Carmen pushed away from him, keeping one hand on his chest. Roxane Coss didn’t want her to bring breakfast? “Did I do something wrong?”
“Oh, no,” Gen said. “She thinks very highly of you. She told me so.” He tucked her into the crook of his arm and she breathed into his shoulder. This was what it felt like, to be a man with a woman. This was the thing Gen had missed in all the translation of language. “You were right, what you thought about, her feelings for Mr. Hosokawa. She wants to be with him tonight.”
Carmen raised her head. “How will he get upstairs?”
“Roxane wants you to help him.”
Gen lived one life and in that life he was always a prisoner and his friends were the other prisoners, and even though he loved Carmen and got along politely with some of the terrorists, he never got confused and thought he wanted to join LFDMS. But for Carmen it was different. She had clearly two lives. She did her push-ups in the morning and stood for inspection. She carried her rifle on guard. She kept a boning knife in her boot and she knew how to use it. She obeyed orders. She was, as it had been explained to her, part of the force that would bring about change. But she was also the girl who went to the china closet at night, who was learning to read in Spanish and could already say several things in English. Good morning. I am very well, thank you. Where is the restaurant? Some mornings, Roxane Coss let her climb into the impossibly soft sheets on her big bed, let her close her eyes for a few minutes and pretend she belonged there. She would pretend she was one of the prisoners, that she lived in a world with so many privileges that there was nothing to fight for. But no matter how the two sides got along, they were always two sides, and when she went from one to the other it was a matter of crossing over something. Either she told Gen she couldn’t get Mr. Hosokawa upstairs, in which case she disappointed Gen and Mr. Hosokawa and Miss Coss, who had all been so kind to her, or she told him she could, in which case she broke every oath she had sworn to her party and put herself at risk of a punishment she would not imagine. If Gen had understood any of this he never would have asked her. For him it was merely about helping out, being a friend. It was as if he only wanted to borrow a book. Carmen closed her eyes and pretended to be tired. She prayed to Saint Rose of Lima. “Saint Rose, give me guidance. Saint Rose, give me clarity.” She pressed her eyes closed and pleaded for the intercession of the only saint she knew personally, but a saint is very little help when it comes to smuggling a married man into an opera singer’s bedroom. On this matter, Carmen was on her own.
“Sure,” Carmen whispered, her eyes still closed, her ear pressed to the steady thump of Gen’s heart. Gen’s hand came up and smoothed her hair, over and over again, the way her mother had done when Carmen was a child and had a fever.
In the vice-presidential mansion, none of the guests, not even Ruben Iglesias himself, knew the house as well as the members of LFDMS. Part of their daily work was the memorization of windows and which ones were wide enough to jump through. They calculated the falls, estimated the damage in terms of their own bones. They each knew the length of the hallways, rooms from which one could make a clear shot to the outside, the fastest exits to the roof, to the garden. So naturally, Carmen knew there was a back stairwell in the hallway off the kitchen that led to the servants’ quarters, and that in the very room that Esmeralda had once slept there was a door that went to the nursery, and the nursery had a door onto the main hallway of the second floor, and that hallway led to the bedroom where Roxane Coss slept. Of course, other people slept on the second floor as well. Generals Benjamin and Hector had rooms on the second floor. （General Alfredo, the worst sleeper, found a little rest in the guest suite on the first floor.） Many of the boys slept on the second floor and not always in the same place, which is why Carmen chose to sleep in the hallway outside of Roxane Coss’s room, just in case one of those boys woke up in the middle of the night, restless. Carmen herself had used this route to the china closet every night, her stocking feet silent on the polished wood floor. She knew the location of every creaky board, every potentially light sleeper. She knew how to flatten herself into the shadows when someone came around the corner headed for the bathroom. She could skate those floors as quiet as a blade drawing over ice. Carmen was trained, an expert at remaining silent. Still, she could sense the depth of Mr. Hosokawa’s ability to be quiet. Thank God Roxane Coss had not fallen in love with one of the Russians. She doubted they could make it up the stairs without stopping for a cigarette and telling at least one loud story that no one could understand. Gen was to bring Mr. Hosokawa to the back hallway at two A.M. and she would take him to Roxane Coss’s room. Two hours later she would come to the door to lead him back. They would say nothing to each other, but that part was easy enough. Even if in this case they were allies, there was nothing they knew to say.
Once the plans were made, Carmen left Gen to watch television with the other soldiers. There she saw a repeat broadcast of The Story of Maria. Maria had gone to the city to search for her lover, whom she had sent away. She wandered the crowded streets with her little suitcase in her hand and on every corner strangers lurked in the shadows, conspiring to ruin her. Everyone in the Vice President’s study wept. Carmen played checkers when the program was over and she helped with supply lists and volunteered to cover afternoon watch if anyone was feeling tired. She would be exemplary in her helpfulness and willing participation. She did not want to see Gen or Mr. Hosokawa or Roxane Coss for fear she would blush and give herself away, for fear that she would become angry at them for asking so much of her.
How much does a house know? There could not have been gossip and yet there was a slight tension in the air, the vaguest electricity that made men lift their heads and look and find nothing. The salted fish and rice that came for dinner did not go down well and one after the other they put their shares on the table half eaten and walked away. Kato picked out Cole Porter on the piano and the evening fell into a low, blue light. Maybe it was the fine weather, the irritation of once again not being able to walk outside. A half-dozen men stood near an open window and tried to breathe the night air as darkness settled in, taking away the view of the overgrown garden one twisted flower at a time. From the other side of the wall they could hear the faint race of engines, cars that were possibly blocks away from their street, and for a moment the men at the window remembered that there was a world out there, and then just as quickly they let the thought go.
Roxane Coss had gone to bed early. Like Carmen, she didn’t want to be there once she had made her decision. Mr. Hosokawa sat next to Gen on the love seat nearest the piano. “Tell me again,” he said.
“She wants to see you tonight.”
“That’s what she said?”
“Carmen will take you to her room.”
Mr. Hosokawa looked at his hands. They were old hands. His father’s hands. His nails were long. “It’s very awkward that Carmen should know this. That you should know.”
“There was no other way.”
“What if it is dangerous for the girl?”
“Carmen knows what she’s doing.” Gen said. Dangerous? She went down the stairs every night to come to the china closet. He wouldn’t ask her to do something that wasn’t safe.