The narcotraffickers have a saying: “You can’t hide in Mexico, you can only be hidden.” That’s because Mexico isn’t a country, it’s a multitude of small towns and extended families. Blood is thicker than water, villages never forget their own, and gossip — not futbol — is the national pastime. Towns and families must agree to stop talking about the fugitive, or their inevitable gossip will give him away. The same rule applies to foreigners too, especially somebody like Nooshin. To Mexicans she’s a circus freak without a circus. No matter where she goes, she attracts scrutiny and wags tongues. And thank god.

This is how the gossip game works:

An elderly and superstitious woman bumps into Nooshin in an empty plaza somewhere, interprets her as a bad omen, makes the sign of the cross, and scuttles away. Later she gabs about the encounter to a friend of hers, who mentions it to her son in Guanajuato, who happens to be dating a girl whose sister is a tour guide and received that bulletin about Nooshin’s disappearance. And that’s how I find out that “una gringa muy MUY alta y esta en los huesos y con el mal ojo” — a very VERY tall American girl who’s just skin-and-bones and has the Evil Eye — passed through Ahorcada.

“Ahorcada? Never heard of it.” I blink at the mismatched couple standing in the hotel room’s doorway. The son is wider than tall, a doughy-faced Indian who never met a meal he didn’t like. His girlfriend is frail and knock-kneed, with delicate mestiza features. They’re blinking back at me — and today’s growing collection of empty Tecate cans, kicked into a corner. In a gust of brewery-breath I ask them, “Where the hell is Ahorcada?”

“Thataway.” The son’s porcine face is even piggier in profile. He’s waving a flabby arm in the general direction of Canada. “Ahorcada is thataway.”

I grab my backpack and root around for a map. “Show me.”

“Not until we get the reward,” says his girlfriend. Her dark eyes are shining with dollar signs.

“Reward? What reward? There’s no reward!” I unfold the map and hold it out for their inspection. “Now please, show me.”

The son begins to reach out a hand, bulbous and rough like a seal’s flipper –

She slaps it away. “American money. 50 dollars. Right now.”

“Not a chance,” I tell her, and make grateful noises as I begin to shut the door. I can find Ahorcada on my own.

“Wait. Let me show you.” The son’s flipper-hand reaches out to the map again. His bratwurst-sized finger isn’t very good for pointing, but he indicates a gray dotted line that leads away from Guanajuato, then trails off into nowhere. “The second-to-last pueblo on this road,” he announces, tapping the map. “I grew up there.”

My eyes are roaming the map for any kind of detail — crossed picks that indicate a mine, plane silhouettes for an airport, blue lumps for a lake. But there’s nothing except that gray dotted line and its unnamed white circles, the map’s smallest population unit. 1,000 souls and less. “What’s in Ahorcada?” I finally ask.

“Stupid assholes like you!” his girlfriend bursts out. At first I think she’s referring to me, but she’s not. The eyes that were shining with dollar signs are shooting daggers at him. “We could’ve gotten money for this!”

“There’s nothing much in Ahorcada,” the son shrugs placidly, as if he’s deaf to his girlfriend. His fleshy shoulders keep jiggling after the shrug ends. “It’s up on the Manzanares Mesa. There’s a whole lot of nothing much up there.”

I surprise him by thrusting a couple $20 bills at them, which his girlfriend claws out of my hand. Then I begin folding the map with excited movements, my heart somersaulting in joy. Nooshin isn’t lost to me anymore. She’s synonymous with an foreboding destination — Ahorcada, which means “hanged woman” in Spanish — and I’m coming to get her.

Kneeling to stuff the map into my backpack, I’m struck by the weirdness of it. Why the hell was Nooshin going to Ahorcada? The answer is a big fat duh — she wasn’t. She took the first bus she found, a local one that just happened to be transiting nowhere.

A rotund shadow looms over me. “Are you her husband? Boyfriend? Something like that?”

I’ve already forgotten the son and his girlfriend are still standing in the doorway. I consider them warily, knowing that whatever I say will ripple across the map we’ve just been looking at. Gossip is the national pastime in Mexico, after all. “Husband, boyfriend, something like that,” I agree evasively.