She shook her head sadly. “I am so sorry, senor.”
The folded twenty-peso note made a tiny whispering sound as I rubbed it back and forth on the edge of the counter.
She tilted her pretty head to one side. “There is a honeymoon couple and they leave today by car. They are in a cottage. If you wish to wait for two, three hours...”
“I wish to, thank you. Can you take care of this?” I picked up my bag, hoisted it over the counter, shoving both it and the peso note toward her.
She swung the bag down with ease for such a tiny girl. “You will have cottage twenty-one, señor. A boy can show you where it is if you wish.”
“I’ll find it, thanks.”
I registered and took a walk around the grounds. The palms were thick on either side of the curving paths. The flowers were vivid and a few brilliant parrots, who looked as though they’d flown through a paint shop, scolded and squawked in the trees.
The huge swimming pool was occupied by about four swimmers, but there were a good score more lounging around the apron of the pool in the sun and sitting with drinks in the clusters of chairs in the shade. A tiny marimba band made the appropriate gourd noises inside the open shed-like affair that housed the bar. All very plush.
In my dark Mexico City suit, even with my coat over my arm, I felt like a very sombre blackbird among these gayly colored vacationers. A few people looked at me with idle curiosity and I could see them mentally labeling me as a recent arrival.
I stood at the end of the path and looked across the pool. Various characters of both sexes were trying to achieve the shade of whole wheat toast. A few had succeeded. One of them was a woman in a white bathing suit, stretched out on a narrow mattress on her back. Her hair was in a bandanna and she wore sun glasses with enormous white rims, startling against the tan of her face.
Circling the pool I walked up to her, stood looking down at her. I cast a shadow across her face.
Her mouth didn’t change. I couldn’t see her eyes. But the relaxed fingers of her right hand slowly curled into a white-knuckled fist, and then as slowly uncurled.
“Hello, Burnsie,” she said in the flat, harsh voice I remembered so well. Six years since we had seen each other.
She had oiled herself with some sort of lotion. The sun had turned it into tiny beads against her brown, firm skin. I eased myself down onto the concrete, feeling the oven heat of it through my pants.
She reached for the offered cigarette. She did not raise her head as I lit it. She sucked smoke deep into her lungs and, leaving the cigarette between her lips, exhaled slowly.
“You’re better looking, Burnsie. I like the lines at the corners of your eyes and around your mouth. You don’t look like the boy reformer any more.”
“Thanks.”
“Something smartened you up, Burnsie.”
“You, and a few other things. I had a bad time getting over you, Beth.”
She took another drag and rubbed the cigarette out against the tiles. She propped herself up on one elbow. “You think you did get over me, Burnsie?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“This isn’t any accident, meeting like this, is it, Burnsie?”
She’d be too smart to fool that way. I said, “No, it isn’t any accident.”
“I didn’t think it was.” She stood up with one quick, easy motion, stood looking down at me. She was good to look at. I felt the faint twist of an old knife in a wound I thought long healed. “Get a table for two in the shade, Burnsie. I’ll go scrub off this grease.”
She was back in twenty minutes. As I watched her walk toward the table, I remembered the funny awkwardness she had had the first time I had seen her in the show at Zarro’s. She still had that awkwardness, but a proud way of carrying herself.
She wore one of those white lace Mexican blouses with elastic in the neckline so that it can be pulled down over bare shoulders. Her hand-painted skirt was very full and quite long.
I stood up. There was amusement and irony in the gray-eyed look she gave me, along with the gamin smile.
“Burnsie, as I was dressing, I remembered the time you told me that my hair was like old silver coins in the moonlight. Remember that?”
I flushed as I sat opposite her. “I remember it, Beth. It was and it is.”
There was no point in antagonizing her. And her hair was just as it had been when I first met her. Yet the planes and lines of her face had suffered a subtle thickening, a coarsening. Her nose had spread a bit, it seemed, and her brows were thicker, her cheek bones more solid, the mouth wider, heavier. She was no longer beautiful. Yet she was extraordinarily attractive. Sitting at the table with her was like trying to look at an oil painting from too close. There was an aliveness and vitality and color about her.
She wanted a planters’ punch, and so I ordered two. We were sparring, avoiding the subject, mentally circling each other with guard held high.
“Wally is out impressing his personality on the sailfish today,” she said. “He’ll be back in two hours. Five o’clock.”
“Do you think he’ll be difficult?” I asked.
She shrugged her bare brown shoulders in a gesture I remembered from a long time back. “He’s smart. He knows there’s no case without a complaint.”
“But shouldn’t he be afraid of my mentioning his whereabouts to the wrong people? The people on his side of the fence?”
She smiled, almost with pity. “Poor old Burnsie! By the time you could say Acapulco to the wrong people, we’d be in Guatemala or Peru or the South of France. Our papers are in order, you know.”
“But you haven’t been too smart. I followed you and traced you here.”
“You’re smarter than they are, Burnsie.”
“Not quite. There’s somebody else on the trail, too.”
She sat very still. One hand slid up to the slender brown column of her throat. With that hand she reached for her glass. “Don’t kid me, Burnsie.”
“I’m not.” I looked into her eyes as I said that, and I saw her doubt change to belief and to fear.
She said, “I heard you went to work after the war for Uncle Sam.”
“And so you can guess why I want to see Schaegan.”
“I can guess.”
Chapter Two
No Time for Memories
We had another punch, tall and dark and cool and strong. I had missed lunch. The punch made my lips feel numb and gave the pool an unrealistic look. It made the marimba music sound better. And it made Beth look better to me.
I wanted to find out what she really thought. So, when the two punches melted a hole in my caution I leaned toward her and said:
“Why did you do it, Beth? I understood you were doing all right with your place. Why did you tie up with Schaegan?”
Her laugh was very short and very bitter. “Doing all right? I was going snow blind from looking at the empty tables. I was in hock to my ears. The syndicate was bleeding me. I went to see Schaegan. I thought he was top man in the syndicate. I told him that either the bite was reduced, or I would have to fold. Schaegan told me that it wasn’t his decision to make, but that he’d try to make the big boss see the light. I went back to see Schaegan several times. It turned out to be — one of those things. He couldn’t get the bite reduced, not even after we were married.”
That answered some of my questions, my personal questions. But not the business questions. Wally Schaegan could answer those — if I could convince him that I could keep him out of trouble after he gave me the information.
“Are you happy, Beth?” I asked.
“You’re getting drunk, Burnsie.”
“Maybe I am. And maybe it’s important to me to know if you’re happy.”