What We Become (41 page)

“And do you know who the fellow was?” Fossataro was still talking to Barbaresco, who by then had pricked up his ears. “None other than Errol Flynn!” He laughed out loud, clapping Max on the arm. “You have before you the two fellows who gave Captain Blood a drubbing!”

“Do you know what the book is, Max? In chess. Not a book,
the
book.”

They are in the gardens of the Hotel Vittoria, strolling along one of the side paths that runs like a tunnel between the varieties of trees, bright patches of sunlight filtering through their branches. Beyond the trellises laden with vines, seagulls are wheeling above the cliffs of Sorrento.

“A player is the sum of all his or her games and analyses,” Mecha Inzunza goes on to explain. “Hundreds of hours of study go into each move on the board, countless strategies and variants, the result of working with a team or alone. A grand master can remember thousands of things: moves made by his predecessors, games played by his opponents. All of it, regardless of memory, is kept as a record.”

“A kind of manual?” Max asks.

“Exactly.”

They are making their way back to the hotel, unhurriedly. A few
bees are hovering around the oleanders. As they penetrate farther into the garden, the traffic sounds behind them on Piazza Tasso grow more distant.

“A chess player can't travel or function without his or her personal papers,” she continues. “What they are able to carry with them from place to place. A grand master's book contains the work of a lifetime: opening moves and variants, studies of opponents, analysis. Usually kept as notebooks or files. In Jorge's case, eight thick leather-bound notebooks, containing seven years' worth of annotations.”

They linger in the rose garden, where a tiled bench encircles a table blanketed with leaves.

“A player is defenseless without that book,” Mecha adds, placing her bag on the table and sitting down. “Not even someone with the most prodigious memory can retain everything. There are things in Jorge's book without which it would be hard for him to play Sokolov: previous games, analyses of his attacks and defenses. Years of work. Imagine, for example, that the Russian doesn't like playing the king's gambit, an opening based on the sacrifice of a pawn. And that Jorge, who has never used the king's gambit, considers doing so at the Dublin championship.”

Max is standing in front of her, listening attentively.

“All that would be in Jorge's book?”

“Of course. What a disaster if it fell into Sokolov's hands. All that work for nothing. His secrets and analyses in his opponent's possession.”

“Couldn't the book be rewritten?”

“It would take a whole lifetime. Not to mention the psychological blow: the knowledge that your opponent is aware of all your strategies, your thoughts.”

She looks behind Max, who turns, following the direction of her gaze. The apartment house occupied by the Soviet delegation is close, only thirty feet away.

“Don't tell me Irina has given Jorge's book to the Russians . . .”

“No. Thank goodness. Otherwise he would be finished against Sokolov, here and in Dublin. This is something else.”

A brief silence. Mecha fixes Max with her glittering gaze as the sunlight spills through the trellis.

“This is where you come in,” she says, in a strange, mysterious voice, a faint smile on her lips.

Max raises his hand as though demanding silence in order to make out a note or some obscure sound.

“I'm afraid . . .”

He pauses for a second, unable to go on, and Mecha interrupts, impatiently. She has opened her bag and is riffling through it.

“I want you to get hold of the Russian's book for my son.”

Max's jaw drops. Literally.

“I'm not sure I understand.”

“Then I'll spell it out for you.” She extracts a pack of Murattis from her bag and puts one in her mouth. “I want you to steal Sokolov's notebook with all his openings in it.”

She has uttered these last words with tremendous calm. Max's hand reaches automatically for his lighter, but he freezes.

“And how do I do that?”

“By walking into the Russian's apartment and taking it.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that.”

A buzzing of bees, close by. Oblivious to them, Max is staring at Mecha. With an overwhelming desire to sit down.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you've done it before.”

He sits down beside her, still in shock.

“I've never stolen a Russian chess book.”

“But you've stolen lots of other things,” says Mecha, who has plucked a box of matches from her bag and is lighting her own cigarette. “One of them mine.”

Max removes his hand from his pocket and rubs his chin. What is this foolishness, he thinks, completely at a loss. What the hell is he getting into, or are they getting him into?

“I'm no longer a . . . I don't do that anymore.”

“But you know how to. Remember Nice.”

“That's absurd. Nice was nearly thirty years ago.”

Mecha says nothing. She smokes, watching him very calmly, as though everything had been said and the ball was in his court. She's enjoying this, he realizes with sudden horror. She finds this situation and Max's bewilderment amusing. And yet she's deadly serious.

“Are you suggesting I break in to the Soviet delegation's apartments, find Sokolov's chess book, and hand it over to you? And how am I to do that? How on earth do you propose I do that?”

“You have the knowledge and the experience. You'll find a way.”

“Look at me.” He touches his face as he leans over, as if it weren't plain to see. “I'm not the man you remember from Buenos Aires or from Nice. I have . . .”

“Things to lose?” She looks at him from very far away, disdainful and unfeeling. “Is that what you are trying to tell me?”

“I stopped taking certain kinds of risk a long time ago. I live peacefully, without any problems with the law. I am fully retired.”

He stands up abruptly, ill at ease, and takes a few paces around the arbor. Gazing nervously at the yellow walls (suddenly they look menacing to him) of the apartment house occupied by the Russians.

“Besides, I'm too old for this game,” he adds, genuinely despondent. “I haven't the strength, or the heart for it.”

He has turned toward Mecha, who remains seated, smoking calmly as she watches him.

“Why should I do it?” he protests. “Give me one good reason why I should expose myself to such danger at my age.”

She opens her mouth to speak, but stops herself almost in
stantaneously. She stays like that for a few seconds, pensive, her cigarette smoking between her fingers, studying Max. At last, with infinite scorn and sudden vehemence, as though venting a long-pent-up rage, she puts out the cigarette on the marble tabletop.

“Because Jorge is your son. Stupid.”

He had gone to see her in Antibes, concealing his desire to explain himself beneath the guise of caution. It was dangerous, he told himself, for her to be on the loose over the next few days. In case some remark or secret she might confide to Susana Ferriol placed him at risk. It was easy enough finding her address. A brief telephone call to Asia Schwarzenberg, who made a few inquiries, and two days after his meeting with Mecha Inzunza, Max was stepping out of a taxi outside the gates of a villa surrounded by laurel bushes, acacias, and mimosas, near La Garoupe. He walked across the garden down a beaten earth driveway, where the Citröen two-seater was parked, bordered by cypress trees whose dark foliage contrasted with the calm, shimmering surface of the sea beyond. The house was a bungalow built on a small, rocky outcrop, with a broad terrace and a sunny veranda beneath wide arches, overlooking the garden and the bay.

Mecha Inzunza didn't look surprised. She welcomed him with unnerving ease after the maid who had opened the door vanished in silence. She was wearing a Japanese, silk pajama suit with a narrow waist, which accentuated her slender lines, discreetly hugging her hips. She had been watering the plants in one of the inside patios, and her bare feet left damp traces on the black-and-white tiles as she led Max through to the living room. It was decorated in the safari style that for the past few years had been all the rage on the Riviera: folding chairs and tables, built-in shelves, glass and chrome everywhere, with a couple paintings on otherwise bare walls, in a house that was beautiful, uncluttered, and simple, and in which
only the very rich could afford to live. Mecha poured him a drink; they smoked and tacitly agreed to engage in polite chitchat, as though their recent encounter at Susana Ferriol's dinner party, and subsequent farewell, had been the most normal thing in the world. They discussed the villa she had rented while the conflict in Spain dragged on, how ideal it was to spend the winter there, the mistral, which made the skies a cloudless blue. Afterward, when they had run out of small talk, and the conversation was beginning to pall, Max proposed they have lunch somewhere nearby, at Juan-les-Pins or Eden Roc, and continue chatting. Mecha responded to his suggestion with a lengthy silence, then repeated the last word he had said under her breath with a contemplative air. Finally, she told Max to pour himself a drink while she changed to go out. I'm not hungry, she said. But a walk would do me good.

And there they were, strolling amid the grove of pines rooted in the sand, the rocks and clumps of seaweed on the shore in the shimmering midday sun, the azure waters of the bay open to the skies, and the sandy beach stretching as far as the old city wall. Mecha had changed out of her pajamas into a pair of black trousers and a blue-and-white-striped sailor's top. She wore sunglasses (and a hint of eye shadow beneath the dark lenses) and her sandals crunched on the gravel alongside Max's brown brogues. He was in shirtsleeves, hair slicked back, hatless, his jacket folded over his arm, and his sleeves turned up twice over his bronzed wrists.

“Do you still dance tangos, Max?”

“Occasionally.”

“Even the Old School Tango? I don't suppose you've lost your touch.”

He looked away, uncomfortable.

“Things aren't the way they used to be.”

“You mean you no longer need to dance for money?”

He chose not to reply. He was thinking of her swaying in his arms that first time in the ballroom on the
Cap Polonio
. The sun
illuminating her slender body in the room at the boardinghouse on Almirante Brown. Her mouth and her greedy, searching tongue when she thrust the tango dancer aside at the dive in Buenos Aires. Her husband's dazed expression, eyes bleary with drink and drugs, his salacious laughter as they copulated in front of him, there and later on in the hotel room, where they met in a hungry embrace, obscene in their nakedness and utter abandon. He was thinking, too, of the countless times he had remembered that scene over the nine years that had gone by, whenever an orchestra struck up the first bars of the melody composed by Armando de Troeye, or he heard it playing on a radio or phonograph. That tango (the last time he had danced to it was five weeks before, at the Carlton in Cannes with the daughter of a German steel manufacturer) had followed Max halfway around the world, and it always gave him a feeling of emptiness, absence, or loss, an intense, physical yearning for Mecha Inzunza's body. Her luminous eyes, open wide, staring at him from close up, frozen with pleasure. Her delicious flesh, always warm and moist in his memory, which he recalled so vividly, and which was close to him once more—still so unbelievably, so strangely close.

“Tell me about your life,” she said.

“Which part?”

“This one.” She made a gesture that seemed to embrace him all. “The part you've been cultivating all these years.”

Max began to talk, cautiously, discreetly, and without going into detail. Skillfully mixing fact and fiction, weaving together amusing anecdotes and interesting situations that obscured the checkered parts of his life. With that natural ease he had, adapting his genuine past to that of the person he was pretending to be at that moment: a wealthy businessman, socialite, habitué of trains, transatlantic liners, and luxury hotels in Europe and South America, perfected over time and from consorting with distinguished or wealthy people. He spoke without knowing whether she believed him or not, but in any case did his best to avoid any reference to the clandestine nature
of his true activities, or their consequences: to the brief spell in a Havana jail, which ended happily in his release, or his minor brush with the law in Kraków following the suicide of a wealthy Polish furrier's sister, or the shot that missed its target in the doorway of a gambling den in Berlin, involving a bungled sting during an illegal card game. Nor did he mention the money he had made and spent with identical ease during those years, or the emergency funds he kept in Monte Carlo, or his long, invaluable association with the safebreaker Enrico Fossataro. Nor, of course, did he mention the pair of professional swindlers, a husband and wife, he had encountered at the Chambre d'Amour bar in Biarritz, during the autumn of '31. Their brief association ended when the wife (a melancholy, attractive Englishwoman named Edith Casey, who specialized in fleecing wealthy widowers) took it upon herself to strengthen her ties with Max, to the point where her husband took exception. He was a cultivated yet brutish Scotsman, who called himself McGill or McDonald, and whose more or less justified jealousy brought to an end a year of mutually lucrative activities, following an unpleasant scene in which, to the couple's surprise (they had always considered him a peace-loving young gentleman) Max had been forced to resort to a couple of dirty tricks he had learned during his time in the Legion in North Africa. He had left McGill or McDonald or whatever his real name was laid out on the carpet of a room in the H
Ô
tel du Golf de Deauville, with a bloody nose, while Edith Casey hurled insults at him as he fled along the corridor and vanished from their lives.