Loe raamatut: «Mexico Set»

1

‘Some of these people want to get killed,’ said Dicky Cruyer, as he jabbed the brake pedal to avoid hitting a newsboy. The kid grinned as he slid between the slowly moving cars, flourishing his newspapers with the controlled abandon of a fan dancer. ‘Six Face Firing Squad’; the headlines were huge and shiny black. ‘Hurricane Threatens Veracruz.’ A smudgy photo of street fighting in San Salvador covered the whole front of a tabloid.

It was late afternoon. The streets shone with that curiously bright shadowless light that precedes a storm. All six lanes of traffic crawling along the Insurgentes halted, and more newsboys danced into the road, together with a woman selling flowers and a kid with lottery tickets trailing from a roll like toilet paper.

Picking his way between the cars came a handsome man in old jeans and checked shirt. He was accompanied by a small child. The man had a Coca Cola bottle in his fist. He swigged at it and then tilted his head back again, looking up into the heavens. He stood erect and immobile, like a bronze statue, before igniting his breath so that a great ball of fire burst from his mouth.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Dicky. ‘That’s dangerous.’

‘It’s a living,’ I said. I’d seen the fire-eaters before. There was always one of them performing somewhere in the big traffic jams. I switched on the car radio but electricity in the air blotted out the music with the sounds of static. It was very hot. I opened the window but the sudden stink of diesel fumes made me close it again. I held my hand against the air-conditioning outlet but the air was warm.

Again the fire-eater blew a huge orange balloon of flame into the air.

‘For us,’ explained Dicky. ‘Dangerous for people in the cars. Flames like that, with all these petrol fumes … can you imagine?’ There was a slow roll of thunder. ‘If only it would rain,’ said Dicky. I looked at the sky, the low black clouds trimmed with gold. The huge sun was coloured bright red by the city’s ever-present blanket of smog, and squeezed tight between the glass buildings that dripped with its light.

‘Who got this car for us?’ I said. A motorcycle, its pillion piled high with cases of beer, weaved precariously between the cars, narrowly missing the flower seller.

‘One of the embassy people,’ said Dicky. He released the brake and the big blue Chevrolet rolled forward a few feet and then all the traffic stopped again. In any town north of the border this factory-fresh car would not have drawn a second glance. But Mexico City is the place old cars go to die. Most of those around us were dented and rusty, or they were crudely repainted in bright primary colours. ‘A friend of mine lent it to us.’

‘I might have guessed,’ I said.

‘It was short notice. They didn’t know we were coming until the day before yesterday. Henry Tiptree – the one who met us at the airport – let us have it. It was a special favour because I knew him at Oxford.’

‘I wish you hadn’t known him at Oxford; then we could have rented one from Hertz – with air-conditioning that worked.’

‘So what can we do …’ said Dicky irritably ‘… take it back and tell him it’s not good enough for us?’

We watched the fire-eater blow another balloon of flame while the small boy hurried from driver to driver, collecting a peso here and there for his father’s performance.

Dicky took some Mexican coins from the slash pocket of his denim jacket and gave them to the child. It was Dicky’s faded work suit, his cowboy boots and curly hair that had attracted the attention of the tough-looking woman immigration officer at Mexico City airport. It was only the first-class labels on his expensive baggage, and the fast talking of Dicky’s Counsellor friend from the embassy, that saved him from the indignity of a body search.

Dicky Cruyer was a curious mixture of scholarship and ruthless ambition, but he was insensitive, and this was often his undoing. His insensitivity to people, place and atmosphere could make him seem a clown instead of the cool sophisticate that was his own image of himself. But that didn’t make him any less terrifying as friend or foe.

The flower seller bent down, tapped on the window glass and waved at Dicky. He shouted ‘Vamos!’ It was almost impossible to see her face behind the unwieldy armful of flowers. Here were blossoms of all colours, shapes and sizes. Flowers for weddings and flowers for dinner hostesses, flowers for mistresses and flowers for suspicious wives.

The traffic began moving again. Dicky shouted ‘Vamos!’ much louder.

The woman saw me reaching into my pocket for money and separated a dozen long-stemmed pink roses from the less expensive marigolds and asters. ‘Maybe some flowers would be something to give to Werner’s wife,’ I said.

Dicky ignored my suggestion. ‘Get out of the way,’ he shouted at the old woman, and the car leaped forward. The old woman jumped clear.

‘Take it easy, Dicky, you nearly knocked her over.’

‘Vamos! I told her; vamos. They shouldn’t be in the road. Are they all crazy? She heard me all right.’

‘Vamos means “Okay, let’s go”,’ I said. ‘She thought you wanted to buy some.’

‘In Mexico it also means scram,’ said Dicky driving up close to a white VW bus in front of us. It was full of people and boxes of tomatoes, and its dented bodywork was caked with mud in the way that cars become when they venture on to country roads at this rainy time of year. Its exhaust-pipe was newly bound up with wire, and the rear panel had been removed to help cool the engine. The sound of its fan made a very loud whine so that Dicky had to speak loudly to make himself heard. ‘Vamos; scram. They say it in cowboy films.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t go to cowboy films,’ I said.

‘Just keep looking at the street map.’

‘It’s not a street map; it’s just a map. It only shows the main streets.’

‘We’ll find it all right. It’s off Insurgentes.’

‘Do you know how big Mexico City is? Insurgentes is about thirty-five miles long,’ I said.

‘You look on your side and I’ll look this side. Volkmann said it’s in the centre of town.’ He sniffed. ‘Mexico, they call it. No one here says “Mexico City”. They call the town Mexico.’

I didn’t answer; I put away the little coloured town plan and stared out at the crowded streets. I was quite happy to be driven round the town for an hour or two if that’s what Dicky wanted.

Dicky said, ‘Somewhere in the centre of town would mean the Paseo de la Reforma near the column with the golden angel. At least that’s what it would mean to any tourist coming here for the first time. And Werner Volkmann and his wife Zena are here for the first time. Right?’

‘Werner said it was going to be a second honeymoon.’

‘With Zena I would have thought one honeymoon would be enough,’ said Dicky.

‘More than enough,’ I said.

Dicky said, ‘I’ll kill your bloody Werner if he’s brought us out from London on a wild-goose chase.’

‘It’s a break from the office,’ I said. Werner had become my Werner I noticed and would remain so if things went wrong.

‘For you it is,’ said Dicky. ‘You’ve got nothing to lose. Your desk will be waiting for you when you get back. But there’s a dozen people in that building scrambling round for my job. This will give Bret just the chance he needs to take over my work. You realize that, don’t you?’

‘How could Bret want to take your job, Dicky? Bret is senior to you.’

The traffic was moving at about five miles an hour. A small dirty-faced child in the back of the VW bus was staring at Dicky with great interest. The insolent stare seemed to disconcert him. Dicky turned to look at me. ‘Bret is looking for a job that would suit him; and my job would suit him. Bret will have nothing to do now that his committee is being wound up. There’s already an argument about who will have his office space. And about who will have that tall blonde typist who wears the white sweaters.’

‘Gloria?’ I said.

‘Oh? Don’t say you’ve been there?’

‘Us workers stick together, Dicky,’ I said.

‘Very funny,’ said Dicky. ‘If Bret takes over my job, he’ll chase your arse. Working for me will seem like a holiday. I hope you realize that, old pal.’

I didn’t know that the brilliant career of Bret was taking a downturn to the point where Dicky was running scared. But Dicky had taken a PhD in office politics so I was prepared to believe him. ‘This is the Pink Zone,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you park in one of these hotels and get a cab?’

Dicky seemed relieved at the idea of letting a cab driver find Werner Volkmann’s apartment but, being Dicky, he had to argue against it for a couple of minutes. As he pulled into the slow lane the dirty child in the VW smiled and then made a terrible face at us. Dicky glanced at me and said, ‘Are you pulling faces at that child? For God’s sake, act your age, Bernard.’ Dicky was in a bad mood, and talking about his job had made him more touchy.

He turned off Insurgentes on to a side-street and cruised eastwards until we found a car-park under one of the big hotels. As we went down the ramp into the darkness he switched the headlights on. This was a different world. This was where the Mercedes, Cadillacs and Porsches lived in comfort, shiny with health, smelling of new leather and guarded by two armed security men. One of them pushed a ticket under a wiper and lifted the barrier so that we could drive through.

‘So your school chum Werner spots a KGB heavy here in town. Why did Controller (Europe) insist that I come out here at this stinking time of year?’ Dicky was cruising very slowly round the dark garage, looking for a place to park.

‘Werner didn’t spot Erich Stinnes,’ I said. ‘Werner’s wife spotted him. And there’s a departmental alert for him. There’s a space.’

‘Too small; this is a big car. Alert? You don’t have to tell me that, old boy. I signed the alert, Remember me? Controller of German Stations? But I’ve never seen Erich Stinnes. I wouldn’t know Erich Stinnes from the man in the moon. You’re the one who can identify him. Why do I have to come?’

‘You’re here to decide what we do. I’m not senior enough or reliable enough to make decisions. What about there, next to the white Mercedes?’

‘Ummmmm,’ said Dicky. He had trouble parking the car in the space marked out by the white lines. One of the security guards – a big poker-faced man in starched khakis and carefully polished high boots – came to watch us. He stood arms akimbo, staring, while Dicky went backwards and forwards trying to squeeze between the white convertible and a concrete stanchion that bore brightly coloured patches of enamel from other cars. ‘Did you really make out with that blonde in Bret’s office?’ said Dicky as he abandoned his task and reversed into another space marked ‘reserved’.

‘Gloria? I thought everyone knew about me and Gloria,’ I said. In fact I knew her no better than Dicky did but I couldn’t resist the chance to needle him. ‘My wife’s left me. I’m a free man again.’

‘Your wife defected,’ said Dicky spitefully. ‘Your wife is working for the bloody Russkies.’

‘That’s over and done with,’ I said. I didn’t want to talk about my wife or my children or any other problems. And if I did want to talk about them Dicky would be the last person I’d choose to confide in.

‘You and Fiona were very close,’ said Dicky accusingly.

‘It’s not a crime to be in love with your wife,’ I said.

‘Taboo subject, eh?’ It pleased Dicky to touch a nerve and get a reaction. I should have known better than to respond to his taunts. I was guilty by association. I’d become a probationer once more and I’d remain one until I proved my loyalty all over again. Nothing had been said to me officially, but Dicky’s little flash of temper was not the first indication of what the department really felt.

‘I didn’t come on this trip to discuss Fiona,’ I said.

‘Don’t keep bickering,’ said Dicky. ‘Let’s go and talk to your friend Werner and get it finished. I can’t wait to be out of this filthy hell-hole. January or February; that’s the time when people who know what’s what go to Mexico. Not in the middle of the rainy season.’

Dicky opened the door of the car and I slid across the seat to get out his side. ‘Prohibido aparcar,’ said the security guard, and with arms folded he planted himself in our path.

‘What’s that?’ said Dicky, and the man said it again. Dicky smiled and explained, in his schoolboy Spanish, that we were residents of the hotel, we would only be leaving the car there for half an hour, and we were engaged on very important business.

‘Prohibido aparcar,’ said the guard stolidly

‘Give him some money, Dicky,’ I said. ‘That’s all he wants.’

The security guard looked from Dicky to me and stroked his large black moustache with the ball of his thumb. He was a big man, as tall as Dicky and twice as wide.

‘I’m not going to give him anything,’ said Dicky. ‘I’m not going to pay twice.’

‘Let me do it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got small money here.’

‘Stay out of this,’ said Dicky. ‘You’ve got to know how to handle these people.’ He stared at the guard. ‘Nada! Nada! Nada! Entiende?’

The guard looked down at our Chevrolet and then plucked the wiper between finger and thumb and let it fall back against the glass with a thump. ‘He’ll wreck the car,’ I said. ‘This is not the time to get into a hassle you can’t win.’

‘I’m not frightened of him,’ said Dicky.

‘I know you’re not, but I am.’ I got in front of him before he took a swing at the guard. There was a hard, almost vicious, streak under Dicky’s superficial charm, and he was a keen member of the Foreign Office judo club. Dicky wasn’t frightened of anything; that’s why I didn’t like working with him. I folded some paper money into the guard’s ready hand and pushed Dicky towards the sign that said ‘Elevator to hotel lobby’. The guard watched us go, his face still without emotion. Dicky wasn’t pleased either. He thought I’d tried to protect him against the guard and he felt belittled by my interference.

The hotel lobby was that same ubiquitous combination of tinted mirror, plastic marble and spongy carpet underlay that international travellers are reputed to admire. We sat down under a huge display of plastic flowers and looked at the fountain.

‘Machismo,’ said Dicky sadly. We were waiting for the top-hatted hotel doorman to find a taxi driver who would take us to Werner’s apartment. ‘Machismo,’ he said again reflectively. ‘Every last one of them is obsessed by it. It’s why you can’t get anything done here. I’m going to report that bastard downstairs to the manager.’

‘Wait until after we’ve collected the car,’ I advised.

‘At least the embassy sent a Counsellor to meet us. That means that London has told them to give us full diplomatic back-up.’

‘Or it means Mexico City embassy staff – including your pal Tiptree – have a lot of time on their hands.’

Dicky looked up from counting his traveller’s cheques. ‘What do I have to do, Bernard, to make you remember it’s Mexico? Not Mexico City; Mexico.’