“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, and she did sound incredibly sorry, though perhaps most of all that the phone had rung and it was just another visiting journalist. Nicola had answered, Hello? with breathy anticipation; her subsequent downshift of timbre recalled Angela’s, on realizing it was only Edgar. “I’d have liked to have met your plane. But a few odds and sods are coming over this evening, and leaving my guests would be rude. Not that I won’t be tempted.” A small laugh, minor key. “After all, the members of our incestuous set run into each other every day—”
The call was interrupted by an unintelligible recording. Edgar felt an irrational urgency to keep this melodious voice on the phone, and shoveled more escudos in the slot. “Please,” he pressed. “You were saying?”
“It’s just the local hacks. But this is the first time we’ve gathered socially since Barrington left.” She said the name firmly, as if granting Edgar permission to employ it at will. Equally firm was the word left—not vanished, not was kidnapped, not even fled, much less was assassinated. The verb wasn’t merely descriptive; it was a verdict. “You’d be welcome to join us, Mr. Kellogg.”
She remembered his name! “Edgar,” he corrected. “I wouldn’t presume—”
“Please, you’d not impose. Everyone will be terribly interested to meet you.” She refrained from asserting that her guests would be glad to meet him, but the interest might be real enough.
“I’m afraid I’ll be just off the plane—”
“We’ll try not to detain you. And I’ll make every allowance for the fact that you’re exhausted.” After dictating her address, Nicola reduced her volume another notch. “There’s only one thing, Edgar. That I have that key? If you’d please not call it to anyone’s attention. Simply say you’re calling by to meet your new colleagues. Which you will be.”
“I’ll be discreet,” Edgar promised.
“God knows what you must think of me,” Nicola whispered.
“Hey, it’s none of my business,” Edgar protested.
“You can’t think any worse than I think of myself.” Without saying good-bye, she hung up.
Innocently whitewashed and cheerfully lit, the tiny square building of the Aeroporto Internacional de Cinzeiro was roofed in scalloped terra-cotta like an Arizona community center. While ESTÁ A ENTRAR NA BARBA OCUPADA! was boldly spray-painted across an outside wall, the graffiti’s red lettering was neatly outlined in green, the second B painstakingly extended to make it as tall as the first, its exclamation mark dotted with a daisy. The slogan less resembled the threatening defacement of a terrorist insurgency than a day-camp crafts project.
Deplaning onto the tarmac struck Edgar as quaintly retro-chic until he emerged from the cabin to be broadsided, foom, by a gale wind, which threw him so violently against the portable staircase rail that he nearly pitched over it. As another gust slapped his face in reproof that he’d ever considered air the same as nothing, Edgar clutched the railing hand-over-hand to the runway—skin tightening, eyes tearing, ears roaring. Once he exited through baggage claim’s revolving door, whose flaps swish-swished without aid of electricity, he was again blindsided by a solid atmospheric wall. After stumbling to the taxi stand, using his bags as ballast, Edgar clutched a post while the cabby loaded the trunk. Eyes shielded by protective plastic goggles, the heavyset cabby hunched with a widely planted stance, tilting into the wind and lifting his feet as little as possible. The maneuver looked practiced.
Edgar slumped into the rattletrap taxi, glad that darkness spared him gaping out the window. He didn’t have the energy to be fascinated, and wanted to appraise his new home with a fresh eye. Edgar had already formed a nascent affection for Barba, if only because Lisboners seemed to hate it so much. A kicked cur as a kid, Edgar identified with outcasts more than most of his countrymen, whose reputation for sympathy with underdogs was in his view highly exaggerated.
Such a piercing whistle sang through window cracks that Edgar’s headache was immediate. As the hump-fendered sedan galumphed down the road, it swayed in and out of lane, though the driver wrestled manfully with the wheel. Now and again a thud sounded against the doors as if a linebacker had assaulted the cab with a running tackle.
“Is it always this windy?” Edgar shouted over the teakettle shrill.
“Windy? Is no so windy,” the cabby yelled cheerfully back.
Fighting nausea as the taxi threw him from door to door, Edgar kicked himself for promising to stop by Nicola’s little soirée tonight. Better to have picked up the key tomorrow and sprung for a hotel. He vowed to get in, then get out. So far his “fellow” journalists had hardly constituted a mutually supportive intellectual fraternity, and one carelessly ignorant remark about the SOB could take him months to live down; Edgar admonished himself, Keep your pie hole shut. This Nicola broad sounded all right, but Edgar had minimal taste for socializing at the best of times. The truth was he didn’t like people much, even if he was never sure whether a misanthrope was allowed to deduct himself, like taking a standard personal exemption on a 1040.
Most of all, after a half day in Portugal he’d already had it up to the eyeballs with Barrington Fucking Saddler. Edgar had to write that mop-up article on what might have befallen his predecessor, bringing the story, for the paper, to a close. But the last thing he planned to blather in his free time was, “Gee whiz, guys, whadda ya think mighta happened to lovable old Bear?” Were Edgar to solicit any more gushy hog slop about Saddler, he would have to be paid.
The taxi drew up to a villa whose flat left-hand side loomed three stories high, unperforated by a single window. From this sheer blank edifice, a frivolous hodgepodge of turrets, porticos, and balconies with curlicued grillwork tumbled off to the right. From its fanciful leeward end, the villa resembled a set for Carmen; from the windward side, a nuclear power plant.
Foom. Edgar had trouble getting the taxi door shut. Doubled over, he dragged his luggage toward the entrance, his heavy leather bomber jacket flying horizontally to the right. Grains of sand stung his left cheek like acupuncture. Once he lunged onto the porch and tucked behind that mammoth wall, the roar ceased, the jacket dropped, and Edgar staggered from no longer having to lean into the squall to stay upright. Leonard Cohen dirged from inside.
The door opened only wide enough for Edgar to see in the porch light that the young man’s face presented the same impenetrable façade of the villa’s windbreak.
“Barrington the Second, right?” the boyish-looking Englishman said joylessly. “Surprised they sent someone else. Thought we’d all spend the rest of our poxy lives moping about and waiting for stigmata proof that Our Redeemer liveth.”
This was well too much for two hours’ sleep and a six-hour time difference. “I was looking for Nicola—”
“Naturally,” said the young man savagely.
“Henry, please,” whispered from inside. “If you have to, take it out on me. That poor bloke never did a thing to you.”
“In your version, you done bugger-all to me yourself, remember? I’m ‘paranoid,’ so I’m acting my part.” Henry turned heel, and retreated.
“Edgar! Do come in.”
Edgar thunked his luggage in the candlelit foyer. The taxi was still within hailing distance; after Henry’s warm reception, Edgar was considering a curt request for the key, so he could scram right away. But that was before he got a good look at Nicola.
She was a pre-Raphaelite vision. Tall, narrow, and delicate, the woman’s figure echoed the precision of her speech, the sharply articulated wrists, clavicle, and cheekbones as exactingly wrought as haiku. Tressing in wavelets to her waist, her hair reflected a range of hues from blond to red. She was draped in an assemblage of scarves and shawls that Edgar would have found cockamamie on most women, but Nicola could get away with as much flourish as