Hardly Working (8 page)

“Only money,” I echoed.

He placed his hand on his chest. “But I have my health. That's the important thing.”

“Yes.” My tone was halfhearted.

“I wanted you to be the first to know because I know how important Mudpuddle is to you.”

I nodded absently.

“I'm off to the Caymans tonight but I wanted to tell you face-to-face that I'm not abandoning you. I told somebody else about the project and he wants to come on board.”

“What's his name?” Now I was already following Tod at a run along the marble corridor.

“Hamish Robertson.”

“
The
Hamish Robertson? The near-billionaire Hamish Robertson?”

“The same.”

“But nobody can reach him. Nobody's ever seen him. Not in recent years. We've been trying to get in touch with him for ages but nobody knows where to find him. We thought he might be dead.”

We were already outside. Tod put his key in the front door and locked it. “Oh no. He's fine. He's a neighbor of mine. Didn't you know that? Lives four houses down the road. And he wants in on Mudpuddle. Oh…and Dinah. You better tear up that check.”

“But how do we…where do we…?”

He tossed the suitcase into the back of his Spider and got in. “Dinah, it's been great doing business with you, but I really have to make tracks.”

As I was opening my mouth to say goodbye, he was already roaring down the driveway.

 

I raced back to Green World with the brochures. As I hurried along the corridor toward my office, I passed the Yellow Slicker Guy, Roly, who had taken to sitting all day near Lisa's cubbyhole like an office fixture. He had done a few menial volunteer jobs for Lisa so I checked out his hands. They were clean enough. I said, “Roly. How would you like something to do while you're waiting for Lisa to come back?”

He made a noise like the start of a distant thunderstorm. I took it for a yes.

“Now you can sit over here at Lisa's desk. All you have to do is take this White Over and cancel the
P,
then with this pen, draw in a
K.
There are five hundred of them. Think you can manage it?”

 

“You said you had a car, Dinah.” Outside the Eldorado Hotel, Rupert Doyle was staring at my Mini as though it were a complex Chinese puzzle and he had to figure out which piece he was and where he fitted into it.

“It
is
a car, thank you very much. It's a classic Mini.”

“It's a classic sardine tin. Okay, Dinah. Let's move on out.” He threw up his hands in surrender, opened the passenger door and squeezed himself in. When he finally stopped squirming and shifting, his knees were practically touching his ears.

I suppressed a laugh.

He grinned and said, “It's not so bad. I've ridden in worse, I guess. Places like Guatemala. Nam. At least this isn't a pig or cattle truck.”

“About tonight, Rupert. We're agreed on that one thing?”

“What's that?”

“That you won't say anything. You won't tell him I'm his daughter?”

“Yeah. Well, as I said, you might not want to claim him as father material at all. You're grown up. What difference is it going to make now? And it looks as though your mother did a very good job of being both parents.”

I eyed Rupert with disappointment. What did he know? If my mother's parenting was so great then why did I feel the way I felt? Like half an orphan? And why was I seeing Thomas, I wanted to ask.

But I had to cut Rupert some slack. He spent most of his time among cultures whose social values were completely different, where female expectation was low, where girls became brides in arranged marriages at thirteen and were worn-out old women at thirty. It wasn't Rupert's fault that I was the neurotic product of a first-world country, thirty years old and still at the starting line.

Rupert watched the road and navigated for me. We were heading East into a no-man's land of factories and warehouses. Clouds had been looming all day and as we turned the corner into an unpromising street, the one he said was “the right one,” the sky opened up and rain poured down. I drove at a crawl while torrents streamed over my windshield.

“There it is,” said Rupert. “Down there. You are about to meet Hector Ferrer, your father.”

“Hector Ferrer? God. What kind of name is that?”

Rupert laughed. “Argentinian.”

Argentina. I had to think about it for a couple of seconds.

That big country stuck down near the bottom of South America. Its best-known exports were beef and Eva Peron legends.

“Hector Ferrer.” I tested the words on my tongue as I
pulled up where Rupert asked me to. He pointed to a huge old five-story brick building with rows of floor-to-ceiling windows set with small square panes. A set of narrow rusting iron stairs ran up the outside. It seemed more of a fire escape than a real stairway. At the second-floor level a single light illuminated a sign painted in black on white.

LOS TANGUEROS.

I shrugged and looked at Rupert bleakly. “And what kind of word is that?”

Rupert said, “Los Tangueros means tango dancers in the Argentine language, which is a kind of Italianate aberration of Spanish.”

I had a sudden image of Rudolph Valentino as a sooty-eyed sheikh, gliding across the silent screen in the embrace of a woman with crimped hair and Kewpie-doll lips. I imagined ballrooms and moth-eaten gowns, geriatric hotshots, slick old hustlers, a room full of trussed-up cadavers lurching around a dance floor with roses between their teeth. Marlon Brando making animal noises and dragging Maria Schneider by her legs around a seedy tango salon in Paris.

Rupert unfolded himself from my Mini and pulled up the hood of his jacket. He was indifferent to the rain, like a man who was in and out of monsoons every day. He hurried toward the stairs. I pulled a fold-up umbrella out of my purse and followed him.

He looked back at me and said, “Steel yourself for this. It's a cult, and people in the tango cult take it very seriously. I don't know why, but those who start dancing the tango become obsessed. It has a unique allure—it might look easy to outsiders but I hear that it's actually quite hard.”

When he pulled open the big iron door, I heard first the instruments tuning up and then a fragment of music.

It began as something staid and European, a string quartet, but then picked up and shot off onto a dark musical side street. There was an accordion, a violin, cello and piano. As
the playing progressed, the sound struck me as stark and beautiful, driven and melancholy. Like something that was hurtling toward a dramatic ending, violent sex or death.

It was completely unexpected.

Just as unexpected as the name Hector Ferrer.

Rupert saw the expression on my face and said, “Some call it the Latin blues. There's a quote by Borges…let me see…something like, ‘
El infinito tango me lleva hacia todo…
The infinite tango takes me towards everything.' Something like that.”

I nodded, still trying to take it all in. I followed him into the building and along a dim corridor. The music stopped, then there were more tuning-up sounds. From every part of the building, I could hear low voices, and strange outbursts, riffs of knocking or tapping, footsteps, little clusters of rhythm banged out on the floor that started and stopped.

“We're early,” whispered Rupert. “They're just warming up.”

The music started up again. It was coming from down the hall. We followed the sounds until we came to an open double doorway. There was a huge space before us. Circular shafts of pearlescent light were cast by antique bronze lamps attached to huge old Edwardian pillars, and above them, the ceiling was metal stamped with an intricate pattern and painted a dark green. Under several lamps, small groups of young couples in trim black dance studio clothes silently worked through steps, bends, turns. They talked and whispered, and occasionally broke the quiet with a burst of laughter.

There were at least a couple of dozen young people there with the bodies of classical dancers. Very serious about their moves, they executed them over and over, perfecting them, as if their careers depended on that dance. The cellist began to play again, a thin low grating wire of sound. With the streetlights beyond the huge filmy windows casting a silhou
ette of beating streaming rain on the worn wooden floor, the whole effect was exotic. Ghostly.

Against three walls were rows of small round tables and folding chairs. At one end of the room was the four-man orchestra.

We sat down at a table and Rupert whispered, “Hector first started getting himself in trouble by taking the basic tango and turning it into something of his own, something more artistic. That's what the younger dancers here are likely trying to pick up from him. Sort of taking it to a balletic extreme. They probably dance professionally around town. But the older dancers, the purists, maintain that you have more freedom if you learn the simple basics well. They say even getting the posture right is hard. The posture's very important.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about it. Are you planning to do a tango documentary by any chance?”

He smiled and shook his head. “No, no. Wouldn't be a bad idea though. I spent a lot of time in Buenos Aires at one point in the seventies. You have to see a real
milonga
in Buenos Aires, Dinah. That's the place to see it. Crowded as hell and brimming to the eyeballs with all that Argentine pride, unhappiness, fierceness, hubris really. Simultaneously exhilarating and depressing.

“People in Buenos Aires, the
portenos,
feel themselves to be so depressed that they have more psychoanalysts than any other city in the world. There's actually a neighborhood in the city called Villa Freud. Fathom that. And
bronca.
There's a hell of a lot of that there too. When you meet Hector, you'll find out all about
bronca.
”

“Bronca,”
I repeated. Another word to taste.

“The
milonga
is a place where a person can do something with all those feelings. See, it was a poor dance, maybe a street dance originally, according to the academics. All these immigrants, Spanish, Italian, Cuban, Creole, French, English
even, who went to Buenos Aires looking for a fortune and found misery, had nothing to do and nowhere to go, being stranded at the end of a new and empty continent and surrounded by nothing but ocean and
pampas.
So they made up a new way to strut their macho, to pass the time and impress the whores. It was folk music at first. Then it got stolen by the upper classes, taken for a ride around Europe, and came back semirespectable in the forties and fifties. The earlier tango culture culminated in the movie star Gardel, but he died in a plane crash. Yet another tragedy. Argentina doesn't have very many happy endings. So here's this dance that expresses that tragic, violent nature of the place, a nailing down of all that loneliness and bad luck and passion and jealousy. It's definitely Argentina's theme music.”

“Well, put like that, Rupert, you make it sound…I don't know. Important.”

“As I said, it becomes very important for the people dancing it.”

“It's not part of my world. I don't know anything about it. I mean, I like dancing a lot, but not in any organized way.”

“You'll have good reason to learn all about it now,” said Rupert, then winked.

And then the orchestra started up, the tune a simmering cocktail, smoky and slightly menacing, reminiscent of dark jazzy clubs and the last century's first glimpse of black net stockings.

The longer I watched, the more I came to sense that the older, less flashy couples were more intuitive dancers, moving in a unison, a subtle interplay of refusal and acceptance.

Rupert was smiling at me as I watched the people on the floor, which was now starting to turn as a whole in hypnotic motion. There were mysterious rules in force. Nobody came right out and asked the other to dance. It was all done with a look, a nod, a raised eyebrow, or a step toward that other person. And nobody smiled. Everyone was serious and in
tent. Each couple was their own little cosmos, each couple dancing a sad love affair in miniature, passionate and completely detached at the same time. The music was now urgent, now whining, clashing, dark, complete.

My mother had taught me music, but she'd done it coldly, scientifically, dissecting it and analyzing it until there was nothing left to enjoy instinctively. But I knew that once she'd had a real feeling for it. Or at least that was my impression. It seemed to me there had been a time when our house was filled with music of all kinds, and then a time when it had been unnaturally silent. Sometimes, I doubted myself though, unsure of whether it was an early memory or an invention of mine.

Later, my mother let me know subtly that music was a frivolous indulgence. She would disapprove if I spent too many hours in my room with the music channel or CDs, dancing with my reflection in the mirror and imagining myself somewhere else, being someone else. She would quietly humiliate me for being interested in it, and intimate that it took away from the real business; the sciences. When I was a teenager and turned the car radio onto a music station, she was always quick to turn it back to a talk program or the news. So in a mean-spirited way, I loved all kinds of music because I knew my mother would disapprove.

Sitting there at the edge of the
milonga
gave me a sensation of eating forbidden fruit.

And then all those fruits turned rotten and mushy.

Rupert touched my arm, looked toward the stage area, and in a low whisper said, “There he is. There's your father. That's Hector Ferrer over there.”

I peered through the half-light, the whirl of bodies. A man stood apart from the others, on one side of the small stage platform, overlooking the scene with a proprietary air. He wore a hat, a gangster hat, a borsellino or coppola, and when he lifted it, I could see that his gray, thick, slightly too-long
hair was greased back. His face was heavily grooved and he had an intelligent thin-lipped but cruel-looking mouth. He was slightly paunchy, with a posture that had been pressed down by time into an S curve, hunching shoulders, pelvis thrust forward. He wore a tight black shiny shirt, a brocade vest of red and black which only emphasized his paunchiness. His cream colored-tie was knotted tightly. And sticking out from the bottom of his black dress pants with the clean pleat down the front, was a pair of black-and-white two-toned shoes.