Angels in Heaven

cultural, all right, but
it was so obvious that there wasn’t any point in saying anything.
    A while later we closed up shop. I
went back to the hotel to wait impatiently for Benny to get back, and Doris went to sit by the pool and bring her diary up to date and maybe scribble off a mash
note to Willing Boy.
    I was in the bathroom checking to see
how my tan was coming along when Benny knocked on my hotel room door; that
would have been about two o’clock. I let him in, sat down on one of the twin
beds, folded my arms, closed my eyes like Nero Wolfe, and said, like the great
man himself, “Report please, Archie.”
    He reported.
    “Satisfactory,” I said when he had
finished. “How much?”
    He told me.
    I winced down to my anklets but said,
“Satisfactory,” again. “You all packed?”
    “Yep.”
    I checked my watch. “Then let us do
it, amigo. The tickets should be waiting for us at the airport. I stopped at
the travel agency in the lobby and the guy phoned for me. Oh, I also booked you
and Doris on a boat trip up Piranha River in a leaky pirogue to watch
crocodiles mate.”
    I knocked on Doris’s door and collected
her. To give her credit, she, like me, had only a small overnight bag as
luggage, which made sense, as we planned to be away only overnight, but making
sense about luggage is, alas, not always a woman’s strong point. Me, I could go
halfway around the globe with a mere couple of steamer trunks and the odd
matched set of hand luggage. And enough mad money for emergencies tucked down
inside my jockey shorts to make me look like I was auditioning for l’Après-midi
d’un faune.
    We picked up Benny downstairs, where
he was unsuccessfully trying to impress the beautiful señorita at the front
desk with his fluent Spanish, then piled into the first cab in line in front of
the hotel. Benny settled on a price with the driver, and off we went back to
the airport.
    Shortly thereafter we were thousands
of feet up in the air again, with nothing but some obscure and highly unlikely
law of aerodynamics holding us up there. Two beers and a pack of stale, peppery
peanuts later, and we were beginning our approach into Cancún airport. The
landing strip was surrounded by lush, green, dank tropical jungle that was
teeming—you could tell that just by looking at it—although what precisely it
was teeming with I neither knew nor particularly wanted to.
    As soon as we emerged from the airport
building, Benny snagged us one of a row of new Volkswagen minibuses that seemed
to have the airport monopoly, and for eleven dollars U.S. each, the
bandit driving it agreed to conduct us just north of Cancún to Puerto Juarez,
where the passenger ferry to Isla Mujeres departed. Our route took us directly
through Cancún, so we never saw the resort area on Cancún Island, which the
Mexican government had bought or expropriated back in the sixties and then
proceeded to fill with rows of hotels and condominiums and villas and
time-sharing developments and marimba players and drinks served in hollowed-out
pineapples.
    On the way into town we first passed
a long row of billboards advertising things like local realtors and local
booze; then we hung a left and drove down Cancún’s main drag, which looked like
Main Street anywhere you find a lot of Americans on holiday; then we passed
through one of the native barrios, which looked liked anywhere a lot of
poor Mexicans live who are not on holiday.
    We arrived at the Puerto just in time
to catch the five-thirty sailing of the Cancún-Isla Mujeres ferryboat. As Isla
Mujeres means “Island of Women,” I was quite looking forward to the sea voyage
(especially the end of it), which took place on a most picturesque, rickety, noisy
old wooden two-decker ferry, newly painted in blue and white with red trim. The
crossing took some forty-five pleasant minutes, during some of which I
amusingly pretended to be getting seasick, as it was getting a little rough out
there, and during some more of which Benny told us what few snippets, as he
modestly put it, he had been able to pick up about our destination, though, as
usual, the snippets turned out to be a lot more than snippets, at least as I
understand the word. I do not know where Benny got all his information; the
only books I ever saw him read were biographies or autobiographies of famous
bank robbers, con men, horse breeders, light-fingered Harrys, great train
robbers, and other members of that murky underworld fraternity like