“I can drive there in a day,” Enrique continued. “No one will have to know. I arranged for two weeks of sick leave. Even Garcia won’t be able to check up on me. I’ll find out what’s happening.”
“You think the Americans will just let you visit one of their prisoners?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason you thought you could get close to the Madrigals.”
Sevilla shook his head, but the gesture didn’t bring pain. He was grateful for that. “I failed. Maybe they didn’t know who I was or where I came from, but they knew I wasn’t one of them. These are police. They’ll ask questions.”
“Then I’ll answer them.”
“You’ll lie.”
Enrique was steadfast. “I will.”
“As if I could stop you,” Sevilla said. He sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. Each drink made the cut on his lip burn afresh. He made no effort to protect it.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Enrique said. He got up from the table. Sevilla didn’t watch him go.
TWELVE
FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE SEVILLA had not seriously contemplated the inevitability of old age. When he was in his twenties old age was an impossibility. Surely he would be dead by then, he thought, but death was itself an abstraction not worthy of real thought. Even his thirties were much the same until forty loomed and his older heroes began to pass away with greater and greater frequency.
He was always surrounded by death, especially the more time he spent working against the
With his forties behind him he faced death each time he looked in a mirror at sagging flesh and fading muscles. Even his skin took on a different quality. The wrinkles he expected, but not the strange texture of roughness and looseness that began on the back of his hands and slowly spread elsewhere.
Now he was old, unquestionably old. All the things he knew were coming were here, from the thinning hair to the beard that was now more white than anything else. His vision was going, though he still refused glasses. When he wasn’t drinking his hands were steady, but this was only one small thing to be proud of in a sea of other failures. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had an erection.
With Enrique gone he shuffled around the house in his slippers and housecoat, took naps on the couch and flipped idly through channels on the television. He lacked the energy or the focus to read, though there were many books on the stand beside his bed. He avoided going into his daughter’s room though eventually he knew he must; the photograph needed to be back where it belonged.
It was evening and after a quiet meal that he finally entered. He knocked lightly on the door as if to announce his presence and slipped inside. The spot where he sat on the edge of the bed was dented, he saw.
He put the photo on the nightstand and sat. In the angled light of the lamp he saw that it was wrinkled and this made his heart ache. He wanted to press the picture, smooth it out like a piece of cloth, but the damage was done. As on his face, the lines could not be made to go away.
All day he had felt a weight on him that he thought was sadness. Alone in his daughter’s room with his granddaughter’s crib at hand, he understood it was anger. He felt far gone from himself, so much so that even the Madrigals did not recognize him for a cop, but as a crook, a con man. They did not see any iron in him. He was ashamed.
“I’m sorry I could never bring you home,” he said to the empty room. “Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. But it wasn’t because I didn’t care. You know I would give my life to have you home again.”
Sevilla wrung his hands. The knuckles of one hand were bruised and scabbed.
“I want you to know that what I do now isn’t because I’ve given up. Whatever anyone thinks, whatever they say, that’s not the reason. It’s only I don’t know what to do. I’m not as smart as I believed I was.”
Once there was a time he could have asked for help. He was surrounded by men like himself, men who had become authority because it was, like themselves, immortal and unchanging. Over the years they had fallen away. Some died. Some quit. The ones who remained were worn on the inside and out. They didn’t speak to one another anymore and the new young men… they were not interested.
“There is nothing so worthless as an old man,” Sevilla said.
He took from his pocket his pistol and put it on the bed beside him. It was the first automatic he had ever owned, a .45 given to him by an American policeman from a joint task force south of the border. He still remembered the man’s name: Joe Hopkins. He was young like Enrique Palencia was young and full of the energy long missing from Sevilla’s life.
“A .45 will put a man down and keep him there,” Hopkins told Sevilla. “That .38 you’re carrying is never going to get it done. They’re carrying big guns. We have to do the same thing.”
“I don’t have anything to give you in return,” Sevilla said to the American.
“You don’t have to. Do somebody else a favor someday.”
Sevilla held the pistol in both hands, feeling its weight. The metal was worn from a long time in his holster. He kept it clean and the parts maintained. The weapon held only eight rounds, but they were enough. For the thing Sevilla sometimes had in mind there was need for only one.
Tonight he wasn’t thinking of ending himself, and no matter what he would not do it here in this room that waited and would forever wait for Ana and Ofelia to come home. This room was untouched, sacrosanct. Sevilla thought instead about his old .38 revolver, the one he kept in a locked box in his bedroom closet. This was the weapon Liliana brought out one night when Sevilla was away. Why she chose to kill herself in the kitchen he didn’t know. A perverse thought once occurred to Sevilla that she wanted it to be easy to clean up.
Ana and Ofelia had Sevilla and Liliana to remember them. Liliana had her husband. Sevilla had no one. Perhaps Enrique would regret Sevilla’s passing, but they did not know each other so well. The people in Sevilla’s department knew him not at all; he was a ghost passing through their halls from investigation to investigation, the man all wished would retire but did not even though it was well past time. They sensed the mantle of death around him that didn’t come just from age.
If Kelly ever woke, he might be sad to learn Sevilla was gone, but he had too many other lives to remember. Their closeness was one only Sevilla felt. He followed Kelly and learned of Kelly and eventually there was a sensation of kinship that could only come from long association, but this was something Kelly could not feel because he didn’t know Sevilla was there. Maybe the nurses would tell Kelly how Sevilla called every day to check on him, or how he came to visit when no one else did. Maybe this would make a difference. Most likely it wouldn’t.
The gun whispered ideas to Sevilla, but he didn’t listen. He turned his mind to other things. If he had whisky he would drink it now, right here on the edge of Ana’s bed, beneath the roof of Liliana’s house, and would go on drinking until he could see just straight enough to put the barrel of the gun to the underside of his chin and pull the trigger.
“No,” Sevilla said aloud. “I said no.”
He hoped for a telephone call from Enrique to break the silence, but there was no call. Sevilla didn’t know how long he stayed in Ana and Ofelia’s room. Abruptly he stood and left, taking the gun with him.
Sevilla went to his bedroom and opened the closet. His old suits, his
His holster went into its place at his side, easily hidden by his jacket but where he could reach it quickly. He checked the magazine and the bullet in the chamber.
In his sock drawer he found a matte-black cylinder of rubberized metal. It wasn’t heavy and it fit in a pocket.
