Do Not Become Alarmed(63)

41.



CAMILA TRAILED GUNTHER to the hotel bar, which was dim with dark green walls. “Let’s go upstairs,” she pleaded. “Please.”

“The minibar is empty,” he said. He slid onto a stool and ordered a scotch.

The young bartender, balding in his twenties, glanced at Camila, then turned away for a glass. The bar was deserted, everyone worn out from the night before. Nursing hangovers, making resolutions.

“Just one,” Gunther said.

She climbed onto a stool beside him and ordered a gin and tonic.

Gunther’s drink arrived, and he nodded at the bartender. “I keep thinking,” he said in English, for privacy. “This photograph, on the Instagram.”

Camila closed her eyes.

“It could not happen, with Hector there,” he said.

Camila had thought the same thing.

“So either they have done something to him,” he said, “or the two of them are not together.”

The bartender slid Camila’s gin and tonic toward her. It was cold and bitter and lovely: quinine, juniper, lime.

“Their bathing suits were not at the house,” Gunther said. “Why is that?”

“Perhaps they’re still wearing them.”

“And this tiny car,” he said. “I do not believe they were six, plus the housekeeper’s son, in that toy car. It makes no sense. They have been separated.”

“You think Isabel is alone?”

He drank. “I don’t know.”

“I have to believe they’re together.”

“No.” He shook his head. “If they are together, and if Hector could not protect his sister, he can never live with this. It will be terrible for him.” He drained the scotch and pushed the glass toward the bartender.

Camila knew Gunther was really speaking of himself. The bartender poured him a second scotch. “You said just one,” she said.

“Please don’t begin this,” Gunther said.

Camila sipped her drink and felt the beginnings of the numbness she knew Gunther was looking for. But there was no numbing this pain, this fear, not truly. She could only smooth the edges.

“This tortillera detective, she has done nothing,” Gunther said.

“Don’t call her that.”

“It’s what she is.”

“She seems very good, to me.”

“Incompetent. Five days they have been missing.” He drained his new drink, blinked and grimaced, and pushed it back across the bar. The bartender looked to her. Gunther tapped the base of the glass on the wood to retrieve his attention.

The bartender poured.

“These American women,” Gunther said. “They are at fault.”

“I was there, too,” she said quietly.

“No,” he said. “Their children are small. They should have stayed watching. It was their responsibility.”

“Perhaps.”

“They know it,” he said. “This is the reason they attack each other now. Nora was with the guide today, I promise you.”

“I don’t think so,” Camila said.

“Taking a taxi, to go for a walk,” he said, with contempt.

Camila knew he was often right, when he took the dark view. He had no illusions about other people. She suspected that his habit of suspicion came from knowledge of his own character. He saw himself clearly, and knew his own impulses were not as reconstructed as people might wish them to be.

The bartender brought the third drink. Gunther raised it to him in a mock toast. “Salud!”

The young man lifted his beer soberly, then moved away to clean something.

“El patán del río,” Gunther muttered.

It took Camila a moment to understand what he was talking about. The lout of the river. He meant Pedro, the guide. And Nora.

“She has no right to do this to her husband,” Gunther said.

“We don’t know anything,” Camila said.

“I do know that,” Gunther said. “It’s the only thing I know.”





42.



PENNY SAT IN the back seat of the yellow car with her brother, watching the woman with the scrunchie drive. The woman’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel and she seemed nervous, but Penny wasn’t sure why. She remembered the nervous doctor at the big house, who was a drug addict, but this woman didn’t seem like a drug addict. She wasn’t skinny like the doctor.

“Are you okay?” Penny asked Sebastian.

He nodded. Tears had cut rivulets in the dust on his cheeks.

“Do you have the finger-stick?”

He seemed confused by the question.

She dug into his pocket and found the little device, poked his finger for him to draw blood, and waited for the numbers. He was really low, lower than she had ever seen him. “Do you have any sugar?” she asked the woman. “Candy?”

The woman reached for a purse on the passenger seat, then rummaged in it with one hand. She came up with half a roll of mints, the foil uncoiling, and passed them back. Penny studied the mints. SIN AZúCAR! the label said.

“These don’t have sugar,” she said. “Necesito azúcar.” She gave two to Sebastian anyway, and he stuck them in his mouth.