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night you’ll have touts trying to pull you into their strip clubs. It’s up to you whether you go with them, but they’ll rip you off for drinks.”
    “Any other advice?”
    “Stay away from witches.”
    “Witches?”
    “You’ll see them. Think about it; if they have to work on the street, how good can they be?”
    “There are good witches?”
    She peered at him over the top of her Ray-Bans as if he had just made a joke in poor taste.
    He thought she might want to make up for her earlier rudeness and invite him for dinner or a drink later, but instead she pointed out the elevators and held out her hand. “I’ll drive you up to Santa Marta on Saturday. I’ll call you tomorrow night to arrange a time to pick you up.”
    “I don’t suppose you’re free for dinner?”
    “I have a date,” she said and was gone. Some men standing in the foyer followed her with their eyes. He smiled. If only you knew , he thought, and went up to his room.
     
     
     

Chapter 21 
     
    After he had showered and changed he decided to go for a walk, wandered into the back streets behind the metro. The sidewalks were crammed with people selling watchbands and pirated videos. An old man with stooped shoulders was peddling the ubiquitous chiclesde a peso. There were old magazines piled on the blankets, stiff from rain and sun.
    He saw a woman standing in the bushes sitting on a folding chair. She wore blue jeans and a faded pink t-shirt, her hair tied in pigtails on either side of her face. There was an ash-smeared skull on the grass beside her with a lit cigarette in its mouth.
    An old Mexican woman approached her and she stood there while the younger woman waved a smudge stick around her and started chanting in a language that didn’t sound anything like the schoolboy Spanish that Adam knew.
    He wondered if she was one of the witches Jamie had warned him about.
    It was getting on towards evening and he was hungry. He decided he was not in the mood for the tender delights of the Zona Rosa so he went back to his hotel and had dinner sent up to his room.
    He picked up his cell phone and sat on the bed in the dark, stared at the lights of Chapultepec castle and the luxury hotels along the Reforma. He felt curiously abandoned, high in this glass and concrete eyrie, alone in a strange country with witches down in the street.
    On impulse he tapped her number on his speed dial then immediately cancelled the call and threw the phone aside before he could change his mind and make a fool of himself. What the hell was he thinking?
    He lay back with his eyes closed and wondered if she was making love to some other man right now. He wondered what he looked like, how they had met.
    He ate his cheeseburger watching the sports channel then tried to get some sleep. But it was impossible. Finally he gave up and turned on the bedside light, picked up the book he had bought at the airport bookshop in Boston: Love is the Drug .
    It was written by some Californian self-help guru he had seen on a morning show. He skimmed the pages, impatient for the guy to get to his point. There was nothing he didn’t already know and agree with; in any kind of rational love, passion and pleasure were not paramount, people who stayed together had common interests, goals and needs; a healthy relationship was grounded on years of commitment and struggle in which the needs of the other become as important as the needs of the self.
    It’s what he thought, too, and that was why he had tried to avoid it.
    The book said that romance and passion could not last. Yes, you’re preaching to the choir, pal. How can it? That was why he never wanted to get tied down to one woman. This was what Elena was saying, too, this was why she wanted to marry someone else.
    So, Mister Love is the Drug, how the hell did this happen to me?
    This over-tanned airhead was basically telling him to be the guy he was before he met her. “Yeah, well that’s what I want, too,” he said and tossed the