Cities of the Red Night

'Perhaps.'

'I believe you have a contact from Dimitri.' I had said nothing about this contact when I told my story in O'Brien's office. 'Perhaps it is time to use it.'

'I will.'

'Your presence in South America would be most valuable. It so happens that client who wishes to remain anonymous is prepared to retain you in this connection. You will find thirty thousand dollars deposited to your bank account in Lima.'

'Well, I haven't finished this case yet.'

'Perhaps you can bring the Everson case to a speedy conclusion.' He rang off.

It would seem that I had been called upon to act. I got out a map and couldn't find the Callejon de la Esperanza. There are small streets in Mexico City you won't find on a map. I had a general idea as to where it was and I wanted to walk around. I've cracked cases like this with nothing to go on, just by getting out and walking around at random. It works best in a strange town or in a town you haven't visited for some time.

We took a taxi to the Alameda, then started off in a north-westerly direction. Once we got off the main streets I saw that the place hadn't changed all that much: the same narrow unpaved streets and squares, with booths selling tacos, fried grasshoppers, and peppermint candy covered with flies; the smell of pulque, urine, benzoin, chile, cooking oil, and sewage; and the faces—bestial, evil, beautiful.

A boy in white cotton shirt and pants, hair straight, skin smoky black, smelling faintly of vanilla and ozone. A boy with bright copper-red skin, innocent and beautiful as some exotic animal, leans against a wall eating an orange dusted with red pepper ... a maricon slithers by with long arms and buck teeth, eyes glistening ... man with a bestial Pan face reels out of a pulqueria ... a hunchback dwarf shoots us a venomous glance.

I was letting my legs guide me. Calle de los Desamparados, Street of Displaced Persons ... a farmacia where an old junky was waiting for his Rx. I got a whiff of phantom opium. Postcards in a dusty shop window. Pancho Villa posing with scowling men...gun belts and rifles. Three youths hanging from a makeshift scaffold, two with their pants down to the ankles, the other naked. The picture had been taken from behind—soldiers standing in front of them watching and grinning. Photos taken about 1914. The naked boy looked American—you can tell a blond even in black and white.

My legs pulled me in, Jim and Kiki following behind me. When I opened the door a bell echoed through the shop. Inside, the shop was cool and dim with a smell of incense. A man came through a curtain and stood behind the counter. He was short and lightly built and absolutely bald, as if he had never had hair on his head; the skin was a yellowish brown, smooth as terra-cotta, the lips rather full, eyes jetblack, forehead high and sloping back. There was a feeling of age about him, not that he looked old but as he were a survivor of an ancient race—Oriental, Mayan, Negroid—all of these, but something else I had never seen in a human face. He was strangely familiar to me and then I remembered where I had seen that face before. It was in the Mayan collection of the British Museum, a terra-cotta head about three inches in height. His lips moved into a slow smile and he spoke in perfect English without accent or inflection, eerie and remote as if coming from a great distance.

'Good afternoon, gentlemen.'

'Could I see that postcard in the window?'

'Certainly. That is what you have come for.'

It occurred to me that this must be Dimitri's contact, but this was not the address he had given.

'The Callejon de la Esperanze? The Alley of Hope was destroyed in the earthquake. It has not been rebuilt. This way, gentlemen.'

He ushered us through a heavy door behind the curtain. When the door closed, it shut out all noise from the street. We were in a bare whitewashed room with heavy oak furniture lit by a barred window that opened onto a patio. He motioned us to chairs and got an envelope from a filing case and