I hefted the cake or whatever it was. I said, “But what’s this?”
“That’s to say she’s sorry, man.” We were driving down the street now, turning toward downtown San Cristobal. “She just make that, so she give it to you, say she’s sorry.”
“But what am I supposed to do with it?”
He raised an eyebrow at me in the mirror. “Do with it? You’re supposed to give it to me. That isn’t gringo food.”
“Wait wait wait,” I said. “What is it, Arturo, what is this?”
“Quesillo,” he said. “It’s like a caramel custard, like a flan. It’s a great dessert. Ifigenia makes great desserts. But not for you.”
“She gave it to me, Arturo. She gave it to me.”
“We don’t have to fight over it,” he told me. “You wanna know what it tastes like, I’ll give you a piece.”
“Arturo, she gave it to me. And,” I said, “I am getting tired of holding it on my lap. But if I put it on the seat, it’ll fall over or something.”
He pulled to a stop at the curb and twisted around. “Give it to me, I’ll put it on the floor in front.”
I didn’t trust him. “Arturo,” I said, “just remember who she gave it to.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later. Gimme.”
So I gave it to him, and he put it on the floor in front on the passenger side, and wedged it into position with a couple of beer bottles against the edge of the plate.
“There. It’s safe now,” he said, and we drove on.
I said, “Arturo, excuse me, can I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? You’re my brother now, remember?”
“That house back there,” I said. “Can you really afford that?”
“Who, me? No way, man.”
“Then who pays for it? I’m sorry if I shouldn’t ask that—”
“No, no, man, Ifigenia pays for it. She’s rich, man.”
“Oh, yeah? What, did she inherit money?”
“Naw. Her family’s poorer than us. She’s a writer, man, and an actress.”
“She is?”
“In the — you know — photo novels. You know what I mean?”
“Luz had a million of them,” I said. “I read some. Mostly, I looked at the pictures.”
“Then you probably seen Ifigenia. She writes those things she always puts in a nice little part for herself. She makes a ton of money, man. See, that’s the dramatic thing in her. Anonymous letters, call the police, all this. Her head’s full of that stuff all the time.”
“Well,” I said, “I can see where it might be a little wearing to be around that every day.”
“But every once in a while...” he said, and grinned like a baby.
36
There are two local television channels in Guerrera, neither of which is beamed to any satellite. Substations boost the signal so both channels can be picked up in almost every corner of the country, if anybody cares. Mostly they do tapes from other South American stations: soap operas, movies, game shows, variety hours. They both carry local news programs and the occasional local political program, but that’s about it. One of them is TRG, Guerreran Revolutionary Television, and the other is RIG, Guerreran Independent Broadcasting.
Ifigenia’s cousin Carlita Carnal worked for RIG, as an interviewer, news reader, researcher, and general utility infielder. Arturo had decided we needed somebody who maybe knew something about the Hall of Records and how the records were maintained, and how we might possibly get at them, so when he had Ifigenia penitent he got her to phone her cousin Carlita and beg her to help us.
So where we went now was a café across the street from the art-deco headquarters of RIG — a twenties television station only looks really weird when you remember there were no television stations in the twenties — where Carlita Carnal had promised to meet us as soon after eleven o’clock as possible. We got there at five to eleven and ordered coffee, and I tried to take this opportunity to learn patience.
It isn’t that I was panicking, not quite yet, but we did have only today in which to pull this particular chestnut out of the fire. I did not want Lola to go to jail, not for a minute.
Arturo and I had worked out our story on the drive into town from Ifigenia’s. We couldn’t exactly tell Carlita Carnal the whole truth, but we had to tell her something fairly close to the truth in order for her to be able to advise us on our next move.
To begin with, we couldn’t tell her we were engaged in a life insurance scam, or in anything else illegal that might turn her against us. In addition, I couldn’t tell her I was Barry Lee, because Barry Lee’s spectacular death had been covered by local television, both channels. Carlita Carnal had probably even been the one to report it on RIG.
So what could we say? I’m Garry Brine again, and I’m the movie producer, only based in New York, not LA. Lola Lee, the widow of Barry Lee, is my secretary, and I’ve just found out that, in her grief over the sudden horrible loss of her husband, she did a very dangerous and foolish thing, with her brother Arturo’s help. I’m fond of Lola, and I want to keep her as my secretary, so I’ve come down to undo the damage, if possible.
It seems that Lola and Arturo have another brother, Martin, younger than them, and Lola wanted Martin to come live with her in the States until she got over her bereavement. Martin was willing to go, but he unfortunately had a drug-transporting conviction in his irresponsible youth — he’s perfectly legitimate now, scared straight by that one fall — and he’s banned from the United States.
So what Arturo did, to help Lola out, was go get a copy of the birth certificate of another of their brothers, Felicio, who’d died young. They meant to get Martin new identification as Felicio, who of course had no bad record. But now it turns out the American immigration service found out about the scheme somehow, and they’ve sent an investigator down, and tomorrow he’s going to the Hall of Records to compare death certificates in the Tobón family with recent applications for birth certificates. If he finds the request for Felicio’s birth certificate, and the death certificate, he’ll have the proof he needs.
Arturo is safe, because he’s here in Guerrera and doesn’t plan to go anywhere, but Lola’s in custody in New York. If one or another of those documents isn’t removed from the files, they’ll charge her with a crime and put her in prison. So — to save a poor grieving widow, who didn’t mean to do anything wrong, from a life behind bars — we need to know what the physical situation is at the Hall of Records and how to get our hands on one of those papers and make it disappear.
I could hardly wait for Carlita Carnal to get here, so we could try the story on her and see how it would fly. Well, I could hardly wait anyway.
But I had to wait anyway, because it was twenty after eleven before she walked in the café door. When she did, I knew immediately that’s who she must be. Her hair was blond and nailed in place, her face was clear and attractive and generic, and she strode with great self-confidence. Her matching skirt and jacket were peach and very tailored, her blouse was white, her jewelry was small gold earrings, a slim gold watch, and one string of pearls. Her shoulder bag was a huge bulging leather briefcase that bounced on her hip and looked as though it must weight a hundred pounds, more filing cabinet than purse.
She paused just inside the door to look around the room, and everybody in the room looked back at her. Arturo stood at our table, so I stood too. She nodded and crossed the room to us, and everybody else went back to their food and drink and conversations.
“Artie,” she said, when she arrived, and offered a smile and her cheek for an air kiss. This was someone else Arturo was not going to bear hug: not twice, anyway.