Legends (29 page)

“She did,” Leroy affirmed.

“She never gets it right.” The girl spoke English with what Lincoln took to be an Italian accent. “I’m Paura some days. On others I’m Lucia. Today is a Lucia day.”

Lincoln, an aficionado of legends as well as firearms, asked, “Are these different names for the same person or two distinct people?”

Lucia scrutinized Lincoln to see if he was mocking her. When she saw he was serious, she answered his question seriously. “They’re as distinct as night and day. Lucia is day. Her name in Italian means light. Sunshine and daylight fill her heart, she is grateful to be alive and lives from day to day, she doesn’t see past tomorrow. She goes down on anyone who pays without haggling, she considers it a matter of principle to give a client his money’s worth. She passes on half of what she earns to her pimp and does not hold back his share if a client should happen to leave a tip.”

“And Paura? What’s she like?”

“Paura is night. Her name means fear in Italian. Everything about her can be traced to fear she is afraid of her shadow during the day, afraid of the darkness when the last light has been drained from the day, afraid of the customers who remove their belts before they take off their trousers. She’s afraid of swimming pools. She is afraid life on earth will end before dawn tomorrow, afraid it will go on forever.” She regarded Lincoln with her frightened eyes. “Would you like me to read your palm? I can tell you on what day of the week your life will come to an end.”

Lincoln politely declined. “I have no visible lifeline,” he said.

The girl tried another tack. “What sign were you born under?”

Lincoln shook his head. “I’m a Zodiac atheist. Don’t know my sign, don’t want to know.”

“That more or less narrows our relationship down to dancing,” Lucia said, her body starting to sway to the music again. Shrugging the filmy blouse so far off one shoulder that the aureole on a breast came into view, she held out a hand.

“She’s a nut case,” Leroy muttered. “But she sure has got the hots for you.”

“I have a bad leg,” Lincoln informed the girl.

“Go ‘head and put her out of her misery,” Leroy urged. “Jesus Christ, you can’t catch nothing jus’ dancing with her.” When Lincoln still hung back, Leroy nudged his ankle under the table. “You ain’t being a gentleman, Lincoln, that’s for goddamned sure.”

Lincoln pulled a face and shrugged and slid off the banquette to his feet. The Italian girl gripped one of his large hands in hers and pulled him limping into the middle of the room, then turned and, stomping out her joint on the floor boards, melted against him, both of her bare arms flung around his neck, her teeth nibbling on the lobe of his ear.

In the booth, Leroy slapped the table in delight.

Lincoln was a good dancer. Favoring his game leg, and with the girl glued to his lanky frame, he launched into an awkward little three step that set the other girls around the bar to watching in admiration.

After a bit Lucia whispered in Lincoln’s ear. “You don’t need to tell me your names if you don’t want to. Wouldn’t change anything if you did around here nobody uses real names.”

“Name’s Lincoln.”

“That a first name or family name?” First.

“That your name during daylight or at night?”

Lincoln had to smile. “Both.”

Without missing a beat, Lucia said, “Giovanni da Varrazano, who gave his daylight name to the bridge that connects Brooklyn to an island named Staten, was killed by Indians during an expedition to Brazil in 1528. A little bird whispering in my ear told me you would be thrilled to know that.”

Lincoln stopped in his tracks and pushed her off to arm’s length. The smile sat like a mask on his face. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

Lucia, quite pleased with herself, tucked her breast into her blouse with a dip and toss of her shoulder and sank back into his arms, and they started dancing again. Lincoln, suddenly edgy, pressed his mouth to her ear. “So it’s you, the cutout,” he said. He thought of Djamillah in the room over the bar in Beirut, with the faded night moth tattooed under her right breast; he remembered telling her I am addicted to fear I require a daily fix. You had to be addicted to fear to get into the business of spying; this is the thing he had in common with the Italian girl Paura she had surely been the cutout who had seen the FBI asset thrown to the crocodile. Lincoln identified the source of his edginess: He hoped against hope she wouldn’t suffer the same fate. “Do you have a good memory?” he asked her now. Without waiting for a reply, he said, “Here goes nothing: I was picked up by the Texan sitting at the table with me, I believe his name really is Leroy Streeter because he mentioned that his father had burned down a Negro church in Alabama. He took me to a room over a bar in Ciudad del Este. The Egyptian named Daoud was there.”

“It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t want sex,” Lucia said. “I’ve had enough sex for one day. My pussy and my mouth are both sore.”

“Daoud checked out my bona fides I heard him go upstairs and make a phone call my guess is he was getting his people to confirm that I’d been treated in a Trieste clinic, that I’d written the book I said I wrote. I must have passed the initial muster because he sent me back here and told me to hang out with Leroy until I was contacted again, which is what I’m doing now.”

“The reason we play the same record all the time,” Lucia whispered, her tongue flicking inside his ear, “is because “Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ is the opposite of our lives down here. Except for Lucia, all we do is worry about not being happy.”

“With any luck, the next step is for me to be taken to meet the Saudi.”

“The girls who work here,” Lucia said, “use abortions as birth control. If you ever come back again, it will be appreciated if you would bring us a carton of condoms.”

“Leroy told me why they’re shopping around for ammonium nitrate,” Lincoln went on. “I don’t know if he’s bragging or inventing, but he says he plans to fill a moving van with explosives and blow it up in the middle of Wall Street.” He let one of his palms slip down to her tight toreador pants and the swell of a buttock. “What will you do when all this is over?”

Lucia dropped one of her hands to reach under the back of Lincoln’s shirt. “All this will never be over,” she breathed.

Her answer startled Lincoln; that was what the Alawite prostitute Djamillah had told Dante Pippen as he was leaving the room over the bar in Beirut a legend ago. “It will end one day,” Lincoln promised her. “Where will you go? What will you do?”

“I would go back to Tuscany,” she said, clinging to him, burrowing into his neck so that her words were muffled. “I would buy a small farm and breed baby polyesters and shear them twice a year and sell the hair to make silk-soft cloth.”

“Polyester is a synthetic fabric,” Lincoln said.

Lucia’s hand came in contact with the leather of the holster nestling in the cavity in Lincoln’s lower back. She caressed the cold metal on the butt of the small-caliber automatic in the holster. “I will raise baby acrylics, then,” she said, annoyed at his nitpicking. Her fingers worked their way under the holster; when they reached the smooth scar of the healed wound she stopped dancing abruptly. “What gave you that?” she asked.

But Lincoln only murmured her night name, Paura, and she didn’t repeat the question.

Hanging out at the Kit Kat Klub the following night, Lincoln made a point of dancing with two other girls and taking the second one up to a room so that suspicion wouldn’t fall on Paura if he was compromised. Once in the room, die girl, a bleached blonde who called herself Monroe Marilyn, named her price. Lincoln counted out the bills and set them on the table. Monroe washed in a chipped bidet and insisted he wash too, and watched him to make sure he did. She took off the rest of her clothing except for a black lace brassiere, which she claimed to have bought in Paris, and stretched out on the mattress covered with a stained sheet, her legs apart, her eyes fixed on the filaments in the electric bulb dangling from the ceiling. In the bar below “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” started to play again on the jukebox. Lincoln shut his eyes and imagined he was making love to Paura. Under him, Marilyn moaned and cried out with pleasure; to Lincoln her sensual clatter came across as a recorded announcement, played over and over like the 45-rpm disk on the jukebox downstairs. He finished before “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” did.

“So you got your ashes hauled after all,” Leroy said when Lincoln came limping back to the booth and slid onto the banquette across from him. “You must of broken some kind of speed record. You need to get laid at least once a day not to be sex starved. The trick is to make it last as long as you can. That way you get more fuck for your buck.”

“You ought to write a lonely hearts column for the newspapers,” Lincoln said. “You could advise men how to solve their sexual problems.”

“I just may do that when I’m too old to take on the Federal gov’ment in Washington.”

“How old will you be when you’re too old for the good fight?”

“Thirty, maybe. Maybe thirty.”

Around eleven, an old man wearing a long shabby overcoat and a threadbare scarf wound loosely around his thin neck came into the bar to sell lottery tickets. He had turned up the same hour every night since Lincoln had been hanging out at the Kit Kat. As he stepped through the door, the hookers dropped what they were doing to crowd around him, hunting for lucky numbers on the lottery slips attached to his clipboard. When they’d each bought a ticket that suited them, the girls drifted back to the tables or took up where they’d left off on the dance floor. The lottery vendor shuffled across the floor to a vacant booth not far from where Lincoln and Leroy were sitting. The mulatto waitress filled a tall glass with tap water and set it down in front of him. The old man half bowed to her from a sitting position the gesture seemed to come from another world and another century. A new girl Lincoln had not seen before came down the steps behind a corpulent Lebanese client and, noticing the old man with the clipboard in the booth, hurried over to buy a ticket. When the music went silent, Lincoln could hear their voices he could even make out what they were saying. The girl was asking when the drawing would be held and how she would know if she’d won anything. The old man told her that he kept the stubs attached to his clipboard for months. Each morning he tore the list of winning numbers from the newspaper, he said, and made it his business to personally seek out winners who had bought a ticket from him.

The idea of a hooker hoping to strike it rich from a lottery ticket intrigued Lincoln. He wondered if her pimp would take half the proceeds if she did win.

Leroy was listening to them also. He reached across the table and tapped Lincoln on the wrist. “The hell language they talking?” he wanted to know.

Lincoln hadn’t realized they were talking a foreign language until Leroy called his attention to it. “Not sure,” he replied, although, to his astonishment, he found that he knew very well. The old lottery vendor and the hooker were talking in Polish, which was the language Martin Odum’s mother had used when she told him bedtime stories in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, a lifetime ago.

At the booth, the girl could be heard asking, “lie kosztoje bile ii When the old man told her how much a ticket cost, she carefully counted out coins from a small purse and tore one from the clipboard.

“Sounds foreign to me,” Leroy was saying. “Don’t like foreigners, don’t like the languages they talk. Don’t know why foreigners don’t learn American. Make the world simpler if everyone talked American, is how I see it.”

Lincoln couldn’t resist baiting Leroy. “You want them to talk American with a Texas drawl like you or a clipped Boston accent like John Kennedy?”

Leroy took the question seriously. “Don’t matter none to me. Any American beats out a foreign language, hands down.”

Near midnight, as the girls began to drift over to the bar to settle up what they owed for the rooms they’d used, the fat Arab boy who’d been doing the jigsaw puzzle in Ciudad del Este burst into the bar. He was still wearing the shoulder holster with the plastic grip of a toy gun jutting from it. Spotting the two Americans in the rear booth, he padded over on his Reeboks and thrust out a folded note. Leroy read it and raised his eyes and cried out excitedly, “Bingo, Lincoln. Daoud is waiting for us behind the bar.”

Daoud’s coal black Mercedes was idling in the shadows at the street end of the alley when the two Yankees, the one with the cane limping along behind the short American in cowboy boots, came around the side of the Kit Kat and settled into the backseat. The fat Arab boy slid in next to Daoud in front. “Where are you taking us?” Lincoln asked, but Daoud didn’t bother to reply. He gestured to the driver and the car lurched past the hal al butcher shop on the corner into the poorly lit main drag and headed in the direction of the Little Dipper and Polaris, hanging in the night sky over the rooftops. Twenty minutes out of Foz do Iguacii the paved road abruptly gave way to a rutted dirt track and the driver had to slow down to keep the passengers from hitting their heads against the roof of the car. In the headlights, Indians leading donkeys piled high with burlap sacks could be seen stumbling through the pitch darkness. “In the outback,” Leroy told Lincoln, “lot of smuggling goes on during the night.” After one particularly rough bump Daoud flung an arm over the shoulder of the fat teenager and said something to him in Arabic. The boy said, “Inch’Allak”

Lincoln leaned forward to ask the Egyptian if the boy were his son. Daoud turned his head only slightly and said, “He is the son of my son.”

“And where is his father?”

“His father, my son, was killed in the attack on the American Marines at Beirut Airport in 1983.”

Lincoln reminded himself he was living deep in a legend; that he ought to be commiserating with the Egyptian. “It must be a source of great sadness to have lost your son “

“It is a source of great pride to have given a son to the jihad. Along with my son, two hundred and forty one American marines and sailors lost their lives in the Beirut attack, after which your President Reagan lost his nerve and disengaged from Lebanon. Every father should have such a son.”