‘Yes. This is business.’ As if stung, or unmasked, he reached into his breast pocket, and withdrew an envelope containing a photocopy of a page from Craig Anderson’s current Canadian passport, with place of birth listed as El Tocuyo, Republic of San Timoteo. The birth date was correct, and the photograph was clearly a recent one of the cherubic eleven-year-old enrolled at Escuela Inglesa. Gutierrez then drew out what purported to be an official change-of-name form, with the government seal of San Timoteo on it, listing the Andersons’ former family name as Castillo. The document was dated seven years before.
The piece de resistance, triumphantly presented to Caroline, was Craig, formerly Carlos, Castillo’s birth certificate. The lad had been born to the parents Helmuth and Mariela listed on the previous document, in the little Andean town of Suiza, settled originally by German Swiss at the turn of the century in a remote part of San Timoteo.
‘So you see. Senor Castillo-alias-Anderson is breaking the law. And no, the fact that he and his family were naturalized in Vancouver does not mean they are no longer Timotenos– unless they renounce their citizenship here. And that, of course, they have not done.’
‘Why would they not do that?’
‘Ah, Miss Judge. Forgive me. You do not understand our ways. The Andersons are what we call reincauchados.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Re-treads.’ His disgust was palpable. ‘Like the old tires in my back yard. A truck comes once a month to take them away to be re-grooved, and re-sold as new. These people disguise their origins because they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They belong nowhere. With their money and their passports of convenience, they are always a step ahead of the law. In Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, there is a line, “they drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.”’
‘I am impressed by your memory.’
‘I took a course in American literature at night school. I have the quote on my desk in my office. It sums up the life of emptiness these people lead.’
Caroline sat silent, staring at her plate. Gutierrez reached into his pocket. As he did so, somewhere a guitar began to play softly; a woman’s voice could be heard singing a lament about lost love, a sentimental favourite among Timotenos. The song, which Caroline had always found deeply affecting, induced in her a mood of sympathetic intimacy with this rough and abrupt but curiously endearing man, quite good-looking in a raffish way, a dead ringer for a Mexican actor whose name she had forgotten.
‘Carolina. Would you become my wife?’ Startled, she looked up. ‘Will you marry me?’
