The woman from Monclova was thirty. His peer. To her he hadn’t fibbed about his age, though he had made up a pack of lies about wanting and loving children because the widow had three of them, ages eight,six, and four. He thought she offered more solid possibilities than the woman from Veracruz, but he was struck with a superstitious fear about bilking a widow again.
After all, Cornelia Aguirre had been a widow, and look where that had got him. He’d had to run out of Jalisco with barely a suitcase clutched between his sweaty palms. And she’d been a fine mark too! Wealthy! Gullible! If it hadn’t been for her sons, he would have secured a small fortune.
Or maybe not. His father had always cautioned him to go for the small cons, never the big ones. Small and steady, you could build a nest egg. Of course, there was no nest egg left now. Not after it had been drained dry by his father’s illness. Alone, he’d done what he could. Alone, he had zeroed in on the widow Aguirre and lost.
“What are you doing here, tucked in the corner? You can’t see the pretty girls walking by,” Moisés said as he pulled over a chair and plopped himself down without ceremony.
Moisés wore a striped shirt and too much Vaseline in his hair. He was a gigolo who made his money conning tourists. He’d sweep a woman off her feet with a few well-placed lines, then make off with cash or jewelry, promptly removing any real diamonds or rubies from their settings and selling them at obscure shops in La Lagunilla.
Moisés took off his sunglasses and tossed them on the table. “How are you?”
“Fine,” Ulises muttered. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “Here. Have a look,” he said, without bothering with more chatter, eager to simply seal the bargain and get the hell out of the coffee shop.
He took the camera from his shoulder bag and handed it to Moisés. Moisés turned it between his hands, examining it.
“What do you think?”
Moisés rattled off a figure. When Ulises protested, Moisés laughed. “Now, now, you know how it goes. Hot goods—”
“It’s not stolen. It’s mine.”
Moisés looked at him in confusion. “Really?”
It was true. The camera had been a gift from the widow Aguirre.
“Then why not pawn it?”
“It’s all the same, isn’t it? Why bother with pawn tickets? Besides, I’m too busy to be haggling with those clowns,” he said, although the truth was he was trying to lie low; he didn’t want to show his face around Monte de Piedad or any of the shops his father had frequented. He felt a little paranoid.
There were scant threads that connected Ulises to Jalisco. He’d used another name there and spun a fake background for himself. But he hadn’t been able to collect a few letters, a couple of postcards, which in his haste he’d left behind in his apartment. Two of those postcards tied him to an address in Iztapalapa and might offer a muddy path to his current whereabouts: he’d used his landlady there as a reference for the rooming house where he now lived when he’d been unable to secure his old room upon his return to Mexico City.
But it was unlikely anyone would be thorough or driven enough to make that connection, and the postcards were, at any rate, innocent enough in their content. They had been mailed by his father and were simple greetings from five years back, when his old man had taken a seaside vacation to try to improve his health.
He was safe. Perhaps.
Moisés raised an eyebrow at Ulises, clearly unconvinced by his words, but he pulled several bills from his wallet and handed them to him.
“I could use a guy like you,” Moisés said. “You have the looks, and you speak English.”
French too. His father had taught him everything he knew, and that included languages. He was particular about his son’s education, making sure he didn’t grow up to become a cheap thug from a bad neighborhood. His father had made himself into a gentleman through force ofwill and smarts. It was hard to picture his father growing up in a dismal vecindad, though that was where he’d started his life, an uncouth nobody who managed to escape his past. At least for a while.
Ulises knew where the work Moisés offered led: nowhere. And there was something seedy about those operations, about the men who entrapped the unwary tourists. He thought the business of lonely hearts letters was cleaner. More dignified. If he played well, he didn’t even have to fuck his target. In Moisés’s line of business, the fucking was necessary. An essential component. The sneaking out of the room in the middle of the night, without making any noise, with a woman’s pearls and her change purse tucked in one’s pocket, struck him as obscene.
It was cheap. He and his father had worked the small cons, but they had never been cheap. Yet here he was, and if he didn’t tread carefully, he might wind up a beggar on the street like the one he’d bumped into that morning.
“I thought you already had boys working for you. That fellow with the curly hair, and the other one—”
“David? He’s retired.”
Doubtful. The police had likely caught him. That was the trouble with being the guy with the sticky fingers. He was the one the cops went after with their nightsticks.
“What are you going to do, then?” Moisés asked, and his expression struck Ulises as a tad mocking. Snide. As if Moisés were thinking,What makes you so much better than us?
He bade Moisés a curt goodbye and stepped out of the coffee shop. He took his time walking back to the guesthouse, pausing to look forlornly across the street at the bank where his father had once rented a safety-deposit box and kept his valuables. All of that had been sold.
Once he neared the guesthouse he quickened his steps, thinking he might be able to evade detection. No use. Near the staircase he bumped into Don Pánfilo, who smiled his yellow smile at him.
“I dropped a telegram underneath your door,” his landlord said.
