towels. “The whores use a lot of towels,” he explained, and Trewitt kept his face blank, remembering the job done on his privates by Anita with just such a towel.
“And guess what I find, three weeks running, every Tuesday?”
Trewitt could not, or would not.
“Bandages with pus. Yards of adhesive tape with hair in the sticky part. Bloody linen.”
“Maybe somebody got rough with the girls.”
“Not that rough,” said Roberto.
“So where’s it from?”
“I try to keep my eyes open. Where, I wonder, where does the Madonna go on Tuesday afternoon?”
“Who’s this Madonna?”
“The upstairs lady. The pecker-checker. Fat and ugly. Eeeeeiiii. She been a nurse or worked in the hospital or something, I don’t know. She takes care of the girls.”
Trewitt nodded, thinking about it. Where
Now it was Tuesday, and behind cheap sunglasses, in his yellow outfit, Trewitt lounged on a bench in the hot shade of a mimosa tree. He was among Indians, country peasants, shoeshine boys, hungry scabby dogs, an occasional cop, a more than occasional gaggle of Exclusivo cabdriver pimps, in a small park at the corner of Pesquirica and Ochoa streets. Beyond him were railway tracks glittery with broken glass; beyond them another hundred yards, the Casa de Jason; beyond it, the Ruis Cortina and on the other side of the Ruis Cortina, tucked into the rising bulk of a sandstone bluff otherwise bristling with shacks, Oscar’s. Weeds fluttered in the gritty breeze; skinny dogs and kids fled this way and that; banged-up Mexican cars roamed up and down the streets, jammed full. The sky was blue; the sun was hot.
But Trewitt just sat, one leg tossed over the other, and kept his eyes pinned on a small figure beyond the tracks, just down the block from the nightclub. The boy Miguel. Somewhere closer yet lurked the other boy, Roberto. The three had been so arranged for some time — since ten, and it was nearly one. The heat and the boredom were beginning to get to Trewitt. Not long ago he’d bought a chicken tortilla and a Carta Blanca from a street vendor, downing them both quickly, and was now just a little logy. He had not yet adjusted to Mexican time, in which nothing happens quickly, and was stifling a yawn when the boy leaped.
The boy leaped, then Trewitt. He was up in a shot, panic huge and bounding through his brain.
The car, goddammit, the car!
He sprinted up the street where, among the ’53 De Sotos and the ’59 Edsels and the ’63 Falcons, there was wedged an ’80 Mexican Chevette, rented that very morning from Hertz at the hotel under his real name, a big chance. Trewitt reached it, unlocked it, jumped in.
It was maybe 300 degrees inside — the car had been baking for about three hours in the sun. Still, Trewitt got the key into the slot, started it, cranked the wheel and pumped the pedal. The car accelerated rapidly to almost ten miles an hour and seemed to have some trouble getting into second gear, and just then the younger boy, having threaded his bold way across the tracks and through the traffic, reached him and climbed aboard.
“Go, mister, go.”
“Where? Where?”
“Down there, down there!” the boy screamed.
Trewitt rammed the car across two lanes, took a hard left just beyond the Casa de Jason, and skyrocketed over the tracks on a dirt crossing. Where the hell was the other kid? But Trewitt saw him running hard, his hair flying, his face dark and angry. He had seemed to appear from nowhere — a trick these Mexican kids had — and slid into the back.
“Okay, man, turn right fast,” he commanded.
Trewitt turned and sped into downtown Nogales, for just a few seconds under the bluffs of shacks and then into a flatter part of the city.
“She’s in a green Chevy. Just ahead. Hurry, man.”
But Trewitt could not hurry; he was suddenly in traffic up to his eyeballs.
“A Mexican freeway,” shouted Miguel, laughing.
“Goddammit,” shouted Trewitt.
“Hurry. Hurry.”
“How the hell can I
“Wow. You almost hit that cocksucker,” said Miguel.
They moved at a stately pace. Trewitt searched ahead through the jumble of automobiles and people. He couldn’t see a goddamned —
“There! There, I see her,” yelled Roberto, who’d been craning crazily out the window.
“Watch it, kid,” Trewitt warned, but joy flooded him.
In Le Carre, this would have been handled differently, Trewitt told himself as he bombed and bobbed and lurched sweatily in and out of the traffic, guiding the sluggish yellow Chevette among the dented ’50s hulks that dominated the streets. Goddamn this woman — she had the only
In Le Carre, it would have been bleak, icy professionals, drab men with sinus problems and wretched home- lives, following one another through an Eastern European drizzle. Every brick, every nuance of thought or action accounted for, every alleyway diagrammed, every bitter irony underscored; here, instead, dusty crowded streets, ice-cream wagons, fruit wagons, kids in plastic shoes, hills set with powder-blue shacks, a hot sun, a dry, dusty wind, streets whose names he’d never learn, two Mexican boys shouting into his ear.
“She turned.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Which is it?”
“She turned.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“I can’t see her.”
In Le Carre tail jobs were handled by teams working in units of four, with silhouette changes, a control van with something childish scrawled in the dust high up where no child could reach. In Czecho or one of the old territories, or on Hampstead Heath, but with Moscow Rules. Le Carre knew the nuts and bolts, the trade craft, knew it cold.
“She turned.”
“No she didn’t.”
“Aw, shit,” he bellowed in exasperation, braking the car to one side of the road in a shower of dust. A scrawny chicken hoppity-flipped in front of it from a hole in somebody’s coop and wandered off the shoulder onto the roadway, where it was immediately smashed by a huge Mercedes Pepsi-Cola truck, knocked up into the air as if in a cartoon to spiral down leaking feathers and drumsticks, and land with a thud in the dust.
“Jesus Mary, did you see that?” Miguel asked.
Trewitt had seen it and began to wonder if anywhere in the works of John Le Carre, chickens got creamed by Pepsi trucks and if so, what that decent, weary, brilliant old professional, that traveler in the shadowy labyrinths of espionage, George Smiley, would have made of such a thing; but at that moment, blocks ahead, he saw the green Chevy.
From the avenue they climbed another hill, then down, then up again. Perched all about in no order save that of first claim were tarpaper shacks, corrugated tin roofs, wire fences, pink or blue one-roomers; Trewitt was beginning to believe there was but one street in Mexico and that he’d been down it a thousand times.
He could read the dust floating in the air, however, which told him the Madonna’s car had screeched through moments before, and now and then he could see the vehicle, disappearing on a crest above or careening wildly beneath him as he hurtled down the same hill.
“Where are we?” he asked his guides.
“People from the desert or the mountains end up here,” said Roberto. “The poorest of the poor. Reynoldo, he
