The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (46 page)

Menardo sold “insurance of all kinds” to the whole region around Chiapas. As a salesman, Menardo got better and better; he moved up in the world, establishing his own company: Universal Insurance. He made appointments only with police chiefs, mayors, and owners of grocery stores. Of course there were many businesses and lives that could not be insured, not by any company, and not even by God himself, Menardo liked to joke over a cocktail during a follow-up visit with a new client. The concept of life insurance and insurance for buildings, livestock, and crops was new to the people outside the Federal District. Part of Menardo’s work was to explain tactfully the new world that they were living in, the new age. What was necessary so a man might sleep soundly at night was insurance against all the unknowns stalking
the human race out there. Fire, Menardo likened to a feral cat, stalking at night around warehouses full of hemp or freshly ginned cotton. The glow of the cat’s eyes was seen too late to save a lifetime’s struggle and labor.

They liked it when he talked to them about hurricane winds that stampeded across the bay, to trample flat warehouses full of coffee beans or tobacco drying on racks. But there were always the older businessmen—elderly merchants who had seen their life’s savings roll away in wagons driven by thieves calling themselves “revolutionaries” and “the wave of the future.” These elder businessmen did not approve of the notion of interfering with the will of God by insuring losses. They did not like Menardo, and it took many visits and a great deal of humiliation before Menardo could get them to listen to him. He was there, he told them, because the “new world” could belong to them just as the old one had. Insurance was the new tool of the trade. What Menardo offered were special policies that insured against all losses, no matter the cause, including acts of God, mutinies, war, and revolution. The policies were extremely expensive, but guaranteed 100-percent coverage. How could they lose? How could they refuse this kind of protection?

The older businessmen inquired into the assets of Menardo’s company and found them sufficient. Still they thought he was a fool to insure against losses during revolution since anyone could see the years and the police crackdowns had not cooled off the rabble-rousers and the Bolsheviks. Menardo knew a few of them had developed a perversity due to their advancing age and to the losses they had sustained years ago. Menardo knew that a few of these bitter, strange old ladino businessmen were hoping to see Universal Insurance destroyed and Menardo wiped out. Chiapas had the misfortune of being too close to the border, which leaked rabble-rousers and thieves like a sewage pipe. Menardo’s had been the first insurance company to employ a private security force to protect clients from political unrest.

ILIANA’S FAMILY HAD ANNOUNCED their engagement after one of Menardo’s greatest triumphs as an insurer. A frantic telephone call had come from the owner of a shipping enterprise up the coast. An earthquake in the Pacific had sent a tidal wave in the direction of the docks and warehouses. The freighters could be taken out to sea to ride out the high water, but one warehouse was packed full with new appliances just shipped from the United States.

Menardo had had no more than two hours. He chartered a crop-dusting plane belonging to a coffee plantation he insured. He telephoned ahead for trucks, wagons, wheelbarrows—anything with wheels. He offered phenomenal wages for an hour’s work. He guaranteed anyone injured or possibly lost if the tidal wave should arrive ahead of schedule would have their family and orphans forever cared for by Seguridad Universal. When the chartered plane landed on the dirt strip behind the hospital, a doctor and a priest came running out to complain they could get no one to help with the evacuation of the hospital because everyone in the town had heard about the amazing wages being offered by Menardo. It was true. The men and big boys stood waiting anxiously glancing over their shoulders from time to time to check the ocean waves. A dump truck, a tractor pulling a flat hay trailer, a milk truck, and a number of smaller pickup trucks, taxis, and horse teams and wagons were ready and waiting. On the hill above the town, the women and children stood together, not watching the ocean but the activity at the airstrip. Menardo took command. He politely asked the doctor and the priest to step aside. Everything would be taken care of, he reassured them. While Menardo gave the orders for the crates of refrigerators and stoves to be loaded and moved to high ground, he questioned the doctor and the priest about the number of patients who were ambulatory and those who would require stretchers. Menardo could feel the power swell inside himself. He assured the doctor and the priest he would return with help.

The warehouse emptied so rapidly Menardo imagined the rising
wind was pushing the crates of washing machines and deep freezers out of the building like leaves. On the grassy, green hilltop near the shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Hope, the women and children and their hastily gathered bundles were surrounded with crates of new appliances. Finally, as time began to run out, a lookout was appointed to fire a pistol from the hilltop so the crews emptying the warehouse would have time to escape. Once it was clear the contents of the warehouse would be saved, Menardo had sent ten workers, three pickups, and a dump truck to evacuate the hospital. Patients strapped on stretchers were transported to the hilltop where they, along with all the others, watched as the great wave approached with the roar of a freight train. A fierce wind rode the giant wave, tearing off hats and flapping hospital gowns. Menardo had glanced away for only a moment, to remove a speck of dust in his left eye, and when he looked again, the huge wave had toppled over itself like the stone seawalls the wave pushed ahead of itself. The crowd let out its breath in a sigh—an
aahh
so loud it almost sounded like a cheer. When Menardo looked again, the warehouses lay folded like squares of cloth at the foot of the hill.

The next day Menardo is famous all over Chiapas State and in the most remote villages and towns of southern Mexico. Newspapers proclaim that Universal Insurance makes good on its promises to protect clients from dangers of all kinds. Not a single new appliance has been lost, and the patients have been safely evacuated although the hospital is destroyed. The publicity from the tidal wave brings hundreds of letters and calls from prospective clients. Menardo can not allow the security of his great new enterprise to depend on the teenage boys and village farmers. Menardo sees then the necessity of a crack team of trouble-shooters. Also, a delicate matter has recently developed in a town farther south. A client reports that “agitators” have been talking to his field hands; in the night, vandals have come to destroy the coffee trees. The client, a white-haired gentleman, is a believer in the old order, and in the old ways. He pays Menardo in gold, not currency. “I am solid,” the old man says. “I wish to remain that way.”

MENARDO CARRIES GOLD sewn inside his underwear and socks, which he covers with another plain layer, in case of searches at the international border. In Tucson, he scans the yellow pages. He walks past gun shops, lingers near their doors, hoping to find someone he might approach about a special business deal. He wants his security men to have only the best. He wants an elite security force, one that the wealthy and the powerful will rent for special occasions—elections or funerals and even weddings—when the possibilities for violence proliferate. He prices the guns inside and settles for 9mm Lugers because many of his wealthy clients are Mexicans of German descent. He is a novice. The owners of the gun shops are all white men who wear guns and holsters in their shops. They unconsciously touch their holsters when Menardo walks in their doors. He knows they will call the police if he raises the subject. U.S. laws are strict regarding the sale of firearms to foreigners or citizens of other states. Menardo is once again self-conscious about his flat, thick nose; his skin looks darker in Tucson too.

Menardo sits back in the taxi and ignores the English words of the driver. The taxi stops at the army surplus store near the railroad tracks. Before he goes inside, Menardo checks his reflection in the plate glass. He fears his suit coat is wrinkling and spoiling his image. Menardo sees a man staring at him from the other side of the window. The man is short and slight and has a huge bundle of yellow nylon billowing in his arms. The man does not take his eyes off Menardo as he walks in the door. Menardo refuses to be stared down, but once inside, Menardo realizes he is staring at a man whose face is more than half covered with a reddish-purple birthmark. Menardo drops his eyes, and at the same time the strange little white man drops the parachute and steps over to the glass-front counter. Although the day is hot, the man is wearing tight black leather driving gloves. Menardo admires the parachute in halting English. He might find uses for those in his company. The man pulls nervously at the driving gloves and asks what the company sells. “Insurance and security,” Menardo answers, not sure he has used the
correct English word for insurance. The man has a pistol strapped on his hip. He smooths the leather of his gloves compulsively; first, with the right hand, then the left. Greenlee sees Menardo staring at the pistol and smiles for the first time. The smile goes on and off like a light switch, as if the man does it only to relax his jaws. The man motions at the back of the warehouse crammed full with racks of surplus army jackets, used parachutes, and empty ammunition boxes. Menardo tries to see everything as he follows Greenlee, but every shelf and corner, every square foot of the floor, is piled with canteens, helmets, glass radio tubes, and spools of copper wire.

Menardo can hear someone hammering on hollow metal. Menardo can’t see. He removes his tinted eyeglasses, but it’s of little use. The back room of the warehouse is hot and smells like railroad ties and train diesel and crankcase oil. In the dimness he makes out the hood of a jeep. Leaning in a far corner, almost touching the fifteen-foot ceiling, are what appear to be some sort of antitank missiles. Menardo is new to all this, but he has every confidence a businessman of his brilliance and skill can arrange the purchases and delivery of certain high-quality American firearms. But just then Menardo turns to find Greenlee kneeling, pressing on a floorboard. It comes up with a
pop!
and Greenlee lets himself down into the hole in the floor. Menardo later wonders why he followed crazy Greenlee into the basement. Later, when Greenlee has renovated the warehouse basement, they both still laugh about that day. Menardo had followed Greenlee without hesitation. He stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder, and Greenlee flipped on the lights dramatically. For as far as Menardo could see, in the vast basement of the old warehouse, there were stacked boxes of rifles and ammunition. Later Menardo asked Greenlee why he had trusted Menardo, and Greenlee had laughed nervously, smoothed the leather of his gloves, and said he trusted no one. But with Menardo, Greenlee knew anyone stupid enough to just walk in like that and follow him into a hole in the floor could not have been any government’s agent.

Menardo had returned from Tucson with a full, satisfied feeling, not only from the big meal Greenlee had bought him at the airport before he left, but with the vision in his head of all those crates of rifles. The rifles with ammunition and delivery charges cost once again the amount of the gold coins Menardo had carried. But Greenlee had been happy to open Menardo a charge account. “This is only the beginning, my friend,” Greenlee had said, patting Menardo on the shoulder as Menardo stepped into line with other passengers bound for Mexico City
and points south. It had been just the beginning because Greenlee refused to deal with the others—the hotshot colonels who bought “supplies” once or twice. There were other arms suppliers, of course; but Greenlee got the best even when “the best” was unavailable anywhere else. Even then, Menardo used to have fantasies about Iliana dying, and himself falling in love with a lovely young girl who would immediately give him the son he wanted, the son who would inherit the yearly percentages and all the rest. “All the rest” was what occupied Menardo. Selling insurance and security had been a good beginning. But it had not taken Menardo long to realize, as Greenlee hinted, the real future lay in insurance and security of a different sort.