Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

“I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to you. I will mail this record to you from the airport.”

THE RECORD continued spinning after Sara Klein’s last words. When the needle reached the end of the groove, it retracted abruptly, screeching across the record like a knife across a metal pot. Felix rescued Sara’s message and replaced it in the shiny jacket from which Satchmo’s blackberry eyes twinkled merrily.

For a long moment he held the record in his hands, poised delicately as if it were a crown without a head to rest on. Then he put it in his suitcase. He mustn’t leave a single trace; the less evidence, the better. He walked to the telephone — dial o for an outside line, 1 if you need the assistance of the operator — practicing the phrases he would use. One of them he applied to himself: “My memory has some rights,” and he recalled with a painful start that Sara Klein had been cremated that morning. It had been his obligation, professional perhaps, but certainly personal, to be there. But he couldn’t help it, he’d been too exhausted, and had slept through it in the room on Génova Street. He wanted to forget; he renounced his right to memory; and besides, no one could be held to an accounting now but Felix Maldonado.

When he heard that the phone had been picked up and that I was waiting silent on the line, he said: “When shall we two meet again?”

“When the battle’s lost and won,” I replied. “Good news?”

“Good news!” Felix said in a broken voice.

“Ha, ha!” I laughed. “Where?”

“In Genoa,” murmured Felix. “I pray you, which is the way to Master Jew’s?”

“He hath a third in Mexico, and other ventures he hath.”

“Why doth the Jew pause?” asked Felix, looking toward the suitcase containing Sara Klein’s message.

“Hurt with the same weapons, healed by the same means,” I responded.

Felix paused, and I asked: “What has been done with the dead body?”

“Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin.” There was violence in Felix’s words, but immediately he relaxed and asked in the neutral tone we’d agreed upon, “What news? I have some rights of memory.”

“Go merrily to London,” I counseled him. “Within hours they will be at your aid.”

Felix stared at his reflection in the opaque windows overlooking the bustle of Génova Street. “Lord, I am much changed.”

“A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap. To Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger,” I said, and hung up.

For a moment Felix listened to the dead buzz in the receiver, and then he, too, hung up. He heard a ring, but didn’t know whether it was the telephone or the doorbell. He picked up the receiver and heard repeated the distant flight of the bumblebee. As he hung up for a second time, he again heard the sound of muted and insistent ringing. He went to the door and, lowering his eyes, saw Simon Ayub standing there with a newspaper-wrapped package under his arm and a hotel key in his hand.

“Cool it, man,” Ayub said quickly. “I come in peace. The proof: I have the key to your room in my hand, but I rang the bell.”

“I see your mentor is teaching you a few manners.”

“Tell them to be more careful at the desk. Anyone can get in here. You ask for the key and they give it to you.”

“It’s a hotel for clandestine lovers and shitty tourists, didn’t you know?”

“At any rate, they should be more strict. This isn’t even any fun.”

Ayub tried to look over Felix’s shoulder, sniffing at the air he was tainting with his accent of clove. “May I come in?”

Felix stepped aside, and Simon Ayub entered with the blond-conquistador swagger that had so annoyed Felix ever since the Lebanese had first come to his office in the Ministry of Economic Development.

“For once, I’ll save you any unnecessary questions,” said Ayub, rocking back on the Cuban heels that increased his stature. He avoided looking at Felix. “Three to one, you would come here, and nine out of ten, you’d be in this apartment. Correct?”

“Correct,” said Felix. “But those weren’t my questions.”

“Oh, is that right?” said Ayub indifferently, scrutinizing the four walls of the apartment.

“Why didn’t anything about the attempt on the President’s life appear in the newspapers? What really happened? Who died in my name, and with my name? Why was it necessary to kill anyone? Why didn’t they capture me and kill me? Why did we have to go through the charade of my escaping from the hospital if that’s what you wanted? Who do you and your chief work for?”

“This is a nice place,” smiled Ayub, ignoring Felix’s questions. “The things that go on here!”

“Now,” said Felix, approaching Ayub like a cat. “Who killed Sara Klein?”

“No one comes here but tourists, or lovers.” Ayub continued to smile, allowing himself the excesses permitted those who are small, light-skinned, and good-looking.

“What are you doing here?”

“This isn’t the first time I’ve been here.” Ayub was unbearably cocksure. Felix grabbed his lapel.

Ayub patted Felix’s hand. “Are we feeling better now, friend? Do you want to go back and let Lichita take care of you?”

“Remember, I knocked you down with one hand, dwarf,” said Felix, still grasping Ayub’s lapel.

“I’m not forgetting anything.” Ayub’s eyes suddenly clouded with rancor. “But I prefer to bring that up on another occasion. Not now.”

Smoothly, Ayub removed Felix’s hand, as his self-congratulatory smile returned. “That’s two lapels ruined; the Director General got one with his cigarette the other day, and now you, twisting and pulling. If things go on like this, I won’t be earning enough to pay my tailor’s bills.”

“Who’s your tailor? Lockheed?” Felix stared at Ayub’s bright Braniff-colored suit.

“Classy, mmh?” Ayub smiled, stroking a lapel. “But what a way to greet a friend. Especially a friend who’s bringing you a present.”

He offered Felix the newspaper-wrapped package, which Felix accepted with marked reluctance. “Okay, I’ve had enough of this clowning around. What do you want, Ayub? If you’re thinking of beating me up, you’ll have a hard time of it unless you’ve brought a gang of gorillas with you. I’ll kick the shit out of you.”

“Aren’t you going to open my present?” Ayub smiled as if secretly he thought there was no greater gift than his presence. “It isn’t a bomb, I give you my word.” He laughed almost hysterically.

“What is it, then?”

“Open it with care, friend. It’s Sara Klein’s ashes. Don’t want to let them fly away.”

Felix checked his impulse to punch Ayub, because the eyes of the little man who smelled of clove and dressed like a DC-7 had lost any trace of mockery or aggression or complacency. His cocky attitude refuted it, but his eyes shone with a tenderness that reflected a kind of pain, a kind of shame.

“You accepted the responsibility for Sara Klein’s body?” asked Felix, the package in his hands.

“The Embassy claimed to have no knowledge of her.”

“She was a citizen of the state of Israel.”

“They said she had no relatives there and that she’d lived in Mexico longer than in Israel.”

“But you aren’t a relative.”

“All I had to do to get them to release her body to me was say that I was her friend and would take care of the details. It was easy to see she was a hot potato in the Israelis’ hands. They snapped at the chance.”

“Bernstein was her lover. It should have been up to him.”