The day after I was followed, I went to see Nico. I rang his bell several times from the street, jabbing at the button. He appeared at the street door, out of breath.
“I must apologize,” he said.
“Too fucking right,” I said.
We stood for a minute, looking at each other. Anger was making me flush, and I was hot under the collar of my shirt.
“Sent somebody, did you?” I said. “Christ. What are you worried about?”
“Mr. Reyes sent him.” Mr. Reyes was Nico’s boss, the president of Aliadas S.A. “He said he had to be sure about who you were,” Nico said, spreading his hands apologetically.
“We’re professionals,” I said. “Do you understand? Does he understand? You can’t follow me around in the street, it could derail everything.”
“I told him it wasn’t necessary. I told him it would be—rude. But he’s a very powerful man. He does what he wants.”
“Well.” I glanced up the front of the building, and thought I saw his wife’s face disappear behind a curtain on the third floor. “Is he done now? Is he satisfied?”
“You’re agitated,” he said, putting a heavy hand on my shoulder.
“I’m not agitated. I’m angry.”
“Anne. Please don’t forget that we’re friends. We’re all working for the same side.”
“That’s very clear to me. I’m not sure that it’s clear to you.”
“Mr. Reyes has been at this a long time. Wouldn’t you expect he would want more than your word? More than the word of your friend, your Gerry?”
He lit a cigarette. A mail carrier went by, tipping his hat to Nico. We watched him go down the street. I would tell Gerry what had happened. It was not entirely a surprise.
“Come up to dinner,” Nico said. “My wife made croquettes.”
I rolled my eyes. “Your wife hates me.”
“Of course she does,” Nico said, chuckling. “She knows a liar when she sees one.”
When I got home, I checked my apartment for bugs. I found nothing but some bits of blackened rawhide that a previous tenant’s dog had cached behind the bathtub and under the stove. I told Gerry about the incident. “Mr. Reyes has always been a cautious man,” he said. “We’ve run into this problem before.”
“Tell Nico not to waste my time with this nonsense,” I said.
I met Victoria in La Taberna for our first English lesson. I was early. Victoria was late, but arrived with a composition notebook and a ballpoint pen, which was disarming.
“I’m not a teacher,” I said as she sat down.
“Wot?” She had the British vowels that Argentines often had when they spoke English.
“Your notebook,” I said. “I hope you don’t expect a real lesson. I’m not a teacher.”
She glanced down at it. “No, no. It is just—just in case.” She smiled delightedly at her deployment of this idiom. “We talk, only. It is conversation practice. I write a word if I do not know it. Later I look the dictionary.”
“All right.” I flexed my hands and tried to look lighthearted. She made me uncomfortable; she was so alert. “What do you want to talk about?”
She seemed flummoxed by the question for a moment. She blew her bangs out of her eyes, looked theatrically around the room, her gaze alighting on each person in turn, and arrived finally back at me. “You,” she said. “We talk about you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You are—” She squinted over my head. “Tímida. Yes?”
“Shy,” I supplied.
“Yes. You are shy. You don’t talk much, when we are all together here, all the friends here together. You are shy.”
“What do you want to know?” I said.
She clasped her hands together and rested her chin on them, studying my face. “You do not look North American.”
I laughed. “I don’t?” But I knew what she meant. I was the Turk, again.
“No!” She stroked her own blonde hair, smiling. “I do, more than you! Like Doris Day.”
“That’s not a question.”
“You have pretty hair. Curly hair. Do many girls look like you in Canada? Dark, with curly hair.”
“We look all kinds of ways,” I said.
“Do you have a dog?” she said.
“No.”
“A cat?”
“No,” I said. “Growing up I had a cat. Not anymore.”
“What color?” said Victoria.
“The cat? He was orange.”
“Hm. I had a—how do you say. I had a nutria. You know nutria?”
It took a moment for the word to line up, like the pictures on a slot machine, with its meaning. “You had an otter?”
“Mm-hmm. The animal, yes, that swim? With small ears?” Victoria said. “We had a tank for her.”
I was swept away, thinking what the life of a girl who owned an otter would be like.
“Oh, but my friend, she had a monkey,” Victoria said. “She would give to the monkey a candy of peppermint and the monkey would—” She mimed a shocked monkey, puffing air.
I marveled. “Did you live in the country?”
“No, no.” She gave the name of a middle-class neighborhood, far out from the city center.
“You can have a monkey in Buenos Aires?”
“You buy in Brazil.”
The waiter edged close to our table. We had been growing louder, and he seemed annoyed by our exuberance. Victoria ordered a bottle of wine and he disappeared with a sharp turn of his heel.
“You are rich?” Victoria said.
I was surprised by her forthrightness. My answer to this was part of my cover story, so I was relieved of the trouble of making something up on the spot. “My father is a doctor. But I work too.”
“I am a little bit rich,” Victoria said. “My grandfather has a fábrica de gaseosas.”
“A soda factory.”
She appeared to have forgotten about her notebook. “But you are rich in dollars,” she said. “I am only rich in pesos.”
The waiter’s black sleeves came between us, pouring both glasses. I tapped a cigarette out of my pack. The wine was dry and pleasant, and I realized I was enjoying the reversal—being the owner of the language for once. Victoria’s eyes were very black. When her clumsy chatter ceased for a moment, there was her intelligence between us again, serrated and gleaming. I thought of a bar in Harlem, a place above a chophouse on 125th Street, where I used to go sometimes on payday if I was lonely. You had to tell the man at the street door that you were there to see Calliope and then you could go straight up the back stairs, which smelled like bleach and cherry jam, and edge through into a dark pine room where women circled in pairs. It always felt like it was four in the morning at Calliope’s, and the dancing was always just swaying. Sometimes I picked up Westchester girls who had come into the city for the weekend, or I made sorties into groups of secretaries. Sometimes I pretended to read palms, and the girls pretended to be taken in. Parts of that echoed now: Victoria’s sleepy affectations, her eyelids lowered and her chin resting on her fist, watching me as if we were old friends.
“What are you studying, Victoria?” I said.
She smiled. She looked over toward the bar, where the waiter was polishing glasses. I thought after a moment that she hadn’t understood the question; she kept looking at the bar while the waiter folded the polishing cloth and tamped it down into his back pocket and began to page through his receipts. I was about to repeat myself when she looked back at me again.
“Politics,” she said.
I laughed and filled my glass again, and said, “Well, that makes sense.”
“Your teeth,” Victoria enunciated, “they are rr-red. From the wine.”
“So are yours,” I said. “Why do you study politics?”
“Because I love Argentina,” she said. She hunched her shoulders happily, as if she had said “the Beatles” instead of “Argentina.” “Do you love Canada?”
“Of course I do. We have so much snow.”
“You are funny,” she said, but she didn’t laugh.
“All Argentines love Argentina,” I offered.
“No,” she said. “They say they do, but they do not.”
“Not like you?”
“Not like me.”
I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.
“Some are very critical of the government,” I said. She was clearly used to being looked at, stared at. That made it easy to watch her carefully while she spoke. “Juan José. Elena.”
“Of course they’re critical,” she said, changing back to Spanish now. “The government is very weak.”
“And conservative,” I said. “Reactionary.”
“Strength is what matters,” she said. “We haven’t had a strong leader in—a long time.” I wondered if she wanted to say “since Perón.”
“Does it matter more than policy?”
“Policies change, they come and go. I love Argentina, and I want it to be strong. That’s all.”
Perhaps Gerry had been right. Her interest in politics was limited; maybe I was wasting my time. But there was a vividness to her that seemed important. I was starting to think that I couldn’t understand Román without understanding Victoria.