The Second Saladin - Страница 13

“Not half, Reynoldo. I should think a quarter would be sufficient.”

And so Reynoldo had taken up again the religious life. He lit candles, he wen to early mass, he made ostentatious donations. He became a changed man, a new man. It lasted about two days.

He took another sip of his Carta Blanca. He looked about for Oscar Meza who had disappeared. Had he left? Where was Oscar Meza? He looked again into the mirror and saw the two men — one wore a fine cream suit, elegantly cut, the other a pale blue leisure suit with an open-collared shirt, after the American style, though both were Latins — and saw that they had lit another pair of cigars and were laughing madly at some private joke.

What was so funny?

An hour later, Ramirez glanced at his gold watch. It was nearly 3:00 A.M. Things would die soon; the quiet hours before dawn would arrive, when even a poor whore might sleep. Ramirez pulled his bulk from behind his table and walked through clouds of stale smoke, past a few lingering drunken college boys who were trying to decide which girl to give their business to, and went behind the bar.

Instantly, the youth Roberto appeared.

“Patrón?”

Ramirez threw open the register and made a big show of fingering through the bills. He counted them twice, then turned to the boy.

“Stealing again, Roberto?”

“No, patrón.”

“There should be at least a thousand here. I have watched carefully.”

“A slow night, patrón.”

“Not that slow. Steal only a little, Roberto. If you steal too much at once, the big machine gets out of alignment and maybe you get caught in the gears and squashed.”

“I–I steal nothing, patrón,” the youth said, but could not look into Ramirez’s eyes.

Ramirez knew exactly how much Roberto stole each night and that it was within permissible limits, just as he knew how much Oscar stole — more and more lately — and how much the old lady who sat by the top of the stairs and checked peckers stole. Everyone stole; everybody took only a little for themselves, but by certain rules. There were rules. Nobody was allowed to break them.

“Just do not get so greedy, Roberto. I want to see you live a long, wonderful life and have fifty children. Be fruitful, populate the earth with your seed.”

“Yes, patrón.”

He turned, edged his large body away from the register. He paused for a moment, then moved along. In the pause his fingers had touched a Colt Cobra.38 Special in a holster under the register, he plucked the little revolver out and slid it into the waistband of his trousers, thinking, I wish I had my big Python instead of this little lady’s gun. And thinking, I wish I lit a candle this morning.

The two men in suits continued to drink steadily at their table.

“Roberto,” Ramirez called.

The boy hurried over.

“Take a bottle of the finest American stuff to our two friends. Say it is a gift of the proprietor.”

“Yes, patrón.”

Roberto fetched the bottle and took it to the table. The two looked up as he explained with his stiff little bow. The two men laughed warmly and asked where the proprietor was.

Roberto pointed.

“With great appreciation we accept the gift of the proprietor,” the man in the cream suit called in Spanish.

Ramirez nodded. Oscar Meza should have been back by now. Where was he?

“You run a nice place, Señor Proprietor,” called the man in the cream suit.

“Thanks much, my warm friend,” called back Ramirez. “It is a humble place but honest and clean.”

“An excellent prescription for success in any endeavor,” said the man dreamily. He had slicked-back black hair and was pockmarked, yet he was handsome in a mean way that attracts certain women. His friend in blue was fatter and more solemn — the sort who speaks only when spoken to, and then curtly. Also, he needed a shave.

“Did you have a visit with my girls?” Ramirez asked. “They’re the prettiest in Nogales. In all Sonora.”

“They are flowers. Each and every one. They know tricks, too, all kinds of tricks. I suppose the proprietor taught them himself.”

“These modern girls, you can’t teach them a thing. They already know everything,” he said. “There’s a young one with a magnificent mouth. A mouth of uncompromising sweetness. She’ll play you like a trumpet for only a little extra.”

“Is that Rita? I had Rita. Rita, a most refined and gifted young lady.”

“Rita is truly a rare bloom,” Ramirez called, and kissed his fingertips in homage to her skills. Under the kiss his fingers seemed to blossom, grow light and float away. Rita was fifty and needed dental work.

“We ought to be going,” said the man in the blue leisure suit. “It’s getting late.”

“You’ll come back, I hope?”

“Sadly, no. Our business in Nogales is almost finished.”

“A great pity. But I hope you’ll remember our little establishment fondly.”

“I have a great affection for it,” the man in the cream suit said, rising enthusiastically. He had an automatic pistol in his hand and he brought it to bear on Ramirez’s center, aiming carefully, and Ramirez shot through the table, hitting him in the chest, spinning him around. The report in the closed space was sharp and ugly, but it did not bother the man in blue, for he shot at Ramirez, hitting him under the heart and knocking him back off his chair.

Ramirez felt as though he’d been punched. He fought to get his breath back and to find feeling in his fingertips and when he looked he could see the man in blue tugging at his wounded partner, trying to bring him to his feet, but the man’s limbs were floppy and indifferent and the body kept collapsing forward. Ramirez pushed himself to his knees and rushed a shot at the man in blue, missing, and fired again quickly, hitting him in the jaw. The man sat down stupidly next to his friend. He held his head in his hands and began to moan. He started to weep.

“Oh, it hurts,” he said brokenly, with blood spilling from his mouth.

Ramirez climbed to his feet and walked over and shot him in the back of the neck, pitching him forward.

“Jesus Mary,” said Roberto. “Who are they?”

“Evil men,” said Ramirez. But who were they?

“Run,” he said to Roberto, “go get the Madonna. Quickly, boy, before I bleed my life away.”

The boy dashed off to get one of the prostitutes who claimed to have been a nurse.

Ramirez sat down on a chair. He still had the pistol in his hand. He dropped it.

The room began to flutter before his eyes. He wanted a priest, he hurt so bad. He looked at the two women on the couch, who stared at him in horror and shock.

“Get out of here, whores!” he bellowed. “Whores may not watch a man die.” They scurried off.

He wished he’d lit a candle that morning. He wished he’d been to mass. He wished there was a priest.

Where was the Madonna?

8

The van had reached a suburb of Boston called Medford, up north of Boston, and pulled into a crowded parking lot — acres and acres of cars — surrounding a bar or something called Timmothy’s, a single low building of unsurpassing modesty. The name, in red neon, was written in about fifty places: on the roof, above the doors, on a huge sign at the entrance to the lot: This Is it! The Original! TIMMOTHY’S!

“We are here,” said Lanahan, “because it’s Saturday night. And every Saturday night, this studious intellectual lady, this gifted, brave, strong woman” — Chardy’s words, thrown back at him — “comes here, or one of several other similar institutions, and finds a man and leaves with him.”

“Last weekend she didn’t get home till Sunday afternoon,” said the driver, a wizard from Technical Services.

Chardy wondered if that was a smirk on Lanahan’s lumpy little face in the red glow of the neon. He felt like smacking him, but then the impulse vanished. Lanahan was nothing to him, not worth hitting.

“Nobody from Harvard would come way out here,” said the man up front. “They stick to Cambridge and snottier places like The Casablanca or Thirty-three Dunster Street. This place is too tacky, too crass, your suburban crowd, polyester.”

“She’s in there now,” Lanahan said. “That’s her car.” He pointed to a green VW parked nearby.

The wizard said, “She always goes for the same type. I’ve seen three of them now. Dark Irish. Big, six two, two hundred pounds.”

“She’s looking for some others off your assembly line,” Lanahan said. “She’s looking for you.”

“That’s shit,” Chardy said.

“We shall see. You all set? You ready? You still think you can handle it?”

“Uh-huh,” Chardy said.

“You don’t sound so convincing. Look, there are other ways of handling this.”

Chardy thought, you little bastard.

“Chardy. I have to answer to Ver Steeg on this one. Don’t fuck it up, all right? Just play it cool, don’t come on too strong. Don’t spook this girl. You do it wrong, she goes to the newspapers, makes a big—”

“I can handle it.”

Chardy slid the van door open, stepping into the chilly, damp evening.

Spring had not yet reached Massachusetts and he walked through the ranks of cars in a fog of his own breath. At Timmothy’s a short line formed and he ducked into it. They were all so pretty: the boys in their twenties had expensive haircuts, parted in the middle, that fell in glorious layered cascades; they wore rich, dark clothing, European almost. The girls all seemed small and dark and jocular and somehow Catholic; they would wear crucifixes on their delicate throats and not really believe what they were here for. He felt like some kind of grown-up among them, stiff and stupid, for he was easily a decade beyond the next oldest person in the line. He waited patiently in his drab suit for almost ten minutes, until at last he reached a set of doors that were opened to admit him. He took a last look at the van, far off, under a tall light, its windows impenetrable, and knew that Lanahan was watching, and by extension Yost Ver Steeg and the Central Intelligence Agency.