Lives Undone

by Aitana Moore

  “Querida,” said Sol. “Can’t you call the whole thing off?”

  “No,” Lee said, and managed a smile. “But I’ve done it before. It’s just that it’s boring, and I hope it won’t take long. I’ll have paid my debt to James, and I’ll be free. That’s all I want.”

  This time it was Sol who kept her head down as she sewed a sequin onto the skirt. She might be frank, but she would never be so rude as to call her guest a liar.

  FIVE

  Two months later, a friend of James’ wasn’t sure of his motives, any more than Sol had been convinced of Lee’s.

  "Silly of me not to realize what you wanted with bullfighting,” Pete Hadley said.

  James' eyes left Lee against their will and switched to the enormous ring in Mexico City’s Plaza de Toros, where a matador circled the bull.

  Pete continued, "Do you think by stalking Diego Aguirre you'll get him to give up the video?"

  James had told Pete, an old friend from Oxford, about Diego's blackmail of Caitlin. In his capacity as first secretary at the British Embassy, Pete knew quite a bit about the Aguirre family, but had only offered unhelpful suggestions; one of his ideas had been to hire a private investigator.

  "But you should get one from the US," he had said. "If you get a Mexican he'd only go warn Aguirre you’re investigating him to gain favor with the bloody family. You'll just pass through Mexico; they'll stay. And stay."

  Despite trusting Pete, James hadn’t mentioned that he knew Lee. Pete assumed that James was in Mexico to stalk Diego, which was the same thing James had told himself.

  "Watching a bullfight was on my bucket list," James said.

  "Your bucket list would be tremendously interesting, I think, but I very much doubt sitting here would be one of the items. You've come to watch that prat, though I don't see what you'll gain by it."

  "You never know."

  Leaning over two men to his left with a muttered excuse, James asked a third if he could borrow his binoculars. It wasn't Diego he wanted to inspect.

  Lee had changed from the last time he had seen her at a police station in Winchester. Her dark hair had grown fast and now reached her shoulders; she wore large sunglasses and an emerald-green dress.

  Something around her face had flashed even in the distance, and that's what James wanted to see through the binoculars. Just as he had thought, she was wearing small diamond earrings.

  Diego was giving her things.

  "He’s such a man-doll," Pete added, scanning the expensive seating area below, where Diego and Lee sat. “The woman with him, I think her name is Ashley, is beautiful. Different.”

  “Looks like a gold-digging bitch to me,” James said.

  Pete gave a philosophical shrug. "Well, women around millionaires generally are.”

  “Useful to know.”

  “I didn’t mean in your case.”

  “Why not? Am I not fed with the same food and hurt with the same weapons?”

  “Listen, Shylock, if you keep watching Aguirre his security people are going to rough us up in a while."

  James returned the binoculars to the owner with a nod of thanks. "No one is looking this way, don't get your knickers in a twist."

  They had bought cheap seats in the shade, among a large crowd. That bullring was the biggest in the world, and James had decided it was as good a place as any to watch Lee at work. It would have been wise to stay away not only from the bullring but from the country, yet no one could accuse him of being wise.

  The fact that Lee had been Aguirre's girlfriend for about a month was well documented on gossip sites, since Diego was one of the most desired young bachelors in Mexico. But what had happened to her discretion? She was sitting in a public place with photo after photo of her being snapped and published. Would none of her other international victims recognize her?

  Well, he hardly did.

  "True, the rich never look at the mob," Pete said, "but watching him still seems like a useless thing to do."

  There was no need for James to answer. He didn’t doubt that Lee would shut down the Diego problem for Caitlin; she was good at what she did, as he had reason to know.

  Except that wasn't the only point. Yes, he needed something on Diego and yes, Lee was bound to get it more quickly than a private investigator. But the point had been to punish her, and now he was punishing himself by studying how she worked, how she smiled and leaned against Diego, how she put a hand on his arm when there was a moment of danger in the arena so that he whispered a word of reassurance, how she wore the jewels the boy had given her.

  That was how she had acted with him, in Rome, in Sicily, at Deerholt.

  Vivien smiling, Vivien frowning, Vivien singing. Vivien full of contradictions and secrets and full of truth sometimes.

  Vivien who wasn't Vivien, wasn't even Lee.

  Lee’s body, Lee’s face bathed in tears of pleasure, the way Lee murmured, sighed and begged in bed. Had it all been a lie? No, there were certain things no one could fake. Her distress, the first time she felt pleasure, had been real. The pleasure had been real, and she had struggled against it.

  There had been something there, other than her greed for diamonds; he was an idiot, but he had good instincts. Sometimes.

  James looked at the arena and felt like the bull, stuck full of sharp darts as Lee smiled at Diego, and he gave her a peck on the lips.

  "I think they're grooming him to be president of the country one day," Pete said, lazily observing Diego.

  "And I thought we weren't supposed to look over there."

  "You've convinced me there is no danger."

  "That idiot couldn't even be president of the horticultural society."

  "In any case, he'd just be a puppet for the father and the grandfather. You have to meet the father, and worst of all the mother. You'll feel sorry for Aguirre."

  "Don’t think I will.”

  "True, my sympathy is gone now that he tried blackmailing Cat. Wish he'd hang. But he hasn't gone ahead with the threat, and he's in love."

  This time James didn't look as Pete stared at Lee and continued, "The horrible father and mother must be a bit relieved at the American girl, considering what the older brother gets up to.”

  James had stopped listening, lost in the happy contemplation of what it would feel like to take off Diego’s head with a blow of his fist and strangle Lee.

  Pete got him out of his reverie by saying, "Still, you look a lot angry, which I don't blame you for, but you're on Aguirre's turf. You need to go easy. You’ve been here before; have you never heard the expression, ‘Te mato por nada’?"

  "To kill someone over nothing or for little money?"

  "In Mexico it could actually be both."

  "Isn't civilization a funny thing?" James wondered as a way of response, motioning toward the bull. "I've lived among so-called savages and they wouldn't taunt an animal for no reason."

  The colorful flags sticking out of the bull looked childish, although the poor creature was weak from bleeding and had begun to move uncertainly.

  "It’s the only sport where a man faces a beast, just like in olden times,” Pete said. “In Britain we get our dogs to tear foxes apart, and here they can be much more civilized than us. They can be exquisite, really. But there is more impunity, so they can also be extremely brutal. Even people like the Aguirres. Especially a family like theirs."

  "I think I got the message. As you see, I haven't done anything and am not planning to. Too risky for Cat."

  "We have to hope Diego is happy with the American girl and will forget about the blackmail." Pete glanced at his friend. "It could all blow over by itself. Taking it easy is a good idea in most situations."

  Pete was no fool; he could sense James’ cold rage.

  "Somehow I don't see myself letting the ponce keep a video of my sister,” James remarked.

  A cry went up as the bull's front legs buckled.

  "Let's go," he added with a grimace. "I don't feel like watching thi
s bull die. I was actually hoping it would go the opposite way."

  "Thought you'd never ask," Pete said, promptly standing in relief, as if he were being let out of hell. "Let's go have a long drink. Or ten."

  James didn't look at Lee as they headed for the exit; he didn't want to see any more that day, although he couldn't answer for what he might want another day.

  SIX

  There was something that Lee could always sense: an air full of secrets.

  The secrets were there, between the Aguirre brothers as they sat by the pool — although David’s girlfriend, Luz, kept chatting without giving signs that she noticed anything amiss.

  That was probably the difference between Lee and Luz, as far as the Aguirres were concerned. Luz understood nothing; “Ashley” accepted her place in the scheme of things. Luz thought that David was in love with her, and David let her think it. Diego thought that Ashley was there to have a good time and enjoy his money: a feckless American girl passing through and grabbing what she could while his interest lasted. It made Ashley dependable and Luz a wild card.

  One of David’s eyebrows moved in an unspoken invitation to Diego.

  “We have to work a bit,” Diego announced.

  The pool was at his apartment. David had an identical ten-million-dollar apartment and pool next door, and that’s where they were going. The homes had been gifts from their parents when each turned eighteen. Eventually they would inherit other properties: a historic mansion in Lomas de Chapultepec; an old hacienda in Puebla; a ranch in the northern state of Sonora, where their grandfather kept cattle. There were properties abroad, too.

  “See you later,” Lee said, like the accommodating girlfriend she was meant to be.

  Diego bent and kissed her lips. David idly caressed the back of Luz’s thighs as if fascinated by her brown skin.

  “He likes me to be in the sun,” Luz said in heavily accented English after they left. She lifted a corner of her bikini bottom. “See, that’s actually me.”

  She had said that before; a few times in fact. It was a point of pride for Luz that she might have been pale, if David let her. Her dream was to be a model. She had a pile of magazines by her sun bed and flipped through them, looking for a girl like her.

  Most of the top models in Mexico were of European descent. Very few were part Indian, as Luz was. She was a beautiful girl, with long slim limbs, high cheekbones and intense black eyes. Her straight hair fell almost to her waist, but David would not let her fool around with the color.

  Poor Luz wanted to escape her heritage so that she could grace the cover of a magazine, but the man she loved had a fetish, and he wanted her to stay exactly as she was. Ironies never ceased.

  “I need to go abroad, look,” Luz turned a magazine toward Lee to show a girl not unlike herself in an editorial.

  Yes, she might have been a sensation abroad — in Europe, or even in the United States — if she were a good model. But the portfolio David had funded revealed a girl who couldn’t pose and who didn’t look as pretty in photos as she did in real life.

  “I just can’t leave David,” Luz sighed, swinging her legs and leafing through more pages. “Though yesterday he said he might take me to Paris in summer.”

  “Do you want more wine?” Lee asked.

  Luz glanced at her glass. “Yes, but they will come soon. They always come.”

  She meant the house staff. It was true that they were everywhere, ready to step in when their ice melted or their glasses needed refilling.

  “I have to go to the bathroom anyway,” Lee added, donning a sarong over her bikini. “I’ll ask someone to come out and refresh our drinks.”

  “Thank yo-o-oou,” Luz sang.

  The girl’s smile tugged at Lee’s heart. Luz was only eighteen; she believed in so many silly things. But the young ought to believe in fairy tales, or life would seem all made up of trouble to them, as it did to their elders. Luz had been born in a hut near the border with Texas — how could she not dream of marrying the scion of one of Mexico’s great families?

  “Run, Luz, go away,” Lee said under her breath as she stepped into the apartment. “You don’t want to be here.”

  Lee crossed the smooth marble floors barefoot, knowing that she would pick up no dirt. The servants were constantly cleaning and polishing every surface until the apartment looked like an uninhabited showroom.

  A maid in uniform materialized next to Lee. "Necesita Ud. algo?”

  “Vino? Un poquito, afuera?”

  The maid nodded and went to tell the waiter that they wanted more wine. At Diego’s there was a waiter, a cook, an undercook, two cleaning women and a maid. There was also Jorge, the driver. Seven people attending on a bachelor and his girlfriend.

  Lee had heard the servants talking to each other when they thought she couldn’t hear. They called the Aguirres “españoles”, as if they hadn’t been in Mexico for the past five hundred years. To the working classes, the white Mexicans were still the invaders. She watched the members of the staff standing behind tables, opening doors, driving or going about their chores. They weren’t used to being watched, and they didn’t like it. A few times they had frowned at her for a second. She wasn’t supposed to care what they were thinking. She wasn’t supposed to see them.

  Diego was out, and Luz would probably not move from the pool — but there were servants all over the house, even on a Sunday. In Latin America, the rich didn’t have to give their employees much of a break. There were so many, in any case, that they just rotated to cover the weekends. Diego wasn’t like James, who liked the house to be empty sometimes; he liked to be waited on, hand and foot.

  As she passed the office, Lee eyed the painting that hid his safe. She had managed to leave a camera above it and already knew the combination. Still, there were eyes on her at that moment; she would have to wait for a rare good moment to see what Diego kept in there.

  In the bedroom, she changed into jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. The day was a crisp blue, but in Mexico City temperatures fell as soon as the sun was gone. Lee took a cashmere robe and threw it over Luz at the poolside.

  “I’m not cold,” Luz protested. “I’m from the desert. I’m used to it.”

  Lee smiled. “I’m jealous of how beautiful you look.”

  Luz grabbed her hand and held it for a moment. She was like a child; sweet, like a child. Grateful for affection, like a child.

  “Muchachas!”

  David’s voice reached them before he joined them on the terrace. He smiled from ear to ear, running both hands through thick, dirty-blond hair.

  “Back already?” Lee asked Diego.

  He kissed her shoulder. “Not happy to see me?”

  “You know I am.”

  “Not much business today,” David said, lying next to Luz and slinging a leg over her. “It’s Sunday.”

  Diego’s lips stayed on Lee’s shoulder as if he had forgotten what he was doing. His stubble scraped her, but Lee didn’t have to worry; his pupils were tiny black pinpricks inside light-brown irises. He was high again.

  The “business” he had with David next door was drugs. They were sniffing heroin, not injecting it. Lee had looked for needle holes in his body when he was fast asleep and found none. The brothers probably thought they had their addiction under control, like a lot of rich kids. Just playing, just getting a little high, just feeling good.

  Heroin made Diego pretty much unable to have sex with her.

  The first time he had tried, in that very apartment, he had torn off her dress and rubbed against her so desperately she had thought they would catch fire from attrition. His face had turned dark red as he squeezed her breasts and bit her lips.

  Lee had understood he had a problem. If she had shown eagerness, as she usually did with her marks, he wouldn’t have become any more excited.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong,” he had said after a while.

  “We’ve drunk a bit too much. Can you just hold me?”

  The nex
t morning, he had managed to push his half-soft sex inside her.

  “You’re beautiful,” he had told her when he was done. "You turn me on so much."

  People said the opposite of the truth all the time. Diego didn’t have a sexual deviancy, he had difficulty getting an erection. Two days later Lee had seen his pupils as he returned from David’s apartment and understood: he was an addict, and his libido was low.

  Diego needed to have a girlfriend, perhaps as a cover for the drugs, and like one of the servants in the house, Ashley was meant to perform the function of a ghost. In Ashley he had found something like an accomplice, someone who — he must think — was interested in the lifestyle he could provide and didn’t mind the lack of sex. It was not by chance that he had chosen a foreign woman; he wouldn’t want anyone who belonged in Mexico to find out he was no stallion.

  Perhaps that was why David chose Luz and other girlfriends he had plucked from the working classes — except that David and Luz had a lot of sex; their moans and grunts had drifted to Lee from the terrace that united the apartments more often than she cared to recall.

  Caitlin wasn’t as experienced as Ashley in the ways of the world. She might have tried to excite him by different means or asked him too many questions. In any case, the video he was using as blackmail might not even exist, or he might have made it to keep her quiet about his lack of performance in bed.

  Lee and Diego slept in the same bed, holding hands. Sometimes he asked her to scratch his back — it must itch because of the heroin. Sometimes she ran her hands through his hair until he fell asleep. After the weeks they had spent together, Lee knew she wouldn’t be able to film him in a compromising sex situation. Diego wasn’t a freak; he was an addict. Many rich kids were on drugs, and even if she filmed him getting high, his family would probably squash the scandal.

  But the air was still thick with secrets, and they weren’t only about drugs. She might yet get something on him if she managed to look inside his safe, or if she listened to his conversations. She might get something that would pacify James and free Caitlin.