Angels in Heaven

stratosphere.
Or—take your choice, it’s up to you, darlin’—I got the idea from an old caper
movie I saw on the box with Mom just before we left. What the plot hinged on
was getting the sucker to phone a number he believed was that of a famous
museum, so what the con men did was replace the phone book in a busy café with
one that had been doctored so it listed a different number for the museum.
Well, we couldn’t get to Joaquín’s phone book, if he even had one, or his
switchboard operator’s, so we did the next best thing.”
    “We got to the switchboard operator,”
Benny interrupted rudely. “Or rather I did. I took a drive back out to the
prison Tuesday, remember, and by no coincidence got there at lunchtime. Then I
had a short but fruitful chat with a poverty-stricken clerk, name of Ernesto
Byass. I gave Ernesto our phone number. All he had to do to earn himself two
and a half million pesos was to dial it any time Lt. Esparza asked to be
connected to the Cultural Association. And Lt. Esparza, you remember him, he’s
the one who thought you were so pretty, as indeed we all do, my dear, he
couldn’t dial it himself because all calls at Febrero Segundo, we noticed, went
through a central switchboard manned by none other than Sr. Ernesto Byass.”
    “Naturally,” I interceded smoothly, “Ernesto
only got half his dinero in advance. He gets the other half after a
month or two if he keeps his mouth shut if anyone ever asks him about it, which
is highly unlikely because they’ll blame it all on Ethel. It is perhaps
needless to mention that Benjamin impressed on him the necessity of not
flaunting his new wealth by suddenly going out and buying six new
twenty-six-inch color TVs for his hut, which doesn’t have electricity yet.”
    “Ernesto thought that perhaps in a
year or two his wealthy uncle up in Monterrey might sadly pass away after a
long and painful illness, leaving the Yucatán branch of the family a tidy and
completely unexpected windfall.”
    “I hope I don’t get so busy that I
forget to send him the rest of his money,” I said. “Ah well, time will tell.
It’s not as if he can go to the cops if he doesn’t get it because he’s already
taken half.”
    “Pretty crafty, guys,” Doris said
from her bed of pain-“I’ll give you that one.”
    “Thank you,” I said sincerely. “Now
it’s your turn. What happened with you and the sarge? Did you show him a little
too much leg so that he got all excited and leapt at you like a wild beast?”
    “So I’m typin’ away,” she said, “and
singin’ away when you guys goof up and there’s this god-awful racket from your
office. Sarge heads for the door, what else? All I knew is if anything like
that happened, I was supposed to try and delay him as long as I could—good
luck, Doris. I could’ve tom off all my clothes, I guess, but what I did was
scream ‘/Raton!’ like I’d seen a mouse, and I jumped into his arms. How
was that for quick thinkin’, guys?”
    “Terrific,” Benny said.
    “Lucky for you the one word of
Spanish you knew wasn’t chocolate chip cookies,” I said.
    “So I hang on as long as I can, but
the guy’s a big mother and he finally peels me off and chucks me across the
room like I’m a bag of laundry. I must have caught my head on the corner of the
desk is all I can think of,” she said. “What’s it look like back there?” Sara
made a move to explore the damage with one hand but thought better of it.
    “Ah, it’s just a scratch,” I said.
“You’ll need a complete head transplant, but that’s all. Maybe we can arrange
to get you a head with hair already grown on it. Any particular color you like?
You used to be partial to frosted magenta, as I recall.”
    “Piss off, Prof,” she said, with a
grin I could just make out in the half-light.
    On we went. We nibbled at cheese sandwiches,
apples, and biscuits. We sipped water. We bounced. We felt good; we were
halfway home. Suddenly we really started bouncing; we’d turned off the highway.
After a minute we pulled up, and Jorge cut the engine.
    “More than likely giving us a chance
to stretch our legs and water the greenery,” I said.
    We heard Jorge or Billy or both get
out, and then the sack of hammocks hiding our tunnel entrance was removed and
gratefully crawled in the open air. As I had thought, we ”ad turned off the
main road and parked out of sight of it behind a clump of stunted bushes Cap’n
Dan undoubtedly knew the Greek name