Passion Play (3 page)

At such moments, Fabian saw his spirit as remote from his body. His attempts at mechanical perfection, his horsemanship, his polo, were acts of violence committed by the spirit against an unwilling, submissive body. But now, his body, once only the expression of his spirit, had become a form for aging, nature’s own expression.

Like any other creation, he was also to be changed according to nature’s own timetable; like a ruin, any ruin whose walls crumbled away from life, he might be the setting for a striking drama.

Fabian was about to enter his VanHome when a middle-aged man came up to him briskly, one arm raised in salute. He was Hispanic, lithe and wiry. A sweeping hat, its brim cocked at an extravagant angle, crowned his eager, vigilant eyes as he read the Sign
INTERSTATE WILDLIFE CRUISER
.

“Hey, wildlife man,” the man called out jauntily, “you need a farmhand? Body servant? Wet nurse? Meat for the lions? Anyone, or anything?”

“What if I do?” Fabian replied. “Are you, sir, meat for my lion?”

The man’s hand shot out. “I’m Rubens Batista, once of Santiago de Cuba, now of these here freedom-loving United States.” Fabian took the hand, its fingers a riot of ornate rings.

“That’s some fancy rig, Mr. Wildlife,” Batista said, surveying the VanHome with admiration. “Never seen anything like it. A real palace on wheels,” he declared, stroking the VanHome’s aluminum siding.

“I’m glad you like it,” Fabian said.

“So am I. And those mustangs in there must sure like it.”

“How do you know about my horses?”

“I heard them horsing around inside. And I smelled them.”

“Smelled them?”

“I smell a lot of things.”

“What else do you smell, Mr. Batista?”

“I smell a rich
caballero
, all alone in his big bed on wheels, who might be able to take advantage of my services.” Batista jogged in place as if about to dance. “Those I horse around with call me Latin Hustle.”

“Latin Hustle?”

“The fastest footwork you’ll ever see, Mr. Wildlife.”

“And where can I see your footwork, Mr. Batista?”

At once, Latin Hustle was all business. “At a place, where you can find yourself some household help.”

“What kind of help?”

“A man, a woman, even a whole family. People from voodoo land,” he said, “just fresh from Haiti, just aching to work for you here.”

“And you’re hired to get that work for them?”

“I am. By people who brought these voodoos here,” Latin Hustle explained. “I take a finder’s fee, of course!” His teeth gleamed.

“Why can’t these Haitians get a job by themselves?”

“The voodoos can’t get anything by themselves. They don’t speak English, Mr. Wildlife. They’re not-” he paused-“strictly legal. Strictly speaking, they’re illegal aliens,” he announced briskly. “And there is no way back for them, no way. Get it?”

“I get it. I was once an alien myself,” Fabian said. “Where are these people—and where’s the sale?”

“A couple of miles away. A different place each time a new shipload comes in, on the fishing boats, by way of Florida. That’s two or three times a month, if the sea cooperates.”

“Let’s go,” Fabian said.

“At your service, Mr. Wildlife. Just follow me.” Latin Hustle tipped his hat rakishly to Fabian. He swaggered across the street to where a silver Buick Wildcat was parked, then slipped behind the wheel. Fabian climbed into his VanHome and waved that he was ready.

With Latin Hustle in the lead, he picked his way first through the city’s dense and rushing heart, frantic with business, then swept by rows of theaters and chic movie houses punctuated by some of the city’s most stately hotels.

It was not far, less than three miles, before Fabian, guided by Latin Hustle, turned abruptly into a wasteland of sprawling decay. Burnt-out houses, their windows smashed and gaping, tottered on the fringes of vacant parking lots, strewn with the rusting shells of cars.

Latin Hustle signaled Fabian to stop in front of the dilapidated fortress of a scarred old apartment house, the entry to its courtyard garlanded with a ring of battered garbage cans flowering with an overflow of stinking refuse.

In the sullen light of the courtyard, Fabian confronted a herd of people, perhaps a hundred, mostly dark-skinned, the men in clusters, smoking, some of the women nursing babies, the children silent or playing dully. The atmosphere was somber, the clothes drab, patched, hanging and bulging in odd places.

The appearance of Fabian’s VanHome had caused a stir. A white man in a crisp gray business suit greeted Fabian. Even before Latin Hustle was able to introduce his prize catch, the white man made it clear that he was one of the entrepreneurs.

“My name is Coolidge,” he began, sizing up Fabian and his VanHome. “That’s the biggest motel on wheels I’ve ever seen. I’ll bet it takes lots of horsepower to keep it running.”

“I bet it takes a lot of manpower, too,” Latin Hustle interjected.

“Well, manpower is what we deal in here,” Coolidge said, taking Fabian’s arm as he turned to assess the crowd.

He steered Fabian through the mute herd parting to make way
for them, as well as for several buyers coolly appraising the Haitians.

“How does the law feel about all this?” Fabian asked.

Coolidge looked at him. “What was that you said?”

“All this,” Fabian said. “Isn’t selling people against the law?”

“Nobody sells
people,”
Coolidge stressed with a touch of pedantry. “We sell opportunities. To people who need work or to people who need people.”

“But these Haitians are here illegally,” Fabian insisted politely.

“What’s legal or not legal is for the law to decide,” Coolidge declared, unshaken. “The law couldn’t stop hundreds of thousands of these Chicanos, voodoos, Dominicans—you name them—at the border. Now it’s too late for the law.”

“You mean to say that the police, the Immigration people, the unions, the welfare agencies, the press, that they all don’t know what’s going on right here in plain daylight?” Fabian asked.

“To know is one thing, to do something about it is another,” Coolidge came back smoothly. “The law doesn’t have enough men and means to round up all these people, all over the country, to get them a lawyer, to put them one by one on trial for breaking a law they don’t even know exists, to translate into English what they say and into voodoo what the law says, to prove them guilty, to hear their appeals, to try them again, to deport every one of them all the way back to Haiti or Mexico or Colombia. It’s just too big a job. The law would rather chase after marijuana. That’s easier to catch.”

“These voodoos, all they can say in English is ‘Give me a job,’” Latin Hustle intoned.

“We help them find food, shelter and work,” Coolidge went on. “After all, somebody has to help them.”

Fabian looked at him directly. “How much does such help sell for?”

“If you take one person, that costs more than, say, a couple. Taking a whole family, particularly with young kids—well, there’s a real bargain for you.”

“How much would it be for these two, for instance?” Fabian asked. He pointed at a couple, dark-skinned, the man short and aging, in his fifties, the woman, probably his wife, a bit younger,
yet wrinkled, her eyes tired. The couple caught his look and sign; they shuffled with animation, eagerly ogling him, showing their broken and decaying teeth in forced smiles.

Coolidge threw a brisk professional glance at the two. “Now, a couple like that can still work miracles on a farm or an estate.”

“Voodoo workers, miracle workers,” Latin Hustle echoed.

“What would happen if I took them?” Fabian asked intently.

“They know they’re yours for keeps. Signed, sealed, delivered, Mr. Wildlife,” Latin Hustle explained.

“You mean that’s all there is to it?” Fabian asked.

Coolidge shrugged his shoulders. “What else is necessary?”

“Do I need work permits for them? Social Security, insurance, some kind of official certificate?”

Coolidge patted him on the shoulder. “Relax, my friend, you worry too much. Our voodoos aren’t after your welfare.”

“It’s jobfare they’re after,” Latin Hustle crooned.

Coolidge nodded in agreement. “Remember, only a week ago they were starving in Port-au-Prince.”

“Now
you
could be the prince of their port, Mr. Wildlife,” Latin Hustle went on.

“You give them work—you own them.” Coolidge was catching Latin Hustle’s fever.

“What if I change my mind later—and won’t need them or want them anymore?” Fabian asked.

“Then it’s all up to you. You might pass them on to a good neighbor,” Coolidge said slyly, “or call the police and have them deported. Or ask us to get rid of them for you.”

“Call me, and I will do it for you,” Latin Hustle volunteered.

Fabian looked at the couple again. The ingratiating smiles faded from their faces as they sensed that they had been passed over. They seemed suddenly impassive, numb with indifference.

“Let me sit on it,” Fabian said quietly.

“Don’t sit too long,” Coolidge warned him brusquely. “When the sea gets rough, a lot of them just go down on the way.”

“And as they go down, the price goes up,” Latin Hustle chimed in.

Coolidge walked away, waving his hand in dismissal. Fabian saw him moving on to another potential buyer, a powerfully
built man. Several airline tickets bulged out of the pocket of his jacket.

Latin Hustle looked speculatively at the man and at the tickets.

“There’s
a cat who knows why he’s here. Even before he buys his voodoos, he gets the tickets to put them on the plane. I bet they’ll be fixing up his farm tonight.”

Fabian began to wander through the crowd again, Latin Hustle at his heels, though with diminished interest.

“But there are no young women here,” Fabian said casually.

“Would you be interested in a young woman?” Latin Hustle asked nonchalantly.

“What man wouldn’t be?” said Fabian, drifting toward his VanHome.

“How young?” Latin Hustle was still at his side.

They were on the street. A black woman passed by them with her children in tow—a boy and an older girl. Latin Hustle caught Fabian glancing at the girl. “That’s one pretty girl,” he announced.

“Hardly a girl, almost a young lady,” Fabian countered.

“I know what you mean.” Latin Hustle shifted into a thoughtful mood. “Would you like to father one like that?”

Fabian laughed. “Father her? Isn’t it a bit late? She already has a father.”

“But what if she doesn’t? Would you want to become her foster father?”

“Let’s say I wouldn’t mind having her for a stepdaughter,” Fabian said warily. “Why?”

“I can take you to a place where kids like her are given to foster parents like you every day.”

“How legal is that?” Fabian asked.

“As legal as the sky,” Latin Hustle declared grandly. “These kids are orphans. Abandoned. Thrown out by a mom and pop who can’t or won’t support them or who starve and beat them up.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“My usual, a finder’s fee—that’s all.”

“From the kids?”

“Are you kidding, Mr. Wildlife? These kids own nothing. The foster pop pays. But it’s worth it—it’s fun to have a kid.”

“Let’s go,” Fabian said abruptly.

“Be my guest,” Latin Hustle replied.

They took again to the teeming city streets, Latin Hustle slowing his car to a pace that would allow the VanHome to keep up. He signaled Fabian to stop in front of a sprawling building, shabby but with the air of once having been an official structure. They climbed to the top floor, where Fabian found himself with four other men in a large, anonymous waiting room. Latin Hustle disappeared into one of the two cubicles separated from the room by makeshift plywood walls. The other men were in their forties and fifties. Their faces, pale and sagging, wore an identical enigmatic expression.

No one broke the silence. Latin Hustle reappeared and gestured to Fabian to follow him.

In the cubicle, a short, balding man with glasses sat behind a desk. He stood up and introduced himself to Fabian as a lawyer, pointing to the neatly framed diplomas in Latin and Spanish.

Fabian sat down across from him, while Latin Hustle pulled up a chair beside the desk, like a mediator.

The lawyer looked Fabian in the eye. His formality softened in a polite smile.

“Rubens tells me you’re the owner of a horse stable from out of town.”

“I am,” Fabian said.

“And that you travel with some of your own horses in a custom-made rig.”

“Yes, I do.”

The lawyer leaned across the desk. His smile deepened. “You are, then, a man of certain means.”

Fabian nodded.

“Excellent,” the lawyer said with satisfaction. “And Rubens has suggested that, as a man of means, you might be in the market for—” he broke off at the phrase to correct himself—“you might be considered as a foster parent for a child of a certain age, a child with no means to support itself.”

“To support
herself
,” Latin Hustle threw in.

The lawyer reprimanded him with a glare, then picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper. He turned to Fabian.

“Are you married, sir?” he asked, suddenly a census taker.

“I am not.”

“Divorced?”

“A widower,” Fabian said.

“Excellent,” the lawyer said. “So sorry to hear that,” he added quickly. “And your wife died of—?”

“Cancer,” Fabian said. “She died in a hospital.”

“Cancer,” the lawyer noted. “In the hospital. And how many children of your own do you have?” he continued.

“No children,” Fabian said.

“Lucky lady, your wife,” the lawyer said philosophically. “Leaving no orphans, no one but her husband to mourn her, alone.” He paused. “Do you plan to marry again?” The question was an afterthought.

“Not now,” Fabian replied.

The lawyer sighed as if the most exacting phase of his ordeal had passed. “And a girl—” Again he hesitated, correcting himself. “A child of what age would interest you most?” The pencil hovered. “For foster parenthood,” he added pointedly.

Fabian hesitated.