He got into his sweat suit and sneakers and went downstairs and began to trot. When he turned the corner and came to the Negro slum he saw that the little boy had already fled from whatever den his family occupied.

The boy squatted in the gutter, sifting dust. His dark face lighted as Adam padded wearily toward him.

“Man, who chasin’ you?” he whispered.

“The Death Committee,” Adam said.

Book Two: Fall and Winter

Book Two
Fall and Winter

5: Rafael Meomartino

5

Rafael Meomartino

The only sounds in Rafe Meomartino’s office were the woman’s voice and the singing of compressed air as it bled through the pipes that ringed the ceiling of the small room. The humming noise filled him with a sense of nostalgic euphoria, inexplicable until one morning he realized it was the same feeling he had experienced in another world, in another life, while sitting on the verandah of a club—El Ganso Oro, the Golden Goose, one of his brother Guillermo’s haunts on the Prado—stunned then by too much alcohol but with the hot Cuban wind making a rasping moan in the palm trees similar to the sound he heard now from the hospital’s air pipes.

She looked tired, he thought, but it was more than fatigue that marked the difference in the faces of the two sisters. The woman in Room 211 had a soft, almost slack mouth, slightly weak, perhaps, but also very feminine. This twin’s mouth was . . . female rather than feminine, he decided. There was no weakness. If the chiseled features projected anything through the make-up it was a suggestion of brittle protective gloss.

As he observed her, his fingers touched the tiny angels embossed in bas relief on the heavy silver case of the pocket watch on the desk. Playing with the watch was a weakness, a nervous fetish he fell into only when under tension; realizing, he abandoned it.

“Where did we finally catch up with you?” he asked.

“Harold’s, in Reno. I was just finishing two weeks.”

“Three nights ago you were in New York. I caught you on the Sullivan show.”

She smiled for the first time. “No, the show segment was taped weeks ago. I was working, so I didn’t even get to see it.”

“It was very good,” he said truthfully.

“Thank you.” The smile automatically flashed brighter and then went away. “How’s Melanie?”

“She needs a kidney.” As Dr. Kender informed you on the telephone, he thought, before you hinted to him that probably it was not going to be one of yours. “Are you planning to remain in Boston for a while?”

She recognized the real question. “I’m not certain. If you need to reach me, I’m at the Sheraton Plaza.

“Registered as Margaret Weldon,” she added as an afterthought. “I would just as soon not let it be known that Peggy Weld is here.”

“I understand.”

“Why does it have to be mine?” she asked.