In Flames (5 page)

Back outside on the hot sidewalk, as I was heading for my car, unexpected sounds startled me.

The echoing of Santería ritual drums from nearby foothills behind the town was unusual. I hadn't heard the cult's drums in the daytime before.
Many people miss Delgado Vinny, they loved that crazy joker
…

I drove back to the club, under the sun at its apex, a pitiless light drenching the city, and in my mind I turned over the major's story about the Fergusons, images stark and absorbing as a cable TV epic, a soap opera shot through with shards of tabloid sensationalism and unimaginable corruption. So why did Elaine hit Vinny in the head with an empty beer bottle? What truth had he babbled that provoked her? And why, shortly after, did she disappear from the club party, wandering off through a palm grove in the direction of the beach? I still hadn't said a word to anyone about Elaine's actions, but if other guests had seen her rushing back, hurrying past me right under my nose, I might have a truth or two of my own to reckon with.

I drove along the shore road to a point shortly past the club entrance, pulling into a spot above the beach and palm grove. The air was breezeless, not a ripple on the blue sea surface. Across the sand a lone policeman stood near the waterline, an almost wistful dark figure looking out to sea as if searching the horizon for an answer to the mystery of the roped-off crime scene under his guard.

I arrived at the club in time for the weekly crab salad lunch. An unusual quiet hung over the bar terrace, the clinking of cutlery unaccompanied by table conversations. The luncheon guests, all of them—I felt certain of this—were watching me take a seat at an empty table. Elaine was nowhere in sight. A club member at the next table, Jerry Klauer, a frequent poker player, his skin tanned the color of old copper coins, leaned over and in a soft voice said to me,
“Finito.”

“What is?”

He tilted his head toward the manager's private suite. “Old guy's gone.” The suddenness of the news that Ferg was dead knocked the breath from me, and I called for a cold beer, my throat parched as sand.

“What did the police talk about?” Klauer said.

“Police?” I sounded like a croaking frog.

“Right, the major. You got the first summons, they figure you're so green here, you'll blab anything. The rest of us will get called to headquarters soon, you can bet on it.”

Cutlery went on clinking, food served, wines and beers poured, and I felt every eye in the club stay fixed on me. I wasn't trusted, I was suspect, I was still an outsider who had little idea of what the right words were.
What in God's name should I say
…Ferg was dead. The thought of his still-warm body lying only yards away from the lobster salad tables, Elaine grieving at his bedside, all this chilled me despite the heat, and I recalled those transfixing details from the soap opera the police major told me.

“So what do you think, Dan?” poker player Klauer persisted. “The cops figure out what really happened?”

“I don't know, I swore to the major I don't know anything.”

“Way to go.” He nodded approvingly, and this reassured me, but of what exactly I remained unsure. Did other members believe I knew more than I let on? Did they know more? I ordered lunch and sipped a beer.

“Did he die quietly?” I said to Klauer. Dumb question, and at once I felt like a fool—what difference did it make, Ferg was gone.

“What's really bad here,” Klauer said, “is the timing in all this. It totally sucks.”

They were all on the same wavelength, and this shook me. Everyone was in on something, eyeballing me because they distrusted me. I still wasn't one of them, not a real member in their circle. I was a negligible scrap floating in a void with no real bond at the Club Saint Ignatius, at least not yet in their eyes. An outsider still, who couldn't be trusted not to let something slip out, something that might condemn them all…condemn for what crimes and to what punishments, this wasn't for me to know, not yet.

Elaine appeared on the terrace, clipboard in hand, and the members paused over their lobster salads, silence absolute as she moved behind the bar and started making a phone call. She looked the same as ever, clinging dress, swaying breasts, and I noticed precisely this, her breasts. My obsession was so absurd, was she supposed to wear a bra as a sign of mourning? Her voice, on the quiet terrace, was clear. “Padre Cardenio there? Please tell him to come. We can't wait too long for the funeral, not in this heat.” She ended the call, but didn't move out from behind the bar. A server passed, and without glancing at him, she said, “Get the kitchen cleaned.”

The club golf pro, Jimmy Padgett, looked up from his lunch. “The funeral tomorrow, Elaine?”

“Yes, early.”

“At the cathedral—”

“No, Padre Cardenio doesn't work at the cathedral anymore, he and Mendoza the monsignor don't get along and the higher-ups even want him kicked out of the Church. The service is in the chapel at the expat cemetery.” She was staring at me, I could feel her eyes on me, but didn't have the nerve to look up from my lunch and beer. “Did you go to the police station?” she said, coming over to my table. “They give you a hard time?”

“No, the major gave me a drink.”

I stopped abruptly, a complete ass, certain again of the members' scornful suspicions. And then I spotted it, what I hadn't noticed before—Elaine was wearing lip gloss. How was that for grief. And she was smiling at me, nothing gleeful, only a small pleasant sign. It wasn't easy interpreting her smile correctly. Was she relieved that Ferg's suffering had ended? Pleased she was liberated, a widowed heiress? She poured herself a glass of cold chardonnay from a bottle in the ice bucket on the bar.

“What did they finally do with poor Vinny?” she said. “Anyone know?”

“The police took him to Xy forensics,” Jimmy Padgett said. “Shotgun, they're pretty sure of it, right next to his head. The cop on the beach is sifting sand for a discharged shell. No luck yet. No gun either. By the way, I got free time this afternoon, anyone up for nine holes, it's my treat.” No one responded. “Okay, another day, the least I can do. Elaine, I'll take a glass of that chardonnay, if I may.”

Walter Ferguson's memorial service was a simple affair.

Everyone appeared at Ferg's parties, but few came to his funeral. Several members of the club and I showed up for what promised to be a mercifully brief ceremony in the chapel at the nondenominational cemetery run by Xy Corp., a burial ground reserved for expats, mainly Americans whose families could afford rip-off interment fees for farewells to loved ones who died before they made it back to the States.

A slight flurry of excitement rippled through the onlookers—
mourners
would be an overstatement, as no one was weeping and only Elaine wore black—when a priest in a smudged white cassock entered. His inappropriate, almost impoverished appearance startled me, as did the memory of where I'd first seen Padre Cardenio. Those soft gentle charismatic eyes and patient pacing of the hall at police headquarters, nauseating smells rising from interrogation cells, as the intense unwearied man turned the pages of his breviary under photos of insurgent corpses strung up in trees like drying fruit. Padre Cardenio, his head bowed over Walter Ferguson's coffin, stood still for a moment's silence, and club members exchanged meaningful glances as though reminding each other of an agreement they'd entered, an agreement I knew nothing about. I was certain I remained ignorant of far too much in San Iñigo, and this could be dangerous. Along with other members, I donated to the cost of a single large wreath of colorful island flowers that rested against the front of the coffin, this contribution the extent of any fellowship I sensed, bound to the others only by a death. In an abstract way for each of us, our attendance there was our own doing—we'd all chosen to come to San Iñigo, none of us conscripted, and as my gaze shifted from face to face among the oddly placed gathering, an apprehension gripped me about my presence lumped together with such a strange assembly, a realization that made absurd our individual lots and even our collective fate. We were all good examples, and at the same time casualties, of a hunger for easy profits edging inexorably around the globe, our goal specific if narrow, little more than simply cashing in. Despite the rising heat, this grim insight made me shiver.

Elaine stood to the right of the coffin, looking almost bored, as if the subject of the ceremony had been more or less a stranger who didn't much interest her any longer, her status now one of unhindered availability. Her hands stayed folded in front of her, perhaps in prayer, perhaps not. I forced my gaze to her face, and in the chapel's semidarkness, I was struck by its shadowy proud prisms, the angular face of the fashion model she could have been if at age nineteen she hadn't run off with Ferg, her womanly features now tossing off unmistakable flashes, not of grief, but of worldly intelligence and broad experience, which is to say, knowledge. She looked as if she knew far more than anyone else gathered around her late husband's coffin. Such a face, however eccentric, never comes merely by chance, but is earned over long and eventful time. Neither were her eyes accidental, deeply set and boasting alert animal lives, not the kind of eyes possessed by ordinary women. Elaine's face alone told me she was an ultimate insider, all-knowing and self-assured. Elaine knew a great many truths.

“Padre,” she said, “you can start now.” Her voice sounded unnaturally muted, specially pitched for the doleful occasion, as cello-contralto as a dove's, although it was hard to believe the late Walter Ferguson wasn't earning even a single tear from his widow. A quiet moment dragged on as Padre Cardenio regarded Elaine, before reaching over and calmly plucking the white rose from her hair and placing the flower on the bare coffin top. And while his gesture had an air of gentle reproach, Elaine didn't flinch, her composure unyielding, and I found this most troubling of all.

“Ssshhh!” someone hissed, as a beautiful mestiza wandered in, looking quite upset and wiping her eyes. She sank to her knees, sobbing heavily, and began praying in front of the coffin, stopped, looked around, before realizing she'd wandered into the chapel too early or perhaps too late, and was about to get caught up in the wrong burial. Or maybe she knew exactly who the deceased was, and her grief at the sight of his coffin was no mistake at all. Elaine glared at her, and the light-skinned beauty rushed out.

Padre Cardenio's eulogy at the coffin seemed an undemonstrative and generic enough piece for the occasion, even though the prayer was entirely in Spanish, which I still couldn't comprehend sufficiently, not that it would have made a great difference if I'd understood every word. I was hungover from too much rum the night before, and in any event I'd never been in the habit of going to funerals or even to church once I left parochial school. Although I would admit people generally do show off their better sides at these closing events, considerate and kindly, often forgiving, and resolutely upbeat regarding their own prospects for immortality. In this regard, the unwavering if quiet smile on Elaine's glossed lips seemed to signal unbounded optimism, and again I reflected on the police major's story about her and Ferg, her iron hold on the older man, and the profound changes she must have wrought in his existence, all of this compounded by the torment of her continual infidelities.

Almost before it began, Walter Ferguson's memorial service ended, and as we were leaving the chapel, an odd feeling of dislocation overcame me, a powerful discomfort that left me gasping as though battered by a great breaker wave, tossed up in surf on a strange shore surrounded by picturesque palms, Spanish melodies, and a restless crowd of dark-skinned pallbearers. Too much about San Iñigo, when I thought about the place as my unavoidable lot, was dreamily disconcerting, Xy Corp. and unforgiving heat and older expats, too many of whom reminding me of myself, gamblers and late-night drinkers and has-been jocks. I didn't need a Sister Emma to tell my future, the future lay in front of my eyes, in the cortege behind Walter Ferguson's coffin. Club staffers carried the casket up to the gravesite, marching along a black lava gravel path, the members setting out behind them.

Despite intense heat, we moved quickly, Padre Cardenio in front of the coffin, Elaine walking after, a general without her clipboard but still very much in charge, ensuring everything in order. Cactus plants appeared, clumps of tall spiky tubes, barrel cactus, prickly pear. The trail turned to stone rubble, palm trees yielded to more cactus, thornbush, the spikes of century plants. The cemetery was alive with aggressive vegetation. The pallbearers jolted forward over the stones, and the white rose slid off the casket. Long thorny branches raked the top of the coffin and snapped back above the path with an almost retributive viciousness, making us duck and turn our backs.

Some club members who hadn't joined the procession were already waiting at the open gravesite, several of the men puffing cigars. The dark-skinned bearers lowered the coffin into what looked like too shallow a hole. The idea that I myself, after a rum-sodden existence on San Iñigo, might someday be interred the same way in this very cemetery made me uncomfortable. I felt groggy, my stomach sour, the sun like a hot poker burning the back of my neck.

Standing at the rim of the grave, Padre Cardenio sprinkled holy water over the flowerless coffin and said a short prayer as the pallbearers turned to shoveling black earth over the box in the shallow hole, the wreath leaning against the waiting gravestone, an illusion of permanence in the name carved in stone. And then we moved off silently, heading back out of the graveyard.

I began walking apart from the others as if attempting to slip away from my own future, when from behind me golf pro Jimmy Padgett sidled alongside, his breath heavy with alcohol. “Sleep okay last night?” His voice was low. “Not to worry, pal, we all got a summons now. Arbusto wants to sit in on more questioning at his office, same day for everyone. You too, Dan, you get an encore.” Jimmy rolled his eyes. “Lucky you.” General Armando Arbusto was the San Iñigo vice president and army chief of staff. An unquenchable thirst dried my mouth and throat, sweat-drenched shirt clinging to my back. I'd have found it easier to play a role again for the police major—or even the general—if I could be grilled by either one of them alone. But facing two interrogators, I was afraid when I answered one man's questions, the other might detect a false note, something incomplete in my tone, an unnatural hesitation. And he'd pounce.