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 deat.