to the bars were wide and brightly lit, framing dancers and gamblers and brawlers, and it appeared to Mingolla that the street was the site of dozens of small theaters in which the same play was being performed.
At nine o’clock he walked two blocks south and entered the Cantina Las Vegas 99, the bar where Alvina Guzman plied her trade. He pushed through the crowd to the end of the counter and ordered a rum. Several men were ranged along the counter; the one nearest Mingolla favored him with a disconsolate stare, then went back to gazing into his glass. All the men at the counter were looking into their glasses, all gloomy, and Mingolla had the notion that if he were to imitate them, his thoughts would sail away at the speed of rum into some interior darkness. He engaged in a desultory conversation with the bartender, talking World Cup soccer and the weather, and critiqued the mural on the wall above the jukebox: sparkling dice and roulette wheels, playing cards and poker chips, each given the impression of enormity by the tiny people painted beneath them, their hands upflung in awe. Every couple of minutes he scanned the crowd for Alvina, and at last he picked her out. She was standing by the jukebox, feeding it a coin. A blocky, diminutive Indian woman with adobe-colored skin and full breasts and hips. Her black hair was woven into a single braid that fell to her mid-back, and her clothing—a white blouse and print skirt— showed signs of long usage. Like Hettie, her face conjured up Debora, not by its prettiness, for Alvina was not pretty, but by its impassivity. She stood unmoving, her squarish face without expression, and when a romantic ballad came on the jukebox, she began to dance alone, turning in tight graceful circles, her eyes fixed on the floor. Mingolla had been about to approach her, but held back, seeing in the dance, its sad abandon and its relation to the melodramatic Spanish of the lyrics, something he did not want to interrupt.
Alvina looked lost when the record ended, as if she had awakened to find herself in another world. Mingolla beat his way through the crowd, put a hand on her arm, and her face seemed to drain of an energy whose presence he hadn’t noticed before. ‘Ten lempira,’ she said.
‘
‘Your accent,’ she said. It’s Guatemalan.’
‘Yes, I’m from the Peten. San Francisco de Juticlan.’
‘I’m Guatemalan, too. From the Altiplano,’ Her interest flagged. ‘For the night it’s fifty. You have a hotel?’
‘It’s nearby.’
She took a step toward the door, then said, ‘I don’t do the thing with my mouth… understand?’
Mingolla said that wasn’t important.
They walked without speaking to Mingolla’s hotel and up the stairs to his room. Inside was a cot, a chipped sink, a night table, and a ceiling fixture. The walls were dark green boards, striped with light showing through from the adjoining rooms, and from the room on the right came the sounds of strenuous lovemaking. Alvina started to unbutton her blouse, but Mingolla told her to wait.
‘What is it?’ she asked nervously.
‘Sit down.’ He switched on the light. ‘I want to talk with you.’
‘Why?’ Very nervous. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Please, sit down.’
She did as he asked, but darted a glance toward the door.
‘My name is David, and I know that you’re Alvina Guzman.’
‘It’s no secret,’ she said, affecting calm, but again looked at the door.
‘I want your help,’ he said, infecting her with feelings of friendship and trust.
She lifted her hand as if to touch her face, but left the gesture uncompleted. ‘What help can I be? I’m a prisoner.’
‘I’m going into the Barrio.’
‘You don’t need my help for that.’ She rested a hand on the pillow, then patted it again, testing its softness, its firmness, as if it were a very fine thing, indeed. ‘Why do you want to do this?’
‘There’s a man, a Nicaraguan named de Zedegui…’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He killed my family.’ Mingolla fleshed out the story, his desire for revenge, continuing to exert influence on Alvina, and explained that he wanted to pass himself off as her cousin and thus fall under the relative immunity accorded her family.
‘A friend of mine, he may know this de Zedegui.’ She looked at him with concern. ‘You may be tortured, and you’ll probably never get out.’ In the adjoining room a prostitute gave a patently false cry of delight, and Alvina twitched her head toward the sound. ‘But if you insist on trying,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you at the Ninety-Nine just before three o’clock.’
‘What’ll you do till then?’
‘Work… the guards expect their money.’
Muttered conversation from the next room, the sound of breaking glass.
‘Here.’ He handed her a clip containing a thick fold of bills.
‘This is too much,’ she said after counting it.
‘It’s not enough.’
She raised no further objection, tucked the money into her blouse pocket, and sat with hands on knees, as stolid and glum as an idol. ‘Could I sleep until three?’ she asked.
‘Sure.’
Her back to him, she unbuttoned her blouse, shrugged it off. Red weals of scar tissue crossed her shoulders, and when she slipped off her skirt, he saw that more severe scars figured her dimpled buttocks and thighs. The scars centered her for Mingolla, made clear her long history of hopeless striving and terror, of jungle hideouts and hard traveling. She folded her clothes at the foot of the bed and slid beneath the covers, sitting up, engaging Mingolla’s stare. Her breasts were pendulous, the areolas large and brown. The pucker of an old bullet wound on her right shoulder.
‘You’ve paid,’ she said.
He knew she was merely offering to fulfill a contract, and yet, aroused by his contact with her mind, he would have liked to make love to her. She wasn’t attractive, but she was plain in the way history is plain, its contrivance lending the world a symmetry that implies hidden beauty; and it seemed to him that her impassivity was symptomatic of the quiet confidence with which beauty confronts the world. There was beauty in her, he thought, and the scars bore this out. However, he didn’t want to use her: hers was not the sort of beauty he would feel comfortable using.
‘You wear your scars well,’ he said.
This displeased her. ‘Some men like them.’
‘That’s not how I meant it.’
She continued to meet his eyes. ‘You haven’t answered me.’
‘Yes, I have.’
A fleshy smack in the next room, a cry that was not feigned.
‘I’ll turn out the light in a minute,’ Mingolla said.
He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of the night table, removing a knife, a calf sheath, and
