Assumed Identity

9

Buchanan leaned forward. “Disappeared?”

“That’s what her ex-husband claims. Don’t you read the newspapers?” Holly asked.

“The past few days, I haven’t exactly had time.”

“Well, this morning, the ex-husband went to the New York City police department and insisted that she’d been missing for at least the past two weeks. To make sure he wasn’t treated as a crank, he brought along a couple dozen newspaper and television reporters. It turned into quite a circus.”

Buchanan shook his head. “But why would he think he’d be treated as a crank?”

“Because he and Maria Tomez had a very public and very nasty divorce. He’s been bad-mouthing her ever since. He recently filed a lawsuit against her, claiming she lied about her financial assets when they divided their property during the divorce. He insists he has a right to ten million dollars. Naturally, the police might think she dropped out of sight to avoid him. But the ex-husband swears he honestly believes something has happened to her.”

Holly gave Buchanan a page from the previous day’s Washington Post and a photocopy of a profile in the Post’s Sunday magazine from five years earlier. Buchanan scanned the newspaper story and the profile. The ex-husband, Frederick Maltin, had been an agent who discovered Maria Tomez when she was twenty-two, starring in a production of Tosca in Mexico City. While a few male Hispanics, Placido Domingo, for example, had achieved significant careers in opera, no Hispanic female had ever had similar success. Until Maria Tomez. Indeed, despite her talent and fiery stage presence, the fact that she was Mexican had worked against her, relegating her to regional operas, mostly in South America. Traditionally, female opera stars got their training in Europe and the United States. For Tomez to have been trained in Mexico meant that she was combating a professional prejudice when she auditioned for major opera companies in the United States and Italy.

But Frederick Maltin, who had been on vacation in Mexico, had been enchanted from the moment he first heard Maria Tomez sing. He had sent flowers to her dressing room after the performance, along with his business card and his Mexico City telephone number. When he received a call the next morning, he considered it significant that the call had come so early and that it was Maria herself who called, not her representative. Which tended to suggest that she either didn’t have a representative or else didn’t have confidence that the representative would contact him at her request. Professionally speaking, she was available.

Maltin invited her to lunch. They continued their conversation after an afternoon rehearsal and later, at dinner, after an evening performance of a different opera, Rigoletto. As Maltin repeatedly emphasized, in those days Maria’s schedule had been brutal, and he had sworn to her that if she agreed to let him represent her, he would change all that. He would make her a worldwide opera phenomenon. He would arrange it so that she performed only where and when she wanted to. Two years later, he had achieved his promise.

They married in the interim, and working relentlessly on her behalf, advising her about her clothes, her hairstyle, and her makeup, insisting that she lose weight, hiring a physical trainer to give her body definition, calling in every favor owed to him by anyone of influence in the opera world, Maltin promoted Maria Tomez as a singer in the passionate tradition of Maria Callas and Teresa Stratas. The former was Italian, the latter Greek, and Maltin’s genius was in making his client’s weakness her strength, in making audiences associate Maria Tomez with those divas because of a common denominator they shared, their ethnic origins. For Maria Tomez at least, it suddenly became fashionable to be Hispanic. Out of curiosity, European audiences came to hear her sing. Impressed, they stayed. Enthusiastic, they kept attending her other performances. After Frederick Maltin finished creating her public image, Maria Tomez never had any performance that wasn’t a sellout.

Buchanan rubbed his throbbing forehead. “This guy Maltin sounds like a cross between Svengali and Professor Henry Higgins.”

“That’s why the marriage failed,” Holly said. “He wouldn’t stop controlling her. He supervised everything she did. He dominated so much that she felt smothered. She endured it for as long as she could. Then fifteen years after she met him, she abruptly left him. It’s almost as if something inside her snapped. She retired from performing. She went into seclusion, making occasional public appearances, mostly keeping to herself.”

“This started. .” Buchanan picked up the newspaper article to jog his memory. “She divorced him six months ago, a few months after she took up with Alistair Drummond. But why would a comparatively young woman-what is she, thirty-seven now? — choose a man in his eighties?”

“Maybe Drummond makes no demands. I know that seems out of character for him. But maybe he just wants to shelter her in exchange for the pleasure of her company.”

“So she went into seclusion, and now her ex-husband claims she’s disappeared altogether.” Buchanan frowned. “He could be wrong, or he could be lying. He’s an expert in publicity, after all. He could be trying to attract so much attention that to get any peace, she’ll have to deal with his claims about the property settlement.”

“Or maybe something really happened to her.”

“But what?” Buchanan became impatient. “And what does that have to do with Juana? Was Juana protecting her? Are they both hiding somewhere? Are they. .?” He was about to say dead, but the word stuck in his throat, making him feel choked.

Someone knocked on the door. Buchanan spun.

“Room service,” a man’s voice said from the hallway.

Buchanan breathed out. “Okay.” He glanced toward Holly and lowered his voice. “In case this is trouble, take your camera bag and the briefcase. Hide in the closet.”

Holly’s brow knotted with worry.

“I think everything will be fine. It’s only a precaution,” Buchanan said. “Here, don’t forget your coat and hat.”

“I asked you before. How do you stand living this way?”

After shutting the closet, Buchanan approached the room’s entrance, peering through the small lens in the door, seeing the distorted image of a man in a hotel uniform next to a room-service cart in the hallway.

Buchanan no longer had his handgun. Having traveled with it from Fort Lauderdale to Washington to New Orleans to San Antonio, he’d finally been forced to throw it down a storm drain. His trainers had emphasized-never keep a weapon that links you to a crime. Plus, the urgency of his self-imposed deadline had required him to use a commercial airline to get back to Washington, and he wasn’t about to risk getting caught with a handgun in an airport.

With no other weapon but his body, Buchanan concealed his tension and opened the door. “Sorry I took so long.”

“No problem.” The man from room service wheeled in the cart. A minute later, he’d turned the cart into a table and set out the food.

Wary about having to compromise his hands, Buchanan signed the bill and added a 15 percent tip.

“Thanks, Mr. Duffy.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Buchanan locked the door behind the waiter. Slowly, he relaxed and exhaled.

Holly emerged from the closet, her features strained. “I guess in your line of work, you have to distrust everybody.”

“I was taught early-a person’s either on the team or not.”

“And if not?”

“There aren’t any innocent bystanders.”

“Cynical.”

“Practical.”

“And what about me?”

Buchanan took a long time answering. “You’re not a bystander.”