William Boyd - Restless

'Are you sure this is our product?' she asked Devereux.

'Yes, as far as I know.'

'Will you tell the boss what I think and I'll call back later.'

'Are you going to proceed?' he asked.

'With due caution.'

'Where are you going?'

'A place called Las Cruces,' she said instantly, then thinking: why am I being so honest? Too late now.

She hung up, went to the front desk and asked where she could hire a car.

The road to Las Cruces was due south on Highway 85, some 220 miles or so on the old Camino Real that followed the Rio Grande valley all the way to Mexico. It was two-lane tarmacadam most of the way, with some sections in concrete on which she made good, steady going, driving a tan-coloured Cadillac touring car with a retractable roof that she did not bother to retract. She barely looked at the scenery as she drove south but was aware, all the same, of the rugged mountain ranges to the east and west, the ranchitos with their melon and corn patches clustered around the river and, here and there, she saw from the road the rocky stretches of desert and the lava beds of the fabled jornada del muerte - beyond the river valley the land was hard and arid.

She arrived in Las Cruces in the late afternoon and drove down the main street, looking for the Alamogordo Inn. These small towns already seemed familiar to her having driven through some half-dozen or so identical ones on her journey south: Los Lunas, Socorro, Hatch – they all blended into a homogenous image of New Mexican provinciality. After the adobe ranch houses came the gas stations and the auto shops, then the neat suburbs on the outskirts, then the freight yards, the grain silos and the flour mills. Each town had its wide main street with its garish shop-fronts and neon advertisements, its awnings and shaded walkways, dusty cars parked at an angle on both verges of the road. Las Cruces looked no different: there was the Woolworths, a jeweller with a winking plastic gem the size of a football, signs for Florsheim Shoes, Coca-Cola, Liberty Furniture, the drugstore, the bank and, at the end of the street, opposite a small park with a stand of shady cottonwoods, the plain concrete façade of the Alamogordo Inn.

She parked in the lot at the back and went into the lobby. A couple of roof fans stirred the air, there was a cracked-leather, three-seater sofa and worn Indian rugs on the wooden floor. A cobwebbed cactus stood in a pot of sand studded with cigarette butts, below a sign that said: 'Positively no loitering. Electric light in every room'. The desk clerk, a young man with a weak chin and a shirt collar three sizes too big for his neck looked at her curiously as she asked for a room.

'You sure you want this hotel?' he asked, meekly. 'There are much nicer ones just out of town.'

'I'm quite happy, thank you,' she said. 'Where can I get a bite to eat?'

Turn right out the front door for a restaurant, turn left for a diner, he said. She chose the diner and ordered a hamburger. The place was empty: two grey-haired ladies manned the soda fountain and an Indian with a sternly handsome, melancholic face swept the floor. Eva ate her burger and drank her Coca-Cola. She experienced a strange form of inertia, an almost palpable heaviness, as if the world had stopped turning and only the swish of the Indian's broom on the cement floor was marking the passage of time. Somewhere in a back room jazz was playing on the radio and Eva thought: what am I doing here? What particular destiny am I playing out? She felt she could sit on here in this diner in Las Cruces for all eternity – the Indian man would be sweeping the floor, her hamburger would remain half eaten, the thin jazz would continue to play. She allowed the mood to linger, steeping herself in it, finding it oddly calming, this late-afternoon stasis, knowing that whatever she did next would set a new chain of events in motion that would be out of her control. Better to savour these few moments of stillness where apathy ruled unchallenged.

She went to the diner pay phone, in a small booth by some shelves stacked with tins, and called Transoceanic. Devereux answered.

'Can I speak to the boss?' she asked.

'Alas, no. But I spoke to him yesterday evening.'

'And what did he say?' For some reason Eva felt sure that Romer was in the room with Devereux – then she dismissed the idea as absurd.

'He says it's all up to you. It's your party. If you want to leave – leave. If you want to change the music – do so. Trust your instincts, he said.'

'You told him what I thought about my gift.'

'Yes, he's checked. It's our product, so they must want it out there.'

She hung up, thinking hard. So: everything was up to her. She walked slowly back to the Alamogordo, keeping to the shady side of the street. A large truck went by loaded with massive tree trunks followed by a rather smart red coupe with a man and a woman in the front seat. She stopped and looked behind her: some kids stood chatting to a girl on a bicycle. But she had the strangest feeling that she was being shadowed – which was crazy, she knew. She went and sat in the small park for a few minutes and read her guidebook to drive these demons from her mind. Las Cruces – 'The Crosses' – so called after the massacre by local Apaches of a freight party in the eighteenth century en route to Chihuahua and the tall crosses that were erected over their subsequent graves. She hoped it wasn't a bad omen.

The small red coupe passed by again: no man – the woman at the wheel.

No: she was being jumpy, naïve, unprofessional. If she was worried there were procedures she could follow. It was her party. Use your instincts, Romer had said. All right – she would.

She went back to the Alamogordo and drove her car out on the Mesa Road towards the state college and found the new motel her guidebook had promised – the Mesilla Motor Lodge. She rented a cabin at the end of a wooden walkway and hid the map in the back of the wardrobe, behind a panel that she eased away with her nail file. The hotel was only a year old, the bellhop told her as he led her to her cabin. It smelt new: the odour of creosote, putty and woodshavings seemed to linger in her room. The cabin was clean and modern, its furniture pale and undecorated. A semi-abstract painting of a Pueblo village hung above the desk, which was fitted out with a bowl of cellophane-wrapped fruit, a tiny yucca in a terracotta pot and a folding blotter and writing kit of paper, envelopes, postcards and half a dozen monogrammed pencils. Everything is complimentary, the bellhop told her, with our compliments. She professed herself very pleased with the arrangement. When she was alone again she took 2,000 dollars out of the envelope and stashed the rest with the map.

She drove back to Las Cruces, parked behind the Alamogordo and went into the lobby. A man was sitting on the sofa, wearing a pale blue cotton suit. He had white blond hair and an unusually pink face – an almost albino she thought – with his pale blue suit he looked like a big baby.

'Hi,' he said, standing up. 'Good to see you looking so well.'

'I just had a two-week vacation.'

'Go to the mountains?'

'I prefer the seaside.'

He offered his hand and she shook it. He had a pleasant, husky voice.

'I'm Raul.' He turned to the desk clerk. 'Hey, sonny, can we get a drink here?'

'No.'

They walked outside and looked vainly for a bar for five minutes.

'I got to get some beer,' he said. He went into a liquor store and came out with a can of beer in a brown paper bag. They walked back to the park and sat on a bench under the cotton-wood trees while Raul opened his beer with a can opener that he had in his pocket and drank it in great draughts, not removing the can from the bag. I will always remember this small park in Las Cruces, Eva thought.