Bill Shaw was there waiting to drive him to La Plaza Real, where he would stay for a few days before he moved on to the top floor of a hotel in Acapulco.
Jonas sat down on the couch in the living room of his suite. Though the Mexican government would pretend not to know he was in the country, the hotel knew who he was; the suite was fragrant with fresh flowers, and the bar was equipped with champagne, brandy, and with the liquor it was understood that Señor Cord liked best: Tennessee sour mash bourbon.
"Communication is not all it might be," said Shaw. "When we get to Acapulco — "
"I can make local calls?"
"Oh, sure. It's the taps on the other end, in the States, that I'm worried about."
"We have a directory?" Jonas asked.
Shaw nodded and retrieved a telephone directory from a drawer in the Louis XV writing table where the telephone waited.
"Well, thanks, Bill. Suppose I see you later."
Sitting on the couch, sipping a small shot of whiskey, Jonas flipped through the fat Mexico City telephone directory, half expecting not to find the number he needed and to have to hire someone to locate —
But there it was: Escalante, Virgilio Diaz, listed at the address Phil Wallace had wired him.
He went to the writing table and dialed the number.
"¿Quién habla?"
"Do you speak English?"
"Momenta, señor."
The moment was more than a moment, but eventually another voice came on the line. "I speak English."
"I am calling for Señora Sonja Escalante. I am Jonas Cord, from the States."
"The Señora is not at home at this time. Would you like to leave your number?"
He did. He was not willing to take the shower he wanted, for fear she would call and he would miss her. He drank some more whiskey. He walked around the room. He stared down from the windows at the bustling streets below. He wished he had asked how long she might be out, when he might expect her to call.
The telephone rang about five. "Señor Cord? Momenta. Señora Escalante."
"Jonas?" A small voice. Familiar? He was not sure.
"Sonja? Do you remember me?"
"Remember you? What would you suppose, Jonas?"
Her English was as it had been: only faintly accented. The image of her that he had retained in his memory all these years was vivid; and he wondered if she was anything like that image anymore.
"I deeply regret ..." His voice caught.
"What do you regret, Jonas?"
"That so many years have passed. That I didn't come looking for you."
"I wouldn't have received you," she said with a firmness in her voice that he had only rarely heard but still vividly remembered. "I have always known where you were. You might have had a little difficulty finding me, but I would have had none finding you. Your name is in the newspapers constantly."
"I'd like to see you, Sonja."
"It's all right now," she said. "You will be welcome for dinner tomorrow night. My husband knows about you and will be glad to meet you."
"I would like to meet your husband, Sonja. Might we, though, meet for the first time ... alone?"
"Where?"
"In a public place. In a restaurant. It's your city. Tell me where."
"Harry's American Bar," she said. "I don't go there often. Make a reservation for nine tomorrow evening."
"I will. And I — I will be there at nine."
4
He was on time. She was on time. She recognized him. He recognized her. He stood. She came to the table, let him kiss her hand, and sat down.
The years had not changed her much. He had not seen her for twenty-five years, but she was Sonja Batista, just as he remembered her. She smiled. She'd always had a beautiful smile. She'd always had a strong, symmetrical, beautiful face.
Changed — Well, she did have a bit more flesh on her face, softening the lines of her high cheekbones and her firm jaw. Her face was incised with very fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth but with no others. If he could judge through her clothes, her breasts were a little more generous than they had been before. They had always been generous enough to win his attention and admiration.
Unchanged — Her dark-brown hair framed her face and fell to her shoulders, a little unruly as always. When he met her, bobbed hair had been in fashion, but Sonja had never bobbed hers. She had been too proud of it. Her brown eyes confronted the world with challenging skepticism, just as he remembered. He remembered too and saw again a stalwart face that did not flinch from reality.
"Twenty-five years," he said. He shook his head. "It's unbelievable."
"I have followed your career," she said. "The newspapers mention you often."
"But what of you, Sonja? I am embarrassed to have to say I have not followed your life."
"That would have been difficult," she said. "I have lived a very quiet, very private life, very different from the way it was when you knew me."
"I told you to call me if you ever needed anything."
For an instant her warm smile turned mordant, but quickly it returned to the open, welcoming smile she had shown him since she sat down. "I never wanted anything from you, Jonas," she said. "I thought of calling you once and decided not to."
He glanced down at the huge diamond she wore on her ring finger. She wore a wedding band also.
She saw the glance and said, "I have been married for twenty-four years."
5
The chastity belts Jonas had heard rumored were in fact worn by a few very traditional, typically very wealthy Mexican women. Sonja wore one.
It could not have prevented her having sex with a man not her husband, if she wanted to. All it did was identify her as the wife of Virgilio Diaz Escalante y Sagaz and was more in the tradition of the name-embroidered silk ribbons some Islamic women wore around their waists in the Middle Ages than the iron belts some prankish women were condemned to endure. It was exquisitely crafted, forbiddingly expensive, and entirely comfortable to wear. Two fine and flexible diamond-studded platinum bands circled her upper legs, another circled her hips, and a supposed shield joined these three bands. Nothing guarded her rear. She could easily have broken the thin metal and taken it off, and if she had, Virgilio would almost certainly not have suspected anything ill. On the other hand, if she didn't break it she could not have removed it; it was locked on her. Virgilio took it off when they had sex, or whenever else she asked him to.
She had worn it for more than twenty years and was proud her husband had never had to return it to the craftsman to be enlarged — as did most husbands who had fitted their wives with these belts.
The man sitting with her, Jonas Cord, could not have understood why she consented to wear the belt. Such a thing was beyond his norteamericano comprehension. A Yankee, he was deficient in the warm, sympathetic understanding, man for woman and woman for man, that so much characterized the Latin peoples. She had once admired his unsentimental Yankee practicality — and maybe did yet, a little — but she was glad her son had been reared in a different tradition.
Her family tradition could not have been more different from the Cord tradition. Her uncle was Colonel Fulgencio Batista y Zaidivar, once President — dictator — of Cuba and likely to be again. Jonas Cord could not begin to comprehend what that meant. When she met him, in 1925, not long before the death of his father, her uncle — her father's baby brother, much nearer her own age than her father's — was a fugitive, and so was her father. They would have been summarily shot if the then Cuban government could have laid hands on them.