In Flames (8 page)

A few weeks later, Gallery Cristoforo opened with a local art photography exhibit.

The assistant Reg hired, Diego Pastori, selected all the photos—
San Iñigo Beach Beauties
—before I'd signed my contract and had anything to say, and when the small gold letters in a lower corner of the gallery's front show window appeared—D
ANIEL
S
HEDRICK,
P
ROPRIETOR
—I acquired legal responsibility.
Gallery Owner
, who'd have ever imagined…I thought it would look great in the next Princeton alumni bulletin. And on Facebook—Reg Townsley conned me into that fiddle, too. My Cottage Club friends would certainly be impressed, even my parents might have something to take pride in.

Reg drew up a guest list of San Iñigo good and great, but he himself didn't come to the opening, that would have been too obvious. His second job at the embassy was no secret to anyone.

Elaine gathered in the usual crowd from the Saint Ignatius, Klauer and the poker players, Jimmy the golf pro, and these club members, so often blasé, threw themselves into the spirit of acres of flesh on local beaches, examining up close the photo subjects, a nondiscriminatory F and M.

A special guest mingled among the invited worthies. An improbable priest in a clean white cassock, Padre Cardenio Morena looked almost dashing. Reg ensured that the priest made the invitation list, his instructions to me precise…the priest was my first assignment.

“Dan,” Reg said, “the idea of two equally correct points of view is demonstrably false and plain crazy. There are right answers and tons of wrong answers, which isn't to say slavery in San Iñigo wasn't something terribly wrong way back when. But now we suspect this priest forgets all that business is long gone and over with. Even his own bishop or whatever doesn't trust him. See what you can see, maybe it's all a mirage. Or maybe not. Go with your gut, Dan…”

The padre's briefcase—Reg's target for me—was in the gallery office, along with the other guests' belongings. I met and greeted everyone, working my way around to the office in back and closing the door quietly behind me. As fastidious as a vigilant housewife or a worried mother, I searched quickly through the priest's briefcase, careful not to disturb the natural place of his possessions. An odious task, but a necessary duty. The padre had expressed sympathies for government critics, and was a proponent of liberation theology, not the local hierarchy's favorite doctrine, nor the new ambassador's. All the wrong answers, in their view, and I relied on their word for something I knew little about. And then
híjole, güey
, hang on. Condoms in the priest's briefcase. Padre, how could you. I was about to stop the search right there, thinking this would satisfy Reg Townsley's brief,
See what you can see
…when I spotted Cuban stamps on envelopes addressed to C. Morena. Reg had made it clear, “We support free peoples all over the world, we support anyone who resists attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure…that's official U.S. policy.” And in San Iñigo armed minorities meant rebel insurgents, and outside pressure meant Cuba or Venezuela.

I paused, and caught sight of the priest's face reflected in the glass of the office door. Many of the local guests—though not all—greeted him cheerily, and I could understand why. He was a warm man, kindly and charismatic in an open Latino way, a man at his ease, even when surrounded by acres of near-naked dark flesh on display in
San Iñigo Beach Beauties
. The envelopes, I discovered when extracting these from his briefcase, were bent at the corners and covered in fingerprints, the letters clearly removed and replaced in the worn and wrinkled covers dozens of times. I hurried, photographing the letters with a dedicated smartphone Reg gave me, sending encrypted pictures of the letters directly to him, before returning the dog-eared pages to their envelopes. On the tattered stationery, I spotted oaths of endearment, and words like
lealtad
and
fidelidad
, loyalty and fidelity. I had no time to translate everything. My Spanish was improving, but not fast enough. Five, six letters, one or two pages each, and I'd be done with my first small job for Reg Townsley.

And then it happened. I was nearly finished picture taking, when Padre Cardenio entered the office. “I want to thank you for inviting—” Cardenio Morena's soft brown eyes lost their liveliness and warmth, his gaze frozen on my hands and the letters.

I reached for the bluff. Reg's instructions were blunt…
If you're caught, fuck 'em, failover to hardball, don't pussyfoot around
. “I'm sorry, Padre, we all have our loyalties. But Cuba…”

His eyes filled with water. “I should have known. But how can you—”

“It's wartime, Padre.”
Just keep going
, the Townsley instructions, push back, never yield an inch. “People get killed every day, and you know who finances the killers here, who funnels the money—”

“A man is ruined because he writes to his wife?”

“Wife…” My heartbeat ceased.

“Go ahead, take your time reading my wife's letters. Or do you need a translation? I can recite them from memory, if you prefer. And you can even record me, if you wish. Please, señor, leave your cell phone on. It doesn't matter now. Nothing does.”

I turned off the cell. “Sorry, Padre, I didn't know.”

“How could you? Your Spanish is still too poor.” The priest lowered himself into a chair as if carrying an unbearable burden of stones on his shoulders. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his fingers, like a child. Against the powerful and armed and ruthless, you can wage merciless war, but not against the pathetic, then the stones rest on your own body. I wanted to contact the embassy and tell them it was all a mistake, they should simply ignore the letters I'd just sent. “I'll retract them, Padre.”

The priest looked up. “I don't want your clumsy sympathy, señor, it won't do me any good. You're young, not married, probably no children. But can you understand that, yes, I have a daughter. I met my wife when I was in Caracas, studying. She had to return to Cuba. I can't travel to Cuba. As you know, no one from this island is allowed that freedom. Exactly as in your country…”

“And hers. She can't leave Cuba and come here. This doesn't have to go any further.”

“It already has. Once it's out, you can't stop these stories.”

“Then why write like this? There are other ways.”

“I'm all alone here. And we're very anxious, my wife and I, we can't email or call.”

I believed him. The priest's story was bizarre enough to be true, not a bluff. In his own way, he was as honest as the general pretended to be, both believing they could get away with basic truths, as reality didn't terrify them.

“Maybe nothing will happen now, Padre, it's all pretty harmless anyway, like you say. I'm sorry, forgive me.” Even in wartime, you have to exercise your capacity to empathize or else it withers away. I was Townsley's front man, not his attack dog or performing monkey on a leash, I wouldn't turn totally inhuman, not for him or anyone else, the extra job wasn't worth anywhere near that extreme a transformation.

“What will happen now, señor, is your embassy will know, and your embassy is full of gossips, it leaks like a grass roof in a hurricane. And you know what this means once it's out, I'm exposed. My superiors in the Church will learn, and at last they'll throw me to the dogs. They've been waiting for a good excuse, my private reading list alone was always too frail a reed to pin an excommunication on.”

“Doesn't the bishop or whoever have any charity, no feeling for human weakness—”

“What do you know about weakness? Since when do yanquis feel for weakness?”

“I went to a Catholic school.”

“So?” The priest's moist eyes regarded me. “They're all Irish up there, the only weakness they feel is alcohol.”

“That's not true.”

But he appeared to sense that he and I now had something in common. Sacred statues and thorn-pierced hearts. Sins whispered in dark boxes. Miraculous relics and flickering lights in dim chapels, and rising up from incense smells and bells and rituals of Catholic childhood, maybe a residual capacity to understand and forgive and help a suffering man. After all, he could let the whole world know what a fraud I was, and we'd both stand exposed. I handed back the letters and opened the office door. My last glimpse of the priest was of him rushing from the gallery, wiping his eyes, and I felt the sack of stones pressing down on my body, and I hated myself for every ounce of this new burden.

Otherwise the gallery opening ended in success, at least a dozen
San Iñigo Beach Beauties
sold, and much rum consumed. A shower of affectionate kisses and hugs fell on me from Elaine. “Later,” she whispered.

Before closing, I retreated to the gallery office and sat staring at my cell phone, confused and irresolute, an inner conflict I hadn't anticipated when I signed the gallery papers.
Dan Shedrick, cultural consultant
,
le gallerist
…I attached the smartphone to my laptop. What exactly had I sent, the act was irrevocable, disgraced priest Cardenio Morena was right about that part. I pressed a hand to my forehead, perspiration seeping between my fingers, and despite the heat, I shivered.
Was it fever?
…so many mosquitoes in San Iñigo. I felt my temperature rising, sensing the brink of a life perhaps altered permanently. There had to be some excuse I could create to stop the padre's pathetic details from circulating, or at least discredit the worthlessly sad information I'd shoveled into the insatiable great maw of surveillance. I failed to realize this was precisely the sort of personal data they treasured, blackmail simply another tool of tradecraft. I was never an effective liar or much of a smooth talker, and so I emailed a dashed-off written report to Townsley, including a confession of impulsiveness, overeagerness to oblige, a lack of prudence. I revealed myself as the fool I was.

But Padre Cardenio was wrong about one thing. With the computer dictionary I had enough Spanish to discover heart-wrenching explanation, an account of how a desperate wife expressed her impossible love for a priest. And after I sent my excuses to Townsley, as I scrolled through the phone file of letters from the wife in Cuba, I translated…
My dearest Cardenio, I'm growing old, all alone. I'm not a good person. You can't imagine how easy it is for someone like me to commit the unpardonable sin of despair. But I think of Fidelita, and how well she's doing in school, and I think how you and I made her together, so there was once good in both of us, and there can be good again. Pray for me, dearest Cardenio, remember us in your daily Mass, and I ask Fidelita to pray for you, too. Know that I love you both more than my own life.
…
I nursed no doubts about the authenticity of this distressing letter, it wasn't in a cryptic code, a secret message to a García in the mountains, a notice of weapons dropped on a northern beach, a battle order for rebellion. It was the real-life plight of a single mother in Cuba who fell in love with a Catholic priest, a man who might never see her again or know their child, yet a man who loved them both no less, and maybe even all the more for this cruel separation. With every sentence I read, I felt myself shrinking.
Was sentiment corrupting me?
…Always a danger, Reg warned me against sentiment, worse than bribery, sentiment was stronger because feelings had no set price in cash, you couldn't simply buy feelings. Above a certain number of dollars, a potential asset open to bribery could be relied upon to turn and, for the right amount, the promising prospect became your willing servant. But sentiment could bloom in a heart simply at the mention of a name, a lost picture seen again, a fragrance recalled. Sentiment didn't cost a dime. Sentiment was cheap and unpredictable. Sentiment was final. I'd obeyed an order, and the results of my first little coup lay secure in a U.S. government server,
eternamente
. Not like the old days, when paper could be shredded, scraps devoured in flame, evidence vanished, ashes ground out of existence, no surprises found or suspicions confirmed, only a blank slate. Cell phones, emails, these were all traps.

“Hello, Reg…” I spoke to his voicemail, my tone guarded, pitch subdued, guilt and pity clouding judgment. “I just sent you some letters by mistake. If you could disregard them, please. Nothing to sweat about. My email explains my impulsiveness. Thanks.” So many slips in torrents of information, and nothing to be done. Maybe Reg would understand and nothing would happen, nothing other than my racing heartbeat.
Gallery Owner
…seemed like a swell deal, the idea I could have something for almost nothing in San Iñigo, catnip for any human, dreamy heaven come down to earth.

For days on end the air in San Iñigo stayed windless and enervating.

Although I wasn't ill, the strangeness—two jobs, two deaths, a widowed lover, humiliated priest, and uncompromising heat—all this piled up.
U got world by balls
…my Princeton friends sent TSMs.
Dude, u don't know how lucky u are, yr own gallery
…
2 jobs? Sweet. I'd love to find 1
…
Sex, sunshine, money—what a mash-up, some bastards have all luck
…They didn't know the details, I kept these to myself and looked for security and comfort in routine. Each day after work on the harbor site, I threw myself into an hour of tennis, then swam a dozen balls-out laps in the pool. Three evenings a week I was a regular for aperitif time at the club, keeping the bar in business, while on the other evenings I played host at the gallery, always with invited local guests (Townsley's suggestions). I welcomed the alcohol, letting it numb me most nights until I stumbled into Elaine's bed, where I built up a debt far in excess of any bar bill. The night memories of Vinny's murder, and Elaine's strange behavior emerging from the palm grove, the discovered shell casing…these discrepancies grew dimmer, suppressed in memory, the general's warnings dismissed as a jilted lover's depraved vengeance.

As weeks passed, and heat grew more intense, my daily tennis matches at the club were harder fought. I felt my muscles growing more resilient, even as my mind shut down, aperitif hours beckoning with greater force. The island's anesthetic effect worked wonders on me exactly as it did on almost everyone else, and an immunity was developing.

The police major, an unlikely art lover, took to dropping by the gallery for drinks whether invited or not. “You know, Señor Shedrick, our investigation continues. And I'll tell you a truth here, my friend, all we're missing is her DNA on that weapon. We have a shotgun now, but funny how nothing is on it. Except that poor victim's brains. No problem, we'll come up with something, murder is no joke. People are upset about Vinny, they miss him and his clowning around…” The police major shook his head over the mystery of this sense of loss. “Maybe you blew it, señor.” He smiled at me, large white teeth like tombstones, breath thick with odors of an uncovered grave. “Coming to San Iñigo, bright young man like you, such a wonderful future in America, and now all this.”

“I was unaware you knew so much about me.”

“This is a small city, señor, it's not like New York. In San Iñigo it's safer to assume when you sleep with a married woman—or recent widow—it's common knowledge.”

He made me feel like a fool. Stealth—or so I'd come to believe—was part of the attraction in a sexual affair, that extra bit of secret spice, while an open affair, on the other hand, looked ludicrous. To the police major's frequent provocations, I developed a standard response to match his calculated manner. I wore a fabricated smile as steady as his, equally as knowing and ironic. “I'm okay, officer, I'm cool here. I got a lot to do now, so if you'll excuse me, please.” And I'd leave the gallery, struggling to hold dignity intact, retaining this attitude for as long as I felt someone looking at me. I wanted to give the impression I knew exactly what I was doing, particularly when I didn't, which was most of the time with Elaine. Maybe they had no DNA evidence they could trace to her, and I still had her almost every night, which was proving enough for me, all these strands growing stronger in a complex web of illusion and self-delusion, a contraption assiduously woven, and blinding me. So much for my talent as a good watcher.