All day yesterday, he’d acted like someone else. Someone he didn’t know.
And now? Ten minutes ago, when he’d walked inside the highrise, thinking surely he must have jotted down the wrong address, he blinked hard and wondered what in heaven’s name he was doing. What did he have to say to Capriati? In the lobby, a woman at a sleek metal desk between two elevators asked if she could direct him. “KKLT?” he said.
“Eighth floor.”
“Right or left?”
“The whole floor, sir.”
He’d glimpsed a security guard sitting on a stool by a giant potted plant. An elderly man in a blue uniform, half-asleep, snorting into the banked snow of his mustache.
So Danny had walked back out to the parking lot, disoriented, a little nauseous. Sitting in the car now, with all the windows up, he felt his wits returning. The heat was stifling, but it made him aware of his skin, his boundaries, his limits — countered the churning he’d felt in his gut since the moment he’d heard about Anna Lia, the sensation of being blown into the world, every cell tossed into the grit and whimsy of the planet.
The radio tapped him in the head:
Danny’s Spanish was rusty — he used it sparingly, with hospital administrators in Del Rio, Nuevo Laredo, other border towns — but he caught the drift: “Don’t speak about your husband, woman of bad sentiments. Everything, to you, is a fairy tale because your time of reckoning is yet to come.”
The swift rhythms reminded him of Gustavo’s voice: “Bomb? What bomb?” he’d said on Crespi’s phone, over an ocean-roar of static and stale technological air. “Who is this? Anna Lia?”
Adoring Daughter. Rebellious Young Woman. Wife, Adulterer … Killer?
“Here’s Inti-Illimani, folks, hold tight …”
“Damn straight,” said Danny. Solid now, secure within his skin, he opened his car door.
In the lobby, the old guard was showing a pair of Girl Scouts a brochure of some kind, perhaps a map of the building. Danny tucked the gun inside his belt, smoothed his shirttail over his jeans. What was he was fixing to do? Look around, he thought. Blue glass panes, each as tall as a man, filtering the afternoon sun; black marble floor; golden door handles. A smell of pine, vaguely chemical, in the air. This is what she left you for.
Apparently, visitors were supposed to sign in with the woman at the desk, but she was busy with a group of gray-suited men, so Danny scooted into an open elevator — silver doors, like the gates of an Asian palace. “Eight, please,” he said to a woman in a black turtleneck and orange knee-length skirt. Her fingernails were purple. Tattooed to her cheek, below her left eye, a tiny red strawberry.
After what seemed like only seconds, the doors opened onto a maroon-carpeted room. Plush white chairs surrounded a ficus plant in a bright red pot. KKLT in golden letters curled across the wall, which was made of dark, gleaming wood like the coffin Danny had picked for Anna Lia.
At a bright steel desk, a young, short-haired woman, looking pale and anorexic, stared at her phone’s blinking lights. She appeared to be mesmerized. Morosely helpless.
“Excuse me,” Danny said. “Roberto Capriati? I know he’s on the air right now, but can you tell me … is there any way I can speak to him? Does he have a break coming soon? It’s urgent.”
“Appointment?” the young woman said. The word demanded all the pluck she could muster.
“No. An emergency. Please.”
“Name?”
“Danny Clark.”
She punched a button on the phone and spoke into the receiver. Then she nodded toward a hallway. “There’s a waiting area on the left. He’ll be with you shortly.”
“Thank you.”
He left her apparently on the verge of collapse.
Down the hall, Danny found a row of plastic chairs facing a fat glass pane. Behind the partition, Roberto sat behind a console of loud yellow lights with a headset clamped to his ears. He smiled weakly at Danny. A sparse mustache, thin as fishing line, drifted across his lip.
The clothes, Danny thought. Silk shirt, lime green, and a sea-colored tie flaring wide across his chest. Anna Lia was always a sucker for snazzy outfits. Couldn’t be the face — all saggy and dark.
“We’re going to take you to Belize now, and the Garifuna, the Black Caribs of the Central American coast,” Roberto said into a padded mike the size of an avocado. “In 1635, friends, Spanish slave ships bound for Barbados sank near the island of Bequia. Hundreds of African slaves escaped and eventually intermarried with aborigines who’d emigrated from South America three hundred years earlier.”
While Roberto prattled on, Danny stared at posters on the walls advertising running shoes, acne medication, hair gel — products that kept the station afloat. He remembered a man in Hobby Airport one night, waiting for his luggage while Danny signed for a record shipment. The man worked for a large supermarket chain. “We do polling all the time,” he’d told Danny, making small talk. “Testing the public’s tolerance. A few years ago, you didn’t hear about feminine napkins on TV, am I right? It just wasn’t tasteful. Now, no one thinks about it. I mean, you got whole families slicing into their Swanson frozen chickens in front of the old tube — little Billy and Sally and Courtney — while some blowsy blonde tells them how fresh she feels. You know what’s next? Diapers for adults. I kid you not. Our latest marketing research indicates that people are ready to consider, in mixed company, the problem of bladder leakage.”
Sure enough, the following spring, Depends appeared on grocers’ shelves.
Why not coffins? Danny thought. Right next to the pharmacy. For all your death and dying needs …
“Today, only about seventy thousand Garifuna are left, in the coastal cities of Honduras and Belize,” Roberto said.
Or bombs. Let’s get some tracking data, see who’s shopping around.
“The song you’re about to hear was recorded by the Library of Congress as part of its Endangered Music Project. Relax now, sit back, and listen to the rain forest …”
Through the station’s speakers came crickets, water crackling on leaves, distant thunder, a faint chanting, female and male, old and young, chilling Danny with its doleful simplicity, its dark and solemn repetitions.
Roberto pulled off his headphones and slipped through a glass door into the hallway. He held out his hand. Danny shook it mildly. “Hello, Danny. Sit, sit. I only have a few minutes, but … how are you? I tell you, man, things have been nuts around here since the news broke. Day and night, calls to the station, reporters wanting inside dope about her habits, her interests … ahhh. I just try to stay busy, that’s all. Listen, I’m sorry, Danny. I’m sorry about everything that happened, man. It was never personal, you know? You know that, don’t you?”
Fucking fast talk. “Tell me what you did,” Danny said. His stomach rumbled.
“What I did?”
“To Anna Lia. So she wanted you dead. That’s what they’re saying, right? It’s all about you. What the hell did you do to her?”
“Wait, wait, wait — ”
“I want to know, goddammit.”
“Danny — ”
“Tell me!” He stood, toppling his plastic chair.
Roberto paled. “Have you come here to shoot me, Danny? Is that why you’re here?”
Danny’s shirt had hitched up over his belt, revealing the pistol.