Wild Country

Chapter Forty-Five

The man known to a few as San Antonio Rose took the call on a Wednesday night during late October in his SanTone Ringcity apartment. The caller used a voder with a preset message; such a cheap voder that it did not even place graceful inflections in common phrases.

Even so, the message was too direct to misunderstand. He might care to visit a certain dubok — a word the voder botched badly — one of several drops his leader had established for business connections. There he would retrieve a sample of goods that might be of interest to someone called Caballo the Horse. In due course, the caller would quote a price. End of message.

He pondered the mystery of a caller who knew his telephone code, yet refused to identify himself. It could mean the Department of Justice had penetrated Sorel's channels — but if so, they would already have the apartment staked, and his own channels inside the law would have alerted him. No, the caller was almost surely one of Sorel's regular contacts, because he was obviously familiar with those ringcity duboks.

That particular dubok was in a part of the latino district so conspicuously dangerous at night that only members of a local raza bunch dared walk the shadowed streets. And they dared it only because it was they who made it dangerous. San Antonio Rose decided that the sample, presumably of drugs, could wait until morning. He had not achieved his status in this business by taking insane chances with teenaged muggers.

The caller had chosen that dubok for precisely that reason: San Antonio Rose would almost certainly visit the drop in daylight.

Next morning, after a sidewalk breakfast of huevos con chorizo and a bottle of Negro Modelo beer in the barrio, San Antonio Rose paid a visit to a tiny, parklike, street-corner cemetery; knelt with hat in hand at a flat headstone boasting polyethelyne tulips in a brass vase. He casually rearranged the plastic blooms, then palmed a vial no larger than a thimble and leaned back as though satisfied with his decorating talent. His guess — that the vial contained some illegal drug to be analyzed for purity — was perfectly correct. He did not guess that the cocaine sample was merely bait, sacrificed so that he would not wonder why he had been lured into the open on a fruitless errand. The man remained there for a few moments and then, satisfied that he was not to be challenged, walked away.

The challenge, when it came, was the commonest type to be met there in daylight. The boy who materialized at his side had done so with no more noise than a mouse, on bare feet with soles tough as horn. "Watch your car, shine your shoes, find a virgin, only a dollar," he chanted in locally accented English.

The man shook his head, irked because the little cabrdn had nearly made him jump.

The boy had not kept his belly off his backbone by being shy. "Ever'body needs something, mister." He danced ahead of the man, now skipping backward to match the long strides, and waved his hands for attention. "What you doin' here, anyway? You lost? You look like an Anglo to me."

San Antonio Rose stopped, reached out casually with one hand, then swiftly with the other, grabbing the lad by the collar of a jacket much too large for him — but perhaps the right size to hide a loaf of bread. The man rattled off, in local Spanish dialect, an ugly suspicion concerning a relationship between the boy's mother and a small hairless dog. Then in English he added, "I see a cornshuck in your pocket, so you already stole your tamales for lunch. You love Anglos so much, go find one." He turned the boy around with ease, released him, moved as if to whack his rump.

Of course he swept thin air, as he had expected. Nimble as a mountain goat, the boy darted away and was instantly swallowed between the small, close-packed houses of the barrio. San Antonio Rose smiled to himself and walked on to Fredricksburg Road, where he caught a bus, once more anonymous.

But not destined to remain anonymous for much longer. The boy hotfooted it over fences and between chickencoops to arrive back at a street corner a block from the tiny cemetery. The slender fellow with the soft voice and the scarred face was there, as promised, with a crisp fifty-dollar bill, also as promised. The boy gravely withdrew the little tape recorder from the depths of a jacket pocket; exchanged it for the reward.

They spoke in Spanish. The boy: "It was hard work to make him talk with me. Dangerous. Worth more money."

The adult: "I watched. You were well paid." Then the little recorder went into a tattered shopping bag, next to the camera with the excellent four-hundred-millimeter lens.

The boy had seen the results of knife fights before; surmised that this fellow with the soft voice, badly cut hair, and uncallused hands had met with a broken bottle, and recently. Noting the boy's interest, the fellow turned away, hitched the shopping bag up under one arm, and strode off. The boy thrust the money out of sight and watched his benefactor for a block, wondering what was odd about that stride. Probably a homosexual, thought the boy, and dematerialized into the alleyways. He would break that bill and give only twenty to his mother. She would, in any case, never believe he had earned fifty dollars from a swishing maricon merely by provoking a stranger to curse him.

You could get many, many things in SanTone Ringcity with cash. With cash and close connections of long standing in the legal system, you could get almost literally anything. With several good telephoto close-ups of a man standing on a sidewalk in broad daylight, and a voiceprint of that man in two languages, you had a fair chance of discovering much about him. Especially if he had any criminal record since the war.

The owner of the recorder had everything it took to learn the real identity of San Antonio Rose. Including the burning will to trace his connections, using any means whatever. Now, if San Antonio Rose was known in any capacity by the legal system, he would be revealed by modestly illegal record checks. And from there, Marianne Placidas knew she was not far from locating Felix Sorel.