“The woman. I must see the woman you have on board.”
“Shove off, buddy, dames don’t travel on tankers.”
“Goddammit, I just saw her…”
“Okay, greaser, go back to your tequila.”
“Fuck you, gringo.”
The man laughed and his freckles danced. “Meet me in Galveston and I’ll kick the shit out of you. So long, greaser.” He secured the gangplank and thrust an obscene finger toward Felix.
Felix threw himself against the side of the tanker still bumping against the dock, and, swinging his machete, an unlikely Quijote, attempted to pierce the body of the slowly moving giant. As the ship eased away from the dock, the cutting edge of the machete scratched fresh paint, leaving a long shining scar along the hull.
The tanker churned the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The night of rotted mangoes and sweet nicotiana evaporated like the puddles following the shower. Felix read the name on the tanker’s stern, S.S. Emmita, Panama, and saw the flag of four fields and two stars floating limply in the heavy air.
The face of Sara Klein, a paper moon suspended in a circle of light, had disappeared.
PART THREE. OPERATION GUADALUPE
28
FELIX BOUGHT a white fiber hat at the Coatzacoalcos airport and took the first Mexicana flight. In Mexico City he caught a Pan-American Airlines flight to Houston. He had a visa for multiple entries into the United States, and the immigration officials saw no discrepancy between the photograph on the passport and the moustached face of the man wearing a white hat and black sunglasses. Bernstein was right; these men weren’t looking for him.
In Houston he rented a Ford Pinto at the airport Hertz desk and got on the highway to Galveston. He had a day to kill; the Port Authority at Coatzacoalcos had told him that the Emmita made no ports before Galveston; she was carrying a cargo of natural gas from Mexico to Texas, and in Texas she was taking on refined products destined for the East Coast of the United States. It was her normal trading route, and she called in at Coatzacoalcos every two weeks except in the winter, when the northers held her up a little. Her captain was named H. L. Harding, but he hadn’t made this run because of illness. And no one had seen a woman go aboard.
The August heat on the barren plain between Houston and Galveston is unrelieved by hills or woods or aromas — except that of gasoline. Felix was grateful for the long, straight highway that allowed him to drive without major distractions and see before him, instead of the dirty Texas sun, the opaque moon of the face he’d glimpsed in the porthole of the Emmita, a face he’d always compared to Louise Brooks’s in Pandora’s Box; the more he thought about it, the more the cinema buff in him substituted a second, the stark white face of Machiko Kyo in Ugetsu Monagatari, the flesh consciously artificial in its mortuary whiteness, the false eyebrows tracing an arc of conjecture over the real, shaved-off brows; the phantom gaze merging into the vigilant sleep of Japanese eyes, the painted mouth a rosebud of blood.
Felix was dizzied by the contrast between the daylight scene of the reverberating Texas plain and the nocturnal vision of Japan, a misty moon following a rain, a night of ancient spirits and sorceresses who take possession of the bodies of virgins in order to effect a festering revenge, visions echoed in the night he’d spent in Coatzacoalcos, the bloody beef carcasses, the vultures, and dovecotes installed in the ruins of a fire, the silvery cupolas of the refinery, Bernstein’s room, the rococo hotel, the cambujo … and the white profile of Sara Klein glimpsed against the darkness of the S.S. Emmita.
The vision was so confused and so powerful that he felt ill and had to stop the car; he crossed his arms over the steering wheel and rested his head; he closed his eyes and repeated wordlessly that from the beginning of this adventure he’d sworn to be wholly accessible, ready to respond to any situation, to be led by any suggestion, to be open to all alternatives, and — and this was the most difficult of all — to keep his mind razor-sharp, assessing the deliberate or the chance accidents others created for him, to be aware of them, but never to prevent or avoid them.
“For a few weeks, you’ll be living in a kind of voluntary hypnosis,” I’d told him as I explained what he might encounter. “If not, our operation may fail.”
“I don’t like the word hypnosis,” Felix had said, smiling his Moorish smile, so like that of Velázquez. “I’d rather call it fascination. I’ll allow myself to be fascinated by everything that happens to me. Maybe that’s the fulcrum between the exercise of will you’re asking of me, and fate.”
“No parking on the expressway.” Someone was tapping Felix on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t feel well,” said Felix, raising his head from the wheel to see the beefy arm of a State Policeman.
“You a dago or a spick? You people shouldn’t be allowed to drive. I don’t know what this country’s coming to. Ain’t no real Americans left. All right, get going,” said the patrolman with the broad, red Irish face.
Felix drove on. A half hour later he was in Galveston, and drove directly to the offices of the Port Authority. He asked for the date and the hour of the arrival of the S.S. Emmita, en route from Coatzacoalcos under the Panamanian flag.
The shortsleeved clerk told him, first, to close the door or the air conditioning wouldn’t do any good, and second, that the Emmita wasn’t going to arrive anywhere, for the simple reason that she’d been undergoing repairs in dry dock. Why didn’t he speak with Captain Harding who was supervising the work.
There is no more insolent sun than one struggling through a veil of clouds, and the thermometer was hovering around 98 degrees when Felix located a bare-chested old man standing beside the disabled hull of the S.S. Emmita, Panama. A frayed cap with a worn leather visor protected him against the burning sun. Felix asked if he was Harding. The man nodded yes.
“Do you speak Spanish?”
Again the old man nodded. “I’ve been in and out of the ports along the Gulf and the Caribbean for thirty years.”
“And you never get sick?”
“I’m too old to get the clap and too tough for anything else,” Harding replied good-humoredly.
“I saw the Emmita weigh anchor last night in Coatzacoalcos, Captain.”
“The sun’s pretty strong,” Harding replied kindly.
“It’s the truth.”
“Dammit, my tanker isn’t the Flying Dutchman. Look at ’er, no wings.”
“Well, I have wings. I flew here today from Coatzacoalcos. Your tanker left the dock at midnight and should reach Galveston tomorrow afternoon about four.”
“Who spun you that fairy tale?”
“The Port Authority, and a freckled sailor who promised to kick the shit out of me here.”
“You’re sick, mister. You better get in out of the sun. Come along with me and we’ll have a beer.”
“When will your ship be repaired?”
“We sail day after tomorrow.”
“For Coatzacoalcos?”
The old man nodded, scratching the white horsehair mattress on his chest.
“They said you weren’t aboard because you were sick.”
“The bastards said that?”
“If what I’m telling you is true, can I count on your help?”
The old man’s eyes flickered like tiny stars in a sky of wrinkles. “If some bastard’s knocking around the Gulf using the name of my ship, you wait and see, I’ll be the one who’ll knock the shit out of the whole kit and caboodle, damn pirates! Maybe they fooled the Mexican authorities and they’re headed for another port.”