Half the Day Is Night (46 page)

So why weren't the Uncles here?

The station cleared leaving them alone on their platform.

“This is crazy,” she whispered to David, to keep her voice from echoing. She hated standing here, it would have been better to have told Saad to meet them on the street. At least on the street she and David would have had some place to go if they saw someone.

“It's like the parking, all concrete,” David said. So she knew he was afraid, too.

Every time the chute came in she tensed, thinking Saad would be on it. The chute would come in, rumbling the concrete under her feet, and people would get off. Rush-hour traffic, for a moment the station would be full of feet and voices. The chute would rumble out and she would scan the crowd frantically, looking for Saad. Beside her, David rose on the balls of his feet, trying to look. No Saad, unless she had missed him. And in a couple of moments, the platform would clear.

There were four more chutes before she finally saw Saad get off, but when she saw him, she wondered how she thought she could have missed him.

“Sorry,” he said, “I couldn't get out of work.”

He couldn't get out of work? He didn't sound like someone who was leaving the country the next day. What were they going to do, fire him?

She looked at David, wondering if they should run now. But after Saad, what did they have left to try?

It was not good to be desperate.

The streets were full of people coming from work. Lots of women with string bags. Never men, why don't men ever shop, she wondered.

Saad was nervous, he chattered about work, about someone named Septiem who had wanted him to stay and help with something even though he kept saying he had an appointment. She found it hard to follow so she didn't try.

She remembered the way to the loft this time. Saad pulled on the door. She wanted to say, “Wait.” She wanted to talk to David.

“It's early,” Saad said. “The night people aren't here yet.”

“What about your partner?” she said, hanging at the door. “What if he's here?”

“Galvez is in Del Sud,” Saad said. “You think I'm crazy? I wouldn't bring you here if Galvez was here, he'd kill me.”

The doorway at the top of the stairwell was dark, as if no one was there, but still she hung back, unwilling to climb the stairs.

“What?” David asked.

“I don't know,” she said. So she climbed the stairs, listening, straining to hear the sound of people.

The loft was dark, and when Saad palmed the lights, the lines of benches were empty.

“Where are the people with the documents?” she asked.

“They're coming at seven,” Saad said.

Now it was coming. Now the Uncles would come up the stairs, that was why Saad had been late, some sort of last-minute procedural nonsense.

She thought David would react, the way he had when he saw the crucifix in the political's bedroom. David would put it all together, get them out of here.

David sat down at a workbench.

Saad said, “I'll make coffee.”

It sounded exaggeratedly normal. Everything was extraordinarily normal. Saad went into the office and she held her breath, but after a moment he came out with the carafe from the coffee maker and ran water in it.

The sound of the water was loud.

They drank coffee and waited for the people with the documents to arrive. The coffee was sweet and bitter. Tim had always said that coffee in Caribe tasted funny. Assuming she did leave tomorrow, the coffee would never taste this way again. How could she already be homesick and she hadn't even left?

At seven minutes after according to her chron, someone beat on the heavy door at the street. Saad got up too fast.

It would be so strange to be sitting here drinking coffee when the Uncles came in. But on the other hand, it would be over.

She heard Saad say hello, waited for the Uncles to rush up the stairs, but instead she heard the sharp sound of voices. They came up slowly, someone walking heavily.

But it wasn't the Uncles, it was a stocky Indian woman and an old hispanic man. The old man was leaning heavily on the bannister, his body bent forward and his arm ahead of him as he pulled himself up the steps. The woman had a camera bag around her neck and a big briefcase in one hand.

The woman looked hostile, she would not look at any of them. The old man was too busy recovering from the stairs to look up from the floor.

It was her luck that Saad's document forgers were bargain basement. She found it hard to believe that these people could hack the security system at the port and create the necessary authorization to get them through. Hackers were usually kids, soft feral boys who looked as if they never got any exercise.

“Stand against the wall,” the woman said to David. There were no introductions. How nice it would be to be back in the world where people said, “hi, I'm—”

David didn't look comfortable standing against the wall. The command had an ominous ring to it. But all she did was take some ims.

“Now you,” she said to Mayla.

Mayla brushed her hair with her fingers, trying to get it to lie flat. Who cares, she thought, but she did it anyway.

“Okay,” the woman said. She heaved the briefcase onto one of the benches and took out what looked like a printer. She found a power source. While she was scuttling around, the old man slowly lowered himself into a chair.

“Here,” she said suddenly, turning back to the camera which had been steadily spitting out ims. She dug into the briefcase again and pulled out a reader. “Pick out an im.”

They were all awful, but document ims always looked awful. In the light from the loft she looked flat-faced and kind of Chinese, which was a surprise. She picked one out, handed the reader to David. He put one of his in the reader and—she was pleased to see—grimaced.

“I look ghastly, too,” she said.

“I hate my ims,” he said.

The Indian woman looked irritated. “You do not want too good a picture,” she said. “Pictures look a little different from the cardbearer, because time has passed.”

The Indian woman took the im and slipped it into a fold in a blank ID card. She fed the card into the printer.

For a moment they all stood looking at the printer. Mayla was holding her breath. Then the card fed out. The Indian woman glanced at it and handed it to Mayla. It was still warm.

The card looked like a regular card but the name on the card was Constanza Rodriguez. The Indian woman did the same for David and his card said Luis Chen.

“Now,” said the Indian woman to Mayla, “I cut your hair.”

“Pardon me?” Mayla said.

“Women never look the same as their card, always a bit different, because their hair is longer or shorter. At the port, they will be looking for things like that. So I will trim your hair so it will be different.” The woman smiled maliciously, “Don't worry, I am not expensive.”

Okay, so she could get another haircut in Miami. “Not too short,” she said, feeling foolish.

“Okay,” the woman said.

The old man started to get up.

“Baba,” the woman said, “stay quiet.” He blinked at her but sat back down.

“Would he like some coffee?” Saad asked.

She shook her head. “It isn't good for his heart.”

“Coffee?” the old man said, his voice a rasp.

“No, Baba,” she said loudly. “There's no coffee.” She took scissors out of her briefcase. “He cannot be left alone anymore,” she said, matter-of-factly.

He wasn't Indian, maybe her father-in-law? She wasn't wearing a wedding ring, and Mayla thought Indian women did wear wedding rings but she wasn't sure.

The woman cut her hair briskly, with practiced movements. It was strange to have her hair cut without a mirror to look in. She wondered what she was doing. Mayla wanted to say not too much again, but she didn't dare, so she sat, listening to the snip of scissors.

“What about David?” she finally asked.

“Men do not change so much,” the woman said. “Just do not wear the same clothes that you wore in the im.” The scissors snicked. She seemed to be taking off a lot around the ears.

“Okay,” she finally said.

“It looks nice,” David said. “You look different.”

“I think it is a good look for you, Constanza,” the woman said. “Okay. That is all, you have your cards.”

“What about the port system?” Mayla asked. “What about hacking it?”

“My hacker works at the port. The cards have an access code that the technicians use to check the equipment, they will come up green,” the woman said. “Then the system don't even check your information against the base, it just repeat the information on your card. But use them fast, the port changes the codes sometimes.”

“Will tomorrow be okay?” Saad asked.

“Should be,” she said. And then loudly, “Okay Baba, let's go.”

Mayla wished she had a mirror.

*   *   *

She hated her haircut. It was short on the sides and hung longer and flipped under in the back. Her bangs ran across her forehead. It was too young for her, for one thing, a middle-school girl's haircut. For another, it looked, well, cheap. It made her look hard. And old. Or maybe the last few months had made her look old. Or maybe she was just tired. But she didn't like the haircut at all.

“I like it,” David said.

Men liked things like that, though. Men didn't recognize class, they liked flash. This haircut was all flash, like a tight gauzy blouse.

It would grow out. If it got them to Miami then she'd have nothing to complain about.

David was sitting on the bed. He had a duffel bag. It was mostly empty: a toothbrush, a change of clothes. She had a little suitcase that was just as empty, but they thought it would seem strange if they didn't have any luggage at all.

She sat down on the bed. Nothing to do but go, but she was afraid.

He sat down next to her. He had been so good, not pressuring her about sex, just letting that one night go as if it had never happened.

“You're a good man, David,” she said.

He smiled and the creases ran away from the corners of his eyes. “I am not so good,” he said.

“If it wasn't for you,” she said, “I'd have been arrested.”

He shrugged. “If it wasn't for me, you would never have been suspected. Because I walked away from the house.”

“Maybe,” she said, “maybe not. The blue and whites can make strange decisions.”

“They are crazy, the institution, because the country is crazy. Now we have to go.”

But she still thought it, following him out of the room. He was a good man, he tried to do the good thing. Maybe he shouldn't have walked away from the bombing, but he had called her, when it would have been smarter not to. And he had stayed with her since she found him on the fish farm.

A good man. But that sounded like a judgment, it sounded final. A superstitious shudder walked up her spine. She shouldn't be thinking about him in final terms.

She tried to think of Miami, but there was nothing, she couldn't force her mind in any direction at all.

They were on their way to the port. Saad would be at the port.

She was leaving Caribe. That should have been good for some emotion but it wasn't. She did hope, in an abstract sort of way, that Tim had left. She should call her grandfather—

What an amazing reflex. Call her grandfather. Absolutely. Just as soon as she got to Miami.

They got off the chute at the Marincite Port Authority and walking up the ramp she saw an Uncle. All in black, like at Tumipamba's funeral, with a headset. He was watching the crowd come through the entrance. She half-stepped and David said, “Keep walking.”

Of course, if they turned around that would call attention to themselves.

David drifted away from her and then back until there was a couple of meters between them so they did not appear to be walking together. Maybe her haircut would hide her. Nothing could hide the fact that he was oriental. Was he going to allow them to pick him up so they wouldn't see her?

No, she thought, if they were looking for a couple, there was no sense in being a couple.

She passed the Uncle, her eyes on the concrete ramp, her shoulders tense, waiting for him to come away from the wall, to glide through the crowd like a barracuda—

But he didn't move, not when she passed, not when David passed. She thought maybe he said something into his headset, but she wasn't sure, and it didn't necessarily have to be about them. Or maybe they were just going to be picked up farther in.

Her stomach hurt and she had to go to the bathroom.

She saw the ladies public and ducked in. It smelled, publics always did, but she felt a little sheltered.

She had cramps and she took a long time, and all the time she was sitting there she expected the stall door to be kicked open and the Uncles to come in and rag her out with her tights around her knees. She had her hands clasped together, she felt as if she were praying, but she didn't really know what to do except think, please no, please no. But the Uncles didn't come.

They weren't waiting when she came out of the public. Across the concourse she saw David reading a newspaper but she pretended not to see him. She checked her gate on the monitors and saw him fold the newspaper and start walking. So she walked to.

At the gate she would find Saad and get their tickets. Then she would leave David's on the seat so he could pick it up. If he got to the gate, if she got to the gate—

Two more Uncles in black, standing outside a stall that sold coconut bread hamburgers and beer. And two more a little beyond them on the other side of the concourse. Uncles everywhere. For her and David, for Saad? Had something happened and Saad's partner figured out what was going on? Were their documents okay or had the Indian woman betrayed them?

She saw their gate, full of people. She saw Saad waiting just this side of the departure check. She started for Saad, better if she got the tickets from Saad than if David did, she was marginally more disguised than he was.