The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [70]
At that moment, her cell phone rang. It rang once, twice, three times, unusual for her, since she usually answered right away. She stood reeling in the living room, holding on to the chair. Finally, she gathered herself enough to find her bag, tossed down earlier on the couch, reached inside and picked up her phone.
“Hello?” she said.
A man’s voice answered. “Isolde, it’s Enrique.”
She scanned the men in her mind. Enrique? “Yes?” she said.
“I’m on the board of the Arts for Children committee. Do you remember, we exchanged a word the other day at the board meeting at Alicia’s?”
She had a vague sense of who it might be, an older man with smooth white hair. He had asked her a few questions about her town in Austria. She had been vague, as she didn’t like to reveal much about her past. But there had been a number of older men there. Maybe it was a different one.
“Hello, are you there?”
“Yes, yes,” she said.
“Pardon me for calling your cell phone like this. It’s the only number I was able to obtain for you. I’d be delighted if you’d accompany me to the art fair tonight.”
She couldn’t discern his motive. But she must do it, she told herself—pretending she was reluctant, though of course she wasn’t—if it had anything to do with finding a job.
“Oh, well, yes, that would be fine.”
“May I pick you up?”
She gave him her address, hung up. The apartment rippled before her eyes, as if consumed in haze, then righted itself.
Okay, good, she had an escort. Now what to do about her hair? She looked in the mirror again. She knew. She’d wear a headband, a wide black cloth one framing her face, covering the roots. It gave her an elegant, wealthy look. Yes, that was the answer, at least for now. She wouldn’t dye her hair today.
twenty-three
I really needed a haircut and a wax. I also wanted to hear how Vera was doing. I got on that same bus I’d taken before, meandering through the city, a long woozy ride. We passed through the medical zone, an area full of hospitals and research centers. We passed the National Institute of Microbiology. Gabriel had told me about this place, a monumental building in the neoclassic style, designed by immigrant Italians. Inside were large quantities of snakes in crystal cages. They were brought in on the railroads—a big railroad station was nearby—so as to extract the venom needed to make vaccines. “Venom, like blood, can’t be reproduced artificially,” Gabriel said. He remembered vividly going there as a child. His friend’s uncle, an employee, took the snakes out of the cages so they could touch them. “They were so cold,” Gabriel said. In neighboring cages were the furry animals, rats and rabbits, reserved for the snakes’ meals.
I got off the bus, pausing on the bridge as I walked over. It was near the end of the day. The light was hazy and warm and seemed to contain spores rising and falling. Or else it was pollution, I couldn’t tell.
Vera was speaking in Belarusian to another woman when I arrived. I waved and sat down in the waiting area, flipping through the magazine Gente until Vera called me. She explained that the other woman was her friend and always did her waxing here.
“Her boyfriend’s Muslim. He treats her really nice. She always takes all the hair off down there. She said that’s what most Muslims do.”
But Vera looked different. It was partly that she was tan.
“I called and you were at the beach,” I said.
She was dressed up more than usual. She had earrings on. But it wasn’t just that. She had a slightly harder look, maybe it was the eyeliner, black, right on the bottom rim of her eye. The jewelry also looked hard. She told me she had moved