Emily Kimelman - Sydney Rye 03 - Insatiable (9 page)

“Who are you calling?” Ana Maria asked me.

“An old friend,” I said, getting up.

I took a long sip of my Bloody Mary before picking up the phone. I needed to call Mulberry. I didn’t know if I could trust him, but I at least owed him the opportunity to explain. Additionally, it felt safe to call from a plane. Try tracing this one, ha.

“Mulberry, it’s Sydney.”

“Jesus, what’s going on?” he sounded worried.

“I was going to ask you the same.”

“Where are you?”

“I need some questions answered first.”

“What?” He was remaining calm and I tried to do the same.

“What were Blane and I supposed to do?”

“Bring the girl home.” I paused, it sounded rehearsed. Or was that my imagination?

“What about Alejandro?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“What?”

“Blane says you killed him,” he whispered, as if saying it out loud made it true.

“Jesus,” I said.

“What happened?”

I looked over at Ana Maria. She was sipping her Coke and looking at the clouds outside the window. “Blane killed Alejandro,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“I can’t trust you, Mulberry.”

“Sydney, why? I believe you.”

I laughed. “A lot of good that does me.”

He sighed. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about all of this.”

“I’m getting sick of you apologizing.”

“Then let me make it up to you. Let me help.”

I chewed on the straw that came with my drink. “I’ll think about it,” I said, and then hung up before he got the chance to respond.

None of this made any sense. I didn’t know what side Mulberry was on or why there were suddenly sides. A couple of days ago my life made sense. I laughed at that thought because it was so stupid. My life never made sense.

“What’s going on?” Ana Maria asked.

I chewed on my straw some more. “Blane is saying that I killed Alejandro.”

Her eyebrows pushed together in conference over her dark eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“Me either,” I admitted.

She sipped her Coke looking over the edge of her glass at me with wide eyes. I picked up a newspaper and tried to read it but my mind was too full. I could risk trusting Mulberry which might work out, but with Bobby Maxim involved I needed to be very careful. Of course, it was possible that both Mulberry and Maxim were out of the loop. Maybe, as I hoped, Blane and Pedro had their own thing going on. It wouldn’t be the first time Bobby misjudged the maniacal nature of one of his associates.

I glanced over at Ana Maria again. She was picking at a hang nail, looking almost bored. Blue sat next to me and leaned his weight against my side. It felt good. I slung an arm over his shoulder and looked over at him. “Here we go again, boy,” I said, kissing the crown of his head.

When we landed “to refuel,” Nicole asked if we wanted to stretch our legs. We stepped out onto the tarmac into a hot night. The wind was up and clouds moved across the sky quickly. It looked like rain was on its way.

“There is a lovely view of the ocean just on the other side of that fence,” Nicole told me. “The gate is rarely locked,” she said, pointing to a nearby exit. “Town is not far from here. There is a hotel not even a mile down the road if you can believe it. You could walk or catch a cab. If you weren’t headed to Jamaica, that is.”

“Thanks,” I said, with a smile.

“What is going on?” Ana Maria asked as we headed for the gate. “I thought we were going to Jamaica.”

“Not really,” I said, as I pushed open the gate. It let us out onto a road lined by lush tropical foliage. Within minutes, a safari truck half-filled with tourists appeared. I waved to the driver who stopped but was hesitant to let us aboard with Blue in tow. “He’s a gentle giant,” I told him.

The driver bit his lip and looked over his shoulder at the half-f truck. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. He had short, cropped hair that was sprayed with gray, a small paunch around his belly, and worry lines across his forehead that put him in his late 50s to my calculations.

I reached into my bag and pulled out a $50 bill. “Would this help make up your mind?”

The driver’s eyes narrowed but he nodded. He took the money. As Ana Maria and Blue headed for seats in the back, a shadow of suspicion crossed his face. I hurried aboard before the driver could change his mind.

The other tourists got off at a Hilton and we followed suit. Getting a room was simple enough. Though a manager had to be called in when I explained that I didn’t want to use a credit card but would gladly give them a cash deposit. The manager was happy to accept my money and Melanie Frank’s passport without question. I threw in a tip for both the manager and her suspicious underling.

Once in the room (ocean view, two queen-sized beds, pet friendly, rack rate of $340 a night) Ana Maria and I climbed into our respective beds and slept heavily.

The next morning as sun shone in through our windows, I looked over at Ana Maria sleeping peacefully. For someone who just saw her cousin murdered, the girl seemed unusually restful.

I ordered us breakfast and she blinked her eyes open as I replaced the phone onto its receiver. After our coffee and eggs, I told Ana Maria, “I think we’ve come far enough together. While I appreciate your help, it does not make sense for us to stick together anymore.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I think maybe you should go home.” While I’d needed her to dock the boat and having her escort me out of the country helped, now I’d be better off on my own.

“I can’t go home,” she said, “my parents don’t want me. They killed my cousin. They might kill me.” I wondered if that was true. Would the man and woman I met in Mexico City really kill their own daughter? And for what? I didn’t even really understand the explanation Blane had given me for Alejandro’s death. The Zapatista seemed like little threat to the democratically- elected government of Mexico. And Ana Maria, a threat?

“Do you really think your parents would kill you?” I walked over to check out the view. The hotel was U-shaped and we could see not only the ocean but also several pools and their respective bars.

“My mother,” she spat out the words, “is only concerned with her own power.”

“But isn’t she fighting for women’s rights?” I asked.

Ana Maria let out a jaded laugh that belonged to a much older woman. “She cares as much for the poor women of Mexico as I care for the rich. My parents are criminals,” Ana Maria said. “They should be in prison.”

“Any chance of that?” I watched a little boy on the pool deck running across the wet surface, his father following with his arms outstretched trying to catch the child before he fell.

“I don’t see how.”

“Don’t you have friends? What about the Zapatista? Can’t you stay with them?”

She snorted a laugh. “They can’t even take care of their own let alone someone as important as me.”

“OK, well Ana Maria, I don’t get any of this.” I turned back into the room to face her. “Why would your parents want to kill Alejandro?”

“Alejandro was adopted. You know this.” She was standing in front of the TV, her fist clenched by her sides. “My aunt was sterile and a Catholic.” I moved away from the window and sat on a bed. “Do you know about the Pope and his connection to indigenous people?”

“No.”

“The church supports their rights and believes they should be shown respect. My aunt is a very religious woman and so when she decided to adopt she wanted an indigenous baby.” Ana Maria paced in front of the TV which showed a schedule of the hotel’s events over a soundtrack of Muzak.

“What did your father think about that?” I asked.

She laughed. “I’m sure you can imagine.”

“Not really.”

She glanced at me, then continued pacing, her fingers starting up their nervous tapping I’d noticed on the sailboat. “The coast of Cancun, the Yucatan Peninsula, was once the land of indigenous people. My father was on the front lines of turning it into a destination for the world. He does not care if he destroys the delicate ecosystems. Or if he pollutes the drinking water and the sea.”

“Go back to Alejandro. I don’t get what any of this has to do with him.”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. “Let me start again. It is important that you understand. Alejandro started working for my father when he was sixteen. It was at my aunt’s urging that my father even hired him but Alejandro was a hard worker, and smart. My father saw that he could use him. He thought that if he put him in charge of his hotels on the Yucatan that the indigenous people would not fight against his hotels the way they did against the others. He thought that if he put a Mayan in charge, the Mayans would stop fighting him.”

“Did it work?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “In a way. Alejandro was smart, as I said. He was very young when my father put him in charge. Only twenty years old when he became General Manager.” Ana Maria stopped pacing and Blue went and sat by her side looking up at her calmly. Ana Maria didn’t notice him.

“Alejandro was made General Manager in 1997. Does that year mean anything to you?” I shook my head. “It was three years after the free trade agreement with Canada and the US. The agreement that started the Zapatista war.” Ana Maria walked over to the window and looked down at the pools below.

“One of the refugees was Alejandro’s brother. Alejandro did not know about him because my aunt did not tell him that he had an older brother. Maybe she didn’t know. But he knew about Alejandro and when he had nowhere else to turn, he came to him.”

“You can imagine Alejandro’s surprise. Here he is managing a chain of hotels that run along the most expensive coast in Mexico and his brother, a poor farmer without a farm, comes wandering out of the jungle looking for help.”

“Alejandro’s brother, Miguel, explained to Alejandro what the government was doing to him and their people. Alejandro knew about the conflict in Chiapas. Everyone did but he did not know, or perhaps he did not want to know, it had anything to do with him.”

“Of course, he took his brother in. He began to make changes to the hotels. Making them as green as possible. He wanted their impact to be not only the lowest in Cancun but in the world. My father let him because unlike the other hotels in the area where crowds of local people marched with signs letting the tourists know where their shit was ending up, his hotels were beacons of environmental health. You see, it was not my father, it was all Alejandro. My father just took the credit.” She turned to me, her mouth was turned down at the ends and her eyes were cold.

I shrugged. “If you say so.”

“It’s the truth,” she said, “I’m not a liar.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

She turned back to the view. “Alejandro began to help the Zapatista. He helped build their websites. He organized meetings for their leaders with political figures. He did all this, of course, with a mask; no one knew that he was who he was. It would be too dangerous.”

“How long have your parents known?”

“I do not know.”

“When did you become involved?”

“Alejandro and I have always been close. I would follow Alejandro around and he didn’t mind. Two years ago, I heard him on the phone talking to his brother. He respected me enough not to lie. Alejandro told me the whole story.”

“Why did you run away from your parents now?” She bit her lip and her chin wobbled. “Your parents said that you left because you found out about your father’s affair.”

“That was just an excuse,” she said, “I didn’t want them to know the real reason I was going to Alejandro. I didn’t want them to know what he was doing because I was afraid.” Her voice caught in her throat. She hastily wiped her hand across her eyes. “They didn’t even start looking for me until I’d been gone for two weeks. What does that tell you?”

“You left home two weeks ago? I was told it was-” I counted back in my head. When we got to Mexico City, I thought she’d been missing for two days. Then we got to Playa del Carmen, that’s another day. The night on the sailboat makes four and today would be five. “Five days.”

Ana Maria’s eyes widened. “That’s when Alejandro made contact with Luis Sanchez Zedillo.”

“Who?”

“My mother’s opponent in the next election.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Alejandro agreed with the Zapatista that they should fight for their rights but he thought that they should try using the pre-existing system.”

“But Blane said he was trying to overthrow the government.”

“The Zapatista would love to see the corrupt political system thrown out and in its place a form of democracy much closer to the people. They would like political terms to be only two weeks so that everyone in the community has a chance to lead. However, Alejandro thought this was impractical. He wanted to work on electing politicians who supported the indigenous cause.”

“Does Luis Zedillo?”

“Alejandro thought he did.”