Dancing with the Tiger Read online

  “I’m retired and my children just gave me this trip to Mexico—”

  “That’s good, but I mean really.”

  “I’m an art collector.”

  “Paintings?”

  “Masks. Pre-Columbian objects. Some folk art.”

  “Masks?” The man held his palm over his face like a starfish.

  Daniel nodded.

  “What does an art collector do, exactly?”

  “You study art, travel, meet dealers, visit artists, locate works of value, or works that will accrue value, either monetarily or culturally, pieces that are exceptional in some way. Rare or old. Unusual. Striking.”

  “How do you make money?”

  “You can sell the collection or sell individual pieces for a profit.”

  “So you deal art?”

  “No, more collect.”

  “While Mrs. Ramsey was teaching?”

  “While Rose was teaching.” He wasn’t going to explain the economics of their marriage. This was another thing he and Thomas Malone had in common. They had both married money.

  “But do you ever finish collecting? What’s the end point?”

  Daniel sighed. He was tired of explaining. His head hurt. “With masks, you’re done when every village or style is well represented. Or you could lose your passion, start collecting something new, or run out of money or make one particularly large purchase, a capstone.”

  The fact that he was a prisoner struck him with new force. He didn’t belong here. His tone grew irritable. “A collection is complete when the whole becomes more than any one part. When it fuses into something meaningful and lasting.”

  The man chewed this over. “Like family.”

  Daniel frowned. “Some families. Not all.” He was in no mood for sentimental comparisons. “Actually, no collection is ever complete. I have every stamp. I have the perfect collection of Tiffany glass. There are always subtleties, offshoots, curiosities. A collection ends when you die. Even then, it isn’t done. You are.”

  “Always more to want.”

  “More to learn. Appreciate. It’s like love. Where does that end?”

  “You buying more masks when you’re down there burying Mrs. Ramsey?” The light was getting stronger now. Dust mites swirled in the air.

  “Am I going to buy more masks?” He repeated the question, realizing how the truth would sound. “No, burying my wife. That’s it.”

  The man released the bars. “I had your wife’s class twice, I mean for two years. She decorated her classroom with all these posters and quotes. I only remember one. Monet or Matisse, maybe. You might know since you study art.”

  Daniel couldn’t remember Rosie’s classroom. Had he ever been to see it? These little resurrections were gifts—as when a friend uncovered a forgotten letter, a photograph or story—and he could add this new memory to the mix of old ones, another collection, forever dwindling, as he and his memory aged.

  “What was the quote?” he asked, nervous somehow. Afraid this artifact would prove disappointing, unworthy of her.

  “What have you done for color today?”

  “What?”

  “It was a question: What have you done for color today?”

  Daniel looked around the cell. “Not much. How about you?”

  The man shrugged. “So far? Nothing. But I’m getting off work. Start by cooking my wife breakfast. It’s her birthday.”

  “That’s color?”

  “Red watermelon. Green rind. I don’t know. I’m not an artist.”

  Daniel Ramsey pictured Rose sitting in her chair, surrounded by art books. Rose had brought color to his life. Love, yes. But spirit and vigor. And Anna, of course. But more than that, Rosie noticed things. Like how the fuchsia blossoms of bougainvillea were not in fact blossoms, but leaves. The actual flowers were tiny and yellow, buried, nearly lost in all that showiness.

  He looked up, ready to share this detail, but the man was gone.

  Daniel Ramsey listened to the sounds of morning. Crackling scanner. Coffee brewing. The horrors of the previous night belonged to yesterday. Color. What had he done? What would he do? He leaned against the bars, straining to see the window where the light was coming from.

  four ANNA

  Emilio Luna looked confused. He had done commissions, but never in stone. The carver kept gazing past Anna as if Salvador might appear. He studied the photograph.

  “Lo necesito rápido,” Anna said, spinning her hands. The ugly American. It had come to this.

  Emilio Luna lowered his chin, his voice soft as dust. “It’s not my specialty. You need to go to the coast, where they work stone.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “I have other work.” The carver gestured to a pile of heart-shaped boxes. “My brother Javier would have to help. It will be too expensive.”

  “¿Cuánto?”

  Emilio Luna looked through the trees. “Four thousand pesos.”

  Anna winced. “Three thousand?”

  His dog sauntered over, settled its rear in the dirt. The carver looked in its blue eyes, letting the animal decide. “Three thousand, five hundred.”

  “Three thousand.”

  “The stone is very expensive. Sería mucho trabajo.”

  “Three thousand five hundred. Three days.” She held out her hand. He grasped it with a feathery touch.

  “Do you want a deposit?” A bluff. She had only five hundred pesos. Emilio Luna shook his head. No deposit.

  One more thing, Anna said. “If you please, señor, this is a secret. Don’t tell anyone. Not even Salvador.”

  —

  At the bus stop, Anna’s phone rang. Constance Malone.

  “You didn’t come to work today. We were worried and finally I said, ‘I have to call.’”

  “Montezuma’s revenge,” Anna said. “I could barely form sentences. Please tell Thomas for me. I hate to miss work.”

  Constance invited her to dinner Saturday night. “You’ll be human by then.”

  Saturday night. That would put Anna on the Malones’ patio a day after her meeting with the Tiger, assuming she survived that encounter. The timing was perfect. The party would keep Thomas clear of the chapel. The noise would mask the looter’s racket.

  “I’d love to come,” Anna said. “Tell me what to bring.”

  “Just you,” Constance said. “And Salvador.”

  “I’m not sure I can. We’ve fallen out of touch.”

  “Then bring another handsome painter.”

  Anna promised to try.

  She climbed on the local bus, feeling tall and blonde and thin, a flamingo in a duck pond, the wrong color and all out of proportion. As the bus rumbled out of San Juan del Monte, she took pictures through the window, not stopping to focus or compose. Super Medino. A bicitaxi. Papel picado hanging like lace. Blue wall. Green wall. Canary-yellow wall. And she thought: There is more color on one Mexican street than in all of New England. And she thought: I belong in this place where I do not belong.

  five THE LOOTER

  Touring the tunnel was more dog-like and humbling than he’d imagined, the two of them crawling on their knees. The looter rapped the chapel’s foundation with his flashlight to show where he would bust through the floor. Anna looked strung-out in the half-light, like she hadn’t slept, or maybe didn’t cotton to being alone with a man underground.

  “I tried to dig during the day, but the damn dog would bark. Still, at night, sometimes he showed up.”

  “The dog?”

  “Malone.”

  “Where?”

  The looter pointed up, then spun his finger around his temple, the universal sign of crazy. “He talks to himself and moans.”

  Anna made a face. “He makes me sick. Constance invited me to dinner Saturday night.”

  “That a
sshole invited you—”

  “No, she did. But it’s perfect. He’ll be out of the chapel, and we’ll make lots of noise.”

  “You should make a toast. To . . . what’s her name?”

  “Constance.”

  “To Constance and her husband, the rapist.”

  “The impotent rapist.” Anna laughed, stopped herself. “I’m worried about the Tiger. What if the copy doesn’t fool him?”

  “Reyes doesn’t remember the mask. He just remembers he wants it.”

  Anna ran her hand along the chicken wire lining the ceiling. Powder showered her hair. “This is a great tunnel. You could go into business.”

  “After the mask, I’m out of here.”

  Anna asked where. He stroked his jaw, considering. This Anna was easy to talk to. Or maybe it was the tunnel. “Back to Colorado. Open a business.”

  “Marry Chelo?” she teased.

  He couldn’t stop smiling—Chelo on the brain. He closed his mouth so she wouldn’t see his fucked-up teeth.

  “You went and saw her, didn’t you?” Anna poked him. “I can see it in your face. You two made up.”

  Not to jinx anything, but he was making plans. He’d fly back to Denver and introduce Chelo to his mother. She would cry she’d be so happy. She’d hang their coats in the closet, show them the powder room. That’s what she liked to call it. The powder room. Chelo would blush, say something polite in English that she’d rehearsed. It is a pleasure to meet you. You have a beautiful home. On the patio, they’d circle chairs, and for once, his mother wouldn’t pepper him with questions. Beers in hand, they’d admire the Rockies, stone pyramids sugared up with snow. The looter would point out Pikes Peak and brag to Chelo how he’d once hiked twenty-six miles up and back, stood on the tippy top, and his mother would let that lie stand because he’d gotten close to the summit, close enough. His mother wouldn’t ask directly about the baby—Is that my grandchild?—but she’d be hoping a girlfriend and baby would bring her prodigal son home. He’d leave the money he owed her by the coffeepot. Not explain a thing. Just let the magic stand for itself.

  “Hey”—Anna tossed a stone in his lap—“where are you?”

  He grinned. “Underground.”

  “I need you to be alert. Saturday, seven o’clock. Be here. I’ll be there.” She pointed up, behind her, to the house. “So long as the Tiger hasn’t . . .” Anna dragged her thumb across her neck.

  The girl looked unhinged; it made him nervous. He wasn’t used to relying on girls for anything but sex and sandwiches. Getting over rape took time, the looter understood that much. His sister had been jumped once and she never liked men again, but maybe she never had. She’d always liked books more than people.

  “You got your phone?”

  “I got it, but I keep it turned off.” He pulled it out of his pocket, regarding it suspiciously.

  “Well, turn it on. What if I need to reach you Saturday?” The looter hesitated, then moved the power switch. Anna fingered the ground, as if she’d lost something. “Maybe we should bless the tunnel.”

  Before he could object, crazy Anna had crawled outside. A minute later, she was back with two sticks and a vine. “The tall stick is you and the shorter one is me. Our paths have crossed.”

  She looked wild-eyed, but the looter went with it. “Give them to me.”

  While Chelo was religious, this chick was making shit up on the fly. He wrapped the vine around the sticks like a Boy Scout. He was earning his Rudimentary Christianity in the Wild Merit Badge, his Humoring the Date-Raped Girl Merit Badge. He could add these to his earlier badges in Archaeology, Advanced Tunnel Building, and Scoring Drugs in a Foreign City. He was on his way to Eagle Scout.

  The cross looked pretty damn official, he had to admit, resting against the tunnel. He didn’t have the heart to tell Anna that the Virgin hadn’t actually spoken to him in the cathedral. Digging had been his idea.

  Anna eyed the cross. “Do you think it will protect us?”

  In the distance, a donkey belched, as though he was tired of being a jackass, thank you, it was someone else’s turn. The looter palmed Anna’s boot.

  “Protect us against Reyes?” He remembered a line from some country song, or maybe this was his own voice, a baby step closer to wise.

  “I’m sorry, little darling,” he said. “We’re too far gone for that.”

  six THE DRUG LORD

  “¿Vivo?”

  Reyes scratched his fake mustache. He was bald today, in a politician’s suit, looking like Carlos Salinas, the exiled former president, the Harvard fucker who rigged ballot boxes, whose friends and relations often wound up dead. Reyes checked his reflection in the gilded mirror. Okay, maybe not Carlos Salinas. Maybe his chunky brother Raúl, the cabrón whose wife was caught withdrawing $84 million from a Swiss bank account.

  “Alive?” Reyes repeated. “I wanted him dead.”

  The drug lord poked his sandwich. Sausage with chili. Heartburn seared his chest. He burped up a tamale from three days before. Who needed to keep a diary with a gut like his?

  “Are you an assassin or a nun? Do I need to show you?”

  Reyes pointed a pistol out the open window, shot at nothing. Birds jumped out of the trees, discombobulated, flapping.

  “Feo. That’s me. Shooting you. Can you hear it? When I want to kill something, I kill it.”

  He bit into his sandwich, opened his desk drawer, wiped his greasy fingers on a five-hundred-peso bill.

  “How the hell would I know where he is? Look where drug addicts go. Just find him before I find you.”

  Reyes propped his feet on the desk, leaned back. It was good when things went right, but also good when things went wrong. If everything always went right, he’d be out of a job.

  “Feo? You know what? Con todo respeto, you’re ugly. That’s the only reason I keep you alive. You make me look good. You’re my point of comparison.”

  Reyes stood, shook out his pants.

  “Maybe you saw wrong? Now you’re backpedaling. If you saw his ghost, kill the ghost, too.”

  Silence. The birds scurried back into the tree. He fired. They took off like crazy. Too much shit inside those birds. No manners at all.

  “Feo, you’re killing me, and I’m already dying.”

  He clicked his laptop. His screen saver was his favorite prostitute, Suerte. Breasts like mountaintops. Made killer pozole. What they had was special. They would sit outside under a palapa at his villa in Acapulco and watch the sun drop into the sea, hire a gypsy guitarist to sing his heart out, sand everywhere, rum, hot tub, pinball, pork rinds, caviar, cocaine, trumpets, bodyguards, Viagra, helicopter humming. Yes, it was romantic. He was not ready to give up this life. Cancer could take a number. He was busy.

  “Cabrón, that’s a joke. I am not dying until I kill you. Then I can rest in peace.”

  He caressed his chest. The birds were back in the trees. Let them shit in peace. He could be generous, but not with the digger. That emaciated, drug-addicted American asshole was going to learn a lesson he’d be too dead to use. Like the last Salinas brother, Enrique, found murdered in his car outside Mexico City, plastic bag over his head.

  “Bring me the head of John the Baptist. . . . I saw it in a movie once. And a painting. Caravaggio. Ever heard of him? Stupid question.”

  He rubbed his bad ear.

  “Okay, if you can’t bring me his head, then bring me your dick and I’ll eat that for lunch. Good thing I’m not too hungry. Ha ha.”

  A patrón had to be ugly. People expected it. It gave them courage to follow through. You could never talk to a person the way you talked to a video camera.

  “I want him dead. More dead than last time. No more bedtime baths. Bullets.”

  He hung up, called Suerte.

  “I need you, baby. I don’t want to die with you left undone.”
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  seven ANNA

  Emilio Luna sat shirtless in the shade, sanding heart boxes. Seeing Anna, he hopped into his house, returned wearing a shirt and carrying a turquoise mask. He handed it to Anna.

  “La máscara es bonita.” She bit her lip, fishing for the right words. “But it doesn’t look the same as the other.”

  The carver considered her critique before disagreeing. “Javier works stone in Mitla. They have worked stone for hundreds of years.”

  “Yes, but the face looks different. Where’s the photograph?”

  The carver fetched it. Anna held photo and mask side by side.

  “It is better this way,” the carver said. “You don’t want an angry mask.”

  Anna resisted the urge to smash the mask over his head. She was meeting the Tiger in two days. A dry breeze blew between them. She had no more money, so she tried flattery instead.

  “Your brother is famous, a real artist. I know he can handle even the most delicate jobs. The two masks need to be . . .” The heat had melted her brain. “Idénticas.”

  The carver muttered something, prayer or curse, wiped his face with his shirttail. “Javier is away.”

  “When will he return?”

  “Depende.”

  Anna wanted to climb into a heart box, close its perfect wooden door. She looked into his eyes. “If you do the work by Friday afternoon, I will be very content and will tell all my American friends about your remarkable masks.”

  She hated herself as she said this. Emilio Luna waved away this stupidity, sat back on his stump and resumed sanding. Anna reeled with dizziness. She hadn’t brought any water. She was hungry and had to pee. I would be so grateful. That was what she wanted to say. But the conditional of agradecer was beyond her, given the heat, her anxiety. Instead, she said the one thing that might persuade a Mexican carver to help a demanding gringa.

  “Por favor, señor. It’s a present for my mother.”

  The man looked up, saw something in her face he recognized. That she was lying but had no choice.