“You’re beautiful,” he said.
She looked at him. Her drink was half gone. “I know,” she said.
By the time they were finished with dinner and they’d had a couple of after-dinner drinks, he was feeling unbeatable again. It was quarter past eleven and the solicitous waiter wanted to go home. Lester wanted to go home too — he wanted to take Gina up to his room and discover everything there was to know about her. He lurched suddenly to his feet and threw a fistful of money at the table. “Want to go?” he said, the words sticking to the roof of his mouth.
She rose unsteadily from her seat and leaned into him while she adjusted the strap of her right heel. “Think we should take a cab?” she said.
“A cab? We’re just at the other end of the beach.”
She was staring up at him, small as a child, her head thrown back to take in the spread and bulk of him. “Didn’t you see that notice in your room — on the bathroom door? I mean, it sounds almost funny, the way they worded it, but still, I wonder.”
“Notice? What notice?”
She fished around in her purse until she came up with a folded slip of paper. “Here,” she said. “I wrote it down because it was so bizarre: ‘The management regrets to inform you that the beach area is unsafe after dark because of certain criminal elements the local authorities are sadly unable to suppress and advises that all guests should take a taxi when returning from town.’ “
“Are you kidding? Criminal elements? This place is a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere — they ought to try the Tenderloin if they want to see criminal elements. And besides, besides”—he was losing his train of thought—“besides …”
“Yes?”
“There’s nobody in the whole country taller than five-four, as far as I can see.” He laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Criminal elements!” And he was still shaking his head as they stepped out into the night.
Call it hubris.
They hadn’t gone two hundred yards, the night deepening, dogs howling in the hills, and every star set firmly in its track, when they were jumped. It was nothing like the way Lester had visualized it while stalking home after the bars closed on Twenty-fourth Street, half hoping some sorry shithead would come up to him so he could break him in two. There were no words, no warning, no “Give me your wallet” or “I’ve got a gun” or “This is a stickup.” One minute he was trudging through the sand, a drunken arm draped hopefully over Gina’s shoulder, and the next he was on the ground, two pairs of booted feet lashing diligently at his face and ribs while a whole fluttering rush of activity washed round him, as if a flock of birds had burst up off the ground in a panic. He heard a grunt, a curse, the unmistakable crack of bone and cartilage rearranging itself, and it was Gina, Gina the Puma, whaling away at the shadows with both fists as he shoved himself up out of the sand and the boots suddenly stopped kicking and fled.
“You all right?” she said, and he could hear her hard steady breathing over the hammering of the waves.
He was cursing into the night—“Sons of bitches! Motherfuckers! I’ll kill you!”—but it was all bluster, and he knew it. Worse, so did she.
“Yeah,” he said finally, his chest heaving, the booze and adrenaline pulsing in his temples till the blood vessels there felt like big green garden hoses crawling up both sides of his head. “Yeah, I’m okay…. I took a few kicks in the face maybe … and I think — I think they got my wallet….”
“Here,” she said, her voice oddly calm, “are you sure?” And then she was crouching, feeling around in the sand with spread fingers.
He joined her, glad to be down on his hands and knees and relieved of the effort of holding himself up. His wallet? He didn’t give a shit about any wallet. The sand was cool, and the regular thump of the waves conveyed itself to him in the most immediate and prescient way.
“Les?” She was standing now, obscuring the stars. He couldn’t make out her face. “You sure you’re all right?”
From a great reeling distance he heard himself say, “Yeah, I’m fine.” Her voice was insistent, the voice of an intimate, a wife, a lover.
“Come on, Les, get up. You can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”
“Okay,” he said. “Sure. Just give me a minute.”
Then there was a brightness, a burning-hot soldered light fused to the cracks of the blinds, and he woke to find himself in his bed — his Mexican bed, in his Mexican hotel, in Mexico. Alone. Without Gina, that is. The first thing he did was check his watch. There it was, clinging like a manacle to his wrist, dividing his naked forearm from his meaty pale hand and indifferently announcing the time: two thirty-two. All right. He heaved himself up to a sitting position, drained the plastic water bottle he discovered behind the tequila on the night table, and took a minute to assess the situation.
There was a rumor of pain between his ribs, where, he began to recall, two pairs of sharp-toed boots had repeatedly inserted themselves in the waning hours of the previous night, but that was nothing compared with his face. It seemed to ache all over, from his hairline to his jaw. He reached a hand to his cheek and felt a tenderness there, and then he worked his jaw till the pain became too much for him. His right eye was swollen closed, there was a drumming in his head and a vague nauseous feeling creeping up the back of his throat. To top it off, his wallet was missing.
Now he’d have to call up and cancel his credit cards, and he was a fool and an idiot and he cursed himself twice over, but it wasn’t the end of the world — he had ten thin crisp hundreds hidden away in his carry-on bag, or his shaving kit, actually, where no one would think to look for them. It could have been worse, he was thinking, but he couldn’t get much beyond that. How had he managed to get himself back last night? Or had Gina managed it? The thought made him burn with shame.
He took a shower, clapped on a pair of coruscating silver-lensed sunglasses to mask the desecration of his eye, and limped down to the restaurant. She wasn’t there, and that was all right for the moment — he needed time to pull himself together before he could face her. The waitress was there, though, eternally responsive to his needs, wearing another down-to-the-toes peasant dress, this time in a shade of blue so pale it barely registered. She smiled and chirped at him and he ordered two tall Smirnoff-and- naranja with soda cloob and three fried eggs with tortillas and a fiery serrano salsa that cleared his airways, no doubt about it. He ate and drank steadily, and when he looked up idly at the sea stretching beyond the veranda, he saw nothing but a desert of water. He had a third cocktail for equilibrium, then went down to the front desk and asked the attendant there if she knew which room Gina was staying in.
“Gina?” the woman echoed, giving him a blank look. “What family name, please?”
He had no idea. She’d told him, but it was gone now, obliterated by vodka, tequila, and half a dozen kicks to the head. All he could think of was her professional name. “The Puma,” he tried. “Gina the Puma.”
The woman’s hair was pulled back in a bun, her blouse buttoned up to her throat. She studied him a long moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you.”
“Gina,” he repeated, and his voice got away from him a bit. “How many Ginas could there be in this place, for Christ’s sake?”
When she answered this time, she spoke in Spanish, and then she turned away.