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“Is he coming here?” Victor said suddenly.

“I would rather hope not,” Tuck Bradley said, and he smiled, and he took Ardis Bradley’s arm and after they left no one spoke for a long time. I think no one bothered to get dinner that night except Charlotte, who was seen at the Jockey Club as usual and was reported to have eaten not only the plato frío and the spiny lobster but two orders of flan.

At the time this surprised me.

At the time I had no real idea of how oblivious Charlotte Douglas was to the disturbance she could cause in the neutron field of a room, or a lawn.

5

AS A MATTER OF FACT LEONARD DOUGLAS DID NOT COME to Boca Grande that spring.

Leonard Douglas did not come to Boca Grande until early September, at a time when the airport was closed at least part of every day while the carriers negotiated with the guerrilleros and when visitors to the Caribe were routinely frisked before they could enter the dining room.

I have no idea whether he had even intended to come in the spring, or what he had called Tuck Bradley to say.

Or to ask.

Neither Ardis nor Tuck Bradley ever mentioned the call from Caracas again.

If he had called from Caracas to ask about Charlotte he never took the next step and called Charlotte herself: Victor had her calls monitored, both at the Caribe and at the apartment on the Avenida del Mar she rented the week after she met Gerardo, and, at least until the week the guerrilleros knocked out the central monitoring system, there was no record of a call from Leonard Douglas to Charlotte Douglas.

Nor, on the other hand, was there any record of a call from Leonard Douglas to Tuck Bradley, which made Victor depressed and suspicious about his Embassy surveillance team.

I believe he put the entire team under what he called “internal surveillance,” but it turned out to be just another case of mechanical failure.

Most things at the Ministry did.

I recall thinking that Victor would not be entirely sorry to turn over the Ministry to whoever was trying to get it that year.

“You’re aware Gerardo’s still seeing the norteamericana,” Victor said one morning in March.

I knew that he was disturbed because he had come to see me in my laboratory. Victor does not like to see me in my laboratory. His forehead sweats, his pupils contract. I have observed taboo systems in enough cultures to know precisely how Victor feels about me in my laboratory: Victor distrusts the scientific method, and my familiarity with it gives me a certain power over him.

In my laboratory I am therefore particularly taboo.

To Victor.

For some years I used this taboo to my advantage but I am no longer so sure that Victor was not right.

“I believe they’re ‘dating,’ Victor.” I did not look up from what I was doing. “I see her too. What about it.”

“I’m not talking about you seeing her.”

“I took her to Millonario. She killed a chicken. With her bare hands.”

“I’m not talking about you seeing her and I’m not talking about any chickens seeing her. I’m talking about Gerardo seeing her. Observed at all hours. Entering and leaving. I don’t like it.”

“Why don’t you have him deported,” I said.

Victor took another tack.

“You’re very sophisticated these days.”

I said nothing.

“Very tolerant.”

I said nothing.

“I suppose with your vast sophistication and tolerance you don’t mind the fact that your son also spends time with the faggot. The West Indian faggot. Whatever his circus name is, I’m not familiar with it.”

I transferred a piece of tissue from one solution to another.

Victor meant Bebe Chicago.

Victor was as familiar with Bebe Chicago’s name as I was, probably more familiar, since Victor received a detailed report on Bebe Chicago every morning at nine o’clock.

With his coffee.

“I sometimes wonder if your son has leanings. That way.”

“No need to worry about the norteamericana, then.”

Victor drummed his fingers on a flask and watched me for a long time without speaking.

“The West Indian is financing the guerrilleros,” he said suddenly. “I happen to know that.”

“I know you ‘happen to know that,’ Victor. You told me a year ago. When Gerardo and Elena were such a burden to you.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to you that this West Indian is financing the guerrilleros?

“It doesn’t make any difference to you either. If it did you’d arrest him.”

“I don’t arrest him because I don’t want to embarrass your son.”

I said nothing.

Victor would have arrested me if he thought he could carry it off.

“All right then,” Victor said. “You tell me why I don’t arrest him.”

“You don’t arrest him because you want to know who’s financing him. That’s why you don’t arrest him.”

Victor sat in silence drumming his fingers on the flask.

It was the usual unsolved equation of the harmonic tremor in Boca Grande.

If Bebe Chicago was running the guerrilleros then X must be running Bebe Chicago.

Who was X.

This time.

There you had it. The guerrilleros would stage their “expropriations” and leave their communiqués about the “People’s Revolution” and everyone would know who was financing the guerrilleros but for a while no one would know for whose benefit the guerrilleros were being financed. In the end the guerrilleros would all be shot and the true players would be revealed.

Mirabile dictu.

People we knew.

I remembered Luis using the guerrilleros against Anastasio Mendana-Lopez and I also remember Victor using the guerrilleros, against Luis.

I only think that.

I never knew that. Empirically.

In this case of course it would turn out to be Antonio who was using the guerrilleros, against Victor, but no one understood this in March.

Except Gerardo.

Gerardo understood it in March.

Maybe Carmen Arrellano understood it in March too.

Charlotte never did understand it.

I don’t know that either. Empirically.

“I suppose you do know who’s running the West Indian?” Victor said after a while. He was still drumming his fingers on the flask, a barrage of little taps, a tattoo. “I suppose in your infinite wisdom you know who’s running the West Indian and one day you might deign to tell me?”

“How would I know who’s running the West Indian, Victor? I’m not the Minister of Defense. You might want to watch that flask you’re banging around, it’s cancer virus.” It was not cancer virus but I liked to reinforce the taboo. “Live.”

Victor stood up abruptly.

“Disgusting,” he said finally. “Filthy. Crude. The thought of it makes me retch.”

“Are you talking about the cancer virus or the guerrilleros?

“I am talking,” he whispered, his voice strangled, “about the kind of woman who would kill a chicken with her bare hands.”

It occurred to me that morning that Charlotte Douglas was acquiring certain properties of taboo.

Which might have stood her in good stead.

Had Victor been in charge at the Estadio Nacional instead of waiting it out with El Presidente at Bariloche.