People said ugly things because they were ugly inside. Or at least that would be her theory until she got through the rest of this rehearsal.
“Excellent. Tony, let’s do it a few more times, please. Nadia?” Jared cued the wizened one at the piano as Tony got into position and Pagan began her lonely initial steps.
Tony stepped in and grabbed her hand vigorously. Stiff, Pagan turned toward him and did her back ocho in surprise. As he pulled her in again, she couldn’t help it; her resistance was real, and his grip on her hand tightened until her finger bones cracked.
Only a few more steps. She forced herself to melt, to yield as they went through the dance. She twirled around him, resentful planet to his glowing, annoying sun, yielding to his pull.
The last flurry of intricate moves involved hooking her leg around his, then withdrawing, followed by a series of little flicks of her heel as she pivoted within his embrace. As they began, Tony shoved her this way and that.
“Angle, angle your hips!” Jared shouted at Tony. That was how you guided your partner, not by force.
But Tony wasn’t listening. The angry glitter in his eyes, the power in his grip, was frightening, as if he might throw her instead of dip. He pushed her hip too hard and squeezed her hand cruelly. Pain shot down her arm.
She managed the first two kicks perfectly, anyway, but on the third she pivoted too far. The pointed heel of her dance shoe jabbed right into Tony’s groin. He let out a sickened grunt of agony and released her.
She hadn’t meant to do it.
Had she?
Either way, his anguished grimace was very satisfying. She stepped back as he doubled over, hands clutched between his legs.
“Sorry,” she said, her voice calm, as if she’d stepped on his toe. “My fault.”
Tony fell to his knees, sucking in air. “You bitch,” he said with a groan.
Oh, yes, she was feeling better now. Amazing what a little accidental violence could do for your spirits.
“Your face is purple,” she said. “You might want to change your tanning oil.”
Jared rushed to Tony’s side, eyes wide. “Are you going to be able to keep dancing?”
Tony shook his head. His lips completely disappeared as he pressed them together.
Pagan gathered up her trench coat and purse. “Same time tomorrow?”
Tony’s burning glare as he struggled to sit up was a balm to her soul.
“I think tomorrow maybe we’ll go through your little rumba number with David instead,” said Jared.
David was Pagan’s other costar, a dim, sweet boy she could wrap around her finger with one flutter of her eyelashes.
“If you think that’s best,” she said, and sauntered out the door, even as her spirits sank. Tony Perry and the terrible script were only the first challenges this movie was going to throw at her.
Buenos Aires, Argentina
January 10, 1962
CÓDIGO
The code of behavior which governs the dance.
Eight days of rehearsal and several grueling flights later, Pagan and Mercedes landed at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, rumpled and grouchy.
Devin Black was not waiting for them.
It was at a sunny eighty-five degrees as they made their way down the rickety metal stair onto the tarmac. A strong humid wind nearly snatched Pagan’s pillbox hat off her head and whooshed the skirt of Mercedes’s Zuckerman pink cotton piqué sheath dress so high her garters showed. The Pan Am stewardess in her chic blue uniform ran easily down the stairs after them to ask for an autograph for the captain, smiled her regulation Revlon Persian Melon lipstick smile and trotted back up the stairs.
“How does she look so unwrinkled?” Mercedes asked as they straggled into the terminal.
“I know,” Pagan said. “My garters have found a new home, embedded in my thighs.”
Inside they found a short, square man in a neatly pressed black uniform and cap holding a sign that said Señorita Jones.
“My name is like a terrible alias,” Pagan said to Mercedes. “Buenos días, señor. Soy Pagan Jones.”
He blinked at her and Mercedes, then looked down at his sign and back up at them. “Buenos días, señoritas,” he said. Under his formidable black mustache, his uneven teeth flashed in a smile. “I’m sorry. They didn’t tell me you spoke such beautiful Spanish.”
Pagan laughed and continued in Spanish. “Mercedes is the real expert. What’s your name?”
“Yo me llamo Carlos Cavellini,” he said, except he pronounced yo and llamo with a zsh sound at the beginning of the word instead of a y. He gestured for them to follow him and they fell in as he led them through the airless, bustling airport. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Pagan said, “Cavellini. That’s a beautiful name. Is it Italian?”
Carlos’s smiled widened. “There is an old saying. A Porteño—that is what we who live in Buenos Aires call ourselves—a Porteño is an Italian who speaks Spanish, lives like a Frenchman and wants to be English.”
They tucked themselves into the backseat of his big black car as Carlos and a porter loaded their luggage. Beyond the airport were green fields, but as they drove, the gray smudge of a city lurked on the horizon.
“They weren’t kidding when they said it’s summer here,” Pagan said, rolling her window down to feel the wind in her hair.
Half an hour later they pulled up in front of a ten-story building that looked like something from a movie about Paris in the 1920s, with flags from a dozen countries waving over the grand entrance. The entire neighborhood reminded Pagan of Europe, with grand boulevards, green parks and many-storied gracious buildings dotted with window boxes and fancy decoration over the doorways.
“The Alvear Palace Hotel,” Carlos said. “Finest in the city.”
“Which barrio is this?” Mercedes asked, folding up a map she’d been studying. She’d read two books on Argentina before the trip, and had agreed to do a report for her social studies class at school when she got back. Pagan, as usual, was going in blind.
“We’re in Recoleta,” Carlos said. “North of the city center, where there are many colleges, museums, churches and fine homes.”
Devin wasn’t waiting for them inside the ornate hotel lobby, either. The place had a sort of between the wars grandness and Pagan half expected to find Devin there chatting with girls dressed in sparkly flapper dresses, like something out of The Great Gatsby. But no matter how hard Pagan scrutinized the gold-bedecked marble columns, the red brocade benches or the high-ceilinged archways, he did not appear.
“Where the hell is he?” she muttered to Mercedes as Carlos ordered the bellboys to take their luggage and walked soundlessly along the thick Persian carpet to hand their passports to the hotel clerk.
Mercedes shrugged. “Maybe his flight was delayed.”
Pagan shook her head, irritated. “His flights are only late if he wants them late.”
“Will you require the car this afternoon, señoritas?” Carlos asked.
Pagan exchanged a look with Mercedes. They were both exhausted from the trip. “Thanks,