43
Except he didn’t. In the dark, despite this car’s intensely bright high beams, I hadn’t noticed that modest Casa Montana Mojoca sign as we whipped by it, so I didn’t realize we’d already passed the turnoff to the hotel until I saw a dim city glow out ahead of us, smudging the black sky with ocher, like a poor erasure. I said, “Isn’t that Marona?”
“Yes, we’ll be there in ten minutes,” Rafez told me. He was still being pleasant.
I said, “But we missed the turnoff. For the hotel.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Didn’t you understand? The hotel ferry is idle until six, and of course you wish to make a report about the theft of your automobile and the attack by the bandits. There’s a police substation in Marona. We’ll go there, we can be comfortable, perhaps have a cup of coffee, you’ll make your statement, and then we’ll drive back when the ferry begins its work again.”
That’s when I knew I was in trouble. Up to that point, we’d had merely an hour and a half of pleasant chat, with long periods of silence, as though there were no suspicious elements in my story or appearance at all. Rafez had asked me where I was from, and I said New York, and he told me of his hopes to visit there someday, but didn’t tell me, as he’d told Lola, that he intended to be a policeman in New York eventually, because of his special knowledge of fighting criminals who speak Spanish.
He had also asked me how I liked Guerrera, and I’d told him it was just fine except for tonight’s unfortunate events, and he smoothly apologized on behalf of his entire nation. He then told me some anecdotes about crime fighting in Guerrera, most of which concerned his brilliant intuitive deductions — he was apparently the Sherlock Holmes of 221B Calle Panadero — and I told him some stories about crime in the greater New York area that I remembered from newspapers and television and that had nothing to do with me.
But now this wasn’t after all just a pleasant chat to kill time until I was dropped off at my hotel. It was the beginning of an interrogation.
I was sure I wasn’t going to like this.
Marona at three in the morning is not a happening place. The downtown shops are sealed behind solid metal gates, there are no moving cars or pedestrians, and the only illumination is the streetlight at every intersection. The Marona police station, on a downtown corner, is a three-story adobe structure with bars on every one of its small windows — from which very little light leaked — and an overhead garage entrance on the side street, which opened upward when our driver touched the control hooked to the visor in front of him.
Inside, a black ramp curved steeply down to a basement parking area, while the garage door clanked downward behind us with a certain finality. This concrete space below-ground could have held a dozen cars but contained only five, including something that looked a lot like a smallish tank; armored personnel carrier is what they call it, I believe. In case the muggers ever get nukes, I suppose.
The driver stopped us at a parking slot near a red metal fire door, and we all got out. The driver was a uniformed cop, not tall but bulked up, with a sidearm and a certain flat way of looking at things.
“The elevator is out of order, I’m afraid,” Rafez said. “We’ll have to walk.”
“That’s okay.”
It was the top floor we were going to, so it was up three clanging metal flights of stairs, inadequately lit by low-wattage bulbs. At the top, we went through another red metal fire door into a hallway even less adequately lit; one overhead fluorescent in the middle of a thirty-foot-long corridor.
“This way,” Rafez said, and we three walked past several closed doors until we found the one he liked. He opened it, flicked on fluorescent ceiling lights inside, and gestured smilingly for me to go in.
I didn’t like Rafez’s smile. I didn’t like anything about him. I was glad Lola had punched him in the nose.
I stepped through the doorway, and this was clearly nothing but an interrogation room. Under the flat fluorescent lighting, a gray metal desk stood in the middle of the black linoleum floor, not facing the door but sideways to it. A padded swivel chair was to its right, behind the desk, and an unpadded wooden armchair faced the desk on the left. Four armless wooden chairs were ranged at unequal intervals along the left wall, behind the wooden armchair. There was nothing else, no filing cabinets, no wastebasket, no telephone, no calendar on the wall — in fact, nothing on the walls.
Well, at least there wasn’t blood on the walls.
I hesitated, as though unsure which chair was supposed to be mine, and Rafez courteously gestured me toward the interrogatee’s place, saying, “Have a seat, why don’t you?”
“Thank you.”
We positioned ourselves traditionally, Rafez at the desk, me facing him, the driver out of sight — but not out of mind — behind me.
Rafez opened a desk drawer to take out a long yellow pad and a ballpoint pen. Placing them on the desk, he smiled at me and said, “This automobile. From whom was it rented?”
“Pre-Columbian Rent-A-Car.”
“Ah.” He made a note. “And what kind was it, please?”
I didn’t want to say it was a VW Beetle, because I didn’t want to give Rafez any reason at all to remember that terrible accident at the Scarlet Toucan three weeks ago, so, remembering another car that was typically rented in this country, I said, “A Honda Accord. It was red.”
“Red. Ah, I see,” he said, as though that were significant. Making another note, looking down at the pad, he said, “Did Carlos Perez recommend Pre-Columbian?”
Who? Did I know that name? I said, “Who?”
He looked up at me. His smile was still pleasant as he said, “Carlos Perez, your friend. I just thought naturally you would have consulted with him when you wished to rent a car.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I shook my head in honest bewilderment. “Perez? I don’t know any Carlos Perez.” I frowned, trying to think. Somebody at the hotel? “No,” I said.
He watched me very intently, and now I could see doubt in his eyes. He could tell I wasn’t faking, but he tried once more: “No? Carlos Perez from Rancio? You don’t know him?”
Oh, for God’s sake, Cousin Carlos! I’d never known his last name. Carlos and Maria, that’s who he meant. Carlos and Maria Perez.
In that instant of realization, I lost control of my face. I immediately got it back, but with Rafez immediately was not soon enough. I blinked at him, while doubt disappeared from his eyes, and that small smile returned to his mouth. “You recall him now?”
He knows, he already knows, so what can I say, how do I get around this? Denying I know Carlos Perez will only make things worse.
So I had a second sudden moment of realization. “You!” I cried, startled, and pointed at him so explosively that I heard the creak of leather from the driver behind me. “You were the policeman! When I was with Maria!”
He sat back to think that one over. Had he caught me out, or had I somehow slipped through his net? Why had I suddenly made his job so easy for him? Temporizing, he merely repeated what I’d just said: “When you were with Maria.”
“When I was pretending to be the chauffeur,” I said.
He looked at me, completely without expression. “When you were pretending to be the chauffeur.”
Was he going to use that as a tactic forever, merely repeating my own words back to me? I said, “On the road to San Cristobal. You remember.” I laughed lightly; I’ll never know how I managed it. “That could have been very embarrassing,” I said.