Under the Skin

maids said la dona had not come down for her morning cup of chocolate. The household staff was called to assembly in the main parlor and it was discovered that her personal maid was also absent. None of the staff had seen either of them since the evening prior. Before he could send for his segundo, the foreman himself appeared with the news that the stableman in charge of caring for la dona’s stallion had departed the hacienda last night in one of the trucks and had not returned. The man told the gate guard he was being sent to Torreon to pick up a new saddle for la dona. The women must have been hiding in the vehicle.

Don Cesar dispatched teams of searchers to the nearest towns, more than a hundred miles south to Gomez Palacio, to Torreon, to San Pedro de las Colonias, seventy-five miles north to Jimenez. But there was no need—they found the truck twenty miles away, where the hacienda road met the highway at the small railstation pueblo of Escalon, found it parked behind the depot. They roused the night clerk from his bed—a man they called El Manco Feo for his ruined arm and the ugly dogbite scars on his face—and learned that yes, a man and two women, all strangers to him, had boarded the night train to Monclova. His description of them was accurate. The clerk was taken to Las Cadenas to give his report to Don Cesar in person, to tell him that the train had arrived in Monclova hours ago. Don Cesar knocked him down and kicked him repeatedly before ordering him out of his sight.

He had no notion at all whether she was still in Monclova or where she might have gone from there. He sent men to that city to seek her. He interrogated every member of the house staff, questioned all of his vaqueros. The missing stableman was Luis Arroyo, who had been on the payroll less than six months. None of the other hands knew where he was from, knew anything of his past.

And then a short while ago it had been learned that the maid who fled with the party, one Maria Ramirez, had been born and raised in a village called Apodaca, just outside of Monterrey, and that her father was a baker there….

El Segundo arrives on the balcony as Don Cesar finishes his brandy. Segundo is a tall lean man of middle years and wears his black beard in a sharply pointed goatee of the grandee style, his long hair in a ponytail. His dress is impeccable and his manners courtly, but his dark hands are scarred from ropeburns and branding irons, with knife cuts, the knuckles large and prominent and scarred as well.

“A sus ordenes, patron,” Segundo says.

Don Cesar instructs him to send their best retrievers to the family home of this Maria Ramirez and question her about his missing wife. If the Ramirez girl should not be there, then the family must be questioned about her. The retrievers are to be given ample expense money and are to act upon whatever information they get that might lead them to his wife. If they are unable to find her, then that will be the end of it and he will be shed of the bitch.

Segundo says he understands completely. He will dispatch Angel and Gustavo—and then softly inquires what Don Cesar desires them to do if they should find her.

“Quiere que se la traigan? O prefiere que…se desaparesca?”

Don Cesar considers the question as he stares out at the great desert beyond the hacienda.

And finally says that they should bring her back, of course.

In the hours after the wind and drizzle quit, a thin fog rolled in off the gulf and the windows glowed pale gray in the morning light of New Year’s Day. I got dressed and tucked the Mexican Colt under my coat at the small of my back and went downstairs.

As always, Gregorio had set out the makings of breakfast for his tenants before he went to bed. A big kettle of coffee was lightly steaming on the stove, next to a warm pot of refried beans and a large and ready frying pan. On the counter stood a wire basket of eggs, a fresh loaf of bread on a cutting board, a can of lard, some bulbs of garlic, a string of dried chiles, and a large roll of chorizo sausage. A gourd covered with a warm damp cloth held a stack of fresh corn tortillas. On the table were bowls of butter, sugar, grape jam, shakers of salt, red pepper, ground cinnamon.

By this hour Sergio had already come in from his night clerk job and had eaten and cleaned up after himself and gone up to his room. I usually took breakfast at a cafe across the street from the train station but I wanted a word with old Moises this morning, so I figured I might as well eat while I waited for him to come down.

I

I lit the gas burner under the big frying pan and cut off a chunk of chorizo and put it in the pan and ground it with a fork. Then broke off a clove of garlic and peeled it smooth and dropped it in with the chorizo and used the fork to crush it up good. I chopped a big chile to fine bits and stirred it in with the sausage and garlic. The chorizo sizzled and darkened and the fragments of garlic and chile turned brown in the oozing grease. The sharp aromas mingled with the fragrance of coffee and refried beans. I turned down the burner a little and cracked three eggs into the pan and scrambled them with the chorizo and seasonings. When the eggs were almost done I pushed them with the spatula to one side of the pan and took two tortillas from the gourd and quickly heated them in the cleared side of the greasy pan. I laid the tortillas on a plate and scraped the chorizo-and-eggs onto them, then added some beans on the side and poured a cup of coffee and stirred in plenty of sugar. Then sat at the table to eat.

Gregorio had taken his magazines to his room with him but the morning paper was on the table. I was leafing through it and having my second cup of coffee when old Moises came down and looked surprised to find me there. “Buen ano nuevo, joven!” he said.

I waited till he sat himself with a cup of coffee, then gestured for him to put the tin horn to his ear. He did, and I asked if he had been to the party at the Morales place last night.

“Como?” he said, pressing the horn harder to his ear. “Que?”

I leaned over the table and asked the question louder.

“La fiesta de Morales? Si, yo fui, claro que si. Era muy buena fiesta.”

Had he met Avila’s relatives from Brownsville?

“Que?” he bellowed, twisting the horn like he meant to screw it into his skull.

With my mouth right at the ear horn, I loudly and slowly repeated my question. He listened hard, then said that there had been many people at the party, a few he had never seen before, but with the music and laughter and his bad ears he hadn’t caught their names.

Was there a pretty girl he hadn’t seen before?

“Ay, hijo!” But of course there had been pretty girls! Every woman in the world was a pretty girl in her own way, did I not know that? As a man ages he gains wisdom and comes to see the eternal beauty of all womanhood. Why, if he were only ten years younger…

I patted his shoulder and cursed myself for a fool to have thought he might be of any help, then took my plate and cup to the sink and washed them while he rambled on about all the women he’d known, large and small, darkskinned and fair, all of them lovely, all of them a wonderful mystery, although of course there had been a special one, a girl back in Michoacan whom he’d known for less than a month, when they were both nineteen, one whom Death the Bastard took from him but whom he had not failed to think about every day since…

He was still going on and on when I said goodbye and went out the door.

The holiday street traffic was of course much lighter than usual for a Wednesday. Most businesses were closed and a lot of people were still in bed with aching heads and new regrets.

The air was cool and heavy with the smell of the sea, but the wet and littered streets still carried tinges of the town’s hangover, the faint odors of booze and tobacco ash and rank bedsheets. A sickly yellow seadog still arced through the light mist over the Offatt Bayou.

But holidays were good for the gambling business. Even at this midmorning hour I found the betting room behind the Turf Grill already half-full and loud with talk of the day’s favorites and longshots at the Florida and California tracks. The Juarez and Tijuana races would get a lot of play too. The parlor betting would be heavy all day long.

Up on the second floor I went into Rose’s outer office and spoke with his secretary, Mrs. Bianco. A lot of the guys called her Momma Mia, and she seemed to enjoy it, but to me she was always Mrs. Bianco. She had a pronounced Italian accent and a motherly manner and could have been on an advertising poster for pasta or tomato paste. Portly and beginning to gray, always dressed in neat and matronly fashion. She lived alone in a boardinghouse down the street from the Club. Not many knew it but she was one of Rose’s highest-paid employees and among the handful of people he truly trusted, and there was no aspect of Maceo business she wasn’t privy to. She knew how I stood with Rose too and tended to be more direct with me than she was with others—and I’d