Two of my men will be down here, the others will stay with the cars.
The manager, accompanied by four bellmen, one for each bag, leads us to the elevator, and we head up.
Three minutes later, I am alone in my room, door closed with the air conditioner humming.
I close the curtains. I’m too tired to enjoy the view, and right now the king-sized bed looks more inviting than the pool down below. I take a shower, and a half hour later, I’m asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A few minutes before nine in the morning, the lobby of the Casa Turquesa is empty except for a girl at the small desk by the door.
“Buenos dias.” She smiles and asks me if I want to take breakfast at the restaurant out by the pool deck.
Instead I order a cab.
Twenty minutes later, the driver drops me off in an area of old Cancun, on a street called Tankah Calle. Here the shops are not as glitzy as out near the beaches in the hotel zone. The buildings are mostly two and three stories, dingy.
Cancun is now a city of a million people and has the feel of a quiet, rustic town that may have grown a little too fast. There are modern shops jammed in between stucco buildings that look as if they date to the forties. The streets are crowded with cars, most of them honking horns, the Mexican equivalent of brakes.
I look for an address along the sidewalk and then realize the number I’m looking for is on the other side of the street. I hustle between cars and take a few honks crossing over, and then I walk half a block.
I see the name on a sign hanging out over the sidewalk before I see the number. ANTIQUITIES BIBLIOTECA.
Nick had misspelled it in his little handheld. I had gotten up early and checked the Cancun phone book this morning, suspecting that I would probably find it. The telephone number in the book matched the one in the memo pad of Nick’s device, if you ignored the international code for Mexico.
From out on the sidewalk I see an “open” sign hanging on the glass door, so I head for it. I can see a woman inside at the counter talking to a gentleman, his back to me.
My hand is nearly to the doorknob when he turns to give me a profile.
I pull my hand back in and walk quickly past the door and continue on until I find a newspaper rack three shops down. I drop a few Mexican coins in the slot and grab an edition of a Cancun paper I can’t read. I sit down on a bench and open it.
Six minutes pass before Nathan Fittipaldi comes out of the front door of the antiquities shop. He comes this way, so I hold the paper up in front of my face until he passes, crosses the street, and then I follow him.
Two blocks down, he enters a parking garage, walking down the ramp and disappearing into the shadows. I stand across the street from the exit with the newspaper and keep an eye. A minute or so later, a large Lincoln Town Car rolls up the ramp with a driver in the front seat. The back windows are tinted, but the driver has to stop to pay the charges at the exit booth.
Through the windshield I see Fittipaldi sitting behind the driver in the backseat. Next to him is a woman, blond hair and dark glasses, snuggled up to him. It seems Dana has found the time to vacation in Mexico.
By ten-thirty I am back at the hotel where I find Adam in the restaurant having breakfast.
“Where were you? I called your room, but there was no answer.”
“I decided to take a walk, get a little exercise.”
“How was it?”
“Good.”
“Listen, I’ve thought about our schedule here. We don’t have a lot of time,” he says. “Unless you want to hold over and take a commercial jet back.”
I have to be back in the office on Monday, I tell him.
“Then I think it might be best if we use today to scout out the brothers down on the coast. What do you think?”
“I thought we would talk to the father.”
Herman and Julio are at a table far enough away so we can talk and not be overheard. The cabana, restaurant, and bar by the pool are empty. Adam is wearing a pair of heavy tan pants and boots with a light nylon slipover shirt.
“I thought it might be wise to wait until Friday before talking to Pablo Ibarra. I had my office call his and tell him I was coming down on business. I told them to keep it vague. He knows I’m with the same firm as Nick was. We have a tentative appointment for tomorrow evening. Now, if you want to change it, I can.”
“No. That’s fine.”
“I suspect that the answers ultimately lie with the old man,” he says. “But I am also afraid that if we hit him dead on, not knowing more, that Pablo Ibarra will stonewall us. He has nothing to gain by talking to us, unless he thinks we know more than we do.”
“How do we do that?”
“You read his letter to Nick,” he says. “What do you think he was trying to say?”
“He was telling Nick to back off.”
“Right. To leave his sons alone. Nick had something on the sons or they were doing something that the father didn’t like. We have to make Pablo Ibarra suspect that we know what that was.”
“I’m listening.”
“We need to take a look at their operation. At least have some clue as to what they’re doing.”
Adam’s plan seems to make sense.
“I had Julio’s people scout the location down on the coast.”
“When?”
“When I called and told them I needed them to meet us here. I was trying to figure how to use what little time we had the best way we could. Two of his people took one of the cars yesterday, went down the coast, and checked the place out. They found it.”
“Then why don’t we go?”
“That’s what I thought.”
An hour later we’re headed down the coast, back past the airport.
In the sunlight the terrain looks different. The resorts are like alabaster palaces set against the turquoise waters of the Caribbean.
The water is so clear I am told that divers swear they are peering through air. Through breaks of jungle and rises in the highway, I can see rolling waves, white beaches, the shoreline dotted with coral inlets and reefs of basalt.
Traffic on the road moves at a clip, in places narrowing to two lanes, then opening again for passing. There are very few vehicles, just an occasional tourist bus, mostly empty, and a chartered van for scuba divers on their way to a remote beach.
Overhead the sky is clear and bright. But in the distance above the jungle to the south, it is leaden. Every few seconds I can see tiny threads of fire as lightning strikes the jungle floor fifty or sixty miles ahead of us.
Large land crabs scurry across the road, moving like giant spiders from jungle to jungle, across the strip of pavement separating them from the sea.
Adam fills me in on the two Ibarra brothers, Arturo and Jaime. He has a thin file compiled by Julio’s firm, pulled together and faxed from the home office in Mexico City this morning.
“Took a quick look at it this morning when I got up,” he says.
“Three years apart in age,” he says. “Arturo is the mover, shaker, the businessman, if you want to call it that. Jaime is muscle, all the way to the area between the ears. He has a bad reputation for temper. He killed a man in a fight four years ago in a private club and got off on a theory of self-defense. He has a few minor convictions, but an
