Franklin de Dios said, “How you doing?”
Jack heard him. The weird-looking Indian was right there in front of him. He saw him say it. The same way he said it coming out of the Men’s room.
But Jack said, “What?”
“I wonder if you are a cop.”
Jack kept looking at him.
“But I don’t think so. Man, now I don’t know who you are. You drive that coach… Will you tell me something? That girl was in there, wasn’t she?”
Jack didn’t answer. The guy spoke with an accent, but without strain or any kind of emotion. The guy sounded as if he really wanted to know. It didn’t make sense.
“See, they never told me what that girl did, why they wanted to have her… If you not going to tell me, it don’t matter. You going to shoot me, uh?”
“You just do what you’re told, is that it?”
“They say you have to take orders.”
“You don’t seem to have any trouble with it. Shoot Boylan in the back, nothing to it.”
“Who is Boy-lon?”
“You mean you kill a guy, you don’t even know his name?”
Now the Indian’s face showed surprise, a glimmer of it, and then gone.
“After, maybe, yes, you can know who you kill. If you have time to look in the man’s pockets for food or for money.”
“For food?”
“Yes, and you see his name sometime. The guys that have army IDs. But what difference does it make? He don’t know you either. He could be looking in your pockets if you not lucky that day.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You going to kill me-do you know my name?”
Jack said, “You’re a weird fucking guy, Franklin,” and saw that glimmer of surprise again on the face in the mirror. “Take off all your clothes and get in the shower.”
Franklin de Dios nodded, moving toward the tub as he took off his coat. “Shoot me in there so there won’t be no blood.” He stepped out of his pants and they were looking at each other directly for the first time.
“We tie their hands behind them, make them kneel. They do that, too, the Sandinistas. I think everybody does it that way.”
“You’re talking about the war. Killing prisoners.”
“Yes, of course. Tha’s what you do.” The Indian’s shirt came off to show a muscular torso, green-striped boxer shorts. He looked over again. “Tell me how you know my name.”
Jack said, “Listen, I’m gonna step out for a minute. Turn the water on and get in. I’ll be right back.”
“I have to take my shoes off.”
“They get wet, what difference does it make?”
“Yes, you right. We always make them take their shoes off. But nobody is going to need these shoes. Unless, do you want them?”
“Will you get in the fucking shower?”
Jack stepped out of the bathroom, closed the door and waited. In a few moments he heard the shower go on. He pictured Franklin de Dios in there in his green drawers adjusting the faucets, not too hot, not too cold… Jesus, the guy accepting it, waiting to die.
The next ten seconds he spent at the dresser, opening the drawer, shoving the Beretta and the extra magazines under the guy’s shirts, then closing the drawer and walking off and then returning to the dresser-because it didn’t make sense to put the guy’s gun back, the guy was going to know he was here-and wasted another ten seconds thinking about it, Christ, hearing that shower going. He told himself, forget the fucking gun; started out again, stopped, dropped the key on the floor, and kicked it under the bed.
No more going into hotel rooms, never again.
“ALL I COULD THINK OF WAS, no more of this shit. I have to get out of here. I did look over the rail. You were still there.”
“Yeah, stuck with those guys. This creep asking me about Miami. Have I ever been to the Mutiny, Neon Leon’s? He wants to know what bars I go to, if I ever get over to Key Biscayne. Where’s Key Biscayne? I was in Miami once in my life, when I was eighteen.”
They were in Jack’s Scirocco parked at the foot of Toulouse, the river close by in the dark, beyond the cement dock and the silhouette of a dredge against the night sky.
“That was my last time. Ever,” Jack said. “I’m not even sure if I’ll ever stay at a hotel again.” He started the car. “We better go to your place.”
“No. It’s too depressing… It’s sort of a mess.”
“Tell me what the guy said, when he came back.”
“He didn’t say anything. So I assumed, well, at least you didn’t get caught. You were either gone by then or hiding under the bed or in the closet…”
“You didn’t see me leave?”
“How could I? They’re looking right at me.”
“The guy must’ve said something. The Indian. That’s what he is, a Miskito Indian.”
“He handed Bertie the letter and Bertie started yelling at him in Spanish, I guess for taking so long.”
“What letter?”
“From the President, Reagan. First he read it out loud and then I had to read it… I didn’t understand the last line. It was in Spanish.”
“Was the guy, when he came back, did he look wet?”
“Wet? Why would he be wet?”
“He didn’t say anything at all?”
“Nothing, not a word, he just stood there. Bertie yelled at him and then the other guy got into it.”
“Crispin?”
“Crispeen. Those little arrogant guys love to yell. I did look up at the top floor when they were yelling. I knew you were okay, but where were you? The colonel, he started touching me then, running his hand up my arm, telling me what a wonderful time we’re gonna have. Jack, I had to get out of there. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Bertie, but I can’t go out with you.’ He said, ‘But why?’ I said, ’Cause you’re too fucking short,’ and left.”
Turning out of the lot toward Canal Street Jack said, “Did the guy’s hair look wet?”
They had a drink at Mandina’s while he told her about the Indian, Franklin de Dios, coming into the room. Then he had to tell her about the colonel raising funds, that much. He’d tell her the rest in a quiet place. They left the car at Mandina’s and walked. She asked him where they were going; he said, wait.
When they came to Mullen & Sons Helene said, “Oh, no, uh-unh. I’m not going in there at night. Are you kidding?” She looked up at the gray turreted shape in the streetlight and said, “It used to be someone’s home, didn’t it?”
She stood in the lighted front hall, not moving, while Jack looked in the visitation rooms. He came back to her shaking his head, took her arm as they moved toward the stairway and she said it again, “Oh, no, uh-unh.”
“If I’m not here and there’s a body, Leo gets somebody in. You know what I’m talking about? He calls a security service and they send a guy over.”
“Jack, I don’t want to see a dead person.”
They were in the upstairs hall. “There aren’t any here. I’ll show you.” He reached into a doorway and turned on the light. “This’s the embalming room. If there was a body it’d be laying on that table.”
“Oh, my God,” Helene said. She didn’t move. “What’s that thing?”
“That’s the embalming machine.”
“Porti-Boy? Oh, my God… How does it work?”
“Come on.” He turned the light off and took her down the hall to his apartment.
“What’s this?”
“Where I’ve been living the past three years.”
“Gee, it’s nice, Jack. Who’s your decorator?”
He said, “Helene, I was in a bathroom with a guy that thought I was gonna kill him. Try to imagine something like that. He didn’t cry, he didn’t say please don’t… It was the same guy yesterday at the restaurant. You were there.”
“I must’ve left just before.”
“Well, it was the same guy. He’s standing there in the bathroom, he thinks I’m gonna shoot him, and he asks me if I want his shoes. Can you tell me what kind of a guy would say that?”
Helene didn’t answer. She watched him get a bottle of vodka from the refrigerator that stood in the barely furnished room; she sat with him in the old sofa that used to be downstairs and didn’t say anything, not a word, until he had told her everything that had happened from the trip to Carville on Sunday until this Tuesday evening at the St. Louis Hotel.