Spiral (56 page)

Haydon was stunned a second time, amazed he was being told this. He looked at Garner, who stared at Heidrich with the unflappable composure of a trained psychiatrist. If he was shocked, he was determined he wasn't going to let it show.

Then Heidrich fell silent. He looked at Haydon and smoked, giving no indication he intended to continue. With what appeared to Haydon to be deliberate insolence, he was pretending to have delivered himself of all that he had to say. Perhaps he had sensed, and inwardly rankled at, Haydon's own haughty silence. Heidrich was not the kind of man to be bested in the subtleties of game-playing. He wasxxnot a subordinate, an errand boy coming to Haydon with his tail tucked apologetically between his legs to report on the State Department's indiscretions. If Haydon wanted something from him, he should by God ask for it. In all probability, Heidrich had bridled at having to come here in the first place.

"My concern," Haydon said obligingly, "was for Celia Moreno. She
was
working for you, wasn't she?"

Heidrich lifted his head in a half-nod. "Yeah," he said, "she sure was. We had had our eyes on her for a while. We recruited her as soon as we could after we started suspecting Ferretis. Even though we already knew the assassination plots existed, we let her 'discover' them for herself. We, uh, thought that would give her a motivation she wouldn't have had otherwise. Besides, we couldn't tell her too much. It wasn't as though she were a professional. What we needed from her were the details. God knows we had too damn few before she got involved. But she got them for us. She was good, damn good."

Haydon remembered Valverde's satyr's grin as he looked at Celia, bare-legged in the pink silk dress. He imagined the two of them naked on the nappy brown sofa, Valverde's pale buttocks, Celia's smooth knees. Every time Valverde took her clothes off, she'd said to Haydon, her body became Esteban's insurance policy.

Haydon forced his thoughts back to the present. "Elkin was your man."

Heidrich nodded.

"And the FBI really didn't know anything about it."

Heidrich shook his head, but didn't elaborate. He went back to Celia. "We know she's concerned about her safety," he said. "She doesn't have to be. She was doing the right thing for the right people."

The right thing for the right people, Haydon thought. Who the hell had put Heidrich in charge of morals?

"Why the charade, then?" Haydon worked to keep his mind on track.

"Well, maybe that could have been handled better," Heidrich conceded. "But we didn't have a lot of time. There was no way we could risk telling her more than we did."

"And the tails I spotted at the Guadalajara airport?" Garner interjected.

An uncomfortable half-grin crawled across one side of Heidrich's mouth. "It looked like amateur night, didn't it? We weren't sure why you were going down there. That move was a bit of a surprise.

And it put you way ahead in the game. Which was awkward for us. Up to then we didn't think you had a chance in hell to prevent the assassination."

Haydon's mind was charging ahead, almost stumbling over itself as he tried to pull it all together.

"Then you knew about Bias Medrano, what he was planning, and when?"

Heidrich shrugged and narrowed one eye. "That's a touchy area. We did, and we didn't." He said nothing more, and he wasn't the least bit uneasy about leaving it at that.

"I guess it was your man who called in the tip about the motel, then," Haydon said. "I didn't have any luck tracing it."

"Right." Heidrich put out his cigarette in an ashtray on the corner of Garner's desk. "Negrete was going crazy. We were afraid he was going to get the information out of Arizpe in time to stop it. We knew you wouldn't be able to do that. You couldn't resort to those methods, and that was the only way anyone was going to get that Indian to talk. It was too bad Negrete got to him. We didn't think that would happen. Ironically, you two were trying to accomplish the same thing, but for different reasons."

"And you were betting on the
tecos."

For a moment Heidrich looked at Haydon in silence. Then he raised his arm and looked at his watch, then returned his eyes to Haydon. "That's about it," he said.

There were no more questions, only silence. Haydon looked at Garner, who had taken his ballpoint pen out of his pocket and was doodling on a piece of paper. His equanimity was gone. He seemed embarrassed, and didn't look up.Haydon struggled with the welling anger, the several conflicting angers. Anger at himself for having this reaction, a piety he could not justify, an indignation that bordered on hypocrisy. The right thing for the right people. Heidrich played a complicated game on a large and complex scale, and Haydon reminded himself he was in no position to judge. He knew from experience that such contests sometimes required a fierceness of moral decision that, in retrospect, seemed to negate its original purpose altogether. And he knew that it was easier to criticize someone else for making those decisions than it was to make them yourself. He had no business feeling the way he did toward Heidrich. But he couldn't help it.

He gazed out the window to the city—lights like the sparks of scattered fires—and felt suddenly overwhelmed. There was too much to understand, and he understood too much. Too many secrets, too much fierceness. He stood, but couldn't bring himself to speak to Heidrich, even to look at him. He felt transparent, as if his alienation, his anger and emptiness, his distaste for Heidrich, were immediately apparent. Then he realized he didn't care, he didn't give a damn. No one said anything as he left the room, his movement silent on the carpet of the long dark hallway.

Epilogue

H
e hadn't returned intentionally, that is, he hadn't planned it. But his headlights caught the street sign, and he turned impulsively. In a few moments he was sitting across the street from the Belgrano walls staring at them through the light rain.

It was the middle of November. The drought had broken in October with thunderstorms more reminiscent of spring than fall their downpours washing the city like a ritual ablution. The steel; heat, too, had been subdued by the storms, and wrathful summer like a malevolent spirit, had loosed its grip. There was a period o clear days, cooler and cleaner days, renewal at the end of a long ho year. Then in the first week of November, gray, damp days descendec in a mantle of fog and charcoal clouds. Rain was ever present. Hay don observed his forty-first birthday.

Looking across at the pitted wall darkened by the week of rail and shrouded in mottled shadows, he felt no heart-quickening recol lections, no anxiety. He cut the Jaguar's headlamps, and the street lights threw a leaden glow through the drifting mizzle. The wind shield wipers were on intermittent. They swept in front of him, and he looked across at the gates through the polished glass. The rain would add more rust to the gates. He remembered Mooney commenting on the rust that morning. Mist collected on the windshield, and the iroi gates grew indistinct, then distorted. A beginning rivulet hesitated a the top of the glass, then plunged crazily, followed quickly by a sec ond one chasing it down. The wipers rose and fell. The glass wa clean, the gates were sharp and clear again.

Haydon looked at the sleeves of his raincoat on his outstretched arms, his hands gripping the steering wheel. He could smell the heavy rain-dampened cloth. He could smell his own cologne, which seemed to take on a second life after he had been out in the rain.

The wipers rose and fell.

Haydon reached over to the passenger seat and picked up his dark gray trilby. The lightweight felt was damp in his fingers as he put it on, tugging at the front of the brim. He opened the car door and got out, locking it behind him. It was better outside. The closed car had begun to bother him. As long as he was driving it was all right, but sitting in the dark, in the rain, here, it was beginning to bother him.

No matter how much it rains in the barrios, the sidewalks are always gritty. They never are washed clean. He walked a little way, ignoring the stained walls on the other side of the street, feeling the grit and moisture grinding under his leather soles with each step. His breath floated around his face in the November chill. He stopped, looked both ways along the deserted street, and stepped off the sidewalk toward the gates. Twice he splashed through muddy puddles he could have avoided had he been paying attention.

On the other side, he stopped. He looked through the wrought-iron bars into the derelict grounds. With his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, he held his breath and listened. In the mottled gloom just inside the gates, water dripped steadily on some hollow shell of a weed. Everything was just the opposite. That morning there had been a bright sun and a small crowd. The air had been parched dry and the dead weeds were crackling with the sounds of insects popping among the empty pods. There had been a dead man at his feet. There had been Mooney. Now it was dark, and he was alone. The night air was moist. There were no insects, and the dried weeds were limp. There was no dead man, and only the ghost of Mooney.

Haydon looked down at his waist where the two wings of the gate came together. The chain was still looped through the bars, but there was a different lock. He pulled a hand out of a pocket and touched a water droplet hanging off the rusty chain. He rubbed his fingers together and returned his hand to the pocket.

Looking up, he peered through the towering cypresses toward the upper story of the old house. It was difficult enough to catch a glimpse of the place during the day, and on this foggy night he had only a sense of its presence, but a sense that made it as real as if he had touched it, and walked in its rooms. Through the shadows and tangled brush and cypresses the streetlights picked up a glint from a glass pane in an upper-story window. Yes, the old place was still there, holding its breath, too, wanting him to go away, wanting to be left alone.

Haydon was aware of his wet feet. The thin leather of the Italian shoes was no good for walking in the rain. His feet were getting col and the unevenness of the sidewalk where it joined the brick drive under the gates led him to imagine that he was standing on the corpse of the Mexican. He had been right here. Exactly here. Haydon seem, to feel the flesh roll on the dead man's bones, could feel the shifting of the body fluids that made unsteady footing. He wanted to reach out to the rusty gate to steady his balance, to step down off the cadaver. In his mind he saw the Mexican moving underneath him, small twitches—for every motion there is a countermotion—animated by Haydon's efforts to maintain his balance.

He looked away quickly, far away down Chicon toward tl solitary rosy orb of a tiny neon light in the window of a cantina. Jesus Christ. Why did he think such things? He turned, carefully, an walked away.

Haydon listened to his own footsteps as he walked toward th corner. He could hear the moisture, the grit, knew that though he di not walk carelessly, taupe flecks of mud were speckling the toes of his shoes. The graffiti going by his shoulder was illegible. The frail bar branches of tall shrubbery dangled over the top of the wall in seven places, like shocks of coarse, wild hair, the mizzle dripping from th tips onto the sidewalk.

When he came to the corner he did not hesitate, but rounded the turn and saw the long stretch of wall broken at midpoint by the vertical recess of the doorway. At this angle he could not see th grilled iron gate, taller than he, that covered the doorway. He stood ii the subdued pewter light cast from a distant lamp and took in th' arena of Mooney's passing. The sidewalk was narrower than he had remembered, the street closer to the wall. He began walking. The wall was higher—he reached out a hand and let his fingers trail along the surface—and coarser. There were cracks in it he did not remember He approached the gate and stopped in front of it. He did not remember the portal being so narrow.

He looked down at the sidewalk. A steady trickle of water rar off the brim of the trilby and dribbled at his feet on the spot where Mooney, alone, had experienced that final and incomparable sensation. From here he had stared up at the end of the world. Perhaps he had seen the night sky. Perhaps he had seen the stars before the rods and cones of his retina withered, trapping forever their sparkling images somewhere in the secret windings to his brain. Perhaps the sound of barking dogs had chased him into eternity. What had he smelled? What had he tasted? And what, in God's name, had he thought?

Making a quarter turn, he faced the gate. The smooth poles of bamboo glistened in the rain on the other side. Black bamboo. He stared into the dense stand, saw the thin individual stalks as though each were carved of brittle Mexican obsidian, a task of a lifetime, of two or three lifetimes. Dark and impenetrable.

His eyes focused on the gate. He never really had looked at it. He stepped forward. It was a beautiful piece of ironwork, intricate in design, the great swirl of its pattern following a centripetal course to its middle. Though he did not remember the gate itself, he did remember every detail of Mooney's death here. It had been the heart of the maelstrom, the four-day spiral of violence that had swept so many lives into the vanishing point of its center. He would remember. Memory never failed him; it cursed and blessed him, but never left him. Mooney's dying was as real as the rain, a timeless moment in the mind's eye.