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“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, Carlos. I’ll see you down here tomorrow morning to go to wardrobe fittings.”
As he touched his cap and walked off, the hotel clerk, a thin woman with ash blond hair and sharp blue eyes, was writing their information down on some cards. She looked up, pushing an official smile onto her lips. “Buenos tardes, Señorita Jones. We’re so delighted to have you staying here for the next few weeks. We have the suite ready for you and your maid.” Her eyes flicked to Mercedes briefly, dismissively, then back to Pagan.
Heat rose up from Pagan’s heart. Beside her, Mercedes got very still.
“My maid?” she asked, as if not quite understanding, although she understood all too well.
The woman nodded. “Did you not want her in the same suite?”
“Do you mean my sister?” Pagan blinked innocently and linked her arm through Mercedes’s, leaning into her warmly. Mercedes’s whole body was rigid, but she didn’t push Pagan away. “Did you hear that, sis? She thinks you’re my maid. What would Daddy have thought of that?”
The clerk’s eyes got wide, first with surprise, then with disbelief. Pagan and Mercedes were close in height, one skinny, the other strong, one pale and perfectly platinum blonde, the other darker with a strictly controlled mass of black curls. But they both had brown eyes, and they were both staring right at the hotel clerk.
“Daddy would’ve checked us into a different hotel,” Mercedes said in a low tone. “One with better service.” Mercedes wasn’t half as good a liar as Pagan, so she kept her voice low on the rare occasion when she did it. The louder your voice, the more likely the strain of lying would show.
“And he would’ve told the studio and everyone he knew what a horrible mistake they made,” Pagan said to her. “Do you think other people from my movie are staying here? We’ll have to tell them all about this.”
The clerk’s eyes bounced back and forth between them, a nervous sweat dotting her upper lip. But Pagan could see that she still didn’t believe them. “I’m so sorry, ladies. You have different last names on your passports, so naturally I assumed...”
“Mercedes Duran equals maid?” Pagan said, smiling prettily. “Sure. There’s no possible way I could have been born a Duran, changed my last name to Jones and dyed my hair. No one in Hollywood ever changes their name. Just ask Rock Hudson.”
The woman paled. “My mistake, señoritas. I do beg your pardon. Sisters. Sharing a suite. How nice...”
“We’d like to speak to the manager, please.” Pagan’s voice was still sweet, but edged with iron. “And we’d like anyone other than you to serve us for the duration of our stay.”
An apologetic manager showed them to their lush suite, ushering in a bellboy with a complimentary bottle of champagne to earn their goodwill, only to have Mercedes tell him to take it away. The rooms were opulent, shiny with gold-patterned wallpaper, fresh flowers on the marble tables and two large bedrooms with giant satiny beds. The heavily draped windows featured a view out over the rooftops and the busy boulevard below.
As the door shut behind the last bellboy, Pagan took off her white gloves and threw them on the gold brocade sofa. “What the hell? We’re in Latin America. You’d think the name Duran would be a badge of honor down here instead of Jones!”
Mercedes shook her head with resignation, which somehow made Pagan angrier. “From what I read, most people in Buenos Aires are of some kind of European descent. The indigenous people were driven out and mostly disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Pagan put her hands on her hips. “You mean killed.”
“Probably. But that woman who checked us in, her family probably came from Germany originally, or maybe England or Sweden. Anyone who doesn’t look European here is considered lower class and referred to as indio, or negra.”
Pagan shook her head. “I’m sorry, M. I wanted to smack her.”
“You can’t smack them all.” Mercedes slumped onto the sofa. “But you did confuse her. You’re good at that.”
“Everyone needs a specialty.” Pagan came over and flopped next to her on the couch, leaning her head back against the carved gilded wood lining the back. “Does that happen to you a lot back home, too?”
“Not in my old neighborhood,” Mercedes said, using her right toes to tug her left shoe off her heel, then switched to do it with the other foot. “But where we’re living now? They all think I’m your live-in maid.”
“What!” Pagan swung up to her feet again in agitation. “What do we do with these people? It’s not like we can put a big sign over your head saying I’m Your Equal, You Sons of Bitches.” She paused, thinking. “Can we?”
“Stop trying to save me,” Mercedes said. “I’m fine.”
Pagan stopped pacing and looked at her friend. Mercedes had leaned sideways onto the fat pillows on the sofa and closed her eyes, feet tucked under her. Pagan kicked off her own shoes and flung them into her bedroom. They thumped satisfyingly against the wall. “Okay. I’m ordering us some sandwiches and putting up the Do Not Disturb sign. I need to rest up before wardrobe tests tomorrow.”
“But what if Devin Black comes knocking?” Mercedes said with a sly, sleepy smile.
“Damn you,” Pagan said. Without even opening her eyes, Mercedes knew exactly why Pagan was so agitated.
Mercedes started giggling, burying her face in the pillows as her shoulders shook. She must be tired indeed to descend into such girlishness.
“While I’m at it, damn him, too,” Pagan said. “Devin Black can sit on it. And rotate.”
* * *
Devin did not appear that night, and he still hadn’t called by the time Pagan left for costume fittings the next morning. She’d awoken at 2:00 a.m., unable to fall back asleep while her mind raced, wondering whether she’d made the right decision to come all this way to shoot a terrible film.
She was risking her career, a career that had recently been revived on the brink of death due the accident and her conviction for manslaughter. The comedy she’d shot in Berlin had started to warm the public to her once again because it was actually funny. And Daughter of Silence was likely to win over the critics. But one truly terrible picture and not only might the audiences turn away, but the studio might rethink using her in anything else of quality. She was still a box office risk. Taking this part in Two to Tango might turn her into something worse—box office poison.
And what if Devin never showed up? What if he’d been hurt or killed? Okay, so that was a farfetched late-night fear whispering in her ear. But he could’ve been pulled into another assignment, in which case they’d stick her with some idiot who didn’t understand her, someone who wouldn’t allow her to get what she needed out of this whole patriotic mission thing.
And now, fittings. Given how much she hated the character she was playing in the movie, Pagan was not looking forward to seeing the clothes Daisy would wear.
“If there are too many frilly dresses, I’m rioting,” she said, finishing her second cup of coffee.
Mercedes didn’t look up from the morning paper. “Trying on hand-tailored clothes is such a chore.”
Great. She couldn’t even be grumpy with justification. Because Mercedes was right. It was one of the most irritating things about her.
“Girdles are torture devices,” she muttered, and put her cup down with a click.
“Bras are worse,” Mercedes said. “But on the plus side, they make your chest look like it’s about to launch two rocket ships. And rockets are cool.”
Pagan laughed, threw a long trench coat over her jeans and wrinkled white shirt and left to find Carlos waiting for her in the hotel lobby.
The day was already slightly breathless with heat as she walked out of the hotel. Overhead, the flags flapped in a strong summer breeze. Sunshine blared off the windshields of passing cars. Carlos drove her by the gates of what he said was a famous cemetery and north to an area called Palermo.
Through her open car window, Pagan watched stylish women in pencil skirts walking small dogs on the sidewalks and men in summer suits eating outside at cafés or gazing at shop windows. Large leafy trees lined many of the streets, and between the tufts of greenery she caught glimpses of multistoried blocks of gracious stone buildings and open parks with splashing fountains.
What a contrast to the divided city of Berlin. When she’d been there in August, Berlin had been visibly recovering from the huge destruction wreaked by the Allies during the war. Buenos Aires had avoided the war altogether, like all of mainland United States, but with these magnificent mansions and wide, well-kempt avenues, this city was more like a dream of Paris than New York.
The wardrobe department was lodged on the second floor of another genteel stone building with decorative flower finials over the windows. The door at the end of the dark hallway led to a huge open room with sunlight cutting yellow squares on the hardwood floors and racks of clothing. A sewing machine whirred invisibly nearby. Between the headless mannequins and shelving with metal bins for accessories, Pagan could see that the opposite wall was covered in mirrors.
“Hello?” she called out, brushing past a rack of black jackets. Tony Perry’s name was scrawled on big yellow tags attached to each one. “Madge?”
“Pagan, honey!” a woman’s scratchy voice called from somewhere to her right. “Over here!”
Pagan spotted a column of smoke trailing up near the ceiling and wound her way between ball gowns, shelves of hats and rows of linen trousers toward it. “They’ve buried you alive, Madge. I’m here to save you.”
She rounded a trestle of frilly yellow skirts to find Madge Popandreau, wardrobe mistress for Two to Tango, seated at a huge black sewing machine. She had her eternal cigarette clutched between narrow, red-lipstick-smeared lips, her sharp black eyes following the line of white tulle as she threaded it under the bobbing needle. Madge had frizzy unnaturally black hair pulled back in a giant bun, square, deft hands and an eagle gaze that could spot the head of a pin on a sequin-covered dress.
“I’m just finishing up your petticoat for the big rumba number. Throw on that black suit for me in the meantime, will you, sweetie? Mind the pins.” She jerked her head toward a rack of clothes with tags that bore Pagan’s name. “Rada!”
“Coming.” The voice was gloomy and Russian. A lanky young woman with a leonine mane of dark blond hair emerged between racks of fur coats. “Hello,” she said to Pagan in the same sad tone. “I will help you with the clothes.”
“You wearing a girdle, honey?” Madge asked, still sewing, and didn’t wait for a reply. “If she’s not, get her one, will you, Rada?”
Rada nodded and scanned Pagan’s hips as she took off her trench coat. “No girdle today?”
“I’d rather jiggle like Jell-O,” said Pagan.
Rada nodded mournfully, as if Pagan had announced a sudden death, slid the tape measure from around her neck and whipped it around Pagan’s hips. “A full-body one is required for this suit.” She shook her head. “It is very tight.”
“I don’t need to breathe,” Pagan said as she slipped off her sneakers and unbuttoned her jeans. Near-nudity was the norm in wardrobe. Rada turned, and pulled a black sheath of elastane and straps off its hanger attached to the suit.
Pagan wiggled and wrestled her way into it, adjusting the bra straps, as Rada slipped the silky wool suit off its hanger. The pencil skirt was tight as hell at the waist—Rada hadn’t been kidding—and it clenched tighter still as it slid down her hips.
“I know you’re all about the A-line Dior these days, honey,” Madge said. “You like to be able to move, maybe have a snack, like a real-life person. But this director, Victor, he didn’t want you looking human and told me to make it as close-fitting as possible. I said okay, since you don’t have to dance in it.”
Victor sounded like a treat. Pagan hadn’t met him yet, and was dreading it more each day. “I might need to walk,” she said, squeezing her feet into the four-inch black heels that went with the suit. “I don’t think I could sit down in this.”
“We’ll get you a slant board,” Rada said.
The dreaded slant board, a simple contraption that allowed actresses to recline on a wooden board that could be leaned back at an angle to take the weight off your feet.
“Those things make me feel like I’m about to be buried at sea,” she said.
“Before you die, this director wants to see every twitch of your derriere. It’s a part of his ‘vision,’” Madge said tartly.
“Twitching, but not jiggling,” Pagan said, eyeing her clearly outlined rear end in the mirror. “So he likes ’em fake.”
“We are here to create illusion,” Rada said, her sorrowful voice lending the sentence an unexpected profundity. “Reality is of no importance.”
“Film’s an illusion, honey,” Madge said tartly. “Might as well make it pretty.”
“It’s not how we feel that’s important,” said Pagan, reciting the old, sarcastic Hollywood line. Madge joined her in saying the next part of it: “It’s how we look.”
Madge moved expertly from sewing tulle to repinning the black suit, pegging the skirt hem a shade narrower to emphasize the curve of Pagan’s hips. She had to take mincing little steps in it. Good thing she hadn’t had to run around in this boa constrictor the night the wall went up in East Berlin.
But then good girls didn’t do things. They liked being hobbled in tight skirts and heels so they could have things done for them, and to them. But heaven forbid they climb scaffolding or crash through a barricade manned by armed members of East Germany’s most feared soldiers.
Or damned well walk normally.
Not that she, Pagan, would ever do such things. Bless you, no. She was nothing but a silly teenage girl, and the most you could expect out of her was to make faces at a camera.
Before her adventure in Berlin she’d thought that way about herself, too, if she thought about herself at all. But then she’d ended up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall the night it went up, with people she cared about in danger. Desperation had forced her to realize that people’s condescending expectations could be used against them. She’d pretended to be exactly what the leaders of East Germany thought she was so she could escape and get Thomas and his family to safety.
Give most people exactly what they expected and they never bothered to look deeper.
She’d thought she could pretend to be the sort of girl who wore a suit she could barely move in, for the sake of this sad little movie. But it was challenging these days to act like a shallow little dimwit.
On screen, sure. But in real life? Now that she knew a bit better who she was, the facade was becoming difficult to maintain.
Madge and Rada wrestled her out of the mummifying black suit and replaced it with the foofiest big-skirted ball gown Pagan had ever worn.
“I knew it,” she said, flicking the ruched trimming that wound around her torso. She was a fish caught in a very fancy net. “I know Daisy’s a small-town girl, but...”
“The director wanted frills,” Madge said flatly. “So he gets frills.”
“And I get chills,” Pagan said, swaying the hooped skirt to and fro. “Fit’s great, but I’m going to knock over every piece of furniture I walk past.”
“Can you waltz in it?” Madge asked, her lips moving around the cigarette lodged in her mouth.
“If Scarlett O’Hara can do it, so can I.” Pagan did a tentative one-two-three around the sewing machine. The skirt swung like a large white gauzy bell. “I could signal ships at sea with this thing.”
“Pearls,” ordered Madge.
Rada draped a multistrand pearl necklace with a large rhinestone clasp around Pagan’s bare shoulders.
“It’s like Breakfast at Tiffany’s set in the Civil War,” Pagan said.
Madge snorted. “Exactly what Victor requested. I told him it was derivative, that we should set the style, not follow it. He said, ‘It’s not that kind of movie.’ Of course it isn’t if you think of it that way! Ach.” She made a helpless gesture with both hands, exhaling smoke through her nose. “I’m going home tomorrow, and you’ll get to deal with him. Rada will be here for the shoot.”
“The suit will tear,” Rada said gloomily. “The netting will rip. It is inevitable.”
“Is he that bad?” Pagan lowered her voice, even though they were the only ones in the large cluttered room. “Victor?”
“You haven’t met him?” Madge lifted her painted eyebrows and paused to remove the burned nub of her cigarette from her mouth. “You won’t like him.”
“Tony likes him,” Rada said, and raised a melancholy eyebrow that said it all.
Pagan’s heart sank. Why couldn’t things ever be easy? The thought of a man who was anything like Tony Perry in charge of an important movie in her career made her want to dive straight into a martini glass. But then a nice, sunny day sometimes did the same thing.
“There should be a word for men who prefer the company of other men—not to sleep with, mind,” Madge said, stubbing out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray by the sewing machine. “But who cannot abide to speak to women unless it is to condescend or seduce.”
“I believe the word for men like that is jerk, Madge,” Pagan said.
Madge snorted and lit another smoke. “Sorry to be so blunt, honey. But you should be prepared.”
“I’m always ready for men like that,” said Pagan. “My whole dang life has prepared me.”
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_373c1d66-1f22-5077-9367-eb35a04b318d)
