Night Of The Jaguar

Fourteen

On Sunday night Nigel Cooksey told Rupert Zenger that there were Colombian gangsters in town with an interest in the Forest Planet Alliance. By Monday afternoon Rupert was gone, off to an important conference in Bhutan about the mountain forests of that nation, taking Luna Ehrenhaft with him and leaving Scotty in charge of the property, and the name of his attorney with Cooksey.

“Gosh, that was fast, just like you said,” observed Jenny at the gate of La Casita as the airport limo pulled away. “How come he took Luna?”

“Oh, Rupert needs a little entourage. And Luna, despite her bravado, has nearly as strong a sense of self-preservation as Rupert.”

“You’re kidding! Poor Scotty! No wonder he’s been moping.”

“Yes, but moping has always been part of Scotty’s demeanor. I think Luna was growing tired of it. She has something of an instinct for the alpha male.” He drew the gate closed and barred it. “He asked me to come as well, you know.”

“Really? Why didn’t you?”

“I prefer it here. Bhutan is utterly fascinating I’m sure, but I feel obliged to stay with my collections and…things. Nor am I particularly fearful of gangsters.”

“Do you really think they’ll come?”

“Oh, they’re here already.”

Jenny couldn’t help a quick scan of the surroundings. “What do you mean, ‘here already’?”

“Well, as you must know, Rupert’s tower provides the only view of the road over all our foliage, and while I was up there last night discussing this and that with him I happened to notice a large black van cruising by, more slowly than the empty road would require, and then it came by again and stopped briefly. We’re fortunate that there’s no road verge wide enough to park such a machine on Ingraham across from this house, but in any case, the van returned about an hour ago and is now parked just beyond the curve of the road.”

“Are you going to call the cops?”

“I think not. After all, what would we tell them? That an illegal alien bush Indian suspect in two murders intimated that, via mystic powers, he has sensed danger from a group of men innocently parked by the side of a public road? No, I believe we’re on our own for the present. However, they’re likely to wait until nightfall before making any attempt to interfere with us, and we are not without resources.”

They walked back to Cooksey’s rooms. Jenny felt somewhat stunned by these developments and silently wondered why Cooksey seemed so cheerful. Then she thought of something. “Oh, God, we should call Geli Vargos. They might go after her.”

“I’m sure Miss Vargos knows more about it than we do.”

“What do you mean, she knows?”

“I mean that your friend is the granddaughter of Felipe Ibanez, one of the principals of Consuela Holdings. Rupert told me last night.”

“I don’t understand. She was, like,spying on us?”

“Not at all. Rupert thinks it was something like guilt, a subject on which I believe he is by way of being an expert. Wealthy people who have grown rich from various forms of exploitation often have the urge to recover their self-respect through good works. Rupert, who as you may know was in public relations for a large oil company, is one such, and Geli Vargos seems to be another, although in her case it was the family fortune that bore the curse.”

“So she’s still on our side.”

“In a manner of speaking. I’m sure she still wishes us well, but now that there is real danger afoot, I doubt if she’ll go out of her way to help us if it’s to the detriment of her family. Or so Rupert believes.”

“Heknew about this all along?”

“Oh, yes. He was quite upset when we all found out about the Consuela company’s plans for the Puxto from our little friend. Geli gave quite a lot of money to the organization, you know.”

“But the point for all of us was tosave the rain forest,” Jenny cried. “How could he take money that came from cutting it down?”

“You’d have to ask Rupert that, and I’m sure you’d get a good temporizing answer. In any case, we have little time and we have to prepare this property to resist intrusion.”

“How? By throwing grapefruits?”

“Not quite. Scotty has a shotgun and a full box of shells. I think we can prepare some surprises for anyone creeping about in the dark. We’re in Scotty’s workroom if you’d like to join us.”

“Yeah, but first I got to tell Kevin about all this,” said Jenny, and she hurried off.

Kevin was lying in bed with the headphones on. The stink in the room made it clear that he had ignored Rupert’s clean-up-dope command. She obtained his attention by yanking his cable and, after the usual snarling from him, told her story, which he thought was hilarious, and he got in some zingers about how he’d been right all along about that Cuban bitch. She let this pass. When she told him about Cooksey’s plans and Scotty’s shotgun he said, “Big deal. I got a gun, too.”

“No you don’t.”

He reached quickly under the mattress, yanked out a big blued semiautomatic pistol, and waved it in her face. “Then what the fuck do you think this is? A pamphlet?”

“Where did you get it? And don’t wave it around like that.”

“Never mind where I got it. And fuck this pissy little operation anyway. I got something major going on.” He hopped out of bed and struck action-hero poses with the gun, crouching, whirling, pointing it clutched in both hands. She stared at his antics and with a part of her mind registered that he had obviously never had a pistol in his hands before. Jenny herself had been raised among a population rich in guns of all kinds.

“What do you mean, major?”

“You’ll read about it in the papers. Oh, I forgot, you can’t read the papers.”

She let this slide by. In fact, although she didn’t read the papers, her reading had improved a good deal over the past months. “Kevin, you’re so full of shit. Did you ever even shoot a gun like that?”

“Fuck you, yes! And you know, the best thing about pulling this thing off is after tonight I am gone from here, baby, and I won’t have to listen to you putting me down anymore.”

“What thing, Kevin? What are you pulling off?”

He grinned and stuck the pistol in the waistband of his cutoff jeans. “A disciplined revolutionary never discusses operations with outsiders.”

“And probably doesn’t smoke dope all the time either. What’s the operation? This is something that skank Kearney thought up, isn’t it?”

“He’s not a skank,” said Kevin, “and Kearney ’s not his real name.”

“Kevin, I don’t care what his name is. He’s nuts. And besides, you can’t go out anywhere now. Cooksey said there’s a bunch of gangsters watching the place.”

“Fuck Cooksey and fuck you. He’s an old lady anyway. I’m going.”

Jenny had another and stronger line of invective in her mouth, when she suddenly realized that she was not Kevin’s mother, and that scenes like this had undoubtedly played out while he was at home, with no good outcome. So she walked out of the cottage without another word and started for the tin-roofed shed where Scotty kept his workshop. Halfway there she stopped, turned on her heel, and walked back to the little parking area, where she opened the engine compartment of the VW van and deftly removed and pocketed the distributor rotor. As she walked past the pond, she saw that the surface was dotted with leaf-fall. Scotty hadn’t been skimming them lately. Nor, she recalled, had Rupert been keeping up with feeding offal to his piranhas. She paused to throw in a scoop of fish food from the big can placed there and watched the water boil as the population attacked the morsels. The piranha would have to wait. In fact, she found she didn’t much care about them; let the sneaky bastards starve, she unecologically thought.

In the work shed she saw that Scotty was at his pipe cutter dropping short pieces from a length of two-inch irrigation pipe. Cooksey was mixing something in a washtub, a pink jellylike substance with a sweet stink.

She wrinkled her nose and asked, “What is that stuff?”

“A kind of napalm. Soap flakes and gasoline and a little diesel. Would you like to help?”

She nodded. Under his direction she began to disassemble twelve-gauge shotgun shells, placing the shot and the gunpowder into different containers and snipping out the primers with an aviation shears. Cooksey poured his mixture into bottles, which he stopped with rags. Then he began to construct small objects out of lawn mower throttle springs, strips of sheet metal, epoxy glue, and small nails. After she finished with the shells, she watched him work. It was obvious from the way his long brown fingers moved over the materials that he had done this kind of work before.

“What’re you making?” she asked.

“Booby traps. Scotty, have you one of your pipes ready yet?”

Scotty handed him without comment a length of capped pipe with a small hole drilled through the center of the cap. Cooksey unscrewed the cap and glued a shotgun shell primer into the opening with quick-drying epoxy, and then, using the same adhesive, attached one of his springed constructs to the side of the pipe. He replaced the cap and locked the pipe into a table vise. He attached a long piece of flower wire to the device and handed the free end to Jenny. “Go over there and pull on this,” he ordered.

She pulled, the catch snapped, and a nail came down on the primer, producing a satisfying small pop.

“Splendid,” cried the Professor. “I see it’s like riding a bicycle.”

“Where did you learn how to do this kind of stuff?” she asked.

“Ah, as a youth I ran off to join the Royal Marines, over my mother’s strenuous objection, I might add. I ended up in the Special Boat Service.”

“Simply messing about in boats?”

“Yes, but at a very elevated level. They teach one how to mess about with this sort of thing as well. As I will now teach you.”

Margarita Paz lived in a low-rise condo near Marti Park, a building old for Miami, and inhabited by respectable, elderly Cubans. She had once owned a house near her restaurant but had sold it a few years ago and moved here. This was vaguely attributed to Paz’s lax progenitive abilities. Who needed a house when it was clear it would never be filled with grandchildren? Her condo was on the top floor, with a nice view of the park, and she had purchased it for cash, because it was the kind of building that no savings and loan in Miami would have financed for a black woman. Literal cash: she had seen the ad, determined over the phone (in Spanish) that it was still available, and had within the hour walked into the real estate office with a small suitcase from which she had extracted neat bricks of one hundred $100 bills, thirty-one in all. The white Cuban person behind the desk had grown somewhat whiter at this display; if a comic-book thought balloon had appeared over her head at the time, it would have contained the wordnarcolista. The papers got signed without delay.

Paz directed Morales into the small parking lot, observed that his mother’s pale blue ’95 Coupe de Ville was in its stall, and bid farewell to his supervisor-companion. He rang at the outer door. No answer. He used his key. At her apartment door he rang again with the same result, and after a brief wait, he let himself into the small foyer. He called out, “Mamí, it’s me.” Nothing. Now a little prickle of concern.

In the foyer, on a small wooden stand was a half-life-size clothed statue of a black woman holding a paler infant. The woman wore an elaborate silver crown, and there were silvered metal rays emanating from behind her gown of blue brocade, which was covered with silver embroidery depicting shells, fish, and other marine life. Below her feet tossed plaster sea waves, from which emerged a miniature steel anchor. When Paz was a little boy, this image had been a cheap framed poster; later, that had been replaced by a plaster statue, and then another more elaborate one, and finally this one, probably the most luxurious available image of La Virgen de Regla, aka Yemaya, theorisha of maternity and of the sea, to whom his mother was dedicated in Santería. As a little boy he’d imagined it was a representation of Mom and himself.

The living room, which he now entered, was furnished in pale pink velvet and mahogany, heavy, expensive pieces-a tall breakfront, a long couch, armchairs, a coffee table inlaid with a marine scene in pale woods. The lamps on the side table were plaster sculptures, whose pale silken shades were protected by clear plastic. Mrs. Paz, in a flowered blue robe, was lying on the couch like a corpse, one arm and one foot resting on the floor, a copy ofPeople en Español fallen from her slack hand, reading glasses dangling from one ear. Her breath came in snorts and hisses.

Paz had not seen his mother asleep all that often, despite having lived in her house for eighteen years. In his mind she was always up and pushing, often pushing Paz as well, full of angry energy focused on never, ever, falling back into the nothing from which she had finally emerged. Here was the consequence: utter exhaustion. Paz was struck by a tender compassion and was wondering whether to tiptoe out and leave the poor woman in peace when she suddenly awoke. A lightning flash of fear appeared on her face when she knew that she was not alone, and then, when she observed who her visitor was, she quickly reassembled her normal stern mask. She made her glasses vanish, sat up, and said, “What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what?’ I’m your son, I’m visiting you on your day off.”

“Do you bring Amelia?”

“No, she’s still at school. Look, Mamí, the reason I came is I need your help.”

“Money?”

“No, money’s fine. This is a spiritual thing.”

Eyebrows climbed on her dark face. “I’ll make coffee,” she said and left for the kitchen.

They sat there at the old, chipped enamel-topped table he recalled from their days of poverty, drinking her bitter brew, and he told her about the dreams, his and Amelia’s, of the spotted beast, and about what he thought was happening to his wife, and how he had given the child the charm, theenkangue he had received from her years ago.

“That wasn’t wise,” she said when she heard that. “Enkangueare made for one person.”

“I know that, but she was scared and anyway it seemed to have worked. She hasn’t had hardly any nightmares since I gave it to her.”

“You should have come to me.”

“Iam coming to you, Mamí. I need a set for the whole family. I thought, these dreams, and after that reading Amelia got…and now I’m looking at my…you know, Calderón’s death, and there’s some kind of big cat involved in that, too.”

“Your father,” she corrected.

“Honestly, I can’t think of him that way. I mean he treated us like garbage his whole life.”

“You he did. But not me, never.”

“What do you mean? I thought he, you know…when you needed money for our first catering truck, he took advantage of you.”

She fixed him with a glare. “Is that what you think, son of mine? That your mother is a whore to buy a catering truck?”

Paz felt blood rush to his cheeks, but he met her stare. “You had no choice,” he said.

“You know nothing about it.”

“Thentell me, for God’s sake!”

She took a sip of coffee. “Ah, finally he asks, after nearly thirty years. All right, since you ask. Juan Calderón loved me and I loved him. He was a bad man and he loved in the manner of bad men, not like you love, but it was love all the same. He wanted me all the time, and I wanted him. Of course, it was impossible that it should go any further, but this we had, for seven months. You understand, it was something that was common in Cuba, the rich white man takes a black mistress to learn about passion before he marries whatever cold little white girl the parents have arranged. So I became pregnant, and therefore you must never think, my son, that you were not made in love, even in the love of a bad man. When I told him, he wanted to fly me to Puerto Rico so I could kill you, but I said no, and then he said, I will put you in a little apartment, you’ll be available. This is how it’s done, or was done where we both came from, a few years of comfort, he buys you some nice things, and then he finds another girl, a younger girl, and you go to work as a maid somewhere, and take care of your littlecabrón. But I said no, I said I wanted a loan from him to start a business, and we fought, because always he wanted to control me. But in the end I was stronger and he gave me the money, and said he would never see me again and if I ever made a claim on him, or you did, he would make something bad happen to the both of us. So I didn’t tell you about him, I made up a story, so you wouldn’t approach him. But you did anyway. Thesantos made it part of your life. And that’s also the reason I didn’t raise you in Santería, may it not be held against me. I wanted you to be an American boy. I thought I could protect you with my prayers to thesantos, and you would have a different kind of life, that you would escape from all this…the dark things. But Ifa has drawn out the thread of your fate in a different direction than I planned. And you know this, too, which is why you had Ifa cast for my grandchild and why you come to me now, although for your whole life you’ve thought that all of this was nonsense.”

“I’m still not sure I buy the whole thing-” he began, but she made a dismissive gesture of her hand and interrupted, “Yes, yes, you believe in your heart, because theorishas have shown you things, things not even I have seen.”

She drained her coffee down to the dregs, and swirled these around in the cup, a habit of hers. Sometimes things were revealed there, but apparently not now. She rose from the table. “I’ll get dressed and we’ll go see Julia at thebotánica.”

Paz just sat there mute, as if he had taken a blow to the head. She paused at the door and added, “I’m sorry, Iago. I was wrong. I tried to control things instead of handing everything over to thesantos. But you know, this is how I am, like a mule.”

Paz tried to recall if his mother had ever apologized to him about anything and came up blank. This was nearly as disturbing as the revelation about his father.

The shop had no name. It was jammed between a pharmacy and a shoe place in a strip mall on West Flagler near the county auditorium, a twelve-foot frontage with one dusty window that announcedBOTÁNICA in peeling gilt letters. Behind the window stood a row of dark-skinned plastersantos lined up like people waiting for a bus back to heaven: St. Lazarus, who was Babaluaye, curer of ills; the Virgen de Caridad, who was Oshun, the Venus of Cuban Africa; St. Peter, who was Ogun, lord of iron and anger; St. Anthony of Padua, who was Eleggua, the trickster, guardian of the ways; and Yemaya, walking on her plaster seas. Above these a slack piece of wire had been draped, from which hung cellophane packets of herbs and powders.

Inside it was dim and dusty, heavy with oversweet perfume. Only a narrow way led to the counter in the rear, so crowded was the place with statues and crates, and slapdash shelves holding the physical paraphernalia of the religion: strung cowries, toy weapons of cheap metal, fly whisks, framed pictures of the saints; and cans of purifying sprays, glass jars of dried leaves, crucifixes, bolts of heavy cloth for making costumes for the ceremonies, dream books; andsoperas, the containers used to hold the holy items appropriate to the various spirits, and a pile of concrete cones, each embedded with three cowry shells to make a crude face, the sign of Eleggua.

The woman behind the counter was over seventy, Paz estimated, with a face as dark, slick, and worn as the seat of an old saddle; her head was wrapped in a cloth of pink African print cotton. When she saw who it was, she smiled, showing her four remaining teeth, put aside her newspaper and came from around the counter to greet them. A warm embrace for Mrs. Paz, and a more ritualized one for her son; the woman smelled of some musky spice.

Chairs were swept clean and set out, chatting commenced. Most of it was about the workings of the various Santería congregations in Miami, and most of the people mentioned were strangers to Paz, except for the people who were denizens of the spirit world. Paz knew those, at least. He listened silently, feeling like a fool, feeling about twelve in the presence of adult conversation. He was grateful that sociability did not seem to be required of him, though, because the premises upon which he had based his whole life had just been overthrown and he was not in the mood to chatter.

After a little over half an hour this part of the visit expired. A brief silence, and Mrs. Paz poked him and said, “Give Julia the things from Lola and Amelia.” Paz had not mentioned these items to his mother, but of course, she knew that he knew thatenkangue could not be made without them. He passed the envelopes to Julia, who made some gesture to his mother, and then both women vanished into the back room of the shop.

Mumbles floated out from there, not all in the Spanish language. Paz gave up eavesdropping and amused himself with dream books. These were arranged in convenient alphabetical order, by subject. If you dreamt of a judge it meant you would overcome your enemy and also that you’d hit on a 28, 50, 70 bet at bolita, the Cuban lottery. He looked upjaguar but none of the dream books covered that one. He grew bored with this and explored the shop. He knew what a lot of it meant, but there were also any number of substances and objects he couldn’t identify. There was a basket of toy tools made of pot metal, and a selection of bow-and-arrow sets, and little plaster animals with arrows stuck in them. He picked up a bow and drew it. To his surprise, it was a real bow, made of some dark, oily wood. Pathetic, came the thought, miserable poor people desperate to change their luck. Ridiculous, really. What was he doing here, messing with this crap? He tossed the bow back into its bin.

Irritable now, he checked his watch. Two thirty-five and he had to be at the school to pick up Amelia at three. He could be a little late, but then he would have to endure a lecture from Perfect Miss Milliken about being a model of reliability for the children. Sorry, Miss M., he imagined himself saying, my family is cursed and I had to drop by thebotánica for some antihex medicine. She’d be on the phone to Child Protective Services within minutes. Or to the mother, thinking of whom brought the recollection that Lola got off early Mondays. He’d call her, make something up about the murder case, hot on the trail, he hated to lie, but still it was, if not really an emergency, a truly unavoidable delay. Not that he would a thousand times rather explain all this to Miss Milliken than to Lola.

He pulled out his cell phone and popped a speed-dial button. But the woman at the ER nurses’ station said that Dr. Wise had gone home sick. What was it? She didn’t know, and here he heard a little hesitancy, something not quite right. Was it serious? This is her husband. Sorry, Mr. Wise, she had no information on that. He broke the connection and dialed home. Five rings and Amelia’s little voice saying they couldn’t come to the phone right now could you leave a…

He called again with the same result and then dialed Lola’s cell phone, which he knew was like one of her breasts, always in reach and always warm. He got her answering service. Now in something close to panic, he skirted the counter and went into the back room. The two women were at a table, and both looked up, startled, as he entered. He explained the situation. The two exchanged an unreadable look.

“We’re almost done,” his mother said. “Go and wait. We’ll drive over to the school.”

Paz walked out without a word and called Tito Morales, and got another answering service. No one wanted to talk to him today. He was about to call for a cab when Mrs. Paz and Julia emerged, the former holding a small brown paper bag.

“We can go now,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”

“Let me drive,” he said. And he did, with reckless speed.

Amelia is up in the tree, in violation of strict orders not to climb higher than Miss Milliken can reach. Normally she is an obedient child, but this thing in the tree seems outside of normal constraints, like being in a dream. As soon as she reaches the hammock, Moie continues the story where he left off, as if she has not been away for more than a minute.

“So when Rain saw that Caiman would eat the whole world, she went to Sky and mated with him and out of her came Jaguar. She said to him, Jaguar, you are chief of all the beasts now. You must stop Caiman before he eats the whole world that our family has made. So Jaguar attacked Caiman and they fought for many hands of years. But Caiman was too strong. With his mighty tail Caiman threw Jaguar high into the air, up to the moon, so that he crashed into it. This is why you still see his face on the moon. When Jaguar fell back to earth he landed on a field of barren rock, with no food to eat. He was starving. Then came the Hninxa, and she said to him, Jaguar, eat my flesh. I will make you strong enough so that you can defeat Caiman, so he will not eat the whole world. So Jaguar ate the Hninxa…”

“What’s a Hninxa?” asks Amelia.

“No one knows,” says Moie. “There are no animals like that anymore. But this is what we call the little girls we give to Jaguar, so that Caiman does not come back and eat the world again. Now, Jaguar was strengthened so much by the flesh of the Hninxa that he defeated Caiman. He broke off Caiman’s long legs, so that he could not crawl far from River, and he broke off half of his tail, and from this he made all the fishes. He said: Caiman, you will not run on the land now, but crawl and eat only the fish I have made from your tail. And Caiman went to the water. But his spirit flew out into the world and became many hands of demons. Now, these demons are still alive and still wish to eat the world. And Jaguar thought, I will make First Man, and he and his people will help me rule the beasts, and if Caiman attacks me again I will have strong allies. So he did. Now it is many hands of years after that time, as many hands as the leaves in the forest, and the demons of Caiman’s spirit are in thewai’ichuranan, and they want to eat the world again. So Jaguar called me and said, Moie, take me to Miami America so I can fight Caiman as I did long ago. So I came. And Jaguar said also, I will send to you ahninxa of thewai’ichuranan and you will give her to me to eat, and then I will have strength over thewai’ichuranan demons. That is why I am in this tree.”

“Did Jaguar send you a…one of those little girls yet?”

“Yes.”

“Who is it?”

“It is you,” says Moie, and he smiles, showing his sharpened teeth.

Amelia stares at him, then giggles. “That was a good story,” she says. “Would you like to hear a story?”

“Yes, I would.”

But before she is more than halfway throughThe Little Mermaid she hears shouting from below, Miss Milliken’s voice and her father’s voice.

“I have to go,” she says.

“Wait,” says Moie, and dipping his finger into a small clay pot, he presses a spot of ointment to the back of her neck. It feels warm on her neck for a moment. She scampers down from limb to limb and drops like a warm mango into her father’s arms.

After that she has to endure a stern lecture from the teacher, which her father supports. It is dangerous to climb into the tree. Does she want Miss Milliken to keep her indoors while the other children played? She does not. Well, then.

As parent and child walk away, Paz asks, “What were you doing up there, baby?”

“Nothing. Eating Fritos and watching the bugs. Did you have imaginary friends when you were a kid?”

“Probably, but I don’t remember.”

“I think it’s very babyish. I have a friend named Moie who’s half imaginary and half not imaginary.”

“Really? Like Mary Poppins?”

They have been strolling across the lawn to the parking lot, but now she stops short and looks at him severely, a look he has seen any number of times on her mother’s face. But this fades and is replaced by one more confused. “I forgot what I was going to say.”

“That happens to me all the time. Was it something about your imaginary friend?”

She shrugs. Then the animation returns to her face and she asks, “If God said you should kill me with a big knife, would you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“We had Bible study. They used to kill little boys and girls. It’s a sacrifice. I think Abraham was mean to sacrifice his little boy just ’cause God said.”

“But he didn’t sacrifice him.”

“No, but he was going to. I think God was mean, too.”

“It’s just a story, honey. Abraham had faith that God wouldn’t really make him do anything bad to his little boy.”

Again that dreamy expression crosses her face and clears.

“Isaac. There’s a Isaac in my class. He brought his Game Boy to school and Miss Milliken took it away and gave it back later.”

After a short pause she asks, “Anyway, would you?”

“No,” replies Paz without thought.

“Even if God would be mad at you?”

“Let him be. I still wouldn’t.”

“People who let themselves get sacrificed are martyrs, did you know that? And they get to be angels and fly around in heaven. Oh, look there’s Abuela!”

“Abuela!” she cries and runs across to the car and hoists herself through the window into her grandmother’s lap. The two chatter happily in Spanish for the whole drive to South Miami while Paz tries several times to get his wife to answer her cell phone, and grows increasingly worried.

At the house, after Mrs. Paz departed in her Cadillac, Paz and his daughter went around the back, and Paz noted that Lola’s bike was not in its place. She must have taken a cab home, which did not bode well at all. He paused before the door and said, “Look, kiddo, your mom’s a little sick and I want you to try and be real quiet, okay?”

“Okay. What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know. Probably a little flu or something. Just watch cartoons for now, and later you can help me make our dinner.”

“I could make it myself.”

“I’m sure,” he said and opened the door.

“What’s in the bag, Daddy?” the child asked.

“Nothing, just some stuff Abuela gave me.”

“Torticas?”Hopefully.

“No, just…a kind of medicine for Mommy. I’m going to go in now and see how she is. Go change out of your school clothes now.”

The child skipped off to her room and Paz entered his own bedroom. His wife was a mound on the bed under a light throw. He sat carefully on the bed, and as he did, he slipped theenkangue made with her hair under the mattress. She stirred and groaned.

He tugged the blanket off her face and felt her forehead. It was clammy but without fever. She blinked at him with red and swollen eyes.

“How’re you doing, babe? Not so hot?”

“They sent me home,” she croaked.

“Well, yeah. You’re sick. It’s a hospital.”

“I’m not sick. I had a…a breakdown.”

“A what?”

“I…they called me in, we had a kid, a drug OD, comatose. There was a traffic accident, a van, half a dozen seniors all hurt and the ER was jammed. And I couldn’t think what to do. I was the only spare M.D. and they were all staring at me and I went blank. I couldn’t…I told them to…I made the wrong call, and they all stared at me, the nurses, because they knew it was wrong and I started screaming at them and…I can’t remember it all, I was…hysterical, and they got Kemmelman and he grabbed me and threw me into the doctors’ dressing room. And later I went home, I sneaked away and took a cab and I have to sleep, Jimmy, I need to sleep and I can’t. I take pills, I can’t remember all the pills I took and I’m a doc. I’m a doc but I can’t sleep. Why can’t I sleep, Jimmy? I’m so tired and I can’t sleep.”

“You have bad dreams.”

“Sixty milligrams of flurazepam and I can’t sleep,” she said. Her voice had become high and soft, like a little girl’s.

“You have to get off those pills, babe. No more pills.”

She stiffened and tried to sit up. “Is Amy okay? Where’s Amy?”

“Amy’s fine,” he said. “She’s in her room. Listen, you’re going to sleep now. I’m going to stay here with you and rub your back and you’re going to go to sleep and when you wake up you’ll be fine.”

“No…I have to see Amy.” She repeated her daughter’s name several times, weeping now, but he held her close and stroked her back and after a while the sobs faded and were replaced with the sighing breaths of deepest slumber.

Paz awoke with a start out of one of those dreams that are so confused with reality that it takes more than a few seconds to discover which is which. He thought he’d been on a stakeout and fallen asleep and the suspect had slipped away, and he felt shame and despair. But, thank God, just aregular bad dream. Lola was still out, inert next to him, softly snoring. He slipped from the bed and went into his daughter’s bedroom. There he placed her newenkangue on the bedpost and retrieved his own, returning it to its old place around his neck.

His cell phone played its tune. He pulled it out, saw who was calling, and after a brief hesitation, made the connection.

“What’s up, Tito?”

“No one says hello anymore,” said Morales, “ever since they figured out how to tell you who’s calling. I think that’s a major cultural change.”

“The end of civilization as we know it. How did you make out?”

“Oh, I got the name and address. We’re looking for the Forest Planet Alliance, on Ingraham. Where are you now?”

“At my place.”

“I could come by. I think we should pay these folks a visit.”

“It can’t be now, man. I got personal business.” A silence on the line, and Paz added, “Lola’s sick.”

“Oh? Nothing serious, I hope.”

“No, just some kind of flu. Look, I’ll check in with you in the morning.”

“Fine. Look, you ever hear of a guy named Gabriel Hurtado?”

“No. Who is he?”

“A Colombian. Some kind of drug lord. His name came up. Apparently your…I mean, Calderón was in communication with him recently. We got it off his phone logs. The feds have expressed an interest. They’ve been after him for years, two million reward for information leading to.”

“The more the merrier,” said Paz, sniffing. Someone was cooking onions. He heard the familiar rattle of implement against pan. “Look, Tito, I got to go. I’ll call you.”

“Colombian narcos. Usually they don’t use mystic panthers.”

“Jaguars,” said Paz and broke the connection. Then he went into the kitchen and found his daughter, standing on the little wooden stool she had used as a baby, calmly sautéing chicken pieces. On the stove steamed a pot of rice and a pot of black beans. “I’m making arroz con pollo,” she said. “I was hungry and I thought if Mommy was sick and you were sleeping I would cook this for all of us. I didn’t make a mess.”

Paz looked around the kitchen. Well, not much of a mess. He sat on a chair and watched his daughter cook, rendered speechless by the splendor of it.