Bat came to see him nearly every day, so often that Jonas began to wonder if he came to see him or to see Angie. The young man was not subtle about his admiration for his father's woman. He stared at her legs. It amused her, and she would allow her skirt to creep up. When she noticed him staring at her breasts, she would shrug and thrust them forward. Their little game amused Jonas at first, then ceased to amuse him.
Bat suggested they go to a bullfight on Sunday afternoon. "It's not one of my favorite spectacles, but everybody should see it once."
He bought them good seats in the shade, where they were surrounded by happy aficionados. A noisier and more exuberant crowd sat in the sun on the opposite side. The spectacle was, as Bat had said, something everyone should see once, for the color and the horses and the brassy music, if not for the killing of bulls.
Angie sat between Jonas and Bat, drawing honest stares. She wore a white dress and a white picture hat. She sat with her legs crossed at the ankles, the way finishing schools taught; and no one, especially not Bat, guessed that her finishing school had been a women's reformatory. She studied her program for some time, then turned to Bat and said, "I hope the score is matadors seven, bulls one. I think the bulls should be entitled to win occasionally."
After the first fight, a group of American tourists got up and left. One of the women had fainted — or pretended to — when the bull's blood gushed from its neck. One of the men, wearing a panama hat, a light-blue suit, and white shoes, proclaimed indignantly that bullfighting was no sport and was brutality practiced to entertain brutes.
"¿Que quiere usted decir?" Bat asked innocently: What do you mean? He judged his group looked norteamericano, too, and he wanted the angry Mexicans seated around them to think they weren't. The tourist in the panama hat shot him a hard look as he bustled by. Bat turned to the Mexicans sitting around them, turned up his palms, turned down the corners of his mouth, and shrugged. The people laughed.
In the second fight, Angie got her wish. The matador was gored and thrown. The bulls did win occasionally.
"It's no secret that I'm in Mexico City," Jonas said to Bat as they waited for the third fight. "Someone knew how to find me."
"Who?" Bat asked.
"A man by the name of Luis Basurto. Ever hear of him?"
"I've heard of him," said Bat. "What's he want?"
Their conversation was interrupted by the cry of a boy selling chewing gum and candy. "¡Chicle! ¡Chocolate!" — Cheek-leh, Choco-lawt-eh.
"He wants to interest me in investing in a Mexican hotel deal."
Bat shook his head. "Basurto is a crook."
"That simple?"
"That simple. Are you interested in investing in a Mexican hotel?"
"Well, I bought The Seven Voyages," said Jonas. "I'm going to make it pay, too. I'm looking for at least one more."
"There's no legal gambling in Mexico."
"Well, that's what —"
"¡Chicle! ¡Chocolate!"
"— that's what Basurto says he can take care of."
"I expect he can," said Bat dryly. "But it would be damned risky. What would happen is, you'd invest in the hotel and pay him a fee to do whatever he does to get officials to look the other way; and then as time went by he'd up the fee and up it again, claiming the locals were demanding more. He'd take a percentage off you. If you didn't pay him what he wanted, he'd have you raided. He'd have you closed down. That's the way he works. He invests nothing, but he takes a percentage."
"I imagine there are ways of handling him," said Jonas.
"He'd have you at a disadvantage. This is his turf, you know. Anyway, why buy into trouble?"
"Well, he's coming out to see me. What do I say to him?"
"Say, 'This is my son Jonas Enrique Raul Cord y Batista, a lawyer with the firm of Gurza y Aroza. That firm will be advising me.' Basurto won't even make the proposition. He'll just pass the time of day and say he's pleased to have met you. And good-bye."
"¡Chicle! ¡Chocolate!"
"There will be others besides Basurto," said Bat. "Some of them entirely legitimate. They will invite you to invest."
"Do you want to vet them for me?" asked Jonas.
"I'll be happy to."
3
After a week, Angie returned to Las Vegas. After she was gone, Sonja called, asking Jonas to come to Cordoba and spend a weekend at the hacienda. Bat would drive him. Jonas agreed, and on Friday afternoon Bat picked him up in the Porsche. He gave him an exciting ride, at speeds sometimes greater than 160 kilometers per hour.
The hacienda was actually some distance to the east of Cordoba. It was situated on a mountainside, and on clear days a very distant view of the Gulf of Mexico could be seen from the windows.
Sonja was the chatelaine of the hacienda, mistress over an extended family and a dozen servants. The mountain land had once been a working sheep and cattle ranch. In years past, Sonja explained, the family had sold the land cheap and on good terms to tenant farmers and farm laborers who now worked all but about fifty hectares of land immediately adjacent to the house. The family kept the house as a home, but the income to maintain it came from oil and other investments.
She showed Jonas the thickness of the outer walls: a meter and more. The dining room had once been a chapel. A pantry had once been an arsenal. The swimming pool had been dug out of the rocky land that had once been a courtyard enclosed by high walls, now torn down, and the well that supplied the pool with water had been inside those walls.
"The place was built to sustain a siege," she said. "Once in fact it was attacked by Zapatistas." She smiled. "And the people inside surrendered."
She gave him the bedroom suite that Fulgencio Batista used when he came to visit — which he occasionally did. Emiliano Zapata had slept two nights in that same room.
She introduced Jonas to one of Bat's half brothers and one of his half sisters. The others were away: the boy in school in France and the girl living with her husband in the States.
The half sister, whose name was Rafaela, told Jonas how Bat had saved her life by shooting a rattlesnake with a pistol.
"You lived in a handsome home," Jonas said to Bat as they stood on a stone terrace looking at the distant sea.
"I didn't live here long," said Bat. "I went away to school."
Over dinner, Jonas stared at Sonja as much as he could without being noticed. He was sure what he had said to Bat had been right: that she was living a better life than he would have given her. Still, he couldn't help reflect on what might have been. He might have lived his own life very differently if he'd known she was carrying his child and had married her. On the other hand, he might have resented her, as men tend to do when they marry women they have made pregnant without intending to.
He remembered her bright wonder as they crossed the Atlantic twice on the big liners. He remembered her gratitude. Painfully, he remembered the hurt he'd dealt her when he left her. He had been simply unable to believe she was as innocent as she was.
A rationalization. He had known.
Now here she was, still beautiful, and now sophisticated and dignified.
She'd brought the boy up wonderfully. It was going to be a pleasure to introduce him to Nevada Smith.
In the Old World tradition, the women left the table after dinner, and the men remained for coffee, brandy, and cigars — Bat and Jonas and Virgilio Escalante. Virgilio and Bat wore white suits. Jonas didn't have one and wore a summer-weight tan suit.
"The price of oil is down," Bat said to Virgilio.