Naked in LA (28 page)

That night we drove down to Mexico. I wore a scarf and sat low in the seat until we were out of the city.

Reyes headed toward San Diego and then across the border into Mexico. He didn’t say much, he looked angry. Was he angry with me, with himself? I don’t know.

Once he said: “It’s not the way I’d do it.”

“Do what?”

“If I was in their position, I’d get one of those pro-Castro communist nuts with a grudge, some guy not even remotely connected, and I’d put a gun in his hand. There’s plenty of crazies who want to kill the president, but They’re too dumb to know how to do it. That’s what I’d do.”

“Would you?”

“Would I what, princess?”

“Would you help them kill him?”

“I didn’t even want them to kill Castro.” He drummed on the wheel with his fingers. “I have to get out of this business.”

“Come with me,” I said. “Let’s leave all this behind. We could be happy, you and me, I know we could.”

He just shook his head and smiled.

We drove through the deserts of the Baja Sur, stopped to sleep by the side of the road for a few hours, got coffee and eggs at a roadhouse. When we arrived in some one-horse town called La Paz with a dirt airstrip with a donkey on it, there was a charter plane waiting for us.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“You’ll see.”

“I don’t have any luggage.”

“You won’t need any where you’re going. I’m afraid you’ll have to say goodbye to the glamorous life.”

“What about my apartment?”

“You don’t get it, do you?” he said as the Cessna bounced down the runway. “You are about to become a missing person. A day or so from now there will be cops swarming all over your place looking for signs of foul play, there’ll be mob guys watching the studio, looking all over the city for you. You have a passport and a pulse, for now that’s all you need.”

The charter flew us to Mexico City. From there we boarded a South African Airways 707. I was exhausted, slept on his shoulder on the long flight across the Atlantic. We changed planes in Madrid. By the time we reached Johannesburg, I was exhausted. I thought we would go to ground somewhere in the backblocks, but when we cleared customs Reyes walked straight up to the Air France counter and got us seats on a flight to Dar Es Salaam.

“I can’t,” I said to him. “I need to rest. Can we get a hotel for the night?”

“Where you’re going, princess, rest is all there is.”

I didn’t even know where Dar Es Salaam was. When we got off the plane the breathless heat hit me like a wall. I was dirty, tired and bathed in sweat. One night in the Mexican desert and I’d stopped looking like a movie star; by the time we stepped off the Air France flight into the white-walled, stinking terminal in some country I had never heard of, I looked more like a hobo.

Reyes seemed to know his way around. He went straight to a windowless office in a corner of the terminal. There was a telephone, a rusted metal filing cabinet and a Frenchman with three day’s growth asleep at the desk. He woke him up, said something to him in French, and took my arm.

“Not another plane,” I muttered.

“You think it’s easy to disappear?”

The pilot’s name was Jean-Luc and he talked incessantly, in French, the whole way. Reyes said a few words back. Another surprise, I didn’t even know he spoke French. Apparently there were still many things I didn’t know about him.

Three hours later we touched down at a town whose name I could not pronounce, on an island I had never heard of. The terminal was a tin shed with goats munching on the heaps of rubbish that were piled up outside. Reyes put me in a dilapidated taxi, one door held on with pieces of wire. I couldn’t breathe because of the heat, and as I tried to gasp in some air I swallowed a fat African fly.

This was a nightmare.

The trip from hell to paradise takes about twenty minutes, bouncing across the potholes on an unmade road. The taxi left us outside a dilapidated beach hut beside a lagoon so impossibly blue it didn’t seem real. Palm trees bent over a white beach, too drowsy to stand up straight.

A hammock had been strung between banana palms.

I looked around, enchanted. In the distance clouds hugged the rainforest flanks of a volcano, banana plantations and vanilla bushes hugged the dirt road beside the beach. A group of small children rushed up and stared at us, giggling and shouting:
“Mzungus!”

“What does that mean?”

“It means “white people,” Reyes said.

He led the way inside the hut. There was a table and two chairs, a bed with a mosquito net, a fly-catcher made from shells. A wood carving of a turtle and a piece of driftwood so smooth it might have been carved from marble lay on a low table next to a carved sea chest decorated with mother of pearl. There was an ancient bookcase, bowed in the centre by the weight of the books on the shelves, everything from Harold Robbins paperbacks to ancient navigational charts of the islands.

“You’ll be able to catch up on your reading,” Reyes said.

“Is this it?” I said.

“No one will find you here. Even the people who live here don’t know where the hell they are.”

A man came in wearing a long skirt, a white shirt and a skullcap. He grinned and bobbed his head.

“This is Shofa,” Reyes said. “It’s not his real name; it’s from the French word for “driver.” That’s his hut over there. He’ll take care of you, bring you food and tea, anything else you need. I hope you like seafood and fruit.”

“How long am I going to be here?”

“As long as it takes.”

“But I have no money.”

“You won’t need any--he’s been paid. Jean-Luc will fly out with newspapers once a week and check in on you. He’ll try to sleep with you, of course, but it’s up to you whether you let him.”

“Reyes, it’s you I love.”

He pretended not to hear me.

“I always thought I’d need this myself one day. It’s my bolt hole, my insurance. The people here are about as friendly a people as you’ll find anywhere, and the only danger is the volcano, but that hasn’t erupted for fifty years.”

“Stay,” I said again, convinced that if I could make him spend the night he would not leave me.

He bit his lip and I could see the torment written on his face. I held my breath. He turned and said something to Jean-Luc, who looked disappointed. He shrugged his shoulders and walked out.

“I have to leave in the morning though,” Reyes said.

I bathed in the lagoon. I was utterly exhausted, but I was determined not to go to sleep until I had made Reyes forgive me. There was not a shred of doubt in my mind that I could do it.

I didn’t care about Hollywood anymore. I didn’t care about money or proving anything to anyone. I knew that I loved Reyes. I knew I could make things different in the future. I just wanted a second chance.

It was evening. Oil lights twinkled along the beach, but otherwise it was utterly black. We had fallen off the world.

Shofa brought us fried crab, some rice, papaya. After we’d eaten we went back inside the hut and Reyes turned off the lamp. Through the doorway I could see the moon hanging fat over the ocean, making the sand glisten like bone. I took off the wrap that Shofa had given me to wear and stood in front of him naked.

“You’re beautiful, princess,” he whispered.

“I’m all yours.”

“Yeah?”

“You were right about me. I was vain and stupid and scared. Things can be different now.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“But it does matter. Can you forgive me?”

“I forgave you for what happened in Havana. I don’t know that I could do it again.”

“But you have to,” I whispered.

“Forgive once and that’s okay, I guess. Forgive twice it gets to be a habit and you spend your whole life listening to people saying They’re sorry.”

I took his face in my hands and kissed him, hard. I tore open his shirt and pushed him back on the bed. I thought I could change his mind with sex, an instinct as primitive as it is hopeless. He let me try; he was a red-blooded man, and once I started in on him neither of us could stop. But no matter what I did he wouldn’t let himself come. I did though; more times than I could count. Perhaps it was the danger or perhaps it was just that I had never let myself go so completely. When we finished, we were lying on the floor, on the straw mats, covered in sweat.

I wrapped my arms and legs around him and promised myself I would never let go. “I love you, Reyes,” I whispered.

“I love you, too,” he said.

I gave in to exhaustion, slept like the dead.

The next morning when I woke up he was gone. I ran outside, thinking that perhaps he had just gone to swim in the lagoon, but when Shofa saw me he grinned and bobbed his head to show me he was sorry and pointed towards the sky. In the distance I saw a distant speck, climbing away from the airport and heading out towards the bitter, bright ocean.

He didn’t even say goodbye.

Chapter 39 

I sat on the beach, staring at the sea. I stayed there all day. Shofa came down to bring me food but I didn’t eat or move until sunset.