“What will make it easy?” Meyer asked.
“The Maya network: Listen, my friends. All up and down this coast and off into the deep jungle, the Maya do the hard work. A lot of Mexicans have come in to work at the hotels, but in some of them, like the Casa Maya, it will be all Maya workers from one village. There is one man who has a big ranch. He has important political jobs. He is like the jefe of all the Maya. He can spread the word that Barbara Castillo wants to know where is this Roberto Hoffmann. If he lives in Quintana Roo, someone will know him. There are lots of strangers now, houses being built, people coming from Venezuela and Honduras and Germany, building houses by the sea. But the Maya do construction, make gardens, roads, string wires. Someone will know. I will leave the word with him on our way back. It is beyond the place I showed you, Akumal, but not far beyond. With a stone wall done in the old way.”
“We have a photograph of him back at the hotel,” I said.
“Good. Because how he looked is not very clear in my memory. He had… a nice ordinary look. Just one more, pleasant person who smiled a great deal and said agreeable things. Are you sure?”
“Almost positive.”
She pursed her lips in thought and then asked, “Why would such a man want to marry that woman, your niece, and then kill her?”
Meyer told her Cody Pittler’s story. She understood at once. “Aha!” she said. “He is killing Coralita over and over and over. He is punishing them and himself for being evil. But that does not include killing my Willy.”
“I would guess that-”
“We will find out,” she said. “We will find out soon.”
On the way back we stopped at the ranch on the west side of the road. She walked from the driveway to the ranch house and was gone for about ten minutes. She came back and said, “He was not there, but I left a note. He will get word to me. I told him it is urgent.”
Twenty-three
THERE was no word from Barbara Castillo the rest of that day, or all day Saturday or Sunday. On Sunday evening when we came back to the hotel at nine, there was a note to come to her apartment.
As she held the door open and we walked in, once again I was aware of the physical impact of her. She had all the presence of one of the great actresses, along with such vitality you could almost feel the electricity. It was like walking under the power lines that march across a countryside. In the field under the lines you can feel the hair lift on the nape of your neck and the backs of your hands.
She wore white shorts and a red blouse, no jewelry at all. She was barefoot. I had noticed before that her hands and feet did not fit with the slenderness of the rest of her. They had a broad, sturdy look of strength and competence.
She clasped her hand around my wrist. Her hand was quite cold and damp. She tugged me toward the couch. I sat beside her, and Meyer sat in the nearest chair.
“I know about him!” she said. “Many many things. I showed Ramуn the photograph you let me take, and it is the same, but with a mustache now, and the hair much darker.”
“Who is Ramуn?”
“Oh, a nice shy little man, very broad and strong, very polite. He is Maya. One of the jefe’s employees drove him in in a truck to tell me about the man he works for, Senor Hoffmann. He has worked for Senor Hoffmann for, he thinks, eight years. He went to work for him shortly after the big house was built, one year or maybe two afterwards. Remember I pointed out the road to Playa del Carmen, where we can go to Cozumel by passenger ferry or small airplane? To find Mr. Hoffmann, you go down almost to the water and turn left, to head back toward this direction. It is a public road and it goes for maybe a mile. At the end of it there is a big iron gate and a warning not to enter. Once you are through the gate, the driveway winds through some gardens and then comes to the house. It is a big house, with a beach in front of it and a lagoon beyond it, with a boathouse and garages and servants’ rooms. Mr. Hoffmann is very rich, Ramуn says. But compared to Ramуn almost anybody would seem rich. I asked what kind of work Mr. Hoffmann does. Ramуn said that he often goes on business trips and stays for a long time. Many months. He is a residente. He has the proper documents. He speaks Spanish as good as any Mexican, and better than most Maya. There are six servants, including Ramуn. He has no woman, this Hoffmann. He does not have friends who visit him. He does not give parties. The only time he leaves his house and grounds is when he goes out in his boat to fish or into the jungle to hunt tigers. Or goes away on a trip. He has a big shortwave radio receiver and a big aerial. He listens to it a lot. Now he has a television set. Of course there is no station he can hear, but when he came back from the United States last year he brought American movies and a machine to play them over his television. Sometimes he lets the servants watch one. Oh, and he has an exercise room, with machines in it.”
“Did you say tigers?” Meyer asked.
“Tigers? Oh, yes. They are big tawny jungle cats. Wildcats or panthers. Do you know that men used to gather chicle in the jungle to make chewing gum? They tapped trees. The men who gathered the chicle were called chicleros. They shot the panthers. Then it became possible to make the juice in a laboratory. No more chicleros. The chicle trails are overgrown. The panthers are returning. They used to say the panther is the second most dangerous creature you can meet in the jungle. The most dangerous, of course, was the chiclero. They were wild rough men. So he fishes and hunts and stays by himself.”
“What about William Doyle?” I asked.
She put her cool hand back on my wrist and tightened her grasp. She looked down and spoke so softly Meyer leaned forward to hear her. “On that day William dropped me off, Ramуn said a man came in a small gray automobile. I showed him a picture of Willy. Ramуn said possibly it was the same man, but he could not tell, they all look so much alike to him. They went out fishing in the boat. Usually a servant named Perez went along when Hoffmann fished, but he did not go that day. When the boat came back, Hoffmann was alone. He said he had let his visitor ashore at the house of a friend, and he would come back for his car later on. And in the morning, the gray car was gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
She lifted her head to look at Meyer. “You were right. William must have known somehow, maybe by accident, that Hoffman and Evan Lawrence were one and the same. It was not healthy to know that. William thought he was a friend.”
“Hoffman seems to have all the conveniences,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Ramуn says they have a good well, which is very unusual in this part of Yucatan. And there are two big generators which came in long ago by ship, and tanks which hold many gallons of diesel fuel. Thousands, Ramуn said. But it is probably hundreds. Also there is a tank and a pump for the gasoline for the car and the boat. With our little car, all he had to do was take it out onto the highway and find a place to run it off the road into the jungle. The village people would soon take everything from it. What was left will rust away very quickly. He could walk back by night, ducking out of sight when traffic came. It is no problem for him. I loved the little car. It was like a fat friendly little dog. It tried hard but it could not run very fast.”
“Does Ramуn understand he is employed by a bad man?”
“He does not want to think that. But it doesn’t matter what he thinks. He will do whatever his people tell him is necessary.”
“The others too?”
“If they are all Maya. And if we ask them, through the jefe.”
“If he goes hunting he has guns there,” I said.
“I forgot. Many many guns. And there are burglar alarms, Ramуn said. No one can approach the house at night, or come in the lagoon in a boat. A loud siren sounds. The children of the servants have set it off by accident, and they have been very frightened.”