Then RedShoesForSale makes a few posts of her own. The first, a photo grabbed from the Internet of the interior of a record shop, the customers browsing through bins clearly labeled JAZZ. The second, another stolen photo of some random girl alone on a park bench, the skyline of Manhattan clearly visible behind her. I caption the image, “missing new york.”
Since I am where I choose to be, I might as well also choose who I’m here with.
* * *
I found a cheap hotel in the barrio called Retiro by the main bus station, where it’s me and a few dozen prostitutes. Over the past three days, the magenta walls and green tile floor have grown on me, even if the constant noise from the traffic outside and the enthusiastic work ethic of my fellow guests have not.
From my fake balcony—just a wrought-iron railing a few centimeters from a tall window—I can hear the sirens and chants and pop of police grenade launchers. I wonder if the tear gas will drift up here to the third floor of the hotel, but the only thing I smell is burning trash.
Despite my general spirit of weightlessness—this freedom like a new pair of shoes, beautiful but not yet broken in—I continue wearing the knife and sheath strapped to the underside of my forearm. It’s my one concession to reality, my one acknowledgment that though I’ve run away from Judita, she can’t be too far behind. Plus, I have business to attend to, specifically, getting rid of the last few cameras and phones I brought from Uruguay.
Just past lunchtime, I leave again, my backpack heavy on my shoulders. One of the women from the hotel who’s always out front smoking told me about a strip of pawnshops in the Congreso neighborhood an hour’s walk away. I head there for the third day in a row.
By now, I know to avoid the main streets, and every time I hear chanting or sirens, I turn away from them. The last thing I need, the very last thing, is an ID check, or any sort of attention at all, not with a backpack full of stolen goods. When I arrive in the neighborhood, I pick up where I left off, halfway down the west side of the street.
I browse the shop for a few minutes, peering through smudged glass at gold watches and sets of silverware arranged haphazardly in the display cases. A man with an enormous belly and a black mustache stands in the back of the shop, hands on hips, relating a story to a rapt audience of two young men, both in muscle shirts. The punch line—so I made her eat it, every last bit—brings on roars of laughter.
Idly, I strum the strings on an electric guitar hanging by its throat along the wall. Then the air over my shoulder becomes warmer, and I hear breathing. “The next Jimi Hendrix,” says a man’s voice.
The top of my head comes up just to the man’s mustache. He’s bigger than he looked standing at the back of the shop. Not fatter, bigger. “I’m selling,” I say, touching the strap on my backpack. “A camera and phone. You interested?”
“Didn’t I see you on the street yesterday?” he says.
“You must be thinking of someone else,” I say.
“You’re trying to unload merch, you come straight to me next time, okay?” He holds out a puffy hand. “Guillermo.”
I shake it. “Good to meet you.”
The man gestures to the back of the shop. “Gotta be careful with the serial numbers. They’re checked against a database.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“If it comes back stolen, the police take it. No compensation.” He opens the door to a back office and nods for me to go inside. “Which is why I never check serial numbers.”
He meets my eyes and gives a little smile of mutual understanding.
The fluorescent lights of his office buzz and wash everything in the room with green sickness. A foggy mirror in a gold curlicue frame hangs at an angle above filing cabinets piled high with papers and a single tabby cat, which looks up as we enter, then goes back to sleep. Guillermo sinks into his desk chair and holds out his hands, palms up, well?
I set a Canon on the desk and he picks it up, squinching his face as he appraises it.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, what else you got? I invited you back here to do some real business.”
One of the two men in muscle shirts leans against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest.
No point in playing him along. There’s less money selling the rest of the equipment in bulk, but it’s safer than spreading it out between different stores, especially if Guillermo is right about the serial numbers. I lift my backpack onto my lap and unload everything.
Guillermo and the guy in the muscle shirt examine each piece, whispering in some sort of code to each other, then frowning dramatically at the sight of the tiniest scuff.
Five minutes later, Guillermo leans back in his chair and glowers. “I’ll be honest, for a thief, you don’t have a very good eye. This is consumer-grade crap. Obsolete.”
The other guy resumes his position at the doorframe and gives a little grunt of agreement.
“I like you, though,” Guillermo continues. “I want to do you a favor, and maybe we can do more business in the future.” He pulls a fat wad of cash from his pocket, peels off a few bills, and pushes them across the desk.
I run the math in my head—just less than six hundred US dollars. It’s a colossal screw. He’ll get ten or fifteen times that when he sells them.
“No thanks,” I say, and reach for the cameras.
Guillermo’s hand flashes forward, catching my wrist, the handle of the knife just a few centimeters up my sleeve from his fingertips.
In less than a second, I’ve calculated my response—jerk him forward, fist to ear, foot into the balls of the man behind me.
“How much are they going to be worth to you in jail, sweetheart?” Guillermo smiles.
The man at the doorframe pulls a phone from his pocket. “Detective Moreno?” he says. “We haven’t given him a bust in a while.”
My eyes dart from Guillermo to his partner. I could take them both, but there’s a third man out in the shop, and there’s no such thing as a pawnshop without a gun stashed in easy reach. Too many variables, too many things to go wrong.
I reach forward, place a hand on the cash. “Deal,” I say.
* * *
The day is not a total loss, however. Far from it. Despite the mega-screw at the pawnshop, there is good news: Tumblr user known as RedShoesForSale gets her first like.
It turns out TerraFirma clicked the little heart below her photo of the girl on the park bench in Tompkins Square captioned “missing new york.” He even left a little comment: “me too.”
My heart pings. Just once, and just a little. But has Terrance connected the two dots I’d left for him, the two photos? So I leave him the third, and most important. User RedShoesForSale posts a photo she took yesterday afternoon, of a jazz club in the ritzy barrio of Recoleta. Look carefully at the photo, and there’s a schedule for this weekend’s performances, a three-night engagement of an avant-garde trio from Japan.
It’s the last attempt I will allow myself. If it works, it works, and if not—no doubt it’s for the best. Trying to contact him is against all principles of security, against all the ideas I’ve been taught about the unbridgeable gulf between new life and old. But Judita Perels has run away from Judita Perels.
I have two days to go until Thursday, the first night shown on the jazz club schedule. And like the path of the Erebus, I’ve plotted Terrance’s route through the cities he’s visited. If he gets the message, if he makes the connection, if he doesn’t hate me, then he’ll be there. So it’s with that delicious question that I wander the city of Buenos Aires for two more days as myself, neither Judita nor Gwendolyn, but both, the me that’s too complicated for names.
Nine
On Saturday, the final night, Terrance shows.
He appears just as the last of the audience trickles into the club for the late performance. Well-dressed, monied porteños: blonds in their fifties in short cocktail dresses, guys the same age in fitted suits with h
eads of immaculately groomed graying hair. Very few young people. Only one, in fact.
Terrance stands out with his youth and dark skin, but that’s not what I recognize first. He’s in a pair of dark blue slacks and a pressed white shirt and is, at least from behind, at least in his gait, exactly as I remember him. Slim and aristocratic.
My stomach turns like a schoolgirl’s at the sight of him, and the sensation of it reminds me of the simplicity of our lives when we’d first met on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village in that used-record store, where everything smelled of dust and ozone and old vinyl. Nothing to worry about in the world other than tests and homework. It’s all I can do to stop myself from calling out to him. But I have to be careful. Now more than ever.
I watch up and down the street from my sidewalk table at a nearby café, searching for tails. This would be a professional-grade operation, and thus, his followers would blend in. Everyone is a suspect. The bearded bum begging for change. The teenage couple making out on a bench. I watch them all closely, watch whether they move as Terrance goes past, watch what they do next. But he’s clean. At least as far as I can see, he’s clean. Not that I can ever know for sure.
I order another maté as Terrance disappears into the club. There can be no question of my approaching him at the bar during the show. I don’t know what he’ll do, how he’ll react. So, instead, I resolve to wait as long as necessary for him to come out.
“You all by yourself?” the waiter asks as he brings me the gourd holding the maté.
I take a drink through the steel straw and shrug. “Waiting on my boyfriend,” I say wistfully.
He arches his eyebrows and checks his watch. “If he doesn’t show,” he says, “I get out of here at two.”
I smile at the waiter and tell him I’ll keep it in mind. Christ, I want a drink, just a little of the Malbec that’s cheaper than bottled water here. But I don’t dare risk it. I need the focus and paranoia that come from sobriety.
I throw a few bills on the table at midnight, when the ten p.m. show ends. A few of the porteños trickle out, then some more, then Terrance. His hands are in his pockets, and his face is sullen. All the Tumblr clues had just been a miscommunication. He starts down the street in the direction from which he’d come, and I hang back, watching again to see if he’s followed.
Half a block behind him seems like the right distance. I blend in with the pedestrian traffic, just another girl headed to another bar. Midnight is early here in BA, practically dinnertime, and the streets are so full it’s hard to keep track of Terrance through the crowd. He makes a left, so I make a left. He turns right, so I turn right. No sign of anything suspicious, so I pick up the pace.
Ahead, a little square surrounded by noisy bars. The streets are thick with loud, drunk kids our age. I move up to his left elbow, and when he’s not looking, say in English, just loud enough for him to hear: “Don’t turn around.”
He doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t even flinch. “Is it you?” he answers back.
“It is,” I say.
No reply for a dozen paces, then: “Is anyone following?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Which hotel are you at?”
“Paradiso,” he says.
One of the big, run-down hotels with its best years behind it. It’s maybe two kilometers away from where we are now. “Room number?”
“Five-oh-two.”
“I’ll meet you there in an hour.”
No turn of the head, no nod, no acknowledgment whatsoever that he’s heard me. Instead, he accelerates while I slow down, putting distance between us. He gets it, the need for discretion, for secrecy. And this makes me sad. I expected, maybe wanted, the same boy I’d known in New York. But he isn’t that Terrance anymore.
I fall back, watching the people around him, scanning the couples leaning in close to one another, the beat cops waiting for a bust, the lost tourists squinting at street signs. The path Terrance takes is indirect and odd, just as I would have taken. If he were being followed, the pursuers would stand out. But all I see are civilians. Even when we reach the Paradiso, it’s an innocent scene: shabby bellmen in shabby uniforms, shoving people into cabs; tourists snapping iPhone pictures.
Terrance disappears into the hotel and I disappear into the crowd on the other side of the street. Eventually, I make my way across and into the lobby. The ceiling is vaulted five stories above us, robin’s egg blue, complete with peeling paint and water stains and a massive gold chandelier that looks like it’s listing to one side. Aging waiters who’ve worked here their whole lives serve wine and beer to clots of tourists littered around the beat-up leather couches and threadbare armchairs. Someone’s playing an unseen piano, and the notes echo around the room, like lost ghosts.
I glance around for anything suspicious before walking over to a grand staircase. My ascent is slow, deliberate, running a hand along the wrought-iron railing as I casually survey the guests in the lobby. At the fifth floor I leave the stairs and travel down a hallway, room 508, 506, 504. At room 502 I pause, head canted, listening. I hear a television down the hall, but otherwise it’s silent. I raise my hand, hesitate, then give a single, quiet knock.
From inside the room comes a sharp breath and the sound of fabric rubbing against fabric—someone pulling themselves up from a chair. I stand back a little so he can see me through the peephole. The door opens a crack, then opens all the way.
I register the sight of him—handsome, clean, upright—all the things I missed. But that has to wait. I push him aside with my arm and rush into the room, looking for whoever else may be inside. The room is large and shabby, with scuffed parquet floors and walls painted yellow thirty years ago. Tall ceilings with ornate moldings and gold, limp curtains beside tall windows.
“Gwen, what are you…?”
“Change rooms,” I say. “Call down to the front desk and tell them you want to change rooms.”
He stiffens. “Why?”
“Do it.”
He hesitates a moment, then picks up the phone receiver. His eyes never leave mine as he speaks to whoever’s on the other end, and mine never leave his. I’m gawking, I realize. At the shock of seeing him, at the joy of it. But his eyes regard me differently, like a stranger he doesn’t trust.
He hangs up. “Five minutes.”
“Thank you,” I say. “It’s just—I’m paranoid.”
“The room’s not bugged, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he says.
I lean forward a little, and he does, too. Then he’s holding me, with my cheek against his chest, his arms around my shoulders. I breathe him in, the expensive soap, the nervous sweat, all of it so very real and right here.
“I brought it with me,” he says.
“Brought what?” I say.
“The book. The one you gave me.”
From a battered canvas knapsack, he fishes out the copy of 1984 I’d given him, along with a folded sheet of paper. I take the book into my hands greedily, then check the paper to make sure it’s the same one I’d found in the storage locker in Queens. Zoric’s account numbers.
“I scanned the book and the paper, just in case,” Terrance says. “It’s uploaded to an encrypted FTP site if you lose these.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“It traveled with me everywhere, you know. In case.”
“In case what?”
“In case this. Running into each other.”
I embrace him tightly. “This means—everything,” I say.
“Did you ever read it?” he says.
“Not the whole thing,” I say. “I know there’s a sad ending. I don’t like books with sad endings.”
“Winston betrays Julia,” Terrance says, still in my embrace. “He betrays her and then it ends.”
* * *
The staff at the Paradiso scramble over themselves to switch Terrance to another room. Polite inquiries are made. Was señor, perhaps, displeased by the view from the windows? In any case, they make it up to
the señor with a room that’s larger and shabbier yet, with a curved bay window overlooking a square and a church. As the bellman finishes showing us around, a manager comes bearing an ice bucket from which juts a bottle of champagne, the French stuff, the good stuff, and on the house. All this is accepted with only a polite gracias from Terrance; the world has always fallen over itself this way to please him.
I realize, instantly, my own error in having him switch rooms. Terrance is now known to them. Someone at the front desk no doubt Googled his name and now he—and therefore I—is on their radar. The son of a hedge fund billionaire is with us; call the manager at home. I commit to changing hotels, immediately, tonight. Then I hear the pop of the champagne bottle and forget what I was thinking.
“You want?” he says, pouring so that the bubbles rise exactly to the tops of the glasses and no farther.
I take the glass from his hand greedily and am about to drink when Terrance clinks the rim of his glass against mine.
“To—you,” he says. “And whatever this is we’re doing.”
It isn’t easy, like I thought it would be. He doesn’t reach for me, as he did in my imagination. Instead, for too long, we simply stand there and drink the champagne. Maybe nothing needs saying. No, everything needs saying. From me: apologies and explanations. From him: forgiveness granted or declined.
Except I don’t feel like words right now, so I—all bravery, no skill—do the reaching. I raise my hand and cup the side of his face, then lean in to kiss him. He grabs my wrist instead.
“What is this?” he says, holding my arm with one hand, and with the other, unfastening the cuff of my shirt. The knife in its homemade sheath, strapped to my forearm with tape. I’d forgotten it was there, as if it had grown into me.
“For protection,” I say.
“From what?” he says. “Me?”
“No. Not you,” I say. “Everything but you.”
He shakes his head. Sadness and pity. Disgust. “Who are you?”
The Greed Page 7