want, though.”
“You mean they take old women with blue hair?”
“No,” she said. “But you don’t have to be young. They feed off emotion. They got you when you were going to bed Maria, right? And me on my wedding night, with Ash …” She trailed off a moment, raised her hand to her mouth as if anticipating the cigarette that wasn’t there. “They’ll get us,” she said, quietly. “We have too much circling us—all that bad history. They’d be nuts not to go for it, don’t you think?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, señora.”
She released me and stepped away. I thought she would go for the purse she had left near the gate—for her smoking. But she hugged herself, rubbing her arms as though she were cold.
“The tango is like life,” she said. “Struggle, struggle, struggle and then—what did you call it?”
“Salida,” I said. “The end.”
She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Salida.”
That afternoon we went to La Recoleta and walked among the tombs. Cole ate a dolce de leche cone in ravenous little bites that made me question her age. I had placed her at thirty, yet now she seemed younger. Her step even bounced a little as she walked past the marble sarcophagi, immune to the flocks of tourists. She had more energy since we’d danced.
“You’re younger than I think you are, aren’t you?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed above the rims of her sunglasses.
“I thought you were part of the generation who thinks those sorts of questions are rude,” she said.
I waited, but she said no more. We walked in silence, enjoying the sun, staying clear of Evita’s mausoleum. She was happy to be doing something, I decided. It explained her sudden lightness.
After I left my church, I had only felt alive when I followed one of them to an assignation. I took a pathetic thrill knowing I could recognize one, shadow it while it prowled, unaware. Such delights, however, faded when I began to notice them everywhere. After dark they haunted the restaurants, lurking, never eating. I’d seen one in a barber’s shop once, reading a newspaper. Some had passed the little hall where, for a few months, I had taught the tango to old folks and tourists. They’d never liked my clientele. Their paths always ended with the abduction of another young beauty. Another Maria.
I thought of Cole’s theory: were they drawn to emotion, somehow? To love? It could be. But why here, in this city? The vast streets and close-knit barrios were a beating heart upon which they preyed.
“The lights start about midnight,” Cole said around the last bite of her cone.
I nodded. “You can see them from the street.” “We should come back after dinner,” she said. “Hide until the guards leave.”
“What? You mean watch from inside?”
She pushed the sunglasses down her nose. “You’ve never done that?”
I shook my head. I’d always seen the lights from a distance, circling the cemetery on foot. It had never occurred to me to get closer.
“Well,” Cole said. “We can fix that. Come with me tonight. I’ll take the first watch—Jesus!”
If she had still had her cone she would have dropped it, bowled over by a pair of speckled cats who came charging from between the tombs. They vanished into the shadow of a large mausoleum, hissing and spitting as they fought.
“Tonight,” Cole said, firmly, straightening her skirt.
When her back was turned, I crossed myself.
Nothing happened that night, save that she grew even younger to me. We took turns sleeping, crammed into a nook of broken stone where the backside of an enormous tomb had crumbled. No watchmen came near. My only company as I fell asleep, too tired to care if my cheek pressed into her hard young shoulder, was the distant howling of cats.
In the middle of the night I jolted awake. Cole put her hand on my shoulder and together we watched the silver-blue light bloom over La Recoleta. Beyond the boundaries of the cemetery the nightlife would carry on, the neon glare masking the glow to the casual eye, but I heard no motorcycles rev, no horns or voices, not a single strain of music. The light hummed, casting moon colored shadows on the cemetery paths.
“God,” I said.
Cole nodded. I could smell the new-washed sweetness of the sweatshirt she had used as a pillow and wanted suddenly to burrow into it. Her grip tightened on my shoulder.
“I want to go to them,” she whispered. “But we aren’t ready. Have you ever thought that they might