It was one of those moments — and there were many more than I imagined then — in which Felix and I were on a telepathic wavelength. Sara was present, dead or living, mysterious in the persistence of her reality, strangely close in her absence; so, too, Ruth, whom we must not frighten by telephoning, even if she suffered a while longer; when the time came, we would explain things calmly, to the degree that explanation was possible. And Mary, why hadn’t we been thinking of her?
I feared I was falling into the greatest of detective-novel commonplaces, cherchez la femme. I closed my book, and my eyes. There was so little time. I thought about my sister, Angelica.
33
ON THE OTHER HAND, Felix did not check his second impulse; he dialed Mary Benjamin’s number, and a servant answered. “The señora may be busy, may I say who’s calling?”
Mary was the one woman who could take it: “Felix Maldonado.”
She was listening on the extension; a light click had betrayed her presence on the line, and immediately he heard Mary’s irritated voice. “Whoever you are, I don’t appreciate your sick jokes.”
“Don’t hang up,” said Felix, with an affectionate inflection Mary should recognize. “It’s me.”
“I told you…” Mary’s voice was still irritated, but slightly tinged with doubt and fear.
Felix laughed. “You sound a little shaky; this is the first time I ever heard that from you.”
“There’s always a first time.” Mary was struggling to compose herself. “Felix was very big on black humor, wasn’t he?”
“Prove it.”
“Don’t be stupid, I don’t have a televiewer on my phone yet.”
“Génova Suites. Room 301. Eleven-thirty tonight. Be there. The last time, you stood me up.” Felix hung up.
Italian restaurants abound in the Zona Rosa. The Ostería and Alfredo’s, facing one another across the arcade between Londres, Hamburgo, and Génova, sounded too Roman, and the Focolare on Hamburgo, too generic, so Felix walked toward La Gondola on the corner of Génova and Estrasburgo. He says he was thinking of me. For the first time, he had deliberately betrayed my instructions. He needed a woman, too much adrenaline had been pumping through his body the last few days; he hadn’t had a woman since Licha. It meant coming out in the open, but after ten years without touching her, he wanted to go to bed with Mary Benjamin. Mary Benjamin was exactly what he needed, a hot, passionate bitch, and if he’d consulted me, I would have racked my brain to come up with a quote from Bill Shakesprick to tell him to get himself a call girl in one of the hotels in the Zona Rosa. But Felix had other things in mind.
There weren’t many people in La Góndola that night, but it was filled with penetrating odors of tomato and garlic and basil. Emiliano and Rosita sat facing each other, hands clasped, elbows on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. Felix sat down beside the “saucy” boy who was bringing him a warning, facing the girl with a head like a woolly black lamb. The young couple’s faces betrayed their uneasiness, they could dispense with the preliminaries.
“Did Harding give you the ring?”
They shook their heads.
“What happened?” asked Felix impatiently. Mary was boiling in his blood, a soft, warm Mary was clasped between his thighs. “Did you forget the code from The Tempest?”
“We didn’t get a chance,” said Emiliano, dropping Rosita’s hand. “The old man was dead.”
“They killed him, Emiliano, tell him,” said Rosita, playing with some toothpicks, not daring to look at Felix.
“When?” Felix asked, paralyzed within a triangle of stupor, impatience, and disbelief.
“After the tanker docked, this morning,” said Emiliano, helping Rosita in the construction of a toothpick castle.
“How?”
“A machete, in the neck.”
“Where was he?”
“In his cabin, probably getting ready to go ashore.”
“And the ring?” Felix asked carefully; he could hear his voice rising.
“It wasn’t there.”
“How can you be so damn sure, my beardless friend? Did they let you search the old man? Did they let you in the cabin?”
“Hey, Feliciano,” Rosita interrupted. “We’re on the same side, what the hell’s with you?”
Felix ducked his head to acknowledge the rebuke, and Emiliano continued. “We thought the scene was coming down pretty heavy, so we got in touch with the chief. Within a half hour, the cops were swarming all over the Emmita, searching everything. Not a whiff of the ring, man.”
“Tell him, Emiliano, tell him about the girl.”
“The mate thought the cops were looking for something else. He told them Harding kept an old silver locket hanging over his hammock, with a faded snapshot of a girl in it, signed Emmita. He couldn’t believe they’d waste the old guy for such a nothing thing, though sometimes at sea they tell tales of feuds that last to the grave.”
“The locket wasn’t worth a penny to anyone except him,” Rosita said excitedly, covering her mouth with the napkin. “It was gone, nothing but a faded circle where it used to hang.”
“The fuzz pulled in the thief almost before he could turn around. They found him a little after six, drunk out of his mind, in one of those all-night bars on the docks. He was carrying a big roll and the locket was around his neck.”
“The snapshot was gone, the bum’d thrown it away,” moaned Rosita. “He was trying to con some girl into going to bed with him, telling her she’d be his new sweetheart and he’d put her picture in the locket.”
“They put him in jail, but when they searched him, he was clean. He said he’d found the locket on the dock, and that he’d never been on the Emmita. The hiring agent, though, said they’d been shorthanded and he’d signed on the cambujo part-time as a stevedore.”
“The cambujo?” Felix interrupted.
Emiliano nodded. “Yeah, he usually worked in the Hotel Tropicana. He does a little bit of everything, though, even butchers beef sometimes in the market. They call him El Machete.”
He looked at Felix with pride, like a student who’s passed his exams with honors. “Old Bernstein packed up lock, stock, and barrel, and checked out of the hotel a half hour after the Emmita docked.”
“The sea had its sadness,” murmured Felix. He removed one toothpick and the whole rickety structure collapsed on the tablecloth.
“What?” said Rosita.
Felix shook his head. “Have you been watching Bernstein?”
“He’s back home. His servant girl has orders to say he’s very busy preparing his courses for the fall and he can’t receive any visitors. We found out he’s leaving for Israel tomorrow morning. An economy-class round-trip ticket, good for twenty-one days.”
“Did the Coatzacoalcos police interrogate the cambujo about his connection with Bernstein?”
“The chief said it was hopeless. The prof had paid him off. Besides, El Machete knows he’s well covered, and Mexican justice being what it is, he’ll be out of the tank before you know it.”
“Well, Bernstein has the ring, that’s the one thing we can be sure of,” said Felix.
“He wasn’t wearing it.” Rosita laughed.
Felix remembered the man who’d called himself Trevor, and Mann, and God knows how many other aliases. The only way to proceed secretly is to proceed openly.
“The chief has men watching him night and day,” said Emiliano.
“Since when?” Felix inquired skeptically.