“It gets warped every hour on the hour,” Charity said with a kind of grim satisfaction. “What’s on your calendar for the next few days?”
“Nothing I can’t clean up by this afternoon or push off on someone else.”
“Will your car make it as far as Pasoloma?”
“Probably.”
“Then a couple of hundred dollars should do it.”
“Make it three.”
“The plants you see growing around here are not money trees, junior.”
“Okay, I’ll settle for two. If I run short I can always sell a few secrets to Cuba.”
“This is highway robbery,” Charity said and made out a check for three hundred dollars. “And listen, junior, you’d better get going first thing tomorrow morning before Smedler finds out how really warped my judgment has become.”
Part III
The highway was known on both sides of the border as Numero Uno.
The border with its twenty-four gates was the busiest in the world, but most of the cars and vans and buses going into Mexico stopped at Tijuana or some sixty miles further south at Ensenada. Beyond Ensenada the speed and volume of traffic decreased and Aragon was able to slow down enough to decipher an occasional weather-beaten sign along the road. Dr. Ortiz evidently didn’t believe in encouraging visitors. The word Pasoloma and an arrow pointing west toward the sea was painted on a shingle nailed to the prostrate trunk of an elephant tree.
Aragon turned right on a narrow dirt road oiled just enough to settle the top layer of dust and coat the sides of his old Chevy with a kind of black glue. The road ended abruptly on a curve with the Pacific Ocean about twenty yards ahead, and Aragon realized he’d arrived in Pasoloma. What Laurie had described on the telephone as a small seaside village was in fact a gas pump, some dilapidated wooden shacks and a dozen kids accompanied by some dogs, chickens and a burro. One of the chickens flew up and landed on the burro’s back and the reluctant host was trying to dislodge it with a series of kicks. It was the only activity in the entire village.
The clinic itself was at the top of a newly surfaced driveway curving up a hill between boulders and paloverde trees — the original ranchhouse now serving, according to a sign on the door, as the main office; a number of outbuildings remodeled as staff residences; a cluster of modern cottages with attached carports, most of them occupied by large American cars. In addition to the cottages, two other structures were new — a rectangular one with small high windows obviously meant to discourage sightseers and another that looked like a small hospital, with a late-model station wagon and a jeep parked outside. Both vehicles were identified by the lettering on their sides as belonging to Dr. Manuel Ortiz, Clinica Pasoloma.
It was early afternoon, siesta time. Hardly anyone was in sight. A nurse in uniform was walking slowly toward the hospital, a gardener was clipping a mangy-looking hedge, leaf by leaf, and half a dozen people sat around the swimming pool. Only one was in the pool, an enormously fat man lying on his back with his belly protruding from the water like the carcass of a sea lion bloated with decomposing gases.
Aragon parked his car in front of the ranchhouse and went into the door marked Oficio.
A middle-aged woman sat behind the reception desk reading a newspaper. She had Indian features, eyes flat and expressionless as pennies, straight black hair and lips that moved only enough to permit limited conversation. Though her language was Spanish, she used no exaggerated gestures or inflections.
“The office is closed.”
“Oh, sorry,” Aragon said. “I didn’t see any sign to that effect.”
“Something happened to it.”
“Perhaps you could answer one simple question?”
She looked him over carefully. His youth pegged him as a non-customer, his accent as American, his car as poor. There was no use wasting energy on him.
“The office is closed until three o’clock.”
“It’s two now. Let’s pretend we’re on daylight-saving time, that way we wouldn’t be breaking any rules, would we?”
“I think yes, we would.” She folded the newspaper and put it on the desk. “Dr. Ortiz is my sister’s son-in-law. We make the rules together, the whole family, and we keep them together.”
“I’m sure you do. You look like the kind of person who would make a good rule and stick to it.”
“This is a family enterprise.”
“And very successful, I hear.”
“Where do you hear that?”
“Santa Felicia, California,” Aragon said. “I just drove down today to see Mrs. Shaw.”
“Who?”
“Miranda Shaw. Mrs. Neville Shaw. Or perhaps Mrs. Grady Keaton.”
“Why do you want to see somebody whose name you don’t even know?”
“I represent her lawyer.”
“Our patients are not allowed to have visitors,” said Dr. Ortiz’s mother-in-law’s sister. “We make that very clear in the instructions they’re sent before they arrive for treatment. The only exceptions permitted are that a wife may bring her husband, or vice versa, if they choose to rent one of our cottages.”
He asked the price of a cottage and she mentioned a figure that would have rented half a hotel in Santa Felicia.
“It is the sea,” she added, observing his shock. “One must pay for the sound of waves and the bracing salt air.”
Aragon went down to the beach for a free trial of the waves and the bracing salt air. There was a south swell with sets of eight to ten feet and almost no wind to rough them. In California on such a day, at Hammond’s Reef, Malibu, Zuma, Huntington Beach, the water would be swarming with surfers in wet suits maneuvering for position or sitting on their boards like rows of cormorants. At Pasoloma there were only three surfers, young men wearing swim trunks instead of wet suits because the water was still summer-warm.
A purple van carrying Oregon license plates was parked nearby on a patch of sea daisies, its roof draped with jeans and T-shirts drying in the sun. Beside the van a blonde girl lay on her back, nude, sleeping.
Aragon said, tentatively, “Hello?”
She twitched as though an insect had buzzed her ear. Aragon repeated the greeting a little louder and this time she opened one eye. It was blue and bored. “What?”
“I said hello.”
“So hello. If you’re from the Federales, we’re not carrying any grass. Cross my heart. In fact, you can search me if you like, as long as Mike doesn’t see you. He’s the jealous type and I’m his lady.”
“You could have fooled me.”
She sat up, shaking the sand out of her hair. “If you’re such a gentleman, stop looking.”
Aragon tried. “Is that Mike out there?”
“Him and his friend, Carl.”
“There are three of them.”
“The other one’s just a guy who was on the beach when we got here.”
“Does he have a name?”
“I didn’t ask him. Names don’t matter anymore. I mean, nobody cares. My old lady had a neat system, she called all her guys the same name. Ed.”
“Why Ed?”
“Why not? What’s wrong with Ed?”
Aragon had never before argued the merits of the name Ed with a naked girl and it seemed a poor time to start. Besides, she had already lost interest. Her mind was on food.
“Is there any place around here where I could get a hamburger? We’ve had nothing to eat but fish all the way down the coast. I’m afraid my face will start to break out. Have you heard that too much fish will make your face break out?”
“I haven’t heard that, no.”
“Maybe it’s not true. I hope not. It wouldn’t be fair to have your face break out for eating something you don’t even like... Mike’s watching us. I better put some clothes on. Oh Christ, he’s coming in.”