Planet Willie (15 page)

“Follow me,”
Pepe says, and leads us back through the tables of the restaurant to what looks
like a door to a closet or a boiler room. He opens the door and leads us through
a curtain and into a cement-floored room as big as the restaurant area with
bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Half a dozen folding tables topped
with green felt are set up around the room, and dealers in tuxedos are passing
out cards to a few dozen men scattered around smoking cigars and drinking
beers. Paint it gold and carpet it red, we could be in a Vegas gambling hall.

By midnight we’re
down two grand at the poker table.
We
meaning Kafka, who keeps assuring
me he’s read a book on Texas Hold ‘Em and has a system that takes all of this
into account. And
two grand
meaning probably three, conservatively
estimating, at least half of that deducted from Harry Shore’s retainer. This
goes on till about four in the morning, when Kafka goes all-in with an unsuited
two-seven and miraculously wins back three of my grand. Minus probably five, which
makes forty billion or so in pesos, but Kafka’s seeing the glass half full, contrary
to what he’s been doing to those Cosmetic Surgeries. Tells me how this is all a
part of his master plan, and he’ll get the bastards in the morning. Laying the
groundwork, he says. Building the foundation, he’s telling me as we ride back
to our five-star hotel in a taxi generously provided by Pepe and his friends.

18

In the morning
I wake with some pushups and deep knee bends before breakfast down by the pool,
where a group of college girls is doing water aerobics with an instructor they
call Suave. Pretty girls, but not enough to make you want to do water aerobics
or call yourself Suave, and I do give both options some consideration. After
breakfast I call up the Albanians, and we meet in the lobby to discuss the
day’s agenda. Twiggy’s clearly fed up with us both and volunteers for airport
duty again. Meanwhile over her shoulder Kafka’s dealing cards to his invisible
friends, which I take to mean that Twiggy is as yet blissfully ignorant of the
news that we’re all worth significantly less than we were yesterday. Once she’s
gone, Kafka insists on staking out Lulu from El Loco, which is honestly the last
place he needs to be, but against my better judgment I let him go. I want to go
check around town and see what I can learn about this Queso.

So I set off
walking, not quite sure of where I’m headed. I’m just moving, counting on a
little inertia to take me into the heart of things, which is Newton’s first law
if I’m not mistaken. Then I see the cliffs of Acapulco in the distance and
figure maybe I’ll catch one of Pepe’s death-defying leaps if he’s around, maybe
ask him what he knows about these nuns of Santa Pulcheria, specifically Lulu
Shore, or the man who makes her tremble, Mister Ricardo Queso.

It takes me
about an hour to get over to the observation platform, where a crowd has
gathered and the day’s first divers are climbing up to the peaks to begin the
show. Most of those on the observation platform are tourists, and nobody looks
a likely source of information pertaining to Queso or anybody else who might
help me get that painting back. Acapulco, Mexico. What the hell am I doing?
Seems like I keep asking myself the same questions, but truth be told, the
answers don’t matter so much when those divers start plunging a hundred feet
into this narrow little channel running out to the Pacific. I don’t know that
I’ve even seen anything so spectacular, and I can imagine the thrill it gives
Caroline, even if I can’t imagine her actually flying through the air. A young
guy, muscled like a gymnast, climbs up the rocks on his bare hands and feet.
When he gets to the top, he says a little prayer and waits, watching the waves
come in as the crowd holds its breath. You have to hit the tide just as it
fills the channel, Pepe has explained. Otherwise you’ll hit bottom and stay
there till the tide washes you up on the beach, and that’s a death scenario I
really wouldn’t want to even try to imagine.

So this time I
let the kid up there do the death scenario for me. Don’t know his name, don’t
know where he comes from or how he spends his time, but mister he is one
fearless Mexican cliff diver. I watch in sheer wonder as he flings himself out
into the air like a lunatic. Takes what seems like a minute or two to arch down
and hit the water at what Junie James once called a perfect vertical. Comes up out
of the splash grinning, and I’ll bet a hundred Madonnas that no crowd ever went
this wild for Rock Lightford.

“Pretty crazy,
no?” somebody says by my shoulder. I turn to find Pepe, dressed in blue jeans
and a t-shirt.

“Hell, I came
to see you,” I say. “Why aren’t you up there?”

He’s on the
evening shift, he tells me, and just came over to hang around a bit and see if
he could pick up some gringas. I nod a bit at this, and then I ask how much El
Loco pays him to find likely marks for their secret casino. Pepe frowns. They
buy his drinks, he says, but he swears he wasn’t trying to scam us – people do
win money back there, just not my amigo Kafka. We go over to the concession
stand for two Cokes and take a seat on a bench.

“Where’s your
amigo today?” Pepe says after a while.

“He’s supposed
to be helping me out with a little investigation,” I say. “That is if he hasn’t
found his way to the back of El Loco.” Pepe is curious to know exactly what I
mean by investigating. I tell him a bit about my life as a famous private
investigator and mention that we’re looking for information about a man named
Ricardo Queso. Pepe gives me this sideways look like he’s trying to gauge
whether I’m dumb or just plain stupid. Then he tells me that Queso controls
just about every entertainment operation in Acapulco, from the parasailing to
the discotecas to the cliff diving we’re sitting there watching.

“You work for
him?” I say.

“He used to be
a cliff diver himself,” Pepe says. “He worked his way up. Hombre, he’s a
legend. Everybody wants to do what Queso’s done.”

“You know him
personally?”

“I see him
around. He still comes out here to watch a few times a week. He takes a
personal interest in young divers. He’s still very big in this world.”

I ask if
Queso’s out there this morning, Pepe tells me he wouldn’t know. He keeps a
table reserved at the Mirador, the restaurant up the hill with views of the
show out plate glass windows. He wears a white suit, apparently, and his
table’s big enough to seat the white-suited bodyguards who accompany him any
place he wears pants.

 “So don’t
think you’ll get close to him,” Pepe says. “The only time I’ve met him was when
he hired me. Since then we haven’t talked. Nobody talks to Queso unless Queso
wants to talk. He’s too busy running the city.”

“Does that
include back room casinos?”

“Gambling is
illegal in Mexico,” Pepe says, making a point of studying the technique of one
of his pals flipping through the air over the water. I nod real slow and
pretend to do some higher-level trigonometry in my mind. Then I look back over
at Pepe.

“You’re the
detective,” he says, shrugging his shoulders and sipping on his Coke.

“He takes a
cut?”

“Hombre, Queso
takes a cut of everything,” he says, his eyes fixed on a large man in a suit
and tie who’s coming our way, boots moving real slow like he’s wading through
the sunshine. When the man gets close, Pepe stands and introduces me to his
cousin, who also happens to be chief of police. The Chief is wearing one of
those big Mexican mustaches that tells you he’s also wearing a gun. He wants to
know if I’m enjoying the festivities, and then he wants to know if it’s too
early for us to join him for a real drink. We end up riding with him over to El
Loco, where the Chief turns out to be as popular as Pepe, and where we’re on a
second round of Coronas before I can even begin figuring how to slip off and
locate Kafka, who has unsurprisingly abandoned what was supposed to be his post
with a view of the plaza. Just imagining the kind of damage he’s doing in the back
room starts my boots tap dancing, but the Chief’s ordering up a third round,
and I really can’t refuse when Cindy, the girl who’s tending bar, tells us that
tequila body shots are on special till noon. One look at Cindy will tell you
the bar’s been tending her, but when faced with a choice between rescuing an
Albanian from straight flushes and a tequila body shot, I’ll choose Cindy’s
belly button every time. It’s sort of a rule to live by.

So Cindy comes
around the bar wearing a little t-shirt tied up into a bikini and what they’re
calling a shot belt, little glasses all around where they’d put the bullets,
and a bottle of Cuervo in the holster. She hitches herself up on the Chief’s
stool and leans way back like she’s doing the limbo, which gets us all a little
nervous for Cindy and that stool, but the Chief takes charge of the situation and
crouches over like Cindy’s the line of scrimmage. She holds up the bottle,
pours it down her front till it pools a little around the button area, and the
Chief just drinks it up as neatly as you please. Wonderful to see, glassless
tequila. Conservation of our natural resources. I mention as much to Cindy,
which gets her to giggling, so that by the time I get down there myself, she’s
more wave pool than body shot. And yet more fun than I’ve had with a belly
since Vail, Colorado, which is saying something. What I want to know is where
do you go on honeymoon when you’re starting in Acapulco? Then she passes out in
my arms, the Chief makes an arrest on the spot, so Cindy’s out of a job, and
I’m left to console myself with a little tequila in glass form.

The good news
here is that with the Chief out of the way, I feel I can make a move on the
casino, which is the suggestion I make to Pepe. With pleasure, Pepe says,
con
mucho gusto
, and so we make our way through the restaurant tables into the
back room, where my
gusto
takes an immediate hit when we find a crowd
making a spectator sport out of watching Kafka toss chips. The kid’s broken out
in a sweat just trying to keep his stack moving out into the other fellas
stacks as fast as he needs to. You have to give the lunatic credit though, he
is unperturbed, even after another acquaintance of Pepe’s steps into the game
and draws to a five-of-a-kind. Hell, Kafka just lights two of those Albanian cigarettes
he carries and gets them both going at once.

“I need to
talk to you, Kafka,” I say into his ear.

“Not right
now, Willie,” he says, raising with what I see is a pair of twos.

“What are you
doing?” I say.

“It’s a pair,”
he says.

“I mean back
here. You were supposed to be watching Lulu.”

“I did,” he
says. “She came out of the convent about an hour ago and smoked a cigarette
behind a trash bin. Then she went back inside.”

“She smokes?”

“She tried to
hide it behind her wimple, but yeah, she was smoking. Then she ate some breath
mints and went back into the church.”

“And so you
figured you could abandon the post and come over here.”

“Hold on,” he
says, staring down his opponents and raising again with the table showing an
ace and a king. “Yeah,” he says, sipping a Cosmetic Surgery. “If you think
about it, all that money Twiggy’s so crazy to get her hands on, I could make it
in here in less than a day.”

“If you knew
how to play poker.”

“You’ll see,” he
says, as the dealer rakes his money over to man in mirrored sunglasses who’s
holding an ace.

“Can we talk
for a minute, Kafka? Think they’ll let you sit out a hand?” I say, knowing full
well that he could sit out for years and still have a seat saved. They may well
put a brass plaque on one –
Kafka sat here
. In any case, he makes a sign
at the dealer and follows me over to the corner of the room.

“Where’d you
get all that money?”

“I won a lot
of it.”

“Where’d you
get the rest?”

“Also borrowed
a bit. Like an investment.”

I ask who he
borrowed it from, he tells me the casino will lend you pesos at twenty-five
percent interest, which considering you’re using it to play poker means you can
cover the interest in just a hand or two. “Poker’s not really a game of
chance,” he tells me. “You can learn poker. It’s a skill. You just have to know
the percentages.” I ask how much money. He says ten thousand pesos, which he tells
me is about a thousand bucks.

“Who’d you
speak to about the money?” I say

“You just ask
a dealer. Mine waved over somebody who gave me an envelope. Actually, there he
goes,” he says, pointing out a bruiser in a white suit who’s making his way
across the room with an envelope in his hand. You don’t have to be a detective
to figure he’s one of Queso’s Blancos. It does, however, help to have an
uncommon investigative mind to come up with the kind of genius plan I now
propose to Kafka.

Here’s how it
goes: I’ll flash some money around and sit at his table. He’ll play only his
very best hands, and I’m talking suited aces and high pairs, and when I see
he’s in on a hand, I’ll throw in serious money no matter what I’m holding. So
I’ll lose big, he’ll win big, and I’ll borrow real big to see if it gets me
taken to Queso. Worst case scenario, Kafka wins the money I’ve intentionally
lost and we come out even. That’s the plan.

I’ve never
been a gambling man, but a few hands in, contrary to the plan, I’m up five
thousand pesos. Then Kafka comes in with a raise and a significant look for
yours truly, so I re-raise with trash, which three cards later has developed into
a full house and a pot of skyscraper dimensions, again for yours truly. What
Kafka’s got left in front of him now is more like a hut, such that you can’t
help but thinking that our most brilliant move of the day was posting Twiggy far
across town at the airport. Two hands later Kafka shows a pair of aces but is
unfortunately busted by my six-high straight. He really has no choice but to
wave over some more money, which isn’t how we planned it, but when you’re hot,
you’re hot, and it really can’t be denied that I’m smoking.

So I go with
it, and we go all day. By afternoon Kafka’s on a first name basis with the
white suit, and I’ve got what looks like a model of Manhattan in front of me,
chips rising up along little avenues I’ve carved out. Then Kafka goes bust
again, providing me with that second Empire State Building I didn’t really
need, and the white suit is none too pleased to inform him that the bank’s
closed unless he agrees to put up some collateral. Kafka offers his leather
cap, or a couple of Albanian cigarettes. He offers his Seiko, and that’s when
the suit starts taking it personally. He slaps the kid, who covers his face in
his hands and wails with pain, or at least that’s what it sounds like until he
drops his hands and stares down the Blanco with more rage than I figured he had
in him. Before I can blink, the kid’s invented a few awkward looking punches
and has landed a few on the Blanco, and before I can move, two more white suits
have shown up on the scene and have fastened onto Kafka like they intend to stretch
him till he breaks. Meanwhile nobody’s playing poker anymore. A circle of men
surrounds the suits, and Kafka’s glancing around the crowd trying to locate me.
Before I can commit suicide, however, the suits are dragging the kid to the
back of the room, making a pretty good example for the rest of us of what
happens to a man who runs up a debt to Ricardo Queso. A door opens out onto an
alley, where a black Mercedes waits. The crowd follows them out to watch as Los
Blancos toss Kafka into the back seat like luggage and take him away.