They drank their drinks. The band had started to practice downstairs. They could hear the hard thumps of the drums and the harsh notes of the trumpet.
McGarvey had come this far and had only got half the story. He wasn’t going to leave without the rest of it. But there was something from her past, something from Mexico City that had shamed her, that had frightened her and had made her grown up all at once. He suspected she’d been trying to bury it all these years.
“Something happened to you in Mexico City, Evita,” he said. “Before you moved up to Washington. Before you got pregnant with Juanita. I think it’s important.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she flared.
She was crashing from her coke high, and already she’d gone too far with him, answered too many of his questions, revealed too much of her past to him for her to stop now. Her resistance had very nearly totally collapsed.
It was a strange year during which she had tried to ingratiate herself with her family, she said. She spent a lot of time with her mother and with her sister. But it wasn’t the same any longer, and she’d known at the time that she had crossed some invisible bridge, not only because she had married an American, but because of her infidelity. Her mother had looked into her eyes and had seen as clearly as if it was written there. It was a thing she was incapable of hiding from someone who had known her so well. Her sister knew or suspected, too, that something was amiss. She became terribly busy that year, too busy with her own family for Evita, which added still another burden in a load that was rapidly becoming impossible to hold up let alone carry. “Get on your knees and ask forgiveness from God,” her mother told her. But by then she figured it was already too late for her. She was a spy and an adultress. How could there be any forgiveness for her? For a time she traveled, moving from their city house to their mountain chalet, where she would stay for a month or a week or sometimes for just a day. Then she would pack a few things in her sports car and drive recklessly fast down to their house on the sea, where she would isolate herself even from the house staff, sometimes remaining in her room for days on end, eating only a small meal every second or third day so that she lost a lot of weight. She began to be sick all the time. Her movements became erratic. She traveled all over Mexico. Sometimes staying at their homes, sometimes in luxury hotels, sometimes in terrible, dirty, bug-infested village inns from which she would come away even sicker than before. She was trying to find herself. Trying to make some sense out of her life. And not doing a very good job of it.
McGarvey didn’t know how he could help her. He wanted to reach out and take her into his arms and hold her close and tell her that those times were long past, that memories alone could not hurt her, not really. But he suspected she was beyond even that sort of comfort.
Evita was staring past him into the fireplace, her eyes filling, tears running slowly down her cheeks as she relived the personal hell she’d been subjected to. She could have been alone in the room for all that she was aware of his presence.
“Evita?” he said gently.
She blinked and nodded.
“I was no longer a mexicana, don’t you see?” she said. “I had lost my country, but I hadn’t found a new home. Not yet. I was alone. Drifting. Darby and Valentin had both left me, though I hadn’t realized it yet.” She closed her eyes.
“What happened to you down there?”
“I got my education, didn’t you hear?” she whispered. “I saw my family and my country as a gringo would see them, as a foreigner would see them, and what I found wasn’t very pretty. Especially the part where everyone was looking back at me. I had become a stranger in my own land, and my own people looked at me like I was a foreigner. I’d been to the north and to the south. I’d been west to the Pacific and to the ancient East. But there was nothing left for me. Nothing at all.” She held out her glass. “I’d like more champagne.”
“Don’t you have a show tonight?” McGarvey asked.
“More.”
McGarvey poured her another glass of wine and brought it back to her. He lit her a cigarette. He was getting a little worried about her. Between the wine and the cocaine she was very strung out.
“What happened, Evita?” he asked. “What did they do to you down there?”
“I walked in on Valentin and Darby,” she said. “They were together in my bed making love to each other.”
McGarvey had expected almost anything except that, but although he was startled he did not allow it to show on his face. Baranov was a powerful man. He’d heard it a dozen different ways now, and still he had not begun to suspect just how powerful and dedicated a man the Russian was until now. Baranov had got Yarnell to spy for him and had then cemented the relationship by seducing first his wife and then Yarnell himself. He had ruined them both as a couple and both, ultimately, as individuals. Yarnell the superstar had met his match, and Evita the naive little Mexican princess had succumbed simply as a matter of course. Her turning had to have been ridiculously easy. Hardly a challenge for the likes of Yarnell or Baranov. Yet they had taken the time and effort to do it. Why? Yarnell because he wanted an image during his tenure in Mexico. But why Baranov? What more could he have hoped to have gained by seducing first the wife and then the husband … unless Yarnell had made a desperate attempt to control the situation instead of himself being controlled? If that had been his battle, he had lost. Yet later, in Washington and then in Moscow, Yarnell had comported himself as the perfect spy. He hardly faltered. By then Baranov’s control had probably been so utterly complete that Yarnell was no longer even thinking for himself. And poor little Evita had been left behind in the dust. So why pick on her again? She’d said Baranov had been here less than a year ago.
“He wanted Darby and me to get back together,” she said. “Because we both needed each other, we both were drifting and there was more to life than that. He came here in the middle of the night and let himself in. The first I knew he was here was when I woke up with him in bed beside me. And we made love. He still knows me. Knows my body, which buttons to push, which chains to rattle. And I enjoyed it, do you understand? It was wonderful. Had he asked me, I would have run off with him anywhere. Even to Moscow.”
“But he didn’t ask.”
“No.”
“What then, Evita? Why did he come here? What did he want?”
She looked away.
“What did he say to you?”
“He told me about you.”
“By name?”
“No. He said that someone who had once been in the Company would be coming around asking questions about him and about Darby. He was specific in that you no longer worked for the Company. You don’t, do you?”
“No,” McGarvey said.
“He told me that I should tell you everything. That I should be completely honest with you.”
“Except about his visit.”
She closed her eyes. “He never knew that I saw him and Darby together. He knows everything except for that. It’s been my own secret.”
She was getting back at Baranov. Now, after all these years, she had finally struck a blow at the man who in her estimation had ruined her marriage. It was the real reason she had talked to McGarvey. Or at least one of the reasons. There was another. Fear.
“Now he wants Juanita, doesn’t he?”
Evita opened her eyes. “You bastard!” she said with a lot of feeling. “You sonofabitch! You’re all alike.”
“Darby will give her up to save his own position and you know it.”