“Señor, you’ll have to buy it now, and hold on to the other end yourself,” the man told Lev, extracting from him five pesos. “Otherwise she’ll have this dangerous device for catching boyfriends, entirely at her disposal. Who else here needs to trap a few novias? You, young men?”

“That one maybe,” said Frida laughing, pointing across the table. “He’s desperate to trap a particular novio.”

There was no need to say it like that. Novio, the masculine form.

“But forget about the other one.” She tugged her trapped finger free of Lev’s grip, its long prosthesis still attached, and shook it at Van as if he were a naughty child. “He needs no devices for trapping girls, apparently he has his own equipment. What time is it now, four o’clock? They’re already lined up waiting for him at the Golden Earring.”

“What is this?” Lev sat forward. “You go to that bar at night?”

“Not every night. And the girls don’t make a queue.”

“Oh, I’ve heard some stories!” Frida said. She seemed quite intoxicated, but maybe it was an act. She can seem that way at any time, for her own reasons. The toy man sensed that he had stepped in the pie, and scurried back to his canoe.

“What is this, Van?” Lev asked again, seeming interested but not disapproving. “You didn’t tell me about any girls.”

Van blushed acutely. “Not girls. One girl. Her name is Maria del Carmen.”

“Maria del Carmen,” Frida sang. “So this boat named Carmen carries more than one torch. Tell me about this young lady. Is she a bar girl?”

“A waitress. But educated at university. She tutors me in Spanish sometimes in the evening.”

“Oh, very good, very good,” Frida said, smiling ferociously, a cat with the mouse beneath its paw. “University educated and pretty, I have no doubt. Tutoring you in Spanish! Have you learned this one yet, esternón?” She touched her breastbone, leaning forward, and then cupped her own breasts in her hands. “What about pezónes?”

Van’s complexion gave over completely to his blush. His ears and even the back of his neck. “I know the words. If that’s what you are asking.”

She stood up and leaned across the table, close to his face: “Y besos suaves?”

Lev pulled her back by the hand. “Frida, he’s a man, not a child. If he has a lover in the town, it’s not your concern.”

“Everything is my concern, mi viejo. Lovers, most of all.” The looks she gave to Van were smoldering. She worked the woven boyfriend trap gently off of her finger and studied it for a moment, before tossing it across the table to the object of no one’s desire.

“Insólito, you’re the one who needs this. Better go trap yourself a different fish.”

14 June

The household has exploded. Diego and Natalya learned of their spouses’ affair, leading to the unpleasantness one could reasonably expect. Lev left this morning for a house in the desert at San Miguel Regla, loaned on short notice by trusted friends of Diego. When Sra. Frida came to the house today, Natalya made a very painful spectacle of her anger. Poor Belén was so frightened she dropped a plate of fritters.

Of course Van went with him, and Lorenzo also, but not the other bodyguards. Lev says he can’t impose an army on the hospitality of the Riveras’ friends, even if they support the Fourth International. Diego fears the place can’t properly be guarded. And to complicate the arrangement, Diego may count himself among those lined up to assassinate his comrade guest.

Frida seems both disconsolate and unrepentant. A strange mix. Surely, señora, you don’t blame anyone but yourself? You wanted to be discovered, that was obvious. Remember what you asked for in these pages: a history without deceit.

17 June

In the kitchen, the stories burn hotter than the stove. Perpetua says Señora Frida went up to San Miguel Regla yesterday, on the excuse that she needed to give some money to the Landeros family for taking Lev in their house. Perpetua clucked her tongue. “What business could she have up there except monkey business? But once you’re on the horse you have to hold on, I suppose. Even if he bucks.”

“That old man must have spice in his sauce yet,” said Carmen Alba.

“Old?” Perpetua spat. “He’s not even sixty. You girls are children, you don’t know. The longer the sauce cooks, the spicier it gets.”

Belén kept a nervous eye on the kitchen door, fearing the wife of the sauce in question.

30 August

A telegram came yesterday: Lev’s former secretary Erwin Wolf, murdered in Spain by the GPU. Natalya felt someone should take the sad message to Lev. It was a quiet drive to San Miguel; César seems more than ever suspicious, even though he no longer has to share his room with a notebook-keeping spy.

The road to Regla passes near the great pyramids of Teotihuacán. Then through little mountain towns, steep streets filled with taverns, donkeys and dust, and pink colonial mansions from an earlier time, before it was shameful in Mexico to be rich. Now the mansions are all apartments, displaying laundry from their balconies.

Lev’s place at San Miguel Regla is a small apartment at the back of a large hacienda. It seems safe enough, a high wall and Lorenzo posted at the window, in a desert outpost visited mostly by vultures. The Landeros are rarely in residence, the family and servants in any case asked not to approach the rear of the house. With no women around, the rooms shared by Van, Lev, and Lorenzo look like drawers in a giant cabinet, the beds swimming among notebooks, pistols, shoes, and inkwells. If Lev stays much longer, he may drown in his river of paper.

Lev finds the desert air invigorating and takes long walks each morning on the empty roads. He has fallen in love with cactus, finding a hundred varieties populating the dry ravines. To Van’s dismay he digs them up, wraps them in burlap coats, and carries them home on his shoulder. Somehow, he plans to make a garden of these bizarre, prickled creatures. Van seems prickled also. Maybe missing life at the Golden Earring.

The return trip was even slower due to César’s somnambulant driving and the anticipation of Natalya’s poor eager face, the small bulldog sniffing for her absent master. She’ll have to be told; Lev indicated no plans for returning soon. He doesn’t mean to neglect her; it’s only his pure fascination with life as it is, however it is. For any homeless wanderer he is a miracle of instruction: now that he is exiled from every place on earth except a desert wilderness, he declares a passion for cactus.