The road to Zacatecas had some rollercoaster twists and turns in the mountains, but was mostly a ruler-straight line through dusty desert, with occasional small, dusty towns, and the larger cities Monterrey and Saltillo, also dusty. Actually, we both would have liked to slow down and see the country, which had a spare beauty neither of us had experienced before, but there were time constraints. Radical plastic surgery isn’t an outpatient procedure, and they weren’t going to delay the summit while I healed.
We spent the night in the suburbs of Saltillo, again leaving at first light, and arrived in Zacatecas in the early afternoon. First we went to a bank and rented the largest safe-deposit box we could buy, filling it completely with hundred-dollar bills. That left us with three packets of ten thousand dollars each, for spending money.
The Free Clinic didn’t advertise in the streets, didn’t have an address in any directory. We’d been told to look up one Eduardo de Rivera at 26 Hidalgo. Of course he wasn’t in, and the housekeeper didn’t know where we could find him or when he’d be back. We sat in an outdoor cantina on the other side of the street for a couple of hours watching the door. When a man in a business suit rushed up to it, we were right behind him. Cutting short our introductions, he ushered us in hurriedly and turned us over to the housekeeper, saying he’d be back in a few minutes, and ran upstairs.
Like all the other residences on the block, 26 Hidalgo looked rundown from the outside, just a crumbling dusty adobe wall with a heavy door, double-locked and braced with metal bands. Inside, the place was opulent. Thick carpets and expensive
woods in large, cool rooms with high ceilings, brass fixtures gleaming labor-intensively. Medieval wall hangings and pre-Columbian sculptures. We passed a grand piano and an ornately carved antique billiard table on our way to the atrium, where the housekeeper, Consuelo, seated us in comfortable wicker chairs in front of a trickling fountain that was very old and ostentatiously Italian. There was a riot of orchids in planters around the room, and exotic dwarf fruit trees. Wordlessly, she brought a bottle of Dom Pérignon and three crystal fluted glasses. She poured two of them and disappeared.
Valerie toasted me. “I think we’ve been in the wrong racket all these years.”
“Doing all right now, though.” I switched to Larry Martino’s soft, refined voice. “Here he comes.”
Senor de Rivera had traded his coat and tie for a cardigan pullover. He looked like Carl Sagan back in the seventies. The man who came down with him looked like George Raft in the thirties. Silent, unsmiling, stuffed into a dark suit. He obviously had company in the suit,.45 caliber or so. He stayed at the entrance to the atrium, unfortunately out of the watch’s range.
De Rivera’s English had an unexpected Hebrew accent. I later learned he had grown up in Argentina at a time when being Jewish was becoming more and more dangerous, and so had gone to college and medical school in Tel Aviv, where he first learned the tongue of Shakespeare and Henny Youngman. “It is a facelift you want,” he said. “One or both?”
“Both of us want some modification,” I said. “For me, a combination: rhytidectomy, rhinoplasty, mentoplasty, and blepharoplasty….”
“Okay.” He put a finger to his lips. “You have
looked into it. Face-lift, nose reconstruction, chin augmentation, eyelift. Expensive and painful. You are sure, or you want advice?”
“I’ll take advice.”
“Okay. You aren’t doing this so you look pretty. You’re doing this so that someone looks at you, he sees someone else.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. I can make you look young like your own son. Brow-lift and then hair transplant to cover the scars.”
“I’d like that, but the hair transplant takes months, doesn’t it?” He nodded. “I have to be out of here in five or six weeks.”
“Okay. The other procedures should be doable in that time. The swelling will be down by then, and the scars not too obvious. Perhaps some numbness. Even paralysis. You are not young.” He turned to Valerie. “Señora. You also must leave in six weeks?”
“Maybe five,” she said.
“Okay. Face-lift, eyelift, brow-lift. I would say. Then hair dye and careful practice with makeup, new patterns. Forgive me, but you are not used to makeup.”
“I don’t normally wear any. It’s part of this disguise.”
“Sure, okay. We have a woman here who can teach you everything.” He reached under the cardigan and brought out a calculator, which he held up to the light for a few seconds, then started punching: “Two facelifts… two eyelifts. One of each… brow-lift, rhinoplasty, mentoplasty. Look,” he said, pointing at me, “I can make your ears not stick out so much, too. But you got to wear a band around your head while you sleep, maybe six weeks.”
“I’d better not chance it.”
“Okay. American dollars?” I said yes. “That will be two hundred fourteen thousand dollars, cash in advance.”
“Ouch. That’s almost ten times as much as the States.”
“Okay, so go to the Mayo Clinic. Maybe they take Medicare for it, hm? Maybe State Farm?”
“I’ll tell you what. We won’t haggle over the price. You’ll get your two hundred grand. But we give you half when you begin the procedures and the other half when we’re satisfied with the results.”
He slowly replaced the calculator, staring at nothing. “Look. Number one, I should do it over and over until you like your looks? What do you mean ‘satisfied’?”
“Just that we look radically different.”
“Okay, that much I can always guarantee. But like I say, there might be some paralysis. Maybe some pain we have to go in after at some later date.”
“That’s all right”
“Okay, number two. I got to have cash in advance because there are so many people involved. I just do the rhytidectomies. I got to fly in people from all over the place for the other procedures. A hundred thousand won’t do it”
“Oh, baloney,” Valerie said. “You fly in four people to do our eyes and noses. That’s eight thousand dollars first-class airfare, max, if they all live in Tasmania. Leaves enough to pay them each more than twenty thousand dollars for a day’s work. If they get more than that, I’m gonna walk out of here and go to medical school.”
He looked hurt “There are more than four people.”
“The offer stands,” I said, and turned on the watch, unnecessarily.
He stared away for a few seconds and then nodded.
“Okay, you bring me the hundred and seven and we’ll start calling people.”
I took the three packages of bills out of my pockets, and Valerie opened her purse. “Would you pick up the phone for sixty?”
He slit the plastic of one with a thumbnail and pulled a bill out of the middle. He held it up to the light and studied it closely, then crumpled it up and smoothed it out. “Okay. Forgive me, but I had a patient once who printed his own money.”
“A reasonable precaution. We have a precaution, too: We don’t both go under at the same time. One of us must always be awake
while
the other’s in surgery.”
He stacked up the six packets. “Actually, that’s not an unusual arrangement. Sometimes they even want an observer in the operating room. That’s awkward. Federico”—he looked up at the George Raft character—“
Telefonea un taxi para los estimados señores.”
He stood up and bowed slightly. “Federico will tell you when your taxi comes. Be here tomorrow at nine o’clock… and, Senora, don’t eat any breakfast. We’ll work on you first.”
“This is the clinic, here?” she asked.
He smiled. “Indeed. The smallest and most expensive hospital in Mexico.”
Nick said it feels like having been on the losing end of a fistfight, this long healing period. I wouldn’t know. I was glad for the strong painkillers.
For weeks we were virtual prisoners at 26 Hidalgo, claustrated in a set of rooms that had no mirrors. Of course we could see each other, and lied about what we saw.
It was doubly painful, watching Nick agonize through the surgical procedures and also watching his face disappear, the man I’ve loved for more than half my life. I think of myself as practical rather than romantic. But no one is completely one or the other, I guess.
His chin augmentation gave me the shudders. They make a long incision in the gum, between front teeth and lower lip, and slide a piece of plastic down over your chinbone. It gave him a Kirk Douglas profile. I’d just started getting used to his chin, after all these
years of seeing hair. Now I have twice as much chin to get used to.
Both of us temporarily got bright-red bloody sclera (the “whites” of the eyes) from the eyelifts, and since Nick couldn’t wear contacts after the operation, they brought him a pair of eyeglasses. I could see my vague reflection in them, enough to tell that Zacatecas was better off not having me on the streets for a while.
I was just as glad not to have the rhinoplasty, which gave Nick hell for almost a week, cotton packing jammed up his nose, an itchy cast taped over half his face. My brow-lift was a lot easier, though for a couple of weeks afterward I felt like I was doomed to walk around for the rest of my life with an expression of perpetual wide-eyed amazement.
There was no magical transition scene like you see in the movies, the surgeon slowly unwrapping the coils of bandage to reveal Natalie Wood bathed in soft light, radiant, impeccably coiffed. Instead, the bruises went from purple to blue to brown to green to yellow, and disappeared; meanwhile, the stitches came out, one set after another. Then one day we looked just like normal people, if strangers and a little under the weather.
They dyed my hair coal black and showed me how to use makeup dramatically, Latin style. Nick kept his ash-blond bleach job but started to brush his hair straight back, rather than part it. He looked like a man about forty, prematurely balding. I looked younger. De Rivera offered to complete the job with a thirty-five-thousand-dollar breast-and-ass lift, but I said no,
gracias
. I didn’t plan to go back into the escort business. Besides, whatever this figure’s shortcomings, I have worked hard for its virtues.
We walked around Zacatecas for a few days, getting a feel for freedom after so many weeks of confinement in our elegant prison, our stifling bandages. It’s a good town for exercise, very up and down. A couple of the sidewalks are so steep they had steps molded into them.
We also practiced being our new selves. The Free Clinic documents your new identity pretty thoroughly. Nick was Anson Rafferty, an unemployed-by-choice linguistics professor who lives in Miami with me, his wife, Linda, woman of some means. “Rafferty” was a person Nick had made up while he was working for the CIA: a man who spoke fluent Russian and had done some contract work for the Agency in the sixties and seventies.
We had a family passport with four years’ worth of travel in Europe and South America; we made up and memorized consistent stories about the places we’d been, which was sort of fun. Florida driver’s licenses and an assortment of credit cards—the American Express Gold Card being in my name, naturally. We had a post office box in Miami where birth and marriage certificates were waiting (since it would seem suspicious to be carrying those around). They even went so far as to supply us with an assortment of appropriate business cards and receipts. Nick says they call that “pocket litter” in the spy biz.
I would have liked to relax in Zacatecas for a long time. Clean mountain air, cool mornings, warm afternoons. No KGB agents but my husband, and I didn’t mind him spying on me. But we had to get back to the muggy traffic clot of Miami and get to work. Since it was my idea, at least nominally, I couldn’t object.
We left the polyester disguises and Mercury station wagon for the clinic to hock and took an asthmatic
puddle jumper to Guadalajara, where I put together a wardrobe for us from boutiques and a classy used-clothing store. Opened an obscenely large dollar account at the largest bank, with cash, and then closed it with a check. They didn’t even blink. Then we caught a comfy 777 back to Miami, where Customs scrutinized us for a half hour and found nothing. If they’d come upon the $397,850 cashier’s check, it might have given them pause, but it wasn’t illegal. The only illegal things we were smuggling in were sealed behind new faces.
We still had the lease on the West Miami high rise, but didn’t go back, in case they had trailed us that far—the CIA, the KGB, or the people who’d given us the attaché case full of money. We picked up the documents claiming we had been born and married, and drove a rented car north until we got tired, West Palm Beach. I opened an account with the cashier’s check and got a fancy television set as a premium. (I could have chosen a grandfather clock instead, but decided it would look tacky in the hotel room.) Then I wrote checks to three other banks, opening CD accounts in my name and a smallish joint checking account in one, just thirty grand.
We slept twelve hours, and then Nick started the delicate business of getting a job as President Fitzpatrick’s Russian translator. He had put the wheels in motion before we left for Mexico.
We’d found out that Fitzpatrick’s usual translator, in French as well as in Russian, was J. Cameron Lambert, a general in the Air Force Reserve and dedicated party hack. He had done a lot of work in the primaries and delivered at least New Hampshire, and this was his reward: Special Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Assistant Director
of Presidential Foreign Advance. He was a robust man in his midsixties, who was about to fall ill with the flu. Unable to make the Russian trip, he would recommend his old friend Anson Rafferty. Speaks Russkie like a native. Real patriot. Did some hush-hush work for the CIA, never could tell me what it was about. President Fitzpatrick would be a sucker for that; he loved spy stuff.
When Nick had created the dossier on Rafferty, he’d put his own fingerprints in the file, but the picture was his old new face, and he’d only given a sketchy background. So before he made the move on J. Cameron Lambert, he had to make sure that Anson Rafferty existed as a whole paper person, with an up-to-date photograph. That meant he had to talk his way into the right file room at Langley. He made some phone calls.