¿QUÉ PASA SI NO PODEMOS PREVENIR LA FALLA?

Nancy's eleven-year-old Cutlass had almost reached the turn-off at La Jolla Drive when the steering stiffened and the brakes went mushy and the oil warning light blinked on. The car rolled slower and slower, and it was only by wrenching the steering wheel violently to the right that she managed to manoeuvre it off the freeway. It stopped, and she applied the hand-brake. She said, 'Shit.'

It had been the scrappy evening to end all scrappy evenings. Now she was stranded on the northbound freeway at eight o'clock in the evening, all dressed up in her best blue linen suit and her matching blue shoes, angry, frustrated, and unhappy.

It had been her second date with John Bream, who worked alongside her in the creative department at Sutton & Ramirez, the second-largest advertising agency in San Diego. John was advertising's answer to Richard Gere. At least, that was what Nancy had thought at first. He was athletic, argumentative, highly creative, and sullenly handsome; and when he had asked her out on a date two weeks ago, she had spent half a week's salary on a new silk dress from Capriccio and three hours at Young Attitude having her bright red hair cut and styled in a wave.

The first date had been wonderful. A Korean dinner at the Seoul House, disco

dancing and then a drive out to the seashore to watch the surf. They had kissed, and John had told her how vivacious she was. 'You're the most vivacious girl I ever met, bar none.'

Tonight, though, when she had called around to his apartment in the Old Town, he hadn't booked dinner and he hadn't planned on dancing. He had been wearing nothing but a bright green towelling bathrobe and what he must have thought was a seductive smile. When she had protested, he had lost his temper. 'Do you know how much money I've spent on you already? And now you're telling me you're not going to come across, because it's against your principles? Jesus, you women! Some feminist revolution! You're only independent when it happens to suit you!'

His crudeness had appalled her. She had read letters in Cosmopolitan about men who expect sex in direct repayment for money invested on dates, but she had never encountered it before - at least, not so blatantly. She had turned around and left. He had shouted at her down the staircase, 'You tight-assed bitch!'

She twisted the key again and again in the Cutlass's ignition. The starter-motor whinnied and whinnied, but then after a while it began to sound like a regurgitating horse, and finally it refused to do anything at all but click. Her previous boyfriend, an overbearing know all called Ned, had warned her several times that her alternator was on the way out. She climbed out of the car and stood glaring at it with her hands on her hips, as if there was a possibility that it might start up out of sheer

embarrassment.

Although it was summer, there was a cool wind blowing up here, where the freeway cleaved between the grassy hills of La Jolla Village. The sky was the colour of

pasque flowers, blue fading into violet, and southern swallows soared high above Nancy's head. Oh well, she thought wryly, at least they aren't vultures.

Traffic whizzed and whistled past her, orange lights glowing smugly, interiors dark and private, and even though she raised the Cutlass's bonnet, and switched on her emergency flashers, nobody wanted to stop. There had been too many rapes and too many muggings on the freeway lately. Too many motorists had stopped to assist stranded ladies, only to find themselves attacked by two or three hoodlums jumping out from the bushes.

Nancy began to feel shivery, and she rubbed her arms to keep herself warm. It was almost completely dark now, and she was beginning to think that she would have to leave the car and walk all the way to La Jolla Village, to see if she could get a taxi to take her home.

She reached into the car for her pocketbook, and was just about to lock the door when a white Lincoln slowed down and pulled off the freeway only twenty yards in front of her. It waited with its engine running, and with its brake lights still flaring bright, indicating that the driver was holding the car in gear. Nancy hesitated for a moment, and then began to walk towards the Lincoln, ducking her head a little so that she could make out what kind of a person was sitting inside.

She drew level with the passenger-door, and the driver wound down the window.

She looked in, her hand shading her eyes from the glare of the traffic. White leather seating, expensive. The driver was wearing a black leather designer jacket and black pants. His face was thin, hollow cheeked, and swarthy, almost Mexican. The whites of his eyes sparkled in the darkness.

'Having trouble?' he asked her. Nancy could hear the soft tones of hymn-singing on the car tape-deck. O Jesu, I have promised . . . Perhaps he was a priest, Nancy thought to herself. But then what kind of a priest wears a black leather designer jacket, and drives around in a white late-model Lincoln?

'My car died on me,' she said, anxiously. 'The battery's dead, I guess. Anyway it won't start.'

'Where are you headed?'

'La Jolla. Right at the top of Prospect Street.' 'Is that far?'

'If you take the next turn-off, it's about two miles towards the ocean.' 'Can I offer you a ride?'

Nancy bit her lip. She remembered her friend Carole, who had accepted a ride home from a Thanksgiving party in Leucadia last November, and had been robbed and raped by three teenage boys. She remembered a girl from the office, Linda, who had been attacked in Balboa Park in broad daylight and almost killed. Just because this

man was good looking and well dressed and driving an expensive car, that didn't mean anything at all. Sex criminals came in every colour and size and every conceivable variety, with optional extras.

The young man waited, with unusual patience, while Nancy tried to make up her mind. At last she said, 'Okay Thank you. That's very kind of you.'

The young man released the central locking system, and Nancy opened the

passenger-door and climbed in. Before he started off, the young man looked at her appraisingly, without any pretence at discretion, and said, 'You're a pretty girl. You ought to be careful, out on the freeway.'

Nancy tried to smile. 'I was scared at first that nobody was going to stop. Then I was scared that somebody might.'

The young man glanced in his rear-view mirror, and then steered the Lincoln out into the traffic. 'You're not scared of me, are you?'

'Do I have any reason to be?' Nancy asked him.

The young man pulled a face. 'I don't think so. But you never can tell, can you, what evil lurks in the hearts of men?'

He paused, steering the car with one hand. Then he added, 'Only The Shadow knows, ho-ho-ho.'

'That dates you,' said Nancy. 'My father used to know all those radio catchphrases.' 'Like "Nobody home, I hope, I hope, I hope," ' the young man suggested.

'That's right! How did you know that?'

'That was Elmer Blurt, out of Al Pearce and his Gang.'

Nancy shook her head in amusement. 'You know, I never met anybody who knew all those catchphrases, except for my father.'

The young man looked in his mirror again. 'Should I turn off here?' 'That's right. Just where it says La Jolla Village Drive.'

The young man piloted the Lincoln off the freeway and up the La Jolla exit ramp. At the top of the ramp, he took a left, and headed uphill towards La Jolla itself.

'I should introduce myself,' he told Nancy. 'My name's Ronald DeVries. 'I'm Nancy Busch,' said Nancy.

'You might have gathered that I don't actually live around here,' Ronald told her. 'As a matter of fact, I just came up from Mexico. I was living in San Hipolito for quite some time.'

'I don't know San Hipolito,' Nancy confessed. 'Is that a nice place?' Ronald lifted a hand, as if to say, San Hipolito? What can I tell you?

'You didn't like it too much, then?' asked Nancy.

'It's okay, if you don't have to stay there. I had to.'

'I love La Jolla,' Nancy told him. 'I've lived here for eleven years now. It's much more commercialised than it used to be, but it still has charm. You can sit right out on the rocks in the winter, when there's nobody around, and you might just as well be the only person in the whole darn world.'

'You'll have to direct me,' said Ronald, as they reached the top of a La Jolla Drive.

'A left here. A left.'

As he steered the car around the corner with exaggerated care, Ronald said, 'You look as if you were going out someplace tonight.'

'I was. I had a slight disagreement with my boyfriend. Well, ex-boyfriend, from now on.'

'That's too bad,' said Ronald, and lapsed into silence.

Nancy said, 'Are you a priest, or anything like that?' 'A priest?' Ronald laughed.

'Well, those are hymns, aren't they, on your tape-deck?'

Ronald reached over and immediately switched the tape-deck off. 'It was just something I was listening to, to pass the time.'

'Are you going far?'

'I was planning on getting to Santa Barbara.'

'That's a real long drive. I hope I haven't delayed you.'

Ronald overtook a toiling cement-truck, and then pulled over to the inside lane again to let a red Porsche blare past them. 'As a matter of fact, I was thinking of giving up on Santa Barbara and inviting you out for dinner.'

Nancy immediately shook her head vigorously. 'Oh, no, I can't expect you to do that, not after giving me a ride and everything. Besides, I have to arrange for somebody to go collect my car. I don't want to wind up with no wheels and no engine.'

'Listen,' said Ronald, 'Call the emergency services and arrange for them to collect your car. They won't need your keys. Then come out to dinner.'

'I'm sorry, Ronald,' Nancy told him. 'That's real generous of you, I mean it. But I hardly know you, and I'm not at all sure that I feel in the mood for it any more.' Ronald turned the Lincoln into Prospect Street, without Nancy directing him, and then parked on the slope outside her house.

'How did you know I lived here?' she asked him, in amazement.

'You told me. Right at the top of Prospect Street, that's what you said. Now, how about dinner? I've really gone cold on the idea of driving all the way to Santa Barbara, and I'm going to have to eat somewhere.'

'But you're right here, right outside the exact house.'

'Coincidence,' Ronald told her, off-handedly. Then, 'Come on, Nancy, how about it?

A friendly diner a deux, no strings attached, no complications. All I'm looking for is company. I hate to eat alone.'

'Well... all right,' said Nancy. 'But I'm going to have to call the tow-truck first. Do you want to come inside?'

'I'll wait in the car, if you want me to.' 'Of course not. Come along in.'

The house in which Nancy lived was large and secluded. It had been built in 1936 in the red-brick style of an English country villa, although it was difficult to see much of the brickwork now because of the thickly overhanging ivy. Fifteen years ago, the owner of the house had gone back East, and ordered that the property should be divided into apartments, for long-term lets. Nancy had sub-let the second-floor

apartment at the back of the house, from an oceanologist who had been sent to work in Kyoto for four years.

Nancy opened the front door and led the way inside. The hallway was gloomy and smelled of lavender-polish and Chinese cooking. There was a dark long-case clock opposite the stairs, which ticked with infinite weariness, and whose half-seen pendulum always reminded Nancy of something written by Edgar Alien Poe.

She climbed the stairs, Ronald following her. 'Do you know who to call to pick up your car?' asked Ronald, as she unlocked the front door of her apartment.

'Don't worry, it's happened before,' she told him, as she switched on the lights.

Ronald came in, and looked around her living-room with approval. It was sparsely but tastefully furnished with plain modern furniture, glass-topped tables, Italian lamps with necks like futuristic giraffes, and Red Indian blankets on the walls. While Nancy went to the phone, Ronald walked over to the window, and drew back the plain woven curtains.

'You have an excellent view of the neighbours,' he complimented her. 'Are those two having a fight over there? They certainly look like they're shouting.'

There was a painting on the wall beside the telephone. It was a nude, in oils, and at first glance it was obviously Nancy. Ronald came closer, and made a deliberate play of comparing the portrait and the model, turning his head from one to the other as if he were watching tennis. The likeness was unmistakable: the pale-skinned, slightly squarish face, with the short straight nose and the sudden splash of freckles, the bright red hair; the tall, angular figure, with small but well-rounded breasts.

Nancy watched him as he made his comparison, the phone still held to her ear.

'One of my boyfriends was an art student,' she commented.

'He was good,' Ronald acknowledged.

She looked round at the portrait. 'You're the first man who's ever said that. Usually, they say that they prefer the original. You know, flattery, and jealousy, too, that some other man has seen me with nothing on. My girlfriends don't like it, either. They think it's an upwardly mobile way of streaking."

Ronald shrugged. 'I'm not like other men. Do you mind if I smoke?

'Go ahead. There's a Sheraton ashtray over on the bookcase.'

Ronald went over to the other side of the room and picked up the ashtray. As he did so, he inspected Nancy's collection of books. Advertising Art. The 100 Greatest Advertisements. The Techniques of Persuasion. Then he came back across the room, tucking a Russian papirosi cigarette between his lips, and lighting it

one-handed with a folded-over matchbook. The tricky technique of a man who thinks that appearances are all-important. The kind of a man who can toss peanuts up into the air and catch them in his mouth.

'So, you're in advertising?' he asked, as Nancy completed her call to the tow-truck company, and put down the phone. 'The second-oldest profession.'

'I'm a designer,' said Nancy. 'I paste eentsy little bits of lettering on to slippery sheets of overlay, and draw a lot of lines, and get paid for it.'

She was obviously waiting for him to tell her what he did, but he stood there silent with his hands in his pockets, puffing at his cigarette and looking at her unblinkingly.

'Shall we have some dinner?' she suggested.

'Sure. What do you like to eat?'

'Could you bear Mexican?' Nancy asked him. 'Manuelo's is good.' 'I could bear Mexican,' said Ronald.

They drove down to Manuelo's, even though it wasn't more than five minutes' walk away, down on the tourist stretch of Prospect, with its fashionable boutiques and its high-priced restaurants and its art galleries and realty offices. The sidewalks were

crowded with evening promenaders and there were no free parking spaces, so in the end Ronald parked the Lincoln outside La Galeria art gallery. As he locked the car, he nodded towards the art gallery window. 'How about that?' he asked Nancy.

They crossed the sidewalk and stood close to the window. On a blue hessian-covered stand, under a single spotlight, stood a bronze statuette of the Great God Pan, cloven-hoofed, goat's horned, dancing and playing his pipes. His face was sly and sharp and infinitely wicked.

'It's terrific,' said Nancy. 'A classic.' She was being sarcastic. She thought it was awful. She wouldn't have bought it even as a doorstop.

Ronald said nothing, but nodded, and stood staring at the statuette with his hands down by his sides, as if it somehow mesmerised him. Nancy waited patiently. She didn't like to urge him on too much, since he was buying.

Eventually, without explaining what it was about the statuette that had interested him so much, Ronald turned away from the art gallery window and offered Nancy his arm. They walked together along the noisy, brightly lit sidewalk, and Nancy found herself feeling unexpectedly cheerful. Perhaps fate had been taking care of her, after all, when she had argued with John, and when her car had broken down on the freeway. Perhaps at last (please, fate!) she had found herself someone special;

because there was no doubt about it, Ronald DeVries was special.

They shared guacamole and cuesadillas smothered in Manuelo's thick secret sauce.

They ate rich chilli, and washed it down with strong red wine. They talked about advertising and office affairs and cars that broke down and childhood

embarrassments. They laughed and they held each other's hands across the tablecloth, their eyes sparkling in the light from the candles that flickered between them. Ronald ordered more wine and Nancy went to the restroom. She looked at her face in the mirror, and said, out loud, 'I hope you're not becoming infatuated, my dear.'

She came back to the table. Ronald had already poured her another glass of wine.

He said, with amusement, 'You know something? You know what our Christian names are? Ronald and Nancy! Can you believe that? Isn't that too Presidential for words?'

'You were telling me all about those old WC Fields radio sketches,' Nancy reminded him.

'Oh, sure. They were terrific. There was one where he says he always collapsed at the sound of the word' 'work''. In his family, they wouldn't say it out loud, they always referred to it as "W". Otherwise, he would pass out, and the only remedy was a deep dipper of dogberry brandy diluted with straight gin.'

Ronald did a passable WC Fields impression. 'I remember the first drink of it. . .1

Ronald did a passable WC Fields impression. 'I remember the first drink of it. . .1