“Are we going after Darby and Valentin? Is that why you’ve come?”
“Yes.”
She seemed to think about it for a long moment. “Then the truth is what you’ll get,” she said. “Only I don’t think you’re going to like it very much.”
It was late afternoon. Their flight was due to touch down in Mexico City a few minutes before eight. The plane was barely half-filled so they had three seats to themselves in the smoking section near the rear. A thin haze hung over them. They had drinks, but had passed on the dinner. The stews had left them alone for the past half hour. Evita was strung out. “I don’t know what will happen to me if I have to meet face-to-face with him again. You can’t imagine what he’s like.”
They were all bastards, McGarvey thought.
“He’s worse than Darby,” she said, looking out the window. “More ruthless. More sure of himself.” She turned back. “He gets what he wants. Always.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that you went to Mexico City to see him?”
“It wasn’t important.” She shrugged. “It had nothing to do with what you wanted.”
“Did you see him?”
“No. But I found him. That part was easy. He’s living in our old house. Same staff for all I know,” she said bitterly. “I had to find out.”
McGarvey hadn’t been following her until that moment when it suddenly occurred to him what she was talking about. “It was your daughter, Juanita.”
“Someone told me she was there.”
“With Baranov?”
“I didn’t know. She went down with some of her friends from school. He would know she was there.”
“Was she with him?”
“What do you want from me?” Evita flared. “Cristo!”
“Was she there? Was your daughter with Baranov?”
“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “She and her friends were there. But I didn’t find out about it until later. I didn’t know at the time.” She shook her head. “She was proud of herself. For all I know Darby made the introductions.”
“Why didn’t you do something about it?”
“I wanted to,” she flared again. “I wanted to take a gun and shoot him dead. I wanted to make him suffer like I had. But it wasn’t possible. Nothing is possible against him.”
“Why did he come to you in New York, then?”
“He offered to give her back,” she said. Her eyes were filling. “Do you understand me? He offered to sell me my own daughter. Which was a laugh because when she finally did come back to the States she went straight to her father. So everything I’ve done in the past nine months has been for nothing.”
It was coming now, McGarvey thought. The truth, so far as Evita knew it. And he thought he had a good guess what it might be. All a part of Baranov’s plan. The Russian had made his calculations well.
“What was the price?” he asked. “That you spy for him?”
“I had been his whore in the early days. It was time to graduate. To grow up. It was important that we all expand, that each among us finds our place, our purpose in life.”
“You supplied the club and the call girls?”
She nodded. “And Valentin arranged for the marks. Most of them were diplomats from the UN. But we got a steady Washington crowd, too, especially on the weekends.”
“The tables are wired for sound?”
“That’s right. The cameras are in the ceilings and in my apartment, of course.”
“Who collects the film?”
“No film. It’s all electronic this time. Goes out over a phone line to somewhere in the city.”
“No one comes to maintain the equipment?”
“Not in the nine months since it was installed.”
“Do you have a switch so that you can turn the system off?” McGarvey asked. “When you want privacy?”
She shook her head.
“Everything that’s said or done in the club, in your apartment, is transmitted?”
She nodded.
“Including our conversations?”
“Yes,” she said. She smiled wanly. “I tried to warn you.”
“But I wouldn’t listen,” McGarvey mumbled to fill the gap.
“Men never do.”
He might not have heard her. He was thinking of everything that had gone before. The unexplained, the unexplainable had come clear. Or at least a significant portion had. But he hadn’t told her everything. She hadn’t been told, for instance, about Janos. She was a leak, but she wasn’t the only one. He wondered then, about his own stupidity. He had made a colossal blunder with Evita. What other blunders had he made? In how many other instances had Baranov forseen his moves; in how many other places had Baranov anticipated his actions and lain in the bushes waiting for him? Somewhere a long time ago he had heard the notion that some lives are inevitable and that of those lives some are terrible yet necessary. It wasn’t fate; rather it was more akin to the ball rolling downhill — once it began its journey nothing short of catastrophe could stop it, which was ironic because at the bottom of the hill lay another sort of catastrophe. McGarvey felt at that moment as if he were rushing headlong down his own path of inevitability, and had been ever since Santiago.
Evita told him a story about a young boy who lived in the small town of Bellavista and dreamed someday of going to the big city and doing great things. The problem was, he had no idea what a big city was and even less of an idea what a great thing might be. Nevertheless, he prayed every night for his dreams to come true and eventually they did. Only they turned into nightmares because of his stupidity.
It was clear she was telling a story about herself. “What happened?” McGarvey asked.
“It’s simple. He got in over his head. He attracted too much attention and the vultures came after him.”
“And?”
“In all of his life, the young boy never had more than a single centavo to call his own. One coin in his pocket. So his wish was that as often as he put his hand in his pocket, there would be a centavo for him. Hundreds of centavos. Thousands of centavos. Millions. But still only one centavo at a time.”
“So he went to the big city. Did he do great things?”
“You don’t understand. Who cares about a single centavo at a time, no matter how many of them there are? The little boy was not only very stupid, but he turned out to be a freak and finally an outcast among his own people.”
“The problem is, I can’t figure out what it is that Baranov is really after,” McGarvey said. “He’s been working on it for months, perhaps even years, and something is about to happen. Do the names Ted Asher or Arthur Jules mean anything to you? Anything at all?”
“Never heard of them,” she said. “What have they got to do with this? Are they friends of Darby’s?”
“They were murdered last year on their way to Mexico City.”
Her eyes widened. “Valentin?”
“Most likely.”
“Why? Were they investigating him?”
“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “But I’d guess they were.”
“He’ll kill us, too, you know.”
“He might try.”
“He’d be crazy not to,” Evita said. “And why are we going to him like this? What exactly do you hope to accomplish? Are you going to try to kill him?”
McGarvey thought again about Janos and Owens, and about himself. Baranov had had plenty of opportunities to have him killed. But not so much as one attempt had been made on his life. Baranov knew about him and so did Yarnell, through the surveillance equipment in Evita’s club if nothing else. So why hadn’t someone come after him in the middle of the night? Why hadn’t someone planted a bomb in one of the cars he had rented? Why hadn’t his hotel been staked out? Why hadn’t they come after him and Basulto in Miami? Especially Basulto. It was the Cuban who blew the whistle, who fingered Yarnell and therefore Baranov.