Balance of Power

Chapter Ten

Barney's peaceful death was shattered suddenly by blinding lights and nausea. Throbbing nails in the skull. Pain pins in the chest. Breathing hard. So hard.

"Breathe, Barney, damn it, you drunken Irish son of a bitch." The voice was harsh. Two strong hands worked over him. His mouth tasted of salt. That was a curare depressant. Had he been slashed with curare? Where would anyone up here get curare? Was the past following him?

Auca. Inca. Maya. Jivaro. Who still existed? Who used curare? Agony behind his pupils. Both arms numb. No, not numb, Barney realized as he faded into semi-consciousness. His arms were strapped down. So were his legs.

Was he back? Was it the hut in the jungle again, the poker glowing in the fire at the center, the machete poised above him, his arms and legs tied with hemp? Or had he never left? Would it never end?

"Breathe, damn it."

The machete! It was coming down, slowly now, into his arm. He tried to focus.

Not a machete. A tube, a tube from above, sliding painlessly into his left arm.

Then he saw Doc Jackson's face, perspiring and mad, the high black cheekbones, the deepset dark eyes, the rising forehead and short kinky hair. A face without fat, just taut, hard skin, with thick lips now grown tight and hard and cursing. "Damn you, you fucker, breathe, I said."

Doc, Barney wondered. How did Doc find the hut in the middle of the jungle? He'd left long before. Did he come back, just to save him?

The hands worked on his chest as the tube in Barney's arm replaced the poisoned blood in his body with fresh.

"Barney," Doc's voice commanded. "Barney, make yourself breathe. Force it." He beat down hard on Barney's chest.

Barney opened his mouth to scream when the pain, like cymbals in a tunnel, banged through him to the tips of his fingers.

"Good," Doc said, relieved. "You know you're alive when you feel pain. That's the only way you know. Dumb bastard. Don't talk. Just keep breathing."

"Doc," Barney said.

"Shut up, you stupid fuck. Breathe hard."

"Doc. Denise is dead."

"I know that. This isn't Hispania. You're in Harlem. In my clinic."

"She's dead, Doc."

"Keep breathing."

Barney breathed. And Doc Jackson's face disappeared into the lights above and Barney smelled hospital smells and then it was the smell of the Puerta del Rey waterfront, like a sewer beneath the sun, fermenting.

"How can you be here?" Was Barney talking? Was Doc answering? Who was answering?

"Keep breathing."

It was Denise who was talking. Oh, what a beautiful sunny day. What bright colors the women beneath the window were wearing. Oh, how beautiful if you could forget the smell, which you did when you had been there long enough and didn't think about it.

"The whole country knows why you're here, Barney," she said in her pleasant sing-song way.

Barney leaned against the window sipping a cup of rich black coffee. His hair was touseled and he wore a pair of striped undershorts and a shoulder holster with a long-barrelled .38 police special.

He waited to look around, because he knew that when he did, his heart would jump and he would want to sing when he saw her again. He was so happy he could have blown his brains out.

He had stalled headquarters for three weeks to stay in Puerta del Rey after a routine assignment was finished. It had to do with shipping and the CIA had flooded the area, taking no pains to disguise its presence. El Presidente Caro De Culo, the dictator of record, had been served notice not to interfere with banana shipments.

De Culo had received the notice, responded favorably, and the surface network of the CIA left the island with as much ostentation as it had arrived.

Not Barney. He had concocted a tale about a fictitious group seeking to overthrow De Culo, and the CIA left him there for a report. When the report was completed, he was to leave.

The report story had kept him afloat in Hispania for three weeks now. Three beautiful, glorious weeks.

"The whole country knows what you're doing, Barney. You haven't bothered to keep it much of a secret."

Some people said Denise had a raspy voice, but they didn't really appreciate the soft timbre tones flowing from her exquisite throat. They didn't know Denise.

Early on the regular assignment, Barney had been detailed to escort the vice-president of a large American fruit-shipping firm to a plush brothel and see that he returned with most of his money. More important, he had been told, was to see that the executive didn't get carried away with the little leather whip he liked to use. Mainly, it had been an assignment to smooth over whatever wrath the executive's perversions incurred.

It was not a pleasant assignment. But it was not a pleasant business. And the executive was a major figure in the banana triangle. So Barney had brought him to the house, had whispered a word of caution in the right places and the right girl followed the executive up a red carpeted stairway.

And then, for the first tune, he had heard Denise's voice. "Don't you want someone?"

She was beautiful, breathtakingly beautiful, even though she dressed herself plainly, almost as though to hide her ripe, shapely body. And her face. Unadorned by makeup or jewelry, it possessed all of the finest features of every race on earth, blended together in unobtrusive perfection.

Her eyes were faintly almond shaped, colored light gray with sparks of blue and brown. Her skin was golden, slightly darker than Arabia, but lighter than Africa. It hinted of sunlight and moonlight at the same time, of Europe and the Orient. There was Indian in her, too, apparent by her prominent, strong bones and shapely lips, red and full and curving playfully at the corners.

She repeated her question, almost taunting. "Don't you want someone?"

Barney looked at her, let his gaze rise from her neat red leather shoes, up the bare legs, across the simple knit dress, and met her eyes. He smiled. "No, nothing. I'm here on business."

"What is your business?" she asked.

"Looking out after perverts, like the one upstairs."

"Yes, we know him. There is no worry. The girl can take care of herself. She is very well paid. There is no need for you to wait here, disturbing the other guests."

"I'm not leaving without him."

"I could have you thrown out. But I know you people would come back. Everyone knows your organization is here in numbers. Why don't you take one of the rooms upstairs?"

"I don't want one of the rooms upstairs."

Her smile of gentle condescension did something to Barney's gut. "Well, agent whoever-you-are, there really isn't too much I can do to stop you from standing here in the middle of the reception room and annoying the guests. Would you care for something to drink while you're ruining my business?"

Barney shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. The other island girls he had known were different-giggling, pretty birds who teased and played and fluttered away. This one had a strength that unnerved him. It filled the room. It commanded.

"The bar is behind the staircase."

"I'll have coffee. Where's the kitchen?"

"I'll make it. Come with me."

They walked through a door into the rear of the building. Two uniformed maids playing cards suddenly jumped from their chairs and erupted in a geyser of excited and nervous Spanish.

"They're not used to seeing me here," Denise said. Neither was the cook who spilled hot soup on himself or a busboy who almost dropped a tray.

"Leave us alone," she said quietly, and the kitchen became vacant hi an instant.

"I hate agents, policemen, assassins, extortionists, soldiers, and pimps," she said. She made the coffee from fresh ground beans in a copper pot.

Barney sat on a cutting board, dangling his legs, feeling his butt getting moist from recently butchered meat. He didn't care. He was watching Denise. For some reason, the sight of this woman making coffee was more thrilling to Barney than a forty-girl chorus line of nude beauties.

"You know, I don't find you at all attractive," she said.

"You don't appeal to me either."

Then they laughed. Then she served the coffee.

They talked a lot that night, Denise about the financial problems of payoffs, the difficulty she had in selecting bed partners, Barney about the boredom of his business, only kept interesting by its stakes, his success with women which somehow was never success, and the state of Hispania which neither of them cared very much about.

With the dawn, Barney left to escort the executive to a hotel and then a conference. They walked through streets of almost naked children. "One drop of nigger blood," the executive said, "and it destroys a race."

"I guess they become perverts," Barney said. He could see the executive contemplating a complaint to his superiors.

He returned to the whorehouse and Denise Saravena for three beautiful weeks.

One night, she said: "Barney, I want your baby. I could have it if I wanted without telling you. But I want you to know when we make love that I'm trying to conceive your child."

Barney didn't know why he couldn't speak. He tried to say something, anything, but all he could do was cry, and tell her that he could never be a father to her baby because he wasn't going to be around much longer. He wanted their baby to have a father.

Then Barney said that they were going to get married very soon because he did not want to do it without marriage anymore.

She laughed and told him he was romantic and foolish and lovely, but no, marriage was impractical.

Barney told her she was right, it would be highly impractical, and that they wouldn't make love any more until they were married.

Denise pretended to think this was very funny, that he sounded like a young girl waiting for a ring. That night she tried to seduce him as a game. It did not work. The next day they knelt before a priest in a small church near the American embassy and became husband and wife.

So he found himself, standing near a window on a bright morning, dressed in shorts and a shoulder holster, listening to the magnificent words of his complaining wife and loving every minute of it.

"They all know we're married, Barney. Everyone does. Sooner or later, even the CIA will find out."

Barney had savored the pleasure of gazing upon Mrs. Denise Daniels long enough that day. With a firm pirouette, he wheeled to embrace his wife, and, still holding his coffee, kissed her. Morning mouths and all, it was wonderful.

"Darling," she said, escaping long enough from his lips to talk, "I know this country. The moment you are without your country's protection, President De Culo and his gang will close on you. Darling, listen to me," she urged as he waved her worries aside like so many annoying flies. "He permitted your interference with the banana shipments only because he had no choice. This regime does not wish to be under American influence. De Culo rose to power from nothing, by offering money and food to his army."

"American money."

Denise shook her head. "For one" so intelligent, my darling, sometimes you look no further than your own CIA does. The money De Culo uses now for his army is American money. Some of it."

Barney screwed up his face. "What are you talking about?"

"Some of the money is American," she repeated quietly. "Not all. What the United States cannot understand is that no population on earth outside of the American people require so much money for minimal subsistence. What you Americans call 'poor' is colossal wealth for us, and for every other people in the world. De Culo's money from the American government is a far greater amount than what is needed for the maintenance of his troops, and certainly more than necessary for De Culo's civil programs, since he gives nothing to the people to keep them from starving. All the money goes to the army. And there is more, much more."

"Like what?"

"Ammunition. Arms. Guns, grenades, food supplies. They are all stored underground, deep in the jungle. I know these things, Barney. My girls tell me. They are offered many presents in the course of a drunken evening with De Culo's swaggering officers, most of whom were starving and ragged as the rest of us before De Culo's mysterious appearance with enough money to organize an army and take over the government."

"We don't give arms to Hispania."

"No, you do not. You give money. De Culo buys the arms with American money. His general, Robar Estomago, makes the arrangements with the Russians."

"But there aren't any Russian installations here," Barney said stupidly. "No treaties, no pacts..."

Denise smiled and shook her head. "No, there are no official agreements with the Russians," she said sadly. "De Culo could not get the American money if there were. Hispania is too small and poor a country to be considered dangerous by the powerful United States. And so your CIA never looked for the Russian installation. And never saw the Russian guns. They have been well hidden. Your people wanted only to see the banana shipments, and so you saw bananas only."

"Jesus," Barney whispered. "I suppose De Culo's original money to start his army came from the Russians."

"Of course. And your government, which views Hispania as harmless and impoverished, viewed what they saw of De Culo's ragged little army, without uniforms and made up of the village poor, as a feeble attempt at pride. They did not see the guns. They did not even look at a map."

She walked over to a battered cypress wood chest in the corner of the room and took from it a world map, its creases worn to holes from folding and refolding. She opened it flat on the table in front of Barney. On the map was drawn a network of fine red lines originating from Moscow and fanning out into the Middle East, Europe, Asia and South America, with a separate series of blue lines to Cuba. From Cuba, other blue lines emanated toward Puerta del Rey.

Barney sucked in his breath as he traced each line from Moscow to known Russian military installations around the globe. Although there were no codes on the map, there could be no mistaking the meaning of the lines. Broken red lines to France and Italy indicated peace treaties and possible allies in the event of full-scale nuclear war. Broken blue lines leading to strategically advantageous areas in the Middle East had to mean possible installations, or partially completed installations, in countries where the Russian army could seize the government by force when it decided to. Iran was a broken blue line. So was Afganistan. And so was Hispania.

But the most prominent line on the map was a hand drawn wobbling, drunken line orignating with a small ink blob on an uninhabited jungle border of Hispania, no more than three hours on foot from the spot where Barney and Denise were sitting at that very moment, and leading directly on a straight course over Cuba to Washington, D.C.

"I took this from one of the girls here," Denise said. "General Estomago's favorite. It had fallen under the bed. I found it after they had both left the room. The next day, one of Estomago's men came around to ask if I had found a map outlining potential banana routes. Estomago must have thought I was stupid. Hispania has no reason to ship bananas to Cuba."

"This is a military map," Barney said. "Some of this information is so classified that the CIA doesn't even have it on file yet."

Denise nodded. "Yes, that line to Hispania is new. And so is that line from Hispania to Washington."

"You know what it means?" Barney said.

"Yes. It means that the Russians have waited for the right time and now have built a military installation on Hispania. A nuclear installation which they will unveil at the right moment and use to intimidate the United States. El presidente De Culo and General Estomago have been working on this for two years. Everybody knows about it."

Barney fingered theold map. "If everybody on this island knows about the Russian installation, why hasn't any word leaked out by now?"

Denise sighed. "You still do not understand," she said. "Hispania is a poor country. We do not care whether the Russians control our bananas or the Americans control our bananas. Whoever is on the dicator's throne at the moment will see to it that we do not get money for our bananas anyway, no matter what country he is allied with. We do not care about politics, because we are hungry. De Culo is a wicked man, but every dictator who has come to govern Hispania has been a wicked man. He is no more wicked than the rest. And in his army he feeds many of the young men of our villages. These are men whose families would starve, were it not for the scraps of American and Russian food supplies which they are able to steal and bring home to their people. It is the only way we live. No, we will not talk about the Russian installation. Starvation of our entire country is too high a price to pay for one conversation with a drunken American ambassador."

"You said Estomago has a favorite girl here," Barney said. "Who is she?"

"She is a strange one. An American. I do not trust her."

"Why'd you take her on?"

"Estomago told me that I was to give her shelter and employment to customers of his choosing. She is not a regular working girl here. She is only for Estomago. And for others whom he selects."

"Like who?"

"The most prominent of your CIA men, usually. At first I thought she was a CIA agent herself, but I do not believe that is so. Her hatred for America is very deep. She slashed a young American visitor with a knife once."

"An agent?"

"No. Fortunately, he was a runaway soldier from the American army, so I was able to cover up the incident. But the girl is vicious. I dismissed her after the stabbing, but Estomago insisted that I take her back. He said he would close my house if I didn't. So she remains."

"I want to talk to her," Barney said, rushing to throw on a shirt and a pair of pants. "I want to see her right now."

"Be careful, darling," Denise warned. "She is Estomago's woman. And you are already being watched here, since you are the last American agent on the island. If she suspects that you know anything, Estomago will kill you."

"Tell her I'm on my last fling before heading home to the bad old USA."

"But she must know that we're married."

"That's perfect. Say you married me to get a passport out of this stinkhole, and you'll be leaving with me, just as soon as I have my fill of young poon-tang."

Denise led him upstairs to the girl's room. The door was closed.

"She is very private," she said. "This one never chats with the other girls or even dines with us. Always alone."

She rapped sharply on the door. After a few minutes, it was opened by a young, platinum-haired, thin-faced girl dressed all in white, her thin lips stretched taut against her teeth to resemble a skull.

"Yes," she drawled sullenly, the hint of the American South drawing out her word.

"I have a visitor for you," Denise said crisply. The girl turned her back on them and walked wordlessly toward the bed, unbuttoning her blouse.

Denise closed the door behind her as she left. "What's your name?" Barney asked, still standing inside the door, his hands in his pockets.

"Gloria," the girl said with a bored half yawn. "Come on. Get this over with."

"Gloria what?"

"Sweeney," the blonde said. "You come here to talk or screw?"