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Page 74
Summer found him in Mexico, traveling the Pan American Highway between Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Oaxaca. He had begun to lose track of time. He walked and begged rides until finally he came into the high, smoggy reaches of Mexico City.
The Americans had been a bitter disappointment. He had somehow imagined that he need only present himself at their embassy in Mexico City to be taken in, listened to, given a respectful hearing. He had envisioned succor, rest, and most of all, belief. He had found none of these things. One did not appear at an embassy, dirty and in rags, and ask first for the military attaché, and then, failing that, for money enough to travel to Washington. The only person he was allowed to see had been a lowly clerk of some kind, backed by an armed guard. The clerk, baffled by the apparition before him, had asked him to return at a later date, carefully unspecified.
But the obsession sustained him.
He had turned his hand to petty crime to earn money for his passage to the north. He had worked in turn for a garbage hauler, then a whoremistress old enough to be his mother. She had been generousor as generous as one who sold hundred-peso girls could be. She, too, had been fascinated by his steel hook.
He left Mexico City and walked north again to Querétaro and San Luis Potosí, stopping from time to time when his money ran out and he was obliged to earn or steal more. But he never stopped for long. Arkady Karmann was a driven man. Cadging rides, crawling aboard slowly rolling freight cars in the dark nights, he made his way north and north again, like an insect on a map.
To the Texas border.
The rain felt icy as it ran down his neck and back. It was the nearest thing he'd had to a bath in months. He had managed one haircut since Honduras, but a bath had been beyond his capabilities.
"Compadrecuándo llegamos a la frontera?"

 
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