The police had returned to Mrs. Vitrier’s home with her and had there picked up Miss Bowie’s personal effects, including her purse and her tourist card which, on the day of her death; was almost a month overdue for renewal. Their search for the young man known only as George had been unsuccessful.
As I put the papers away again, Meyer said, “Anything new?”
“Just more questions. When did she send for that bank draft to clean out her account?”
“Harl said it was in late March.”
I had the address where they had sent it. She had been at Los Tres Rios Trailer Park at Culiacan, over in the State of Sinaloa, on the Gulf of California, and it had been made out to her, payable at the Culiacan branch of the Banco Nacional.
“My question right now, Meyer, has something to do with it being one hell of a trip from Brownsville to Culiacan and another hell of a trip from Culiacan down to Oaxaca. And did they all go, and did they go in that camper, and where and when and how did they split up? And the Mexicans are very touchy about people getting their vehicles back to the border in six months. You can renew and go back in again, but don’t get cute about overstaying your tourist card deadline. Why did she want the money, all of it, and why did she overstay her permit?”
“Shut up,” said Meyer, “and look out at the nice volcano, McGee. I mean at the three nice volcanoes. No, by God, there are four of them.”
“Citlaltepetl, Malinche, Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatopetl.”
“Travis, do you have something caught in your throat?”
“If you want to cheat a little, you can call that one over there Orizaba instead of Citlaltepetl.”
“I did not know you had any expertise on Mexico’s snow-capped peaks.”
“Once upon a time there was a roof garden in Puebla, and a little tile stairway going up to it, and the biggest mesh hammock you ever saw in your life, old friend. And when the moonlight was right and the night balmy, a fellow could go padding up the tile stairs and stretch out in that hammock, and one Maria Amparo Celestina Rodriguez de la Vega would take up her warm one third of said hammock and make a fellow name each volcano and name it right.”
“Is that where you got your pidgin Mexican, senor?”
“It helped.”
So fasten seat belts, and, in the late afternoon, head down and into that misty, poisonous, saffron smutch that fills the mountain bowl of that great city half full. Better than six million of the fifty million Mexicans live on that swampy plateau seven thousand five hundred feet high. An inaccurate comparison would be twenty-four million Americans living in Denver. Mountains rim the Mexico plateau, enclosing and holding the exhaust fumes of uncounted thousands of trucks and buses ranging from brand new to items so ancient they have a sidelong, clattering shamble, steaming and groaning. And the exhaust of a bedazzling number of Volkswagens. A big new plant on the Puebla highway stamps them out like production-line tacos, and every boulevard is a combination scrambling road rally, dodgit game, and demonstration of machismo. Add the smoke of a few hundred thousand little charcoal cooking fires, and the city is in an unending haze, saffron-gold on the sunny days, purple-brown when it is cloudy.
Our cab driver was a large, loud, jolly type with a dashboard covered with religious statuary and medallions. With graceful little flourishes of hand and wrist on the wheel, he slid through openings that opened just as he got there, closed just as he got through. He said we were very lucky it was not yet five o’clock, because we would make the trip to the Hotel Camino Real in perhaps twenty minutes, and a half hour later it might take an hour and twenty minutes. I translated for Meyer. Meyer sat with his eyes shut and said he would have preferred the hour and twenty minute version.
Once he got to the Paseo de la Reforma heading out toward Chapultepec, he was able to play the chicken game at each traffic circle-at Colon, Cuauhtemoc, Independencia, Diana. To play the game properly, you get into five-abreast traffic and accelerate to fifty as you enter the traffic circle, then all go screaming and swaying around the monument in the middle and find room to peel off and out of the group and exit from the circle at the street you want.
Meyer had opened his eyes: They were too far open. I tried to take his mind off the chicken game by telling him bits of lore-such as the fact that Chapultepec means Grasshopper Hill. But all he could say, watching the traffic inches away, was a barely audible “Dear kindly Jesus.” He said it several times.
We popped out of the flow at Diana, sped across the bow of several buses, and gradually slowed down as we went along Mariano Escobedo. The driver turned into the hotel entrance, stopped abruptly, hitched around to face us, looked at his watch, and with a big grin said in semi-English, “Twenny-toos minootis!”
“I’ll just sit right here for a while,” Meyer said. But a large young man garbed like an Ecuadorian admiral handed us out and got us and our luggage into the incoming flow. My first look at the Camino Real. Twenty-five million dollars worth of it. Seven connected buildings, the tallest only five stories. Entrance lobby the size of a football field, paved with little oblongs of gleaming hardwood, each piece smaller than the end of a pack of cigarettes. Bold colors, daring architecture, startling vistas, all of it a maze of shops and bars and lounges, fountains and pools and restaurants, stairways and corridors and carpeted luxury. Seven hundred and something rooms and suites.
The reservation was in order, the bellhops brisk, and after a very short elevator ride and a very long walk, we were deposited in a pair of interconwcting singles on the third floor of a bedroom wing. Drinks came swiftly. I unpacked. I heard Meyer’s voice raised in sonorous melody, and wandered into his place and found him in his giant tub, his drink on the broad marble encircling slab, the black pelt on chest and shoulders foamed with soap.
“About those last lions,” he said. “Too damned fat and sleepy and indifferent. Send the boys out to get some lean and hungry lions. How can we put the fear of God into those Christians unless we use faster lions?”
“Anything else?”
“Who catered that last orgy? There were only three dancing girls apiece. An austere orgy is no orgy at all.”
“I’ll make a note of it.”
“And get me my fiddle.”
“So soon? We haven’t put out the last fire yet.”
He hoisted his glass. “Here’s to primitive, backward Mexico. Here’s to hardship.”
I left him there, paddling happily, soaping and singing, and went back into my room and looked up Ron Townsend’s number in the oversized phone book. The hotel operator told me I could dial direct. There was a little gadget on the phone. Push the gadget and dial.
A girl answered and I asked for Ron.
She had a good voice, husky and very personal. She got my name and came back and said, “Hang in there while waterboy gets the soap out of his eyes, friend.”
He came on the line, properly enthusiastic. He is a young partner in a Miami advertising firm. He was born and partially raised in Cuba. He is the agency expert in Mexico and doing well. I had made a good recovery for them some time ago when a secretary, unbonded, took off with enough cash out of the safe to sting them pretty good. He was delighted to learn Meyer was with me, and apologetic about having a date he couldn’t break. But he said he could stop off on the way, so in thirty minutes or so he joined us at the bar in the Camino Real which he favored, named Azulejos, bringing with him the voice on his phone, a young girl at least five ten, suitably spectacular, and clad in minileather fastened with big brass chains and galoshes snaps. Her name was Miranda Dale and she had just finished a bit part in a West German motion picture they had shot at Mazatlan, on Mexico’s west coast.