Carlos Fuentes - Hydra Head

Cactus, Reforma, La Venta, Pajaritos, Cotaxtla, Minatitlán, Poza Rica, Atún, Naranjos along the shelf of the Gulf, from Rosarito in Baja California to the plains between Monterrey and Matamoros in the north, from Salamanca in the center of Mexico to Salina Cruz on the Pacific; the complete network of oil, natural gas, propane, and other petrochemical pipelines, platforms for undersea drilling, all the plants for absorbents, lubricants, and cryogenics, the batteries of separators, refineries, and operating fields.

Not a single place, not a single fact, not a single estimate, not a single certainty, not a single control valve in the Mexican petroleum complex had escaped the fluid stone gaze of Bernstein’s ring; whoever possessed it and deciphered it had all the necessary information for utilizing, interrupting, or — depending on the circumstances — appropriating the functioning of this machinery, the fertile Hydra head the Director General had referred to, which now was being projected on the wall like the shadows of reality in Plato’s cave.

Again I touched the control. The light in the Virgin’s eye was extinguished and the stand ceased to rotate. I turned on the lights. I removed the clear stone from the stand and replaced it in the tabernacle.

We returned to the library in silence. I pressed the spine of Timon of Athens and the bookshelf returned to its customary position.

“ANYTHING ELSE you want to know?” I asked, arching my eyebrows as I offered Felix a cognac.

He refused; his hand was toying with the pistol. But he answered my question with another: “Who killed Sara Klein?”

He gazed into my gray eyes as coldly as I gazed at him. “Ah, but that’s the only thing I don’t know.”

“Then I’ll have to find out. Do you know who the nun is?”

I sighed deeply, shook my head, and quickly sipped my cognac.

“I told Emiliano and Rosita to ask you to get the license number of the convertible the kids were driving when they serenaded that night…”

I took a piece of paper from my pocket and handed it to him.

“Who does the car belong to?” he persisted.

I thrust my hands into the pockets of my pin-striped suit. “I don’t know. The plates are registered to a one-peso cab.”

“What’s the driver’s name?”

“A Guillermo López.”

“My friend Memo,” Felix murmured, and for the first time he stared at me suspiciously.

Feigning indifference, I walked to the fireplace, picked up the fire tongs, and poked at the dying fire. I allowed Felix an opportunity to look at my back, the cut of my finely striped suit.

“Anything else, Felix?” I asked, my back still to him.

“Ruth,” said Felix, like a sleepwalker. “I ought to see Ruth. How am I going to explain?”

“You must see her. You won’t have any problems. I promise. She’ll be happy to know you’re alive. Believe me. And after you’ve seen Ruth, what do you plan to do?”

“The Director General said to call myself Velázquez. He told me I have an office, a secretary, and a salary,” said Felix, with a forced laugh that was far from humorous.

“Accept his offer. It suits us.”

“It suits us?”

“Of course. Felix Maldonado is dead and buried. Diego Velázquez is the ideal replacement. No one is looking for him. No one recognizes him. He has no past. He has no outstanding debts.”

I heard Felix’s footsteps behind me, muffled by the thick Oriental rug. Then his heels clicked on the stone hearth. He seized my shoulders and forced me to look into his eyes. His gaze was dead; it was also deadly. “You’re repeating what the Director General told me…”

The fire tongs crashed to the warmed stone.

“He was right. Let me go, Felix.”

He released his grasp, but remained menacingly close.

“You’re more valuable to us than ever,” I said through tight lips. “It’s to everyone’s best interest that you forget Felix Maldonado and take on a new identity. The perfect spy has no personal life, no wife, no children, no house, no past.”

I spoke phlegmatically. Again Felix responded with the Mexican counterpart, Indian fatalism. “I don’t understand you. It doesn’t matter about me. But I don’t understand your game. They’ll gather all the information again and everything will begin all over.”

“For you, it began in a taxi, remember? That was the moment of no return, Felix, that unknowing step from reality to nightmare, the moment when everything that seems real and secure in your life slips away and becomes uncertain, unsure, and phantasmagoric. Do you believe you can simply return to your former life, assume an irretrievable reality, be an obscure bureaucrat and Don Juan and husband named Felix Maldonado?”

I took Felix’s hand, though it was a risk; he would feel my dry, lizardlike skin. “I need you, Felix. And you’re right. The game will begin again. It’s like two cowardly and imperfect knights jousting in a dark labyrinth. The next time, however, they’ll find that their adversary is stronger and, what’s more, different. And so on and so on. That’s why I wanted them to recognize me this time; they won’t the next. And you will need me, because I’m the only person in the world who will still call you Felix Maldonado.”

“Ruth…?”

“No, no, don’t answer. You will offend me deeply if you underestimate me. Don’t make the mistake our enemies made. Don’t underestimate me, or my ability to disguise myself. You know, baldness can be an advantage. I simply put on a gray wig with an unruly lock of hair, I shave off my moustache, thicken my eyelids with makeup, add a few wrinkles, make my nose a little more acquiline, speak with any one of the many English accents I learned watching Shakespeare with you … Although at times I prefer to quote Lewis Carroll. Welcome to Wonderland.”

“Trevor.”

“And you, my friend, would have to take on the role of the March Hare…”

“But Angelica was your sister…”

“ Poor Ophelia. No, hold my hand, Felix, even though my skin repels you. Add a neutral Colombian accent, interjections from the 1890’s, poppycock, pip-pip, balderdash … Are you following me, Felix?”

“But you were acting for the Arabs in Houston…”

“They know me as Trevor, an English homosexual expelled from the Foreign Office as a security risk. The Israelis and the CIA know me as Mann, a mercenary agent whose cover is a traveling job with Dow Chemical. You know me as Timon of Athens, your former classmate and owner of a petrochemical empire in Mexico. I serve them all so I can use them all, and so they will fear me. I’m not sitting in my library waiting for your telephone calls, Felix, while you risk your neck. I received your call in Mexico City telling me about poor Ophelia — that’s the only time you really surprised me — and three hours later I was in Houston looking like a Roman senator and giving a passable imitation of Claude Rains; tomorrow, after a four-hour flight, I’ll be in Washington presenting myself to the CIA in Langley as the questionable Mr. Mann, with a slight German accent and another passable imitation, this time of Conrad Veidt…”

I released Felix’s hand only because I’d run out of breath and couldn’t talk, only because I couldn’t touch him if I wasn’t talking, only because I wanted him to have his hands free to do whatever he pleased. I was giving him that freedom. Finally I had demonstrated that I, too, took risks, that he wasn’t the only one living dangerously. I’d finally canceled that debt from our youth.

“But Angelica was your sister,” Felix repeated, his voice, his eyes, his body, unbelieving, the hand with the pistol hanging limply.