The Immigrant’s Daughter (40 page)

“Utter exhaustion. You?”

He shrugged. He made no mention of being in her bed, nor did she bring it up. He pointed to a tray. “Pan dulcy and lousy coffee.”

“Yes. They grow so much of it, you'd think they'd learn to brew it.”

Again, he shrugged.

“I'll have just a mouthful, and then we'll find the dentist. What did you say his name was?”

“Joe Felshun.”

“Good enough. Don't talk anymore. Your shirt's a sight, and I could wash it in the sink, but it would take hours to dry. No, don't bother telling me you don't give a damn. I seem to sense that you're very angry, which is all right if you're angry with me, but I think that to be angry down here invites trouble. Angry men are full of macho, and that never helps.”

Joe Felshun was of the same mind. “Cool down, Abe. You're lucky.” He was the only one she had ever heard call Abrahams “Abe.” “No bones broken. Who put on that weird bandage?”

They had found Felshun at his office, a small stucco building in Escalón, located modestly between two high-walled estates. There was no wall around the small, whitewashed house, and alongside the door a polished brass plate bore the legend
DENTISTA AMERICANA.
The office was clean and neat and very modern. Felshun x-rayed Abrahams' cheekbone, removed the bandage and replaced it with a more professional dressing.

“Looks good,” he decided.

He was a small birdlike man, sharp-faced, an old resident of San Salvador, “who stays alive,” he told Barbara, “because there's no replacement. I'm the only man in this whole benighted country who can do a proper root canal or a decentinlay. Believe it or not, I was born here. My folks got here in ‘thirty-nine. Out of Germany and no other country they could get into. My English is rotten. Do you follow my Spanish?”

“I do indeed,” Barbara said.

“How did this happen?”

Barbara hesitated, and Abrahams said, “You can trust him.”

“Damn right!” Felshun said in English.

Barbara told him about their experience the day before.

“I don't believe it. You mean you carried off a charade like that?”

“We're here.”

“You're here, but I'm afraid you haven't heard the end of this,” he told Abrahams. “In your place I'd lay low a bit until the swelling goes down and it has a chance to heal. I'd say put a cold compress on it, but that's a nasty cut and I'd like it to have all the healing it needs. Use a compress if the pain doesn't stop.” He turned to Barbara and regarded her thoughtfully. “You're a nice lady. What on earth are you doing here?”

“I've been asking myself the same question.”

Abrahams drove her back to the hotel, dropped her off and said, “Call me tomorrow. I'll be at the office.”

As she entered the hotel, the doorman said, “There's a gentleman here to see you,” pointing to a tall, bearded man in a black jacket and striped trousers. Evidently, he recognized Barbara at the same time, and he approached her and introduced himself as Señor Raoul Domingo of the Spanish Embassy. “I am the ambassador's secretary, as you might say. Could we sit down somewhere and talk? Perhaps a coffee in the lounge.”

When they were seated, he made some small talk about the weather and then complimented her on her use of Spanish. “Both the ambassador and I were astonished at the fact that your accent must have been letter-perfect.”

Then they knew about it. “It's less my accent than the wretched Spanish of the soldiers.”

His turn. She waited.

“Of course,” he said, “the ambassador understands your action and the need for it. We both feel that it probably saved your lives, and we also admire the boldness and the wit that enabled you to carry it off. That pig of a National Guard officer was convinced that we would raise a frightful rumpus over his insult to the ambassador's wife, and he stupidly went straight to the colonel in command of his unit and pleaded his case. You must never underestimate the stupidity of the National Guard, and never underestimate their viciousness. You have placed them in an untenable position, and the plain and simple truth of it is that if you remain here, they will kill you.”

“Oh, no! No! I can't believe that.”

“Of course you can't. But what I say is absolutely true. You have never encountered men like those who officer the National Guard. I have been here six years. I know. The ambassador knows. We both have great admiration for what you did. That is why I came here. You must leave immediately.”

“I can't. I have an interview with the American ambassador tomorrow.”

“Do you remember how they walked into this hotel and gunned down the two American labor people?”

“I saw it happen.”

“The ambassador has reason to believe that the same thing will take place here tonight. It will be quite open. If the Englishman is with you, you will both die. If he is not, it will be you alone, while you are eating dinner. I am not trying to frighten you, señora. What is madness elsewhere is matter of fact here. I can only warn you. In your place, I would leave Salvador immediately.”

He excused himself, bowed and left. Barbara sat where he had left her, unmoving, staring at a badly painted picture on the wall facing her. She sat unmoving for about ten minutes, and then she went to the desk and asked when the next plane for the States would leave.

“About three o'clock, señora. But that is schedule. It might leave an hour later.”

She checked out, paid her bill and then went up to her room and called Abrahams' hotel. His room did not answer. With an increasing sense of panic, she called Reuters and drew a breath of deep relief when she was told that Abrahams was there. His pain must have lessened, because when he heard her voice, he said cheerfully, “Everything jolly at your end, love?”

She repeated what the Spaniard had said to her.

“Vastly exaggerated. On the other hand, you'd better get out of here. There's a plane this afternoon.”

“I want you to come with me.”

“Barbara, that's impossible. I can't just pack up and chuck my job. Believe me, love, I can take care of myself.”

“No one can take care of himself in this place, and if you don't leave, I won't leave.”

“Oh, that's lovely — all I need at this point is a female Don Quixote. Now look, Barbara, you've been on my back since you came here. Go home. I swear to God that if you don't, I'll never see you or talk to you again. Leave me alone! Just don't hang on and be a bloody pain in the ass to me!”

She put down the telephone, her eyes brimming with tears, and it was not until she was on the plane, on her way back to California, that she realized it was the only way he could have persuaded her to go.

Twelve

T
he house on Green Street in San Francisco was untouched and exactly as Barbara had left it. She was always surprised, after any length of time away, to come home and find everything just as it had been, and this time she walked slowly and thoughtfully through every corner of the house, touching things lovingly. At the very top of the narrow wooden house, there were two windows from which she could see San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate. She could stand in front of one of the windows and watch the gulls swoop down to rest on rooftops just below her point of vantage.

She had stopped for a day in Los Angeles to see Carson, who embraced her with a fierce tenderness that almost crushed her ribs. Then he held her firmly by her shoulders, at arm's length, staring at her.

“Thank God,” he said at last.

“It was a little hairy, Carson, but I'm back and I'm all right and I wish I could have stayed at least another week.”

“Did you have anything to eat? Did they feed you on that lousy plane?”

“Nothing I wanted to eat.”

“I have to talk to you, but not here. Do you want to check into a hotel? Or a late plane to San Francisco?”

“A hotel — at least to get cleaned up.”

“I reserved a room at the Wilshire after you called. I'll take you there, and then we can have some dinner and talk.”

“I'm not going to tell my story, Carson — not tonight.”

“I understand.”

“I mean, I want to think about it and brood for a few days and then write it. I'm not holding back. I have a hell of a story. I think I could do twenty thousand words and never have the reader pause to take a breath.”

“Well, that's good. That's very good.”

“I should think you'd be pleased.”

“Of course I'm pleased. If you do twenty thousand words, we'll run it five days, give it the whole first column on page one, and finish it inside. But I don't want to talk about it right now. I want to talk about you.”

“I've been going all day, and I'm dog tired.”

“You're alive. That's all I care about.”

It was after nine when they entered her room. Barbara went into the bathroom. Carson called his office. When she came out of the bathroom about ten minutes later, Carson was still on the telephone, talking very little, listening, nodding. Barbara dropped into a chair facing him, feeling deliriously lightheaded, still high with the wonderful exultation of someone who has escaped from an almost irretrievable situation.

“I'm ready for that dinner you promised.”

“Barbara dear,” Carson said without pleasure, “there's something I must tell you right now. I can't postpone it. This is something I discovered about an hour before your plane landed, and I'vejust had the facts fleshed out by Bill Hedley, my international editor. It's rotten news, but I don't know any other way to deal with it except to give it to you straight on. Cliff Abrahams is dead. He was murdered at about five
P.M.
today, while you were in flight. Thank God you were on that plane.”

He waited, and for a few minutes Barbara did not speak. Her face crinkled, and now Carson could see every wrinkle, as if she had grown old instantaneously, very old. Her gray eyes filled with tears, and she put her bent forefinger in her mouth, clamping her teeth on it desperately. It took her minutes to manage to speak, as if she had to learn the art of speech all over again, while a wild protest, wordless, raged crazily in her brain. Then she felt that her heart had stopped beating, that the world had stopped turning, that all motion had ceased, and in this awful void where she was suddenly placed, she was able to talk again and to ask Carson where and how it had happened.

“The first news came to our office from the Reuters people by telephone. Two more detailed stories came in after I left to meet you, one from Reuters and the other from Associated Press. It appears he suffered some kind of facial injury the other day.”

“Yes, I was with him,” Barbara whispered. “He was pistol-whipped by a National Guard officer, bruised and cut around the face.”

“Yes. This afternoon, at about four o'clock, he went to see a friend of his, fellow by the name of Joe Felson or Felron — anyway, something like that.”

“Joe Felshun. Yes, he's a dentist. He bandaged Cliffs face properly. Cliff trusted him. That's why we went to a dentist instead of a doctor. There was no doctor he trusted.”

“You were with him? You met Felshun?”

“Yes, I met him.”

“Why did Cliff go to a dentist?”

“I told you. He didn't trust any of the doctors.”

Carson shook his head hopelessly. “Barbara, the story that we have says that Cliff was coming out of this dentist's office, and the dentist had gone to the door to say goodbye to him. A car was standing at the curb, and when Cliff appeared, two National Guard soldiers stepped out of the car. They were carrying submachine guns and they opened fire and riddled both men with bullets. Then they tossed a hand grenade into the open door of the dentist's office. Cliff had been hit over thirty times. Both men died instantly. I don't like to put this to you so bluntly, but it's better than having you read it in the papers. I know Cliff became a good friend —” His voice wavered and choked. “He was a good friend of mine.”

What should she say? The word
friend
was meaningless. When it came to the cords that knit one human being to another, the English language was empty. What had Clifford Abrahams been to her — friend, protector, companion, brother? No word fit. For a few days they had connected with each other in some mysterious manner. There was no sex involved — she was old enough to be his mother — yet the connections were strong and good. And now he was dead as a result of a process that she herself had set in motion. She couldn't have known what that day would bring; no one knows what tomorrow will bring, and in any case, once they had been stopped by the National Guard, their fate was sealed. Both she and Abrahams survived by their wits, but she, Barbara Lavette, was here in Los Angeles, and tonight Abrahams was dead.

Such was the news that greeted her in Los Angeles. And now, in her house in Green Street a few days later, she opened her front door and looked down the long sloping street and breathed the clean, cool air washing in from the same Pacific Ocean that lapped at the shores of El Salvador.