The Jaguar Page 5

  7

  AFTER SUNRISE SOMEONE KNOCKED ON her door and Erin rose from a deep sleep and sat up on the bed. She had no idea where she was. She touched the long white nightshirt that she wore but that did not belong to her. When she looked out and saw the palm trees swaying in the orange light and the water glittering between the mangroves she remembered, and her heart tried to climb out from its cage inside her.

  A woman’s voice. “Desayuno.”

  “Yes, breakfast, thank you.”

  The lock whirred and clunked and in walked not a woman but a slender teenage boy with a golden pompadour and a shy smile. He held a folding stand in one hand and with the other he balanced a large waiter’s tray over his shoulder. The tray was stacked with stainless-steel warmers that clinked as he crossed the room. At the table he set the tray on the stand and took his time arranging her meal. He changed his mind twice on the placement of side dishes. With a flourish he snapped the napkin and folded it into a loose scallop and set this to the left. Then the flatware.

  Erin caught the scent of the meal as it went by and thought it was the best breakfast she’d ever smelled. Her stomach moaned and gurgled. She watched him pour the coffee and the juice. Last he lifted the warmers and stacked them on the tray, then with a matadorial flair swept up the stand and smiled shyly at her again on his way out.

  She ate piggishly, slopping the ranchero sauce onto her nightgown and shoveling down fast the tortillas heaped with sweet preserves. She drank the juice and sighed with the pleasure of it: tangerine. She finished it and held her free hand to her belly.

  She drew a bath and dried off the derringer and set it on the deck of the beautifully tiled Roman tub. She lifted off the nightshirt and threw it over the shower curtain rod. Her right upper calf still stung from where the taped gun and cash had rubbed and pulled. She disliked guns and the sounds they made. She floated freely in the great deep tub listening to the amplified slurp of the bathwater going in and out of her ears. In these sounds and in their echoes she heard melodies as she had always heard them, the gifts of her nature coming from a universe that, even as a small girl, she had understood was made not only of matter but of music. Straight above her was a raised plaster ceiling painted with the likeness of a young Mayan woman looking down on a warrior who knelt before her. She was long pregnant and she held an urn but Erin could not see into it. This brought tears to her eyes and terror to her heart so she sat up suddenly in the water and slapped herself in the face, hard. You will not come apart. You cannot come apart. She slapped herself hard again.

  She dressed in new clothes from the wardrobe, pulling off the tags as she went. They were designer garments, fashionable and well made. She was slender and long-legged and flat-chested but the clothes fit right, even the sandals. The clothes were in colors she liked. She lifted the blouse and stood sideways to the mirror and wondered if they knew.

  She pushed aside the breakfast dishes and sat for a long while at the table by the window. She had been to Cancún twice in her life and this place reminded her of it. She and Bradley had stayed at the Camino Real and snorkeled at Isla Mujeres and rented a jeep to drive to Chichen Itza and Tulum. The jungle around Cancún looked like this jungle, only flatter. She remembered the cloud-muted sunlight and the heat. This morning’s light was filtered by clouds too and when she touched her hand to the window she could feel the warmth of the day already on the glass.

  She reached to open the window but it was not made to be opened. She picked up one of the stainless-steel plate warmers and flung it hard against the glass, to no effect. She lifted a chair and threw it against the glass hard but the glass, if it was glass at all, was very heavy and did not break. She turned and ran to the door and lowered her shoulder and tried to knock it down. She kicked it and hit it with the sides of her fists. She screamed and cursed for anyone to hear and was answered by dead silence. In the bathroom she vomited. She paced the perimeter of her quarters several times, then squeezed into the corner between the wall and the bed and pulled the colorful woven bedspread down over her, curled into a ball on the floor and wept.

  Hours later she awakened and threw off the cover and stood. She saw that the breakfast dishes were gone and a light lunch had been left in their place. The chair was back at the table and the plate warmer had been picked up from the floor by the window. She was a heavy sleeper, but she was surprised to have slept through all this. Or maybe not, she thought. You don’t get kidnapped every day. You don’t see your husband beaten bloody by drug traffickers. She looked outside. From the sun she guessed it was closer to evening than morning. She wondered if the breakfast had been drugged but that made little sense. There was a vase of fresh cut tropical flowers on the table.

  She walked the room again and felt the sudden rush of abandonment. She’d never felt abandoned in her life. Not for a day, not for an hour. She had never really even been alone, either. And you have to be alone to be abandoned, she thought, although they were not the same thing. She wanted someone to talk to. And someone to listen to. Maybe if she divided the lunch into two meals and set a place across from her someone would appear and they could lunch. To lunch, she thought. A verb.

  She stood for a moment in front of the Hummingbird. It was a beautiful instrument, large and resonant and aesthetically dazzling. It looked fairly old, as did the case. She reached for it, then stopped herself. She felt like Pandora, or maybe like Eve herself, confronted with a thing of temptation that had been forbidden to her. But why forbidden? Who had forbidden it? Herself? Some distant God? She had no memory of the forbidding. In fact, she thought, it hasn’t been forbidden; it’s been offered.

  She picked it up and sat in the handsome leather chair. The strings were new and out of tune. She tuned it and played softly without singing, letting her fingers chase down the music as her ears heard it. The sound led to the feelings and thoughts, and she fetched the paper and pen from the desk and set them on the table in front of her.

  Hours became minutes as they always did. There was terror, anger, shame, even hope. She tried to slow the rush of emotion enough to capture the last two days with words, not so much capture as synopsize, sketch, represent. Notes into music. Thoughts into rhyme. Later could come the clarity and the accuracy, the shading and wit.

  Later, lost to all this, Erin heard another knock on her door.

  “Go away! Marcharse!”

  “Mr. Armenta will be here in one half hour.” It was the soft high voice of the room-service boy.

  “For what? Why?”

  Silence.

  Think. She put the guitar back in its case and pulled off the three sheets of paper upon which she had written, then put the pad and pen back on the desk. The lyrics she stashed under the bed.

  Think. She found a blue dress and bit off the Bloomingdale’s tag. It was modest and fit loosely around her middle. Then a pair of new sandals. She turned sideways to the mirror to see her profile and she pulled her stomach in again and when she felt the tears starting up she whacked herself on each cheek and this helped.

  From the wardrobe she retrieved the used medical tape and in the bathroom she hiked up the blue dress and used its fading adhesive to fasten the derringer around her unchafed calf. She brushed her hair and pulled it back into a pony tail. She thought for a moment, then changed her mind about the gun and removed it and put it and the tape back where they had been.

  Five minutes later she heard the whir and clunk of the door lock and Armenta pushed into the room. He wore a black open-collared dress shirt instead of the Pacifico T-shirt, and a pair of wrinkled linen pants instead of the shorts. His hair was still a mess and his face still unshaven and jowly and his eyes haunted. His sandals were a burnished orange color, similar to that of a sunburst Gibson ES-335 guitar. His matching belt was tooled with crocodiles. Three phones hung from it: one satellite and two cell phones, she guessed.

  “I will show you my home.”

  “Let me go.”

  He wagged a thick finger at her and s
hook his head slightly. “You will now see my home.”

  8

  THEY TOOK THE ELEVATOR TO the basement kitchen. It was large and two black women labored over the stoves and another operated a tortilla maker. It was hot and fragrant. Two young men sat in folding chairs by a far wall, weapons across their knees.

  “A large kitchen,” said Armenta. “Yes, very large.”

  “Why are the staff all black?”

  “I used to live in the Caribbean.”

  They left the kitchen through steel double doors and entered a warren of windowless vaults that soon defeated her sense of direction. The air was cool and smelled of concrete. Armenta led the way, apparently disinterested and walking fast, revealing the large handgun holstered at the small of his back. But Erin was intrigued by the mystery of this place and she lagged behind to see.

  The vaults were large and the ceilings high and all were made of concrete block, unpainted, roughly cemented together. In the first was a bank of four large Honda generators, which groaned along. It was vented to the outside by a network of pipes and grates, and the adjacent vault was filled with fifty-five gallon drums of what Erin figured must be gasoline to run the generators.

  In some of the vaults were large quantities of canned food and bottled water, sacks of flour, rice and beans. Others, she saw, were stacked high with crates and pallets of music CDs and movie DVDs. Thousands of them. She recognized the covers of some—American and Mexican musicians and Hollywood movies and TV shows—and she remembered Bradley telling her that the Mexican drug cartels weren’t selling just drugs anymore, but also pirated entertainment and both stolen and counterfeit designer fashion ware. She wondered if any Erin and the Inmates CDs were in the crates. Not likely, she thought, as they were a good band and known but not famous.

  One large room was filled with Olmec statuary much like she remembered from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. She had always been impressed by the great brooding heads with their infinite gazes. Another room had Toltec pieces and another was cluttered with Mayan artifacts, many crumbling with age—stone serpents and jaguars and great blackened blocks that must have come from pyramids or temples or one of the big sporting arenas like she’d seen in Chichen Itza. Armenta stopped and spoke softly into one of the cell phones as he waited for her.

  They took the elevator up one floor to the ground-level zoo. It included two tigers, two lions, two leopards, two jaguars, two pumas and two ocelots. Armenta said they were mated pairs. Their separate enclosures spanned outward like the spokes of a half-wheel from the common hub of the Castle’s ground floor, then continued out into the jungle behind the structure in widening angles. The runs were separated by metal spike fences that Armenta said were too high even for the leopards to jump. The viewing area took up approximately the rear half of the ground floor of the Castle, and had a cobblestone floor and a low limestone ceiling that, to Erin, gave it the look and feel of a dungeon.

  Here in the viewing area the cages converged, each of the enclosures ending at a large rust-eaten barred door that might have come from a prison. Monkeys sat on the cobblestones just out of claw range or walked with tails waving as they contemplated and jeered the captives. A giant sloth slept in a leather chair. A group of coatimundis came wobbling in from an opening on one side of the enclosures, crossed in front of Erin and Armenta, and continued out another. Parrots and macaws in reds and greens sat atop the prison doors. Peacocks and hens came and went. In the shade near the courtyard stood a large aviary filled with what looked like pigeons.

  “I brought the cats in so you could see them.”

  Erin studied the animals. They looked healthy. Their coats shone even in the dim light except for the lions, pale and tawny, the color of the hillsides where she lived. All of the animals were calm except the leopards. They paced opposite sides of their cage in opposite directions, six steps from the bars to the raised grates that kept them from their runs, six steps back, again and again as if counterbalanced. The tigers seemed curious about her though the lions did not. She recognized the black jaguar from the third-floor landing and it beheld her again with its pale green eyes. Eyes like the moon, she thought, eyes like the stone heads that stare forever. A piece of a song she had been hearing came to her now and she added to it: Come to me by moonlight, sugar/Let the moon be your guide/Be a jaguar in the jungle/Be a cat with Olmec eyes. She sensed Armenta looking not at the cats, but at her.

  “I give them to friends. I sell them occasionally. They are splendidly cared for and indulged and yet this changes their natures none. They are not dogs and can never be as dogs. This is what I respect in them.”

  Armenta walked to the last barred door and pushed a red button on the wall. Erin saw the enclosure grates withdraw into their respective concrete floors and the animals, some running and others walking, travel back into their dark slices of jungle.

  Again they took the elevator up, though Armenta pushed one of the lower buttons. It was a good-sized car, paneled with Honduran mahogany, which Erin recognized from the precious bookshelves in her father’s Austin library. She counted six unnumbered control buttons. She and Armenta looked self-consciously straight ahead as strangers in elevators do. She could smell his cologne and the leather of his belt and sandals.

  “How many levels?” she asked.

  “Four or five.”

  “Which?”

  “This is level two.”

  “Why is there no third-floor landing?”

  He shrugged and they walked down a marble-floored hallway and came to another armed man, seated outside a door. Erin recognized him from the van. He rose and opened the door for them and Erin stepped into a large, well lit office. There was a counter with a sink and a coffeemaker and a refrigerator in one corner. The office was carpeted and three of the walls were lined with CD racks. Hundreds and hundreds of recordings, she saw. Some she recognized by their cover art and many she did not. The racks were so high there were wheeled ladders to reach the upper discs.

  “From all over the world,” said Armenta.

  “I thought I had a lot.”

  Armenta led her past a desk with a sleek new computer on it and little else. He held a door open for her and as she stepped in, Erin recognized the wonderful aural hush of a recording studio.

  The control room was large and filled with state-of-the-art equipment—a vintage Trident mixing board, Genelec loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling, a pair of NS-10 near-field speakers and Auratones on the board. She saw the two Studer twenty-four-track tape machines, and the racks with the Neve compressor, a near-holy Pultec EQP equalizer, FX, reverb mainframes dat machines, CD players and tape decks, a dedicated Mac. It was cold as control rooms are. As she moved slowly through it, looking at the expensive equipment, she felt no warm spots in the room, and she thought of her first recording sessions in an Austin garage when she was so young her brothers insisted on being there with her: the heat and the terrible acoustics and the troubled wannabe record producer who swilled warm beers and smoked joints and finally fell asleep on the floor mumbling sweet nothings to the cover of an Emmylou Harris long-play.

  “Forty-eight tracks of analog,” said Erin. “And a Mac to store the digital. You have all the good toys,” she said.

  “I like the warmer sound of the analog.”

  “I always have too.”

  He nodded. “However the digital has no hissing, and duplication is very convenient. I do the recording. I am a good engineer. I play accordion, but not well. I sing poorly.”

  He held open the heavy door and they stepped into the tracking room. The ceilings were high and the rafters exposed and the woodwork and finish were handsome.

  “This is more Honduran mahogany,” said Armenta.

  Here in the tracking room his voice was flat and clear, as if stripped of nonessential vibration. Erin could tell that the baffles and sound-proofing were excellent, though hidden within the gorgeous woodwork. The air here was lively in a shimmery way—a tuned
tracking room, she thought. Beautiful. There was a big drum booth, a piano booth in which a Yamaha grand piano held court, a vocal booth caked with foam from ceiling to floor. She turned and looked at Armenta.

  “Los Jaguars de Veracruz have recorded here. And Mara Graco. Do you know Mara Graco?”

  “I love Mara Graco. La Cumbia de Rosas.”

  “And La Casa du tus Sueños.”

  “The House of Your Dreams.”

  “Her voice is almost that of a man. It is smoking and rich and hides something sharpened. She plays the piano very well but this talent is not featured on her recordings. Until here. Here Mara Graco played the Yamaha. It was…extraordinary. I want Flaco Jimenez to come here. So robusto, his accordion. I have seen him perform many times.”

  Erin looked briefly at Armenta. His gray-black hair sprang randomly but his hangdog eyes were intensely focused on her. He seemed flushed by the memory of Mara Graco playing the Yamaha. For a moment his face held a ruddy glow and the hint of a smile. Then these faded and Erin saw the haunted face she had seen before, a man with losses he could not recover and regrets he would not outlive.

  “And the Brazilians?” asked Armenta with a small twinkle in his eyes. “Nora Ney? Marisa Monte?”

  “Hipnotico,” said Erin. “I love the Brazilians. They absorb so much and make it all work. I miss the old sambas.”

  “I very much love the Irish too,” said Armenta. “And when the Chieftains play together with Los Tigres del Norte—”

  “The Irish and the Mexicans together,” said Erin. “Was ‘San Patricio’ a wonder or not? With Ry Cooder!”

  “Did you know that the accordions were brought here by the German and the Polish miners? Because they could travel with them. And the Mexicans fell in love with this sound. That is why much of our music is polka music—German polkas played faster and with happiness! Oh, yes, then you mix into this the passionate Irish. I reproduced two hundred and ten thousands of CDs of ‘San Patricio,’ and sold them easily. The Chieftans are excessively popular in Mexico, as are the Celtic Women. I made forty thousands of DVDs of their American PBS special. And the Spanish musicians who are so diverse and unpredictable, I am trying to bring them a bigger audience in Mexico, much bigger. The Arabic musical influence is so distinctive and unusual in Spain. Absolutely! And the Scottish are among my favorites—from ancient highland bagpipes to the guitar of Mark Knopfler! And he mixes them together in ‘Piper to the End!’ And of course the English, too, they produce greatness. And you Americans. You have Bob Dylan and the Boss and Bonnie Raitt and Taylor Swift. You may wish to know that Erin and the Inmates are beginning to be very popular in this country, especially in the states along the Gulf of Mexico. I sell you very strongly there because many of these states are friends to me. And because Mexicans love women who can sing. So they love you. I sell CDs of American women singers by the many of thousands. Most in Mexico, but many to Central and South America. Not in the United States anymore because of iPods. All of those products you saw in the basement are ready to be shipped. Of course, the downloading of music will ruin my CD business when the iPods become more affordable here. Until then, I will sell to the people what they want.”