Spirit of Tabasco, Page 2

powers. It used to belong to her grandmother, who was a witch in Mexico.” I picked up a French fry and put the entire thing in my mouth. It burned and I gagged, chewed, and swallowed fast to avoid spitting the hot mash out on my plate.

  “A witch! As in ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog’?”

  “Mom says that her grandmother was not weird or wicked. She tried to help people with her powers.” I sipped my vanilla coke to soothe my blistered palate. “But Mom did say there is a spirit in the mirror named Jose Maria.”

  “Jose Maria? Is that a dude or a chick?”

  “It’s not a person, Johnny. It’s a spirit. It’s a power.”

  “And how did Gordon Laigle get in touch with this power?”

  “That is the two-dolla question, my brilliant brother.”

  “I’m sure you know everything about these kinds of mirrors. Am I correct?”

  “I did do some research on mirrors in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The Olmecs, Mayans, Toltecs, and Aztecs all used mirrors. The shaman and holy men used them in their rites and rituals. The mirrors were seen as portals to the spirit realm. They were also used as eyes of animals in glyphs and sculptures of their gods. In some dialects, the word for eye and mirror is the same.”

  “But the Old Man is the least spiritual man in the history of the galaxy.”

  “I know. I think the best thing we can do is get that mirror out of his grubby hands before he does more damage.”

  Johnny waited until the waitress refilled his water glass and said, “Maybe we should just let the two of them do their dance, he and this Jose Maria, dude/chick. See where the spirit takes him.”

  “Mom wants her mirror back. And he is our father. If he is in trouble, we have to help him.”

  “You sure?”

  “You do not mean that.”

  “Don’t I?”

  I waved down the waitress for the check. “Let’s go for the gold.”

  As Johnny drove up Selma Avenue to the Hollywood Freeway, I called my father on my cell phone. As with the half dozen times I had called him in the past few days, he did not answer. As we turned on Argyle, a lemon-yellow vintage panel truck turned in front of us. “Remember that old truck that Gordon won in a poker game when we were camping in Mexico? It looked just like that, only rusty as an old tin can,” Johnny said.

  “And the poor hombre came back to our campsite to beg Dad to sell it back to him,” I said. “He said he had five kids and that truck was the only way he had to make a living.”

  “And of course, Gordon had to win. A bet is a bet. ‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ he told us. ` If you can’t afford to lose, you shouldn’t play the game.’ That poor old Mexican was crushed. I’ll never forget the look on his face,” Johnny said.

  “Dad never even brought that truck out of Mexico. He sold it for next to nothing at the border.”

  As we came down Victory Boulevard in North Hollywood, Johnny took both hands off the steering wheel and pointed and waved. “There he is. There’s the Old Man.”

  Gordon walked across the parking lot of the gold exchange building, carrying a cloth sack in his right hand. He stepped up to a gleaming emerald green Porsche Carrera, with the dealer plates still on it. He got into the driver’s seat and pulled out just as we bounced into the lot.

  “What the hell. Look at that car he’s driving,” Johnny yelled. “When did he get that?”

  “I would say recently. Follow him, if you can keep up.”

  He could not. As if he saw a shadow, Gordon put his foot into his hulking muscle car and disappeared down the boulevard, running a yellow light just a millisecond from red.

  I called Ellie. She said my father had called her on his way to Beverly Hills. He had a meeting with Emil Drescher, an art broker with whom my father worked, staging ultra-expensive homes in the Hollywood Hills. She said she thought the meeting had to do with the disk, but Gordon did not give her details. She told me Drescher’s address and phone number.

  When we entered the Hollywood Freeway off Coldwater Canyon, we drove down into four lanes of stopped traffic. As far up the freeway as I could see, I did not spot my Dad’s shiny dark green Porsche in the sea of brake lights. I could not imagine him caught in the gridlock with that car. We would miss him at Drescher’s.

  High dense hedges, tall fences and shade trees fronted the quiet mansions along North Rexford Drive off Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Drescher buzzed us in his massive iron gates and met us at the front door. “Gordon Laigle’s sons! How wonderful to meet you.”

  “I’ll bet he talks about us all the time,” Johnny said.

  “Not really. In fact, I cannot recall him ever mentioning you. Yet, here you are.” Drescher led us into a large den near the foyer. A burnished black grand piano, top up, with the name Bosendorfer on it, took up a corner of the room.

  Drescher offered beverages, which we declined.

  “Mr. Drescher, sir, we are sorry to barge in on you, but we do have important business that is related to our father, as I told you on the phone,” I said.

  “It has to do with his mirror,” Drescher said, raising a hand upon three fingers of which he wore large diamond rings.

  “Sir, that mirror does not actually belong to my father, our father. It belongs to our mother. Our father absconded with it and we assume that he is now trying to sell it.”

  “Besides being a broker, I am also a bit of an expert on Mexican art,” Drescher said. “Gordon did bring the mirror to me. In fact, he was just here. He left minutes before you arrived. He showed me the piece and I was quite impressed. It could well predate Teotihuacan.”

  “It’s worth something, you think? Dollar-wise.” I sat at the edge of the leather chair. Johnny leaned back and inhaled deeply, as if he were trying to breathe in the grandness of the room.

  “Yes, it might bring a sizeable price.”

  “Just what that old fool needs is more money,” Johnny said.

  “And you are going to help him with sell it?” I said to Drescher.

  “I can’t say, young Mr. Laigle. The situation has become complicated, to the extreme. I would even say dangerous. But Gordon and I have known each other for years. He came to me in confidence, with a specific predicament. I have to honor that confidence. If you want to know what he intends to do, I would advise that you ask him.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Drescher, that is exactly what we are trying to do. But he doesn’t return my phone calls and now he seems to be evading us.”

  “I’m sorry. I only hope that you can find a way to help your father, because care and concern is what he needs now. Have you seen the state he’s in? He is a walking zombie. His skin and hair look dry as hay. And he cannot stop or get out of the way.”

  “Does all this danger and drama have to do with the spirit in the mirror, whom my mother calls Jose Maria?” I said.

  Drescher stood to show us out. “Enough, Gentlemen. I am beyond my ability to aid or abet. I did give your father the name of a true expert down in San Ysidro, by the name of Alejandro Aguilara. If anyone can help your father in his situation, it is Señor Aguilara.”

  As the metal gates rolled closed behind us, Johnny turned on to Arden, toward Sunset. “Jules, I don’t think I can drive Thuys’s car all the way to San Diego,” he said. “And I have to get to work.”

  “Dad is not going to San Ysidro. At least not right away.”

  “But that Bosendorfer dude said he sent him there.”

  “Dad would have to be on death’s door to go to a Mexican for help. And he sounds exhausted, so he won’t drive three hours. Even in, and especially in, his spanking new Porsche.”

  “Gordon does have a thing about Mexicans. How can you live your whole life in Southern California and be as bigoted as he is?” Johnny said. “That’s insane.”

  “That’s Gordon.” I lowered my window to let a breeze in the car. Thuy’
s AC was broken. “I believe Dad’s bigotry is huge in this whole mess. Mom says he always put down her family. He thought he was better than her half-Mexican brothers who drove trucks and worked as landscapers and mailmen. He would have nothing to do with Nana.”

  “You think he stole the mirror out of spite, as a way of screwing over Mom and her family.”

  “And then, he admired his own reflection so often, Jose Maria saw who he really is.”

  Johnny blasted the car horn behind a white Prius that sat in the intersection on the green light. “Come on, Idiot. Move!”

  “Gordon saw Jose Maria, too,” I continued. “Somehow he peered into that mirror and made the connection that it and the power inside were bringing him luck.”

  “How do you come up with this stuff?” Johnny said.

  “It’s like Henry James said, ‘Be a person upon which nothing is lost.’ I see things as they are. Not as I think they would, could, or should be. The truth of the matter is right there in front of us, in every moment, in all its glory and detail, if we care to see clearly.”

  Johnny accelerated the car down Sunset. “Where to, Little Buddha?”

  “Let’s go home so you can get to work. We’ll catch the Old Man on the morrow.”

  When Johnny, Thuy, and I stopped by my Dad’s place after school the next day, Ellie told us that Gordon had been there and gone. He had asked her to drive him to San Diego. She told him she had an ocular migraine.

  “What is that?” Johnny said.

  “My vision is blurry straight ahead. In my periphery, I see