“You ever taken a lesson?” he said.
“Just what they made us do in PE.” I could remember the time signature, but not the steps, exactly. I watched his feet and tried to mirror them. “Just follow,” he said. There was a kind of lightness on the ball of the foot that helped. I wasn’t a bad dancer, just ignorant. Nick put his hand low on my hip, directing me, and this was familiar too, the way gay men would sometimes handle women casually, pushing through crowds at the bars without appearing to notice whether they were among friends or strangers.
“There, you’re getting it,” he said. He lifted and turned my hand, and I did a little spin. We danced until we were hot, and then had more champagne. An older man asked me to dance, nodding at Nick, who nodded back, and we swam out a few paces into the crowd. He was a very good dancer, able to anticipate and compensate for my mistakes. I was a little giddy. We circled the floor twice and then he relinquished me to Nick again with a smile. The band took a break; an old recording crackled out of hidden speakers while they loosened their collars at the edge of the stage. I went to the ladies’ room, a shocking shift in color and light, a large gray-tiled room like you might have found in a train station, with an old woman brooding over a basket of hand towels at the far end of the sinks. Women trooped in and out of the stalls, flushed and chattering, rearranging their dresses, patting at their damp faces, leaning in goggle-eyed to the mirrors to reapply their lipstick and mascara. When I came out again, I couldn’t find Nick. I was untroubled; I ordered another champagne, enjoying how cheap it was, and accepted an invitation from a young man with a sheen of sweat on his upper lip, who was pained and heated and lacked the grace of my previous partner. As the song ended he pressed his hand against the small of my back and stared into my eyes. My confidence in my performance wavered. I couldn’t remember how I used to extricate myself from men like this. I had once been able to do it so quickly and sweetly that hardly anyone got angry with me. I patted his arm and hurried away, but I could feel him staring at my back.
Now I wished in earnest that I knew where Nick was. I was hungry and my feet were starting to throb. I walked the perimeter of the room, where women conferred in the shadows and waitresses stood back to rest. I didn’t see him anywhere. I found a chair that was stranded by itself and sat for a while, waving off an invitation or two to dance. It must have been getting close to one o’clock. It had been a long day and I could tell that I was very tired, but I floated above the fatigue, like a balloon.
An inexplicable current of cool air led me finally to a set of double doors on the far side of the dance floor, through which I could see the dark blue of the night outside.
I stepped through into a patio surrounded by a tall fence. Wicker chairs were arranged in clusters, and groups of people stood talking and laughing in the dark. The air smelled like the ocean. I wondered where we were. The sky was open above us. Nick was standing off to the left, talking closely with a man.
I was embarrassed, as if I had already interrupted. I was searching for the handle of the door and thinking of calling a cab when Nick spotted me. “Anne!” he called genially. I turned around and pretended to have just seen him. It was while I was faking this expression that I saw the man was in uniform.
“Annie, this is Captain Arroyo,” he said in Spanish, and then both men laughed, as if this formality were a joke in light of their long and intimate friendship. “Marcelo,” said the captain, kissing my cheek. He smelled like rum. Nick was weaving happily on his feet. I wondered if he was nervy enough to be trying to pick up this soldier. There were some who were. The man had a soft Rudolph Valentino face. He had removed his hat and his damp hair was standing up, as if he had been running his hands through it. For a fraction of a second after the greeting kiss he lingered near my face, suspended in the dark.
“Marcelo knows a quieter place,” Nick said.
CHAPTER 14
The quieter place had no neon lights and no marquee over the sidewalk. We stepped out of a cab in front and I tried to memorize the street, to make out the signs at the corners, the storefronts (shutters down, unlit) across the way, but there was nothing to catch on to. In the cab I had tried to mark each turn we had taken but had lost track; the streets were narrow in this part of town and we had stopped and reversed twice when blocked by the tedious inching of a night bus. I felt sober because I was nervous, but I could tell that I wasn’t thinking all that fast, and the champagne and the long hours were weighing on me. Marcelo had assumed the role of my chaperone, and helped me onto the sidewalk. It was all campy, his intercession between me and every door we had encountered since leaving Club Florida, but I doubted that he found it so himself. Nick was perpetually half a step away from him on the other side, cheerful, apparently inexhaustible, his collar undone.
Marcelo went ahead of us to talk to the doorman, who stood under a light at the side of the unmarked door. Nick lit a cigarette.
“You’re in love?” I said.
He smiled.
“This isn’t New York,” I said. “He’s not some kid on a weekend pass.”
“He seems interested in you,” Nick said.
“He’s not very perceptive.”
“He’s nice though, isn’t he?”
But Marcelo was coming back, grinning, clasping his hands, and we both stopped talking. “You’re my guests,” he said. “It’s all understood.”
Irritated, I followed them inside. It was a long, low room, a wash of black interrupted only by well-shaded lamps in leather banquettes. At the far end, a girl with honey-brown hair stood illuminated like the Virgin behind a shining bar. She was holding a shaker with both hands, her nails were painted and she wore a lot of bracelets, and for an instant she was Max; then she turned to pour the drink and I saw that her hair was a wig, and she was a stranger again. There were no other women in the place.
I shouldn’t have come. I was either an unwilling trois in this ménage or Nick had dangerously misunderstood Marcelo, and in both cases, I would have been better off back at the hotel hours ago. It was just that Nick felt like an ally and I was alone on this island with half a plan. We chose a banquette, Marcelo crowded in beside me and Nick sat across from us, and a waiter came to take our order. Marcelo asked for a round of something for the table, a name I didn’t recognize, and the waiter returned with three glasses of something dark. Nick launched into a raucous, serviceable Spanish. He wanted to know where Marcelo had grown up and what position he had played on his district-champion baseball team and what had happened to the high school novia he had almost married and where his dear old parents were living now. Marcelo answered all questions, elaborated, became wistful. Another round of drinks came. Marcelo’s military posture was buckling, his elbows were on the table, ash from his waving cigarette landed on the silky surface of his drink. I had stopped drinking mine. I longed for a plate of chicken and mashed potatoes.
“Three generations,” Marcelo said. “We’re all army men.”
“No such pressure for me,” Nick said, winking. “My father’s an accountant.”
Marcelo’s thigh was pressed against mine under the table, but it was hard to say if it was on purpose. I could feel his weight. I withdrew into the corner of the booth, and he corrected for the lack of support, tipping the other way, and then looked at me over the horizon of his own shoulder as if he had just caught me doing something flirtatious.
“My father was a magazine editor,” I said, for no particular reason.
“A scurrilous profession,” Nick said in English.
“My father was a colonel,” Marcelo said. “I serve in his old command. But he’s retired now. Sits and looks at the water all day.”
“What command is that, Captain?” said Nick.
“Intelligence.”
For me there was a shift, as if the film in the projector had just skipped off the reel. Then it caught and held again, and I pretended to yawn. My body had gone rigid. I took a deep breath disguised by a sip of the drink and willed my ar
ms and legs to relax again. I felt a righteous fury at Nick that would have to wait awhile before it could do anything much.
“Intelligence!” Nick said. “That’s the hardest to get into. I had a friend who did it. A guy from around here. He spent years training.”
Marcelo nodded modestly. He was trying to light another cigarette, but his depth perception was gone. Nick took the lighter from him. He wouldn’t look at me.
“My father practically ran the CEFA,” Marcelo said, leaning back now, his cigarette lit. “He had lunch every month with Trujillo. General Wessin would visit our house at the beach when he went on vacation.” Sadness or anger came over him. He sat up straight. “The Americans betrayed him. He did everything for them when the marines came, and they threw him away like trash.”
“What did they do to him?” Nick said.
“They exiled him. They came with guns and took him to the airport and put him on a plane to Miami. He had to leave everything behind; his house, his dogs.” He leaned back, looking up into the low plaster ceiling. “He’s a good man. He’ll be back.”
“You’re in the CEFA, then?” Nick said.
“No, no. They took it apart after he left.” He blinked, very slowly. I thought he might not open his eyes again, but he did. “They took it apart. But we remember. All of us who trained there.”
“You remember?”
His gaze traveled down in no great hurry from the ceiling and alighted on Nick’s face. He smiled. “We remember all the old tricks,” he said.
So much of the work is in trying to get close. But what I had taken a long time to learn, and would not now forget, was how dangerous it was to get closer than you meant to. I stared at Nick until he looked at me, and then I fell sleepily against the padded back of the booth. “I’m too tired,” I said. “And I’m hungry. I’ve got to go home.”
“Ah,” Nick said, touching his hair. “Well—”
“Sweetheart, don’t go,” Marcelo said, drifting my way again, blocking the light. “It’s early.”
“But it’s late,” I said, smiling.
He put his arm around me. It was heavy and his shirtsleeve was damp. “Some man is missing you?”
“Let me out,” I said. “I’ve had too much to drink.” I put a hand over my mouth and hunched my shoulders. Marcelo slid rapidly out of my way and I was free, dragging my pocketbook after me.
“I’d better take the lady home,” Nick was saying.
I made it to the bar in a few long steps. “Sweetheart,” I said to the girl in the wig, and she turned as if revolving on a stand, like a ballerina in a music box. “You have the number of a cab?”
Nick caught up with me while I was waiting outside.
“Look,” he said.
“I don’t need any explanations,” I said. “I’m just leaving.”
“It’s a little bit complicated,” he said.
“It’s none of my business.”
Nick glanced back toward the door of the club.
“What, is he coming?” I said.
“No, he found a friend in there.”
“A second friend, you mean.”
He turned back, listing under the weight of an apologetic smile. “I can’t imagine what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking they killed a lot of people, Nick, and are probably still killing a lot of people, and I have no idea what you think two queers from New York are going to get out of hanging around with one of them.”
A cab rounded the corner and, to my huge relief, nosed up to the curb in front of us. Nick darted out and opened the door for me.
“After you,” he said.
“Oh, are you getting in this cab too?” But I didn’t stop him. He went around to the other side and climbed in. I gave the address of the hotel. He waited a few minutes, until the car was humming along a stretch of highway that fronted the beach, the perfect blackness of the ocean filling the windows on the right side, and then spoke quietly in English.
“I’m here for the reason I said,” he said. “I’m a reporter. But I’m not looking for a story on the economy.”
Nick’s room was two floors below mine, facing the same way, the balcony putting him even with a sign on the discount department store across the way, so that DAMAS—CABALLEROS—NIÑOS glared hopefully in four-foot letters through his French doors. I had agreed to come only because he said he had a leftover sandwich there that I could have. I collapsed in a chair and he handed it to me, wrapped in foil.
“So what is it, then?” I said. “What’s the story you’re after?”
“I want to find out what happened to Trujillo’s machine after Trujillo died.”
“Isn’t it everywhere you look?”
“I mean, Balaguer is part of it himself. But he claims he took apart the police state and I don’t think he did. I think the secret police are still very active.”
I was still angry, although I was pleased with the sandwich: layers of pork, with pickles. “Doesn’t everybody know that already?” I said.
“Dominicans know that. I don’t think Americans do.”
Why did that make me so sad? I looked at the LL in CABALLEROS. I had been awake in the night for so long and it would still be hours before the sun came up. I tried to recall what I had understood about politics when I was twenty years old, twenty-two, before all this. I could hardly remember. Some vague symbolic nonsense, a schematic of the world that now looked like the backdrop of a child’s play.
“So that’s why you chose that place,” I said.
He had lit another cigarette and was searching in a drawer. I thought I saw embarrassment; he could have looked at me, but didn’t. “Yes.”
“I thought you wanted to pick up soldiers,” I said.
“Well, I would have settled for that.”
I snorted. Nick gave up on the drawer and went out to the balcony, returning with an ashtray.
“You could get into trouble,” I observed.
He sat in the other chair, next to a floor lamp with a parrot painted on the shade. He rested one ankle on his knee and looked down at his dress sock for a long time.
“It gets to be a habit,” he said finally.
“Oh? You’ve done this kind of thing before?”
“I spent a little time in Guatemala after the coup in ’63.”
I waited for him to go on, but that was all he said. I thought of Argentina, the crowd of people at the ferry terminal the day the tanks rolled into Buenos Aires. The far-reaching and heavy and vibrating lack of surprise. A few soldiers I had seen that evening, drinking toasts to each other in a bar on Carlos Calvo, as if a pitched battle had just been won or a wedding celebrated. The president had been an old man with gentle manners, and they had merely sent him away in a car with a couple of guards. It was the ease of it that had shocked me in the end, the way a veil of procedure had just fallen away. The new president put on all his medals, held a press conference, and then threw himself a parade.
“I know a man who was in the Sierra Maestra with Castro,” Nick said. “A correspondent for the Washington Post.” There was a sheen of jealousy over it. He actually put his chin on his fist, looking out toward the French doors.
“Real action for once,” I said, unkindly.
He glanced at me. “I guess this all looks a little perverse to most people. Chasing this kind of thing around.”
“It’s a living.” Unexpectedly, I felt a brief desire to tell him the truth about my life, or at least I imagined what it might be like if I did. But it passed. I ate the last bits of the sandwich and crumpled the foil.
“I really apologize,” he said. “To tell you the truth, even though I went out hoping I would meet somebody useful, I didn’t expect it to work out—well, quite as well as it did. I didn’t think I would involve you in anything. A total stranger! It was stupid.”
He looked sincere, even upset. “Well,” I said. I put the ball of foil on the end table and stood up to go. “No harm done.”
In the morning
I was ready and waiting outside the Palacio Municipal when the massive doors creaked open at a quarter to nine. The square was quiet at that time, the palacio casting a long shadow across it, the leaves of jacaranda picked out in the rich light. There was a flutter of secretaries rising from the benches when the bolts were shot, and I watched them stream past me into the dark of the building.
I chose the same window and the same clerk as the day before. He left an office boy to steward his chair and led me up a flight of unlit stairs into a large, high-ceilinged room, guarded by a woman at a green desk. She was backed by battalions of filing cabinets that stretched to distant windows. It reminded me of an obscure wing of a research library uptown where I had met Jane once to take her out to lunch. The same helpless sense of history at our heels, of there being too many things in the world that were irreplaceable but not in use, of time doggedly gaining on us. She had wanted a first edition of something. A book of poems. She was bright-eyed when I came to get her because she had found it and there had been an inscription on the title page: To my sweetheart, Christmas 1837. I remembered the white gloves they made her wear, flitting in the bad light.
“She’s looking for a license,” the clerk said to the woman at the desk, who looked startled, as if this were a day she had prepared for but had hoped would never come. She cleared a newspaper and a piece of lacework off the table and put on her glasses.
“The name is Ibarra,” I said. “They were married fifteen or twenty years ago.” A guess.
“Fifteen or twenty?”
“I’m not sure.”
She looked at the clerk who had brought me. He shrugged. “What is your purpose?” she said.
“They’re family,” I said.
“Hmm,” she said. “It would be better to be certain of the year.”
“It would be,” I said amiably.
The clerk was already thudding down the stairs behind me. The woman stood and entered the ranks of filing cabinets, and I waited at her desk. There were no visitors’ chairs. I could hear drawers opening and closing in the far reaches of the room. Ten minutes passed, fifteen. My feet were beginning to ache, and it was hot. A fan rotated on a stand nearby, making a lot of noise and moving the air only a little. I thought about sitting in the woman’s chair, but guessed that it would be an affront. I paced. A cat I hadn’t noticed stood up on a windowsill, stretched, and dropped down to the floor, and I spent some time chatting with it and petting it. The sound of drawers on rusted slides moved closer, then retreated again. Thirty minutes had passed when the woman returned, holding a manila folder, smiling.
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 12
