“No, senor, I’ve been here all afternoon and no calls. Would you like me to send security?”
“No,” Vargas said. “I’ve got it.”
Thanking the man, he hung up, then left the bag of taquitos and burros on the nightstand and headed out the door.
Five minutes later he was on Avenida Lopez Mateos, the heart of downtown Playa Azul.
72
The day of the Dead festival didn’t officially begin until tomorrow, but that didn’t keep the tourists from starting early.
The streets and bars were packed shoulder to shoulder with people dressed in black, some of them wearing skull masks, others sporting hoods, almost all of them half-drunk and getting drunker.
By nightfall, a good portion of them would be back in their hotel rooms or on board their ship, decorating the carpet with the contents of their stomachs.
Pushing his way through the crowd, Vargas saw no sign of Beth, but he hadn’t really expected to. Instead, he narrowed his focus on finding the restaurant she’d told him about. Where she’d last seen her sister.
Problem was, he knew there were at least a half-dozen outdoor cafes along the main drag and finding the right one, especially in this crowd, could prove to be difficult. And even if he did find it, there was no guarantee Beth would be in the vicinity.
Maybe he was concerned for no reason. Maybe she had simply gotten bored and decided to go for a walk, hoping to jar some of the memories that evaded her. For all he knew, she could be back at the hotel by now, climbing the steps to her room.
But Vargas didn’t think so. He’d spent enough time with Manny over the years to know that something was up and that Beth’s headache could well have been a sign of worse things to come.
Cursing himself for leaving her alone, he continued moving, pushing through the crowd until he came upon his first outdoor cafe and knew immediately that this wasn’t the one.
No leather-goods shop in sight.
Moving on, he went a block and a half and found another one with umbrellaed tables taking up most of the sidewalk, tourists lined up nearby, waiting to be seated.
They were young and loud and Vargas marveled at how Americans seemed to lose all sense of decorum when they were drunk and on vacation, coming into a foreign country as if they owned it and had the right to be served, screw anyone who got in their way.
Vargas himself tried to blend in whenever possible, no matter what country he might visit. And he was sure there were many Americans just like him. But the loud ones always got the attention and helped generate the anti-American sentiment that pervaded so many countries.
Stalled on the sidewalk, waiting for a crowd of oncoming tourists to pass, Vargas felt a tap on his shoulder and turned, hoping it was Beth.
Instead, he found a couple of glassy-eyed twenty-year-olds staring up at him, both wearing tight black dresses, their faces painted white, with smudges of black around the eye sockets.
“Aren’t you that guy?” one of them said.
Vargas was at a loss. “Guy?”
“The one from that Desperado movie.”
“Antonio Banderas,” the other one said, running a finger suggestively along the line of her cleavage. “You’re him, aren’t you? Is it true Salma Hayek is only like five feet tall?”
“No habla ingles,” Vargas told her, then turned and continued up the street.
Two blocks later, he saw it. A leather-goods shop directly across from an enclosed oblong structure jutting out from the curb, crowded with diners.
Vargas searched their faces, saw no sign of Beth, then crossed to the leather-goods shop and went inside.
The place was jammed with tourists looking at handmade jackets and belts and handbags and luggage. Vargas worked his way to the register, told the woman behind the counter who he was looking for, and did his best to describe Beth.
The women eyed him as if he were a crazy man and gestured to the half-dozen Beth look-alikes who crowded her store.
Nodding, Vargas went back outside.
Next stop: Armando’s.
73
Armando’s Cantina was an institution in Playa Azul. Opened in the late 1800s, it had seen the town grow up around it, turning into a thriving seaport.
But the moment Vargas stepped inside, he knew he had wasted the trip. Not only was Beth not here, but the place was so crowded, the music and conversation and laughs so loud and obnoxious, that if she had bothered to come by, he was pretty sure she would have fled immediately.
As he stepped back out onto the sidewalk and closed the door behind him, a thought occurred to him:
Seaport.
The cruise liner.
He’d seen it docked in the harbor when they drove into town.
If Beth was in a bad way, if she was-as Pasternak had told him-reliving the same two days over and over, wasn’t it possible that she would have gone to the ship thinking that she was still a passenger?
Cutting across the street, he headed in the direction of the harbor. But as the ship came into view his cell phone rang.
He answered it without looking at the screen. “Vargas.”
“Hey, pocho, you’re on for midnight.”
“Little Fina?”
“She didn’t want to talk to you, but I told her you were writing a book and might make her famous.”
Vargas hesitated. “How did you know I was writing a book?”
“Come on, genius. Your cousin Tito, remember? You think I’m gonna sell merchandise to a guy, I don’t know something about him? He told me your whole sad story.”
“I’ll have to remember to thank him for that.”
“You can thank me, too, while you’re at it. Where you staying? I’ll pick you up around eleven forty-five.”
“You don’t need to do that. Just tell me how to get there.”
Ortiz snorted. “It don’t work that way, pocho. I drive or it don’t happen.”
“Okay, fine,” Vargas said, then told him the name of his hotel. “What kind of car do you drive?”
“Look for a blue and white taxi.”
“You’re a cabdriver?”
“Hey, man, you think I can make a living selling popguns to cheap bastards like you? Tourism, baby. That’s where the real money is.”
They hung up and Vargas continued west, waiting at the light to cross Avenida Reforma toward the Playa Azul port terminal.
Up ahead was a road leading directly to the ship. The road was gated, with a security guard standing watch.
And there was Beth, yelling at him.
Vargas couldn’t hear what she was saying. But the moment the light turned green, he darted across the street and approached them, Beth’s voice coming into range:
