Acapulco presented its brilliant, smiling crescent at mid-morning, a tumbled ring of golden green hills, a fringe of hotels that seemed to sit right in the blue ocean. White flecks of sails looked perfectly still on the surface of the bay. They got out of the plane into a warm, thick atmosphere that after a few minutes made them remove their jackets and ties. A limousine took them into the town and deposited them near the main plaza on the Costera, the great main avenue that curved around the bay.
Ramón wanted to go at once to the police station to learn whether the boy had been found, but Theodore suggested a telephone call, on the grounds of saving time. He knew that Ramón would get into some kind of altercation with the police if they went there, and that they both might be detained for some time. Ramón called from a telephone on the counter of a plaza bar, his face tense, his eyes glancing over the people at the tables and the passers-by on the sidewalk.
“Does it matter who I am? I am a citizen asking a question!” Ramón said, and Theodore gestured for him to keep calm, but Ramón was not looking at him. “Está bien! Gracias!” He hung up, and slid a twenty-centavo piece across the counter to pay for the call. “They have not found him,” he said to Theodore, swung his jacket over his shoulder, and they walked out on to the sidewalk.
The plaza was noisy with tourists and Acapulcans, sitting at sidewalk tables over early apéritifs. They had walked half around the plaza when Ramón said: “Teo, I am going to do a lot of walking, and I don’t expect you will enjoy it. Would you like to sit and have a drink somewhere?”
“I know what he looks like better than you,” Theodore said, “and I’m just as eager to find him.”
They got back to the corner at which they had entered the plaza. Before them, the row of coconut palms down the centre of the Costera swayed and hissed in the gentle breeze from the ocean. A slow-moving car with an amplifier blared a cha-cha-cha tune, and over this a man’s recorded voice screamed unintelligibly about a local movie.
“So many hotels,” Ramón said irritably.
“He would not go to a hotel! I’m quite sure the hotels are alerted. We should go to the lowest sections of the town—wherever they are,” Theodore added, because he was not familiar with the lower sections of Acapulco. “How about the Malecón? The boys on the wharf. They always know everything that’s going on, you know.”
“Let’s try behind the Cathedral first,” said Ramón, and they turned and headed for the blue-and-white Cathedral of Arabian style whose two domes could be seen at the end of the plaza, above the trees. The Cathedral’s three tall doors, one in front and one on either side, stood wide open to the tropical breezes and the stares of tourists.
Ramón hesitated at a side door and said: “I’ll just be a minute, Teo,” and went in.
Theodore lit a cigarette and looked up the sidewalk, which presented an uninteresting vista.
Ramón came out after two or three minutes, and they continued the slightly uphill climb and walked for half an hour among the streets of small private houses that resembled those of small towns in the U.S.A., with their bench swings and front porches. Once Ramón detached himself and crossed a street to speak to two boys sitting on a porch rail. Theodore saw them shake their heads, and when Ramón turned away, one of them put a hand over his mouth foolishly to hide a grin. They went up La Quebrada, a street that led to the steep rocks from which local boys dived every night for prize money. Ramón walked to the small plaza overlooking the rocks and looked at the few figures on the stone benches. None looked like Infante.
“Down to the Malecón!” Theodore proposed, and Ramón came with him.
It was a considerable walk, and they took a different route back to the Costera. Theodore looked over the drifting, chattering groups of boys and young men they passed on the way, but he wondered if Infante—if he were still here at all after the warning in the papers —were not holed up in the house of someone he had bought off to hide him. On the other hand, Infante was not the sort to be cautious for ever. He would want to go to another big town, and there was none near Acapulco.
The Malecón was a cement embankment where little boats and sail-boats tied up and from which people took off for an afternoon’s fishing, returning at sundown to have their pictures taken beside hanging sailfish. Here there were always boys and men fishing with hand-lines, boys awaiting their girl friends, and loiterers of all kinds who came to buy marijuana and dope from certain skippers of the sail-boats and motor-launches. Ramón asked Theodore not to walk with him now, so that he could better talk to some of the boys, and Theodore sat down on an empty bench, where he was immediately approached by a barefoot child of six or less who offered to shine his shoes for a peso.
“Dos pesos,” Theodore said.
A blank stare, and then a grin. “Okay! Two pesos!” in English, and he fell to work.
Twenty yards away, Ramón was talking to a slim boy in a white shirt and white slacks. The boy shook his head repeatedly, and drifted on, without a glance back at Ramón.
“Take it easy, niño!” Theodore said. “If you get polish on my socks, you are worth only one peso!”
But he gave him two pesos and a fifty-centavo tip, and continued to sit on the bench, watching Ramón’s dark-clad figure growing smaller, far down the Malecón. He was bound to be recognized as Ramón Otero by someone, Theodore thought, and the word would be passed around. They’d have no peace. Theodore foresaw false leads, and gratuities paid for nothing. He stared out at the beautiful, neutral Pacific, whose surface rose and fell even within the quiet bay like a powerful and tranquil breathing. His clothes were beginning to stick with perspiration. He wondered if tonight he and Ramón could not go to that quiet stretch of beach beyond Hornos and plunge into the sea naked. Or would it remind Ramón too much of the nights when Lelia had been with them here, swimming with them, too, in the darkness? Ramón would not tell him if he were disturbed by his memories, he would simply refuse to go to the spot. Theodore closed his eyes to the glaring sun and remembered a night with Lelia and Ramón on the little beach, the nervous, cool lap of the small waves and the sound of a ripe mango or coconut falling from a tree to the sand.
In the afternoon they explored Caleta Beach as well as Hornos, the afternoon beach, Ramón oblivious of the stares of the nearly naked sun-bathers as he tramped in his city clothes among them. Theodore stayed on the paved walk, from which he could see the beach as well as the people on the street. When Ramón emptied the sand from his shoes for the last time, it was 5 p.m. Theodore persuaded him to go into Hungry Herman’s for a hamburger, but Ramón would not order anything but coffee. From here, Theodore made a call to Sauzas, whom he did not get, but he learned that Infante had not been found and that there were no new reports from Acapulco. Theodore told this to Ramón, and proposed that they find a hotel for the night, rest a while, and go out again in the evening, when everyone would be out of doors or at some night club. Ramón agreed to the hotel, but said he did not need to rest. His eyes, however, were already haggard, and Theodore felt sure he had not slept the past night.
“I have the feeling he is in this town, Teo,” Ramón said. “Or somewhere near. There’s Pie de la Cuesta, you know, and Puerto Marques. A big hotel there, too.”
“Ramón, he wouldn’t dare stick his head into an hotel!”
“What makes you so sure?”
“All right, ask at the Hotel Club de Pesca, and see what they tell you!” Theodore said somewhat impatiently. The Club de Pesca was a gaudy, hulking hotel, built in a curve, just the hotel Infante would choose, if he dared.
They walked towards the Club de Pesca, and Theodore inquired for rooms in four or five hotels that they passed, all of which were filled. At the Club de Pesca, Ramón approached the desk and asked if a Señor Salvador Infante was registered there.
“Or Señor Salvador Bejar,” Ramón added, and Theodore walked farther away, embarrassed.
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“Infante?” came the clerk’s voice. “The one they are looking for? I wish he would come in here, señor!”
Angry, Ramón rejoined Theodore, and they left the air-conditioned lobby and went out into the sun. “One has to ask to know!” Ramón said as resentfully as if he had been personally insulted. In Ramón’s mind, the young delinquent was a persecuted child, at worst a minor offender who had paid enough for his misdemeanors by being harassed over the whole United States of Mexico.
“Let’s try the other end of the Costera for an hotel,” Theodore said, “otherwise we’ll be walking back all the way we’ve come. And I for one am going to ride on something.”
There was a bus-stop very near the Club de Pesca, and a bus was just sliding to the curb. Theodore got on it, but Ramón stood where he was.
“I’ll meet you on the Malecón!” Ramón called to him.
Let him exhaust himself on this nonsense, Theodore thought. But as he walked up the bus aisle, he found himself glancing as anxiously as Ramón to make sure that no face on the bus was the pale, furtive face of Infante. Theodore rode past the Malecón until the hotels became thinner, got out and, at the second hotel at which he inquired, secured a room with twin beds for the night. The dull practicality of this jolted him from his thoughts of the preceding hour, and made him feel vaguely ashamed. He resolved not to nag Ramón to sleep in a bed tonight if he preferred to walk the streets or to explore the all-night cabarets. Ramón had a purpose and he had not. That was the difference between them.
Theodore walked back to the Malecón and stood near the warehouses, watching a couple of sandalled longshoremen rolling barrel-sized coils of copper wire from the dock into a warehouse. He walked on, looking for Ramón’s figure in the bright dusk.
“Joven!” he called to a young man approaching, who was licking an ice-stick.
The young man strolled towards Theodore, no doubt thinking he wanted to ask a direction.
“Listen—you have not possibly heard where Salvador Infante is in this town, have you?” Theodore asked.
The boy’s shining brown eyes widened very slightly, innocently.
“Two hundred pesos, if you have an idea,” Theodore said. “I am a friend of his, not the police.”
The boy’s eyes lingered momentarily on Theodore’s expensive wristwatch, and came up to meet Theodore’s eyes. He shrugged. “Don’t ask me, señor. I heard he was here—”
“You don’t know anyone who knows? Two hundred pesos if you tell me that. I have the money with me. No questions asked.”
He turned his round, dark head to look behind him. “I don’t know, señor. I am sorry.” And he seemed really sorry, because no one at all was around them, or watching them.
Theodore nodded. “Gracias.”
They walked on their separate ways. He caught sight of Ramón at last, not on the Malecón, but across the Costera from it, walking very slowly, his jacket over one shoulder. When Theodore approached him, he said he had been waiting half an hour.
“I’ve been hanging around here only because if you hadn’t found me, you’d have called the police or something wild like that!” Ramón’s eyes were wild now, and bloodshot.
“It took me a few minutes to find a hotel room, Ramón. Here’s the key. The name is on it—Hotel Tres Reyes, way down.”
“I don’t need a hotel, Teo.”
“Keep the key, anyway. I can get in when I go back, but you may not be able to without the key.”
Ramón thrust the key back at him. “Thank you, Teo,” he said with gentleness in his voice, but none in his face, and walked on a few steps.
Theodore caught up with him. “Where now, Ramón?”
The problem was solved by Ramón’s suddenly collapsing. People gathered round, murmuring about the sun’s rays, tequila, the low altitude, but Theodore knew it was none of these things. A couple of boys, of the kind Ramón had been approaching all afternoon, helped Theodore lift his limp figure into a taxi, and one of them laid Ramón’s jacket over him with a hand as slender and gentle as a girl’s.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ramón was able to walk into the Hotel Tres Reyes when they reached it, though he did not seem to know where he was. Theodore got him to lie down and sent for orange juice and hot tea. Obediently, Ramón sipped at both tea and the orange juice, while Theodore sat uneasily on the other bed, listening to the waves’ restless swish on the beach below their terrace. They were on the second floor of the hotel. Next to them was a suite with kitchenette, occupied now by a couple with a baby that sometimes cried at night; and for this the usual price of the room would be lowered ten pesos, the manager had told Theodore. The baby was already starting to cry, and the breeze that blew through their open terrace door brought also the sounds of a refrigerator door being opened and closed, the clatter of a pan, and the cooing efforts of the woman to get the baby to hush. Theodore sighed, depressed by the transistorizes and the vagueness of his and Ramón’s position now. What if Salvador Infante had already got himself killed and was floating in the Pacific at this moment, never to be found except by sharks?
Theodore took a shower with the bathroom door open, so that he could hear if Ramón stirred or left the room, Ramón was sitting up when he came in again. Theodore proposed a shower for him, but Ramón shook his head.
“It’ll refresh you—for this evening,” Theodore said. “You’ll want to go out again, won’t you?”
This inspired Ramón to move. Theodore adjusted the shower at a tepid temperature for him and advised him not to touch the taps, since they worked backward and the hot water was scalding. Ramón emerged from the shower a few moments later, his black hair wet and combed down, buttoning his blue shirt.
“What do you say to a nap?” Theodore asked. “Everybody’ll be having dinner until ten or so—”
“Only in the hotels,” Ramón said. “You said the boy wouldn’t be in a hotel, he’d be on the streets.”
There was no denying this.
Ramón put his jacket on. “Not that you have to go with me,” he added.
But Theodore got up, put his own jacket on, and went with Ramón out of the door. It was ten minutes to seven. The futility of it made Theodore feel tired, and Ramón’s energetic pace on the sidewalk increased his sense of flagging.
They went to the plaza, ablaze with lights now, though the sun had still not set. Here were hundreds of faces to look at, and they paused at the open-front bars and restaurants, and Ramón walked into some alone. People looked at him, and Theodore noticed some whispering and pointing. Ramón seemed as unconcerned as if he walked through a forest of trees. They continued up the Costera to the little thatch-roofed restaurant where he and Ramón and Lelia had often come to eat when they tired of their hotel food. The twelve or so tables were visible from the sidewalk, and all were occupied; but Infante was not there.
There were the back streets, scores of them, lighted as much by the occasional tiny food counters with one table and chair in front of them as by the infrequent street lamps. Somewhere they heard a guitar. Theodore looked over his shoulder, sure that they were being followed.
“Ramón,” Theodore said, touching Ramón’s arm to stop him. Theodore turned round to face the tall boy, who hesitated in a frightened way as if he were going to turn and run. “Buenas tardes,” Theodore said, walking towards him. “You have something to say?”
The boy advanced timidly. He was ugly and stupid-looking, about nineteen. “You were—asking on the Malecón today about Infante?” he asked quietly, though the sidewalk where they stood was deserted.
“Sí,” Theodore said. “Do you know where he is?”
A blank, frightened stare. “I, no, señor. But maybe somebody else does.”
“Who?” Ramón said.
“Do you want a few pesos first? Do you really know anything?” Theodore
asked.
“I know something,” the boy said defensively. “Maybe worth—a hundred pesos?”
Theodore hesitated, thinking that if he really knew anything, he would have made the price higher. “What is it? We’ll pay you.” He put his left hand inside his jacket, as if to draw out a wallet.
“Another man was asking for Infante on the Malecón this afternoon,” the boy said quickly. “He got into a boat. I saw where the boat went.”
Theodore pulled out his wallet, turning himself slightly lest the boy suddenly snatch the whole wallet from his hands. “Now what’s the rest of it?” Theodore asked with the hundred-peso note ready in his hand. He replaced his wallet.
“The boat went towards Pie de la Cuesta,” the boy said.
It was a village on a promontory, some twelve miles north. “You’re sure the boat went there?”
“Sí. I don’t know if it stopped there, but it went in that direction.”
“And who was the man?”
A shrug. “A man. This high.” He indicated a height shorter than his own.
“A policía?” asked Ramón.
“I don’t know.” The boy looked at the hundred-peso note.