“So would I without something to remember it by. I use the digits for my birthday date. That’s a number I can’t forget.”
“I’ll do the same. My birthday is March 29, 1950.”
Carlos pushed the numbered buttons for her: 29-3-50.
“You’ve done it wrong!” cried Tash. “It’ll have to be 3-29-50, if I’m to remember it, because that’s the way I think of numerical dates.”
“A month-day-year sequence? Okay.” He corrected the number and put the books he was carrying on the table. “Have you everything you want in here?”
Tash smiled. “Everything. Typewriter, tape recorder, papers, pens, pencils, even comfortable chairs and a nice view of flower beds. Everything but work.”
“Don’t worry. There will be more than enough of that, I assure you.”
He sat on the edge of a window seat and held out a cigarette case.
“No, thanks. I gave it up two years ago, but it doesn’t bother me when other people smoke.”
“What strength of character! Some day I am going to be virtuous, too, but now, like Saint Augustine, I am asking God to wait until I am a little older.” He drew on his own cigarette luxuriously. “Do you read Spanish?”
“Only a little.”
“Then it’s just as well most of these books are in English.” He took an ashtray from the table and set it on his lap. “What do you know about Barlovento?”
“Nothing.”
“Fine. Then you won’t have anything to unlearn. I was born there, but educated in America. I was a classmate of the Governor’s at Princeton. I’m an American now, but . . . how can I be indifferent to the fate of Barlovento when it is becoming a football in American politics?”
“The dock strike?”
He nodded. “Barlovento is mining country. America needs bauxite from those mines, but the dockworkers’ union had such a bad experience with Communist infiltration during the thirties that they won’t unload any imports from Barlovento, which, they say, is Communist.”
“Is it?”
Carlos shrugged with Latin elaboration. “Such polarized terms have little meaning in an economy as primitive as Barlovento’s. The dictator, Escudero, calls himself an agrarian reformer. He has trade relations with Russia, like everybody else today, including us. If he is handled with tact, he is more likely to evolve into a Tito than a Mao. His predecessor, the neo-fascist Roya, was far worse. The Mafia ruled Barlovento through Roya. Indeed, it was to escape Roya that my father brought his family to this country.”
“And where do I come in?”
“There are two factions among Barloventan-Americans now: immigrants, who are pro-Escudero and want the Governor to break the strike, and political exiles, who are anti-Escudero and want the Governor to support the strike.
“One thing that confuses people is the fact that the anti-strike faction is liberal and the pro-strike faction is conservative.
“In a few days the Governor will have to make a speech about all this. You are going to write the speech.”
“Which side do I take?”
“Can you ask? Neither, of course! He must say nothing in a great many words and so buy time for negotiation. This is what I believe speech writers call a challenge.”
“But won’t he have to take sides eventually?”
“If he’s lucky, the President will step in and stop the strike as a matter of national interest. Then the Governor won’t be compromised. That’s important to him because this is an election year.”
“So he is going to run for a second term?”
“Of course. That was decided months ago.” Carlos smiled. “Now you’re one of us, we don’t have to pretend with you any more.”
“Anything else?”
“Just remember to walk on eggs whenever you mention the Barloventan crisis.”
“In other words, dodge it?”
“Exactly.”
Tash remembered her first day as a reporter. She had covered a story about the sale of a Fragonard drawing for a fabulous sum. When there wasn’t time to look up the date of the drawing before going to press, she had asked the city editor what to do about it. He had answered, without looking up from his work: “Dodge it!”
To a girl fresh from academia where accuracy and honesty were gods, it had been a shock. Now she was getting used to this other world, where the only goal was getting things done, however sloppily or deviously.
“How did you learn so much about American newspapers?” she asked Carlos.
“Not so long ago I was running the South American department in the New York office of a North American wire service. When Jeremy found out how many Barloventan-American voters there were in this state, he decided he needed a press aide who could talk to them in their own tongue. So here I am!”
“Barlovento means windward, doesn’t it?”
“So you do know some Spanish?”
“Not as much as I’d like to.”
“In that part of the Caribbean, the prevailing wind is such that it was always easier for Spain to invade leeward islands, like Sotavento, in sailing ships than windward islands, like Barlovento. So Barlovento got its freedom long before Sotavento and was always more free until Roya took over. Why not put that in the speech? Say something about the gallantry of the liberty-loving Barloventistos, who threw off the iron yoke of tyrannical Spain over one hundred years ago, etcetera. Revolutions as old as that are respectable. The safest way to give brio to a newspaper story is by whipping a dead horse, and—”
He paused at the sound of staccato footsteps outside in the corridor.
The door burst open, and an angry, little man plunged into the room.
“Carlos! Why are you hiding back here?”
“I am not hiding. I am explaining to Miss Perkins—”
“Miss Perkins?” The little man turned to stare at Tash. “Well, I’ll be jiggered! I always thought Tash Perkins was a man. The name sounds like a man’s and the columns read like a man’s.”
Tash was nettled. “Would you say Lise Meitner’s equations and formulae read like a man’s?”
Carlos interrupted in his most formal tone: “Miss Perkins, may I present the Lieutenant Governor, Mr. Job Jackman?”
In the neighboring state of Maryland, there was no lieutenant governor, but here he was an
