Aztlan: The Courts of Heaven (5 page)

“Not yet,” he said. “But I’ll be wracking my brain, that’s for sure.”

Great, I thought.

While I had him on the line, I took a shot: “Tell me, did Coyotl ever give you the impression he didn’t want to play a game?”

Pactonal laughed. “That guy wanted to play even when there
wasn’t
a game. He wanted to play in his
sleep
.”

Just then, I heard a female voice in the background. I couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying, but I got the general idea. Apparently, Coyotl’s disappearance wasn’t the
only
reason Pactonal had stayed up late.

“Got to go,” he said. “Speak to you later.”

“No doubt,” I replied—though, truthfully, I wasn’t looking forward to it. When I’d asked him to buzz me, it was in the hope that he would actually have something to say.

Then something occurred to me. Coyotl’s current teammates hadn’t known a lot about him. But his previous teammates, guys who knew him when he first came up . . .

I put in a call to one of them—a guy named Nagual who had played long enough to have been on
my
teams before he was on Coyotl’s. Unfortunately, I got no response. I left a message asking him to get back to me as soon as possible.

As the Merchant City was enclosed on three sides by roadless hills, my driver had to cut back into Aztlan into order to get to Oxhoco’s place. In the auto-carriage as much as by rail, entering the Merchant City was like crossing over into a different world.

The careful, ordered symmetry of broad streets, soaring pyramids, and splendid reflecting pools of Aztlan proper suddenly gave way to a frenzy of chaos and color. Where Aztlan was majestic, dignified, the Merchant City was a hive—each fat, bristling bee striving eagerly to crawl over all the others for the chance to suck up a little more nectar.

I had never met Oxhoco before but I had heard a lot about him. After all, he represented not only Coyotl but a half-dozen other ball court players. From what I had heard, none of them were unhappy with his negotiations on their behalf.

He turned out to be short and squat, with a couple of chins too many. A toad of a man. But a toad who liked expensive things, if the dramatic array of furnishings in his office was any indication.

“What can I do to help?” he asked after we had sat down on matching ocelot-skin chairs under a painting of a sunset by an artist whose name escaped me. “Please tell me.”

“How well do you know Coyotl?” I asked.

He held out his pudgy hands, palms up. “I’m his agent, for the gods’ sakes.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Just then, a woman walked into the room. She was beautiful in a girlish way, with long, dark lashes, a long, graceful neck, and long, shapely legs.

But there was nothing girlish about her demeanor. She had that look I’d seen before in women who worked in the Merchant City—a look that said, “Beans first, everything else second.”

“Investigator Colhua,” said Oxhoco, “this is Calli Ollin. She’s working with me for a little while, getting to know the ball court business.”

I extended my hand to the woman. Her hand was slim but her grip was firm—a lot firmer, in fact, than Oxhoco’s had been.

“A pleasure to meet you,” she said, her voice soft yet rough around the edges.

“Same here,” I said.

“I asked Ollin to join us,” said Oxhoco. “She’s been working with Coyotl pretty closely over the last half-cycle or so. I thought she might be of some value to your Investigation.”

I nodded. “Thanks.” Then I asked Oxhoco the same question I’d asked him before: “How well do you know Coyotl?”

This time he said, “Very well. He’s like a son to me.”

“They’re not just business associates,” Ollin interjected. “Coyotl depends on Oxhoco for everything.”

“What do we mean,” I asked, “by everything?”

“
Everything
,” said Oxhoco. “I picked out his apartment in Tonatiuh. I bought him his clothes. I even introduced him to his friends. He doesn’t trust most people, and for good reason: Most of them want something from him. I make sure he’s surrounded by people he can trust.”

“Including women?” I asked.

The agent’s eyes narrowed. “What are you suggesting, Investigator? That I line up temple women for him?”

“Temple women” was an old-fashioned way of saying “prostitutes.”

“Do you?” I asked.

“You don’t know Coyotl,” said Ollin, interrupting a second time. ”He doesn’t have to pay for women. They’re drawn to him the way moths are drawn to a flame.”

I knew how that went. After all, I had played in the Sun League myself. But I had never been as big a star as Coyotl.

“Does he have any enemies?” I asked.

“Not one,” said Oxhoco. “People love him.”

“
Everyone
has enemies,” I said.

“Not Coyotl,” he insisted. “Even players on other teams admire him.”

I couldn’t tell if he believed what he was saying or if it was just his agent’s brain working overtime.

“All right,” I said, “what about his finances? To your knowledge, did he owe anybody beans?” I had already asked the question of Ichtaca and Xochipilli, but Oxhoco was in a better position to answer it than anyone else.

“No,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. “And before you ask, no one owed him any either. I made sure of it. I said if people take offense when you tell them no, you’re better off without them.”

Good for you, I thought.

“Did he have any health problems?” I asked. It was another question that I had asked before. But then, some ailments weren’t obvious even in the ball court.

“Not one,” said the agent. “Any one of us would be happy to be as healthy as he is.”

Agent’s hyperbole? It was hard to tell. As Coyotl’s representative, Oxhoco had every reason to present his client as the picture of health.

I nodded. “That’s it for now. If anything else occurs to me, I’ll give you a buzz.”

“I’ll be here,” Oxhoco assured me. He turned to Ollin. “Why don’t you show our guest to the door?”

“Of course,” she said. She gestured. “This way.”

I watched her unfold herself from her chair. It was by far not the most unpleasant thing I had done that day, or even that cycle. Following her down the hall was equally far from unpleasant.

There was no question that Ollin was attractive. But I’d known lots of women who worked in the Merchant City, and I’d discovered the hard way that they weren’t my type. Too mercenary, too concerned with piling up the beans. So when we got to the door, all I said to Ollin was, “Thanks for your help.”

I expected her to return my pleasantry with one of her own. Instead, she said, “You know, you were one of my favorite players when you were with the Eagles. I never missed one of your games on the Mirror.”

“Really,” I said.

“Really. In fact, I was present at the game against Yautepec—the one in which you got hurt.”

“You were?” I asked, a little surprised.

“Absolutely,” she confirmed, smiling a tight little smile.

I frowned. “I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that—”

“It was five cycles ago, and I don’t look twenty-five.”

Ever since a boy of fifteen cycles was killed at a match between Yautepec and Ixtapaluca, you had to be twenty to get through the gates. “Well,” I said, “yeah.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I get that a lot.”

“Where were you sitting?” I asked, hoping to get past my little gaff.

“The corridor.”

Corridor seats were hard to come by—even for me, and I still had some contacts. At a championship game, they were nearly impossible. With his connections, Oxhoco might have gotten his hands on them, but Ollin was too young to have been working for Oxhoco back then.

So her family had had a few beans.

“You had a good view,” I said.

“I did—of the game, and also of what happened to you.”

I didn’t remember everything that had happened to me in the ball court, but the gods knew I remembered
that
. Lands of the Dead, I remembered it every day.

“You were down a goal,” she said, as of to prove to me that she had been there, “and the Yautepec defenders had the ball right in front of me. You were trying to dig it out before time expired. It was two against one, but somehow you wrestled it away from them.”

And set my eyes on the goal, with only the center to beat, and the seconds spinning away like leaves trapped in a flood.

“You pretended to kick from where you were, hoping the center would move up to block you. He did. You took advantage of the fact, making a quick move around him.”

The fans were counting down, their voices like thunder in the confines of the Arena. Six, five, four . . .

I pulled my leg back to make the shot, but before I could bring it forward I saw someone come at me from my left. It occurred to me that he might be in time to block my shot. But I didn’t rush.

I put all my concentration into driving the ball through the hoop.

A fraction of a second before I made contact, I felt something hit my plant leg from the side. Not the ball, but my leg.

And more specifically, my knee.

“It must have hurt,” she said.

More than you can imagine, I thought. But what I said was, “I guess. It was a long time ago.”

She studied me for a moment. “You hungry?”

It was the second time she had surprised me in the last couple of minutes. “Sure,” I said.

It was almost dinner time, after all. And if anybody wanted to get me, I had my radio on.

“I know a place,” she said. “My treat.”

I couldn’t have asked for a better deal than that.

I expected Ollin’s “place” to be one of the nicer restaurants along the River of Stars in District Fifteen. That was where you saw all the up-and-coming, young merchants after they left their offices in the Merchant City.

It was a restaurant all right, but it wasn’t in District Fifteen. It was in the heart of the Merchant City, the kind of establishment where the menu had tomato stains on it and the piper in the corner was playing for tips.

“Try the salamander,” Ollin said, plucking some complimentary popcorn from the cracked wooden bowl that sat between us. “They put honey and yellow chiles in the batter.”

I shook my head. “I get my salamanders from only one place—a street vendor in District Ten.”

“Zolin?” she said. “On Xipe Totec Street?”

I found myself smiling. “You know him?”

“
Know
him? I practically support him all by myself. Every time I’m in that part of town.”

“Same here,” I said. “I’m surprised I haven’t seen you there.”

“I’m surprised I haven’t seen
you
.”

“Maybe you have and you just don’t remember.”

She shook her head. “No, I’d remember seeing Maxtla Colhua.”

It was flattering to be spoken of that way. Especially when I hadn’t played a Sun League game in many cycles.

“Well,” said Ollin, turning her attention back to the menu, “if not the salamanders, I’d go for the duck. The cherry sauce is like nothing you’ve ever tasted.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Good move,” she said.

It turned out that she was right about the duck. I’d never had anything quite like it.

And I’d never met anyone quite like her. We got to know each other so quickly that we’d advanced to the more personal questions before we ordered dessert.

“Do you have a mate?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No.”

“An intended, then?”

“Not that either.”

“No woman at all? That’s surprising.”

“Is it?”

“A guy with your looks . . ." She smiled.

I shrugged. “I work a lot.”

“There must be
some
one.” She said it as if she knew it for a fact.

Normally, I would have steered the conversation in a different direction. I didn’t like to talk with women about other women. I figured that was rude.

But for whatever reason, I made an exception. “There
was
,” I conceded. “Not too long ago, someone I’d known when we were kids. But it turned out we didn’t have a great deal in common.”

“She wasn’t interested in your Investigations?”

“Actually,” I said, “she was a suspect in the Renewal murders.”

Calli—I no longer thought of her as Ollin—leaned forward. “Really.”

“But it turned out she wasn’t guilty.”

“Then what was the problem?”

“You mean why aren’t we still together?”