The Ultimate Good Luck (25 page)

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.

Q
UINN 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 you 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.

“I have no idea,” Susan Zago said airily. She made a U-turn in the street and approached the wide avenue slowly in the dark. “He was narco-tráfico,” she said. “A lot of people might have killed him. There was probably a queue.”

“I don’t think so,” Quinn said.

“It doesn’t much matter what you think,” she said.

“It was your husband, right?”

She turned on the lights and eased into the avenue. She seemed impressed that she was doing things right. “Why should he?” she said.

“Because of the kind of photography you and Carlos used to tease each other.”

“He doesn’t care about that,” she said, her face motionless in the dash light. “It’s not your business anyway. Who I fuck is my business.”

“It was supposed to make me trust him.”

“How nice,” she said. She seemed amused, as if Bernhardt
had been a child she was tired of. “Are you happy you trusted him?”

“You said it.” He watched her face in the dark. He wanted to see a response. “It’s my business. It didn’t work out, that’s all.”

“Apparently not.” She turned down Bustamante Street above the Centro, where there were no streetlights. “But it leaves you in a bad position now, I’m afraid,” she said.

There were no soldiers on the street, and the pottery alleys in the next block were shut, though far down beyond the market he could see in the sheen of night rain the glare of the truck garages still working.

“I want to know who Deats is,” Quinn said. They were not very far from the Hotel Monte Albán. He thought he could make it back all right now and he felt safer, which he knew was also silly.

“He’s a man who works for my husband,” Susan Zago said, carefully watching the adobe façades pass by the car window. She was looking for something that required her concentration. “In the States. You know? A connection?” She looked at him as though she’d figured something out. “You need time, don’t you Mr. Quinn? But you don’t have it. Too many facts piling up.”

“I guess I’ll have to brave it,” he said.

She stopped the Renault outside a white building without windows, but with a curved arch-entry to an invisible inside. It became quiet a moment. “I always try to remember everything that ever happened to me, you know?” She smiled over at him appealingly, her face pale and calm. Her perfume smelled sweet. “So I need time. I suppose I think everybody else is the same way.”

“I forget as much as I can,” Quinn said.

“A tough guy,” she said, and her look became strange again, as if she believed him and pitied him at the same time.

“How did you get into this?” he said.

“In what?” she said.

“These people.”

“It’s fun,” she said, and looked out the window behind him into the rain as if for a signal. “Don Luis is an old man. I’m interested
in young men. Our interests coincide.” She opened her door. “There’s nothing else amusing to do here.”

The arch-entry protected them a moment from the rain, then opened to an atrium where there was a low concrete sculpture and a reflecting pool. The building was two-tiered with a loggia and a stone staircase at the far end that rose to the gallery level. The rain was intense inside the court, and it was hard to see what the sculpture was imitating.

Susan Zago hurried up the far stairs ahead of him and Quinn had a strong feeling suddenly of being followed. He looked back in the open court, but no one was there.

At the top of the stairs a man leaned forward out of the dark with a short, blunt-nosed weapon, and Susan Zago immediately stepped aside. The man was not a man really, but the boy who had killed Bernhardt. He was wearing thick black-rimmed glasses with wet lenses, and put the barrel of the gun squarely in the middle of Quinn’s stomach and reached forward to search. “Don’t cause trouble,” Susan Zago said quietly from the side. “This is necessary.”

He wanted to concentrate on the boy. He had almost shot him the night before and now the same boy was keeping him in the rain while he patted under both arms and down his trouser seams, the gun barrel jerking against his stomach. The boy smelled like disinfectant and didn’t search like Zago’s man. He did it the way he’d seen it in movies, and he missed the pistol in the small of his back. The boy’s hair was wet and parted in the middle and slicked back, making him look very young. When he finished the boy dropped his eyes. It felt odd, Quinn thought, always to be intimate with strangers, never with people you cared about. Kids with guns. Ladrinos. It had to be another phase of the modern predicament.

He wanted to know how many people were here now. It was a measure of normal efficiency to know who you’re going to see coming back out. He looked around the dark gallery, but there was no one to see behind the other balusters.

Midgallery there was a door to the right. Susan Zago stopped in front and turned. “You get to see where I paint,” she said. Her skin was light colored and her hair shone in the dark.

“Who’s that boy?” he said. He touched the pistol grip, found he could reach it with his entire hand. He felt himself getting cold along his ribs.

“Just a boy,” she said. “Do you know him?”

“ ’Fraid not,” he said.

“Just step inside,” she said.

The air inside made him think there were high ceilings, though he couldn’t see walls. The air felt cool and large, and there was a thin odor like kerosene that didn’t seem to come from any one direction. Susan Zago closed the door and shut out the rain noise, and immediately there was a sound to the left of feet moving. He couldn’t see distinctly. Water ran out of his hair, and he pulled the gun to the front of his belt against his stomach.

There was the sound of glass scraped over metal, and a match flared low to the floor. He could see two knees and two hands raising the chimney of a metal lantern. The odor of kerosene grew stronger while the man fingered the glass, holding the match until the wick flamed and burnt off freshly and began a glow. The man lowered the chimney with his finger tips, adjusted the jet so the light grew into the dark, then picked up the lantern and held it out and walked forward toward where Quinn stood with Susan Zago.

“This is Señor Muñoz,” Susan Zago said formally.

He watched the man shape up behind the lantern. He was a tall handsome boy in his twenties with a smooth brown face and fine features that looked more intelligent than the boy’s outside. He was wearing a blue cotton work shirt and white pants, and his hair was neat. His eyes moved confidently to Susan Zago when he heard his name spoken. He had a big automatic pistol stuck in the front of his trousers, the grip turned toward the hand that carried the lantern. When he came closer he raised the lantern so that Quinn could feel the heat in his eyeballs, then drew
it back as if he had satisfied himself. “I am sorry to meet you this way,” the boy said politely, and his face became serious. “I would like to meet you in a nice restaurant if I could. But.” He smiled in an embarrassed way.