“But Abie admitted that my version was correct…”
“Of course, it suited him for you to think that passion was the motive for the crime. Not so, the motive was political. Sara Klein had to be silenced forever. They succeeded. But do not torture yourself, Licenciado. Abie Benjamin is dead inside a freezer, and you have your revenge, n’est-ce pas?”
Although he couldn’t see out, Felix knew that they were driving through Mexico City. The two men did not speak for a long while. Felix’s depression annulled an anger that lay beyond his fatigue, like the city beyond the curtains of the car.
“You robbed me of my only act, my one free act,” Felix said finally. “Why?”
Deliberately, the Director General lighted a cigarette before responding. “The Hydra of passion has many heads. Ask yourself whether Sara Klein deserved to die as you imagined it, because of mistaken passion. You should have realized, that crime hid other mysteries, like those Russian dolls that grow in number as they diminish in size. No. Believe instead that in the end Sara Klein died the death she deserved. Othello’s passion would not have suited Sara. Macbeth’s passion, yes. All the waters of the great god Neptune will not erase the blood from our hands, Licenciado. I know that. Sara died with clean hands … But I believe we are almost there.”
The Citroen stopped. Felix opened the door. They were in front of his apartment house in Polanco.
“I shall wait for you here,” said the Director General after Felix got out.
Felix crouched down beside the door to peer toward the ghostly outlines of the man in the cushioned darkness of the French automobile. “Why? I’m home. I’ll be staying here.”
“Nevertheless, remember that I shall be waiting.”
Felix closed the door and looked up toward the ninth floor of the building. He could see lights, but only from the dimmest lamps in the apartment.
47
IN THE ELEVATOR, he thought about the last time he’d seen Ruth. It seemed a century ago, not three weeks. He remembered his wife’s expression: she’d never looked at him just that way, her eyes filled with tears and tenderness, slowly shaking her head, her brows knit, as if for that one time she knew the truth but didn’t want to offend him by speaking it.
“Please don’t go, Felix. Stay here with me. I’m not playing games now. I’m asking you sincerely. Please stay. Don’t jeopardize yourself.”
Tender, sweet Ruth, neither as intelligent as Sara nor as beautiful as Mary, but capable of sudden rages sparked by jealousy and cooled by affection. A freckled Jewish girl, she disguised her freckles with makeup, drops of sweat gathered on the tip of her nose, Señora Maldonado was a pretty Jewish girl, charming, active, his faithful Penelope, and now he was returning defeated from the wars against an invisible Troy. She was the woman he needed to solve all his practical problems, the woman who always had his breakfast ready, his suits pressed, his suitcases packed. She did everything for him, even putting in his cuff links. And all she asked was patience and compassion.
He took out his key ring. The keys to his home. Patience and compassion. He hoped Ruth would be patient and compassionate. They needed both more than ever before if they were to rebuild their relationship. She thought he was dead, how would she receive him? She knew him well, she remembered him with sadness, but she wasn’t looking for him. Would she recognize his altered face, very little changed really, but enough to create doubts. Was it he or was it another? Would Bernstein be proved right?
He looked at himself in the hall, honestly believing the reproduction of the Velázquez self-portrait was a mirror. How would Señora Maldonado react to the fact that from now on she would be called Señora Velázquez? How would she handle the practical details, the documents, the family, the relatives? Neither the Director General nor I had explained that. Then Felix must have shivered: in the same way we had changed him, we were transforming his wife. Only a little, but enough to induce error, to provoke doubt. He felt like Boris Karloff about to touch the electrified fingers of Elsa Lanchester.
He heard a voice that was not Ruth’s. It was coming from the living room. The double doors between the hall and the living room were ajar. He felt ridiculously melodramatic; how long is it before a young widow receives callers? When does the first suitor call upon Penelope? What is his name?
He paused with his hand on the doorknob. The living room was in deep shadow, only the dimmest table lamps lighted. No. It was a woman’s voice. Ruth’s visitor was a woman. It was late, almost eleven, but there was a normal explanation; Ruth was lonely, she needed company.
He listened to the voice of Ruth’s visitor. “I had left you to follow him. But I had followed him to fulfill a duty he himself had pointed out to me. It was no easy job for Bernstein to take your place, to offer himself in your place, to dilute my sense of duty by adding to it a love different from that I’d sacrificed, your love, Felix…”
His hands were burning as he entered the living room, seeking the origin of the voice, blind to everything except the reality of that voice, Sara Klein’s voice.
The tape whirred peacefully in the cassette. Felix pressed a key, the tape shrieked and spun forward. “That night, we went to bed together. With Jamil, all the frontiers of my life disappeared. I ceased to be a persecuted little German-Jewish girl…”
He pressed the stop key. Only then did he hear the rhythmical sound of a rocking chair.
He turned and saw her sitting there, rocking, unspeaking, dressed in a nun’s habit, scattered rosary beads in her lap, tense hands gripping the arms of the chair, long black skirts hiding her feet, a white wimple framing an overly made-up face, enough to disguise the freckles but not enough to dissipate the drops of sweat gathered on the tip of her nose, rocking, rocking, in the shadows.
“You were never really converted, were you?” asked Ruth, rocking, rocking, with a torturously neutral voice.
Felix closed his eyes. He wished he could close them forever. He left the room, his eyes closed, he knew by heart the arrangement of his own home. He reached the front door and, as he opened it, opened his eyes. He had kept them closed for fear of seeing himself in the self-portrait Ruth and Felix Maldonado had laughingly bought one day in Madrid. He ran down the stairway, skipping steps, crashing against the handrail, pressing the sweat from his hands against the cement walls of the stairwell. Asphyxia — he needed air, air from the street.
He was on the sidewalk, panting.
The door of the Citroen opened.
A pale hand beckoned.
48
AGAIN IN HIS ROOM in the Hilton, he slept twelve hours. The Director General had accompanied him to the room and given him sleeping pills and a glass of water; he stayed with him as he fell asleep. Felix Maldonado could barely stammer his last question; his tongue was thick and his teeth felt as soft as hominy. “I give up, I give up,” he said with a calm delirium that the skull-faced man observed with curiosity. “Who is it who has this power, this power to change lives, twist lives at his whim and make us someone else? I give up.”
The Director General was incapable of feeling compassion; when he felt a twinge, it was instantly converted into scorn. But he had said it once before, he preferred cruelty to scorn. “There is one question you haven’t asked, even though it’s the one that should most disturb you.” In spite of himself, his intended cruelty took on overtones of pity. “Why did Sara Klein return to Mexico? Why did she travel from Tel Aviv to be here only four days?”