Relic of Time (11 page)

She had hours in her hotel before her return flight was due. She told herself that it was perfectly understandable that she should have been moved by the events surrounding Lloyd's burial. The news of his death had come to her as a thunderclap after she had spoken in the hopes of shocking whoever had answered the phone. She had taken an envelope from the funeral parlor, and she now stuffed some money into it and wrote her name on it. And address. Then she flew back to Minneapolis.

Miguel Arroyo did not strike Neal as a man who was fomenting revolution, claiming vast territories allegedly stolen from his ancestors in the long ago, and now facing kidnapping charges. He swept into the visiting room with the ease of a dancer coming onstage. He had agreed to the interview because Lulu was with
Commonweal
and Neal was just part of the package. Arroyo's charm did not diminish when he learned Lulu was married.

“A working wife?” He expressed merry surprise. The guy could have been an actor. Maybe that was what he was.

“With a working husband.” She nodded at Neal, who got a fraction of the smile, but then he concentrated on Lulu again.

“But you use your own name.”

“Professionally.”

“Ah.” A slight alteration in the mustache, more teeth. You would have thought Lulu had told a dirty joke. Neal decided that he hated Miguel Arroyo. In the young man's presence he felt his age and was sure he looked it, and then some. Lulu was an affectionate woman and marriage was taking it out of him.

“I hope your lawyer agreed to this interview,” Neal said.

“Oh, I'm my own lawyer.” After graduation from San Diego University, the alleged Notre Dame of the West, he had studied law at Berkeley. But even so.

“A fool for a client?”

Lulu intervened. “What's all this about your kidnapping Don Ibanez?”

“A silly misunderstanding.”

“His daughter said you drove away with him.”

“In the passenger seat. He took me into town where I had left my car.”

“And then?”

“I drove here. And was arrested.”

“And what of Don Ibanez?”

He looked blank.

“Did he drive away? Which direction did he go?”

Arroyo was disappointed. “I went through all that with the police.”

“Why were you there? To visit Don Ibanez, I mean.”

“We have much in common.”

He seemed serious. More than once, Don Ibanez had dissociated himself from the firebrand of Justicia y Paz. For the old man, the recovery of California was a romantic dream, all the more attractive for being unrealizable. He was under the spell of a lost cause. Neal wondered if the old man had forebears who fought with the Confederacy. He would look it up.

“You think of him as an ally?”

“I would not presume to speak for Don Ibanez.”

“Has Senora Arroyo been in?” Neal asked.

“My mother has gone to God.” He closed his eyes in commemoration.

“I meant your wife.”

“Have you found her?”

“Is she lost?”

He leaned toward Lulu. “I have yet to meet the woman I am destined to marry.”

“Is there anything between you and Clare Ibanez?”

“What did she say?”

“It has been speculated that you had gone there to see the daughter, not the father.”

Arroyo sat back. “That would be George Worth. He meant to be helpful.”

“Then there's nothing to it?”

“Would I tell you if there were?”

“Why would she accuse you of kidnapping her father?”

“I don't think she quite said that.”

“Who is George Worth?” Neal asked.

He inhaled. “There are two kinds of revolutionary, the practical and the contemplative. George is a contemplative.” He went on to describe the Catholic Worker house in Palo Alto. He urged them to go there. “Clare Ibanez worked there for a time.”

“She did?”

“Imagine a girl with her background living in such poverty and squalor. Yet many others have done it. What do you know of Dorothy Day?”

He seemed disappointed that they already knew of the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. “A pacifist,” he said. “But a saint.”

“How's the war going?” Neal asked. This guy was getting on his nerves.

Miguel Arroyo frowned. “I have ordered hostilities to cease.”

“And have they?”

“Communications are imperfect.”

“He's a phony,” Neal said when they left.

“He is not!”

“I think you made a conquest of a conquistador.”

She looked at him and began to smile. “Jealous? Is Neal jealous?” She begin to tickle him, right there in public.

“He could be your . . .” Careful, careful. “Your little brother.”

“He is cute.”

“Cute!”

Before they left the building, they learned that Don Ibanez's car had been found in a parking lot at LAX. And that was where they went next.

By the time they got there, the police had already checked out the trunk of the car, doubtless influenced by
Prizzi's Honor
and a number of other movies. The trunk was empty. Lulu tugged Neal aside and they went inside the terminal.

“What for?”

“Why would you leave a car in an airport parking lot?”

“Tell me.”

“Because you were going to catch a plane.”

She was right. But it took time to establish it. Don Ibanez had flown out of Los Angeles on Mexicana. Destination, Mexico City.

Ray called to tell Laura that they had a nibble on the reward that Ignatius Hannan had offered for the return of the stolen Lady of Guadalupe.

“Oh, good.”

“Crosby is working with Traeger on it.”

This good news, coupled with that of the discovery of Don Ibanez's car at the Los Angeles airport and learning that he had gone there to catch a flight, made it seem that it all would soon be over. Clare's father had not been kidnapped after all. When contacted in Mexico City, Don Ibanez had been astonished to learn that he had been the object of a police search. He called Clare immediately, and Laura listened to the young woman babble in Spanish to her father. After she hung up, she told Laura she had confessed to her father that it was all her fault.

“What else were you to think?” She wanted to ask why the old man had not told his daughter where he was going, but she sensed that criticism of Don Ibanez would not be welcome. “Is he on his way home?”

“Tomorrow.”

She told Clare then of Ray's message. The young woman was overjoyed. “Oh, I wish I had known that when I was talking with my father.”

Clare suggested that they go to the little basilica and say a prayer of thanksgiving. Laura knelt beside her and wished that she had the simple piety of Clare and her father, and of Nate Hannan, too. She and Ray seemed returned prodigal children, still with only one foot in the faith from which they had wandered.

After several minutes, Clare rose and walked toward the altar. She stood in front of it and stared at the softly illumined image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“Is anything wrong?” Laura asked when she joined her.

“No, of course not.” But she had hesitated before answering.

 

Back in the hacienda, they had lunch and then they settled down and Clare told her all about George Worth again. It was impossible not to feel Clare's anguish. This wasn't the impediment to love created by family feuds, the Montagues and the Capulets, the Whatchamacallits and the McCoys. The impediment wasn't external at all. It was Clare herself who was divided, not just reason against emotion, but a civil war of emotions. She wanted so much to share the ideal of George Worth, but she had been unable to overcome her aversion to the circumstances in which he lived that ideal.

“But couldn't the circumstances be changed, made less, well, whatever they are?”

“Of course they could. I could provide the money, or Father could, but George won't hear of it. The whole point of it is to be as poor as those he welcomes to the house. His life has to be precarious.”

“Is he a Franciscan?”

“Worse.” But she smiled when she said it. It occurred to Laura that the founder of the Franciscan nuns had been Saint Clare.

“I know!” Clare wailed.

When Crosby arrived, Traeger was already there, looking completely unchanged from when he had been hired by Nate.

“First the secret of Fatima, now Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

Traeger nodded. “I can't get out of church.”

It seemed to dawn on Crosby that he had been Nate's second choice to recover the sacred image. But any negative thoughts he might have had about that seemed swept away by the thought of working with Traeger now. Neither man would give any details about what arrangements had been made to meet with the claimant of the reward.