She sighed and ordered another cocktail from the waitress. A man came up to her and asked if he could join her but he didn't use the passwords, just wanting to pick her up. She said she was on her honeymoon, waiting for her husband and he wandered away looking for more promising material. She finished her drink and went to bed where, try as she might to calm herself, she slept badly.
The next day she wandered around the old town, went into a church on the plaza and took a stroll through Rio Grande Park under the tall Cottonwood trees and looked out at the broad turbid river and the hazy mauve mountains to the west and, as she frequently did, marvelled that she should find herself here, at this stage of her life, in this town, at this time. She lunched at the de Vargas and, as she passed through the lobby afterwards, the desk clerk suggested she might appreciate a tour of the university, telling her that the library was 'magnificent'. She said she'd save it for another day. Instead she took a taxi to her other hotel and lay on her hard bed, reading a novel – The Hollow Mountain by Sam M. Goodforth – with dogged concentration throughout the rest of the afternoon.
She was back in a booth in the cocktail lounge at six, enjoying a dry Martini, when a man slipped into the seat opposite.
'Hi, glad to see you looking so well.' He had a plump, pasty face and his tie had grease stains on it. He had a local newspaper in his hand and was wearing a frayed straw trilby that he didn't remove.
'I just had a two-week vacation,' she said.
'Go to the mountains?'
'I prefer the seaside.'
So far so good, she thought. Then said, 'Have you anything for me?'
He pointedly placed the newspaper on the seat beside him. Very BSC, she thought, we love newspaper drops – anyone can carry a newspaper. Keep it simple.
'Go to Las Cruces. A man called Raul will contact you. The Alamogordo Inn.'
'How long am I meant to stay there?'
'Until Raul shows up. Nice talking to you.' He slipped out of the booth and was gone. She reached over and picked up the newspaper. Inside was a brown envelope sealed with sticky tape. She went up to her room and sat and looked at it for ten minutes then she tore it open to find a map of Mexico with the printed title: LUFTVERKEHRSNETZ VON MEXIKO. HAUPTLINEN.
She called Transoceanic.
'Sage, hello.' It was Angus Woolf – she was surprised to hear his voice.
'Hello. Moonlighting?'
'Sort of,' he said. 'How's the party going?'
'Interesting. I've made contact but my gift is particularly intriguing. Inferior material, I would say.'
'I'd better call the manager.'
Devereux came on the line. 'Inferior?'
'Not that you'd spot it immediately but it wouldn't take you long.'
The map looked professional and official and was printed in black and white and two colours, blue and red. Mexico was divided up into four districts – Gau 1, Gau 2, Gau 3 and 4 – and blue lines between red cities indicated air routes; Mexico City to Monterrey and Torreón; Guadalauara to Chihuahua and so on. Most unusual were lines extending beyond Mexico 's boundaries: one south 'für Panama ', and two north 'für San Antonio, Texas ' and another, 'für Miami, Florida '. The implication, Eva thought at once, was too clear – where was the subtlety? But more worrying too were the errors; HAUPTLINEN should have been HAUPTLINIEN, and 'für' in the sense of 'to' was not correct either – it should have been 'nach' – 'nach Miami, Florida '. To her eyes the positive first impression was quickly undermined and subverted by these factors. The spelling mistakes might just be explained by a compositor who didn't speak German (perhaps the map had been printed in Mexico) but the mistakes plus the territorial ambitions enshrined in the air routes seemed too much to her – trying too hard to get the message across.
'Are you sure this is our product?' she asked Devereux.
'Yes, as far as I know.'
'Will you tell the boss what I think and I'll call back later.'
'Are you going to proceed?' he asked.
'With due caution.'
'Where are you going?'
'A place called Las Cruces,' she said instantly, then thinking: why am I being so honest? Too late now.
She hung up, went to the front desk and asked where she could hire a car.
The road to Las Cruces was due south on Highway 85, some 220 miles or so on the old Camino Real that followed the Rio Grande valley all the way to Mexico. It was two-lane tarmacadam most of the way, with some sections in concrete on which she made good, steady going, driving a tan-coloured Cadillac touring car with a retractable roof that she did not bother to retract. She barely looked at the scenery as she drove south but was aware, all the same, of the rugged mountain ranges to the east and west, the ranchitos with their melon and corn patches clustered around the river and, here and there, she saw from the road the rocky stretches of desert and the lava beds of the fabled jornada del muerte - beyond the river valley the land was hard and arid.
She arrived in Las Cruces in the late afternoon and drove down the main street, looking for the Alamogordo Inn. These small towns already seemed familiar to her having driven through some half-dozen or so identical ones on her journey south: Los Lunas, Socorro, Hatch – they all blended into a homogenous image of New Mexican provinciality. After the adobe ranch houses came the gas stations and the auto shops, then the neat suburbs on the outskirts, then the freight yards, the grain silos and the flour mills. Each town had its wide main street with its garish shop-fronts and neon advertisements, its awnings and shaded walkways, dusty cars parked at an angle on both verges of the road. Las Cruces looked no different: there was the Woolworths, a jeweller with a winking plastic gem the size of a football, signs for Florsheim Shoes, Coca-Cola, Liberty Furniture, the drugstore, the bank and, at the end of the street, opposite a small park with a stand of shady cottonwoods, the plain concrete façade of the Alamogordo Inn.
She parked in the lot at the back and went into the lobby. A couple of roof fans stirred the air, there was a cracked-leather, three-seater sofa and worn Indian rugs on the wooden floor. A cobwebbed cactus stood in a pot of sand studded with cigarette butts, below a sign that said: 'Positively no loitering. Electric light in every room'. The desk clerk, a young man with a weak chin and a shirt collar three sizes too big for his neck looked at her curiously as she asked for a room.
'You sure you want this hotel?' he asked, meekly. 'There are much nicer ones just out of town.'
'I'm quite happy, thank you,' she said. 'Where can I get a bite to eat?'
Turn right out the front door for a restaurant, turn left for a diner, he said. She chose the diner and ordered a hamburger. The place was empty: two grey-haired ladies manned the soda fountain and an Indian with a sternly handsome, melancholic face swept the floor. Eva ate her burger and drank her Coca-Cola. She experienced a strange form of inertia, an almost palpable heaviness, as if the world had stopped turning and only the swish of the Indian's broom on the cement floor was marking the passage of time. Somewhere in a back room jazz was playing on the radio and Eva thought: what am I doing here? What particular destiny am I playing out? She felt she could sit on here in this diner in Las Cruces for all eternity – the Indian man would be sweeping the floor, her hamburger would remain half eaten, the thin jazz would continue to play. She allowed the mood to linger, steeping herself in it, finding it oddly calming, this late-afternoon stasis, knowing that whatever she did next would set a new chain of events in motion that would be out of her control. Better to savour these few moments of stillness where apathy ruled unchallenged.