“That’s all you could get for fifty American?”
“Inflation,” the boy explained.
But Trewitt was secretly delighted with the small automatic. He fired one of the precious 7.65-millimeter rounds that night into a gully wall. The pistol was accurate to maybe seven feet, something out of an old Hemingway novel, fresh from the retreat from Caporetto, but it was his, his alone. Its weight in his waistband pleased him, and he carried it with a round in the chamber, but at half cock, pushed around on his hip. He tried his draw too, in private moments, groping quickly for the weapon. He needed to improve, and vowed to spend half an hour a day in practice.
Look at me! For the pistol was only the beginning. The shop-windows and the mirror also threw back the vision of a dashing young gangster in a yellow leisure suit, a double-knit polyester thing only recently arrived from Taiwan, and a white-on-white imitation-silk shirt (also Taiwanese) with a huge flappy collar and no buttons above the sternum. He looked like a pimp, an assassin, a failed movie star in the getup, a zoot suit, a blast of sheer arrogant yellow that would have burned the retinas of his friends. The bad taste of it was awe-inspiring and of his old self only his Bass Weejuns, tassel loafers in a muted oxblood, remained, because the Mexican shoes all ran to three-inch heels and seemed to be made of plastic.
And Trewitt had one more treasure of considerable significance to him: he had a new recruit, No. 2 in his network. The bartender Roberto had signed on. He had been sacked by Oscar Meza for stealing and like many another Latin male, unjustly dismissed only for playing by what he understood the rules to be — they had been Reynoldo Ramirez’s rules, after all — was insane with a desire for vengeance, la venganza, and dreams of glory. He too had an image problem: he wanted to be a tough guy, a knife fighter, the kind of man whom all the women wanted.
Roberto’s story: One of his less pleasing jobs in the brothel involved the sorting of laundry, going through the towels. “The whores use a lot of towels,” he explained, and Trewitt kept his face blank, remembering the job done on his privates by Anita with just such a towel.
“And guess what I find, three weeks running, every Tuesday?”
Trewitt could not, or would not.
“Bandages with pus. Yards of adhesive tape with hair in the sticky part. Bloody linen.”
“Maybe somebody got rough with the girls.”
“Not that rough,” said Roberto.
“So where’s it from?”
“I try to keep my eyes open. Where, I wonder, where does the Madonna go on Tuesday afternoon?”
“Who’s this Madonna?”
“The upstairs lady. The pecker-checker. Fat and ugly. Eeeeeiiii. She been a nurse or worked in the hospital or something, I don’t know. She takes care of the girls.”
Trewitt nodded, thinking about it. Where did the Madonna go?
Now it was Tuesday, and behind cheap sunglasses, in his yellow outfit, Trewitt lounged on a bench in the hot shade of a mimosa tree. He was among Indians, country peasants, shoeshine boys, hungry scabby dogs, an occasional cop, a more than occasional gaggle of Exclusivo cabdriver pimps, in a small park at the corner of Pesquirica and Ochoa streets. Beyond him were railway tracks glittery with broken glass; beyond them another hundred yards, the Casa de Jason; beyond it, the Ruis Cortina and on the other side of the Ruis Cortina, tucked into the rising bulk of a sandstone bluff otherwise bristling with shacks, Oscar’s. Weeds fluttered in the gritty breeze; skinny dogs and kids fled this way and that; banged-up Mexican cars roamed up and down the streets, jammed full. The sky was blue; the sun was hot.
But Trewitt just sat, one leg tossed over the other, and kept his eyes pinned on a small figure beyond the tracks, just down the block from the nightclub. The boy Miguel. Somewhere closer yet lurked the other boy, Roberto. The three had been so arranged for some time — since ten, and it was nearly one. The heat and the boredom were beginning to get to Trewitt. Not long ago he’d bought a chicken tortilla and a Carta Blanca from a street vendor, downing them both quickly, and was now just a little logy. He had not yet adjusted to Mexican time, in which nothing happens quickly, and was stifling a yawn when the boy leaped.
The boy leaped, then Trewitt. He was up in a shot, panic huge and bounding through his brain.
The car, goddammit, the car!
He sprinted up the street where, among the ’53 De Sotos and the ’59 Edsels and the ’63 Falcons, there was wedged an ’80 Mexican Chevette, rented that very morning from Hertz at the hotel under his real name, a big chance. Trewitt reached it, unlocked it, jumped in.
It was maybe 300 degrees inside — the car had been baking for about three hours in the sun. Still, Trewitt got the key into the slot, started it, cranked the wheel and pumped the pedal. The car accelerated rapidly to almost ten miles an hour and seemed to have some trouble getting into second gear, and just then the younger boy, having threaded his bold way across the tracks and through the traffic, reached him and climbed aboard.
“Go, mister, go.”
“Where? Where?”
“Down there, down there!” the boy screamed.
Trewitt rammed the car across two lanes, took a hard left just beyond the Casa de Jason, and skyrocketed over the tracks on a dirt crossing. Where the hell was the other kid? But Trewitt saw him running hard, his hair flying, his face dark and angry. He had seemed to appear from nowhere — a trick these Mexican kids had — and slid into the back.
“Okay, man, turn right fast,” he commanded.
Trewitt turned and sped into downtown Nogales, for just a few seconds under the bluffs of shacks and then into a flatter part of the city.
“She’s in a green Chevy. Just ahead. Hurry, man.”
But Trewitt could not hurry; he was suddenly in traffic up to his eyeballs.
“A Mexican freeway,” shouted Miguel, laughing.
“Goddammit,” shouted Trewitt.
“Hurry. Hurry.”
“How the hell can I hurry?” Trewitt complained. All of Mexico out for a drive that afternoon. The traffic lights all fouled up, strange directional signals giving him orders he couldn’t understand. Somebody honked and cursed. The sidewalks were dense with people who roamed in and out of the small stores and spilled aimlessly into the streets. An ice-cream wagon was parked in the middle of an intersection. Kids fled in and out.
“Wow. You almost hit that cocksucker,” said Miguel.
They moved at a stately pace. Trewitt searched ahead through the jumble of automobiles and people. He couldn’t see a goddamned —
“There! There, I see her,” yelled Roberto, who’d been craning crazily out the window.
“Watch it, kid,” Trewitt warned, but joy flooded him.
In Le Carré, this would have been handled differently, Trewitt told himself as he bombed and bobbed and lurched sweatily in and out of the traffic, guiding the sluggish yellow Chevette among the dented ’50s hulks that dominated the streets. Goddamn this woman — she had the only fast car in the country.
In Le Carré, it would have been bleak, icy professionals, drab men with sinus problems and wretched home-lives, following one another through an Eastern European drizzle. Every brick, every nuance of thought or action accounted for, every alleyway diagrammed, every bitter irony underscored; here, instead, dusty crowded streets, ice-cream wagons, fruit wagons, kids in plastic shoes, hills set with powder-blue shacks, a hot sun, a dry, dusty wind, streets whose names he’d never learn, two Mexican boys shouting into his ear.
“She turned.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Which is it?”
“She turned.”
“No, she didn’t.”