The Canadian took another step back, the better to scrutinise the painting before her.
“Mind if I go away and think about it?” she asked.
“Not at all,” Carmen told her. “How long are you here, in Buenos Aires?”
The Canadian, to Carmen’s surprise, turned to her assistant for confirmation. The girl looked back at the painting, screwed up her reddened face and shrugged - a gesture the Canadian seemed, against all reason, to accept as an answer.
“Not long,” she said. “Couple of days, maybe, before we move on.”
“Wonderful. And are you staying nearby?”
“We’re at the Palacio Rojo over in Recoleta - you know it?”
“Very well,” Carmen said. She resolved to find herself in the vicinity of the hotel that evening - and if she should happen, while she was there, to bump into the Canadian, perhaps strike up a conversation and, who knows, even flirt with her a little over a bottle of Rioja until the deal was done and the Castillo sold… well, who’d be there to call it anything but coincidence? “Very well indeed.”
She needed a coffee and a cigarette, after the Canadian and her assistant left: something strong and hot and soothing to wash down the rough caress of the smoke in her lungs.
There was a cafe-bar across the street from the gallery; a pretty little place with outdoor seating and a barista who knew her by name. She left her own assistant in charge - hoping the girl would have the sense to stall if any serious buyers walked in, rather than try to sell them on anything herself - and sped over there, unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth before her feet had even hit the pavement.
A queue had formed at the counter when she got there, which frustrated her; the place wasn’t usually so busy so early in the morning. But, thirsty and jittery as her encounter with the Canadian had left her, she stood in line and waited, smoking and taking in - against her will - the fizz and crackle of other people’s conversations as they ebbed and flowed around her.
“I thought she did quite well there, our El,” the woman at the table next to her was saying - an old woman, white and grey-haired and wrinkled, her harsh English vowels falling discordantly on Carmen’s already-strained ears.
“Sophie too, I thought,” her companion added. She was brown-skinned, Indian or Pakistani or Bengali, as old as the other woman but more sophisticated; her English and her bearing more refined than her friend’s, her plain khakis and faded grey tunic fashionably minimalist rather than institutional, as it might have looked on a woman with less obvious style.
“She’s comin’ along, ain’t she? Picks things up quick, that one.”
The two old women paused to sip at their coffee, the white one nibbling at the edges of a thick, oozing slice of chocotorta.
“They brought Rose with ‘em this time, I noticed,” the white one said, several swallows later.
“Yes. Although I suspect she doesn’t know exactly what they’re up to. And she’s been off sightseeing with Harriet most days, from what I’ve seen. They’re at the Bosques de Palermo this afternoon, I gather.”
“Nice, that, ain’t it? All of them and that Harriet getting along.”
“Nice for El, certainly.”
The Indian one finished her coffee and leaned back in her chair contentedly. Her eyes caught Carmen’s, and she smiled broadly.
Tourists, Carmen thought, taking in the woman’s camera, the binoculars she wore around her neck like jewellery. God save us from tourists and their endless rubbernecking.
“Good morning,” the beaming woman said, in perfect Spanish. “Wonderful day, isn’t it?”
“Lovely,” Carmen replied, smiling insincerely back at her.
The queue began to inch forward and Carmen, relieved to be free of the woman’s stare, moved with it towards the counter.
“Come on, then,” she heard the white woman say, before the sound of her was swallowed by the grind and gurgle of the coffee machine. “Move your arse. We can’t sit here all day, unless you want young El to see us and work out we’ve been keeping an eye on things.”
“Very well, then,” said her friend, with a world-weary sigh. “Lead on, if you must.”
“Con leche?” the barista asked Carmen, as if he didn’t know already.
She nodded her assent, then turned her own neck to watch the women leave - curious, despite herself, about where they might be heading, and who this El might be that they were so keen to avoid.
But they were gone.
Ah, well, she told herself, mind already turning back to the Canadian and the accidental meeting she’d be engineering later. How interesting could it really have been, anyway?
About the Author
Natalie Edwards is a writer and researcher based in the fox-ravaged wilds of Leicestershire, where she lives with her partner and their two extremely energetic children.
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The author of the El Gardener series of feminist heist books and (as TC Parker) of the horror novels Saltblood and A Press Of Feathers, she’s been a copywriter, a lecturer and, very briefly, an academic; now she runs a semiotics and cultural insight agency by day and dreams up horror and crime fiction at night, when the kids are asleep.
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Visit her online at www.tcparkerwrites.com and follow her on Twitter: @writestc
Also by Natalie Edwards
Writing as Natalie Edwards:
The Debt (El Gardener Book 1)
The Push (El Gardener Book 2)
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Writing as TC Parker:
Saltblood
A Press of Feathers
The Remembrance Page 26