Bernstein made a slight nervous movement. The Yves-Grant again pointed at Bernstein’s navel.
Felix asked, “How did you recognize me?”
Now Bernstein’s laughter was gargantuan. He bellowed like a Santa Claus on holiday, naked in the tropics, far removed from his icy workshop. “Such imagination. I told you! Ever since you were in college…”
“Answer me. I don’t need an excuse to shoot.”
“I don’t have the background, my dear Felix. I don’t understand why you think I shouldn’t recognize you.”
“This, and this, and this,” said Felix, with the rage of futility and fatigue. One by one, the pistol barrel pointed out the scars on his face. “And this, and this. I have a new face, can’t you see?”
Bernstein’s laughter was explosive. When it subsided, he settled his naked bulk in the only chair capable of sustaining him. “They made you believe that?”
“I can see myself in the mirror.”
“A touch here, a slight modification there?” Bernstein smiled. “Your hair cut short, a new moustache?” He crossed fat hands across his belly, but did not achieve the desired resemblance to a benign Buddha.
“Yes,” replied Felix, willing to be convinced. He felt that only by abandoning all strength could he recover his capacity for it. And there was something more, the dark little seed of an idea beginning to sprout in his guts, working its way toward his chest.
“The only surgery performed on you was that of suggestion.” Bernstein smiled, but immediately erased the smile. “It’s enough to know that a man is being sought. After that, everyone sees him differently. Even the man himself. I know what I’m talking about. Have a drink. It’s too late. Relax.”
Bernstein indicated the table cluttered with bottles, glasses, and ice, repeating the earlier wave of his hand through the open window toward the teeming market. The ring with the clear stone was no longer on the professor’s finger.
The seed exploded in Felix’s intestines, branched through his chest, and blossomed like a sunburst in his head.
As he ran from Bernstein’s room, still carrying the pistol, he could hear the professor’s steely cry, strong at first, then dissipated by street noises, then once again erupting from the open window: “It’s too late! Be careful! Watch out!”
27
THE CAMBUJO from the Hotel Tropicana was standing beneath Bernstein’s window, facing the market. He was ready, fists clenched, legs planted sturdily, and smiling; Felix could read the caution signal flashing from his gold teeth.
He stuck the pistol in a pocket and limbered his leg muscles. He meant to take a running jump with both feet on the servant’s belly, but the cambujo broke into a run toward the market, swinging the beef carcasses aside, turning over crates, scattering straw in his wake. Blood from the sides of beef stained Felix’s shoulders, and huge clusters of bananas struck him in the face; the machetes glittered more by night than by day. Felix grabbed one at random as he ran by. Better that no shots be heard that night in Coatzacoalcos.
The cambujo continued his flight through the market, zigzagging back and forth and sowing obstacles in Felix’s path. A mix of Olmec Indian and black, he was short in stature but fast, and Felix was unable to overtake him. They emerged at the far end of the market onto the railroad tracks, and Felix saw the mestizo bounding along the rails like a rabbit, following the tracks toward the port outlined in the distance by scattered yellow lights. Felix followed his dark hare, who had an obvious advantage; he’d played there as a child.
Maldonado tripped over a spike and fell, but he never lost sight of his prey; the cambujo seemed not to want to be lost from view; as Felix fell for the second time, he stopped and waited for Felix to get to his feet before he went on running.
The rainstorm had ended with the same abruptness with which it had begun, magnifying to an even greater degree the pungent odors of the tropical port. A moist lacquerlike film shone on the long expanse of dock, the moribund rails, the asphalt, and the distant hulks of oil tankers. The cambujo ran along the length of the dock like a swift Veracruz Zatopek, with Felix some twenty meters behind him, harboring the burning conviction that this was not a normal chase; the cambujo was a false hare, and he a false turtle.
The pursued slowed his pace and the distance between them narrowed dangerously; Felix clasped his machete more tightly in his hand; at any moment the cambujo might turn with a pistol in his hand, his pursuer now within sure range. He stopped beside a black rain-washed tanker sweating gray drops of water and oil; Felix dropped the machete and threw himself upon the dark little man.
The tanker whistled one long blast. Felix and the cambujo fell to the ground and rolled along the dock, the mestizo offering no resistance. Felix straddled the heaving chest of his oddly passive adversary and planted his knees on the outspread arms. The prisoner twisted his wrists, teasing Felix with balled fists. For an instant they stared in panting silence, Greek masks. Felix’s face was the grimace of pain, the mulatto’s the mask of comedy, black, sweating, gold teeth shining. Felix felt beneath his weight that the wiry little man had yielded completely, with the exception of those clenched fists.
Felix seized one fist and tried to pry it open. Worse than the iron gauntlet of a medieval warrior, it was the claw of a beast with its own secret reasons for not ceding. The tanker sounded a second blast, more guttural than the first. The cambujo opened the hand, grinning like the little laughing heads of La Venta artifacts. There was nothing in the pink-palmed hand crisscrossed with lines promising eternal life and good fortune for the cambujo.
His captive turned round eyes toward the ship as Felix struggled to open his other fist. The ship’s gangplank began to rise from the dock toward the portside rail of the tanker. Felix reached for the abandoned machete and held the edge to the cambujo’s throat.
“Open that fist or I’ll cut off your head, and then your hand.”
The fist opened. Bernstein’s ring lay there. But not the stone as transparent as glass. Felix leaped to his feet, grabbed the neck of the cambujo’s shirt, jerked him to his feet, and roughly ran his hands over his body, felt the shirt, the trousers. He released him, as the ship cast off its lines.
Freed, the cambujo trotted back toward Coatzacoalcos, but Felix had no further interest in him. A cameo of light on the dark tanker had captured his attention, a circle of light on the poop deck, doubly bright, illuminated by brightness as strong as if from a reflector and by a face as brilliant as the moon, framed in the oval of a porthole, an unforgettable and unmistakable face, with bangs and crow’s-wing hair emphasizing the luminous whiteness of the skin, the icy diamonds in the gaze, the aquiline profile, as the woman turned her head.
The gangplank was halfway between the dock and the port rail. Felix thrust the ring into his trousers pocket and, still clutching the machete, ran desperately along the ship and lunged for the gangplank, managing only to brush the ends of the thick ropes dangling from the treads.
A freckled gringo, about forty, with a face marked by thin lips and a flattened nose, shouted from the raiclass="underline" “Hey, are you nuts?”
“Let me on. Let me on!” shouted Felix.
The gringo laughed. “You drunk or somethin’?”