Under the Skin (13 page)

him. How many of the staff, he suddenly wondered, had heard him
pleading with her like a whining boy? He tore the drapery off the
hall window and piled it at the foot of her door and set it afire. In
minutes the door was ablaze. There was no other door to the room
and her windows were forty feet above the patio but she made no call
for help or cry of fear. Servants appeared at the end of the hall and
went racing away again, yelling at each other to bring buckets of
water. When the door was a sheet of crackling flames he kicked at it
until a portion fell away in a shower of sparks and then he covered
his head with his arms and crashed through the burning wood and
into the room. He slapped away smoking cinders from his clothes
and hair, saw her staring huge-eyed at him. He took off his thick
leather belt and doubled it and threw her facedown across the bed
and stripped away her robe and pinned her with a knee between her
shoulders. She was strong and kicking wildly but he was furiously
determined and tore off her silk underpants and whipped her bare
buttocks with the belt. He was elated by her shrieks and the servants’ arrival at the door to fling hissing bucketfuls of water on the
fire and witness his punishment of her. She managed to break free
after he’d laid on a dozen strokes. Her bottom was striped with red
welts and she was crying in pain and outrage. She called him a bullying old bastard, she shouted that she hated him. He warned her
that if she ever again bolted a door against him he would tie her to
a tree in the patio and strip her naked to the waist and use a horse
quirt on her back while everyone of the hacienda looked on. But he
feared her will to resist and told the carpenter that the new door to
her chamber should have no bolt.

They saw little of each other over the following days. Whenever
they came in sight of each other they did not speak. Their suppers
were silent affairs but for the clink of dishware and the serving staff’s
footfalls on the hardwood floors.

pride, and despair. He pined for her affections even as he refused to
lower himself to apology. He yearned to touch her even as he refused
to speak or even look directly at her. He was meting harsh punishments to his peons for the smallest infractions, ordering the whipping
of a stableman for being slow to saddle a horse, of a pair of kitchenboys for dicing in the pantry. He had a woman branded on the cheek
on her husband’s charge of infidelity, though there was no proof of it
and she swore it was not true.

He was drinking heavily every night, pacing himself to exhaustion in his chambers, trying to understand how things had come to
such a pass—his mind in a mad muddle, his emotions in chaotic tangle. When he thought of her naked beauty he had to bite his tongue
against howling in desire for her. He thought he might be going
mad.

And then one night, less than a week ago, he could bear it no
longer. He smashed a brandy bottle against the wall and stalked to
her chambers with a lamp in his hand and banged open her door,
waking her in a fright. He set down the lamp and shrugged off his
robe and flung himself on her. She resisted for only a moment before
letting herself go limp and shutting her eyes, refusing him even her
sight, refusing him everything but unresponsive flesh. He could not
help but proceed, though it was like coupling with the newly dead.
When he was finished and realized he was crying, he cursed her and
struck her with his open hand. She flinched but did not open her eyes.
He stormed from the room in a weeping rage.

He kept to his chambers for most of the following day, heartsickened by his brute behavior, frantic with fear that her affections were
forever lost to him. The next day was Christmas, and hoping to begin
a process of amends and reconciliation, he presented her with an exquisite emerald brooch. He laid it before her on the supper table and
she stared at it without expression and then ignored it. He asked if he
might pin the brooch on her to see how it looked, and she picked it

The next days passed like a time of mourning. He would see her
from his window as she set out on her stallion onto the riding trail in
the mesquite woods. On her return she would linger within the stable, no doubt seeing to it that the horse was properly tended, perhaps
feeding it apples as she liked to do. Then she’d go for a walk in the
garden and he’d lose sight of her. She would not return to the house
until dusk. Sometimes she would take another wordless supper with
him in the dining hall, sometimes she would retire for the night
without eating, and he would dine alone at the head of the huge
empty table.

And then that morning, four days before the new year, she was
gone. Her bed had not been slept in. She was not in her bath, on her
balcony, in any of the reading or music parlors, not in the dining
room nor the kitchen. The maids said la doña had not come down for
her morning cup of chocolate. The household staff was called to assembly in the main parlor and it was discovered that her personal
maid was also absent. None of the staff had seen either of them since
the evening prior. Before he could send for his segundo, the foreman
himself appeared with the news that the stableman in charge of caring for la doña’s stallion had departed the hacienda last night in one
of the trucks and had not returned. The man told the gate guard he
was being sent to Torreón to pick up a new saddle for la doña. The
women must have been hiding in the vehicle.

Don César dispatched teams of searchers to the nearest towns,
more than a hundred miles south to Gomez Palacio, to Torreón, to
San Pedro de las Colonias, seventy-five miles north to Jiménez. But
there was no need—they found the truck twenty miles away, where
the hacienda road met the highway at the small railstation pueblo of
Escalón, found it parked behind the depot. They roused the night
clerk from his bed—a man they called El Manco Feo for his ruined

arm and the ugly dogbite scars on his face—and learned that yes, a
man and two women, all strangers to him, had boarded the night
train to Monclova. His description of them was accurate. The clerk
was taken to Las Cadenas to give his report to Don César in person,
to tell him that the train had arrived in Monclova hours ago. Don
César knocked him down and kicked him repeatedly before ordering
him out of his sight.

He had no notion at all whether she was still in Monclova or where
she might have gone from there. He sent men to that city to seek her.
He interrogated every member of the house staff, questioned all of his
vaqueros. The missing stableman was Luis Arroyo, who had been on
the payroll less than six months. None of the other hands knew where
he was from, knew anything of his past.

And then a short while ago it had been learned that the maid who
fled with the party, one Maria Ramirez, had been born and raised in
a village called Apodaca, just outside of Monterrey, and that her father was a baker there....

El Segundo arrives on the balcony as Don César finishes his
brandy. Segundo is a tall lean man of middle years and wears his black
beard in a sharply pointed goatee of the grandee style, his long hair
in a ponytail. His dress is impeccable and his manners courtly, but his
dark hands are scarred from ropeburns and branding irons, with knife
cuts, the knuckles large and prominent and scarred as well.

Don César instructs him to send their best retrievers to the family
home of this Maria Ramirez and question her about his missing wife.
If the Ramirez girl should not be there, then the family must be questioned about
her
. The retrievers are to be given ample expense money
and are to act upon whatever information they get that might lead
them to his wife. If they are unable to find her, then that will be the
end of it and he will be shed of the bitch.

n the hours after the wind and drizzle quit, a thin
fog rolled in off the gulf and the windows glowed
pale gray in the morning light of New Year’s Day. I
got dressed and tucked the Mexican Colt under my coat at

As always, Gregorio had set out the makings of breakfast for his tenants before he went to bed. A big kettle of
coffee was lightly steaming on the stove, next to a warm pot
of refried beans and a large and ready frying pan. On the
counter stood a wire basket of eggs, a fresh loaf of bread on
a cutting board, a can of lard, some bulbs of garlic, a string
of dried chiles, and a large roll of chorizo sausage. A gourd
covered with a warm damp cloth held a stack of fresh corn
tortillas. On the table were bowls of butter, sugar, grape
jam, shakers of salt, red pepper, ground cinnamon.

By this hour Sergio had already come in from his night
clerk job and had eaten and cleaned up after himself and
gone up to his room. I usually took breakfast at a café
across the street from the train station but I wanted a word
with old Moises this morning, so I figured I might as well
eat while I waited for him to come down.

I lit the gas burner under the big frying pan and cut off a chunk
of chorizo and put it in the pan and ground it with a fork. Then
broke off a clove of garlic and peeled it smooth and dropped it in
with the chorizo and used the fork to crush it up good. I chopped a
big chile to fine bits and stirred it in with the sausage and garlic.
The chorizo sizzled and darkened and the fragments of garlic and
chile turned brown in the oozing grease. The sharp aromas mingled
with the fragrance of coffee and refried beans. I turned down the
burner a little and cracked three eggs into the pan and scrambled
them with the chorizo and seasonings. When the eggs were almost
done I pushed them with the spatula to one side of the pan and took
two tortillas from the gourd and quickly heated them in the cleared
side of the greasy pan. I laid the tortillas on a plate and scraped the
chorizo-and-eggs onto them, then added some beans on the side and
poured a cup of coffee and stirred in plenty of sugar. Then sat at the
table to eat.

Gregorio had taken his magazines to his room with him but
the morning paper was on the table. I was leafing through it and
having my second cup of coffee when old Moises came down and
looked surprised to find me there. “Buen año nuevo, joven!” he
said.

I waited till he sat himself with a cup of coffee, then gestured for
him to put the tin horn to his ear. He did, and I asked if he had been
to the party at the Morales place last night.

“Como?” he said, pressing the horn harder to his ear. “Qué?”
I leaned over the table and asked the question louder.
“La fiesta de Morales? Sí, yo fui, claro que sí. Era muy buena fiesta.”
Had he met Avila’s relatives from Brownsville?
“Que?”
he bellowed, twisting the horn like he meant to screw it

The air was cool and heavy with the smell of the sea, but the wet
and littered streets still carried tinges of the town’s hangover, the
faint odors of booze and tobacco ash and rank bedsheets. A sickly
yellow seadog still arced through the light mist over the Offatt
Bayou.

But holidays were good for the gambling business. Even at this
midmorning hour I found the betting room behind the Turf Grill already half-full and loud with talk of the day’s favorites and longshots
at the Florida and California tracks. The Juárez and Tijuana races

Up on the second floor I went into Rose’s outer office and spoke
with his secretary, Mrs. Bianco. A lot of the guys called her Momma
Mia, and she seemed to enjoy it, but to me she was always Mrs.
Bianco. She had a pronounced Italian accent and a motherly manner
and could have been on an advertising poster for pasta or tomato
paste. Portly and beginning to gray, always dressed in neat and matronly fashion. She lived alone in a boardinghouse down the street
from the Club. Not many knew it but she was one of Rose’s highestpaid employees and among the handful of people he truly trusted,
and there was no aspect of Maceo business she wasn’t privy to. She
knew how I stood with Rose too and tended to be more direct with
me than she was with others—and I’d caught glimpses of the .38
bulldog she kept in the bottom righthand drawer of her desk. I once
asked Rose if she knew how to use it and he smiled and winked and
left it at that.

She told me Signore Maceo had sent LQ and Brando and one of his
slot machine mechanics to the Red Shoes Cabaret near Alvin. I knew
the place. It was in Brazoria County, just west of the Galveston line,
and it rented its machines from the Gulf Vending Company. The
place had changed hands a few months before and the new guys had
been consistently slow about toting up the daily take from the slots
and handing over the Maceos’ cut. Artie Goldman suspected they
were shaving their revenue reports, and Artie’s suspicions were good
enough for Rose.

The Red Shoes guys would be surprised when the mechanic
showed up that morning to check their machines. Each of the slots
had been geared to keep a tally of the money it took in—a running
tally that wasn’t erased each time the machine was emptied, as many
of the joint owners had been led to believe was the case. LQ and
Brando would ensure that nobody interfered with the mechanic’s in