“I don’t like you going out at night,” said Noreen. “Suppose you get stopped at an army checkpoint?”

“Do I look like a revolutionary?” asked Dinah.

“Sadly, no.”

“Well, then.”

“My daughter is nineteen, Carlos,” said Noreen. “But she behaves like she’s thirty.”

“Everything I know, I learned from you, mother dear.”

“Where are you going, anyway?”

“The Barracuda Club.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go there.”

“We’ve been through this before.” Dinah sighed. “Look, all my friends are going to be there.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Why can’t you mix with some friends of your own age?”

“Perhaps I would,” Dinah said pointedly, “if we weren’t exiled from our home in Los Angeles.”

“We’re not exiled,” insisted Noreen. “I just needed to get away from the States for a while.”

“I understand that. Of course I do. But please try to understand what it’s like for me. I want to go out and have some fun. Not sit around the dinner table and talk about politics with a lot of boring people.” Dinah glanced at me and flashed me a quick, apologetic smile. “Oh, I don’t mean you, Señor Gunther. From what Mother’s told me, I’m sure you’re a very interesting person. But most of Noreen’s friends are left-wing writers and lawyers. Intellectuals. And friends of Ernest’s who drink too much.”

I flinched a bit when she called me Gunther. It meant Noreen had already revealed my secret to her daughter. That irritated me.

Dinah put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it as if it were a fire-cracker.

“And I do wish you wouldn’t smoke,” said Noreen.

Dinah rolled her eyes and held out one gloved hand. “Keys.”

“On the desk, by the telephone.”

Dinah stalked off in a cloud of scent, cigarette smoke, and exasperation, like the ruthless bitch-beauty in one of her mother’s gothic-American plays. I hadn’t seen any of them onstage, only the movies that had been made of them. These were stories full of unscrupulous mothers, mad fathers, flighty wives, dishonest and sadistic sons, and drunken homosexual husbands—the kind of stories that almost made me glad I didn’t have a family myself. I lit a cigar and tried to contain my amusement.

Noreen poured us both another bourbon from a bottle of Old Forester she’d brought from the living room and helped herself to ice from a bucket fashioned from an elephant’s foot.