Fifty Grand

The words were out before I could call them back.

“What things?” she asked.

I knew I had to change tack immediately.

“Nothing. Forget it. Look, the person you should ask is Francisco. He’ll go with you, especially if you tell him that he’ll make more money.”

“You and Francisco are not together?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I will ask him.”

“Do that.”

Angela’s lips narrowed and she went back to the trash bags and I picked up the cleaning spray. Through the living room window I watched Jack and Paul reverse out of the driveway.

Things to do, I thought.

Things to do.

8 THE GARAGE

When I was thirteen I won a poetry competition-the Dr. Ernesto Guevara Young Poets’ Prize. The competition was open to all children under the age of sixteen, though really it was open only to the children of Party members. The prize was a trip to St. Petersburg to study composition at the Pushkin School. My poem wasn’t very good, it was about the harbor lights on Havana Bay watching themselves on a still January night. I imagined all the events the harbor had seen over the last five hundred years and wrote about them. The metaphors were weak, the images childish, and the good bits were echoes from José Martí and García Lorca. It was a bad poem but my father knew how to play the game. He changed my title from “Night Harbor” to “Time Can Be Either Particle or Wave” and threw in a line about quantum physics. It was the early 1990s. Things were changing in Cuba. We were ending our ties with Russia, America had a new president, and for a brief while all things seemed possible. It wasn’t quite our Prague Spring but it was something. The judges read my poem and lapped it up. I won the prize and at a big ceremony in the Teatro Karl Marx I got a medal from Vilma Espín-Mrs. Raúl Castro.

Of course they never flew me to St. Petersburg. The trip kept getting pushed back and pushed back and finally, after Dad defected, it was quietly forgotten about. I didn’t write any more poems after that. But the point of this story isn’t my aborted poetry career, or the evils of the Party, or my father’s cunning-no, the point is the change of title. “Night Harbor” would never have won anything, but “Time Can Be Either Particle or Wave” sounded very hip back then. As Dad said, you’ve got to give people what they want, not what they need. You have to change yourself to fit the circumstances. When you’re an undercover detective you have to own every room you’re in.

Like a lot of actors I began with the clothes. I had bought an outfit in Mexico City, an expensive-looking dark gray suit: pencil-thin skirt, light, well-cut jacket, white blouse, black stockings, black high-heeled patent leather shoes, black fake Gucci clutch purse. I’d had to spot clean the jacket since it had been tossed from my bag and had lain on the desert floor while I killed two men.

I had the suit, I had the lie, I had a card.

My voice wasn’t my voice. My face wasn’t my face. Red lips, dark eyes, and that unpleasant local look-a thick layer of orange bronzer that made the skeletal Fairview women resemble victims of some nuclear disaster.

There wasn’t much I could do with my hair but I had gelled it for more bulk and I sat with the poise of an American businesswoman, cross-legged, relaxed, coolly regarding the glossy magazines in the waiting room.

Marilyn, the blond, good-looking, fortysomething secretary, finally announced me: “Miss Martinez from Great Northern Insurance,” she said.

I entered the office.

“Miss Martinez,” the man said, not getting up from his desk.

“Mr. Jackson,” I replied with a smile and passed him the card with the fictitious name and cell phone number.

“I’m a very busy man, what’s this about?” he asked, taking the card Ricky had made for me, crumpling it, and throwing it in a wastebasket.

“The next piece of paper I’m going to give you will be a subpoena, I hope you take better care of that,” I said, annoyed but inwardly thanking him for letting me enter the role without the necessity of small talk.

“You can’t touch me, you’re not a cop,” he said with a little tremor.

“No?” I said with a look that told him I knew everything. Every little scam he’d pulled over the last five years. A bend of the law here, a few false accounts there. There wasn’t a garage in the world that hadn’t defrauded an insurance company at some point, and the Pearl Street Garage of Fairview, Colorado, was surely no different.

He grimaced. His mouth opened and closed like a dying snapper.

I sat back in the chair. Breathed. Watched.

The TV news tells us that Americans are all bloated capitalists but this was not the case in Colorado. The trophy wives on Pearl Street, the Hollywood types, the hardworking Mexicans in the Wetback Motel-lean. Mr. Jackson was no exception. Mid-fifties, but trim. Skinny arms, prominent Adam’s apple, dyed black hair, and dead, beady, blue-black eyes. Like those of a stuffed animal. I had the feeling that Mr. Jackson was one of those people undergoing a starvation diet in the hope of living longer.