Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

by Rosalie Knecht

  “You think the people who hired you are Dominican agents.”

  “Who else could they be?”

  “You need to get out of this, Vera.”

  “How, Gerry?”

  “Pull up stakes. Disappear. Go out of state for a couple of months.”

  “It’ll be dangerous for me if they know their cover is blown.”

  “Is that it? You could come up with something if you really wanted to.”

  I avoided his eyes.

  “So why don’t you?” he said.

  “Why don’t I what?”

  “Get out of it.”

  I flinched. It was uncomfortable to have my impulses probed like this. And it seemed so obvious anyway. Why make me say it? “Because he’s just a kid. He has nobody.”

  He let that stew. Then he said, “So what’s your plan?”

  “It’s developing.”

  “All right, Vera.”

  “I’m looking for him; I’ve had some leads. But I need to know where his parents are.”

  “What if they’re in prison, like they told you?”

  “Maybe he has other family.”

  “How are you going to get the agents off your back? Even if you find him and you find his parents?”

  “That’s the part that’s developing.”

  He set his fingertips against his temples and closed his eyes.

  “You’re alone in this,” he said.

  I waited for him to go on.

  “Why did you ask me here?” he said.

  “I need help.”

  “Vera.”

  “You must have people in the Dominican Republic,” I said.

  “Of course I do. Because Balaguer is friendly, Vera.”

  “Friendly to who, exactly?” I said.

  “To the United States. You know that.”

  “He’s hardly any better than Trujillo.”

  “Trujillo was friendly too.”

  “He was a psychopath.”

  Gerry spread his hands, as if to say: Who are you talking to? To what audience?

  “Where are your people?” I said. “The embassy?”

  “Please, Vera.”

  “I need to know if the parents got a visa. Their names are Dionisio and Altagracia Ibarra.”

  “Please, it’s a small country,” he said. “They wouldn’t have left under their real name. There are still informants everywhere. A third of the island is reporting on the other two-thirds. Or maybe the other way around.”

  “I need to know if they’re in prison like I was told,” I said.

  He shook his head. He extricated his own cigarettes from his jacket pocket and made a lengthy process out of lighting one. Something in him was withdrawing. “They don’t share that information with us.”

  “Don’t they?” I leaned closer. “That’s all their own business?”

  He said nothing. His hair was neatly combed; he wore a suit. How was it possible that in only the space of a year, he had begun to look displaced in time? He wasn’t so old. I would have been surprised if he was more than thirty-five. I was only twenty-seven myself, and I felt it too. There was something jangling and chaotic happening out there that we were not a part of. Who were we?

  “You’re asking too much,” he said.

  I touched his hand. The anger was back, surprising me, heating my face. “You owe me this much,” I said.

  The music clicked on. I go out walking, after midnight, out in the moonlight, just like we used to do.

  “I have a man I can ask who has a man he can ask,” he said finally.

  Three days later my service had a message from him. I was due at Saint Jerome for an afternoon shift in a few hours, but I went out for a walk and I called him back from a telephone booth at the edge of Grand Army Plaza.

  “They’re not in prison,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” I practically went up on tiptoe.

  “Almost sure. Almost is the best I can do. You know how these things are. They’re an important family.”

  “Yes.”

  “So the important families, if they go to prison, there are records. They go on a list.”

  “All right. So where are they, if they’re not on a list?”

  “Evaporated, I guess.”

  “So they’re gone? Gone where?”

  “I don’t know any more than what I’ve said already,” he said.

  The trees creaked in the wind blowing up Flatbush Avenue. “Thanks, Gerry.”

  “Yes, well.” He sighed. “You’re welcome.”

  I hung up, hesitated, and then called my service. The girl came on the line, sounding tired. “You have a message from a Mr. Ibarra,” she drawled. “He’s asking for a return call. Shall I connect you?”

  “No, not right now.” There was an idea forming, and it made me feel nauseous and hot, like looking down into deep water. I hung up the telephone and began an argument with myself.

  How else can you do it?

  But you don’t have to do it at all.

  I crossed to the library, a place where I had gone many times to unspool my confusion. It took itself so seriously, with its gold-leaf figures of Whitman and Moby Dick in the facade, its fifty-foot lobby, that it made me take myself more seriously, which discouraged my usual evasions and self-deceptions. I went into the fiction room on the right and sat at a table with my head in my hands. There was no reason in the world not to tell Mr. Ibarra that I had failed, withdraw from the case, and go back to trailing unfaithful wives on their Saturday shopping trips around Queens.

  And yet the thought of doing that made me furious. It was an adolescent kind of rage, my throat closing. Félix was a person—I kept thinking—who was alone. A child who was alone, as I had been. Whatever Gerry thought, whatever Jane might have thought if she knew about this, it was unbearable to drop it now, when a path had already begun to open that could bring me to his parents. Because it had occurred to me that there are public records everywhere, and one thing that’s always public is a marriage license, and a marriage license lists an address.

  It would take a lot of money to get there. But I could keep cashing Mr. Ibarra’s checks. I went back out to Grand Army Plaza and called the service back.

  “A return message for Mr. Ibarra,” I said. “Are you ready?”

  “Ready, miss.”

  “Some progress. Working on a lead in Pennsylvania.”

  She read it back to me.

  “That’s it,” I said. I would tell them I had caught a rumor about some niece or nephew of Mrs. Villanueva in Scranton or someplace, and had gone to investigate. I needed a cover for leaving town. I walked back toward Eastern Parkway, navigating the plaza’s ring of traffic, looping past the histrionic Neptune with his trident. I was beginning to be afraid of the undertow in all this. I walked along the fine western margin of Prospect Park, where sandstone mansions with many-lobed windows looked over the elms and plane trees and broad lawns. The sky felt close on this side of the park, now that the leaves were gone. I could almost see how to land it all. It could be done. I turned into the park, to walk the wooded path that led to Lincoln Road. I would have to go to Santo Domingo, find the old estate, talk to whoever was there.

  The neighbor woman had had enough. There had been a man parked for a long time on Webb Street. The sun had set and night was falling. Down a block or two, at the end of Avenue X, seagulls roosted, as docile as chickens, in the riggings of sailboats. The lights were coming on in parlors.

  The man was smoking. The window was down, although it was a cold night and getting colder. He had been there for nearly an hour. Moving slowly, his movements hard to discern through the reflection of the sky in the windshield, which was still a little pink. It was his cuff that showed he was smoking, a muted white drifting up to the face and disappearing again.

  The car was a Chrysler Newport—tan, with new tires. It didn’t look out of place on the block, which was lined with single-family homes and duplexes warding off the oceanic atmosphere with v
inyl siding, modest vehicles parked along the curbs.

  When the street was truly dark, and the lone streetlight at the far corner had come on, the man climbed out of the car and walked toward the late Mrs. Villanueva’s house. He passed the front-porch steps without pausing and stepped over the low ornamental fence and into the side yard where her clothesline still hung. He was lost to view around the back of the empty house.

  The neighbor woman decided that it was time to intervene. She didn’t like people creeping around and she doubted he had a good reason to be there. She stepped back from her window and pulled on her overshoes and coat, picking up the flashlight she kept by the door for good measure, because it was heavy and she wasn’t afraid to swing it. She reached the sidewalk just as the man came back around the side of the house.

  She fell back without meaning to. He was tall, his face shadowed by a hat, his shoulders bulked by a thick scarf. He barely seemed to have seen her. She blocked his path.

  “Go on and get out of here,” she said, “whatever you’re up to.”

  He stepped around her. She faltered.

  “I’ve seen you here before,” she called after him. “A while back. I remember your car.”

  He didn’t turn. She watched him go, gripping the flashlight, wondering if it was still worth calling the police. He got back into his car.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she called after him again, but he had rolled the window up, and the sound of the car starting shook the quiet of the street. There was an exhalation of blue exhaust, and then he was gone.

  I packed quickly, remembering the last time, when I had prepared to go to Argentina. Nerves made me irritable about little things, unable to find my sunglasses, fluttering in a panic for ten minutes over the Anne Patterson passport, which turned out to be in a book where I had left it. It was not like Argentina, I reminded myself. For Argentina I had had no return ticket. I hadn’t known how long I would be gone.

  This time I had a round-trip ticket, purchased that afternoon at a travel agent on Jay Street. I had given myself a week. I didn’t have any vacation days yet at Saint Jerome, so I was forced to give my notice. I was ashamed of myself, in a funny way, as if I really were a caseworker. I told Mrs. Allen over the phone, making up a sick mother to allay my guilt, and listened to her voice go cold. I tried not to think of the boys in my cottage. I couldn’t have meant anything to them yet, anyway.

  I hesitated over a swimsuit. This was not a vacation, and yet, how would it look not to have one? Gerry used to say that an agent should prepare like an actor. Curious, and friendly with a few young actors during those first years in New York, I had read Stanislavski’s book An Actor Prepares. I liked it, the way the director harassed the acting students with koan-like instructions, how the students behaved when they imagined an audience and how they behaved when they imagined they were alone. Maybe I envied them their effortless conviction of the importance of what they were doing. I had never felt that anything I did could be both pleasurable and important. That was probably my mother’s influence. Her only leisure was reading the newspaper and playing tennis at the club, and even that she did with her colleagues and their wives, and played to win.

  But I had learned something about concentration from Stanislavski’s book. Choose a point of attention, he said: the Nearest Object. I had used this when traveling with a false passport. In the customs line, I would choose a little thing, a child’s hat, a red suitcase, and focus on it. It helped me stay calm. Stanislavski had steered me right before. If I was a woman on a Caribbean vacation, I should pack a swimsuit. When I was finished, when everything else was ready, I took a .22 pistol down out of a box in the attic, unloaded it, and zipped it into a camera case at the bottom of the bag.

  III

  JANUARY 1968

  DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

  CHAPTER 12

  The French doors to the balcony were open and sunlight came through a fabric awning, tinted blue and yellow in stripes. The hotel was modest, concrete, painted pink, but it managed five stories and I was on the fifth, privy to a slice of a view past the casino billboard across the street: a glittering tropical sea, the horizon attended by small white clouds so still they appeared to have been painted there. I had fallen asleep as soon as I checked in; my flight from New York had been early. The breeze was warm, coming from the beach and picking up the smell of frying meat as it passed over the few blocks that separated my hotel from the grander ones along Playa de Güibia. I was hungry and thirsty, but a strange, light feeling clung to me. No one knew where I was, and it was warm here. My street in Brooklyn was iron gray, and there had been ice on the trees when I stepped out to wait for my cab that morning, evidence of a late freezing rain. On the rattan bedside table I found a can of Canada Dry that I had had the foresight to buy from a café in the Santo Domingo airport, and went to the balcony to drink it, then came back to call down to the desk and ask for a continental breakfast to be sent up. Traffic was noisy on the street five floors below, and music drifted up from sources I couldn’t see. At the end of the block there was a small park, a few benches in a circle admiring a statue of a man in a frock coat, who was orating with one hand spread over his heart. I would see later that it was Duarte, father of the Dominican nation. While I drank the ginger ale I watched a man with a cart flay young coconuts, one after another, with balletic strokes of a machete. A row of tiny children in uniform came out of a school and were led away down the street.

  The casino billboard was a photograph of a showgirl in a towering headdress with tiers of radiating feathers like an Aztec god. She wore a lamé bikini and cascades of fine chains, and her expression was uncertain. Room service arrived, a woman in a yellow uniform who brought a tray out to where I was sitting and told me, while I searched through the pockets of my discarded jacket for the pesos I had already converted, that dollars were fine. I passed her one and she backed out.

  The showgirl and I confronted each other again while I ate the buns glazed with sugar and drank the strong coffee. She looked like she couldn’t understand what I was doing there, but was trying to be polite about it. I wondered for the tenth time what Gerry would have said if I had told him my plan. “You have no backing,” probably. I lit a cigarette.

  Before I left New York, I had had some business cards made up identifying me as the assistant to a location scout in Hollywood. Sometimes a flashy story got you further than an ordinary one. I thought about how I should put my shoes on and choose my lightest dress for this day that was getting hotter and hotter, and go downstairs.

  But I stayed in the plastic chair on the balcony, and when I finished my cigarette I lit another one, with fingers that were beginning to be unsteady. I had a raspy cough from smoking too much.

  I had passed under a sign that spanned the street as I came from the airport that morning: SANTO DOMINGO DE GUZMÁN, OLDEST CITY IN THE AMERICAS. The sea was an impossible color. I had read that Dominicans believed there was a curse on Columbus’s name, and refused to speak or write it. Hotels named for him burned, airplanes crashed, and newly ordained members of the Order of Christopher Columbus died of strokes and heart attacks one after another, like dominoes falling. The Arawak dead did not forget. I felt a doomy lack of equilibrium. Balaguer admired the man and liked to talk about him, although even he, out of an abundance of caution, called him only “the Admiral.”

  I had liked stories about sailors and explorers when I was in school, and it was mostly for the way they paired the misery on board the ship—the filth, the exotic grimness of words like hardtack, the barrels of fresh water dwindling in the hold—with visions of islands like this. The wretched Spanish or English fleet always came at last, when all seemed lost and the men were on the brink of mutiny, to a white shore lined with palms. The air was always heavy with flowers. Native people paddled out in longboats, offering fruit and roasted fish. And then the story that I liked most as a bloody-minded eleven-year-old, the reversal of these themes, or maybe the real point of them: Magellan a
nd his starving crew landing on a Filipino beach and being cut to pieces by the army of Lapu Lapu, the king of Mactan. Magellan had wanted to convert the king to Christianity. My sixth-grade textbook, with beautiful reserve, said that Lapu Lapu “refused this overture.” He also declined to return the body. When I first read that story I was taking riding lessons with a daughter of a Filipino diplomat, and she told me that people in Cebu and Mactan still saw Magellan’s ghost. “What does he do?” I said, breathless. “He rolls around on the beach and yells,” she said, laughing.

  I put on a short dress and dug up my largest sunglasses from the bottom of my bag. My legs were pale. The New York summer was a long time ago now.

  In the lobby I picked my way through a few fellow tourists standing next to islands of luggage and found the directory I was looking for at the end of the broad reception desk, sheltered under the leaves of a banana tree in a pot. “It’s very safe here,” I heard the bellhop saying to a tanned pair of grandparents with Miami tags on their suitcases. “The police are very hard.” There it was, the Palacio Municipal, City Hall. I wrote down the address and gave the young girl at the desk five centavos for a map of the city. The bellhop was telling the old couple where they could gamble. Through the glass doors at the back of the lobby, a turquoise swimming pool rippled in the noon sun. I went the other way and stepped out into the glare of the street.

  Motorbikes rattled past. A taxi discharging a passenger in front of a hair salon was blocking a convertible trying to make the turn at the end of the block, and the second driver was half out of the vehicle, one leg in the street, preparing to air his grievances. A honking city bus vibrated and fumed behind them. The street was lined with concrete multistory buildings, their facades complicated by balconies and strung with wires and cables. Expensive handbags gleamed in a vitrine across the street, each arranged on its own plinth, like a Greek urn. I saw my chance and ran toward the taxi, which was still idling in the street as the grand lady who had stepped out of it laboriously counted the coins in her purse. “Where you going, miss?” the driver called out.