Richard Ford - The Ultimate Good Luck

Quinn thought about drinking beers in San Pedro, and Sonny saying he’d rather be in business. That didn’t seem so long ago.

“There’s no use calling the consulate if you don’t have anything to say, is there?” she said.

“I can say he’s alive.” He looked at her. “I want to stay with that if I can. He’s supposed to survive this. That’s why I’m here.”

He thought about Susan Zago. The nonsensical always became the thinkable once you reached the logical flash point. The war was that way. At some point it just became more interesting to think about the deviances.

“He’s just an asshole jock,” Rae breathed and closed her eyes. “He’s not salvageable. He’s like me.”

“You love him, though, right?” he said, staring at her. “That makes you salvageable.”

“I hate him,” she said.

“That’d probably surprise him,” Quinn said. She was putting up perimeters now, something he couldn’t quite do. He could always see anybody’s problem if the payoff was big enough. It was a shit way to operate.

The cathedral clock began chiming six.

“I don’t hate him to punish him,” Rae said earnestly and raised on her elbows. “Do you understand that? I hate him so I can not feel bad. I’ll feel bad later, but I’ll be with you then. If I felt bad now I don’t know if I could stand to be with you anymore.” She smiled. Somebody had to feel bad, and if it was her he was going to lose. But if it was him, that was just the standard price. “What’re you about to do?” she said. She looked at the purple heliotropes on the chair as if they had been in the room all along.

“See Zago’s wife,” he said.

Rae looked at him oddly. “That’s a bum idea.”

He sat opposite her on the bed. “I already heard that.”

“But you didn’t pay attention, Harry,” she said. She looked at him as if she saw something perplexing. “She’s a down-and-outer.”

He put his hands on her legs. “That’s right.” He felt better being near her, his mind sliding off center. He didn’t need to hear what she said.

“She killed Carlos because he ditched her,” Rae said dreamily. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

He could feel the long muscles lengthen up her thighs and then, by inches, relax. She didn’t have the wish to resist now. Importance was slipping away, and she would give it all over to him.

She lay on her back and let him touch her. He could hear her breath subside and shallow. He felt dead-even on everything. “Did you bring me those flowers?” she said. She was staring sideways. The room smelled like rain. He could hear the hiss off the street, and in the distance a voice in conversation he couldn’t understand. “I noticed them, you know, but I didn’t know where they came from. I decided they’d been here all along, and I’d overlooked them.” She reached for him. “I must be going crazy,” she said. “I don’t seem to feel anything right anymore.” She looked at him as if they were inside something she couldn’t find her way back from and was ready now to hear the thing she was supposed to do.

QUINN STOOD OUT OF THE RAIN under the hotel marquee. Cafés in the Portal were half-empty, Americans sitting resolutely in their tin folding chairs drinking Tecates and staring back into the restaurants where the lights were blue and cold. The soldiers on the square slouched into the lees of buildings, and the police stood behind the Baskin-Robbins’ sawhorses, yawning at the dark.

He had called the consulate and gotten the same recording and the story didn’t seem solid anymore. Sonny’d had a breakdown. Nobody’d believe it soon enough. They thought about Sonny, he realized, the way you thought about somebody’s grandmother in South Dakota whose life was interesting and then absolutely forgettable, so that there wasn’t even a way to specify what Sonny suffered or might end up suffering. He felt like he had gained more precision but lost more accuracy, which seemed ridiculous, the opposite of experience. The rain hung in the air. He listened to the blue neon hum, stared at the darkness, and tried to believe he could still work it. He had the pistol, but he didn’t have a waterproof for the rain.

A Renault turned off the Avenue Morelos and idled along the north term of the zócalo, disappearing, then reappearing behind its headlights at the corner. The soldiers watched it as dismally as they watched the rain. The Renault passed the colonnade of the government palacio, then turned up the Twentieth of November Street to the hotel and stopped, water shining and hitting noisily off the windshield.

The driver’s window came half-down. Susan Zago’s white face looked out at him, her features more purposeful than the night before. Her eyes were alive and attentive. “Please get in,” she said.

“Where’s this going?” Quinn said when the car was moving. He checked the back seat — too late, he realized — but there was no one there. It was unsafe, like not noticing the moza had been in the bungalow.

Susan Zago was wearing a rubber mackintosh and was regarding the streets as if she was following a route that was hard to make out. She seemed animated. Her hair had been tied back and she was wearing perfume. “I have to see if I’m followed,” she said.

“Who’d follow you?” he said.

“My husband. The police.” She glanced in the rearview. “They don’t like my friends.”

“Don’t you think they know exactly what you do?” he said.

“Maybe,” she said and smiled. “You can always think everything’s on a grid and somebody’s responsible for everything. But it isn’t true.”

“What do you think is true?”

“No one cares,” she said. “It’s like every place else, unless they’ve got money in it, of course. You just don’t know where they have money.”

She headed toward the American Highway by the brightly lit Pemex where the overland trucks were lined up to refuel in the rain, then through the Zapata rotary and back in toward the Centro along the second-class bus route. Suddenly she turned the car sharply onto a residential street that ended in a block in a park full of trees with their trunks painted white like the trees in the zócalo. She stopped at the curb and closed the lights. No other car came off the avenue, but she sat watching the mirror as though she expected to see something. It was play-acting. He thought he ought to try to get out now and back to the hotel as quick as he could. Only he didn’t want to be in the street with the gun. “Your wife is certainly pretty,” Susan Zago said, watching the mirror all the time.

“Let’s goddamn get on with this,” he said.

Susan Zago restarted the car. “It’s not me you’re seeing,” she said.

“I guessed,” he said.

“My friends don’t want to be surprised,” she said, still watching the glass. Animation made her prettier than she’d seemed before.

“Who killed Bernhardt?” he said. He realized he wanted to know and this was the right place to find out.

“I have no idea,” Susan Zago said airily. She made a U-turn in the street and approached the wide avenue slowly in the dark. “He was narco-tráfico,” she said. “A lot of people might have killed him. There was probably a queue.”

“I don’t think so,” Quinn said.

“It doesn’t much matter what you think,” she said.

“It was your husband, right?”

She turned on the lights and eased into the avenue. She seemed impressed that she was doing things right. “Why should he?” she said.

“Because of the kind of photography you and Carlos used to tease each other.”