“Sweetheart, I tell you there’s only one man in this world who could make me betray my Memo, who’s been so good to me.”
“Simon Ayub, I suppose?” Felix asked brutally.
Licha clung to his lapels. “You, darling, you, only you, only you, like the song says. I’ll give to you what you give to me, true love, darling, true love.”
“No,” said Maldonado, seizing the tail of an intuition that streaked like a comet through his mind. “I was asking you whether Simon Ayub had handled the arrangements.”
A vague wave of his hand included the coffin, the naked feet, and the fading Menorah, but ended beneath Licha’s blouse, caressing her breast, and his eyes signaled yes, everything was fine, anything she wanted.
“You think it was him?” Licha pulled away, wiggling triumphantly, but Felix sensed that for the first time she was surprised. She extracted a stick of gum from her shiny handbag and carefully unwrapped it. Felix grabbed her by the arm and squeezed hard.
“Ayyy! Don’t hurt me.”
“You know,” said Felix, in the voice of violent familiarity that in fact pleased Licha — he remembered she had no defenses against that line of attack. “You know,” he repeated, “all women are alike, you have to put up with them.”
“Not me, honey. I’ll make you love me,” the nurse squealed.
“You just put up with them,” said Felix, without releasing Licha’s arm. “Any woman, a special woman, it’s all the same. No escaping it. Even after you try to get rid of them, you have to put up with them.”
He picked up his suitcase and hurried from the mortuary chamber. Licha, the stick of gum folded in her mouth, unchewed, stood paralyzed for an instant, stunned by Felix’s changes of mood. Then she ran after him. She caught up with him at the stairway. She tugged at his sleeve to stop him, then ran ahead of him and stood in his way.
“Let me by, Licha.”
“All right, you win, don’t be mean to me any more,” she said, with a toss of her head. “Simon handled everything. You’re right. He brought her here. He said you’d follow her anywhere because she had you on a string…”
Felix slapped her, interrupting the surly, hysterical gush of words. She stumbled against the marble wall, and sudden tears left a smear of moistness there that reminded Felix of the sheet covering Sara’s body.
“Who does Ayub work for?” Felix continued down the stairs. His grief was temporarily allayed by his outrage at Licha’s presence. He had been deprived of the moment he’d hoped to consecrate to Sara Klein by a vulgar, stupid woman who was trying to worm her way into his life because she thought he had no life, no name — nothing — of his own.
“I don’t know, sweetheart, honest.”
“Where did he get the authority to claim the body? Who delivered the body to him? Why do you say he wanted to draw me here if he had me in his hands at the clinic? Why did we go to all the trouble to rig that elaborate charade of the fire? Why did I have to escape in the first place?”
“I don’t know, I swear on my mother’s grave.” Licha’s voice was shrill. “He said all he wanted was to lay into you till you sat up and begged, that’s what he said…”
“He could have done that in the hospital.”
“Here, let’s have a little respect,” called the monkey-faced concierge as they reached the vestibule. “We respect the dead here.”
Felix stopped, surprised to see the memorable face he’d already forgotten; he turned to gaze at the stone stairway that separated him from the body of Sara Klein. Her face had defined memory, and death. Only then did he realize that he had looked at her from a face that didn’t belong to him, the face of a man taking Felix Maldonado’s place. If Sara had awakened, she wouldn’t have recognized him.
It was early morning. As they emerged into the street, Felix smelled the renewed and familiar burnt-tortilla odor of Mexico City.
Once again, Licha threw her arms around him. “That’s why I came, sweetie, I swear it, to warn you. Hurry, we can go together. I know where we can hide, where they can’t find you. Honest, I don’t know anything more.”
Felix hailed a taxi, opened the door, tossed his suitcase inside, and got in without looking back at the nurse.
“Let’s go together,” she whimpered. “I want you to be my man, don’t you understand, I’ll do anything for you…” Licha removed a stiletto-heeled shoe and hurled it after the taxi fast disappearing down the deserted street.
The watchman with the face of an ancient ape had followed them, and asked Licha if she wouldn’t like to go up and sit awhile with the woman on the second floor. She had no mourners, and that was bad for their image. They would pay her by the hour; they budgeted in a little to hire someone off the street now and then.
“Oh, go off to the zoo and hire your shitass mother, cheetah,” Licha said, glaring with hatred. She recovered her shoe, slipped it on, and clicked off toward Insurgentes.
20
FELIX CALCULATED, successfully, that at the Suites de Génova they would assign him the room they’d had the greatest difficulty renting. At first, the man at the desk observed with ill-disguised displeasure Felix’s barely healed face and the dark glasses attempting to disguise it, and his initial reaction was to say he was very sorry but they were completely booked. A second clerk whispered something in his ear.
“Well, we do have one suite available,” the first clerk allowed, a thin, dark-skinned young man with oily eyes and hair.
Felix longed to ask him, Where the hell did you come from, you low-class bastard, that you think you can look at me like that? Buckingham Palace, or Skid Row? He wanted to ask them how many people during ths last two days had requested any suite but the one vacated by the woman who’d had her throat slit, with all that publicity in the papers …
“Name, please? Please fill out this card.”
The clerks exchanged congratulatory looks, as if saying to each other, What about this clown! as Felix wrote the name Diego Velázquez. Born: Poza Rica, Veracruz, 18 December 1938. Current Address: 91 Poniente, Puebla, Puebla. I had told him it would be best always to include some element of truth in his lies. He hesitated before signing the name of the artist he no longer resembled, and observed the thin clerk remove the key to 301 from its pigeonhole; it clinked against its twin, and then the clerk escorted Felix to the third floor, where he surrendered the key to him. The bellboy deposited the suitcase on the folding luggage rack. Felix tipped him twenty dollars. The clerk saw the size of the tip, and they bowed and scraped their way from the room.
Once alone, Felix looked around him. If anything had been left in the room to mark Sara’s presence, the police would surely have removed it. He had no evidence that she had died here except his own imagination and will. That was enough. He had returned to the site of Sara’s death to conclude the homage interrupted by Licha. But thinking of the nurse made him remember Simon Ayub, and the thought that the diminutive, perfumed Lebanese had seen and touched Sara’s naked body irked Felix; an awful nausea followed the irritation.
He put all thought aside and yielded to weariness. He took a long bath and then stood before the washbasin and studied his face. The swelling had subsided considerably and the incisions were healing well. He touched the skin of his cheek and jawbones and it felt less tender. Only his eyelids were still purple and puffy, obscuring the ineradicable pinpoint identity of the eyes. He realized that the old resemblance to the Velázquez self-portrait that had been his and Ruth’s private joke was returning with the beginnings of his moustache. He soaped five days’ growth of beard and carefully shaved, a difficult, often painful task. He spared the burgeoning moustache.