Chapter 20 #2
“All right, I’m nervous,” she conceded. “But it won’t do us any good if we’re jumpy and start acting stupid.
Beto is so lazy he wouldn’t be bothered to type a report, never mind conduct an actual investigation, and Bartolo doesn’t know the first thing about police work.
The reason he was hired is because Beto is his godfather and his family wanted him to have a proper job. ”
“There’s still that private investigator from Mexico City who came looking for me. Suppose Bartolo got in touch with him?”
“Why would he? He’d never connect Cándido’s death with that man.”
“I guess you’re right.”
She ran a hand down the front of her dress. “He’s probably looking for me. I have to go back and—”
“Flirt with him some more?” he asked. The words escaped his mouth before he could consider them, their acidity surprising him, and yet the way she’d smiled and stood close to the guy had been shocking.
He’d never seen her act like that with Bartolo, and to now witness such a display stung.
It was playacting, he understood that, just as his letters to lonesome women, his marriage to Perla, were merely games, but it rankled him.
She looked up at him sharply. “I’m not flirting. It’s useful if we know what he’s thinking, and this way he’s distracted, right? That’s better than having him pulling at every thread and seeing where it leads. You can’t be so stupid you don’t understand that.”
“I’m not stupid at all, which is why I know you’re flirting, and yes, I’m sure the erection he’s getting every time you brush against him is distracting. But don’t try to tell me blue is red and black is yellow.”
Once again, the words flew out of his mouth. She scoffed in response. “Are you jealous? There’s no proper relationship between you and me. I’m not your sweetheart.”
“No, I don’t think you’d ever be anyone’s sweetheart,” he said darkly.
“You’re one to talk.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” she said, and her eyes narrowed. “If someone knows about flirting to get what he wants, it wouldn’t be me.”
“Go back to him, go.”
“Sure. By the way, I laid my aunt’s negligee on her bed this evening. She’ll be needing you tonight,” she said with a delicious brutality.
He glared at her as she walked away, then paced in circles before quickly storming back the way he’d come. Later, he glimpsed Bartolo and Inés standing in the courtyard chatting again. She tossed her head and smiled at the policeman.
He wanted to punch the young man in the face and contented himself with muttering a curse under his breath as he returned to the living room. They were beginning to hand out conchas and coffee. He was irritated, couldn’t swallow a morsel.
He did not understand why he was angry, or the reason for his outburst. As she said, there was no relationship between them. Yet he felt awfully hurt, awfully raw.
That night, as he knelt by the bed and serviced Perla, kissing and nipping and licking her cunt, he thought about the ridiculous, servile nature of his position. What had he obtained out of this whole marriage? Not one cent.
He closed his eyes, thought about Inés while he was fucking Perla.
He cursed the girl in his mind because she was an awful, mean creature, like a wild animal you can’t hold in your arms. A wolf that will gnaw off a hand, or else a jewel-colored frog from distant swamps, the sort that poisons if you touch it.
Nevertheless, when he came on the sheets, pulling out quick, he thought of Inés, and her image lingered in his brain, like staring at a negative, all the shadows turned into light.
The next night at Lulú’s house they served sandwiches cut into triangles and Bartolo’s mother showed up, ostensibly to pay her respects and join the round of prayers, but everyone knew she was there to keep an eye on her son.
Someone must have tattled and informed her that Bartolo and Inés had spent much of the previous evening chatting.
Inés was not considered a suitable prospect for the policeman, and his mother was there to ensure the girl maintained her distance from her boy.
Ulises smiled, pleased with this development, pleased with the small, silent humiliation heaped on the girl as Bartolo’s mother walked around the room with her hand on her son’s arm and he looked down at the floor, at the ceiling, anywhere but at Inés.
Yet as much as he was secretly amused by this social snub, this reminder that Inés was a bastard child kept at her aunt’s house as an act of charity, he also felt a pang of sympathy, and if he could have, he would have taken her in his arms, held her tight.
Each night they went to Lulú’s house and he stood among the circle of smoking men, or wandered to his wife’s side, smiling weakly, or mouthed the words of a prayer, and all the while his eyes strayed toward the girl.
He realized he was in deep trouble. Not trouble with the law, though he still feared discovery, even if the policeman was forgetting his crusade to launch a proper inquest and placidly seeming to consider that it was better if the death was wrapped up and forgotten.
No, the trouble, the fear that crept down his spine at nights while the mourners bent their heads and clasped their rosaries between their hands, was the fear that he was letting himself be caged.
He did not have the money he had hoped to obtain from this venture. He was not a prince from The Arabian Nights, not a man-about-town in good clothes and fancy shoes, but a useless idiot caught in a snare. He was, frankly, a prostitute who had been bought cheap.
He was starting to dream again about cities bombarded by the Luftflotten, that irrational fear of death assaulting him in his bed. There was of course that other fear, of ending up in the streets, just a dirty pauper begging for a coin.
I killed a man for nothing, he thought, and tried to convince himself it had not been for nothing, that there were still riches to be mined.