Arturo said, “Listen, could you be an American?”
He was sounding friendly again, as though he was on my side. I said, “What do you mean?”
“Mamá,” he said, “we still got some of the Barry Lee stuff, don’t we?”
“Oh, sure,” she said.
I said, “Some of my old things are still here?”
“Lola had her own stuff to carry,” he explained. “She took some of yours, left some. One suitcase. We got it downstairs, under the house.”
I hadn’t noticed it. I said, “What do you mean, be an American?”
“It’s not workin’, you bein’ Guerreran,” he said, “because you can’t talk.”
“It’s driving me nuts,” I admitted.
“So what if you put on American clothes,” he said, “and went somewhere Americans go, and be an American for a while?”
I said, “How do I do that?”
“You don’t know how to be an American?”
“Not without a passport,” I told him. “Not without credit cards. Even if I had the cash, and I don’t, nobody expects cash from an American. What do you want me to do, go to some hotel? Hi, I’m an American, I’ll pay you in siapas? And the hotel always asks to see the passport. They’ve got some police form to fill out.”
“That’s right, dammit,” Arturo said. “But it would be so perfect, you know? An American is something you could play.”
Mamá said, “Dulce.”
Arturo turned to her, frowning. He thought about it. Slowly he nodded. “Son of a gun,” he said. “She might do it. Only whadda we tell her?”
I said, “Her?”
Instead of answering, he said, “You’re an American, right? And you gotta hide out. Only not for the reason you really got to, for some other reason. What’s the reason?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re looking for.”
“A reason for you to hide out,” he explained, “that makes you a sympathetic guy for a friend of mine.”
“You mean noncriminal,” I said. “Like I’m hiding from my ex-wife.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Why you hidin’ from your ex-wife?”
“She’s trying to serve me papers,” I said. “It’s a financial settlement, and she’s vindictive, and she wants it all. And there’s a deadline. If I can keep out of sight for a month I’ll be okay.”
Slowly he nodded. “That might do it,” he said. “Let me make a phone call.”
“To Dulce,” I suggested. “Who is she?”
“Let’s just see if this works,” he said. “You go get your suitcase; I’ll make the call.”
I said, “This is just a ploy to get me down there with Madonna.”
He laughed. “Not a bad idea. If the phone call don’t work, I’ll tell you, Take the suitcase back down again; here, I’ll come with you.
“Please don’t joke, Arturo,” I said. “I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”
“Lemme call,” he said.
So I went downstairs and Madonna snorted. You again?
“Don’t mind me,” I told her. “Carry on.” I looked around, and there was my green vinyl bag with all the zippers. “I won’t be bothering you again, I hope,” I told Madonna, and carried the bag upstairs.
Arturo was still on the phone. Mamá smiled at me: it’s working out.
I carried the vinyl bag into the bedroom and put it on the bed next to the ratty cardboard suitcase I’d been lugging around. Boy. Already you could tell these were two different guys, and you didn’t even have to look inside the luggage.
I opened the vinyl bag, and here were a lot of old friends. My Reeboks: great. I’d never been really comfortable in those peon shoes. A nice variety of touristy clothes. Underwear. My toilet kit. Fantastic. Wow, I’d missed all this gear.
“Okay,” Arturo said, in the doorway.
I looked at him. “Okay? I’ve got a place to stay?”
“Put on some American stuff,” he told me, “and let’s go.”
“Sure.” I pulled out tan chinos, a light blue LaCoste pullover. “Where we going?”
“I tell you in the car,” he said. “We gotta get outa here, man. Leave that other stuff behind.”
“Right,” I said.
30
“Backseat, tourist.”
“Oh, right.”
I got into the back of the Impala, Arturo got behind the wheel, and we drove away from Mamá and Papá’s house. I said, “Where are we going?”
“Up by Marona.”
A long way, nearly two hundred miles, up where the Siapa River, for which the local currency is named, meets up with the Conoro River, the one my rented Beetle belly-whopped into.
There was pretty country up around Marona. The Siapa is the cleanest and freshest and fastest of all the waterways of Guerrera, tumbling north out of the mountains of Brazil. There are nice resorts and rich people around there.
Come to think of it, that was also where my undertaker, Ortiz, came from. That wasn’t the idea, was it, to have me hang out at a mortuary for the next couple of weeks?
Then a worse thought occurred to me. Was this instead of Madonna? As casually as I knew how, I said, “Where by Marona are we going, Arturo?”
Instead of answering, he said, “Take a look in the seat pocket there, the hotel brochures.”
The back of the front passenger seat had a wide pocket, like a kangaroo’s pouch. I reached into it, and it was full of different kinds of brochures and pamphlets, hotels and tourist attractions. All because of Arturo being a sometime cabdriver, I supposed. “Got them,” I said.
“Take a look at Casa Montana Mohoka.”
I leafed through them and found it, and it was actually Casa Montana Mojoca, but pronounced with that airy j. “Got it.”
“Look it over.”
I did. It was an expensive full-color brochure that opened out to eight pages, and what it described was a pretty snazzy-sounding destination resort. A golf course. Tennis. Olympic pool. Full gymnasium. Meeting facilities for conferences. Private airstrip and helicopter pad. Nature trails. World-famous orchid-viewing walk. Horseback riding. Rafting the Siapa.
What a place. This was the kind of resort being built all over the world these days, in out-of-the-way locations where the costs are low and the regulations nonexistent. Corporations use them for all kinds of conferences, and then the corporate executives come back and use them for their vacations. They fly into some little country like Guerrera, go straight to the resort, spend their three days or their week, fly back out, and they’ve never been anywhere at all. Corporate people love that kind of place, because it comes with a guarantee of the removal of all doubt and danger. A vacation with no surprises: what a concept!
“Look,” Arturo said.
We were just passing the church, going through the plaza, and out ahead of us to the right was the white Land Rover, stopped in front of Club Rick. We drove on by, and the Land Rover was empty.
“Asking questions,” I said.
“You got it.”
I looked out the rear window, and that white vehicle just sat there in the sun, as innocent as an ice-cream cone. Then we were through the plaza, and it was out of sight, and I faced front again.
This brochure, Casa Montana Mojoca. I said, “Is this where I’m gonna stay?”
“Right.”
“But, Arturo,” I said, “these people don’t take some bum in off the street. I don’t mean I’m a bum, I mean I don’t have any ID, I don’t have any money—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s all taken care of.”
We were leaving Sabanon now, thank God. I said, “You mean, this person Dulce?”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Dulce and me,” Arturo said, “we go back a long time together, early schooldays, know each other forever. Shit, she might even have been my first, I don’t remember. I think I was maybe hers, too.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Haven’t seen each other in years,” he said. “Except, every once in a while, if I got a fare out to Mojoca — when I’m being a cab-driver, you know, not wasting my time with you — sometimes I see her out there, say hello. We get along.”
“She works there?”
“She’s the assistant manager,” he told me. “It’s a big company owns it, you know. From London, I think. So the top-guy manager, he’s an American, but she’s number two. Makes a shitload of money, I think.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“I told her your story,” he said, “and the first thing she ask me, Are there any kids? And I say no, this isn’t whaddayacallit—”
“Child support.”
“That’s it, that’s what she calls it. It isn’t any of that, I told her, it’s just this ex-wife she’s a greedy bitch, so that’s why you gotta stay out of California till the judge does his decision.”
“California.”
“Yeah, you’re a big movie producer in Hollywood. That’s why you just got to hole up, not use your real name, not show your passport to nobody, not even let the staff know who you really are, ‘cause somebody gonna tip off the newspaper; you know, the celebrity newspapers.”
“Arturo, that’s wonderful!” I said.
“So the deal is,” he told me, “you’re goin’ in under an alias, she’ll fix it all in the computer, give you a room, you don’t have to pay nothin’ till the end, when it’s safe to use the credit card. And you come to ask me for help ‘cause I drove you other times you been down here, and you know my gringo brother-in-law that died, and you gotta move outa Rancio because your ex-wife traced you there.”
“Boy,” I said. “It all ties together, doesn’t it?”
“It better tie together,” he said, “or you’re in shit.”
Madonna. I said, “What’s my name now?”
“Well, she just had a cancellation,” he said, “so she put it back in the computer, because they got all the records on that guy. So your alias is, you’re Keith Emory.”
“Keith Emory,” I said, and spelled it. “Like that?”
“I dunno, she didn’t spell it out. She’ll take care of you, don’t worry.”
“And what’s my real name?” I asked. “When I’m in California, producing movies?”
“We didn’t get to that,” he said. “You can pick that one for yourself. You got two — three hours to come up with somethin’.”
“Okay,” I said.
I looked at the brochure some more. Casa Montana Mojoca. A vacation with no surprises. I could live with that.
31
As we drove through Marona, a pleasant old plantation town of whitewashed stone buildings, a number of modern banks, and the usual slums all around the perimeter, Arturo said, “You got your name yet?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m salting myself away, so my name is Brine.”
“Whatever,” he said.
“And I want a first name that sounds like Barry, at last,” I said. “I’ve been too many other people. So I’ll be Gary Brine. The big movie producer.”
“There you go,” he said. “Gary Brine. That’s her husband’s office.”
On our left we were passing a yellow stucco building with a wooden sign out front showing several names. Just ahead of us down this block was a sprawling red-brick hospital. I said, “What office? Whose office?”
“Dulce’s husband,” he said.
We were past the building now. I said, “So she’s married? Dulce?”
“Married,” he said, and laughed. “She got six kids, man.”
“And what’s her husband do, that he’s got an office?”
“He’s a doctor. Woman doctor, you know? He’s not a woman, he’s a doctor for women.”
“I follow,” I said. “And what’s the last name?”
“De Paula.”
“Dulce de Paula.”
“Dulce and Fernando de Paula. And you’re Keith Emory. Except you’re really Gary Brine, big movie producer.”
I said, “I’ve been thinking about that, Arturo, and I think maybe I’m a medium movie producer. I don’t work on the big things that everybody knows about, because then I’d have to talk about how I’m buddies with all these big stars and stuff, and I wouldn’t like that. So I’m a producer that does the small crap.”
“Whatever,” he said.
We were past the main part of Marona now, headed out into Guerrera’s central forest. Soon we were running along the side of a ridge, green slope upward on our left, downward to our right. From time to time I caught a glint of bright water down there past all the green.
The sign for Casa Montana Mojoca could not have been more discreet. Small plain-white block letters on a dark green background on a sign that couldn’t have been larger than a foot square stood humbly beside a blacktop road on the right, giving only the name of the hotel. An even more discreet rectangular sign in the same color scheme, nailed to a tree, said PRIVADO.
Arturo took this road, and we angled down toward the Siapa. So, I thought, a riverside resort hotel: not bad.
Except it wasn’t. The blacktop road, barely two lanes wide, with nothing but forest on both sides, descended the slope, and there at the bottom was the river, and on the river a ferry. In fact, two ferries; I saw one on the farther shore, just pulling out. These ferries were small and open and could carry possibly three cars. They were mostly dark green, with white highlights, the same colors as the two signs back at the main road, and they were very shiny and clean.
A wooden barrier was down across the road, just this side of the ferry slip, with a shingled guard shack next to it. A man in a dark green uniform with white piping and a tan clipboard came out and spoke with Arturo and checked something off on his list: Keith Emory, I supposed. A display of security to calm the timorous North American.
We were the only passengers on our ferry, with its polite two-man crew in dark green and white. We got out of the Impala to enjoy the ride, leaning on the gleaming white wood railing that ran down the side of the boat.
The ferry coming the other way carried only a beer truck, and as we passed each other in the middle of the sparkling river I read the brand names on its side: Corona, Heineken, Budweiser. I was willing to bet they put away a lot of Bud Light over there.
As we neared the opposite bank, Arturo and I got into the Impala again, front seat and back. The ferry bumped into position, the wooden pole barrier was lifted, and we drove past a waiting taxi with a white-haired couple in the back and up the curving blacktop road into more forest.
Somehow, this forest seemed groomed, as though it had a regular appointment at the hairdresser. The shrubbery along the road had clearly been shaped and maintained, and the trees farther back were less encumbered with vines than I was used to in Guerrera. Some distance away, at one point, I saw a group of people on horseback, riding slowly in single file. They were mostly in pastels.
The first sight of the hotel was out of a children’s book. We came around a curve, and there was a medieval castle combined with a wedding cake, four stories high with setbacks, gleaming white in the middle of its own manicured lawns. To its left, extending away, I could see the beginning of the golf course.
The high porte-cochere entrance tried to suggest that this hotel had been here since its guests arrived in horse-drawn carriages, but in fact the building was surely less than ten years old. A doorman and two bellboys, all in the same dark green and white, one of the bellboys holding onto a wheeled luggage cart, came out to greet us, but then looked blank-faced as Arturo drove on by.
Gary Brine was a special case. Arturo steered the Impala off the curving blacktop onto an AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY gravel drive, and we sailed around the corner of the wedding cake, seeing more of the golf course, now out ahead of us. Arturo came to a stop next to a part of the side of the building where a white door stood in a little white clapboard separate section of its own, with square double-hung windows flanking the door on both side
s. A brass plate identified the door, but I was feeling a little too tense to read it.
“Okay, Mr. Brine, you’re on,” Arturo said.
I took a deep breath. I’m on. That’s right, it’s a performance, a show. I grasped my bag and, as Arturo got out at the left front, I got out at the rear right. Would Garry Brine wait for the cabby to lead and introduce him? I thought not; I opened the white door and stepped inside and said to the three women at desks in there, “Hi. Who’s Dulce?”
They giggled. It was a sunny air-conditioned room, painted light yellow, with light green industrial carpeting. Five desks, each with its own computer terminal, two of them unoccupied, were spaced almost at random around the room. Large blown-up photos of other hotels were mounted on the walls.
One of the three women — they were all thirtyish and attractive, in an overblown yet muted way, like Luz dressed for the office — rose, still giggling, and said, “We all are. But you want Mrs. de Paula.”
“That’s right,” I said, and Arturo came around me to do a quick explanation in Spanish. The woman who’d told me they were all sweet — yes, of course — replied and then looked at me with new interest. “This way, please,” she said.
I followed her, and Arturo followed me, through the room to a closed door on the opposite wall. The woman knocked, a female voice spoke from within, and my guide opened the door, leaned in, and said something. Then she stepped back, smiled a bit shyly at me, and gestured for me to go inside. Movie producers, apparently, carried a bit of clout.
The office I stepped into was as large as the one outside but had only one occupant, one desk, and no computer terminals. The woman now rising from that desk, coming around it, hand out, face smiling, must have been more or less my contemporary, if she’d been Arturo’s first love, but she seemed somehow older, more maternal. She was a large big-boned woman, probably five foot ten, with shortish pepper-and-salt hair in neat waves, neither fussy nor flyaway. She wore a white frilled high-neck blouse and full black slacks. Both wrists were adorned with gold bracelets that made small tinkling sounds when she moved.
The Scared Stiff Page 13