Passion Play (17 page)

Fabian’s body went as hot with sweat as his voice was cold. “I don’t remember any of that,” he said. “We were all drunk—or drugged.”

“Others do remember,” Falsalfa said. “When you and Elena became too obvious, Francisco almost killed you with a machete. It was the guide, a man in my service, sober fortunately, who disarmed him and saved your life. It was he who guarded you in the hut while Francisco raved outside.” Falsalfa paused for emphasis. “And it was during the night that poor de Tormes, so tired, so drunk, and so angry, sat down in the yard—right on a tarantula taking its midnight walk there.”

“I’m certain de Tormes was murdered,” said Fabian.

The smile was no longer on Falsalfa’s lips. His hammock stopped swaying. “Would you like me to instruct my prosecutor to open a formal inquiry into the death of Francisco de Tormes?” He spoke brutally. “To tell the public what took place between you and Elena in that village of Cacata? Remember, Fabian, you are not in the United States. Here, what chance would you have for an acquittal?” Falsalfa’s composure had returned. “The fact is, neither Francisco nor the tarantula can testify, but as for the guide, the villagers—show me one man or woman who wouldn’t believe it was you who conveniently arranged that meeting between de Tormes and the tarantula.”

Fabian stood silent as the hammock resumed its rhythm. He saw himself on a witness stand in a country whose language he
barely spoke, many of whose customs were alien to him. In Los Lemures, where the whim of Falsalfa was the final court, a protracted trial would be his and Elena’s downfall.

“What will happen to Señora de Tormes?” he asked abruptly, the change in his thought reflected in his voice.

Falsalfa recovered his smile. “Now, that is the concern of a reasonable man,” he sighed. “All you really care about is—Elena.” He considered the matter. “She is free to do whatever she pleases. But with Francisco gone, it will be a bit harder for her. Like him, she comes from a poor family, and all de Tormes left her are debts.” He brightened at a statesmanlike solution. “Why don’t you give Elena a call and invite her to Casa Bonita for a few days?” Falsalfa looked directly at Fabian, the smile broadening. “Better yet, Fabian, why don’t I ask my personal secretary to invite her in my name? After all, Elena is the widow of my old friend, de Tormes, and the mistress of Fabian, my polo pal. What do you say?”

Fabian spoke in a voice harsh with rage. “I say, Your Excellency, that it is you who seized our trip to Cacata as the occasion to murder Francisco de Tormes. That’s why I intend to leave Los Lemures on the first plane, unless I, too, happen to be bitten by a tarantula before I get on that plane.”

Falsalfa measured Fabian with absolute certainty. “You’re just a one-on-one amateur in whatever you do, Fabian. You will always be just an amateur. Nobody in Los Lemures would bother to waste a good tarantula on you!” He gestured toward the door. The hammock was still swaying as Fabian walked out of the room.

Years later, with Falsalfa no longer in power, Fabian had been a referee at a polo meet, with some of his friends playing on each side. The game passed with a few penalty shots, but otherwise without incident. That evening Eugene Stanhope had given a dinner party for Fabian at a local cabaret. It was crowded with tourists, and Fabian’s table, at the center of the room, was the largest and most boisterous, with a dozen of his friends and polo colleagues celebrating.

Toward the end of dinner, the lights in the room dimmed. Waiters suddenly appeared, bearing aloft an embossed salver
with a large ice-cream cake resting in a pool of brandy and studded with a coronet of gleaming sparklers instead of the usual birthday candles. They placed the elaborate tribute in front of Fabian, and just at the moment the headwaiter put a match to the brandy around the cake, a trio of nightclub minstrels began to serenade Fabian in thickly flavored English. His friends joined in, and tourists around the room picked up the chorus. In pleasure and surprise, Fabian rose, tilting the salver as he did so; a stream of flaming brandy slid down the front of his shirt over his jacket and trousers. He was on fire.

People applauded wildly, under the impression that the flames and Fabian were part of the entertainment. His clothes ablaze, he plunged through the room, stumbling by tables of still-cheering patrons, toward a side door opening on a verandah above the gardens. He vaulted over its railing, into the lush foliage below, blindly rolling over and over on the dewy ground to put out the flames. When, dazed, he sat up, his white suit hung in charred strips, his chest and thighs showing through the scorched cloth.

Fabian knew he had to do something about his burns at once. He went around to the back door of the cabaret to tell his friends that he was going home. A guard, looking at his disheveled state, took him for a drunk or vagrant, and rudely pushed him aside. Fabian then went to the main entrance, where couples in formal dress waited for admission to the cabaret. Once again, a guard shoved him away.

Fabian’s pain was intensifying; he slipped back through the gardens to the verandah and climbed onto it again, returning to the restaurant by the same door he had left.

As he approached the table, Fabian met with a volley of greetings and laughter from his friends and people at nearby tables. Taking his appearance as a prank, they promptly opened a magnum of champagne. With faultless aim, they doused Fabian and his burns in the sparkling fountain.

Only at the table did Fabian recall that the guard who had pushed him so rudely at the door was the same man who was once with him in Cacata, the one accused by Elena of murdering Francisco de Tormes.

In times of calm, Fabian would yield to the ministry of nature, never intrusive. It came to him in the spreading reach of a forest, the pine scent, the shallow scrub bristling the rim of a lake, the vanishing ruts of a dirt road.

In times that were febrile and hectic, the city was his nurse, always on call, faithfully dispensing to him music that would heal, a theater, pensive, compact with figures that could abort or compel his energy and thought, cinemas blinking their colors and images, the kindling of burlesque, the tease of a live sex show.

In the city, Fabian inched his VanHome along the streets, scanning the sidewalks, alleys and benches for the figure of a woman alone. He could become as aroused by a lock of hair tucked behind a girl’s ear, a certain contour of her hip or leg, as he might be by the sound of her voice, by what she said or how she responded to something in him. She would be young, tall, slender, long-legged, with large eyes and thick hair, a wide mouth, conscious of the impact her body and her walk made on men.

She had to acknowledge that he could offer no more than the union of the night, the courtship of a weekend or the intimacy of
a few evenings. A man of the field and of country spaces, a man whose pattern of life was marked by abrupt change, by travel, Fabian could not permit himself to be detained too long by the solaces and distractions of a city or large town. He found himself selecting, isolating, soliciting partners as transient and avid as himself, as ready to initiate, as willing to discard.

One evening in a bar, Fabian came upon a sometime acquaintance, a well-known television sports commentator, who occasionally invited him to appear on his program to discuss various polo and horsemanship tournaments. Stephen Gordon-Smith was in his early fifties, handsome, with that virility of voice, gesture and looks, that easy directness of manner that was the hallmark of his profession. The two men were settling down for a drink when Fabian suddenly caught a glimpse, in a far corner of the bar, of two young women he had met earlier in the year. Employed by a clothing manufacturer, they were models working out of New York.

Fabian signaled them to come to the table and, when they did, he introduced them to Gordon-Smith. Both women were of Latin descent, in their early twenties, dark-haired, feminine and vivacious, with thick but well-drawn features and expressive eyes; tall and slender, they were proud of their well-defined breasts, narrow waists, and firm buttocks.

Gordon-Smith made no effort to conceal his pleasure with the girls, particularly Diana, the bolder of the two, who flirted with him more openly. Fabian noticed that his friend’s fascination with Diana was growing and when her companion got up to leave for an appointment, Fabian left too.

Three or four weeks later, after an interview about the importance of the Eugene Stanhope Polo Tournament, Gordon-Smith took Fabian to dinner and freely confided that he had been seeing Diana almost constantly and that he was considering taking a leave of absence from the network—as well as from his wife—to be able to travel and live with Diana.

Fabian, who knew how strict and conventional the major TV networks were in insisting that their most visible spokesmen—among whom Gordon-Smith had to be counted—maintain irre
proachable conduct in private as well as public life, was astonished by his friend’s decision. It seemed to him especially bizarre in light of the affectionate intimacy he had observed between Gordon-Smith and Emily, his wife of over twenty years, whom Fabian had met once when she and their two daughters accompanied Gordon-Smith to an intercollegiate polo championship at an Ivy League college during Fabian’s brief tenure there as polo coach.

“How well do you know Diana?” Fabian asked cautiously.

“As well as a man ever knows a woman.” Gordon-Smith smiled expansively, with his easy air of male camaraderie.

“Has she told you much about her life?”

“There isn’t much to tell,” Gordon-Smith said. “Remember, she’s only twenty-four.”

“What was her life like?” Fabian maintained his casual tone.

“Didn’t she tell you?” Gordon-Smith shrugged. He was not much interested in Diana’s past.

“When I introduced you to her,” Fabian said, “there was no time to tell family histories.”

“Well, Diana left Ecuador—or was it Nicaragua?—just before one of those government unheavals they had down there. That’s when her family lost everything, and she emigrated here to live with an aunt,” Gordon-Smith explained patiently. “With a little private tutoring, she picked up the language, then worked in a couple of fancy beauty parlors. Then she did something in the fashion business, as a coordinator or, you know, a model—” He broke off, happy to change the subject, and reached eagerly for his briefcase. A file of glossy, neatly mounted fashion photographs slid before Fabian’s eyes. He saw Diana glowing up at him in color and in black and white.

“Isn’t she stunning!” Gordon-Smith announced with elation, spreading out the photos.

“She is,” Fabian said. “What a beautiful woman she has become.”

Gordon-Smith leaned across the table. “I’ve had my share of women, but”—his voice dropped even lower—“no woman has ever given me what I get from her.” He laid a hand, commanding, on the photographs of Diana.

“She understands you?” Fabian suggested.

“Sexually—there’s nothing she doesn’t know about me. Nothing!” He finished his drink and reached for another that the waiter had just put before him. “We’re so open with each other, so uninhibited.”

Fabian shifted in his chair uneasily. “How long do you plan to stay with Diana?” he asked.

“Diana has made me realize what a conventional life I’ve been living all along,” Gordon-Smith said forcefully. “I want to change it now.” He stopped, the glance he threw at Fabian a challenge and also a quest for reassurance. “Even if it means breaking away from my past.”

“What about your family?” Fabian asked.

Gordon-Smith waved the question aside. “The girls are grown up,” he said. “As for Emily—” he hesitated. “Emily is as free to be herself as I am.”

“And the job?”

Gordon-Smith chafed under Fabian’s probing. “The job has nothing to do with my life—as long as I keep it private.”

Fabian felt he should no longer withhold what he knew. “Diana is an extravagant character,” he volunteered.

Gordon-Smith smiled indulgently. “She loves to go places, to travel. Last week she took me all the way to Miami so she could get a tan to show off, and I guess I’ve been to about every disco there is.” Laughing, he raised his eyes and saw Fabian’s expression. “Is there something you know about Diana that you’re keeping from me, Fabian?” he asked, suddenly sharp.

“She’s a transsexual, a man,” Fabian said calmly.

Gordon-Smith wrapped both his hands around Fabian’s wrists.

“She’s what?” he shouted hoarsely, the familiar resonance of his voice spilling round the restaurant. “What did you just say?”

“Diana is a transsexual—a man who became a woman,” Fabian said. He kept his voice steady as he released his wrists from Gordon-Smith’s grip.

Gordon-Smith had turned sallow. “You’re making that up,” he muttered sullenly. “You’ve got to be. I know Diana. I’ve had sex with her. I ought to know a woman when I’m inside one.”

“Diana was operated on some time ago,” Fabian said, “and the operation altered her appearance and her sexual organs. She can perform sexually as a woman.”

“Why do you know what I don’t?”

“Where I met her, most of her friends didn’t bother to hide what she was,” Fabian retorted, “and that’s a place I don’t think you’d like to find yourself.”

Gordon-Smith’s movements were slack, tired. He suddenly looked his age. “Why didn’t you tell me this when you introduced me to her?” he asked resentfully.

Fabian softened his tone. “It wouldn’t have been fair. When you met her, she had been a woman, psychologically as well as physically, for years—convincing to herself, to people like me and apparently to you.”

“Then what makes you think it’s fair to tell me now?”

Fabian wished he could pinpoint his motive as accurately as he could strike a polo ball. “Perhaps it isn’t. But most of those who enforce our sex laws run you down by snooping and denouncing, by informing on you. You’re linked to a woman who, under some of the vagrancy statutes in this country, could be arrested, fined, even jailed as a TV, a transvestite, though she’s not. I thought you should know that.”

Gordon-Smith broke the long silence. “I can just see the headlines: ‘TV Anchorman Anchored to a TV.’” He thought for a moment. “Tell me, Fabian,” he questioned, “because I enjoyed myself so much with Diana—does that mean I’m queer?” He asked the question with almost a professional detachment.