“Very embarrassing,” he said.
There’s an echo in here, I thought. I said, “Since I was pretending to be a Guerreran chauffeur, and I don’t speak Guerreran Spanish.”
“You don’t speak Guerreran Spanish.”
“My accent makes grown men weep. Maria told me, ‘I’ll tell you to let me handle it and you don’t say a word.’ So that’s what I did. In fact, I was afraid to look at you.”
“Afraid to look at me.”
“Afraid to look at you,” I agreed. Two could play at this game. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you before this. I just sat there and looked out the windshield, straight ahead.”
For a wonder, he didn’t repeat that. What he did instead was put down the pen so he could rub the point of his jaw with the soft flesh of his hand between thumb and forefinger. Brooding at me like that, he looked as though he were trying to unscrew his head.
A long silent moment went by. Leather creaked behind me. Rafez, more quietly than ever, said, “You were pretending to be the chauffeur.”
A very early repetition, now repeated again. I’m in a time loop here. “That’s right,” I said.
“Why?”
I looked flustered. I looked embarrassed. I said, “Inspector, you know what it’s — certainly you can — Maria and I—”
“You are suggesting,” he said, inventing a sentence all his own, “that you were having an affair with Señora Perez.”
“Inspector, Maria and I—”
“With the consent of her husband.”
I sat ramrod stiff in the chair, startled, showing a bit of fear. “No, sir! If Carlos thought for a second...” I looked left, I looked right, I lowered my voice as I said, “Please, Inspector, promise me, none of this will leave this room.”
“You had his car,” he pointed out.
“It’s her car too.”
He thought some more, unscrewing his head. Then he took the hand away so he could shake the head, emphatically and firmly. “No,” he said. “You were there for the beating of Alvarez.”
I said, “The man on Sunday, after church? Was that his name?”
“You know his name,” Rafez snapped, beginning to show his exasperation. “You know Carlos Perez’s name. You know everybody’s name. But I’m not sure I know your name.”
Uh-oh. Let’s change the subject, shall we? I said, “Honest, Inspector, I went to mass with Maria and Carlos that morning, and Carlos just said he wanted to talk with a man afterward and would I come along, and I said sure, and we walked, and Carlos and this man — Alvarez? — they talked about I don’t know what, and all of a sudden Carlos started beating up on him. I had nothing to do with it, I didn’t touch him, I don’t know the man, I never—”
“You know,” Rafez snarled, “he’s my man! You know, and Carlos knows. If he was taking, it was not for himself, it was for me, and Carlos knows that. How did Carlos find out?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, “and that’s the truth. Alvarez is your man? I don’t know what you mean by that, I don’t know why Carlos beat him up, I don’t—”
“The smuggling!” Rafez was really losing his temper now, which I didn’t at all want, but I didn’t see how to keep it from happening. “Are you going to sit there,” he growled, “and tell me you don’t know about the smuggling?”
“Well, smuggling,” I said, using his method, repeating his word while trying to think. “Of course I know it’s around,” I said.
“And what was I costing him?” Rafez demanded. “A pittance. He didn’t have to know, and if he did know he didn’t have to treat Alvarez as though — as though Alvarez were not under my protection. As though it didn’t matter that Alvarez was under my protection!”
This was weird. Rafez was interrogating me, but as we went along I was the one learning things. He was still completely at sea, and I was beginning at last to understand what had happened after mass that Sunday. I said, “Believe me, Inspector, if Carlos — Perez? I never knew his last name, I only knew those people socially — if Carlos has treated you with disrespect I don’t blame you for being upset, but I had nothing to do with it. I’m an American citizen, I’m not involved in anything in Guerrera except—”
“You’re involved in everything in Guerrera!” he shouted, which was going too far.
So I ignored it. “Nothing except Maria.” With dignity, I said, “And I hope you’ll keep my confidence on—”
“Pah!” he said, and sat back and glared at me. “You are not having an affair with Señora Perez,” he decided.
I just looked at him. He brooded at me some more, then said, “But it may be true you are not as close to Carlos Perez as I thought.”
“No, sir, I’m not.”
He nodded slowly, while he thought about things. Then he said, “Let me see your passport, Mr. Emory.”
“It’s at the hotel.” I’d been waiting hours to give that answer.
“It is not,” he said, and said to the driver, “Saco.”
Oh, no. In either language, that’s my vinyl bag. It’s all over, I thought, as the driver came heavily forward. He picked up the bag, carried it to the desk, and zipped it open. Unhappily, I watched him paw through my messily packed things. Out came all the wrong ID: The passport. The driver’s license. Even the birth certificate.
As the driver walked back to his chair, not bothering to look at me, Rafez studied the three documents before him. At last he looked up. He was puzzled, but he was ready to be enlightened. “Felicio Tobón,” he said.
44
“I can explain,” I said.
“I truly doubt that,” he said, which made two of us.
Still, it was up to me to try. “I’m actually connected with the DEA,” I astonished myself by saying, and then I added to my gall by explaining to this policeman what that was: “The Drug Enforcement Authority.”
“Administration,” he corrected me.
I nodded and decided to say nothing more. That had been panic, a perfectly sensible reaction under the circumstances, but not a helpful one. I hadn’t made things worse by starting a yarn about being an undercover investigator for the DEA — Administration, I knew that — only because in fact things couldn’t get worse. Rafez held Felicio Tobón’s ID in his hands. He had investigated Barry Lee’s fatal accident and had worked with the insurance investigator, Leon Kaplan. It was all over. Lola and I were both going to jail.
Well, at least she’d be going to an American jail. I tried to imagine a Guerreran jail. Then I tried not to.
Rafez at last gave up waiting for me to spin another tale, and looked at the documents again. “Felicio Tobón,” he said, testing the words, assaying them. “There are Tobóns in Guerrera,” he decided. “It’s a large family, they’re all over the country.”
He looked at me as though expecting me to either agree or argue, but why should I? Let him find the way on his own; he would, soon enough. It wasn’t up to me to help him.
He nodded, as though my silence had been significant, and studied the documents some more. “They’re very good,” he said.
“They should be,” I told him. “They’re real.”
He lifted a surprised eyebrow at me, then held the birth certificate in both hands and lifted it so he could look at it with the ceiling fluorescent behind it. Then he did the same with the driver’s license. For the passport, he took a magnifying glass out of the center drawer of the desk and bent low over the first two pages. Then he put the magnifying glass back in the drawer and held up the passport to show it to me, open to the page with my picture. “But that is you,” he said.