But then the drought had ended and the big coastal hotels had gone up, and one evening in a cruelly hot August, infant Maria had come screaming into the world. The store had supported them. A new bed was bought. Ramon bought himself a Jeep and a carved headstone for the grave of Melita, who had suffocated at eleven months in her crib. Lienore had a pair of nice dresses that she almost never took out of their plastic sheaths; Maria had bikinis to wear, and to take off, in front of the boys who stayed at the hotels.
And the day came when, walking in the street, Ramon passed Maria and a tall Caucasian fellow walking arm in arm and Maria blushed, turned her eyes away from him, and steered the young man in another direction so that their paths would not cross. Ramon took this, in an awful way, as fulfillment of all his ambitions. That he could raise a daughter so much better than he was that she could feel embarrassed at the sight of him! How far the Madradas name had advanced in the world! He cried that night when he told Lienore, but he was not entirely unhappy.
For a dozen years, and more than a dozen, the store prospered, and the Madradas fortune, though still meager, grew. Ramon paid visits to the owner of the building next to his, where a steakhouse with outdoor tables did brisk business every night of the week. Discussions began, papers were signed, hands shaken. And now Ramon, who owned a bodega and a steakhouse, felt his eyes start to wander toward the cantina across the street.
But the drought returned, as droughts will, and hotels with huge, always-full pools notwithstanding, the flow of Norte-Americanos slowed to a trickle, and then to less than a trickle — a drip, really.
Ramon took down the outdoor tables — who now wanted to sit outdoors? — and installed a pair of ceiling fans. He put signs up in the windows of the bodega advertising special sales, on suntan oil and postcards and paper fans, and then took the signs down when it became clear that they brought no one in. He had a half interest in the cantina by this time, and people did still come in to drink, but the balance shifted and what had once only pretended to be a rough bar for the benefit of tourists became the genuine article, peopled with out-of-work natives and angry hotel workers laid off by their belt-tightening employers. Ramon cut his steak order in half, and then in half again, and finally switched to grilled hamburgers instead. He closed the bodega for longer siestas every afternoon. Some days he didn’t open at all.
Then a day came when the bills started to arrive three at a time and the money he kept in the bank, no longer as savings but as a buffer against catastrophe, was gone, down to the last cruzeiro. Sales at the bodega were stagnant. Ramon’s suppliers refused to come to restock the shelves. Pescador Street was half-deserted, storefronts empty after having been abandoned by their discouraged owners. Having lived through a drought before, Ramon was determined to see this one through as well. But in the end he arrived reluctantly at the conclusion that without additional money from some source — any source — there was no way that he could.
It was then that one of his suppliers, a man named Borges who was full of pity and small kindnesses and who never stopped coming to see Ramon even after his bosses told him that Ramon’s bodega was off-limits, told Ramon, in a whisper, of the Jomon.
He said their name quickly and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as soon as the word was out, as though its mere passage between his lips had dirtied him. Ramon, who had never heard of the Jomon, nevertheless picked up on the significance of Borges’s gesture.
“They are loansharks, the Jomon?”
Borges shook his head, but said, “Yes, they are loansharks. But they are more than that.”
“What more?”
Borges groped with his hands in the air, as though trying to pick out with them the words his mouth found so distasteful. “They are... young men. Who think of themselves as criminals. And they are criminals, of course, but not the type they think they are. They fancy themselves gangsters, you understand? Like the Mafia in Chicago. But they are just three punks with guns. They—” Borges spat on the floor and then rubbed it out with the tip of his shoe. “They are killers.”
“You mean,” Ramon said, “they lend money and then kill you if you do not pay it back?”
“They kill you if you do not pay it back. They kill you if you pay it back but they don’t like the way you look at them. They kill you if someone says, ‘Here’s some money, kill this man whom I don’t like.’ ”
“You mean they kill for money?”
“I mean they’d kill for a glass of tequila.”
“So why are you telling me about them?”
“Because,” Borges said, “you are my friend. I see you every week starving a little more. Without money your stores will die and you will die, too. I see Maria and she is too skinny. I tell you because I don’t have any money to give you and you need money and if you want it, the Jomon will give you what you need.”
“And then they will kill me.”
“No, not if you pay them back the way they tell you to. They do not kill everyone with whom they deal. I have taken their money, Ramon, and I am still here. I seriously say to you: think about it. Because I cannot see you like this any longer, it breaks my heart.”
That night, Ramon sat behind the counter at the bodega and listed on a sheet of paper all the monies he needed to repay and figured out how much it would take to keep the stores going at a minimum level for six months. By which time the drought, which had persisted through two summers already, would have to have lifted — nothing lasted forever. He added up his column of figures, circled the sum, and sat staring at it until dawn. Then he telephoned Borges to have him put the word out on the street that he was in need of the Jomon’s services.
The man in the mask held the pictures in front of him one at a time. He looked at them slowly, through the milky layer of plastic and the pinprick holes in front of his eyes. One picture showed a middle-aged woman collapsed against the foot of a staircase, her hands outstretched above her head, a bullet hole in her neck. The other showed a young woman on the floor of a dressing cabinet of the sort that were set up on the periphery of every beach. Her long black hair covered most of her face, but anyone who knew Maria Madradas — or Maria Stone — would have recognized her. And the purple marks on her throat from where she had been strangled were clearly visible.
The man in the mask passed the photos back across the desk and along with them he passed a plastic shopping bag filled with rubber-banded thousand-cruzeiro notes. The blond pocketed the photos and passed the bag to the man sitting next to him. This man, who had worn a sealskin jacket the day before, was now wearing a white T-shirt and, over it, a suit jacket. He pulled out several stacks of bills and thumbed through them.
“The proof is to your satisfaction?” the blond said.
The man in the mask nodded.
“Good. So who is it you want us to kill?”
The man said nothing. He passed a photograph of his own across the desk. It showed a man in an overcoat smiling for the camera.
The blond’s eyebrows rose.
Ramon sat across a wide wooden table from the three young men, sunlight streaming into his eyes from a window high on the wall above their heads. He found himself unable to sit still. Borges’s warnings rang in his ears: be polite, answer their questions, be direct. They are doing you a favor. Keep this in mind.
Ramon wrung his hands under the table and tried to keep the sound of his anxiety out of his voice. “I need the money until the first of October. By then, I will be on track again and I will begin to pay you back. You will have all the money and the interest by Christmas.”