“I don’t know what I would have done that night without him there,” Evita told McGarvey, her eyes glistening.
McGarvey lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She accepted it gratefully. The gesture made him think of Owens. The two of them—Evita and Owens —had a lot in common; both of them had been badly abused by Darby Yarnell, and in the end by Baranov.
It wouldn’t be easy, Valentin had told her, keeping up appearances, keeping a stiff upper lip, keeping up with their work. She was one of them now, and even if her father could not have known what great services she would perform, Valentin did, and he was very proud of her. Then he had a glass of wine with her, and somehow, ridiculously, she was in his strong, wonderfully gentle arms. He smelled clean of soap and of cologne, and of wool and leather. (Which was odd, McGarvey thought, for a Russian. But then Baranov, by all accounts, was not an ordinary Russian.)
“He told me that I should just let go. That if I needed strength he had plenty for me, and for Darby, too. I thought he had enough strength then for the entire world. ‘Trust in me, Evita,’ he said to me. ‘I will always be there for you. No matter where. No matter why.’ Goddamnit, I believed him, you know.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I believed in him all the way.”
And still did, at least in some measure, McGarvey thought.
Baranov took her to the big bedroom that looked toward the glittering city in the distance where he gently undressed her, telling her all the while that he was proud of her, that Darby would understand, that all of us needed to gain strength from someone else from time to time, there was no dishonor in it for either of them. He, too, needed strength. And he was so different from Darby, the only other man who had ever touched her. She had such a terribly infinite need that there was a fire in her head that would have been impossible to quench in any other way, even with Darby himself, had he been there. They made love, or rather, she said, Valentin made love to her. She was like a puppet beneath him; he pulled every string, and he knew exactly which strings to pull, and his touch was perfection.
She stopped in midsentence and looked up again, realizing perhaps for the first time who she was talking to and just what she’d been saying.
“Goddamnit to hell,” she said without anger.
“He is a very bad man, Evita,” McGarvey suggested. “What happened was not your fault.”
“But I loved it, don’t you see? I even loved the danger. But it wasn’t enough in the end. I wasn’t nearly enough for them. But then they had each other.”
23
Evita got up and put on some music. It was Spanish classical guitar, very good, very sad, very distant. They sat across from each other, smoking cigarettes, drinking, listening to the music, allowing the music to soothe, in a measure, the embarrassment she’d felt by her admission of faithlessness not only to her husband, but to the new system she’d embraced with her marriage: the U.S.A.
“It wasn’t all so black and white,” Evita explained. “You don’t live your life, ordinarily, thinking how history will judge you. It happens hour by hour, sometimes second by second. Am I going to be prosecuted for it after all these years? Are you a real cop after all? Are you going to try to arrest me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you are after Darby.”
“Yes,” McGarvey said.
“And Valentin?”
“Him too.”
“You might have said him especially. He is the devil. But I don’t think it will happen. He’s too smart, and he has too many friends. He told me an old Russian saying once: ‘Before a fight two men are boasting; afterward only one.’ It will be him in the end who will do the boasting. You’ll see.”
“Not if you help me,” McGarvey said earnestly, sitting forward.
She laughed. “What, a disenfranchised cop and me, a drug addict?”
McGarvey listened to her in utter amazement. She did not know his real name, she did not know who he worked for or what he was after, she did not know a thing about his background, he was just a face professing to know something about her past, and yet she’d called him a “disenfranchised cop.”
Had she been waiting for him, or someone like him, to show up all this time? Had Baranov predicted he, or someone like him, would come sniffing around her as if she were a bitch in heat. Did Yarnell attract that type? Or had the remark simply been coincidental? Was he jumping at straws? Christ, how did one know in this business; everyone lied about practically everything, to practically everyone. A great depression seemed to settle on him. He thought about all the women in his life. His mother, his sister, his ex-wife, his Swiss girlfriend, and now Evita Perez. There wasn’t one of them in the bunch who’d liked him for what he was, or who had told him the complete truth about anything.
McGarvey sat back, his feet propped up on a white lacquered coffee table, willing himself to remain calm.
“That shocks you, I see,” Evita said, moistening her lips. She stood up and got a small silver box from the mantel. She brought it back and opened it, taking out a tiny mirror, a razor blade, a tiny golden straw, and a small vial. She smiled. “There are worse habits,” she said. She opened the vial, carefully tamped out a tiny bit of cocaine on the surface of the mirror, then closed the vial and replaced it in the silver box. Her movements were very slow, very deliberate, very precise; she was a chemist working with a precious substance in an important experiment. She was overcoming her guilt and paranoia with a certain belligerence. She cut three lines of coke and quickly bent down sniffing a line up her right nostril with a practiced hand. She waited a moment, then sniffed the second line up her left nostril and immediately the third up her right again. She sat back with a long, languorous sigh. Her eyes were shining.
She put the paraphernalia back in the box, and then took her time about replacing the box on the mantel. She’d done something fine. She was becoming cocky. She even swaggered a little. “What else do you want to know, Glynn, or whoever you really are?”
“Darby came home eventually. He must have known that something had happened,” McGarvey said. “What did he say to you?”
“What happened after that, you want to know.” She came back and sat down on the couch, pulling her dress above her knees so that she could sit cross-legged. “Valentin was a much better lover than Darby. And Darby was damned good, you know. It was grand for a while. When Darby was in town Valentin got scarce. But when Darby was gone, Valentin was there. Sometimes Darby would hardly be out of the driveway and Valentin would be coming up in his big, flashy Buick with all the chrome. Never saw it dirty. Must have had a boy or someone polish it every day. Wouldn’t let me smoke in that car. He was proud of his cigarette lighter. It had never been used. You could see it was new. He’d pull it out and show it off.”
“What did you do for him?” McGarvey asked. With her legs spread he could see everything. She wore no panties. He averted his eyes. She laughed.
“For Valentin? Nothing much. Attended a few meetings. Waited once in his car for him outside the Ateneo Español. He said he wanted to talk to someone. But mostly we went dancing, and sometimes we went to parties.”
“Just you and Valentin?”
“Sometimes Darby and I would go to a party. But if I was with Valentin it meant Darby was gone. He was seeing other women, of course, Darby was. He’s always had his women on the side, so I didn’t feel so goddamned bad.”
“Who was at these parties that you went to with Baranov, then? Americans? Mexicans? Russians?”
“Yes. And Bulgarians and Spaniards and a few Cubans from time to time. I met Uncle Fidel when he was just a piss ant lawyer. He was nothing big in those days.”
“Americans?” he asked again.
“Some.”
“CIA?”
Evita shrugged. “I never asked. They were good times. Everyone was having a lot of fun. Sometimes we’d fly over to Acapulco … that was before it became really big. Sometimes we’d fly over to Cancun on the Gulf Coast. One night we had a picnic, a bu
nch of us, in front of a Mayan pyramid. We went up to the top, just Valentin and me, and we made love there. I was an offering to the gods. That’s what he told me.”
“Did you love him?” McGarvey asked gently.
She smiled dreamily and leaned her head back, her eyes toward the ceiling, her lips parted, her hands on her lap as if she were in some yoga position. “Maybe if you explained what that word means …” She drifted. “I used to know, but then it seemed to change. Every time I thought I had it, it would change again. Damndest thing, you know. There weren’t any answers anywhere … not even in the Mayan temple. Even the old ones didn’t know. So who was I, a lesser mortal, to figure it out? Darby wanted me sometimes. I understood that. Valentin wanted me at other times. I understood that, too. But it didn’t last very long.”
She’d been a little girl looking for love and security, McGarvey thought. What she’d gotten instead were lies and manipulation. Owens had seen the confusion and unhappiness in the girl, and it had made him angry at his student, at his superstar. Life was filled with disappointments, though. He didn’t know anyone who was guiltless, or anyone who had never suffered.
After the revolution came to Cuba and Castro installed himself in office, Mexico City cooled down for a time. Baranov stopped bringing her past the Ateneo Español to wait for him while he talked with friends. Even the nightlife seemed subdued compared to what it had once been. People had become more serious, Evita said. She had been flying high, and she began to come down. A week, or sometimes two, might pass during which she would see neither her husband nor Baranov. She had no idea where either of them were getting themselves off to in those days (later she learned that Baranov was bouncing back and forth between Mexico and Moscow, while Darby was commuting on a weekly basis between Mexico and Washington, D.C.). She did know that they were very busy. When they were together, she said, they seemed preoccupied, distant, as if only a part of them had returned to her. Big things were in the wind, she knew at least that much. And a year later, when the Bay of Pigs story broke in all the newspapers, she’d known what her husband and Baranov had been up to all that time, but by then, of course, she had been installed in their Washington house, and she became pregnant with Juanita. After that she rarely saw her husband, and only once in that first year, shortly after her daughter was born, did she see Baranov.
“I was a widow, but I was too dumb to realize it at the time,” she told McGarvey, sitting up. Already she was starting to come down from her coke high. Her tolerance was up. McGarvey figured she probably had a pretty heavy habit for it to work off so fast. She’d probably be on crack before too long. The cycle was common from what he’d read about it.
What about the three houses in Mexico? The town house that Owens had called a palace, the mountain house, the beach house? She had never gotten herself involved with the finances of their marriage. Darby was a more than adequate provider. She never wanted for anything. The bills were always paid, their house staff in Mexico City and again in Washington, operated a household account which took care of their physical needs, and five thousand dollars was automatically deposited into her own checking account each month. If she’d wanted more, even twice that amount, she knew that Darby would have given it to her, no questions asked. Not once in the years they were together had she ever balanced her checkbook, or even noted a check in the register. There simply was no need for it. Such work, when she first came to New York, was so alien to her, so outside the realm of her ordinary knowledge, that she immediately hired an accountant who did it all for her, and who was still doing things with numbers to keep her afloat. She was even quite prosperous in her own right, she’d been told a couple of years ago. But money meant nothing to her. It never had meant anything to her. She had wanted a relationship, plain and simple. It’s all she’d ever wanted, really.
“There were a lot of years there when I was alone, raising Juanita. And I didn’t mind being alone. Not really. Mexico City had been fun, but now I was a mother. That to me was a million times more important than all the little intrigues and schemes we’d played. I don’t think I even read a newspaper or looked at a news show for five years. I had my own little world raising my daughter, and I was content in it.”
“No friends?” McGarvey asked.
“I didn’t need any. Darby would breeze in every now and then. We’d get dressed up and make the rounds of the Washington parties. But it never lasted very long. A weekend, sometimes a little longer. Never more than a week. Which was fine with me. I’m telling you, I was done with that life. Completely done with it.” Her eyes glistened.
“But you still loved him. Your husband.”
“I wanted to, believe me, I wanted nothing more than to be in love with my husband and him with me.”
“And Valentin Baranov?”
“Sure,” she said noncommittally, glancing toward the silver box on the mantel. “Him too.”
McGarvey got up and poured Evita a fresh glass of champagne and himself another bourbon and water. It was still morning down on the street. He felt as if he’d actually lived through those twenty years with her since he’d come up here. But then it was an occupational hazard. He’d been a specialist at attaching himself to other people’s lives; listening to them, watching them, reading their mail and their personal notes, their diaries, even their shopping lists. Seeing where they had been, what they were up to now and in which directions they were likely to go in the future. He knew their schedules and routines, their habits and pet complaints. He got to know some people so well that like any competent biographer, he could lay out his subject’s life better than the subject could. Along with this occupational hazard or vice or whatever came another gift; he could tell when people were lying to him by commission, but especially if they lied by omission. Evita had left a gap a mile and a half wide back there sometime between the preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion and her move to Washington, D.C. Something had happened in Mexico City, something terrible, something that irrevocably changed her life, transformed her overnight from a still-naive little girl to a hardened woman for whom isolation in a large city in a foreign land without her husband or any other emotional support was no particular strain. In fact, like a fallen princess who seeks the convent for solace, she had gotten along quite well in her solitude. She was content, she’d said, to remain alone in Washington raising her daughter without friends, without worries, without concerns. But it didn’t last.
“I sent Juanita away to boarding school when she was thirteen,” Evita explained.
“Why?”
“I went through a bad period there. She was growing up without a father. There was a lot I didn’t know. A lot I couldn’t give her. I knew that much.”
“Did you get to see her very much in those days?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, pushing her hair back away from her eyes. A car horn honked outside, startling her. She glanced toward the window then looked away guiltily. “But not enough. She was starting to ask questions that I couldn’t answer … .”
They drank their drinks. The band had started to practice downstairs. They could hear the hard thumps of the drums and the harsh notes of the trumpet.
McGarvey had come this far and had only got half the story. He wasn’t going to leave without the rest of it. But there was something from her past, something from Mexico City that had shamed her, that had frightened her and had made her grown up all at once. He suspected she’d been trying to bury it all these years.
“Something happened to you in Mexico City, Evita,” he said. “Before you moved up to Washington. Before you got pregnant with Juanita. I think it’s important.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she flared.
She was crashing from her coke high, and already she’d gone too far with him, answered too many of his questions, revealed too much of her past to him for her to stop now. Her resistance had very nearly totally collapsed.
It was a strange year during which she had tried to ing
ratiate herself with her family, she said. She spent a lot of time with her mother and with her sister. But it wasn’t the same any longer, and she’d known at the time that she had crossed some invisible bridge, not only because she had married an American, but because of her infidelity. Her mother had looked into her eyes and had seen as clearly as if it was written there. It was a thing she was incapable of hiding from someone who had known her so well. Her sister knew or suspected, too, that something was amiss. She became terribly busy that year, too busy with her own family for Evita, which added still another burden in a load that was rapidly becoming impossible to hold up let alone carry. “Get on your knees and ask forgiveness from God,” her mother told her. But by then she figured it was already too late for her. She was a spy and an adultress. How could there be any forgiveness for her? For a time she traveled, moving from their city house to their mountain chalet, where she would stay for a month or a week or sometimes for just a day. Then she would pack a few things in her sports car and drive recklessly fast down to their house on the sea, where she would isolate herself even from the house staff, sometimes remaining in her room for days on end, eating only a small meal every second or third day so that she lost a lot of weight. She began to be sick all the time. Her movements became erratic. She traveled all over Mexico. Sometimes staying at their homes, sometimes in luxury hotels, sometimes in terrible, dirty, bug-infested village inns from which she would come away even sicker than before. She was trying to find herself. Trying to make some sense out of her life. And not doing a very good job of it.
McGarvey didn’t know how he could help her. He wanted to reach out and take her into his arms and hold her close and tell her that those times were long past, that memories alone could not hurt her, not really. But he suspected she was beyond even that sort of comfort.
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