Felix rolled slightly and seized Angelica by the neck; she uttered the strangled cry of a wounded shark; the water shattered like crystal around them, a Laocoön-like figure shot toward the surface, though in this case each must have believed the other the serpent.
Felix could only imagine the terror in Angelica’s eyes. He clamped his hand over her mouth and again thrust her beneath the surface, her body yielded, and he was reminded of a woman who for a moment resists an overture for the sake of appearances, then suddenly surrenders. He grappled for Angelica’s hand and tore the ring from her finger. In other circumstances, this strong-minded, athletic woman, who went swimming every day with Ruth at the Chapultepec Sports Club, would have defended herself better; she now seemed incapable of offering resistance, and Felix’s arms again embraced her, this time to lift her from the pool.
The contact with the almost inanimate body excited him; some women are at their most beautiful at rest, and Angelica, normally aggressive and very much the lady, now resembled a goddess rescued from the sea, proud, solitary and sensual, as Felix left her almost lifeless beside the pool.
He dressed hurriedly, left the hotel, and drove off in the Pinto. Once on the superhighway to Galveston, at moments when the lights from a passing car allowed it, he held the stone round as a marble, clear as the waters of the swimming pool, and sparking a thousand lights of its own, between his thumb and index finger to study it, seeking its secret, its flaw. He was driving ninety miles an hour, and had no time to stop.
When he reached Captain Harding’s gray cottage, he tested the stone in the mounting of Bernstein’s ring; it fit perfectly, and he replaced it in its original setting. Even as he did so, he laughed at himself; how many mountings had it enjoyed, this indecipherable object, whose secret, he was sure, would turn out to be as obvious as Poe’s purloined letter.
Harding was waiting for him. He recounted without dramatics how the captain of the Alice and the freckled sailor had been arrested and charged with conspiracy, illegal exercise of authority, fraud, and misrepresentation; they’d thrown the book at them, he said. No lack of charges. And Harding added that he’d even managed to punch Freckles in the mouth when he admitted it was he who, suspended on a painter’s rig somewhere between Coatzacoalcos and Galveston, had changed the white letters on the stern of the ship. The Emmita would sail in the morning at six and within forty-eight hours be in Coatzacoalcos. Could he do anything for Felix?
“Would this ring fit your finger, Captain?”
Harding observed the stone with some reservation and tried it on his finger. “Fits all right, but the boys’ll have a good laugh. I’ll look like a Lolla Palooza sporting a rock like this.”
“Like who?”
“Guess you didn’t read the funny papers? Forget it. Before your time. Don’t worry. To think they insulted me that way, my ship, my name, my reputation, everything. They retire sick old men, you know. My friend, I love the Emmita like a woman. She’s everything I have in the world. It’s like those bastards buggered her. Who do I give the ring to?”
“Do you know The Tempest?”
“I’ve known ’em all.” The old man laughed.
“A boy and girl will be waiting for you at the dock at Coatzacoalcos. They will ask you if you’ve come on behalf of Prospero, and you’ll tell them yes. They’ll ask you where Prospero is, and you’ll say in his cell. Give them the ring.”
“Prospero,” repeated Harding. “In his cell.”
“The sea has its sadness, doesn’t it, Harding?”
“Like a mother who outlives her children,” the old man replied.
30
HE HAD NO DIFFICULTY identifying the sounds in the Rossettis’ room. When he returned from Galveston, he left his door ajar and called me in Mexico City to relay the quotes from The Tempest. Before hanging up, he added with the blend of defiance and humor so typical of my friend Felix Maldonado: “Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.”
“Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,” I replied, first because I wasn’t willing to be outdone by Felix, but also because it was my way of letting him know that, as with him, my personal emotions occasionally became entangled with my professional obligations, and that, like me, Felix must learn to keep the two separate. “And therefore I forbid my tears.”
Felix held the receiver to the open door so I could hear the movement of doctors and nurses and resuscitation equipment; apparently, he even expected the odors of antiseptic and medication to flow through the telephone lines from Houston to Mexico City. It was I who hung up.
Felix slept peacefully; he had sufficient evidence that Angelica was the dominant one and that Rossetti wouldn’t make a move until his wife had recovered. A drowning person either dies instantly or is instantly saved. Death by water admits no twilight zone; it is black, immediate night, or day as luminous as the one Felix discovered when he opened the drapes. A wind from the north was sweeping the heavy gray clouds toward the sea, washing clean the urban profile of Houston. I, on the other hand, dreamed uneasily of my dead sister, Angelica, floating in a river like a sylvan siren adorned with fantastic garlands.
About three in the afternoon, the Rossettis left their room, Angelica leaning heavily on her husband’s arm, and entered the Cadillac waiting at the hotel entrance. Felix again followed in the Pinto. The limousine stopped before a building soaring toward the sky like an arrow of copper-colored crystal. The couple got out, and Felix double-parked, so as not to lose sight of them, and hurried into the building, just as the Rossettis were getting into the elevator.
He watched to see where the elevator stopped and then consulted the building directory to match the stops with the names of the offices on those floors. His job was facilitated by the fact that the Rossettis had taken the express elevator that served only the floors above the fifteenth. But he couldn’t complain of lack of variety: investment brokers, import-export companies, architectural firms, the private offices of lawyers and insurance underwriters, businesses serving the shipping and port industries, petroleum technologists, and public-relations firms.
The elevator had stopped on the top floor, the thirtieth, and Felix considered that the Rossettis’ mission might be important enough to have taken them to the penthouse executive suites. But that was the simplest deduction, and surely those two had thought of that. Felix read the names of the offices on the twenty-ninth floor. Again, lawyers’ names in lengthy lists strung together by chains of hierarchical snakes, & & &; Berkeley Building Associates; Connally Interests; Wonderland Enterprises, Inc.
“Is there a communicating stairway between the thirtieth and twenty-ninth floors?” he asked the Chicano doorman.
“Right. There’s an inside stairway that serves the whole building. With fire-retardant paint and everything. This is a safe building with all the latest. It’s only been open about six months.”
“Thanks.”
“For nothin’, paisá.”
Felix took the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor and walked to an opaque glass door with the painted sign WONDERLAND ENTERPRISES, INC. He was struck by the old-fashioned glass door in such modern surroundings; all the other offices discreetly announced their functions with tiny copper plates on doors of fine wood. He entered an ultra-air-conditioned reception room furnished with light leather couches and dwarf palms in terra-cotta pots. Presiding over all this from behind a half-moon desk was a blonde with the face of a newborn kitten, a kitten precariously teetering on the brink of forty. She was reading a copy of Viva, and she looked Felix over as if he were the centerfold in living color.