Dancing with the Tiger (23 page)

The death mask was gone again, and Anna was nearly positive that Thomas Malone had stolen it. Not that he was letting on. The collector was all sweetness and light, cracking a joke about food poisoning as he escorted her to the front door. Behind his eyes, a glimmer, taunting her, daring, or was she just imagining another mask?

Her only hope was the Excelsior. A concierge, a different one, greeted Anna with a bow and fetched the manager. He was a jolly man with a domed forehead and a mustache that twitched with concern as he listened to Anna's story. (Apparently, he had been briefed when he had arrived that morning.) She apologized, offered to pay for the scarf and the candlestick—a bluff, she didn't have that kind of money—but the manager said the
señor
had taken care of everything. Anna asked if anyone had found a turquoise mask. The manager made a big show of
grilling the chambermaid, a terrified girl, who curtsied her denials.
No,
señorita,
she had not seen a mask.
No,
señorita,
nothing in the room. The manager checked the
oficina de objetos perdidos
.

“I am sorry,” he said. “We have not seen the mask that you are describing.”

And with that, Anna was done. So very done. The Ramseys' dream of redemption ended in yet another failure. Thomas Malone had the mask, and neither Anna Ramsey nor Anna Bookman could extract it. By now, Thomas had figured out that Anna was not an underemployed ingenue, but a rival collector. Hot, hungover, hopeless, Anna wandered the parched streets of Oaxaca. Forget imperial booty. She would give her life for an aspirin.

Only one pharmacy downtown was open on Sundays. The line barely moved. Anna was counting the customers when another horror struck. Skinny jeans, black heels, sunglasses tucked into cleavage, Salvador's
cariño
was the first customer in line. Anna ducked her face, feeling slovenly, hideous. Her breath could have ignited a good-size hibachi.

The pharmacist spoke in a hushed voice, then fetched a box of pills. When the
cariño
turned to pay, Anna nudged in close enough to read the pink label. Prenatal vitamins.

—

Water, coffee,
a margarita.

The second round, Anna skipped the water.

A jet cut a white contrail across the sky. Her flight home left the next day. She tallied her scorecard. She'd lost the death mask. She'd lost the Rose White Ramsey Gallery. She'd lost David. She'd lost Salvador.
She'd lost $14,000. She'd lost her father. But there was still time to do one thing right: that afternoon, she would take a cab into the hills and scatter her mother's ashes at the old bullring, the most beautiful spot in Oaxaca. Salvador had been right about that.

She opened her bag and found a note folded inside. It read like an old-fashioned telegram:

Malinche. Stop. Feel the need for further collaboration. Stop. Meet me at the VIP Hotel at 9. Stop. I have another present.

What the hell was Thomas up to now? She balled the note and left it in the ashtray, resisting the temptation to set it on fire.

—

The Puesta del Sol
lay fat and full in its Sunday post-
comida
slumber. Anna hadn't been back since she found the bloody mask on her door. Surely the Tiger would not show his face in broad daylight. She just needed to pack her things. Anna told the weekend clerk she was checking out and asked him to help her with her bags in
cinco minutos
. She peered in her window. Nothing amiss. She turned the key, threw her clothes in her suitcase, not stopping to fold or inventory. When she knelt to check under the bed, a hand palmed her head:
“No te mueves.”

Anna screamed. The hand slammed her face to the floor.
“Si gritas, te mato.”
If you scream, I will kill you.
“Dame la máscara.”

“No la tengo.”

The hand released. Anna turned slowly around. Her attacker was a man in a tiger's mask, the man who'd stabbed the dancer, set the widow
on fire, chased Anna in the mountains. He was pulling stuff out of her bag. Anna cowered, knees to chest. Her cheek was bleeding again. The pain felt good, familiar, hers.
See, you've hurt me, that's enough now. Go away.
The Tiger yanked a chair over and sat, twirled a machete on his thigh.

“Where is the mask?”

“I don't have it.”

“It's here somewhere.”

“Someone stole it from me.” Her Spanish was disintegrating. Masculine. Feminine. Who the hell cared?

“Déjate las macanas.”
Cut the crap.

“I swear someone stole it. Don't hurt me. It is dangerous to hurt Americans.” Anna couldn't remember whether
herir
was the right verb. She might have just told him it would be dangerous to boil Americans. “If you hurt me, there will be . . .” The only word she could find was “consequences.”

“¿Señorita?”
The clerk.

The Tiger hacked his machete down her shirt buttons, cutting an inch of fabric. “Answer him,” he hissed.

“Todo está bien.”
She hoped the clerk could hear the subtext, the fear. “I have changed my mind and will stay another night.”

“Bueno. Como usted lo desea.”
Footsteps drifted off. The idiot had left her. The Tiger went to the closet and lifted her mother's urn. “What's this?”

Anna whispered,
“Nada.”

He tipped it, threatening to pour the contents on the floor. “Do you think I'm stupid?”

“Stop. It's my mother,” Anna cried out. “She's dead. She wanted to be in Mexico.”

“Then I will take your dead mother with me. When you bring the mask, I return her.”

“I am leaving tomorrow.”

“Not anymore.”

“Please.”

The Tiger righted the urn, but did not put it back. “I give you until Friday. Meet me at Monte Albán at midnight. By the Danzantes. Come alone. If you do not come, I will pour this dirt down a toilet in a whorehouse on the highway to Guerrero. You understand?”

Anna repeated her mission. “I am going to bring you the mask.” This was the easiest way to form the future.
I am going
to find the mask.
I am going
to die in this crappy hotel room.
I am going
to lose my mother forever.

The Tiger wedged his machete into the chair. “If you trick me, I will kill you and your pretty boyfriend and his ugly mother.”

Anna risked a joke. “The mother, too? You promise?”

“A present.” He stood, stopped himself. “Are you a virgin?”

“Do I have a Virgin?” She fingered San Antonio.

“No.
Are
you a virgin?”

She had thought this nightmare was nearly over, but perhaps it had just begun. “No,” she said, her voice barely audible.

He jiggled his knife between her legs. Anna gave a short cry. Skin. It was no protection at all. “Too bad,” he said, turning away. “I have no interest in
la chingada
.”

—

For a good while,
Anna didn't move; then she got up and couldn't stop—pacing the patio, circling the maimed angel, smoking, swearing,
messing with her hair. She had come to Mexico to bury her mother's ashes, but had lost them instead. Well, technically, she had not lost them. They were being held hostage by a drug lord's hit man. It was terrible. Crazy. Terrible crazy.

Two cigarettes later, she collapsed at a table, head buried in her arms.
Mom, mom, mom.
After twenty years, she had so few memories left. Tea parties. Her mother poured sweet apple tea in little cups she'd painted by hand. She'd put on a corny southern accent. “Bless my heart, Miss Anna. You are a sight for sore eyes.” Her mother, who loved the beach, who taught Anna to sing periwinkles out of their shells. Her mother, who knit doll blankets, collected vintage tablecloths, ferried spiders outside. Her mother, who felt none of the same sympathies for criminals. “Throw away the key,” she said, as she refolded the newspaper after reading about some murderer. “Just make him go away.” (She would have abhorred the drug violence in Mexico.
How much money does anyone need? Are these drug lords happy? Sleeping with guns. Their own children aren't safe.
)

When Anna's father traveled, she and her mother stayed alone for long stretches. Her mother seldom lost her temper, though nothing made her angrier than when Anna complained she was bored. “Read. Draw. Write a letter. Ride your bike.” The list had infinite variety, but always ended with
Go climb a tree,
her mother's way of saying,
Leave me in peace.
Her mother was earning a degree in museum studies, and spent hours poring over dull books, taking notes, pleading for Anna to give her an hour of quiet.

So Anna climbed trees. Until one day she climbed a pine tree so high she couldn't get down. Twenty feet up, she got stuck on a branch, sap smeared on her jeans, palms sore, so high she could see the shingles on the roof. Climbing up had been easy.
Don't look down.
And she
hadn't, until her mother ran out and stood beneath her, small and worried, hands on her waist.

“Sweetie, you're up awfully high. You think you can climb down?” Her voice was serious but calm. She was wearing her favorite thrift-store shirt, red checks, rolled sleeves.

Anna sat sideways on a branch, like a swing. She didn't dare turn to dangle a leg to the next limb down. The branches were making her dizzy. The wind had picked up. Rain was coming. She tried not to cry.

“Can I jump to you?”

Her mother looked horrified. “Jesus Christ. Don't move.” She tore off to the house, hair flying. A minute later, she was back.

“The firemen are coming. Just hold tight.”

“What fire? I want to come down now.”

What happened next surprised Anna even more. Her mother started to climb. Anna had never seen her mother climb a tree, but her arms were strong and she made short work of it. She was athletic, a tennis player in college. She could still do a split.

The branches thinned at the top. When her mother touched Anna's blue sneaker, she stopped, and together they waited for the bucket truck, breathing in the earthy scent of needles and bark. “Two Christmas ornaments hanging off a pine tree,” her mother would say later. “All we needed was a star.”

When they were down, her mother rocked Anna in her arms, whispering, “I'm so sorry. It's all my fault.” Anna decided it was worth feeling that scared to feel this safe.

“What did you learn today?” her mother asked when she tucked Anna into bed that night. Her hands smelled like Nivea.

“Don't climb trees?”

Her mother shook her head, then kissed Anna's cheek. “Next time you climb a tree, take me with you.”

—

The laundry girl rolled past
with a cart full of dirty towels. Anna missed her mother so much her teeth hurt. If only it were possible to summon the dead, from dreams and stories, memories and photographs. A solid made from ether. Even for a day.

Next time you climb a tree . . . Take me
with
you. Take
me
with
you
.

And Anna thought:
That tiger can have the death mask, but not my mother.

She would do what she had to. She would do what she must.

Anna walked to her room, opened the closet, removed the Malinche mask Thomas had given her. What had Doña Marina done when the murderous Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his army of marauders attacked her beloved city?

La Malinche had slept with the enemy—and survived.

Hugo took a seat facing Jesus. After leaving the American, he had stumbled into the first church he'd come to, exhilarated and ashamed. True, his rock prayer had gone nowhere, but maybe for a prayer to succeed, you had to get out of your car. He bowed his head. He prayed he had not hurt the girl. He prayed for the dead. There were so many. The dead outnumbered the living tenfold: the Mexicans who died at the border; the young women of Juárez who disappeared,
feminicidios
, sold, some believed, for body parts; the police gunned down by drug dealers; the dealers gunned down by police; Hugo's own father, dead and gone; his mother, too. The dead haunted his sleep. Pedro's mother, wailing as she cleaned Montezuma's floors. Pedro hammering. His revenge. In the afterlife, he'd become a blacksmith, fashioning hooks and latches and skeleton
keys. He prayed for the girl's mother, ashes in an urn, hidden in the backseat of his car.

Billions of people had died the world over, and still all these souls believed their lives were precious. Men and women dreamt and loved and ate and saw the world through their eyes and watched their bodies age, wither, and return to the ground, all but a lucky few forgotten, trod upon by the living, who labored and fucked, burdened by the crushing weight of their endless desires. The living owed the dead their peace. What right had he to steal their finery?

Hugo turned to the Virgin. The Mother of God soothed him like a balm. When he looked into her face, he knew what he could not do: when the American brought him the death mask, he would not give it to Óscar Reyes Carrillo or Thomas Malone or Lorenzo Gonzáles. Not for love or money, guilt or gratitude. Not even to ensure the caresses of the papershop girl. Only two omens remained—the two-headed monster and the burning temple. The empire, Hugo now understood, was his own sanity, the delicate kingdom of his mind. The path to salvation was so simple it was childlike. He could hear his mother scolding him after he'd left his toys strewn:
Hijo, put things back where they belong.

—

When he barged into his house,
he found his wife collapsed on the floor. Sliced apples lay scattered around her.

He knelt before her.
“¿Qué te ha pasado?”

“I felt dizzy, but I am okay now. Resting. I have good news.”

He shook her arm. “Are you crazy? You are sick on the ground. What good news?”

“The Virgin sent us a child.”

Hugo fell back on his heels.

“I am pregnant, but don't worry.” His wife's voice gained strength. “We can still go to the other side. The baby will be born with an American passport. The Virgin answered our prayers.”

Hugo assembled some kind of expression. Proud husband. Proud father. Where did a man go to procure such a face? He laid his hand on her stomach. “I don't feel anything. Are you sure?”

“He's only a few weeks old. A grain of rice.”

Hugo helped her to bed. “Rest now. I'll check on you in a bit.”

He escaped to the yard, picked up a fallen orange, and hurled it into the darkness. The stars blinked a message he could not decode.

The mature man:

a heart as firm as stone . . .

From his Aztec history book, he was memorizing the Huehuetlatolli, the ancient truths and teachings of the Nahuas, lessons designed to teach young men how to live a good life. They were recited in school. They were recited when a loved one departed.

Tears filled his eyes, for himself, his wife, his unborn child, for the American girl carrying her dead mother, for the papershop girl in her yellow dress, the sun around which his world revolved, beautiful, young, and bright.

He wished the baby were hers.

His phone rang a text. Reyes.
I'm waiting. Your wife has beautiful hands.

With a moan, Hugo rolled into a ball, pressed his face into the dirt.