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“I have none. Shall I expect you to grill me further?”
The front door opened and Renata called, “¡Hola!”
Stuart whispered, “And now, for the sake of the children, we pretend nothing’s happened.”
Renata walked in, looking harried, her mind elsewhere, with a white sack from the farmacia in her hand. “More Lomotil,” she said. “How are you now?”
“Sitting up and taking notice,” he said, and got up from the dining room chair. “I’ll go fetch my hat.”
Stuart may have spoken about their talk while he was upstairs, because Renata drove Atticus through the centro in silence—so daughterly that silence, as if she’d been wrongly punished and thought a sentence might heal the rift she wanted prolonged. She finally said, “I hate it when he talks about me.”
“Wasn’t much said.”
“Stuart has this unfunny way of teasing, playing the British twit, the scoundrel, the thoroughgoing cad. I find it defensive and maddening.” Renata shifted down to first gear as a Bohemia beer truck lumbered into her lane, then impatiently shifted to second to swerve around it and was halted again by the white cart of a man hawking chicharrones. “You haven’t seen his good side. Stuart’s really a Renaissance man. He’s good at business, he’s suave, he’s fluent in five languages, he’s practically a walking library. And he’s sane. Stability was a big plus for me.”
“You’re trying to tell me why you chose him over Scott. You can’t put that sort of thing into words.”
She glanced at his face and again fronted her glare. “I find the choice so foolish sometimes. Even hellish. But he has such power over me. I hate it.”
“He said the same thing about you.”
“Really? I haven’t felt in charge at all.”
“Well, I believe that. Seems to me every one of you here oughta try living according to Bible values and see how that works out.”
Renata sighed.
“Well, I had to say it.”
She parked the Volkswagen near the shaded porches of the shops on the west side of the jardín. A public telephone was bolted to a great pillar there, and a shoeshine boy stood on his box as he pretended to make a call. His friends grinned as he shouted, “Quisiera denunciar un carterista. Un cochino enano.” Atticus couldn’t translate it. Un carterista, he thought, was a pickpocket.
Renata said, “I found the car here. Where we’re parked.” She got out.
Teenaged boys were busily soaping and rinsing cars in the street while the American owners skeptically watched. On the great plaza of the parroquia, twenty grandfatherly men in white shirts and trousers were tuning the instruments of an orchestra, and Stuart’s beggar was behind them there, swinging forward on his crutches and his one leg until he got to the back of the parroquia and abruptly disappeared as if through a held-open door.
Atticus followed Renata under the loggia in front of Printers Inc, which was closed, and toward a grand but foundering city hall and la comisaría de policía. Half a dozen frowning teenagers in hand-me-down navy blue uniforms defended the police station with machine guns and fifty-year-old rifles that they seemed eager to try out.
Renata was waiting at the street corner for the halting passage of a hotel tour bus filled with Americans his age in golf visors and sunglasses. A fairly young mother knelt on the sidewalk with a feeding infant at her left breast, and she talked to Renata with a face full of such frank misery that Renata put a peso bill in the upraised hand and got a pack of Chiclets from an offered box. “I have zero discipline. Zilch,” Renata said. “You always feel so guilty. Stuart has the right idea.”
“I just saw Stuart’s beggar,” he said.
“Really? Where?”
“Heading into the church basement looked like.”
Renata stared behind her at the parroquia. She seemed fascinated. And then she gave Atticus a fleeting glance and walked across to the police station and in Spanish explained who they were to a boy who’d looped and crossed canvas straps of cartridges over his pigeon chest. The boy gloomily heard Renata out and jigged his rifle sight toward the interior, and Renata and Atticus walked inside.
A jaunty man with the yellow stripes of a sergeant’s rank was feeding on a banana as he sat at a wide mahogany desk in a room that was otherwise as open as a night-train depot. The green tile floor was unswept, gray cobwebs waggled in the air, and a hundred years of boot marks
and spitting stained the green walls. An oranged map of Resurreccíon behind the desk was covered with Saran Wrap and pleated with tape. The jungle along the highway was roughed out with X’s and with the words Las Ruinas. Renata told the sergeant their names and purpose in Spanish, and the police sergeant looked fully at Atticus like he was no more than fancy clothes he didn’t want and fine boots that he did. He finally held out his hand. “We wish you visa.”
Atticus found it in his wallet and the sergeant took his time spelling out the English words on it, then he folded up his banana peel before squeezing it into his pocket behind a name tag that read “Espinoza.” His skin was a freckled, caramel brown, and there was only a faint hint of gray in his hair though he seemed to be in his sixties. While still focused on Atticus Cody’s visa, he offered, “I have know your eh-son. We pass on the street, my mind take a picture.” Sergeant Espinoza handed the visa back and said, “Siempre muy borracho.” Always very drunk.
Renata replied in irritated Spanish, and Espinoza sheepishly hunted through an upper drawer in the mahogany desk. When he’d got out a ring of old skeleton keys, he held a harsh policeman’s stare on Atticus and asked, “¿Está listo?” Are you ready?
“Sí,” Renata told him.
“You look not well,” Espinoza said.
