Gringos Read Free

Eli.”
    â€œI bought it from Eli.”
    â€œWell, whatever you do, I don’t want to know about it. I really am out of the game. You might pass that word around.”
    â€œI was just curious about the current value. I wanted you to see it. You’re not the only one around here with an eye for these things. I don’t plan to sell it right away. It’s a wonderful investment.”
    It was an investment worth about $35 and there was no telling what he had paid Eli Withering for it. The piece was six or seven inches high, a terra cotta figure of a haughty Maya woman, seated tailor-fashion, with earlobe plugs, bead necklace and upswept hairdo. She held a fan or rattle across her body. There was a piece just like this under glass in a Mexico City museum, dated 800 A.D., and it too was a fake, or a fine copy, as we say.
    This one was in mint condition all right. An old grave-looter named Pastor had minted it very recently in his shop at Campeche. It wasn’t worth much, unless you could find another gullible buyer, but in a sense it wasn’t altogether a fake. Pastor had come by a genuine Maya mold from the island of Jaina and he used it to press out and bake a few of these things now and then. Maybe more than a few. He was getting careless. He had left a sharp ridge on this one, untrimmed, where the base of the mold had pressed against the excess clay. The ridge was much too sharp and fresh. Along the back he had beveled off the clay with his thumb, the way you do with putty on a window pane.
    Things had turned around, and now it was the palefaces who were being taken in with beads and trinkets. Emmett carefully wrapped it again and put it away in a drawer. I dozed. I had work to do, bills to pay, an overdue delivery job in Chiapas, but not today. Emmett read a detective novel. He and Frau Kobold read them day in and day out, preferably English ones and none written after about 1960. He said the later ones were no good. The books started going wrong about that time, along with other things. I put the watershed at 1964, the last year of silver coinage. For McNeese it was when they took the lead out of house paint and ruined the paint. I forget the year, when they debased the paint.
    Poor Emmett. He had been here more than thirty years, perhaps the only person ever to come to Mexico seeking relief from intestinal cramps, and still he thought he could beat a zopilote like Eli Withering, a hard-trading buzzard, at his own game. Emmett came from Denver and went first to Tehuacán for the mineral water treatment, then drifted on to Mazatlán, San Cristóbal, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Cuernavaca, Mérida, in that order. It wasn’t a natural progression or one easy to understand. Along the way he had been married and divorced many times. He could still call all the wives by name. Now his money was gone, from the family-owned chain of movie theaters in Colorado, or almost gone.
    I said nothing about the anonymous letter. It was unlikely that Emmett would write such things, but then sometimes he was out of his head, from all that medication.
    Later that evening Louise came by the hotel and gave me some green figs and a handmade card for Christmas. She had tried to give Frau Kobold a little knitted belt of some kind, only to be turned away at the door.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with that old woman?”
    â€œShe won’t accept charity from strangers. I’ve told you that, Louise.”
    â€œA Christmas gift is not charity.”
    â€œNo, but that’s her way. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just leave her alone.”
    She walked around inspecting my room. She pulled the curtain and looked into the closet, which was so shallow that the coat hangers hung at a slant. She asked if she could use my bathroom. When she came out she said, “I didn’t really have to go but I wanted to see how you had organized your bathroom. I wanted to check out your shaving things and your medicine