The Dismal Science (23 page)

“Then how would she get her car tomorrow?”

“She could take a taxi back tomorrow.”

“Oh, yes, of course. That's a better idea.”

“Would you like me to call a taxi?”

Vincenzo, thinking he'd just park her car in the neighborhood, assented. The concierge picked up the phone and dialed.

Back outside, the valet had already unloaded his luggage and stacked it by the door. Vincenzo tapped the passenger's side window of the car, but Lenka didn't stir. He tapped it again. Nothing. He went around to the driver's side and got in. She was snoring, a light snore that sounded only when she exhaled. He shook her gently. She groaned.

“¿Señorita Lenka?
Excuse me, it's time to wake up.” He shook her again, more firmly.

“¿Y qué pasó?
” she said, coming to. She looked around.
“¿Llegamos?
” She blinked several times and looked back at him. “Are we—” She wiped her eyes.

“I have ordered a taxi for you,” he said. “They're going to put your car in the garage overnight.” He had a twenty-dollar bill in his hand. He held it out to her. “This is for the taxi tonight, and so you can come back tomorrow and pick up your car.”

She looked at the money and then she looked at him and he noticed that she appeared confused, and then affronted. She
shook her head. “I'll drive.” She got out of the car and shut the door.

He got out, too. “I don't think that would be very safe,” he said. “Anyway, they've already called a taxi for you.” He held out the bill again.

“You don't have very good manners, do you?”

Startled, he said, “I'm sorry, I thought—”

“That's twenty times the cost of a taxi,” she said. He watched as a taxi pulled up behind her and the bellhop motioned in Vincenzo's direction. Lenka shook her head. It was chilly and she crossed her arms, frowned at him sleepily. She was even more attractive when she was grumpy, he thought. “What taxi driver is going to have change for that? Anyway, I don't need your money.” She opened the door to her car and was about to get in when the taxi pulled up alongside her car and said something to her. She got out of the car and went over to him, leaned down and talked to him. They talked for a minute.

Vincenzo put the money away. What, he wondered, would have happened if he'd tried to put her up in one of the hotel's two-hundred-dollar-a-night rooms? She'd probably have slapped him in the face.

Once her conversation with the driver was done, he drove away and she came over and looked at Vincenzo wearily.

“I'm sorry I got angry at you,” she said. “That was nice, what you offered, and you're right that I'm too sleepy to drive. It's not safe.”

She agreed to stay for a coffee and then take a taxi home. She handed her keys to the valet, took her ticket, and they went inside. They sat in the window of the café in his hotel and
talked—he drank coca tea and she had
café con crema
. She was magnificent, and he wondered whether there was a chance that she might overlook his frailties: his baldness, potbelly, and over-long beak, to say nothing of his ineptitude with her language and the fact that he was unemployed. That she had a boyfriend did not help his case, he knew. He asked about the boyfriend and she just shook her head, as if thinking about something else.

“Is he from here, too?” Vincenzo pressed.

She kept shaking her head, and then said, “Do you know anything about hedge funds?”

“Yes, I do. Does he work for a hedge fund?”

She shook her head some more. “Not really. But why would a hedge fund want to invest in Bolivia?”

“It wouldn't. Well, maybe, in passing, for corporate or sovereign debt. Or maybe with one of the larger companies outside of Bolivia that has a significant interest in Bolivian gas or minerals. It is just not a very substantial economy.”

“This is what I hear from people. But don't we have something to offer?”

“Of course. Bolivia has a lot to offer. There's just not much money here.”

“And money is everything?”

He shrugged. “No. It can be helpful, but it depends on what you're trying to do.”

She had a sip of her coffee. “What are you trying to do?”

“Money is not part of it.” But this wasn't true for a variety of reasons, mainly because money had everything to do with his former job, and also because his own monetary situation—the lack of financial pressure—surely informed his decisions.

“That is good to hear. Why did you say you wanted to come to Bolivia?”

He sighed. “I'm not sure that I did want to come here.”

“Then why come?”

The truth, that he had nowhere else to be, that he didn't know quite why he did many things these days—he didn't want to say that to her, not yet.

After a while she nodded. Neither one of them spoke. She seemed to be waiting for something and maybe he did, too. Eventually, he said, “Should we call you a taxi?”

“I'll just walk—I have a friend nearby.”

Wondering if she meant her boyfriend, he said, “I'll walk you.”

She smiled at him sympathetically, and said, “Then I'd have to walk you back here.” He smiled, somewhat, and she said, “I'll be back here tomorrow morning for my car. We can have breakfast if you want and then I will explain what the plan is. Evo wants to meet tomorrow. He's going to be busy afterward for a couple days, and I am going out of town, too. The reporter comes tomorrow afternoon, yes?”

“Walter? Yes, that is my understanding.”

“Evo wants to meet you both. The party is next Wednesday, so you have time to explore the city. I will go, but will be back in La Paz on Monday. Okay?”

“I'm sorry if I offended you earlier.”

She put her hand on his shoulder, leaned in, and kissed him on the cheek and he held steady—it was all he could do to resist the urge to pull her to him and kiss her on the mouth, to grope her with two hands. She patted his jaw lightly. He almost
kissed her hand, but stopped himself there. “Sleep well, Mr. D'Orsi,” she said.

“I won't,” he replied.

She gave him a simple smile, free of any decipherable innuendo—one more gesture for him to adore—and then she turned and left. And as he watched her go his heart sank, fearful that he was already mishandling this, too.

In his room that night, Vincenzo showered and then flipped through the dreadful television channels. It was all badly dubbed cowboy movies from the seventies, or bizarre Bolivian game shows—half advertisement, half entertainment—on brightly colored sets covered in the logo of some dish soap. Otherwise, there was one slick telenovela set on a farm in the 1800s, and there were the obligatory mirthless newscasts from the
BBC
or
CNN
. He turned it off, remembered Lenka sleeping in the car, the sight of the top of her pink panties and how that color had contrasted with the flawless skin on her back. He tried to put his mind elsewhere, but the headache was no better and he felt exhausted now, too, the kind of weariness he associated with the flu. He glanced at the books he'd brought along: Stiglitz's
The Roaring Nineties
and his new copy of
Purgatorio
, but neither would hold his attention. Lenka's skin had been light brown and he had noticed the downy hairs on her forearm, the wrinkles at her knuckles, and how her earring holes drooped from too many rings and too much gravity over too much time. On her chin she had the strangest birthmark, like
a splash of inverse freckles. And her dark eyes emitted, even in that sleepy stupor, such ferocious intelligence that, when he thought back on meeting her, he could see that that was what had done it. She must have had that effect on all men, he supposed, and it stung him already. Her boyfriend was—but how could he be jealous already? Well, he was. Or—it wasn't jealousy, exactly. To be jealous you must possess, there needs to be a claim. This was
envy
. It was covetousness.

When Dante and Virgil made their way to the second terrace on the mountain of purgatory, envy, he remembered, they found the inhabitants whose eyes had been sewn shut. There, Dante had a difficult time—having already worried through the first terrace, where he confronted his own pride. Now he had to recognize, with dread, his own weakness for envy. Yet, succumbing once again, he placed himself sixth among the poets he found there, above Ovid and Lucan. Like so much of purgatory, the sin was slippery; it sneaked in, even with the vigilant. The pride and the envy, in all of these cases, came from a desire to measure one's worth, upon death. A measuring of the value, the imprint, of what had elapsed.

Before dropping off to sleep that night, Vincenzo checked his e-mail once more. There were a dozen new messages, mostly junk. But there, among the dross, he spotted one from Hamilton. He wanted to delete it outright, but couldn't bring himself to. Instead, he opened it, hoping to find within it someone else sharing in this experience—some variation on the flinty but
strangely warm camaraderie that can occur between two men jilted by the same woman.

           
Vincenzo,

           
As you probably heard, I'm stepping down “voluntarily” in the next month or so. And against the advice of my wife, and having already had one too many glasses of vodka, I've decided to write to you and see what you think about all this shit that you heaped onto our plates. Do you have any regrets? I'm dying to know.

           
In any case, I want you to know that I will never forget what you've done to my life.

           
—Will Hamilton

It could not have been more unsatisfying and he immediately wished he hadn't read it. But he had, so he replied, writing:

           
Happy to hear you're being pushed out, too. No regrets here.

           
—V

Then he closed the browser and shut down his computer. He put on his pajamas and brushed his teeth. Sitting up in bed, he looked around the ugly little room and felt surprisingly great. Elated, even. Could he really take pleasure in vandalizing another man's life? Yes, it appeared so.

12

PHANTOMS

After his morning shower, while dressing, Vincenzo noticed an envelope had been pushed under his door.

He opened it and found a handwritten note on hotel stationery:

           
Vincenzo!

           
I was passing by and just wanted to stop in and see how you're enjoying La Paz.

           
Your old friend,

           
Ben

Vincenzo's mind flickered on and off as he reread the note; then the knowledge of this spread in him, staining everything it touched. The wretched feeling souring within him, he shuffled over to the phone and called down to the front desk and asked, despite his reluctance, to speak to the person who'd taken the note.

When asked to describe who left the note, the woman on the phone told him there had been a black man, a foreigner.

Vincenzo thanked her and hung up.