Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

  “The bookkeeper is the Turk,” he said. “The woman Turk.”

  I grasped that I was, in fact, the Turk. I remembered now that the realtor who showed me my apartment had called the Syrian grocer across the street a Turk, which I had thought was simply an error of nationality, but now I realized that it was a catchall, and it covered me. You just had to have the right kind of face, and I did. My Armenian grandmother would have had a stroke if she’d heard it.

  “I’m working,” I said. “Are you allowed to come up here?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’ll tell the manager you were up here,” I said. “Came up for a cigarette, did you? What will he think of that?”

  He stepped back, paused under the light, and then was gone down the stairs. The racket of creaking boards lasted a while after he was out of sight. I let out a breath, shut the door, and went back to my chair. An ambulance was moaning in the street below, trying to push through the traffic at the corner of Callao and Rivadavia, and I was sweating from the surprise.

  I had asked Gerry before I came: What happens if it goes bad? What if they arrest me? We’ll make every effort, he said.

  I folded the ledger up and lit another cigarette. I would need to get a dead bolt for the outer door. I could straighten that out with the manager downstairs; tell him there was private financial information up here.

  My heart was still beating too fast. I walked three laps around the outer office, then turned the tape recorder back on and ate the sandwich I had brought in my purse for lunch. It’s hard to be afraid while you’re eating a sandwich.

  I lasted only another hour in my post that day. It was evening when I came down the stairs of the confitería, carrying my equipment in a shoulder bag. I stopped in the main dining room, the salón, and the manager poured me a glass of sherry at the bar and looked around the room while I chatted; he wasn’t much for chatting back, but I took the glass of sherry as a sign of friendship anyway. He made no objection when I said I was buying a lock for the office door.

  The street outside had been washed clean by a day of rain, and there was a cool shock to the air. The season was really turning now, and I was glad of my nylons for the first time in months. The evening wind from the Río de la Plata was scattering the clouds, and in the new darkness there were patches of deep, clear blue in the sky. There was a sadness to this kind of weather. Was it just that it made me think of school? Bethesda-Chevy Chase, and then the year at the Barrington School, the year I turned eighteen, walking down the short path from the chapel to the dormitory at precisely this point in the evening, that deep, transparent blue in the west that was the blue of space. Wet oak leaves on the bricks. On fall evenings you were always alone.

  Light spilled out of the bars on Rivadavia. It was twenty blocks or so back to my apartment, and I could have taken a bus, but I decided to walk instead, since the weather was so fresh. I had been thinking of getting a cat. But who would I give it to when I left? And sometimes I was out all night. I didn’t like walking past all the men sitting in the open french doors of the bars, but as I passed I realized that the abrupt darkness of the evening had dazzled them, and they could hardly see the street at all. I stopped to light another cigarette in front of the unlatched casements of the Bar Entre Ríos and a man drinking a glass of brandy looked straight through me while he spoke to his companion: “They are all thieves, of course,” he said.

  The bookshops had opened their doors to the cool evening as well. A sooty cat rested in the doorway of one, settled in a crouch like a loaf of bread. A cart of used paperbacks had been pushed out on the sidewalk, and I stopped to look at the ten-cent romances.

  The boy might have been a kitchen hand looking for a quiet place to have a cigarette, or he might have been sent up to take a look at me—by someone. By the manager?

  It was possible. There are all kinds of spies in the world, certainly, and all kinds of subterfuge, and the manager might be what Gerry called a “mother-in-law”: a person who is watching you, but who works for no one and has no particular purpose in mind. But then, sometimes a person who looked like a mother-in-law turned out to be an actual counteragent. Better spies than me had mistaken one for the other. I pictured the manager, with his well-groomed mustache, making reports at a pay phone to the Buenos Aires police. It was plausible. The police might want him for an informant for the same reason I wanted him for a friend.

  I bought two romances from the old man at the counter inside and went on. I would get a lock for the door from the hardware store near my apartment.

  The streetlights were out between Libertad and Cerrito, so I walked in a brief darkness before approaching the frantic edge of Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest street in the world. White apartment blocks rose above a softening fringe of trees on the far side, and in the distance to my left I could see the Obelisk, a disorienting echo of the Washington Monument that had sentried my childhood, bathed in footlights on the plaza at Corrientes. The dozen lanes of the avenue were separated by concrete islands where people huddled with net bags of groceries, harassed on both sides by cabs. I always felt like a rabbit crossing it. I was on the second island, waiting for another endless light and watching someone a few islands ahead make a mad dash in front of a van, when I started to think that someone was following me.

  It was the sense of a distance between us that was too fixed. A man in a gray raincoat had been half a block behind me when I waited, a few minutes before, at the corner of Uruguay; and when I paused on the curb at Talcahuano, trying to gauge the intentions of a honking garbage truck, there was the gray raincoat again, indistinct because the streetlights were out, waiting aimlessly halfway down the block. Now I felt sure that the same raincoat was behind me on another traffic island at the same distance, ten yards or so.

  I’d had this feeling many times over nothing, so I indulged it without much conviction. I half turned toward the Obelisk, holding my hair out of my face as the breeze kicked up, and glanced back. There was a confusion of jacaranda branches against the lights of a hotel at the edge of the avenue, a pair of matrons with collars turned up waiting on the sidewalk, three glum boys with their hair falling down to their eyebrows. There was no gray raincoat.

  I was being silly; I’d been rattled by the kitchen boy. The light changed, and I hurried across the path of a throbbing city bus. The wind felt gritty. It was unimpeded on the avenue and carried diesel fumes, brackish water, and perfume. With some relief I reached the far side, where the wind dropped down and semidarkness returned.

  My neighborhood had a chattering charm in the evening. The husbands and wives of San Telmo were on their way home, men walking from the subway station with a last cigarette burning, women carrying their shopping up. I stopped at a market on the corner and bought a couple of breaded chicken cutlets and a packet of green beans for dinner, waiting in a shuffling line. As I stepped out onto the sidewalk again, I saw the man in the gray raincoat standing under a tree.

  He was a thin, hawk-like man in cheap oilcloth. Sharp-shouldered, not tall, wearing gray trousers, and his face, turned frankly toward the doorway as I came through it, was red from the wind and lit by the row of bulbs that hung over the bins of fruit in front of the market. He looked about forty. The tree interceded between us, its yellow leaves jittering hysterically in a gust of wind.

  It was a hiccup, the moment when we looked at each other. Neither of us was supposed to do that, acknowledge each other that way, though I told myself—trying to calm the quiver of surprise as I turned left and continued up the street, pinned to the far side of the sidewalk by his gaze—that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if he knew I’d seen him. I turned in to the Bar las Flores and sat down to wait him out. It was an hour before I looked out and saw the sidewalk was clear, then made my way back to the apartment.

  DECEMBER 1957

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  In the morning there were two police cruisers parked at the curb outside my aunt Bev’s house looking for me on a c
harge of auto theft. The following day my mother went to a hearing at which my presence was not required and filed a motion to have me declared incorrigible, which was granted instantaneously and would be reviewed in a month. Two days later I was serving a thirty-day sentence in a juvenile detention facility called the Maryland Youth Center.

  When I arrived, I was ushered into a small room by a woman with thinning hair shellacked into a bun and told to take all my clothes off. She watched while I stripped, and once I was naked she uncrossed her arms and left the room and came back with a smock for me to wear, which had a number inked on it near the collar, and a pair of stockings much thinner than the ones I had come in with.

  I learned later, from the other girls, that if I had had a pocketbook with me they would have confiscated it, and they would have made a point of destroying makeup. “They don’t just throw it away,” said a girl who had cut most of her own hair off with sewing scissors. “They run it under hot water and mash it together in front of you. I had a coral Lancôme.” She shook her head. Her eyes were wet. “A coral fucking Lancôme,” she said.

  The Maryland Youth Center was a brick building stranded on a low rise, a treeless waste that looked like a scalp shaved for hygienic purposes. The windows had metal grates across them, which was to prevent both escapes and suicide attempts, although the building was only three stories high. I was told that the thick hedge of yews around it had been planted after a bad run in which three girls had jumped from the roof in the space of two weeks and broken their legs on the pavement. There is no place on this earth where suicide is more freely discussed than in a juvenile detention center for girls.

  MARCH 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  The day after I was followed, I went to see Nico. I rang his bell several times from the street, jabbing at the button. He appeared at the street door, out of breath.

  “I must apologize,” he said.

  “Too fucking right,” I said.

  We stood for a minute, looking at each other. Anger was making me flush, and I was hot under the collar of my shirt.

  “Sent somebody, did you?” I said. “Christ. What are you worried about?”

  “Mr. Reyes sent him.” Mr. Reyes was Nico’s boss, the president of Aliadas S.A. “He said he had to be sure about who you were,” Nico said, spreading his hands apologetically.

  “We’re professionals,” I said. “Do you understand? Does he understand? You can’t follow me around in the street, it could derail everything.”

  “I told him it wasn’t necessary. I told him it would be—rude. But he’s a very powerful man. He does what he wants.”

  “Well.” I glanced up the front of the building, and thought I saw his wife’s face disappear behind a curtain on the third floor. “Is he done now? Is he satisfied?”

  “You’re agitated,” he said, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m not agitated. I’m angry.”

  “Anne. Please don’t forget that we’re friends. We’re all working for the same side.”

  “That’s very clear to me. I’m not sure that it’s clear to you.”

  “Mr. Reyes has been at this a long time. Wouldn’t you expect he would want more than your word? More than the word of your friend, your Gerry?”

  He lit a cigarette. A mail carrier went by, tipping his hat to Nico. We watched him go down the street. I would tell Gerry what had happened. It was not entirely a surprise.

  “Come up to dinner,” Nico said. “My wife made croquettes.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Your wife hates me.”

  “Of course she does,” Nico said, chuckling. “She knows a liar when she sees one.”

  When I got home, I checked my apartment for bugs. I found nothing but some bits of blackened rawhide that a previous tenant’s dog had cached behind the bathtub and under the stove. I told Gerry about the incident. “Mr. Reyes has always been a cautious man,” he said. “We’ve run into this problem before.”

  “Tell Nico not to waste my time with this nonsense,” I said.

  I met Victoria in La Taberna for our first English lesson. I was early. Victoria was late, but arrived with a composition notebook and a ballpoint pen, which was disarming.

  “I’m not a teacher,” I said as she sat down.

  “Wot?” She had the British vowels that Argentines often had when they spoke English.

  “Your notebook,” I said. “I hope you don’t expect a real lesson. I’m not a teacher.”

  She glanced down at it. “No, no. It is just—just in case.” She smiled delightedly at her deployment of this idiom. “We talk, only. It is conversation practice. I write a word if I do not know it. Later I look the dictionary.”

  “All right.” I flexed my hands and tried to look lighthearted. She made me uncomfortable; she was so alert. “What do you want to talk about?”

  She seemed flummoxed by the question for a moment. She blew her bangs out of her eyes, looked theatrically around the room, her gaze alighting on each person in turn, and arrived finally back at me. “You,” she said. “We talk about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You are—” She squinted over my head. “Tímida. Yes?”

  “Shy,” I supplied.

  “Yes. You are shy. You don’t talk much, when we are all together here, all the friends here together. You are shy.”

  “What do you want to know?” I said.

  She clasped her hands together and rested her chin on them, studying my face. “You do not look North American.”

  I laughed. “I don’t?” But I knew what she meant. I was the Turk, again.

  “No!” She stroked her own blonde hair, smiling. “I do, more than you! Like Doris Day.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “You have pretty hair. Curly hair. Do many girls look like you in Canada? Dark, with curly hair.”

  “We look all kinds of ways,” I said.

  “Do you have a dog?” she said.

  “No.”

  “A cat?”

  “No,” I said. “Growing up I had a cat. Not anymore.”

  “What color?” said Victoria.

  “The cat? He was orange.”

  “Hm. I had a—how do you say. I had a nutria. You know nutria?”

  It took a moment for the word to line up, like the pictures on a slot machine, with its meaning. “You had an otter?”

  “Mm-hmm. The animal, yes, that swim? With small ears?” Victoria said. “We had a tank for her.”

  I was swept away, thinking what the life of a girl who owned an otter would be like.

  “Oh, but my friend, she had a monkey,” Victoria said. “She would give to the monkey a candy of peppermint and the monkey would—” She mimed a shocked monkey, puffing air.

  I marveled. “Did you live in the country?”

  “No, no.” She gave the name of a middle-class neighborhood, far out from the city center.

  “You can have a monkey in Buenos Aires?”

  “You buy in Brazil.”

  The waiter edged close to our table. We had been growing louder, and he seemed annoyed by our exuberance. Victoria ordered a bottle of wine and he disappeared with a sharp turn of his heel.

  “You are rich?” Victoria said.

  I was surprised by her forthrightness. My answer to this was part of my cover story, so I was relieved of the trouble of making something up on the spot. “My father is a doctor. But I work too.”

  “I am a little bit rich,” Victoria said. “My grandfather has a fábrica de gaseosas.”

  “A soda factory.”

  She appeared to have forgotten about her notebook. “But you are rich in dollars,” she said. “I am only rich in pesos.”

  The waiter’s black sleeves came between us, pouring both glasses. I tapped a cigarette out of my pack. The wine was dry and pleasant, and I realized I was enjoying the reversal—being the owner of the language for once. Victoria’s eyes were very black. When her clumsy chatter ceased for a mome
nt, there was her intelligence between us again, serrated and gleaming. I thought of a bar in Harlem, a place above a chophouse on 125th Street, where I used to go sometimes on payday if I was lonely. You had to tell the man at the street door that you were there to see Calliope and then you could go straight up the back stairs, which smelled like bleach and cherry jam, and edge through into a dark pine room where women circled in pairs. It always felt like it was four in the morning at Calliope’s, and the dancing was always just swaying. Sometimes I picked up Westchester girls who had come into the city for the weekend, or I made sorties into groups of secretaries. Sometimes I pretended to read palms, and the girls pretended to be taken in. Parts of that echoed now: Victoria’s sleepy affectations, her eyelids lowered and her chin resting on her fist, watching me as if we were old friends.

  “What are you studying, Victoria?” I said.

  She smiled. She looked over toward the bar, where the waiter was polishing glasses. I thought after a moment that she hadn’t understood the question; she kept looking at the bar while the waiter folded the polishing cloth and tamped it down into his back pocket and began to page through his receipts. I was about to repeat myself when she looked back at me again.

  “Politics,” she said.

  I laughed and filled my glass again, and said, “Well, that makes sense.”

  “Your teeth,” Victoria enunciated, “they are rr-red. From the wine.”

  “So are yours,” I said. “Why do you study politics?”

  “Because I love Argentina,” she said. She hunched her shoulders happily, as if she had said “the Beatles” instead of “Argentina.” “Do you love Canada?”

  “Of course I do. We have so much snow.”

  “You are funny,” she said, but she didn’t laugh.

  “All Argentines love Argentina,” I offered.

  “No,” she said. “They say they do, but they do not.”

  “Not like you?”