“Look, God damn it.” He grabbed Sonny’s hands and squeezed. He didn’t want to freak him. “Why would they think you did it if you didn’t do it?” he said softly. “This is just business, O.K.? It’s all business.”
Sonny stared at him. His pupils were wide and deep. He felt like he could see inside Sonny’s brain. “Maybe,” Sonny said, “somebody’s fooling somebody else. That’s been done, hasn’t it, Harry?” Sonny smiled. He moved his hand again toward his ear, then stopped halfway and put his hands on the table, and began to move his head down toward where his hand was. “My ear doesn’t hurt,” he said. “They gave me a shot. I don’t feel it.”
“Why get me in this, God damn it?” He felt desperate, though it wasn’t an unsatisfying feeling, just a familiar one, almost a calming one.
“It looks good,” Sonny said very softly, almost muttering.
“To who? Who gives a shit?”
“Maybe they had an argument, you know,” Sonny said. He couldn’t keep his head still and his eyes began to rove. Whoever had been kicking the ball had stopped, and the absent noise hollowed the silence in the cafeteria. Sonny’s blood stream was loading up now. “You know, Harry,” he said. “I had a dream this morning. I was standing by my Cadillac, holding a basketball, and there was a hedge beside it and a field with some woods in it. And the trunk of the car was all full of my shit, and there were four hats. And somehow some Mexicans came up and took the hats and put them on and started to leave. And I said, ‘Those are my hats, man,’ and they said, ‘We’re Mexicans, you don’t own anything.’ ” Sonny smiled. “And that was all. I didn’t argue. Though I thought they were doing something wrong. And they stayed out in the field where I could see them, wearing my hats.” His smile widened.
“Please cut this shit out,” Quinn said and looked down. Both guards were watching him strangely. One glanced at his wrist watch and said something to the other one, and both looked at him again. “Dionisio’s dead, man. Carlos is dead. This shit is up. They’re all over you.”
Sonny stared intently at the box of Gauloises, his eyes bright. He seemed frustrated but not even aware of it. “You know,” he said, “it’s a goddamn good feeling to fuck somebody you don’t know.” He looked up proudly, as if he’d discovered something wonderful.
“Why is that?” Quinn said.
Sonny smiled. Someone started kicking the ball again, the hits popping as if there was a hurry. “Well,” he said slowly, and grew silent again. “If you start finding out things the next thing you know she’s saying, ‘Why don’t we do it as much as we used to?’ And then you’re all set up, you can’t do anything, and you’re out of control, you understand? You don’t want to be there, do you?” Sonny took a deep breath and held Quinn’s hands and squeezed them. “If you don’t know anything though, Harry, you can fuck her till piss turns to Popsicles and everything’s great. That’s where I made my mistake with Kirsten, you know, I found out too much, tried too hard.” He smiled. Flies were on his bandage. Sonny was sweating out of enthusiasm for the idea he had in his head. It kept him from being afraid. In whatever way, Quinn thought, that he was like Sonny, he hoped he had better ideas.
“I know what you did,” Quinn said softly. “Can’t you just tell me where you put it?”
“What is this man?” Sonny said. “Tell me what you’re talking about, Harry? Where I put what?” Quinn looked up at the guards, who were walking toward him. “I’m really fucked up,” Sonny said, smiling and looking relaxed. “I know you’re saying shit I’m not understanding. You’ll have to come back, you know. Maybe tomorrow.”
“O.K.,” Quinn said and stood up to leave. “You try to get it right tomorrow.”
A fly lit on Sonny’s hand, and he slowly let his other hand cover it. “You gotta kill these fucking flies, man,” Sonny said. “They’ll keep you awake.” He smiled.
26
ON THE TWENTIETH of November Street it had begun to rain. The daylight was used up and water was bouncing off the bricks in front of the taxis, trickling into a garbage current along the gutters. The pottery alleys on Bustamante were open, and a few tourists in rain gear had avoided the army barricades and were walking the slick streets through the rain. Two German men in walking shorts stood under an umbrella, pointing to a particular stall where candelabra were sold. The clerk waited at the verge of the lighted shed yelling at them, beckoning in the mist.
Quinn’s stomach exerted a failing low-grade pain he thought would quit if he didn’t concentrate on it. He hadn’t eaten in a long time, and this was only a minor flare-up. He thought it could be nerves, a bad reaction to Sonny letting go.
He walked up the line of pottery stalls across from the Hotel Señoria, examining the green fish dishes and black cups in straw paper, wanting something to catch his eye. Coming back empty-handed was going to leave Rae with the day empty and nothing to connect with. It wasn’t kind enough. He came to a stall selling the purple flowers he had seen piled around Juárez’s statue. The Indian woman was shouting “heliotropos” into the street and he bought a paper full and started back to the hotel in the rain.
He felt hollowed out now and he tried to think if Bernhardt had mentioned anybody, relatives he could call. He had said once he had a wife somewhere who hadn’t worked out, and a mother, but there was no way to find them now in time, no way to express perfunctory sympathy. It was as if Bernhardt never existed. His constancy had simply leached away. Bernhardt and Deats were beginning to take equal importance in his mind, and that seemed incorrect but impossible to change.
When he reached the Centro, the demonstrators who had been in the park were gone. The soldiers in white puttees from Manuel Ocampo were patrolling the empty sidewalks in the rain. Leaflets littered the promenades, and the cathedral floodlights had been turned on, making the drizzle spectral in the dense light. The soldiers still wore their riot visors and moved self-consciously through the water, their guns at order. The zócalo itself seemed orderly and private, and the few tourists in the cafés in the Portal had their backs to the streets, as if whatever was in the arcade was what they had expressly come to see.
He called the American consulate from the hotel office. He wanted every chance used. Bernhardt had explained it to him carefully. Bad shit in the prisión was what the consulate went to sleep on, and if he couldn’t prove Sonny was about to take an egregious down, no one would pay attention. But it was last chance time. The phone rang and rang then was answered by a recording of a man’s voice with a Boston accent that sounded, itself, like a recording. He recognized the voice from the first day he saw lawyers, a man named Benson. Benson’s voice said to leave a number and a message and someone would call back. He tried Zago’s number but no one answered, and he walked on up the stairs with the heliotropes wetting his hands.
“Something happened outside,” Rae said. She was standing with her back to the open window. Her face was rigid.
“I guess,” he said. He put the heliotropes in the pure-water bottle and set it on the chair.
“No, you don’t guess,” she said tightly. “Something bad happened. It scared everybody. And you don’t look scared.” She wound her hands. “I went to sleep and I dreamed shooting and people getting killed, and when I woke up all those soldiers we saw were out there, and the students were gone. Did you see that?”
“No.” He sat on the bed and watched her with the rain hissing like a curtain in the early dark. He tried to remember the shooting for her sake.
“The police came up here,” she said. She looked betrayed, as if there was a blame she wanted assigned.
His mind raced to his pistol and then to the money in the lock box. He stood up and went to the bureau and opened the second drawer. “What’d they say?” The pistol was gone.
“They said they were thinking of arresting me,” Rae said. “I saw them drive up in the street, and I hid your gun. I don’t know why I knew they were coming.”
He looked around the room. “Where is it?” he said.
“On the ledge.”
He leaned out into the rain and felt the pistol on the string course. No one on the street looked up. “Did they mention Carlos?” he said.
Rae sat on the bed watching him. “Often.”
He wiped the gun on his pants. “What happened?”
He opened the breech to check for water.
“I told them Señor Bernhardt was our lawyer. I told them we had to see him tomorrow, and I told them I wanted them to leave because I didn’t feel well.” She looked up at him with no expression.
“What did they say?” He pushed the cylinder closed and put the gun back in the drawer. There wasn’t any water.
“That he was muerto,” Rae said. “That must mean dead.”
He looked at her. “Did they think you were surprised?”
“I tried,” she said, “but they were rude about it. It made me mad.”
“What else?” He began to try to figure what it meant that the police had come at all, if it meant they were checking all Bernhardt’s clients. Everything seemed to have four dimensions now. It was hard to concentrate right. It was like an illness.
“That’s all,” Rae said. “I went down and checked the lock box. They know something about us now, Harry.” She seemed fatigued.
“There’s nothing to know.” He looked out the window at the other arcade of the Portal. Absence of people made the buildings seem distinct and depthless in the rain. The Christmas lights had been turned on, but the band kiosk was empty, except for a soldier in the shadows. “We haven’t done a goddamned thing,” he said. It made him mad she was conceding a thing she didn’t have to. It was something entirely different from giving Sonny up.
“I think they just haven’t figured out why they should arrest us yet,” she said calmly. “I don’t think it matters what you do, it’s whether they think they should arrest you.”
“That’s wrong,” he said. “You’re wrong about that. We didn’t kill anybody.”
“Did Sonny tell you where he put it?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Has he been lying to us?”
“Sure.” His mind began to race, then stopped at nothing.
Rae lay back on the bed. “So are they going to kill him?”
“I have to think yes,” he said. “Zago’s not answering his phone. I called the consulate. They’re calling me back.” She knew everything important now. They were looking at the same picture. “I didn’t think Zago’d back out,” he said.
“No fixed ideas,” Rae said, and looked at him. “Sonny’s luck just ran out, didn’t it, Harry? That’s why I didn’t go today. I didn’t want to come in behind that.”
Quinn thought about drinking beers in San Pedro, and Sonny saying he’d rather be in business. That didn’t seem so long ago.
“There’s no use calling the consulate if you don’t have anything to say, is there?” she said.
“I can say he’s alive.” He looked at her. “I want to stay with that if I can. He’s supposed to survive this. That’s why I’m here.”
He thought about Susan Zago. The nonsensical always became the thinkable once you reached the logical flash point. The war was that way. At some point it just became more interesting to think about the deviances.
“He’s just an asshole jock,” Rae breathed and closed her eyes. “He’s not salvageable. He’s like me.”
“You love him, though, right?” he said, staring at her. “That makes you salvageable.”
“I hate him,” she said.
“That’d probably surprise him,” Quinn said. She was putting up perimeters now, something he couldn’t quite do. He could always see anybody’s problem if the payoff was big enough. It was a shit way to operate.
The cathedral clock began chiming six.
“I don’t hate him to punish him,” Rae said earnestly and raised on her elbows. “Do you understand that? I hate him so I can not feel bad. I’ll feel bad later, but I’ll be with you then. If I felt bad now I don’t know if I could stand to be with you anymore.” She smiled. Somebody had to feel bad, and if it was her he was going to lose. But if it was him, that was just the standard price. “What’re you about to do?” she said. She looked at the purple heliotropes on the chair as if they had been in the room all along.
“See Zago’s wife,” he said.
Rae looked at him oddly. “That’s a bum idea.”
He sat opposite her on the bed. “I already heard that.”
“But you didn’t pay attention, Harry,” she said. She looked at him as if she saw something perplexing. “She’s a down-and-outer.”
He put his hands on her legs. “That’s right.” He felt better being near her, his mind sliding off center. He didn’t need to hear what she said.
“She killed Carlos because he ditched her,” Rae said dreamily. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
He could feel the long muscles lengthen up her thighs and then, by inches, relax. She didn’t have the wish to resist now. Importance was slipping away, and she would give it all over to him.
She lay on her back and let him touch her. He could hear her breath subside and shallow. He felt dead-even on everything. “Did you bring me those flowers?” she said. She was staring sideways. The room smelled like rain. He could hear the hiss off the street, and in the distance a voice in conversation he couldn’t understand. “I noticed them, you know, but I didn’t know where they came from. I decided they’d been here all along, and I’d overlooked them.” She reached for him. “I must be going crazy,” she said. “I don’t seem to feel anything right anymore.” She looked at him as if they were inside something she couldn’t find her way back from and was ready now to hear the thing she was supposed to do.
27
QUINN STOOD OUT OF THE RAIN under the hotel marquee. Cafés in the Portal were half-empty, Americans sitting resolutely in their tin folding chairs drinking Tecates and staring back into the restaurants where the lights were blue and cold. The soldiers on the square slouched into the lees of buildings, and the police stood behind the Baskin-Robbins’ sawhorses, yawning at the dark.
He had called the consulate and gotten the same recording and the story didn’t seem solid anymore. Sonny’d had a breakdown. Nobody’d believe it soon enough. They thought about Sonny, he realized, the way you thought about somebody’s grandmother in South Dakota whose life was interesting and then absolutely forgettable, so that there wasn’t even a way to specify what Sonny suffered or might end up suffering. He felt like he had gained more precision but lost more accuracy, which seemed ridiculous, the opposite of experience. The rain hung in the air. He listened to the blue neon hum, stared at the darkness, and tried to believe he could still work it. He had the pistol, but he didn’t have a waterproof for the rain.
A Renault turned off the Avenue Morelos and idled along the north term of the zócalo, disappearing, then reappearing behind its headlights at the corner. The soldiers watched it as dismally as they watched the rain. The Renault passed the colonnade of the government palacio, then turned up the Twentieth of November Street to the hotel and stopped, water shining and hitting noisily off the windshield.
The driver’s window came half-down. Susan Zago’s white face looked out at him, her features more purposeful than the night before. Her eyes were alive and attentive. “Please get in,” she said.
“Where’s this going?” Quinn said when the car was moving. He checked the back seat—too late, he realized—but there was no one there. It was unsafe, like not noticing the moza had been in the bungalow.
Susan Zago was wearing a rubber mackintosh and was regarding the streets as if she was following a route that was hard to make out. She seemed animated. Her hair had been tied back and she was wearing perfume. “I have to see if I’m followed,” she said.
“Who’d follow you?” he said.
“My husband. The police.” She glanced in the rearview. “They don’t like my friends.”
“Don’t you think they know exactly what y
ou do?” he said.
“Maybe,” she said and smiled. “You can always think everything’s on a grid and somebody’s responsible for everything. But it isn’t true.”
“What do you think is true?”
“No one cares,” she said. “It’s like every place else, unless they’ve got money in it, of course. You just don’t know where they have money.”
She headed toward the American Highway by the brightly lit Pemex where the overland trucks were lined up to refuel in the rain, then through the Zapata rotary and back in toward the Centro along the second-class bus route. Suddenly she turned the car sharply onto a residential street that ended in a block in a park full of trees with their trunks painted white like the trees in the zócalo. She stopped at the curb and closed the lights. No other car came off the avenue, but she sat watching the mirror as though she expected to see something. It was play-acting. He thought he ought to try to get out now and back to the hotel as quick as he could. Only he didn’t want to be in the street with the gun. “Your wife is certainly pretty,” Susan Zago said, watching the mirror all the time.
“Let’s goddamn get on with this,” he said.
Susan Zago restarted the car. “It’s not me you’re seeing,” she said.
“I guessed,” he said.
“My friends don’t want to be surprised,” she said, still watching the glass. Animation made her prettier than she’d seemed before.
“Who killed Bernhardt?” he said. He realized he wanted to know and this was the right place to find out.