He sat very quietly, looking off in the distance. As I watched him, I felt such a pang of regret. His hair had a lot more grey in it, and he looked so tired, and perhaps more than a little disillusioned, the exhaustion of a highly moral man in a line of work in a country not noted for its morality, I thought. I wanted to reach out and touch his face and stroke his hair and tell him everything would be all right. He’d always been such a crusader for the rights of the indigenous people of the Yucatan; he’d even, I was reasonably sure, been a member of a local guerrilla group operating out of the forests outside of Merida where we’d met. But then he’d been persuaded to take the political route, to get himself elected, and to work for his people that way. Never one to do anything by halves, he’d told me he couldn’t do that and maintain our relationship, and I’d been the part of his life that was sacrificed.
“This maybe is not working out as well as you’d hoped,” I said hesitantly. “The life of a politician, I mean.”
He just looked at me, then turned away again, his gaze focused on the treetops, and when he finally spoke again, his voice was bleak. “Perhaps not,” he said. “I’m not making many friends, that’s for sure. And the things you see sometimes…” His voice trailed off. I didn’t probe anymore. The thing about Lucas was that he told you what he wanted to tell you. I’d learned to live with that.
“You were always very good about not asking me about my secret life,” he said finally. “But I suppose you know I was not above a little resistance, shall we say, from time to time.”
I waited.
“I really appreciate the fact that you didn’t ask about it, and that you didn’t try to argue with me when I told you our relationship had to end. I’ve deluded myself into thinking you would have regretted that decision,” he said.
“You didn’t delude yourself,” I said. Actually I’d been more than a little upset with him.
“The thing is, when you do the kind of work I used to do, you have to have a plan. An escape plan, if you follow me.”
“Lucas,” I said. “You’re in politics now. I don’t want you to do anything that would compromise you.”
He laughed, but it was a laugh with no humor in it. “Compromise me? When I think of what I have seen some of my fellow elected representatives do! Helping someone on the run from the police is a minor indiscretion barely worth noticing, believe me,” he said bitterly.
“Here,” he said, taking an old silver coin out of his pocket. “Take this. I’ll give you the money for the cab. Go to this address,” he said, scribbling an address on a piece of paper, “and go to the flat on the main floor. There will be an old woman there. Show her the coin. She’ll take care of you. Do whatever she tells you, even if you don’t like the idea, okay? It will take a few days, but if you really want to go to Peru, we’ll get you there.”
“I know this is pushing it a little, but could you get me as close as possible to a place called Campina Vieja?” I asked.
He actually smiled slightly. “I’ll do my best,” he said.
He stood up. It was time to go. He walked me to the street and a cab stand, and gave the driver an address. I got into the cab. His black mood softening, he leaned in the back window and planted a gentle little kiss on my lips.
“If this political stuff doesn’t work out,” he said with a tired little smile, “I may need to leave Mexico in a hurry myself. I’ve heard Canada is good. Hard to get citizenship, though. Would you know a nice Canadian woman who’d marry me?”
“Maybe,” I said. The cab pulled away. I didn’t look back. Moira would be pleased.
Four days and nights I spent in a tiny room in the back of the building where the old woman lived. The building looked like any other in that part of town, distinguished only by the fading pastels, that had been chosen for the stucco, the color peeling under the hot sun. This building was pale aqua. I gave her the coin, as instructed, and after looking at both it and me very carefully, she led me up three flights of stairs, pulling her bent figure up each step, leaning heavily on the railing.
The room was small but adequate: a small bed, a desk and chair with one tiny lamp, a ceiling fan. The shutters were pulled against the heat of the day. There was a shower, for which I was grateful. The old lady did not speak to me, whether because she could not or would not, I do not know. But she saw to my comfort. A tray of food arrived regularly: fresh warm tortillas, always, and eggs or sopa, and cheese, sometimes a little wine or beer.
At night, before the little lamp was turned on, she pulled heavy dark curtains across in front of the shutters. No one was to know I was there. After I turned out the light, I opened the curtains and lay on the bed, watching through the cracks in the shutter, a soft pink glow which I think must have come from the neon sign of a cantina, because I heard music and voices and the clatter of dishes until very late at night.
The days and nights blurred together, the days known by the sunlight against the shutter, the night by the pink neon. Mainly I slept, exhausted, feeling safe for the first time in days, confident that neither the police nor the Spider would find me there. Sometimes I dreamt, though, and the horrible pictures of Edmund Edwards and Lizard hovered on the edges of my sleep.
Sometimes my dreams were of an arid desert, where bleached skeletons and blackened brush dotted the landscape, where no living thing could be seen.
On the second day a man came to see me. He told me to sit on the edge of the bed, and pulled the desk and the chair up to me, so that he could sit across from me. He turned the little lamp on my face and looked at me very carefully, turning my head one way and the other. He asked me to stand up and walk around. Then he got up and left, as suddenly and silently as he’d arrived.
He was back again the next night with another, a hunched over old man, a serape and hat making him indistinguishable, who stood out of the light in a corner. The first man pulled up the desk and chair as usual, but then took my handbag and emptied it onto the desk in front of us.
He went through everything in my purse, everything. He took my wallet and emptied it. He took the U.S. money and carefully divided it into two piles, putting half back on my side of the table and half in his pocket. “Credit cards,” he said, and cut them up one at a time. “Passport,” he said, then, “driver’s license.” These he didn’t cut up, but tucked them away carefully in his pocket.
On the fourth night, the man arrived with his companion once again, but this time I knew who it was and smiled into the darkness in the corner. The first man handed me a package of hair color, and gestured for me to go into the bathroom and use it. In a few minutes my strawberry blond hair was brown. I stared at a stranger in the mirror.
He handed me a U.S. passport, and the picture in it looked more or less like the stranger in the mirror.
I had a driver’s license, Kansas, and the exit part of a Mexican tourist card already filled in. I also had a wallet bulging with money I didn’t recognize, Peruvian soles. And no credit cards.
Suddenly the man in the corner threw off his poncho. It was Lucas. “I have a message for you from a friend of yours, the policeman. Not a bad fellow really, for a policeman.” He looked at me.
“He says that should I be speaking to you—I said I would be surprised if I did—I should tell you that you should come home. That he will do his best to straighten everything out. He also says to tell you Alex will be all right.
“We could get you home too, you know. Send you north rather than south.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve come this far, and I think I’ll see it through.”
“So you’re still set on doing this.” He sighed. I told him I couldn’t really think what else to do, although I had a pang of doubt as I said it. He handed me a sealed envelope. “Do not open this,” he said. “Give it to the person it is addressed to without opening it. It will serve as an introduction.”