It had not been the most methodical of jobs, but then neither was I a schooled pistolero. It had been informed, however, by a cla.s.sic frenzy and a degree of hatred/brutality I"d never known I contained. I sat there while he sponged off his face with the wet washcloth, and my knees were shaking. He looked as though someone had mistaken his face for ten pounds of dogmeat, and had tried to fry it. His left eye was swollen shut, with thick, red-blue puffy tissue that gleamed in the light. His mouth was raw and cut through by his teeth. He had smaller cuts and contusions all over, and frankly, it would be some time before the hatcheck girl at PJ"s winked at him again. I handed him the phone. He looked at it, then at me. The eye was starting to drain blue into his cheek.
He called his father and mouthed some sort of nonsense about needing four hundred dollars to get him out of a very tight spot. I think he knew just how tight that spot was. His old man must have said okay, because I saw Roger Gore visibly brighten at one point midway in the conversation. There was a great deal of "Okay, Dad, this is the last time; I"ll be turning over a new leaf, you"ll see; you won"t be sorry, Dad, thanks a million," and he racked the receiver. I looked at the kid just as hard as I could, and I said: "It"s a shame there"s no law protecting girls like Jenny from their own stupidity. It"s also a shame there"s no law that punishes a guy for not being a gentleman. But anyhow, Roger friend, there are more serious pains than the ones I loaned you. I"m not telling you not to swear out an a.s.sault and battery on me. That"d be foolish, though; a.s.sault means to threaten battery, and since I didn"t threaten you, I guess the best you could do would be battery, which might net me about five years in the slam, but there are more serious pains, Roger friend, and they are dispensed by much more unpleasant guys than me. I leave you with that thought.
"We"ll be taking Jenny down to TJ on Thursday. Get the money to her before then." I stood up and made to leave.
He snarled at me from the floor. "Your Jenny is a tease and a b.i.t.c.h, man! She wanted it as much as I did, that Jenny of yours! So just who the h.e.l.l you think you"re helping? Your Jenny"s a dummy and a tramp, and she hasn"t got any honor to protect! So take your Jenny and shove--"
I planted my foot with carefully calculated force in his groin. Gently I added, "She is neither your Jenny nor mine. She is her own Jenny, and whatever is wrong there, fellah, she is still a human being.
"Which is a condition I doubt you possess."
He was sucking air like a beached ba.s.s when I left.
My engine was still running.
When I got back, Jenny was alone. Rooney had gone over to see her parents; they had bought a new dog, and Rooney was a flip when it came to babies or tiny dogs. It wasn"t a vagrant thought: Jenny looked like a little of each. The washed-face pinkness and confusion of a baby; the anxiety and need to love or be loved a small dog wears like a second collar.
"Want to play some gin?" I asked her.
She nodded mutely and went to the sideboard to get the dog-eared deck. We sat down on the sofa, and she shuffled while I lit a cigarette. For a while we played, and didn"t say anything. Finally, I knocked on four in a spade hand, caught her with about twenty-five points, and said, "I talked to Roger. He"s changed his mind."
"You didn"t hurt him!" That was the first thing to cross her mind. Not did I get the money, not was she going to be rescued, but was he all right. I had one of those moments of stomach-muscle-tensing disorientation, as though I had intruded on a personal fight between two people who knew each other better than any interlopers with inclinations of arbitration.
"He"s okay. We just ... talked awhile. I convinced him you were his responsibility. He"ll be getting the money to you before Thursday."
She dropped her arms, and I could see her gin hand. It wasn"t so hot. "Thank G.o.d," she breathed. There was a pale milkiness about her then. As though some vital ingredient in her spirit had been hit by a catalytic agent, had vaporized in her system. She seemed just a little dead, at that moment.
She dropped the cards and lay back against the sofa with her eyes shut. Her hair was a natural blonde, somewhere between hard canary and yellow ocher, and she wore it in a ponytail, usually, a style few girls affect any more. But she wore it well, and there was a pleasantness to her youthfulness. I looked at her, resting there, and something turned over inside me.
She had said something.
I hadn"t really heard it, had just imagined I"d heard it, but she had spoken, absently, without realizing what words had been selected to convey her fear and her insecurity, but she had said, "Oh, Kenny ..."
And it was someone else"s voice from another time. I can"t remember even now who it was. Another girl I had known, when I was young enough to be able to remember everyone who had said yes, and count them on one hand. Perhaps it was that second girl I"d slept with. I can"t recall who she was. There isn"t anyone, man or woman, who can"t recall the first. But the second ... ah, that"s another matter. And perhaps it was her.
Whoever it had been, this was now, and Jenny had said, "Oh, Kenny ..." and I was holding her slim body very close to mine, and my hands were locked behind her back, still clutching the gin cards. Her face came up, and there were dust motes spinning in her eyes of whatever color those eyes might be.
I smelled her hair, and it was very clean. It was another reminder of things from before, but they were silly, irrelevant things, like a field of winter wheat I had run through once, on a picnic day, when there had been such things as days right for nothing but picnics. It was a stupid thought, and it pa.s.sed quickly, but not before I recalled having run and run and finally fallen down on my back, and lain there, completely hidden from all but the sky, staring straight up and feeling sorry as h.e.l.l for myself. I kissed Jenny, and her mouth was soft, precisely as a woman"s mouth should be. I kissed her the way a gentle lover would kiss someone he revered.
"Not like that," she murmured, pulling my face down harshly. "Like this." She opened her lips and worked at me fiercely, as though it was something worth doing and hence, something worth doing well. It was possibly the grandmother of all Soul Kisses, and when she was done, I knew I"d been kissed. My hand was on her thigh, and she moved slightly, so my hand went over the rise, down where her slacks were tightest. I had a mad thought that someone was going to pop out of the clothes closet ant take movies of it all, but that thought pa.s.sed, too, and in a moment we were wriggling with each other"s clothes, trying to keep our mouths together, and yet get naked.
Jenny was young, but Jenny was expert. She took me the way Hillary and Tenzing Norgay took Everest: all the way, and chiefly because it was there. Anything worth doing was worth doing well. Midway, she arched up and there was a feral gleam on her face, a drawing back of the lips and an exposure of small teeth that reminded me of a timber wolf I"d shot up near North Bay. Sometimes, though, she was a flower, and sometimes she was a hot shower, and sometimes she was a pitch pipe whistling an elegant tune. She had a small habit of twisting her hips sidewise at special times.
When we were over the final hill, and the road behind seemed much too rough for anyone to have crossed alone, much less two people as strangely locked as we had been, I went into the bathroom and took a bath. Not a shower. A bath. I have taken showers since I was sixteen and had a bad back. Baths are a pain, and they leave a dirty ring around the tub.
I felt I needed a bath.
And I wanted to see that dirty ring around the tub.
Thursday was two h.e.l.ls and a decapitation away. Every time Rooney looked at me I could swear she knew. And when Jenny leaned over in a movie we three attended, with her hand on my leg, and whispered, "At least I know for sure you couldn"t make me pregnant," I wanted to open my wrists with a beer can opener. What had I stumbled upon: a key to the depravity of the young? Or the key to my own yin and yang? I didn"t feel guilty, I felt unclean, which was infinitely worse. I, Kenneth Duane Markham, became a case in point for myself. This, I thought angrily, is how we fool ourselves into thinking we"re honorable men. Jenny"s mere existence became a constant reminder of the other side of my nature; an ungovernable side that didn"t even have the consistency, the decency or the stamina to be constant. I was a mealymouthed, smiling sinner who took his pleasures and pains as they comfortably fit into the regimented scene of everyday life. Dorian Gray be d.a.m.ned! There isn"t one of us who isn"t in that bag.
But finally we left. Our little caravanserai moved out onto the road with all the glee and aplomb of a New Orleans funeral that couldn"t find a Preservation Hall Dixieland band.
We turned onto the Hollywood Freeway and sped straight down Route 101. Santa Ana Freeway, Pacific Coast Highway, El Camino Real; past Downey and its used car carnivals, past Disneyland and its ludicrous Matterhorn rising out of the surrounding squalor, past Tustin and the art bookstore that faces out on a highway going too fast to give a d.a.m.n. San Juan Capistrano, and I"ve never seen a swallow yet, going or coming. San Clemente, Del Mar, Pacific Beach, and we were in San Diego. I once asked a resident if they minded the Navy calling it "Dago," and that worthy responded he didn"t care if they called it dog-whoopee, as long as they kept spending their money. That, I feel, sums up the beauty and glory of San Diego, a h.e.l.luva way to end a beautiful state. It is not, I hasten to add, a coincidence that Dago appears at what might metaphorically be termed the backside of the state. We pulled in at a one-arm joint on 101, just before National City, the other side of San Diego, and while Jenny went to phone, Rooney and I had cups of coffee; I worked my neck around, trying to unkink it.
"What"s the matter with you today?" she asked, over the lip of the cup.
"What do you mean: what"s the matter? Nothing. Why, does something look the matter?" I could feel my nose growing, like Pinocchio"s.
"You"ve been awfully quiet the last forty miles or so."
I shrugged. "Tired. My back aches. That"s all."
She didn"t answer, but she knew I was lying.
"And this isn"t really the pleasure trip of all time," I added. Keep talking, schmuck, I told myself. Dig it a little deeper.
"Well, it"ll all be over soon enough," Rooney said, trying to cover her own awareness of my mood. She knew me too well. I knew we"d be splitting up soon. I couldn"t let anyone get that close to the core of me; as long as it was froth and foam it was safe. But the encystment was too marked in me, at age thirty. I smiled across at her rea.s.suringly.
Jenny came back. "Have a cup of coffee and a piece of pie," I told her. She shook her head no. "I"m not supposed to eat before the operation. His girl told me not to eat for about six hours beforehand. I haven"t eaten since last night. I"m starving, but you know you"re not supposed to eat before this kind of thing."
I hadn"t known, but I saw no reason for her to make a big who-struck-John of the whole matter. I mumbled something about oh yeah, I knew. And that was that. She sat down next to Rooney, staring at me with open malevolence. Like I was the guy who"d knocked her up. In a philosophical sense, I suppose I was as guilty as Roger Gore, but somehow I couldn"t bring myself to eat that particular humble pie. I had a feeling too many strange Jack Horners had already had their thumbs in it.
"Well, what did they say?" Rooney asked.
Jenny pulled her eyes away from me with difficulty. There was actually physical violence in her expression. I chalked it up to her fear and the fact that I was a man the same as Roger Gore, only he wasn"t handy for hating.
"She said to drive across the border, into downtown Tijuana, and park behind the Woolworth"s at 4:30, there"d be a fellow to meet us. She said his name is Louis--"
"Luis," I corrected her.
"So Loo-ees," she snapped back. "So what?" Then she went on, addressing herself to Rooney. I couldn"t have cared less. "She said to dress poorly, not like tourists--"
"Turistas," I murmured, under my breath.
"Why don"t you just shut up!" Jenny was screaming. A man at the counter turned to look at us, and the waitress paused on her way through the swinging doors to the kitchen.
I reached across and grabbed her wrist as hard as I could. "Listen, you little a.s.shole, I"ve had about as much horses.h.i.t from you as I can take. I"ve had to listen to your miserable bellyaching and whining and complaining for the last week; you may not appreciate the fact that aiding someone in getting an abortion is a prison offense, and that Rooney and I are risking our necks to drag your b.u.t.t down here, but the least you can do is be civil and keep from being a bigger pain in the a.s.s than you already are." I shoved her wrist away violently and slumped back in the booth. Rooney was staring at us as though we"d both gone insane. Jenny was rubbing her G.o.ddam wrist and looking like a whipped spaniel. I drank coffee and pretended I was in Nome, Alaska.
After a long silence in which no one seemed to move, Rooney said, guardedly, "Let"s go. It"s three o"clock now. It"ll probably take us a while to find the Woolworth"s."
"I have a terrible headache," Jenny said, rubbing one hand up across her temple. "Do you have an aspirin?"
I threw a half dollar onto the table and slid out of the booth. As I stalked to the car, Jenny was bugging the waitress for an Empirin or somed.a.m.nthing. I got into the car and lit a cigarette. It tasted like dust, and so did the day.
Getting into Tijuana, unlike the crossover to h.e.l.l, involves no Stygian water-ride, and if one of the border guards be named Charon, at least he has had the good sense to have it Anglicized. At that point, all differences cease.
We drove up to the big white pa.s.s-through that stretched across the road. The parking lot on the American side was not filled. Had it been a weekend, with the jai alai, the dog and horse races at Caliente, the bullfights, the lots would have been banged to the fences; but this was Thursday, and midday was not too far advanced, and traffic was steady, but not a flood, as it would be the next day.
We were waved through without a pa.s.sing glance from the patrolmen. Does no one smuggle anything into Mexico?
A few feet beyond the pa.s.s-through, the car told me we were in Mexico, and I knew why most people left their vehicles on the American side (a single reason out of three good ones). The pavement came to a halt, was replaced by a three-foot stretch of open dust-dirt, and then resumed as pavement again. But a return to pavement so marked I knew I had left the United States. The Mexican pavement was in chunks. It was pocked and upthrust as though a decade of cars had gone over it without the most minor attention by repair gangs. We b.u.mped and jounced across the pa.s.sway, the Magnette clanging like a dinner gong.
(The other two reasons, incidentally, are that if you have an accident involving your car in Tijuana, whether you are right or wrong, struck or striker, the car is impounded, they throw you up under the jail, and only a feisty bribe will get you out; the third reason is that hubcaps, car seats, dash clocks, luggage racks, headlamps and other minor items have an uncanny habit of vanishing from the auto in question. Some contend it is the highly spiced atmosphere of the town.) We pa.s.sed through the Mexican side with even less event than the Yankee entrance. Fat chance they"d keep out a spendable dollar.
Once through the arch, and a left turn, it was an open scene from Hogarth. Perhaps Hieronymus Bosch. Possibly Dali. Definitely Dante.
Filth.
The word comes unbidden. A hundred, two hundred rickety taxis, all parked in rows, waiting for the turistas. The street hard-packed dirt and broken concrete. Dozens of barefoot urchins, scuddy in their dingy rags, clutching cigar boxes full of Chiclets to be sold at a dime or half dollar for a penny pack. Ramshackle buildings, swayleaning as though propped from behind with poles. A miasma of road dust rising turning in the sunbeaten air. A sense of hurry, of expectation, of fear and sickness and something about to happen. A faint electric stir of movement within the ma.s.s gibbering movement of dirty hack drivers and shawl-wrapped women hustling for the dollars. A tone of impending disaster, always omnipresent. Was this perhaps the stench that filled Pompeii before it dissolved in fire? Did Sodom or Gomorrah have to contend with that stink no Air-Wick could ever contain, that color of madness in the wind and in the very horizon line?
I gunned the Magnette and pulled out of the middle of the maelstrom. We banged down the street, between two untidy rows of temporary structures, all of which were selling car upholstery. Tuck and roll shops. Best bargains. Get it here, installed in ten minutes, satisfaction guaranteed. All misspelled.
Cover-up shops for stripping and repainting cars; hot cars; stolen cars; lost cars; impounded cars; and legitimate tucking and rolling, as well. Guaranteed to last at least till you recrossed the border.
A huge sign across the end of the road bellowed: BIENVENIDAS AMIGOS!.
Welcome, suckers. Unfurl your desires and let us see under which banners you skulk. We have it here, guaranteed, satisfaction 100 percent or we give you a dose of the clap free!
A clutch of buildings clogged the roadside on either hand. One of them said MARRIAGE DIVORCE CAR INSURANCE on a sloppily lettered sign. A second advised FULL COVER INSURANCE WHILE IN MEXICO GUARANTEED! A third reversed the order (or perhaps the owner was more of a cynic) by offering DIVORCES QUICK--MARRIAGES--NOTARY. Notary what, I never paused to inquire. We did a dog-leg and turned up another street, in as hideous a condition as the one we"d just left, following a white arrow-sign that said DOWNTOWN TI.
Someone had, perhaps, bitten off the remaining section of the sign. Maddogs, I am told, are not uncommon in such heavy climates.
Farther into TJ, the incredible poverty and squalor of the people struck us like a hammer blow. "It"s unbelievable!" said Rooney, as a gaggle of barefooted, dirt-smeared children raced directly across our path, causing me to swerve into a huge chuckhole. They ran across the razor-edged rocks of the road as though their feet were wound with asbestos.
Slat-houses tottered at every curb. Porches boasted fat old women, whose only joys were watching the horrors the young girls had to endure. On every bit of habitable land, someone had thrown up a jury-rigged shack. Garbage cans lived more open lives than the people whose refuse they received. Every half-block there were one or more stores advertising LICORES.
I could understand it; the only way to live and stay sane in such a cesspool, was to stay liquored-up constantly. We drove on.
After what seemed a Minotaur"s maze of twistings and turnings, through streets littered with animate and inanimate garbage, with the castoff and the downcast, with the vile and the pitiful, we saw a street of neon lights and brighter buildings. Traffic was incredible. The taxis moved as though their wheels were about to be revoked. Pedestrians leaped out--perhaps hoping they would be struck down by a rich gringo--and ma.s.ses of humanity surged across at intersections which had never known the luxury of a stoplight.
We drove down past the old bullring, the Toreo de Tijuana. The new one was up on the hill overlooking the town, but the turistas go there, and for a real bloodbath corrida, the townsfolk go to the old ring, where the toreros must perform with more skill and pa.s.sion. A bright, romantic poster outside the ring proclaimed: 6 LA TRASQUILA 6 THE GREATEST BULLFIGHTING FIGURES CARLOS ARRUZA (The Mexican Cyclone) FERMIN ESPINOZA MILLITA (The Master of Masters) AND SILVERIO PEREZ (The Pharaoh from Texcoco) FIGHTING TO DEATH IMPASING BULLS FROM 6 LA TRASQUILA 6!!
I did not read this sign all at once, then. Much later l was to have painful opportunity to study it at my leisure, or a copy thereof, while lying on my back. At the time, all I saw was the bright poster color and the word ARRUZA. We continued driving toward what had to be the center of town.
As we drove, seedy-looking men with rolled newspapers leaped out onto the street, trying to wave our car into whatever empty lot they had appropriated as a parking area. We drove straight down into the heart of town. The roads were a little better now, on a par with a neglected side street or country road in the States. I knew I"d have to have the Magnette completely overhauled when I got back. Every seam was sprung; every bolt was loose.
We cruised around, and finally I spotted the Woolworth"s. It looked like any plastic-and-chrome eyesore from the States, but among the filthy, falling-down shops and bars and arcades of downtown Tijuana, it was shining, gleaming, sparkling, a rea.s.surance that stability still existed. We rolled slowly toward the big store, and I saw an empty parking place on the street. "She said behind the Woolworth"s, in their parking lot," Jenny said.
It was the first sentence out of her mouth since we"d left the coffee shop in National City.
I pulled around the side of the building, and started into the lot. An old Mexican with gold teeth came running out of a rickety guard-shack and tried to take a dollar from me. I asked if this was parking for Woolworth"s. My Spanish was pa.s.singly understandable, but not enough to get elected mayor. He answered in English, almost. "Ess park for no-whan, no Wowlwort"s, ees pay for aver"whan!" And he continued to shove his hand through the window. His hand looked as though the last time it had been introduced to soap was when Calvin Coolidge approved the World Court. "I"m waiting for someone, I"ll only be here a few minutes," I tried to tell him. I should have known better; it was a stupid thing to say, a turista remark. He didn"t give a d.a.m.n if I was there for a minute or the decade. I backed up and found myself on the street, with the old man still screaming imprecations at me, possibly for running my nasty old car across his valuable dust.
The empty parking s.p.a.ce was still there. I pulled into it, and as I negotiated the b.u.mper of the car against the high curb, I realized I was being "navigated" from the sidewalk by a little boy of nine or ten. Unasked, he had taken me as his mark. A moment before he had not been there, but like some sort of perambulant plant he had sprung from the shadows or the sidewalk, and was hand-waving me into the slot. Then he reached into a cigar box he carried, pulled out a penny and leaped at the parking meter. He beat the other four kids to the meter by a split-instant. They were identical in a tragic, sorry way. Each was his own person, but each dwelled within a coat of the same Tijuana dirt, and so they looked alike. The kid that had thrust the penny into the meter was around the car and trying to get my door open before I"d turned off the motor.
Rooney reached across Jenny and unlocked the door Jenny had just locked. "They"re just children, Jenny."
She looked as though she"d eaten a ripe persimmon. "But they"re so filthy!" she squeamed. Her nose wrinkled.
"It comes from not bathing," I snapped. "And from having to sleep in a doorway. Offensive as h.e.l.l, ain"t it."
She didn"t answer. By this time we had parted company for good and always, and for a second a wisp of thought crossed my mind how this adventure had altered all our relationships to one another. Then the kid had my door open and was demanding I pay him for parking my car, for his having waved his hands to steer me in, for his having put a penny in the meter.
"Doe-lahr, Senor," he urged, "doe-lahr!"
I shook my head no. He would not be put off. "Gimme, gimme, gimme!" he kept saying, not shouting, just demanding, in a tone of righteous indignation that was guaranteed to intimidate the sternest soul. And in an instant there was another one beside him, and a third, and then a very little one, no more than five or six, with huge wet eyes like one of the hideously stylized Keane paintings, and all of them with the cigar boxes filled with small change, packets of Chiclets, a knife perhaps.
The tiny one managed to wiggle past me and would not budge; wedged in between the car seat and the door. I asked him and asked him again, tried, "Vamanaos," and it didn"t work, so I lifted him bodily and set him outside the car, closing the door with my back. His body went rigidly limp, if such a thing makes sense. He was affronted. He demanded money; for what nebulous service I cannot guess.
We managed to elude the kids, and it only cost me a half dollar to the one who had invested his penny. It was a quarter to four. We had forty-five minutes. So we walked up the block.
In the s.p.a.ce of two hundred yards, it was a toss-up which deal would be more to my advantage: taking one of the girls offered to me by the sidewalk hustlers, or sell the two I had, turning a tidy profit. Rooney"s bemused stares canceled either possibility. We walked through the shops and I decided I wanted to buy a set of steel-rim bongos. The opening price was thirteen dollars. When I left the shop, I had the bongos and was six dollars and fifty cents lighter.
Finally. it came around to 4:30 and we returned to the car. The fog lamps were gone from the front grille. I cursed eloquently, and Jenny mumbled something about replacing them, but I was in no mood for heroics, so I hustled them into the car, and we backed out of the parking slot. I pulled into the parking lot and here came the Old Man once more. I gave him the dollar and pulled into the back.
Jenny had been told to look for a 1962 Imperial, black.
We saw it parked at the other end of the lot, next to an old Ford with a man and woman in the front seat. Loafing against the rear of the Woolworth"s was a trio of oily looking juvies overdressed and indolent. "I hope Luis isn"t one of them," Jenny whispered. I didn"t say anything; he probably was.
We pulled in next to the Ford, and I cut the engine. The man in the Ford was talking earnestly to the girl beside him. She was a wild-looking blonde, and I had the strange premonition that they were there for a familiar reason. "Let"s get out, let them know who we are," I said. I got out and went around the car, and very ostentatiously helped Jenny from the car, as though she were an invalid. She looked at me peculiarly, but I didn"t feel like explaining.
One of the young hoods detached himself from the group, waved good-bye to his fellow lounge-rats, and ambled across the lot toward us. "Uh-oh, here we go, gang," I said softly. The guy and the blonde got out of the Ford. She was wild. And I thought, Perhaps they"re friends of his, cover sent along in case of trouble.
"Let"s go," the kid said, walking up to the five of us. It was Luis. He had a memorable scar on his right cheek. I doubted he had come by it at Heidelberg.
He opened the doors of the black Imperial, and I helped Jenny and Rooney into the back seat. I started to get into the front seat, and he said, sharply, "In the back."
"I want to follow in my own car," I said. He shook his head. I stared at him for a long moment, and without uttering a sound Luis said, Do you want this thing done, or don"t you? I got into the back seat. The blonde and her boy friend got in the front. He was carrying a copy of Kafka"s IN THE PENAL COLONY, in a well-thumbed paperback edition, and while I wasn"t dead certain, I was inclined to think my original estimate of the couple was correct. Why is it a corollary of being a college student that caution and common sense have been left out of the equation?
Luis backed out of the s.p.a.ce, spun the wheel as I imagine he thought Fangio might have done it, and sped across the lot, out a side entrance, and down another street. He drove without saying a word, but flicked on the car radio, and in a moment we were inundated by yay-yay"s and boom-boom"s from a San Diego rock "n" roll station. It was rea.s.suring to know that bad taste was not strictly an American malady.
He drove for a long time, back and forth and around, and at one point stopped to buy a newspaper from a hawker standing on a deserted stretch of road. I surrept.i.tiously glanced behind me as we whipped away down the road, and the newspaper vendor was moving quickly toward a small shack set off the road. I looked for, and found, the telephone lines running into the shack. Signal number one, apparently pa.s.sing us through.
We drove a while longer, and Luis pulled in at a liquor store that also sold IMPORTED FRENCH PERFUME THE REAL STUFF! He got out, went inside, and I slow-counted to three hundred and eighty-five by thousandcount. He came back with a brown-paper sack twisted at the top, and I knew we"d come through phase two of the clearing process. He was a.s.sured--in some indefinable way--not only that we were not being followed, but that we were what we declared ourselves to be: waifs on the sea of intrigue. He roared out of the parking lot of the liquor store, and tooled the big Imperial toward the hills overlooking Tijuana. We roared past Caliente track; I relaxed, and Jenny looked more frightened.
It was a twisty-turny, and I went through a third of a pack of cigarettes. Finally, we pulled down a side street, turned left through an alley, and went right parallel to the street we had just come down. Luis whirled the wheel again, and pulled up into the driveway of an expensive-looking home surrounded by a high polished-wood fence. I could see the house through the close slats of the fence, and it was a big-money pad. Whoever lived there (and don"t think for a second it wasn"t obvious who lived there), lived well.
Luis braked to a halt before the inner gate, and honked twice, sharply, paused, then honked again. The gate went up, pulled on a chain by a skinny, underfed-looking Mexican youth perhaps a year or two younger than Luis, the pickup agent. He drove the car through, and the rickets case let the gate down again. We were in a narrow pa.s.sage between the fence and the side of the house. Beyond the house, the pa.s.sage opened into a large back area that ended in open-face garages. From where I sat, I could see a Bentley, a Thunderbird and what looked to be an Aston Martin roadster, each in its own berth, each a current model, each gleaming and polished.
Luis got out, and I opened the door on my side.
There was just barely enough room to squeeze out, and be wedged against the side of the house. The college students in the front seat could not yet leave the car, the pa.s.sage was so narrow. Luis came around the car and opened the door beside me, into the house. I stepped back and Jenny and Rooney slipped past me. Luis watched Jenny"s legs as she slid out of the car. Eyes salivate, don"t ever let them tell you otherwise. She caught him at it, and smiled coquettishly.
Luis ran a hand through his thick, glistening shock of hair. The Demon Lover strikes again!
We went inside, and were followed by the college students. There were three couples waiting. The girls were all exceptionally attractive, and all under twenty-one, I would have guessed.
It was an anteroom, with two sofas, several large borax modern chairs, and a tv set babbling a moron"s guessing game. Something about trusting one another ...