Santiago nodded.
"And you, my Mexican friend, are you moving here from Los Angeles?"
"Just here to visit my friend," Chollo said, "the pussy cat."
"And what do you do in Los Angeles? When you are there?"
"I work with a man named del Rio," Chollo said.
"Ahh!" Santiago said, and smiled as if this explained much.
Chollo smiled back, and as he was smiling the gun disappeared back under his coat.
"Ahh!" Chollo said.
He was on his feet now, pacing. She watched him struggle for calm, twirling the cigar slowly between his fingers. He had delicate hands, as she always imagined a surgeon's would be, and when he talked he used them expressively. He used everything expressively. His face was very alive, no matter how much he tried to keep it smooth. His eyes were big and they moved continuously, looking at everything, shifting endlessly. He had a big video camera in his hand, though he wasn't using it and appeared to have forgotten it. As he paced, he moved in and out of the small circle of light by the table.
brilliantly.
"I do," he said. "But it is not such a slum, and I am a beneficent owner."
"Yeah," I said. "It looked great till we got in here."
"Give me time, Senor. I have not had enough time. I have spent much time putting down unrest and eliminating troublemakers."
"Except Deleon."
"Si."
"How come he's still in business?" I said.
"He presents a challenge. He is himself a dangerous man." He looked at Chollo. "Volatile?"
"Same in English," Chollo said.
Santiago looked gratified.
"Volatile, and well armed. He has a large, well armed following also. And where they live it is a how do I say?"
He looked at Chollo, making a looping gesture with his hand.
"Laberinto?" he said to Chollo.
"Maze," Chollo said.
"Exactly. It is a maze in there, tunnels connect houses, food stores, barricades. It is a nut that would cost a lot in the cracking."
"But it could be cracked," I said.
"By someone resourceful enough who found it worth the cost," Santiago said. "So far I have not."
"But I might," I said.
"Perhaps."
The car stopped at an intersection, then turned left. We passed an abandoned gas station, the pumps gone, the glass out, and the doors to the repair bay gone. Inside, a group of men gathered around the empty pit where the lift used to be. They were boisterous and excited. Above their excitement were the sounds of animals.
"Dog fight," Chollo said.
"Si," Santiago said. "They put them in the pit and they bet."
"Fun," I said. "What do the dogs get out of it?"
"The winner lives," Santiago said.
We drove on. At the top of the small rise, at the intersection of two silent streets, we stopped. Across from us was a complex of three-storied, flat-roof tenements. Most of the windows were boarded up, though in some there were small openings as if someone had cut a square in the plywood. The clapboard siding on the buildings was probably painted gray once, but it was now peeled down to its weatherstained wood, warping in many places. The windowsills were beginning to warp and splinter as well.
"Those four buildings," Santiago said, "are Luis Deleon's castle."
The alleys between the buildings had been closed off with plywood so that the four buildings formed a kind of enclosed quadrangle. I wondered if Lisa was in there. If she were, it was a different living arrangement than she'd had in Jamaica Plain in the squeaky-clean condo with the Jenn-Air stove and the Jacuzzi.
"If he has the Anglo princess," Santiago said, "he has brought her here."
"But you don't know if he has her," I said.
"It pains me to say this. I know almost everything that happens in Proctor. But this I do not know."
"We need to know," I said. "And we need to know under what circumstances."
"Circumstances?"
"We need to know if she's there because she wants to be, or she's been kidnapped," I said.
"You think an Anglo woman would not wish to come here, with a Latin man?" Santiago said.
"They tell me she would have once," I said. "I need to know if she did now."
"Take more than love for me to move there," Chollo said.
Santiago shrugged. Beyond the derelict tenements, eastward toward the ocean there was a loud clap of thunder, and after it, the shimmer of lightning against a dark cloud that piled high above the roof tops. The rest of the day remained vernal.
"Vamanos!" Santiago said to the driver.
"Let's go," Chollo translated for me.
"I sort of got that one," I said. "Especially when we started right up."
Chollo said nothing. But his eyes were amused.
"What do you think?" Santiago said, facing back toward me.
"You figure if Deleon were out of the way, someone could unite all the Hispanic people into one effective block?"
"Yes," Santiago said. "I do."
"And whoever did that could control the city and the dead whale would be all his."
"Not a pretty way to say it, but this also is true."
"You got anybody in mind to play Toussaint L'Ouverture?"
"Of course it is me, Senor."
"So if I took Deleon out for you it would be a considerable favor."