Santiago said, "Julio, throw the Chicano out."

One of the background thugs heaved himself languidly off the wall and walked toward Chollo. He was maybe four inches taller and thirty pounds heavier. He had the bored look that thugs work so hard on. He put a hand on Chollo's arm. Chollo's hands moved so fast I couldn't quite tell what he did, but Julio was on the floor gasping for air and clutching at his throat, and there was a 9mm automatic in Chollo's hand.

"Mistake, Jefe, to let me keep my gun. You think because there are five of you and two of us…"

"Baptiste," Santiago said. "You and Tomas take Julio out until he stops choking."

The other two loungers came forward, watching Chollo out of the corner of their eyes, and got Julio on his feet and helped him from the room. Chollo didn't put the gun away, but he let the gun hand drop to his side, the barrel pointing at the floor.

"You are quick to take offense," Santiago said.

"We will get along better if you remember that," Chollo said.

Santiago smiled.

"I try to get along as well as I can," he said. He looked back at me. "And, you, Spenser, are you also quick to take offense?"

"Not me," I said. "I am a pussy cat."

"That may be," Santiago said, "though you do not look like a pussy cat."

I smiled like I had a mouthful of canary and let it pass.

"I will think about your situation," Santiago said. "And, truthfully, will consider if there is anything there for me. If there is, I will be in touch."

I took my card from my shirt pocket and put it on Santiago's green leather table top.

"Call me," I said.

Santiago nodded.

"And you, my Mexican friend, are you moving here from Los Angeles?"

"Just here to visit my friend," Chollo said, "the pussy cat."

"And what do you do in Los Angeles? When you are there?"

"I work with a man named del Rio," Chollo said.

"Ahh!" Santiago said, and smiled as if this explained much.

Chollo smiled back, and as he was smiling the gun disappeared back under his coat.

"Ahh!" Chollo said.

He was on his feet now, pacing. She watched him struggle for calm, twirling the cigar slowly between his fingers. He had delicate hands, as she always imagined a surgeon's would be, and when he talked he used them expressively. He used everything expressively. His face was very alive, no matter how much he tried to keep it smooth. His eyes were big and they moved continuously, looking at everything, shifting endlessly. He had a big video camera in his hand, though he wasn't using it and appeared to have forgotten it. As he paced, he moved in and out of the small circle of light by the table.

"You cannot," he said. "You cannot keep saying these things to me, Angel. I love you too much. I cannot hear it."

"Then let me go," she said.

He had paced out of the light circle and she couldn't see him in the dark room. She had no idea what time of day it was and already was beginning to lose track of how long she'd been there.

"That is like asking me to die," he said.

He came back into the light, his narrow, beautiful, boyish face lit by the lamp on one side, still in darkness on the other. A half face, volatile and compelling… and crazy, she thought.

"Keeping me here is asking me to die," she said.

"To be with me, to live in wealth and excitement forever with me, is to die? Do you know who I am? Do you remember? Do you know what I have become? I have money, more than you can imagine. I control everything here. You can have anything you want."

"I want to be free," she said.

"Of me?"

"Everything isn't about you, for crissake, Luis. I want to be free, period. I want to choose what I'll do, and where I'll go, and who I'll love. Can't you understand that?"

"I too will choose, and I choose you," he said. "What has happened to you, Angel? The Anglo princess that used to make love to me, shamelessly? Are you now tired of the foolish Latino boy? Have you now decided to be an Anglo again and marry a stiff Anglo man and wear white panties and go to church?"

She could feel how shallow her breathing was. "If I'm going to make love, Luis, I'm going to do it shamelessly, you know? There's nothing going on to be ashamed of."

"We will make love again," he said. He was back out of the lamplight circle again and his voice came seemingly disembodied from the darkness.

"No," she said and her voice was steady, although her breath came more rapidly as she was saying it. "We won't. Maybe you can force me to fuck you, but we won't make love."

He was silent in the darkness. Then the bright camera light came on, and the camera began to whir. Behind the light she heard him say, "I have learned, chiquita, to take what I can get."

Chapter 27

Chollo and I were riding in the backseat of a silver Mercedes sedan through Proctor. Freddie Santiago sat in the front seat and the gray-haired guy with the rimless glasses was driving. There was a black Lincoln behind us, carrying five guys with guns, in case someone tried to spray-paint Freddie's windshield. It was another raw spring day, heavy with the threat of rain, which had not yet been delivered. It was nearly noon, and the unemployed men stood in groups on street corners. Some were on the nod. Some simply stood, their hooded sweatshirts too threadbare, their baseball jackets too thin, shoulders hunched ineffectually as if even the spring warmth were not enough to ease the chill of despair. On one corner there was a fire in a trash barrel, and eight or ten men and boys were around it. There was a quart bottle of something in a big paper sack passing aimlessly among them.

"Probably sherry," said Freddie Santiago. "Package store house label. Costs $2.99 a quart, gives you a pretty good bang for the buck."

"Tastes like kerosene," Chollo said.

"Si. But taste is not the point," Santiago said. "Like most people here they have much time and little money. Sherry helps pass the time."

"So does work," Chollo said.

"There is no work," Santiago said, "except perhaps your kind, my Mexican friend. This was a fine bustling mill city once, a Yankee city. Did you see the fine clock tower on City Hall? Lots of Canucks and Micks came in to work the mills. Some Arabs, too. Then the Jews came in and organized the mill workers, kicked up the prices, and the Yankees moved everything out… south, where the workers weren't organized and the niggers would work for half what they were paying up here."

Santiago paused and lit a cigarette with a gold lighter. He checked to make sure no shred of tobacco had fallen on his white raincoat. Spring outside the car was in full flourish early this year, but the impact of it in Proctor was slim. No flowers bloomed, no birds sang, none of nature's first green came golden from the earth.

"So there's nothing to do here, and nobody to do it."

"A perfect opportunity," I said.

"Exactly," Santiago said. "So the spics move in. And now there's nothing to do and a lot of people to do it."

Santiago exhaled smoke through his nose and smiled at us. He was sitting half turned in the front seat, his left arm on the back of the seat. He seemed pleased with his small history of Proctor.