Three large blocks had already been assembled as foundation of the new structure, and I could see that instability was the name of the game. Francisco was holding Tadd’s hand so that my grandson couldn’t put another block in place.
“C. G. goes next, dodo,” Francisco was saying. “You started.”
“I know I started, loco-moto, ” Tadd said. He saw me in the door and grinned. “Then C. G., then you. So whose turn is it now?” He wrestled the block free from Francisco’s clawlike grip. “It’s mine, and this is where it goes.”
The exchange was enough to crumble both Francisco and his little brother into a heap of giggles.
“Did everything go all right?” Tadd asked, and the two Guzman kids spun around, prompting the inevitable.
“Padrino!” Francisco announced. He scrambled to his feet and flung himself at me. Carlos beamed, but remained near the blocks. He reached out and touched the large, angular blue block.
“This one’s mine,” he said soberly.
“That’s good,” I said. “And yes. Everything went just fine. Who’s winning?”
“Tadd cheats,” Francisco said in my ear.
“Well, you’ll have to watch him, then,” I said, and returned to the living room.
I found a soft spot on the old sofa and collapsed, resting my head on one of the corduroy pillows. “And C. G.? That’s new, isn’t it?”
“That started last year,” Francis Guzman said. “Francisco decided that he’d call his brother ‘C. G.,’ and Carlos was supposed to call him ‘Frank.’”
“Very executive,” I said.
With a grunt I sat forward and wrestled off my boots. Freed from a couple of pounds of leather and neoprene, I swung my feet up on the corner of the coffee table and sighed, eyes closed.
“What can I get you, Dad?” Buddy asked.
“No phone calls,” I whispered. “What’s that stuff you’re drinking?”
“A little brandy.”
I opened one eye and looked his way. He held up the glass, tantalizing. I rocked my head from side to side. “If I start on that, it’ll put me right to sleep.”
“That’s the object.” Francis laughed. “You’ve had quite a day.”
“Days,” I said. “Days and days. But we’re making progress.” I sat up a little straighter and opened my eyes. “Actually, we’re not, but it sounds better, especially during an election.”
“Alan Perrone was telling me that he wasn’t a hundred percent sure about Sosimo Baca, either,” Francis said, and I looked at him sharply.
“When did you talk with him?”
“He called here a while ago. He just wanted to chat. During the course of things, we got to talking a little bit about the case.”
“He told us earlier that he thought Sosimo got punched in the gut. Or hit, somehow. He doesn’t think that anymore?” I felt a rise of irritation. If the coroner had new information, I would have liked to have heard it myself.
“No, he still thinks that. But we were talking about aneurysms in general. You just can’t predict.” He made a small explosive gesture with the hand that wasn’t holding the brandy glass. “Some just pop, no warning.”
“But he thinks Sosimo was struck, somehow.”
“Yes.” He sipped the brandy. “I thought I might swing by the hospital tomorrow and have a chat with Alan. See how things are going with him.”
“Things are going fine, as far as I know,” I said. “He’d like to see you, especially if there was a little business mixed in with the visit.”
Francis flashed a broad smile just as the blocks in the bedroom crashed to the floor again. The tower must have been spectacular, with enough force to send one of the key components skittering out into the hall. Francisco emerged on his hands and knees, grabbed the block, and disappeared.
“Maybe I will,” I said to my son, pointing at his brandy glass. “With my house falling down around my ears, maybe I’ll need something to help me sleep.”
“They wind down eventually,” Estelle said.
In a moment, Buddy handed me a large snifter with a dark, fragrant puddle in the bottom. “Thank you,” I said. “I keep rediscovering things I’d forgotten I had.” I admired the glass. “These haven’t been out of the cabinet in God knows how long.” I took a sip and remembered why I didn’t bother to buy much brandy.
I swirled it a little, and decided to just plunge in.
“Are you toying with the idea of going back into partnership with Perrone?”
Caught by surprise, Francis Guzman paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. To hell with it, I thought. I’d been about to add something to soften the question, to ameliorate it, to give him an easy out with a quip. But I didn’t. I let it hang there, unadorned and blunt.
Francis Guzman took a sip and set his glass down. “He made an offer in early August that I turned down,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap. “They finally got the bond issue straightened out, so the day after tomorrow they’ll know if there’s going to be the local share of four million bucks for the hospital renovation.”
“A good chance,” I said. “A bond issue hasn’t gone down in flames in quite a while. The schools got two million last year.”
“Well, there’s always the risk that the voters will say enough is enough.” He shrugged. “Anyway, when it looked like that would go through and make it to the ballot, Alan started bugging me a little bit.”
“Good for him.”
“Well, it was bad timing,” Francis said. “And then I had my little accident…”
“Not so little,” Estelle said.
He flexed his hand, regarding the scar with detachment. “It’s kind of like, one thing happens and that snowballs. Sophia paid us a visit toward the end of summer. You remember my aunt?”
“Indeed I do,” I said. Sophia Tournal, the semiretired attorney from Veracruz, was hard to forget.
“She thinks we ought to relocate down there.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Talk about extremes. From Rochester, Minnesota, to Veracruz, Mexico.”
“Lots of advantages,” Francis said. “The ocean, the culture.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Estelle had nestled beside him, and looped her arm through his. “We talk about this all the time, Bill. And the one thing that we keep circling back to is the language. Just in the six months we’ve been up north, I see both Francisco and Carlos using Spanish less and less.”
“I don’t think they’d ever actually forget,” I said.
“Oh, yes. They forget. We can see it. First, they lose the edge, you know what I mean? They lose the depth, the fluency. Next thing you know, all they can say in Spanish is the daily around-the-house stuff.” He leaned forward some more and drilled his right index finger into his temple for emphasis. “Or worse yet, the street slang, the Spanglish. They lose the capacity to be truly bilingual. To be able to think in either language, at any level.”
“So you got an offer from Sophia, too.”
He nodded. “Basically a blank check. She plays hardball.”
“I bet she does. I can understand how she’d be delighted to have you guys in the neighborhood. I’m a little surprised that you’d consider going from big to bigger, though. If you think Rochester is a busy place, imagine Veracruz. What is it, about five times bigger?”
“About four times,” Estelle said, and I felt a little pang of comfort that she’d taken time to check.
“Not to mention about fifty times bigger than Posadas on a busy day,” I added. “What did Sophia offer?”
“Like I said, basically a blank check,” Francis said. “She owns a building that would make a nice clinic. One block from the beach.” He flashed a smile full of perfectly regular white teeth, and I had no trouble imagining the young doctor on a surfboard, beard dripping salt water, arms spread for balance. “More important, there’s a real need there.”
“I’m sure there is. There’s a need anywhere that there are human beings. It just depends what you want.”
The smile spread wider. “Counteroffer?”
That took me so by surprise that for a moment the words didn’t register. To stall for time, I took a second sip of the powerful brandy. No sounds issued from the bedroom. Either the combatants had all fallen asleep, or the game was getting to the deadly stage where a single hand tremor could send the tower crashing to the floor amid high-pitched cries of “Idiota! Idiota!” I set the brandy glass down with care.