Dancing with the Tiger (21 page)

They wandered the city until dark. The looter was letting things evolve, the SAT word for letting shit flow downstream. Outside the market, crones sold baskets of chili peppers, their scrawny legs crossed beneath their rumps like knitting needles. Some clown was hawking Calderón puppets. The girl wanted hair combs. They searched for one of those discount stores where everything costs ten pesos and breaks before you get it home.

“Mira. Hay uno.”
The girl pointed.

“Te espero afuera.”
I will wait for you outside.

The girl looked doubtful, like maybe he'd ditch her. He kissed her forehead, all those peppery freckles. He hadn't meant to kiss her. It just came up.

The girl waddled into the store.
Chelo.
He had a hard time remembering her name. He leaned against a kiosk, glanced down a side alley,
where a haggard guy was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, eyes like jumping beans. The looter didn't need to smell the piss to know what the guy was selling. Old cravings yanked his insides.
Walk away. Walk away now.

He darted in the opposite direction, hungry for distraction. Underwear shop. Penny candy. One of those document joints where you can laminate an ID, wire money, have credentials forged. Once in D.F., on the Plaza de Santo Domingo, he'd bought a fake driver's license under the name Nacho Rico. Forget the U.S. of A. These shops were the land of opportunity. For a hundred bucks and a passport, you could walk out a dentist.

He circled back to the kiosk, read the posters, blinked in disbelief.
Mask exposition at La Fábrica. The collection of Thomas Malone. More than a hundred masks from all over Mexico.
A second poster had been stapled over most of the first.
Óscar Reyes Carrillo opens his mask collection to the public.
Seeing Reyes's name in print brought back the sickening smell of wet cement. A foot-odor smell, muggy and human. The looter spun around, nerves jumping. Daylight had its shadows. He touched the poster, making it real.
Thomas Malone is here, which means the mask is here.
The scabs on his arms pussed through his shirt, leaving pale pink moons.

The girl called out, “Cruise.”

Cruise? She was looking right at him. She must have misheard his name or forgotten how to pronounce “Chris.” He smiled. Cruise Maddox. He liked it.
Come cruising with the Cruise.
Welcome to the Cruise Ship Lollypop
. He chuckled. Chelo looked hurt, wanting in on the joke. He took her hand. “I'm in the right place. The man I'm looking for is in Oaxaca. We just have to figure out where he lives.”

The girl looked pleased. “God helped.”

“But the man I am
not
looking for is here, too.”

The girl scanned the street. “Then we'll stay away from him.”

And the looter said: “Where can we buy a gun?”

—

He didn't know squat about guns,
and Chelo wanted nothing to do with it. When the pawnshop clerk presented two pistols, he chose the bigger one without question. He remembered to ask for bullets. What else did you need? Aim wasn't for sale.

Chelo waited outside until he was done. “No good comes from that.”

“But with a gun, no bad comes either.”

“Son peligrosos.”

“No, guns aren't dangerous,” he argued. “
Lo contrario.
A gun makes you safe.”

She sighed. “You think like my father.”

“Where is he?”

“Dead.”

They held hands as they walked. Her fingers were sticky but warm. The looter felt braver with the gun, though he wasn't sure where to put it. It seemed careless to store it in his satchel and worrisome to jam it into his pants. At a hardware store, he found a cheap fishing box, dumped its plastic trappings in a trash can, laid the pistol inside, then carried the box with his right hand, slung his satchel, leaving his left hand free for the girl. Voilà.

They kept walking, past Chinese slippers and rainbow tupperware. The gun made the looter feel oddly festive, a sheriff leading the world's smallest parade. He wondered if he was a good shot, wished he'd paid
more attention the time his father drove him to the salt marsh for target practice. The sun had been setting, and the air smelled like skunk cabbage, and his father drank can after can of light beer, using the silver empties as targets. A bully trying to look tough.
Packing heat.
The looter gave a half laugh at the cliché of it all. With a gun, you could be whoever you wanted, and if someone objected, you could blow him away. A clay pigeon. A white bird that turns into dust.

Dinner was a comedy, sweet, really. There was nothing on the menu—there wasn't even a menu—just a shy woman with a lazy eye offering them vegetable soup, hot chocolate, rice, beans
de la olla
, and
tlayudas
with chicken. The
tlayuda
was the local specialty, a crispy tortilla shaped like an elephant's ear, layered with beans, cheese, shredded lettuce, and
pico de gallo
. They ordered two of everything, asked if there wasn't a beer. There wasn't. They ate the hot food, which, like all food in the mountains, no matter how simple, tasted delicious.

After dinner, they cut through the woods. Salvador had requested a private cabin, but they ended up the only occupants of a dormitory designed for tour groups. Six rooms of bunk beds, a long corridor, a common room big enough for a county square dance. The kitchen smelled like soup and crackers.

“I feel like we're on a Christian retreat,” Anna said, peering into the empty fridge. “Hello. Hello.”

Salvador groaned. “The owner promised me a bungalow. It's typical. You make your reservation and then it's ‘I am sorry, there are no cabins available.'”

Anna wondered what Salvador expected of this evening. Bunk beds made the logistics more complicated. Either they squeezed into a single bunk, which seemed premature, or slept stacked like campers. The thought of negotiating these possibilities made Anna extraordinarily thirsty. She slipped a bottle of wine into the fridge.

Salvador looked wistfully at the cabins nestled in a bluff below. “Look at the other people in their
casitas
.”

“Let's make a fire.”

“We need
bon-bones
.”

“What are those?” Anna asked.

“Those white candies you put on the fire.”

“Marshmallows?”

Salvador shrugged. He didn't know the word in English, and she didn't know it in Spanish. “Let's go to the store.”

They wound through a wooded shortcut. Branches thatched the darkening sky like lace. Anna tried to see everything before it saw her.

At a small store catering to campers, an effeminate boy fetched marshmallows, chocolate bars, and no-name vanilla wafers from wooden shelves. Anna's friend Mercedes often complained that all the nice Mexican men were gay. While this seemed a stretch, Anna was quite sure it was true of all nice clerks. On the way back to the dormitory, they gathered kindling. Anna hummed, stuck close to Salvador's side. The night smelled like dirt and trees.

Salvador held up two handfuls of sticks.
“Basta, ¿no?”

He went inside, but Anna lingered on the stoop, watching the stars, searching for meaning or pattern. The longer she looked, the more lights she saw. Patience rewarded. Distance overcome.
Slow down,
she told herself.
Be where you are.

—

It felt good
to be sitting on the lap of Salvador Flores in a chair before a fire in a dormitory in Benito Juárez. Anna impaled a marshmallow, lit the sugar on fire. They jousted with their burning sticks, shadows towering on the wall. Anna pressed her marshmallow into a cookie lined with chocolate. She bit in, made a face.

“Another lousy American invention. More fun to make than to eat.” She yawned, chucked her s'more in the fire. “I'm ready for bed.” She wanted to get that part over with: who was sleeping where. Sometimes you couldn't enjoy the middle until you knew the end.

“We have thirty beds,
mi amor
. Which do you prefer?”

Anna led him into the farthest bedroom, no longer unsure what she wanted. The moment might have been awkward, but wasn't. They climbed to a top bunk and held each other, staring through the glass roof at Orion's Belt and a hundred other stars Anna couldn't name. It was cold away from the fire, even though they were dressed.

Anna fingered the globe around his neck. “Does this have a story?”

“A present from Enrique. From Guatemala.”

“You wear it all the time?”

“I like the idea of it.”

“What idea?”

“I don't know. I can't think when I am in bed with you.”

Anna wrapped her legs around him, hoping to make his concentration even worse. Their heat was building. She palmed the planet in her cold hand.

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

Salvador chuckled. “Why am I here if I have a girlfriend?”

“I saw you in the
zócalo
with this beautiful woman.”

“A tall girl with crazy brown hair?”

“Long legs.”

“Look at you,” he teased. “All
celosa
.”

“Jealous?”

Anna was about to deny this, when above them, on the glass ceiling, something moved. She tensed, unsure, and then terribly sure. A man was crawling across the glass, apelike, on all fours. He was wearing a tiger's mask. His mirror eyes caught the beam of the security light. So did his machete. Anna gave a muffled scream: “It's the Tiger. Get up.” Salvador fell off the bed, sputtering,
“What?”
Anna fell after him. “The one who killed the old woman.” Salvador couldn't find his car keys. Anna couldn't find her shoes. They fished around wildly, cursing. Her heart seemed to be beating outside her body while her mind throbbed
nonono
. Keys found, shoes in hand, they raced through the common room, past the dying orange embers, down the long corridor, through the soup-and-cracker kitchen. Salvador slid the dead bolt and sized up the shadows.

The salamanders watched them, scales frozen.

The moon had nothing to say.

They ran.

Salvador unlocked the car, wheeled into reverse, swearing,
“Hijo de su gran putísima madre.”
When they reached the town square, Anna half expected ghost children to be practicing their marches, but
everything was hushed and gray. A spotlight illuminated the Mexican flag, the Oaxacan flag, both limp. On a stone wall, the store clerk, wearing a wedding dress, twirled a lavender paper flower.

—

“What is happening?”
Salvador was leaning so far forward his forehead almost touched the windshield. A road sign said fifty kilometers to Oaxaca.

“That's the tiger from San Juan del Monte. He's chasing me.” Whatever Anna's heart was doing didn't feel natural. “It's dangerous to drive so fast.”

Salvador let up the accelerator.

“Don't slow down.”

Salvador said, “He knows you have the death mask.”

Statement. Not question. Anna held her breath, thinking she misheard.

His voice turned grim. “That tiger knows you've been carrying the death mask around with you. Reyes wants it, so he will do anything—including killing us both—to stop you from smuggling it over the border.”

Anna tapped the window with her knuckle. “How did you know?”

“Lorenzo Gonzáles is a friend of mine.”

“He's not a nice person.”

“Neither am I.”

Out the rearview mirror, black.

“Your friend lied to me.” She faced him, indignant. “Offered me five hundred pesos, like I'm a complete idiot.”

Salvador shifted, taking the switchbacks hard. “Give me the mask. I will make sure it goes to the right people. What do you need it for? You have Malone and your book.”

Anna resented this description, start to finish. “I am not writing a book. I came to Mexico to buy this mask for my father, and I've worked damn hard to get it.”

“Your father?”

“Gonzáles didn't tell you that part?”

Salvador asked what part.

“The idiot who wrote the messed-up mask book. Daniel Ramsey. He's my father. I helped him write that book.”

Salvador took his foot off the accelerator.
“Me lleva la chingada.”

Anna kept going. She was losing her voice. “We need this mask for the Ramsey Collection. The Metropolitan Museum was
planning
to open a gallery in my mother's name. With this mask, they might still do that. My father comes back, a hero. Do you get why I had to do this? My name was on that book, too. Imagine how I felt. I'm supposed to be a fact-checker.”

They'd reached the valley floor. Salvador rolled to the curb.

“What are you doing?”

Salvador killed the ignition. “I don't feel like driving anymore. I am not safe with you. Not in my car. Not on the street. Not in bed.
Everything you have told me is a lie.
” He was yelling. “That tiger is crazy. You think you can beat Reyes?”

“I don't know Reyes—”

“You know what he does to people? He doesn't care.
Ni una
madre.
”

Not even a mother. The essence of nothing. Anna checked the rearview mirror. Her voice chilled, cool to subzero. “Why are you with me?”

Salvador met her tone. “Mexican museums look professional with their locks and security cameras, but every day art disappears. Hands go and take. A little of this. A little of that. It all goes to the black market. Lorenzo and I saw this every day, but we could not stop it. Now we work together—underground—to keep the best art in Mexico.
For the public.
Away from people like Thomas Malone.”

A glow appeared in the rearview mirror. Light finding strength. Anna pleaded with him.
“We need to go.”

Cursing, he started the car, careened onto the road. Anna didn't speak, for fear of distracting him. She didn't dare look behind.

“You've got it all wrong,” she said finally. “Gonzáles
runs
the black market. He called us.”

“That was a mistake. He didn't believe the death mask was real. You choose your battles. You let some pieces go, to save what's most important. We work closely with the few honest museums left. If the press writes about a piece, it cannot disappear so easily. But always we are fighting Reyes.” He glared at her. “And people like him.”

So this is what he thought of her. She was just another looter.

“You were trying to steal the mask back from me?”

“Steal it? No. Convince you to do the right thing.
Keep the mask in Mexico.
That's all I ask. In Mexico, where it can be seen in context.”

“That's why you took me to the Ecce Mono. You didn't just happen to stop in my café. Gonzáles sent you. You never cared about me, you were keeping an eye on the mask. That's why you're here now. Not for me. For the mask.”

Salvador's face looked grim in the dashboard light.

“Yes,” he said. “That's why.”

He turned to her, his eyes lifeless. “I've never given a tour in my life.”

—

They did not speak again
. Anna focused on the Virgin and Che, wondering which force was more powerful. Reverence or rebellion. They lost the Tiger somewhere on the city outskirts. To be sure, Salvador drove a crazy loop past an abandoned mine, around a baseball field. This was his city. He would not be outdriven. Home, on the safe side of the security wall, Salvador dropped his duffel.

“What do you want to say to me?”

It was late, past midnight. Anna's fear felt both vivid and distant. She was close to tears. “Thank you for getting us out of there.”

Salvador appeared smaller outside his car. Not a great Mexican muralist, a Rivera or Orozco, just a man cobbling together enough beauty to survive the day. She might love him, though maybe only because she'd never see him again.

“Tell me you won't see Malone,” he said. “We can work together to find a safe place for the mask.”

“I won't see Thomas Malone, but I need the mask.”

“Then forget it. Forget—”

A woman in her late fifties padded out in a flowered terry-cloth bathrobe. Her brown hair was streaked with copper highlights. Thick face cream gave her worried face an oily glow. She coddled her large breasts to keep warm.

“Hijo. ¿Qué haces? Ya es tarde.”

“Mamá. No te preocupes. Estamos bien.”

“Mamá?”
Anna looked incredulous.

Salvador's shoulders fell. “
Mamá, te presento a mi amiga, Anna.
Anna, this is my mother.”

The woman glanced unhappily at Anna.

“You didn't tell me you lived with your mother.”

“I don't.”

“You live
next door
. You never introduced me?”

Salvador rocked to one hip, defiant. “You prefer to be with Americans.”

The mother pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her robe. She looked like a woman who drank coffee all day, like a woman who had dieted for thirty years and never lost a pound.
“Hijo, dime lo que está pasando.”
The mother's brow tensed. She fingered the collar of her robe as she smoked.
“Me preocupaba—”

“
Todo está bien.
This is the woman I took to see Tío Emilio. She is a writer, writing a book about masks.”

“Tío Emilio?”
Anna had the sensation of falling.

Salvador crossed his arms. “Emilio Luna is my uncle.”

Anna assimilated this new fact. She was not the only liar. He had not
really
wanted to discover the truth about the carvers. He was protecting his family from scandal. No doubt Emilio Luna had a second workroom filled with Grasshopper masks, one that wasn't on the tour.

“I should go now,” she said.

Salvador responded with furious calm. “I am a simple man. I live here and take care of my mother. My masks are for my wall, not my face. I don't even know who you are.”

His mother arced a pink slipper over the stones.

“That's right,” Anna said. “You don't.”

She walked out to the street. A pregnant mutt limped past her. Anna followed the dog. Somewhere in Oaxaca, a murderous man in a tiger mask was stalking her, but Anna wasn't scared. Pity the tiger who crossed her path.