“I don’t know what I would have done that night without him there,” Evita told McGarvey, her eyes glistening.
McGarvey lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She accepted it gratefully. The gesture made him think of Owens. The two of them — Evita and Owens — had a lot in common; both of them had been badly abused by Darby Yarnell, and in the end by Baranov.
It wouldn’t be easy, Valentin had told her, keeping up appearances, keeping a stiff upper lip, keeping up with their work. She was one of them now, and even if her father could not have known what great services she would perform, Valentin did, and he was very proud of her. Then he had a glass of wine with her, and somehow, ridiculously, she was in his strong, wonderfully gentle arms. He smelled clean of soap and of cologne, and of wool and leather. (Which was odd, McGarvey thought, for a Russian. But then Baranov, by all accounts, was not an ordinary Russian.)
“He told me that I should just let go. That if I needed strength he had plenty for me, and for Darby, too. I thought he had enough strength then for the entire world. ‘Trust in me, Evita,’ he said to me. ‘I will always be there for you. No matter where. No matter why.’ Goddamnit, I believed him, you know.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I believed in him all the way.”
And still did, at least in some measure, McGarvey thought.
Baranov took her to the big bedroom that looked toward the glittering city in the distance where he gently undressed her, telling her all the while that he was proud of her, that Darby would understand, that all of us needed to gain strength from someone else from time to time, there was no dishonor in it for either of them. He, too, needed strength. And he was so different from Darby, the only other man who had ever touched her. She had such a terribly infinite need that there was a fire in her head that would have been impossible to quench in any other way, even with Darby himself, had he been there. They made love, or rather, she said, Valentin made love to her. She was like a puppet beneath him; he pulled every string, and he knew exactly which strings to pull, and his touch was perfection.
She stopped in midsentence and looked up again, realizing perhaps for the first time who she was talking to and just what she’d been saying.
“Goddamnit to hell,” she said without anger.
“He is a very bad man, Evita,” McGarvey suggested. “What happened was not your fault.”
“But I loved it, don’t you see? I even loved the danger. But it wasn’t enough in the end. I wasn’t nearly enough for them. But then they had each other.”
23
Evita got up and put on some music. It was Spanish classical guitar, very good, very sad, very distant. They sat across from each other, smoking cigarettes, drinking, listening to the music, allowing the music to soothe, in a measure, the embarrassment she’d felt by her admission of faithlessness not only to her husband, but to the new system she’d embraced with her marriage: the U.S.A.
“It wasn’t all so black and white,” Evita explained. “You don’t live your life, ordinarily, thinking how history will judge you. It happens hour by hour, sometimes second by second. Am I going to be prosecuted for it after all these years? Are you a real cop after all? Are you going to try to arrest me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you are after Darby.”
“Yes,” McGarvey said.
“And Valentin?”
“Him too.”
“You might have said him especially. He is the devil. But I don’t think it will happen. He’s too smart, and he has too many friends. He told me an old Russian saying once: ‘Before a fight two men are boasting; afterward only one.’ It will be him in the end who will do the boasting. You’ll see.”
“Not if you help me,” McGarvey said earnestly, sitting forward.
She laughed. “What, a disenfranchised cop and me, a drug addict?”
McGarvey listened to her in utter amazement. She did not know his real name, she did not know who he worked for or what he was after, she did not know a thing about his background, he was just a face professing to know something about her past, and yet she’d called him a “disenfranchised cop.”
Had she been waiting for him, or someone like him, to show up all this time? Had Baranov predicted he, or someone like him, would come sniffing around her as if she were a bitch in heat. Did Yarnell attract that type? Or had the remark simply been coincidental? Was he jumping at straws? Christ, how did one know in this business; everyone lied about practically everything, to practically everyone. A great depression seemed to settle on him. He thought about all the women in his life. His mother, his sister, his ex-wife, his Swiss girlfriend, and now Evita Perez. There wasn’t one of them in the bunch who’d liked him for what he was, or who had told him the complete truth about anything.
McGarvey sat back, his feet propped up on a white lacquered coffee table, willing himself to remain calm.
“That shocks you, I see,” Evita said, moistening her lips. She stood up and got a small silver box from the mantel. She brought it back and opened it, taking out a tiny mirror, a razor blade, a tiny golden straw, and a small vial. She smiled. “There are worse habits,” she said. She opened the vial, carefully tamped out a tiny bit of cocaine on the surface of the mirror, then closed the vial and replaced it in the silver box. Her movements were very slow, very deliberate, very precise; she was a chemist working with a precious substance in an important experiment. She was overcoming her guilt and paranoia with a certain belligerence. She cut three lines of coke and quickly bent down sniffing a line up her right nostril with a practiced hand. She waited a moment, then sniffed the second line up her left nostril and immediately the third up her right again. She sat back with a long, languorous sigh. Her eyes were shining.
She put the paraphernalia back in the box, and then took her time about replacing the box on the mantel. She’d done something fine. She was becoming cocky. She even swaggered a little. “What else do you want to know, Glynn, or whoever you really are?”
“Darby came home eventually. He must have known that something had happened,” McGarvey said. “What did he say to you?”
“What happened after that, you want to know.” She came back and sat down on the couch, pulling her dress above her knees so that she could sit cross-legged. “Valentin was a much better lover than Darby. And Darby was damned good, you know. It was grand for a while. When Darby was in town Valentin got scarce. But when Darby was gone, Valentin was there. Sometimes Darby would hardly be out of the driveway and Valentin would be coming up in his big, flashy Buick with all the chrome. Never saw it dirty. Must have had a boy or someone polish it every day. Wouldn’t let me smoke in that car. He was proud of his cigarette lighter. It had never been used. You could see it was new. He’d pull it out and show it off.”
“What did you do for him?” McGarvey asked. With her legs spread he could see everything. She wore no panties. He averted his eyes. She laughed.
“For Valentin? Nothing much. Attended a few meetings. Waited once in his car for him outside the Ateneo Español. He said he wanted to talk to someone. But mostly we went dancing, and sometimes we went to parties.”
“Just you and Valentin?”
“Sometimes Darby and I would go to a party. But if I was with Valentin it meant Darby was gone. He was seeing other women, of course, Darby was. He’s always had his women on the side, so I didn’t feel so goddamned bad.”