If she started thinking like this she would panic completely. Ask Daniel Brennan’s advice before she tried to locate an English-speaking doctor and set events in train for which Jenny would probably never forgive her? He was right here at the hotel, and at some point he might have dealt, as Mary had not, with someone in this semicomatose condition; he might reassure her that it was simply a matter of sleeping it off.
Daniel Brennan was not in his room, and now her throat did begin to prickle.
Ask for the number of a doctor right now? But he would ask a few preliminary questions for which she should try to have intelligent answers, and Mary put the receiver back and went distractedly to feel the pulse in the wrist that might have been that of a young child. It was a ridiculous gesture, she knew as she made it: she had no idea of what a sleeper’s pulse should be, let alone a drunken sleeper’s, let alone a drunken sleeper’s who couldn’t be considered in normal health and had probably taken an unknown medication.
Still, Mary tried to assess the beat; it seemed light and far-spaced, but that might have been in contrast to her own speeded-up and violent pulse. She tucked Jenny’s arm back and pulled the blanket higher, because the room wasn’t warm, trying the usual talisman: someday I’ll look back on this and wonder how I could have gotten so . . . But it didn’t work, because she knew she would not forget this.
The suitcase, then, because once in a blue moon prescription labels contained actual information. There wasn’t a tremor of awareness from Jenny at its thump on the neighboring bed, the sharp clicks from the catches. Mary pressed testingly on the contents in search of something hard and glassy, had to delve. A promising resistance inside one slipper proved to be cologne. She extricated the other slipper, and shook out a bottle nearly half-full of yellow-and-white capsules.
It was not one of the blue-moon instances. The label carried only Jenny’s name and the doctor’s, a date in March, and instructions to take one capsule three times daily.
There went the hope of an intelligent answer for a doctor. Fleetingly in a rage at Jenny and Dr. J. Wittenbaugh, and the Actons and Owen St. Ives and Daniel Brennan, Mary put the bottle back in its nest and yanked up folds of clothing to replace the slipper beside its mate.
Her uncaring fingers touched more than fabric and the daytime sandals parcelled out neatly at the sides of the suitcase. With a crackle electrifying in the silent room—Jenny a very concentration of stillness in her eerie sleep—a twist of newspaper, so tightly gathered as to have a recoil when it was nudged, flew free.
Another auxiliary bottle of capsules? No. A pair of pottery birds for salt and pepper, undoubtedly Jenny’s house present for her. These were not gift-shop robins or canaries: the painted eyes were fierce and alert, the feathers a subtle gradation of slate-blue and mushroom and wheat-color under the high hard glaze. More carefully this time, Mary reached in to bundle the inevitable Mexican wrapping tight together again, and snatched her hand back and stared at her fingers.
Salt and pepper shakers did not come filled with anything, and this was in any case softer than salt, almost like powdered sugar with a faint suggestion of glisten. Mary did not taste it as detectives did in books, because she wouldn’t have had any idea of what to expect and she felt that she didn’t have to. This was cocaine or something like it. Buried at the bottom of a suitcase which in the normal course of events she would never have penetrated, introduced so hastily that one of the small bottom corks had not been pushed quite home.
An echo came back. Jenny, after they had been beckoned through Customs: “Can you get out again just as easily?”
Jenny, intimate of a known user.
But even if she had been so inclined—and she is not, said Mary steadily to herself—she would have had no knowledge of how to obtain the drug and no opportunity. Except for brief periods at the swimming pool, and the few requested minutes to shop alone and a fast foray for the morning newspaper at the Casa de Flores, she had been constantly with Mary.
In addition, this obvious cache, as opposed to the astonishing ingenuities cited in the newspapers, seemed meant to be found, had perhaps already been reported. As far as statistics were concerned, Jenny fell into the right age group and came from the East, where the street price for drugs was reportedly higher than in the Southwest, so close to the border.
The Mexican attitude toward Americans engaged in drug traffic within its boundaries was ferocious, and although there was now a treaty for prisoner exchange it would not, if it was like most governmental processes, be enacted with any particular speed in individual cases. The U.S. Embassy, if not quite taking a detached stance, was relatively powerless. Mary thought about what she had heard of Mexican prisons —and in fact listened to in scraps tonight at dinner; thought about Jenny in her vulnerable sleep, felt cold to her marrow.
Before a doctor, before anything, this terrifying white substance had to be disposed of, the pottery birds washed, the suitcase lining washed too. Because the newspaper wrapping had been so very tight, Mary didn’t think that any of Jenny’s clothes had been in contact with the drug, but she would have to make sure.
She had a desperate sense of haste, and her hands tended to shake. She lifted out garments, placed them to one side, carried the newspaper bundle
