In Flames Read Online Free Page B

the starchy accessories, an appearance remarkably reminiscent of saintly Mother Teresa, and who could dismiss a saint? Certainly not me, it wasn’t a risk I’d run.
    “Please, Sister, have a seat.”
    “You look lonely, señor. I never see you before,
por favor
forgive me, my eyesight is weak.” Otherwise Sister Emma looked about as incapacitated as a Carib Indian on the warpath, her makeup right up to the job, eyes rimmed with kohl, slanted eyes, dark brown and flecked yellow, limpid and alert as the eyes of a young cat, although she must have been at least eighty.
Weak?
Hardly. Her lean and clever face was powdered party-rouge: her lips, for all her advanced years, a slippery and vibrant chorus-girl scarlet, her hair almost rosy, a spry spray of wispy curls poking out from under her veil. She smelled of perfume (vanilla extract) and the evening’s steamy heat and rum. And on second thought maybe she wasn’t so saintly.
    “And now, señor,” she said, getting down to business, “tell me what you expect from me. Who did it, right?”
    I was speechless. I didn’t dare ask which
it
she meant.
    “I can see what you’re thinking, señor, but don’t ask me. I know little about this outside world here.” A lie, a convenient ruse, a facet of her performance: Sister Emma set government ministers quaking precisely because she knew too much about the outside world. “Evil, only evil out in the world. Envy and malice and spite. And greed and filth. I don’t know about any of that. And I don’t want to know. Look at Vinny, he knows too much. People laugh at him now, but maybe not forever. They’re all grown-up men around this place. Still, inside”—she tapped her chest, thin and bony, at the spot over her heart—“in here, they’re always boys. Like foolish Vinny. Even in death they’re like children. They never invite me to a single funeral. I don’t know what they’re afraid of, but they don’t want to know me by the time it’s too late, they never do. Still, who am I to judge?” She paused to sneeze, wiping her nose with a lacy pink handkerchief tucked up the sleeve of her black robe. “I hate this chilly weather. Wish I could go someplace warmer. Don’t know how my daughters stand winters up in Brooklyn. Now how can I help you, señor?” Before I could respond, and as if Sister Emma already knew all the answers, this bearer of God’s peace grasped my hand. It wasn’t at all what I was expecting for entertainment on Saint Paddy’s Day, but this was San Iñigo not Manhattan, even if tea leaves and palm readers were everywhere in New York and I’d heard more than a few phony fortunes there. Back in prep school and at college parties, teenage fooling around with cards on drizzly summer afternoons, I could have once almost half-believed in a trip far away, beautiful women waiting for me, a phone call with fabulous news that would make me rich. Once a friend in Cottage Club, high on illicit substances, looked at my hand and refused to say anything at all, only to scare the hell out of me, and I believed his silence might have brushed closer to truth than anything spoken. “You have something silver, señor?” As much statement as question. And I did, a silver key ring from Princeton. “Please, cross my palm,” she said, extending her open, heavily creased hand, and in the innumerable lines crisscrossing her skin I thought I could detect snarls of her miseries like tangles of warring snakes. “Go ahead, señor, make a cross.” And with the silver Princeton souvenir, I sketched a cross on her wrinkled palm. “Now your hand.” Wary of offending her, I held out my right hand and felt it firmly gripped, as though Sister Emma fortune-teller intended to say,
Expect no hesitancy from me
. “See? Right here, señor.” She pointed to a line on my palm. “The girdle of Venus, all these little X marks. This means many children over a long lifetime, but you…you don’t, do you?”
    “No, I don’t.