Meyer gave it thought. "Not entirely sure. But if we could understand all the formative influences on Walter Rockland-"

"We would learn," I said, "how come he turned out to be a wicked, contemptible, evil son of a b.i.t.c.h."

And by then it was too late for more talk. Enelio wanted to be home. He wanted to be there very badly. He was willing to sacrifice our kidneys, our discs, and our silver fillings to that desirable end.

But near Oaxaca, Enelio suddenly braked, swung over to the curb and cut the motor off. He turned in the seat to address me and Meyer simultaneously. "I am a respected citizen of the State of Oaxaca," he said. "I have a certain amount of influence. I am a happy man. I enjoy my work. I enjoy my friends. I enjoy doing a favor for a friend. McGee, I was glad to welcome you to Oaxaca as a favor to my good American friend Ron Townsend."

"And I appreciate it."

"But I am not going to go to the officers of the law and try to explain to them just how we happened to find that body. They look at me strangely already. They look at you even more strangely. I am not a man who has this big thing about killing and bodies and investigation. I am going to be a bad citizen. If you report it, I never heard of this trip today. A dear little crumpet will swear I spent a long, long siesta with her. In fact, it was my plan. In fact I should have been with her. I do not like to throw up. It gives me a severe headache. But you, of course, are at liberty to report it."

"It would be nice if they knew about it," Meyer said.

"I think that tomorrow one of our pilots for our little airline will see a gleam in that arroyo and so advise the police."

"In that case, Don Enelio," I said, "I too have lost my taste for civic duty. I think that sergeant of yours would like to knock my head a little."

"He implied as much. He is known for enjoying such small pleasures."

"What about this wallet?"

"If I had it, I would wipe it off very carefully and put it in the mailbox by the Hotel Marques del Valle."

"Consider it done, but after I see what"s in it." He waited. They did not turn around to watch me. Three hundred and sixty-two pesos, which is twenty-eight dollars and ninety-six cents. A Mexican peso, after it goes from hand to hand in the public market a few times, can turn into something that looks like a piece of Kleenex rescued from the bottom of a pot of very stale and very greasy bean soup and then used to patch a manifold in a sloppy garage. Florida driver"s license. Truck registration slip, a couple of months overdue for re-registration. Tourist card. A small squashed notebook with a soiled red plastic cover containing addresses, phone numbers, notes to himself. It seemed to be in the order in which he had written the items down. It was better than half filled. I scanned the last few pages and found Bruce Bundy, with address and phone. What they did not know had been there, they would never miss, and it needed longer and more careful study, so I put it in my pocket. I found a Miami Beach health card certification, with thumb print and picture. The picture confirmed a positive identification of the thing suspended in the tipped camper. I found two keys, obviously vehicle keys, probably spares. I found three folded color Polaroid prints quite ancient and faded, and featuring obscene acts so unique, so improbable, that after an instant of surprise, the performers no longer looked obscene or shocking, but looked instead strangely comic and forlorn. n.o.body I knew. All strangers, even the sheep dog. I put them back in the wallet with everything except the red book, thinking that the prints might well end up taped on the inside of the door of some local cop"s locker. Some daring sociologist should someday publish a collection of the art work found on the insides of locker doors of cops, firemen, ballplayers, and resident golf pros.

So we went roaring ahead again, back to the downtown hotel where he had picked us up. The car was parked over beyond the post office. On the way I felt a stupid smile appearing on my stupid face from time to time. Perhaps more rictus than smile. It is one of the many curious phenomena of reaction. There is a dreadful jolly animal hidden inside us all who keeps reminding us we are alive and somebody else is dead. It kept telling me to remember how deeply the wire had eaten into the wrists of Walter Rockland, impacted there by the spasm of powerful muscles reacting to unspeakable pain.

No more hustling towels for the guests around the pool. No more two hundred percent markup on funny cigarettes. No more decisions, boy. All problems are solved forever.

Fuentes double-parked in front of the hotel and signaled the strolling cop that he would be but a moment by holding up thumb and forefinger a half inch apart, and the cop touched his cap in proper deference to the local power structure.

Enelio said firmly, "You are very nice fellows. You are splendid fellows. Lita tells me that the delicious sisters from Guadalajara have dreamy eyes about you two, and say now that it is the best vacation of all. For that the sisters and I am grateful, and my faith and trust is justified. But no more of death, eh? Maybe I am not a true Mexican. I am not enchanted by death. Do not tell me any more you learn. Do not ask my advice on any such matters, eh? In fact, let us not see each other as planned tonight. In exactly... forty minutes I shall be in one big deep hot tub, and pretty soon I will give a big yell and Lita will come scampering in with very, very cold wine because I like it very cold when I am in a hot tub, and she will pour a gla.s.s, and when I have drunk it all she will take the big brush and the special soap and scrub my back, and then she will pour me another gla.s.s, and soon then maybe I will begin to sing a little. I shall tell her that we are going to stay in, because with a woman in my arms I can stop thinking about death. I know I will live forever. So there is the place at this hotel, and there is the other place at the other hotel, and Lita will stay with me. So I advise you, kind gentlemen, to stay apart, to stay with your loving girls, to lose the stink of death in the sweetness of girls, and have food and drink sent in, which is possible in both places, and make the girls of Guadalajara laugh and also, in time, make them cry, because laughing and crying are very living things. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will hear from me. Adios, amigos."

So he sped off. It was after five. Meyer grabbed a table. I went inside to the men"s room and scrubbed my hands and face and neck and arms, and looked at myself in the mirror and saw I was still wearing that stupid smile. It is the smile of the survivor. A man walks away from the pile of tinsel junk that was once an airplane, and which for some unknown reason failed to explode and failed to burn, and he wears that smile. I wiped the wallet off and dropped it into the mail box. Meyer had a cold Negro Modelo waiting on the table for me.

"I"m trying not to think," he said. "I don"t want to do any thinking, please."

"So don"t."

"But the stinking wheels go around in my head. I keep remembering that day aboard the Flush, and trying to say something to Bix that would make it easier for her, somehow, to accept Liz"s ugly death, and those beautiful deep blue eyes of hers were absolutely bland and indifferent, no matter what polite thing her mouth was saying. There was a... a challenge there. Something like that. I wanted to try to reach her and get some reaction, some genuine reaction, no matter how. To say or do some... ugly thing, to shock her awake maybe. Travis, I wonder if there are people in this world who are appointed by the G.o.ds to be victims, so that they bring out the worst in everybody they touch. And the perfect victim would have to be surpa.s.singly lovely, of course, to be most effective. I keep wondering if she was the catalyst, not Rockland. And maybe, that day, if I hadn"t become irritated at being unable to get any reaction, if I had tried harder."

"Meyer, Meyer, Meyer."

"I know. I have this thing, like the disease of kings. A bleeder. The internal wounds do not clot well. All my life is remorse. If I had done this, if I had done this..."

"And if your aunt had wheels she"d have been a tea cart."

"Where are we, Travis? Just where the h.e.l.l are we?"

"In Oaxaca. The Chamber of Commerce motto is "Stay One More Day in Oaxaca." "

"Perhaps I do not care to."

"A pity to spoil a nice girl"s vacation just when it is shaping up, Meyer."

"Now Travis."

"My G.o.d, when you get the shys you look just like Howland Owl."

"Well... she is quite young, and... and, dammit, McGee, anything that pleasurable has to be shameful, sinful, and wicked. I am a lecherous old man, shaken by remorse. We should go home."

"So we can go back to Lauderdale, land of the firm and sandy young rump, home of the franchised high-starch diet, and appraise the cost and the seaworthiness of all the playtoys that churn up and down the waterway, and criticize the way they are being handled. And we can wonder who did what to whom and why, and wonder why we didn"t stay just a little bit longer and find out."

"Or not find out."

"Somebody wasn"t in it for the money. Somebody wasn"t worried about little incriminating items in the wallet. So Rockland has been dead in that aluminum hot box since August seventh, and I think maybe whoever did it parked the truck on the rim, worked on him for a long, long time, then rolled it over, pried dirt down on it, piled brush on it, and went away. It was a punishment which somebody devised to fit the crime. It was a very sick mind at work. Very sick and very savage."

"As with Mike Barrington, with Della Davis, with Luz?" Meyer asked. "As with my travel clock which is now junk?"

"Mr. Nesta? You had what we"ll call an exploratory session with him. Do you buy him?"

"No. Not for that. Maybe, without the alibi, for what happened on the Coyotepec Road. Hallucination, violence, amnesia. But not what... was done to Rockland. It"s fallacious to try to a.s.sess what any human- being is capable of, naturally."

"You know, Meyer, my friend, what has put us into cerebral shock is knowing that Rockland was probably capable of doing to others just what was done to him. He was the sweet guy who led Bix Bowie out into the cornfield. He was the charmer who did the one thing that would finally destroy Carl Sessions. And he-possibly-set Bix up to fly off the mountain."

Meyer shrugged, ma.s.sively, slowly, expressively. He wore that inexpressibly mournful look of the giant anthropoid, of the ape who knows there is not one more plantain left in the rain forest.

"There"s Bundy." he said without conviction. "We don"t know if Bundy told us the whole story, and... Forget it. It was a stranger. It was somebody who took a dislike to him, for some strange reason."

Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison came up behind me and pressed my shoulder affectionately. "Travis darling! How lovely to see you again, dear." I came to my feet, feeling as clumsy and oppressed as the big-footed kid who has to come into the living room to meet mother"s bridge friends. I mumbled the presentation of Meyer. She had a friend with her, a sunburned youth of sufficient inches over six feet to be able to look me right in the eye. He was rawboned, shy, with cropped blond hair and a face and manner from the midwest farm belt.

"I want you to meet Mark Woodenhaus," she said. "Isn"t that a precious name?" The boy suddenly looked even more sunburned. "He"s been working out in a primitive village doing some kind of sanitation thing with the... what is the name of it, dear?"

"The Friends" Service Committee, ma"am."

"And I found him trudging down the highway all hot and dusty and carrying a monstrous dufflebag because he couldn"t spare bus fare. It"s volunteer work isn"t it, dear?"

"Yes, ma"am."

"And I truly believe that parasites like myself should take every chance to express their deep grat.i.tude to marvelous young men like Mark, don"t you, Travis?"

"The best is none too good," I said. I could not see through the dark lenses of her gla.s.ses very well, but thought I saw a significant wink. "Would you like to sit with us?" I asked her.

"Oh, thank you so much, but I think not. We have some errands to do, don"t we, Mark darling? Some bits of luxury for those poor young people slaving away out there in. the bush. So nice to see you, really. Do hope you"ll be about for a time, Travis. Come along, Mark."

She looked, as one might well say, smashing. Vibrant and saucy and a-hum with improbable energies. Happily predatory, she scurried along in her lime yellow slacks beside the gangly, unsuspecting prey, with his plowjockey stride. The solid and shapely behind swung in graceful clench and cadence, and as I watched it disappear down the long aisle between the evening tables, I remembered, out of nowhere, an ancient incident, and remembered the tag line because of its aptness.

I"d been out in the placid Gulf of Mexico off Manasota Key in a small boat with a good and longtime friend named Bill Ward. We were trolling slowly for anything interesting and edible. But there was no action. A gull came winging by, and in the silence, out of boredom, Bill aimed a forefinger at it and said, quietly, "Bang!" At that precise instant the gull, spotting a small meal on the surface, dropped like a stone. Bill, eyes and mouth wide in amazement, turned toward me, inadvertently aiming the lethal finger at me. "Don"t aim that thing at me," I told him.

"And there you sit," Meyer said, "steeped in jealous envy."

"Smiling, the boy fell dead."

"Well, he has found a Friend. And the magic word is Service. But it will play h.e.l.l trying to get back to that primitive village, carrying that dufflebag."

"And on his hands and knees. Where were we? h.e.l.l, let"s write a finish for it, Meyer, for a bad movie. Harl Bowie is really not confined to a wheel chair. And that German nurse of his got her basic training in concentration camps. So, as a cover story, he suckered us into coming down here openly. He knew the whole story, snuck into town with the German nurse, and took care of Rockland before ever sending us down here."

Meyer smiled and then sobered. "Remember my saying that one shouldn"t guess about what people are capable of? I think if Harlan Bowie knew the whole story, he could possibly do that to Rocko."

"So let"s write the part for Wally McLeen. Minda didn"t make as many bad scenes as Bix, but it wasn"t exactly a fond daddy"s idea of a nice vacation for dear daughter."

Meyer chuckled. "Poor Wally. What"s the word for what he"s trying to do? He"s trying to get with it. Or maybe that expression is already pa.s.se."

"And for a man devoting his whole time to tracking down his daughter, he isn"t very well organized. He hadn"t even nailed down the names of the original group."

We sat in our silences, watching the people. Meyer said, "Somebody had a h.e.l.l of a long and lonely and conspicuous walk back from the place where we found the camper. Unless, of course, they had a rented Honda to offload before running the truck into the dry gulley."

"Come off it, friend. Wally is trying to establish communication. He is a very earnest little guy. Boring, obvious, comical... but earnest."

More silence. Then it was my turn. "So he reports a conversation with Rockland. He says he didn"t know it was Rockland. He says the mysterious stranger tried to con him out of money in return for producing darling daughter. It accounts for the two of them being seen together in a public place... how long before Rockland had his little misfortune?"

Meyer half-closed his eyes and turned his computer on. "Wally McLeen claimed they talked on the... we figured out that it had to be the last day of July. Rockland lived five more days. But could that puffy little man immobilize Rockland long enough to wire him and gag him? Unlikely. And could he have done the mischief on the Coyotepec Road? Three of them?"

So I thought that over and finally said, "Item. Let"s say, just for the h.e.l.l of it, that Wally went into that compound believing that Jerry Nesta was there with the others. He could have taken Mark by surprise, then got the two women before they could run. Then he could have scurried around and found that Jerry wasn"t there. Item. He made a point of telling me he had been out on the Coyotepec Road that morning on his rented bike."

Meyer shook his head. "No, Travis. We"re playing bad games."

"Agreed. But he is a common denominator, and so what we do is get him off the books because if we don"t he"ll muddy up the logic of the situation. And we get to throw two stones at one bird, because maybe he knows something useful, without knowing how useful it is."

"But we will have to listen to the communication lecture again."

"And admire the progress of the chin whiskers." Meyer remembered the room number and went and checked and came back and said the key was in the box, so Wally McLeen was out. I took a stroll down the porch and couldn"t spot him. I put a note in his box to call me at the Victoria. By then it was five minutes past the time we had all agreed to meet on the veranda. And the sisters appeared, newly and too elegantly coiffed, high heels, gloves, evening bags, dresses more suited to the night life of Guadalajara or Mexico City than to a September night in Oaxaca.

Their festive smiles and dancing eyes dimmed when they saw that Meyer and I were still in the rough dusty clothes of the expedition to the burned land, and they exchanged a meaningful sisterly glance. They came to the table and were seated. I said that I was sorry that we had not yet had time to change. I said that it had been an evil day, and they would have to forgive us if we seemed solemn and tired. I said that Enelio Fuentes was also tired, and that he and Lita had decided not to join us.

Any affront Elena may have felt was erased immediately by the concern in her eyes as she searched my face. She moved her chair closer, laid her hand on my wrist. In a little while I noticed that Meyer and Margarita were gone. I had not seen them leave. I told Elena, in our special clumsy mixture of English and Spanish, that I was sorry she had taken such care to dress for a dinner party. She said she had dressed to please me, and asked me if she did please me. I said there could be no question of that. She said that whatever I wished-cualquier tu quieres-that would be the evening that would please her. I said that I wished to go up the hill with her, to have a quiet drink with her, to have food together, and then to have love. She said she had planned on love in any case.

The last angle of the sun before it slipped over the mountains found her face with a single shaft of orange light. She looked at me, her eyes moving back and forth, focusing on each of my eyes in turn, and she wore a small, questioning sensuous frown. Black pupils set in deepest brown, whites of her eyes blue-white with superb health, long fringe of wiry. black lashes, long oval face, matte golden skin, microscopic beads of moisture in the down of her upper lip above the broad solid mouth. Then suddenly her eyes looked heavy and her mouth loosened, and her head bowed slightly. She took a deep and shuddering breath and exhaled slowly. Her nostrils flared and the enameled nails bit into my wrist. She smiled and said, "Why we are sitting here so long time, querido?"

I could have reported to Enelio-but I knew I would not-that a back can be effectively scrubbed in a tiled shower stall, and that there is no real need for a special brush and special soap. Also gin over ice is cold and pleasant and goes with a hot shower in a very Sybaritic way. I could have reported that soon I came to believe that I would live forever, and even sang a little.

Good steaks came down the hill from the hotel, and when we were done we put the cart outside at the end of the porch, turned off the lights and sat comfortably and quietly and had coffee and looked at the stars. Wally had the grace to phone at that time, and I went in and took it in the dark, sitting on the turned-down bed.

"Trav? This is Wally. I just found your note in the box a little while ago. What"s it about? Have you... have you heard something about Minda?"

"I wish I had, Wally. No. This is something else."

"Well, what is it?"

"Meyer and I would like to have a chat with you when it"s convenient, Wally."

"What about?"

"We think it"s a good idea to pool everything we"ve all learned up to this point. What do you think?"

"Well... I guess it couldn"t do any harm."

"When would be a good time? Now?"

"Oh, not now. I"m going with a bunch of the kids up to Monte Alban to see the ruins by moonlight again. Say, how about tomorrow morning? Have you ever seen the ruins at Yagul? It"s only about ten miles down the Mitla Road, and there"s a sign where you turn off to it."

"I saw the sign the last time we were out that way."

"I"m getting turned on pretty good by these ruins. I mean they are sort of timeless, and your own troubles don"t seem to mean so much. They don"t really know much about Yagul. It"s so quiet there, you can sit and... contemplate things. I was planning to go out early. I"ll be there all morning. Why don"t you and Meyer come out any time tomorrow morning? It will be a good place to talk. I think a place that is very, very old and peaceful and dead is a good place for really talking, don"t you?"

"Sure, Wally. We"ll see you there."

As I talked I had heard her close the door and click the night lock. I had heard a tock of heels on tile, then felt a dip of the bed as she sat on the other side. Whisk-whisper of nylons, then slap-pad of bare feet. Zipper-purr, rustle of fabric, click of snaps. Dip of bed again. I hung up. Hand on my shoulder to urge me around and pull me down to a mouth that fastened firmly and well, while a hand plucked at the tied belt of the robe I had put on after showering. Voice making a tuneless little contented ummming sound, way back in the strong round throat.

"This you want?" she whispered. "Turn some bad day to good things?"

"This I want."

"This you have, Tuh-rrrravis."

"You are fine."

"Sank you ver" motch. You are doing some thing in Mexico... how you say?... peligroso?"

"Dangerous? I don"t know. Maybe, maybe not."

She held me tightly and made a small growling sound in her throat. "Some person hurting you, Elena will fix. Tear out some eyes. Cut out some tongue. Breaking all bones, verdad?"

Something came flickering in through the back door of my mind, but by then everybody had become too busy to notice, and so the thought sat patiently out there in the back entryway until somebody had time to notice it.

I got around to noticing it when she lay purring into my throat, tickling weight of long heavy dark hair fanned across my chest. I eased the blanket up over her without awakening her. The thought that had come into the back of my mind was a memory of how the primitive warriors of history dreaded being handed over, alive, to the women of the enemy tribe. There had been a very convincing savagery in Elena"s threats about what she would do to whoever harmed me.

Rockland had gone to Eva Vitrier"s estate in La Colonia, and he had managed to take Bix Bowie away in Bundy"s car. Bundy had been wickedly pleased to learn that Eva could become emotionally involved, infatuated, with a girl she saw on the street and contrive to invite the girl and her friend into her home. The two girls had been her guests for a long time. It would seem plausible that they might tell Eva Vitrier some of the rancid highlights of their vacation in Mexico, the same things Nesta had told Meyer.

So sooner or later Mrs. Vitrier would reveal, calculatingly or accidentally, her desire for the Bowie girl. In view of Bix"s pa.s.sivity about being used in physical ways, perhaps an actual affair had begun. Safe to a.s.sume that Minda McLeen would be opposed, and also fair to state there was very little she could do about it. So the note to Harlan Bowie about coming to get Bix may have come from Minda. Perhaps the girls quarreled over Eva"s attentions to Bix, Minda demanding that Bix leave, Bix refusing. So Minda left.

Knowing Rockland"s past abuse of Bix, knowing Rockland was responsible for her addiction, knowing Rockland was responsible for her death that Sunday evening, what would happen to Rockland if he went back to the Vitrier house? She could very well have mutilated him in exactly the ways I had seen. The flaying and blinding could even be said to be a symbolic expression of her att.i.tude toward male s.e.xuality. And perhaps her wealth enabled her to employ muscle she could trust-muscle that could overpower him, truss him up, leave him alone for her savage attentions, and then dispose of truck, camper, and body in one package.

So then Wally McLeen would be a waste of time. But it was set, so we"d lose nothing by going through with it. I thought of a twelve-second system for opening him up, and knew it would draw a wide dazed blank He was one of the nice little people you meet on a Honda.

Elena suddenly began to jerk and twitch and make m.u.f.fled little yelping sounds. I woke her up, and tenderly and gently quieted her down. She said it had been a terrible, terrible dream. I had been broken into tiny bits, and if she could put them together in time I would live. But the little wet pieces kept crawling away in every direction as she tried to reconstruct me.