“Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“What?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “it was like you were a million miles away. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, no,” Camerando said, “not at all. It’s good to see you again, Dorothy Bliss.”
Mrs. Bliss — those crystal clarities, transparent, fluent as glass — saw what he was doing. He was collecting, composing himself. She saw what she had done. She had drawn blood.
Then he did something astonishing. He sat down beside her on the bus bench. Even when he’d spoken so rudely to her in his car, when he’d come to her door to give her the money he said she’d won on a bet he’d put down for her at the dog track, when she’d seen him in the corridor at the Towers that time and ducked into a neighbor’s apartment to avoid him, even then she had never felt so fiercely pressed and intimidated by a man. Compared to this, his looming, heavy presence, Junior Yellin was a piker, his goosing her behind a freezer case mere kid stuff.
“Oh,” said flustered Mrs. Bliss, at a loss for words whose thoughts were so piercing, “you don’t have your car today? You’re riding the bus?”
Camerando looked around to see if the coast were clear. Leaning in toward her, he lowered his voice. “I have my car,” he said so softly that Mrs. Bliss had to strain to hear him. “It’s in its customary parking space. Well, you’ve seen where I park. It’s very convenient. A cop watches it for me.”
He’s paying me back, Mrs. Bliss thought, all her clear certainties on her like a head scarf. It’s my marker. He thinks he owes me. I don’t know why, it isn’t honor, it isn’t anything. Maybe it’s superstition. Sure, she thought, it’s the marker. He wants to be done with me. He’s going to pay me off big.
“You got me dead to rights, Mrs.,” Hector Camerando said. “I see a woman down here. Her name is Rita de Janeiro. This is only her stage name.”
“Please,” she said. “Mr. Camerando.” It was her stage name, Rita de Janeiro? She didn’t want him to tell her her two-feet-on-the-ground name, her floor or earth name. She didn’t want him to tell her anything. She didn’t care to hear his secrets. What, this was how he was going to pay her off? This was what the street value of her marker came to? She’d have been better off with the cash. And besides, now she knew what she’d stalled him for she finally decided what her payoff should have been.
She heard him out, but barely listened to Hector Camerando where he sat beside her on the bench in the little wooden bus stop shelter whose vague simulacrum of a confessional she wouldn’t have noticed even though she understood that what she was hearing was a confession and that he offered it to her not so much in the spirit of closing the books as to someone in authority in whom he’d vested an almost magical power of forgiveness and amnesty. No one, not Frank, not Marvin on his deathbed, not Ted on his, had ever spoken to her like this.
“She’s a topless dancer. She makes me crazy, she drives me wild. Did you see The Blue Angel? Emil Jannings played a good part in that picture. He was an important professor but he fell in love with a nightclub singer, Marlene Dietrich. He’d do anything for Marlene Dietrich, anything. She took him for all he was worth, but all she ever did was make a fool out of him and give him the horns.
“I’ll tell you something about myself. I’m not a professor. I don’t live with my head in the sky. Well, you know from personal experience what I can do. With the jai alai. With the pooches. Dollars-and-cents-wise, I turn water into wine. I got so much juice and clout I have to watch myself.
“Now I want you to understand something, Mrs. B. Excuse me, but I was never particularly horny. I was never particularly orientated to a behind or a leg or a bust line. Excuse me, but I was never particularly orientated even to the big C or any other of the female parts and features — the eyes, the hands, the teeth, a smile, the skin. For me it wasn’t even the whole person I was interested in.
“What I’m talking about, and I think you’ll understand this, is general passion, consuming lust.”
“I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Bliss said.
“I mean, of course Rita de Janeiro is her stage name. Oh, I don’t mean it had to be Rita de Janeiro. That’s just a flag of convenience, that’s just what her and her manager agreed on. It could have been anything. It could have been Mrs. Ted Bliss.”
Mrs. Ted Bliss winced.
“She’d just had her first period when she started. So of course she had a stage name. The truant officer would have reported her otherwise. And they wouldn’t just have shut that place down,”—he pointed toward a small brick building on the other side of Collins Avenue, undistinguished except for the fact that it looked more like a Chicago saloon (down to a high rectangular window built into the side of one wall like a wildly offset postage stamp) than Miami’s usual stucco, faintly iridescent pastel, mother-of-pearl, plaster-of-paris structures—“they’d of burned it.
“Hey,” Camerando said, “I’m not kinky. I don’t have nothing for little girls. Only this little girl. Only Rita.”
“She’s what, twelve?”
“Twelve when she broke into the business,” Camerando said. “She’ll be a senior next year. She’s sixteen. Next week she takes the test for her driver’s license. I’m going to surprise her with a car if she passes. Hell,” he said, “even if she don’t pass. I got this cute convertible in mind. Her little ass was just made for it.”
He didn’t bother to keep his voice down now. He’d set decorum aside, safety, almost as if he’d become Emil Jannings himself, Mrs. Bliss a version of Marlene Dietrich. God knew why, but he’d identified a power in her, too, offering his confession like a sacrifice. She knew she could take advantage of him. She still held his marker. She could take him for all he was worth.
“Can you get me in to see Alcibiades Chitral?” This was the marker she had wanted to call in.
“Hey,” Camerando said.
Because now she was on his turf again. And she understood that whatever powers he’d granted her, whatever the specific amounts he permitted her to draw upon from her letter of credit, they were not infinite. They were only social, friendly. They were merely honorary amounts and powers.
“But you said,” Mrs. Bliss said, her tone quavering, a whiny, petulant register that, even had she heard it clearly, she might not have recognized.
“What did I say?”
“About the water and wine,” Mrs. Bliss said. “All you could do,” she said, her voice trailing off.
“Agh,” Camerando said, “I’m all talk.”
He wasn’t of course. It was just more of the same. Another way to put you on, trip you up — YOU, DOROTHY BLISS, HAVE ALREADY WON…And there were all her prizes, written down, in black and white, the number to call. No fine print. No hidden clauses. Just go try claiming them. See what they do to you. Tie you up in the courts years. Make you sorry you were ever born.
But he wasn’t. If he was all talk, life was all talk; God, death, blood, love were all talk. The world was all talk.
She, she was helpless. She was. Look at him, smell him beside her there on the bench, all his showy shtarker maleness. His expensive, dry-clean-only necktie and matching pocket handkerchief, the shine on his expensive shoes. See how at ease he is, how he sits on the bus bench as if he owns it, though Mrs. Bliss knows it must be years since the last time he waited for a bus. So don’t tell her he’s all talk, or that he couldn’t get her into the prison to see Alcibiades Chitral if he wanted, or maybe only if she hadn’t made it all sound so urgent and by letting him see how much she wanted it, that that gave him just that much more advantage over her. Though God only knows why he’d want it or how he would ever use it. Except, Mrs. Bliss thought, that’s why people accumulated power and advantage, like misers socking it away bit by bit for a rainy day.