What We Become by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

resting on their chocks, were so dazzling that Max had to lower his cap a little more to shield his eyes. Mecha Inzunza took a pair of dark glasses out of the pocket of her sweater and put them on.
    â€œWhat you told him about the origins of tango fascinated him,” she said, after a few more steps. “He can’t stop mulling it over. . . . He is expecting you to keep your word and take him there.”
    â€œWhat about you?”
    She gave him a sidelong glance, turning her head twice, asthough not fully grasping the implications of his question. Inzunza bottled spring water, Max remembered. He had flicked through the illustrated magazines in the reading room in search of advertisements, and had questioned one of the stewards. At the turn of the century, her grandfather, a pharmacist, had made a fortune bottling water in Spain’s Sierra Nevada. Later on, her father had built two hotels there, and a new health spa, recommended for people with liver and kidney ailments, which had become fashionable among the Andalusian upper classes in the summer season.
    â€œWhat are you expecting, Mrs. de Troeye?” Max persisted.
    By this stage of their conversation, he was hoping she might ask him to call her Mecha, or Mercedes. But she did not.
    â€œI’ve been married to Armando for five years. And I admire him deeply.”
    â€œIs that why you want me to take you there? To take you both there?” He allowed himself a skeptical expression. “You aren’t a composer.”
    She did not reply at once, but continued to stroll, her eyes hidden behind her dark glasses.
    â€œWhat about you, Max? Will you travel back to Europe on the Cap Polonio or stay in Argentina?”
    â€œI may stay for a while. I’ve been offered a three-month contract at the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires.”
    â€œAs a dancer?”
    â€œFor now, yes.”
    A brief silence.
    â€œThat doesn’t seem to hold much of a future. Unless . . .”
    She fell silent again, yet Max had no difficulty completing the sentence: unless with your good looks, honest-John smile, and tangos you manage to seduce a millionairess perfumed with Roger & Gallet, who will take you on, all expenses paid, as a chevalier servant . Or, as the Italians put it more crudely, a gigolo.
    â€œI don’t intend to devote my entire life to that.”
    Now the dark glasses were turned toward him. He saw himself reflected in them.
    â€œThe other day you said something interesting. You spoke of tangos to cry for and tangos to die for.”
    Max made a dismissive gesture, as if to minimize its importance. His instinct told him to be honest this time, too.
    â€œIt was a friend who said that, not me.”
    â€œAnother dancer?”
    â€œNo . . . He was a soldier.”
    â€œWas?”
    â€œHe isn’t any longer. He died.”
    â€œI am sorry.”
    â€œThere is no need to be.” Max smiled wistfully to himself. “His name was Dolgoruki-Bragation.”
    â€œNo ordinary soldier’s name. More like that of an officer, wouldn’t you say? . . . A Russian aristocrat.”
    â€œThat is exactly what he was: Russian and an aristocrat. Or so he claimed.”
    â€œAnd was he really . . . an aristocrat?”
    â€œPossibly.”
    Now, perhaps for the first time, Mecha Inzunza seemed unsettled. They had come to a halt beside the outer rail, at the foot of one of the lifeboats. The name of the boat was painted in black letters on its prow. She removed her hat (Max managed to read Talbot on the inside label) and shook her hair, loosening it in the breeze.
    â€œWere you a soldier, too?”
    â€œFor a time. Not for long.”
    â€œIn the world war?”
    â€œIn Africa.”
    She tilted her head slightly to one side, fascinated, as though seeing Max for the first time. For years, the war in North Africa had been grabbing the headlines in the Spanish press, filling