“Who was there,” Charlotte repeated. “When he was buried. You said you buried him. Who came.”
“I got hold of Porter. Porter came.”
She seemed to be waiting for something.
“A couple of people I didn’t know.”
She still seemed to be waiting for something.
“And six FBI.”
She had stopped in front of a building on Calle 11 and still she seemed to be waiting.
“It was fine, Charlotte. He didn’t want anyone there. The letter said so. The letter they found in his coat. All he wanted was nobody there and somebody singing ‘Didn’t I Ramble.’ ”
Charlotte said nothing.
The letter in Warren Bogart’s coat also had a message for Charlotte and Marin but Leonard did not mention the message.
“He carried it in his coat. The letter.” Leonard shook his head. “He did. Didn’t he.”
“He did what.”
“He did ramble.”
The message for Charlotte and Marin had read only “you were both wrong but it’s all the same in the end” and Leonard did not mention the message.
“Not a letter really,” he said. “A note. On the back of an envelope.”
“This is where I work,” Charlotte said. “I’m quite late now.”
She looked directly at Leonard as she spoke and then she turned and walked inside and down a corridor and into an office. When he followed her into the office she was standing at the window smoking a cigarette and staring out at the blank wall of the adjoining building and she did not turn around.
“Would you go to the desk for me,” she said after a while. She did not turn from the window. “Would you tell them I can’t see anyone for a few minutes. Twenty minutes.”
“I’ll call.” Leonard picked up the telephone and jiggled it. “How do you call?”
“You don’t. The switchboard’s out. Or something. Since the bomb.”
He stared at her.
“You had a bomb here?”
“Or something.”
“When was the bomb? Or something.”
“I don’t know. Yesterday. No, it was the day before, because I still had the curse, I was changing a Tampax when it went off. Would you please go to the desk?”
Leonard put the telephone down and watched Charlotte crush her cigarette on the ledge outside the window.
“I want you to come with me,” he said after a while. “I never told you what to do but I’m telling you now. I want you to come with me to the airport. Now.”
“Actually I can’t.” Charlotte said, and then she turned abruptly from the window. “Didn’t Marin come.”
“She couldn’t have, Charlotte. I told you. The FBI were there. Naturally the FBI were there.”
“Did you tell Marin.”
“Yes.”
“Did she want to come.”
There was a silence.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said.
“Tell her she was wrong,” Charlotte said. “Tell her that for me.”
13
“AND WHAT ABOUT THIS FUCKING BOMB,” LEONARD Douglas said to me.
He had finally drunk his second drink and then a third and a fourth. He was in no way drunk but he gave off the sense of a man who normally had one drink, maybe two when politesse required it, a man who prized control and had been pushed in a single week almost beyond it.
He had found Marin Bogart in an empty room in Buffalo.
He had buried Warren Bogart in an empty grave in New Orleans.
He had come to save Charlotte from an empty revolution in Boca Grande and Charlotte was not listening.
He had found his way to me and in my house there were flowers in the vases and ice cubes in the carafes and clean uniforms on the maids. In my house it did not seem so empty and I was listening.
“ ‘A bomb or something,’ she says. Don’t miss the or something. I look around, I discover the back wing of the building blew up three days ago, I find four people died outright and the fifth’s dying now, peritonitis, this fifth one got caught on the table, the doctor jumped and punctured this one’s fucking—”
Leonard Douglas seemed to have rendered himself temporarily mute.
“Uterus,” I said. “I heard there was a bomb. Before you came. I asked Charlotte about it. Charlotte said—”
I broke off. Charlotte had said that when the bomb went off she was in the bathroom and she had forgotten about her Tampax and had spotted blood all over the clinic without realizing it.
That was all she had said.
“She said it wasn’t near her office,” I said.
“Never mind where it wasn’t. Because she goes charging in where it was, the ceiling’s still falling, she gets three people out, she’s a heroine, she’s mad as hell, she’s shouting ‘Goddamn you all’ the whole time. They tell me that. Charlotte doesn’t. All Charlotte remembers about this bomb is it went off while she was changing her fucking Tampax.”
“She bled.” I did not know what else to say. “She remembers she bled all over the clinic.”
Leonard Douglas looked at me a long while.
He loosened his tie and closed his eyes.
It was just sundown and I could hear the DDT truck outside.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “She remembers she bled.”
The DDT truck was gone before he spoke again.
“You didn’t know about Bogotá, did you.”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t have told you. It upset you.”
“I should have known.”
“She should have known too.” Leonard Douglas stood up and picked up his jacket. He did not seem to be talking to me at all. “It wasn’t the way she thought it was either. I wasn’t the way she thought I was and Marin wasn’t the way she thought Marin was and Warren wasn’t the way she thought Warren was. She didn’t know any of us.”
“She remembers everything,” I said. “You said she remembers everything.”
“No,” Leonard Douglas said. “She remembers she bled.”
14
A FEW DAYS AFTER LEONARD DOUGLAS LEFT BOCA GRANDE Charlotte told me that he had “passed through” but had left before she could “arrange an evening” for him.
“An ‘evening,’ ” I remember saying. An evening for a man who had just found her child and buried her child’s father. An evening for such a man in an equatorial city under martial law and rigid curfew. “What kind of ‘evening’ exactly did you have in mind?”
“An evening to meet everyone. Of course. I particularly wanted him to meet you.”
“He did meet me,” I said after a while. “He spent three hours here in this room. He told me about Marin. He told me about Warren.”
She looked away before she spoke.
“I know he did,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Charlotte stood up then and walked out onto the terrace and across the lawn to where the roses grew. I remembered her walking across the lawn the night she met Gerardo and I remembered Elena and I remembered Ardis Bradley and I remembered Carmen Arrellano and I wished suddenly that Charlotte had gone to Paris.
You smell American.
I wonder what American smells like exactly.
Norteamericana cunt.
When Charlotte came back inside she did not look at me.
When Charlotte came back inside she was already talking and her voice was low.
Charlotte wondered if she had ever told me about the night Marin was born. Marin was born at Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York. Warren hit the head nurse on the maternity floor. The head nurse brought assault charges but later dropped them. Marin weighed six-eight at birth but only six-two by the time they took her home. Charlotte supposed that was normal. Warren was afraid to hold Marin in the taxi going home. Charlotte supposed he had been drinking. Instead of holding Marin he held his hands an inch or so above the soft spot on her head to protect it if the taxi bumped and he said over and over again that he did not want her to go to Smith and marry some eighth-rate ass from Sullivan and Cromwell.