by Hy Conrad
The storm was beginning to let up, and soon the Abels were engaged in the age-old game. Do I make a run for it, or do I wait? Will it stop completely or just get worse? From around the corner they could hear the voices of another couple, male and female, probably under a similar canopy, probably considering the same options. Fanny was closest to the corner, and her ears pricked up. She leaned her head out, almost into the rain, then drew it back.
“It’s them,” she silently mouthed.
It took Amy a moment to realize. “Are you sure?” she mouthed back.
Before Amy could object, her mother stepped out into the rain, hugging the wall, then darted her face around the corner. She raced back to Amy and their canopy. “It’s them,” she confirmed.
“So?” Amy enunciated broadly, without sound, as if speaking to an unskilled lip-reader. “Is it really Lola?”
“She’s wearing the pendant,” Fanny enunciated back. “I didn’t see the mole.”
Mother and daughter traded places. The rain had devolved into sprinkles, allowing Amy to abandon the canopy and stand within inches of the building’s corner. The man was speaking. It definitely sounded like Jorge O’Bannion, with his smooth, deep ringmaster voice. Amy felt a light touch on her shoulder and turned to see her mother still under the edge of the canopy. “What are they saying?”
Amy shrugged helplessly, which meant “I don’t speak Spanish.”
Fanny clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes, which meant “That old excuse.”
Amy tilted back toward the corner and considered her mother’s argument. As was often the case, Fanny was being unreasonable but accurate. It was her go-to excuse, Amy knew, a ridiculous mental block. She was good at languages. There were certainly enough words that were similar to Italian. She should be able to glean some meaning from them, perhaps enough to positively identify the woman in the head scarf. Forcing herself to ignore the rain and the ruined pashmina, she focused all her attention on the voices. It was an intimate conversation but still loud enough. Afortunado. Jorge said it more than once. Was that the same as fortunato? Lucky? El cuerpo. Was that like il corpo, the body? Tinte. Was that tinta? The word motocicleta came up more than once. Motorcycle, she deduced, although she didn’t know why Jorge would be bringing his motorcycle into the discussion.
Amy’s intense focus blocked out everything else, even the rain. Or the sudden lack of it. Just as she was getting used to their vocal rhythms, growing adept at catching a few words and extrapolating the meaning of a sentence here and there, the voices started growing dimmer. Without thinking, she poked her head around and saw the couple walking away, down the lamp-lit cobblestones. Fanny must have known, too. She was right behind Amy as they once again picked up their trail, scurrying half a block behind their prey, mentally cursing all the other pedestrians who were also coming out from under their awnings and making life difficult.
The surveillance parade ended at the door to a small, well-maintained apartment building—ocher with red shutters and trim—that had probably been a private home in the old days. Jorge used a key on the outside door and chivalrously eased the woman inside.
Fanny waited a few moments, then walked up and checked the buzzers. “J. O’Bannion. Three-A.”
Luckily for them—afortunadamente?—there was a café directly opposite the building, and it was open. The owner, a motherly middle-aged type, just a shade younger and thinner than Fanny, took pity on their bedraggled state and, without any translated request, brought out towels from the kitchen, two for each of them. Amy thanked her profusely and ordered an herbal tea, then talked Fanny into an herbal tea, instead of another maté jolt. They settled down at a table for two by the window, where they toweled off as they shared a view of Jorge’s front door.
“So?” asked Fanny as she tried to rearrange her soggy head of henna. “What did they say?”
“I didn’t understand everything,” Amy admitted.
“But you understood enough.”
“Enough to be confused.” Amy wiped her tortoiseshell Tumi’s with her napkin. “The word lucky came up. ‘We were lucky.’ Also the word police, more than once. And motorcycle.”
“Jorge’s motorcycle? How did that come up?”
“I didn’t ask,” said Amy. “At some point Lola was angry with him. They were arguing about money. Jorge wanted more money, or she wanted more money. It wasn’t clear. And they agreed not to see each other. Three months, that’s what he said. Tres meses. She didn’t seem happy with that.”
Fanny waited for more. “And?”
“And . . . and it’s hard enough eavesdropping in English.” Amy gave it some more thought as she put her glasses back on. “He said she had to dye her hair. She told him that she liked it this way, but he insisted she had to dye it.”
“Only logical if it’s Lola and they faked her death.”
“How could they fake her death? There was a real body.”
Fanny waved this nit away. “As he said, they got lucky.”
“Lucky there was another woman’s body just lying around Patagonia?”
Fanny sipped her herbal tea and made a sour face. “How can you drink this tasteless stuff? Did Jorge ever call her by name?”
“Yes, he said the name Lola several times.”
“So we know we have the right woman. I say we ring his doorbell right now and confront them. He’s going to have a hard time explaining her.”
“Really?” Amy had to laugh. “You actually think he’ll let us in?”
Fanny made another sour face. “Then we’ll just wait until she comes out. We’ll do our own stakeout. I’ve never done a stakeout.”
“We’re not doing a stakeout.”
“Why not? When this place closes, we’ll set up on the street. Disguise ourselves as street beggars. It’s a nice evening, if the rain has stopped for good. Do you think she’s staying the night?” Fanny was warming up to her own idea. “Well, I’m glad we had a big dinner. But we should be sure to use the bathroom here before they close.”
“I’m soaked to the bone. There has to be a better way.”
“What way? Once we lose track of Lola, we’re back to square one. We might as well go home.”
“We are going home,” Amy reminded her. “Tomorrow.”
“What? How can you think of going home? With a mystery so close to being solved? I’ll bet you anything Trippy wouldn’t go home.”
“That’s because Trippy’s not wet and shivering and exhausted. Trippy is imaginary.”
It was an irrelevant fact. “We’re both Trippy,” said Fanny. “And we’re staying right here, staking them out until Lola . . . Oh, fudge!”
They had been barely aware of the street traffic outside the café. There wasn’t much—a car barreling through a puddle, a few scooters buzzing by. Neither had expected anything to happen so quickly. But when Fanny happened to glance out just then, there was Lola out in front of Jorge’s building, still under her head scarf, about to step into a waiting taxi. They continued to sit in front of their herbal teas, stunned, as the taxi sped off into the dimly lit city.
“This is not how I expected my first stakeout to go,” Fanny said. “Truly.”
CHAPTER 25
Amy stayed to pay the check, while her mother thanked the café owner and went outside. It always surprised Amy how quickly things could turn. In less than an hour they had gone from a dead end to the lucky sighting of a dead woman to another dead end. She tried to think of their next possible step. Nothing was coming to mind, and it didn’t help that she was momentarily distracted by the exchange rate and whether ten thousand pesos would be too much to leave or too little. And then she remembered the towels and left twenty thousand.
When she stepped out into the street, the rain had stopped and the moon was just rising above the skyline. Fanny stood in front of Jorge’s building, writing something on a piece of notepaper. She put the pen back in her purse, folded the paper in half, and handed it to Amy. “Put this in your pocket,” she
told her daughter. Amy did so. Then, without further explanation, Fanny pressed the buzzer: J. O’Bannion, 3A.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I don’t see what else we can do. Can you think of something?”
Before Amy could respond, a muffled voice erupted over the intercom. “Bueno. Quien es?”
“Jorge?” said Fanny chirpily into the speaker. “It’s me, Fanny Abel. Amy and I happened to be in the neighborhood. Do you mind if we come up, dear? It’s important.”
There was a longish pause, followed by a buzz on the door.
“Follow my lead,” Fanny whispered as she pushed open the door and began looking for the elevator. “And stay open to improvisation.”
For the first time in their acquaintance, Jorge was not the perfect gentleman. When the elevator arrived on his floor, he was standing at his door in a black velvet dressing gown, his arms crossed, his hair still moist from the downpour. “How did you get my address?”
Fanny looked perplexed. “You gave it to us.”
“I did not,” he replied. “Not that my home address is a secret. But I don’t make a habit of giving it to business clients.”
“Well, you must have,” said Fanny, leading the way from the elevator to the door. “Amy wrote it down. I suppose it must have been on an e-mail. Or maybe when you were telling us about Valparaiso. Lovely city, by the way. The hills. The adorable funiculars.”
“I did not give out my address,” he repeated.
“Of course you did,” said Fanny. “Amy, show him where you wrote it down.”
Amy took her cue, unfolding the paper from her pocket and holding it out for inspection. “I honestly can’t say how we got your address,” she said, which was true. She couldn’t say.
“So . . . May we come in?” Fanny shook her whole body pitifully, like a wet dog. “We got caught in the rain. Looks like you did, too. Did you just get back from dinner? I hope you weren’t eating alone. That can be depressing.”
O’Bannion stood his ground in the doorway. “It’s late, Mrs. Abel. What can I do for you?”
Amy could almost see the wheels turning in her mother’s brain. “My little girl and I . . . I say little even though she’s so much bigger than me. But that’s a mother’s prerogative, isn’t it? We’re staying just a few blocks away. Lovely hotel. If we’d only been thinking, we could all have had dinner together. Then you wouldn’t have had to eat alone. Did you have to eat alone?”
O’Bannion ran a hand back through his hair, looking bemused and annoyed at the same time. “If you must know, I had a lovely dinner with a close friend.”
“Oh, who was it?” asked Fanny. “I mean, was it someone we might know?”
“You think you may know my friends? In Valparaiso? Which friend do you know?”
“I don’t know. Who did you have dinner with?”
The bemused part of his expression dissolved. “Mrs. Abel. It has been a long day. If there is not some urgent matter, I must please ask you to leave.”
“Are you upset with me, dear?” Fanny pouted. At the same time, she insinuated herself a few inches over the threshold. “Did I do something to offend you? If so, I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing,”
“It’s not nothing. I can tell.”
It took O’Bannion a moment or two. He took a deep breath. “When I invited you on this tour, it was with the understanding that you would promote the New Patagonian Express. Today I read your latest episode of TrippyGirl and was so disappointed. The Express was barely mentioned. Instead, you have her, a woman, wandering into a monastery and spending the night. Is she going to have carnal relations with a monk, heaven forbid? Or worse, are you going to reveal what really happened in the bell tower? Do I need to warn my dear trusting cousin to prepare for a scandal?”
Fanny bristled, or at least pretended to. “I should remind you that my daughter single-handedly prevented something far worse than a scandal.”
Amy shot her a look. “There’ll be no scandal,” she promised. “We agreed. And I apologize for not featuring the Express more prominently. It was a wonderful tour. Mother and I were just discussing how to best spread the word. Maybe a Trippy adventure lasting a month or two.”
“Exactly,” Fanny agreed. “It’ll put our Siberian adventure to shame.”
O’Bannion seemed interested. He almost smiled. “Something romantic perhaps?”
Amy nodded. “We were thinking that Trippy might fall in love with a handsome gaucho working at Torre Vista or at Glendaval. Maybe she goes camping with him.”
“Camping?” O’Bannion sounded dubious.
“Glamping,” Amy said, correcting herself. “It’s all the rage. Glamorous camping, with champagne and hot outdoor showers. Then they get lost in the majestic mountains. I think our readers would love that.”
“I would love it,” Fanny said, pitching in. “And if people love it enough, you can add it to your itinerary, except for the getting lost part.”
“It sounds perfect,” said O’Bannion. Unconsciously, he edged open the door a little more. “If that’s indeed what you’re planning to do.”
“It is,” said Fanny. “That’s why we dropped by, to discuss the story before we leave tomorrow. But we can always discuss it by e-mail.” She frowned. “Even though Amy is terrible with returning e-mails.”
“No, we can discuss it now. Please.” He stood aside, finally relenting. “I was behaving rudely.”
“Thank you, dear.” For Fanny, this had been the goal. She was not a long-term thinker, always focused on the very next step. Get inside. Regain his trust. After that, she had no idea. Something would come to her.
O’Bannion ushered them into an elegant but dimly lit living room. The furniture was old and huge, as if meant for a castle instead of a city apartment. The Abels made themselves uncomfortable in an oversize pair of stuffed chairs that squeezed down when you sat until you could feel the springs underneath. Their host settled on the front edge of a sofa that might have had the same problem.
“It’s too bad you have to leave so soon.” Once again he was the aristocratic gentleman.
“It is,” said Fanny. “But if you have the time now, we’d love to pick your brain.”
“Pick my brain how?”
“Oh . . .” Fanny scratched her temple. “Find out more about Lola Pisano, for example. We wouldn’t use her name, but just knowing about her would help us create a believable character.”
“Lola?” O’Bannion looked skeptical. “I thought your story was about glamour camping with a gaucho.”
“It is,” Fanny repeated. “But maybe they find a body when they’re lost. That makes it exciting—and closer to the truth.”
O’Bannion balked. “I’m not certain you should use Lola. She was a friend.”
“We don’t want to use her,” said Fanny. “That’s why we need to know more, so we can make it different. We could invent a story—just off the top of my head, um . . .” She thoughtfully stroked her chin. “A rich woman wants the world to think she’s dead when she’s not dead. That’s a great twist. But we can’t make it even remotely like the truth.”
“Why would she want you to think she’s dead?”
“Aha!” Fanny clapped her hands. “That’s the mystery. Why do you think this woman wanted to fake her death? Off the top of your head.”
“But she is dead. You saw her body.”
“It’s fiction, remember? Just a story.”
“I don’t like this,” O’Bannion said emphatically. “Romance with the young gaucho is better.”
“Maybe,” said Fanny. “Or maybe—and I’m just spitballing here—maybe the gaucho is really Lola’s nephew, and he wants to kill her. But Lola pretends to be dead in order to foil this attempt on her life. Later on, someone sees her alive, and this ruins her plan.”
O’Bannion eyed the door, obviously regretting having let them in. “If you send me your ideas, I may be able to help. But please don’t include Lola. It would b
e disrespectful.” He pushed himself up from the sofa, a little unsteady on his feet. “I’m grateful with your intent to include the New Patagonian Express. Every ounce of publicity helps. And now I must say good night.” He held out his hands in a farewell gesture. “It was an honor to know you. You are two remarkable women. Have a safe journey back to New York.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about Lola? You must have been very good friends.” Fanny stayed seated and eyed Amy, instructing her to do the same.
“We were, Fanny. But that’s a private part of my life. What time did you say you leave tomorrow?”
“It’s a late flight. So if you want to have lunch or even an early dinner . . .”
“I’m afraid not.”
Amy was surprised, almost stunned, to see her mother fail so completely. It filled her with a kind of panic, as if the axis of the globe had shifted and she could no longer count on Fanny’s gravitational pull. Panic was probably the only explanation for what she did next. “Where are you going to from here, Jorge?” Amy said. “Are you staying in Valparaiso?”
“Tomorrow I go to my estancia at Glendaval. There are improvements I need to oversee.”
“Can we go with you?” asked Amy.
It took O’Bannion a moment to comprehend the request. “You wish to return to the estancia? Why?”
Amy didn’t quite know why. She knew only that she had to stay close to Jorge O’Bannion if she ever hoped to figure this one out. “We want to see your improvements.”
“So we can write about them,” added Fanny.
“What about your flight home?” O’Bannion asked. “What about your work?”
Amy and her mother exchanged glances. Fanny raised an eyebrow, combining it with a half smile. “My dear, this is much more important. We believe in the New Patagonian Express.”
“You are willing to do this?” Jorge O’Bannion seemed deeply touched. “Both of you?”
“Absolutely,” Fanny said. “It shouldn’t take us more than a day or two of nosing around.”