Valentina positioned herself at a table where she could see up the stairs to Anastasio’s door. She sat in the common room of Mistress Salome’s boarding house, where the residents and wanderers gathered for the benefits of the electric fire (now blaze-red and tin-tinning), the television screen (now black as polished obsidian), and the drinks dispensed by fat Salome. Valentina listened to the voices without much understanding. Salome’s, quarrelsome, guarded, parrying but persistent, the priest’s a woodly bursting, threatening drunken flight.
-I might have not looked happy and that’s right!
-None of us was thrilled, Father Tommy.
-So you’re listening ah.
-Always one ear for my customers and one for you.
A guarded laugh from behind the bar and Salome glanced at the table, she, Valentina, being the customers. The priest twisted his boxer’s damaged body but couldn’t locate her through his haze.
-A great listener, Salome, and write it all down.
-Do not!
-For them yes yes you do.
-I won’t even bother asking who this them might be.
They argued some more, the Paranoid and the Informant. Valentina turned her glass of dark beer round and round on the damp cork coaster. She lifted the glass to see. Michelin Man. No two coasters matched and a doubled napkin served just as well. She slid her fingernail through the moisture frosted on the side of the glass, fashioning a happy face. She added horns and spectacles before erasing it with her thumb.
-The heat’s a fright isn’t it Salome?
-Tommy, don’t.
-Too close to the fire now Salome.
-Tommy, don’t begin.
It had been the waitresses’ winking had tipped her to the man upstairs. She caught him at the double doors and he didn’t prevent her. A few minutes past noon when she stood at the end of the bed. His head lolled on the tilt of the pillows, nodding off as she closed the curtains, the light so bright otherwise. She prepared herself before telling him the possibilities and offering these to him, turning round three times to show what there was to see. He nodded, agreeable to all, and presently fell asleep. Valentina waited, counting the shallow seconds between breaths. She counted also the money in his wallet, taking just the cost of a cheese sandwich with chips, with lemonade and tip at the station diner as well the amount the babysitter had asked. She put her clothes back on and then watched him sleep for a long time. She itemized his different identity cards, selecting Anastasio as the name with the magic tone, a name she could remember when pressed.
It was now half past five and the streets outside the common room were already dark, the sky slate blue. In the morning she was confident she would find someone to buy Alejandro.
The drizzle and slur of Salome’s satin ascended the stairs above this latest bounty hunter. He called after her his now familiar need.
-I have in my hand a list of names, I was hoping for a list of places.
Her words were over the shoulder and heavy with the accents of smoke, a flash of the stripper’s old fire.
-My memory’s a steel trap for faces, but addresses slip and blur and change.
The violent ones might take it by force, but he preferred the wheedler’s charm, the swindle of rhinestone compliments. To touch with honor the much-dishonored.
Her parlor was a shrine of cats, a quiet temple of purr and claw, nine lives and seven veils, and never a bill unpaid. Felines and their menace of movement, all flight or sheer tease, that revving of the rump, the sudden tail-down quiescence. Half the time there was no visible prey, nor shadow worth the arc and assault, but the disappointment, that was real enough, for ghostkiller Tom, smokecatcher Tina, headhunter Salome. In any paragraph of potential squalor their hinted presence protected from evil, like a summons of daylight into a nightdream.
-Was it my father then who sent you?
An ill-tuned ear might strain for pause or echo, an eye less shrewd might miss the dancer. He read the shadows underneath her moving hands, the bloodpoints in her tired eyes, prepared an answer, offered up a lie.
Anastasio had slept from dawn until well past early evening. And stood now in the door of his anonymous hotel room, listening to the pump and bursts of conversation going on below him. A priest, itinerant, non-denominational, was arguing downstairs with the jolly madam. Had he slept through the possibility then? An assignation with the bus station girl, half-impulse and sheer need. Tea or aspirin, tea and aspirin, he had said to the waitress’ worried smile. The voices bullied on, that of the priest flowing up the carpeted steps, angel’s words on a whisky stallion.
-I wasn’t happy with what happened.
The priestly tongue, the same that had damped its demanding vowels in perpetual interruption during his brief exchange with Madam, twelve hours or so earlier, now blurred a rise and fall to her patient anger.
-None of us was exactly overjoyed, Father Tommy.
-Oh you’re back.
-I never really left not really.
-Meaning.
-Oh.
-Meaning you’ve been watching from afar.
-Now.
-Or rather having someone a trustworthy someone neutral third party watch me from afar.
-Father Tommy, do.
-I know it pains you to get dirt under your nails.
-Oh now I’m not feeling so baitable as all that.
-Can’t stand the fire can you Salome?
-Don’t begin.
-The heat’s a fright now there Salome.
-I won’t.
-Because you can’t. You can’t! Because.
-Why can’t you just drink in silence like the others tell me.
-Blood, Salome, that’s why. Blood and shame, the whelping of bastards under a roof of sin, sheets mired with.
-I won’t hear a word more about the sheets, Tommy, not a word.
And it followed that nothing followed, the cart before the horse and the wheels bogged in mud. He shut the door, shuffled cautiously across the room, released the blind and flooded the room with dirty blue nightlife. He felt for the bottle and drank, like a man long in the wilderness. He would sleep some more. In the morning he would test the mirror and see what remained of himself that might be suitable for sale.
In the rocked, violent, midnight train, three words of Spanish set the infant Alejandro weeping. In dubious victory she slept, her head on a stranger’s shoulder. They woke in the fog of ghostly mountains. Angels patrolled the corridors, their lookout lax, their Customs armbands neither hap nor hazard. They handed the precious papers back without a word, allowing the family to pass, beyond the borders of God’s cruel country, into a world where the sun’s warmth was rumored to be more than senile hearsay, where life was unremarkable and the taste of tears unknown. Far inland from the sea, traveling on through the clear glass of dawn, to disappear somewhere along the crowded streets, among the welcoming strangers.