Chapter 3·Tomás Arreola · Michoacán

Tomás Arreola. Michoacán. Thursday 11 March 2032, 10:00.

The boss's house had a wall round it that had been white once. At the gate stood a boy of about seventeen with a rifle. In two years the boy had never looked Tomás in the eye. He kept it up today.

Eleven cars in the drive. Nine of them had been in the yard on Tuesday.

Inside, the good room. Two sofas and a fish tank nobody fed. Men standing because the seats were gone. The television on with the sound off and the twelve lines on it, and under them a bar in three languages that went too fast to read.

The boss sat at the head of the table with a coffee he had not touched. Beside him, Padre Nacho. Padre Nacho was not a priest and never had been. He was the man you saw when a thing needed deciding and then not talking about again. He had a legal pad and he was writing on it.

"So," the boss said. "We're going to be calm."

It was the voice he used before a job. Men breathed out. Somebody laughed. The boss let them.

"Number one. It's a hoax. Almost certainly a hoax. Padre?"

"Almost certainly," said Padre Nacho, writing.

"Number two. We proceed as if it is not."

Nobody laughed at that.

"Because I have been in this business twenty-six years, and the reason I am still in it is that when a man tells me he is going to kill me, I believe him until he doesn't. So. If it's a hoax, we lose a week. If it's not a hoax, then next Thursday every one of you is a farmer." He drank the coffee, all of it, and set the cup down. "And so am I. So we have six days, and we are going to use them."

Padre Nacho turned the pad round. Two columns. Names in one. Names in the other. Tomás could not read them from where he stood.

"Everything that is owed," the boss said, "gets collected. This week. Everything owed to us and everything we owe. Both directions. I want a clean sheet on Thursday morning. Padre has the list. He'll come to each of you."

A man by the fish tank, Beto, who ran the crossing at Apatzingán, said, "Owed how, patrón? Owed money, or owed?"

"Owed," the boss said.

The room went quiet.

"Four times the rate," the boss said, into it. "For the week. Cash, up front, from tonight. Because after Thursday, gentlemen, nobody in the world is ever going to be paid to do this again. So the price this week is whatever I say it is, and I say four."

Men breathed out again. Beto sat down on the arm of the sofa. Somebody by the fish tank laughed. Six more days. A number. A list.

Through the window the boy at the gate had the rifle across his knees.

Padre Nacho found him on the back step at eleven.

Tomás was smoking. He had given it up. He had bought the packet at the petrol station on the way.

"Tomás."

"Padre."

The old man sat down beside him with the pad on his knees. He smelled of the cologne from the green bottle. Twenty years of it.

"You're on the Tuesday loads."

"I know."

"And the boss wants you on a thing on Saturday. In Uruapan." He tapped the pad. "You know the name. It's been on the list a long time."

A magistrate in Uruapan. Two years on the list. She had not taken the money. She had not been frightened by the second visit. She had been too much work to be worth it, and had been left, and had gone on doing her job in her small office. Tomás had been on the second visit. She had kept her hands flat on the desk the whole time so that he would not see them shake. He had seen anyway. It was, professionally, a good technique.

"Saturday," he said.

"Saturday. Four times, like he said. And Tomás." Padre Nacho looked at the yard. "You know it's a hoax."

"Sí, Padre."

"You know it's a hoax, and you're going to do the job on Saturday, because you're the best I have and it's a clean one and I want it done properly. And on Thursday morning when we all wake up and nothing has happened, we are going to laugh about this week for the rest of our lives."

"Sí, Padre."

Padre Nacho waited.

Tomás looked at the cigarette. Then at the fence, and the dry field past it, and a dog going along the far side of the field in the sun, in no hurry.

"No," he said.

Padre Nacho did not move. "No what."

"No Saturday."

"Tuesday?"

The dog had got to the corner of the field.

"Tuesday's driving."

"Tuesday's driving," Padre Nacho agreed. He wrote something on the pad. He wrote nothing by the Saturday name. Tomás saw him write nothing. The name would go to Beto, or to one of the younger ones.

Tomás sat on the step. The dog turned round at the corner and came back along the fence.

"You're the first," Padre Nacho said. He said it kindly. "You won't be the last. I'll have six by tonight. The boss is going to notice."

"I know."

"Go and see your sister, Tomás." The old man got up, one hand on the wall. "Go tonight. Drive. Take a bag. Don't come back for the Tuesday loads. I'll tell him you're sick."

Tomás looked up.

"Because if it's a hoax," Padre Nacho said, "you'll have wasted a week with your family, which God knows you could stand to. And if it isn't." He shrugged, and looked at the pad, at the two columns, at the names. "If it isn't, I would rather not have you in the room when he finds out what a no costs him this week."

He went in.

Tomás finished the cigarette. He took the packet out of his pocket and put it on the step and left it there. He went round the side of the house to the car. At the gate the boy with the rifle looked him in the eye for the first time in two years.