I opened the door with my right hand, keeping the left in my pocket. The door traced a fluid, dignified arc. It had taken me much practice and oiling of the hinges to remove all hints of anxiety or reluctance from my door opening. A banality, you will say, but a loose screw sinks the big ship. Nothing, not even the color of the roses in a particular vase, had been left to chance. The path from McCabe’s arrival to her apotheosis on the pyre had been minutely mapped. The door opened with an elegant sweep. I heard a breathless “Hi, there.” Then I heard myself say, “Hello.” Then, “Could you please open the garage door?” I did as I was asked. When the blue sedan was parked in the garage, hidden behind the Land Rover, I offered to take one of the two small bags. “Thanks, but I think I can manage,” was the polite answer. We stood in the dim light of the garage, unsure of what to do or say next. “I owe you an explanation,” I heard. The acrid body odor was distracting, as were the soiled shirt, muddy shoes, and greasy dark-blue suit. “Motor oil. Had to pour it in the dark. Got it all over me.” Where had that telegraphic form of speech been learned? “So…” I said, searching for the right balance between distress and panic. “Sorry to barge in on you like this…” came the insincere answer. I slammed the car top with unintended violence. “Whatcha done?” said a mean, deep voice coming out of my chest that I had not heard in years.
He looked at me reproachfully. That is what saved him. I had grown up cosseted by his reproachful gaze. It made me feel daring and modern where he was meek and old-fashioned. I took him to the maid’s room in back of the garage. Unused since the Judge died, it smelled musty. “Take a bath. You stink,” I said, handing him a large garbage bag for his filthy clothes, a towel, and a bar of soap. He was anxious to tell me his story. “Later,” I said. I had to throw the kitchen window open, so McCabe would not smell his presence. I warned him not to leave the room, or make any noise. “You can’t stay long. This is not my house,” I said. “I know that,” answered Rafael Cohen.
27
The Grand Vizier
When I returned with food, booze, and an air freshener, Rafael was dressed for summer cocktail hour in the Vineyard in a pale blue shirt, white and blue seersucker suit a size too large, and sockless penny loafers. He was scrubbed clean and imperfectly shaved (his perennially blue jowls always lent him a Nixonian truculence on TV, which his soft, high-pitched voice belied). His big, swarthy head, though, was pure La Esperanza. All he was missing was the moustache. Those were the only clothes he had in his car when he left, he said, devouring the ham and cheddar sandwiches.
I found him a forest-green parka that had belonged to Mrs. Wilkerson. It was a little tight on his waist, but not too girly. The Judge, who had been six foot four, could only provide socks, scarf, and woolen cap. I personally contributed a large grey cable-knit sweater that fat McCabe had given me before she melted away. Nothing could be done about the penny loafers and the seersucker pants. He would have to freeze in them. The jacket, on the other hand, was returned to the bag it came from, which I noticed was otherwise empty. What I had taken for a second bag was in fact a large, hard-cased briefcase. Rafael had shoved it under the bed, but insufficiently, so the top and handle stuck out. It was 1:30 p.m. He had been here only an hour and a half and it felt like a century. The elasticity of time is one of the themes I wish I had had time to study. McCabe would not arrive now until four o’clock at best, if traffic out of the state capital were miraculously light. I had two and a half hours to get Rafael back on the road.
He sat on the maid’s bed, licking the mayonnaise off his fingers and finishing his second beer. I sat across from him on the only chair with a bottle of Evian at my feet. The food tray on the night table was a repellent mess of chewed ham fat, gnawed bread, and ketchup-soaked napkins. Rafael belched before his hand could reach his mouth, and thanked me for the first time since his arrival. I removed the tray from my line of vision and hoped he would go wash his hands and greasy mouth, from which still hung a few distracting crumbs. Rafael had always been a slob, but I could not believe he ate like this in front of his masters. His down-home minstrelsy was for my benefit, I suspected. He took a wallet out of his back pocket and showed me a picture of a blond girl and boy standing on the exact kind of fastidiously clipped lawn that calls for a seersucker suit. They were twins, he said, just turned twelve. A good-looking blond woman could be seen in the background. The kids were almost as tall as the mother, who was not precisely short—“Five foot eleven,” said Rafael, flattered when I asked. (He was five four and a half in his socks, although he always lied about his height. Had he dared lie about it to his current employer?)
So far, my day with Rafael had been a succession of rancid clichés, from his unannounced arrival, haunted and hunted, to the picture of the predictable blond, white giants. We were trapped in a B-movie medley. I was not I anymore, but a ventriloquist’s dummy channeling my own discarded voices from the past. Who was he? “This situation is spiraling out of control,” I heard myself say, teeth martially clenched. Some malicious prompter was feeding Rafael and me these trashy lines. I sank deep into the chair. When I opened my eyes, Rafael was leaning over me with a wet towel. “You passed out,” he said. I was still clutching the proof of his successful safari in Upper Blancoland. He pried his trophy family out of my fingers and sat on the bed to look at them. It was considerate of him to let me be, to spare me from further embarrassment. I had never fainted before in front of him, although I had been on the verge twice: when they drew blood from my wrist at age eleven, the Elmira school district having gotten it into their heads that all spic children were either asthmatic or tubercular, and when I cracked the back of my head on the curb during an after-high-school brawl.
“I haven’t done anything illegal,” Rafael finally said, cleaning his black-framed glasses with a corner of the bedspread and putting them on. He now looked like the Kissinger of the Paris Agreements, down to the kinky hair creeping up under the thick pomade. “Nothing at all that could get you or,” and here he hesitated, searching for the prudent term, “the main tenant of this house in trouble.” Lawyerly mendacity had replaced the telegraphic style. He stole a glance at his family picture. Did he wink at them? “You gotta leave right now,” I said. The corners of his mouth went up slightly. “I swear you’re gonna be sorry if you don’t. You’re gonna lose your job and bring grief to your family, and shit’s gonna rain on your boss if you stay here.” He blinked twice behind his thick lenses, but his mouth remained almost gleefully upturned. “You’ll lose everything, Rafael,” I said. He studied his family picture under the bedside lamp. Did he get his instructions from them? Was he trying to find his genetic imprint in the two Brobdingnagian children? Where I saw none, a father’s eye might see a dozen tiny hereditary signs such as curved toenails or unusually thick earwax. He put the picture back in his wallet. Then he retrieved the wet towel from my lap and hung it from the shower curtain rod. “I already have,” he said from the bathroom.