The girl ducks; her lips attempt a smile but fail.
A guard comes up behind them, shooing them on. The women sit in the far cubicle, Nathan in the middle, the guard nearest the door. Nathan rests a legal pad on his knees. He nods at the guard. She stands and goes out.
When the door closes, Amparo peers over the edge of the partition into the hallway. The guard there has left her desk. The others in the booth have turned their backs. Amparo prods the pregnant girl to her feet and leads her into the next partition with Nathan. The girl's face is cut, he sees, her bottom lip swollen. Amparo and the girl sit.
Amparo takes out cigarettes and lights one. The girl reaches for the pack but Amparo pulls it back and holds it over her head as if away from a small child or dog. She blows smoke in the girl's face.
"Don't you know you can't smoke when you're pregnant?" The girl looks blank-faced and Amparo rolls her eyes at Nathan. "A peasant, my cousin. She's never left America but there she sits unable to speak the language."
"She's your cousin?" Nathan asks.
"Sorry to say." As though struck by a sudden thought, a longforgotten memory, Amparo whirls on the girl. "Jibara! Nunca tu iras de este pais, y sin embargo nunca aprenderas su lengua."
The girl slouches in her chair, her face fixed in an expression of deep dismay.
Crossing her legs Amparo bounces the top one as though testing the knee. "The peasant needs you. Tell Mr. Stein what happened."
The girl speaks at the level of whisper. Her fingers flutter. "Hoy me acuchillaron por buena, al paracer no les gusta la gente feliz, hay que estar realmente loco. Fue la chica que supuestamente me iba a cuidar, ella fue la que me jodio. Era la chica que estaba supuesta ayudarme, fue la que me contuvo."
Amparo leans forward conspiratorially. "She got cut today for being too nice. They don't like happy people here. You have to be mad, she said. She said it was the girl who was supposed to help her, she was the one who held her down. Her boss in the law library." She smokes thoughtfully, then leans and stubs out the cigarette in an aluminum ashtray and gestures vaguely in the air with one hand. "My cousin is a retarded Snow White. She didn't do nothing wrong. And her baby's coming. When, darling? Cuando nacera el bebe?"
The girl, crying, turns away.
Amparo shrugs. "I think next week maybe."
"Of course," Nathan says, and taps the pencil eraser repeatedly on the paper. "Who was your lawyer at the arraignment?"
The girl begins to speak, but Amparo interrupts her: "Herbert Harvey," she says. "Or Harvey Herbert. Siempre me olvido. Idiot. He wants her to plea to save himself the trouble, but I'm telling you she didn't know nothing about what was in that box. She was sitting in that apartment waiting for her man Arelis, who was delivering. So it's smack. So what? So it's none of her business. She's sitting filing her nails like a good girlfriend, keeping her feet up on the whatchucallit, el marco de la ventana."
"Windowsill," Nathan suggests.
"Windowsill. Minding her own business. A beautiful day, you know? She's listening to the radio, doing a little cha-cha out the window, rubbing her belly, talking to her baby, making it feel better about coming out into this piece of shit world. Then there's a knock on the door and it's the mailman with a box. She's expecting a box of baby stuff from the hospital so she signs for it then sits back down to make her nails nice. Then the next thing she knows her door is broken down and six cops are running around the apartment with guns."
Half rising out of her chair, Amparo aims her fingers with thumbs cocked.
"They got dogs. The dogs are tearing everything up. They make her lie down on the bed with her hands over her head while they empty her closets. One of them sits on the bed with her and plays with her tits, for as you see, she has very nice tits. Then they make her open the box in front of them. She thought it was baby stuff."
"From the hospital," Nathan says.
Amparo turns to the girl. "Que habia en la caja?"
"Formula, panales y otras cosas."
"Formula and diapers," Amparo explains. "It’s a free program they got."
"What was the return address on the box?"
Amparo waves Nathan away. "So it's Bogota." She shrugs. "The peasant doesn't read."
"Baby supplies from Bogota," Nathan says aloud, just to hear how it will sound to the judge, maybe jury. He sighs. He puts pencil to paper. "When?"
"Three months ago."
Nathan looks up. "Why not bail?"
"She can't make it," Amparo says.
Nathan taps the pencil tip against the pad. "How much?"
"Five hundred," Amparo says.
"Cinco," the girl spits, thrusting five fingers at the air as if against an invisible wall.
Nathan looks back and forth between the girl and Amparo. "She couldn't make five hundred dollars? You?"
Amparo shrugs, as if to say, Why should I help?
"Is Arelis the father?" Nathan asks. "Arelis es el padre del nino?"
"Si," the girl says.
But Amparo shrugs. "You think she knows?"
Nathan looks at the girl a long time, as if trying to decide, or deciding whether to decide, or if any of this warrants a decision. He writes, because he thinks he should, on a random line in the middle of the legal pad: Arelis.
Amparo leans back and the girl leans back with her. They conference quietly and Nathan drifts down a strain of music floating by in the wake of a ribbon of thought: Johnny Hartman crooning, "My One and Only Love"-
"She don't know anything else about anybody else," Amparo says. "But someone has been here."
The girl hands across a business card. Nathan holds it with both hands and looks at it a long time. It is Claire's. He pockets it and puts down his pencil. "Forget about this," he says. His pad of paper is blank, save Arelis, a name that floats in the middle of the yellow pad without context and without identification. The entire case. He'll sell.
"So how is my case progressing, Mr. Stein?" Amparo says coolly.
"I talked with Roberto tonight. He said-"
She slumps forward on her elbows. "Is it safe?"
"I talked with him tonight."
She taps her chin. "Did you."
"That's what I said. It's safe."
"Who says? You or Roberto?" Nathan doesn't answer and she pulls hard on another cigarette and cocks a wary eye across the table at Nathan. "Because Manny thinks Roberto's out of town. So I wonder how you could have called him."
Nathan scratches his arm. The wounds there have begun to itch in the warmth.
"I suppose you'd tell me if this isn't true," she says.
"Of course."
Amparo leans back, fragile and exposed. She seems to hold this news close to her breast. "Because if you are wrong Roberto will kill me as sure as I am sitting here before you. And if I am killed I will leave orders. You will not live five minutes." She smiles broadly.
"I talked to him," Nathan says.
"Why don't I believe you?" Her fingers shakily turn the burning stub of her cigarette on herself. She ignites a fresh one, which leads into her mouth like a fuse, and waves it in exasperation. "You still have the money I gave you?"
"Of course."
Amparo pushes her hands at the air between them. "That I don't believe, but I have no choice. Tomorrow then. You make the payment tomorrow by noon and then it's all safe and you take me to a beautiful lunch. Then we go lie down in East Hampton."
Nathan nods. "Of course. But it's cold. It's winter."
"Winter. Of course. In here one forgets these things." Amparo smiles and leans over the table, playful now. "Now this matter of my payment. My payment to you. For your services. It's good. It's beautiful." She lifts her arms, indicating the space behind him, as though offering a tropical beach, white sand, paradise. "A Land Cruiser," she says. "Forest green. Leather everywhere I am told. It sits in your garage.
Nathan stiffens. "My-?"
"East Hampton. They had to move the motorcycle. Manny says it's a very nice motorcycle. He says it rides real nice. He said you have nice toys inside the house, a very nice kitchen. And the bedrooms, he said, magnifico. That bed of yours he warned me was as big as the lawn, but you need to clean the pool."