Arturo gestured to me and said, “This is Gary Brine from New York.”
She gave me a metallic smile and her bright-eyed look and said, “How are you?” She had no accent at all, like Lola.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Sit down. Thank you for coming.”
We all sat, and Carlita Carnal said, “When Ifigenia calls, it’s always some wonderful dramatic adventure.”
“There, see?” Arturo said to me. “Dramatic. I told you.”
Carlita leaned her bag against her chair leg and said, “Somebody’s in trouble, I take it. You, Artie?”
“No, my sister,” Arturo said, and started the story, and I added a detail or two as he went along. She nodded, remembering the death of the American Barry Lee; she did remember there was a beautiful widow, Lola, but hadn’t realized she was Arturo’s sister.
Arturo went through the rest of the story, and Carlita watched him, almost without blinking, smiling sometimes, nodding her head sometimes, never interrupting. Then he was finished, and she nodded and said, “Okay. You got an application for a birth certificate in the records, and you need it out.”
I said, “Or the death certificate. Either one.”
“Well, forget the death certificate,” she told me. “At that time, thirty years ago, the deaths were recorded in big ledger books, sixty-two lines, sixty-two deaths on a page. When you want a death certificate, they go look in the book, copy down what’s there, fill out a form for you. You can’t take one line out of sixty-two lines out of one page of a great big book.”
“Then the birth certificate,” I said. “The application.”
“That should be easier,” she said. “That’s just Artie’s written application, in the file.” She smiled at me and said, “Now, the story he told me doesn’t hold up. I hope you know that.”
I looked at her. “It doesn’t?”
“No. Things don’t work that way. We don’t have to go through the details, do we?”
“Not on my account,” I said.
She looked at Arturo. “Artie,” she said, “I know you’re not a bad guy, so let’s just say you need this piece of paper for whatever reason, and you’d like to know could I help.”
“That’s it,” Arturo said. He acted humble before her, and I felt pretty much the same way myself.
She looked back at me. “So it isn’t really bad,” she said, “but it’s illegal.”
I cleared my throat. She raised a well-shaped eyebrow at me. Her eyes were large, hazel, with large clear whites. She had a very intense gaze. I decided not to speak.
The eyebrow lowered. She said, “I’ll make you a deal. Okay?”
“Probably,” I said.
“I’ll see what I can do to help you,” she told me, “and then, if you get caught — not because of me, I won’t get in your way — but just in case, if you get caught, you don’t speak to any reporter from anywhere in the media, not American, nobody, until you talk to me. First interview. Okay?”
“There’s nothing to get caught about, I—”
“Is it okay?”
Arturo said, “It’s okay.”
I said, “Sure, it’s okay, ’cause it can’t happen.”
“That’s great,” she said. “So if you don’t get caught, once it’s all over and you’re safe, you’ll tell me all about it. Exclusive. Deal?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “No problem at all.”
“And you buy me lunch today,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “Here?”
“No, it’s too early,” she said, looking at her watch. “And not here anyway. And I’ve got appointments. Artie, I’ll meet you two at Carla Fong’s as close to twelve-thirty as I can make it.”
“We’ll be there,” I said.
Arturo said, “Thank you, Carlita.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she said, gathering up her huge shoulder bag and getting to her feet. “But when it’s time to thank me, I’m gonna want enthusiasm. See ya, fellas.”
And she marched on out of there.
37
There are Chinese restaurants all over the world, but in each part of the world they’re a little different, altered by local tastes. In Guerrera, the local taste runs heavily to jalapeño peppers, so in that country, when the Chinese menu describes a dish as “hot and spicy,” it means something even more dangerous than the same dish in the States.
In Guerrera, it is generally agreed that the finest Chinese restaurant is Carla Fong’s, on Avenida de Doce de Julio in San Cristobal. Mrs. Fong is not herself Chinese; she is Guerreran, and she runs the front of the house from her seat at the cash register. Her husband, Fong Fang, is the chef, and a good one. The place is simple and clean, mostly Formica, with exotic travel posters on the walls, mainly not Chinese. There’s Mount Fuji over there, next to the Taj Mahal.
Arturo and I got to Carla Fong’s a few minutes early, having phoned for a reservation, and the place was quite full. I would guess most of them were lawyers and a few were shoppers. There were no tourists. Tourists don’t go to South America to eat in Chinese restaurants, no matter how good they are.
Arturo had explained, when he’d made the reservation, that we would be lunching with Carlita Carnal, a local celebrity, so he’d asked for a quiet corner table, and our hostess, Mrs. Fong’s daughter, who looked Chinese but was named Tiffany, smilingly showed us to a table near the back that was partly shielded from the rest of the diners by a Chinese screen crawling with ferocious dragons.
Carla Fong’s was the only place I knew of in Guerrera where you could drink Tsingdao, the very good Chinese beer. We ordered two from Tiffany, she went away, and I said again, as I’d been saying for the last hour, “I’m still worried.”
Arturo, as he’d been doing for the last hour, tried to reassure me, saying, “You can trust Carlita. She won’t turn us in.”
But that wasn’t what I was worried about. I had thought Arturo and I had been very clever in our cover story, yet Carlita Carnal had seen through it as though it were plate glass. Were all our cover stories that stupid and obvious? Had nobody in Rancio believed I was a deaf mute? Had the good folk of Sabanon snickered behind their hands at the idea of my vow of silence?
To put it in a nutshell, which I was afraid to voice out loud, was I not good enough for the whole original scheme? Was insurance fraud, after all, beyond my capabilities? I was suffering from massive doubt and a deeply lowered self-esteem. When I contemplated myself, all I could see were inadequacies and failings. He isn’t up to it, a tiny voice kept whispering at my inner ear.
I sighed. Arturo looked concerned. He said, “Hermano, what we got to do is not worry. What we got to do is plan.”
“I know. You’re right.”
“Carlita’s gonna come through for us,” he said. “So I been thinkin’, you know? And I think what we do, we go in there, in the building, late this afternoon.”
“We let it go that long?”
“No, wait now,” he said, and Tiffany brought our beers and three menus and went away. We drank beer from the bottle and Arturo said, “What I think we do, we get like a map from Carlita, like what hall we go down, what door, where the file cabinets are, that kinda thing.”
“Probably,” I said. “She’ll probably be able to do that.”
“So we go in late this afternoon,” he said. “With sandwiches.”
I put my bottle on the table. “Sandwiches?”
“Because what we gonna do, we’re gonna hide in the men’s room, see?” he said. “When they shut down for the night. Then, real late, we go there, to the files, and we get the paper, and then we find someplace we can sleep awhile, and then we go back in the men’s room, and come out when they open the place in the morning.”