Maybe it was the hangover, or maybe it was my own struggle with bizarre impulses, but to me at that moment, what she said made sense. "It"s okay," I said. "We"ve got spare gaskets."
"Really?"
"Sure. Knock yourself out."
I stepped back and watched as she crawled all over the engine. Soon she had the valve covers off. She tinkered with the lifters for a while, and then she moved on to inspect other parts. Now and then she mumbled things like "Huh" and "Wow." After nearly an hour of that, she started putting everything back together. I watched closely to make sure she did it right. She did, and it didn"t take her long.
I said, "Where"d you learn to work on cars?"
"In Spain. I serviced Formula Ones."
"I didn"t know there was a Spanish team."
"It"s the only one. They used to be called Hispania Racing, but now they go by HRT F1."
"How"d you get involved with them?"
She stepped back from the Bentley, wiping her greasy hands on a shop towel. "Pretty much the way I got you to let me have a look at this one."
"I"ll bet men usually say yes when you ask for things."
She said, "They do."
Her smile lit up the garage, and I remembered Haley at the Nueces River. I made myself refocus on the present. "I"ll bet you didn"t come here to play with the Bentley."
"No. I came to deliver that." She nodded with her chin toward a nearby workbench. On it was a manila folder. I went over, picked it up, and withdrew a few papers.
"Background on Alejandra Delarosa," I said.
"The congressman pulled some strings and had someone put the file together for you. He and Dona Elena thought it might be helpful."
I saw names and contact information for the woman"s former employers, landlords, priest, and other acquaintances. There was the LAPD case file Russo had refused to share with me, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement file, and more. I started reading and got interested. When I looked up a few minutes later, Olivia Soto was watching me with a frown, which she quickly replaced with a more neutral expression.
I said, "Please be sure to thank the congressman for me."
"You know, he had another file. On you."
"Did you read it?"
"I might have seen a few things, while it was lying open on his desk."
"I see."
"I was wondering if you"d tell me... that poor woman and your overdose. How did you come back from that? How did you stay sane?"
For some reason, the question embarra.s.sed me. I tried shrugging it off with a grin. "What makes you think I"m sane?"
"I"m sorry. I shouldn"t have asked that. It"s none of my business."
I didn"t know what to say, so I said nothing. The silence was a little awkward. I remembered her parting questions at the Montes"s house the day before, and I thought about the fact that the file could easily have been sent over to me by courier.
"Well," she said, "thanks for a great time. I"ll be going now."
I walked her outside and along the gravel drive toward the car she had parked beside the fountain at the mansion"s entrance. Our footsteps crunched on the gravel. The water gurgled in the fountain. There were the usual birds-of-paradise, bougainvillea, and morning glories, all Teru"s handiwork. G.o.d chipped in with a pair of hummingbirds flashing metallic ruby and green, a perfectly blue sky, and a perfectly green lawn.
When we got to her car, a little j.a.panese thing, I said, "It was good to see you again."
She offered her hand. "Yes. Thank you."
I needed to say something to get her talking. I needed to know more about why she was really there. I"ve found the best way to get people to open up about themselves is to open up myself, so I said, "I have no idea why I"m not crazy."
"I"m sorry?"
I said, "What you asked me a minute ago... I think that a lot."
"It wasn"t an idle question. I lost somebody once. Sometimes I think I"ve been crazy ever since." She looked at me closely. "You understand?"
"I do."
She covered my hand with her other one, and we stood that way, my one hand in both of hers. It felt very presumptuous. Very awkward. But I also felt the fact of her. I felt it flow into me. Another person, touching me. I felt it travel up my arm and spread within my chest and begin to burn away my nerve endings, which strangely didn"t cause me pain, but only the utter lack of feeling that can only come with bitter cold.
The nothingness that had nearly conquered me forever hovered all around us as she said, "I knew it. I saw it in you yesterday. You have a broken heart."
I hadn"t thought it possible to feel the loss of Haley in a new way, but to hear myself described so precisely with such a cliche left me speechless.
She moved closer. She released my hand and placed her palms flat against my chest. She was beautiful, but I witnessed her hands against my chest with a sense of impotent outrage, as if watching from too great a distance while someone tried to steal from Haley. Olivia looked up at me, her eyes searching mine, her lips moist and slightly parted. She had completely misunderstood, just as I intended, and she had revealed a little something. Maybe it was important. I hoped so. It was costing a great deal to learn.
She said, "Maybe I can help. Maybe we can help each other."
I was paralyzed. I couldn"t bring myself to push away. I stood there, absolutely helpless as my heart raced. The ground around us turned to polar blue. I felt the freeze creep up my legs. I felt it spread across my loins, my stomach and my chest. I was ice, a pillar of it in the Southern California sun. I saw the water vapor in my breath condense, a fog ascending toward the place where Haley waited. I saw white frost form on Olivia"s black hair. I feared for her. If she did not let me go, I knew my frigidness would spread to her. I began to tremble. She felt it. She stepped back.
"You"re not ready," she said.
It was far more than merely that, of course. I was mad, or else the world was mad, or maybe it was both. But I could only nod. I had opened myself to Olivia, just a bit, in hopes that she would open up much more to me. Through that tiny opening had crept a glacier that would cover me completely if I wasn"t careful.
She got into her car. She started the engine and rolled down her window. "I"m so sorry," she said. Then she drove away.
21.
The rumble of Olivia"s tires on the gravel faded behind me, but I didn"t turn to watch her go. The freezing she had started in my nerves seemed to forbid it. So I stood still as one mad vision fell into another. The gurgling fountain there beside me overflowed into the world. It filled up everything, absolutely everything between the earth and outer s.p.a.ce above. I rose on that swirling tide. I drifted through the emptiness inside my skull. There was no calm and distant place where I could make a stand.
Panic came with chaos to destroy that fantasy. From all directions, unconnected ideas trailed away before I understood them. Everything I tried to cling to vanished. I saw Haley standing at the open doorway of her mansion, smiling down upon me with teeth like stars in a constellation. Radiating from her was the physical texture of our love. How I wanted to be with her. Was that possible? Could I be where she was now?
"Sir? Sir?"
I returned.
Simon stood beside me. "There is a call for you."
He was holding out a portable telephone. I took it. I put it to my ear and said, "This is Malcolm," It helped to state my own name as a fact.
"It"s Olivia."
"Oh, hi. How are you?"
There was a pause. "Well, I"m okay. It"s only been a minute, after all."
I tried to laugh. It came out sounding something like a sob.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I am. Yes."
"Well, I just thought I ought to call to tell you there"s a man in a car outside your gates."
"Miss Lane"s gates."
"What? Oh yes, of course. Well, anyway, he"s parked out there, and when I drove by, I saw him taking pictures with a telephoto lens."
That was strange. I thought I said as much aloud, but apparently I didn"t, because she said, "Malcolm, are you there?"
"I"m here."
"Okay. Well, I just wanted to tell you that."
I said, "Thank you very much," and then hung up.
Simon searched my face. "Is there some kind of difficulty?"
"Let"s go see."
We walked down the driveway. It was a long walk underneath the sycamores. When we reached the gates, I punched in the code at the keypad, and they swung open. We went out, and there, as Olivia had said, was a small car parked about one hundred feet away. In it sat the Guatemalan Fidel Castro.
Simon and I stood and stared at him. He sat and stared back at us. I started walking toward him. He raised a camera to his eye and aimed the long lens at me. When I got closer, he lowered the camera and started the car. I was almost to him when he stepped on the gas. The car leaped forward. I stood still and watched it come. I saw Castro smiling through the windshield, accelerating straight at me.
Simon tackled me from the side. We fell together on the gra.s.s next to the road as Castro roared past, inches from our feet.
Lying on the ground by Simon, staring at the sky, I said, "Are you okay?"
"It would seem so," said Simon.
"That was a good tackle."
"Kind of you to say so."
"I"ll bet you didn"t learn to do that playing rugby."
"No."
"Do I hear him coming back?"
Simon sat up and looked down the road. "I"m afraid so."
"Maybe we should move."
We got up and hustled toward the gate, but it was too far away. Castro was upon us while we were still a few yards from the driveway. Between the estate wall on one side, and the neighbor"s fence on the other, we had no place to hide.
"Move away," I said. "It"s me he wants."
Instead, Simon walked to the center of the road and turned to face the oncoming car. He had bits of gra.s.s on his black suit and in his gray hair. He reached behind his back and withdrew an automatic that had been concealed beneath his suit coat. He a.s.sumed a firing stance I recognized well. Simon waited in the path of the oncoming car with a calmness one might see in someone waiting for a bus.
When Castro was at fifty yards, Simon squeezed off three methodical shots. Every one of them hit the windshield. One was slightly to the left of Castro. One was slightly to his right. One barely missed the top of his head. The car swerved and missed Simon as it pa.s.sed. It kept going.
Simon reached back to replace the weapon in its holster as we walked toward the gate.
"A sidearm?" I said.
"Indeed."
"Since when?"
"It seemed a wise precaution after the incident with the bomb."
Teru stood just inside the gates when we entered the grounds. He said, "Was that shots I heard?"
Simon pressed the b.u.t.tons on the keypad, and the ma.s.sive gates swung closed behind us as I told Teru what had just happened.
Teru looked at Simon and said, "You missed the guy three times?"
"I beg to differ, Mr. Fujimoto. One does place one"s shots with care."
As the three of us walked underneath the sycamores, I thought about the training required to be able to stand in front of an oncoming car and calmly bracket the driver"s head with three warning shots. I thought about the fact that England often attached members of its secret services to diplomatic teams, just as the CIA often stationed people at American emba.s.sies.
I said, "What were you before you went into b.u.t.tling, Simon? MI6? Royal Marines?"
"One couldn"t say."
"You might as well. One of these days I"ll find out anyway."
"Will you indeed, sir?"
"Don"t call me, "sir," Simon. My name is Malcolm."