The Scared Stiff (16 page)

"Nobody," I said.

"Exactly," he said.

"Including me," I said. "If she's that against the whole idea, she won't let me stay there. Or she'll turn me in."

"It's worth a try," he repeated. "I can't think of nothin' else, so what the hell. Lemme at least call her on the phone."

"Okay," I said. "Any port in a storm."

He looked interested. "Yeah? That's nice. You just make that up:

"Yes," I said.

"You're pretty good," Arturo told me, and crossed over to the telephone to make his call.

Well, I could see him regretting
that
one right away. He got a few sentences into the conversation, saying, "Ifigenia," in honeyed tones two or three times, and then the squawks started out of the earpiece. Not in
her
house. How dare he make such a suggestion, doesn't he ever think about his
children?
How long is she supposed to put up with a lowlife? When is he gonna fix that stair he promised to fix last
September?

Arturo said this, and he said that. His eyebrows lifted, and they lowered. He bobbed and weaved, moving from foot to foot, as though in an actual physical boxing match. Mamá gave me the evil eye —
see what you've done to my son
? — and Papá went off for more beer, bringing back four bottles. I was grateful for mine.

Well, Arturo finally managed to get off the phone, and when he looked at me his expression was speculative, as though he were wondering if it would relieve his feelings if he kicked the crap out of his troublesome brother-in-law. I said, "Sorry, Arturo."

"De nada,"
he said, and sighed. "I gotta do
somethin'
about you, man," he said. "It's come down to it now. Either we find someplace safe, or I gotta get rid of you myself."

I blinked. "What?"

"I wouldn't give you to Manfredo and them," he said, "they'd screw it up somehow, leave evidence; they'd get your fingerprints or somethin', the cops would. I'd rather feed you to Madonna."

"Arturo," I said, "don't joke."

The look he gave me was not comical. "Barry," he said, using the wrong name for emphasis, "don't you know what's goin' on?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe I don't."

"You think we're goin' through all this for
you?"

"Well, it's mostly for Lola," I said. "I understand that."

"That's right."

"And everybody else that's involved," I went on. "None of us wants to get caught at this."

"Caught?" He looked at me as though I was very dumb. "Who's gonna get caught? Doin' what? What are you talkin' about?"

"Well, the family."

"No," he said. "Don't you worry about
us,
we're not in trouble, we didn't do nothin' to break the law. And neither did you."

I frowned at him. "I didn't?"

"No," he said. "You wanna play a joke, pretend you're dead, go ahead, nobody can stop you. Nobody can stop us, we go along with the gag. That ain't a crime."

"Busting up that car is."

"Big deal. They make you pay for a Beetle."

"Arturo, wait a minute," I said. "You're wrong about this. We
are
committing a crime."

"No, we ain't," he insisted. "Don't you know the only one that broke the law here? That if
you
get caught,
she
goes to jail? That's right, man: Lola. When she put in that insurance claim
that
was a crime, the only crime anybody committed. They wanna go after you for conspiracy? Too much trouble. They got the one did the fraud; they throw her in jail; that's it, next case."

"Arturo—"

"I like you, Felicio," he said, sounding as though he didn't like me at all, "but you ain't my sister. You ain't even my brother. I'll do anything for Lola, you know that, so that's why I'm playing along with this. But I gotta tell you, it's
her
I'm worried about, not you. I know she wouldn't be happy if you got killed, so I'll do what I can to keep you alive. But one way, you know, Manfredo and them from Tapitepe are right. If you're dead,
nobody's
in trouble. So if it comes down to you dead or Lola in jail, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna lose another brother."

What do they call it, the law of unintended consequences? You think you're so smart, you think you're so clever. You scheme and scam and think you've got it all doped out, and there's always some other angle you didn't take into account.

So what had I done this time? I
thought
what I was doing was scamming an insurance company, which was already scary enough, but it turns out what I actually did was put a six-hundred-thousand-dollar price on my head. And then I marooned myself in a place full of people anxious to collect, where I didn't have any resources of my own and where, it now turned out, I didn't even have any allies. Not when push, you know, came to shove.

All of a sudden, I didn't want any more beer. More beer would just muddy my head, and if we'd reached the point where Arturo contemplated feeding me to Madonna, I could not afford a muddy head.

I put down my beer. I said, "Maybe…"

They all looked at me. They were very interested in what I had to say. Unfortunately, I didn't
have
anything to say. I'd been thinking, Maybe I could get the American visa now and leave Guerrera right away, but in the first place it wouldn't be right away, and in the second place I shouldn't call attention to myself while insurance investigators were wandering around Sabanon. So I didn't have anything to say after all.

Arturo said, "Listen, could you be an American?"

He was sounding friendly again, as though he was on my side. I said, "What do you mean?"

"Mamá," he said, "we still got some of the Barry Lee stuff, don't we?"

"Oh, sure," she said.

I said, "Some of my old things are still here?"

"Lola had her own stuff to carry," he explained. "She took some of yours, left some. One suitcase. We got it downstairs, under the house."

I hadn't noticed it. I said, "What do you mean, be an American?"

"It's not workin', you bein' Guerreran," he said, "because you can't talk."

"It's driving me nuts," I admitted.

"So what if you put on American clothes," he said, "and went somewhere Americans go, and be an American for a while?"

I said, "How do I do that?"

"You don't know how to be an American?"

"Not without a passport," I told him. "Not without credit cards. Even if I had the cash, and I don't, nobody expects cash from an American. What do you want me to do, go to some hotel? Hi, I'm an American, I'll pay you in
siapas?
And the hotel always asks to see the passport. They've got some police form to fill out."

"That's right, dammit," Arturo said. "But it would be so perfect, you know? An American is something you could play."

Mamá said, "Dulce."

Arturo turned to her, frowning. He thought about it. Slowly he nodded. "Son of a gun," he said. "She might do it. Only whadda we tell her?"

I said, "Her?"

Instead of answering, he said, "You're an American, right? And you gotta hide out. Only not for the reason you really got to, for some other reason. What's the reason?"

"
I
don't know," I said. "I don't know what you're looking for."

"A reason for you to hide out," he explained, "that makes you a sympathetic guy for a friend of mine."

"You mean noncriminal," I said. "Like I'm hiding from my ex-wife."

"Maybe," he said. "Why you hidin' from your ex-wife?"

"She's trying to serve me papers," I said. "It's a financial settlement, and she's vindictive, and she wants it all. And there's a deadline. If I can keep out of sight for a month I'll be okay."

Slowly he nodded. "That might do it," he said. "Let me make a phone call."

"To Dulce," I suggested. "Who is she?"

"Let's just see if this works," he said. "You go get your suitcase; I'll make the call."

I said, "This is just a ploy to get me down there with Madonna."

He laughed. "Not a bad idea. If the phone call don't work, I'll tell you, Take the suitcase back down again; here, I'll come with you.

"Please don't joke, Arturo," I said. "I've been under a lot of stress lately."

"Lemme call," he said.

So I went downstairs and Madonna snorted. You again?

"Don't mind me," I told her. "Carry on." I looked around, and there was my green vinyl bag with all the zippers. "I won't be bothering you again, I hope," I told Madonna, and carried the bag upstairs.

Arturo was still on the phone. Mamá smiled at me:
it's working out.

I carried the vinyl bag into the bedroom and put it on the bed next to the ratty cardboard suitcase I'd been lugging around. Boy. Already you could tell these were two different guys, and you didn't even have to look inside the luggage.

I opened the vinyl bag, and here were a lot of old friends. My Reeboks: great. I'd never been really comfortable in those peon shoes. A nice variety of touristy clothes. Underwear. My toilet kit. Fantastic. Wow, I'd missed all this gear.

"Okay," Arturo said, in the doorway.

I looked at him. "Okay? I've got a place to stay?"

"Put on some American stuff," he told me, "and let's go."

"Sure." I pulled out tan chinos, a light blue LaCoste pullover. "Where we going?"

"I tell you in the car," he said. "We gotta get outa here, man. Leave that other stuff behind."

"Right," I said.

"
Backseat
, tourist."

"Oh, right."

I got into the back of the Impala, Arturo got behind the wheel, and we drove away from Mamá and Papá's house. I said, "Where are we going?"

"Up by Marona."

A long way, nearly two hundred miles, up where the Siapa River, for which the local currency is named, meets up with the Conoro River, the one my rented Beetle belly-whopped into.

There was pretty country up around Marona. The Siapa is the cleanest and freshest and fastest of all the waterways of Guerrera, tumbling north out of the mountains of Brazil. There are nice resorts and rich people around there.

Come to think of it, that was also where my undertaker, Ortiz, came from. That wasn't the idea, was it, to have me hang out at a mortuary for the next couple of weeks?

Then a worse thought occurred to me. Was this instead of Madonna? As casually as I knew how, I said, "Where by Marona are we going, Arturo?"

Instead of answering, he said, "Take a look in the seat pocket there, the hotel brochures."

The back of the front passenger seat had a wide pocket, like a kangaroo's pouch. I reached into it, and it was full of different kinds of brochures and pamphlets, hotels and tourist attractions. All because of Arturo being a sometime cabdriver, I supposed. "Got them," I said.

"Take a look at Casa Montana Mohoka."

I leafed through them and found it, and it was actually Casa Montana Mojoca, but pronounced with that airy
j.
"Got it."

"Look it over."

I did. It was an expensive full-color brochure that opened out to eight pages, and what it described was a pretty snazzy-sounding destination resort. A golf course. Tennis. Olympic pool. Full gymnasium. Meeting facilities for conferences. Private airstrip and helicopter pad. Nature trails. World-famous orchid-viewing walk. Horseback riding. Rafting the Siapa.

What a place. This was the kind of resort being built all over the world these days, in out-of-the-way locations where the costs are low and the regulations nonexistent. Corporations use them for all kinds of conferences, and then the corporate executives come back and use them for their vacations. They fly into some little country like Guerrera, go straight to the resort, spend their three days or their week, fly back out, and they've never been anywhere at all. Corporate people love that kind of place, because it comes with a guarantee of the removal of all doubt and danger. A vacation with no surprises: what a concept!

"Look," Arturo said.

We were just passing the church, going through the plaza, and out ahead of us to the right was the white Land Rover, stopped in front of Club Rick. We drove on by, and the Land Rover was empty.

"Asking questions," I said.

"You got it."

I looked out the rear window, and that white vehicle just sat there in the sun, as innocent as an ice-cream cone. Then we were through the plaza, and it was out of sight, and I faced front again.

This brochure, Casa Montana Mojoca. I said, "Is
this
where I'm gonna stay?"

"Right."

"But, Arturo," I said, "these people don't take some bum in off the street. I don't mean I'm a bum, I mean I don't have any ID, I don't have any money—"

"It's okay," he said. "It's all taken care of."

We were leaving Sabanon now, thank God. I said, "You mean, this person Dulce?"

"That's right."

"Tell me about her."

"Dulce and me," Arturo said, "we go back a long time together, early schooldays, know each other forever. Shit, she might even have been my first, I don't remember. I think I was maybe hers, too."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Haven't seen each other in years," he said. "Except, every once in a while, if I got a fare out to Mojoca — when I'm being a cab-driver, you know, not wasting my time with you — sometimes I see her out there, say hello. We get along."

"She works there?"

"She's the assistant manager," he told me. "It's a big company owns it, you know. From London, I think. So the top-guy manager, he's an American, but she's number two. Makes a shitload of money, I think."

"That's great," I said.

"I told her your story," he said, "and the first thing she ask me, Are there any kids? And I say no, this isn't whaddayacallit—"

"Child support."

"That's it, that's what she calls it. It isn't any of that, I told her, it's just this ex-wife she's a greedy bitch, so that's why you gotta stay out of California till the judge does his decision."

"California."

"Yeah, you're a big movie producer in Hollywood. That's why you just got to hole up, not use your real name, not show your passport to nobody, not even let the staff know who you really are, 'cause somebody gonna tip off the newspaper; you know, the celebrity newspapers."