The morning after the mayoral election I stride out of the Hotel Independencia and make it halfway down the block before I realize something is wrong with the weather. My skin is flushed beneath my jean jacket and chambray shirt. The cold? What the hell happened to all the overcast and rainy cold? I crank my neck skyward, where distant thunderheads are skulking over the eastern mountaintops. The leading edge of a warm front that slipped in unnoticed last night — in the high sierra, there’s no humidity to produce the telltale mugginess that signals one front pushing into another. To the west, the sky is cobalt blue and flecked with clouds blowing in from the Pacific coast.

“Senor!” a female voice yells. “Wait up, senor!”

I turn around, discovering the teenage secretary from the mayor’s office. She’s on an intercept course, clacking across the cobblestones in her high heels. “Hi,” I say when she arrives.

“Hi yourself, senor,” she says breathlessly, looking delectable in a man’s dress shirt and the obligatory miniskirt. The wind shifts and her cheap perfume hits me like a sucker punch. “The mayor would like you to join him for breakfast. I’ll show you to him.”

Last week in the mayor’s office she could safely ignore me, a mere petitioner. But now that the acting mayor ordered her to bring me to breakfast, she’s obligated to shower me with attention. How am I? How is my visit going? Do I need anything that the mayor’s office could provide? Does my so-called wife?

“Actually, I’m on my way to the farmacia to buy some Bactrim tablets and Lomotil for her,” I say leadingly.

“Your wife is suffering from a little Montezuma’s Revenge?” Not the most politically correct way to phrase it, but she’s all smiling teeth, unable to resist. “I’ll have some Bactrim and Lomotil delivered to your hotel’s front desk.”

It doesn’t take much to keep my end of the conversation going. I let my attention wander from the idle banter to her, a desperately ambitious muchachita trading on the only thing she has — her sex. She probably expected to be a fixture in the mayor’s office for as long as her looks held, a loyal sycophant hoping to grace his arm someday. Like their counterparts in America, Mexican politicians rarely leave their wives for their mistresses, although it’s been known to happen. But the former mayor took her future with him when he plunged off that hairpin curve.

“Who do you think won the election?” I ask. It’s a politer version of who do you sleep with next to keep your job?

“The acting mayor.” She says it with pissed-off certainty, striding briskly into the heat.

“You don’t sound too happy about it.”

“He’s a fat pig. Nothing like Juan.”

Juan is the recently deceased mayor. I’ve seen pictures of him in the local paper, a grinning weak-chinned figure often flanked by his wife and children. Even in grainy black-and-white he looks better than the acting mayor ever will.

I grope for an upside. “Well, at least you weren’t with Juan when, uh…”

“I might as well have been.” She pauses to wave in the direction of a too-enthusiastic truckdriver, honking at her, then turns back to me darkly. “Two years with Juan, and for what? I’m right back where I started.”

The teenage secretary refers to the Hotel del Coronado as the “new” hotel, which just means it was built sometime in the last century. The furniture in the lobby is scarred, the stucco walls are cracking. I stumble on a broken floortile on the way to the elevator — elevator singular, since the other elevator’s doors are hung with a NO FUNCIONA sign. After a shuddering ride we’re emptied onto a balcony littered with potted palms and metal patio furniture.

“The mayor,” she announces, and steps back.

“Acting mayor today, mayor-elect tomorrow,” he gloats, waving me over with a flabby arm. “Have some breakfast. There’s plenty for both of us.”

He isn’t kidding. The spread in front of him would feed several ordinary appetites — chorizo, Mexican omelettes, refried beans with cheese, you name it.

I seat myself next to the fresh fruit platter. “This is an unexpected honor, senor,” I tell him, and pop a slice of mango into my mouth. Delicious.

“Do you know why I asked you here?”

I slide my eyes from the fruit platter to him, carefully concealing my alarm at his tone. “No idea,” I lie.

“Two kinds of gossip spread like wildfire in a small town like Chirbampo. The first is when a man is sleeping with a woman who isn’t his wife.” He laughs all mano-a-mano with me, then casts a lecherous glance at the teenage secretary, standing in attendance at the elevator doors and chatting on her cellphone.

You can almost see her skin crawl. She drops her gaze to the patio tile.

His amusement is long gone when he says, “The second is when an outsider shows up and starts asking a bunch of questions about Senor Reyes.” He stabs a link of chorizo with his fork and points it at me. “You told me you wanted to interview Senor Reyes, not half the goddamn town!”

“You never even told me he was incarcerated, and Don Fidel only said he was on trial for tax evasion. How was I supposed to know the government finally caught up with Senor Reyes for prolonging the Prieto mineworkers’ strike and cashing in all those federal subsidies?” When the mayor’s eyebrows rise at my candor, I quickly add, “Senor.”

The fat man pops the chorizo into his mouth and chews stonily, staring past the balcony railing at a town of countless poor families and a few rich ones. His town, at least until the next election. “Senor Reyes is a pillar of this community, a hero to the people here. The mineworkers’ strike was his idea, you know. Imagine encouraging a strike against your own mine! But without the strike benefits for his workers and the federal subsidies for his idled mine…”

He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. Silver has been the raison d’etre of Chirbampo ever since the Spanish sunk the first mineshaft here in 1552. Ending the strike means facing up to economic reality — the Prieto mine is played out, and so is Chirbampo. Last one out, turn off the lights.

“So why are you upset at me for the field interviews?” I complain through another mouthful of mango. “I was only asking about the Korea Textile maquiladora in Tijuana that Senor Reyes owned, way back in the 1970s and 1980s.”

His beady eyes narrow. “That’s not what gets back to me after a couple iterations of gossip.”

“Good point,” I acknowledge. Now I’m sampling the chorizo. The homemade sausage links almost melt in my mouth. Too bad Nooshin can’t keep anything down or I’d bring some back to the hotel for her.

“Besides, I can tell you’re the kind of gringo who’d rather apologize later than ask permission first.” He uses pudgy fingers to scratch his chin, all three of them, and stares at me blandly.

The implication is clear. He’s giving me a chance to redeem myself. I can promise to keep him in the loop, in effect giving him veto power over my activities in Chirbampo. Or I can just blow him off and keep doing my own thing, in which case he runs me out of town. He wins either way. I don’t.

“It won’t happen again,” I finally sigh. “I’ll clear everything with you first.”

Just like that, the tension ebbs out of our conversation. The acting mayor gets to his feet and lumbers around the table, grinning broadly, a meaty paw extended. “I’m glad to hear it,” he tells me, pumping my hand. “What do you say we celebrate with a drink?”

“Sounds good to me.” So does a bullet between the eyes.

“Maria! Tequila!” he bellows, even though she’s only a couple yards away.

The teenage secretary clip-clops over to a side table, retrieving a bottle of Andres Mesar and two glasses on a silver serving platter. She pours the tequila and hands a glass to each of us.

“To Chirbampo,” the fat man toasts, reaching up to clink his glass against mine. Then he tosses the yellow liquor down his throat.

“To Chirbampo,” I echo. Tequila shots with the mayor before 9 AM. Only in Mexico, man.

A strangled beeping comes from the general vicinity of his waistline. He fishes beneath a lovehandle for his cellphone. “I need to take this. I’m sure it’s somebody important calling with congratulations,” he says, then puts his glass back on the tray Maria is holding. “Set me up again, alright?”

She watches him waddle to the far end of the balcony, then looks at me. Her gaze is unreadable, her eyes like dark mirrors reflecting me back to myself. She lifts the tequila bottle to her lips and tilts her head back, swigging deeply, before refilling the mayor’s glass.