“Do you have the money?” Rose asked.
“I have everything. My friends have been generous. I borrowed money for the fee, clothing, and gear. I’ll see how I pay them after I get out of trouble. I just need to go to the school to get my sister, take her, and take off, dressed as for the Winter Olympics.” María Paz laughed. “I have set up two of everything, for her and for me. So I have to say good-bye to you soon, Mr. Rose, I can’t stay longer. I would love to stay. But this is all very complicated, very exhausting, you know, life-and-death circumstances. The good news is that Violeta will like Seville; it was she, after all, my sister, Violeta, who said Seville in spring smells like orange blossoms. And don’t tell me that I shouldn’t get my hopes up, sir, I know I shouldn’t, I know it won’t be easy, I’m very clear about that. Between here and that spring there’s a whole fucking winter in the way. ‘Winter is coming,’ so says the motto of House Stark in Game of Thrones. Have you seen it? Isn’t it the best? ‘Winter is coming.’ I guess that’s my motto too. Things are going to be fucked. I know that. Very cold, very scary, I know, with a whole bunch of motherfuckers breathing down our necks. Anyway, I wanted to come to say thank you, Mr. Rose, and tell you that the death of your son caused me a lot of pain. Your son was the sweetest, most beautiful person I have ever met. I came just to tell you that.”
“How did you find out about his death?”
“I was in your home when the accident happened, Mr. Rose, and I figured it out because of the dogs. They began acting very strange, running up and down those stairs like crazy, and I thought, what’s going on with these animals, why are they suddenly so unhinged? Then I took off the headphones, because it was nine or ten at night, and I was watching TV with the headphones and couldn’t really hear what was going on. I was up there, hiding in your son’s attic, hiding from you too, Mr. Rose, a detail for which I owe you a belated apology, because we did it behind your back and should have consulted you. I’m sorry. Your son had left for Chicago around four in the afternoon, but now it was well into the night, and I was just lying around watching TV with the headphones on. Your son had set it up for me so that you wouldn’t hear the TV when you were home and then have to come upstairs to turn it off. In any case, I took off the headphones, and I heard your screams. You, Mr. Rose, yours. Out of nowhere, you had started wailing, and I knew immediately that something horrible had happened. It was the most pitiful sound that I’ve ever heard. I peeked down the stairs to see what was happening, because you know, if you were hurting him, I was going to have to go down to help him, even if it was just scaring you to death with my appearance. I went down the stairs slowly, slowly, my heart pounding, and I could hear that you were on the phone with your ex-wife. Then I knew what had happened to your son, and I felt the world had been pulled out from under me. I sat on the steps and wanted to die. I thought, if I stop breathing, I’ll just die right here, and this hellish journey will be over. I was ready for anything, anything but that, that they would take him from me, Mr. Rose, my salvation, my only true friend. I swear that night I wanted to die, right there in the attic, to be found mummified one day. I almost came down to give you a hug, Mr. Rose, to ask you how such a fucking tragedy is possible, to cry with you. Of course, in the end, I didn’t dare. You had no idea who I was or what I was doing in your damn house. The following day, Empera came upstairs and told me what had happened. She said you were going insane because your son had been killed in a motorcycle accident not far from Chicago. She asked me what I planned to do, and I told her I was getting out of there. She made me some chamomile tea to calm me down and instructed me to wait until half past three, because she finished work at that time. When she was off, Empera pulled her car into the garage, hid me well in the backseat under a pile of blankets, and that’s how we slipped out without a hitch through that ring of patrol cars and police vans.
“I’ll never forget the horror within that car, Mr. Rose. After the death of my mother, that was the saddest and most desperate moment of my life, Empera crying while driving and me crying while huddled under those blankets, waiting for the car to stop where I would get out on who knows what corner of what town or what stretch of road, again no better than a stray dog, cast off by fate and unprotected. In the days that followed, I did nothing but mourn, terribly missing both your son and the dogs, especially the baby, Skunko, what a loving little dog. You should have seen how we hit it off because he reminded me a lot of Hero. Sometimes I even forgot that he wasn’t Hero and was surprised to see him run off without his cart. I called Skunko Hero and he kind of got used to that name, because he came running when I called him.
“I even missed you, Mr. Rose; although you may not believe it, I had grown fond of you even though you had never even met me. I watched you out the window when you went down to the garden to play with the dogs, or take them out for a walk, and it inspired me tenderly. I saw this and I thought, a man who cares for his dogs so much has to be a good man. How I wished I had a father like that. Now once again, Mr. Rose, the time of parting again, so goes life, one good-bye then another. What can we do?”
“For now, there will be no good-byes, María Paz. You can’t go,” Rose told her, the ring of command in his voice. “Don’t go before you take out the clamp. Then you have to help me find Cleve’s murderer. Tell me who killed Cleve.”
“Nobody killed him, sir.” Surprised at the undesirable twist that the conversation had begun to take, María Paz took a few steps backward, away from Rose. “Cleve was killed in an accident, sir. His bike killed him . . . Good-bye, Mr. Rose. Maybe someday we’ll see each other again.”
“You need some money?” Rose asked as a last attempt to keep her from leaving. “I can give you money, if you need . . .”
“No, Mr. Rose, thank you very much, I don’t need anything,” she started to say, moving farther away, but still facing him and holding his gaze.
Just at that moment, the air seemed to crackle in the mall and people moved to one side, sensing an approaching commotion ahead.
At first, it was just a rough perception without details: it filled the place with the acrid smell of stampede and violence in the making, still undefined. Seconds later, María Paz saw several policemen rushing toward her in a flash, pushing their way through. Were they coming for her? It unleashed a mad drumming in her chest. Yes, they were coming after her and this time she was trapped. How many times in recent months had she experienced the same feeling of having reached the end of the road? After so much forced immobility while locked up in Manninpox, she had not stopped running ever since she was released. Now the police were on top of her. Fear paralyzed her, and for a moment, the image of Violeta crossed her mind. She would not get to see her sister, Violeta. Things had to go to shit with only a few days to go. But were they really coming for her? María Paz was not going to wait around to find out. She overcame the momentary panic and set her mind to not surrender. Her survival mechanisms kicked into gear and within seconds her body became a type of getaway vehicle, strengthening its cardiac capacity, increasing blood pressure, intensifying metabolism, accelerating her mental activity, and increasing the blood glucose, which flows into the large muscles, particularly the legs, fueled and ready to run. María Paz was about to do it when something stopped her, a hand that grabbed her forcefully by the arm, like a vice that immobilized her.
“Do not run. That’s the last thing you should do,” she heard Rose telling her, his body pressed against hers. In that fashion, holding her, protecting her, Rose led her to a spot in the front row among the crowd that gathered to witness the police action as if it were live television, a little Sunday show for a mob thirsty for some excitement, everyone looking around trying to figure out who the cops were after—a shoplifter? a child molester? a credit card thief?—who would soon be smacked with a club across the head, or shot in the leg to be brought down, then handcuffed and humiliated before the eyes of all, with cell phones and security cameras catching every se
cond of the shame. In the first row, as if part of an audience, Rose and María Paz stood with the rest of the spectators ready to enjoy the show. It hadn’t been since Greg, or Cleve, that she had felt protected in the arms of a white man, arms that lifted her from the risk zone and put her on the safe side of society.
“Take off that hat,” Rose whispered, without loosening his grip on her, “it’s too showy.”
As soon as she obeyed, he regretted having asked: from under the cap sprung her untamed mane of hair, even more eye-catching than the motley cap.
“You’ll have to cut it,” Rose whispered in her ear. “Or dye it.”
“Never,” she said. “Over my dead body.”
The policemen ran past and soon were out of sight. With the show disrupted, the crowd dispersed. After realizing that the cops had not been after her, María Paz suffered from a crash of adrenaline that left her limp and docile as a rag doll, and Rose took advantage of this to guide her toward the parking lot.
“From now on you’ll be better off with me,” he told her once they were in his Ford Fiesta.
“I was scared shitless when I saw the cops running toward us,” Rose admits to me. “But I found the courage somewhere to take María Paz into my arms to protect her, knowing that in the eyes of the law this gesture could send me to die. Not that she was very grateful later, hardly said anything about it, but things changed after that. From that moment on, she accepted me as an ally. I just had to show her what I was willing to do for her.”
As they fled Garden City, María Paz said she was starving and they stopped in a nondescript, out-of-the-way restaurant in Deer Park, one of those “all you can eat” places, where Rose only had a coffee, because he had eaten lunch shortly before, and she had a plate of fried eggs with bacon, a green salad, and potatoes with melted cheese, plus a slice of obscenely rich chocolate cake, with two Diet Cokes.
“Jesus Christ, girl, you were famished,” Rose told her as they cleared the table.
“You have to take advantage when it’s offered; you never know when the next big meal will come.”
“Are you full?”
“About to burst.”
“So let’s talk seriously. You have to understand. They left a clamp inside you, that’s the cause of the bleeding.”
“Don’t worry about the bleeding; it’s gone down a lot. Maybe because there is no more blood inside. I’ll put the clamp thing on hold until Seville.”
“Don’t you believe me?” Rose pulled out a pen and drew on the paper tablecloth—a drawing similar to the one Dummy had sketched on the table in the conference hall, back in Manninpox. “There you go. This is your uterus, and this is the clamp. Look at it. It’s metallic, and it can be very dangerous.”
“But it’s soooo tiny,” María Paz said. “A little shit clamp. The truth is, Mr. Rose, of all the problems that I have, those little tweezers seem like the least of them.”
“But it’s not, and we’ll remove it. Don’t worry about anything, I’ve got it all planned out. You’ll need a week to recover. Your cyber-coyote can wait; call his Blackberry from the pay phone here and tell him things need to be postponed. Did you pay him all the money?”
“Only half.”
“Then no problem. Money makes the dog dance.”
María Paz went to the pay phone by the bathrooms, and from the table, Rose watched her call and then talk and gesticulate wildly.
“He says he gives me eight days,” María Paz told Rose when she came back to the table. “Eight days, Mr. Rose, and after that, come what may, I’m out.”
Good. Rose had it all planned. He had his ex-wife’s ID in the car and her health insurance documents that he kept updated, never a month late with payments, not really sure why. An unhealthy fixation, if you will, paying health insurance premiums year after year for a woman who abandoned him, perhaps because he still believed that when he least expected it, she would return and would need health insurance. Maybe that was the reason, or even simpler, the act of not paying the fees anymore would have been like a permanent separation, as if he were burying Edith. Whatever the explanation was, the futile effort now could prove useful; it would help with María Paz’s operation. Edith was young when the ID picture was taken; both women had dark hair and eyes, Edith a more pronounced nose, María a rounder, brown face, but smudge the date of birth with a coffee stain and force things a bit, and they could be the same person. Not that Rose didn’t want to pay for the operation; he would have done so willingly; it was more for reasons of security. Shielded by Edith’s identity, who would imagine María Paz in the operating room of a good private hospital?
Rose told her of his master plan, and she fiercely refused to participate. She said it was a crazy and absurd idea, a risk they shouldn’t take under any circumstances. Someone would catch them and turn them in. She didn’t look like the woman in the picture, at all; there was no chance.
“You’ll see, Mr. Rose. I know a better way. Have you ever wondered how the thousands of illegals in this country go to the doctor?” she asked Rose, and he admitted that he hadn’t. “Do you think we don’t get sick?”
“I guess you do.”
The following day, after spending the night in the studio on St. Mark’s, María Paz and Rose went to a building in Queens. Nothing too unseemly about the place, a couple of dour-faced porters not wearing uniforms, people coming in and out, the smell of air-conditioning with a tinge of bleach and vinegar. Rose looked around and noticed that everyone looked like immigrants; perhaps the only discordant note was an occasional white person in the mix of dark people coming in and out. In the badly lit lobby, there was an ATM, vending machines, bathrooms for men and women—nothing that would draw attention.
“Comadre!” María Paz told the receptionist. The two embraced effusively, bemoaning how long it had been since they last saw each other. And how is your sister? And your husband, still unemployed? And remember Rosa, from Veracruz, what a tragedy, and this and that and that and this, until the receptionist passed María Paz off to another comadre, who also hugged her excitedly and made her fill out a questionnaire. What happened to you? And María Paz explained about the clamp, carefully avoiding any mention of Manninpox. Can you imagine it was just a simple curettage and such and such? Who’s the gringo with you? Two other nurses, or assistants, or just gossips flitting about wanted to know. He’s like a father to me, María Paz informed them. Ah, well, okay, he can be trusted then. Yes, no worries, very nice people, helped me with everything, no drama there. Ah, well, good, then the coast is clear.
María Paz was eventually whisked off by the gang of comadres, and Rose was directed to a waiting room with a dingy gray carpet and an old TV with a fuzzy image. “Everything has been arranged, sir,” they assured him, “don’t worry about a thing, they’re going to treat her like a queen, she’s like family, like a sister. Relax, relax, María Paz. Everything is good, mija. Good ol’ Dr. Huidobro will do that procedure in the blink of an eye. Who is Dr. Huidobro? Oh, you don’t know him? An Uruguayan—new, marvelous. You’ll see what a doll he is.”
“Let’s get out of here before it’s too late,” Rose managed to tell María Paz when he checked on her, or rather he begged her. The whole thing made him horribly uneasy. What kind of place was this anyway, a clandestine clinic in the middle of New York? They should just go; she was adding one more illegal act to the many hanging over her head. But she had already changed into the green robe tied in the back that left her butt exposed, and they were taking her to radiology.
Rose went back to the waiting room, uncomfortable and frightened, staring at the carpet stains, not knowing where they stood and feeling as if his apprehensions were multiplying like rabbits.
Never in his life had he been in such a suspicious place. Holy God, he thought, this really is the third world in all its glory. He was mulling over all this when he saw María Paz in the hallway, accompanied by a t
all, sharp-looking guy, a telenovela hunk, in coat and tie and wearing a white surgeon’s cap. He spoke Spanish to Rose, introducing himself as Dr. Huidobro when Rose joined them. Judging by the accent, he was from the Southern Cone.
“Are you from Argentina?” Rose asked, and María Paz opened her eyes wide to indicate that he was committing a faux pas, that those kinds of questions were not asked in this place.
“More or less,” the man said. He held on to one of María Paz’s hands with his left hand, and with the right held up an X-ray.
Not letting go of María Paz’s hand, this Huidobro pointed to the clamp on the X-ray, on the right side just as Dummy had indicated. He informed them that the operation would be performed the following morning at 7:30 a.m. It had to be done as soon as possible, but it was a simple procedure. It would be done under local anesthesia and María Paz would be released the same day.
“Will you perform the operation?” Rose asked in a somewhat aggressive tone, because what he really wanted to say was Let go of her hand, motherfucker, who the hell do you think you are?
“I’ll perform the operation, of course, not to worry, me personally,” Huidobro assured them, and immediately afterward presented him with a bill of $2,500, which Rose ran to the nearest bank to withdraw. Without providing a receipt, Huidobro grabbed the wad and in the blink of an eye, it disappeared into the pocket of his pants.
A pig, thought Rose, nothing but a pig, I hope he washes those dirty money-grubbing hands before operating, and that he is as handy with the scalpel as with the cash. Rose didn’t trust him at all, with the look of a tango singer or a soccer player more than a surgeon. But there was nothing Rose could do. María Paz had already decided to put herself unconditionally in his hands and behave with the docility of cows to the slaughter.
“You’ll be fine, we’ll take good care of you,” Huidobro told her, holding her hand again, and explained that they would take her blood pressure, draw some blood, and put in her IV.
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