“Rent, baby. You gotta rent the room. Is not free, nothing free. For the towel, the clean sheets” — yeah, fresh out of the dryer sometime in 1968 — “It’s for the big boss. He beat me up if I don’t get it.”
What was the difference? But this was costing a fortune. He was counting it out in ones when he heard the siren.
He raced down the steps two at a time, almost spilling out of control at the end as he lurched into the now-empty bar. The boy Roberto quietly polished glasses and nearby Oscar Meza sat at a table talking with a bulky policeman in a crisp tan uniform with a yellow tie — yes, yellow, canary yellow, screeching yellow — whose beefy shoulder was looped with a final ludicrous touch, a gold braid.
Trewitt tried to gain command of himself, but the cop looked over to fix him with a set of dead eyes.
Trewitt smiled casually, and tried to shuffle out.
He heard the word gringo, and the two men broke into laughter.
Trewitt reached the door and stepped into the night. He could see nothing except the railroad tracks beyond the street and beyond that, Oscar’s competition, the Casa de Jason, another nightclub. Trewitt descended the steeply pitched parking lot to street level and turned. Five hundred yards ahead, beyond an arcade of canopied shops adjacent to the railroad tracks, lay the border; he could see it in lurid light, and the beggars and cabdrivers collecting there, a cruel, high fence, a traffic jam, booths, and a fortresslike bridge of offices overhead. He could see no flag; but, beyond the fence, he saw something perhaps more emblematic: the golden arches of McDonald’s.
Then he saw the crowd. It had gathered just up the street at what seemed to be a bridge at the corner of Calle Buenos Aires and the Ruis Cortina. Indians, a few Americans, Mexican teenaged girls in tightly cut American jeans and blouses, but mostly policemen. Three or four gray pickups had been parked nearby and by their uniformity Trewitt realized they were official vehicles.
Warily, he walked into the crowd; he could hear, among other things, the trickle of water.
It smelled here. Something? What? The odor was overwhelmingly familiar. His nose picked it apart but could not identify it — too many other odors were woven into it. But it was disgusting.
The crowd had gathered at the bottom of the street. It was a cobbled, climbing street that traveled up the side of a hill, lit intermittently by overhead lamps. He could see signs of the shops that ran partway up the hill, before the road disappeared into darkness: a dental clinic, a TV and stereo shop, a small food shop on the other side of the street, and a few others. But Trewitt pushed his way through the crowd and came soon enough to the wall, where he stood by three policemen who were talking rapidly among themselves. Lights — there were lights back here. He could feel the warmth, the human warmth, of people all around. He was aware that the blank brick wall that stared back at him twenty feet away was the wall of Oscar’s, of the whorehouse; the gurgle of water was very strong indeed, but he could not quite get to the edge, to look into the — the whatever it was that lay before him and had drawn all these people.
He gave a last, mighty shove, and broke through two men and came to the edge.
The scene, in fact, was a phenomenon of light. The Mexican faces, fat and slack, Indianesque in their unreadability, almost Asian, and the pencil moustaches; and the indifferently blazing headlamps from the police trucks, throwing beams that cut this way and that through the crowd, and a jumble of shadows on the wall beyond. And the Spanish, against it all, the Spanish in a thousand babbling tongues and incomprehensible dialects, jabbering, spiraling through the air. And the odor: he now recognized it for human waste, the stink of cesspool, of outhouse, of backed-up pipes, the smell of the toilet, the urinal, the smell of defecation. Miasmatic, it covered him like a fog, drilling through his sinuses; he winced at its power, feeling his eyes well with tears.
Bill Speight lay on his back in the sewer. Trewitt, at the edge, could just now make him out. Three or four different light beams pinned the old man against a cascade of stones and beer bottles and rusty pipes and assorted junk. The police were talking about las botas, Trewitt overheard as he stared at old Bill in the sewer.
Boots.
That was it: there was a delay until some high rubber waders could be found; no man would descend into the muck without them.
A flashbulb popped and in its brightness Trewitt could see that the old man had taken some kind of heavy-caliber or big-bore shell in the left side of the face. Shotgun, perhaps. The features had been peeled back off that side of his head; yet on the other, astonishingly, the old Bill prevailed. The vision so diverged from Trewitt’s assumptions of human anatomy that he could make no sense of it.
Speight was soaked by the rushing water from a pipe. A shoe had come off and floated downstream, where it wedged against a rock. It was an old Wallaby.
They’d blown the side of his head in and thrown him into a sewer behind a whorehouse, Trewitt thought dumbly. He accepted and did not accept it. Only yesterday, as he sat throwing down rum-and-Cokes, old Speight had numbed him with an endless tale of the Korean War, an account that could have been in a foreign language, so full was it of obscure references, improbable characters, unlikely events. Halfway through, Trewitt realized he must have missed something important, for he had no idea what the man had been talking about. Now he was dead. In a sewer. Shot in the face.
Trewitt gripped the bricks before him for steadiness. Oh, Jesus, poor old bastard. He realized he was trembling, that he was cold. He looked again at Bill. Bill had been so alive just a few minutes ago. Trewitt thought he might be sick. He didn’t know what to do. He could hear the police asking questions.
“Anybody know this old bird?”
“He was with another gringo in Oscar’s. A young one.”
“Where is he?”
“Still with his girl friend.” There was some laughter.
“They get those boots yet?”
“Yes, they just arrived. Who’s going down there?”
“Call Washington. Have them send a vice-president.” More laughter.
Then something occurred to Trewitt.
They — whoever they were — killed Speight for trying to find out about Ramirez.
He, Trewitt, had been with Speight.
He, Trewitt, had asked about Ramirez.
And then, and only then, did he panic.
16
On a Saturday night in Boston, in her high-ceilinged old room, Chardy lay beside her in the dark. Sleep had never come easily for him and it evaded him tonight. But that was fine; he would just listen to the breathing.
The night’s lacework of shadows lay across the far end of the room, webs and links and flecks of brightness; moonlight threaded through the dark, gleaming cold. Chardy anchored himself against the coming of a bad minute or two by putting a hand against her arm. In Chicago there’d never been anything to touch.
Sometimes, then, over those years — frequently, if he was honest about it — he’d awaken weeping. A secret shame: big guys don’t cry. Sometimes it was his back, which to this day became occasionally infected and could be quite painful. Or sometimes a sensation, a vision, would set it off: a twinge of pain, a picture of a hot blue flame. Or sometimes something even stupider: some police officer or fireman or boy scout’s sudden heroism, as vicariously experienced through the newspaper; or an old pro basketball player, on the line looking at a one and one with a whole season’s weight perched on his shoulder; or a young kid, a freshman, taking a jump shot in the last second of an NCAA game. It was the contrast that wrecked him each time: they’d passed their tests, he’d failed his.