The Return: A Novel (54 page)

On his last trip down to the sick bay, he heard the air torn by an unearthly banshee shriek, and there was Amparo, her fine intelligent face destroyed by inconsolable grief, kneeling by the black and bloody corpse of her little boy. She kept shaking it, slapping at the lolling face, issuing howl after howl, until the other women led her away.

Marder went to find Father Santana. He waited while the priest annointed the head of a dying man, one Henriques, a man who made small glittering glass animals. When the priest looked up, Marder said, “Come with me. I want you to do something.”

They moved to a corner of the sick bay. Marder looked Father Santana in the face. His skin and the crow-black hair above it was frosted with plaster dust, like everything else in the room. His Roman collar had flecks of blood on it. His expression was that of a terrified man being brave. Marder thought he looked a little like Patrick Skelly did in battle, and it made him more confident in the man.

“I’m happy to see you here, Father. How did you get through?”

“I arrived before this new attack. The Templos were happy to see me. They have a number of dying men, and they made no objection to me coming here and doing the same for you.”

“Well, good. I’m glad you’re here. Look, Father, this can’t go on. The secondary positions are being pushed in one by one as the men run out of bullets. We haven’t the ammunition to keep them away from the house for more than a few hours. I want you to go out there and negotiate a truce.”

“What kind of truce? If they’ve won, what do you have to negotiate with?”

“Me. Cuello will want me alive. He’ll want to torture me, display my body with a sign on it, as an example to anyone who thinks of defying him. If not, tell them we’ll hold out to the end. He’ll have to clear the house room by room. We have plenty of ANFO explosives left. He’ll lose hundreds of men, and he’ll be so weakened that he’ll worry about another gang or another
jefe
taking over his operation. Also, you can tell him I’m prepared to sign over the property to him.”

“Really? I heard you’d set up an
ejido
.”

“I did, but he doesn’t know about the
ejido
. Anything I sign will have no validity under Mexican law. We’re buying time, Father. As soon as Pepa’s video gets released, there’ll be an enormous public pressure to send in the army. Every man Cuello has is on the island right now. It could be a clean sweep.”

“But they’ll kill you. They’ll torture you.”

“They might. But as we Felizistas like to say, victory or death. And, also, they might just shoot
you
. So will you do it?”

Marder saw the priest’s throat move as he swallowed heavily. Then he grinned. “We’ll be fellow martyrs, perhaps. San Miguel and San Ricardo of Michoacán, joined for eternity like Saints Perpetua and Felicity. Tell me, I’ve always wondered—does a name like Marder predispose you toward martyrdom? Some tiny subconscious message?”

“But my name has nothing to do with martyrdom. Marder is the German for ‘marten,’ a kind of large weasel. Which you may think is much more appropriate.”

Father Santana laughed a laugh that was a little too shrill. Then he let out a long breath, as if expelling some toxic gas. “My Lord! This is interesting in itself. I’ve been terrified of them for so long, so long, and now I’m not. It seems so awfully stupid to be afraid of death, especially in my profession, and now that I’m not, it’s hard to recall the fear. I suppose it’s like learning to swim—or, no, like acquiring speech—and not recalling a time when you couldn’t. Well, Don Ricardo, my only real regret is not having the long conversations about such elevated subjects that I would’ve liked us to have had.”

“We’re not dead yet, Father,” said Marder. “You should see about getting yourself a big white flag.”

22

Statch kept time by counting her strokes, and this gave her some idea of distance too, since she’d swum eight hundred meters so often that she had a good sense of how many strokes would move her approximately that far. After five of these intervals—four kilometers—she seemed to be fine, at least physically. She’d never swum long distances in the sea before, but she’d thought it wouldn’t matter, water was water, and salt water actually buoyed her up more than fresh, a slight advantage. As she swam, she thought of the classic long-distance swims—the English Channel was just about forty of those eight-hundred-meter laps—that had been done hundreds of times, by swimmers of no particular competitive talent. She could do it, twenty-one miles, not a problem. Or twenty-eight and a half, which was the distance around Manhattan, and plenty of duffers did that too.

One the other hand, those people were not entirely alone, in the dark, and at an unknown distance from the shore. How far could it be? As much as thirty miles? Could she swim thirty miles, without months of training, dragged down by a bulky shirt with a pistol in its breast pocket, throwing her balance off at every stroke? Probably not. But the distance was surely less than that, far less. She’d boarded the yacht while it was still in sight of land, she’d been on the tender for less than an hour, surely, and how far could the yacht have traveled afterward? She recalled her time in the blank room. If the vessel had been hurrying along, she would have heard the vibration caused by faster revolutions, and she had not. Or had she? She couldn’t recall.

But at least she was swimming in the right direction. She rolled onto her back, resting in an easy float, moving up and down on the regular swells. The stars were all out, burning in their ordered patterns. The Dipper was in the right place and Polaris on her right, and the moon was in the right place too, with a line dropped through its horns touching the southern horizon. She was definitely swimming east; all she had to do was keep swimming and she would strike North America before long.

But her stomach hurt. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and she was ravenously hungry. She could burn three thousand calories in a day of hard practice, and even though she was taking it easier now, the drain on her glucose reserves would be enormous. She could burn fat, but she didn’t have much fat to begin with. Long-distance ocean swimmers tended to be a little heftier, their fat also providing insulation from the cold. Which was going to be a problem if she didn’t see some town lights pretty soon. The water was more than eighty degrees, she estimated, but that was still a lot cooler than the human body. Every minute she spent in the water drained heat from her, which had to be cooked up from food or fat, but she was using too much energy for this to work properly, and in the middle of the tenth eight hundred meters, she felt the first stab of a cramp in her thigh.

She rolled over on her back and floated, trying to will the muscle to relax, the fibers to stop their futile, agonized contraction. She should get out of the pool and massage the cramp away. She actually had this thought, and this increased her panic. The chill was starting to steal her mind, her body was resigning the struggle to regulate temperature, the cooling brain was beginning to generate fantasy. She stared at the sky. Polaris was in the wrong place, on her right, not her left. Had she been swimming out to sea? For how long? And did it matter?

She reoriented herself and swam for some minutes, until the cramp hit again and she had to stop and roll onto her back and stare up at the stars. One of her first memories floated into mind. She was sitting on a dock at night—it must have been at that place they rented on the south shore of Long Island for a few summers—and her mother had told her that the stars were little holes in heaven through which the light of God shone. Even at four, this was an unsatisfying explanation, and when she discovered the truth somewhat later, it had instructed her that her mother was not to be trusted in matters concerning the real world. The stars were gigantic balls of flaming gas, their numbers, their distances, stupefying, and God had nothing to do with it, with anything at all; the universe spread in spangled glory above her remained utterly indifferent to her fate.

So she declined to pray, as she knew many people, even atheists, did in the last extremity. Or not for herself: she did stare up at the universe and say out loud a prayer for her father, the true believer, that if there was a Something that cared, it would care for her father, that it would help him through her death, that he not blame himself for it, that he be comforted in whatever way religious people found comfort.

That concluded, she had a spate of shameful self-pity, and salt tears leaked from her eyes and mixed with the salt sea. She’d fucked up her life; no one loved her, nor she anyone; she had not made the slightest real contribution to human happiness or advancement; she would shortly sink and fall down the miles of black water and be consumed by scavengers, and she would dissolve and be nothing again.

After that, she bobbed like flotsam on the rollers, waiting for the cold to rob her of consciousness, for a period of time she could not have measured, minutes, hours—time itself had become meaningless, she had always been here, floating on a sea treacherously warm, waiting helpless for the life in her to depart. The cramps eased, but she had no strength in her limbs anymore; she barely had the energy to hold the float position. She let the pistol slip away, its value now less than a marginal increase in buoyancy; her determination to hold on to it seemed the absurd extravagance of a person she no longer was. Getting sleepy, images from her past, lines of poetry she’d memorized, classroom scenes, the usual embarrassments, bubbling up. She looked up at the star directly overhead. It got blurry, became a looping line, went out; she was underwater, sinking.

Something touched her leg.

As if it were an electrical contact, the touch sent a shot of galvanic energy through her body. Her limbs made the practiced and automatic motions that drove her to the surface. A single light shone above the sea, casting a dim cone of yellowish illumination on the working deck of a shrimp boat and the water around it. They were pulling in their nets—that’s what had touched her. Three feeble strokes brought her over to the bight of the net, thick with shining shrimps. She hooked her fingers into it, and in a few minutes she was lying on the plywood deck, staring up at the wondering faces of the fishermen.

*   *   *

“Can I borrow your cell phone?”

Pepa Espinoza turned from her computer screen and there was Carmel Marder. For a moment she did not recognize her, so gaunt was her face, so red and crazy were her eyes.

“Jesus Maria, Carmel! What the devil happened to you? Where have you been?”

“Please, I just want to call my father.”

“You can’t. The cell service is out at the
casa
. My God, sit down! You look like you’re about to collapse.”

Pepa had been working at a small table at El Cangrejo Rojo, a table off to the side, an area not clearly visible from the central square of Playa Diamante. She pulled out a wire chair and Statch collapsed into it.

Pepa waved the barmaid over. “You looked starved,
niña.
You should eat something. What did they do to you?”

“I’ve been in the water,” she said. “And, yeah, I could eat.”

Pepa watched her eat: stacks of buttered tortillas, chicken soup with rice, half a dozen beef enchiladas, a plate of tacos stuffed with fresh
huachinango
, washed down with glass after glass of iced tea. While she ate, Statch told her tale.

“Wait, you
killed
Gabriel Cuello with a
pen
?”

“Yes. A hundred-forty-nine-dollar Rotring 600. I regret losing the pen.”

“Mightier than the sword, to coin a phrase.”

“Yes, strange when these old metaphors come literally to life. Although I actually killed him with a .22 hollow point through his skull. But if I’d been carrying a Bic, I’d be dead now, and he’d be cutting pieces off me and throwing them to the crabs.”

Statch stopped then and lifted her glass to her lips, with the ice cubes going like castanets, until she could no longer hold on to the plastic cup. It fell clattering to the floor, and Carmel Marder had to endure fifteen minutes of hysterics.

*   *   *

“Post-traumatic stress,” said Pepa, when it was all over.

“I guess. Or brain damage. Anyway, after I killed him, I went over the side and swam around for a while in the dark, until these guys on a shrimp boat picked me up. I had two hundred American rolled up in a little steel pill case attached to my knife, and I gave them that and I told them I would pay triple whatever they expected to clear from catching bait shrimp if they’d run me back to the marina at Playa Diamante, and here I am.”

“I’m going to interview you as soon as my crew gets here. This is an incredible story. Girl escapes from El Cochinillo, kills him with a pen? I’m pissing in my pants!”

Statch decided in the moment that there would never be an interview. She would never tell anyone about the two other men she’d shot in cold blood, or what happened on the water, or that she’d figured out that she swam more than twenty miles. Or that, as hard as she tried, she could not remove from her mind the fact that the conjunction of her course with that of the fishermen Serafin Montoya and his son Ascensio was nothing but brute chance. It was necessary for her to discount Señor Montoya’s excited explanation, delivered as he swathed her in blankets and fed her hot fish soup, that they were far to the south of their usual fishing grounds, that this unusual course derived from a message that had popped into Serafin’s mind while praying for a good catch to the Virgin of Guadalupe, as he did every night, and that this rescue was beyond all question a miracle of God and the Virgin. Nor could she believe that the reason Serafin had been willing to take her fifty miles out of his way on the mere promise of a reward from a stranger was that, in the hour preceding the rescue, he had caught more shrimp than he ever had in a lifetime of fishing.

Statch also grasped for the first time the actuality of her father’s pain, and Skelly’s more cryptic agony, what it was
really
like to kill another human being. She wanted to be with her father, to hug him for a long time, to make him understand that she knew, and to convey her hope that they could forgive each other for these crimes on behalf of the human race.