Both of the child’s hands went over her mouth. Her hands looked like she spent the entire day licking them and then running them over the dirtiest, stickiest surfaces that the planet Dirty Sticky could offer her. She stood there, the discreet monkey, eyes wide and snapping with impatience, shifting from foot to foot in her eagerness to spread the latest word about Michael Jackson or the intifada.
“Okay, now,” I said, lifting the saltshaker and bringing it partway down with every word. “What’s-your- name?” I pointed it at her and punched its side with my thumb.
“Boutros Boutros-Ghali,” she said. And opened her mouth wider, but I pushed my imaginary mute button and the hands went up again.
“Are you alone here, Boutros?” Push the button.
“Tee Wee,” she said. “Da da DAHT-DA-” The Headline News theme was cut off by the magic saltshaker. Her grubby palm smacked into her lips.
“Only the TV? Nobody else?”
She pulled the hands away.
“Ah-aah,” I said. “I didn’t push the remote.” I added salt to the rug. “Go.”
“ No entiendo.”
Uh-oh, I thought. Espanol. Another of the many languages I don’t speak. “Well, me, too. Mute’s on.” I gave her a couple cc’s of salt. “Stay close,” I said. “I mean, vamanos. And silencio, okay?”
“Hollywood minnit,” she said before gluing her hands in place.
The dining room barely provided space enough for me, Boutros, a small formica table, and four chrome and vinyl chairs. A rickety wicker bookcase, hip-high, housed a collection of paperbacks with Spanish titles and no fewer than three Spanish-English dictionaries. In a plain wooden frame above the bookcase a lachrymose Jesus, bleeding profusely from the head, opened his chest to reveal a remarkably red and improbably symmetrical heart.
I followed Boutros into a kitchen with an old Gaffers amp; Sattler gas four-burner, the kind Eleanor wanted to find, and a refrigerator that would barely have held my average week’s worth of beer. Ropes of chiles hung from the walls, pinned in place with big flat thumbtacks. Jesus was in here, too, his chest intact this time, with rays of light streaming out from his white-clad form. The floor was worn linoleum, the corners of the tiles curling up here and there, clean enough to give birth on. Beyond the kitchen was an infinitesimal laundry room. The man’s clothes Elena had been washing the previous night were neatly folded on top of the dryer. There was no dust or lint anywhere.
What in the world, I wondered, had the child gotten her hands into?
Lyn Vaughn, ensconced on the blue CNN set in Atlanta, smiled at me in a newsy, discreetly foxy fashion from the screen of the hulking television set in the living room. The television set has replaced the piano in modern homes as a surface on which to display pictures, and the space above Lyn Vaughn’s talking head was cluttered with framed snapshots, uniformly self-possessed faces that presented variations on a genetic theme: the echo of an uptilted eye here, a broad Indio nose there. A family. Three sober-faced boys-teenagers-decked out in stiffly starched shirts, one girl of eight or ten wearing a white communion dress, Elena herself in a puritanically simple dark dress, and a woman with a short thatch of steel-gray hair who had to be Marta. Marta, the troll-aunt, tiny and bent, with something simmering, insistent, and compressed, in her eyes.
I picked the picture up and showed it to Boutros, whose hands had found their way into her mouth. She tore her eyes away from Lyn Vaughn and looked at it. “ Tia Marta,” she said around nine grimy fingers.
Another picture, the largest of all, showed Elena, the boys, and the girl, considerably younger, standing in front of a greener, lusher, muddier world that had to be El Salvador. They were all looking past the camera, laughing at something. The boy in the center had thrown his arms comfortably over his brothers’ shoulders.
No picture of the baby. No man to take it since she was born? There wasn’t much of anything to suggest a man’s presence. There wasn’t, in fact, much of anything at all: a couch, two chairs, a low table. A closed door.
Through the door, a hallway, parallel to the street. Three bedrooms, one with three beds-the boys? — one with two-Elena and her older daughter? — and one, the tiniest of all, a penitential nun’s cell with a bare brown linoleum floor, an iron-framed single bed, and a four-drawer dresser of unpainted, unfinished wood, the kind people buy cheap, meaning to paint it, and never do. Surrounded by a pink plastic frame on top of the dresser, Marta’s face squinted apprehensively out at me, waiting for the next blow.
The mystery of the child’s hands was solved. Aunt Marta’s room apparently served as a trap for all the dirt that entered the house. There were dust rats under the bed, grit on the linoleum. It may be sexist stereotyping, but it seems to me that when a woman lets her space get seriously dirty, she’s usually depressed.
In the top drawer, rolled up into a sock, I found eleven hundred dollars in twenties and fifties. A lot of money for a maid. The child gazed up at me solemnly as I unrolled the sock’s mate and heard something jingle. Marta’s cache: a ring, another, a gold chain, a-
Somebody moaned, a constricted little vocal shiver with no force behind it. I looked at Boutros, but she’d dropped to her fanny on the floor, where she was rolling dirt ropes on the linoleum.
My spine went stiff, and the pain in my back wrapped itself around my middle, saddled me, and dug in the spurs. I closed my fingers around the sock and replaced it silently. For insurance, I picked up the saltshaker, which I’d been toting around with me, and zapped the child. A dirt rope went into her mouth, but she kept quiet. Easing the salt-shaker into my left hand, I pulled my gun out of my pocket, trying to keep my body between it and the child, and slid my feet toward the door. My shoes squealed on the linoleum. Boutros got up and slid along behind me. Her shoes squealed on the linoleum.
Okay, skip stealth. I sprang across the hall and into the boys’ room, gun extended, and kicked the door back against the wall. The child squealed happily at the noise. No one behind the door, no one in the room, no one in the closet, no one in the little bathroom.
I kicked the door again as I hurtled back into the hallway and slammed my back against the wall. Pulling both hands from her mouth, the child clapped them together. She was having a great time. I took three long steps sideways, hugging the wall, and then whirled and kicked the open door of the largest room, the room I’d taken to be Elena’s.
It banged against the wall and bounced shut behind me, but by then I was raking the clothes in the closet with my free hand, keeping the gun back, at waist level, pointed into the closet. The clothes swayed back and forth, hangers rattling. No one.
There were two beds, a queen-size one with a cerise coverlet in the center of the room and a smaller one, a child’s bed, up against the wall to the right. Boutros squatted Asian-style, bottom touching the floor, next to the larger bed and put a dark brown handprint on something white protruding from beneath the bedspread. A shoe.
It was a small shoe, a white canvas sneaker. It had a foot in it. It was perfectly still, as still as the foot of a corpse.
I put the gun in my left, reached down, and took hold of the corpse’s foot. Boutros scuttled backward, and the corpse said, “ Yaiiii.”
“Mr. Max give me,” Marta Aguirre said sullenly. She was even smaller than I’d expected, a shrunken, malformed woman who seemed to have been compressed unevenly by external pressure, collapsed inward like a tin can at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
She was sitting on her hands on the queen-size bed, and I was perched on the smaller one, the child’s bed, feeling oversize and overtired and stretched far too thin for any of this. Boutros, whose name turned out to be Tina, was in the living room, glued to the latest carnage from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You’ve already admitted you took the rings and the gold chain. Why would Max give you more than a thousand bucks?”
“For gold,” she said.
It was what she’d said before. I put a hand behind me and rubbed at the small of my back. Peter Pain immediately whammed me a good one. “Gold for what?”
“Surprise.”
“Well, you’re going to have to spoil it,” I said. She glowered at me, and I tried the direct approach. “What kind of a surprise? For whom?”
Her mouth shrunk at the corners like a poison kiss, giving her an expression of surpassing bitterness, the expression of something little and bent that lived in the dark under a bridge and frightened dogs. “ Maricon,” she said venomously. “Fancy boy.”
