The Ultimate Good Luck (17 page)

“There’s no place to go,” Rae said helplessly.

“Yes there is, so just get up. It’s fine.” Water beat loudly in the fountains and the thop-thop of a helicopter somewhere too high in the haze to see began buffeting the ground. People in the Portal were staring at the sky.

“This is stupid,” Rae said. “This is all very stupid.” She was starting to cry.

“No it’s not,” he said. “It all makes perfect sense.” He looked around the empty park. A green parrot stood out on the hot pavement perfectly still, its red target eye blinking at the sunlight. He took Rae’s hand.

A
LL THE COMMERCIAL STREETS
up Cinco de Mayo had emptied. No one cared to be on the street with soldiers, and the siesta had begun. Every two minutes a blue minibus would swarm by with its flasher spinning, and disappear into the Colonia La Paz, where shooting was still going, leaving the streets back toward the Centro silent and restricted. Whatever had made Quinn quease up yesterday had begun to stroke again, and he was having to down pills to keep his stomach from involuting. He didn’t want that trouble and he thought he could worry about the long-term later.

He had found a driver and paid him to take Rae to Monte Albán for an hour, then chauffeur her back to the bungalow via the periférico. She had gone quietly into the cab, but when he closed the door she rolled the window down and said: “Why don’t we just forget this now? I don’t care anymore.” Her hair had come loose and her skin looked dry and pale.

“You should’ve figured that out before,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very sorry.” The cab slipped away and out of sight into the mercado.

He wanted the gun. The thought of the American with his
clothes burned off made him feel a way he hadn’t felt in a long time, a way the dead boy out in the shanties and the American girl blown in two hadn’t made him feel—that he could shoot somebody. Nobody wanted to shoot anybody until they saw someone they knew killed ridiculously. And then it became the only way to preserve importance and you couldn’t back out. Shooting somebody raised your personal importance level, and that was necessary now. He knew he could work right up to it.

Bernhardt’s office was on a hill block of blue and white flush façades with fake miradors above street level. The buildings were flat-roofed comerciales with steel shutters that opened directly to the sidewalk.

Beside the office door a carne carbón built out of half a five-gallon Pennzoil can sat smoking with strips of meat burning on the grate. A rooster stood beside the brazier and watched him approach. The rooster flapped its wings when he got close, as though it wanted to fly but had forgotten how. Quinn checked down the street for the tender. Two women were walking leisurely in his direction arm in arm, but too far away. The rooster had one leg tethered to a large rock against the wall, and after a moment stopped flapping and walked behind the brazier and stood looking up, noodling as if the silence had caused it to want to doze.

Bernhardt’s office was a high-ceilinged room open to the street. A desk in the corner faced out and a few gloomy tube-steel-and-plastic clients’ chairs backed against the wall barbershop style. The room was dim, though there was a zizzing fluorescent ring. Quinn disliked the office. It felt tired. Bernhardt told him no one trusted lawyers who were hopeful, and no one paid lawyers who were rich. Everything in the States was the opposite and better.

Bernhardt had his coat off, his silver pistol lay on the desk top in front of him. His hand wasn’t far from it, but he didn’t seem nervous. “Where is your wife?” he said.

Quinn looked around the room. “She gets upset when people
get blown up,” he said. His eyes came to the gun. “Do you need that in here?”

Bernhardt smiled. He leaned his head a fraction toward the wall behind and opened his hands. “Ladrinos steal the paintings from the Palacio de Bellas Artes to hold for ransom.” He made a wry face. “The bomb is diversion. But violence is promiscuous.”

“What about Deats?” Quinn said.

“Arrangements are made now for Señor Deats.” Bernhardt’s eyes stayed fixed on him as if he was watching for a particular effect. “
You
are necessary now,” he said.

“How’s that?” Quinn said.

“To speak to someone,” Bernhardt said, his eyes intent. Bernhardt picked up a silver letter opener from his glass desk top and held the point to the palm of his hand. The blade distorted the light back on his face. “Señor Deats has associates in Oaxaca who are unhappy with him,” he said methodically. “Today I know this. They think he has treated them unfairly.”

“Are they going to kill him?” Quinn said.

“No,” Bernhardt said and shook his head slowly. “It will be painless.”

“What happens?”

“It is my worry,” Bernhardt said soothingly. “He creates his luck. Maybe it won’t be bad.”

“What are his friends mad at him for?”

“Business,” Bernhardt said. “I am not involved.” He closed his fist around the blade of the dagger and let his eyes fall toward it. “Don’t worry about that.”

Quinn thought about the Americans at the airport full of bullets. It wasn’t how he had imagined things. And he had to let what he’d imagined slip away now. Bernhardt was lying, but he might not be lying about anything that mattered. It was just negative information, and he didn’t have the luxury for that now. “I have to think about it,” he said.

“Tonight.” Bernhardt pointed the dagger toward the open street. “It must be tonight.” A police van passed, flasher turning, but with no siren. Quinn could hear the engine strain up the hill.
“If there is martial law,” Bernhardt said thoughtfully, “no one will come out of the prisión. So.” He let his head roll back against the cushion of the chair and waited. The smell of burned meat hung in the office. It was a rotten smell and infected the air in the room. “What did you think you would have to do to get your brother out of the prisión?” Bernhardt said and pursed his lips. Bernhardt reminded him of the deputy of penitentiaries, a certain distance, a certain reservation now. He wondered what Bernhardt’s was in behalf of.

“Who killed the boy?” he said.

“Who knows?” Bernhardt said placidly and shook his head.

“You work for them too?”

“I must know people who are not my clients.” Bernhardt let the blade dance between his fingers while he thought a moment. His eyes half closed. “I am your lawyer. It is unreasonable to represent two sides.”

Quinn stared at the silver Llama. It seemed sensible. He felt like he was being let inside something new that would be profoundly ordinary and profoundly predictable in every nuance, and that whatever was lethal in it would appear not to be, and vice versa, and for that reason was all the more lethal.

“What do I have to do?” he said.

Bernhardt leaned forward in his chair. Far out in the Colonia La Paz there was the chatter of small-arms fire and the wetted thop-thopping of a helicopter. It had become too far away to matter. “Tonight I will drive and get you. Your wife may come with us, it will not be unpleasant.” Bernhardt had become businesslike now, as though he was satisfied by events. “Afterward. You will leave your house, I will have a hotel for you. When he is released, your brother-in-law will need to leave quickly. I have a turista card and a ticket. It will be smooth, but it is best to avoid the law still.”

“What’s wrong with the bungalow?” He was thinking about the money and about Rae alone there. It made his stomach tighten.

Bernhardt’s features gathered gradually around his large mouth,
which had become pinched in thought. “Nothing,” he said. He looked innocently across the desk. “It is more efficient. You are leaving. It will be easier.”

“Where’s the room?”

“In the Centro,” Bernhardt said. “The Monte Albán.” His eyes shone.

“How safe is it?”

“
Very
safe,” Bernhardt said confidently. He opened his desk drawer, took out a small photograph, and pushed it across the desk. A blond woman stood in what looked like a motel swimming pool, naked from the waist up. Her small breasts were nearly invisible in the baked colors and she was smiling hopefully, as if what was happening to her was not what she had expected but was something she was trying to get through.

“This is a woman I knew once in Texas,” Bernhardt said confidentially. “She is not bad looking? Do you think?”

“No.” Quinn put the picture back on the desk top. There was writing on the back side. The woman, he guessed, was trapped.

Bernhardt seemed pleased and took the picture back. “You should trust me now,” he said, and smiled and put the picture in the drawer. “Maybe you don’t trust me before.”

“I trust you,” Quinn said. “What’s my choice?”

“But you should trust me as if you
had
a choice,” Bernhardt said. “You have this against me now.”

“I don’t need anything against you.” Quinn stood forward into the dim light. “That doesn’t mean shit to me.”

“It is an intimacy,” Bernhardt said proudly. “As if we were friends.”

“Any way you want it,” Quinn said, and turned to leave.

Bernhardt smiled at him. “I invite you not to worry now,” he said.

“That’d be nice,” Quinn said. “But I don’t think it’s going to work out like that.”

H
E CAUGHT THE
R
EFORMA BUS
back up the hill. The bus should have been empty in midafternoon, but it was crowded with poor women and private-school girls in blue kilts riding home to the wealthy neighborhoods, and beyond into the slum barrios above San Andrés Huayapán. A soldier rode in the front step well, but when the bus departed the Centro, he fell asleep against his rifle and everyone became quiet. The schoolgirls sat stiffly facing forward with their books on their bare knees, not looking out.

The shooting in Colonia La Paz had stopped, and the streets felt sealed off. The tortilleriás, the little cubed single-door buildings with names like Mimi and Fifi, were all closed and the wooden doors bolted. A mist had burned off the hills and been borne up, leaving the south end of the valley in a Levantine light that turned the mountains gaudy, green and yellow and black as far as you could see downrange. It was like a
National Geopraphic
, a stricken landscape that appealed to you the moment you realized you’d never be there. Only, he thought, he was there now, and it made him feel on the edge of something dangerous, as though a sense of lucklessness swam in the air around him.

His mother had told him once after his father had died that
the worst of the thirties in Michigan had been to see time making people luckless, people who had never thought of themselves that way, but who had had to begin thinking it because of money, becoming, as she said, a class apart and unreachable. When they had moved off the farm to Traverse City, across from them had been a big yellow house owned by some Jews from Grand Rapids, but in the late forties when his father was working for Deere, it had turned over and become a rooming house with a sign in front that said, simply,
DIEL
33377. He couldn’t forget the number now or the way someone had spelled
dial
wrong. After a while, the people in the neighborhood began to refer to it only as the Dial House and believed, with his mother, that the people who lived there were luckless, as though it was still the thirties and the people were pariahs. Cabs parked there long hours and sometimes overnight while their drivers were inside. Transients moved in and out of the upstairs in cherry time. New children turned up playing in the curb gutters summers, looking as if they had lived there all their lives. And his mother, with the other people in the neighborhood, disliked them, the tall knobby-faced men with long slick hair, and the children, dark and barefooted, and the tiny, silent Mexican-looking women you only saw in doorways. His mother pulled him inside when she thought he played with them or showed a tolerance for them, which he did. Some of them, he thought, were musicians, Southerners or men from Indiana, who played the local radio shows, and the women and children were their families. Though now, staring at the empty streets as the bus heaved across the American Highway and up into the better, upper-class neighborhoods below the bungalow, to wherever the rich schoolgirls lived behind walls, a long way from Traverse City, he believed they were just country people with nothing to live on, gone from wherever they had lived, ready to go anyplace to improve their luck. Maybe they would’ve done something illegal or violent, which is what his mother had thought and warned, but he doubted if there was ever any chance. His mother called them “common,” which was a serious epithet in
Michigan, a notch above trash. And she said the word as if it had a bad smell on it, and didn’t like saying it as much as she didn’t like the people she meant it to describe. She thought, he knew, that his father’s family, who were from Niles, had an impulse that carried them (and him too) toward the common, and that their tolerance for it was a weak board in the family character, weak and corruptible. And it terrified her the way moving off the farm had terrified her, the way the long grey expanse of the lake terrified her, the way the hand terrified her for what it meant. She saw it in his father and in him, and thought that she herself was totally incorruptible, and that she should encourage at least obstinancy in them both, which would do the work character and incorruptibility would’ve done if they had existed in them. It was why, Quinn thought, his father had been glad to lose his hand and quit farming and wanting to farm, and why his mother had waked up screaming. She didn’t know when you’d gone too far with something and when obstinance and self-denying became a bigger threat than whatever loss it kept away in the first place. And his father, finally, had had to learn that in a hard way.

The point was, he knew now, after all those months alone in the trailer and in the Scout and out in the woods in the tent, that everybody lives in some relation to the luckless, whether they call it that or call it something else, or whether they manage to live near it or far away. And what mattered most was that you
knew
the relation moment to moment, like the one he felt now, the particular danger, so that your life turned out to be a matter of what you did to make that bearable, since you couldn’t get so far away from it as to make it not exist. Though when you
tried
to protect yourself completely and never suffer a loss or a threat, you ended up with nothing. Or worse, you ended up being absorbed right into nothing, into the very luckless thing you were most afraid of.