She thought this over for a few seconds while she watched the traffic. “You want me to talk dirty, is that it? Ok, fifty bucks and I’ll tell you about a guy who fucked me with a champagne bottle. Let’s go sit down in the coffee shop.” She turned on her clear-plastic heels and started to walk.

“No, you don’t have to tell me anything. I’m a lawyer and I just need someone who can translate for me while I’m talking to a woman from Guatemala. I’ll pay you. Now, do you want it or not?”

Another line of cars approached from the east and went past us without slowing. The last of the cars sped out of sight toward West Hollywood.

“I got to be back by nine,” she said finally.

We were already in my car and I was trying to get the air conditioning to work before she spoke again.

“Where we going?”

I handed her the paper on which I had written the address. I told her about Carmen Luzano. Leaving out the part about Crystal’s and the thousand dollars.

She glanced at the address, then folded the paper. “Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“What do you mean?” Obviously she had no concept of what life was like west of La Cienega.

“There’s a million crummy offices downtown with guys who do immigrations. Trámites. You don’t even have to be a lawyer. They’re like notaries. Very official-looking rubber stamps. Very latin. If this Carmen wanted papers, she’d go to one of them.”

“She’s scared,” I argued. “She needs the lady she works for to take care of it for her. She’s probably not very bright.” I bit my tongue. What the hell did I care what the hooker thought? I was paying her. Under other circumstances I would have called the interpreters’ office at the court building and gotten a referral to someone certified, someone qualified.

“What’s your name?” I asked, resolving to make our time together as painless as possible.

She crossed her arms in front of her chest and stared out the window without looking at me. “Lupe.”

“So, what country are you from?” I asked, making a last-ditch effort to communicate with her.

“East LA,” she snapped.

After that there was silence as I drove over to Wilshire Boulevard and turned left, heading for downtown. Near Western is the building that houses the Office of the British Consulate. When I was in law school, I demonstrated in front of it in solidarity with the IRA hunger strikers in British prisons. I hadn’t had that thought for a long time. Bobby Sands, dead for at least two years.

“You’re an Aquarius,” she guessed.

She couldn’t possibly believe in that crap, could she? I didn’t say anything. I wondered how she knew I was an Aquarius.