Crouched low, Felix moved still closer to the steps. His stockinged foot struck a step. He looked for the nearest cover. His hands touched the icy window of a freezer. He leaned against the cold surface. He was safe from Abie Benjamin’s bullets, the staircase ascended alongside the freezer.
“A little before midnight, Mary left the room in her bathrobe. Again, she was both insulting and seducing you. She said she was coming to see me and that she’d be back in half an hour to make love to you as never before. She permitted herself the luxury of a final defiance; she threw the key to room 301 on the bed.”
“You’re very close. Be careful. How did Mary get the key to Sara’s room?”
“I don’t know, but I can imagine. In that hotel, the rules are easily bent. Guests visit each other constantly, and receive unexpected visitors at all hours of the day and night. The concierge is used to that. But the most obvious answer is the true one. Mary went down to the desk and took the extra key to Sara’s room from its pigeonhole. The concierge was outside, with his back to the lobby. The clerk was sleeping, or watching television in the kitchen.”
“Oh, yes, you know her, you bastard. She was a virgin until she met you. You had her before anyone. Before I did. A nobody like you.”
“It didn’t matter to her. A woman’s virginity matters only to the men in her life.”
“You’ve been my nightmare, Maldonado. You’ve destroyed my happiness. She was always holding you up to me, you, her first man, the only man, the one who really excited her, not me, she wouldn’t come near me, you, a goddamned nobody…”
“I was to be the victim that night.”
“Yes. I was going to rid myself of the ten years you’ve been there in my bed, between my wife and me…”
“But when you opened the door to 301, the room was dark. You approached the bed. All the rooms are identical. You groped in the darkness. You touched a woman’s body. You heard the music of the mariachis in the street. You didn’t care that I wasn’t there. She was there. Mary. One way or other, you would avenge yourself for the humiliations of your marriage, and I’d appear to be the guilty one. You’d kill two birds with one stone, Abie. You pulled your straight-edge razor from your pocket, you put your hand over the woman’s mouth, and you slit her throat.”
“Yes.”
“Trembling, you returned to your room and found Mary lying on the bed, laughing with delight. She began telling you how once again, as usual, she’d tricked you; she’d followed you down the hall and watched you from the public bathroom; she’d seen you enter Sara’s room, and…”
“Yes!”
“Her smile congealed when she saw the razor you still held idiotically in your hand. Fool, she said, nothing but mistakes!”
“Yes.”
“You made two mistakes, Abie. You didn’t kill me. And you didn’t kill Mary. You killed Sara Klein. You killed the wrong person, you son-of-a-bitch!”
Suddenly all the lights in the market flashed on. Felix closed his eyes in pain and surprise.
“I’m coming after you, Maldonado. It’s time for a showdown.”
He heard Abie’s footsteps slowly descending the few steps from the balcony to the ground floor.
“This time I’ll make no mistake, Maldonado. You wove your own noose. Tomorrow they’ll find your body and Sergio’s together in a dump. The Mustang’s in his name. There’s nothing to tie me to him or to you. Did you grieve over Sara Klein’s death? Then it wasn’t for nothing. I knew it would hurt you, and you know what? I felt no remorse. It was the same as killing you. Now I’m going to kill you a second time, Maldonado, before I kill you forever. The third time’s the charm, they say. And never again will you say anything or hear anything or fuck another man’s wife. You know who told Mary Sara was staying at the Suites de Génova?”
Pressed against the freezer, Felix saw the tip of Abie’s shoe appear, only a few feet away.
“Ruth,” said Abie.
Felix felt the unremembering, unhating tension of a leopard. The instant Abie moved into his line of vision, Felix leaped on him, but prevented his falling by throwing a hammerlock around his neck. Abie’s back pressed against Felix’s chest; each grasped a weapon in his right hand. Felix pulled the trigger and the gray-haired, black-moustached man screamed and the pistol fell from his fingers. Felix dropped his own.44, opened the door to the freezer, and pushed Abie inside.
The man with the coarse, ugly, ruddy face fell to the icy floor in the midst of hanging sides of beef and extended his beautiful, imploring hands toward Felix.
Felix slammed the freezer door. He knew that those doors had no opening on the inside — as if the slaughtered steers might slip from their hooks and escape their icy tomb. No one would arrive before six o’clock the next morning. Nine hours at a temperature of fifty degrees below zero is a long time.
He looked at Abie, locked inside the freezer, the floridity and aggression gone forever. In his eyes, the cold of terror anticipated the cold of death. He pushed aside the sides of beef, rose, slipped, and fell forward against the frost-framed glass door.
With his bleeding hand, he scratched six letters in the frost of the door. Felix read them in reverse, red on white, as with a grimace of terror Abie placed his hand over his mouth, closed his eyes, and remained kneeling, like a penitent in Antarctica. He had managed to scratch nun eht.
46
THE BURBERRY SCARECROW had more life than Abie Benjamin. Felix Maldonado retrieved his trenchcoat from the shopping cart and put it on. He went upstairs, where he found Abie’s control panel on the desk. First he punched the key marked SECURITY DOOR, STOREROOM. He depressed it for an instant only, enough to allow him to leave as he’d entered, on his belly; he didn’t want to arouse suspicion by leaving the rolling door wide open.
Next he turned off the fluorescent lights. The antiseptic cathedral sank into an almost sacred darkness; only the frost in the freezer glistened dimly, like tiny votive candles.
He squeezed beneath the steel door and then returned once more, dragging Sergio de la Vega’s rain-soaked body. He didn’t want Abie Benjamin’s vacation in the snow to be interrupted because of this Cardin-shrouded corpse. He propped the body against some cartons of Ajax and derisively bade him farewell. “Tend the store for Abie.”
For the last time, he wriggled through the opening between the rolling door and the concrete floor. In the rain, he walked to the Mexico City — Querétaro highway and, without much hope, stood waiting for a taxi or a bus. Clusters of men wearing sarapes and sombreros trotted along the highway, numb with cold. A city of thirteen million, Felix thought, and not even the most elementary means of public transportation. The horse and the wheel had come late to Mexico, after centuries of foot travel. Now a man without a car was a pariah, a peasant condemned to repeating the journeys of his ancestors. As he watched them jogging stolidly by, he recalled the figures he’d seen the night of his last meeting with Sara Klein, the figures resembling the paintings of Ricardo Martínez. He’d been unable to describe them, because he hadn’t dared approach those creatures of misery, compassion, and horror.
The unremitting rain washed from his trenchcoat the emblems of honor won in the joust against Abie Benjamin: dust, mud, and grease. It wasn’t much of an accomplishment, but for the first time since he’d accepted this mission in the name of his father’s humiliation, Felix felt free. Finally he had done one thing on his own, without orders from me, without finding himself in circumstances where he was forced to follow my wishes, believing he was acting on his own. He had avenged Sara Klein. And he had not compromised the humble, Memo and Licha and the fat woman.