CHAPTER TWO
One Time in Old Mexico…
(1958)
1.
The first time Donald Miller almost died was during a visit to Mexico, but later he didn’t remember anything of the event, except in dreams that dissolved moments after waking. His body remembered, though. His blood remembered, and the black sap of his subconscious.
He and his wife Michelle took a spring vacation to Mexico City. Her umpteenth visit and his first. A well-connected colleague of Michelle’s, one Louis Plimpton who had conducted a significant measure of research in the country, pulled strings and managed to get them into a suite at an international hotel. A gorgeous elevated view of the garden district, silk sheets, plush towels, fresh fruit, expensive coffee, complimentary brandies and margaritas. Walking through the mahogany double doors, Don took in the slate tiles, marble statuary, and gold-chased accents and raised a brow at his wife who merely smiled and advised him against looking the gift horse in the mouth.
Every morning began with a multi-course continental breakfast followed by guided tours of historic neighborhoods, lunches at sidewalk restaurants, then dinner and a show at the hotel nightclub, which imported Vegas talent to croon the tourists into buying a few more rounds. The days were breathless, the nights languid. They made frequent love with resurgent abandon—tied one another up with silk scarves, wore blindfolds and joked about paying a maid to join the merriment. They drank too much and for once didn’t talk of their careers or how after seven years of marriage that it might be time to start a family, or anything to do with responsibility or sobriety. That part of the trip went off like a second honeymoon and lasted for a week. Among the best weeks of young Don’s life.
One morning as the couple lay entwined and still drunk from the previous evening’s excesses, Michelle received a call from, as Don barely managed to discern, Bjorn Trent, a professor at the University of Mexico, about a dig occurring at nearby ruins, south of the city proper. Something to do with work? Or was it more claptrap regarding the missing tribe she’d become increasingly devoted to the past couple of years? Although he wasn’t entirely sure if she meant missing like the Mayans, or misplaced by anthropologists who hadn’t quite nailed down seasonal migratory patterns.
While he shared her love of the cryptic and arcane, the intensity of Michelle’s research worried him. Junk science was a keen way to get relegated to the lunatic fringe of the community. Tough enough she was a woman in a man’s world…
Answers were not forthcoming. She slammed the phone, kissed Don goodbye, throwing on her clothes as she dashed from the suite. He did not see or hear from her again for two days and two nights. This incident was to change many things between them, most especially the power dynamic all couples share, although the full effects wouldn’t be experienced until many, many years later. Good things were worth waiting for, weren’t they?
Late into the first afternoon, real worry for her safety began to gnaw him. Don played the customary role of the concerned spouse—he rang the university and received short shrift from one ill-tempered secretary or intern after another, none of them the slightest bit interested in Don’s plight, none of them knowledgeable of any professor by the name of Bjorn Trent. Thus he languished in loosened tie and shirtsleeves on the edge of the bed, phone cradled against his ear, an endless chain of cigarettes smoldering between his fingers as the sun fell and the suite darkened and grew black but for the occasional flare of his cigarette cherry and the reflected glow of the cityscape that softly swirled on the bedroom wall.
The weather turned nasty and dawn came through the gray underbellies of rainclouds and fired them crimson. The air tasted of creosote and burnt tar. Don slouched to a corner bistro in his slept-in-clothes and drank bitter coffee and sucked on a bitterer wedge of grapefruit and contemplated alerting the consulate, hesitating only because this wasn’t entirely out of Michelle’s character. She’d pulled similar, albeit less dramatic, stunts in the past, charging off to have beers with an old chum, or visit a remote site without notice or a how-do-you-do for poor worrywart Don. When the moment seized her, she could be impetuous as the wind, and just as indifferent to his feelings.
And so he lingered at the café, sucking his grapefruit and watching the rain, caught somewhere between sullen resentment of being tossed aside for this Bjorn fellow and dread that something terrible had happened—an accident, a run-in with the soldiers or the police, that she might be lying semi-conscious in a squalid hospital bed or trapped in a country prison and desperately awaiting rescue. He fumed and fretted by turns. A pigeon strutted up and shit upon Don’s shoe.
Eventually he paid his tab and hailed a taxi to the university, determined to conduct the investigation in person. Perhaps the unhelpful secretaries and grumbling interns would be of sweeter disposition when confronted with the red-eyed and bewhiskered countenance of a frantic husband.
Not so, as it turned out. He spent a frustrating eight hours routed around the labyrinthine complex of tunnels and offices above and below the main university structures, finally landing in the subbasement cubby-hole of a junior assistant to an assistant of some middle manager of a scarcely spoken-of tentacle of the bureaucracy.
The alcove was dimly lit and hot as a furnace room, which considering the location, meant the boiler might’ve been perking along nearby. A pallid functionary showed him a seat at a desk mostly obscured by piles of folders and loose-leaf parchments. There Don waited, slumped and battered and beginning to lose his mind with aggravation and no small measure of fear for Michelle’s imagined plights. He chewed the end of his tie in frustration, embarrassedly dropping it when an ascetic, elderly gentleman in a dark suit emerged from the stacks, silent and graceful and pale as a deep-sea fish and took a seat on the other side of the desk.
The elderly man wore a pair of tiny glasses that rendered his eyes quite strange. He leafed through papers atop the general stack, adjusting his glasses periodically. Presently, he fixed Don with the cold beady gaze of a bird examining a worm and said in cultured English, “I am señor Esteban Montoya. I am in command of campus security. You require my assistance.”
Don noted the choice of ‘command’ and the customarily interrogative phrased as a declaration, and the tomb-like confines squeezed in a bit tighter. “Yes, I’m Don Miller and my—”
Señor Montoya wagged his finger. “No, no. Do not bore me. I know about you, señor. I know of this wife of yours as well. You’ve annoyed my staff for many hours today. Asking questions. Now I ask the questions. Start again, por favor.” He didn’t raise his voice, merely allowed ice to inform it.
“Uhh, right. My wife is missing.”
“Your wife is not missing, señor.”
“She’s been gone for…” Don counted the hours on his fingers because he was too tired to trust his calculations. “Over thirty hours.”
“I see.” The way señor Montoya stared beadily and coldly indicated he did not see.
“No phone call. That’s really why I’m worried.”
“Because she went shopping or sightseeing in our lovely city and has not contacted you. Perhaps you missed her call while away from your hotel.”
“Calls are being forwarded to the front desk while I’m out. I checked an hour or two ago. Still nothing.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“Frankly, señor, I think perhaps you are excited for no reason.”
“Well, I don’t know how it’s done here, but where I come from—”
“San Francisco, USA.”
“Right. In the USA, if a man’s wife goes off in the morning and doesn’t return for thirty hours, we alert the proper authorities. It means something might be amiss.” Don was flushed and his dander was up. The official’s cool, condescending demeanor almost made him hope Michelle was in trouble (God forbid!). He didn’t wish to imagine the insufferable arrogance Montoya would exhibit when she came prancing along, blithe as a you please.
“Oh. That is what you do in the USA. Has this happened before?”
Don hesitated. “Er, not like this.”
“So it has happened.”
“But thirty hours! And no call! And nobody here has even heard of Professor Trent! How is that possible?”
“Your wife is an anthropologist. Well regarded. And you, señor?”
“Didn’t you say you knew?” Don and the official stared at one another. Don sighed. “Geologist. I work for AstraCorp.”
“That is not very exciting.”
“No, it’s not. Well, sometimes. There’s the caving. That can be hairy.”
“I’m sure.” Señor Montoya scribbled something with a pencil stub. He removed his glasses. The sharpness of his gaze suggested that the glasses functioned as costume jewelry. “Professor Trent, you say?”
“Yes! Thank god! I thought either I or everybody in this place had gone mad. Yes, Professor Trent. You’ve heard of him.”
“Of course. He works in Natural Sciences.”
“That’s swell. We find him, we find Michelle. They’re investigating some ruins. I don’t think she said which ones…”
The old man clucked disapprovingly. “You let your wife run away with Professor Trent? Muy mallow. He is muy handsome. He’s Swedish.”
“Swedish?”
“Si, señor. Swedish. Professor Trent is popular with the señoritas. The faculty know to keep their wives far away.”
It didn’t seem possible Don was hearing these words come from the official’s lips; it was too dreamlike, as if he’d fallen asleep at the hotel and was simply in the throes of a nightmare, any moment Michelle would flip on the lights, or leap into bed and shake him awake for the tale of her adventures.
Señor Montoya waited, unblinking.
Don squared his jaw. “Fine. You don’t want to help, I’ll go to the cops. I didn’t want to involve them, didn’t want to make a fuss, but okay.” He stood and straightened his jacket.
“Wait,” said Montoya. “Perhaps we are hasty.” He slipped his glasses over his nose and smiled, not particularly happily, but a degree or two warmer. “You don’t understand. The policia are… Let us say, unreliable. They will want money or they will do nothing. As you say in America, sit on their hands.”
“Yeah, that’s what we say.”
“I shall help you. It must not be held against me that the University was discourteous to a guest.” Montoya clapped his hands briskly and dialed the phone and began speaking swiftly in Spanish to whomever answered. The conversation concluded quickly. He said to Don, “I have friends in the policia. These men are retired, so have plenty of time to assist you. Here, I shall give you their address. Go to them and they will escort you, help with the locals, smooth any difficulties. The city is beautiful. She is also perilous for foreigners, especially after dark. These men, my associates will keep you from coming to harm.”
“That’s gracious of you, señor Montoya. Perhaps I should speak with the faculty…Trent’s supervisor. As I said, I’m not even certain which ruins they’re visiting.”
Montoya picked up the phone. He spoke rapidly, and impatiently, or so it sounded, and scribbled more notes all the while not breaking his gaze with Don, not blinking his cold eyes. “I apologize, señor Miller. Most of the administration has departed for the day. Professor Trent’s secretary provided an itinerary. Unfortunately, no site was listed and I am unaware of these mysterious ruins you mention. There are many unusual attractions here.” He tore a square of notebook paper and handed it over. “Some of those establishments are notorious. You will need Ramirez and Kinder, I think.”
There wasn’t much for Don to do thusly confounded by the certainty and finality of Montoya’s statement. Deflated, he thanked the elderly gentleman and spent half an hour negotiating the subterranean maze before pushing through an unmarked service door into soft, purple twilight. He rented a taxi and hove off to track the policemen as Montoya had directed. The taxi driver frowned upon receiving the address and muttered sourly, but he threw the car into gear and careened through the labyrinth that comprised the surface streets of the city. Meanwhile, Don blotted the rivulets of sweat cascading down his cheeks and held onto the door strap for dear life.
He was dropped in a strange and largely unlighted neighborhood in a district he wouldn’t have recognized in broad daylight. The street was unpaved and white dust covered everything, turning gray in the quickening gloom. A cat slunk through weeds in the cracked sidewalk, and a Mexican flag rustled limply where it hung from a deserted balcony rail. Faintly came the strains of a man and woman shouting and bits of music and canned laughter from a radio show, drifting through a window seven or eight stories up, the only one with any light shining out. This was disquieting—Don was wearily accustomed to the hustle and bustle of the mighty city, the pell-mell crush of millions of citizens packed like ants into a colony. Such silence, such emptiness, was unnatural, was claustrophobic and deafening.
He spied the twinkle of the cityscape between canted and decrepit brick apartments. The lights of the center of town appeared as remote as the constellations glacially coalescing overhead. This celestial glow permitted him to shuffle across the rutted avenue and barely make heads or tails of the building numbers. None of them bore titles, just numerals bolted or painted onto stucco or wood, if at all. The alleys were black cave mouths and odors of urine and decay wafted from them and his eyes and nose watered and he covered his mouth with a handkerchief. Someone whispered to him from the shadows. A trashcan lid clattered across his path, rolling on edge, rolling fast.
“Oh, Michelle,” he said and picked up the pace, dangerous as that might be, and soon decided he was at the right door because it was made of rotten wood, its white paint peeling like dead skin, and because it was the only door in the wall that was otherwise crisscrossed with fractures and blurry graffiti and a few windows with iron grilles. No handle, though; the door fit square into the frame, rusty keyhole awaiting a key he didn’t possess. Don was ashamed at the panic rising with helium lightness through his body, but the person in the alley called again, slightly louder, and there was an intercom with the letters worn off the placard, no taxi in sight, no nothing except acres and acres, and row upon row of menacing architecture. So he started pressing buttons. After a while, and a series of hang-ups, garbled responses, or plain static silence, a buzzer buzzed in the guts of the building and the horrid white door clicked open and he ducked through.
The door didn’t have a handle on the inside either. “What?” he said, his voice rebounding unpleasantly from the walls. He stood in a caved-in foyer that smelled almost as putrid as the alley had and was illuminated by a greenish-red light in a distant aperture. The floor was a partially skinned aggregate of tile, slate and gravel littered with broken glass and shreds of packaging and tatters of fliers. The walls were soft and pocked, corroded rebar exposed. A rickety metal staircase spiraled up and up into the green-red gloom. The radio program he’d heard outside echoed from the invisible upper levels, muffled.
Away from the icy stare of señor Montoya, this entire endeavor seemed less of a wise idea with each passing second. Here was the kind of place a dumb, bumbling American might easily find himself set upon by vagabonds and held for ransom, or simply murdered and dumped in a ditch. He seriously wondered if it would be better to brave the unlighted streets and find a police station, or a payphone to contact the consulate and get the highest authorities involved. However, there was the small matter of no door handle or evident method of egress from the squalid foyer.
In his moment of doubt, the clang of a heavy door thrown wide rebounded down the stairwell and the music and recorded laughter tripled in volume. Footsteps and creaking approached at length. Minutes passed. From the shadows above, a man said, “Hey, gringo. Get your ass up here, pronto!”
“Who goes there?” Don said, not quite sufficiently gullible to traipse farther into the dark without verifying the identity of the speaker first. Ransoms and ditches, ransoms and ditches. Might already be too late.
“Listen, amigo—this is a bad neighborhood. There’s some muchachos in the alley wanna slit your throat or make sweet love to your lily white ass and they gonna be tryin’ the door. I ain’t plannin’ on hangin’ out here all night. Come on!”
The man didn’t sound Hispanic and that threw Don until he recalled that Montoya had referred to the contacts as Ramirez and Kinder. Etymologically speaking, Kinder was awfully Caucasian, and that was close enough for Don, especially as he was anxious about the potential appearance of thugs who wanted to make love to his ass or cut his throat, or first one then the other. Someone knocked on the door and dragged what sounded like a nail or knife across the wood. Don ascended the stairs to the second floor landing in three or four bounds. He stopped short of a man in a turban, v-neck silk shirt, cotton harem pants, and grimy sandals.
The fellow was extraordinarily pale, as if he’d given a bonus quart at the blood drive, and his eyes glinted blue as chips of ice. He was lean and his nose hooked at precisely the right length to be character-enhancing rather than repulsive. His voice was husky and raw; a drinker’s voice. “Yeah, you’re him. I’m Ramirez. Follow me.” Don didn’t have an opportunity to reflect on this turn of events as Ramirez turned and began to climb with the speed and agility of a mountain goat, remarking over his shoulder around the fifth floor, “Hug the wall, whitebread. Some of the supports are comin’ unscrewed. Long way down.”
Don, soaked in sweat and hallucinating from exhaustion, lacked breath to respond. He hugged the wall, though, and gladly. Sixteen months since his last caving expedition and he had seen his stamina decline to the degree his belly ever so slightly pooched over his belt. Michelle hadn’t commented, although he suspected she wasn’t impressed.
On the seventh floor, Ramirez led him through a swatch of near-perfect darkness and into a shabby studio. Wallpaper hung in loose flaps and bare bulbs dangled by wires from a water-stained ceiling. A radiator thumped and rattled under the single prison cell window. In the corner a stove and antique fridge sat covered in mold. A vinyl couch, gradually coming unstuffed, and two wooden chairs were the only furniture. Boxes of newspapers were stacked waist-high, their surfaces layered with the white dust. The floor was bare wood, notched and scarred and stained. A naked woman sprawled on pile of blankets near the fridge. Her hair was so blonde it was nearly white. She snored. A cockroach balanced upon her thigh, preening its antenna. On the wall above her, a nude Aztec princess and a jaguar in velvet. Doom sliding over a purple horizon, its wormy shadow a bruise upon the princess’s bare shoulder.
A thick man in a serape sat on one of the chairs. His hair was blue-black, and thick and shaggy and fell to his waist. He hunched over a long, primitive stone knife, sharpening it with a whetstone. He glanced at Don and returned to his business.
“Kinder, it’s our wayward gringo. Gringo, this is Kinder. Wanna drink, amigo?” Ramirez didn’t wait for a reply. He threw the bolt on the door and peeked through the spy hole, as if it were possible to see a damned thing on the pitch-black landing. “Yeah, all clear. Sometimes the pendejos follow us. That’s when I reach for this.” The pale man slid a nine iron from a bag stuck between two piles of boxes, brandished and slid it back into place. “Okay. Time for a drink.” He stepped over the snoring woman and retrieved a bottle of tequila from the shelf. He squinted, then poured some booze into a dirty glass and brought it to Don. Don had a sip against his better judgment. When in Rome, and so forth. Ramirez swilled directly from the bottle and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and belched. “Yo, Benny, wanna slug?”
“Uh-uh.” Kinder spat on the stone and kept grinding. He might as well have been hunkered near a prairie campfire. The muscles in his shoulders flexed and rippled through the fabric of the serape.
Don couldn’t tell if that was a petrified worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle or a trick of the light. “Señor Montoya says you gentlemen can help me with a problem. He says you are policemen.”
“Retired,” Ramirez said. He didn’t appear old enough to rate retirement. “Montoya sent you over here. That was dumb. We woulda come to you. But whatever, hombre, whatever. What’s your problem, uh?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No, amigo. Montoya only said a gringo pendejo was making waves at his office and we needed to take care of it. We gonna take care of it. You got money, right? American dollars. No pesos.”
“Huh? Wait, he sent me to you because the cops would shake me down for cash.”
“Damned right those pigs would. Never ever trust the pigs, my friend.”
“But… You want money. And you’re a cop.”
“Of course we want money. That’s how it works. Grease the wheels so they roll, amigo. I’m no pig, I gave that up moons ago. Trust me, I know how the pigs think. You’re way better off with us. You’re with the angels now. Right, Benny boy?”
Kinder spat and slid the blade across the stone.
“Okay, man. How much you got?” When Don hesitated, Ramirez rolled his eyes and snapped his fingers. “Let’s go. How much?”
“Uhhh… Thirty-five, American. A couple hundred pesos.”
“You…say what? Thirty-five American?”
“Thirty-five American.”
“Throw him out.” Kinder didn’t bother to glance up this time.
“What the hell you doin’ here?” Ramirez said. He took away Don’s glass.
“Montoya sent me—”
“Oh, for fuck sake. Yeah, yeah. Why?”
“My wife. She’s missing.” Don found it difficult to form words. He swallowed and set his jaw. “I can write you a check for more. Or get it from the hotel, or whatever. Or, you know what? Forget it. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“Slow down, don’t be mad. I’m yankin’ your chain. Montoya said to take care of you, that’s what we do. Benny’s into reruns of Bob Hope. After he listens to his show, we talk. Come to an agreement.”
“This was a bad idea. The worst. Thanks for the drink. I’ll show myself out.” The very idea of navigating the stairway of certain death terrified Don, but he wasn’t going to accept any more grief from these seedy characters. Likely true that the police would be unsympathetic, yet such was his predicament that calling in the cavalry, an cavalry, appeared the only tenable option.
“Hang on, hang on. Thirty-five is something. Not much, but something. I dunno. Maybe I could make a call. Besides, you’ll trip and break your neck if I don’t go with you. Montoya might not want it like that. Gotta picture of your woman?”
“Here.” Don sighed. The mention of the stairs clinched it, though. He thumbed through his billfold and handed Ramirez a snapshot of Michelle standing on the lawn in her blue sundress, croquet mallet in hand, a floppy hat shading her face.
“Mother Mary, that’s a fine-looking woman,” Ramirez said in a reverential tone. He scooted over to Kinder and showed him the photo.
Kinder expertly flipped the knife and slid it under his serape. He stood and rolled his brawny shoulders and looked at Don with dispassionate hatred. “What the hell are we waiting for?”
2.
The trio descended into the lobby, Kinder at the fore, gasoline lantern lighting the way, Don in the middle, and Ramirez at the rear, tapping the nine iron against his palm. They went outside into the humid night, crossed the street, bee-lined through a deserted lot and wound up inside a locked garage that Kinder possessed the key to. Inside the garage were islands of tarps and machinery and broken cars. He whisked the canvas from a cherry Cadillac convertible. Don rode in back. Ramirez took shotgun and Kinder drove. Ramirez and Kinder chatted in Spanish, referring by the dashboard glow to the jotted itinerary Professor Trent’s secretary had provided.
Ramirez whistled. “Amigo, some of these places are not so good. Are you sure your wife would go there?”
“No. It’s Trent’s list. She went with him to see ruins.”
“I don’t understand. Your wife got a boyfriend?”
“Jesus, no. Look, they’re just friends. Not even friends; colleagues, like cops, you see?”
“But, man. These places… Okay, okay. You’re the boss. Benny will take us right there, no problem. Right, Benny?”
Kinder stepped on the gas and the Cadillac’s engine rumbled and wind whipped through Don’s hair and stung his eyes. The lights of the metropolitan heart of the City didn’t draw nearer, but slid sideways and receded as the car growled its way beneath a series of bridges and then climbed a steep switchback grade. Tenements and cinderblock and corrugated tin row houses crowned the rise. A large portion of the block appeared to be a ramshackle cantina. Cars parked at random angles in the dirt lot, the ditch and the road. People stood around drinking, or flopped in the dirt, loving or fighting, it was impossible to tell; dozens of them, and more lined the roof of the cantina like birds on a wire, bare legs hanging in front of the dead neon sign that spelled Casa del Diablo. Light fell from the stars and the batwing doors and a pole with a torch breathing medieval fire over the scene.
Don thought there must be a serious mistake. “This can’t be right,” he said.
Kinder parked in the middle of the road. There was nowhere else. “It’ll be fine,” Ramirez said as he hopped over the side, one hand on his turban. He waved impatiently at Don. “Don’t lag behind the big dogs, amigo. This is no place for puppies.”
“I’m sure it’s not where my wife would’ve come.”
“Don’t be scared, puppy. Nobody gonna lop off your head with me and Benny in your corner. Stick close, hug the wall—it’s a longer fall than them damned old stairs.” Ramirez snickered and grabbed Don’s shoulder and pushed him forward across the muddy lot and through the batwing doors into a smoggy, smolten den of crimson light and fire pit smoke coiling and roiling in a bloody miasma that rendered the occupants, of which there were scores packed into the oven, shadowy figures who stopped their boozing, dicing, and whoring to stare at Don. A yellow dog missing an eye snapped at him, all rotten teeth and lolling tongue, and tore off a chunk of his leg, putting action to the crowd’s voiceless intent. People laughed and guitars and horns kicked back to life. He’d paid the cover charge of flesh.
“Haha, Benny, he’s bleedin’ like a stuck pig. Better sop it up, amigo. These mutts got the rabies. So do the dogs, harhar! Hey, give me some dough.” Ramirez grabbed the notes Don blindly thrust at him.
They shoved him into a chair in the corner and he hissed through his teeth with agony as blood soaked his pants leg and he patted it with his handkerchief. Too much blood though.
“Ay caramba! Poochie took a whole piece,” Ramirez said and pressed a bottle of warm beer into Don’s hand. “Drink. It helps!”
Don swallowed and while he did, Ramirez cackled and dumped a stream of whiskey from a bottle he’d uncapped directly onto the seeping wound. White fire did a tarantella in Don’s brain and he nearly fell backward off the chair. Ramirez caught him.
“Shh, amigo. Don’t show no weakness. Gotta be strong, gotta have cojones. Dog eat dog in this town, harhar!”
No question remained in Don’s mind that he’d royally screwed up with this particular operation. Instead of getting out of a hole, he’d continued to dig for China. He lay his sweaty forehead against the table and prayed for the searing pain in his thigh to relent, for the hyenas to vanish in a puff of smoke, for the whole quagmire to dissolve and reveal itself the effluvium of a nightmare. None of that happened. Instead, Ramirez massaged his shoulders while raising the bottle with his free hand and swilling inhuman amounts of tequila and muttering what had to be a slaughtered rendition of a Mexican lullaby.
Kinder returned, a couple of men in tow. “Good news, gringo. These guys know where the chica and her boyfriend went.”
“Not her boyfriend, damn it!”
“What’s that? Hey, this is excellent luck.” Ramirez shook Don none too gently. “Open your eyes, sleepyhead. Clubbo and Günter here have brought the good word. Gimme your wallet.” He snatched the remainder of the cash and stuffed the deflated wallet into Don’s shirt pocket. He glanced down and shook his head sadly at all of the blood on the floor. “Man, he really bit the shit outta you. You need to see a vet.”
Clubbo was a silver-haired Cuban in a white shirt and a shell necklace—Ramirez explained his friend was on the lam from revolutionary forces on his island. Günter was European. His hair was nearly as long as Kinder’s, but dirty blond, and his beard was full and curly. He wore a leather jacket and leather pants and resembled an Ostrogoth who’d stepped out of a time machine, as painted by Frank Frazetta lacking only a sword in his hand and a nubile maiden wrapped around his leg. He’d tattooed skulls on his knuckles and a thick spiky bracelet adorned his left forearm. Kinder said something about a stint in a Russian gulag.
Neither of the newcomers spoke. Their gazes slid over Don and fastened to the cash in Ramirez’s fist. Ramirez gave each a share. The men frowned and pocketed the loot. A topless bargirl with tits floppier than the hat Michelle wore in her snapshot sashayed over with a platter of beer and another bottle of rotgut tequila and everybody had a snort, including Don, who demurred and tried to squirm away, but Kinder pulled back his head by the hair and Ramirez cannon-balled the medicine down his throat and laughed as the American coughed and choked and thrashed around.
“So your lady, she’s a scientist or some shit,” Ramirez said, and knocked back another shot of hooch. He looked like an albino devil and the stone at the center of his turban glistened like a third eye, flickered with the inner fire of the Fabled Ruby Ray powering on. “Yeah, this is the question of the hour. Why she fuckin’ around the ruins, huh? People around here don’t appreciate gringas sneaking into our ruins. Uh-uh.”
“Maybe she just fucking around,” Kinder said, gazing at the door, one hand hidden under the table like he was waiting for John Wayne to strut in and open fire.
Don laughed crazily, and red hate shot through his vision. He reached across the spilled drinks, smashed tortilla chips and half-full beer bottles, and socked Kinder in the mouth. Don had boxed a smidge in his youth and this was a decent blow, delivered from the lower back and hip, thrown loose as an uncoiling chain until it snapped tight on impact. The kind of blow that when delivered with twelve-ounce gloves could lay a man on his backside. Bare knuckle, it was a wicked shot. It felt like hitting a sandbag.
Ramirez and Clubbo yanked him back. Each man drove his thumb under Don’s clavicles and he lost most of the feeling in his arms and chest.
Kinder blinked and casually flicked a drop of blood from his dented lip. “Don’t want me talking about your puta that way, eh? Okay, I’m sorry, gringo.”
Again Don lunged and again the men restrained him, although this time Ramirez punched him in the heart and Don’s vision went for a few seconds, along with his wind.
Kinder smiled slightly when the American ceased gagging and retching. “Forgive me. Sometimes I forget that not everyone is an animal. Lupe,” he nodded at Ramirez, “give our amigo another drink. He needs it. You smoke, amigo?” He drew a cigarette from a plain white pack and lighted it with a match he struck on the sole of his boot. “Nah, you don’t smoke. Climbing in and outta them caves, you gotta be strong.” He flexed his biceps mockingly. “Too much smoke robs your strength. But listen, so does a woman. Don’t hit me, hombre. I’m giving you some wisdom. Women like your wife, women who wear pants and run around with handsome strangers, you gotta watch out for those bitches. They don’t care for nothing but themselves. I’m sorry to tell you this. It’s the way of the world.”
“Piss up a rope,” Don said, hoping for Gary Cooper but probably channeling Andy Griffith. Cursing wasn’t his forte, however the occasion seemed to merit it. The others had released his arms, but he’d calmed and his urge to kick the Mexican’s ass or die trying had subsided. His rage smoldered, tempered by the change in Kinder’s timber, how the man’s rough features had smoothed and taken on the aspect of an entomologist preparing to dissect an insect. Genie-like, Louis Plimpton’s blandly superior face came to mind. “I sure as hell smoke.” He clumsily snatched a cigarette from stoic Clubbo and lighted it from the candle in the bowl because his fingers weren’t working very well. “How’d you know I cave?”
“Señor Miller, how do you think? Montoya told me over the phone.”
“Yeah? Damned short conversation.”
“Montoya is concise.”
Don’s pain receded to a dull throb in the background wash of light and noise. “You guys aren’t cops.”
“Real bright one here,” Ramirez said.
Kinder sighed. “Shut up, Lupe. Look, amigo. Everything is going to be all right. The señora is fine. She’ll come home tomorrow as if nothing ever happened. What say we enjoy a few more drinks then get you to your hotel and you forget about rushing into the hills looking for her and this Trent pendejo?”
“Do you know where my wife is?”
“Si, señor. Can’t you relax and have a nice evening? Let your troubles resolve themselves. As I say to you before, these wayward women will only bring you sorrow. No use chasing after them like a dog chasing chickens.”
“I say we round up some putas and go to the donkey show!”
“If you aren’t cops,” Miller said, “then what are you?”
“He’s not gonna listen to reason and get whores with us,” Ramirez said. “Montoya said so.”
“Shut up, Lupe,” Kinder said.
“Easy, easy. Just sayin’.”
“Dirección Federal de Seguridad.”
“Mexican Intelligence? Where’s your suit, your badge?”
“I hope you can keep a secret, señor Miller.” Kinder stared coldly at Don, and it was similar to the creepy look Montoya had used, except Kinder was built like a truck and carried a knife large enough to slice off a man’s arm. “Sure, yes. You’re all right, Miller. We can be friends.”
“Mexican Intelligence… Good lord. You go after the real bad guys.”
“Si, señor. We go after the bad men.”
“You’re surveilling Michelle? What on earth for? Is that legal?”
“Everything is legal in México, especially for us, stupido,” Ramirez said and snickered in that ugly manner of his. “We make the rules.”
“We’re not watching señora Miller. She’s not important. We’re watching Professor Trent.”
“Oh, that rat bastard. How I’m growing to hate that sonofabitch.”
“Hey, there’s the spirit,” Ramirez said and slapped Don’s shoulder.
“What’s he mixed my poor sweetie up in? Oh, god, it’s nothing to do with the Reds, is it? Jesus, she’ll be blacklisted…”
The men exchanged glances. Kinder said, “Nothing to concern you, or your wife. This is an internal matter, a matter of state security. Come, finish your beer and we’ll take you home. Tomorrow all will be well.”
“ ‘An’ all manner of things will be well’,” Ramirez said.
“Lupe, for the love of fuck, please shut up.”
“Okay, I am.”
“No way, Jose,” Don said, a tiny bit drunk on top of everything else. “She isn’t spending another night doing god knows what with Mr. Sweden. No, sir. I insist, secret agent Kinder, sidekick Ramirez, your two goons, that you escort me at once to these precious ruins of yours.” He slapped the table for emphasis.
“But, señor… What will you do if we find them?”
“I’m…going to challenge him to a duel. Anybody got a gun?” Don swayed in his seat, steadied by Ramirez and one of the aforementioned goons, Günter.
“Ay yi yi,” Kinder said and again glanced at his friends. “So be it. Montoya promised you’d prove intractable. Lupe, my apologies. To the car, then. Ondalay.”
3.
The brutes Günter and Clubbo assisted Don to the car as his legs had all but given out from exhaustion after the adrenaline rush, loss of blood, and the free-flowing booze. The trio sat in back, Don wedged in the middle, his head resting on Clubbo’s shoulder. Clubbo smelled pretty good; a combination of liquor, smoke, and aftershave. Don drifted in and out of reality as Kinder dropped the hammer and they hurtled along a winding road that led ever farther from the city into the night.
“My people were Celts,” Ramirez said.
“Celts, really?” Don was slurring. “I thought there was something different about you.”
“My clan is special. Real black sheep. We were into the groovy shit, hombre. We danced to the music of the old black gods.”
“Celestial music,” Kinder said, his voice heavy with melancholy. “Those must’ve been the days.”
“Don’t be sad, compadre. The wheel rolls round and round…all hail Old leech!” And this shout was echoed by Kinder and the heretofore silent Clubbo and Günter.
“My wife would love to talk with you,” Don said.
“Oh, yeah!”
“Shut, up, Lupe! The fucker will climb over there and kick your ass.” Kinder feathered the brakes and slewed the big car wildly, throwing everyone around.
After they’d straightened out and things were calm for a few moments, Ramirez said as if muttering to himself, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the fall of the Western Roman Empire in Britannia, we were there, man, sticking the shiv to those wop fucks. We limed our hair and fought butt naked, painted in blue and red. We set ourselves on fire, hacked off the heads of our enemies and made fruit bowls outta their skulls. Got one in my pad, too. Fought with copper and bronze and flint. Men fucked men when putas were scarce, and the dogs ran scared. Everybody ran scared. So don’t screw with me.” His eyes were wild in the rearview and Don waved at him, limply.
“Nobody’s screwing with you,” Kinder said. The pair passed a marijuana cigarette back and forth and the Cadillac swooped in broad, stately arcs across the faded centerline. Too dark to be certain, but it felt mountainous.
“I’m okay,” Ramirez said after taking a manly drag on the cigarette. He popped his eyes at Don in the mirror. “Be good, puppy. You’re under surveillance.”
Something huge and dark blotted the stars, and snuggling into Günter’s armpit, Don realized his instincts were absolutely correct—they were in the mountains. Even then, the powerful Cadillac toiled beneath the shadow of a tower of rock. The warm wind grew dense with the tang of pollen and sap, a cloying sauna humidity that instantly stuck Don’s shirt to the small of his back and caused him to imagine Aztec ziggurats wreathed in vines and a terrible shadow of winged lizard gliding across the rainbow landscape, an Aztec Princess, nude as fire and over her shoulder a storm cloud, a cloud of something at any rate, a ball of raveling yarn crackling with lightning and closing fast. He groaned and Ramirez barked laughter, and then the car stopped.
Don tried to make a break as soon as the doors opened; jackknifed his head into Günter’s jaw and then flung himself across Clubbo, elbowing and clawing the big man as he went. Günter wasn’t any more fazed by the headbutt than Kinder had been by getting socked back at the cantina. The brute caught Don’s belt and he and Clubbo threw him from the Cadillac. Don landed face down in the dirt and the goons casually kicked him in the ribs and thighs until he couldn’t suck enough air to scream.
Kinder called a halt to the beating.
Günter and Clubbo helped Don to his feet and led him by the headlights’ shaft to a mossy boulder and propped him against it. Things happened as if in a dream—someone stripped his jacket and shirt; a quick yank and there went his belt and pants, everything dumped into a canvas bag Kinder held open. Don didn’t resist; his limbs were heavy as lead and focusing was impossible.
In his delirium he was far past resistance or holding grudges. He said, “Am I being Shanghaied?” and everyone chuckled and Ramirez patted his arm, careful to stay clear of the blood pumping from his nose and the gore yet trickling down Don’s leg from the savage dog bite. To Don, his thigh and lower leg were a mass of grue, no better than a deer haunch smashed by a car, but he felt only the dullest sensation of pain at this point. Insects churred in the thick brush that surrounded them. Rocks and gravel everywhere, the dim outline of a cliff just at the edge of the headlights’ glow; a cave mouth. Someone had painted an inverted crucifix and a crude devil face against the pale rock of the mountainside and other, obscure symbols and glyphs whose significance escaped him. “Are these the ruins?”
“There are many, many ruins in Mexico.” Kinder straightened and handed the bag to Clubbo. Clubbo walked to the car and tossed the bag inside. “There are many wonders. I regret to say, compadre, that these ruins your wife spoke of do not exist. I could not take you somewhere that does not exist, so I bring you here. This is the Cave of the Ancients. A dangerous, dangerous place, unless you know where to step. There is a hole inside the entrance. Not far, not far. It may interest a man such as yourself. The hole is bottomless. I ask myself if such a thing as a bottomless hole is possible. We shall go see it now, eh?”
Don briefly contemplated the panic that should’ve coursed through him. He felt most excellent, adrift on a pink cloud. These men were his facilitators, solicitous to his every need, and his need was to continue floating, to feel the balmy breeze rushing over his damp skin. Michelle’s face bobbed to the surface of his muddled consciousness and gazed at him with loving disapproval, then burst into vapor and troubled him no more as the men hoisted him upon their shoulders and carried him like a football hero. Ramirez walked ahead with a torch he’d fashioned from a stick and some rags and by that queer and reddish light, devils, or the shadows of devils hooked to the shoes of the men and capered across the stony earth.
The walk lasted an eon and the stars hardened and fossilized in the heavens and Don’s blood slowed to stagnancy in his veins. Ramirez began to sing as the path rose and the group came to the mouth of the cave, and though completely incapacitated physically and mentally, Don was amazed by the size of it. The thing yawned like the spiked maw of the Ouroboros and what Ramirez sang was a song of death, of sacrifice.
They proceeded into the cave and along a tunnel. The floor was sandy and occasionally the men’s shoes crunched upon bits of shattered bottles of revelries past. And they continued through a snaky side passage, emerging at length into a great cavern. Stalactites spiked the ceiling and the torchlight reflected from deposits of quartz and mica. Even to Don’s reduced sensibilities, the chamber felt ancient and malign, a cyst in the granite sinew of the mountain, and fear kindled in his belly. A feeble thing, his fear, pacified and quieted by whatever drug his companions had slipped him at the cantina.
“Aw, shit,” Don said to no one in particular as he was laid across a slab of worked stone with a smooth concavity marking its axis and a series of deep grooves carved into its foot. The surface of the slab had been fashioned and planed so that it canted toward the edge of a pit. The pit spanned perhaps six feet. An odor of decay wafted from its depths.
The men lighted more torches that were fixed to sconces of blackened iron in the walls. Each man stripped to the waist then donned the headdress and mask of a demon or beast, or demonic beast, and joined his fellows in the wicked chant, this accompanied by the blowing of reeds and clashing of cymbals and piercing ululations that echoed most alarmingly from rock that had seen slaughter and sadism aplenty in its epochs as sentinel and receiver of blood.
Clubbo and Günter were monkey demons, Kinder a bird of prey with a yellow beak, while Ramirez had donned the trappings of a monstrous bat. Kinder took the ugly stone dagger from his belt and held it loosely, like an ice pick. Ramirez brought forth a similarly brutal stone tomahawk and danced recklessly near the pit, waving a blazing torch in his other hand.
Their dreadful song reached a crescendo. Don considered struggling, tried to flex his hand, tried to swing upright, and found that his extremities were beyond leaden and now short-circuited, nerveless lumps. He closed his eyes and waited. There came then a strange and hypnogogic interlude which might’ve lasted seconds or minutes and the song resumed altered; shriller and discordant. When he managed to summon the strength to look, he beheld the wondrous sight of Ramirez levitating as if a puppet jerked off his feet by a string, then flying in reverse into the greater darkness of the cavern. He shrieked piteously and flailed with the torch and vanished.
Don couldn’t see any of the other men as their screams and wails diminished in opposite directions. However, the acoustics were treacherous. He fell unconscious for a much longer duration. When he awoke, the torches had died, leaving him in blackness. His body and mind were free of the drugged lassitude. He shook violently with chill and pent animal terror and those were bad moments.
Someone whispered, “Let the dark blind you on the inside, Don. There are frightful things.”
A family bound for market found him on the road near a small southern village two days later; cut, bruised, suffering from exposure and a gash on his temple likely received in a fall. He’d lost twenty pounds and skated very near death. Michelle came with the police and officials from the U.S. Consulate. Even Dr. Plimpton frantically hopped a flight and ensconced himself in the hallway, berating himself for some mysterious reason Don was too addled to comprehend.
She sobbed and lay with him on his hospital bed and kissed him a thousand times, explaining that he’d completely misunderstood her last words the morning they’d parted—she and Professor Trent hadn’t visited any ruins. There were no ruins. Instead, they’d attended an informal lecture at the home of a German scientist at his villa in the hills. No phones, as the fellow was a notorious recluse. The bus had blown a gasket, so the guests were detained for nearly a day waiting for fresh transportation. An awful misunderstanding.
Naturally, the local authorities questioned him regarding who he’d spoken with and where these people had taken him. Already, the details of names, faces, and events slipped through his memory as eels through a skein.
Don remembered nothing of his escape from the cave. Within a few years, his only solid recollection of that Mexico vacation was the superheated romance with Michelle in their hotel and vague impressions of snooty bureaucrats, menacing street thugs, and a parade or party where everyone had worn horrible masks. The rest was simply smoke. For her part, Michelle never spoke of it again.