“Listen, Rose. Do you know anyone in New York or nearby whom you can trust absolutely?” she asked.
“What?”
“You heard me. A friend, a smart, clever, and good person you would trust with your life.”
“Let me think… hold on. Yes, there’s someone.”
“Good. Do you have your friend’s number here?”
Rose told her it was Ming, and María Paz already knew more or less who he was through Cleve, who had mentioned him a few times.
“Will Ming be able to deal with Violeta?” she asked.
“Ming deals with himself, so he can deal with anyone.”
“Great.” María Paz gave her approval. “Then call him. Call him immediately. He must have heard the news as well, so you don’t need to go into long explanations with him either. Tell him to go to Violeta’s school today. Give him the address of the school and directions. Today is Saturday, visiting day, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Where does Ming live?”
“New York.”
“How long does it take to get from New York to Montpelier?
“About five hours.”
“It’s one now. Five hours, it’ll be about six thirty. Perfect. Tell Ming that he has to be there by six thirty. Have him ask for Violeta at the receptionist. Tell him to take her out of there right away, and wait two or three days, whatever it takes, in that motel where you and I stayed when we were in Vermont, North something…”
“The North Star Shine Lodge,” Rose said. Since he had befriended Pro Bono, he made sure he remembered the names of all hotels and motels where he and María Paz stayed.
“Yes, that one. Can you tell Ming where it is?”
“Right off I-89, about fifteen minutes before Montpelier. He’ll see it advertised on a large billboard, indicating the exit. From there, he just has to follow the signs.”
“Good, Rose!” María Paz hugged him. “And I did love your son, do you hear me? I loved him very much. And I love you too, when you don’t scream at me. Now, call Ming. Give him directions, and be very concise.”
“Ming is not autistic, María Paz, and neither am I.”
“We are all a little autistic. Tell your friend to speak softly to Violeta, keep his distance, don’t put any music on in the car because she is very sensitive to noise, don’t make any jokes because she won’t get them, but definitely laugh at the jokes she makes. Warn him to be careful, because the girl bites. And very important: he must introduce himself very simply. ‘I am Ming.’ Very clearly, ‘I am Ming.’ Advise him that he should not seem anxious or in a hurry, because she freezes up. Go on, call your friend.”
Rose made the call and Ming accepted the assignment without hesitation, glad to know that Ian Rose was alive. Then María Paz called the school again.
“It’s one in the afternoon, Violeta,” she told her.
“No, it’s one and ten minutes.”
“You’re right. At six-thirty today, a man named Ming will pick you up in his car.”
“A man named Ming.”
“Good. What’s the name?”
“My name is Violeta.”
“Listen, Violeta, this is not a joke. The man who’s going to pick you up. What is his name?
“His name is Ming.”
“Very good, Little Sis. Ming is a good person. You go with him. Ming will pick you up at six thirty. Ming will take care of you.”
“What a nag you are, stop repeating things. Ming will take care of Violeta, Ming will take care of Violeta, I know, I know.”
“Alright, sorry, Little Sis. Sorry to repeat. Just one last time: Ming take care of Violeta, Violeta leave with Ming.”
“Yeah, María Paz, please don’t talk like Tarzan. And if Sleepy Joe comes, I don’t go with him.”
“No! Not with Sleepy Joe, no, for God’s sake, Violeta!”
“I said that, not with Sleepy Joe.”
“Not with Sleepy Joe, no, Violeta. Sleepy Joe does bad things. Who are you going with?”
“With Sleepy Joe,” Violeta said and laughed.
“You’re playing, right? You’re teasing your sister. You go with Ming. At half past six. And don’t bite.”
“No more, Big Sis. I get it,” Violeta said, and hung up.
Toward the end of the third day of their trip, María Paz and Rose finally arrived at North Star Shine Lodge and found that despite the general chaos of things, everything was more or less under control. Ming had done his job to the letter; Sleepy Joe had not attacked, not even a sign of him; and Violeta had behaved herself, as far as things went. And now everything was on hold.
There, in that motel, the threads of this story come more or less to a dead end, or at least a neutral end, with everything quiet, perhaps falsely quiet, just like this winter of their discontent they are traversing. María Paz, Ming, and Rose entertained themselves by playing endless rounds of miniature golf, tapping the ball with the putter to make it roll on the dirty green felt. While Violeta ran after hers, picking it up and placing it in the hole. Then they ate Kentucky Fried Chicken. What else could they do? It wasn’t as if the range of possibilities was wide open. Outside the cold roared and cops were everywhere. They heard the wail of sirens; although the motel was out of the way and hidden, it was in the same area of the school, but on the opposite side of the mountain. And they didn’t know exactly what all the hullaballoo was about, or who the authorities were after. Whether it was Sleepy Joe, whom everybody was looking for, or María Paz, the fugitive, or even the girl, who had left the school without telling anyone she would be spending some nights away.
It seemed that life had pushed them to the limit, without leaving them anything other than their little golf games, old episodes of Friends, and fried chicken. Ming was worried about Wan-Sow, his prima donna finned dancer with piranha teeth, who got very agitated if it was not fed mosquito larvae every twelve hours. And yet, how could he return to his noir comics and his betta, and leave his friend’s dad in such a bind? Violeta, meanwhile, had become very obsessive-compulsive about miniature golf, breaking down every time anyone dared to suggest it would be appropriate to end the game. And the three dogs were simply happy to be dogs and to be there, or at least ignorant of the fact they could be anywhere else.
Ian Rose thought about the pipes in his house in the Catskills, which had likely frozen and burst, as had happened during other winters, and meanwhile he was stuck, far away and unable to do anything about it. But there was no abandoning these women, who in the end were the only thing he had left aside from his dogs.
María Paz seemed disoriented and perplexed to him, sandwiched between nothing and nothingness, unable to stay in the United States, unable to call for a new cyber-coyote to change her escape plan again. Because how could she just take off forever, leaving Violeta in that school she was so fond of, at the mercy of the murderer? And at the same time, what could Rose do about him, The Passion Killer, given that after the fiasco of his role as a vigilante, he no longer had any hopes of sneaking up on him commando style with Ming’s Glock?
In fact, they could describe their current situation with the same words that Pancho Villa uttered to Claro Hurtado, on that night in Parral, Chihuahua: “We’re cornered.”
María Paz got to thinking about Cleve, about how terribly she missed him, and even laughed, remembering the advice he had given as her creative-writing teacher, when she asked how to end a story she was writing, one almost as tangled as the one they were living now. “Write ‘And everyone died,’” Cleve had said. “That should solve everything.” In short, this was a sublimely dramatic moment, while stagnant; they were neck-deep in water, suspended in the eye of the hurricane, as they say, or floating in a dead calm, while all around them the murderous winds howled. It seemed as if nothing they had done had done any good, and now there was nothing else to do. So they did nothing.