Stand up, bring over the gem, and ask which woman dropped it was what the ordinary right-thinking man would do. But barging into the conversation was wrong. Impolite. Anyway, I already figured the stone belonged to the middle woman. The one about thirty, with jewels, and smoky blonde hair. She outranked the dumpier women in style and quality of clothes. They had to be casual acquaintances. So what I didn’t want was just loud thanks.
Now I have to tell you how I live. I live by being useful to people. Without fawning. I accent my fine features and manly build with the best tailoring. Ladies are good to me. They buy me things I don’t ask for. The presents come from a deep desire to share my company. No gentleman could deny them.
I win the respect of men too. Maybe it’s the wide range of topics I know first-hand. Maybe they see in me the boldness they once had.
My uncle says if I weren’t so restless I’d be a millionaire by now. He’s a millionaire. It isn’t a criticism. More of him later.
So what happens is I promote. I illuminate my backer. I enrich him. Then I move on to something new. Change is a condition of my nature. The millionaire for all his strokes of brilliance gets rich by being conservative. That’s what I think. How I think.
The reason I’ve told you what I think, and how, is so you can understand two things. (1) I didn’t steal the stone. (2) I intended to return it to its rightful owner.
So I sat in Del Prado until the three women left. I picked up the stone, went to my apartment. The idea was that I’d check the lost-and-found columns. I could see myself declining the reward, a reward that might not even have gotten mentioned if I’d returned the diamond on the spot. In the privacy of the lady’s suite I could see myself allowing her to dwell on my attributes. We’d think of something.
No ad appeared.
So the stone was mine by default. Before I had time to worry about it I was on this boat headed for Merida, Yucatan. A friend offered to back me in a tourist hotel catering to Americans on their way to the Mayan ruins around Chichen-Itza. I was to look into the purchase of Hotel Narcissus now that I hadn’t drowned.
“Nice stone.”
I clamped my hand over my diamond. I looked around. Hanging over the edge of the upper bunk was the face of one of my fellow passengers. Nothing but a boy, maybe sixteen. He grinned. Teeth came to points like a row of tobacco-stained gabled roofs. “Quite nice,” I said putting the stone back in the money-belt, sitting on my own bunk, and taking off wet shoes and socks.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “your secret’s safe with me.”
I said, “You seem to be trying to stimulate a conspiracy.”
He just grinned.
I reached for my clothes, started dressing. The stone was on me and my conscience was clear. I even felt good-natured. Maybe it had something to do with being alive after the storm.
“Taking it to Merida for sale?” he said.
“I’m going to Merida on business. Other business.”
“You’re in business?”
He was harmless. I ignored his sarcasm and told him my hotel plans, changing only names and locations. He didn’t believe me. Nobody believes the truth. With his dark, pitted face and big-boned meatless nose, he suggested deserts and tents. Cunning. Which is not to say he was anything like me; I saw that at once. His motives were practical. Mine are charged with an intuitive search for grandness everywhere.
He swung up on his bunk, then sprang to the floor. “You want to sell that stone, don’t you?”
“It’s a keepsake.”
“You can talk to me. Call me Abel.”
“It’s a keepsake, Abel.”
“I don’t ask where you got it. I ask if you want to sell it. I think we can get a quarter of what it’s worth. That’s good, considering.”
“We?” I admired that. “If I meant to sell it, I’d’ve gone to a dealer in Mexico City.”
“You’re from the capital?”
I admitted I lived there.
“Then why didn’t you sell it there?” He cocked his head. “Because the police have its description.”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
“I don’t care how you got it. The point is you’ve got it and it doesn’t belong to you.”
“Oh...?”
“I could tell the way you looked at it, and handled it. It’s the way I look at a thing that doesn’t belong to me. My eyes feast.” He gave me the rip-saw grin. “Don’t admit a thing. Just listen. Merida is my home. I know the place. People. I get around. Let me take you to him.” One of the other passengers in the four-bunk cabin came in, a student who’d spent part of the morning telling me about climbing Mount Popocatepetl. He’d shown me his membership card in the Alpine Club of Mexico City College. Because he majored in anthropology, he thought it only right to see the Chichen-Itza ruins before going back to the States and into his father’s grain-elevator business. Climbing into his bunk now, he just moaned. His tongue lay like dead liver over his lower teeth. He turned his face to the bulkhead.
“Outside,” I said to Abel. We left the seasick student after I got a coat. Wind blew across the deck. Lime seas nipped at the railings.
“The man I know,” Abel said, “used to work in customs. During the war many Europeans tried to slip gems into Mexico. This man made a fortune. He knows how to dispose of such things.”
What Abel didn’t say impressed me. “The man has influence?”
“Everywhere!”
I looked for men like that in every town. From what Abel told me so far I could find him for myself. But I try not to spread bad feeling. I spread good feeling. “Suppose I said yes.”
Abel said, “We split.”
I looked out to sea.
“You can’t sell the stone in Mexico without me. And you can’t smuggle it out. I don’t think you’d dare.”
I liked the boy even though he had no aptitude for what he was doing. “What do you think the stone is worth?”
“Let me see it again.”
Up in the wheelhouse, the captain was looking the other way. I fished out the stone, stamped it into the palm of Abel’s hand. He held the gem to the light as if he understood what he was doing. “You might get eight hundred dollars. That’s four hundred dollars each.”
He was guessing. I don’t know gems so I guessed too. “It’s worth three thousand.”
“In a window.”
I took back the stone. “I’ll give you a hundred pesos for the man’s name.”
Abel just grinned. “Not pesos. Dollars. I get half of whatever you get.”
“You know the man?”
“I guarantee he has influence,” Abel said. “I’ve dealt with him. In a small way.”
I saw Abel’s flaw. His aims were trivial. Still, I liked his curiosity. His problem was to keep out of jail. I said, “The man’s name.”
“Half.”
“His name.”
“Half?”
Money isn’t everything. “Half,” I said.
“Sandalio Fuentes. I’ll tell you how to get to his house.”
When we landed in Merida, I accepted Abel’s invitation to stay at the home of his parents. The house was surrounded by mildewed walls. The boy’s parents greeted me like their son’s guardian. They owned a store. The income, I figured, didn’t justify Abel’s shady inclinations.