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“Yes, ma’am, I do,” Naylor said, and took several photographs from the breast pocket of his tunic.
“His name is Karl,” Naylor said. “He’s a really bright kid.”
Doña Alicia stared at the first photograph for a long moment and then laid it down and stared at the second and then laid that down and stared at the third.
“Blond,” she said. “And so fair-skinned.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Naylor said.
“Would you think me rude if I asked you gentlemen to wait outside for a few minutes?” Doña Alicia asked. “Grace will get you coffee. I think I should talk to my husband about this.”
“Yes, of course,” General Stevens and Major Naylor said, almost in unison.
They left the office and sat beside one another on a couch in the outer office. General Stevens looked at Major Naylor and raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t think that went as well as it could have gone,” Stevens said.
[N
INE]
Room 714 The Plaza Hotel New York City, New York 0955 12 March 1981
“Who the hell can that be?” Juan Fernando Castillo inquired almost angrily when the telephone rang, although there was no one else in the three-room suite.
He was a tall, heavyset man with a full head of dark hair. He was dressed in white Jockey shorts and a hotel-furnished terry cloth bathrobe. He had not knotted the cord, and his chest, covered with thick hair, was visible.
He laid The Wall Street Journal down on the room service table and tried to push back the chair he had just pulled up to it. It hung up on the carpet and fell over. In stepping over it, he bumped into the room service table, knocking over his freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, which, for some reason known only to God, the goddamned hotel served in a stemmed glass.
He walked to the telephone.
“What is it?” he snarled into it.
“Did I wake you, Fernando? It sounds as if I did.”
“Actually, I was having my breakfast,” he said. “Is something wrong, love of my life?”
“No, I would say quite the opposite.”
“Then why did you call at this hour?”
“Because I really wanted to catch you before you left the hotel.”
“What’s up, Alicia?”
“I just found out we’re grandparents.”
“Funny, I seem to recall having five grandchildren,” he said, then thought: Four granddaughters and one grandson, out of three daughters. He has my Christian name, but his surname is Lopez. The Castillo name dies with me.
“Now there are six. He is an absolutely beautiful boy of twelve.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It seems Jorge had a child, or started one, when he was in Germany.”
Oh, my God!
“Start at the beginning, Alicia, please.”
