Dancing with the Tiger (4 page)

Her father straightened, indignant. Anna knew what was coming.

“This is not about me,” he said icily. “The Met is the largest museum in the United States. Four hundred galleries. More than fifty galleries of Asian art, seventy-two galleries of European painting. Guess how many rooms are dedicated to art of the Americas? Three. It's an embarrassment, and they know it. The Met is an encyclopedic museum with many pages missing.
Some people
, apparently, are invisible. The art of
some
countries doesn't matter.”

“Dad, I know.” She had heard this rant a million times. “They are
still
not going design a gallery for one mask.”

“They will for this one.
For this one mask, the Rose White Ramsey
Gallery will open with a black-tie reception and international press. Our book will be reissued with proper clarifications. The mask will be featured on postcards and T-shirts. This twigger is a fine digger, a connoisseur of controlled substances, I am sure, but no art historian.” He was practically levitating. “This is not some two-bit relic he's dug up. It's
Montezuma's funerary mask
.”

This new absurdity took Anna a moment to absorb. Her father's eyes gleamed. He believed this. He wanted her to believe it. He was drunk. Dry drunk, whatever that meant.

“
The
Montezuma?” she said at last. “There's no such thing.” Even as she dismissed this, she remembered reading rumors she'd discounted as apocryphal. Like the Loch Ness monster and the blood-sucking
chupacabra
. “And you believe in this mask because some drug addict sent you an e-mail.”

“Gonzáles sent the e-mail. He trusts his digger implicitly.”

“Gonzáles,” Anna scoffed. “I don't trust any of them. And even if it's true, how are you going to smuggle it over the border? In your boxers?”

“I am done playing fair.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Gonzáles will give the mask a legal provenance, say it was part of ‘an old European collection.' Prior to 1970. Prior to UNESCO. Another fee, but so be it.”

“So he's a liar, too. I thought he was a respected—”

“To accomplish a greater good. He wants
me
to have the mask for the Ramsey Collection. If I don't buy it, Malone will. Then no one will see it but his housekeeper and her feather duster. Or Reyes will use it as a doorstop.”

Thomas Malone was her father's friendly rival, a man Anna had never met but loathed anyway. Malone was younger, richer, and lived
in Oaxaca, all sources of envy. Óscar Reyes Carrillo was a Mexican drug lord, whom her father knew only by reputation, from hushed conversations in art circles.

“Or . . .” her father continued, “it will be put in a Mexican museum and stolen within the year.”

“It's not that bad.”

“You know how much a Mexican museum guard earns? Two-fifty a week. You think he's not corruptible?”

“So we'll steal the mask first? That's the American spirit.”

“We are not
stealing
anything.” Her father's face reddened. “Current cultural property law ignores the essential role the collector plays.
We
are the ones who safeguard art. We hold it and preserve and protect it from scoundrels. What did Hernán Cortés do when Montezuma gave him gold goblets?
He melted them down.
Furthermore, you forget, the gallery is not in my name. It's the
Rose White Ramsey
Gallery. It was your mother's money. My work, but her money. She loved those masks as much as I did.”

Love. It justified anything. It was why he drank. Why he collected. Why he had never remarried. Her father had never recovered from her mother's sudden death. Well, neither had Anna. She was only ten, a girl,
a little girl who'd grown up
without a mother
. She resented her father's epic descriptions of his loss. By magnifying his sorrows, he diminished her right to her own.

“Mom didn't love masks.” Anna's voice was flat, lifeless. “She loved you. She loved Mexico.”

Her father's hands pulsed. “Any great achievement requires commitment and dedication. Your mother understood that.”

“You never even buried her.” Anna stared into the bedroom. “Always
another excuse.
Oh, my knees. My back.
There's this mask I want to buy. . . .
She wanted to be in Mexico.”

Her father picked up his drink. Anna eyed it suspiciously. They had entered new terrain. She wasn't sure what he'd do or say.

“Ashes,” he snorted. “A silly romantic idea she wrote in her journal and now you hold me to it. Your mother's gone. Nothing I do will change that. But this death mask could bring the Ramsey Collection back to life.”

Anna grabbed the laptop, marched to the kitchen. Hit Google.

“Go ahead,” her father called from his chair. “Look it up. Read the history. There's a mask drawing in the Codex Mendoza that's an exact match. Snakes across the forehead, the warts. Turquoise and jade were more valuable than gold because green stones offered protection in the underworld. The
sitio
makes perfect sense. A half mile north of the Templo Mayor. Montezuma would have been buried in secret. Mexico City is a graveyard. The government has no idea what's underground. The entire city should be excavated, but there's no money. Who do you favor? The living or the dead? The present or the past? . . . Are you reading?”

“I'm reading.”

“Go to the British Museum. They have the largest collection of mosaic—”

“I'm there.”

Anna cinched her hair into a ponytail. “Montezuma the Second died in 1520. He was either stabbed by the Spanish or stoned by his own people for trying to placate Cortés. His death was unexpected. He was fifty-three. His body was thrown in the river. No mention of a mask. No, wait, his servants rescued and cremated him. . . .
It was
customary for royalty to be buried with masks to ensure their safe travel in the afterlife, but no one has ever found Montezuma's funereal mask. Collectors have been looking for centuries. . . .
Blah, blah.
Holy grail.
Please.
Such a treasure would be priceless
.”

Anna studied the fridge. It was empty, but you couldn't tell that from the outside. “What's the going rate for priceless? For the Mexican Tutankhamen?”

Her father coughed up something nasty. He did that a lot. It was getting worse. “Crass comparison. The truth is, I don't know. Six million. That's a wild guess. No less than that certainly. I'd give you the money. You'd be free. Your children would be free.”

Anna didn't care about her children. She cared about David. A sordid daydream was forming.

Her father read her mind. “I'd like to see David's face at the next curators' meeting when he hears the news. I don't think he fully appreciates what we do.”

Anna would like to see that face, too.

Her father coughed again. He was in no shape to travel. His knees were bad. His Spanish was never great. He forgot to fill the bird feeder, pay bills. He was a weak man with large passions or a large man with weak passions. She should have forgiven him by now. She was trying.

“This is the last mask.” His voice barely reached her. “The last mask will save the rest. Your mother deserves this.”

“Give me a minute. I'm still reading.”

But she wasn't reading. She'd drifted into her father's bedroom. On the bureau, she found a bank envelope filled with crisp hundred-dollar bills. She pocketed it, removed her mother's urn and journal from the closet. The urn was Mexican
talavera
, blue and white, sealed with a
cork. She brought the urn, journal, and envelope into the kitchen, set them on the breakfast table. Now what?

Her father was still talking, his voice subdued, almost contrite. “I won't do it, if you're really opposed. I don't want to fight about it. Tell me what you think. I trust your opinion.”

That hurt. It hurt because he meant it. He was relying on her judgment now. This natural transference should have pleased Anna, but instead it filled her with a strange loneliness. She went to the sink, got herself a glass of water. Her eyes were dry. Her stomach hurt. Her mother had washed dishes in this sink. She'd worn rubber gloves. She propped avocado seeds on toothpicks, waited for roots to grow.

“Dad, where
are
your masks?”

“In the basement. The Met shipped them back. Forty-two boxes.”

She heard the pain in his voice. Her father had been so strong since he quit drinking, but how much disappointment could he take?

Anna squeezed the bridge of her nose. She wanted to feel lucky, a woman capable of finding love and treasure, but it was February and the trees had no leaves and her father wanted to go back to Mexico, where her mother had died, and maybe he didn't care if he died there, too. He loved her but considered documenting Mexican art a higher purpose, his calling, and maybe it was. She was too old to play the needy child, but it was hard to argue away this hollow feeling.

“What are you doing in there?” he called out.

“Making you lunch.” She had another thought. “Did this twigger find an urn with the mask? Or was it sitting there all by itself?”

“I heard nothing about an urn.”

Anna peeled off bacon and dropped it in a frying pan. The heavy smell of grease made her woozy with nostalgia. She and David cooked
bacon every Sunday and made love and read the paper as the morning light grew stronger.

She wiped her father's counters with a warm sponge. Outside, three crows flew across the pallid sky. An omen of death. A loaf of white bread lay open on the counter. Another omen of death. Everything was an omen of death, if you thought about it long enough. Expiration dates. The freezer. The broom. The dustpan. The recyclables. Save the date.

Only plastic lived forever. Plastic was happy.

When the bacon was crispy, she made a sandwich, piled on mini carrots, a multivitamin garnish, set the plate on her father's side table.

“Forget about Mexico,” Anna said, not meeting his eyes. “The death mask is just another lie.”

She left before he could argue, muttering that she had to run out. And she did run out, with the journal, the urn, and the envelope.

It was nearly midnight and Hugo knelt in his flowerbed planting dahlias, thinking of the papershop girl. Lightning bugs circled the yard. Cryptic warnings. Across the valley, fireworks exploded, light but no noise. Dogs howled with longing. Every tuber he planted was her. Over and over, he covered her round hips with dirt and patted her behind with his trowel so she would stay put, grow, flower before him, as she did every afternoon.

It was easy to love two women, but impossible to leave one for another.

He and Soledad had built their lives together. Each object in their home had a story, a familiar weight. They had boiled beans in the bean pot, drawn the curtains to make love, washed their feet in a bucket.

“¿Tú vienes?”
Soledad appeared in the doorway, a shadow in a robe. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders.

“Soon,” he called back. “I have another row to plant.”

“You are excessive in everything . . .”

Hugo banged his lover's rump, blew the dirt for luck. “I am the man you married.”

“What was I thinking?”

He shook his trowel at the stars. “You should have married Him.”

“Who?”

“God. Imagine the house. A villa in Huatulco.”

Soledad smiled wryly. “God lives in Cancún.”

“With all the tourists?”

“God would banish the tourists and have the warm water all to Himself.”

“Then why hasn't He done it?”

“He is waiting for me.”

Hugo threw a pebble at the screen door.

Soledad jumped. “You're in a bad mood.”

“It's my mood. Let me have it.”

A minute of quiet, then an accusation: “You are just pretending to plant dahlias.”

Hugo dropped his trowel, impressed. “Pretending?”

“You say you are planting dahlias, but that is not what you are really doing.”

“What am I really doing?”

“I don't know, but if I knew, I would make you stop.”

“Stop trying to be clever.” His wife was not a beautiful woman—her younger sister Sonia was lovelier but forever dissatisfied—still, in this light, she glowed with warmth and comfort, a gift of the moon.

“Come to bed,” she told him. “You have work tomorrow.”

“I am working hard now, extra jobs.”

Hugo did not tell his wife that the drug lord Óscar Reyes Carrillo had offered him a hundred times his normal pay to make a pick-up in Tepito. He and Pedro, together. If the job was done right, more work would follow. Hugo knew that Reyes sought him out because he worked for Thomas Malone, and someday Reyes would exploit this connection, but Hugo planned to be long gone before that day arrived.

“We are close,” he said. “Are you ready?”

“I've been practicing English.”

“We are going to ditch the
gringo de mierda
.”

Soledad hurried across the yard, glancing behind at the chapel. The red light was on, as it always was late at night.
“Shhhhhhhh.”

Hugo shooed her worries with his trowel. “He can't hear.”

Soledad pulled him. “Come to bed.
Ya basta.
”

“Leave me alone, woman!”

“You are shivering.”

She ran inside, returned with a blanket, draped it over his shoulders. Though he was grateful, he did not thank her. His fingers were stiff. His calf muscles ached. He was burying his lover. His wife did not appreciate this sacrifice. He dared not point it out.

“What color will the flowers be?” Soledad was crouching, whispering into his neck. Her breath smelled like chamomile and honey.

“Yellow.”

“Yellow and what?”

“All yellow.”

She flinched, then wrapped her arms around him, the way a mother wraps a naked child in a towel after a bath. He let himself be held. When she spoke, she chose her words with care. “If all the flowers are yellow, our garden will be the most beautiful in Oaxaca. Tell me again how close we are.”

He pulled her into his lap, listened to the frogs sing about rain. “Halfway. Maybe more. We can stay with my cousin in Texas.” The sureness of this one fact made all the suppositions surrounding it seem possible. “We will leave on a warm night, ride the bus with a picnic of
tortas
and fruit, cross the river on a raft. Jaime will fix us a mattress on his floor. We will sleep without worries on borrowed white sheets. In the morning, I will earn our first dollar. We will press it in a book and give it to our children when they go to university and become doctors and lawyers who take their families on vacation in Cancún, where God has a time share.”

He tugged her waist. “The Virgin will watch over us.”

The same fairy tale was told all over the valley. Hugo tilted his head, watched the stars, but could not imagine God, or even God's mother, looking down on him with anything like love. Somewhere, the papershop girl was curled in her sheets, one pretty foot curved into the arc of the other, lace gloves paired on her desk. His wife's hair pressed against his throat. All he could see was darkness.