Джеймс Грейди - The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

José Antonio waits for the man to move on to other duties, then stretches out on top of the tarp and the three stacks of clothing it covers. Drowsing on the makeshift pallet, he learns his first lesson of what it means to have money: the rich often endure boredom.

He is confused by his feelings. Already today he has done more, seen more, said more than he has often managed in a whole week in Bejucal. Even as he considers what is happening, the surging of the boat rocks him to sleep.

The crack of a parrot’s caw tumbles him awake. He slips to his feet from the bales on which he has slept. The parrot, perched on a rail of the gunnel, squawks off to a tree overhanging the bank of the river. The branch bobs under its weight.

José Antonio is hungry. He doesn’t know how long he has been asleep, but it is still morning. A dream nags at him until it fades like something big just beneath the surface of water, a pirarucu maybe, going deeper. He peels a banana.

It goes on like this, the sleeping, the eating, the jungle and its river closing behind them, until José Antonio would believe they have been traveling a week, a month, whatever he was told.

Over the next days, the boat fills its holds, and the deck grows impassable with bales of textiles, cages of croaking macaws, tin vats of tortoises clambering over one another, tubs of something that looks like human fingers floating in vinegar. The nooks where one might doze away the afternoon under a canvas awning are filled with loose cargo. But José Antonio hardly notices. He paces the bow, cramped as it is, like the caged ocelot or the little peccary leashed to a cleat.

He grows impatient to arrive and fulfill the vow he has repeated as a prayer for nearly as long as he can remember. But always nagging him through the ten thousand nights — no, more — he knelt before the Virgin was how to carry out his promise to avenge his mother, how with his father fled and no means to follow? How, without help, could he track the murderer across that wilderness of years? How could he hunt a beast that had hidden itself in a thicket of time, whose black hair had turned to ash, whose handsome face sagged under a mask of wrinkled age, whose fierce eyes had dulled to tarnished coins? But it is all unfolding now, the path he could not see, like the brown river snaking silently through the impenetrable jungle all the way to Puerto Túrbido.

José Antonio will not be lulled again, not by the thrum of engines beneath his feet, not by the lassitude of a damp breeze, not by the sway of a loose-rigged boom. The lethargy of the jungle — the plodding gait of the ai slung along the underside of a dripping branch, the tapir’s shamble through giant cane grass, the slumber of the anaconda — yields to the wariness of prey, the watchfulness of predator. He is alert, straining to see beyond the next bend.

Eventually, the next bend reveals a stand of huts, tottering on stilts sunk in the muddy wastes of the lapping river. Then, farther on, children peer from tin sheds in a clearing.

The jungle thins. Trees shrink to bush. Bush droops to brush. Brush crumbles to burned plains. Fires smolder across the horizon.

People emerge from the smoke. At first, one or two straggle out of shadow. Then the shadow thickens into a knot of human figures. Suddenly the whole plain is writhing with creatures, moving in aimless circles and dark with soot.

On both sides of the river, the mud banks are stamped with footprints, littered with refuse. The boat glides on.

Mud hardens into rude walls, rises into raw houses. Incinerators, like huge tree trunks, spire beneath the dense foliage of their yellow smoke. Foam bubbles halfway across the river wherever a factory squats on the bank. Rusted warehouses, barges lining their wharves, fill the spaces between.

The captain slows his vessel as it approaches a complex of whitewashed buildings and docks. Signaling with one long shrill of his whistle followed by one short blast, he waits for an echo from the harbormaster, then comes about and eases his boat against the wharf of a two-story shed.

Longshoremen are already on board, hefting cargo on their shoulders, before José Antonio can bid the captain farewell and make his way down the gangplank.

He follows the wharf along the river past warehouse after warehouse until it swings into the harbor itself. Jutting from the murky orange sunset behind them, the cathedral’s three steeples, flanked by the cupola of the old colonial garrison and the little dome of the city hall, tower over the masts and the smokestacks of ships at anchor.

For the first time since his journey began back in Bejucal days and days ago, he is afraid. The welter of people, the clanging of sounds, the labyrinth of buildings — he stands confused in the church’s vast plaza and doubts himself. Seeking refuge through the small wooden entrance set into one of the enormous carved doors of the cathedral, the man kneels before the statue of the Blessed Mother crushing the serpent Satan under her heel. Banks of candles flicker at her feet. José Antonio prays for guidance and, lifting his eyes, recognizes the snake: it is a bushmaster. The knowledge calms him; he realizes, whatever Puerto Túrbido may look like, he is still in the jungle.

The other great square of the city, the Plaza of the Peace of December the Third, is only a short walk from the widow’s house in which José Antonio has taken a room.

Awaking at dawn, the man sits upon his bed until eight, when Señora Machado serves breakfast to her boarders. She is young to have lost a husband, he thinks, peeling a mango the woman has offered him from a blue bowl.

As she has instructed, he follows the Boulevard of the Revolution the few blocks to the plaza, about which all the government offices assemble like ornate stools around a flowered carpet, or so it looks to him as he regards the squat buildings bordering the square.

The Office of the National Lottery is on the second floor of the National Bank. Though the facade of the bank is gilded, the man is disappointed to discover at the top of a rear staircase that a simple door with a milky pane is the threshold to his future. Entering, José Antonio is surprised to join others, Indians and country folk like himself, milling about a vestibule fenced off from the main office by a gated mahogany railing.

Two clerks, each at his own desk, argue quietly with the people who sit across from them. One man, his back to the crowd in the vestibule, pounds the desk. The clerk speaking to him lifts both hands as if offended and closes the ledger lying between them. The angry man hunches his shoulders; even at a distance, it is obvious he is apologizing and cajoling the clerk to reopen the book. The young clerk, with a disdainful snort, relents. José Antonio notices that, against the far wall beneath a large window, the chief clerk drinks from a delicate cup and watches his two subordinates.

The waiting area grows more crowded. An hour passes before José Antonio finally swings open the mahogany gate and stands before a desk. The clerk gestures for him to sit and asks for his ticket. When he reaches behind his neck and lowers his knife in its sheath onto the desk, he sees fear blanching the young man’s face. He doesn’t like the clerk, the way the fellow made another man beg just an hour ago. So he holds the sheath in one hand and slowly draws the blade with the other. The clerk’s frightened chatter is silenced abruptly when José Antonio pounds the lip of the sheath in his fist against the desktop. Raising the sheath, he reveals a crumpled blue ticket.

The nervous laugh as the pale hands of the clerk smooth the paper pleases José Antonio. He is getting his bearings in this stone jungle.

The clerk, comparing the ticket to his ledger, suddenly bends closer to the page. Excusing himself, he retreats to the desk of the chief clerk, where he waves the blue paper and whispers excitedly. He returns and tells José Antonio his superior will handle the case.