Angels in Heaven

first.”
    We drove on for a while through the
flat and monotonous terrain. An occasional slatted truck with a load of campesinos in the back passed us and once or twice a dusty car. Occasionally we
glimpsed some unhappy-looking campesinos at work in what was left of the
maguey cactus fields. Once we saw what was left of an armadillo someone had run
over. A few minutes after that I had my first sight of the clink called the
Second of February, which some might find a slightly bizarre name for a
clink—me included, at first—but then again, how does one name a prison? Usually
after its location, I suppose, as in Dartmoor, which is in Dartmoor, on a moor
by the River Dart, or Devil’s Island or the Jacksonville Pen, but why not at
least endeavor to be more creative and give prisons designer names like
Dun-Rovin’ or Bide-A-Wee or, if you want to use a date, how about Father’s Day
or maybe April Fools? What’s in a name, anyway? Wouldst not a rose smell as
sweet if it wouldst be called instead limburger cheese? Not to me it wouldnst.
    I was nervous is what I was, which is
why my mind, usually so precisely focused, was chattering away in so aimless a
fashion. I had been nervous for the last few days and trying, with a notable
lack of success, to hide the fact behind those two old standbys—thinly
disguised insults and forced humor. True, I did have a plan of sorts, but there
were a lot of details still to be worked out and who knew if it would work
anyway and we were a long way from home and time was going by and Billy was still
marking the days off on a cell wall and one mistake from his would-be heroic
rescuers and we’d be doing the same.
    And if we did get him out, then what?
My loyal, doughty assistants, being more or less of a normal height—i.e.,
short—might be able, suitably camouflaged, to pass undetected in a crowd of
Méridans, but where and how could a Goliath hide in a land of
Toulouse-Lautrecs?
    I became even more nervous the closer
we got to Febrero Segundo, and when I got that first glimpse of it, I achieved
a lifetime personal best.
    We’d just topped a small rise in the
road, and there it was ahead of us and off to our left at the end of a few
hundred yards of dirt road. Benny pulled over and pulled up. About all we could
see from our viewpoint were the walls, which were bad enough—twenty feet high,
we estimated, laid out in a large rectangle with turrets at the corners and
another above the huge front door and yet another one in the center of the rear
wall opposite the entrance. Around the walls for two hundred yards or so in all
directions, the scrub and maguey had been burned to give the guards a clear
field of fire. A Mexican flag hung limply above the front turret. We could see
that all the turrets were manned and the tops of the wails were being patrolled
as well.
    I looked at Benny the Boy.
    Benny the Boy looked at me.
    “A piece of cake,” he said, snapping
his fingers. I had to laugh.
    Then he said, “If you don’t mind me
asking, Victor, what is it we hope to achieve today?”
    “You got me there, pal.” I sighed.
“All right. We would like a look around. I thought it might be a good idea for
us to have our look around when the big boss isn’t in, which could give us an
excuse to go back another time and see him, which would give us a second look
around. I’d also like to see how Billy is and let him know we’re on the case
and to warn him to go along with whatever it is we come up with.
    But hell, I don’t know if we can
bluff our way in to see him.
    In a lot of jails only immediate
family and legally interested parties get to visit, and God knows what the
system is down here. Maybe at least we can get some kind of word in to the poor
stiff.”
    “No problem there,” said Benny. “If I
can’t find out what the visiting policy is any other way, I’ll just call them
up and ask.” ft
    “In that case,” I said* “wagons roll,
preferably to the nearest bar with a phone.”
    So we rolled to the nearest bar—a
nameless, tin-roofed café in that small, untidy cluster of enterprises at the
crossroads that Benny had mentioned—parked, and sat at a tin table outside that
told us to drink Corona beer, not that I had to be told. The rotund owner came
smartly out from behind his homemade tin bar to take our orders; being on duty,
more or less, we had to settle for Pepsi-Colas. When he came back with them, he
inquired if we were by any chance visiting the prison up the