t want to let me drive because she thought my brain was still addled and my reflexes numbed, and she drove along that interminable ribbon for the whole day until night fell, without a single complaint. “Something had to come of having been a limousine driver,” she commented, referring to the era when she met my Popo.
Daniel Goodrich wanted to know, when I told him the story, what we’d done with the plates. My Nini took charge of throwing them into San Francisco Bay from the ferry.