Trevor waved the pistol in Felix Maldonado’s direction. “You may leave, Señor Maldonado. Bear me no rancor. After all, you’ve won this round. You have the ring. I repeat: it is of no value to you. Go quietly, and ruminate on how Rossetti gathered facts little by little, partially from the offices of the Director General, partially from Minatitlán and other centers of the Pemex operation, and delivered the raw information to Bernstein. It was your professor who put everything in order and turned it into coherent cybernetic data. Don’t worry; Rossetti prefers the responsibility of a crime resulting from conjugal problems to one caused by political indiscretions. On the other hand, our unfortunate Angelica, now united with her homonyms, will not be enjoying her customary privilege of unbridled chatter.”
“And what about me, aren’t you afraid I’ll talk?” said Felix, with sinking spirits.
Trevor/Mann laughed, and again assumed a British accent. “By gad, sir, don’t push your luck too far. Talk is precisely what I want you to do. Tell everything. Transmit our warnings to whoever it is who employs you. Allow me to demonstrate my good faith. Do you want to know who killed Sara Klein?”
Felix could only nod, humiliated before the assurance of the man with the features of a Roman senator, the stubborn lock of hair, and the anachronistic interjections. Merely by mentioning her name, Trevor/Mann was verbally pawing Sara, the way Simon Ayub had physically pawed her in the mortuary.
“Look to the nun.” A veil like ashes masked his gray eyes.
“And another thing, Señor Maldonado. Don’t try to return here with bad intentions. Within a few hours, Wonderland Enterprises will have disappeared. There will be no trace either of this office or of Dolly or of myself, your servant, as you Mexicans say with such curious courtesy. Good afternoon, Señor Maldonado. Or, to quote your favorite author, remember when you think of the Rossettis that ambition should be made of sterner stuff, and when you think of me, remember that we are all honorable men. Pip, pip!”
He bowed slightly toward Felix Maldonado.
AGAIN he was driving toward Galveston, pursued now by a black angel of presentiment but also driven by the desire to put the greatest possible distance between him and Angelica’s horrible death. He had been assured in the offices of the Port Authority that the Emmita would dock punctually in Coatzacoalcos at five o’clock on the morning of August 19. Captain Harding’s schedule went like clockwork. Felix drove by the little gray house beside the exhausted, oily waters of the Gulf. The door was unlocked. He went in, and smelled tobacco and beer gone flat and scraps of ham sandwich in the garbage. He resisted his longing to spend the night there, far from Houston and Trevor/Mann and the Rossettis, one very dead, one a walking corpse. He was afraid his absence from the Hotel Warwick might cause suspicion, so a little after midnight he returned to Houston.
For the same reasons, he decided to stay at the hotel through Wednesday. He bought a return ticket to Mexico City for Thursday afternoon. By then, the Emmita would have reached Coatzacoalcos and Rosita and Emiliano would have received the ring from Harding’s hands. Felix engaged a cabana by the swimming pool, sunned, swam, and had a club sandwich and coffee for lunch. He went in swimming several times, hoping to cleanse his memory of Angelica, but he kept his eyes open underwater, afraid he would find her broken body at the bottom of the pool.
Everything seemed normal in the hotel, and the Rossettis’ room was quietly emptied of their belongings and occupied by another couple. Felix could hear them from the balcony; they spoke English and were talking about their children in Salt Lake City. It was as if Mauricio and Angelica had never been in Houston. Felix faded into the protective coloring of the hotel and took advantage of the dead hours to try to order his thoughts, an undertaking that led nowhere.
Thursday afternoon, he left behind him the burning plains and humid skies of Texas. Soon the sterile earth of northern Mexico dissolved into dry, dark peaks, and these yielded before the truncated volcanoes of the center of the Republic, indistinguishable in form from the ancient pyramids that perhaps lay beneath their petrified lava. At six o’clock in the evening, the Air France jet hurled itself down into the circle of mountains half hidden in the lethargic haze of the Mexican capital.
Felix took a taxi to the Suites de Génova, where they asked whether he wanted the same room. Thanks to his memorable tips, they fawned over him as they led him to the apartment where Sara Klein had been murdered. The thin and oily employee ventured the comment that Felix looked very well after his trip. As he removed the white sombrero he’d bought in the airport at Coatzacoalcos, Felix confirmed in the bathroom mirror that his hair was beginning to grow back thick and curly and his eyelids had lost their puffiness; only the scars from the incisions were still noticeable. Somehow his moustache was obliterating the memory of the operation and returning to him the face that, if not exactly his own, more and more resembled the face of his private joke with Ruth, the Velázquez self-portrait.
Thinking of Ruth, he almost telephoned her. He’d forgotten her all the time he’d been away; he’d had to put her out of his mind; if not, that most intimate and commonplace of all relationships might have diverted him from the mission I’d commended to him. He was also restrained by the fact that to his wife he was a dead man. Ruth had attended the burial in the Jardín Cemetery organized by the Director General and Simon Ayub. The widow Maldonado had not had much time to accustom herself to her new role. As Felix had felt he must reserve a sacred moment with Sara’s body, he felt now he must reserve a special moment for his reunion with Ruth. A disembodied voice over the telephone would be too much for such a domestic woman, a woman who solved all his practical problems, who prepared his breakfasts and pressed his suits.
His feeling for Sara, living or dead, was a different matter, something akin to the sublimation of adventure itself. She was the most fervent, but also the most secretly guarded, motivation for his actions. My instructions had been clear. No personal emotion was to stand in our way. There is no intelligence mission that does not inevitably evoke one’s emotions and weave an invisible but inescapable web between the objective world we set out to control and the subjective world that, whether we wish it or not, controls us. Had Felix realized during this strange week that, no matter how wide-ranging, events never move us far from the place where we are our own hosts, and that no external enemy is greater than the one residing within us?
Later Felix told me that as he was dialing my number after his return from Houston he remembered the joking way he’d announced Angelica’s death before it had occurred: “Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.” I’d set aside my personal feelings, although at that point Angelica’s role in this intrigue was ambiguous. He felt he didn’t need to say anything more when he telephoned me from the Suites de Génova, didn’t have to find a quote from Shakespeare to tell me that, instead of drowning, Ophelia had died a broken doll upon the steamy pavement of a Texas city.
“When shall we two meet again?”
“When the battle’s lost and won.”
“But tell us, do you hear whether we have had any loss at sea or no?”
“Ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, land-thieves, and water-thieves.”
“What tell’st thou me of robbing?”
Читать дальше