the room, noting the presence of each of the others. He slipped a hand inside his shirt, pulled out an envelope, and offered it to Isabel.

She nodded cooly and took the sealed envelope, leaving it unopened. "How is it with Gonzalo?" she asked.

The swarthy man pulled a despondent face. "Nothing goes well anymore, he said. He glanced towards the perspiring Esteban. "The Junta has the pressure on so bad, Gonzalo said he couldn't manage every- thing you wanted. He told me to tell you to get out, and forget about else." everyone grimaced. "Everyone will have to survive as best they can."

Isabel's face showed a trace of arrogance at his words. She gestured curtly that he could go. With a downturn at the corner of his mouth, a caricature of a smile, the messenger turned and slipped away through the partly opened door, which Martinez again manipulated with such ease and quietness.

When he had gone, Isabel slitted the envelope the messenger had given her with one of her dagger-like nails. She took out the two passports and visas from within and checked them over. A look of disgust twisted her mouth into an ugly line. "They're for me," she said contemptuously, handing them to Perez, who had crossed the kitchen to stand beside her. "Gonzalo sent me a choice of women's parts, but nothing for Varga."

Perez took the documents and turned them over with deliberate slowness. The bindings cracked as he opened the pass- ports firmly and peered at the words written on the yellow paper. For what seemed an age, he read the papers in their entirety, and then laid them on the carving table behind him. His eyes unexpectedly opened wide as he stared at Esteban. He leaned over to

Isabel and began to whisper in her ear, a whisper like a dry rustling of leaves. Isabel was surprised by whatever the old man said. She looked cal- culatingly at Esteban, and then whispered back to the old man. Esteban shifted nervously under their continuous gaze. The private murmuring was making him decidedly uncomfortable. Plots were obviously being hatched plots that concerned him.

Isabel broke off the whis- pering with a firm nod. She raised her hand and signalled to the two guards to withdraw, which they did without argu- ment. She gestured to Esteban to approach the now silent conspirators. "Isidro thinks that there might yet be a way to get you out of the country,' she said in a low voice. Esteban had stopped in the center of the floor, three feet from Isabel, who had now shifted to rest herself against the carving table. "Photographs right away,' the old man's voice was a dry rattle.

Isabel nodded. She handed the visas to Esteban. One was for an ‘Elisabeta Vazquez,' secretary, and the other for 'Dolores Rodriguez,' a nurse. "Isidro can add any picture we want to these visas, and to the passports. So, Esteban," she smiled crookedly at him. “Do you feel more like an Elisabeta than a Dolores, or vice versa?"

Esteban's mouth opened in shock. He recoiled away from the smiling girl and the wrinkled, grim-faced old man. "Y-You can't mean..." he said.

Isabel nodded deliberately. "It's the only way," she said firmly. "I can disguise you well enough. Even your own sister won't recognize you. She frowned at the passports, open on the table. "You can be Elisabeta. Likely I know more about nursing than you, and I can explain more convin- cingly that you have laryngitis."

"I-I'm not going to dress up as a girl," Esteban's voice was both indignant and frightened.

"Oh, yes, you are," Isabel's dark eyes smouldered back at him. "It's the only way to get you out of here alive. Don't you realize," her jaw thrust forward, emphasizing the strength of her will power, "that Gonzalo sent the message tonight for me to abandon you to your sister." She paused and looked fiercely at the old man. “And it's the correct thing to do. It's time for all of us to cut our losses. "And you," she looked back at Esteban, "are not po- litical. You're just so much deadwood. You have the Varga but name, that's only only of publicity value if you're out of this country attacking her and her friends in the Junta.' She pushed off from the table and began to pace the tiled kitchen floor. Esteban had to twist around to follow her. "We only took you out of San Martino because you shared the cell with Joaquin.

Esteban's face sagged as the extent of his worthlessness be- came apparent to him. Isabel was doing an excellent job of crushing his spirit. "Just think how much your sister cared for you," Isabel sneered. "Those that weren't one hundred per cent for her were against her, even her own brother." She stopped pacing and faced Esteban. He could hear Perez wheezing behind him. "But, I don't agree totally with

Gonzalo and the others. I think that someone like you, a non- political, jailed by his own sister, can help to get us the foreign support we've got to have. At the very least, we can discredit her, maybe even have her re- placed, and that would be a considerable victory for us all.”

Her brown eyes bored into Esteban's face. “I-I c-couldn't do what you ask," he stam- mered. "I-I'd never be able to carry it off."