15
I needed a driver. I went back to my room at the hotel and changed into an outfit that looked Californian to me, a dress with a complicated print and sandals. I put most of the cash I had left in the safe. I went out to the balcony and smoked a cigarette and had another staredown with the casino girl on the billboard.
I worried that there would be no one there. I hoped for servants who could tell me something – anything – about where the Ibarras had gone. I felt hot. I had heard that a lot of the old families kept a place in the capital but really lived out there, on haciendas. Maybe this was the home the boy thought of, more than wherever they had lived in Santo Domingo when the war started. There was a buzz in the air like static, which I recognized from old times: it was fear, the
