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"Johns who?" asked Norton.

"Edwin Johns, the painter you told me
about," said Morini.

"Oh, Edwin Johns," said Norton.
"Why?"

"For money," said Morini.

"Money?"

"Because he believed in investments,
the flow of capital, one has to play the game to win, that kind of thing."

Norton looked doubtful and then said:
maybe.

"He did it for money," said
Morini.

Then Norton asked him (for the first time)
how Pelletier and Espinoza were.

"I'd prefer it if they didn't know I
was here," said Morini.

Norton looked at him quizzically and told
him not to worry, his secret was safe. Then she asked him to call when he got
to
Turin
.

"Of course," said Morini.

A flight hostess asked to speak with them
and a few minutes later she went away smiling. The line of passengers began to
move. Norton gave Morini a kiss on the cheek and departed.

Before they left the gallery, thoughtful
but hardly downcast, the owner and only attendant told them that the
establishment would soon be closing its doors. With a lame dress over one arm,
he said that the house, of which the gallery was part, had belonged to his
grandmother, a very respectable lady, ahead of her times. When she died the
house was passed down to her three grandchildren, in theory equally. But back
then, he, who was one of the grandchildren, lived in the
Caribbean
,
where in addition to learning to make margaritas he did intel and spy work. A
hippie spy with some rather bad habits, was how he described himself. When he
got back to
England
he discovered that his cousins had taken over the entire house. That's when the
quarreling began. Lawyers cost money, though, and in the end he had to settle
for three rooms, where he set up his gallery. But the business was a flop: he
didn't sell paintings or used clothes and hardly anyone came to try his
cocktails. This neighborhood is too chic for my customers, he said, now the
galleries are in the old working-class neighborhoods, the bars are on the
traditional bar circuit, and people in this part of town don't buy used
clothes. When Norton, Pelletier, and Espinoza had gotten up and were heading
down the little metal staircase that led to the street, the gallery owner told
them that, on top of it all, he'd recently begun to see his grandmother's
ghost. This confession piqued the interest of Norton and her companions.

Have you seen her? they asked. I have,
said the gallery owner, though at first I just heard strange noises, like water
and bubbles. Noises he'd never heard in this house, although since it had been
divided up to be sold as flats and new bathrooms had been installed, there
might be some logical explanation for the sounds. But next came the moans,
expressions not exactly of pain but more of puzzlement and frustration, as if
the ghost of his grandmother were moving around her old house and not
recognizing it, converted as it was into several smaller homes, with walls she
didn't remember and modern furniture that must have struck her as common and
mirrors where there never used to be mirrors.

Sometimes the owner got so depressed he
slept in the store. What depressed him wasn't the sounds the ghost made, of
course, but his business on the brink of ruin. On those nights he could clearly
hear his
 
grandmother's steps and her
moans as she moved about upstairs as if she understood nothing about the world
of the dead or the world of the living. One night, before he closed the
gallery, he saw her reflected in the only mirror, an old full-length Victorian
looking glass that stood in a corner for the use of customers trying on
dresses. His grandmother peered at one of the paintings on the wall, then
shifted her gaze to the clothing on hangers, then she looked at the gallery's
two lone tables, as if they were the ultimate indignity.

She shuddered in horror, said the owner.
That was the first and last time he'd seen her, though every now and then he
heard her wandering on the upper floors, where surely she was moving through
walls that hadn't used to exist. When Espinoza asked what his old job in the
Caribbean
had been like, the owner smiled sadly and
promised them he wasn't mad, as anyone might think. He'd been a spy, he told
them, in the same way that others work for the census bureau or in some
statistics department. His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't
say why.

During a seminar in
Toulouse
they met Rodolfo Alatorre, a young
Mexican whose scattershot reading included the work of Archimboldi. The
Mexican, who was living on a creative writing scholarship and spent his days
striving, apparently in vain, to write a modern novel, attended a few lectures
then introduced himself to Norton and Espinoza, who lost no time giving him the
brush-off, and then to Pelletier, who supremely ignored him, since nothing
distinguished Alatorre from the hordes of generally irritating young European
university students who swarmed around the Archimboldian apostles. To his
greater discredit, Alatorre didn't speak German, which disqualified him from
the outset. Meanwhile, the Toulouse seminar was a great success, and amid the
fauna of critics and specialists who knew each other from previous conferences
and who, at least on the surface, seemed happy to see each other again and
eager to resume old discussions, the Mexican could either go home, which was
something he was loath to do because home was a dreary scholarship student's
room where only his books and papers awaited him, or stand in a corner and
smile right and left pretending to be deep in thought, which is what in the end
he did. As it happened, it was thanks to this position or pose that he noticed
Morini, who, confined to his wheelchair and responding distractedly to
everyone's greetings, displayed—or so it seemed to Alatorre—a forlornness
resembling his own. A little while later, after Alatorre had introduced
himself, the Mexican and the Italian went out for a walk along the streets of
Toulouse
.

First they discussed Alfonso Reyes, with
whom Morini was reasonably well acquainted, then Sor Juana, Morini unable to
forget the book by Morino—that Morino who might almost have been Morini
himself— on the Mexican nun's recipes. Then they talked about Alatorre's novel,
the novel he planned to write and the one novel he'd written so far, and they
talked about the life of a young Mexican in Toulouse, about the winter days
that dragged on, short but endless, Alatorre's few French friends (the
librarian, another scholarship student from Ecuador he saw only every so often,
the barman whose image of Mexico struck Alatorre as half bizarre, half
offensive), about the friends he'd left behind in Mexico City and to whom he
daily wrote long monothematic e-mails about his novel in progress, and about
melancholy.

One of these Mexico City friends, said
Alatorre, and he said it innocently, with that slight hint of clumsy boasting
typical of minor writers, had met Archimboldi
just the other day.

At first Morini, who wasn't paying close
attention and was letting himself be dragged to all the places Alatorre
considered worthy of interest, places that in fact, while not being obligatory
tourist stops, were in some way interesting, as if Alatorre's secret calling
was to be a tour guide, not a novelist, decided that the Mexican, who had in
any case read only two novels by Archimboldi, was bragging or mistaken or else
didn't know that Archimboldi had vanished long ago.

The story Alatorre told was in short as
follows: his friend, an essayist and novelist and poet by the name of Almendro,
a man in his forties better known to his friends as El Cerdo, or the Pig, had
received a phone call at midnight. El Cerdo, after a brief conversation in
German, got dressed and set off in his car to a hotel near the
Mexico City
airport. Even
though there wasn't much traffic at that time of night, it was past one when he
reached the hotel. A clerk and a policeman were in the lobby. El Cerdo showed his
credentials, identifying him as a top government official, and then he
accompanied the policeman to a room on the third floor. There were two other
policemen there and an old German who was sitting on the bed, his hair
uncombed, dressed in a gray T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, as if the arrival of
the police had caught him sleeping. Evidently the German, thought El Cerdo,
slept in his clothes. One of the two policemen was watching TV. The other was
smoking, leaning against the wall. The policeman who had arrived with El Cerdo
turned off the TV and told them to follow him. The policeman leaning against
the wall demanded an explanation, but the policeman who had come up with El
Cerdo told him to keep his mouth shut. Before the policemen left the room, El
Cerdo asked, in German, whether they had stolen anything from him. The old man
said no. They wanted money, but they hadn't stolen anything.

"That's good," said El
 
Cerdo in German. "That's progress."

Then he asked the policemen which station
they were from and let them go. When the policemen had gone, El Cerdo sat down
next to the TV and said he was sorry. The old German got up from the bed
without saying anything and went into the bathroom. He was huge, El Cerdo wrote
to Alatorre. Nearly seven feet tall. Six foot six at least. In any case:
enormous and imposing. When the old man came out of the bathroom, El Cerdo
realized that now he had his shoes on and he asked him whether he felt like
taking a drive around
Mexico City
or going out for a drink.

"If you're tired," he added,
"just tell me and I'll leave this instant." "My flight is at
seven in the morning," the old man said. El Cerdo looked at his watch. It
was after two. He didn't know what to say. He, like Alatorre, hardly knew the old
man's work. Any of his books that were translated into Spanish were published
in
Spain
and were late
coming to
Mexico
.
Three years ago, when he was the head of a publishing house, before he became
one of the top cultural officials in the new government, he had tried to
publish
The Berlin Underworld,
but
the rights already belonged to a house in Barcelona. He wondered how the old
man had gotten his phone number, who had given it to him. Simply posing the
question, a question to which he didn't expect an answer, made him happy, filled
him with a happiness that somehow vindicated him as a person and a writer.
"We can go out," he said. "I'm game."

The old man put on a leather jacket over
his gray T-shirt and followed him. El Cerdo took him to Plaza Garibaldi. There
weren't many people there when they arrived, most of the tourists had gone back
to their hotels, leaving only drunks and night owls, people on their way to
supper, and mariachi bands rehashing the latest soccer match. Shadowy figures
slunk around the streets leading into the plaza, occasionally halting to
scrutinize them. El Cerdo fingered the pistol he had begun to carry since he
began to work for the government. They went into a bar and El Cerdo ordered
pork tacos. The old man was drinking tequila and he had a beer. As the old man
ate, El Cerdo thought about the changes life brings. Not even ten years ago, if
he'd walked into this same bar and started speaking in German to a gangling old
man, someone would inevitably have insulted him or taken offense on the
slenderest of pretexts. Then the looming fight would have been staved off by El
Cerdo begging someone's pardon or making explanations or buying a round of
tequila. Now no one bothered him, as if the act of wearing a gun under his
shirt or working high up in the government gave him an aura of sainthood that
even the killers and drunks could sense from a distance. Pussies, thought El
Cerdo. They smell me, they smell me and they're shitting in their pants. Then
he started to think about Voltaire (why Voltaire, for fuck's sake?) and then he
started to think about an old idea he'd been mulling over for a while,
requesting an ambassadorship in Europe, or at least a post as cultural attache,
although with his connections the least they could make him was ambassador. The
problem was that at an embassy he would make only a salary, an ambassador's
salary. As the German ate, Cerdo weighed the pros and cons of leaving
Mexico
.
One of the pros absolutely, would be the chance to write again. He was
attracted by the idea of living in Italy or near Italy and spending long
periods in Tuscany and Rome writing an essay on Piranesi and his imaginary
prisons, which he saw extrapolated not exactly in Mexican prisons but in the
imaginary and iconographic versions of some Mexican prisons. One of the cons,
no question about it, was the physical separation from power. Distancing
oneself from power is never good, he'd discovered that early on, before he'd
been granted real power, when he was head of the house that tried to publish
Archimboldi.

"Listen," he said suddenly,
"weren't you supposed to have disappeared?"

The old man looked at him and smiled
politely.

That same night, after Alatorre had
repeated his story for Pelletier, Espinoza, and Norton, they called Almendro,
alias El Cerdo, who had no trouble relating to Espinoza what, along general
lines, Alatorre had already told him. In a certain sense, the relationship between
Alatorre and El Cerdo was teacher-student or big brother-little brother. In
fact, it had been El Cerdo who had gotten Alatorre the scholarship in Toulouse
which in a sense testified to the degree of El Cerdo's regard for his little
brother, since it was in his power to grant flashier scholarships in more
prestigious locales, to say nothing of appointing a cultural attaché in Athens
or Caracas, which might not have been much but would've beer something, and
Alatorre would have thanked him for the appointment with all his heart,
although God knows he didn't turn up his nose at the little scholarship in
Toulouse. The next time around, he was sure, El Cerdo would be more munificent.
Almendro, meanwhile, wasn't yet fifty and outside the limits of
Mexico City
his work was
widely unknown. But in
Mexico City
,
and, to be fair, at some American universities, his name was familiar, even
overfamiliar. How, then, did Archimboldi, supposing that the old German really
was Archimboldi and not a prankster, get his number? El Cerdo believed it had
come from Archimboldi's German editor, Mrs. Bubis. Espinoza asked, not without
some perplexity, whether he knew the great lady.