"Oh, yes."
"They are, truly. And they asked specifically for you."
"Send one of the other girls."
"No, no, I can't do that."
"Please, Alberto. If you cared for me…"
"I do, Mariucha, you know that."
"Then send one of the others. Please, Alberto, please, querido, do that for me."
"You are making me impatient," he said. "You are supposed to be there at four o'clock, and it is already three-thirty. Go to them at once, and do what they ask, and do it graciously or—I promise you—you will have reason to regret your impoliteness."
"One of these days," she said, "I'm going to call your bluff."
But she never did.
And the iron grip tightened.
"Mariucha, what is it now? What do you object to now? I do not understand you, I sometimes think you are taking leave of your senses. What is the matter this time?"
"Papa," she said—she had taken to calling him Papa, as did all the other girls—"I'm not going. Send me back to prison, okay? Call whoever it is you have to call. Tell them to come get me."
"I will call the Mexican Embassy at once," he said, and went to the telephone. "As you wish. But will you not at least tell me…?"
"Yes, I'll tell you," she said, "I'll tell you, all right. If you're going to keep sending me to these creeps"—the word in Spanish was patanes—"then I'd rather go back to prison, I mean it, make your phone call, go ahead."
"Who is this person you're talking about?" Hidalgo asked.
"I'm talking about the man Arabella went to see last week, the man you're sending me to right now, I'm talking about the creep who…"
"He is a gentleman," Hidalgo said.
"Oh, yes, Arabella told me what a gentleman he is."
"He comes from a very good family."
"Maybe that's why he likes to shit on peoples' faces."
"I do not enjoy it when you're crude," Hidalgo said.
"And I do not enjoy…"
"Forgive me, Mariucha, but I suspect in your heart of hearts that you truly miss the Fortress. I will make the call. I will telephone."
"Good. Do it."
"I will."
"Because you don't give a damn, Papa. You just don't give a damn about a person's feelings."
"I care for you deeply, Mariucha. I care deeply for all my little girls. But, please, I have had enough of you. Please, no more. Enough." He picked up the telephone receiver.
"Why don't you send Constantia?" she said, naming the girl from Munich. "She'll do anything."
"Yes, she is not an ingrate. I will send her perhaps, but only after you are already on your way. I will call for them to come take you. Do you have any personal belongings you wish to pack? You know what it is like in prison. Take whatever you think will help you there. I will not begrudge you the many gifts I've lavished on you."
"Papa, please," she said. "Please don't send me to this man, Papa, I beg of you."
"But I am not sending you to him. I am sending you back to prison," he said, and began dialing.
"Por favor," she said. "Por favor."
He slammed down the telephone receiver. "Then will there be an end to this?" he shouted. "Or must I listen to it day and night forever?"
"I'll…"
She shook her head.
"Yes, what is it?"
"Nothing," she said. "Give me the address."
"You will need money for the taxi," he said.
"Yes," she said, and turned away from him because she did not want him to see that she was weeping.
In the fifth year of her indenture to him, and despite all her precautions, she became pregnant by one of Hidalgo's "gentlemen." Hidalgo generously offered to pay for the abortion, but he did not tell her what else he had arranged with "el medico" who performed the operation in the dingy back room of a hardware store in one of the worst sections of the city. Marilyn fainted while he was working on her. When she regained consciousness hours later, she was bleeding severely. It was then that Hidalgo told her the doctor—he insisted on calling the man a doctor—had also scalpeled out her uterus.
She struck out with her fists at Hidalgo and the butcher both, and then ran to the bathroom and vomited into the filthy toilet bowl where the fetus still floated. She fainted again, and woke up in the apartment hours later, remembering the horror of her ordeal and screaming as she had in Mexico when she'd been covered with rats, screaming until one of the other girls slapped her and told her to shut up. Before she was fully recuperated, Hidalgo put her back to work again.
That was when she decided she had to kill him.
"No," Willis said. "You didn't. Please, Marilyn, you…"
"I did. I killed him."
"I don't want to hear it. Please, I don't want to hear it."
"I thought you wanted the truth!"
"I'm a cop!" he shouted. "If you killed a man…"
"I didn't kill a man, I killed a monster! He ripped out my insides, I can't have babies, do you understand that? He stole my…"
"Please, please," he said, shaking his head, "please, Marilyn…"
"I'd kill him again," she said. "In a minute."
He sat shaking his head, unable to stop shaking his head. He was afraid he would begin crying. He covered his face with his hands.
"I poisoned him," Marilyn said.
He kept shaking his head.
"Cyanide," she said. "For rats."
Shaking his head. Breathing in great gulps of air.
"And then I went into his bedroom and searched for the combination to the safe because I knew that was where my passport had to be. I found the combination. I opened the safe. My passport was in it. And close to two million dollars in Argentine currency."
Willis sighed deeply. He took his hands from his face.
"So what now?" she said. "Do you turn me in?"
The tears came. He took the handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped at his eyes. He began shaking his head again, sobbing, wiping away the tears.
He did not know what to say.
He was a cop.
He loved her.
He was a cop.
He loved her.
Still sobbing, he went to the front door, and fumbled for the knob, and opened the door—
"Hal?"
—and went out into an afternoon smelling of springtime.
CHAPTER 17
His eyes were swollen and red. Carella knew he'd been crying, but he did not ask him why. They were sitting at Carella's desk, side by side, Willis in a chair he'd pulled over, both men studying the list of names Marilyn had provided. Under any circumstances, this would have been a part of police work they found tedious. But there was about Willis a melancholy listlessness that exaggerated the normal boredom of paper legwork, hovering over the desk like a cloud threatening an imminent storm. Carella was tempted to ask, "What is it, Hal?" tempted to say, "Tell me." Instead he went about the work as if it were merely routine, when he knew with every fiber of his being that it was not.
They looked together at the first page, which listed the men Marilyn had dated since her arrival in the city last year. The list was not extraordinarily long. Some twenty-five names on it, Carella guessed.
"Not many addresses," he said.
"Only the ones she knew," Willis said. His voice was toneless. He did not raise his eyes to Carella's. They stayed lowered to the sheet of paper with the names scrawled in her handwriting. Carella could not even guess at what pictures were behind those eyes.
"Means we'll be hitting the phone books," he said.