I said, “Can we get away with that?”
“Of course,” she said, and I realized that in her mind a person with her capacity for imperiousness, in a country like this, should be able to get away with anything. I hoped she was right.
Both rear doors of the police car opened, and the two men got out. Both wore white guayabera shirts and black sunglasses and modified black cowboy hats with gold stars pinned on the front. One wore dark jeans and boots, the other tan cotton slacks and soft tan shoes. Both had black holsters on their belts, on the right side, flaps shut.
The one in jeans leaned against the trunk of his police car, unsnapped his holster flap, then folded his arms and looked at me, without expression. The other one came forward, and I heard Maria’s window lower and felt the sudden moist hot air stroke the left side of my neck. She snapped at me in Spanish to let her handle this, sounding very aggravated, and I sat to attention, staring back at the one staring at me. The other one stopped next to me and tapped my window with a knuckle, and I pretended not to hear him. My hands were on the steering wheel, correctly, at ten and two o’clock.
Maria demanded to know what this fellow wanted, so he gave up on me and moved farther back along the car. He called her Maria, with a little too much familiarity, and hoped Carlos was well, and she told him not to worry about Carlos, and he said but he did worry about Carlos.
It was quite a battle they had, without ever stating the topic, all words and attitude. He used the power of his position, and she used the power of her imperial status. He spoke insinuatingly, as though to say, I could be rough, but I’m choosing not to, and she spoke with condescending grace, as though to say, I could dismiss you like the peon you are, but I’m choosing to give you a moment of my valuable time.
Then he straightened, as though tired of it or having made his point. “You want to be careful on this road,” he said. “And tell Carlos I might come visit him.”
“You won’t,” she said, but he’d already turned away. As he strolled back to his car, making a laughing comment to his deadpan partner, Maria slid her window closed and said, “¡Lechón!”
In the rearview mirror, her face was very angry. She caught my eye and made a brushing-along gesture. “Drive on!”
Now I really was the chauffeur, and she really was her highness. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, but at the moment she was impervious to irony. I put the Buick in gear, and we drove out around them as they got back into their car. In the rearview mirror, I saw them U-turn and recede.
We drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she said, “I’m sorry, Ernesto, that pig had me out of sorts.”
“I got the idea you didn’t like him. Is it okay to ask what it was all about?”
“It was nothing to do with me,” she said. “Carlos had a disagreement with a man a week ago—”
“Sunday before last?”
“Yes. You know about it?”
“I was there.”
“Oh. Well, that man is a friend of this pig, Rafez, and he—”
“Rafez? Rafael Rafez?”
Her expression in the mirror was astonished. “You know him? How on earth do you know him?”
“He groped Lola, the night I died,” I said. “She had to give him a bloody nose before he’d lay off.”
Delighted, she said, “Really? Lola gave him a bloody nose?”
“All over his white linen suit, the bastard.”
“But that’s wonderful,” she said. “Brava for Lola. Oh, now I feel one hundred percent better. Thank you, Ernesto.”
“De nada,” I said.
21
Laryngitis again, and in two hours I had my passport. I loved it. It was a dull red, with harder covers than my old American passport, and the picture inside looked just like Felicio Tobón de Lozano, with his round swarthy face, bushy mustache, messy dark hair, and a black necktie this peasant was obviously not at all used to wearing. With this passport, I could travel the world.
With this passport, I could get back with Lola. That was the point. This passport was my passport to Lola.
Arturo promised he’d phone Lola to tell her their brother Felicio had a passport now, find out what news there might be, and then come let me know.
But it wasn’t Arturo who snuck into the house two days later, Wednesday afternoon, while I was reading last week’s Newsweek out by the pool. It wasn’t Arturo who went hiss! hiss! at me until I finally heard it and turned around to stare at the living room doorway. It was Luz.
Damn. I’d almost forgotten about Luz. The only time I’d seen her, since the night I’d come here and she’d spoken to me in English, was at the funeral, all in purple. But now here she was, hunched in the doorway, her face a Kabuki mask of stress and agitation, her breasts threatening to jump out of her gold scoop-neck blouse as she clutched the air with scarlet-nailed hands, gesturing to me to come over, hurry, come over quick.
Well, I’d have to deal with it, that’s all. Not looking forward to this, I got to my feet and went over to the living room, as she receded into the dimness ahead of me. I went in, prepared to explain whatever was necessary to explain — the sanctity of marriage? — and she said, with a broken sob in her voice, “Oh, Barry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”
“Ernesto,” I told her. “Or maybe Felicio. Anything but Barry.”
“It’s all my fault,” she repeated, and clutched at my arm to draw me toward a sofa. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t know they were so stupid.”
“You didn’t know who was so stupid?” I asked, as we sat together on the sofa. Her black skirt ended where her legs began, and her knees were angled toward me.
“My cousins,” she said, which covered half of Guerrera.
I said, “Which cousins?”
“From Tapitepe,” she said, naming the south-easternmost town in the country, at the border with Venezuela and Brazil. “Manfredo and Luis and the other Luis with the bad arm and José and Pedro and poco Pedro, little Pedro.”
“Ah,” I said.
“You met them,” she assured me, “at your wedding.”
“I met all the cousins at the wedding,” I said. “I don’t necessarily remember them. What’s the problem, Luz?”
“I tol’ them,” she said. “Not them, exactly, I tol’ a few others — in the family, you know — and now they know too, and it’s all my fault. But I didn’ know, Barry, I didn’ know they—”
“Felicio,” I said.
“I didn’ know how they’d be,” she said. “I swear it. I didn’ know.”
“How they’d be about what? You mean, you told them about me?”
“They know about it,” she said. “How you not really dead. Because you gonna get millions of dollars from the insurance and the whole family’s gonna be rich.”
“Well, no,” I said. “Not millions, and the whole family—”
“So they think that’s good,” she said. “Very good. But I tell them, We can’t say anything outside the family, because if the insurance finds out, then the family don’ get nothing.”
“Luz,” I said, “the family was never going—”
“So they say,” she went on, “if the family gets all this money if Barry Lee is dead, how come he’s alive?”
I looked at her. “Say that again?”
“Why have the risk?” she asked me. “That’s what they say. Why have the risk? If the insurance find out Barry Lee ain’t dead, nobody gets nothing.”
“Luz,” I said, “they were never going to get anything.”