Richard Ford - The Ultimate Good Luck

“I know what you did,” Quinn said softly. “Can’t you just tell me where you put it?”

“What is this man?” Sonny said. “Tell me what you’re talking about, Harry? Where I put what?” Quinn looked up at the guards, who were walking toward him. “I’m really fucked up,” Sonny said, smiling and looking relaxed. “I know you’re saying shit I’m not understanding. You’ll have to come back, you know. Maybe tomorrow.”

“O.K.,” Quinn said and stood up to leave. “You try to get it right tomorrow.”

A fly lit on Sonny’s hand, and he slowly let his other hand cover it. “You gotta kill these fucking flies, man,” Sonny said. “They’ll keep you awake.” He smiled.

ON THE TWENTIETH of November Street it had begun to rain. The daylight was used up and water was bouncing off the bricks in front of the taxis, trickling into a garbage current along the gutters. The pottery alleys on Bustamante were open, and a few tourists in rain gear had avoided the army barricades and were walking the slick streets through the rain. Two German men in walking shorts stood under an umbrella, pointing to a particular stall where candelabra were sold. The clerk waited at the verge of the lighted shed yelling at them, beckoning in the mist.

Quinn’s stomach exerted a failing low-grade pain he thought would quit if he didn’t concentrate on it. He hadn’t eaten in a long time, and this was only a minor flare-up. He thought it could be nerves, a bad reaction to Sonny letting go.

He walked up the line of pottery stalls across from the Hotel Señoria, examining the green fish dishes and black cups in straw paper, wanting something to catch his eye. Coming back empty-handed was going to leave Rae with the day empty and nothing to connect with. It wasn’t kind enough. He came to a stall selling the purple flowers he had seen piled around Juárez’s statue. The Indian woman was shouting “heliotropos” into the street and he bought a paper full and started back to the hotel in the rain.

He felt hollowed out now and he tried to think if Bernhardt had mentioned anybody, relatives he could call. He had said once he had a wife somewhere who hadn’t worked out, and a mother, but there was no way to find them now in time, no way to express perfunctory sympathy. It was as if Bernhardt never existed. His constancy had simply leached away. Bernhardt and Deats were beginning to take equal importance in his mind, and that seemed incorrect but impossible to change.

When he reached the Centro, the demonstrators who had been in the park were gone. The soldiers in white puttees from Manuel Ocampo were patrolling the empty sidewalks in the rain. Leaflets littered the promenades, and the cathedral floodlights had been turned on, making the drizzle spectral in the dense light. The soldiers still wore their riot visors and moved self-consciously through the water, their guns at order. The zócalo itself seemed orderly and private, and the few tourists in the cafés in the Portal had their backs to the streets, as if whatever was in the arcade was what they had expressly come to see.

He called the American consulate from the hotel office. He wanted every chance used. Bernhardt had explained it to him carefully. Bad shit in the prisión was what the consulate went to sleep on, and if he couldn’t prove Sonny was about to take an egregious down, no one would pay attention. But it was last chance time. The phone rang and rang then was answered by a recording of a man’s voice with a Boston accent that sounded, itself, like a recording. He recognized the voice from the first day he saw lawyers, a man named Benson. Benson’s voice said to leave a number and a message and someone would call back. He tried Zago’s number but no one answered, and he walked on up the stairs with the heliotropes wetting his hands.

“Something happened outside,” Rae said. She was standing with her back to the open window. Her face was rigid.

“I guess,” he said. He put the heliotropes in the pure-water bottle and set it on the chair.

“No, you don’t guess,” she said tightly. “Something bad happened. It scared everybody. And you don’t look scared.” She wound her hands. “I went to sleep and I dreamed shooting and people getting killed, and when I woke up all those soldiers we saw were out there, and the students were gone. Did you see that?”

“No.” He sat on the bed and watched her with the rain hissing like a curtain in the early dark. He tried to remember the shooting for her sake.

“The police came up here,” she said. She looked betrayed, as if there was a blame she wanted assigned.

His mind raced to his pistol and then to the money in the lock box. He stood up and went to the bureau and opened the second drawer. “What’d they say?” The pistol was gone.

“They said they were thinking of arresting me,” Rae said. “I saw them drive up in the street, and I hid your gun. I don’t know why I knew they were coming.”

He looked around the room. “Where is it?” he said.

“On the ledge.”

He leaned out into the rain and felt the pistol on the string course. No one on the street looked up. “Did they mention Carlos?” he said.

Rae sat on the bed watching him. “Often.”

He wiped the gun on his pants. “What happened?”

He opened the breech to check for water.

“I told them Señor Bernhardt was our lawyer. I told them we had to see him tomorrow, and I told them I wanted them to leave because I didn’t feel well.” She looked up at him with no expression.

“What did they say?” He pushed the cylinder closed and put the gun back in the drawer. There wasn’t any water.

“That he was muerto,” Rae said. “That must mean dead.”

He looked at her. “Did they think you were surprised?”

“I tried,” she said, “but they were rude about it. It made me mad.”

“What else?” He began to try to figure what it meant that the police had come at all, if it meant they were checking all Bernhardt’s clients. Everything seemed to have four dimensions now. It was hard to concentrate right. It was like an illness.

“That’s all,” Rae said. “I went down and checked the lock box. They know something about us now, Harry.” She seemed fatigued.

“There’s nothing to know.” He looked out the window at the other arcade of the Portal. Absence of people made the buildings seem distinct and depthless in the rain. The Christmas lights had been turned on, but the band kiosk was empty, except for a soldier in the shadows. “We haven’t done a goddamned thing,” he said. It made him mad she was conceding a thing she didn’t have to. It was something entirely different from giving Sonny up.

“I think they just haven’t figured out why they should arrest us yet,” she said calmly. “I don’t think it matters what you do, it’s whether they think they should arrest you.”

“That’s wrong,” he said. “You’re wrong about that. We didn’t kill anybody.”

“Did Sonny tell you where he put it?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Has he been lying to us?”

“Sure.” His mind began to race, then stopped at nothing.

Rae lay back on the bed. “So are they going to kill him?”

“I have to think yes,” he said. “Zago’s not answering his phone. I called the consulate. They’re calling me back.” She knew everything important now. They were looking at the same picture. “I didn’t think Zago’d back out,” he said.

“No fixed ideas,” Rae said, and looked at him. “Sonny’s luck just ran out, didn’t it, Harry? That’s why I didn’t go today. I didn’t want to come in behind that.”