Maya's Notebook: A Novel (35 page)

What the members of the Club of Criminals wouldn’t have given for those two crates of lethal toys! We threw the bags in the van, my Nini swept the ground to erase our footprints and the wheelchair tracks, and we closed up the locks and drove away, unarmed.

With the bags in the
van, we went to rest for a few hours in a motel after buying water and provisions for the trip, which would take us about ten hours. Mike and my Nini had arrived by plane and rented the van at the Las Vegas airport. They didn’t know how long, straight, and boring that highway was, but at least at that time of year it wasn’t the boiling cauldron it is in other months, when the temperature goes up over a hundred degrees. Mike O’Kelly took the bags of treasure to his room, and I shared a king-size bed in the other room with my grandma, who held my hand all night. “I’m not even thinking of running away, Nini, don’t worry,” I assured her, collapsing with exhaustion, but she didn’t let go. Neither of us could sleep very much, so we made use of the time to talk. We had a lot to say to each other. She told me about my dad, about how he’d suffered when I ran away, and repeated that she’d never forgive me for having left them without news for five months, one week, and two days. I’d destroyed their nerves and broken their hearts. “Forgive me, Nini, I didn’t think . . .” And it’s true that it hadn’t occurred to me. I’d only thought about myself.

I asked her about Sarah and Debbie, and she told me she’d attended the graduation of my class at Berkeley High, invited by Mr. Harper, with whom she’d become friends, because he’d always been interested in how I was doing. Debbie graduated with the rest of my class, but Sarah had been taken out of school and had been in a clinic for months, in a terrible state, weak and skeletal. At the end of the ceremony, Debbie went over to my grandma to ask her
about me. She was wearing blue, looking fresh and pretty; nothing remained of her goth rags or deathly makeup. My Nini, annoyed, told her I’d married the heir to a great fortune and was in the Bahamas. “Why should I tell her you’d disappeared, Maya? I didn’t want to give her the pleasure, after all the harm she did you with her awful habits,” announced the unforgiving Don Corleone of the Chilean mafia.

As for Rick Laredo, he’d been arrested for something so stupid it could only have occurred to him: dognapping. His operation, very badly planned, consisted of stealing some pampered pet and then calling the family to demand a ransom for the mutt’s return. “He got the idea from the kidnappings of Colombian millionaires, you know, those insurgents, what are they called? The FARC? Well, something like that. But don’t worry, Mike is helping him, and they’ll soon let him out,” my grandmother concluded. I pointed out that it didn’t worry me the slightest little bit that Laredo was behind bars. On the contrary, I thought that was his rightful place in the universe. “Don’t be so hard on him, Maya, that poor boy was very much in love with you. When they let him out, Mike’s going to get him a job at the Animal Shelter, so he’ll learn to respect other people’s puppies. What do you think?” That solution would never have crossed Snow White’s mind. It just had to be my Nini’s idea.

Mike called us from his room at three in the morning. We shared some bananas and rolls, put our meager luggage in the van, and half an hour later left in the direction of California with my grandmother at the wheel. It was very dark,
a good time to avoid the traffic and the patrol cars. I was nodding off, felt like I had sawdust in my eyes, drums banging in my head, cotton in my knees, and I would have given anything to sleep for a century, like the princess in Perrault’s story. A hundred and twenty miles up the road we turned off onto a narrow track, chosen by Mike on the map because it didn’t lead anywhere, and we soon found ourselves in a lunar landscape of utter solitude.

It was cold, but I warmed up quickly by digging a hole, an impossible task for Mike from his wheelchair or for my sixty-six-year-old Nini, and very difficult for a sleepwalker like me. The earth was stony, with creeping dry and hard vegetation. My strength was failing. I’d never used a shovel, and Mike and my grandmother’s instructions just increased my frustration. Half an hour later I’d only managed to make a dent in the ground, but since I had blisters on my hands inside the rubber gloves and could barely lift the shovel, the two members of the Club of Criminals had to be satisfied with that.

Burning half a million dollars is more complicated than we imagined; we didn’t factor the wind into our calculations, or the quality of the reinforced paper, or the density of the bundles. After several attempts, we opted for the most pedestrian method: we put handfuls of bills in the hole, sprinkled them with gasoline, lit them on fire, and fanned the smoke so it wouldn’t be seen from far away, although that was pretty unlikely at that time of night.

“Are you sure all this is counterfeit, Maya?” my grandma asked.

“How can I be, Nini? Officer Arana said that they nor
mally mix fake bills with legal ones.”

“It would be a waste to burn good money, with all the expenses we’ve got. We could save a little bit, just for emergencies . . . ,” she suggested.

“Are you crazy, Nidia? This is more dangerous than nitroglycerine,” Mike said.

They carried on a heated argument while I finished burning the contents of the first bag and opened the second. Inside I found only four bundles of bills and two packages the size of books, wrapped in plastic and sealed with packing tape. We ripped them open with our teeth and fingers because we didn’t have anything sharp and we needed to hurry; it was starting to get light, dark gray clouds sweeping across a vermilion sky. In the packages there were four metal plates for printing fifty- and hundred-dollar bills.

“This is worth a fortune!” Mike shouted. “It’s much more valuable than the money we’ve burned.”

“How do you know?” I asked him.

“According to what the police officer told you, Maya, Adam Trevor’s counterfeit bills are so perfect it’s almost impossible to spot them. The mafias would pay millions for these plates.”

“So we could sell them,” said my Nini, full of hope.

Mike stopped her with a cutting look. “Don’t even think about it, Don Corleone.”

“We can’t burn them,” I interjected.

“We have to bury them or throw them in the sea,” Mike decided.

“What a shame. They’re works of art.” My Nini sighed,
and proceeded to wrap them up carefully to keep them from getting scratched.

We finished burning the loot and covered the hole with dirt. Before we left, Snow White insisted on marking the place.

“What for?” I asked.

“Just in case. That’s what they do in crime novels,” he explained. I had to go find some stones and make a pyramid on top of the hole, while my Nini paced out the distances to the nearest reference points and Mike drew a map on one of the paper bags. It was like playing pirates, but I didn’t feel like arguing with them. We did the trip to Berkeley with three stops to go to the washroom, drink coffee, fill up with gas, and get rid of the bags, the shovel, the plastic container, and the gloves in different garbage cans. The blaze of dawn colors had given way to the white light of day, and we sweated in the feverish steam of the desert; the van’s air conditioning didn’t work very well. My grandma didn’t want to let me drive because she thought my brain was still addled and my reflexes numbed, and she drove along that interminable ribbon for the whole day until night fell, without a single complaint. “Something had to come of having been a limousine driver,” she commented, referring to the era when she met my Popo.

Daniel Goodrich wanted to know, when I told him the story, what we’d done with the plates. My Nini took charge of throwing them into San Francisco Bay from the ferry.

I remember that Daniel Goodrich’s
phlegmatic psychiatrist’s veneer slipped when I told him this part of my story, back in May. How have I been able to live without him for such an eternity? Daniel listened to me openmouthed, and from his expression I guessed that nothing as exciting as my adventures in Las Vegas had ever happened to him. He told me that when he got back to the United States he’d get in touch with my Nini and Snow White, but he hasn’t yet. “Your grandma sounds like a riot, Maya. She and Alfons Zaleski would make a good pair,” he commented.

“Now you know why I’m living here, Daniel. It’s no touristic whim, as you might have imagined. My Nini and O’Kelly decided to send me as far away as possible until the situation I’m embroiled in settles down a bit. Joe Martin and Chino are after the money, because they don’t know it’s counterfeit; the police want to arrest Adam Trevor, and he wants to recover his plates before the FBI gets hold of them. I am the link, and when they find out, I’m going to have them all on my heels.”

“Laura Barron is the link,” Daniel reminded me.

“The police must have figured out I’m her. My fingerprints are all over the place—in the lockers at the gym, at Brandon Leeman’s building—and if they grabbed Freddy and made him talk, heaven forbid, they’d even find them in Olympia Pettiford’s house.”

“You didn’t mention Arana.”

“He’s a good guy. He’s working with the FBI, but when he could have arrested me, he didn’t, although he was sus
picious of me. He protected me. He’s only interested in dismantling the counterfeit operation and arresting Adam Trevor. They’d give him a medal for that.”

Daniel agreed with the plan of keeping me isolated for a while, but he didn’t think it would be dangerous for us to write to each other—no need to overplay the persecution complex. I opened an e-mail account in the name of [email protected]. No one would suspect the relationship between Daniel Goodrich in Seattle and a little kid from Chiloé, one of many friends made on a trip with whom he keeps in touch regularly. Since Daniel left, I’ve used the account daily. Manuel does not approve of the idea. He believes the FBI spies and their computer hackers are like God, omnipresent and all-seeing.

Juanito Corrales is the little brother I always wished I had, like Freddy was too. “Take him with you back to your country,
gringuita
, he’s no use to me, the little brat,” Eduvigis said to me once, as a joke, and Juanito took it so seriously that he’s making plans to live with me in Berkeley. He’s the only person in the world who admires me. “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you, Auntie Gringa,” he tells me. We’re into the third volume of Harry Potter, and he dreams of going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and having his own flying broom. He’s proud to have lent me his name for an e-mail account.

Naturally, Daniel thought it was crazy of us to burn the money in the desert, where we could have easily been caught by the highway patrol, because Interstate 15 has a lot of heavy goods traffic and is policed by land and helicopters. Before making that decision, Snow White and my
Nini weighed up different options, including dissolving the bills in Drano, like they once did with a pound of pork chops, but they all presented risks, and none was as definitive and theatrical as fire. In a few years, when they can tell the story without being arrested, a bonfire in the Mojave Desert sounds better than a liquid that unclogs sinks.

Before meeting Daniel, I hadn’t
ever thought about the male body or ever stopped to contemplate one, except for that unforgettable vision in Florence of
David
: seventeen feet of perfection in marble, but quite a small penis for his size. The boys I used to sleep with never resembled that
David
at all; they were clumsy, smelly, hairy, and covered in acne. I went through adolescence with crushes on movie actors whose names I don’t even remember, only because Sarah and Debbie or some girls at the academy in Oregon did too, but they were as incorporeal as my grandma’s saints. It was easy to doubt whether they were actually mortal, so white were their teeth and so smooth their waxed and bronzed torsos. I would never see them up close, much less touch them; they’d been created for the screen, not for the delicious handling of love. None of them figured in my erotic fantasies. When I was little, my Popo gave me a delicate cardboard theater with cutout characters in paper costumes to illustrate the complicated storylines of operas. My imaginary lovers, like those cardboard figures, were actors without identities of their own who I moved around on a stage. Now they’ve all been replaced by Daniel, who occu
pies my nights and my days. I think and dream only of him. He went away too soon, before we managed to get anything really established.

Intimacy needs time to mature—a shared history, tears shed, obstacles overcome, photographs in an album. It’s a slow-growing plant. Daniel and I are suspended in a virtual space, and this separation could destroy our love. He stayed in Chiloé several days more than he’d planned to. He didn’t get as far as Patagonia. He flew to Brazil and from there to Seattle, where he’s now working at his father’s clinic. Meanwhile I should be finishing my exile on this island, and when the time comes, I suppose we’ll decide where we should get together. Seattle is a nice place, and it rains less than in Chiloé, but I’d like us to live here. I don’t want to have to leave Manuel, Blanca, Juanito, and Fahkeen.

I don’t know if there would be work for Daniel in Chiloé. According to Manuel, psychiatrists go hungry in this country, although there are more neurotics than in Hollywood, because happiness seems kitsch to Chileans. They’re very reluctant to spend money to get over their unhappiness. Manuel’s a good example himself, it seems to me; if he wasn’t Chilean, he would have explored his traumas with a professional and could be living a bit more happily. And it’s not that I’m a fan of psychotherapy—how could I be after my experience in Oregon?—but sometimes it helps, as in my Nini’s case, when she was widowed. Maybe Daniel could work at something else. I know an Oxford academic, one of those with leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket, who fell in love with a Chilean woman, stayed on Isla Grande, and now runs a tourism company. And what about the Austrian woman with the
backside of epic proportions and the apple strudel? She was a dentist in Innsbruck, and now she has a guesthouse. Daniel and I could bake cookies—there’s a future there, as Manuel says—or we could raise vicuñas, as I’d planned to do in Oregon.