For a dollar they were given a couple of wooden stools in the corner of a room half filled with people, most of them in the fifty-cent, or standing, class. Emilia sat with her scarred hands clenched in her lap.
“A snake,” she repeated. “Though you would never guess it to look at him. Such honest blue eyes, such even teeth.”
“Do you know where he’s living?”
“Ha! I have people keeping track of him every day, every minute. I know what clothes he wears, what he eats for breakfast. He can’t buy a pack of cigarettes without me finding out. What a fool he was to think he could leave me cold after I paid good money for his release. When I leave this place again, I’m going to mash him like a turnip.”
“I thought you intended to get married in the church.”
“First I mash him like a turnip. Then we get married.”
She was unmistakably serious. No matter where he was, Harry’s future didn’t look too bright.
“Marriage might improve my temper,” she added thoughtfully. “I lose it at the stove, at the pots and pans, because they burn me. Then I throw them and they burn me again, and on it goes, back and forth. Do you think marriage has an improving effect?”
“Occasionally.”
“How much are you planning to pay me?”
“You haven’t told me anything useful yet.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You said you and Jenkins served time together.”
“That’s how we met. These two Americans were brought in one day and as soon as I saw Harry my insides started spinning.”
“The other American was Lockwood?”
Emilia nodded. “Him, what a crybaby, always fussing about this and that. The guards had to give him stuff to shut him down. Harry was a real man, pretending he didn’t care what the authorities did to him or how long they kept him there.”
“What was the charge against him?”
“Something silly like cheating. It’s the custom. Somebody cheats you, you cheat somebody else.”
“How did Jenkins get out?”
“Me. I had some money saved — the head cook’s pay is pretty good and there’s nothing pretty to spend it on in this place. When I finished serving my sentence I rented a nice apartment and then I went and paid Harry’s fine and we set up housekeeping. For a while we had a rosy time. But my rosy times never last. As soon as the money ran out, so did Harry. Or tried to. I caught him packing and beat him up, not bad, just enough to put him in the hospital. He didn’t squeal on me — he knew he had it coming — but the doctor at the hospital reported me to the police and they brought me back here to the Quarry. Everybody was glad to see me, of course, because my tamale pie is the best in town... How much are you going to pay me?”
“For telling me your tamale pie is the best in town? Nothing. It’s not the kind of information that’s worth anything to me.”
“What kind do you want? You name it, it’s yours. See, I’m saving up so I can buy my way out of this place and go back with Harry.”
“And mash him like a turnip.”
“Maybe not. Maybe my heart will melt when I see him again.”
Aragon wouldn’t have bet a nickel on it. Emilia’s temper probably had a lower boiling point than her heart. “Is Jenkins still living in the apartment you rented?”
“How could he afford an apartment without my help? No, he has a little room over the shoemaker’s shop, Reynoso’s, on Avenida Gobernador. It’s a low neighborhood, lots of thieves and prostitutes, but Harry hasn’t anything to steal and the prostitutes don’t bother him, because he’s broke. How am I sure? My spies are here, there and everywhere, watching. Right this minute he is” — Emilia consulted a man’s wristwatch which she fished out of the front of her dress — “sleeping. That’s Harry for you. Everybody else running around working and Harry in bed snoring his head off.”
“What does he do when he’s not sleeping?”
“Hangs out at bars and cafés, especially the places where Americans go, El Domino, Las Balatas, El Alegre. He’s not a drunk, liquor’s not one of his weaknesses, he goes there on business.”
“What kind of business?”
“Whatever he thinks of. He’s very smart but he has bad luck. And tourists aren’t as easy as they used to be in the old days when all he had to do was make up a few little stories. Expenses keep going up and up, and tourists keep getting more and more suspicious and stingy.”
Aragon thought of the Hilton price he’d paid for the shack at Viñadaco and he wasn’t surprised that the tourists were getting more wary of Harry’s little stories.
He said, “What happened to Lockwood?”
“I don’t know. Suddenly he left. That was long before I paid Harry’s fine and got him out.”
“Did he come back to visit Jenkins?”
“Why should he? They weren’t friends, they were partners. He blamed Harry for leading him into trouble. How can you lead someone who doesn’t want to go?”
“Did you notice whether Lockwood had any visitors?”
“There are always Americans shut up in this place, and the American consulate sends somebody over to check on them from time to time. Maybe it was one of the consulate that got Lockwood released.”
“Did his case ever come to trial?”
“It was a single case, him and Harry together, when they were brought in. But when the magistrate finally heard it, there was just Harry. Lockwood had disappeared.”
“Do you think he died?”
“A lot of people do,” Emilia said philosophically. “He was an old man, anyway, more than fifty, always throwing up from his stomach.”
“Didn’t Jenkins try to find out what happened to him?”
“If he did he never told me. We had more interesting things to talk about in our rosy times. In the not-so-rosy we didn’t speak to each other at all.”
She repeated Jenkins’ address, Avenida Gobernador above the shop of Reynoso the shoemaker. Aragon thanked her and gave her ten dollars. She didn’t seem too pleased at the amount, but at least she didn’t try to mash him like a turnip.
Nine
He returned to the Hotel Castillo, stopping at the desk for his key and a map of the city, the kind which gas stations back home used to give away free. The map cost two dollars, the key was free. From his room he tried, for the second time that day, to put through a call to Gilly. All the lines were in use, on business, the telefonista implied, much more urgent than his.
Over lunch and beer at the hotel café he studied the map of Rio Seco. Avenida Gobernador was within walking distance and he would have liked to walk, both for exercise and to avoid the insanities of the city traffic. (One of the oddities of the automotive age was how such good-natured, slow-moving people could become irascible speed freaks behind the wheel of a car.) But the Avenida paralleled the course of the river for several miles and he had no way of knowing on what part of it Reynoso’s shop was located. It was not in the telephone directory or on the hotel’s list of shops and services.
He found out why when he reached it. It was hardly more than a hole in the wall on the edge of the red-light district where porno bars alternated with the rows of prostitutes’ cubicles. The neighborhood was quiet and Reynoso’s place closed. Sex as well as shoemakers took a siesta.
A boy about Pablo’s age offered to watch his car to make sure nobody stole the hub caps and windshield wipers and radio antenna. “Hey, man, watch your car? One quarter for watching your car, man.”
“Who’s going to watch you?” Aragon said.
He meant it as a joke but the boy took it seriously. “My brother José. He’s working the other side of the street.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”