The Ultimate Good Luck (24 page)

He sat alone in the visitation, facing the yellow door. The cafeteria had the same sweet urine stink from the day before, though it was empty except for the guards at either end. The visiting hour was nearly over and the guards were bored and careless. Water had seeped from the walls and the pools were full of dead beetles. Outside someone was methodically kicking a ball against concrete.

When Sonny stepped into the room, he had a wide gauze bandage on his head that was thick over his left ear. His hair had been cut to his scalp and his face looked too white. He looked as if he wasn’t sure where he was, and might cry but didn’t want to.

“Did they let you see medics?” Quinn said automatically, when Sonny was in front of him. He pushed the Gauloises pack across the table. He wasn’t sure Sonny could speak, and that was everything now. “What in the fuck happened?” He rested his hands on the table. He wanted to take Sonny’s hand, but he didn’t want to be conspicuous. Someone continued kicking the ball outside.

“My ear,” Sonny said softly. Tears suddenly swelled out, and he shut his eyes and pressed his lips against his teeth.

He wasn’t sure he could make Sonny understand, though he thought the situation had to be pretty clear. “Now listen,” he said, “they know you skimmed it.” He glanced at the two guards who were watching Sonny oddly.

Sonny looked dazed. He seemed to want to portray disappointment but didn’t know how. “What’s going to happen, Harry?” he whispered. He raised his hand to touch his ear, then put it back under the table.

“Did you hear what the fuck I said? You’ve got to give it back, or they’re going to blow you up.”

Sonny’s blue eyes blinked. “Who?” he said.

“Zago.”

Sonny shook his head and smiled. “I don’t know
him,”
he said. His eyes glazed as if words were in his head but wouldn’t get organized and he was waiting for them to do that. “Two guys came in to cut my hair last night, you know. They said I was coming out. Then they took scissors and cut off my ear.”

“Zago did it,” Quinn said. “You’ve gotta quit this shit. You understand?”

Sonny blinked again. His eyes looked like Rae’s eyes expressing something he’d seen Rae express, bewilderment over too much at once. “I didn’t lay any shit off, Harry,” Sonny said in a practiced voice. He let his gaze drop to the Gauloises box. “I picked it up in the room. I took a cab. Some dudes in white shirts came in the airport and grabbed me and I got set up.” He let his eyes wander slowly toward the exit at the far end of the cafeteria. “Where’s Bernhardt?” He stared at the yellow door as if he thought Bernhardt was going to walk through it.

“Look, God damn it.” He grabbed Sonny’s hands and squeezed. He didn’t want to freak him. “Why would they think you did it if you didn’t do it?” he said softly. “This is just business, O.K.? It’s all business.”

Sonny stared at him. His pupils were wide and deep. He felt
like he could see inside Sonny’s brain. “Maybe,” Sonny said, “somebody’s fooling somebody else. That’s been done, hasn’t it, Harry?” Sonny smiled. He moved his hand again toward his ear, then stopped halfway and put his hands on the table, and began to move his head down toward where his hand was. “My ear doesn’t hurt,” he said. “They gave me a shot. I don’t feel it.”

“Why get me in this, God damn it?” He felt desperate, though it wasn’t an unsatisfying feeling, just a familiar one, almost a calming one.

“It
looks
good,” Sonny said very softly, almost muttering.

“To who? Who gives a shit?”

“Maybe they had an argument, you know,” Sonny said. He couldn’t keep his head still and his eyes began to rove. Whoever had been kicking the ball had stopped, and the absent noise hollowed the silence in the cafeteria. Sonny’s blood stream was loading up now. “You know, Harry,” he said. “I had a dream this morning. I was standing by my Cadillac, holding a basketball, and there was a hedge beside it and a field with some woods in it. And the trunk of the car was all full of my shit, and there were four hats. And somehow some Mexicans came up and took the hats and put them on and started to leave. And I said, ‘Those are my hats, man,’ and they said, ‘We’re Mexicans, you don’t own anything.’ ” Sonny smiled. “And that was all. I didn’t argue. Though I thought they were doing something wrong. And they stayed out in the field where I could see them, wearing my hats.” His smile widened.

“Please cut this shit out,” Quinn said and looked down. Both guards were watching him strangely. One glanced at his wrist watch and said something to the other one, and both looked at him again. “Dionisio’s dead, man. Carlos is dead. This shit is up. They’re all over you.”

Sonny stared intently at the box of Gauloises, his eyes bright. He seemed frustrated but not even aware of it. “You know,” he said, “it’s a goddamn good feeling to fuck somebody you don’t know.” He looked up proudly, as if he’d discovered something wonderful.

“Why
is
that?” Quinn said.

Sonny smiled. Someone started kicking the ball again, the hits popping as if there was a hurry. “Well,” he said slowly, and grew silent again. “If you start finding out things the next thing you know she’s saying, ‘Why don’t we do it as much as we used to?’ And then you’re all set up, you can’t do anything, and you’re out of control, you understand? You don’t want to be there, do you?” Sonny took a deep breath and held Quinn’s hands and squeezed them. “If you don’t know anything though, Harry, you can fuck her till piss turns to Popsicles and everything’s great. That’s where I made my mistake with Kirsten, you know, I found out too much, tried too hard.” He smiled. Flies were on his bandage. Sonny was sweating out of enthusiasm for the idea he had in his head. It kept him from being afraid. In whatever way, Quinn thought, that he was like Sonny, he hoped he had better ideas.

“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.

O
N THE
T
WENTIETH
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.”