Montega's Mistress (8 page)

Once they were alone Matteo opened his arms, and Helen ran into them. He held her for a long moment before she said, “Matteo, you’re all right. I was so worried.”

He stepped back to look at her, brushing a strand of hair from her brow. “I’m fine. I hope my men didn’t frighten you. There was no safe way to get in touch.”

“I was scared at first, but then the bigger one showed me his medallion, the one with the same figure that’s on the ring you gave me. After that I knew they were from you and I would be okay.” She touched his cheek, roughened now as it had been when he was sick. “How is your arm?”

“Good as new. You’re an excellent nurse.”

Helen’s hand fell away and she said guardedly, “Matt, why did you bring me here? The way you left I never expected to see you again a week later.”

“I didn’t expect it either,” he replied simply.

“What happened?”

He turned away. “I can’t get out of the country. My plan when I left you was to go south to the Keys and use a connection I have there, but apparently I’m too hot to handle.” He smiled resignedly. “The local police are one thing, but your FBI is also looking for me, and my friend didn’t like the idea of federal charges and a federal court. So here I am.”

Helen sighed and folded her hands, as she had when she was little and confronted with a problem. The cloak-and-dagger tactics and unsavory surroundings might be necessary, but they still made her uneasy.

“All right, Matt,” she said in a controlled voice, “what is going on? You wouldn’t tell me before, but you must have changed your mind, or I would not be standing here, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So. What’s with your clothes—your hair, for starters. You look like a Wall Street stockbroker out for Saturday lunch at the country club.”

“Good,” he said with satisfaction. “That’s my disguise.”

Disguise? she was about to reply when she had to jump out of the way as a mouse scurried by, followed by another in hot pursuit.

“You’d better get a cat in here,” she advised him. “You’ve got mice roller skating all over the place.”

“I don’t plan to stay,” he answered dryly.

“No? Where are you going?”

“Back home, I hope. That depends on what you do.” He held her light gaze with his darker one. “You helped me once, Helen, will you do so again?”

“Tell me about it,” she said warily, “and I’ll let you know.”

Matteo gestured for her to resume her seat, overturning an orange crate next to it. He arranged the box so that he would face her and sat down. “Ask, and I’ll answer,” he said.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I am Matteo Salazar de Montega,” he replied solemnly, humoring her, like a child reciting his lunchtime menu for his mother.

“And where is your home?”

“My country is Puerta Linda,” he replied, producing a map from his pocket and opening it for her. He had come prepared.

“Here,” he added, pointing to the coastline of Central America. Helen followed his forefinger to a tiny state divided from its neighbors by a river on one side and a mountain range on another. She continued to look down at the map as he took off his tinted glasses in order to see better.

Puerta Linda. The name struck a chord in Helen’s mind, and she remembered news reports of the turmoil in that country, the clips filled with shots of men in fatigues toting rifles and aerial views of verdant jungles.

“The night we met I was buying guns for the revolution there, and your Coast Guard interrupted the sale,” Matteo went on evenly. “That’s why the federal government is in on it, too; they’re looking for me on illegal purchase of weapons charges.”

Helen listened, absorbing each piece of information as it came. Puerta Linda was a world away, the current government a corrupt dictatorship threatened by bands of rebels who sought to overthrow it. Rebels like the man before her, who watched her calmly with obsidian eyes, waiting for her reaction.

And now his name began to assume its full significance, and her mouth went dry. Montega. He was the leader of the revolution, a young turk who was trying to organize the various factions to make a disciplined assault on the sham democracy in power. He had been described as well spoken and American educated, a brilliant organizer with a keen mind and limitless personal courage. Matteo Montega was the most prominent figure in his country’s evolving history, and Helen had been hiding him in her father’s house for a week, feeding him erythrocin and Angel Bites. It was incredible.

“What do you want me to do?” Helen asked quietly, subdued by the enormity of it.

“Your government knows that I will try to get back to my country,” he answered. “Agents are watching the airports, monitoring all flights to Puerta Linda. There aren’t many, so it isn’t difficult to screen the passengers. I want to leave the country as part of a couple because they will expect me to be traveling alone. But I need someone, a real American who would not arouse suspicion, to pose as my wife.”

“And that’s where I come in,” Helen whispered.

“Yes. There is more involved here than just my breaking American law, although that is what they would use to imprison me. The current government in my country is allied with the United States, and the Puerta Lindan officials would like nothing better than for the American authorities to throw me in jail and let me rot there. I’d be out of the country and out of their hair, permanently.”

Helen swallowed, realizing that he was right.

“You must understand,” he said, leaning forward earnestly. “My country would be ripe for a Communist takeover if the current government fell and the rebels were not organized and ready. I must be there, Helen, or Puerta Linda will go from a lesser evil to a greater one.”

“I’m not a very good actress,” she said feebly. “I don’t know how convincing I would be.”

“You would just have to be yourself,” Matteo replied. “You are an American, you have the right accent, the right attitude; you could answer questions correctly if you were challenged. We’ve got all the paperwork; you wouldn’t have to do anything except get on the plane with me and sit there until we arrived.”

Helen stared back at him, her eyes wide.

Matteo took her hand. “Helen, I speak English very well, but I have never been able to lose my accent completely. And it gets more pronounced under stress; it would give me away in a minute. At the very least it would make the authorities suspicious, and closer investigation would prove disastrous. But if you were with me you could do most of the talking, provide me with cover, don’t you see?”

“I see,” she murmured, not looking at him.

He thought she was about to turn him down and said, “Before you say no, let me tell you more about me and my country, and why it is so important for me to get back there.”

Helen’s gaze returned to his face as he said, “The bird on the ring I gave you is the aquatar. It is native to my country and a freak of evolution, able to survive under conditions that would kill other wildlife, able to eat almost nothing for long periods and store its own water. It is a survivor, tough and smart and as tenacious as the spirit of freedom in my people. That’s why we took it for our symbol.”

Helen listened, intrigued.

“My country has not been in the hands of the people for a long time. The ‘elections’ the government holds are a farce; the officials talk about registering and voting, and then perpetuate a dictatorship that has kept the same faction in power for twenty years.”

“Puerta Linda always calls itself a democracy,” Helen said. “But most people know better.”

He snorted. “Do you think so? Americans don’t seem to care.”

“They just don’t understand, Matteo. It’s all so confusing, so many different groups and it’s happening so far away.”

“But you should try to understand!” he said passionately. “You Americans take too much for granted; when I was in school here and would hear on the news about the lack of ‘voter turnout’ during an election, I would be enraged. Do you know what the opportunity to vote in a free election would mean to any Puerta Lindan? And so many of you throw it away; softball games and appointments for a haircut are more important.”

Helen dropped her eyes, remembering an election day when she had been immersed in her research and had forgotten to vote.

“I want to bring to Puerta Linda the same kind of government you have here. My father made a mistake in sending me to America to school. I learned what it’s like to live in a free society, and once you’ve done that, you can’t go back to a lifetime of indentured servitude.”

“Your father?” Helen said.

“Yes. He was a minister of the current regime who served it until he died three years ago. He had all the wealth and privileges its favorites enjoy: a seaside villa, a staff of servants to wait on him and his family, the best of everything. Nothing was too good for a man so high in the government, a trusted cog in the most corrupt machine in Central America.”

“It must have been hard for you growing up in his house,” Helen offered softly.

“I didn’t,” Matteo responded, meeting her gaze directly. “I am illegitimate. My mother was my father’s maid.”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice.

Matteo stood and began to walk around, gesturing to make his points. “I was raised with my mother’s people and saw things from their point of view. She was poor and I was poor, dirt poor, while my father and his legal wife, and their legal children, lived in a big house, and were driven around in a fancy car, and ate off china plates.”

Helen didn’t say a word, fearful he would remember that she was a lot closer in origin to the father he described so bitterly than to Matteo himself.

“We ate off the clay dishes my mother made by hand, when we had anything to eat at all,” he continued, lost in the past. “And she was ignored once she got older and lost the beauty that had attracted my father’s attention. But he did do one thing for her, something that changed the course of my life and made me glad, for once, that he had sired me.”

“What was that?”

“He listened to my mother when she asked for me to receive an education. She knew it was the one route I could take to escape the cycle of poverty that had trapped her and everyone like her. She begged and pleaded and I guess she finally wore him down, or maybe I was getting old enough to become an embarrassment and he wanted me out of the way. I don’t know. But when I was ten he arranged for me to go to boarding school in Connecticut. He had a lot of diplomatic ties here because the ambassador to the U.S. at that time was a close friend of his.”

Helen sensed that he had almost forgotten she was there, his memories were so vivid. He smiled slightly.

“So I found myself living and studying with a bunch of rich Americans, the sons of doctors and lawyers and big businessmen. And there I was, the Puerta Lindan bastard without a word of English transplanted to the wilds of New England. The first winter I almost froze. I had never seen snow, and we had two blizzards, drifts up to the windowsills. I thought I was at the North Pole. And I couldn’t even say Connecticut.” He grinned suddenly. “When I get nervous I still can’t.”

Helen smiled back at him, glad that his reminiscence had taken a humorous turn. “I can’t imagine your ever being nervous,” she said.

“It happens,” he replied lightly.

“What school was it?” Helen asked.

“Longfield Academy, in Westport.”

“I know it.” She didn’t add that she had a cousin there.

“And so,” he went on, “I began my American education. The people in charge at the school knew who my father was, and they were very anxious that he should think everything possible was being done for his son. In enrolling me, he neglected to mention that he had never married my mother, so they treated me like the scion I never was in Puerta Linda—private tutors to help me with my English, the best accommodations, the roommate of my choice, and so on. It was a very schizophrenic existence; in America I was the Puerta Lindan prince, and at home I was the Montega bastard.”

Helen could feel the pain in his voice as he spread his hands and said, “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I began to spend more and more time in America. On school vacations I would go to the home of a friend and have my bed changed by a maid who might have come from my village in Puerta Linda. I saw less and less of my mother, finding ways to remain on campus over the summer: sports camp, an extra course, a school job. She finally died the fall I started college at Columbia.”

“Matteo, you were young,” Helen said gently. “No one would choose to be treated the way you were at home when there was an alternative available.”

“She had no alternative,” he said flatly. “And I almost forgot she existed while I was so busy grabbing at the good life.”

“You’re remembering now,” Helen stated quietly.

He looked at her, really seeing her for the first time in several minutes. “That’s right. What I want to do is for her and everyone like her. If I can change their lives maybe hers won’t have been in vain.”

“Did you go back to Puerta Linda after college?” Helen asked.

“Not right away. I had majored in engineering, and I took a job at a firm in New York. I had a big salary, a flashy apartment and a fast sports car. I dated blondes and redheads with names like Sharon and Tracy and Beth.”