“No. She feels good with them. This I cannot explain. She has not been out of the Castle since Gustavo. Two years. I try to do what she wants.”
“I feel dizzy and bad.”
“We are almost finished.”
By then her sense of direction had failed. She had no idea even of north or south, or which part of the floor they had already seen and which part remained new. The next room was filled with bricks of cocaine and the next with heroin and another with methamphetamine. There was another room they could only walk halfway into because the rest of it was filled with bundles of American cash, floor-to-ceiling, taking over almost the entire space, denying them entry. In each of these rooms guns lay about like housecats, not organized and not stowed in any orderly way, mostly just sprawled on the drugs and cash or propped in corners or laid out on the floor where there was room. Many of them were gold or inset with gold, and some had jewels and mysterious inscriptions, and some had images of Malverde, Patron Saint of Narcos, etched onto the butts or stocks. She was pretty sure she was looking at handguns and combat shotguns and assault rifles, as well as exotic sniper guns and grenade launchers and shoulder-launched rockets. She’d seen them in movies.
Erin stood in the doorway, weak with fear, inhaling a world of cash and drugs and guns. She felt the Cowboy Defender ready in its place but it seemed a hundred miles away.
“And my favorite of all the rooms,” said Armenta, walking quickly down another hallway now, turning to wave her on.
He pushed open a door and found a light and Erin stepped in. At first she thought she’d walked into the New World before Columbus. The room was crowded with jade statues and masks and mosaics, quartz carvings of gigantic frogs and strange gods, a huge stone crocodile and an enormous limestone shark carved in meticulous detail, and hundreds of pots and calendars and tablets covered with Mayan writing. Wooden carvings of birds and monkeys and fish and turtles hung from the ceiling. But there were also tables heaped with modern brooches and watches and rings and earrings and necklaces, and there were wooden bins of loose emeralds and diamonds and rubies, some still uncut, and strings of pearls draped through the shutter slats, and chains of gold and silver that had fallen from the slats and were now heaped upon the floor like something that housecleaning would have to deal with, and crystal vases of loose cultured pearls and freshwater and small black pearls. On the floor stood small golden humanlike figurines and more circular golden calendars, and there were silver suns the size of dinner plates leaning against the walls, and Erin saw a silver jackal standing nearly life-sized, its open jaws draped with thick golden chains, and she saw a silver coiled cobra with its head raised and its hood flared, and a flock of jeweled silver birds sitting on a rod fixed above one of the windows. Most of the things were New World creations but she recognized pieces that came from Asia and Africa and the Middle East and Europe and Polynesia. Plunder from around the world, she thought, the treasure of everywhere.
Armenta smiled and folded his hands behind his back and took a formal step toward her, as if he were going to ask her to dance. “Do you like all of this?”
“So much.”
He nodded as if her answer didn’t matter. His face was lugubrious and his black eyes threw the sparkle of the jewels at her.
“You are looking to be sick,” he said.
“Can I sit down?”
“Here.” With one stout arm Armenta swept a bin of rubies off one of the tables. They clattered brightly across the floor and Erin backed herself to the table and hoisted herself up. There she sat and hung her head and through the curtain of red hair stared down past her boots at the twinkling city of gemstones above which they dangled.
“The most scared I’ve ever been before coming here was when all these tarantulas came crawling across the ground toward me. It was like they had sprouted out of the desert. They weren’t there and then they were everywhere. The males come out of holes looking for a mate. I don’t know why they all get to feeling that way at once. Like a bunch of guys heading for the honky-tonk after work on a Friday maybe. And every one of those spiders you had to multiply by eight on account of how each leg articulates slowly and separately when they walk, which divides your attention eight ways, which makes you eight times as scared. This was in Arizona. It reminds me of here. Every time I look at something I get scared more.”
Armenta said nothing for a long while. He was moving from table to table, looking down at the booty. She could hear him toeing the fallen rubies or whatever other treasures had ended up on the floor. He was humming a Lila Downs song. She knew that this was the time to draw the gun and when he came closer she would shoot him. She edged the shawl away to free the gun and she willed her hand to take it, but her hand did not move.
“Did a tarantula bite you?”
“No.”
“When I was young in Veracruz another boy kept a tarantula in a cigar box for an amusement. The boy was older and somewhat cruel. This was a black and red spider, and large. His father worked the docks and he brought Fernando a monkey and several birds and snakes and many exotic insects. Fernando carried it around in the box and he would hold it in his hand if you paid him. He dared me to hold the tarantula so I held my hand out and he carefully picked it up from the box and set it on my hand. It simply stood there. And then Fernando commanded the spider to bite. He said, morder! and the tarantula bit me. On the palm. Two marks. It did not hurt but I was very surprised. Fernando looked surprised too. My father said tarantulas cannot hear but I had proven him wrong.”
“What did you do?”
“I flung the spider into the air and beat Fernando with much force. I took my money back and all that was his also. After that, we were friends.”
“I made friends with a girl who talked trash about me, but I never trusted her.”
“In my business loyalty is often tested. And if a man or woman fails the test it is always obvious. In that way it is an honest business.”
“I don’t like backstabbers. Maybe I can get into your line of work.”
“I have one more thing to show you. But first I want you to choose one thing from this room and bring it with you.”
“Why?”
“Please just choose one thing you call beautiful. You will find this to be interesting.”
Erin looked around and spotted a plate of what looked like solid silver, inlaid with black hummingbirds that might have been obsidian or onyx. It was propped up against the wall near a corner stacked with assault rifles. She wondered fleetingly if the assault rifles were loaded.
“The silver plate.”
“Taxco. You may pick it up.”
She walked to the corner and knelt down and picked up the plate. When she straightened she again unwrapped the shawl and she felt the cool fresh air on her skin. My skin. The skin he will take. The plate was perfect cover, but she could not make her free hand move to the gun.
“I’ll take this,” he said, picking up a silver candlestick that had rubies and the patina of history upon it. “Come now.”
He led her from the room and down a hallway she didn’t recognize, and she saw the lepers’ quarters neat and organized. The lepers mostly ignored them but some looked up and acknowledged their benefactor, and Erin saw that some of their faces were untouched and others incomplete and there were missing fingers and missing hands and feet and a stillness about them that suggested preoccupation of the highest order.
She followed him down the outside stairway and into the courtyard and he pushed open the sun-gate. He had been right, Erin saw-even in the moonlight the stainless steel shone hopefully. With the candlestick in one hand he led her across the sandy road and onto a jungle trail that wound through the trees.
The trail to the cenote, she thought. Where Bradley would be waiting the day after tomorrow to steal her away from here. Then they could get word to Charlie. And he could do whatever he needed to leave this place alive. Money or not, she thought. The money wouldn’t matter. It was like God himself was showing her the way so she couldn’t miss it. A rehearsal. The day after tomorrow!