Chapter 1
“But what if the young man is innocent?” asked Don Jaime. He spoke in Spanish with a lisping Castilian accent, an affectation that marked him as a man of some daring among Mexican politicians.
“Innocent!” Mrs. Ross put all the scorn of her seventy-one years into the word. “I tell you he is precisely like the other one!” Her Spanish lashed at him, full of overtones from countless kitchen maids and with hardly a trace remaining of her native English.
“But … but …” Don Jaime sputtered at her as only the mayor of a small town can sputter at a rich land owner and valued confidante. “You cannot come here and ask me to imprison a tourist simply because he reminds you of someone out of your past! Please? You cannot.” His shoulders hunched in a Latin shrug. “Emma, my dearest friend, we must remember that times change.”
“But young men don’t!”
They sat in Don Jaime’s upstairs parlor, a plaster and blue tile room of austere furnishings. It looked out on Mexico’s Lake Chapala from the waterfront of San Juan. Afternoon sunlight, reduced to narrow ribbons by venetian blinds, wove a tapestry of glowing yellow across the room.
An immense black upholstered chair enfolded Mrs. Ross, dwarfed her. She had presented this chair to Don Jaime on his Saint’s Day ten years ago because she could not endure sitting in any of his other furniture. Every other chair in the house presented unexpected corners, painful edges and sloping planes that kept you ever on the alert against being slid off onto the floor. She was convinced that none of these pieces had been designed for human beings.
Mrs. Ross wore a blue silk dress and a small blue-feathered hat over her grey hair. She looked like a shriveled dowager duchess: sharp-eyed and slightly sunburned so that the effect was a little horsey. Her face presented balanced planes that still revealed some of the beauty that age had covered.
Don Jaime held himself severely upright in a high-backed teak throne. He was a lean figure in a black business suit of European cut. His face—long, narrow and with pinched-in cheeks—looked like the face of the crucified Jesus that hung in San Juan’s church. Although two years older than Mrs. Ross, he still retained the glossy charcoal hair of his youth.
On this afternoon there had been the long, slow ritual conversation: the inquiries about health, about mutual friends, the state of the weather, of the crops (both agricultural and tourist), and a discussion of a recent fishing tragedy at Solas farther down the lake in which a father and son had drowned. The son had been known to Serena, Mrs. Ross’s current maid of all work.
During all their talk there had been persistent mouse-like sounds in a nearby room: one of Don Jaime’s serving girls making work there to eavesdrop.
But now Mrs. Ross was down to the object of her visit. “I know this young man’s type,” she said.
“What do you really know about him?” asked Don Jaime.
Mrs. Ross’s nose twitched in irritation. “His full name is Francis Andrew Hoblitt,” she said. “He comes from St. Louis. He is twenty-eight, unmarried, speaks little Spanish … and that poorly. I’m certain you’ve seen him around: a blond young man, always frowning.”
“And always carrying the drawing pad.” With two motions of his hands Don Jaime hung the squared-off pad shape in the air between them.
“The same. He lives in that little guest house that the Friesmans rent out. He drinks too much. He throws things … and he doesn’t like the new tax on foreign artists. He said vile things to the tax collector.”
She did not add that Hoblitt, while in wine, had pinched Lolita Veras on the bottom. Hoblitt was altogether the kind of tourist who made Mrs. Ross ashamed of her countrymen.
Don Jaime nodded, averted his eyes. He had been a widower for thirty-six years, and his manner betrayed a certain watchful caution with women (although he had courted Mrs. Ross when she first arrived in San Juan in 1937).
The detailed information about Hoblitt did not surprise Don Jaime. Through her many tenants and employees, Mrs. Ross ran a first class spy system—almost as good as Don Jaime’s own. And he knew that an absolute requirement for anyone working in Mrs. Ross’s immediate household was the ability to relay every bit of gossip heard in the market square. Serena, the current maid, shone above all others in this capacity—a two-legged recording device who chattered endlessly at her work, telling everything she saw or heard, spicing it all with local superstitions.
“Do you think this Hoblitt is a good painter?” ventured Don Jaime.
Mrs. Ross dismissed Francis Hoblitt’s work with one word: “Modern!”
Don Jaime scowled, thinking now about St. Louis, a name he had just heard in connection with Hoblitt. Don Jaime knew that St. Louis was a place name in América del Norte, very likely a large city. His knowledge of geography went little beyond awareness that Mexico City (called simply “Mexico” in the local idiom) lay somewhere vaguely eastward—not as far as the Gulf, but nonetheless a boring trip in his twelve-year-old chauffeur-driven Buick. He knew that Guadalajara lay northward up the superhighway, and that the Pacific Ocean billowed endlessly off in the west. América del Norte—that bottomless source of rich tourists—remained a geography book picture: a green, yellow, brown and pink blob occupying an immense frozen area north of the Rio Grande—which was a Mexican river.
Perhaps it is evil to come from St. Louis, thought Don Jaime. A breeding ground of gangsters, possibly.
He said: “You know St. Louis?”
“I’ve never been there.”
Mrs. Ross resigned herself to a few moments of diversionary questioning, but she resolved not to be put off. This business of Hoblitt and Paulita Romera could become tragic, she told herself.
Don Jaime pursed his lips. “St. Louis, then, is not near to Fairbanks?” Don Jaime had been told the fiction that Mrs. Ross came from Fairbanks, Alaska, a locale he had hopelessly misplaced. He thought of Alaska as being somewhere eastward, fronting on the Atlantic Ocean, and close by the capital of América del Norte, which was a city called New York.
“It’s at least three thousand miles from Fairbanks!” snapped Mrs. Ross.
Three thousand miles! An incomprehensible distance having something to do with kilometers. Don Jaime put it out of his mind.
“Perhaps it would serve if I detailed Beto to keep watch on this Señor Hoblitt,” said Don Jaime. By Beto he meant his nephew, Roberto García y Machado, a mustachioed braggart and police chief of San Juan.
Mrs. Ross had never reconciled herself to Mexican political nepotism. She scowled. “You know very well, Jaime, that Beto would be off drunk somewhere when anything serious happened, and he would show up later full of stupid excuses. This is much too critical for Beto.”
“But what do you expect me to do?”
“Trump up some charge against Señor Hoblitt, throw him in jail and have him deported. It’s really very simple.”
“Very simple!” Don Jaime threw up his hands.
“If you wish me to handle this myself, I shall!”
“Oh, no! No … no …” Don Jaime, instantly sobered, shook his head.
The last tourist that Emma Ross had handled herself had landed in the Guadalajara hospital, the innocent victim of a street riot, it was said, although it had been dark at the time and the only witnesses were a dozen or so tenant farmers from Mrs. Ross’s lands. There had followed a sharply worded note to Don Jaime from Don Tomás Norillega, minister in charge at the Dirección General de Turismo in Mexico City. The note’s substance had been: “See that such things are not repeated. They frighten away the tourists!”
“No,” said Don Jaime. “We will work out something.”
“I’m sure you will.”
Don Jaime turned to look out at the lake through the slatted blinds. The sun’s reflection lay like a molten copper puddle on the surface of the water. He squinted. A fly buzzed his head, evaded the warding hand to alight on the glossy black hair.
It was a tragic thing, he thought. In spite of the fact that he felt he knew the real situation with this Hoblitt, Don Jaime’s Latin heart ached with the story Mrs. Ross had told.
For her part, Mrs. Ross was reviewing the same story, wondering if she had left out some fact more apt to stir Don Jaime to action. She felt supremely sure of herself in this matter: Urgent action is required!
***