The New Republic

“I’ll be discreet,” Edgar promised.

“God knows what you must think of me,” Nicola whispered.

“Hey, it’s none of my business,” Edgar protested.

“You can’t think any worse than I think of myself.” Without saying good-bye, she hung up.

Innocently whitewashed and cheerfully lit, the tiny square building of the Aeroporto Internacional de Cinzeiro was roofed in scalloped terra-cotta like an Arizona community center. While ESTÁ A ENTRAR NA BARBA OCUPADA! was boldly spray-painted across an outside wall, the graffiti’s red lettering was neatly outlined in green, the second B painstakingly extended to make it as tall as the first, its exclamation mark dotted with a daisy. The slogan less resembled the threatening defacement of a terrorist insurgency than a day-camp crafts project.

Deplaning onto the tarmac struck Edgar as quaintly retro-chic until he emerged from the cabin to be broadsided, foom, by a gale wind, which threw him so violently against the portable staircase rail that he nearly pitched over it. As another gust slapped his face in reproof that he’d ever considered air the same as nothing, Edgar clutched the railing hand-over-hand to the runway—skin tightening, eyes tearing, ears roaring. Once he exited through baggage claim’s revolving door, whose flaps swish-swished without aid of electricity, he was again blindsided by a solid atmospheric wall. After stumbling to the taxi stand, using his bags as ballast, Edgar clutched a post while the cabby loaded the trunk. Eyes shielded by protective plastic goggles, the heavyset cabby hunched with a widely planted stance, tilting into the wind and lifting his feet as little as possible. The maneuver looked practiced.

Edgar slumped into the rattletrap taxi, glad that darkness spared him gaping out the window. He didn’t have the energy to be fascinated, and wanted to appraise his new home with a fresh eye. Edgar had already formed a nascent affection for Barba, if only because Lisboners seemed to hate it so much. A kicked cur as a kid, Edgar identified with outcasts more than most of his countrymen, whose reputation for sympathy with underdogs was in his view highly exaggerated.

Such a piercing whistle sang through window cracks that Edgar’s headache was immediate. As the hump-fendered sedan galumphed down the road, it swayed in and out of lane, though the driver wrestled manfully with the wheel. Now and again a thud sounded against the doors as if a linebacker had assaulted the cab with a running tackle.

“Is it always this windy?” Edgar shouted over the teakettle shrill.

“Windy? Is no so windy,” the cabby yelled cheerfully back.

Fighting nausea as the taxi threw him from door to door, Edgar kicked himself for promising to stop by Nicola’s little soirée tonight. Better to have picked up the key tomorrow and sprung for a hotel. He vowed to get in, then get out. So far his “fellow” journalists had hardly constituted a mutually supportive intellectual fraternity, and one carelessly ignorant remark about the SOB could take him months to live down; Edgar admonished himself, Keep your pie hole shut. This Nicola broad sounded all right, but Edgar had minimal taste for socializing at the best of times. The truth was he didn’t like people much, even if he was never sure whether a misanthrope was allowed to deduct himself, like taking a standard personal exemption on a 1040.

Most of all, after a half day in Portugal he’d already had it up to the eyeballs with Barrington Fucking Saddler. Edgar had to write that mop-up article on what might have befallen his predecessor, bringing the story, for the paper, to a close. But the last thing he planned to blather in his free time was, “Gee whiz, guys, whadda ya think mighta happened to lovable old Bear?” Were Edgar to solicit any more gushy hog slop about Saddler, he would have to be paid.

The taxi drew up to a villa whose flat left-hand side loomed three stories high, unperforated by a single window. From this sheer blank edifice, a frivolous hodgepodge of turrets, porticos, and balconies with curlicued grillwork tumbled off to the right. From its fanciful leeward end, the villa resembled a set for Carmen; from the windward side, a nuclear power plant.

Foom. Edgar had trouble getting the taxi door shut. Doubled over, he dragged his luggage toward the entrance, his heavy leather bomber jacket flying horizontally to the right. Grains of sand stung his left cheek like acupuncture. Once he lunged onto the porch and tucked behind that mammoth wall, the roar ceased, the jacket dropped, and Edgar staggered from no longer having to lean into the squall to stay upright. Leonard Cohen dirged from inside.

The door opened only wide enough for Edgar to see in the porch light that the young man’s face presented the same impenetrable façade of the villa’s windbreak.

“Barrington the Second, right?” the boyish-looking Englishman said joylessly. “Surprised they sent someone else. Thought we’d all spend the rest of our poxy lives moping about and waiting for stigmata proof that Our Redeemer liveth.”

This was well too much for two hours’ sleep and a six-hour time difference. “I was looking for Nicola—”

“Naturally,” said the young man savagely.

“Henry, please,” whispered from inside. “If you have to, take it out on me. That poor bloke never did a thing to you.”

“In your version, you done bugger-all to me yourself, remember? I’m ‘paranoid,’ so I’m acting my part.” Henry turned heel, and retreated.

“Edgar! Do come in.”

Edgar thunked his luggage in the candlelit foyer. The taxi was still within hailing distance; after Henry’s warm reception, Edgar was considering a curt request for the key, so he could scram right away. But that was before he got a good look at Nicola.

She was a pre-Raphaelite vision. Tall, narrow, and delicate, the woman’s figure echoed the precision of her speech, the sharply articulated wrists, clavicle, and cheekbones as exactingly wrought as haiku. Tressing in wavelets to her waist, her hair reflected a range of hues from blond to red. She was draped in an assemblage of scarves and shawls that Edgar would have found cockamamie on most women, but Nicola could get away with as much flourish as she liked. She belonged in a tower, weaving by a shattered looking-glass, or banished eternally from Camelot in a longboat drifting downstream.

The crimsons and cobalts of her fabrics set off a shocking pallor. Nicola’s pained expression captured the very inchoate yearning that Edgar had been too embarrassed to express to Wallasek, and echoed the ruinous cycle of desire and disappointment tyrannizing his own life. How many times had Edgar confronted the mirror ball of a sparkling new acquaintance, only to reach for the facets and cut his hand—to complete another soul-sickening inversion as in the cold light of day the bauble revealed itself as a cheap disco trick? How many times had he met the likes of Nicola and vowed to see through the gaudy gypsy get-up as tacky theatrics, to remember that behind every pretty face lurked yet another grasping, lying, scheming, petty, faithless shrew? And how many times had these warnings to himself successfully protected him from heartbreak?

Not once. Taking the slim white hand, Edgar had to stop himself from kissing it.

“Nicola Tremaine.”

Edgar burst out, “That sounds like a movie star!”

She must have thought him a complete rube. “Thanks. I’ve felt selfish keeping the Tremaine, but Nicola Durham simply sounded too prosaic. I’m afraid Henry was rather offended.”

“You’re an aesthete,” said Edgar, hoping that in candlelight it wasn’t too obvious his countenance was crestfallen.

“Almost nothing but,” she confessed easily, leading him around a bend and down a few stone steps. “I care mostly about names with a ring, juniper berries in jasmine rice, or soup bowls and dinner plates from different sets that uncannily go together. Grace, taste, appearances. You’ll soon learn that I’m a shamefully superficial person.”

Edgar reflected that if his own surfaces were as pleasing as hers he’d have no motivation to probe beneath them himself, but didn’t know how to say as much without sounding oily. So he trotted after her fringed train as it shivered down the stairs, mouth open like a dog’s. God-fucking-damn it. She would have to be married.

The moment Edgar entered Nicola’s living room he felt the collective resentment of her guests so forcefully that he came physically to a halt. It wasn’t as if he had gatecrashed a genuine ho-down; a mere desultory murmur ceased when he walked in. Yet the dozen people scattered around the room turned to greet the National Record’s fill-in stringer with one long synchronized sneer. Meanwhile, “Famous Blue Raincoat” droned its tuneless, depressive best: Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair … Real party music.

Nicola’s eyes darted the room; if she was deciding to whom it was safest to introduce him, she was having a hard time. Stranded by the table of booze and eats—intricate open-faced sandwiches, individually assembled into one-of-a-kind Miros—Edgar was keenly aware that his shirt was crumpled, his jeans smelled stale, his teeth were furry, and the gale had tossed his hair to salad.

“You can always go local.” A rangy fellow gestured at the bottles, having eased off his stool and gimped to Edgar’s side.

“What constitutes going local?” asked Edgar warily.

“Try it,” the weathered American dared him, uncapping a brown bottle labeled CHOQUE.

Though alerted by a sadistic twitch in the older man’s face, Edgar felt eyes on him and swigged. Before the beer was down his gullet, Edgar’s oral membrane had constricted into a dry pucker, like mouth eczema. Slamming down the bottle, he scrubbed his lips with a napkin, then stuffed down a sandwich. Edgar was reminded of the time he sneaked into his parents’ bathroom to swill what he thought was codeine-laced cough syrup, and instead chugged his father’s prescription anesthetic for rectal itch.

“Cerveja de pera peluda,” the man explained. “Choque means what it sounds like, ‘shock,’ but you get used to it.”

“What the hell’s a putrid pera?” Edgar gasped, still scouring his lips.

“Barba’s only thriving native fruit: the hairy pear,” said his new acquaintance. “It grows in such abundance that it would provide a cash crop, only no one else wants it—so they export terrorism instead. There’s more of a market. Meanwhile, they put peras peludas in everything. The fruit ferments like a bastard. Some of us old-timers have acquired a sick addiction to hairy-pear beer. Speaking of which—Durham! Did the Independent run your fluff piece?”

“They spiked it,” said Henry. “With Barba dropped out of the news and that, the foreign desk didn’t think a feature was timely.”

“Curious,” the tough old hand observed, “the way Saddler took the party with him—like the Grinch that stole Christmas. Not an incident since he dearly departed. Hardly thoughtful. The rest of us have to make a living. Reuters just e-mailed that they’ll close the bureau in three months if nothing blows up.”

“I thought Henry’s feature was better than fluff,” Nicola intervened. “Barbans’ taste for peras peludas made a trenchant metaphor. The way a bitterness runs in their blood—”

“Nick, nobody gives a rat’s ass about the cultural niceties of this toilet bowl if the Soldados Ousados aren’t releasing nerve gas in Paris metros,” the Reuters man overrode. “If the Sobs slaughter enough innocents, Henry can sell a feature on how Barbans tweeze their nose hairs.”

“I thought the piece provided good color,” Nicola maintained staunchly.

“So your husband doesn’t get his hundred quid,” the leathery wire-service man noted with a cynical squint. “The rent will be late?”

Nicola hung her head. Henry’s face remained impassive. Whatever this razzing was about, Henry was used to it.

“Win Pyre.” The man extended a hand, its palm callused, his veined metacarpus tinged the gray-brown of a cancerous tan. “Where you last posted, Kellogg?”

“The States—freelancing.” Freelancing prompted the usual smirk. Not wanting to be taken for a complete loser, Edgar added, “I’m a lawyer. Or was a lawyer. Actually, I’m still a lawyer.” Made a hash of that bio. But is, was—tense was tricky. The fact that Edgar remained a member of the New York bar in good standing was surprisingly important to him.

“Criminal law?” Pyre fished.