“Are you going to represent Martha Conover?” he asked.
“Looks like it,” I said.
“Did she do it?”
“She says she didn’t.”
His frown created a diversion channel that led from his receding hairline to the bridge of his nose. His eyebrows met across the furrow and squished together in a fuzzy caterpillar kiss. “You think we ought to roll the dice with a wobbler?” he asked.
“A wobbler? What the hell is a wobbler?”
“An unwinnable case.”
“It’s not that unwinnable,” I said.
“You gotta hear your horoscope for today,” Anna called from her desk, where she was busy opening a package and reading the newspaper at the same time.
“Why?” I replied.
“It says, ‘In your life you are both the marble and the sculptor, and your greatest pleasure is doing what other people say you cannot.’”
“Um,” I said.
“Hey, look at this,” Anna said, pulling two small black tubes from their padded envelope. “Our skunk guns are here.”
“Let me see.” I went out to her desk to take a look. I held mine in the palm of my hand. It was, just as the ads said, small enough to carry on a key ring. Anna pulled a larger, white spray bottle from the box. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Neutralizer. You spray it around to get rid of the skunk smell.”
Brink didn’t buy it. “You can never get rid of the smell of a skunk,” he said.
“These are all natural, free-range, native New Mexico skunks,” I said.
“It beats getting beaten up or murdered,” said Anna.
******
The Kid came for dinner, and we had our personal big three—tacos, tequila and Tecate—at my coffee table. He had already stopped in the parking lot and left a couple of extra tacos with no hot sauce for his buddy, La Bailarina. “How’s la viejita?” he asked over dinner, meaning the little old lady Martha Conover.
“Difficult.”
He squeezed some lime juice on the top of his Tecate can, took a sip. “She’s an old lady, Chiquita.”
“She’s not that old, and even if she was, that wouldn’t give her an excuse to be a narrow-minded bigot.” You could say that what we become when we are old is the sum of all the things we do when we are young. Martha Conover had been bigoted when she was younger too. “You feel like going out for dessert, Kid?” I asked when dinner was finished and I’d cleaned up by throwing the paper wrappers away.
“Dessert? Why you want to go out for dessert?”
“I feel like it.”
“If you want dessert I’ll make you dulce de leche.”
Dulce de leche was an Argentine favorite made by sticking a can of evaporated milk in a pan of water and boiling it until it caramelized. It’s about as unappetizing as the maté they sip from straws for tea, but in a different way. One is too sweet, one is too bitter. “There’s a French place on Academy,” I said. “Let’s go there.”
“Why?”
“I feel like having a French pastry.”
The Kid didn’t feel like having a French pastry, but he was so startled by my request that he agreed to come. Chez Henri, the French place on Academy, was in a faceless strip mall identical to a hundred thousand strip malls across the West, with a dry cleaner, a semi-ethnic restaurant, a stationery store, a Furrs Cafeteria and an exercise studio that had gone belly-up. The mall made up in parking space for what it lacked in distinction. The interior of Chez Henri aimed for Provençal charm, with rough plaster walls, dark beams in the ceiling, red and white checkered tablecloths and candles in wine bottles. It missed, but it wasn’t entirely off the mark. The Kid ordered a Napoleon and an espresso that was dark and thick enough to dissolve a quarter in. I ordered fresh raspberries with cream in spite of my stated desire for a pastry. I had no idea where the raspberries came from at this time of year, but they were plump and delicious. I had a dog, a malamute, when I was a kid, who used to walk up to raspberry bushes and—very carefully—bite the berries off. He thought they were worth the trouble. Me, too.
Chez Henri was small enough to have only one waiter, who moved at the pace of a somnolent snail. His movements had the deliberate slowness of someone who didn’t much like his job, or the people he was waiting on. As Whit had said, the service here wasn’t great.
“Some people I know recommended this place,” I said when the waiter finally showed up with the desserts. “She’s in her late thirties, he’s fiftyish. They both have kind of blondish hair. He’s big, looks like a football player, in fact, but his hair is getting thin on top. They were here on Halloween.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Them. They were with another guy, who talked on his cellular phone all night. I don’t know who he was trying to impress.” That would be Ed George, the banker. “They stayed until eleven-thirty. I couldn’t go home until they left, and I thought they’d never stop talking.”
“Once Whit Reid gets talking, it is hard to stop him,” I agreed.
“They didn’t leave any kind of tip either.” He served the Kid his Napoleon, slouched over to the next table.
“How you like your dessert?” asked the Kid.
“Delicious,” said I.
“Who are those people you were talking about?”
“Cindy and Whit Reid. Cindy is Martha Conover’s daughter and my old high school friend. Whit is her husband. I was checking on where Whit said they were the night Justine Virga died.”
“Why you do that?”
“Just curious.”
I shifted to another lane. “I had my oil changed at Mighty today.”
“Why? I change your oil for you.”
“I know. Martha had her oil changed there the week before Halloween, and I wanted to see what the place was like—if anybody could have taken her keys and copied them. The guys there speak Argentine Spanish. You don’t know them, do you?” One of the first things recent immigrants do is find other immigrants from the same place and pool their resources. It’s the time-honored way to make it—legally or illegally—in America.
The Kid stirred a couple of teaspoons of sugar into his espresso. “No. I was only ten years old when we left Argentina. I don’t know many people from there. Argentinos don’t think I am a countryman anyway. Because I lived in Mexico, to them I am a Chicano.”
I’ve never been able to figure out what to call Spanish-speakers myself. A Chicano to me is someone with close ties to Mexico, maybe an illegal alien, maybe not. When one of them is accused of a crime, he or she becomes a Mexican national to the police and the newspapers. I know native New Mexicans whose families have been here for hundreds of years who call themselves Chicanos. It means la raza, the race, and has a certain kind of “this is who I am, roots and all” militancy. Besides, New Mexico was once part of old Mexico, and if you go back far enough, New Mexicans are Mexicans too. If you go back even further, they are descendants of the original Spanish settlers, and I also know native New Mexicans with roots who call themselves Spanish, and sometimes they’re related to the ones who call themselves Chicanos. On the other hand, when Martha Conover says Spanish, it sounds like an insult. As for me, I’m an Anglo but never an Angla: nobody uses that word, although a female Chicano can be a Chicana. I’m a WASP too, but people in New Mexico also don’t use that word.
“The Argentinos are muy arrogantes, the Mexicans say. Because they don’t have Indian blood, they think they are more European and better than the other Latinos,” the Kid continued.
“They don’t have Indian blood because they killed all the Indians off.”
The Kid shrugged. “They did that in this country too, Chiquita. The Argentinos think they are better educated and have more culture than the other Latin Americans, the Mexicans say. Who knows? Maybe they do.”
The waiter showed up with the check, a subtle hint that it was time to leave. I ignored it and ordered a cappuccino. The Kid asked for another espresso. A candle flickered in the middle of the table.
We leaned over it and whispered like conspirators, even though there were only a few other people in Chez Henri and none of them were in hearing distance. It was the kind of place that made you want to whisper and linger. Some zippy accordion music in the background wasn’t all that different from the kind of music the Kid played. We were only a few blocks from La Vista, but the setting was so far removed from any we’d ever been in together that it put a different spin on things. I asked the Kid a question that I’d asked him before but he’d never completely answered. “Why did your family leave Argentina?”
Maybe because he was out of his element, or an espresso buzz had put him in a talkative mood, he answered me this time. “It was the time of the dirty war, and it was crazy there. The left, the right; the comunistas, the fascistas; the guerrillas, the military; the Perónists, the anti-Perónists; the Montoneros, the anticomunistas—everybody was fighting everybody else. The military leaders owned their zones. They could put in prison and torture anybody they wanted, and nobody could stop them. They had a torture machine they called Susan. They poured water on people, tied them to the machine and shocked them or killed them with electricity, but they did it so there were no marks on the body. Twenty-five thousand people died or disappeared in the dirty war—Los Desaparecidos, they called them. The military took them from their homes, put them on the floor of a car and put a blanket over them so no one knew where they were going. Sometimes they buried Los Desaparecidos in big holes, sometimes they threw them in the river, sometimes they put cement on their feet and they dropped them in the ocean. You could see them on the bottom, moving like that.” His hand made a motion like grass swaying in water. “The military took Los Desaparecidos children and raised them themselves or sold them. They hated the parents enough to kill them, but they wanted their children. Crazy, no? They have a saying there, God is an Argentino, but when something bad happens, they say God was busy in another place. My father taught at the university. The military took away his job, and we went to Mexico before they took away him.” It was a long speech for the Kid, and he finished with a gulp of espresso.
“What did your father teach?”
“Filosofía.”
It seemed pretty harmless to me. “Why did the military eliminate his job?”
The Kid shrugged. “Maybe he gave somebody’s son a bad grade. Maybe they think filosofía is revolutionary. Who knows? They could do what they wanted.”
“The woman that supposedly got killed by Martha Conover’s car is from Argentina too.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did she come here?”
“Maybe for the same reasons you did. Would you ever go back?” I asked. There he was the son of a professor. Here, in some circles anyway, he was a wetback and a spic.
“No, I am a norteamericano now. The Argentinos are funny people. They are inteligentes and sensitivos but they can also be stupid and cruel. Here people are impulsivos; they kill when they feel like it. There they think about it first. They are … how you say it?”
“Calculating.”
“And cruel. They tortured people and made them suffer. Politics were an excuse for the criminals to steal and kill. Here nobody needs an excuse. That’s freedom, no?” He smiled, but then he turned serious again. “I think about what happened to my father, and I will never go back. They took away his work and his life. I have my own business in America. No general can take that from me.”
“Things have gotten better in Argentina, haven’t they?”
“Sure, but you never know when they are going to get bad again. I like it here; it is the land of opportunity.”
That’s how it looked to him, but to me we seemed to be becoming more third world every day. The rich got richer, the poor poorer, the national debt multiplied like bacteria, even the air seemed grayer than it used to be. “Did your mother die after you got to Mexico?” I asked.
“Claro. Something inside her broke when she left Argentina.”
The Kid and I came from different backgrounds, different countries. He was younger and better looking, and we didn’t listen to the same music. You could say that trying to reconcile the opposites generated the heat, but when it’s not broke, I don’t analyze it. We did have one thing in common—both of us had lost our mothers. In her own way, my mother was a desaparecido too.
The waiter yawned as he made another pass by our table. “Vamos,” I said to the Kid.
“Bueno,” he replied.
Coming here had been my idea; I paid for the coffee and dessert, leaving the waiter a large tip, more than he deserved, but he’d told me what I wanted to know and I wouldn’t want anybody to think I had cheapness in common with Whit Reid.
We had taken the Nissan, and when we got back to La Vista I parked it in its numbered space. La Bailarina’s van was parked in the visitor’s space next to the Dumpster. She was there every night when I went to bed and gone when I got up in the morning. Either she had someplace to go or she didn’t want to be seen here in daylight. She had one of those sun screens that had a pair of dark glasses on one side and said NEED HELP. CALL POLICE on the other. The dark glasses were facing out. The curtains over the other windows were pulled tight.
The Kid and I went inside, turned out the lights, got into bed and made love in the dark. Afterwards he went right to sleep—he always does, even after three cups of espresso. I stayed awake and watched the wind sway the curtains and shift the patterns of light on the floor. Winter was in the wind. It caught a dry leaf and rattled it against the window. A train cried as it passed through the city, a siren circled from somewhere near Tramway, car waves crested and broke with the lights on Montgomery—the sounds of a night that’s in motion. The woman climbed into her convertible, put the top down, started the engine, backed out of the driveway and left a garden behind for her husband to water. She was going to meet a man, and she was laughing. She was at the peak of her power, and she thought she could stay there forever. Her brown hair lifted behind her and floated. I made a sound that woke up the Kid. He rolled over, put his arm around my waist, his cheek against the back of my neck.
“You have that dream again, Chiquita?”
“Yeah,” I said.
9
I NEEDED TO tell Martha Conover what I had seen at the Atalaya lot, so I stopped by her place the next day on my way home from work. I didn’t call first; I wanted to see what she was like on the afternoons when she wasn’t expecting visitors, how quickly the vodka went down then. I got gas at the Texaco on Wyoming, one of those stations where you didn’t have to pay in advance—in the daytime anyway. As I pulled the nozzle from the regular unleaded pump, the gas gushed out, down the side of the pump, around my feet, across the ground. “Son of a bitch,” I said. A smarter woman than I ran out of the convenience store, took the nozzle from my hand, flicked off the switch in the handle that keeps the gas flowing automatically and hung it back on the pump.
“Why would somebody put the nozzle back with the switch still on?” I asked. “How could somebody put it back with the switch on?”
“Got me,” the attendant said. “Be glad you weren’t smoking.”
My shoes smelled of gasoline, but I didn’t feel like going all the way home to change them. I went on to Los Cerros, hoping Martha wouldn’t notice. It looked promising when she came to the door with a half-empty glass in her hand.
“You doing anything this afternoon?” I asked.
“No,” she replied. She was home all alone, but she was dressed in a suit and heels, as if she was going to tea.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Come in.”
The ice rattled in her glass; background music tinkled on the CD. “I’ve been listening to a Mozart sympathy,” she told me. The phone rang. She excused herself and walked into the bedroom to take the call, marking time with the ice cubes in her glass.
I sat on her chintz sofa and waited while she talked. Waiting isn’t my forte, but I can do it when I ha
ve to. I found myself listening to the music, which at the moment was just a piano. There wasn’t much else to do; Martha was too far away for me to eavesdrop on her call. I’d heard Mozart before—who hasn’t?—but I’d never listened. The sun came in through the open drapes and settled in my lap like a cat. The pianist’s fingers moved over the keyboard with exquisite precision, lingering on every note. I imagined fingers roaming slowly over that part of my body where the vital organs are located. It was deeply sensual music, music that knew all about loss and desire, and it had a familiar kind of tension to it. I wanted it to last forever at the same time I longed for the end. When I felt like I couldn’t stand it another minute, the orchestra rolled in with a crash and broke the spell.
I got up, pouring the sun out of my lap, crossed the room, picked up the CD container Martha had left on top of the machine and read the program notes. She had been wrong; it wasn’t a sympathy, or a symphony either, I’d been listening to. It was Mozart’s ninth piano concerto. The pianist was Alicia de Larrocha, a woman approaching her seventies, who lived in Barcelona. It was a wonderful gift to play so sensually at that age, at any age. Mozart fathered six children, and four of them died in infancy, according to the program notes. He was only thirty-five when he died, half of his allotted span, but thirty-five years wasn’t so bad for him, because he lived twice as fast as anyone else. He was the supreme genius of music, the notes read. “If only the whole world could feel the power of harmony!” Mozart was quoted as saying, and “The function of harmony is to proceed toward a resolution.” It’s also the function of litigation.
I heard the disharmonious tinkling of ice that said Martha Conover was coming back into the room.
“You like Mozart?” she asked when she saw the CD notes in my hand.
“It’s very sensual music,” I said.
“Mozart? Mozart is not sensual. Mozart is orderly. These days, people your age think about nothing but sex. Sex has caused more misery than all the wars put together. I’ve never understood what all the fuss was about, and if you ask me, it is the most overrated activity in America.”
The Lies that Bind Page 8
