“Well,” said Speight, “thanks for your trouble, Mr. Tell.” He probably wanted to head back to the motel bar for a rum-and-Coke. Trewitt had never seen a man drink so many rum-and-Cokes.
“Sooner or later Hector will decide to chat with us,” the supervisor promised. “I’ll give you a ring.”
“Do you think you could let me run through your file on the border runners, the coyotes?” Speight asked.
“Don’t see why not,” said Tell.
They turned and left, and Trewitt made as if to follow. But his sense of poignancy for the rough, brave boy alone in an American jail, facing bad times, stormed over him. He paused, turned back.
The boy had perked up and sat on his bunk, eyeing Trewitt. His dark brown eyes were clear of emotion. In the office Trewitt heard the two old men enmeshed in some folksy conversation about the old days, the way things used to be. But Trewitt, in the cell, felt overwhelmed by the present, by the nowness of it all. He yearned to help the boy, soothe him somehow.
You should have been a social worker, he thought with disgust. This tough little prick would cut your throat for your wristwatch if he had the chance.
But an image came to him: Hector and the others in some kind of truck or van, prowling through the night on the way to something they must have only vaguely perceived as better. They would have been locked in with the Kurd for hours, with a strange tall man. What would they have made of him?
The boy looked at him coldly, and must have seen another gringo policeman. Trewitt felt he’d blundered again. He knew he should leave; he didn’t belong in here. He felt vaguely unwholesome. He turned to leave — and then a terrific idea, from nowhere, detonated in his head.
“Hector,” he said.
The boy’s eyes stayed cold but came to focus on him. Speight’s words boomed loudly behind him someplace and the supervisor and the guard laughed. Had they noticed his absence? His heart pounded.
He could see before him a picture: it floated, tantalizing him. It was a picture of a high-cheekboned, tall, bright-eyed man with a strong nose and blondish hair. It was on a wall. It was the picture an artist had projected from the old photo of Ulu Beg.
Blond. And tall. And strange.
Trewitt said, in the Spanish he had so recently denied knowing, “I’m a friend of the tall norteamericano with the yellow hair. The one with the gun. He is a big gangster. He thanks you for your silence.”
The boy looked at him cautiously.
Trewitt could hear them laughing, old Speight and old Tell, two old men full of good humor. Would they miss him yet?
“You were betrayed,” Trewitt invented. “Sold for money by the man who took you to the border. The tall man seeks vengeance.” He hoped he had the right word for vengeance, la venganza.
“Tell him to cut the pig. Kill him. Make him bleed,” the boy said coldly.
“The tall norteamericano gangster will see it happen,” he said.
“Tell him to kill the pig Ramirez who let my brother die in the desert.”
“It’s done,” said Trewitt, spinning to race out.
Ramirez!
He was so charged with ideas he was shaking. He couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“Okay,” he said, “I think we ought to bump something back to Ver Steeg. The hell with cables. I think we can call it in. Then we can open a link to Mexican Intelligence — I’m sure we have some guys in Mexico City who are in tight with them — and get a license to do some nosing around over there. Then—”
But Speight was not listening. He sat gazing thoughtfully into his rum-and-Coke. It wasn’t even noon yet!
“Bill, I was saying—”
“I know, I know,” said Speight, nodding. He took a long swallow. Trewitt knew he had once upon a time been a real comer, a man with a great future, though it was hard to believe it now. He looked so seedy and didn’t want to be rushed into some mistake.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “That’s a great idea, a fine idea. But maybe we ought to hold off on this one. Just for a while.”
“But why?” Trewitt wanted to know. They sat in a dim bar, at last safe from the bright desert sun that seemed to bleach the color from the day almost instantly. They were not far from the border itself. Trewitt had glimpsed it just a few minutes ago; it looked like the Berlin wall, wire and gates and booths, and behind it he had seen shacks crusted on suddenly looming hills, a few packed, dirty streets — he had seen Mexico.
“Well …” Bill paused.
Trewitt waited.
“First, it never pays to make a big thing out of your own dope. Second, it never pays to rush in. Third, I am an old man and it’s a hot day. Let’s just sit on it, turn it around, see how it looks after the sun goes down.”
“Well, the procedure is—”
“I know all the procedures, Jim.”
“I just thought—”
“What I’d like to do — you can come along too, if you want; you might find it interesting — what I’d like to do is a little quiet nosing around. Let’s just see what we can develop in a calm way.”
“Mexico? You want to go to Mexico? We don’t have any brief to—”
“Thousands of tourists go over there every day. You just walk across and walk back, it’s that simple. It’s done all the time.”
“I don’t know,” said Trewitt. Mexico? It frightened him a little bit.
“We’ll go as tourists. Turistas. We’ll buy little curios and go to a few clubs and just have a fine time.”
Trewitt finally nodded.
“Turistas,” Old Bill said again.
11
He waited by the huge old boathouse, a Victorian hulk; it was a clear, chill day, almost a fall day, and before him he could see the wind pushing rills across the water. Some Harvard clown was out in a scull working up a sweat and Chardy watched him propel himself down the river toward the next bridge, bending and exploding, bending, exploding. The rower developed surprising velocity and soon disappeared under the arches, but by that time Chardy’s vision had locked on an approaching figure.
It seemed to take a great deal of time for her to cross the shelf of worn grass that separated the Georgian mansions of several Harvard houses from the cold Charles. She wore jeans over boots and her tweed jacket over a turtleneck. Her hair was hidden in a knit cap. She had on sunglasses and wore no makeup. She looked more severe, perhaps more bohemian, certainly more academic than last night.
Chardy walked to meet her.
“You get some sleep?”
“I’m fine,” she said, without smiling.
“Let’s go down to that bridge.”
His head ached and he was a little nervous. A jogger, ears muffed against the cold, loped by and then, traveling the other direction, a cyclist on one of those jazzy, low-slung bikes. They reached the bridge at last, and walked to its center, passing between trees only a little open to the coming of spring.
Chardy leaned his elbows against the stone railing, feeling the cold wind bite; his ears stung. He had no gloves, he’d left them somewhere. Chardy could feel Johanna next to him. She had her arms closed around her body and looked cold.
He scanned the left bank, Memorial Drive, which ran through the trees. Cars sped along it. He looked off to the right, where the road was called Storrow Drive and studied the traffic on it, too.
“This should be all right,” he said.
“What are you worried about?”
“They have parabolic mikes that can pick you up at two hundred feet. But you need a lot of gear to make it work, which means you need a van or a truck. I was looking for a van or a truck parked inconspicuously somewhere.”