and sensible and comfortable with the girls, who liked him very much. She was entering a new season in life, and it looked as if it were going to be a good one.
“Everything okay with Rita? ”she asked.
“Yeah, everything's fine. I talked with her last night.”
Pause. He could feel her listening to his voice, reading between the lines of the way he sounded. She was all over this.
“Come on Titus. What's going on?”
“I'm under a little pressure here, ”he said. “It's nothing to do with Rita. It's… financial. And it's personal, company's not involved. But Rita doesn't know about it yet. It doesn't seem right to go into it with you before I've had a chance to tell her.”
“Well… is it… disastrous? I mean, hell, Titus, give me something to put this in perspective.”
“Several months back I made some… risky investments. I've just learned that they've gone bad. I've lost a hell of a lot of money. I'm working out how to deal with it. I can tell you more in a few days. But right now, Carla, you're the only person who knows about this. Understand?”
“Yeah, Titus, I understand, ”she said, and he could hear the sympathy and the actual hurt in her voice. “Listen, I'm sorry to hear this. If I can do anything… I'll do anything I can.”
“I've got to go, ”he said.
Chapter 10
Herrin's assistant with the jugular tattoo drove out of Titus's place in his pickup, his windows rolled down in the late morning heat, obviously alone, as anyone could see. In a hidden compartment under the bed of the pickup, Titus lay in the dark, guessing the truck's route by following the right and left turns as they made their way down the winding roads to Westlake Drive and headed toward town.
The ride downtown hardly registered on Titus. He carried no additional clothes, only his laptop, as Burden had instructed. He felt webby headed, his reflexes sluggish from the lack of sleep, his mind only slightly distracted by the rattling of equipment in the pickup's toolboxes and by the smell of plastics and electrical wiring.
Cline let him out in the first level of the Four Seasons underground parking garage, and Titus took the elevator down to the second level, where he met two men waiting beside a rental car. No introductions.
While one of the guys went over Titus with a debugging instrument, the other one opened his laptop and put it through a series of checks as well. Satisfied, they told him to lie down in the backseat of the car, and they drove out of the garage. A few minutes later they told him he could sit up, and he stared out the window into the bright summer light while they headed east out of downtown to Austin-Bergstrom International.
They bypassed the main terminal entrance and circled around behind to the charter flight hangars. The car drove straight onto the tarmac to a waiting King Air 350, and in twelve minutes Titus was in the air.
Alone in the cabin, he watched as the earth fell away outside the window, and when they began passing through the white, cumulous clouds, he reclined his seat as far as it would go. Still trying to understand how this could be happening to him, he fell asleep.
Awakened by the quickly sinking Beechcraft, he sat up just as they were touching down. Zipping past the window was a narrow valley, the grass lush with the summer rains and scattered with up-reaching fingers of garambullo cactus and huisache trees with gracefully outspread canopies. As the pilot turned the aircraft and cut back on the engines, Titus saw a black Suburban waiting at the edge of the isolated airstrip.
The driver was a hefty Mexican behind sunglasses and a mustache, polite but taciturn, and soon they were sailing along the valley's dirt road. Beyond the nearer rolling hills, the Sierra de Morenos stretched out in the blue distance as far as Titus could see. Finally they reached a two-lane paved road and turned south.
San Miguel de Allende was a small hillside town in central Mexico, a couple of hours north of Mexico City. Rich in colonial history, it was crowded with handsome churches and elegant homes clustered along narrow, and sometimes steep, cobblestone streets. It was famously beautiful and long had been a favorite retreat for wandering American writers and artists and eccentric expatriates with dubious pasts. For several decades now it had become a popular second-home destination for well-to-do Americans and a cosmopolitan international crowd.
After rambling into the heart of town, past the Jardin, and then up into the higher neighborhoods, the driver eventually squeezed the Suburban into a cobbled lane of simple, sunwashed walls. He stopped the groaning vehicle on a steep incline and said something in Spanish, gesturing at a massive, dark wooden door set in a fading cornflower blue wall. A jacaranda, lavish with blossoms like broken pieces of the sky, sheltered the doorway. To one side, a brilliant bougainvillea splashed over the top of a rock wall as if the stones were holding back a sea of magenta.
Titus got out with his laptop and waited for his driver to pull away up the hill before he crossed the lane. He stepped down from the steeply rising sidewalk to the level threshold of the cathedral-size door, banged the brass door knocker in the shape of a woman's hand, and waited as the sound echoed and died between the high walls of the lane.
Very quickly a normal-size door inset into the larger one was opened by a grandmotherly Indian, who smiled at him with bright teeth generously framed in gold. Her abundant black-and-gray-striated hair was parted in the middle and worn in two braids that reached down past her thick waist.
Greeting him in Spanish, she stepped back to invite him inside, a brown hand pressed gracefully to the front of her white blouse, which was embroidered with broad, alternating bands of russet and gold. Her skirt, a dazzling thing of cobalt and black stripes, stopped just an inch above her bare, stubby toes.
Talking to him all the while, she ushered him through a short corridor into the diffused brightness of a colonnade that enclosed a garden courtyard. The quadrangle of arches drew his eyes upward, where the dappled light fell past the secondfloor colonnade through the canopies of trees.
Continuing her lilting but unintelligible monologue, the woman gestured politely for Titus to wait on a long wooden bench against the ocher walls of the deep ambulatory. And then she disappeared. Wooden birdcages with varicolored finches and canaries hung along the colonnades, and a fountain in the center of the courtyard added its splash to the highpitched chatter of the birds.
Just as Titus took a deep breath, he was startled by an outburst of shouting. A woman's voice shrilled from one of the doorways on the second floor, a staccato, singsong flood of an Asian language delivered in spirited anger.
Then silence.
Slowly the birds, stopped by the verbal eruption, resumed.
Before Titus could even begin to imagine what that might have been about, a voice above him said, “Welcome to my home, Mr. Cain.”
Titus recognized the voice and looked up to the left side of the courtyard balcony.
Garcia Burden was leaning his forearms on the stone balustrade, looking down at him. He was tallish and lean, and his dark hair hadn't seen a barber in a good while. His unbuttoned black shirt hung open, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. A gold medallion on a chain around his neck dangled over the balustrade.
“We're just about ready for you up here, ”Burden said. “There are stairs over there. ”He gestured toward a stone staircase. “Just come around the balcony, ”he said, swinging his arm past the open doorways.
Burden was buttoning the front of his shirt as Titus approached him, and as they shook hands Titus noted that they were very nearly the same height. But Burden's age was difficult to determine. He might've been near Titus's age as well, but the crow's-feet at the corners of his brown eyes were deeply cut and had the effect of seeming to distort his age. And there was something in the eyes themselves that made Titus take a second look, something that made him think they had seen more than their share of remarkable things, many of them unnerving.
“Based on what you and Gil have told me, ”Burden said, his soft voice even softer now that they were near, “I've got it narrowed to three men. I've got photographs.”
He turned and led Titus through the open doorway in front of which he'd been standing.
The house was old, with the three-foot-thick walls typical of colonial architecture. The room they entered was huge and probably had been several rooms at one time. Though they were only passing through, heading for
