Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

  The empanada was so good that my hunger came back all at once, almost painfully. I took another from the plate he had left in the middle of the table. A warm smell of cumin rose from it when I broke it in half.

  “Do you think the markets will be open tomorrow?” I said. “I don’t want to eat up all your food.”

  “I don’t know. This is my first coup.”

  “Ha. Mine too.”

  I ate my soup very slowly, in shallow spoonfuls. James had forgotten half his food on his plate.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” he said. “It’s just nerves.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Tell me again where you’re from,” he said.

  “Toronto,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. You said.”

  “What do you do, James?”

  “I’m in the family business. Leather imports. But actually—well, I’m AWOL from the family business, if you want to know the truth. I was supposed to go back last year. But I had a crisis, I guess.”

  “A crisis?”

  “Couldn’t face it. Going back to Houston, managing the warehouses. So I stayed here. I told them I was researching new techniques. Cutting-edge stuff in the tanneries in Corrientes. And I was for a while. But then that was all done and I still couldn’t face going back.”

  “And now here you are,” I said.

  “Here I am. A cosmic irony. I didn’t want to leave and now I can’t.”

  “You’re attached.”

  “Can’t help it,” he said.

  The curfew announcement came on again. He wasn’t looking at me much, and his body was hunched sideways at the table, one arm braced across his stomach as he listened to the radio. Maybe he felt me watching him. He glanced up.

  “I’m not an idiot,” he said.

  I teetered. “What?”

  “Who was it who turned your apartment over? It was a boyfriend, wasn’t it?”

  This was an unexpected turn. “A boyfriend?”

  “Or a husband, maybe? You come home with me and run out in the middle of the night. Three months later your apartment has been trashed and you’re back here. With no connections in the world, according to you.” He gestured with the cigarette in a way that seemed self-conscious. “If it’s money you’re after, don’t bother,” he added, taking a drag. It occurred to me that his watch was expensive. “I’ve got none left.”

  Here the best path was obvious. “I’m not after any money,” I said. “I have money.”

  “Is he Canadian as well?” James said. “Has he run out already?”

  I needed to slow it down. “I’d rather not talk about him,” I said, experimentally.

  “Should I be expecting him to show up here and murder us both?”

  In this drama that James was scripting, the man I pictured—the betrayer, or the betrayed, whichever he would be, standing in the rubble of my living room, cuckolded, shouting, red in the face—was Nico. It had a dreamy logic to it. Certainly we had parted ways definitively that day.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “He wouldn’t. He’s married.”

  “Married?” A flicker of genuine moral shock, before he remembered to be louche.

  “I’m so sorry about all this,” I said.

  He looked satisfied now. He settled back into his chair. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re livening up this lockdown, anyway.”

  “So sorry,” I said again. I reached out with my soup spoon and cut the last empanada in half.

  After we ate, I tried to read an old mystery novel from the shelves in the living room while James smoked and listened to the radio. I couldn’t fully take in either the radio broadcast or the book, which was an Agatha Christie novel set, oddly, in ancient Egypt. At eleven o’clock we were both drowsy, the nerves of the day finally overtaken by fatigue, and there was a crisis of manners.

  “Take the bed,” he said.

  “No, no, no,” I said.

  There were sirens in the distance, rising and falling along the river. He switched the radio off. The coughing and droning of police motorcycles sounded in the street below.

  “The sofa is too small,” he said.

  “If it’s too small for me, it’ll be worse for you.”

  “My mother would be appalled if I let a guest sleep on the sofa,” he said.

  “My mother would be appalled about everything that’s happened since I woke up this morning.”

  He was hesitating in the archway that led from the living room to the kitchen. Poking around with the dishes, which I had washed. I thought maybe he expected that we would sleep together again—maybe he thought he deserved it, for being so broad-minded about me—but I also had a feeling I had better not start it myself. It would seem too transactional if I did, and that would bother him.

  “The sofa is really all right,” I said. “I’m insisting.”

  “We’ll renegotiate tomorrow,” he said.

  DECEMBER 1959

  GREENWICH VILLAGE, NEW YORK CITY

  The bars were letting out, and the streets of the Village were filled with young people singing and arguing. The woman’s name was Sheila. She took me to a diner on Charles Street and bought me a burger, because she felt badly about how my night had gone. The place was as bright and noisy and clean at 2:00 AM as a hospital cafeteria. Now I could see how smoothly her face was powdered, how carefully her hair was done; she was Italian, I thought, she had the richness of the Italian girls I had watched going into the parish church in Chevy Chase when I was a child. She had a silver filling I could see when she laughed, and her nails were bitten down. The doom that I had felt in the Bracken became a funny misunderstanding while I ate, an anecdote about a naïve girl I had already ceased to be. Sheila was a student at Dartmouth. She was in town for the weekend. I knew, even as she told me this, that it wasn’t true; maybe it was because I had seen the way the barmaid spoke to her. She was part of this scene, I could tell, and she was older than a college student. She lied to me and flirted with me, and I finished eating and reached under the table to let my hand rest on her knee.

  She took me to an apartment a few blocks away. There was a bathtub in the kitchen; I sat on the edge of it while she mixed us both a drink, and I drank mine without pausing for a breath, I was so nervous. I could sense that other people were sleeping in the darkened rooms of the apartment, but I said nothing and she pretended we were alone.

  In the dark of an untidy bedroom, she took the empty glass out of my hand and sat on the bed. Sirens were going up the avenue. “How green are you?” she said, and I considered a few lies, but then said, “I went to a girls’ school, but we never got much time alone.” She laughed at that as if it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and then she bent and pulled her stockings off.

  I woke early, blinking in the tiny bedroom. Drying laundry was hung over all the furniture; ropes of necklaces dangled from the lamps, and hairpins were scattered across the floor. Sheila breathed softly, facing the wall. I pulled my dress on and stepped clumsily into my shoes, and then—being a little hopeful—I left a slip of paper on the nightstand with my name and the number of the boardinghouse.

  It was a cold morning and I walked home through empty streets, my coat half-unbuttoned. My breath plumed in front of me; my skin felt too soft, a border that could barely hold between my hot self and the freezing air. She had been avid, unembarrassed, and somehow ironic at the same time; I thought I could sense her laughing faintly at me in the dark, and yet it was not unfriendly and I accepted it. Her gestures trailed through my mind.

  JUNE 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  In the morning the radio said that Onganía was being sworn in as president to replace the junta of three, and James went out to get a newspaper. I needed to call Gerry, but it wasn’t safe to use the phone in the apartment. I slipped out of the building, taking the extra key hanging beside the front door, and found a pay phone three blocks away. The woman at Gerry’s service sounded just the same as always. It was com
forting, in a remote way. I asked her to have Gerry call me back, hung up, and stood shivering next to the phone box. It rang almost immediately.

  “When are you coming back?” Gerry said. “I thought you’d be in Montevideo. This is a Buenos Aires number.”

  “They’re not letting foreign passports out,” I said.

  “Damn,” Gerry said. There was a pause. “So go to plan B. Nico can drive you out. Paraguay is easiest, the border’s like a sieve.”

  “Nico’s no good, Gerry. He sold me out.”

  “What happened?”

  “I came back from the ferry terminal and my apartment had been ripped apart.”

  There was a brief silence. “Son of a bitch. They told me he was clean.”

  “I don’t have time to talk about it. How can I get out?”

  “I’ll manage it. I’m going to make some calls. Call me again tomorrow?”

  I wanted something now, today, that I could take back with me to James’s apartment. Some bit of a plan. I sighed. “All right.”

  “What’s it like on the street?”

  “Soldiers everywhere.”

  “All right, then. Get back inside.”

  I hung up and hurried back to the apartment, turning on the radio again. James arrived ten minutes after I did with a copy of El País. The newsagent had told him that a neighbor down the block, a Brazilian journalist who’d lived in Buenos Aires for twenty years, had been dragged out of his apartment at dawn by police and came limping home a day later, his face bruised and his hands shaking. The newspaper James brought was three days old, but he had only discovered it when he was already on his way home. Wanting to be occupied and inconspicuous, I read the paper even though it was completely useless. There was an article about an American minesweeper sinking in an accident off Puerto Rico. A hostile review of a James Bond film. A corn blight in some country where it was summer.

  “There was no speech,” I said.

  “No speech?”

  “Onganía gave no speech,” I said. “When they swore him in. They said on the radio just before you got back.” I was chewing my nails. James made instant coffee and brought me a mug.

  “Everything looks normal outside, except for all the police,” James said. “The banks are closed, but that’s it. People are doing their grocery shopping. Kids are going into the school on Tucumán. I wonder how long it will last.”

  On Thursday the newspaper was new and the radio was reporting that the deposed president’s brother had been arrested, taken away by the police while the two of them were sitting down to lunch at the brother’s house somewhere on the fringes of the city. I hovered near the window through the morning and gleaned absolutely nothing at all from watching traffic go by on the street below. There was a feeling of being hemmed in invisibly, as if I were contained in a glass box. I forced James to accept money in exchange for the groceries he had bought in the market around the corner, and then insisted further on spending most of the short winter afternoon making a ragù, because idling in the living room with his paperbacks was beginning to make me insane. Just before curfew, I went out again to use the pay phone. I told James I was trying to get in touch with my mother.

  Gerry sounded tense, his voice attenuated, as if he weren’t speaking directly into the phone. “Our contacts there are lying low,” he said.

  “Of course they are,” I said. “What’s the plan?”

  “If I can get the right person on the phone, we can get a special emergency visa for you. You’ll get through the port, no problem. But.”

  I stared at a cluster of patrolmen on the opposite corner. They had stopped a shabbily dressed young man and were making him empty his pockets.

  “But you can’t get the right person on the phone,” I supplied.

  “Not yet. It’s too chaotic, my dear. I’m trying.”

  They were putting handcuffs on the young man. My stomach was cramping.

  “You understand that I’m trying, don’t you?” Gerry said.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Here’s the thing. I need you to keep trying too. There’s been an uptick in KGB activity all over Buenos Aires. They’re on the move. You hear me? I know you’re in a tough spot now, but this is no time to drop the mission. This is the opening they’ve been looking for. It could all come apart now, the whole theater.”

  It was beginning to rain. I pulled the collar of my coat up. “What do you want me to do? I dumped my equipment, Gerry.”

  “Those boys you tracked—the ones in the warehouse—whatever they’re planning, it’s getting close. We intercepted a call from the Soviet embassy that went through a Brazilian exchange last night. The tone was very clear. They’re activating their cells in the Southern Cone.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Destroy their capacity.”

  “How?” A number of James Bond scenarios went through my mind. “I’m a tech, Gerry. I don’t do this kind of thing.”

  “Think harder.”

  “I could call it in to the police.”

  “Bingo. Call me again when you can.”

  “All right.”

  I walked back slowly, thinking of Román in jail and trying not to think of it at the same time. He had been kind to me, in an unassuming way: pausing in a doorway when he saw I had fallen behind the group, pulling an extra chair from another table when I arrived last at the bar. He had a fluency with people that came from knowing he was welcome, that the students of the UC were always glad to see him coming. I felt sure that he felt safe, even now. That he had never felt unsafe, didn’t know what it was. I felt cold. He took his bicycle, week after week, to that warehouse in La Boca. He packed a lunch, probably—I thought of the Coke I had seen on the worktable—and spent afternoons there, planning this thing. Gerry said he had bought enough explosives in Paraguay to kill a dozen people.

  Back in the apartment, the radio was taking a wildly optimistic tone, and James had kept the ragù from burning. The financial markets had reopened that morning. They were up, considerably. It was a glorious new dawn for the Argentine economy. An early winter twilight fell, with a perfunctory rustling and cawing of crows on the balcony. It was strange to remember that it was the last day of June. At around six o’clock the news came through that the mayor of Buenos Aires had been arrested. I found myself adding the same herbs over and over again to the bubbling pot, unable to remember what I had already done.

  We played cards. James smoked incessantly. He found a bottle of wine, which we drank with the pasta and ragù.

  “What does your father do?” he said.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  James squinted through his cigarette smoke at the cards in his hand in a way he probably thought was dashing. It was kind of dashing, actually.

  “Can never quite square on you,” he said. “Always one step ahead.”

  “It’s the truth,” I said. “He died a long time ago. I was twelve.”

  “I didn’t mean you were lying. I’m not sure what I meant. I’m sorry.” He rubbed his forehead. “It feels like we’ve been here together for weeks.”

  It had been three days. “Are you tired of me already?” I said, trying to be light.

  “Who gets tired of a pretty girl?”

  He insisted on the sofa that night, and I slept in the bed. In the middle of the night I got up to pee and paused for a moment in the living room, watching him sleep. He looked younger without his glasses.

  In the morning he went out to visit his bank. After he left, I pulled on gloves and a hat and went quietly down the stairs. This would be my best opportunity to make the call to the police. I walked a few blocks, cutting carefully away from the busy street where James’s bank was. Workmen waited at bus stops; children straggled to school. The scene was close to normal, but there was a hush over Buenos Aires. Voices carried with peculiar sharpness. I found a pay phone in front of a butcher shop and asked Information to connect me to the headquarters of the Buenos Aires police.

  �
�I’d like to report a terrorist plot,” I said.

  A mild male voice on the other end told me that this was serious, and that I should be sure that I was serious before saying it.

  “I am serious,” I said. “I can give you an address.”

  “Please proceed, miss.”

  I gave the address in La Boca. “There’s a crate full of explosives under a workbench against the north wall.”

  “How did you obtain this information, miss?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “This is a serious matter. You will need to come into the station to speak with a detective.”

  “I won’t do that. If you don’t want this information, I’ll hang up right now.”

  “No, miss, don’t hang up. Describe the crate, please.”

  I gave as much detail as I could about the crate, the room, and the building, and then I hung up. An old woman in a lavender raincoat came out of the butcher shop, holding a package wrapped in paper, which leaked blood. She stared at me. I moved away down the street.

  In my secret heart, I admitted that I hoped Román and his friends weren’t at the warehouse when it was raided. Some part of me couldn’t believe that they did what they did in earnest. I thought they had to be mistaken somehow, misled. I hoped their supplies would be taken away and their plot ruined, and the episode would bring home to them how stupid they were being, and they would give up playacting like revolutionaries.

  I hurried back toward the apartment. At a corner, a group of soldiers were smoking and watching the street, bored looks on their faces, rifles strapped across their backs. I considered crossing to the other sidewalk, but decided it would only call more attention to me. They stopped me, not by raising a hand or speaking but by drifting into my path. Two in the front looked like they thought this was an excellent game. One put his hand out.

  I looked inquiringly at his face. “Papers?” I said. He smiled, but still refused to speak. There was a sick feeling in the back of my throat. I pulled my passport from my bag and gave it to him, and he thumbed it open, looked at it longer than he needed to, and handed it back. He took a very small step out of my way, enough so I would know I was free to go but not enough to keep me from having to brush against him as I passed.