The Stars at Noon

  “You’re beautiful. Beautiful.”

  I laughed, covering my bad teeth.

  We fell asleep again.

  I WOKE up. I was alone. I pulled on my skirt and blouse and stuck my head out the door.

  The Englishman was sitting at the desk in the lobby, and he was in a state. “I’ve been trying to phone the airline for half an hour. It’s maddening—the bloody phone’s an instrument of torture, nothing more. It goes on ringing, it's unbelievable—is anybody in today at all?”

  “The phone’s a joke. So why aren't you laughing? Everybody knows the phone’s a joke.”

  “I’ll have to go right down to British Airways and see them in person.”

  “And tomorrow you’re going to have to go right back again,” I warned him. “You have to go everywhere twice before anything happens.”

  He sat back in the Señora’s swivel chair and looked at the lobby. The sun was falling through the door, and a yellow fog of dust moved in the light. The Señora was sitting on the divan next to the hi-fi with her feet flat on the floor and her knees apart and her eyes closed, fanning herself with her newspaper in her sleep. “The airlines,” the Brit said, “are computerized.”

  “Kind of like the telephones,” I suggested.

  “I did get through to the desk at the hotel. They’re clear enough that I’m no longer registered there.”

  “And?”

  “And beyond that we don’t seem to communicate.”

  I took the phone from him and dialed the InterContinental.

  “I certainly haven’t checked out of there myself—are you ringing them, I hope.”

  I got a desk clerk on the line and she told me the same thing again. “She says you’ve checked out.”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “Were you there when he left?” I asked the clerk.

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “Please, may I. . . ?”

  I gave him the receiver.

  “I haven’t checked out of anywhere,” he said. “Excuse me—I am he, you see. I beg your pardon? Un momenta—Now,” he told me, covering the receiver with his hand, “she's speaking in Spanish and I can’t understand.”

  “They always do that. It means she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  He handed me back the phone and I said, “Were you at the desk when he checked out of the hotel?”

  “The Watts Oil travel representative checked out for him and removed his baggage.”

  “Somebody took your luggage,” I told him. And I told the clerk, “Very bad. He’s with me now. He wanted to stay.”

  “He must contact his companions at Watts Oil right away.”

  “There’s been a mistake. Can you help us?” I asked her.

  “The best way to start is by talking to his companions at Watts Oil,” she repeated.

  “Now we get a thousand helpful suggestions and no fucking help whatsoever,” I let him know.

  “For heaven’s sake, get the manager on the line,” he said.

  “I want to talk to the manager,” I said.

  “He isn’t here right now.”

  “At what time will he come back?”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps after supper. Perhaps eight o’clock.”

  “Thanks.” I hung up. “You’ll have to go in person,” I said. “Don’t bother with the phones down here. Same with the British Airways—go in person."

  The Motel Whatsis's driveway was only a rut worn in the grass out front and curving out of sight beside the building. The whole time I’d been dialing and talking, I now realized, I’d been looking right at the front fender of a vehicle parked just around the building’s corner—wearyingly identical to the front fender of a Daihatsu jeep.

  “Look at that,” I told the Englishman. “Wait a minute.”

  Stepping out under the awning and creeping out past its shadow, I ascertained that the jeep had Costa Rican license plates; at which point I meant to back off, but the Costa Rican had already seen me, and so I came all the way round the building’s edge.

  “Excuse me,” the Costa Rican said in English. He struck an attitude, one foot up on the rear bumper, polishing his sunglasses with a white handkerchief. His face was a cipher.

  For some reason I laughed out loud. I suppose I was confused.

  “Something funny?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Oh no? But still you’re laughing. What is your name, please?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I have a bad head for names.”

  “Please, hey, wait a minute,” he said. “I was in the U.S. for four years. I got married to my wife there. One of my girls she is going to school right now in Ann Arbor. So don’t fuck with me. That’s my statement.”

  He put his sunglasses on and folded his handkerchief and put it in his pocket.

  “Well,” I said after a long, dull minute—because I was frightened, and felt as if I needed his permission—“I’m going back inside now.”

  “Ho-kay, excuse me, no.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. He opened his eyes. “I told you already once, don't fuck with me, or I’m gonna fuck with you. You better let me take your passport, because I’m gonna make a photocopy.”

  “I can’t give you my passport.”

  He held out his hand.

  “I can’t give you my passport.”

  “I know that your England friend is inside,” he said. “Did you think you were going to play a fucking game?”

  “I can’t really talk to you.”

  “What do you believe? Do you believe this is nothing? Do you believe you take this guy through the Mercado, fuck him, it's fun, and then it’s finished? Did you fuck him?” He grabbed my wrist.

  “Let go.”

  “I’m listening right outside the window, bitch. Do you know who’s playing in your game? A lot of people.”

  I could see he was in pain. “A lot of people?” I said. I was so frightened of him I couldn’t swallow.

  “You’re not gonna fuck him and then you just say, like that, it’s finish. You’re gonna have a lot of explanation to take care of. Goddamn it!” He shook his head. “Another fucking cunt playing games.”

  “Okay,” I said, breaking free of his hold on my arm. “Señora! Call the cops! Señora!” I ran through the door into the lobby. It was empty. The lock was on the phone.

  “The cops!” I heard him say with hard, false laughter, but he made no move to follow me through the door.

  As soon as I saw the Englishman in my room, my heart fell. Just for those few seconds I’d assumed he’d run somewhere far away and I was done with him.

  Well, but I wasn’t done with him. Somewhat stupidly I asked him, “Did you see who was out there?”

  “Yes, I did. That’s why I’ve come in here.”

  For the next few minutes we each behaved as if the other weren’t around. Our panic eliminated all belief in what was happening. I went into the bathroom and stood before the commode, baffled and blank, until I decided I must be looking for a cigaret.

  He, meanwhile, sat on the bed looking between his knees at the floor with his glasses slipped down to the end of his nose.

  Out in the lobby Radio Tempo was playing one I hadn’t heard—a black song, hard-rock disco, you might call it: Oh, baby, kick my butt—I’d love to kick your butt . . .

  I never found out what Radio Tempo thought it was or who in the world ran it. Its programming was unearthly. The gringo rhythms and Top 40 phrases hanging in the sodden air—I wanna; bay-hubee; shake, shake, shake; c’mown now—evidenced that we were using up our tiny lives, going around in these ridiculous circles, along the outflung fingers of an empire.

  "Have you got a cigaret for me?" I asked him.

  “Oh. Sure,” he said.

  I opened the door to see if it was the Señora who'd turned up the radio, or just the housekeeper.

  But it was the Costa Rican, sitting in a chair. He had his feet up on the hi-fi, and his eyes were closed.

  I shu
t the door softly. “This man scares me.”

  “He’s still out there, then.”

  “That’s him. What is he trying to do?”

  “He’s—I don’t know.”

  “All right, all right,” I said, “but who is he working with up here? I mean what does he think he’s doing up here?”

  “He’s nobody here really. He’s completely out of his area. I don’t know if he’s on a private mission, or if he’s in touch with—whoever. But I wish he would go away, I can tell you that.”

  “Maybe you should talk to him. I think you should talk to him. You’re not going to London till you get all this straightened out. You’ve got to face some people. You’re supposed to face them, but it’s my window they're peeking into. Oh, please. You’re a businessman. Don’t you have contacts?”

  “My contacts are no good. Do you have contacts?”

  “A Vice-minister at Interturismo, and a Sub-tenente at Interpren. The vice-ministers and the sub-tenentes, that’s who I know. The slobs and losers. And they both just got done cutting me loose.”

  “Too bad. You struck me as somewhat the Mata Hari.”

  “This is a real revolution—the rot doesn’t climb any higher than the underlings. I never even get introduced to the other ones, the ones without a prefix on their rank.”

  “Well then, won’t you get in touch with somebody? This man at Interturismo, for instance, can he help me get back to the UK?”

  “He's the one who turned us in, it had to be him. The worthless coward!”

  “Maybe he saw no other way.”

  “There is no other way. That's how it works down here.”

  “In any case, he can’t help. What about your magazine?”

  I had to laugh. “Roundup Magazine? They talk to me on the phone, but they don’t do anything else. They’re no help. Look,” I said, “I can’t help you.”

  “What sort of articles do you write for them?”

  “I don’t write any articles for them,” I confessed. “I just talk to them on the phone. Once they sent me money.”

  “Just let me stay. I’ll be out of your life tomorrow—I can't think.” The idea seemed to startle him. “My mind honestly will not function. It’s a remarkable sensation.”

  “All right. We’re finished arguing. Stay or don't stay, it’s up to you,” I told him.

  He could tell I just wanted him out of there. He said, “I’m not going anywhere with that man.”

  “Okay then, let’s take the back door. It’s nailed, we’ll have to pry it.”

  “He’ll hear us. He’s listening.”

  “I’m taking the back door. I’m leaving.”

  “Well and good, then.” He stood quite still.

  Instead I hit my purse for the rum. “I don’t see why I should have to leave,” I said. “Nobody’s after me.”

  “I’ll have some of that,” he said about my rum.

  In a few seconds, I sat on the bed. “What did you do?”

  He sat down beside me. “I told you. Didn’t I? I can’t remember what I've told to whom, by this time.”

  Among the two dozen noises coming in through the window, there were twenty I couldn’t identify. That's where that raw feeling comes from when you’re run up on a foreign shore—nothing’s identified. You just can’t take enough for granted. “You work for Watts Oil, you said. That doesn’t make you a spy.”

  “I’ve given away the company’s secrets.”

  “Right, you said that, but—doesn’t your company sell gasoline? What’s all the fury about?”

  “We take petroleum out of the earth to keep everybody alive, for Christ’s sake—it’s the biggest game going.”

  “But I mean anyway. How big a secret can your secrets be?”

  “Well,” he said, “listen, the location of these things, deposits and so forth, I’m surprised at you, where do you spend your time that you don’t know governments take a deep intertest?”

  I was seeing it now. “You told Nicaragua something,”

  “I jolly damn well did, about the location of an oil deposit. A possible location.”

  “Possible? You mean maybe it isn’t even there?”

  “Testing’s begun. That’s the full extent of it. There may be a batch under Lake Nicaragua, and if it’s there, it spills over into Costa Rica. Costa Rica already knew of it. Nicaragua had a right to the information, it seemed to me.”

  “So you blew it around, what a fool. And now this Costa Rican is after us.”

  “He’s not after us. He has us.”

  An idea suggested itself: “I think we should kill him.”

  “Do you.”

  “Then we’d have his jeep.”

  “And his wallet and his trousers. And his body.”

  “We could put the body in the trunk.”

  “I don’t believe that thing has a trunk.”

  “Are we speaking seriously about this?”

  “Of course not,” he said, “for goodness’ sake. Do you know, I was warned about you. People said, Nicaragua, my God, there’s a guerrilla war on, the place is full of killers. Only they meant foreign killers.”

  “Down here, we’re the foreigners. We’re the ones without any documents on file, no fingerprints, no relatives.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “We’re alone, we can’t be touched,” I insisted, “we’re dangerous.”

  “I’m not dangerous,” he said. “I would never kill anyone.”

  “But you’d screw yourself all up. You’d get yourself in a corner way far away from home, wouldn’t you? Spreading it around about oil wells.”

  “I had a notion everybody should start even.”

  “Start even, oh,” I said, “now there’s a notion that doesn’t apply here at all.”

  Now he was crying about what he’d done to himself. “I told them,” he said, “and they told Costa Rica that I’d fucking told them, you see.”

  He was waking up to it slowly. Gradually and enormously the dawn of all he’d done to himself . . .

  “I could say anything right now,” I told him, “and it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Then help me . . .”

  I’d done only one thing to help him—I’d tried to call him on the phone and warn him—but that one good deed had set me over the brink, and I felt myself slipping down with him . . . In order to stop helping him, I had to help him a little longer. . .

  “They’re sort of after me, too,” I admitted, “at least to the point where I don’t want to talk to them, or him. Or anyone.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “We’re a hell of a pair. You know what, I spend almost every day doing nothing. Do you realize that? Once every two weeks I get slightly off the wall. Why did you have to coincide?”

  He took out his wallet and started looking at all the things in it, the business cards and identification cards and so on, weeping.

  There was no consoling him. “I suppose you love your family and all that,” I said anyway.

  “Yes, yes, I do. I do love my family.”

  He cried without shame, like a girl . . .

  What a fate!

  Every time I turn around, they’re jamming something under somebody’s fingernails, and I’m supposed to watch.

  I HAD to observe him. In fact they were upping my voltage, weren’t the little demons, doing away with whatever was formerly unimaginable, putting before me for observation the most horribly tormented soul of all, the humanitarian among the damned—dressing him in a blue suit, grooming him presentably, handing him an appointment book . . . Believe me, looks deceive: among these souls he would have liked to help, with their diesel-blackened nostrils, their gnarled, arthritic hands and shrivelled guts, their faces rubbed away against the wheel of need, among these he was most definitely the pick hit, the big contender, the one to watch . . .

  Next morning I got the Señora to unlock the phone for me. This equipment wasn’t there for customer use, but the Señora never
minded. She liked me—always looked away from me, smiling in a tight-lipped way. The General of Maids seemed fond of me, too. They didn’t know who I was but they knew I wasn’t holding any terribly high cards.

  I needed to check on the Englishman’s luggage. Also I had to find us another place to stay—where I was living now just wouldn’t do anymore, decorated as its entrance was by the off-course policeman from Costa Rica. He seemed to feel at home here. At dawn he’d been stomping around out in the lobby, invoking childhood terrors. He answered to no one and nobody questioned him.

  Even now this OIJ person watched me through the window, at the same time eating his breakfast of freshly sliced mango out of a little plastic bag. He sat on the fender of his jeep, eating with his fingers, leaning forward with his feet wide apart in order not to dribble on his shoes.

  First I dialled the Inter-Continental, because it was just such a pleasure dialling the Inter-Continental: somebody always answered right away. But nobody of real authority ever wanted to get on and converse. The desk clerk transmitted dreams and legends as to when the manager might appear . . . Obviously I’d have to go over and find this manager myself.

  The line started crackling in a jazzy fashion. Just before the telephone died, I got through to another motel and found us new accommodations.

  Back in my room—my room—the Englishman was just in the process of smelling his shirt before putting it on for the third immolating tropical day . . .

  I told him I was off to the Inter-Continental and served him a number of counterfeit assurances as to his luggage.

  “Please, by all means, find me a pair of undershorts that aren’t completely soggy,” he begged.

  The Costa Rican outside didn’t budge or blink when I left, he just sat on his fender with his sunglasses parked on his scalp—a greasy habit that—committed, I supposed, to following the Britisher only.

  I smiled at him, but I was faking it, I felt much more like crying . . . If only a self-admitted Costa Rican cop in Nicaragua had made any sense at all, I wouldn’t have feared him quite so hysterically.

  But while I looked for a cab, oh! the revitalizing surges of my economic status . . . These gypped Coca-Cola addicts heaving around the streets with their empty bellies couldn’t help looking at me with a certain supernatural awe—financially, I was spectacular, miraculous; the minute I hit the pavement, the day’s rivulet of cordobas started flowing from my hands . . . “Mother,” the cabdrivers shouted, “soothe my coffers.” Mother, the mutilated posters cried, where they speak your name it says Money . . . I intended to ditch my British friend today. But I wanted to stay with him, too, I liked being naked with him, the way he smelled made me feel both hungry and sorry, I liked knowing we were in for it, that we didn’t have far to go . . . “Mother-I-am-penniless-it-hurts—intercede-for-me-in-your-mercy,” the boys out front of the Inter-Continental pleaded. “Mother, let me go through your pockets,” wept the desk clerk. What a morning! . . . If I’d been the fattest woman on earth, or blasting away with a bazooka, they couldn’t have treated me with more respect . . . All but the doorman, who must have known me from the night shift, and failed pointedly to operate his equipment. Now it turned out that the fugitive manager had left a suitcase belonging to the Englishman, also a piece of his hand-luggage, in the hotel’s travel office, right next to the desk of a lady who spoke English and didn’t care whom I claimed to represent, if I wanted these bags I could take them. “Get a real job, you sorry fuck,” I told the doorman by way of a tip, and dragged this stuff out front myself, and was carried off in my taxi with a trunk full of I didn't know what.