The Mulberry Bush (23 page)

“Not me,” Amzi said.

“Security?”

“I'll have to get back to you on that.” His back was still turned.

Amzi had become less anthropoid. You might even have said there were signs of human feelings in his eyes and in his posture. But also resentment, reluctance: He had the look of a man who has been forced to know something he did not want to know.

I said, “Amzi, did you keep the bargain, did you get Alejandro and Felicia out of Argentina, did you relocate them? Are they alive? Did they survive?”

Amzi remained silent. He went to the window again, hiding his face.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“There was a wild card.”

“Who played it?”

Amzi held up a hand. He said, “That's all you get. We'
re
done. Get the fuck out of here.”

Later in an otherwise empty day, I parked my car in the short-term lot at Dulles, rented another car, and at five o'clock by TR's shadow, met Father Yuri on Theodore Roosevelt Island.

I said, “This is about Alejandro. I know you were his confessor and what restraints that involves, but I'm not interested in anything he may have told you. I want to tell you something, then ask for your opinion.”

He nodded.

I told him what I knew—or more accurately, what I had been told about Amzi's dealings with Alejandro. Father Yuri listened in his usual deep silence, eyes averted as if we were in some invisible confessional booth.

He said, “What do you want?”

I said, “First, is that an accurate account?”

“I cannot answer that.”

I took that to mean it was an accurate account, something that Alejandro had told him. It wasn't all I wanted to know.

I said, “In payment for what Alejandro gave him, did Amzi save his life and the life of Felicia? Are they alive?”

Father Yuri said, “You should talk to Diego about this.”

He walked away. I would never see him again. I was sure of that.

That evening at dinner Luz listened as I recounted this conversation.

She said, “Why talk to Diego? We've always known they could kill you. They can kill anyone, whenever and wherever they like. They were just reminding you.”

I said, “If it just confirms what we always knew, then why the sudden change of heart?”

Luz, who never apologized, never explained, ignored the question. She cleared the dishes and carried them into the kitchen and returned with a salad bowl in one hand and a cheese board in the other. In silence, like a dutiful wife from the twentieth century but without the dazzling smile, she mixed the salad. She poured more wine into my glass.

She smiled as if for the camera and pressed the tip of my nose with a fingertip and said, “Do you ever get tired of vinaigrette and the same two cheeses?”

“No.”

“Delice de Bourgogne and gorgonzola night after night, olive oil, lemon juice, mustard on your lettuce over and over again. You wouldn't prefer ranch or Eyetalian right from the bottle and a well-aged Velveeta?”

Now she was smiling a
Midwich Cuckoos
smile. I put my hand on her bottom and said, “Don't make fun of American culture.”

“Why not? Answer the question.”

I said, “No,
you
answer the real question. What's going on here?”

The smile vanished.

“I thought you'd never ask,” Luz said. “I wish I could tell you I'm pregnant and I don't want to bear a child that's condemned to relive the life I've lived because her father was just another Alejandro and her mother was another Felicia and she will never be sure if they are dead or alive. However, I'm not pregnant, and if I ever become pregnant I will put an end to it on the day I find out because I couldn't condemn the child to live the life I led, and one ruined lifetime waiting for the dead to come home in the night and wake you up and give you a kiss and a wonderful new doll pays the taxes on political insanity.”

“You think they may still be alive?”

“Not anymore. But what difference would it make if they were? The damage is done.”

She was dry-eyed, angry, immovable.

I said, “I still want to talk to Diego.”

“About what?”

“The past.”

“You're going to Buenos Aires?”

“Yes. Interested?”

“No. I've already talked to Diego about the past.”

“I'd like to have your help. He may need encouragement.”

“Diego? He's immune to encouragement. He does what he wants, nothing else.”

I started to speak. She stopped me with a gesture. This was a new Luz.

“Enough,” she said. “In three weeks my grandparents celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary. I'll come then.”

Her eyes said, If you're still alive three weeks from now.

As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, we ate our salad and finished the cheese and the wine. We left the dishes on the table and went upstairs. For the first time ever she did not make the first move. When I touched her she submitted, but she did so in silence, and when it was over she turned her back to me. She slept in silence, too—no murmured conversations with the people in her dreams, no laughter of delight.

Oh yes, Luz had changed. Whatever happened to her had happened in Colombia. That was where I needed to go. In the morning I called Amzi. Rosemary said he was traveling and unreachable.

I called Tom Terhune and told him Amzi had suggested I go on leave and I was leaving today.

“Good idea,” Tom said. His voice was flat. “When do you want to start?”

“Now.”

“Fine. Go. Take Luz with you. You won't be bothered. Turn off your cell phone.”

He didn't tell me to call when I got back. He didn't ask how long I would be gone or where I was going.

He merely disconnected. I was not the only one who had been talking to Amzi. Everyone was leaving without saying good-bye: Amzi, who had probably never said good-bye to anyone in his life, Father Yuri. And now, Luz. It didn't take a mystic to read the signs.

From the office I went back to the house to pick up my passport. Just as I was leaving—no note for Luz, no good-bye, she would either be there when I got back or she wouldn't be—she returned from wherever she had been.

She said, “Do you plan to come back?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Not exactly. What I want, what I have to have, is for you to leave your other wife and do it today and lock her up and never see her or think about her again.”

“What other wife?”

“Let's call her by her true name. The witch.”

“Stop talking in code. Spit it out, Luz.”

“I mean that thing that introduced us has been living with us ever since, hiding in our minds, lying between us when we fuck, which is why I fuck like a psychopath, because I'm trying to get past the witch to give myself to your self. I can't live with the witch any longer. You've got to burn her. Kill the bitch. Now, this minute.”

She didn't have to tell me what she meant in plain language. I knew what she meant. The witch was the plan, the prank, the revenge for our fathers.

I said, “How do I do that? And if I do, will you believe me?”

“Yes. Decide. Now.”

“What do you burn in return? Your parents?”

“They burned themselves at the stake long ago. They threw me away just like yours threw you away. My mother made her escape by dying rather than go on with the life to which the Aguilars' money had condemned her. She must have been glad to be thrown out of that airplane and realize she was free of her prison. Not the one the army ran. The one with the invisible walls.”

“And your father?”

“He made his choice, too, didn't he? To die without actually dying. How clever. No wonder he's the saint of fools. He didn't care enough about me even to let me know he was alive. I may have been his own flesh and blood, but how could he care about that when I was the child of a woman he never loved, just something he fucked whenever he had nothing better to fuck? For twenty years he was dead to me, dead to the
abuelos,
dead to everyone who ever trusted him except Diego, who was the only one who was too smart to trust him, and now I discover from a stranger in a hellhole in the Colombian jungle that ….”

Luz stopped herself.

I said, “Discover what?”

Silence. She remained dry-eyed, absent, in complete control of herself.

“No more,” she said. “I'm out. I'm through being your companion in lunacy, through being a spy for Diego, tattling on you, telling him everything because he acts like a father to me for the purposes of cover because he wants to give eternal life to the lie that has ruined my life. It wouldn't have cost the bastards a peso to tell me the truth. My truth to you is, I can't love you if you don't give up volunteering to be murdered.”

This was a performance, not an outburst. She was perfectly composed—not a hint of expression in her voice or her face. Her voice was cold, measured, as if she had learned her lines.

“So what do you want from me?”

“I just told you,” she said. “You have to burn the witch, give up avenging someone who deserved what he got. Yes, he did! Delete the bastard. It's easy—one keystroke. I am filthy rich—literally. The money is filthy. Diego paid me off on my thirtieth birthday. We can go anywhere, be anyone, love for the sake of love.”

“And if I don't give it up?”

“Then good-bye. If you want to die for the sake of a pile of the shit deposited in your mind by liars and fools instead of loving me as I love you, go right ahead. Yes or no?”

“I'll have to think about it.”

“‘
Think
about it? ‘“ Luz said. “You don't know whether to choose the witch or me?”

“Luz, stop.”

“Too late, my friend. It's over. Get out of my house. Go. Die alone.”

Luz!”

“
Go
.”

I remembered Sana'a: the look on Faraj's face when he felt the knife.

If Damián was surprised to hear from me, I didn't hear it in his voice when I called him from the airport in Bogotá. A more suspicious man than myself, if such existed, might have wondered if he had been forewarned.

Like Tom, like Amzi, like Father Yuri, he asked no questions. Nor did he offer any invitations.

I said, “I need to talk to you.”

“You do? About what?”

“A personal matter. Can we meet?”

Silence. I thought he might have hung up on me.

He said, “Does Luz know you're doing this?”

“No.”

“Does anyone?”

“No.”

“Are you doing this in the line of duty?”

“No.”

“It's four o'clock in the morning. I have a surgery at six-thirty. You have no manners.”

“I know. Is the house where Luz and I stayed still empty?”

“Yes, but the security people will shoot you if they find you on the grounds at this hour of the night. Park five houses away, to the east but headed west. What kind of car do you have?”

“A small gray Mazda.”

“One hour, exactly. I will drive by. Follow me. Don't be early or you might very well be shot. This is a dangerous neighborhood after dark for strangers lurking in cheap automobiles.”

Precisely on the minute, Damián's Audi passed by. I followed. He turned into the drive of the house where Luz and I had stayed.

We did not go inside. In the garden, in the dark, he said, in English, “I have half an hour. What do you want?”

“Information.”

“I thought you were off duty.”

“I am. As I said, this is personal. What happened to my wife while she was in Colombia?”

Damián considered the question. His thoughts showed on his face: Should he ignore me, should he lie, should he tell me the truth even if I had no right to it and anyway, being a stupid Yanqui, I could not possibly understand it? Should he escape from this dilemma by calling security and reporting an intruder in the house? Should he shoot me and leave my body where it fell for security to get rid of?

He said, “What do you suspect?”

“That you told her something she didn't know about Alejandro.”

“You suspect this on what basis?”

“Her behavior, your history, intuition.”

“Intuition has been defined as the way your brain warns you when you're wrong about something.”

“Her behavior and your history don't suggest that.”

Damián said, “One day when you were at work, I took her to Leticia, Colombia. Have you heard of it?”

“No. Where is it?”

“A two-hour flight from Bogotá. It's a hellhole on the north bank of the Amazon at the point where Colombia, Peru, and Brazil come together. Half the town is in Brazil under another name. Its economy is based on drugs, murder, and kidnapping. The surrounding jungle is home to terrorists who want to be drug millionaires and drug millionaires who used to be terrorists. Leticia may be the most dangerous place in the world outside of the Afghanistan. Once you are there no one can find you and no one can rescue you and you have no place to go.”

“So why did you take her to such a place?”

“To visit her father's grave.”

I said, “Why is Alejandro buried in Leticia, Colombia?”

“His burial is relatively recent. Leticia is where he went when everyone thought he was dead because it's the last place on earth and that's where Mr. Amzi Strange, mad genius that he is, thought he would be safe because the terrorists would protect him, and because once he was there he could not leave because the terrorists would not let him leave because he was the Jesus Christ of the revolution and they would be unable to protect him if he did. And besides, Alejandro was already in business in Leticia.”

“Doing what?”

Damián snorted—what did I
think
he was doing?

He said, “Let me say this: Luz is a very, very rich woman for the daughter of a man who once chose poverty as a matter of principle and didn't have a peso in his pocket when he escaped from Argentina.”

“He was a drug trader?”

“A drug lord. One of the biggest. In his own mind, twisted as it was, he was still a terrorist, incognito for the cause, who believed that he was filling up a treasury for the revolution that must inevitably come to pass.”

“And Luz's mother?”

“They were betrayed at the last moment by the North Americans, or maybe just one American. The military took her.”

“But not Alejandro?”

“That was the deal. He had already handed over everybody in the movement except the cadre. The junta didn't know who the cadre was. Probably they still don't know for certain, and if they do, they now work for what used to be the cadre, because the cadre now runs the country. Felicia did know all the names, so to the military, having her was almost as good as having Alejandro. Amzi negotiated the substitution. She was supposed to be a hostage to guarantee Alejandro wouldn't start a new movement. Diego was the brains. He was always the brains. And the treasurer.”

I thought,
And what were you?
But said, “You're telling me Felicia survived, too?”

“Alejandro may have thought so. They had released her to Amzi, but then they took her back at the last moment as a guarantee of his good conduct. But she didn't talk. So just as the legend says, they threw her out of an airplane after taking a lot of photographs of her in different clothes and different hairstyles, always with a current newspaper in her hand. Every three months or so until the junta was overthrown they sent Alejandro a retouched picture to show that his wife was alive and well and just as beautiful as ever. To verify a fictitious date, they Photoshopped the front page of the newspaper edition of that day into the picture. Someone from your organization had shown them how it was done.”

“If Amzi betrayed Alejandro and Felicia, why would he save Alejandro?”

“He didn't betray them. Headquarters was supposed to take custody of Felicia, protect her, keep her alive. Amzi was a swine, but he was a man of his word. The military grabbed her at the airport at the last minute, when she was already aboard a plane. They grabbed Alejandro, too, but Amzi made them a deal and they released him in his custody.”

“Then who did sell them out?”

“A young Headquarters guy in the Buenos Aires station who thought all terrorists should die. A zealot, like us, but on the other side.”

“His name?”

Another snort from Damián. Had I no manners at all? The eastern sky was vivid—Renoir pink, Gainsborough blue—and became more so by the minute.

As the colors intensified I said, “You know everything else. You must know the name of the informant.”

Damián said, “There's no end to your curiosity, is there? All right. What harm can it do after all these years? His name was Terhune. Maybe you know him.”

He looked at his watch. He said, “Four-thirty. I have to go. Don't contact me again, ever. Do not go to Leticia. Go home. Don't come back to this country. You are not welcome in our past.”