Chapter I CHAPTER I The antiques store owned by Antonio Elizalde and inherited, like his name, from his father, stood on Calle Del Beso, close to the intersection of Avenida San Luis, in the Mexican town of Santa Ana Tlachiahualpa. The store didn't look promising from the outside, its windows dusty, its frontage dilapidated, and its displays of furniture, paintings, and craquelure plates seemingly untroubled for years by the interest of customers. Its opening hours, in common with its owner, were eccentric and unpredictable despite Elizalde residing on the floor above. Those opening hours had once been posted on a handwritten piece of card jammed in the left-hand corner of the window, but years of sunlight had faded them to illegibility, if they had ever been anything more than aspirational to begin with. Elizalde, in his late sixties, was a single man and likely to remain so. Cadaverously thin, his complexion yellow, and his dress sense favoring gray flannel pants, mutedly striped shirts, and shabby cardigans, irrespective of the temperature or time of year, he attracted few admiring looks from even the most desperate of the town's widows and spinsters. His universe appeared to be a small one, even by the standards of that place. It was bounded by his place of business, the Iglesia de Santa Maria, the Abarrotes Polo convenience store, and the Zitala restaurant and bar, in the latter of which he would smoke Marlboro cigarettes (until the ban on smoking in public places forced him, like so many others, to indulge his vice in secret, like a criminal) and drink no more than two palomas a night. Twice yearly, he left the town to embark on buying trips, vanishing without fanfare and returning similarly unannounced. He was once spotted at Mexico City International Airport by an elderly local woman returning from a trip to visit her grandchildren in El Norte, who was so shocked to encounter Elizalde outside his natural environment that she had to sit for a moment to recover herself. Elizalde had simply raised his hat to her and proceeded to his gate, passport in hand, quietly amused at the effect he had created. Elizalde was not unsociable, but his sociability was almost as limited as his orbit, rarely extending beyond polite comments on the weather, football, or the failings of politicians, both national and local. Nobody resented Elizalde for his reserve because he was courteous and paid his bills on time, both qualities rarer in society than one might wish. He was understood to have money--he would otherwise have been a poor advertisement for his trade--but not so much as to make him a target for theft or extortion. His enterprise might have been more successful had he advertised his wares on the internet or found premises closer to Mexico City, but on those occasions when he could be drawn on the matter, he declared the internet to be too noisy-- demasiado ruidoso , whatever that meant--and Mexico City to be louder still. And who could fault him for this? That he preferred to keep Santa Ana Tlachiahualpa as his base and let the norteamericanos, chinos , and europeos come to him if they wished to buy--because come to him they did, if not in any great numbers, and always by prior arrangement--was something to be celebrated, not condemned. Elizalde's clients would often be accompanied by the local guides who had led them to his door, although some buyers arrived from Mexico City with their own drivers, security experts who made no effort to hide the guns they wore. The customers had nothing to fear from Elizalde, who was an honest, if costly, broker, but Mexico suffered from a surfeit of bad publicity, even if foreign visitors were at greater risk of being kidnapped in New Zealand or Canada than Nuevo León or Chiapas. As for being shot, well, that was a different matter, although the Bahamas were more dangerous than Baja when it came to stray gunfire, and nobody really wanted to see turistas hit by bullets. It attracted too much attention, and anyway, the cholos preferred to prey on their own people, pendejos that they were. So moneyed men and women would enter Elizalde's cool, dark store, where they would be offered bottled water, soda, a beer, even whiskey or tequila if they preferred. Tea and coffee were also available, but most opted for something cooler after the journey. On rare occasions, Elizalde's hospitality would be declined outright, not even an ahorita or a después de un poco más tiempo, por favor , a breach of etiquette that would, in the event of a sale, result in the customer receiving a smaller discount than might otherwise have been available. After such negotiations, assuming they were mutually satisfactory, Elizalde would buy a round of drinks at Zitala that evening, where his neighbors would toast his good health and fortune. Unspoken--by Elizalde and the community in general, even if the metiches inevitably whispered among themselves--was the precise nature of what he was selling, because offloading junk paintings and scuffed art deco furniture salvaged from the more distressed residences of Coyoacán would not be sufficient to support Elizalde's modest existence, even allowing for the fact that he owned the building in which he lived and worked. Also, while his loyalty to the town was admirable, might his decision to remain there not also have been linked to its proximity to the ancient city of Teotihuacan? The great archaeological site covered about eight square miles, its massive pyramids, its Avenue of the Dead, and its history of human sacrifice attracting more than four million tourists a year, some of them eager to return home with more than photographs of ruins or replica figurines of the Old God, the Fat God, and the Flayed God. True, some said that Mexico should not permit its treasures to be sold so easily (if not cheaply) by unscrupulous men. Others argued that the country had more than enough ancient pots and figurines already, most of them gathering dust in museum basements or university attics. What did it matter if a handful went to the United States, Europe, or the Far East? Señor Elizalde paid his taxes, contributed to the Church, and shared some of his bounty when a sale, legal or otherwise, was concluded. If one were to search even a handful of the houses in the locality, one might find similar items on shelves or by doors, discovered in the dirt by someone's grandfather or uncle and kept for the family instead of being surrendered to the state. Let he who was without sin cast the first stone; if one was a thief, all might be thieves. So Elizalde went about his business undisturbed. He sold items of value not only from Mexico but also from Peru, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador. They did not always come with paperwork, but their authenticity was unquestionable. Among collectors of a particular stripe, the name of Antonio Elizalde was a guarantee of quality and probity. His years in the trade had provided him with reliable contacts in shipping companies and ANAM, the Mexican National Customs Agency, but he could also arrange for purchases to be ferried across the border with the United States by car or truck, which avoided the kind of closer inspection that negotiating airports was wont to involve. All might have continued as it was--regular sales of primarily small and easily transportable pieces, yielding an income designed to support a comfortable but unostentatious lifestyle--had those Marlboro cigarettes not caught up with Elizalde: first as a cough, then as chest pains, and finally, having ignored the early warning signs, as a tumor the size of a baby's fist. Elizalde had never been seriously ill before, his family boasting a happy history of long lives followed by relatively quick deaths, and he had never seen any reason to invest in health insurance. That apart, he was also superstitious and regarded insuring his health, like writing a will, as a prelude to inevitable decline, an invitation to Death to take a seat at one's table. Only when a brush with COVID had left him fighting for breath, convinced he was going to suffocate, and he found himself queuing with others at least as unwell at a local clinic, did he decide that some form of coverage might be wise, even if he kept it to the cheapest option. Now Elizalde was being forced to face the consequences of his parsimony. The quality of private healthcare in Mexico was excellent, and the hospitals in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey were among the best, but the treatment he required was expensive, and even a lifetime of illicit dealing in Mesoamerican antiquities would not be sufficient to settle his bills while leaving him financially positioned to enjoy life afterward. And so, immersion in various miracle waters having failed to heal him, Elizalde had instead involved himself in an act of theft and smuggling unprecedented in his history, one that had brought with it a payday large enough to cover the bulk of his treatment, albeit at considerable personal risk should his complicity become known. Then again, if he hadn't agreed to take part, he would have been forced to take his chances with another bunch of crooks, namely his insurers. They had already made it clear that whatever they were prepared to offer would be enough to deal with perhaps only one of the fingers on that malignant fist, leaving the rest to be tackled by the public system. The choice, then, was between slow, painful treatment for cancer--which, with his natural tendency toward the pessimistic, Elizalde felt would lead only to a slow, agonizing demise and the prospect of another decade or more of survival after the best medical treatment money could buy. The downside to the latter was the possibility of a differently agonizing death--slow by the standards of, say, a heart attack, but over with in the blink of an eye compared to cancer--should the victim of the crime connect Elizalde to its commission. Elizalde took the second option, because only a fool would not, and all had proceeded without a hitch, because good things still sometimes happened to moderately good people. The payment was released upon safe receipt of the cargo in the United States, and Elizalde requested that the funds be forwarded directly to his oncologist, who knew better than to ask any questions about their source. Nevertheless, in case the Mexican tax authorities should take an interest, the money was funneled via a private nonprofit foundation registered under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code as a health charity, set up in 2022 through an online legal filing service and registered in Delaware, USA. On the advice of an anonymous client, Elizalde, poor and frightened, had written to the charity shortly after receiving his diagnosis, and in his possession was a copy of his original email, as well as the encouraging response he had received. God bless America. Thus, as the sun was setting, Antonio Elizalde walked back from what would be his final trip to Zitala for a while. The following day, he would take a plane to Monterrey, there to commence a course of therapy he had been warned would be unpleasant but was also likely to be successful. He had enjoyed a final paloma and bought a round of the bar's best tequila for all present, who wished him good luck in the struggle to come. He had sold off--at knockdown prices, though still at a profit--whatever items of dubious provenance remained in his store and arranged for a local family to take care of the building while he was away. In a brown paper bag from his favorite bakery, he was carrying three sweet breads, two of which he planned to eat for breakfast the next morning and the third on the plane, consuming a piece of sweet bread being a known remedy for fear. In flagrant breach of both the law and his doctor's advice, Elizalde was also smoking the remaining cigarettes in his final packet of Marlboros on the grounds that the damage had been done and a few more weren't going to kill him. As though by divine providence, he finished the last cigarette just as he reached the Iglesia de Santa Maria. He entered the church and offered a prayer for himself. Later, at home, he planned to burn incense and make an offering to the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan, deity of the underworld, mother of creation, because one couldn't be too careful, and the Great Goddess had probably been around for at least as long as Santa Maria. Elizalde paused at the church door to button his coat before stepping outside. Ever since his diagnosis, he'd been feeling the cold more, which he ascribed to Death's proximity. The town was silent; no children, no dogs, not even a bird pecking at the dirt. It was as though the rest of humanity had faded away, leaving Elizalde as the last man extant. He tried not to take it as a bad omen, a premonition of some future state of being in which he was reduced to a specter haunting the places he had known in life, invisible to others just as they were rendered unseen to him. A melody came to him, one beloved of his father, Antonio Aguilar, singing "Nadie Es Eterno": Todo lo acaban los años Dime, ¿qué te llevas tú? Si con el tiempo no queda Ni la tumba, ni la cruz. Everything ends with the years Tell me, what do you take with you? If nothing remains after time Not even a tomb, or a cross. It was a song of suffering and loss, the kind, Elizalde reflected, that only a Mexican would find consoling. He decided to embrace the solitude and enjoy the emptiness of the streets as he made his way home. Upon reaching his store, he paused by the window and took in his reflection, almost relieved to find confirmation of his continued substantiality. A shape descended on his face, causing him instinctively to try to brush it away until he realized it was a spider spinning a thread on the other side of the glass, rappeling across Elizalde's likeness. He watched it reach the bottom of a display case, where it landed on a bayonet that had been used at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836; there the arachnid joined more of its kin. To his disgust, Elizalde noticed that the window was crawling with small black spiders. He could only assume that an unnoticed egg sac had recently burst, freeing the young, even if these were unexpectedly large for newborns. If only he'd spotted the sac in time, he could have sprayed it with bleach and water and killed the babies before they could hatch. Now he'd have to turn on all the lights, take a vacuum cleaner, and try to suck up as many of the little cabrones as possible before they overran the showroom. (But had he looked closer, Elizalde might also have spotted other insects alongside the arachnids: beetles, centipedes, wood lice, earwigs, and more. And while some were preyed upon by the spiders, most were ignored because the spiders, like the rest, were too busy trying to escape...) Elizalde hurried to the front door, unlocked it, and stepped into the dark, where he felt small bodies crunch beneath the soles of his feet. He hit the light switch and saw that the floor was alive with spiders: house spiders, thankfully, and not widows, recluses, or hobos, which would have been a very different matter, requiring him to exchange his last night at home for the safety of a hotel room until the exterminators could take care of the infestation. Nevertheless, the spiders were revolting in such numbers and might require him to spend the night at a hotel anyway: he wasn't convinced that his vacuum cleaner would be capable of dealing with all of them, and he couldn't start throwing around buckets of watery bleach without damaging his floorboards, his walls, and--not least--his stock. However difficult to shift some of his inventory might be, it would be harder still to offload if stained with streaks of white. But where had the damned spiders come from? Indeed, where had the other bugs come from, because now he observed them, too, even as they scuttled by him to vanish into the night through the open door. Could it be a fire? Yet he smelled no smoke. Elizalde heard movement from the store, accessed from the main hallway via a doorway to his left. The door opened into his office, which was little more than a nook in a corner filled with dusty paperwork. If there was an intruder, they'd gained access through the rear of the building, since the front door had been locked and undamaged, and the alarm had not been activated. Elizalde could see the glow of the lamp in his office, which remained lit day and night. Natural illumination did not extend far into the showroom, and his shins were already scarred enough from miscalculating the distances between objects without adding further darkness to the equation. His neighbor Señora Cárdeñas or one of her sons might have dropped by to check on him. If so, what were they doing stumbling around among the antiques unless they, too, were trying to discover the reason for the swarm? Curiously, while the spiders were climbing the walls and crawling over the floor, they showed no interest in Elizalde and were leaving a clear area around his shoes, such that his clothing might have been treated with repellent. As he progressed toward the inner door, they continued to avoid him, perhaps having learned from the fate of their brothers and sisters crushed upon his return. Elizalde slipped his mini revolver from his jacket pocket. He'd had the gun for years and rarely went anywhere without it, as an aging merchant operating out of a small town might offer a tempting target for some pinche narco with a habit to feed. The NAA weighed only eight ounces, but it held five .22 rounds that would leave holes not easily filled. Elizalde didn't announce himself before entering, since that was an excellent way to get killed. The door was slightly ajar, and the hinges were well-oiled, so he made no sound as he opened it wider. The office nook beyond was empty--unless one counted the spiders and insects. The glow from the lamp, combined with the moonlight filtering through the muddle of stock in the window, served to render regions of the store semi-visible while leaving others in shadow. The lamp was angled away from the door, and Elizalde stayed behind it to avoid making himself too much of a target. However, he could pick up no trace of an intruder and heard no further movement. His attention was distracted by an object on the floor, gilded by the lamplight. It was a figurine: the representation of the Great Goddess to whom he had intended to make an offering before going to bed. He kept it on a shelf in his office, hidden by files, pens, and stationery because he didn't want prospective customers with the proper knowledge to espy it and begin making offers. The Great Goddess had been handed down from his great-grandfather, who found it at Teotihuacan long before the city became a UNESCO site. The beautifully preserved statue, which had been wrapped in cloth and placed in a stony hollow, more correctly belonged in a museum. But Elizalde, like his forebears, took the view that its heritage was as much familial as national, and as long as it was looked after and did not leave the country, he was doing his duty toward it. It could even be argued that the statue was performing its designated function as a household deity to be respected and worshipped, not trapped behind glass to be gawped at for a few seconds by the ignorant before quickly being forgotten. The Great Goddess wore a feathered headdress and her face was masked. From her nosepiece hung three fangs, while she held seeds in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other. Traces of red and yellow pigment were still visible on her. And all around the Great Goddess spiders scuttled, these ones larger than the rest, but they gave her a wide berth. Now Elizalde began to understand, even if it was an understanding born of a recognition of the numinous. The Great Goddess was frequently depicted in the company of night creatures--jaguars or owls, but oftentimes spiders, because they, like her, preferred the dark. Was it a sign, an augury on the eve of the commencement of his treatment? If so, did it mean he was blessed or cursed? And how had the statue come to be on the floor? It might have transported itself--if it could summon spiders, who could say what else it was capable of?--but Elizalde was more inclined to believe that someone had placed it there. This was confirmed when a throat was cleared and a man's voice spoke from the shadows. "That's quite the show with those spiders," he said. "She's calling them for protection, the ones that haven't tried to get away out of fear. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't witnessed it for myself." The accent was Anglo-American, but Elizalde couldn't place it precisely. He'd dealt with gringos from across the United States and Canada, and this man sounded like all of them rolled into one; not neutral, but an assemblage of cadences, as of one who had traveled much, absorbing into his speech elements of what he heard along the way. Elizalde squinted into the ordered clutter of the store and thought he could pick out a shape seated on one of a pair of early twentieth-century hacienda armchairs in cocobolo wood, their glossy finish apparent even in the dimness. It struck him that the man was small for an adult, more like a duende or an imp. "What are you doing here?" Elizalde asked, adding: "I have a gun." "Oh, I'm sure you do," came the reply. "You'd be unwise not to, what with all the valuables that pass through your hands. I don't see much sign of them here, though. I'm no expert, but a lot of this looks like junk to me, and junk won't keep a man in gravy. By the way, you can tilt that lamp some in my direction if it makes you feel better. I'd appreciate your keeping it more down than up, though. I don't care to be blinded." Elizalde moved the light, but he stayed to one side of the lamp and made sure that the frame of the office nook offered him cover. The beam revealed a slight man, possibly no more than five feet in height, wearing a red-and-white-spotted shirt with its top button undone and a blue tie at half-mast. His navy trousers were held in place by suspenders, and he wore red-and-white two-tone shoes. He looked, to Elizalde, like a character who had strayed from a norteamericano Fourth of July parade and never found his way back again. His hands were folded in his lap, and Elizalde saw no gun within his reach. Relaxing slightly, Elizalde stepped from the nook. The man smiled encouragingly. "That's it, I won't bite. I can't swear to these little critters on the floor, but they've behaved themselves so far." "They're house spiders," said Elizalde. "If they bit you, you'd barely notice." "I might, if all of them took a nibble at the same time, but I'll accept your word on them as individuals. And in answer to your question--and those to come, like who I am--let's begin with the first two, the what and the who, which may be the easiest to answer. I'm here, naturally enough, to speak with you, Mr. Elizalde. Forgive me for not addressing you as 'Señor,' but I don't speak Spanish very well and wouldn't want to set up any false expectations in that regard. But from my inquiries, I guessed that you'd have good English, considering the business you've conducted with speakers of that tongue over the years. "As for who I am, my name is Seeley, and I'm a fixer. I help solve problems." He crossed his legs and leaned back. "I have to say, this is one comfortable armchair. It's nice and low but not too deep. I've been known to struggle with chairs because of my stature--beds and tables also. I always thought Goldilocks erred on the smaller side, which may be why I like that story so much. The world takes the path of least resistance, or so I find. To those of us who deviate from the average, it's unforgiving." Seeley caught the look of bewilderment on Elizalde's face. "There I go again," said Seeley. "I've been advised that I have a predilection for garrulity. I used to think it made people relax, but I appreciate that's not always the case. Call my loquaciousness a trick of the trade. I come out of sales, and the only quiet salesman is a dead one." Elizalde was happy he had a gun. The more he heard from Seeley, the more convinced he became that the man meant him ill. "And what are you trying to sell here, Mr. Seeley?" Seeley smiled sadly. "Why, Mr. Elizalde, I'm trying to sell you an easy death." Excerpted from The Children of Eve: A Thriller by John Connolly All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
