Part 8 (1/2)
”It will unfold as we go along. Okay?”
”Not okay.”
He studied me for a few moments. Sweat ran down his thick red cheek. ”So I'll hold your hand, McGee. We've got two singles at the Sheraton. We locate a pool attendant, a towel boy named Ricky, and we tell him that we've come to do some business with the banker. We give him a room number and sit tight. Somebody will get in touch.”
”Soon?”
”Maybe. Maybe not. We just wait and see.”
At the hotel restaurant near the pool, I excited so much awe and interest I doubt anyone noticed Browder. The employees wore little name plates above the s.h.i.+rt pocket. No trace of any Ricky, and Browder didn't want to ask about him.
He was there in the morning, on Tuesday. He was a tall sallow Mexican lad who had dyed his hair yellow a couple of months back. It was half grown out, a startling sight indeed. He wore a gold snake bracelet around his wrist and a bangle in his ear.
Browder roamed until he could intercept Ricky out of earshot of the other employees and the tourists. He came back angry. ”Christ, I don't know. I told him, and I told him the room number. Son of a b.i.t.c.h is asleep on his feet. He yawned at me. He needs dental work. From now on one of us is in my roam at all times.”
It was a relief to spend a little time away from him. In spite of his objections, I discarded the hat and boots for the time being. At his urgent request I kept the eye patch on until I bought some swim trunks and used the pool. Water kept getting behind the patch. So I left it off while swimming, put it back on when I knew I'd be seeing him. When I was out, he had to stay in the room. Whoever was in the room could watch the junk television from the States on the satellite disk, if they so chose. It's a funny thing about television and cigarettes. Hardly anybody I know anymore smokes cigarettes or watches the tube. One stunts the body and one stunts the mind.
I went and looked at the little Mayan ruin north of the hotel. The hotel itself is like a segment sliced out of a giant flat-topped Mayan pyramid. They are building condominiums nearby, the same size and shape. I wandered over and took a look at construction. Mexico is full of magic buildings. You never find anybody hard at work but the buildings go up.
Wednesday afternoon when I took my fast laps in the pool, there was more of an edge in the northeast breeze. I had tucked the hard eye patch on its black elastic cord into the locker-key pocket of my swim trunks. When I climbed out of the pool and tried to put it back on, it slipped out of my wet fingers and, propelled by the elastic, went skittering off behind me, across cement and tile, way over to a line of sun cots positioned five or six feet apart. It was under the second cot. I said, ”Pardon me,” knelt and retrieved it and stood up to put it on.
”At least wipe it off,” said the woman on the sun cot, reaching out to me with a Kleenex.
I thanked her and wiped the plastic patch off and put it back on. She looked up at me with a skeptical frown. She wore a swimsuit but looked as if she could manage a bikini nicely. Brown hair, blue eyes, a three-day tourist burn.
”Why are you wearing that thing?” she asked.
”How do you mean?”
”You take it off to go in the pool and put it on when you come out.”
”What I've got is some kind of hypersensitivity to light.”
”I bet you have.”
”You sound as if you don't believe me.”
”Maybe because it's the wrong kind of patch. I had a friend who had to wear one of those. That's what you wear when the eyeball is gone.”
”Mine is still right here.”
”I know. So, well, it made me wonder. We put out a lot of spy novels.”
”We?”
”I write copy for a publis.h.i.+ng house in New York. And right now I'm just about as far away from it as I can afford to get. For ten whole days. But my mind is still in the shop, I guess. That patch is like a clue or a signal. I had to ask or worry about it forever.”
”Try to think of it as an election bet. Will that help?”
She frowned, sighed, checked the degree of burn on her shoulder. ”I'll have to make do with that, won't I? Because you're not going to tell me anything else.” She stuck her hand up and said, ”Nancy Sheppard, New York.”
I took it and said, ”Travis McGee, Florida. Happy to meet you. I might be having a drink later over at the...”
”Don't get ahead of yourself,” she said. ”I just wanted to know about the patch.” And she rolled facedown on her sun cot in total dismissal.
So the patch was on and I decided to keep it on at all times. If people from publis.h.i.+ng houses could nail me that easily I was probably being stupid about the patch. And probably the boots and the hat. But everything hurt except the hat.
Nancy Sheppard's observation had jolted me out of a curious listlessness I had felt ever since the awareness of being hunted for reasons no one would or could explain. As quarry, I was acting much like the persons I had hunted. Aware of pursuit, they do not become more sly. They become careless, random, disheartened. Easier to bring down. They seem to welcome the end of the play, just to find out what is going on. So I was being precisely that kind of a horse's a.s.s. Out of control.
I had been in control when I had gone hunting the Sundowner. I found it and then the world turned upside down. I had not reacted this way when I had been hunted other times in other places. But then I knew who was after me and why. For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty. And it was something I could use, if I survived to use it. In Kafka's story The Trial, the prisoner disintegrated because he could never find out what he was guilty of. So I vowed to tighten up. By being a fool, I was handicapping Browder.
Word came on Thursday afternoon. I was on room duty. I wrote it down. There was no point in going to find Browder. He came back a half hour later. He read my note.
”What kind of a voice?”
”Male. Heavy and deep and slow.”
”Accent?”
”Some, but not Mexican. More like German or Scandinavian. But slight.”
”Okay. That's not our guy. So we've got to go to Tulum. Hand me the map.”
”Right down the road past the airport, say eighty-five miles from here, two hours to be safe.”
”You've been there before?”
”A while back.”
He looked at me and when I didn't continue he shrugged and said, ”Suit yourself. You have any Spanish?”
”Kitchen Spanish, without verbs. And not much of that. I've noticed you do a little better than that.”
”A little. So to make it by eleven we leave at nine.”
”Unless you want to get there earlier and look around.”
”I don't want to do anything to make the birds fly.”
We parked at Tulum a little before eleven. The parking lot was across the road from the Mayan ruins. There were a dozen big tour buses and about fifty cars. Two sides of the parking lot were lined with ramshackle shops strung with bright flags and plastic gadgetry. The shops were selling clothing, jewelry, junk, fake Mayan carvings, T-s.h.i.+rts, souvenirs, tacos, enchiladas, beer, soft drinks, seash.e.l.ls and paper flowers. The shops and small restaurants extended down both sides of the approach to the ruins from the main highway.
We locked the little blue station wagon and walked diagonally across the lot and back along the way we had come, to the sign Browder had spotted on the way in. Restaurante Tia Juanita. It was dim inside, out of the white glare of sunlight. There were six crude wooden tables on a dirt floor, mismatched chairs, a counter along the back with a heavy woman behind it. The place smelled of fried grease, beer and urine. One table was occupied by two Mexican kids drinking Coca-Cola out of oversized bottles.
We took the table on the left just inside the door. An electric fan on the counter top turned back and forth, giving us a brief blast of warm moving air every twenty seconds. Browder went to the counter and brought back two bottles of Leon Negra dark beer. We were halfway through the beer when a man came in, paused to let his eyes adjust to the diminished light and then sat down with us. He was big and he looked fit. He had a full beard, ponytail, cotton pullover s.h.i.+rt with narrow red and white horizontal stripes, cutoff jeans and, as I noticed later, old army boots worn without laces or socks. He was a relic from the past, a time traveler from San Francisco in the sixties. Mexico is full of them. Aging hippies, last survivors, drifting down toward the Mayan ruins, burned-out cases, languid and ragged in the heat, traveling with dirty duffel bags, listlessly thumbing the spa.r.s.e traffic.
He looked at me and said, ”Heard of you. I thought it was going to be somebody after the good Oaxaca bush. Very heavy and clean. But you'd be looking for the white lady out of Belize.”