In Flames (3 page)

Saint Patrick's Day gave Walter Ferguson an excuse to throw a party at the club.

He and the U.S. ambassador, the guest of honor, shared Irish ancestry, both friendly sons of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. I bought a Kelly green tie at the Ralph Lauren Polo shop in San Iñigo city center, where no Saint Paddy's Day parade wound around the cathedral square past the Spanish mission monument. There the dark bodies of homeless beggars turned fitfully under the palm trees, the sleepers on cobblestones permanent residents in the plaza. The gloomy cathedral, with its lava black gargoyles and parapets and green copper drainpipes, had the air of a haunted lunatic castle. You half-expected the large wooden doors to creak open and instead of angels a dark cloud of thirsty vampires would soar out into the San Iñigo night and feast on the beggars. That thought alone made me glad I no longer went to church.

In the club bar, Ferg set up a TV monitor with a TiVo playback of the grand Irish march along a windswept and slushy Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The sound was off and no one at the crowded club party was paying much attention to wintry scenes, everyone was having too much fun. Even I felt a growing festive mood after a few shots of Jameson on the rocks. The full moon over the yacht harbor—like the grilled lobster buffet—popped up as if produced through some magic labors of the club's kitchen staff.

A stand-up comic, Delgado Vinny, Skinny Vinny, a local radio talk show host, provided the opening act entertainment. Vinny's English was excellent, and the jokes flew as he pranced from table to table. Vinny was a pale mestizo in a country where lighter-skinned mixed-breeds were said to be the aristocrats waiting for a rebel militia hangman and his noose. Vinny spotted me and swooped over to my table, nimbly seizing my hand.

“
Híjole, güey
. I don't know you, a newcomer…”

“How are you, Vinny?”

“Perfecto, dude. Only watch out for mosquitoes around here. They come big as Schwarzenegger and they sit in beach chairs with their legs crossed just waiting for you, amigo.”

Some people said Vinny was an asset on the books of our embassy, others claimed he was on rebel insurgent payrolls, a deceptive front man for militants hiding in the eastern mountains. The cynical shrugged and swore he was in the pockets of all sides, otherwise how could he still be alive and go on mouthing off so many truths each morning. Truth could be a death warrant in San Iñigo, and Vinny's radio program of hilarious insults and delectable gossip (accurate more often than not) was mandatory breakfast listening for the entire island, at least for those who understood the local Spanish dialect. For this as well I had to take the club veterans' word, since I didn't catch all the language subtleties yet, not by a long shot. One thing was certain, however: Delgado Vinny wasn't a member at the Saint Ignatius, though he was often a guest. That evening Ferg might have been looking to plant a puff piece on the radio for the fastest, widest circulation. Or maybe the reverse was true and the ambassador was keen to mine within the club's privacy Delgado Vinny's priceless trove of island scandal, treasures too true and valuable, too dangerous to expose on air free for nothing. Vinny luxuriated in the attention he earned as party entertainer, ordering the driest champagne and freshest fish, topped off with a snifter of fifty-year-old rum and an eight-inch Romeo y Julieta Panatella, the fumes trailing him from table to table.

“Yo, dude, heard this one?” He exhaled a gust away from my face. “Titi fruit monkey walks into a San Iñigo bar with a priest and a rabbi, and the bartender says, What's this, a joke?” Vinny blew smoke rings. Jet streams. Dreamy clouds promising unimaginable secrets. In his agile fingers an impressive cigar was a magic wand capable of performing miracles, changing lives. “Dude, lemme warn you, the food in this club is deadly. And such measly little portions.” He released a dense cloud as if to camouflage his well-worn material. “You know, amigo, that's sort of how I feel about life, too. Nothing but misery, loneliness, suffering—then oops, it's all over too fast and you're a cold corpse. Here's to our gracious hosts.” He lifted his glass. “Poor old Ferg, look at that sad sack, he's at an age now where only women want to sleep with him. Pisses off Elaine whenever I point that out. You know, it's amazing but I've been in prison only once here, aggravated slander I got charged with and I swear that's like picketing without a permit in this country, they gave me thirty-two years and then let me out after four months. I got lucky, and you know what they say around here, truth can be like a death warrant in San Iñigo. And I suffer from compulsive frankness. Plus I started with the wrong lawyer and there are only two kinds of lawyers in this country, those who know the law—my first lawyer—and those who know the judge. Contagiosos, corrupted, all of them. Three o'clock in the morning they came in my cell—‘You're a free man, Vinny.' They kicked me straight out in the road, no time to say goodbye to my cellmates, eight of them in a three-man cell. And the guards took all my books. I'd read those books again and again and used them as pillows, Lee Child was the hardest to fall asleep on, Dan Brown the easiest. And Jonathan Franzen was absolutely impossible to understand, that man must write blindfolded he's so brilliant. Why they took my books, I'll never know, the guards were all illiterate. But outside of a dog a book is man's best friend, inside of a dog it's too dark to read.” Hugging himself with the sprightly movements of a happy little boy, Vinny rocked back on his heels grinning at me, a skeletal imp of a man. Everything seemed to strike him as funny, he would have found mirth in Sunday sermons at the cathedral. He was like a suit stuffed full of comedians, each one driving the others manic. I could almost believe the story going around that when Delgado Vinny's number finally came up and he looked his executioner in the eye, he'd giggle, tell the hangman a joke, and die laughing.

Vinny waved to the bartender and pointed at my near-empty glass. “
Hermano
, another Jameson here,
por favor
.” He turned to me. “Jameson, breakfast of champions, señor, accept no substitutes. Forget all the rum. May I sit here? Just for a moment. You have the only free chair and my new shoes are killing me.”

“Sure, take a load off your mind.”

“Stale joke.” He sat beside me and lowered his voice. “Still I'm not offended, my skin is light but thick. I'm having a perfectly wonderful evening though tonight isn't it. You want to improve the world? My motto is, make your jokes more hilarious. ‘The world wouldn't be in such a snarl had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl'—Irving Berlin, American poet. And people here say I have no values. Bullshit. The secret to life, amigo, is honesty and fair dealing, and if you can fake that, my friend, you got it made here. Still you know those same people say everything about me is nihilism and cynicism, sarcasm and orgasm.
Mierda,
with a slogan like that I could run for office in this country and win. Hey, my friend, life's short, it's hard out here for a pimp and morality is relative, the heart wants what it wants so take what you can get while you can still get it in this place. San Iñigo may be small but I wouldn't want to paint it, señor, just be careful what you try around here. I can remember when I was fourteen and the first time I ever had sex, I still have the receipt in my wallet. Okay, end of sermon. By the way, have you met Sister Emma? You must. She's the second act. I only open for her. She tells every newcomer's fortune. She tells anybody's fortune even if it's risky making predictions in San Iñigo, especially about the future, still she never makes a mistake. She predicts and—
Ay caramba
—government ministers brown their pants. I'll do you a favor and introduce you. See her over there…”

I turned and spotted Elaine in a clingy green dress—she was leaning over, her breasts swaying, and she was tête-à-tête with a short elderly woman in a black veil and robe, a San Iñigan.

Delgado Vinny signaled to the old woman and Elaine didn't look pleased, she grew tight-lipped, her eyes tensing as Sister Emma scurried across the terrace like a dark beetle on the attack. Far more quickly than my third or fourth Jameson state of mind would let me move, the old woman grabbed my wrist. “God's peace to you, señor, not as the world knows peace today, but only as He knows peace. I give you His peace.” I was startled as much by what Sister Emma said as by her handcuff grasp on my wrist. Her English was as good as Vinny's. She spat out a few words of island dialect at the comedian and he slipped off, fluttering from guest to guest like a trapeze artist on swings of ebullience and ropes of laughter. I wasn't really interested in Sister Emma's fortune-telling, I knew why I was in San Iñigo: set to start earning my fortune, not have it told by a party entertainer. But the old woman made me uncomfortable, reluctant to offend a seer who could set San Iñigo government ministers trembling. Her face, dark brown and wrinkled as elephant hide, was framed by a black cotton shawl with white trim like an old-fashioned nun's habit without the starchy accessories, an appearance remarkably reminiscent of saintly Mother Teresa, and who could dismiss a saint? Certainly not me, it wasn't a risk I'd run.

“Please, Sister, have a seat.”

“You look lonely, señor. I never see you before,
por favor
forgive me, my eyesight is weak.” Otherwise Sister Emma looked about as incapacitated as a Carib Indian on the warpath, her makeup right up to the job, eyes rimmed with kohl, slanted eyes, dark brown and flecked yellow, limpid and alert as the eyes of a young cat, although she must have been at least eighty.
Weak?
Hardly. Her lean and clever face was powdered party-rouge: her lips, for all her advanced years, a slippery and vibrant chorus-girl scarlet, her hair almost rosy, a spry spray of wispy curls poking out from under her veil. She smelled of perfume (vanilla extract) and the evening's steamy heat and rum. And on second thought maybe she wasn't so saintly.

“And now, señor,” she said, getting down to business, “tell me what you expect from me. Who did it, right?”

I was speechless. I didn't dare ask which
it
she meant.

“I can see what you're thinking, señor, but don't ask me. I know little about this outside world here.” A lie, a convenient ruse, a facet of her performance: Sister Emma set government ministers quaking precisely because she knew too much about the outside world. “Evil, only evil out in the world. Envy and malice and spite. And greed and filth. I don't know about any of that. And I don't want to know. Look at Vinny, he knows too much. People laugh at him now, but maybe not forever. They're all grown-up men around this place. Still, inside”—she tapped her chest, thin and bony, at the spot over her heart—“in here, they're always boys. Like foolish Vinny. Even in death they're like children. They never invite me to a single funeral. I don't know what they're afraid of, but they don't want to know me by the time it's too late, they never do. Still, who am I to judge?” She paused to sneeze, wiping her nose with a lacy pink handkerchief tucked up the sleeve of her black robe. “I hate this chilly weather. Wish I could go someplace warmer. Don't know how my daughters stand winters up in Brooklyn. Now how can I help you, señor?” Before I could respond, and as if Sister Emma already knew all the answers, this bearer of God's peace grasped my hand. It wasn't at all what I was expecting for entertainment on Saint Paddy's Day, but this was San Iñigo not Manhattan, even if tea leaves and palm readers were everywhere in New York and I'd heard more than a few phony fortunes there. Back in prep school and at college parties, teenage fooling around with cards on drizzly summer afternoons, I could have once almost half-believed in a trip far away, beautiful women waiting for me, a phone call with fabulous news that would make me rich. Once a friend in Cottage Club, high on illicit substances, looked at my hand and refused to say anything at all, only to scare the hell out of me, and I believed his silence might have brushed closer to truth than anything spoken. “You have something silver, señor?” As much statement as question. And I did, a silver key ring from Princeton. “Please, cross my palm,” she said, extending her open, heavily creased hand, and in the innumerable lines crisscrossing her skin I thought I could detect snarls of her miseries like tangles of warring snakes. “Go ahead, señor, make a cross.” And with the silver Princeton souvenir, I sketched a cross on her wrinkled palm. “Now your hand.” Wary of offending her, I held out my right hand and felt it firmly gripped, as though Sister Emma fortune-teller intended to say,
Expect no hesitancy from me
. “See? Right here, señor.” She pointed to a line on my palm. “The girdle of Venus, all these little X marks. This means many children over a long lifetime, but you…you don't, do you?”

“No, I don't. I'm not married.”

“Your character then, that's what it means. Remember, God is all loving and you are His perfect reflection. You have power to save lives. Maybe a hero someday. Nothing but truth here, señor, may I keep reading, tell you everything no matter what the spirits whisper?”

An uncertain fascination remained and I nodded, a willing captive to her performance. For entertainment value, Sister Emma was worth whatever Ferg was paying her for the evening. She held my hand closer to her eyes and I reflected on exactly how a spirit reader must find it as important as a spy to gather intelligence before picking out precisely the right data. How hard it must be, identifying facts, waiting for the heart of a matter to come slipping out, how difficult the search through so many details to disinter true human character and all its motives. Sister Emma was a first-class forensics expert, she might as well as have been frisking me as she studied my palm and listened to murmuring spirits. If she sniffed around long enough, would she discover my greatest secrets, strongest desires, the essence of my character, all the fears and obsessions I worked hard at controlling and shaping and concealing in my strange new home. Would she probe into three a.m. dreams and disinter feelings best left buried? How much of myself, and no more, would I have to reveal now if I wanted her answer to my absurd question. “And what does it say about the future—”

“No, señor, I'm sorry, I can't tell you the future, not specifically. It's illegal, no more forecasting, not since Americans rewrite our laws. Next thing you know, if it keeps up like this, I'll have to read feet. They change everything here; it's like New York now. And I've already said too much, I could lose my cabaret license to entertain. I can only recommend, you see, suggest, maybe advise, and pray, of course. Now here I can tell”—she studied my palm more intently—“you're a man of imagination and intelligence…hardworking, creative…quite sensitive, passionate, a very aware person. Yes, señor, it's all right here on your hand, nearly everything about you. You want big changes in your life, and you want—here I can't tell exactly what you want, but I suppose it's something very attractive.” And then she slipped in the cliché as smoothly as a thermometer. “Of course you've already made one woman here very happy, señor, that much I can see.”

Made one woman here very happy
…A worn-out cliché, for sure, but no less startling, and while I tried to pull back my hand Sister Emma gripped it more tightly, and we were in a tug-of-war. “You've already tasted some fulfillment in San Iñigo, señor, so keep on searching. Remember, God is all loving and you're His perfect reflection, just be patient and build on what you have. Now maybe we ought to take a look at your past.”

“I know my past. What's next, what happens when she—” I stopped abruptly and it was as if I'd turned off a radio, the unexpected silence unnerving. The old woman had me hooked, I didn't want to bring the reading to a halt regardless of how foolish I felt or how much I dreaded what she might say next (even inaccuracies about evil or passion can be as costly as truth). I tugged my hand again and it slipped free. I felt awkward sitting there, holding my own hand. Some Saint Paddy's party this was turning out to be. “Sister, how much do I owe you—”

“No, señor, it's on the house, part of the celebration for the saint. Señor Ferguson pays me and I can't accept tips. Only one more thing I must advise you, watch out for the evil eye here,
mal de ojo
. It's the worst thing in this country, almost impossible to defend yourself against evil eye. But if you come to my office in town, I can make you protection with beads thousands of years old from ancient Egypt. Only a small charge compared to their true value. And I'll say all the best spells for you, señor, the Anathema of the Archangel Michael against evil eye, the Names on King Solomon's Ring, the Anathema of Shalita against malevolent spirits. By the power of the voice of Our Lord Who cuts the flames of fire I bind, expel, anathematize bullets of war and shells of our wicked enemies away from you, señor, but only when you bear the charms I give you. I don't do this for all my clients, except for you now, yes, a member of the Saint Ignatius. God bless you, señor, may His peace be your peace so you always go well in His light. And now excuse me,
por favor
, I've got to move on and get the next table interested. Enjoy the saint's party. And never forget, God is all loving only if you remember you are His perfect reflection, don't let anyone mislead you into anything that's not right in His sight…”