Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

  At four I woke up again, pulled on my crumpled skirt and blouse, and washed my face in the cramped bathroom. At the front door I took the pistol out of the packed suitcase and stood looking at it. It was so heavy in my hand, even though it was unloaded. The radio was still playing, very low; I turned it off. The box of bullets was in the suitcase.

  I put six bullets in the gun. As I finished I glanced up and saw my reflection in the window, a girl dressed like a legal secretary holding a gun without authority. I straightened my blouse with my free hand. I tried to clear the anxiety out of my face. It didn’t help. The girl in the window raised the gun and aimed: she looked ridiculous. I clicked the chamber open and emptied the gun, let the bullets rattle back into the box, and put the pistol in my purse.

  Outside the streets were hushed, the sky still dark. I walked out to the avenue and hailed a cab, and then sat rigidly alert in the back as the driver murmured and chattered. Dawn was breaking; the sky over Puerto Madero was turning gray, and then the pink of the inside of a shell. Soon we had left the density of the city and turned onto a straight two-lane road that rolled on for miles past rows of leafless young tipa trees, their branches sinuous and black against the sky. Flocks of black birds were beginning to stir. After all this time I was unprepared for the quiet outside of the city, which I could feel even through the grumbling of the car. My stomach had become dense and hard. I hadn’t eaten in hours but couldn’t imagine making any attempt at breakfast, even when the driver stopped with apologies at a gas station to fill the tank and asked gallantly if I wanted a hot biscuit or empanada from the whitewashed cantina at the edge of the lot.

  The airport that Victoria had mentioned was small and alone in a vast open space. Lights twinkled from a low sheet-metal building at the far end of a long dirt runway; in the distance, poplar windbreaks divided fields of tall grass, and black cows huddled beside the brush of a stream. On a pitted tarmac half a dozen small planes waited, painted cheerfully with stripes.

  I couldn’t go into the building because that was where Victoria and Román and their friends would be, and I couldn’t let them see me until the last moment. I paid the driver and pulled my suitcase out of the trunk, and he reversed and turned slowly and bumped over the holes in the asphalt back to the main road. I watched him go for a long time. Nothing interrupted the view out here. He was probably forgetting me already, his mind back in Buenos Aires, even while I could still see his car.

  There was a bench on one side of the metal building. I sat there with my suitcase and watched the sun coming up behind the row of airplanes, which had an alert, doglike quality in the stillness. At any moment Victoria and Román would come out of the building and head for the plane, along with the rest of their little party and the pilot, some friend of theirs with a license that he had earned flying a four-seater over the province of Santa Fe. They would be cheery with relief to be escaping Buenos Aires. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had once hidden out in Patagonia for a while. They robbed a bank in Río Gallegos and then crossed the empty steppes and found a cabin in the foothills of the Andes. I had seen a comic book about it at a newsstand in Palermo Chico. There was optimism in the thought.

  As a child I had taken a train with my parents out to Omaha for the funeral of my great-uncle, and the waving grass and tireless sky of the Argentine campo reminded me of Nebraska. There was little to interrupt my thoughts. I was expanding and contracting with anxiety, and there was nothing to anchor me. The sun was free of the horizon now and the silence was complete, apart from the rustling and clinking I could hear through a steam vent in the wall behind me and the flitting and chirping of small birds.

  A door on metal hinges screeched open behind me and there was Román in a shabby camel coat, cupping his hands to light a cigarette. It took him a moment to see me there, sitting with my knees together beside my brown suitcase, hunched against the morning chill. His eyebrows went up slowly, and he took the cigarette from between his lips.

  “Anne,” he said.

  I cleared my throat. “Román.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I sat up, relaxed my shoulders, pushed my hair out of my face. “Victoria didn’t tell you?”

  He had gone white. I needed Victoria to come out of the building as well. I needed the whole party to be here, and no one else, so this could be accomplished quickly, smoothly. I could hear pounding and rushing in my ears, like waves on a pebble beach.

  “I really don’t know about this,” he said.

  I put my hand in my bag and let it rest on the handle of the unloaded gun. I smiled carefully at him. “I won’t be any trouble at all,” I said. “I just need a lift. You know?”

  “This won’t work,” he said.

  The door opened again, and out came Victoria and a girl with a dark pixie cut. Victoria’s face was uncharacteristically grim. There was a tightness to her jaw, and then she looked over and saw me and her mouth dropped open, as if she had seen a ghost.

  “No, no, no,” she said. “I told you.”

  The girl with the pixie cut looked back and forth between the two of us. A young man came through the door, turning up his collar against the breeze.

  “Is this everyone?” I said.

  Victoria and Román were staring at each other silently. Victoria was shaking her head. The second young man looked puzzled.

  “Is this everyone?” I said again, more loudly, my hands closing around the handle of the gun.

  “Yes, just us four. Not you,” Victoria said.

  “You can’t be here,” Román said. “You don’t understand. This is a very stupid thing you’ve done.”

  “I’m coming,” I said. “I’m sorry. There’s no other way.” My throat was so dry that it was difficult to form the words. At any moment someone else might come through the door, another pilot or passenger or anyone at all, and then there would be too many to manage and there would be witnesses. I drew the pistol from my bag and aimed at Victoria. A chorus of obscenities rose from the other three like sparrows from tall grass.

  “Anne,” Victoria said, and I was not prepared for this, the sight of real fear in her eyes. I had never threatened anyone before. But my hand was steady.

  “You’re taking me with you,” I said. “Quickly. Now. Which plane?”

  Victoria and Román looked at each other again, and this time there was despair on both faces.

  “What have you done?” Román said to her.

  “She has to come,” Victoria said. “I don’t see any other way. We can’t draw attention.”

  “Look at me, not at him,” I said. “Which plane?” I waved Victoria toward the row of planes with the barrel of the gun, the way people did in films. She shook her head briefly at Román and walked toward the second plane in the lot. The other three followed her.

  “Don’t run and don’t yell,” I said to their backs. Behind us the building was quiet. The second man climbed into a small plane with a blue stripe and started the engines. The roar filled the air, and through the cool air churned up by the propellers Victoria looked at me with derision and pity.

  “You should really have listened to me,” she said.

  Our hair was battered back from our faces. My skirt flapped violently around my legs. Victoria stood with her back to this whirlwind, her arms crossed tightly across her body, and there was something I couldn’t plumb in her expression.

  “Get in,” I said, and then shouted it again over the noise of the propeller. She climbed into the plane and I went just behind her, shoving my suitcase ahead of me and then clambering in. I had to bend and shuffle to squeeze past the first and second rows of seats, and there was no way to do it but to bluster through those moments of vulnerability, elbows in, as if I had planned it this way. The handle of the gun felt hot in my hand. I sat in the third row with my suitcase by my feet and rested the gun across my knees. The pilot began a long and careful review of the control panel. Victoria leaned over the back of her seat and looked into my eyes. />
  “Put this on,” she said finally. She held out a pair of headphones.

  “What for?” I said.

  “So you don’t go deaf,” she said.

  I put out my hand for them, and then pulled it back and shook my head. I needed to hear as much as I could. Victoria shrugged and put the headphones on herself. The engine was loud but not deafening, and I could hear stray words passing between the pilot and Román in the seat next to him. Time and weather, fuel, the sun; storms somewhere to the south. Once or twice the pilot glanced back at me. I wondered if I looked frightening. Once we had taken off I would be able to relax. Our disparate aims would resolve into one. I wouldn’t matter anymore, and the bullets that my gun did not contain wouldn’t matter either. The way I had forced myself onto the plane would look, in retrospect, like an embarrassing but forgivable lapse in manners, as if I had gotten too drunk at a dinner party. Maybe there was even something droll in Victoria’s expression, as if she were pleased at my spirit.

  The plane rolled along the packed dirt. The pilot and Román had put on their own headphones; the girl with the pixie cut kept twisting around in her seat to stare at me and chew her nails. I could see out through the windshield to the perfectly straight lines of the runway, which ended in the sea of grass.

  I had never been in a plane as small as this eight-seater Britten-Norman. It rattled and bounced lightly on the runway, like a pinewood derby car. It smelled like fuel and hot grease and the old fabric that covered the seats. The window beside me was broad and square like the window of a bus, and I looked out at the grasses sliding by. The engines kicked into a higher gear, and I began to feel the suspension and pressure that had always thrilled me on airplanes. There was a sand-colored dog running through the long grass at the edge of the strip. I watched it run joyfully, falling farther and farther behind, blurred and indistinct and the color of the earth, and then the plane lifted off from the runway and I watched the dog raise its head to follow us.

  The fact of being airborne was always astonishing. The chatter between the pilot and Román had stopped. There was only the engine and the gleam of the sky through the windshield, and for a few moments we banked left and the ground disappeared. I had not expected the steep angles of flight in such a small craft. My stomach was unsettled. I was happy to be free of the city that had been closing in on me for months but I felt that I would miss it too. I hoped we would fly over it, or near it. I wanted to see it spreading out across the sodden low earth, and then the immense breadth of the Río de la Plata overtaking and dwarfing it, as I had seen it from the plane when I landed nearly nine months before.

  Victoria turned again and watched me over the back of the seat. With the headphones on she looked vaguely like a wartime telephone operator. She was chewing gum, probably to keep her ears from popping, but it made her look bored, and I wondered again if I was misunderstanding which one of us was the dangerous one at this moment.

  “How long will it be?” I said.

  “Four or five hours,” she said. “It depends on the wind. We’ll have to refuel.”

  Below us a town knitted itself together out of prairie roads and railroad tracks. The ground was a dull winter color. A meandering river shone up at us, flat and immaculate.

  “Are you really a student?” Victoria said.

  I felt impatient. “Hush,” I said, and then, in English to myself, “Christ.” She rested her head on her hands on the back of the seat, looking at me with her wide doll’s eyes. She had gotten her roots touched up.

  “Are you really from Toronto?” she said. “Where did you get that gun?”

  I laughed. She stared steadily at me, but I kept laughing.

  “Why not be honest now?” she said.

  “Why not, indeed?” I said. If she had been anyone else, she might have blushed. I couldn’t guess what she was hiding now, but there was something, and she knew that I knew it.

  “You wouldn’t really shoot me,” she said.

  “You’re free to take your odds,” I said.

  The girl with the pixie cut tugged on Victoria’s jacket, giving me a frightened look, as if trying to guide a child away from a tiger enclosure at the zoo. I wondered if they were lovers. What had Román said—What have you done? That was the complaint of a cuckold if I ever heard one. There had been fatigue in his voice as well as panic. It must be hard for him, I thought now for the first time, trailing around after Victoria in a frothy wake of bewitched girls, listening while she went glassy-eyed talking about Argentine territorial integrity or whatever it was that was keeping her awake these last months. I had always been puzzled by her politics, the way she was enthralled by the symbolic but seemed so bored by the day-today. She disliked Onganía but seemed to see the coup as occurring on a plane of events that was fundamentally not relevant to her. She was bare-breasted Liberty astride a barricade in one of those old French paintings. Liberty carried a sword and was illuminated with heavenly light; she didn’t care about beef tariffs or excise taxes.

  I could see a storm now in the distance to the west, soft and gray, quite low over the land. When would I have a chance to eat again? When we stopped to refuel, I guessed. I twisted a button on my coat back and forth, trying to think what dangers the pit stop might raise and how I could manage them. Victoria might try to lose me, given the chance. Strand me on an airstrip somewhere in the upper margin of Patagonia. I would have to insist on staying in the plane while they refueled. But what if they went away and brought back the police, and I was sitting there placidly in the third row of seats with the gun across my knees? But they wouldn’t. They were as afraid of the police as I was. If I could stay in the plane, I would be all right.

  Back in the States I had heard of girls hitching rides on twin props, charming one pilot after another. The pilots were like truckers: they liked company, and conversation helped them stay awake. I had known a girl from Seattle who spent the summer seasons in Alaska that way, working her way from timber camps to canneries along the Pacific coast and into the tundra. Some of the California girls who came from the ranches did it too. It was exotic to me. The landscape we passed over now was the ordinary gray of a temperate winter in a rainy climate, but in a few hours we would reach the edge of one of the great cold deserts of the world.

  “Will we fly over Buenos Aires?” I said to Victoria.

  “Of course not,” she said. “We haven’t filed our charter. We would crash into someone.”

  I said nothing.

  “You’ll miss it?” she said.

  I glanced at her.

  “You’re funny,” she said, shaking her head. “Even after all this?”

  I thought of Nico. The intricacy of his knowledge, his connections, his commitment. Our peculiar alignment. I felt a rush of humiliation again at his betrayal. It must have been so easy for him to do it. I was never a real part of his world. No foreigner ever could have been. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be rooted anywhere as deeply as Nico Fermetti was rooted in Barracas, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

  “Do you have a boyfriend back home?” Victoria said.

  “No.”

  “You are a lonely girl,” Victoria said.

  This seemed like an insolent way to talk to a woman holding a gun. She read this thought, also, in my expression. “A lot of people are lonely,” she said quickly.

  “Are you?” I said.

  “Never,” she said. “I have a purpose.”

  She looked very placid when she said it. This was the kind of thing that made her seem much younger than twenty-seven.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “A purpose doesn’t keep you company.”

  “Mine does,” she said.

  I disliked her certainty. “Do you love Román?” I said. I had to say it loudly to be heard over the droning of the plane. But the other passengers were wearing headphones, and it felt like a long way from the back of the plane to the front where the two men sat.

  “Of course,” she said.

>   “But you lie to him. You do things behind his back.”

  “Not the important things,” she said. “With the important things we are 100 percent together.”

  “What are the important things?”

  She was silent again. She smiled slowly. She was pleased and jittery, as if containing some great news. I couldn’t understand it. I was aware again of the gun resting on my skirt. When I reached up to smooth my hair, my skin smelled like hot metal, like a handful of change.

  “Why did you come here?” Victoria said.

  “To this plane?”

  She rolled her eyes. “To this country.”

  “To study,” I said.

  She leaned closer to me over the back of her seat. “I should have known you were lying,” she said.

  I looked out the window. The sky was a weak, shining color. I could see feathery shapes on the ground that were the long shadows of leafless windbreaks.

  “When I called your apartment the first time, you sounded guilty,” she said. “I told myself it was nothing.”

  “Guilty of what?” I said.

  She shrugged and subsided into her seat. That was the last we spoke for hours. The drone of the plane was hypnotic and I struggled to stay awake. The earth beneath the plane was nearly featureless, and the chill inside the Britten-Norman got into my blood and slowed me down, making me feel heavy and faintly despairing. After two hours I would have given a hundred pesos for a hot cup of coffee and a ham sandwich. I spent a third hour regretting, in great detail, my moody refusal of breakfast from the taxi driver. The fact that I was hungry made me feel incompetent. In fact, there was a heavy cloak of incompetence over everything that had happened over the last few weeks. Agents in retreat were supposed to have a certain kind of savoir faire. I had often felt competent and necessary in the Confitería del Molino, but this kind of thing, the gun and the airplane, was not my scene. Victoria’s head was bent, and when I leaned forward I saw that she was reading a book of patriotic poems. This struck me as insane, perhaps the first truly insane thing I had seen her do.

  The plane was so small that its transitions were abrupt; several hours into the flight we dropped steeply through a cloud bank and approached a streak on the horizon that resolved into a runway. I shook Victoria’s shoulder.