The police car was gaining on me. I shifted into fourth, gave it more gas, and felt the weak striving of the engine. Low-hanging branches flickered in the headlights, bursting forth like pheasants, and made me flinch. The road was narrow and my feel for the pedals was impeded by the stiff and slippery surface of my shoes. The police car surged up, nearly clipping my bumper; I could see that they wanted to pass me and then cut me off, and that the only thing stopping them for now was the close ranks of the mahogany trees, which would give out as soon as this avenue ended at an ordinary road. I shifted to fifth gear. The needle topped out, straining, at 110 kilometers per hour, not much faster than I would have driven on the West Side Elevated at home. The wind in the open window battered me, threw my hair before my eyes. I wished I’d had time to get my seat belt on. There was a bang, and I pitched forward instinctively, hiding my face against the steering wheel. A gunshot or just a piece of gravel flung up by the tires? The car wobbled and I lifted my head again, correcting.
We were by now a mile from the house. There was another bang—I was certain now that they were shooting. I tried to keep the wheels straight. I was all cold, from the crown of my head to my wet feet. The avenue ended, the ranks of trees disappeared, and we streamed into a larger, more airy night. I turned left onto the main road, and the police car followed and jumped forward again, went into the other lane, gaining on me, their front fender to my rear one. I could see their faces in the side mirror; they were shouting. There were three of them. They had all come after me. Their car began to pitch and reel.
I saw it in the mirror, then risked a look back. The police car was weaving, and I saw panic in the face of the deputy at the wheel. The car slowed, then rolled into the right lane and kept going, wobbling, off the road and into the edge of a field, where it stopped. The tire had at last gone flat.
I felt what the old saints must have felt in the face of an unlikely exercise of divine will. I could have floated; I could have taken the battered car up with me. I was weeping. Time compressed into a wild slurry; only a few seconds had passed. And then, still on fire with my luck, I found that I was turning the car around.
I observed this as if from above, with regret. I made a U-turn across the highway with one wheel on the shoulder at the edge of the field, drove the hundred yards back past the police car, ducked below the window for an instant as the men exploded out of their listing vehicle, either saw or imagined the flash of orange as one of them fired at me. There was a reverberating plink that I felt through the pedals; they had hit the flank of the car. I sat up and watched them shrink in the mirror. I turned back into the Avenida de las Caobas.
The trees flashed past again. The horse was gone. The road rose up before me, a confusing echo of my arrival there the day before in the back seat of Miguel’s car, all the landmarks invisible in the dark, only this tunnel of trunks. I came out from the avenue again and into the circular drive.
I stepped out of the car, leaving it running, not shutting the door. My whole body was shaking, and I wasn’t sure if I could stand without one arm on the roof. “Nick!” I called.
An incomprehensible quiet reigned; there was only the sound of the breeze in the forest. Even the frogs had stopped calling. I turned in a circle, unwilling to leave the car. “Nick!” I yelled again.
There were running footsteps, and then there he was, blinking in the headlights, hair wild, eyes round. “What are—what are you—”
“Get in the car!”
He ran for the passenger side and pulled the door shut behind him. I got back in and again put the car in reverse, taking an extra moment to fasten my seat belt. This time, instead of entering the avenue, I turned left onto the dirt farm track that bisected the field, praying that it had an outlet somewhere. Leaves slapped the sides of the car, a continual hissing assault. The track dipped over a hill and widened. The lights of a small house in a pocket of the slope appeared and disappeared. The Ibarra house was gone behind us, as if the mountain had closed over it.
“Who are you?” Nick said.
“Nobody,” I said.
“You left me that note—saying if you weren’t back . . . and then the phone call . . .”
The dirt track opened onto a proper road. I let the car idle at the intersection for a moment, and then chose a direction at random. Away, just away. Putting miles behind us.
“I’m a private investigator,” I said.
“Oh, come on now.”
“It’s true. I got into some trouble.”
“I can see that.”
“I’m looking for a family. That was their place. It’s a long story.”
Occasionally another car passed us now, and I flinched each time. I kept hearing distant sirens in the whine of the engine.
“I didn’t think you were coming back,” Nick said. Then, considering: “Maybe you didn’t think you were either.”
“I didn’t think anything,” I said shortly. “I wish I knew where this road was going.”
“I’m not choosey.”
“What time is it?” I said.
“It’s five. It took me half the night to find a car. I gave fifty dollars to someone for this one—the chambermaid’s boyfriend’s brother-in-law?”
“I’ll pay you back.”
He burst out laughing. It went on for a while. “You’ll pay me back?” he said. He lit a cigarette.
A man in a gas station on a two-lane road, as the birds were beginning to make their uproar in the trees and the sky was going pale, pointed us the way back to the capital. We had wandered north and would be coming down to it over the hills. I wanted to fill the tank but had no money. I did ask him for a cup of water, which he gave me. My purse was on the mountain and the rest of my money was in the hotel safe. I didn’t want to ask Nick for anything else. In the growing light I could see that the bullet had made a neat hole in the front left fender.
“Would fifty dollars fix that?” I said.
“Fifty dollars was just to take it,” Nick said. He directed his comments at a whitewashed school across the road, a single yellow light over the door.
I walked stiffly; my neck and back had gone tight. I made a circuit of the car.
“We’d better hurry, don’t you think?” Nick said, still talking to the school.
“My return ticket is at the hotel,” I said. “I can cash it in at the airport and take whatever flight comes first. Do you have money for your return flight?”
He glanced over. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to him before this moment that his stay in the Dominican Republic was over. But he took it in. “I have traveler’s checks.”
“Good.”
I saw him looking at the bullet hole before he got back in the car. “I heard the shots,” he said.
We pulled back onto the road. I wanted to see the ocean. I felt myself missing something, misunderstanding something, and being accused of it, in the dense silence coming from the passenger side of the car.
A woman I had never seen before was at the front desk of the hotel. We told her we were checking out. I had tried to compose my face and hair in the mirror in the car, but I could tell there was something unraveled about me. Nick was very pale. But she was a hotel night clerk and was used to these things. She paid us no attention.
Nick wrote a message to the chambermaid, and I put a twenty-dollar bill in the envelope for the damage to the car. It would have been fair to leave more, but I knew I would have to add cash to the value of my ticket to leave that day and my reserves were dwindling. The note said that we were sorry for the inconvenience but had been forced to leave the car in the airport parking lot rather than at the hotel. Nick had adopted an attitude of seamless politeness toward me, as if I were someone’s elderly visiting relative. I packed in five minutes, then took another five to panic, thinking I had lost my passport, but it was in a hidden pocket of my suitcase where I had left it. I found Nick waiting for me in the lobby with his bag.
“Christ, I thought you had left,” he said, which
struck me as funny.
“Again?” I said.
CHAPTER 19
The first American flight was a nine thirty to Miami, with a connection to New York two hours after landing. I had just enough money left for a meal, maybe two. Nick booked the same flight. We asked to board early and sat in our separate seats, smoking, while passengers trickled on.
Some final tension in my chest dissolved when I could see the ocean below. I fell asleep and woke to hear the captain’s voice crackling out, “Bienvenidos a los Estados Unidos,” a sentence that sounded to me, still only half-conscious, like a song.
I found Nick reading the Miami Herald and eating a burger at an unfamiliar fast-food joint in the Miami terminal.
“Listen,” I said. I was standing on the outside of a railing that separated the premises of the burger stand from the slick and echoing corridor of the terminal. He lowered the paper.
“Listen,” I said again, my face flaming.
He stared.
“You’re right,” I said. “I wasn’t going to come back at first. I couldn’t see a way to do it. But then I did. I did come back.”
A teenage waitress passed, eyeing me.
“And I will give you the fifty dollars,” I said. “But I know it’s not the same as paying you back.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Why should I be angry, at the end of the day?” he said. “I don’t even know you.”
“Well,” I said. “I guess that’s true.” I stood there thinking, We could be friends. We are friends, I think. Or we were. But I wasn’t the kind of person who could say things like that. Instead I said, “Give me your address, so I can send you a check.”
My own street and my own house, cold as a crypt. I goosed the boiler and fell asleep, too tired to take off my stockings, and woke in the dark hours later, the clock showing seven PM. Fatigue had spread over me and my world like tar. I could hardly imagine getting up, and yet felt that I lay in a pit I had to escape. In the dark room, the smells and sounds of the cottage in San Cristóbal rose up—mildew, damp earth, the hissing of insects from the woods. I sat up and turned on all the lights. Then I took a shower, changed into warmer clothes, heated and ate a can of soup in the kitchen without sitting down, and went to the Bracken.
She wasn’t there. I hesitated in the doorway, thinking I might see her come out of the kitchen, but Lois, the backup girl who worked weekends, was there instead, picking her teeth in the corner by the till. A couple of braying girls came in behind me, dislodging me from the door, and I tried to shake off my disappointment. There was something spongy and weak about me just then. I could feel it and I hated it. I went to the bar and ordered a whiskey from Lois, and when she brought it to me I said, using a bright and unnatural voice that I had never heard before, “Where’s Max?”
“Some girl took her to Key West for the week,” Lois said.
I tried to think of something to say while this information screeched past. I had once had a friend whose third-story apartment was next to the elevated tracks of the J train where they rose and rounded a turn in Brooklyn, and each time the train shuddered and hollered by her windows I would feel completely emptied of words, as I did now, while my friend kept chatting, stirring coffee, picking out records for the hi-fi. “Nice time of year for it,” I said finally, and thought I saw a smirk on Lois’s face. I emptied my drink and asked for another. Peach came in, mercifully, and I talked to her for a while. She was a good soul and you could be a mess with her, and she wouldn’t even notice, let alone hold it against you. I told her I had been on vacation in the Caribbean. She professed to be jealous. She had been cleaning out the freezing attic of an aunt who had just died. Out of sympathy, I ordered whiskeys for us both.
At ten o’clock Peach said she had to go home, she was exhausted, and I was alone again at the bar, which by then was gently moving in and out of focus, my glass sometimes becoming two glasses. “Lois, give me a dime for the phone,” I said.
“Aw, Vera,” she said.
“Come on, Lois. After all the good times we’ve had?”
She dug in her pocket. I went out to the phone in the vestibule and stood leaning my head against its frigid stainless-steel face for a minute, trying to ward off the spins. I had dialed the number before I knew what I was doing, or that’s what I told myself. Jane answered on the third ring.
“Dabrowski residence,” she said.
“Hello, Jane,” I said.
A pause and then her old outpouring of warmth. “Sweetie, hello. Where are you?”
“At the bar.”
“Ah. By yourself?”
“Let me keep some secrets, Jane.”
“What else did I ever do?”
Why did the first touch of familiarity feel like this, no matter what had happened, no matter what it meant? She was teasing me. I sagged into the corner, sat on the tiny bench that had been nailed there for that purpose. “I’ve been traveling,” I said thickly. “I was in the Dominican Republic.” Then, firmly: “On vacation.”
“What a life you lead. I wish I could see you. What bar?”
“The Bracken.”
“That’s a long way from here.” She rented a place by the college.
“Not so long.”
“You know, Vera, I’ve been meaning to call you—I did call you a couple of days ago, actually, but you were away.”
“I was away,” I agreed. A group of men and women pushed past me, bringing a blast of cold air, and I reeled back into the corner, outraged.
“I just—well, I told you that in the midst of my—the stupid thing that I did, that she—the woman I was seeing, she took a lot of money from me. And I’ve been having trouble catching up on my rent.”
A word issued from me, a distant “Oh.”
“It’s not so far to your place,” she said, as if this had just occurred to her. “I could come and meet you there.”
“You could come and meet me,” I repeated.
“Yes. In an hour? I just have to get myself together.”
“You know, Jane,” I said, very slowly, “I think I’d rather be alone.”
All weekend, I had nightmares about the Avenida de las Caobas, the radium eyes of the horse among the dark trees. I sat up late watching television, avoiding sleep. A local station syndicated Johnny Carson episodes on a three-day lag, and I watched Flip Wilson clap politely for the José Molina Dancers. I was drinking, eating poorly, carrying around a perpetual headache, dragging the newspaper off the stoop in the morning. I had planned to mail a check to Nick, but by the time Monday came to deliver me from the desolation of the weekend, I needed to get out of the house. I was worn out from the bitter circle of my thoughts about Max and her girl in Florida, and the damp squib that was left where my anger at Jane had been. I would hand deliver Nick’s check. I had his address, after all, and I figured a reporter might be home on a weekday morning.
He lived in a fourth-floor walk-up over a storefront dance studio on East Twelfth Street. I bought some doughnuts at a shop on the corner: another peace offering. The street door to his building was unlocked, and it was quiet as I went up. I knocked on the door of 4B and waited in the carpeted hall, where overcast daylight filtered down from a skylight. It was beginning to snow.
I heard footsteps, and then the hesitation of a look through the peephole. The door opened. “This is a surprise,” he said, not unkindly.
“I brought your money,” I said. “And—” I held out the greasy bag, and he took it. I watched him think over his options while he held it.
“Well, come in,” he said after a moment.
The apartment was small, tidy, a bit spartan. There were a couple of austere line drawings on the living room wall. He went into the kitchen and came back with a coffee pot.
“I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome,” I said.
He shrugged. “Sit down,” he said. “Is it snowing?” The patch of sky through the living room window had gone soft and gray. I sat at a table and laid the check down in fr
ont of me. He folded it and put it in his pocket. He looked like he had made up his mind about something. He pivoted toward me.
“I have questions,” he said.
“Questions?”
He set a teacup painted with roses in front of me and filled it with black coffee. “Questions about you.”
“Oh. Well. All right—”
“Are you in the CIA?”
“People keep asking me that,” I said to the teacup.
“Was that why you were so angry at the club? Because you were running your operation and I was trying to run mine—”
“You were running an operation?”
“Figuratively, figuratively.”
Intelligence and journalism weren’t so far apart. It was always the sources who mattered. Both disciplines were a mass of deflecting and waiting and preparing. “I guess so,” I said. “I was angry about getting caught up in something without being told first. It’s dangerous to be around an intelligence officer, you know, if your intentions are—informational.”
“Informational!” He sat down in the other chair and emptied the doughnuts onto a plate.
“I’m not in the CIA,” I said.
“Well, that’s what you would say, isn’t it?”
I could tell that he was both joking and not joking at once. A pigeon on the ledge outside the window complained moodily about the snow. What kind of secrets was I supposed to keep now? I worked for myself, after all, didn’t I? What did I have to tell at this moment that could really do me any harm?
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 16