Life During Wartime

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The armies of the Madradonas and the Sotomayors—more than a thousand strong—lived in the streets of Barrio Clarín, in doorways and gutters, under benches in public squares, in pitiful shelters made of cardboard or beneath no shelter at all; and every morning Mingolla would walk out among them and minister to their needs, plying them with his strength, inducing temporary frameworks of happiness and well-being. He derived little satisfaction from the work; the armies were unsalvageable, and the best he could do was briefly to restore their humanity; their minds retained scarcely any structure, and the process of their thoughts was slow and turgid like porridge slopping in a bowl. Though he gained a measure of redemption from these kindnesses, he was less trying to assuage guilt than to evade it. It seemed to him that he was suffering a peculiarly American form of guilt in that he did not want to be perceived as who he was, and thought that by disguising himself as a do-gooder, he might be able to confound whatever all-seeing moral eye governed the region.

Most of the streets in the barrio were narrow, one lane of potholed asphalt, and forked at odd angles between dilapidated four- and five-story buildings of whitewashed stone… old colonial-style dwellings with vented French doors opening onto ironwork balconies, and bands of faded blue and green painted along their bases like stratifications. It was the rainy season, and every day began with drizzles and ended in downpours. Swollen gray clouds passed so low overhead that their bellies appeared to be sagging between the roofs; and this, along with the extreme overhangs of the roofs, produced a claustrophobic effect, making it look that the buildings were leaning together, being pressed down by the heavy skies. Faint traffic noises could be heard from beyond the barricades, and occasionally a jeep would pass, bearing a clutch of Madradonas or Sotomayors. But there were no babies crying, no radios playing, no matrons leaning on the balcony railings to gossip with their neighbors. The apartments were empty, as were the little stores with murals on their pastel facades depicting disembodied shirts and hats, sparkling kitchen appliances, floating loaves of bread, and sewing machines the size of mastiffs.

One afternoon Mingolla ate his lunch on a stoop facing a store in whose windows and along whose aisles were arranged dozens of mirrors; ornate lettering on the facade proclaimed that within one could buy items of religious significance. He’d seen similar stores in Guatemala. Hotly lit windows thronged with golden crosses, gilt-framed Madonnas, Sacred Heart lockets… the gold flashing in the mirrors, brilliant images duplicated over and over, creating a dazzling maze of faith and nowhere for the eye to rest. But the only image held by these mirrors was that of his face: an infinity of gloomy young men, their expressions resigned, empty of conviction. The barrio had done this to him, he thought. Had planed away the extremes of his emotions, making him slow and dim like the members of the Sotomayor army who ranged the street, some moving hesitantly about, but most lying motionless in the drizzle that pocked the leaden puddles. Not far away, an old woman in a widow’s shawl squatted by the curb and peed. Just beyond her, a haggard gray-skinned man walked with the gait of a somnambulist, stopping to touch a wall, to stare, then stumbling on. Their clothes were ripped and stiff with grime, their eyes dark and shapeless-looking like holes worn in rotted fabric. They were armed with clubs and knives and garden tools, and many bore wounds that had gone untreated. Little black receivers like drops of ebony were affixed to their ears, and it was through these that they received orders to fight or disengage. Gauzy shadows appeared to be collecting around them as if they were decomposing, adding their substance to the air. Mingolla wished he could puke, have some overwhelming reaction, but he only felt numb.

The woman sitting at his feet began to hum. A slovenly thirtyish plug of a woman, with heavy thighs and pendulous breasts and jaundiced skin. Clad in a dress that might once have been blue. After he’d finished working on her, she had told him her name was Irma and that she missed her babies.

‘How ya doing, Irma?’ he asked.

‘I’m singing,’ she said, gazing off down the street. ‘Singing to my babies, putting them to sleep.’

‘That’s good.’ He held out half his sandwich. ‘Hungry?’

She rocked an imaginary child in her arms, smiled and hummed.

It might not be so bad, Mingolla thought, to keep growing slower and slower like the people in the armies of the barrio, to wind up inhabiting shreds of memory. Lots of normal people were no different, and they seemed content.

‘Pacito, Pacito,’ Irma crooned, and chucked the invisible baby under its chin. Faint Madonna smile lighting her doughy face.

Mingolla turned away, hollow with the sight, yet at the same time pleased that a human smoke still fumed inside Irma, that she had love to rely on… something he could no longer do wholeheartedly. He remembered one of his father’s salesmen, an old earnest huckster with gray hair and a face like a rumpled dishrag. He’d played uncle to Mingolla, delighted in imparting to him anecdotes of his days on the road, the lore of insurance and selling. ‘First thing,’ he’d said once, ‘you give ‘em the bad news. The premiums, the payment schedules. Then you work around to the benefits, just the ordinary stuff. They’re not impressed. Fact is, they’re disappointed. They were hoping for something better. So you let ’em stew a minute, and then you tell ’em. “Now here’s the beauty part.”’ The salesman had been referring to some hidden investment potential, but to Mingolla his words had had the musty resonance of a universal constant, and he had taken from them a different meaning, a belief that the world—going on and on with its routine turnings, its unremarkable miseries and joys—could suddenly unfold to reveal at its heart a luminous principle as full of serene significance as a Christmas star. Making love with Debora had always seemed to disclose this kind of beauty, but since arriving in the barrio, though their lovemaking was as good as ever, too much else had changed for Mingolla to derive anything from it other than release. Debora had changed most of all. She was caught up in the process of the peace, passionate about it, and even her ordinary conversation smacked of an ingenuous idealism that dismayed Mingolla and caused him to look at her in a new light, to wonder how she could be such a fool. Like the night before, during a pause in lovemaking, lying on their sides, still joined.

…it’s funny… she’d said.

…what’s that…

… I was thinking how I’d like to live with you, and what I decided I wanted was green places, green solitudes… green…

The word green became a chord sounding in him, binding him to her, and for a split second he had a kinesthetic sense of her body and his, how she felt having him inside, the nerveless warmth and comfort of being filled.

…edens, she said. Places without strangers, without rules, make our own rules, our own reasons…

Her intensity made him aware of his own growing ambivalence, but he tried not to let it show.

… why’s that funny…

… I’ve always hated them, jungles, mountains… my father was always dragging us off into the wilderness… he loved it, loved the emptiness… and then after I got out of prison, I was in the jungles and mountains so much… I hated them… but with you, I want a clean place, a place no one else has ruined or touched…

Troubled, wanting to shut her up, because everything she said was causing him to lose faith in her good sense, because how could she be so glad and hopeful in this terrible place, he moved inside her.

… David, oh God, David…

He clutched her ass with both hands, grinding against her, squeezing out feelings.

… I want you to come in me, David… now… but in my mouth, I want you in my mouth…

The words honed his arousal, and he thrust at her for a few seconds, then stopped, feeling distracted. Seams of light through the vents of the shutters, her skin gleaming palely in blurred stripes…

… what’s wrong, David…

… tired, that’s all…

… we can stop, it’s all right…

… maybe…

… we’ll make love in the morning… I want that, I want to walk out and feel you still warm inside me…

He held her as she drifted off, brushing the edges of her thought, their minds engaging like gears in a slow mesh, and he suddenly saw an expanse of smooth-grained golden wood, and had a sense of her personality, her anxiety and the calmness that underlay all her moods, and he heard a chirpy woman’s voice gabbling about a customer she’d had to deal with, knew the woman to be his… or rather Debora’s Aunt Juana, going a little senile now, and Debora was studying the grain of the wood, noticing how the flow crested into dark slivers like stylized waves, and looking up at the glassed-in shelves with their lumps of pre-Columbian pottery, and she wished Aunt Juana would be quiet, those same stories over and over, and if Juana kept it up, Papa would lose his temper, and then she’d have to spend all night soothing him, and she glanced at him, a heavy bulbous man, his impassive face not unlike the faces on the lumps of pottery… and then Mingolla was himself again, marveling at the contact, wondering at all his attempts to fathom her, because there she was, locked in her memory of another time, that mixture of poise and concern and naïveté that was the base compound of her soul, and beneath that, the frail inquiry tinged with hope that we, every one of us, are even before innocence begins. Then another memory, one so brief that he could retain only a sensation of agony and harsh radiance, and he was spinning in the stream of her memory, in a ruddy glow that was like the light of her blood coursing into the past, and memories were slipping by so quickly he could scarcely differentiate between them, and then the stream slowed, entering a region of dusky light, murky darks, dusty, ancient memories, creaky old things, and he had an image of yellowed lace veils, webs of memory lifting from brassbound chests and shaking loose dust that sang as it fell, the singing translating into a whining like the circuit of the blood, then into voices and visions and thoughts, and he was walking in a garden with a young man, the sun making an embroidery of shadow on the stones, and the duenna close behind, coy whispers and signals, and later the pain of a child being ripped loose, and later yet the heartsick perception of the sick old man a lover had become, and then a clangor of steel, shouts, the silver armor masking the horse’s head gone pink from a rinse of blood bubbling from the slash on its neck, and the passage of memory speeding up again, voices and images blending into webs of golden light that wove an endless pattern, binding blood and time and history into a knot, a sexual twining… Mingolla surfaced from this immersion feeling as if he had fallen a hundred floors and landed in feathers. He was sweating, his heart racing, and he was amazed to find that Debora was still asleep. He tried to put together the experience with the intimations of magical connectivity he’d had while working on Major Cabell; but he was reduced to supposition, to vague theorizing, and the only thing that seemed apparent was that the contact had spoken to the character of his relationship with Debora, that they were all flash and dazzle, and no real substance…

Irma sighed, and Mingolla glanced up at her. She was leaning against the glass of the door; a Marlboro decal with the picture of a cowboy lighting up was stuck to the glass beside her mouth like a visual word balloon. Her arms cradling her dreamed-of child. She held it up for him to approve, and still thinking of Debora, seeing not the emptiness of Irma’s arms but the memory they embraced, he said, ‘Yeah… nice-looking boy.’

It rained every morning and every afternoon, and often during the night, and whenever it stopped raining, the heat would settle in; it seemed to have a presence, to be a huge transparent animal crouching in the streets and exhaling a foul warmth. Posters plastered to the walls of the buildings wilted at the corners and hung in scrolls; heat haze rippled above roofs and sidewalks, making it look as if the entire barrio were about to dematerialize. The surface of the asphalt melted into sludge; you could peel off rubbery hunks with your fingers. The armies floundered in humid air, the buzzing of their minds weak and intermittent like that of winter flies trapped between panes of glass. Sweat popped out in drops the size of pearl onions, and smiles were sharp and strained. Then the rain would begin again, diminishing the heat a fraction, spattering on the asphalt, drumming on the roofs, ticking the windows, and lying in bed at night, Mingolla could sense in its incessant rhythms the tension of an event taking shape. Something final and powerful. Whether good or evil, he didn’t know and didn’t care. He was under the spell of heavy life, heavy weather, and he had no interest in the eventual outcome, no interest in anything other than making it through each day.

They were quartered in a pension called the Casa Gamboa, a one-story building of pink stucco with an interior courtyard centered by a swimming pool whose water was so dirty that it looked like a sector of jade amid the bright tiles.’ Macaws sat on perches under the overhang of the roof, cocking their eyes knowingly at passers-by and chuckling, and thick jungly vegetation grew in plots around the pool. Through a breezeway at the rear of the courtyard could be seen an old Oriental man in a wheelchair, who would sit most of the day beside a small garden and tie strips of paper to the stakes between the rows. The maid was a pretty dark woman named Serenita. All these things elements in the story The Fictive Boarding House. Mingolla was not surprised to learn he was living in Pastorïn’s (or Izaguirre’s) story. He realized he had been living in it ever since Roatán, and that even the fact of his existence was to some extent a Sotomayor conceit. Indeed, he found it a comfort to be part of a fiction in that perceiving life this way tended to insulate him from the real, and when he was not working, he would spend his time in the room he shared with Debora. A large white room, much too large for its sparse furnishings of chair, table, bed, and dresser. The room was cooled by a creaky ceiling fan, and mounted on the wall beside the door was a cheap tin crucifix; a cord ran up behind the cross to the light fixture on the ceiling, giving the impression that Christ had some role to play in the transmission of the current. The figure was poorly rendered, its hands and feet disproportionately long, and its expression dyspeptic instead of soulful. Mingolla sympathized with the distorted spiritual values it embodied, and he held out hope that it would effect a miracle of a quality in keeping with its grotesque appearance.

On one occasion Debora dragged him out of the room to attend a negotiating session. She wanted him to see for himself that they were going well, and though he refused to accept this, there was no use in arguing the point. It was in her nature to cling to belief, to commitment, and he knew she would have to experience total disillusionment before giving up the idea of revolution, even one as horrific as this.

The sessions were held in a working-class restaurant with pale green walls and long tables and a glass case atop the counter containing crumbs and dead flies and crumpled wax paper. The negotiating teams consisted of five members of each family and a handful of psychics who had undergone the drug therapy. The psychics—there were thirty-one in the barrio all told—were hostile, suspicious, and neither Mingolla nor Debora succeeded in establishing a relationship with any of them; they were interested only in maintaining their relationships with various members of the families. The Sotomayors, however, were—with the exception of Ruy—gracious to a fault. They were all lanky, long-nosed, and homely… though their chief negotiator, a tall woman in her early thirties named Marina Estil, had a severe hawkish beauty. She was quite tall, almost six feet, with sharp cheekbones and large eyes and black hair cut short to resemble a cowl. Her fingers were extremely thin and seemed paler than her hands. In her frankness about Sotomayor frailties, she impressed Mingolla as being someone whose concern for peacemaking outweighed the imperatives of the feud, and he came to put a modicum of trust in her.

‘You have so much power, and so little interest in using it,’ she told him once. ‘But of course many of us have a problem with the way you do use it.’

‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘How come?’

‘Your devotion to the armies.’

‘It’s not devotion. I just don’t have anything better to do.’

‘Surely there’s more to it than that.’

‘Maybe… it’s not important.’

‘It is to us. What you’re doing exacerbates our guilt. We have trouble enough bearing the weight of our sins without you reminding us of our greatest sin. Some of us take your work as an insult.’

‘That’s tough.’

She laughed. ‘I wonder if you understand the challenge you present to us.’

‘I think so.’

‘Oh, I doubt you can understand the extent of it. For instance, lately I’ve felt attracted to you. And I can trace the roots of the attraction not to propinquity or anything physical, but to your power.’

He liked hearing that. Her honesty supported his impression that she was trying to control her twitches. And although he wasn’t attracted to her, the thought of sex with her intrigued him in the way he’d once had the urge to reach into a cage at the Bronx Zoo and find out if the jaguar’s paw was really as soft and furry as it appeared.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m harmless.’

‘I’m not worried about you,’ he said. ‘Even if I were, you’d be low on my list.’

Led by Marina, the Sotomayors arrived first at the restaurant and took seats along one side of the front table. The Madradonas arrived five minutes later and sat across from them. They were as much a physical type as the Sotomayors: short and squat, with stolid chubby faces and luxuriant growths of black hair. Mingolla got the idea he was watching a debate between alien races. Stubby brown demons with blunt bone-crushing teeth, and pale snake-people with rubies in their skulls. The Madradonas possessed a brisk energy, their manner in sharp contrast to the diffidence of their rivals, and despite his reservations, he had the hope that their efficient shopkeeper mentality might offset the whimsy of the Sotomayors, and thus the peace would be achieved. But after an hour of talks an incident occurred that dashed his hopes.

The Sotomayors had proposed that the families remain in the background of world affairs and practice extremes of birth control in order to limit the possibility of genocidal tendencies; the Madradonas’ position was not far removed from this, but the subject seemed to set them on edge and their replies grew terse and insulting. Finally a portly Madradona man with a crescental scar at the corner of his right eye stood and knocked over his chair.

‘Paris, twenty years ago,’ he said, ‘You remember that, don’t you?’

‘There’s no need of dragging that up, Onofrio,’ said Marina.

‘Tell me how to forget it!’ Onofrio balled his fists, rested them on the table, and leaned over Marina. ‘I remember it too damn well. I was looking out the window, listening to the baby in the next room. And Sara called to me. “There’s a package for you,” she said. “A present, I think. Come see.” I’d just gone out in the hall when “the present” exploded.’ He looked as if he were going to spit. ‘I won’t have you bastards telling me when I can or can’t have children. You’ve taken too many ofour children as it is.’

‘And you haven’t?’ said Ruy. ‘What about Marina? Is her pain less than yours? Your uncle has a lot to answer for.’

‘My uncle had help,’ said Onofrio. ‘Remember, Ruy?’

‘Stop it,’ Marina said. ‘This isn’t…’

A Madradona woman jumped up and screeched at Ruy, and the next second they were all on their feet, yelling, filling the air with accusations, listings of murders and rapes and betrayals. Mingolla started for the door.

‘Don’t leave,’ said Debora, catching up to him at the door. ‘They’ll calm down. They always do.’

Anxiety tightened her mouth, and he wanted to stay to please her; but the sound of the feud, the babbling and cursing, brought home to him the folly at work in the barrio, and he just shook his head.

She called after him. ‘David!’

He turned to her. Look,’ he said. ‘You take care of this end, and I’ll do what I have to. All right.’

Doubt and disappointment contended in her face, and then without another word she wheeled around and went back inside.

Most of the armies kept to the center of the barrio, wandering aimlessly like herds of stupefied cattle, falling out when fatigue overwhelmed their restlessness. Strays, however, could be found in every quarter, and one afternoon Mingolla came across two of them on the steps of the palace that Juan Pastorín had built for the children of the poor. It was a futuristic dome of blue plastic alloy with the look of a gigantic cheap toy. Gold-colored doors. Clusters of needle towers spearing 150 feet above the parking lot that formed a black moat around it. The sunlight channeled shimmers along its surface, and as Mingolla approached it, the whole thing seemed to have the instability of a mirage. Curious to see the inside, he slipped through the doors into a dimly lit room half the size of a football field. The floor was fake gray flagstones, and the walls were unadorned. The dimples formed in the roofby the extrusion of the towers reminded Mingolla of the interior of a doll’s body, the hollows of plastic arms and legs. He gave a shout, testing the echoes, and was about to leave, when a woman came out of a door in the far wall. Not a woman, he realized as she glided toward him. A robot painted and clothed to resemble a plump Victorian matron. Wearing a gown of stiff yellow fabric worked with a lacy design of black silk; hair netted in a bun; a prissy, daffy face with rouge spots dappling the cheeks. It was twice as wide and a head taller than Mingolla, and he retreated a few steps.

‘The labyrinth is closed for repairs,’ it said in a fluting voice. Behind the waxy crystals of its eyes, camera lenses were swiveling. ‘Would you like to hear a story?’

‘Not really,’ said Mingolla.

‘I have stories for all ages. Mysteries, adventures, romances.’ The robot’s whacky-looking eyes tracked back and forth. ‘I know… what about a love story?’

Mingolla’s suspicions were roused; he wondered if someone who knew him was controlling the robot. ‘No thanks,’ he said.

‘I wish you’d let me tell you one, anyway,’ said the robot. I’m sure you’d enjoy it.’ It glided to the door, blocking the way out. ‘The only trouble is, love stories are so sad.’ It tipped its head to the side, looking at Mingolla, who became alarmed by the fixity of the stare.

‘Lemme out,’ he said. ‘I don’t wanna hear your damn stories.’

‘Oh, but you’ve never heard one like this. It’s so sad, it’ll make you happy. Did you know it’s an established psychological fact that sad stories have exactly the opposite effect on a listener? It’s true. You’ll feel much better after you…’

‘Goddammit!’ said Mingolla. Lemme out.’

‘I’m sorry… you can’t leave without the rest of your group. Just you wait with me and listen, and soon your teacher will come to fetch you.’ The robot folded its arms and gazed at him benignly like a doting aunt. ‘Now, this particular story…’

A shout interrupted the robot, and an old man in a brown uniform and cap came hobbling across the hall. ‘What are you doing in here? We’re closed.’

‘The labyrinth is closed for repairs,’ said the robot.

The old man snorted, touched a control on the robot’s side that caused it to stiffen and fall silent. ‘They never finished the labyrinth. Never finished any of it. Just more of their foolishness.’ He was lean, pale, with long arms and legs, and sprigs of white hair poking from beneath his cap. It was the Sotomayor look, and though it made no sense that a Sotomayor would be serving as a caretaker, Mingolla asked if he was related.

‘Used to be,’ said the old man.

‘I don’t understand.’

The old man took off his cap, patted down his hair. ‘They stripped me. Said I’d betrayed them. And I suppose I did, though they’ve let greater betrayals pass. I hated them for it at first. But I came to see I was better off. What’s power ever done but make them miserable.’ He peered at Mingolla, shook his head sadly. ‘Make you miserable, too.’

‘What do you mean they stripped you?’

‘They gathered a threesome and skewered my brains. Stripped away my power. They said they were sorry afterward, but by then I was glad they’d done it. You’ve heard the saying “power corrupts”?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Well, it does worse than that, believe me. At least to them. It ennobles, makes them believe everything they do is right.’ The old man blew air through his lips like a horse. ‘They’re loaded with noble intentions, but they’re wrong all the time. They’re monsters. You should know that, you’re just like them.’

Mingolla decided to change the subject. ‘Did Izaguirre build this place?’

‘Izaguirre, Pastorín… whatever name Carlito’s using.’ The old man made a noise of disgust. ‘Even as a child he was a madman. Took whatever he wanted and pretended it was the act of a saint no matter who was hurt.’

‘Tell me ’bout him.’

‘Just look around you. Look at this place, look at the barrio. Hah! Look at the others. They think they’re in control, but they’re only Carlito’s pawns. Made in his image.’ The old man jammed his cap down over his eyes. ‘Best thing would be for you all to throw yourselves in the sea. Now go on, get out. We’re closed.’

‘I just wanted to—’

‘Get out, I say!’ The old man gave him a push. ‘It depresses me to be around you.’ He shooed Mingolla off with a flapping of his bony hands and slammed the door behind him.

Mingolla blinked at the intense sunlight. The two men on the steps stirred like leaves in a soft wind. He felt less inclined to help them now, but it would at least pass some time. One of them—bearded, blond, wearing clothes that appeared to have been rolled in soot—was leaning against the doorframe. His face was abraded, the cuts crusted with grime; his hair was long and stringy, and though he was sitting in the shade, the pupils of his blue eyes had shrunk to pinpricks, as if he were living in some internal brilliance. Resting across his knees was a machete, its blade fretted with brown stains. The other man lay beside him, his face turned to the golden doors. Mingolla dropped to his knees, preparing to work; but as he met those blue eyes, as he noticed the petulant set of the man’s mouth, the slight bulge of his brow, he was flooded by a feeling of despair.

‘Gilbey?’ he said, and then knowing it was Gilbey, he shook him. ‘It’s Mingolla, man! Hey, Gilbey!’

Gilbey stared at his scabbed, broken knuckles.

Mingolla focused his power, trying to restore Gilbey’s patterns, talking all the while, desperate to make that sullen punkish spirit burn high again. ‘C’mon, man,’ he said. ‘Remember the Farm… ’Frisco? You gotta remember ‘Frisco.’ He was in a panic, like a kid fitting together the pieces of a valuable vase he’d broken.

After a few minutes, Gilbey responded. ‘Mingolla,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I… ’ He nudged the other man. ‘This here’s Jack.’

Jack grunted, knocked Gilbey’s arm away.

Gilbey seemed to fade, then perked up again. ‘Know who this is?’ he asked, tapping Jack’s shoulder. ‘He’s… he’s famous. Hey, Jack! Wake up!’

Jack rolled over, eyes slitted against the sun. His face was partially obscured by a heavy black beard, but his features — cleverly made, foxy—looked familiar.

‘He’s famous,’ Gilbey repeated. ‘Tell him, Jack. Tell him who you are.’

Jack rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Name’s Jack,’ he said foggily.

‘Naw, man!’ said Gilbey. ‘The guy’s… Shit! Tell him. Jack!’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mingolla said.

‘I’m… ’Jack squeezed the sides of his head as if trying to still his thoughts. ‘I’m a singer.’

‘Yeah, yeah!’ said Gilbey. ‘That’s it. You ’member, Mingolla. Prowler.’

Mingolla stared in disbelief, saw Jack Lescaux’s face melt up from the beard and dirt. ‘How’d you wind up here?’

Jack rolled back over to face the door.

‘He ain’t feelin’ so hot,’ said Gilbey. ‘But it’s him, ain’t it?’

‘Yeah, it’s him.’ Mingolla stood, suddenly exhausted. ‘You come on back with me. I’ll find ya a bunk at my place.’ He plucked the receiver from Gilbey’s ear.

‘I dunno,’ said Gilbey. ‘We gotta…’

It’s okay… I’ll be responsible.’

Gilbey plucked at Jack’s shirt. ‘Let’s go, man.’

‘Just leave him.’

‘I ain’t leavin’ him, man,’ said Gilbey, displaying a flash of his old contentiousness. ‘Me’n him are tight.’

‘All right.’ Mingolla set to work on Jack and soon had him standing. He was shorter than Mingolla had assumed from watching him on TV; his clothes were as filthy as Gilbey’s, and he had a crowbar in his left hand. In their rags, leaning together, they looked like zombies at the end of their term. Dead men with blue eyes.

They shambled at Mingolla’s heels across the parking lot and down an empty street lined with groceries and butcher shops and bakeries. Murals of cakes with halos of painted flavor, ice cream bars surrounded by exploding stars, bananas wreathed in music notes. Little coiled nests of human shit everywhere testified to the passage of the armies.

Gilbey picked up his pace, stumbled alongside Mingolla, searching his face. ‘What happened to you, man?’ he asked.

‘You mean back in ’Frisco?’

‘Un-uh.’ Gilbey tripped, regained his balance. ‘What happened to you here.’ He tapped his forehead, very gently, as if afraid he might punch a hole.

‘Bad drugs,’ said Mingolla. ‘War. Shit like that.’

Gilbey nodded, his brow furrowed. Same here,’ he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

On a night not long after he had found Gilbey and Jack Lescaux, Mingolla was about to enter his room at the Casa Gamboa, when he heard Ray’s voice issuing from an open shutter. He flattened against the wall and peeked through the window. Ruy was standing at the foot of the bed, dressed in jeans and a black wind-breaker; his hair was combed straight back, and the collar of the windbreaker was turned up, framing his face in such a way as to give it the austere nobility of a vampire.‘

‘Leave me alone!’ said Debora.

Mingolla couldn’t see her, but the distaste in her voice was clear.

‘I’ve been trying to,’ Ruy said. ‘But I can’t.’

‘You have to,’ she said. ‘I don’t love you… in fact, you’re beginning to disgust me. Don’t you have any self-respect?’

‘Not where you’re concerned.’ Ruy moved out of Mingolla’s line of sight. ‘Don’t you understand how he’s stifling you, stunting you? God, you should be—’

‘I’m not listening to this! Get out!’

‘Debora, please.’

‘Get out!’

‘For God’s sake, Debora. Don’t do this!’ There was a catch in Ray’s voice. ‘If I could just touch you once… like a lover.’

‘I want you to leave right now.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Ruy, ‘sometimes I think if I could touch you just once, that would be all I needed… it would sustain me the rest of my life.’

A pause, shuffling of footsteps.

‘Are you saying that if I let you touch me, you’d leave me alone afterward?’

‘I… I don’t know. I…’

‘Suppose I were to let you touch me,’ said Debora coldly, ‘Would you swear not to bother me again?’

‘You shouldn’t treat me like this,’ said Ruy. ‘I love you.’

‘Answer me.’

‘You’ll let me touch you?’

‘Only if you promise to leave me alone.’

His anger growing, Mingolla went to the door.

‘Please don’t do this,’ said Ruy.

Another pause, and then Debora said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You can touch me, touch my breast, if you swear you won’t even talk to me for at least a week.’

Mingolla put his hand on the doorknob.

Ruy was silent, and Debora said impatiently. ‘Well? Do you want to or not?’

‘I… yes,’ Shame in the quaver of the words.

‘All right,’ said Debora, and then: ‘No, I can’t. The idea of you touching me… it’s repulsive. Get out of here.’

Mingolla opened the door, and Ruy spun around to face him.

Debora was standing in the bathroom door. ‘He was just going,’ she said calmly.

‘That right, Ruy?’ said Mingolla.

Ruy shot Debora a resentful glance, then stalked from the room.

‘I was…’ Debora began.

‘I heard,’ said Mingolla.

‘I was trying to degrade him,’ she said. ‘I thought if he could see what a fool he was acting, he’d leave me alone. I think it worked.’

‘It won’t last,’ said Mingolla, throwing himself onto the bed. ‘The son of a bitch isn’t going to quit.’

‘Maybe not… but I want to handle him myself. Please don’t do anything foolish.’

‘How foolish am I allowed to be?’

She lay down beside him, flung an arm across his chest. ‘Please don’t do anything. Promise me.’

‘Sooner or later he’ll do something even if I don’t.’

‘He might not, he might get over it.’

‘Depends how far you’re willing to go. A quickie in some dark corner might diminish your air of unattainability.’

She frowned and edged away. ‘You don’t understand how hard it is having to fend him off. I know you don’t think—’

‘The thing is,’ he cut in, ‘I know you’re capable of screwing him if you thought it’d save the goddamn revolution. Maybe that’s the right attitude to take. Maybe we should all hop in the sack together and get rid of our frustrations.’

She tensed, and he felt her anger thickening the air. Laughter from the courtyard. Relaxed, confident Sotomayor laughter.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not you, it’s everything.’

‘Just be quiet,’ she said, turning to face the wall. ‘Let me alone.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But only if you let me touch you.’

Shortly after that he fell asleep with his clothes on, without making up. It had been a long time since he’d had a dream that he remembered, but that night he dreamed he was lying in a featureless void and straining to dream. At length he saw a dream approaching, a thin slice of vivid color and motion against the blackness. He awaited its arrival eagerly, but as it drew near he realized that the dream had come in the form of an enormous blade, and he awakened just in time to avoid being cut in half by it. He sat up in bed, frightened, wanting to be comforted, consoled. Debora was inches away, but half-believing that the dream had spoken to their irresolute condition, he doubted she could provide what he needed.

Two days after this, Mingolla broke into Ruy’s room and stole his notebook filled with poems and meditations about Debora. The notebook, he had decided, would give him the tool with which he could defuse Ruy as a threat; and yet he was not altogether sure why he wanted to defuse him, because he did not perceive Ruy as a serious threat. It seemed to him a whimsical act, one predicated on a desire to recalibrate his emotions, a motive similar—he suspected—to that underlying Ruy’s decision to pursue Debora. Seeing this resemblance to Sotomayor behavior in himself was alarming, but he was unable to deny the impulse.

The contents of the notebook made Mingolla envious. Ruy’s observations on Debora’s character were more detailed than his own, and though he chalked this up to the fact that Ruy had the advantage of distance, the rationalization failed to diminish his envy. A few of the passages were quite well written, and one in particular struck Mingolla with its intensity and sincerity.

This passage and others firmed Mingolla’s resolve in that they caused him for the first time to see Ruy as a man; he was not inclined to see him that way, and so in order to reduce Ruy once again to the status of a characterless enemy, he took an irrevocable action against him.

Twice a week Marina Estil held what she called ‘group therapy’ in her hotel. She had tried to persuade Mingolla to join in, but he had refused, not wanting to involve himself more than necessary in Sotomayor business. However, on the night after he stole the notebook, he went to the hotel for the purpose of attending one of these sessions. Marina’s hotel was located three blocks from the Casa Gamboa and served as lodging for the leaders of the negotiating teams, both Sotomayor and Madradona. Mingolla arrived a half-hour early, and rather than standing around the lobby, he went into the lounge and sat down in front of a TV set that was hooked to a satellite dish on the roof. He asked the lounge’s sole occupant—a young Madradona man—if he minded the TV being on, and then flipped through the channels until he came to one showing a line of plodding soldiers moving up a hillside under an overcast sky, and superimposed on this, shot in fiery letters, the legend: William Corson’s War Stories. Corson had visited the Ant Farm during Mingolla’s tour, and though Mingolla hadn’t met him, by all reports he was a good guy. Baylor had done an interview with him, and when Mingolla had asked what sort of man the journalist was, Baylor had only said, ‘The guy gets high.’ Which had been Baylor’s standard for acceptance. The credits rolled, and Corson strolled into view of the camera, the line of soldiers continuing uphill at his rear. He was bearded, tall, dressed in fatigues, with a hooked nose and fleshy lips; he looked, Mingolla thought, a little bit like a thinner, younger Fidel Castro.

‘Behind me,’ Corson said, ‘you see members of the First Infantry heading toward the fighting north of Lake Izabal. Once they cross that hill they’ll be in a hot zone, a zone that’s been hot for nearly three years, a battle without resolution. That fact speaks to the character of the war. Battles flourish like hothouse plants in the midst of pacified territory with no apparent justification other than a command strategy that can be best described as cryptic. All wars have their character. World War One was called the War to End War. World War Two was a righteous crusade against a legitimate madman. Vietnam has been countenanced as both an exercise in the demonic and as a gross political misjudgment. And this war… well, the poet Kieran Davies has pronounced it the vast sputtering signal of the Age of Impotence, the evil counterpart of topless tennis matches and fast food solutions to the nutritional problem.” Davies’s imagery has a basis in…’

‘Very sad,’ said a voice beside Mingolla.

The Madradona man had taken the adjoining chair. He was in his twenties, pudgy, smiling, wearing a red Coca-Cola T-shirt and chinos. ‘But soon,’ he went on, gesturing at the screen, ‘it will be all over, yes?’

Mingolla shrugged. ‘I guess.’

‘Oh, yes.’ The man patted his chest. ‘We will end it soon.’

‘Terrific.’

‘You are Meengolla, no?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I am Chapo. Pleased to meet you.’ Chapo held out a hand, and reluctantly Mingolla shook it. ‘Where are you from in the United States?’

‘New York.’

‘New York City? But this is wonderful! I am living a year in New York, in Green-witch Village.’

‘How ’bout that.’ Mingolla tried to get back into Corson’s monologue, but Chapo was relentless.

‘I love New York,’ he said. ‘I love especially the Mets. Such a wonderful team! Do you like the Mets?’

‘No.’

‘The Yankees, then?’

Mingolla nodded.

‘They are good, too,’ said Chapo with some condescension. ‘But I think the Mets are a little better.’

Mingolla stared grimly at the TV.

‘You are interested in this show?’

‘Right.’

‘I’m so sorry. I will watch with you.’

Corson had begun an interview with a crewcut kid younger than Mingolla, who was wearing an Air Cav patch on a nylon flight jacket. ‘Would you like to say anything to your parents… or your friends?’ Corson asked him.

The kid wetted his lips, looked at the ground. ‘Naw, not really.’

‘Why not?’

‘What’s there to say?’ The kid gestured at the soldiers, the jungle terrain. ‘Picture’s worth a thousand words, right?’ He turned back to Corson. ‘If they don’t know what’s goin’ on, me tellin’ ’em ain’t gonna help.’

‘And what do you think is going on?’

‘With the war? Fuckin’ war’s bullshit, man. This place’d be all right, wasn’t for the war.’

‘You like Guatemala, then?’

‘I dunno if I like it… it’s weird, y’know. Kinda neat.

’What’s neat about it?’

‘Well…’ The kid studied on it. This one time, I hitched a ride to Réunion with these minitank guys… they were convoying oil trucks along the Péten Highway. So one of the trucks turns over in the middle of the jungle, oil spills all over the fuckin’ place. Nothin’ can move till the spill’s cleared up. And alla sudden out of the weeds comes all these Fritos, man. They got little stoves and shit. They start cookin’ food. Fritters and chicken and stuff. Selling pop and beer. Like they been knowin’ this is gonna happen and they was just waitin’ for us to show. And there was girls, too. They’d take ya into the weeds and do ya. They wasn’t hard like the city girls. Sweet, y’know. It was ’bout the best time I had down here, and it was weird the way they was waitin’.’

‘You served in Guatemala, no?’ Chapo asked.

This time Mingolla was glad for the interruption; the interview had made him feel that he was watching a depressing home movie.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Artillery.’

‘It must have been horrible,’ said Chapo, and made a doleful face.

‘Wasn’t great.’

Chapo nodded, apparently at a loss for words. ‘Perhaps we can be friends,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will come to visit me in my room. I live on the third floor.’

Startled, Mingolla said, ‘Maybe… I don’t know. I’m pretty busy.’

‘I would like it very much.’

‘We’ll see.’

On the screen, the kid was talking about his duty. These choppers, man, they are fuckin’ fast. You come in off the sea, you’re so far out you can’t see land, and then the land pops up, green mountains, cities, whatever, like one of those pop-up birthday cards. And then you’re into the clouds. I’m talkin’ ’bout hittin’ at the guerrillas, now. Up in the mountains. So you’re in the clouds, and when you unbutton your rockets, all you see is this pretty glow way down under the clouds. Like glowing marble, that’s what it looks like. And the only way you can tell you done anything is that when you make a second pass, all those little hot targets on the thermal imager ain’t there anymore. You don’t feel nothin’. I mean… you do feel somethin’, but it’s different.’

That was enough for Mingolla, who still felt the deaths he’d caused. He got up, and Chapo, too, stood.

‘I hope I will see you again,’ Chapo said. ‘We can talk more about New York City.’

Stupid blocky brown face. Earnest smile. Common clay of the Master Race. Chapo’s ingenuousness—similar to that Mingolla had encountered in dozens of young Latin men—had sucked in him. Maybe it was for real, but Chapo was no less his enemy for all that.

‘Not a fucking chance,’ said Mingolla, and walked out into the lobby.

Marina’s bedroom was a touch more luxurious than those of the Casa Gamboa. Carpeted with a patchy shag rug. Wallpaper of a waterstained oriental design that might have been plum blossoms, but had worn away into a calligraphy of indefinite lines, with pale rectangles where pictures had once been hung. The bed was draped in a peach-colored satin spread that rippled in the light from a lamp on the night table. Seven Sotomayors, including Ruy, were seated on the bed and floor, and Marina, enthroned in an easy chair, led the discussion… less a discussion than a bout of fabulous confessions. Mingolla stood by the door, watching, listening. He had been disconcerted by Ruy’s presence, but he was now considering changing his tactics and confronting Ruy with the notebook rather than sandbagging him.

‘It was in April of the year,’ said one of the Sotomayors, a man named Aurelio, slightly older than yet strikingly similar to Ruy in appearance. ‘All that month I’d been feeling at loose ends. Even though I was involved in settling the Peruvian problem, my involvement wasn’t enough to prevent idle thoughts, and my thoughts came to settle on Daria Ruiz de Madradona, the daughter of my father’s murderer. She was also involved in the Peruvian operation, but that was not a factor in my decision.’

As Aurelio described the process of plotting that had led to his abduction of Daria, he maintained a downcast expression as if he were revealing a matter of great shame; yet his tone grew exuberant, his description eloquent, and the others, though they sat quietly and attentive, seemed titillated, leaning forward, breathing rapidly. Especially Marina. She had on gray slacks and a silver-and-gray blouse imprinted with a design of black birds flying between stylized slants of rain. Crimson lipstick gave her mouth a predatory sexuality, and her cheekbones looked as if they were about to pierce her skin. With each of Aurelio’s revelations, she appeared to sharpen, to become more intent and alive.

‘I don’t think,’ said Aurelio, ‘I’ve ever known myself as I did in that moment. My location in the world, in the moment. Certainly my senses had never been so clear. I took in every detail of the walls. The grain, the knotholes and wormtrails. All in an instant. I could hear the separate actions of the wind in the trees outside, and how it was flapping a piece of tarpaper on the roof. Daria was not a beautiful woman, yet she seemed unbelievably sensual. Fear drained from her face as she met my eyes, and I couldn’t hate her any longer, because I knew that this moment was more than mere vengeance. It was drama. Ritual and destiny coming together. And knowing this, knowing that she knew, there arose a kind of love between us… love such as arises between a victim and the one who is both torturer and bringer of mercy.’

After Aurelio had finished, the group analyzed his story, dissected it in terms of its bearing upon Sotomayor psychology, all with an eye toward repressing their baser instincts; yet their dissection had the prim fraudulence of sinners who were justifying their wickedness and pretending to be sad. Other stories were told, and Mingolla—seeing in their gleeful descriptions, their delight over their violent traditions, and their penitent pose a perfect setting for his presentation—bided his time.

After an hour of this, Marina asked if he had any questions, and stepping to the center of the room, he said, ‘Sure do. They might annoy you, but I hope you’ll answer them.’

‘We’ll do our best,’ she said.

‘From what I’ve heard tonight,’ he said, ‘and what I’ve heard before, it seems that a good many of your operations have been undermined by someone suddenly reestablishing the feud. And this usually happens at the last minute, right when success is at hand. Is that fair to say?’

One of the men started to object, but Marina interrupted, saying, ‘It’s not unfair.’

‘What makes you think that won’t happen here?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to prevent,’ said Ruy haughtily.

‘Right.’ Mingolla beamed at him, surprised to feel some fondness for him now that he had him in his grasp. ‘Anyway, there’s a casualness to your operations that makes me nervous.’

‘What are you leading up to?’ Marina asked.

He ignored the question. ‘Everybody except you has admitted to some sin. Don’t you have anything to confess?’

‘Marina is our exemplar,’ said Ruy with a measure of bitterness. ‘She’s blameless in all this.’

A smile carved a little red wound in the gaunt planes of her face. ‘Thank you, Ruy.’

‘You must have been affected by the feud in some way,’ said Mingolla. ‘At one of the negotiating sessions, Ruy mentioned something about your pain… something somebody’s uncle had done to you.’

‘Yes? What about it?’

‘I’d like to hear what happened.’

‘I don’t see the point,’ she said coolly.

‘There’s something I want to say, but I want to be sure of everyone before I commit myself.’

‘Very well… but I trust it isn’t just curiosity.’ She smoothed wrinkles from her slacks. Some years ago I was married to a Madradona…’

‘I didn’t know that ever happened,’ Mingolla said.

‘It was an attempt at ending the feud,’ she said. ‘I balked at it, of course. I’d been living in Los Angeles, and I’d become rather a free spirit. Quite undisciplined. Perhaps it was my father’s intention to check these tendencies, for the Madradonas are nothing if not disciplined.’ Laughter from the others. ‘Despite my attitudes, after the wedding I grew to respect and care for my husband… though I can’t say I ever really loved him. But I had sufficient confidence in the marriage to become pregnant. Things were going well for us, but then one day an old lover of mine came to visit, purportedly to offer his congratulations on the baby. In the course of our conversation he drugged me and laid me out naked on the bed. It was his plan to have my husband return home and catch us in flagrante delicto. And so it happened. I was just waking from the drug when my husband entered. He and my lover got into a terrible fight, and though I was still groggy, I tried to intervene. I received a blow in the stomach, and as a result I not only lost the baby, but was unable to conceive another. Later I discovered that my lover hadn’t been entirely to blame. My father-in-law had manipulated him with tales of my husband’s cruelty to me. He’d never accepted the marriage, and I guess the prospect of a child was too much for him.’ She glanced up at Mingolla. ‘Will that do?’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It was important.’

‘Now what’s this all about?’

He let his gaze swing around the room, lingering on Ruy, who was sitting on the bed. ‘I hear the negotiations are going well.’

‘Extremely well,’ said Aurelio. ‘So?’

‘Would you say they’re on the verge of success?’ Mingolla asked. ‘Isn’t this time frame the time of greatest risk, the time when someone is likely to lose it? To find some reason for blowing everything out of the water. Like with Tel Aviv.’

‘If you have something to tell us,’ said Marina, ‘I suggest you get on with it.’

Mingolla took the notebook from his hip pocket, unfurled it, and saw Ruy stiffen. ‘Ruy knows what I’m talking ’bout… don’tcha?’

‘Where did you get that?’ Ruy asked.

‘I thought so,’ said Marina, relaxing. ‘This has to do with Ruy’s fixation on your girlfriend.’

‘It’s more than that.’

‘I doubt it. I’ve seen this before. Ruy learned long ago that he can’t indulge his fantasies.’

‘Give me that,’ said Ruy, coming to his feet and holding out a hand. ‘You had no right to take it.’

‘We’re talking rights, are we?’ Mingolla shoved him back down. ‘How ’bout the right to some privacy?’

The other Sotomayors looked to Ruy as if expecting him to retaliate, but he only sat there.

Mingolla passed the notebook to Marina. ‘See if you don’t think this is evidence of something more than a fixation.’

Two of the men read over her shoulder as she studied the notebook, turning the pages with a flick of her forefinger. ‘Oh, Ruy,’ she said after several minutes, ‘Not again.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Ruy. ‘You don’t see how he… how he…’ He stood, sputtering. ‘She can’t bloom, she…’

‘You’re fucking ridiculous, y’know that, man?’ said Mingolla.

Ruy sprang at him, but Mingolla sidestepped, grabbed his shirt, and flung him against the wall face-first. Ruy sagged to the floor. Blood from his mouth left a red snail track on the wallpaper. ‘See there?’ said Mingolla. ‘Man’s outta control.’

‘You aren’t helping the situation by goading him,’ said Marina.

‘I want you to see what he’s capable of,’ said Mingolla. ‘It’s not my fault he’s the way he is, and if you don’t think he’s a threat… Hey! Let him go on with this shit. It won’t be long before he does something really stupid.’

Ruy groaned, rolled onto his back. Blood smeared his mouth and chin.

‘What do you suggest we do?’ Marina asked.

‘I met an old guy at the palace the other day… the caretaker.’

‘Eusebio,’ she said. ‘We can’t strip Ruy for something he might do.’

‘Then put him on notice. Seems to me the worst thing Ruy could imagine would be to lose his power.’

He could see the idea working in her face, in all their faces. They liked the thought of punishment.

‘Perhaps that is the best way,’ said Marina, and Mingolla thought he detected a deep satisfaction in her voice.

Ruy sat up, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. He gazed blearily at the others; he must have seen something in their faces, because he scrambled to his feet and made for the door. One of the men blocked his path.

‘You can’t listen to him!’ said Ruy, flicking his hand toward Mingolla. ‘He’s not one of us.’

‘Be quiet,’ said Marina.

You can’t do this,’ he said. ‘Not just on his word.’

‘We have your word, Ruy.’ She held up the notebook, and Ruy looked away.

‘Carlito won’t let you,’ he said weakly.

‘We’re not going to do anything,’ she said. ‘Not yet. But if anything happens to Debora or David, you’ll be held accountable. And not even Carlito will be able to help you then.’

Ruy stared hatefully at Mingolla.

‘You been a bad boy, Ruy,’ Mingolla said, and grinned.

‘I don’t want you talking to either of them without my permission,’ said Marina. ‘Is that clear?’

‘That’s hard to avoid,’ said Ruy. ‘I live in the same building, and I’m bound to run into them.’

‘Move,’ she said. ‘Move tonight. You can move in here, Ruy. You used to tell me how much you liked being near me. Now you have your wish.’

Ruy looked stricken. ‘I’m going to talk to Carlito about this. Right now. He’s not going to be happy.’

Marina turned to Mingolla. ‘Would you mind leaving us, David. Ruy apparently needs proof of our seriousness.’

‘What you gonna do to him?’

‘Give him a taste of what he’s risking.’

‘No!’ Ruy shouted it, wrestled with the doorknob, and was thrown back by two of the men.

Please, David.’ Marina gestured toward the door, and Mingolla crossed to it, taking pains to avoid Ruy’s eyes. ‘Oh, David!’ Marina called as he went out into the hall.

‘Yes?’

Her smile was the gracious smile of a hostess acknowledging the departure of a favored guest. ‘Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Gilbey’s friendship with Jack Lescaux gave Mingolla hope that he might restore Gilbey completely: friendship was such a human thing and so untypical of the armies. He was strong enough to effect this; he could feel strength like a heavy stone inside his head, wanting to explode, to exert itself upon some target. But he must not have had sufficient knowledge. Even had he been stronger and more knowledgeable, he doubted he would have been able to do anything for Jack. Most of the time Jack was barely capable of movement, and on the one occasion that Mingolla succeeded in getting him to talk at length, an afternoon they spent on the steps of the palace, it made him very unhappy. Mingolla asked how he had become involved with the families, and he replied, ‘It was somethin’ in the music they wanted… somethin’ they made me do.’ Mingolla assumed Jack had been forced to inject subliminals into his recordings, perhaps ones that would appeal to psychics; but the particulars didn’t interest him. If he were to try and root out every Sotomayor game, he would have time for little else.

Jack hummed, broke off, then rocked back and forth, smacking a hand against his thigh as if trying to recapture a rhythm. ‘Wish I had a billion dollars,’ he sang. ‘I’d buy myself…’ He made a fist, pressed it to his head. ‘I got a little of it,’ he said. ‘Little bit.’

‘Let’s hear ’er. Jack,’ said Gilbey.

Jack, a stressed look on his face, sang out again.

He faltered, appearing worried. ‘There’s more. I… I can’t get it.’

‘Take your time, man,’ said Mingolla.

After a minute, Jack sang some more.

Again he faltered, and Mingolla boosted his good feeling, started him singing a third time, but singing a different song, softer, almost chanted.

‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘Lots more.’

‘Y’should write it down, man,’ said Gilbey, pretending to write with the point of his machete. ‘Get some paper, and write it down.’

‘Yeah, okay,’ said Jack, scratching his head, and then burst into tears.

Mingolla put far more effort into Gilbey. Once, thinking a sexual experience might enhance his work, he dug up a woman for him, primed her with horniness, and staked her out in one of the empty buildings, a room with depressions in carpets of gray dust that testified to the long-ago presence of chairs and tables. The woman was pudgy, worn-looking, and Gilbey said, She’s a fuckin’ beast, man. I dunno ’bout this.’

The woman smiled and jerked her hips in invitation.

‘Well,’ said Gilbey. ‘I guess she got okay tits.’

Mingolla left them alone, and when he returned he found them both asleep, Gilbey’s hand resting in proprietary fashion on her hip. He wasn’t sure anything had happened, but afterward Gilbey did seem more his old self.

That same evening they walked out behind the palace, a spot from which they could see the barricade: a long flimsy wall of planks nailed into a gapped barrier ten feet high, with two guardhouses of equally crude construction behind it. Like kid’s clubhouses. A dirt road led across a grassy meadow from the barricade toward green hills in the distance, and Mingolla imagined stealing a jeep, ramming through the wall, and heading up into those hills. It was a pleasant fantasy, but he knew Debora would never go along with it. And anyway, it was likely they’d be killed in the process.

Jack curled up in the dust, and Mingolla and Gilbey sat on the rear steps of the palace. Mingolla could make out riflemen pacing behind the barricade. Twilight had thickened to dusk, and a scatter of stars picked out the slate-colored sky. The windows of the buildings set away from the palace showed black and unreflective, rectangles of obsidian set into palely glowing stone; the breeze drifted scraps of cellophane along the asphalt, and a scrawny cat with scabs dotting its marmalade coat came prowling past and stopped to regard them with cold curiosity.

Gilbey had stumbled across a splintered baseball bat, one that had probably been used as a weapon, and he was turning it in his hands. ‘Be neat, y’know,’ he said.

‘What?’ Mingolla was watching the shadowy figures of the riflemen.

Gilbey was silent for such a long time that Mingolla wondered if he had lost his train of thought. Get up a game,’ he said at last. ‘Be neat to get up a game. Think we could.’

‘A baseball game?’

‘Yeah, we could get some guys.’ He stared at the bat, gave it a tentative swing.

The idea of Gilbey with his dulled reflexes playing baseball depressed Mingolla. He pictured the ratty blond hair sheared away, the grime washed from the cheeks, the expression firmed into one of sour indulgence. But it didn’t work. The old Gilbey was dead, and the new Gilbey was moribund.

‘We could, uh… we could…’ Gilbey waggled the bat. ‘What’s wrong with me, man? Somethin’s fucked-up wrong, ain’t it?’

‘How ya figure?’

‘With me… wrong with me. And you’re tryin’ to fix it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla. ‘Somethin’s wrong.’

‘Can ya fix it?’

Mingolla didn’t feel like lying. ‘I don’t think so.’

Jack stirred in a dream, muttered, and Gilbey let out a thready sigh. ‘I couldn’t play too good, anyhow,’ he said, the words coming slowly, one at a time, like dollops of thick syrup. ‘Be okay to try, though. I could maybe play right field. Nobody ever hits one out there.’ He tapped the head of the bat against the asphalt. ‘Be okay, y’know. Right field’s not so bad… y’can see a lot from right field.’

Mingolla drew up his knees, rested his forehead on them, and closed his eyes, wishing he could shut himself down.

‘I used to play second… Babe Ruth League. That’s a tough league, man. ’Specially in Detroit. Them niggers come in all spikes and bad grins to second base, y’know.’ He put the bat on his shoulder, setting himself for an imaginary pitch. ‘Jack’s worse off than me, huh?’

‘He’s not so hot.’

‘He could just watch, then… or sleep. He likes sleepin’.’

What would really be neat, Mingolla thought, would be to take a gun and line up the Madradonas and Sotomayors in a row. Shoot them from the legs up, kill them a piece at a time. Or trigger whatever attack Izaguirre had planned in case the talks failed: Mingolla realized he had been hoping the talks would fail, that they would glance up one day at the whistle of an incoming rocket.

‘I could probably still hit a little,’ said Gilbey.

‘Let’s talk about it later, okay?’ said Mingolla. His heart felt lumpy, made of something disgusting and oily like lard.

‘Sure, it’s awright. Sure.’

The stars had brightened, the sky gone cobalt. Somebody at the barricade switched on a spotlight; a shining sword of light dazzled the windows of the empty buildings, swung above their heads.

‘Mingolla?’

‘Whatcha need?’

‘Member Baylor? What happened to Baylor?’

‘He went Stateside.’

‘Stateside.’ Gilbey said the word several times as if by repetition he could comprehend it. ‘’Member all them books he used to read? That science stuff?’

‘Science fiction.’

‘Yeah, science fiction.’ He appeared to be considering the term. ‘They was dumb, y’know, them books.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘ ’Cept for one. I read this one was pretty good.’

The spotlight swept back over them; the cat scampered for cover, and Jack rolled onto his side away from the glare.

‘Yeah, there was this one,’ Gilbey said. ‘I got into it.’

‘Which one’s that?’

‘It’s ’bout this alien. There’s only one of ’em… I mean there’s more’n one of ’em somewhere, maybe, but far as we know there’s only this one we found. And it don’t look like much. Kinda looks like this big brown rock, ’cept the surface of the rock is alla time movin’, shiftin’, and that’s cause it’s so fulla thoughts, the thoughts is pushin’ against its skin, y’know, makin’ it change shape a little.’

Out of boredom Mingolla had read most of Baylor’s books, and this one didn’t sound familiar. ‘So what happens?’

‘Nothin’ much,’ said Gilbey. ‘See, the thing is they wanna find out what the alien’s thinkin’, ’cause they found him driftin’ ’round out in space, and they figure he’s been ’bout everywhere, and they wanna see what it’s like where he’s been. So they look for somebody who can read his thoughts, but nobody can ’cause his thoughts are sharp, man! They hurt. It makes ya scream to feel his thoughts. But, anyway…’

Gilbey faded, and Mingolla rekindled him.

‘So did they find somebody?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Huh?’

‘Somebody to read the alien’s thoughts.’

‘Oh, yeah… yeah, they found this one guy who could stand the pain. And so he squats down beside the alien, touches him, y’know, and soon he realizes the alien’s thoughts ain’t nothin’ but memories shiftin’ ’round under his skin. Memories of every place in the universe, every place that ever was. This guy, now, he’s tough, but even so, man, he can’t take it for very long, and he can only stick with the alien a coupla minutes, long ’nough to get this one memory. After that he can’t deal with the alien no more, ’cause his… his… his tolerance, that’s it, his tolerance is all wore out. But he’s got this one memory, and that’s pretty good.’

‘What was it… the memory?’

‘It’s ’bout these people that live out on the edge of the galaxy, and when they die their bodies is stored on these big black ships that float ’round out in space, and once every while a captain comes on board each of the ships and starts flyin’ ’em toward the center of the universe, to this place where the stars is so thick there’s light all over. Big ol’ suns, man! Burnin’ every color, fuzzylookin’ like Japanese lanterns. The light from ’em kinda overlaps, y’know. Makes prisms and all. Energy’s flowin’ from everywhere. And the alien ain’t clear why this happens, why the bodies is shipped there. It ain’t ’cause alla energy and light gets ’em reborn or nothin’. It just does somethin’ to the bodies, maybe changes them into somethin’ that gets used again or somethin’… I dunno. But whatever, it’s a hard trip. Real hard. Mostly it’s hard ’cause it’s so bright, and the closer ya get to the center, the brighter it is. And it’s slow… the light slows things down. It’s so bright, it’s almost solid, the air out there, y’know. And the captains, as the voyage goes along, the less they see. They goin’ blind from the light. Their eyes get like crystals, hard and shiny and bustedlooking. And if they was by themselves, they wouldn’t be able to steer. But each of ’em’s gotta woman ’long with ’em, and as they come closer and closer to the center of the universe, the women they’re gettin’ more ’n’ more beautiful. And the captains, they so tight with these women, they love ‘em so much, it don’t matter none they blind, they can still see the women. The women they so beautiful, blind men can see ’em, and that’s how they steer, by keepin’ their eyes on the women, by watchin’ how beautiful they get, and what way they beautiful, and from that they can always tell where they are, what part of the center they travelin’ through. And in the end that’s how they come safe back to home.’

Mingolla had been trying to recall the book, but when the story broke off at this inconclusive point, he realized it must have been something of Gilbey’s own invention. It pleased him that his work with Gilbey had unearthed the story, for it substantiated his belief that Gilbey had always been hiding his intellect; but he was also saddened, because he had the feeling that the story was a core myth, a jewel Gilbey had been hoarding, and his having yielded it up now seemed a bad sign.

‘You made that up, didn’tcha, man?’ he said.

‘Naw, uh-uh.’ Gilbey ran a hand along the cylinder of the baseball bat. I read it somewheres.’

But in his face was sly delight, and Mingolla knew he was lying. ‘C’mon, man! You musta made that up.’

‘You liked it, huh?’

‘Yeah, it was good. How’d ya come up with it?’

‘Wasn’t me, man.’

‘Well, it was pretty goddamn good… good story.’

Looking pleased, Gilbey shook Jack and said, Wake up, man. Hey, Jack! Wake up.’

Jack rolled over, blinked, his face a map of fatigue and befuddlement.

‘I wanna tell ya this thing,’ said Gilbey eagerly. ‘It’s like…’ His eagerness evaporated, and he gazed off toward the barricade. ‘Goddammit, man! Ya missed it.’ Then he added in a tone of pride, ‘I ’membered this really cool thing.’

Mingolla had never questioned the existence of the old Oriental man in the wheelchair until he disappeared. Every previous morning, he had sat beside his garden, fiddling with his strips of paper, his back to the courtyard. But on this particular morning he was nowhere to be seen, and the maid Serenita informed Mingolla that he had been taken to the hospital. Disconcerted, Mingolla went to stand by the plot and was surprised to see that the garden had long since gone to seed, implying that the old man’s conscientiousness had been either a product of senility or mind control. But this wasn’t the thing that troubled Mingolla. He had been interested in the old man, had always intended to speak to him, and the fact that he hadn’t brought home the verity that this was how it went with other people: you had intentions toward them, imagined yourself developing relationships, fulfilling certain goals, and—as if intent were all that mattered, as if the function of other people were merely to provide a sort of inadequate moral tinder—you never realized any of them. Like with Tully, for instance. He kept thinking that they were going to grow close, but they had both been too busy to spare time for each other, he with his fraudulent acts of kindness and Tully with Corazon; the sense of imminent closeness had been sufficient to make him believe that they were satisfying the requirements of the bond of experience between them. It occurred to Mingolla that his father had been right about war, that it had, indeed, made a man out of him. He could see intricacies that he had never before suspected, he understood the nature of his responsibilities and felt able to handle them. But the problem was that he had not become a very nice man. Not even average. His capacity for violence and indifference bore that out.

The garden was small, about twelve by twelve, the dirt crumbly and pale brown, interwoven by crispy tomato vines, lumped by shriveled melons and the husks of dried squash. Wanting to feel dirt under his feet, Mingolla kicked off his shoes and stepped over the retaining wires. Clods broke apart between his toes, vines snagged his ankles, pebbles bruised his soles. He stood at the center of the garden, looking up at the white globe of the sun veiled by frays of gray cloud, and felt—as if the garden were a plot of free land—that from this vantage he could see the twisted processes of history that had brought the world to this moment: the invasions, the mercenaries, the manipulations of the United Fruit Company, the blundering American do-gooder, the development bankers and their evil puppets, the vast unprincipled sprawl of business interests. All that on one hand, and on the other, the bizarre tapestry of murder and revenge fabricated by the two families, a Borgia-like progression of poisonings, stabbings, explosions, and kidnappings that spread across the centuries, enacting its bloody scenarios in mansions and povertystricken villages and on battlefields. And these two vines of history grappling, twining, crowding out every other growth, leaching the earth, reducing it to an arid garden in which nothing would grow except an old man’s fantasies.

‘David! Where are you?’ Debora’s voice calling from the courtyard. She came running through the breezeway. Behind her, Sotomayors and Madradonas were gathered at the entrance to the pension, shaking hands and talking. ‘David,’ she said. ‘It’s over. We’ve done it!’

He was unable to break himself out of his shell of gloomy speculation and stood waiting for her to continue.

‘Peace,’ she said. ‘There’s going to be peace.’

Her face looked like peace. A beautiful, dusky, smiling Third World peace. But he couldn’t relate. ‘Good,’ he said, stepping out of the garden. He sat on the tiled walk, began putting on his shoes.

‘Don’t you understand?’ Her smile had faded. ‘The negotiations are over. The treaty’s going to be drawn up tonight and signed tomorrow at the party.’

‘A party?’ That, he thought, would be an appropriate absurdity.

‘Yes, there’s going to be a celebration at the palace.’

‘Swell.’

She frowned. ‘You act like nothing’s happened.’

‘Look…’ he began. Never mind.’

Her face softened, and she knelt beside him. ‘I know you haven’t had much faith in all this, but it really has worked. You haven’t seen how hard these people have been trying.’

‘Hope so.’

She drew back from him as if needing a new perspective. ‘Do you? Sometimes I think you hope just the opposite, though I can’t understand why.’

He felt distracted, disinterested. Her words seemed parental in their reflex and cautionary morality.

She slipped an arm around his shoulders. ‘You’ve been working too hard. But you’ll see. Come with me. Talk to everybody. That’ll make you feel better.’

He was torn between the urge to convince her of a sober truth and the hope that she would remain happy. But deciding that a moment’s peace was better than nothing, he let her lead him out into the congratulatory melee of the courtyard.

That night, an overcast night with a few stars showing between glowing strips of cloud, he fell into a conversation with Tully outside the pension. Gilbey and Jack were sitting by a potted fern in the entranceway, and Tully was standing with Mingolla about a dozen feet away, talking about Corazon.

‘Sometime I t’ink she gonna drop de act,’ he said. ‘But den de nex’ minute, she go inside herself again and I can’t touch her. Damn, I’m getting’ used to it… used to bein’ wit’ a woman dat frown when she feel a smile comin’ on.’

‘Maybe she’ll still come around.’ Mingolla looked back into the courtyard, where, illuminated by spills of light from the windows, three Sotomayors were sitting and chatting in aluminum chairs by the pool.

‘I guess it ain’t ’portant whether she do or she don’t,’ said Tully. ‘I be fah her even if she start t’rowin’ t’ings at me.’ He sucked at his teeth and pointed at the Sotomayors. What you be t’inkin’ ’bout dis shit, Davy?’

‘Tell ya the truth, I haven’t thought much about it at all.’ He studied the Sotomayors, taking the measure of their languid gestures. ‘Debora seems convinced that everything’s great.’

‘Dat don’t tell me what you feelin’.’

Mingolla let the question penetrate. ‘I guess I figure they’ll screw things up somehow. But there’s nothing I can do ’bout it.’

‘Yeah, dat’s my feelin’.’ Tully scuffed the sidewalk. ‘You still got dat map I give you?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You hang on to it, y’hear?’

‘You thinking ’bout running?’

‘All de time, mon. All de time.’ Tully stretched his arms overhead, his elbow joints popping. ‘Dis de kind of night it be good to have a drink or two.’

‘I gotta bottle.’

‘Dat’s not my meanin’,’ said Tully. I’m wantin’ some riot.’ He clapped Mingolla on the back. ‘Like dem nights over in Coxxen Hole. ’Member dem?’

‘Sure do,’ said Mingolla. ‘That was all right.’

‘Better dan all right.’ Tully made a disgusted noise. ‘Dat’s how I know dis barrio ain’t got no future. Dere ain’t no riot, no livin’ wild. De place dead already. Y’can’t make peace in a graveyard and ’spect anyt’ing good to come of it.’ He cast a sad eye on Jack and Gilbey. ‘How de fuck I ever wind up here?’

‘Beats me,’ said Mingolla. ‘I used to hate Roatán, but it’d sure look good to me now.’

‘Yeah, dat little island not so bad.’ Tully kicked a loose pebble on the concrete. ‘Ain’t it fuckin’ strange, Davy. How you start out wantin’ to rule the worl’, and in de end all you wanna do is hide from it?’

Mingolla had the impulse to open up to Tully about all his conflicting emotions, his regrets, but couldn’t find the words.

‘Look like you ’bout to choke on somethin’, mon.’

‘I was just thinking about intentions.’

‘Intentions? What ’bout ’em?’

‘Seems to me that if something gets to be an intention, that’s a guarantee it’s not going to get to be any more than that.’

‘What you talkin’ ’bout?’

‘Just bullshit, man. I’m all fucked up.’

‘Well, you ain’t alone in dat.’

They talked some more, but said little, and when Tully headed back to his hotel, Mingolla—followed by Jack and Gilbey—went back into the courtyard. The Sotomayors had vacated the pool area, and Mingolla sat in one of the chairs. Gilbey and Jack settled on the tiles nearby. The murky water in the pool shimmered with light from the windows along the courtyard, and watching the play of the ripples, Mingolla recalled the story in which it had been featured, described as ‘a sector of jade.’ The story had told how each afternoon the local newsboys would come running into the pension after selling their papers and dive in, vanishing beneath the surface, and the author had imagined them plunging down through moss and kelplike growths to some mysterious country. Feeling desolate, disoriented, Mingolla pretended his gaze had penetrated the depths and was carving a tunnel through the water, and after a second his pretense manufactured a reality, a future he was becoming less and less able to deny. He was standing in a dimly lit room furnished with leather chairs and glassed-in bookcases and an antique globe and a massive Spanish-colonial-style desk. The walls were of a grainy dark wood, and the rug was midnight blue emblazoned with tiny stars, making it seem you were having an audience in the vault of heaven with its chief magistrate, Dr Izaguirre, who sat at the desk, astonished, his gray goatee waggling as he said, ‘We thought you were dead.’

Through the picture window behind Izaguirre, Mingolla could see the desert glowing luminous white beneath a half-moon, and on the horizon a seam of infernal red brilliance that he knew were the lights of Love City, where soon—after taking an overdose of the drug that had funded this entire bit of history, taking it out of despair, out of the hope that it would bring him a vision of some tolerable future—he would wander in a delirium. And despite knowing the result of the overdose, he would go through with it, because even certain knowledge could not defuse his hope.

Izaguirre slipped one hand beneath the desk, and Mingolla said, ‘The alarm’s been cut, Carlito. And they’re all dead out there.’

‘Except for upstairs,’ said Debora bitterly, moving up next to him. ‘They’re alive upstairs… at least they’re breathing.’

Izaguirre was wilting under their stares, his waxy skin losing its tone, his flesh appearing to sag off the bone. ‘What are you planning to do?’

‘It’s already been done,’ said Debora. ‘Almost all of it, anyway.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘All but three of you have been eliminated,’ said Mingolla. ‘The three in the Pentagon. And we’re going to let you take care of ’em for us.’

‘That’s impossible! Only yesterday I was talking…’

‘That was yesterday,’ said Mingolla.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ said Debora. ‘Maybe some of them are salvageable.’

‘Don’t injure them,’ said Izaguirre.

‘Injure them?’ Debora laughed. ‘I’ve been fixing your broken toys for five years… all that had enough left to fix.’ She turned to Mingolla. ‘Can you handle him?’

‘Yeah… go on.’

‘What will you do with me?’ Izaguirre asked as Debora closed the door behind her.

‘You can figure it out, Carlito. Strip you down to nothing, then put you back together. You’ll be a time bomb like Nate and the rest. You’ll be almost alive, like your friends upstairs.’

‘You killed them all… all but three?’ Izaguirre seemed unable to absorb it.

‘It wasn’t even a challenge. We’ve learned a lot the last five years.’ Five black coffin-shaped years, each filled with the ashes of violence and betrayal.

‘If only three are left,’ said Izaguirre haltingly, ‘then there’s no need to…’

‘You know I’m not going to listen to this.’

Izaguirre straightened, composed his features. ‘No, I suppose not.’ His Adam’s apple worked. ‘All the work…’ He passed a hand across his brow. ‘What will you do afterward?’

‘There’s nothing left to do.’

‘Oh, you’ll find something. You’ve become like us, and you’ll have to do something.’ There was a note of triumph in Izaguirre’s voice.

‘I’m going to put you to sleep now,’ Mingolla said.

Izaguirre opened his mouth, but didn’t speak for a long moment. ‘God,’ he said finally. ‘How could this happen?’

‘Could be you wanted it this way. Like your story about the boarding house… it ends with the death of the author. This ending’s got your style, Carlito.’

‘I’m… uh…’ Izaguirre swallowed again. ‘I’m afraid. I didn’t think I’d be afraid.’

Mingolla had often imagined how he would feel at this moment, and he was surprised to feel very little, mostly relief; he had the idea that despite Izaguirre’s fear, the old man felt much the same.

‘Isn’t there anything I can do?’ Izaguirre asked. ‘I could…’

‘No,’ said Mingolla, and started to make him drowsy. Izaguirre half-stood, then dropped back into the chair. He tried to rouse himself, shaking his head and gripping the edge of the desk. A look of panic crossed his face. He sagged in the chair. His eyes widened, focused on Mingolla. ‘Please.’ The word came thickly like a final drop squeezed from him, and his head lolled back. His chest rose and fell in the rhythms of sleep, and his eyelids twitched.

Everything in the room—the whine of the air-conditioning, the gleams on the antique furniture, the false night of the rug—seemed to have grown sharper, as if Izaguirre’s wakefulness had been a dulling agent. The hard clarity of the moment made Mingolla uneasy, and he spun around, certain that some trap had been sprung behind him. But there was only the closed door, the silence. He turned back to Izaguirre. The old man struck him now as a kind of monument, a sad misguided monster trapped in a tar pit, a repository of history, and he realized how little he knew about the families, that most of his knowledge was factual, fleshed out by sketchy impressions. He perched on the desk, engaged Izaguirre’s sleeping mind, and went flowing down the ornate corridors of the blood past the memories of his life and into the memories of other lives, the years igniting and fading like quick candles, and he was the boy Damaso Andrade de Sotomayor on the day of his majority, standing in the gloomy main hall of the old house in Panama. All the family was there, silent in their ebony chairs, the arms carved into serpent’s heads, letting their thoughts blend in the dream, and he could feel the drug in his belly, a distant ache, and he knew the dream as voices, thousands of them speaking at once, not in words but in a wordless whisper that was the soul of the passion. The pale figures of his parents and cousins and uncle and aunts began to flicker like white flames in cups of black wood, and he, too, was flickering, his flesh becoming insubstantial, and the dream firing his thoughts with the joy of vengeance and power. And when the dreaming was done, when he was strong and steeped in the passion, it was his time to travel the path of truth, and without a word he went down the stairs into the labyrinth beneath the house, into the lightless corridors that led to the seven windows, toward the one window that would show him his place in the pattern. He walked for hours, afraid that he would never find his window, that he would be lost forever in the chill, clammy depths. But the stones of the wall, mossy and rough, were friends, and touching them he felt the energies of the past guiding him into the future, which was only the pattern of the blood extending forever. They were ancestral stones, as much of his blood as his family, and their domed shapes had the familiar textures of the Sotomayor skulls in his father’s library, and from them he derived a sense of direction and grew able to choose turnings that had the feel of the blood knot. And when he came at last to his window, he did not see it but apprehended it as a tingling on his skin. He thought this strange. Shouldn’t a window admit light… and then he saw light. Two crimson ovals like pupilless eyes that burned brighter and brighter as he approached. The window, he realized, was made of smoked glass, the sections fitted together with lead mullions into the image of a coal-black man wearing a crown of thorns, the eyes left vacant so as to allow the light of the setting sun to penetrate. The image frightened him, but he was drawn to it, and he pressed against the glass, fitting his eyes to those empty ovals, and across the valley he saw the blocky stone house of the Madradonas, looking monstrous in the sanguine light, appearing to be crouched, preparing to spring. He had seen the house many times, but this view affected him as had none other. Rage choked him, and he came to feel at one with the black burning-eyed figure against which he stood. The network of lead mullions seemed to correspond to the weavings of his nerves, to channel the bloody color of the west along them, filling him with a fierce intent, sealing the image of the ebony Christ inside him, and he knew that of all the children of his generation, he had been chosen to lead the rest against the Madradonas, that he was the arrow notched to the family bow, and that his entire life would be a flight toward the heart of that dark beast hunched and brooding on the far hill.

Mingolla broke contact and got up from the desk, went to the window. Pressed his forehead against the pane. The glass was cool and transmitted the vibration of the air-conditioner. He looked off at the distant city lights, thinking about the Christian girl, the holograph of Jesus walking around on her hand. It had always seemed that beyond that moment lay a beginning, but he had never been able to know it, to make it clear. Probably, he thought, it was just another glimmer of hope. Izaguirre stirred in his chair, and Mingolla realized he was delaying the inevitable. It wasn’t that he was troubled by what he had to do; he was simply weary of the procedure, of exposing himself over and over to the bad news about the human condition implicit in the fact that you could strip the mind to zero. He’d wait a few minutes more, he decided. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt. He pushed Izaguirre’s chair to the side and began emptying the desk drawers, wondering where the old man kept his drugs…

The swimming pool, blank and gleaming, with wavelets tapping the sides. Mingolla sat bolt upright, looked around, certain someone was sneaking up on him. But nobody was in sight. Voices from one of the rooms. A radio playing violin music. Gilbey and Jack still sleeping. He leaned back, stretching his legs, arranging his three visions of the future in chronological order. First the diner, the chat with the waitress; then the confrontation with Izaguirre, and then Love City. The aftermath of a hollow victory. He couldn’t understand how the picture drawn by the visions was compatible with the peace. Maybe they weren’t accurate. But he couldn’t bring himself to accept that. They felt real.

Gilbey shook himself, came to his knees, and, grateful for the interruption, Mingolla said, How ya doing?’

‘I was dreamin’,’ said Gilbey. ‘Dreamin’ ’bout the Farm.’

‘What ’bout it?’

‘Nothin’, just dreamin’.’ Gilbey sat cross-legged, stared at the rippling pod. ‘Y’know, it wasn’t so bad there… the Farm, I mean.’

‘It was a different bad than here.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’ Gilbey mumbled something else.

‘What’d you say?’

‘Didn’t say nothin’. I was gonna, but…’

‘You forgot, huh?’

‘Naw, I didn’t forget.’ Gilbey’s stare tracked around the courtyard, then settled on Jack. He bowed his head, rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I got it all right here to say… it’s all right here. But it just don’t fit into words.’

The emptiness of the palace’s main hall was scarcely compromised by the long tables that had been set up along the walls, bearing punchbowls and trays of sandwiches and pastries. Harsh white lights shone from the ceiling, giving the plastic the look of sweating blue flesh. Several hundred people were milling around, and the storytelling robot trundled back and forth, its Victorian drag striking an odd note among the celebrants, who were for the most part drably clothed. Speeches were given, proclaiming all present to be members of a single family dedicated to the principles invoked by the Peace of Panama… this a phrase much used during the evening. Piped-in music began to play, and Mingolla was persuaded to dance by a dwarfish Madradona woman, who smiled up at him with pointy-looking teeth, and whose torpedo-shaped breasts—confined by a tight red blouse—bumped against his belt buckle.

‘I’ve been dying to meet you,’ she said.

‘Looks like you made it just in time,’ he said.

She acted confused, then her smile returned. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you about our genetics program. Are you familiar with it?’

‘Nope.’ He maneuvered Dwarf Woman between couples. Clutzy dancers, all. Considering the significance of the party, it was—he thought—pretty fucking déclassé. Kind of a cross between a prom and a country club mixer.

‘Well…’ Dwarf Woman frowned at a Sotomayor man who had backed into her. ‘We’ve been hoping you’ll donate.’

‘Donate?’

‘You know… genetic material.’ Dwarf Woman put a girlish emphasis on the last words and tittered. ‘I apologize for being blunt, but I’m so excited by the prospect of blending the lines.’

‘Blending the lines, huh?’ The image of himself fathering generations of Mingolla-Madradonas and Mingolla-Sotomayors touched off a wave of giddy good humor in Mingolla. Tell you what,’ he said, laughing. ‘Why don’t you and me slip out back, and I’ll jerk off on ya. Maybe you can bottle it ’fore it dries.’

He’d expected an offended reaction, but Dwarf Woman dug her stubby fingers into his waist and kept smiling. It was an eerie screw-loose smile, and for a second he thought she might accept his proposition.

‘I’ve been warned about your iconoclastic tendencies.’ She said this in a dire tone as if warning him that she knew his secret. This is no joking matter.’

‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘I mean just from looking round the room, I can tell you people are in need of new blood. Especially you Madradonas. I never seen such twinky little fuckers. You could use a few height genes, right?’ He gave her a lascivious thrust of the hips. Yeah, sure. I can put a little length in your whatsitz.’

Dwarf Woman struggled to free herself, but Mingolla held her in a death grip, whirling her around. Crudity is hardly responsive,’ she said.

‘That’s me… hardly responsive.’ He bounced Dwarf Woman into a Madradona man who was dancing with a Sotomayor woman. ‘Oops,’ he said, and grinned.

‘Let me go!’ said Dwarf Woman.

‘Never,’ said Mingolla. ‘It’s just you and me from now on, shorty.’ He slung her into yet another couple and apologized, saying, Sorry, she stepped on my foot.’

‘I’m not going to forget this,’ she said venomously.

‘Me neither. God, what a night we’re gonna have! Somehow we’ll overcome the difference in height. Ever done it with ropes and pulleys?’ He hugged her even tighter. ‘Aw, babe! I can hardly wait till your teeny belly starts poppin’ out.’

Dwarf Woman writhed, wriggled, straining to get loose.

‘Jesus, that feels good!’ he said. ‘Do it again… a little lower.’

‘Let me…!’

He muffled her words by pulling her head into his chest. ‘On the first date?’ he said, lifting his voice so all could hear. ‘Well, if you’re game, I’ll give ’er a try.’

Suddenly weary of this, he turned her loose and performed a mock bow. ‘Thanks for the struggle,’ he said.

She stood fuming, sputtering.

‘You motherfuckers oughta be in cages,’ he said by way of farewell.

He walked over to the nearest table, swilled down a cupful of punch. Farther along the table, Tully, Corazon, and Debora were talking with several Madradonas. The Madradonas, it appeared, were busy consolidating their role as Masters of Efficiency. Marina Estil, all dolled up in a white silk dress and jade beads, disengaged from another group and came toward him. She was flushed, excited, and in her eyes, her smile, was an intensity that seemed a product of more than natural well-being. He wondered if she had taken something.

‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been so busy, I haven’t been able to get back to you about our little problem.’

‘Everything’s fine,’ he said.

‘I knew it would be.’ She called a hello to a passing Sotomayor, then turned back to Mingolla. ‘Are you having a good time?’

‘Marvelous,’ he said. ‘I’m in a transport of delight.’ He noticed Ruy sidling up to Debora.

‘Marina followed his gaze. ‘Don’t worry, David. He told me he was planning to apologize tonight. That’s all that’s happening. So’—she sipped punch, looking at him over the rim of the glass—have you been meeting people?’

‘Oh, yeah! Lots.’ He told her about the Madradona woman.

She giggled. ‘They’re so officious, aren’t they? Sweet in their own way, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re in a strange mood,’ she said.

‘I might say the same about you.’

‘Oh, I’m just exhilarated. You see, everything’s coming together tonight.’

Her words were oddly weighted, but he chalked that up to chemicals: he was now certain that she was stoned. ‘Everything?’ he said.

She stroked his arm, a seductive move. ‘Yes, and you’re responsible for a great deal of it.’

‘Is that right?’

‘I’ll tell you about it sometime,’ she said. ‘But not now.’ She pointed at the storytelling robot; it had rolled up to the table beside them a few feet away. ‘It’s time for the entertainment.’

‘Gather ’round, gather ’round!’ called the robot, and the crowd formed a semicircle about the table, chattering and laughing. From their ranks came one of the Sotomayor men leading a pale thin girl dressed in a white jumpsuit. She had a withdrawn, blank look, and Mingolla felt that this blankness was a sign of retardation. She stood half-hidden behind the robot’s skirts, nervous, twisting her fingers together.

‘Music, maestra!’ cried the robot, clapping its pink plastic hands.

The girl jumped, ducked her eyes.

‘Please, chiquita!’ The robot gave her a tickle, and she squirmed away. ‘Just a little music to make us all happy.’

The girl smiled wanly, and a moment later bell-like tones began to resound inside Mingolla’s head, tones of such purity that he was stunned by their beauty and failed to notice at first the simplicity and awkwardness of the tune they played. A nursery school tune. Played badly, the timing all wrong. Mingolla realized the girl was in essence a music box whose lid had been opened, a toy with faulty springs. The tune continued for far too long, and the crowd’s applause was polite but unenthusiastic. The girl was led off, and a young man with a similar blankness of expression was presented to the crowd. His eyes were deep-set, dark; he had a pinched, bony face, and his scalp showed through his crewcut. After being prodded by the robot, he stared at a point in midair, and a color materialized before Mingolla’s mind’s eye, a shade of blue so deep and rich that it seemed an emotion, embodying a sense of absolute tranquility. Other emotions were projected, each of them powerful in the extreme, and the crowd applauded each one wildly.

Marina stepped forward and addressed the crowd. ‘I believe we should show our appreciation to Carlito for this great work, for bringing forth flowers from these stones.’

The crowd applauded, and the applause evolved into a chant of ‘Carlito, Carlito, Carlito!’ that ended only when the dance music was struck up again. Mingolla stared into one of the punchbowls, thinking that he’d seen six-legged movement among the floating bits of rind and fruit pulp.

‘Hello, David,’ said a high-pitched female voice at his shoulder.

He spun about and looked up into the robot’s eyes. Behind occluded crystals, the cameras swiveled.

‘Don’t you recognize me?’ The robot clasped its hands over its ample belly.

For a moment Mingolla was at sea; but then, remembering the chopper and its divine pretense, he penetrated the disguise. Izaguirre,’ he said.

‘Good to see you again,’ said the robot. The pudgy pink face seemed to be regarding him with paternal favor.

‘Are you here in person?’ asked Mingolla, hoping this was the case, not knowing what he would do, but hoping all the same.

‘Oh, no. I’m in Costa Rica. But I’ve been keeping my eye on you.’ He essayed a daffy wink. ‘I’m most impressed with the work you’ve been doing.’

‘Are you now?’

‘Indeed! It’s remarkable. The results you’ve achieved put my poor efforts to shame.’

‘You’re just saying that.’ Mingolla offered the robot punch and spilled a cupful over its stiff yellow dress. Gee… lucky you didn’t short-circuit. By the way, what is your work? Entertaining at birthday parties?’

‘Still angry, I see. That’s good, David, that’s good. Anger can be a useful tool.’ The robot dabbed at the spill. To answer your question: No. No birthday parties. My work is much like yours, though I’ve been limited to producing singular effects as opposed to the overall rehabilitation you’ve been attempting.’

‘I haven’t been attempting shit. Just passing the time.’

‘Don’t belittle your efforts. No one would put in the hours you have without a strong commitment.’

‘Beats hanging out with your nieces and nephews.’

‘I won’t insist you agree,’ said the robot. ‘However, I do have a proposal for you. I’d like you to come work with me after all the loose ends are tied up down here.’

‘Naw,’ said Mingolla. ‘I’m going home, gonna sit on the beach.’

‘You can do both.’

‘You work in the States?’

The crystal eyes tracked back and forth across the dance floor. ‘I see no harm in admitting it at this juncture. Yes, I have a home there. I think you’d find it an amiable atmosphere.’

‘Where is it?’

The robot gave out with a fey titter. ‘I believe I’ll keep you in the dark about that for the time being.’

Not as much in the dark as you think, asshole, Mingolla said to himself. Some place with dry desert heat and a lot of horny people. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Scared of me or something?’

‘Not really, David. You’re quite formidable, I admit. But we’ve been around for a long time, and we know how to deal with strength.’ The robot trundled back a foot, then forward the same distance, as if gearing up for a leap. ‘Now about my proposal…’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘A talent like yours won’t lie dormant, David. What else is there for you to do?’

‘Could be I’ll go back into the killing business. The world can always use another assassin.’

The robot’s great oval head twitched. ‘I’m sorry you have so much resentment.’

‘It’s not resentment,’ said Mingolla. ‘It’s disgust.’

‘I’m aware that—’

‘You aren’t aware of shit!’ said Mingolla. ‘The things you bastards…’ He caught himself, not wanting to lose it completely. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe all I can do is try to fix what you people have broken.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ said the robot. ‘That’s exactly how I feel.’

‘Really?’

‘Do you think I’m without feeling?’ the robot asked. ‘Don’t you know how appalling I find what we’ve done, what we’ve had to do?’

The robot embarked upon what Mingolla was coming to view as the classic Sotomayor rap, You Can’t Make an Omelet without Breaking Eggs, and We Will Spend Our Lives Redressing All Wrongs. Izaguirre’s version was superb, heartfelt, and eloquent, and Mingolla had no doubt that he believed every word. He promised Izaguirre that he would give serious consideration to his proposal and that he would try to put his resentments behind him; but after the robot had trundled off to visit relatives, he found that his tolerance of the proceedings had been reduced to zero. The scales had fallen from his eyes. Everywhere he looked he detected the residues of old hatreds. Whispers behind hands, scowls, poisonous stares. And there were fresh hatreds as well. Those he detected in the standoffishness with which the Madradonas and Sotomayors treated their new allies, the drug-induced psychics. The shoddiness of the party, the schmaltzy music, the whirling unlovely couples, the mutant sideshow, the high tech grotesquerie of Izaguirre’s robot: the sinister aspects of all this seemed to have undergone an intensification. He might, he thought, have been standing in Berlin decades ago, watching the burghers ratify their allegiance to the lean, cold National Socialists, disguising their intrinsic meanness and paucity of spirit with shabby pomp and sprinklings of glamour. This gathering had no less potential for nastiness, for vicious perversion, and he perceived in it the shape of the world to come, one not so different from the old. The feud would resurface, with the added bloodiness of a new feud between the families and their drugged creations, and the result would be a world of back-fence wars and heavy tensions and near-apocalypses. Or perhaps a total apocalypse. The families’ propensity for oversight might well allow for this significant difference. But whatever ultimacy they might contrive of the future, of one thing Mingolla was sure: he would not survive to see it. Wherever he turned, people looked away from him, not wanting to be caught staring. That consensus interest alone was enough to damn him. Sooner or later somebody would decide that he was too powerful to trust, or would make a judgment based on a more personal issue.

He spotted Debora standing with Tully and Corazon on the far side of the hall, and he crossed to them, bumping into ungainly Madradonas and graceful Sotomayors. ‘I’m gonna take a walk,’ he said to Debora as he came up. ‘You be all right?’

‘You look pale,’ she said. ‘Are you sick?’

‘Something I ate.’

‘You be missin’ all de fun, mon,’ said Tully drunkenly; he gave Corazon such a fierce squeeze that Mingolla half-expected to see her rosy eye pop out.

‘I’ll go with you,’ said Debora; but she didn’t seem eager to leave.

‘Naw, I just wanna walk a little. I’ll take Gilbey and Jack, and I’ll catch ya back here or at the pension.’

He turned to go, but she stepped in front of him. ‘Is anything wrong?’

It was a temptation to tell her all he’d been thinking, but he knew she wouldn’t buy it. Nothing serious,’ he said. ‘I’ll see ya later.’

As he headed for the door, various of the families acknowledged him with smiles and nods. So sincere, so unassuming. He smiled back, hating them all.

Clear night, the stars pointy and bright, so regularly spaced that the strip of blue darkness overhead looked like a banner laid across the rooftops. Mingolla felt at ease walking out among the dead. The dead could be trusted, at least. Their dim urges were not informed by greed or lust; their memories did not inspire perversity, but were merely unresolvable longings for a world they could not quite recall. He liked the silence of the street, too. Silence was a blue-dark flow through the claustrophobic canyons of the barrio, carrying his reflection smoothly along in the windows of the stores, past the logjams of shadowy figures in the gutters, and he thought it might not be so bad to enlist in those shadow armies, to breathe the poison that made them slow, to follow the orders that permitted them to indulge in the last real reason for living. He increased his pace, swinging his arms, marching, and Gilbey and Jack had to break into a stumbling run to keep up. At last he stopped in front of the store that once had sold religious items and looked at himself in the ranked mirrors. An infinity of starlit Mingollas, all of them dark, with glittering eyes. Studying the reflections calmed him. He turned his head, and the reflections followed suit. He put his hands on his hips, moved toward the window, and an army of Mingollas, bold and undaunted, approached for consultation.

Pity, he thought, that they weren’t magic mirrors. He’d summon his friends and family to appear, give them the benefit of his wisdom. Not that he had a lot to give. Just one word: Panama. He’d say it differently to each of them. Softly to old girlfriends, to Long Island Woman, letting them know how lucky they were as Americans to be insulated against so much painful reality. And to his old buddies, he’d offer it as an admonition, shock them into draft-dodgery. And to his father, yeah, to his father he’d pronounce it as a cross between a whisper and a hiss. The word would cloud the mirror, translating into a gas the color of the night sky and the shadows, one that would envelop his father’s head and convey to him the dark flash of being, send him reeling, choking on quintessential Panamanian truth, and a moment later actuarial reality would knock on the door, and Mom would have lovers in Florida till she was eighty. Wow! What a gal!

Panama.

Not what he’d expected, nosiree!

He hadn’t reached the topless country of white beaches, the tanned coast of movie star tits and coco locos, the loll of brochureportrait dewy daughters of the idle isles, and you got American money, Jim, this land is your land, for rape, rent, and shopping mall development… whatever’s your pleasure. No, he’d reached the bloody republic of history, where Colombian pirates raided the coast and screwed their victims’ corpses, where once a band of white sailors had become headhunters and cannibals, where Chinese railroad workers had drowned themselves by the hundreds when their opium ran out, where a little weed grew that gave you the power to raise armies of the dead.

Where a man named Carlito had been born.

Panama… little shiver of three syllables.

Then the word seemed to acquire a new meaning, to tell of green hills rising beyond a barricade, of Daríen, the cloud forest, the lost tribes, the witch-men and their thoughts like streamers of mist.

That Panama, now… that might just be an option after all.

Jack and Gilbey edged closer as if his longing for escape had spoken to them, and something stirred in the gutter at Mingolla’s feet. A thin shred of a man wrapped in tatters of brown cloth, stinking of garbage. Mingolla went to his knees beside him, looked into eyes empty and doting as a dog’s. The man’s lips were scabbed, and his nose had been broken; strings of bloody mucus hung from his nostrils, thick and webbed like macramé. He reached out his hand, clutched at Mingolla’s arm, and Mingolla, his bitterness swept away, began to work on the man’s mind. Behind him, a rustling, a shifting, but he paid it no attention.

Then Gilbey said, ‘Watch it!’

Mingolla glanced up, saw figures silhouetted against the stars, looming above him, and one, cowled, its face an oval of darkness, swung at him with something long and crooked. He twisted away, but the club struck the side of his head, sending white lights shooting through his skull, and he fell on his back. Gilbey hauled him up, dragged him onto the sidewalk, and he had a dizzy glimpse of hundreds of people choking the street, shuffling forward, making no sound other than the glutinous passages of their breath. Eyes like holes cut in dirty sheets, and weapons at the ready.

Glass shattered.

Gilbey jerked him around to face the store. Jack was smashing the window with his crowbar, clearing away hanging icicles of glass. Gilbey dragged him through the window, into the mirrored showroom. He kept blacking out, floating back to consciousness, seeing himself in the mirrors. Open-mouthed; a black forking of blood from his hairline. Behind them, the army converged on the broken window, pressing inside, unmindful of the spears of broken glass that pierced them. Mingolla tried to strike at them with his mind, but couldn’t focus and was pulled past his floundering mirror images and down a narrow corridor toward the back door. The knob turned in Gilbey’s hand, the door gave a little, but was stuck. Gilbey dropped his machete and wrangled with the knob.

Mingolla leaned against the wall, looking down at the machete. It was a long way off, spinning, receding, and he wasn’t sure he could reach it. But if he could reach it… well, he knew about machetes. Yes, indeed! He bent at the waist, swayed, and in righting himself, managed to scoop up the machete. The hilt was greasy with Gilbey’s sweat, the rust and blood on the blade gleamed in the light from the transom. Its heft stabilized Mingolla, and he turned to face the army.

The corridor was just wide enough for two abreast, and the army surged into it, grunting, bumping into each other, unable to master the tactics of two-at-a-time. Mingolla swung at the first to come within range, slashed a chest, a belly, drawing lines of blood in gray flesh. Two of them fell, then a third. He chopped at the shoulder of an old woman whose shawl had slipped down to blind her, he spitted a young man and kicked him away. With a screech, the door came open, and Mingolla backed into an alley almost as narrow as the corridor. Blocked at one end by a high brick wall, at the other by more of the army. Gilbey took a stand beside him, wielding a two-by-four, and Mingolla, retreating toward the brick wall, slashed the gut of a shirtless man whose skin hung in folds about his waist. He should be feeling something, he thought. Fear at the least, because he likely was going to die: there were too many of them, their heads bobbing, eyes slits of ebony, pale skin showing through rents in their clothing. And regret at killing his ex-patients. Surely he should feel regret. But it was as if the blow to his head had reduced him to their state, to an emptiness empowered by a command, swinging the machete, a little faster and more accurate than they, yet equally singleminded. No shudders flowed along the blade—their lives weren’t stubborn enough to produce such phenomena—and when their blood spattered him, it dripped from his arms with the slowness of heavy machine oil. Flesh Dummies with Real-Life Organs. There was a sweet brainless appeal to cutting them down, a muscular pleasure in a stroke well conceived and nicely executed, and Christ, was he ever doing a good job! Piling up the bodies. They slipped and flailed as they clambered over the pile. Easy to pick off. He swung, connected, biting to the bone. Swung, connected, swung, connected. Should be a work song to sing while he chopped. Well, I’m gon’ take dis machete… Jesus fuck! The alley snapped into horrid focus for Mingolla. He saw his last victim writhing as slow as an earthworm at his feet, shoving guts back into his belly. Once again he tried a mental assault, and as he did, this time succeeding, he realized that in hiding his power from the families, he had hidden its true extent from himself as well.

He felt a sun was inside his head, a heavy black sun shedding lines of force, and he sensed the minds of the armies, those in the alley, those in the store and on the street, sensed them in the way a constellation might know the fires that comprised its shape. Sensed their fragility and vacancy. Some of those near him fell, others staggered and leaned against the walls for support. He had no pity for them. They were unimportant, incidental, and he had wasted too much time with them as it was. A feeling of grim righteousness stole over him, so profound an emotion that it seemed a physical condition, a cellular affirmation of the need to strike back at whoever had tried to kill him. He exulted in the feeling and imagined himself confronting his enemy.

Ruy.

Oh, yeah! Had to be Ruy!

The army rustled, stirred by the wind of Mingolla’s anger.

He pushed through the men and women in the alley, shouldering them aside, unconcerned by their proximity… although he didn’t like touching them, subject to an irrational fear that bits of their substance would flake off and cling to him. He weaved through the motionless dark figures thronging the store, catching sight of himself among them in the silvered mirrors, a man hiding among mannequins. He’d forgotten about Gilbey, but as he moved into the street, he noticed him missing. He turned to the store. Gilbey was kneeling next to a body that lay half-in, half-out of the shattered window. A crowbar beside the body’s outflung hand.

‘C’mon, Gilbey,’ he said.

Gilbey’s hand fluttered over the body; he might have been searching for a switch with which to reactivate it.

‘There’s nothing you can do for him,’ said Mingolla, laying a hand on Gilbey’s shoulder.

‘Leave me alone!’ Gilbey knocked away his hand.

His eyes were glistening, and Mingolla wondered at this, at tears from Gilbey.

‘I…’ Gilbey looked at Mingolla and said his name a couple of times in a quizzical tone as if it meant something rare and unfathomable.

‘What is it?’

Gilbey shook his head, smoothed Jack’s rumpled shirt.

It was useless to continue their charade of friendship, Mingolla realized; it had been a sentimental mistake to distinguish Gilbey from the others, to pretend he was alive and well. There was no room for sentiment here. He walked away from Gilbey, resisting the impulse to say goodbye, and, using his reflection in a store window, he set about cleaning the blood from his face and arms. Around him, the dead stood stockstill like statues in a street scene by De Chirico. He could almost hear the vibration of their emptiness, their longing for purpose, and he knew how to ease that longing, he knew the purpose for which they had been made.

Anger had always been big in him, but what he felt now was anger come to fruition, anger that seemed a separate shape walking in his body, a glittering man of furious principle. His anger spread to infect the army, and as he hurried toward the palace, shadows pushed themselves up from the curbs and doorways and fell into step behind him. The moon was up, and the walls of the buildings glowed with such brilliance that he could make out the gray patches where the whitewash had flaked away. More than ever, the narrow streets reminded him of canyons, and with their ragged hair and primitive weapons, the army might have been cavedwellers on their way to engage a neighboring tribe. Their skin looked as pale and crumbly as cheese, and their eyes had the reflective blackness of the window glass.

When he reached the street that opened onto the parking lot in front of the palace, he divided the army into two forces, sending one on a circuitous route in back of the palace toward the barricade and instructing the others to wait in the shadows until summoned. Walking across the parking lot, he felt calm in the midst of anger, as if the core of his personality had separated from the rest and was observing the goings-on. Parked by the steps were a number of jeeps, and he was pleased to see that most had keys dangling from their ignitions. Inside, the party was in full swing, the atmosphere more drunken than when he had left. Madradonas and Sotomayors tripping the light fantastic to the strains of a jazzy dance tune; the storytelling robot stood unmoving in a comer, switched off. Probably past Izaguirre’s bedtime. As he worked his way through the dancers, Mingolla smiled and nodded to whoever caught his eye. ‘Lovely evening,’ he said. ‘Wonderful party.’ And then, pitching his voice so low that they couldn’t be sure what they had heard, he would add, ‘You’re gonna die,’ and smile more broadly. Debora was hemmed in against a table by a group that included both Ruy and Marina, and Mingotla insinuated himself into the group, stood next to her. ‘Where’s Tully?’ he whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think they went back to their hotel.’ She looked at him askance. ‘You’re bleeding! What happened?’

He touched his brow, his fingers came away red. ‘Got a little bump,’ he said, smiling at Ruy. It was too bad about Tully and Corazon, he thought. But he wasn’t going to postpone things. They would just have to fend for themselves.

‘That looks serious,’ said Marina. ‘You should have it tended to.’

She was acting nervous, fidgeting with her skirt, unwilling to meet his eyes.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, feeling a heady mixture of rage and glee. The blue plastic shell of the palace suddenly seemed the inside of a vast skull, Carlito’s skull. In the beams of light slanting from the ceiling he saw the haywire geometries of Carlito’s thought; the air had the stink of his stale brainwaves, and the dancers, the group by the table, the inanimate robot, all of them were the sorry creatures of Carlito’s imagination, whirling and talking and pretending to be real, each of them moved by some strand of plot or whimsy. But that was coming to an end. He pictured the blue walls cracking, unable to contain the power that Carlito had inadvertently kindled.

‘I’ve had an interesting time tonight,’ said Mingolla. ‘What you might call a real eye-opener, isn’t that right, Ruy?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Ruy said.

‘No, I bet you don’t.’

‘You should have that cut seen to,’ Marina said with some agitation. ‘I’d be…’

‘Don’t trouble yourself.’ Mingolla glanced around at the others; they were staring at him with puzzlement as if they sensed something imminent, but weren’t sure what, and though he had planned to wait until he and Debora got clear, he realized that now was the time, that he couldn’t leave without at least witnessing the beginning of the end. That he, like Carlito, delighted in dramatic presentation.

He took Debora’s arm, steered her away into a clear space at the edge of the dance floor. He turned back to the group by the table. They looked nervous.

‘Somebody tried to kill me tonight,’ he said.

Somebody turned off the music, and everyone was whispering.

‘It’s not that important for the culprit to be singled out’—he raised his voice—‘because every damn one of you is guilty. But I think it’s appropriate that some punishment be meted out.’

Marina pushed through to the front of the group. ‘How did it happen, David?’

‘Somebody sicced the army on me while I was walking,’ he said.

‘Ruy!’ She spun about to face him.

‘It wasn’t me!’ he said. ‘I’ve been here all night.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Mingolla called out to the dancers, ‘How ’bout some more entertainment, folks?’

‘I wouldn’t risk myself just to get back at you,’ Ruy said to Mingolla.

‘Who was it, then?’

Ruy was caught without an answer for a moment. He searched the crowd for a likely candidate. ‘Marina?’ he said.

She looked injured, disappointed, like a teacher let down by her prize pupil.

‘It was her… don’t you see?’ Ruy said to Mingolla. ‘She’s trying to get back at me, trying to set me up.’

‘My God, Ruy,’ Marina said, and gave a pitying laugh.

‘It had to be her,’ said Ruy. ‘All these years she’s pretended that she’s forgiven me, but I knew she hadn’t.’

‘Forgiven you for what?’ Debora asked.

‘Years ago,’ said Ruy. ‘I did something to her. I didn’t mean to, I was crazy about her. But…’

‘You’re the one who made her lose her child!’ said Mingolla, putting together Marina’s flighty behavior that evening with her pleasure in punishing Ruy, with other hints and clues.

‘This is ridiculous!’ said Marina.

‘Yes, yes!’ Ruy moved closer to Mingolla, eager now. ‘And she’s been crazy ever since. But she’s managed to make everyone think her craziness is something else. Dedication, efficiency. She’s just been waiting her chance. She knew I’d be accused if anything happened to you.’

Guilt was plain in Marina’s face, but Mingolla was unable to redirect his anger; the fact of her treachery was not at all surprising, considering what Ruy had done, and he had hated Ruy for too long to give up his vengeance. In any case, he wasn’t concerned with specific guilt, but rather with example, and Ruy, with his pleading manner, his sweaty fear, made a perfect example.

‘’Bye, Ruy,’ he said, and struck with stunning force.

Ruy sagged, his knees buckling, and went down on all fours. His saturnine face emptied, and he collapsed onto his side. Mingolla stood over him, plucking at his mental knots, undoing them one by one. ‘What we call this, folks,’ he said in a lectoral tone, ‘is field-stripping the human mind. Easy as pie once you get the hang of it.’ Ruy tried to speak, but succeeded only in making ugly dream noises. His hands scrabbled on the floor, his legs twitched, and he gazed up at Mingolla, his mouth working, his brow creased, as if trying to recall something important, something that would save him. ‘Doesn’t take long at all, as you can see,’ Mingolla said. ‘Be glad to give lessons.’

The Madradonas and Sotomayors were silent, their expressions ranging from the horrified to the bemused.

‘Know where you are, Ruy?’ Mingolla asked with vast solicitude.

Ruy looked worried. ‘I… unh… I…’

‘Real good, Ruy.’ Mingolla gave his shoulder a pat. ‘You’ll make a terrific soldier. Defending the Sotomayor honor. Shitting in the street, clubbing the other zombies. You’ll do just fine.’

Ruy ventured a weak smile.

‘But it’s gonna be tough. Know how tough it’s gonna be?’

Ruy had no idea, but was all ears.

‘Lemme show ya.’ Mingolla seized Ruy by the shirtfront and began to slap him. Each slap seemed to win a little battle in his heart, to wipe out the last vestiges of compassion.

Somebody grabbed Mingolla from behind, but he shook them off and sent a wave of hatred across the dance floor, a signal powerful enough to summon the army. The families retreated, leaving him and Debora and Ruy in a cleared circle. He studied them, and they returned measuring stares, looks of appraisal. He saw that they weren’t upset by what he’d done; they were merely gauging his relative worth, the risks involved in dealing with him. They appeared to have no conception of defeat.

‘We understand your reaction, David,’ said one of the Sotomayor men. ‘But we can’t let you take matters into your own hands.’

‘Show’s not over, folks,’ said Mingolla. ‘Time for the big finish.’

A noise behind him. He turned, saw Marina kicking Ruy, who was curled up, trying to protect his head. Mingolla caught her arm, ripping a seam of her silk dress, and backhanded her to the floor. She rolled onto her stomach, sat up, demented-looking, all her elegance dissipated. She went crawling back toward Ruy. Mingolla shoved her away with his foot.

Hubbub at the entrance, a scream, people milling.

Ragged figures were crowding through the door. Mingolla pulled Debora against the wall.

‘What did you do?’ she said, pushing him away.

‘They tried to kill me, dammit!’

‘You shouldn’t…’ She broke off, looking broken, defeated. Her shoulders slumped, and she stared out at the dance floor.

It was strange, those first moments of confrontation between the families and their former victims. Haggard men and women, stumbling, blinking at the lights, looking—despite the urgency of Mingolla’s powerful command—bewildered, uncertain, like beggars allowed into the throne room. Some stood fingering their rags, hands to their mouths, in attitudes of humility and shame. But only for a second. Then they shuffled forward, intent on their chore. The Madradonas and Sotomayors were aghast, less terrified than affronted… or so it seemed to Mingolla. And as the attack began they fixed their eyes on the army, confident, trying to influence them. It was only when they discovered that Mingolla’s influence was too ironclad for them to affect that they displayed fear, and by then the army was upon them. A grizzled heavyset man struck first, impaling a pale skinny woman with a pitchfork, walking her backward into the center of the room; she plucked at the tines, open-mouthed, too shocked to scream. An old woman stabbed at a fallen man, her head thrown back like that of a triumphant animal. Marina Estil turned to run and was struck in the neck with a hoe wielded by a young boy; he hacked at her, miring her white silk dress with blood. There was an awful clumsiness to these assaults, a dreamlike momentum, and had the odds been less, the families might have survived; as it was, quite a few were managing to escape out the door. But the odds were too great. All around the room, huddled groups of the families were trying to beat off dozens of attackers; their shouts and screams, bright splinters of sound, were too energetic to suit the slow murders taking place. The blood of the families shimmered like a rich yield seeping up from between the seams of the fake gray stones, and everywhere were instances of courage: Madradonas saving Sotomayors and vice versa, as if in death they were at last uniting in a common cause. He felt no pity for them, yet he saw in their dying a sad inevitability, a summation of centuries of death, a pattern resolving into a knot of blood and fear, cinching tight about the neck of a monster whose neck stretched back into colonial days. And he saw, too, the indulgence of his own act of vengeance, how it had been a reaction worthy of the families, equally as unthinking and with a typically horrid result. But he wasn’t tempted to interfere.

He guided Debora along the wall, shielding her against anyone who headed their way, warding them off with doses of fear, and they moved through the massacre unscathed, like saints immune to fire. But as they drew near the door, Mingolla began to feel an intense sadness and to hear a pure simple music inside his head, tones of crystalline purity. Faint at first, but stronger and more pervasive with every second. His step faltered, and he spotted the girl and the young crewcut man who had ‘entertained’ the gathering standing beside the door, their faces empty, their eyes squeezed shut in concentration. Bells and sadness, sadness and bells. Mixing into a fluid heavy as mercury, slowing and dimming him. He tried to throw off the sadness, to muffle the bells, but his panic didn’t catch, just flared briefly and went out, and it didn’t seem worth the effort to fight anymore. The sad blue music was killing him, chilling him, tolling and tolling, a mournful angelus that made him long to grow slower and slower, to fade with the vibration of the ringing notes, receding forever into a place he could almost imagine, gray and secret deep, the bottomland of the spirit, a little hollow large enough for the soul to curl up in and sleep, and even the screams and shouts were knitting into music, a choral counterpoint. He wondered why Debora wasn’t doing anything, why she was just standing there, wasn’t she going to help… it didn’t matter, it was better to fade, to lean against the wall and let the sadness and the music vibrate inside him, breaking down the structures of his thought, and it wasn’t really so bad, this emptying, this winnowing, like the way you disappear into sleep, cell after cell shutting down, vision narrowing… and then there was something hot inside him, something charged and driven, and he felt Debora joining her strength to his, that twisting fevered energy building into a red noise of thought, of anger and loathing for what was happening, and the little girl shrieked, staggered away, and the crewcut man began to shake, he was biting his lower lip, blood filming over his chin, and the music and sadness splintering into fragments of terror and cool sound.

Mingolla stepped close to the crewcut man, grabbed the front of his jumpsuit, kneed him, let him fall. He turned to Debora, pulled her through the door. ‘What the hell were you doing… waiting like that?’

‘You weren’t doing anything! Why should I?’ She reached out to him, but withdrew her hand. ‘For a second, I just didn’t care anymore… about anything.’

‘Dammit!’ he said. ‘You…’

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t feel like that!’ she said, halfway between anger and tears. ‘You feel like that all the time, and it’s all I can do to keep going in spite of it. I…’

She twisted away from him, and he stood a second, looking at her back. His chest ached with some feeling he couldn’t identify, and his face was hot. Debora was taking deep shivery breaths. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Let’s get outta here.’

As they climbed into one of the jeeps, a Madradona man, blubbering, came running up and struck Mingolla on the cheek, a feeble blow, but one that sobered him, alerted him to the fact that other men and women were converging on them from the corners of the parking lot. The man went to his knees, swayed, clutched at Mingolla’s leg. Mingolla kicked him away, gunned the engine, and sped off, weaving among the survivors, who cried out in frustration, reached for him with bloody hands. He turned down the street leading to the barricade, bouncing over the potholes. The crests of the distant hills were outlined in stars, the glowing walls jogged in his vision. Dark figures were scaling the barricade, some falling when gunfire flashed between gaps in the boards; but many more were making it over, and more still were massed at the foot of the wall. Mingolla laid on the horn, and some of the ragged men and women scattered; others stood and gawked, but he didn’t slow down. ‘Hold on!’ he said to Debora as the wall loomed high, and then, amid splintering boards and gunfire and the thud of bodies impacting the hood, they crashed through the barricade, slewed sideways in the dirt. He fought for control of the jeep, managed to straighten it out. Saw that they were in the middle of a battle much like the one they had fled. Groups of soldiers firing at larger groups of attackers on a field of yellow dirt tufted with grass that showed black in the moonlight. And beyond, a meadow of taller grasses stretched toward the hills.

Debora beat on his shoulder, pointed to a shack with a tarpaper roof, isolated from the battle. ‘They’ll have extra guns in there!’

A bullet pinged off the fender.

He pulled up behind the shack, kept the engine running while Debora darted inside. A second later, she returned with two rifles, shoving a wiry mahogany-skinned man in fatigues ahead of her. She forced him into the back of the jeep.

‘Who the hell’s he?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Hostage,’ she said. ‘He was hiding.’

He was astounded by her transformation from hopelessness to martial efficiency. She seemed at home in this chaos, desperate, yet her desperation contained, channeled.

‘Come on!’ she shouted. ‘Let’s go!’

He swerved out from behind the shack and across the meadow. Bullets zipped past, one striking sparks from the frame of the windshield, and for the first time Mingolla was afraid. His asshole clenched, and a cold spot formed between his shoulder blades.

Debora knelt in the seat, facing behind them, and began to fire. In the rearview mirror he saw three sets of headlights in pursuit. He floored the jeep, and they went sailing over depressions in the meadow, skipping like a stone. The windshield was blown out by a round, and Mingolla threw the jeep into a zigzag course, sending Debora into his lap. She righted herself and kept firing.

‘Head north!’ shouted the man in the backseat.

‘Why?’ said Mingolla, hunching his shoulders, turtling his neck, expecting a bullet at any second.

‘There’s a road! Trails! You can lose them there!’ The man’s head poked between the seats. ‘Make for that big hill!’

An explosion at their rear, and in the mirror Mingolla saw a fire burning in the meadow, two sets of headlights giving it a wide berth.

‘Damn!’ Debora’s rifle had jammed. She flung it down, picked up the second rifle.

With every jolt and bounce, the jeep felt as if it were going to take flight, and Mingolla urged it to stay earthbound with body English and wishes. He made promises to God, get me out of this, Jesus, and I’ll sin no more, and his heart was hammering to the rhythm of Debora’s fire, and the hill was swelling huge and black above them, and the man in the backseat was shouting directions, and then they were swerving up into thick jungle along a narrow dirt track.

‘Pull over… here!’ Debora elbowed him, pointed to a shadowed avenue leading off between two large trees. He did as she instructed, shut down the engine. She propped her rifle on the top of the windshield, covering the road, and as another jeep, its headlights piercing the darkness, swung around the curve, she opened fire. Screams, silhouetted figures against a flash of flame, and the jeep flipped over, the husk of a dead olive-drab beetle crackling in its own juices. ‘There’s one more,’ she said. ‘They must have seen.’

Mingolla reached with his mind. Found three frail minds less than a hundred yards away. He made them afraid… so afraid that they whirled, flared bright, and winked out one by one.

‘We’re okay now,’ he said.

Everything was still, a stream chuckling somewhere near, insects and frogs bubbling, and even the crackling of the flames was compatible with the stillness. All the dark confusion of the escape might never have happened. The shapes of branches and leaves overhead were sharp in the moonlight, and Mingolla felt the aches and tremors of adrenaline as if the moon were illuminating his weaknesses, pointing up their isolation. It seemed that none of what he remembered of the past hour had happened, that they had been disgorged from a nightmare and left on this hillside to sort out reality.

‘Are you going to kill me?’ said a voice from the backseat.

Mingolla had forgotten their hostage. The man was sitting up, looking alert but not afraid; he had a feline cleverness of feature and crispy black hair. Mingolla saw in him an opportunity for some good, a last chance to practice mercy.

‘You can go,’ he said.

‘We can’t…’ Debora began.

‘Let him go.’ Mingolla laid a hand on her rifle. ‘Just let him go.’

The man climbed out of the jeep. ‘I won’t tell anybody,’ he said as he backed away.

Mingolla shrugged.

The man backed, stumbled, and broke into a run, his figure standing out for a second against the flames of the jeep, then vanishing around the curve.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Debora; but her voice tacked conviction.

Mingolla fired up the engine. He didn’t want to look at her, he didn’t want her to see his face for fear of what might be written there. As he pulled out onto the road, her hip pressed against his; she left it there, and the contact made him feel close to her. Yet he also felt that the closeness wasn’t important, or if it was, it was of memorial importance, because things were changing between them. That, too, he could feel. Old postures were being redefined, connections tearing loose and reforming, shadowy corners of their souls coming to light. He put it from mind, put everything from mind, and concentrated on the road, driving north toward Darién.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

By five o’clock the next afternoon, after two car changes to throw off pursuit, they were high in the Darién Mountains, their pace slowed to a crawl by a dense mist. Visibility was no more than a few feet, and Mingolla had to clear condensation from the windshield to see even that far. Finally he gave up and pulled off the road. Debora went to sleep in the backseat, and he sat staring out into the mist, at vague green loops of vines and foliage that resembled fragments of a florid script, the signatures—he imagined—on a constitution not yet manifest in the land. Now and then he heard cries from the mist, cries that seemed as complex and strange as the shapes of the foliage. Birds, he figured. But recalling Tully’s stories of the region, the brujos and ghosts, he pictured little brown men sitting in huts, sending out winged spirits; and once the moon had risen, setting the mist aglow, he thought he could feel them fluttering around the car, dispersing into eddies and streamers whenever he turned his eye their way. He was only a little afraid of spirits; he was much more afraid of his memories and potentials.

After a half-hour he nodded off and was awakened sometime later by a tremendous feeling of anxiety. Something had happened, something bad. He tried to dismiss the feeling as the hangover from a dream, but that wouldn’t wash. His heart was pounding, he was sweating, and when Debora spoke from the backseat, he jumped at the sound.

‘I just had a terrible feeling,’ she said. ‘A dream or something.’

‘Yeah… me too.’

She sat up. ‘Do you…’

‘What?’

‘I wonder if something happened back in the city.’

It rang true, but he didn’t want to think about the city, about anything that lay behind them. ‘Maybe,’ he said.

‘Come and sit with me… all right?’

He crawled over the seat, and once he had gotten settled, she lay down, resting her head in his lap.

…David…

‘I’m here,’ he said, rejecting the easy solace offered by that kind of intimacy.

…I love you…

Her sending had a wistful flavor, as if she were trying to resurrect the emotion.

‘I love you.’ His voice sounded flat, tinny, like a recorded message.

She shifted to a more comfortable position, and out of reflex his hand slipped down to cup her breast. He thought he could go for years without touching her that way, and his palms would remember the weight of her breasts, their exact conformation. The contact relaxed him.

…my father used to love places like this…

…you told me…

…high, misty…

…you like them…

…I can’t help liking them, I’ve spent so much time in them with my father… we used to visit a village in the Cuchamatanes Mountains called Cahuatla, it was so strange, the men wore shirts with big floppy embroidered collars and monkey-skin hats, and some of them looked a little like monkeys, they were all tiny and wizened-looking, even the young ones… and when they’d come out of the mist at you, you imagined they were monkey spirits… we’d go there every May for this festival, my father was amused by it, he couldn’t see it too many times…

…what sort of festival…

…it was really nothing special, all the men would ride horses from one end of the village to the other, and at each end they’d drink some aguardiente, and then they’d ride back and drink some more, and they’d keep getting drunker and drunker… the whole thing was to see who could stay on their horse the longest…

She continued telling him about the festival, and he could see it, the scrawny little monkey men, their striped shirts with red and purple collars shiny as velvet, swaying drunkenly on their bony mounts, and for a while it was enough to listen to her, hear her, watch her memories unfold; but not for long. He sensed her fraying attention in the patchiness of the memories, and he felt her arousal, knew that she wanted to make love, that she was open, wet, and her readiness seemed to him obscene, because something bad had happened, something no amount of lovemaking would erase. But there was no use in dwelling on it, he decided, and there was nothing they could do except make love. She skinned out of her jeans, her panties, sat on his cock, lifting and lowering herself, using the front seat for leverage, and he got into it on the level of prurience, watching her ass come down and sheathe him. At the end her cry sounded as eerie and distant as those of the birds lost in the mist.

They talked for a bit afterward, but their hearts weren’t in it, and soon she was asleep again. Mingolla tried to stay awake, to keep watch. He was troubled by the lack of pursuit, and he suspected they were being spied on from above by choppers with thermal imagers. But realizing that if this was the case, no amount of watchfulness would save them, he gave in to sleep and fell into a dream.

In the dream he climbed out of the car, leaving Debora asleep, and walked farther up the hillside into the mist, picking his way through vines and ferns, his trousers growing heavy with dampness accumulated from the leaves. Before long, he saw a crumbling glow in the mist that resolved into an oblong of yellow light defined by the doorway of a hut. He was not afraid to approach the hut; in fact, it seemed he had been searching for just this hut for a very long time. He ducked inside and sat down facing a gnarled root of a man with black hair and wizened features and coppery skin: an old man, yet with the vitality of youth about him. He was wearing a loose-fitting shirt striped with red and purple and black and yellow, and trousers of the same fabric. The light came from three lanterns hung on pegs and made the freshly skinned poles of the walls gleam like rods of gold.

The brujo—for such Mingolla knew him to be—nodded on seeing him enter and went back to staring at a complicated pattern traced in the dirt floor of the hut. Mingolla, too, stared at the pattern. It took his eye ever inward like the chart of the labyrinth, and he realized that this pattern was the core pattern of the world and time, the one that all the patterns of thought and movement of all living creatures were destined to create. As he followed its course, he found the particular point at which he and Debora made their contribution to the weave, and understood that his visions of the future—of which this was one—were nothing inexplicable or magical, but were a result of being attuned to the pattern, of intersecting its flow and seeing along it to other points that were pertinent to his course. He was on the verge of looking along it into the future, past the time of their meeting with Izaguirre, when the brujo, with a sweeping gesture, rubbed out the pattern and grinned at him.

‘Why’d you do that?’ Mingolla asked.

The brujo reached out and touched his forehead, and when the brujo spoke in a harsh language that had the sound of a language of crows, full of hard h s and aspirates, he understood every word.

‘I had no choice,’ said the brujo. ‘It was given me to do.’

Though this answer seemed an evasion, Mingolla was satisfied by it and could think of no other question he wanted to ask.

‘Tell me what you’ve learned,’ the brujo said.

This at first struck Mingolla as an impossibility, because he had learned so much; but he found himself giving quite a concise answer, as if the brujo’s demand had sought out the level of answers and dredged up the exact quantity of knowledge required.

‘I’ve learned that everything men prize is a joke,’ he said. ‘An illusion. That what men see as their essential things can be stripped away by the power of a whim, that action has no value, that peace and war are the same, that beauty and truth are the convictions of fools, and that fools rule everywhere in the name of a wisdom that exists like music, like smoke, for a moment and is gone.’

‘You know all this,’ said the brujo, marveling, ‘and yet you are sad?’ He burst into peals of laughter, and his laughter choreographed the pale streamers of mist furling in the doorway into the likenessess of dancing women.

‘Why shouldn’t I be sad?’ said Mingolla. ‘I think that’s pretty goddamn sad.’

‘It’s only sad because you don’t really believe it,’ said the brujo. ‘You don’t want it to be true. But once you accept it as true, then other truths will become applicable, and you’ll see things aren’t so bad.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘Doubt is fine for now,’ said the brujo, and then, doing a perfect imitation of Mingolla’s voice: ‘Whatever works for ya, right?’

Irritated, Mingolla asked, ‘What am I doing here?’

‘I’m just checking on your progress,’ said the brujo.

‘And who the hell are you?’

‘Your cousin,’ said the brujo with a mad cackle. From beside him, he picked up a weed that had tiny violet florets with magenta centers; he waved it in Mingolla’s face. ‘Those idiots back in Panama City aren’t the only ones who know about this, and they certainly weren’t the first to discover it… just the first to abuse it. Now they’ve paid for their abuse.’

‘Did something happen back in the city?’ asked Mingolla.

‘You’ll know soon what happened,’ said the brujo. ‘There’s no use in dwelling on it now. But when you find out, remember that you weren’t the agency, only the spark.’

Mingolla couldn’t frame a response.

‘You’ve got a lot to learn,’ said the brujo. ‘Remember that, too.’

There was something hopeful in the brujo’s words, his tone, and Mingolla looked up at him, ready for some good news, but none was forthcoming.

‘It gets a lot worse before it gets better,’ said the brujo, who—along with the hut—was fading, growing as insubstantial as the mist. ‘And when it does finally get better, you won’t care one way or the other. At least not the way you’d like to care now.’

Despite its air of unreality, the dream was so vivid that when Mingolla awakened back in the car he expected to find some talisman, some proof that his meeting with the brujo had actually occurred. A piece of fern stuck to his trousers, or a portion of the weed. There was nothing like that, but there was a proof of sorts. The knowledge of the disaster in Panama City. As real and palpable as a gold coin in his hand.

Debora was still asleep, scrunched into a corner of the backseat. He ran a hand along her flank, loving her, wanting love to mean more than the meaning it had acquired in Panama. She stirred, blinked. ‘What is it?’

He leaned down, brushed hair from her cheek, and kissed her. ‘Go back to sleep.’

She struggled up to a sitting position, looked around at the misted windows as if awakening somewhere unfamiliar. ‘Did something else happen?’ she asked.

In the morning they followed the road through the hills into gray light, to a ridge overlooking a valley. Tres Santos was situated at the far end of the valley between two jungled cliffs that nearly formed a natural arch overhead; from their vantage, the cliffs had the look of two cowled figures gazing down at an unlucky throw of the dice: little white houses with shadow-blackened windows and doors. Green mountains surrounded the valley, appearing to extend forever in every direction; roads wound through them, visible as red threads. Dark cloud bellies swirled and changed shape above the cliffs, lowering, intensifying the atmosphere of gloom.

They drove down from the ridge and into the village along a dirt street broken by gray mica-flecked boulders and parked outside a cantina with the faded mural of an armored man on horseback upon its facade: Cantina Cortez. The door was open, and several men were standing at the bar, watching a portable TV. Short bandy-legged men with impassive pre-Columbian faces, wearing blankets and white cotton trousers and straw hats. When Debora and Mingolla entered, carrying rifles under their arms, the men acknowledged them with nods and turned back to the TV; an agitated voice was issuing from the speaker, and on the screen was a flickering image of ruins.

‘A bomb?’ said Debora. ‘In Panama City… a bomb?’

‘Yes,’ said the bartender, a man older than the rest, with gray streaks in his hair. ‘An atomic bomb. Terrible.’

‘It must have been very small,’ said another man. ‘Only one barrio was destroyed.’

‘But many are dying in the other barrios,’ said a third man. ‘Who could have done this?’

Mingolla was sick with the news, heavy with it. ‘I’m looking for someone,’ he said finally. ‘A big black man named…’

‘Señor Tully,’ said the bartender. ‘He arrived this morning. Take a left at the next corner, and you’ll find him in the third house on the right.’

Mingolla listened a minute longer to the voice detailing casualty figures, recounting the horror of Carlito’s punishment, the punishment of Tel Aviv, a little irony he’d probably never expected to employ. When he went back outside, he found Debora sitting on the hood of the car. ‘Tully’s here,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’ll know what happened.’

‘I know what happened,’ she said. ‘Izaguirre blew them up. Shit!’ She jumped down from the car and kicked at the red dirt. ‘I’ve been acting like a stupid girl. I never should have believed them!’ She walked off a few paces, whirled on Mingolla. ‘We have to kill the rest! Or else they’ll kill us. Your dreams, your hallucinations about the future… they must be accurate. I didn’t understand before, but it’s clear now.’

He was more stunned by her reaction than by the news of the bomb. She looked as if she were about to explode, swinging her rifle back and forth, unable to locate a suitable target.

‘Let’s get Tully,’ she said.

As they walked he watched her out of the corner of his eye, noticing how anger… no, not anger, but the restoration of commitment, how that had carved weakness and worry from her face, left her more beautiful than ever. And in her face, in its clean rigor, he saw the insanity of their relationship. How first one pushed, then the other pulled. How her desire for commitment would drag them so far, how his anger would carry them on until she had another chance for commitment. How they fed off this exchange and called it love. And maybe it was love, maybe the insanity incorporated love. Even realizing all this, he loved her, loved love. Loved it to the point that rejection became unthinkable. To reject it he would have to stop loving himself, and while that was something he would have had no qualms about under other circumstances, he couldn’t afford that kind of honesty now.

Tully was sitting in a chair outside one of the houses, a rifle across his knees, and as they came up, he waved: a languid, boneless wave. ‘Glad you made it, Davy,’ he said in a weak-sounding voice. His eyes were bloodshot, and he seemed energyless, depleted.

‘Where’s Corazon?’ Mingolla asked.

‘Inside,’ said Tully. ‘Pears she cotch a dose from de bomb. ’Pears I cotched one, too.’

‘Radiation?’ said Mingolla, guilt-stricken.

Tully nodded. ‘Look like you two got away clean.’

‘What went on back there?’ Debora asked.

‘Hell, I don’t know. Somethin’ happen at de palace, but I never sure of what. All de day dere’s not’in’ but riot. People ’cusin’ each ot’er of dis and dat. Fightin’ in de streets. Took me and Corazon most of de day to get clear. And we not get clear ’nough. Must be dat bomb were battlefield ordnance, or else we be shadows on de stone.’ He coughed, wiped his mouth, and checked his hand to see what had come up. ‘We took de coast road and make it dis far. Bet you got lost in de mist.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mingolla.

Tully let out a sigh that Mingolla thought might go on forever. ‘Mon,’ he said. ‘Here I been t’inkin’ better must come, and now dis.’ He cocked an eye at Mingolla. ‘Seem like you ’bout to choke on somethin’, Davy.’

‘Tully, I…’

‘Get on outta here, Davy. I don’t wanna hear no bullshit ’bout sadness and de back-time. Dis de way it have come, and dere’s not’in’ to do more. Be worse places dan dis to have a funeral.’ He laughed, and the laughter started him coughing. When he had recovered, he said, ‘De fools ’round here, dey wash a body wit’ lime juice and wrap it in white cloth and sing over you. Lime juice! Dey t’ink lime juice be fah everyt’ing. Cure de dysentery, cure de fever, and make you sweet fah Jesus.’ He gestured with his rifle. ‘Go on, now. Dat stream what’s marked on de map, you find it at de end of dis street. You can spy de trail from de bank. Just cross dem two big hills east, and you be square on one of dem villages I told you ’bout.’

Mingolla fought the urge to do something stupid like insist upon staying. This was the way Tully wanted it, fast and low-key, and the least he could do was to go along. He allowed himself to say, ‘I’ll miss ya, Tully,’ and then wheeled about, leaving Debora in his wake, not wanting to hear Tully’s response, not wanting any more knowledge or guilt. But as he passed by the window of the house, he heard the click of a safety being disengaged. He went into a shoulder roll, heard the popping of a rifle, felt bullets pass close, and as he brought his rifle to bear on the window, in the instant before he fired he saw Corazon, her face empty of emotion, her rosy eye looking full of blood. His bullets knocked her back from the window, pumped a hoarse grunt from her chest.

He got to his feet, unsteady. Debora was covering Tully with her rifle, and he was trying to stand, having a hard time of it. Mingolla went to the window, peered into the darkened room. Corazon had been blown back onto the bed and was spreadeagled on a white coverlet made into a severe abstract by angles of shadow and the scatter of her blood. Her rifle lay on the floor. Tully stumbled into the room, stopped dead.

‘What you do, mon?’ he cried. ‘What you do?’

‘She tried to shoot me,’ said Mingolla. ‘I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t even have time to think.’

‘She wasn’t tryin’ to shoot nobody!’ Tully dropped to his knees beside the bed, his hands hovering over the body; blood was still leaking from Corazon’s mouth and breast, and it looked as if Tully was unsure where to put his hands, what hole to plug.

Voices behind Mingolla. He turned, saw Debora explaining things to a group of men who had come to investigate. When he turned back to the window, he found that Tully had picked up Corazon’s rifle and was training it at his chest.

‘Goddamn you, Davy!’ he said. ‘You ever was low on de spirit.’

‘Listen,’ said Mingolla. ‘She tried to shoot me. What else could I do?’

‘Why she shoot you, mon?’ Tully was trembling, his finger poised on the trigger. ‘She got no cause to shoot you.’

‘I don’t know, man. Maybe somebody put something in her head that made her want to do it… or maybe she was just crazy, too sick to think straight. I don’t know.’

‘You tellin’ me she like dem ot’ers, dem empty shells dat de Sotomayors pump fulla dere shit? Don’t be tellin’ me dat! I know her, mon. Dere were more dan dat in her!’

Suddenly Mingolla wanted Tully to pull the trigger, to end the suspense. ‘What was I s’posed to do?’ he yelled, ‘let her kill me? Let you get all fucking soulful ’bout me dead? This is crap, man! You wanna kill me, go ahead! Go on! Pull the fucking trigger! Maybe somebody put something in your goddamn head, told you to do it. Maybe this whole fucking shuck ’bout Tres Santos is just more Sotomayor bullshit!’ He pushed his chest to the window, puffed it out, daring Tully. ‘C’mon, man!’

‘You t’ink I won’t?’ said Tully. ‘Ain’t but one t’ing holdin’ me back, and dat’s de knowin’ how I helped make you dis way.’

Instead of Tully, Mingolla saw a big black shadow, a creature of blackness, empty, hateful, a nothing with muscles and a sweaty forehead and bloodshot eyes. ‘Fuck you, Tully,’ he said, and focused his anger in a stream of poisonous energy that sent Tully reeling. Tully’s gun discharged. Wild misses aimed at the ceiling, the walls, the floor. He tried to bring the gun to bear on the window, dropped it, clutched his head, letting out a hiss that turned into a scream. Then he fell across the bed, twisted onto his side, his fingers shaking at his temples as if trying to push thoughts back inside, thoughts crowded out by the anger roiling in his skull. And then he was gone. Winked out, truly empty, his blind eyes staring at a cross of black wood on the wall, like an incision into a region of darkness.

Mingolla was crying. He knew it by the wetness on his face and by no other sign, because he felt almost nothing. The tears might have merely been an excess, as if he had been filled to overflowing and was experiencing a necessary spillage. He turned from the window, and the bandy-legged little men moved back from him, staring incuriously, betraying neither fear nor any sort of strong emotion. They had, he realized, seen nothing out of the ordinary. Tears and violent death were part of their millieu, and though they might not comprehend the specifics of the situation, they understood that it was none of their business; they already had a sufficiency of tears and death, and had no interest in sharing the grief of strangers or involving themselves in moral judgments. All this he saw in their faces, all this he perceived as admirable and right.

From the bank of a narrow stream at the base of the hill, Mingolla could look back and see the edge of the village less than a hundred yards away. He could see all its sweetness, the bougainvillea in window planters, smoke curling from a jointed tin chimney, an old man picking his way among the ruts. The view was unobstructed, but Mingolla knew this was an illusion. Doors had been closed, and there was no going back. He looked up at the hill, its green slope as imposing as the hill of the Ant Farm. But this hill was even more menacing. Its blank, silent enormity presaged the grimness of a five-year-plan with no joyful goal at the end, and Mingolla was reluctant to set foot upon it.

‘Are you thinking about Tully?’ Debora asked.

‘No,’ he said.

She looked surprised.

‘I don’t know why,’ he said. ‘The thoughts just aren’t coming.’

‘I know how it is… sometimes you can’t think about important things right away. You have to let them diminish.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe it wasn’t important.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘You don’t know what I’m feeling.’

‘Yes, I do.’ Her eyes were wide, her mouth tight, as if she was trying to hide some emotion. ‘I know exactly how you feel.’

They sat awhile on a boulder by the stream, gathering themselves for the climb. The stream was the only thing of energy in the entire landscape. Its tea-colored water raced over a stony bottom, foaming at the breaks into lacy white threads; orange iron-bearing rocks thrust up from the surface, and midges danced above them. Clumps of small flowers fringed the bank, the blossoms a pale creamy yellow with a magenta splash at the center, the stems furred with dark filaments. Wherever Mingolla turned, his eye met with an infinity of detail, with complicated mosaics of life, with patterns too intricate to unravel, and this complexity afflicted his sense of competence, made him aware of the ineptitude of his judgments, the fallibility of his hates and loves. It might be best just to sit there, he thought, and wait for the ones who soon would be hunting them. The sun’s light came grayish white and watery through a rift in the clouds, and seemed to search out all the fine stems and tendrils and cottony fibers, to course along them and fill the air with a single disturbance, a constant fluctuation of pressure and heat that unsettled Mingolla as might have a background of slow shadows or shouts in many languages. Nothing was clear, not even the urge to sit and wait. But at last he was moved by some vague impulse to stand and begin the climb.

The hill was slow going. They tripped and stumbled as if their many uncertainties were posing an impediment. But on reaching the top and gazing out over the mountains of Darién, jungleshrouded and rumpled to the horizon, it seemed they had come to one of the strange green places of God where the structural immensity of life was made plain, all paths delineated. The low sun had broken clear in the west, and its heavy golden light, reflecting off ridges of state-gray cloud, mined a mineral brilliance from every color. The slopes were a luminous green, the air held a shine in every quarter, and the view was so intricate yet at the same time so comprehensible, it offered a promise of hope and magical possibility. Above one hill a rainbow arched into oblivion; a hawk circled another, and dark slants of rain stroked the summit of a third. Like signals, portents. As if each green dome were a separate identity with its own character and values. The sight boosted Mingolla’s spirits, and as they started downhill, his confidence returned. They walked swiftly, stealthily, twitching branches aside with their rifle barrels, moving with an efficiency that comes only with a surety of purpose, and it seemed to Mingolla that he was growing lighter, the past falling away with every step… and it was, he realized. The past was becoming weightless, frail, and they were leaving behind everything familiar, leaving friends and enemies…

…David…

…yes…

…you’re going too fast…

…it’s easy downhill… make time…

…it only feels easy, downhill’s harder on your legs than uphill… you’ll start to feel it soon…

…okay…

…leaving behind memories and attachments, honesty and duplicity…

…look, David… that bird…

… yeah, weird…

… did you see the tail, the ruby, feathers on the breast… it was a quetzal…

… so…

… they’re very rare… it’s good luck to see one…

… luck… yeah, sure…

… don’t make fun of luck… we’ve been lucky…

… Tully… luck?… Panama… luck?…

… luckier than most…

…leaving behind the fear of death and the desire for life, leaving hope and hopelessness…

…when I first joined the movement…

…I don’t wanna hear this crap, Debora…

…no, you listen… when I was first in the movement, about thirty of us spent the rainy season in the Petén… it was awful, we lived like amphibious animals, our shelters rotting, our clothes mildewing… we caught fevers, dysentery… some of us had leishmaniasis…

…leaving behind the usual, the expected…

…what…

…it’s a parasite, it eats the cartilage in your ears, your nose… anyway, we were there for months… it seemed endless, and I lost sight of why we were there… we were just there, we were just part of the decay, the rain, and nothing I’d thought of achieving seemed worthwhile any longer… sometimes I was so depressed I could hardly lift my head, and then this kid came to the camp, this young boy from a village near Cobán, and he’d sing, he’d tell stories… lovely stories… I hated him at first, because it seemed immoral for him to be so happy, for him to make me forget my misery… misery was important to me, I saw it as integral to the revolutionary ethic…

…leaving behind dreams and the conception of dreaming, for dreams and reality were being fused into the idea of purpose…

…and once he told this story, I can’t remember what it was about, but I remember some of the words… they spoke to me… he was talking about someone who was very sad and they were thinking that there had to be another country after this, but the only one they could imagine was this secure dull place where life was as cozy as a Christmas kiss, and that wasn’t enough for some people, for this particular person, and the secret of living through the sadness…

…leaving sadness and joy behind…

…was to find a story, an emotion, a fable so alluring that it was like another country, a continent rising from the sea, with flamingos and golden melons and animals more beautiful than sin, one that gave you strength to be the person who you always pretended to be, even to yourself, and if you could do that, if you could search inside yourself and find that country, no matter if it was a lie, no matter if it was foolish and childlike, then you could survive all the terrible realities that denied it… at least for a little while… that’s what we’ve found…

…did the kid make it…

…no, but we survived the rains because of him, and after we left the jungle, we had the strength to keep fighting…

…leaving behind the thought of peace, and entering the precincts of a violent dutiful morality with its own continuum of behaviors and possibilities…

…do you understand, David…

…just more bullshit…

…of course it is…

…then why…

…I remember more of what the kid said… some of it had to do with a story a man was telling a woman in order to frighten her, to make her come close so he could seduce her… it was a story about the devil’s green cat, glowing in the darkness of the throne, how it prowls the earth and inspires sin… not just sin… extremes of life, of action… because although it belonged to the devil, like all cats it was independent, it had its own biases, its own idea of what was appropriate… and after the story ended, after the man had seduced the woman, they were lying together, happy, and the woman realized that the story had merely been a tactic, that she had been taken in, but she didn’t care, and when she asked the man if that was the case, if the story had just been a clever lie, he laughed and said, ‘No, there’s no such thing as the devil’s green cat that glows in the darkness of the throne, striking sparks with its claws from the stones of Hell, scenting the burning from the Pit, hissing a wind full of words, saying, Live or be lifeless, Love or be damned…’

…and leaving even love behind, at least for a while, because love was changing into its martial equivalent, denying of sentiment and admitting only to the virtues of its strength…

…don’t you see, David… it’s the same story with us, it’s always the same story… I love you, and it doesn’t matter why…

…leaving behind logic, leaving behind all ordinary truths…

…I love you…

…yet in the single-mindedness of their intent, the purity of their anger, and their lack of choice, they were taking with them everything that mattered.