Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“The door is two centuries old,” Sam said, “almost as old as I am.”

We followed Sam into a room — and a view beyond — that caused me to catch my breath. We were on the dining level of the house — what Sam called “ el comedor ,” a spacious, open, terraced area that included the dining room itself and “ la cocina ” off to the left. The floor was covered with tiles glazed a green as deep as Dale’s eyes, somewhat imperfectly cast so that they created an illusion of a swelling sea enclosed by a waist-high wrought-iron railing that defined the terrace and provided a sense of security against the rugged terrain dropping off below the room and the real sea far below that. The view was spectacular. To the left was the wide sandy arc of the beach with its fishing dinghies belly-side up against the rain, and its thatched palapas , and the jutting peninsula where (Sam explained) the company shooting Night of the Iguana had built a functional set later destroyed by fire for a scene in the film. “This is where it all started,” Sam said. “You can thank Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for what Puerto Vallarta is today.”

The highway curved past the ruins of the Iguana set and disappeared into jungle-fringed mountains that seemed to roll endlessly into the distance, each lush succeeding peak a fainter echo of the one before it. To the right of the beach and the highway that ran above it was the Pacific itself, roiling and tempestuous today, stretching as far as the eye could see, presumably to China itself, punctuated by a pair of huge boulders closer inshore, identified by Sam as “ Los Arcos ,” so called because of the natural arches that ran through them and under them. And there — suddenly on the horizon — a rainbow!

“Daddy, look,” Joanna whispered beside me, and took my hand.

“You brought the good weather,” Sam said, and grinned. “Let’s all have a drink. Toni should be back from town any minute.”

Toni was a nineteen-year-old Swedish girl, almost as tall as Sam, blonder than my daughter, braless in T-shirt and string-tie baggy white pants, and obviously Sam’s live-in au pair, judging from the way she embraced him after she’d swept into the villa and put down the armful of packages she was carrying. She shook our hands energetically when she was introduced and then excused herself (“For just one minute, yes?”) and, her arms full of the purchases she’d made in town, hurried down the stone steps leading to the master bedroom below the living room, on the same level as the guest wing, and similarly opening onto the poolside terrace.

“You should see our bed,” Sam said like the good judge he used to be, leaving nothing open to interpretation. “It’s round, like the one that Playboy guy has in Chicago.”

We were on the living-room terrace, sipping margaritas prepared by Maria and served by Carlos, who seemed to be ideal servants, causing me to wonder why Sam wanted to fire them.

“Toni speaks six languages,” Sam said.

The six languages she spoke were Swedish (of course), English, French, Italian, Spanish, and a little bit of Portuguese. When she joined us, she was wearing one of the dresses she’d picked up in town, a white lace concoction with peek-a-boo eyelets that did nothing to discourage the notion that she was completely naked under it. She was barefoot (“It’s better so not to slip on the tiles,” she explained) and carrying in her hand the low-heeled sandals she expected to wear to dinner in town that night. “I have already made a reservation for nine o’clock,” she told Sam, who accepted the information with a judgelike noncommittal nod. It was obvious — at a little past four in the afternoon — that Toni’s “minute” in the master bedroom had included a shower, a shampoo, a careful makeup job, and the donning of what she called her “wedding dress.” She explained, rather mysteriously, that there was an errand she had to attend to, but that she’d be back before seven, and perhaps we would all like to drive into town together then, to walk around a little or perhaps to shop (“I adore the shopping here!” she said, and rolled her big blue eyes) before we had dinner at La Concha, which, she assured us, and Sam affirmed, was the best restaurant in town. She kissed Sam briefly on the cheek, said, “See you later then, okay?” and whisked off up the tiled steps to the main level, her sandals dangling in one hand, her long legs flashing briefly before she passed out of view above. A moment later, we heard a car starting outside.

“I love her to death,” Sam said, and I thought of George Harper saying almost those identical words during his interrogation, and felt a sudden pang of guilt.

There were two spiders, each the size of a fifty-peso coin, on our bathroom ceiling. I wanted to spray them dead, but Dale informed me that they’d been there before us and were entitled to their space. She named them Ike and Mike. Every time I went into the bathroom, I checked to see that they were where they were supposed to be. They seemed never to move. Neither did they have webs. They simply sat there. I wondered how they survived.

On our first morning at Casa Espina, I began to understand why Sam planned to fire his live-in couple. We were all awake and bustling by seven-thirty, but Carlos and Maria did not come into the kitchen to prepare breakfast until almost nine, Maria explaining that she had misunderstood (although Toni had given her instructions in impeccable Spanish) what time we planned to have our first meal. The meal itself was worth waiting for — freshly squeezed orange juice, sliced papaya, eggs served with bacon unlike any I’d ever tasted before, crisp and only faintly salty, rich dark coffee brimming in pottery cups Sam had bought on his last trip to Guadalajara. Sam asked us if the people who manufactured the decaffeinated coffee Brim were still broadcasting their asinine television commercials, the ones in which the tagline “Fill it to the rim — with Brim” provoked gales of hysterical laughter, as though the actors had just heard the wittiest comment of the century. I told him I didn’t watch much television.

There were no television sets at Casa Espina. Neither was there a telephone. Sam had told me, when he’d invited us, that we could be reached at the Garza Blanca Hotel — perhaps a mile or two away on the road to town — where of course there were telephones, and where the hotel manager would be happy to send a runner to the house with a message. I had left the number with Cynthia, but I did not expect her to call except in an emergency. Sam told us now that he could have a phone installed, but he preferred not to.

“The thing I like best about being here is the utter sense of serenity,” he said. “Nothing disturbs it, unless you want to call the flock of green parrots that flies past the terrace at precisely nine each morning a disturbance. I can remember being back in Calusa, Matthew, that damn phone ringing every ten minutes. I’m happy to be away from it all. I’ll never go back.”

I, too, was happy to be away from it all. But, unlike Sam, I had to go back on the fifth of December.

On Sunday morning Sam awakened us at 7:00 with the announcement that we would have an early breakfast and then take a boat to Yalapa — a beach accessible only by boat — some two hours away. We boarded the boat — a ferry, really — at 9:00 A.M. and were in Yalapa before lunch, which we ate at a beachside restaurant called Rogelio’s, where a wandering peddler tried to sell Dale the identical abalone barrette she had bought in Puerto Vallarta for forty pesos less. On the beach after lunch, I met a man who suddenly reminded me again of what was waiting for me back in Calusa.