32

I rapped on the door of Marta’s building, hollered her name while inwardly cursing the lazy creep of a superintendent who hadn’t fixed the buzzer yet. I was hoping that Paolina would hurry down the stairs to let me in.

Instead I heard Marta’s heavy tread, her cane punctuating the difficult descent.

She’d been hoping for Paolina too. The angry sparkle went out of her eyes when she saw me, leaving them wary and cool. We faced each other, both too tired to hide our mutual disappointment.

“She’s with you?” Marta demanded.

“No.”

“She’s at your house?”

“She was there last night. I told you. She may come back. Right now it’s you I need to talk to.”

“Talk,” she repeated bleakly, shaking her head. But she held the door wide.

The apartment was immaculate, sofa bed returned to its sofa disguise, pillows neatly plumped. Floors vacuumed, end tables shined. Marta must have found waiting intolerable, even cleaning preferable. Kept the mind occupied, kept the body moving, kept you from hearing the tick of the clock, the dead silence of the unringing phone.

The living room looked like a stage set.

Marta said, “Lilia has the boys. I thought when she comes home, the two of us should be alone.”

For once the TV screen was blank. Marta waved me into the tiny kitchen. The table was covered with oddly shaped packages wrapped in aluminum foil and waxed paper. The door to the freezer compartment of the ancient GE refrigerator hung open. A kettle steamed on the stove.

“What do you want?” Marta said, selecting a blunt knife from a jumbled drawerful. “Why don’t you find her? Why doesn’t she come home? What was so bad here for her?”

I couldn’t answer all the questions, and I knew better than to try. I stuck to the first one. “I need to know more about the Hunneman plant.”

She stared at me with angry eyes, hefted the knife in her hand. “Please,” she said, “all I think about is my daughter.”

“I know,” I said.

“You don’t know anything,” she replied bitterly. She poured boiling water into a shallow tray, set it with a bang on the ice-caked bottom shelf of the freezer.

“I know this has to be done,” I said, “either here or at the police station. Tonight.”

“The police!” She smacked her palm against the refrigerator door. “You tell the police. Jesús y María, I tell you before, they close it down. You got no sense.”

“Women who work there die, Marta. Four women are dead. You could be in danger. Lilia could be in danger.”

She gripped the handle of the blunt knife. “I don’t know nothing,” she said angrily, turning away and stabbing viciously at the ice-coated walls of the freezer.

“Then let’s go over to Lilia’s. I’ll talk to her.”

“I can’t leave here in the middle of this. What if Paolina comes? I won’t go.” A hunk of grayish ice fell and clattered across the linoleum.

I picked it up and chucked it in the sink. “Then tell me what you know.”

“You tell the police about me?”

“Just one man. A friend. I’ll try to keep you out of it. You know that.”

She kept chipping at the ice. “I know if I go to jail, maybe you think you have my daughter for your own.”

I sat on a hard wooden chair. I felt like Marta had peeled back a layer of my skin, exposed something I hadn’t even acknowledged to myself. I haven’t thought about kids since Cal and I split up. Was that because I was fooling myself about Paolina? Not about the way I felt for her but about the way she felt for me.

Marta didn’t press her advantage. Water was starting to leak down the side of the freezer and puddle on the floor. “At the factory,” she said, “I do my work. I keep my head down. I don’t look at things and people that don’t concern me.”

“Marta,” I said impatiently, “this is serious. You talk to me or you talk to the police.”

She kept on defrosting the freezer, chipping and hacking at the dirty ice, but she answered my questions. The man she saw the most was the beer-bellied security guard I’d encountered on my brief foray into the plant. There were two shift supervisors, the “boss,” who was spoken of and never seen, and another security guard, who might have been Hispanic.

She swabbed the inside of the freezer with a rag. “I’m only there a few days. I don’t know so much. Maybe Lilia knows. But if Lilia helps, she’ll be in trouble, with no papers—”

“I’ll make sure she has a lawyer—”

“A lawyer. A thief, more like it.” Marta rummaged through the frozen parcels. She dropped one with a thud and I remembered old Mr. Binkleman who lived in the apartment below. “It’s Paolina who makes all this trouble for us.”

“Come on, Marta. You can’t blame her for everything.”

“For this, yes! It’s Paolina who talks to that woman about you, gives her your business card. Showing off, that’s what she’s doing. It’s not me who talks. I know better than to shoot off my mouth.”

It seemed as if the temperature had suddenly dropped ten degrees. As if the freezer had taken charge, ice-coating the room. I could hear the clock tick. “What was Paolina doing there?” I said quietly. It took effort not to scream, not to grab Marta and shake her by her shoulders till her foolish head snapped against the refrigerator door.

Marta repacked the freezer compartment as she spoke, angrily chucking packaged waffles next to frozen pizzas. “She won’t go to school. How can I leave her here, a place like this? In the daytime the boys downstairs, they have the drugs, wine, whatever. The words you hear are obscene, the noises obscene. I cannot leave her here. I need to work so she comes along. She learns like in a school. She learns to work, a better thing than what she learns in school. Learn to make money, I tell her.”

If it got any colder, my teeth would start to chatter.

“What is it?” Marta asked. “You okay?”

I stood abruptly. “If Paolina comes home, you call me. No matter what time of night it is, no matter if it’s two in the morning, you call me. Understand?”

“You got no business talking to me like that, yelling at me, just because my crazy daughter runs away.”

With an effort I calmed my voice. “Marta, if you know why she ran away, tell me. Please.”

She studied a package of frozen piecrust. “You think this is still good?” she muttered. “I can’t find no date on it.”

“Is your husband back in town?” I asked. “Is that what’s bothering Paolina?”

Marta shoved the questionable piecrust to the back of the freezer, pivoted to face me. “Pedro? He wouldn’t come back here. What makes you think Pedro’s here?”

“You were comparing him to Paolina when she ran off, remember?” In very unkind terms, but I didn’t say that.

Marta sank heavily into a kitchen chair. She opened and closed her right hand, staring at the swollen knuckles. The pain made her wince. “You don’t understand,” she said.

“Paolina said the same thing to me.”

Marta made a show of sorting through the remaining frozen foods, inspecting masking-tape labels. She avoided my eyes. “It wasn’t Pedro I was yelling about. Pedro is not Paolina’s father.”

I ran my tongue over my lips. “He’s not—”

“You want to listen to me or you want to talk? Paolina’s father, he’s a rich man. But does that help us here, living like pigs? Do we get anything? No. Her grandfather dies in Colombia, leaves a fortune, a million dollars, more, and what do we get? A little money for a new television. That’s all.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her angry words. “Does Paolina know?”

“She knows nothing. She’s too young. This rich Colombian man, I’m working in his house, a little cleaning, a little cooking. He says he’s going to marry me, but when I’m pregnant with Paolina, then it’s good-bye, he’s got too many important things to do, with the M-19, the guerrillas, the Communists. A man with ideas, he tells me, can’t be chained to a woman like me, a woman with a child; a woman can’t live on the run from the government.”

Her hair had come loose from its tight bun. As she spoke, she unpinned it. It fell, heavy and lank, to her shoulders. She rubbed her temples, closed her eyes. For a moment I got a glimpse of the young woman she must have been, with a fresh, unlined face, a face like Paolina’s.

“He gives me a little money to ease his conscience, and I come to this country after I have my child, my Paolina. I meet Pedro when she is just a baby. He says he loves us both.” She sighed deeply, shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe he did, for a while.”

“How could you keep this a secret? How could you not tell her?”

“What difference does it make?” she said. “What difference would it make? It’s an old story. It happened a long time ago.”

“But how can you be sure Paolina doesn’t know? If you went to see her grandfather—”

“I wouldn’t go, not to beg for money, not if I’m healthy, not if I can work. Paolina knows nothing. She’s just a child,” Marta insisted. “She doesn’t understand. I talk to the old man at night. I bring her with me, yes. To show the old man she looks like her father. But she’s sleepy. She visits with the housemaid. She falls asleep.”

I thought about Paolina’s behavior since she’d returned from Colombia. “She knows,” I said. “Maybe not everything, but something.”

“So what?” Marta said, defiantly sticking her hairpins back where they belonged. “So she accepts what is. What else can she do?”

“I don’t know,” I murmured. “I don’t know.” And I left her there, stuffing food into her ancient freezer.

When I got outside, I tried a deep breath. The night air was heavy with exhaust fumes. I couldn’t get my lungs to expand.

At the phone booth on the corner I stuck in a dime and punched my home number. I got Roz.

“Is she there?”

“No.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, get the hell out and look for her.”

I hung up and got through to Mooney after letting the damn thing ring about fifty times.

“Got anything?” I asked him.

“The lawyer’s here. And I’ve got Canfield, but he won’t say squat till he talks to his attorney. We’re gonna host a goddamn meeting of the American Fucking Bar Association.”

I told him Marta knew zip, and I asked him to put out an all-points for Paolina.