Cari Mora Read online

  He was deciding what to wear to creep the house. His white latex plugsuit was newly stolen from a fantasy convention and he was mad for it, but it squeaked when his thighs rubbed together. No. Something black and comfortable with no Velcro to rasp if he decided to take off his clothes in the house while he looked at Cari Mora asleep. And a change of clothes in a plastic bag in case he got wet or sticky, and an ornate flask of bleach to destroy DNA, should it come to that. And his stud finder.

  He sang a song in German, a folk song Bach used in the Goldberg Variations called “Sauerkraut and Beets Are Driving Me Away.”

  It was nice to be excited. To be going on a creep. To be getting back at Pablo in his infernal sleep…

  Hans-Peter Schneider was in the hedge beside the big house at 1 a.m. There was a lot of moon, palm shadows black as blood lay on the moonlit ground. When wind moves the big fronds a shadow on the ground can look like the shadow of a man. Sometimes it is the shadow of a man. Hans-Peter waited for a puff of wind and moved with the shadows across the lawn.

  The house still radiated the heat of the day. It felt like a big warm animal as he stood close against the wall. Hans-Peter pressed himself against the side of the house and felt the heat up and down his body. He could feel the moonlight, itchy on his head. He thought of a newborn kangaroo working its way up its mother’s belly toward the warm pouch.

  The house was dark. He could see nothing through the tinted glass of the sunroom. Some of the metal hurricane shutters were down. Hans-Peter stuck a pick into the lock and raked the tumblers twice to scratch them.

  He pushed Felix’s key slowly into the lock. He had the good freezing feeling. It was so intimate for Hans-Peter, pressing against the warm house and pushing the key into the lock. He could hear the tumblers engage in a tiny series of clicks, like the insects talking when he revisited a woman dead for days in the bush and warmed wonderfully—warmed warmer than life by the larval mounds.

  The oval bow of the key was flush now against the rose of the lock. Flush as he would be against her if he decided to go upstairs. Stay stuck to her until she got too cool. Sadly, she would cool faster than the house does as it sheds the heat of the sun. In the air-conditioning she wouldn’t stay warm for long even if he pulled the covers up over them and snuggled. They never did stay warm. So soon clammy, so soon cool.

  He didn’t need to decide now. He might just follow his heart. It was fun to see if he could keep from following his heart. Heart HEAD, head HEART, bump. He hoped she smelled good. Sauerkraut and beets are driving me away.

  He turned the knob and the weather-stripping hissed as he pushed the door open. The stud finder taped to the toe of his shoe would detect any metallic alarm mat hidden under a carpet. He slid his foot across the sunroom floor before he put his weight on it. Then he stepped inside, into the cool darkness, away from the shadows moving on the lawn and the heat of the moon on his skull.

  A twang and rustle in the corner behind him.

  “What the fuck, Carmen?” a bird said.

  Hans-Peter’s pistol was in his hand and he had no memory of drawing it. He stood still. The bird rustled again in its cage, shuffled up and down the perch and muttered.

  Silhouettes of mannequins against the moonlit windows. Did any of them move? Hans-Peter moved among them in the dark. An extended plaster hand touched him as he passed.

  It is here. It is here. The gold is here. Es ist hier! He knew it. If the gold had ears it could hear him if he called to it from this spot where he stood in a parlor. Draped furniture, a draped piano. He went into the bar with its pool table draped to the floor with sheets. The icemaker dumped a tumble of ice and he went into a crouch, waiting, listening, thinking.

  The girl had a lot of information about the house. He should harvest that information before anything else. He could always get the money for her later. She wouldn’t be worth more than a few thousand dead, and to get even that he’d have to ship her in dry ice.

  It made no sense to disturb her, but she was so fetching, so heartwarming on the terrace and he wanted to look at her asleep. He was entitled to some fun. Maybe he could just drip a little on the bedclothes, on her scarred arms, nothing more. Oh, a drop or two on her sleeping cheek, little facial, what the hell? A little might run into the corner of her eye. Hello. Prime her eye for the tears to come.

  The telephone in his pocket buzzed against his thigh. He moved it around until it felt good. He looked at the text from Felix and that felt even better. The text said:

  I got it. I got him to give up his permit for 10K and some good shit to come. Our permit clear tomorrow. Can move in now!

  Hans-Peter reclined on the carpet underneath the draped pool table and punched out some texts with what he called his zinc finger. The nail of his forefinger was distorted by the same genetic affliction that made him hairless. He had learned about zinc finger before he was expelled from medical school on moral grounds. Fortunately his father had been too old to beat him hard for the failure. The nail was sharp and useful for clearing his hairless nasal passages, so susceptible to mold and spores and the pollens of spiny amaranth and rape.

  Cari Mora came awake in the dark and did not know why. Her waking reflex was to listen for the warning sounds of the forest. She came to herself then, and without moving her head she looked around the big bedroom. All the tiny lights were glowing—TV cable box, the thermostat, the clock—but the alarm-pad light was green instead of red.

  A single beep had awakened her when someone turned off the alarm downstairs. Now the alarm light blinked as something passed a motion sensor in the foyer on the floor below.

  Cari Mora pulled on some sweats and got her baseball bat from under the bed. Her phone and her knife and her bear repellent spray were in her pockets. She went out into the hall and called down the winding stairs.

  “Who is it? You better say something now.”

  Nothing for fifteen seconds. Then a voice from below said “Felix.”

  Cari rolled her eyes up at the ceiling and hissed between her teeth.

  She turned on the lights and went down the spiral staircase. She took the bat with her.

  Felix stood at the bottom of the stairs, beneath a movie figure, the toothy space raptor from the Planet Zorn.

  Felix did not look like he was drunk. He did not have a weapon in his hands. He had his hat on in the house.

  Cari stopped four steps from the bottom. She did not feel his piggy eyes on her. Good, that.

  “You call me before you come here in the night,” she said.

  “I got a renter, last minute,” Felix said. “Movie people. They pay good. They want you to stay because you know the place, maybe cook too, I don’t know yet. I got you the job with them. You should thank me. You should give me something when they pay you big movie money.”

  “What kind of a movie?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  “You bringing this news at five in the morning?”

  “If they’re willing to pay, they get their way,” Felix said. “They want to be inside before daylight.”

  “Felix, look here at me. If it’s porn you know what I say to that. I’m walking if it’s that.”

  A lot of pornographic movie production was moving to Miami after the passage of Los Angeles County’s Measure B, requiring the use of condoms onscreen, stifling freedom of expression.

  She’d had trouble with Felix about this before.

  “It’s not dirty movies. It’s like, reality something. They want two-hundred-twenty-volt hookups and fire extinguishers. You know where all that stuff’s at, right?” He took out of his jacket a wrinkled City of Miami Beach filming permit and told her to get him some tape.

  In fifteen minutes she heard a boat close inshore on Biscayne Bay.

  “Leave the dock lights off,” Felix said.

  Hans-Peter Schneider is extremely clean much of the time in his public life and smells good to casual acquaintances. But when Cari shook his hand in the kitchen, she caught
a whiff of brimstone off him. Like the smell of a burning village with dead inside the houses.

  Hans-Peter noted her good hard palm, and smiled his wolfish smile. “Shall we speak English or Spanish?”

  “As you wish.”

  Monsters know when they are recognized, just as bores do. Hans-Peter was accustomed to reactions of distaste and fear as his behavior revealed him. On exquisite occasions, the reaction was an agonized pleading for a quicker death. Some people beeped to him quicker than others.

  Cari just looked at Hans-Peter. She did not blink. The black pupils of her eyes had the smudge of intelligence.

  Hans-Peter tried to see his reflection in her eyes but disappointingly he could not see himself. What a looker! And I don’t think she knows it.

  A moment of reverie as he made up a little couplet. I cannot see my reflection in the black pools of your eyes / You will be hard to break but, broken, what a prize! He’d do it in German too, with a tune, when he had time. Use “hörig” for “broken,” more like “enslaved.” Use the tune from “Sauerkraut and Beets.” Sing it in the shower. Maybe to her, if she happened to be recuperating, begging to be clean.

  At the moment, he needed her goodwill. Showtime now.

  “You have worked here a long time,” he said. “Felix tells me you are a good worker, you know the house well.”

  “I’ve watched the house five years on and off. I helped with some repairs.”

  “Does the pool house leak?”

  “No, it’s good. You can cool it if you want to. The pool house A/C is on a separate box with a circuit breaker on the garden wall.”

  From the corner Hans-Peter’s man Bobby Joe was staring at Cari. Even in cultures where staring is not rude, Bobby Joe’s stare would be rude. His eyes were orange-yellow, like those of certain turtles. Hans-Peter beckoned to him.

  Bobby Joe stood too close to Cari when he came.

  She could read the tattoo “Balls and All!” in cursive on the side of his neck under his grown-out jail haircut. His fingers were lettered LOVE and HATE. MANUELA was written in his palm. The end of the strap on the back of his cap stuck far out to the side owing to the smallness of his skull. A memory of something bad pierced her and was gone.

  “Bobby Joe, put the heavy stuff in the pool house for now,” Hans-Peter said.

  When Bobby Joe passed behind Cari, his knuckles brushed her buttocks. She touched the inverted cross of St. Peter that hung from her neck on a bead chain.

  “Is the electric current and water turned on all over the house?” Hans-Peter said.

  “Yes,” Cari said.

  “Do you have two-hundred-twenty-volt current?”

  “Yes. In the laundry and behind the kitchen stove. There’s a golf cart charger in the garage with a two-twenty outlet and two long extension cords on hooks above it. Use the red one, not the black. Somebody cut the ground prong off the black one. It’s got two twenty-amp circuit breakers beside it. In the pool house it’s all GFIs.”

  “Do you have the floor plan?”

  “There are architect’s drawings and an electrician’s diagram in the library, in the floor-level cabinet.”

  “Is the alarm connected to a central office, or the police?”

  “No, it’s manual only with a siren on the street. Four zones, doors and motions.”

  “Is there food in the house?”

  “No. You are eating here?”

  “Yes. Some of us.”

  “Sleeping here?”

  “Until our job is finished. Some of us will sleep and eat here too.”

  “There are the lunch trucks. They work construction jobs up and down the street. They’re pretty good. Better early in the week. You will hear the horn. I like Comidas Distinguidas the best, and the Salazar Brothers are good. The last film crew used them. They have ‘Hot Eats’on the side of the truck. I have a phone number for them if you want them to cater.”

  “I want you to cater,” Hans-Peter said. “You could get food and cook one good meal a day? You don’t have to serve the table, just make the food like buffet. I will pay good.”

  Cari needed the money. She was fiercely fast and thorough in the kitchen, as women are who come up hard in Miami working in rich people’s houses.

  “I can do that. I’ll fix the meal.”

  Cari had worked with construction crews. In her teens when she cooked from midnight on and served food from the lunch trucks in cutoff jeans, the carpenters swarmed and business went way up. In Cari’s experience the majority of the men in the hard physical trades are well-intentioned, courteous even. They are just hungry for everything.

  But Cari could see Hans-Peter’s crew of three and she did not like the look of them. Jailbirds with jail tattoos made with match-soot ink and an electric toothbrush. They were carrying a heavy magnetic drill press and two jackhammers into the pool house along with a single movie camera.

  Women working in the trades can tell you the rule of thumb with a rough crew in a secluded place—it was true in the jungle and it was true here—bigger is safer. Most of the time if there are more than two men in the crew, civilization prevails; they won’t start something with a woman unless they are drunk. This was a rougher crew than that. They stared at Cari when she led Hans-Peter to the electrical boxes mounted in the narrow corridor between the high hedge and the boundary wall of the property. She could feel them thinking Pull a train, pull a train. More than their oafish stares, she was aware of Hans-Peter walking behind her.

  Behind the hedge Hans faced her. Full-face and smiling, he resembled a white stoat. “Felix said he went through four housekeepers before he found you. The others were afraid of this place, all the creepy stuff. But it doesn’t frighten you? I would be interested to know why.”

  Do not engage him, do not answer, her instinct told her.

  Cari shrugged. “You’ll need to pay for the groceries in advance.”

  “I’ll reimburse,” he said.

  “I’ll need the cash up front. Seriously.”

  “You are a serious person. You sound like a Colombian—so pretty the Spanish. How did you get to stay in the U.S., did you try to use ‘credible fear’? Did immigration allow you credible fear?”

  “I think two hundred and fifty dollars will cover the groceries for now,” Cari said.

  “Credible fear,” Hans-Peter said. He was enjoying the planes of her face, thinking how pain might affect them. “The things in the house, the horror movie props, do not scare you, Cari. And why is that? You see they are only the imaginings of mall rats to scare other mall rats, don’t you? You see that, don’t you, Cari? You know the difference. You are closer to the verities—do you know verities? Las verdades, la realidad? How did you learn the difference? Where did you see something truly fearful?”

  “Good chuletas are on sale at Publix, and I should pick up some fuses,” Cari said, and left him standing under the spiderwebs behind the hedge.

  “Chuletas are on sale at Publix,” Hans said to himself in Cari’s voice. He has a startling ability to mimic.

  Cari took Felix aside. “Felix, I am not staying here overnight.”

  “The fire insurance—” he began.

  “Then stay here yourself. Best you sleep on your back. I’ll do the meal.”

  “Cari, I’m telling you—”

  “And I’m telling you. If I stay something stupid will happen. You will not like what happens next and neither will they.”

  Chapter Five

  Don Ernesto wants to know what’s going on at Pablo’s old house,” Captain Marco said. “When can we see?”

  Marco sat with two other men under an open shed in the boatyard in the early evening. A breeze stirred the flags on the freighters tied up along the Miami River. Captain Marco’s boat squeaked against a dock piled with crab traps.

  “I can go in with the gardeners at seven in the morning if Claudio’s truck will start,” Benito said. “By contract they have to let us in every two weeks to drag off the limbs and cut the weeds.�
� Benito was old and leathery. His eyes were bright. With his banana fingers he rolled a perfect cigarette of Bugler tobacco, twisted the end and lit it with a kitchen match, which he struck with his thumbnail.

  “Jesús Villarreal claims the gold is there at the house,” Captain Marco said. “He brought it up for Pablo in his boat in ’89. Don Ernesto says the film crew at the house now is fake, they’re digging under the house.”

  “Jesús was a good man in a boat,” Benito said. “I thought he was dead with Pablo. I thought we were all dead except me, such as I am.”

  “You are way too wicked to die,” Antonio said, and poured the old man a drink from the bottle on the table. Antonio was twenty-seven, fit in his pool service T-shirt.

  The three men under the shed kept a casual eye on Miami for their mentor in Cartagena, as a sideline. They all had the same tattoo, in various places. The tattoo was a bell hanging on a fishhook.

  Music drifted over the water from a restaurant downriver, under the Miami skyline.

  “Who’s digging under the house?” Antonio said.

  “Hans-Peter Schneider and his crew,” Marco said.

  “I have seen Hans-Peter Schneider,” Benito said. “Have you ever seen him? You first see him, you are sad he could be ill. When you know him he looks like a dick wearing glasses.”

  “He’s from Paraguay,” Marco said. “They say he is a very bad man.”

  “He believes so himself,” Benito said, putting the tobacco tin back in the bib of his overalls. “I saw him shoot a man across the ass for loafing when he was digging up Pablo’s house outside Bogotá looking for the money. He is crazy in a bad way.”

  “Hans-Peter Schneider has business here,” Antonio said. “He’s back and forth—he’s got a couple of whorehouses in Miami, the Roach Motel and the other one out by the airport, and a video peep. His high point, he had two real kinky bars—The Low Gravy and one called Congress. The Health Department found out they were serving English breakfasts upstairs and the county pulled his liquor license. ICE tried to bounce him once for trafficking girls and boys. Now he’s got nothing with his name on it. It’s like he doesn’t exist anymore. But he’s in and out, and he collects the money.”