The Ultimate Good Luck (9 page)

Time changed things, he thought, lying on the cool sheets with the Italian girl’s cheap scent on him, and nothing more than the truth. He hoped in twenty years it would change the way he felt about this very moment, and that if he wasn’t dead, he wanted to be able to think a good thought about it, and the picture, straining at the camera beside the pony, made him sure he wouldn’t, as though the picture could trick you in some way you’d be sorry about. Being happy, he thought, and a pain flowered inside his gut, then subsided in a haywire spiral that the whisky controlled, being happy created problems, and not the least of them was being able to stand being happy.

I
T HAD BEGUN
raining in the Centro. Above floors, the air in the government palacio sat still and dense. Electric lights were off for siesta, and a sweet fodderish rain fragrance hung in the deputy’s office. Outside it could’ve been refreshing, but inside made it oppressive.

Bernhardt looked uncomfortable. The set of his mouth was off some way, as if he had been asleep and couldn’t quite get his features straight. It was a look that wouldn’t sell tickets.

The deputy of penitentiaries sat behind a wide French desk. He wore a white silk camisola with expensive orange scrollery on the chest, and he was writing on a printed document that had carbons under it that required him to bear down hard. Each move was a precise move. Occasionally he would stop, turn, and look out the double window at the treetops and rain on the zócalo, then start writing again without speaking. The office had scalloped flutings on the cornices, and on the wall in the shadows was a large imperial portrait of Juárez in a red ermine cape and a gold filigreed crown he couldn’t have lifted. The portrait had once been painted for someone else and Juárez’s little rodent face added, so that he looked like a sideshow freak staring out from a body that was too large for him and that had him worried.

He was impatient to talk to Bernhardt. Deats was somebody you could handle, but Bernhardt had to do the handling. In the street big monsoon drops had begun smacking the cobblestones, and Bernhardt had looked preoccupied and hustled him into the palacio saying nothing except “It is important to be on time.” But that wasn’t enough. He wanted Deats seen to before Rae knew about him.

Bernhardt had on a clean suit, a white twill with European lapels that made him look larger than he was. His glasses shone in the deep shadows, and he was impatient.

The deputy suddenly quit writing. He looked up and smiled, lifted the document off the carbons and blew it. He rose slowly, carried the paper by its corner to the door, handed it to someone outside, then returned to his chair. “Momentito,” he said amiably and pressed his lips together. He was a small, gold-toothed man and got smaller behind his desk. He put both his hands in front of him and smiled patiently so that the gold in his mouth leeched a tiny flicker of light from the room. “A seal,” he said, nodding at Bernhardt.

Bernhardt had the money ready. Six fifties in a Holiday Inn envelope. He reached carefully toward the desk, not quite leaving his seat, put the envelope on the scrolled edge, and slid it forward to within the deputy’s reach. “La petición,” he said softly.

The deputy contemplated Quinn curiously and turned his head as though he heard a sound in the air that he liked, something in the rain hiss. He picked up the envelope, opened the belly drawer, and laid it inside. He looked back at Quinn with interest. “Is your friend?” the deputy said, folding his hands back on the desk top.

“Right,” Quinn said. The deputy was an asshole, but that was a little luxury of taste he didn’t own at the moment. You went through who you went through.

The deputy began shaking his head. “Is bad,” he said and looked grave.

“What is?” Quinn said.

The deputy kept shaking his head. “Narco,” he whispered and let his eyes go dreamy.

“But in a world of bad things,” Bernhardt interrupted softly.

“Ahh,” the deputy said and smiled. It was a sound he liked making. It pleased him into submission. Bernhardt had made the same sound in the morning. “Do you like Oaxaca?” the deputy said derisively, his spidery hands still composed on the desk top. It was beginning to rain harder, and the light passing through the trees behind the deputy had become an exhausted yellow blur. Quinn was ready to get out. He heard Bernhardt shift his feet nervously.

“Sure. It’s great,” he said finally.

“Es bonita, no?” the deputy said and smiled. “Is pretty, yes?”

“It’s terrific,” Quinn said.

“But it is not the United States, correct?” The deputy continued smiling as if they both could agree on that.

“It’s got its moments,” Quinn said. He glanced at Bernhardt.

“Maybe you would stay longer,” the deputy said.

“I doubt that.”

“Of course,” the deputy said and nodded.

Steps approached the office door. A secretary, a Mexican girl in a tight skirt, brought the document directly to the desk. She placed it in front of the deputy without acknowledging anyone and left. A pen was in the deputy’s hand moving quickly.

When he had finished he folded the document carefully, placed it in a fresh white envelope, and pushed it across toward Bernhardt. He smiled again. It was a postal clerk’s smile, no special conviction. “Is dangerous,” the deputy said, looking at Quinn.

“What’s that?” Quinn said.

“Narco,” he whispered, musing in the shadows.

“I wouldn’t know about it,” Quinn said. He didn’t like the implication and he didn’t like the deputy too much. Bernhardt was already at the door.

The deputy leaned backward in his big chair and opened his arms widely as if his appeal went out to a higher authority. “I
know about it very much,” he said and sighed, his chest heaving beneath his silk blouse. “It is a grave offense.”

“I’ll take your word,” Quinn said.

“But I envy that,” the deputy said loudly, letting his arms fall onto the sides of his chair. “You are lucky to know nothing. Maybe you will do well.” He kept the smile frozen on his tiny clerk’s face.

“I’m betting on it,” Quinn said and followed Bernhardt out.

In the courtyard a farmer in a straw hat stood beside a goat, sheltering below the arches of the palacio. A current of urine had drained from between the goat’s legs out into the court and become diluted in the pool of speckled water where the center drain of the court was clogged. The farmer was looking straight into the sky as if he could see the end of the rain high up and was waiting for the moment when that end would arrive where he was standing.

“Deats showed up,” Quinn said when they had stepped out to the cooler air of the mezzanine. It seemed believable to him now. Something about the deputy made it completely believable.

Bernhardt’s mouth was nervous. “Where?” he said. He reached in his coat pocket for the envelope.

“At the bungalow.” He watched Bernhardt closely for some sign of going down the road. “Something’s got to happen right now,” he said.

Bernhardt looked at him. “Do you want just to let it go? We can just let it go.”

“That’s not one of the options,” Quinn said. “Think of something else.”

Bernhardt stepped beside the granite balustrade that overlooked the court where the farmer waited, staring toward the sky. He put his fingers on the edge of the stone. “Does it matter to you if your brother-in-law did as Mr. Deats says he did, or that he didn’t?” Bernhardt said. “A moral dimension.”

“I’m not thinking about that right now. I’ll think about it
later.” He didn’t like things that way, but they were that way. The moral dimension wasn’t an issue.

“These are necessary questions,” Bernhardt said.

“So what do you know about him?” Quinn said.

Bernhardt watched the farmer with the goat. “I know a man Mr. Deats has business with,” he said softly.

“And?”

Bernhardt seemed to want to be very precise. “To deal with Mr. Deats in any way may damage their business, and then we are in their business. And that becomes risky. Do you understand?”

“No,” Quinn said. “I just want to get Sonny out of the joint and the fuck out of here. Why is that risky?”

“I have to see the other people involved. I must impress Mr. Deats.” Bernhardt was keeping his eyes on the courtyard while he talked. “That’s the risk. It might be better to disengage.”

“Are you talking more money?” Quinn said.

“No,” Bernhardt said and suddenly looked at him significantly, though he couldn’t be sure what the significance attached to.

“What happens to Deats?” he said.

“I will talk to him,” Bernhardt said. He took off his glasses and held them up to the grey rain light that bathed the inside of the court.

“Is it easy?” Quinn said.

“No. It is not easy,” Bernhardt said, blinking in the cool air.

“Is it dangerous?”

“Maybe it is,” Bernhardt said.

“I don’t want my wife in this.” He tried to get Bernhardt’s eye. “Do you understand that?”

“It is not necessary,” he said. “She can go back. We do not need her.”

“We need the money, though, right?”

“Of course.”

“All right,” Quinn said. “I just don’t want her in any heavy-duty shit.”

Bernhardt fitted his glasses carefully back over his ears and looked at Quinn calmly. “I will want you to come with me tonight,” he said, “for business. I will explain to you.” He began to walk toward the stone steps.

Quinn looked in the court for the farmer with the goat. They had moved back under the arches. Bernhardt appeared suddenly in the court below. He stopped and looked up and took his glasses off again in the shelter of the lower arcade. Quinn felt something changing imperceptibly, something that didn’t make any difference. It was simply the less important thing you gave up, the slightest measure of control, he knew, that meant you wanted something very bad.

O
N THE AIRPORT ROAD
the rain was already past, dissipating into the mountains above the bungalow, the airport obscured out in dampness like a city eclipsed in a dream. The rented Dodge had a radio and Quinn let himself ease into the jabber of furniture sales and flights to Europe, good living south of the border. There had been police in the streets when he had left the palacio, too many for one afternoon. It had made the city feel tense, as if the rain had left a film of dread behind it. Ugliness went on at all hours, but you saw it by accident or not at all. Something had made waves in the public sector, and Bernhardt had mentioned the shooting the night before. Everything was ripples on ripples.

He had stopped at a tourist jeweler on the way and bought a silver lavaliere with a green inlay of a man dancing. The saleswoman was English and claimed the piece was jade and antigüedad and protective, but the inlay had been machined. It was one lie or another, and for that instant all that mattered was whether the woman had been convincing.

What had pushed it out of shape in L.A. had been the work. He had thought if he could manage a union card somewhere
between San Diego and Santa Barbara and get on any place at scale, he could last a year, and something would get obvious in a year. They rented a house in the redneck suburbs back of Seal Beach a block from the navy station, and he had gone on weekends re-poing cars while he made the oil company offices all week and got his name on the master lists at Rockwell and McDonnell’s and little feeder plants in Ventura.

Rae read magazines for a month, then went to work out of boredom ushering in a Jerry Lewis cinema. She started waitressing in a Redondo bar, then quit and spent a month answering the phone at a crisis center in Point Fermin until the crises started coming home, making her lose sleep. At the end she quit and stayed home watching quiz shows and reading
National Geographic
s stoned, until she decided the moral climate in California was oppressing. She told him she didn’t like the weather being the same and the air changing colors, and that when she was with Frank Oliver they had gone north of Seattle two winters and stayed, and he worked the local rodeos, hung out, and moved cars into B.C., and she applied at the Swinomish reservation and taught prenatal care to give herself a life, and that she had liked that a lot better than L.A. She said she had read in the
L.A. Times
that people with factory skills were getting hired in Washington and the unions were opening up and she had an idea about Alaska. She said they could both work on the pipe and live in a house free and save twenty thousand dollars in six months and do whatever appealed to Quinn after that. She said she wanted to do whatever he wanted to do and stay together, and if he wanted to leave that was all right.