CHAPTER 21
Since I returned from the island, I had been spending two nights a week uptown, in the social clubs of Washington Heights, looking for El Jabalí. It was a helpless kind of orbit, because I had nothing but the nickname to go by, and a nickname is an ineffective way to summon a man who I imagined, like others of his type, did not want to be summoned. Without quite realizing it, I pictured him as Nico, my contact in Buenos Aires. They were both men who dispensed and called in favors, a venerable line of business.
The clubs opened for dancing at night, but during the day they hosted every kind of group activity, from table tennis to boxing, from dominoes and chess to weight lifting and wrestling. They were huge rooms that had been put to other uses before the wave of Dominicans had come to Washington Heights. They had been laundromats and auditoriums and discount clothing stores, and the newly arrived had made them over with slogans and banners and patriotic paint schemes. To meet the many social purposes of the clubs, folding tables and chairs were put out, arranged, rearranged, and folded away each day, like troops of Ziegfeld dancers running through choreography. The tang of the gym, of concrete block and fresh paint and sweat, lingered in the evenings, reminding me of my old high school. I copied the look of the other women, who wore vivid dresses, matching heels, and thick, dark eye makeup. It was usually the old men I asked about El Jabalí, the ones who were already established at a corner table before I came in and hardly left it, except to dance a turn or two with their wives. For weeks I circulated among the clubs, paying the nonmember fee at the door, and no one did more than shake their head in response to my question. I felt conspicuous, but reasoned that if I kept this up, a curious word might reach El Jabalí eventually, of a white girl who was being persistent. On my second or third tour through a club called El Nacional, an old man finally leaned forward and said, in English, “What you want him for?”
“There’s a family I need to find,” I said. “They left DR looking for their son.”
“What’s that have to do with him?”
“He helped them,” I said, over the bachata coming from the speakers just behind us. “That’s what I heard.”
He leaned back and glanced at the man next to him—some silent conference. “Haven’t seen him,” he said.
“Well, thanks anyway,” I said.
That was the closest I had gotten, and that was as far as it went. It was a long way home, the rattling A train as far as West Fourth Street, where I sometimes got out and caught a taxi if I was too exhausted to proceed. If I took trains all the way it was an hour and a half in my party dress, reading an Eric Ambler novel to stay awake, creaking into my house at two or three o’clock in the morning with nothing to show but blisters.
Then one evening I was lingering at the serving window of the little kitchen in the back of Club La Patria, chatting with a cook named Pilar while she fried plantains, and she nodded into the milling crowd and said, “There he is.”
“There who is?” I said, turning to look.
He was a small man in a pressed yellow shirt, perhaps in his fifties, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed him if not for the movement around him: an inner circle of young men standing close, and a larger circle of people passing and offering greetings, or shifting from foot to foot as if preparing to ask a question, or simply slowing to look at him. El Jabalí wore a gray mustache and glasses with thick rims, and his hair was dyed black. I watched while a man approached and leaned in to speak to him. El Jabalí gripped the man’s shoulder while he spoke, his face impassive, scanning the room, and then released him with a nod. The man disappeared into the crowd, visibly relieved.
“You were looking for him, weren’t you?” Pilar said.
“Yes,” I said. “I was starting to think he was a fairy tale.”
She laughed. “Oh, he’s as real as you and me.”
I wondered how I could get close to him. It was like trying to speak to a bride at a wedding, a debutante at a ball. His party ushered him to a table right in front of the bandstand, which was empty that night. The rest of the room was drinking beer and sweet wine out of plastic cups at a quarter apiece, but on El Jabalí’s table a bottle of rum appeared with a tray of real glasses. He settled in and lit a cigarette.
“I’ve got costillas in the back for him,” Pilar said, and hurried away from the window.
A man asked me to dance, and I said all right, and we took a turn or two around the room to the merengue record playing over the PA. While we danced, I saw El Jabalí stand up to talk with an older man, and they walked to the hallway that led out past the kitchen. The song ended and I thanked my dance partner and hurried toward the coat check, which was a card table and a dress rack on wheels, where I had left my purse with a teenage girl chewing gum over a glass jar marked Propinas. She gave the bag to me and I searched in it to make sure it still contained the envelope with the photographs of Félix in Peekskill.
El Jabalí was standing at the end of the hall outside the kitchen with the older man, his arms crossed, his gaze on the floor. I didn’t know how many chances I might have, and at least at that moment he wasn’t surrounded by his younger entourage. I clacked toward them over the tiles, and both looked up at me, irritation quickly hidden under a thin chivalry.
“Miss?” said the older man.
“Sir,” I said to El Jabalí. “Could I speak to you privately?”
The older man stepped back, eyebrows raised, but El Jabalí glanced at him and he stopped where he was. “Regarding what?”
“It’s private.”
“Are we acquainted, miss?” he said.
“We’re not.”
“Then I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”
I had no room to be cautious, then. “I need to speak to Dionisio and Altagracia Ibarra,” I said, tense. “They’re looking for their son, and I’ve found him.”
The two men stared. I pulled the photographs out of my bag and held them up. “This is him,” I said.
They looked at each other. El Jabalí coughed and said, “You have a moment to come upstairs?”
“Yes, okay,” I said.
Climbing a staircase again, with parties unknown; but I went. This was a family place. I listened to his footsteps behind me. At the top of the stairs he went around me and switched on a light. We were standing in an office. Deep shelves against the walls held cascading stacks of paper, bound ledgers, and a couple of typewriters, one with the ribbon pulled out. El Jabalí sat in a creaking chair and indicated another one for me. “Let me see those,” he said.
I handed him the set of photographs. I had copies. They were the best that had come from that day, Félix crossing the street in Peekskill against the light, his left profile and then his right as he looked both ways for traffic, the too-big coat flying out behind him as he reached the restaurant door. El Jabalí looked carefully at them, then rested his chin on his fist.
“How do you know this family?” he said.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
He regarded me. He had a broad, open face, and there was no indication whatsoever of what he was thinking. “Where were these taken?”
I hesitated. “Not far.”
“You tell me where, and I tell his parents.”
“You know where they are?” I said, deflecting.
He didn’t answer, as if it were a rhetorical question. The palms of my hands were beginning to sweat. I opened my mouth to explain that I didn’t want to say where he was, that I couldn’t hand off this information to a person I had just met, that I had to be able to see for myself that the boy was safe. But I suspected that saying all that would seem like an apology or the opening of a negotiation to someone like him. I closed my mouth again.
“You don’t trust me?” he said. “I trust you even less, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I said, shrugging. “That’s why you won’t tell me where the Ibarras are.”
“Of course not.” He spread his hands. “So we are stuck, ar
e we not?”
Funny that we had stumbled so quickly into an honest conversation. “We could arrange a meeting,” I said.
“Yes?”
“If you tell me a place where the Ibarras will be, I’ll bring Félix.”
“It would be dangerous for them,” he said.
“I’m not a danger.”
He turned his hand palm up, as if to show how little it meant for me to say that. He leaned back, and we both sat thinking. Then he said, “They won’t come alone. There will be people watching.”
I was relieved. “Your people?”
The blank, open face again.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I accept.”
Félix did not usually speak to customers, except to offer to take away empty dishes. Some of the busboys took drink orders and ran plates, but this task was reserved for the ones who had worked at La Cucina longest. Only on the busiest nights did Félix join the fray in the dining room—on New Year’s Eve, on Valentine’s Day. So it was a surprise when Paulie came back to where he was standing by the Hobart, polishing glasses to prepare for the dinner service that would start in two hours, and said, “A lady out there wants to speak to you.”
“To me? Why?”
“She said she knows somebody you know. Hurry up.”
It was probably a mistake; no one in Peekskill, outside of the house on the hill, knew anybody he knew. It was a Friday afternoon, and he wondered if she were a truancy officer. He could have gone the other way, walked out the back. But curiosity held him, and a note of pleasure at being looked for. He dried his hands on the front of his apron and pushed through the swinging doors.
It was the dead time of the afternoon, three thirty, and only four tables were occupied in the front room. He saw her immediately, a woman alone at a two-top by the front window, staring out at the street. She had a glass of water and a menu. Her bag and umbrella were hooked over the other chair. He approached around the edge of the room, feeling shy now. She looked younger than he had expected, and had curly hair pinned up, and lipstick on. His stomach turned: she was obviously looking for someone else, and would be disappointed when she saw him.
But she turned and smiled. “Félix.”
He panicked, began to back away. “It’s Bobby.”
“It’s all right, Félix,” she said. “Believe me.”
He was so young. He had, somehow, the same blurriness that the photos had. His eyes were large and dark and he hadn’t had a haircut in a long time. His shoes were a mess. I watched him negotiate with himself, standing a good ten feet away from my table, plans going through his head. His name was a password. Probably no one had called him by it in a long time.
“Listen, listen,” I said, putting my hand on the other place setting at the table. “Sit down for a minute.”
“I can’t sit. I’m working.” The soft accent. His eyes darted to the side, toward the kitchen.
“Okay, stand closer.”
He took a few steps, close enough so I could lower my voice. “Your name is Ibarra,” I said. “I’m here to take you to your parents.”
It was because he had imagined it a thousand times. The arrival of a stranger with good news, into the everyday mess and slush of his life. Or the arrival of the two of them, the faces that shifted in his memory if he tried too hard to picture them, like numbers in a dream. After Mrs. Villanueva died, he had imagined it all the time. In the intake center, lying in the bunk bed, listening to the roar of the expressway all night, and during his first weeks at Saint Jerome, he would picture them coming for him, his mother with her lily smell, his father with his gold watch, stepping out of a car and saying, “Él viene con nosotros.” His father using the voice he used on the telephone in the study, which would neutralize the directors of the intake center, of Saint Jerome, would vaporize them where they stood. “Ustedes no entienden, pues no importa, él viene con nosotros.”
Because he was afraid sometimes that he could use up his memories of their faces, that they could fade from his mind like a picture that was handled too much, he had turned more and more to daydreams of an interceding stranger. So that was why, when the woman in the restaurant used his name, his real name, he knew already that he was leaving with her. There was a burst of fear and daylight in his chest. But there was nothing else to do. He went back to the kitchen, found Paulie talking to the chef, said, “I have to go.”
“The hell do you mean, you have to go?” the chef said.
“I don’t feel good,” he said.
“Who was that woman?” Paulie said.
“I have to go,” he said, taking off the apron. He was smiling and terrified. Paulie and the chef looked at each other.
“What’s the matter with you?” Paulie said, but Félix was already walking away.
El Jabalí had said that Félix’s parents would wait for us in Fort Washington Park, in Washington Heights. And if they weren’t there, what then—bring him back here? I walked ahead of him out of the restaurant, leading the way to my car. When I glanced back, he was looking at me, and then everywhere else, up and down the street. I was trying to think of what to say. All that came out was, “You’re all right? You’ve been okay?” two or three times, while we found the side street where I had parked. He nodded (what else could he do?). There were heavy ceramic planters on the sidewalk and electric-green shoots were just appearing in the black dirt inside. “It’s almost spring,” I said, turning around again, since he was keeping pace two steps behind me, but he didn’t answer and I didn’t bother to repeat it.
“I like your car,” he said softly, when we reached it.
“This?” It listed at the curb.
“Chevy is a good car,” he said, and I realized that he was trying to be polite, to make conversation. I was pierced. I opened the driver’s side, got in, leaned over to push open the other door. He didn’t move. He was skinny and headless through the window, wearing just a T-shirt under his open coat. “Félix?” I said.
“How do you know them?” he said, bending down to look in.
I tried to think how to answer that truthfully, since I didn’t actually know them, since every piece of this story was backward. “I found a man who knows them,” I said.
“But who are you?”
“I’m a private investigator,” I said.
He frowned.
“A detective. Somebody paid me to find you,” I said. “I can tell you on the way.”
But something about getting into the car, this final commitment, was stopping him. He shook his head. “I have to work,” he muttered. “They’ll be mad.” He shuffled away, looking back the way we’d come.
I was afraid he might run and I wanted to get out of the car, but I could tell it was moves like that that would make him run. “I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “I’ve been to Hacienda la Romana. I spoke to Octavio and Irma.”
And it was back, the flicker of hope that I had seen in the restaurant. He got into the car.
“They are okay?” he said.
“They’re fine.”
He put on his seat belt. “The radio works?” he said.
It was one of those tentative days at the end of winter, the late afternoon sky pale blue and layered with thin clouds at the horizon. We drove south, Félix playing with the radio buttons, tuning in to distant rock stations, pausing over the salsa music drifting up from the Bronx, shaking his head when the signals weakened and crackled out. I kept the heat on and aimed all the vents at him. I had stopped at a McDonald’s on the way out of Peekskill and he sat with the wreckage of the meal in his lap. He had twisted the yellow papers that had been wrapped around the burgers into tight points, had collapsed the cardboard boxes into squares, and then torn off the strips and tabs that held them together. As my car shuddered its way onto the Sprain Brook Parkway he said suddenly, “My cat?”
“You have a cat?”
“Yes,” he said. “At the house.”
I tried to imagine where he’d been living. “Will
it be all right tonight?”
“I think Carmelo will feed him tonight, if he sees I don’t come.”
“Carmelo?”
“Yes. It’s many boys.”
“Many boys? Are they all from Saint Jerome?”
“No, they come from other places. They come up to work.”
“We’ll come back for him,” I said. “We’ll come back for your cat.” And maybe see about all those kids, I thought.
“He likes me the best,” Félix said, matter-of-fact. “He’ll be lonely.”
“Not for long,” I said. “I promise.”
He grew quiet as Yonkers became the Bronx. We came down from the West Side Elevated into the already shadowed side streets of Upper Manhattan. It occurred to me finally to say, “I’m sorry about Mrs. Villanueva.”
He said nothing. I didn’t press. I was looking for parking, which was a good excuse. Félix turned the radio up abruptly, a burst of static between the afternoon classical station and the news. I was startled, annoyed, and then he turned it off. “So who paid you?” Félix said. “My parents paid you?”
“No,” I said. “No. What happened was—well.” I saw a spot in front of a laundromat and cautiously ratcheted into it. “It was somebody else. They were pretending to be your family.”
“Pretending? Why?”
“I think they were looking for your parents, and they were hoping that if they found you, they would find them.”
“It was Balaguer?”
“I think it was his people, yes.”
I watched his eyes work back and forth. He twisted the papers again.
“They’re not looking for you anymore,” I said. “I made them think you were dead.”
His eyes widened. “Dead?”
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 18
