“They would not know how.”
She looked at him with contempt, perhaps because she had learned somehow that he was a man who did know how. She let go of the door handle and moved to the dressing table and put her back to it so she could watch him. She put out her right hand and began to rummage in the armoire without looking.
“I have to work,” she said, as if she owed him an explanation. She pulled out a flowered dress and dropped it over the back of the chair and then she began to unbutton her blouse. She was wearing nothing under it. She hesitated before she unbuttoned it all the way, and then, enraged, she tore the blouse off and threw it on the floor. She kicked off her shoes. Her nipples were engorged; she made no attempt to hide her breasts. Her slacks had an elastic top; she put her hands on the elastic, palms in, fingers out, and hesitated again — like him, she had to be thinking of her elegant and happy undressing of the night — then pushed the slacks down. She let go of them when they reached her calves and got them off the rest of the way by pushing one leg down with the other foot then walking them down over her ankles as if she were treading grapes. Then she did the same thing, but more slowly, with her panties. All the color had come back into her face. They looked at each other, and neither could hide the sexual eagerness.
As they grappled on the bed, her eyes were wide, seeming to glare at him; then they closed, and her mouth was as tight as if she had taken a vow of silence. He tried to turn her anger aside with tenderness. Twenty minutes later, they lay still; she moved her body so that she lay partly over him, both of them wedged into the angle between the bed and the cool concrete of the wall.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
“Why does it matter?”
“I have to know.”
“I am Russian.”
“No,”
“I am a DGI agent named Ibazza.”
“No. The thumbprint on the card is not yours.”
Then she has access to a pretty sophisticated system, if she can find that out. She may know whom the thumbprint really belonged to. “Who am I, then?” he said.
“I think you are an American whose boat was blown up. Are you?”
But old caution was always with him. “I am Peruvian,” he said.
She became angry again. “Tell me the truth!” She tangled her fingers in his hair and pounded his head against the mattress. “I swear, if you tell the truth, I will save you. But tell me who you are!”
“Who are you?” he said. He pushed a lock of black hair away from her face. “Who are you, Juana?”
She pushed his hand away. “I have to know who you are. It is all that matters now.”
He moved his body, moving hers. “And this?”
“This is nothing!” She pushed herself upon her hands, away from him. “This is — personal. Therefore, it is trivial.”
“It is a great deal.”
She got up and yanked the dress down over her arms and head, slowly covering her wonderful body as if she were putting out a light. She pulled the panties up and then dug through the bottom of the armoire for shoes. She was very violent in putting them on. “Promise me you will not try to escape,” she said.
“That would be a stupid promise.”
“Promise me!”
“Where my life is concerned, I have no honor, and so my promises mean nothing. Therefore, I promise.”
“It is for your own good. Those two out there are very nervous. I will come back before six. Then you must tell me who you are, or…”
“Or?”
“Or I will have to turn you over to people who will do terrible things to you. I do not want that to happen.”
“Isn’t that ‘personal’?”
She looked at him, through him, then turned the door handle and went out, closing the door very quickly again as if she feared that the same cat would escape. He heard the lock turn and then her hard, quick steps.
Tarp waited for three-quarters of an hour. After that, he went to the armoire and found a pair of her stretch-fabric slacks that would at least cover his nakedness. There was a T-shirt with a colorful decoration from the Festival of Socialist Film. It looked foolish, but it clothed him.
He ripped all the gauze from the bottom of the spring, splashed her cologne over it, and put it on the windowsill with some of the plastic from the mattress cover. The old matches did not light very well, but he got the gauze smoldering and closed the window on it, leaving only a crack to make a draft to feed the fire. Still, it almost went out; then it blazed, and it began to smolder the way he wanted. He opened the window and crumbled some of the yellow foam from the mattress into it, and the smoke turned an ugly green and looked as thick as sewer water.
Tarp propped the flimsy chair under the door handle. He ran some water into the bucket with his urine and set it near the bed, where he could reach it quickly. He fed more foam and more cologne to the fire and watched the smoke drift out through the lattice over the window. He looked up at the smoke detector on the ceiling, which, he thought, symbolized as well as anything could the difference between Juana’s Havana and George Raft’s.
He could see flame at the bottom of the thick smoke, but he had no way of slowing it now. The paint on the bottom of the window was blistering, and as he watched, one pane of glass cracked from the heat.
A building like this one was like a village. Natural affinity and government nosiness made the people almost pathologically aware of each other. It had its own court system for minor “errors” (with Juana the judge); people were always on watch for others’ transgressions. A fire would be a great event. It would offer the thrill of danger, the pleasure of somebody else’s mistake, the titillation of damage to government property. There might even be revisionist or anti-revolutionary meaning in it — the secret cooking of black market food or the operation of an illegal still. That the apartment where the fire started was that of the head of the CDR was even more exciting. There had to be people in the building who would be thrilled by any sign of her failure — men who had wanted her and been rejected, women who disliked her because she was a new kind of Cuban woman, political rivals.
They have to notice soon, he thought.
He heard the muffled pounding of running feet on the floor above.
He waited.
He heard a voice far away. Then another voice, perhaps in the street below.
Suddenly there was a loud voice in the room just outside and a noise like a chair or a table being pushed aside. Several voices were raised then excitedly. He heard a thump and then a strange brushing sound on the door, and he imagined one of his guards putting his back to the bedroom door to keep the nosy neighbors out.
The air in the room grew stifling. The smell of burning plastic attacked his nose, the back of his throat. He coughed. He was thinking of the poisonous gases that could be made by burning plastic. He closed his mind to that and impaled a paper label from the mattress on his improvised club, set it afire, and held it up under the smoke alarm. It screamed like a hurt rabbit.
“Fire!” Tarp shouted in Spanish. “Help me! Help. Help. Oh, Jesu, help me!” While he shouted he was opening the window and tearing down a curtain to drop it on the burning pile on the window ledge. He rubbed soot from the ledge on his hands and face.
“Comrades, for Jesu’s sake! Help!”
The door handle rattled.
He picked up the pail of watery urine.
The door was pushed in an inch and stopped by the chair. Somebody was bellowing outside.