Wet Work

1

"Mr. Robertson to see you," said Miss Farrell.

"Send him in," said Charley Becker. He had hired Robertson away from Northrop six months ago. He was a balding jock in his mid-forties who rose at 4 A.M. every day to strap on blood-pressure monitors and LED pedometers to run seven miles.

He strode in, beaming, hand extended, bursting. "CB!" he said.

Charley nodded. "I've been looking over the log to N forty-nine ninety."

"N forty-nine ninety… forty-nine ninety."

"Those are the tail numbers of the G-4 you've been living in the last six months."

"Right. Hell of a machine. The comparables just can't touch it, in terms of ceiling. I can't stand fighting it out with ATC for a decent vector. You have to plead with those bastards, it's so shoulder-to-shoulder up there."

"I see you took it to Chicago and back four times last week."

"We're burning on the PEMCO deal."

"Uh-huh. Well, only thing I smell burning is paper money, mine. Let me acquaint you with some figures. Costs $4,700 and change to keep that bird aloft per hour. Round trip Dulles-Chicago, that's two hours, that's $9,400, not counting downtime. Times four, that's $37,600. Figuring in downtime, comes to $50,000. Divided by four, that's $12,500 per trip."

"Right. As I say, we're real close-"

But Charley was already punching buttons and a voice fresh as bathroom deodorizer was coming in over the speaker box: "Thank you for calling American Airlines, Susan speaking, how may I help you?"

"Good morning, Susan. Got a fellow here needs to get to Chicago."

"Would that be first class or coach?"

"Well, now. He does like his luxury. But let's say coach. I'm sure he's got frequent-flier miles he can upgrade with."

"Round trip would be… let's see if I can get this computer to tell me… $670. Actually, it goes as low as $2.18."

"Two-eighteen, you say? Now, Susan, he's a bit touchy what altitude he flies. One thing he hates is going shoulder-to-shoulder with a lot of other aircraft. I was wondering if you could fix it so his plane will be above all those others."

"Uh-"

"Oh, and he's particular about what vector he's assigned by Air Traffic Control."

"Actually, we don't handle that here. You'd probably want to speak with… if you'll hold I could ask my supervisor."

"No, that's all right. Thank you kindly."

"Thank you for calling American."

Robertson left. Miss Farrell's voice came on, sounding surprised. "Natasha's just walked in."

"Well, send her in-"

The door blew open. "You son of a bitch."

"Sugar-" She came straight at him, cheeks ruddy from the October wind, breathing like she'd walked up all ten floors. Snorting, Charley would have said, if it weren't such an unfeminine term, though there was something of the charging bull to her aspect. Her long legs disappeared-finally-into a short black leather miniskirt. The jacket, he imagined, was of indeterminate Middle Eastern origins, with raggedy sheepskin cuffs and irregular bits of mirror stitched in along the sleeves. She looked like a cross between a Vogue model and an Afghan mujahed. She looked gorgeous. She planted her hands knuckle-down on Charley's desk-bad sign-and glowered at him with the full-moon eyes. It was her spring-loaded position; she was cocked and ready to fire. Charley felt his back flattening against the chair.

"You look a little pale, honey. You getting enough exercise?"

"Don't patronize me."

"A fine hello." He was trying to buy time while his brain raced to decipher the cause of the storm.

"You're a damn liar, Charley."

More input. Klaxons rang inside his skull, red lights flashed, neurons strapped on flak jackets and ran down corridors shouting and shutting watertight bulkheads against the norepinephrine that was already up to their knees. Aoogah aoogah, dive dive. Something seriously wrong here. More input, damnit! "Uh," he managed lamely, "how do you mean, lie?" She was giving him the microwave stare now, rearranging his molecules, cooking him from the inside out. Don't say a thing, it'll be taken down and used against you. She had a round face, she looked like the ladies painted by whatsisname, the one he could never pronounce. Anger… Inger… Ingres. Those nineteenth-century French ladies with skin soft as butter and their chins resting on a crooked finger, the picture of domesticity-you could almost smell the coq au vin in the oven-except that the eyes always seemed to be undressing the painter. What angst Ingres must have gone through in those quiet parlors-

"You have the nerve to put me under surveillance."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Like you didn't know what I was talking about when someone bought the building I rent in. My own rent-controlled apartment and suddenly there are cameras all over the place and round-the-clock Arnold Schwarzenegger doormen."

"Aw, we been through all that, sug."

But clearly they were going to go through it all again. "Doormen," she muttered, "in a five-story walk-up."

"I told you, the real estate division buys a lot of buildings. It's, a small world."

"Bullshit."

"You know I don't like it when you speak like that. They don't inform me about every little… rathole they're going to buy."

"Rathole. That's my home."

"Nonsense."

"What about that show I was auditioning for that suddenly you become a major backer of?"

"Coincidence."

"You're just like Nixon. You look straight into the camera and lie."

"I don't see the shame in supporting the arts."

"I was humiliated. Then you start having Felix hire people to spy on me."

"That's a terrible thing to say. I am not spying on you."

"Your righteous indignation needs a tune-up, Charley."

"Now look here, girl, you want to go live in a neighborhood looks like Bey-root"-his accent tended to deepen in periods of stress-"I don't see the harm in providing a little peace of mind."

"Your peace of mind, you mean."

"Have you seen the rape statistics for that neighborhood? 'Cause I have." He pressed a button. "Jeannie, bring the rape statistics for Natasha's new"-he said it sarcastically-"neighborhood."

They glared at each other. He said, "If you won't take my money, I've got a perfectly good apartment there that I can't hardly use anyway 'cause of my tax situation. I told you a hundred times you're welcome to it."

"Sutton Place? Are you serious?"

"The hell's wrong with Sutton Place? Not enough violent crime for you? Okay, I'll have Felix truck in some muggers. How many you want?"

"God," she said. "You just don't get it, do you?" It wasn't a surrender exactly, but she went over and sat on the edge of a sofa and lit a cigarette, staring out across Roosevelt Island toward the Mall and the Capitol.

Charley watched her. It disturbed him that she smoked. He'd offered her a significant sum of money when she was thirteen if she wouldn't smoke until she was twenty-one, which she dismissed at the time as an "obvious bribe." Well, this wasn't hardly the time to get on her about smoking. He tried, "Where'd they screw up this time?"

"They were good. I'll give them that."

I?

"Not that good."

She laughed. "He used women this time. As if you didn't know."

"That so?" he said disingenuously.

"Uh-huh." She blew a thin stream of smoke toward the Lincoln Memorial. A 727 flew past with its wheels down for landing at National. "They're kind of butch. Where does Felix find these people anyway?"

"Oh I don't know. Around, I guess."

"Do you pay them the same as men?"

"I'm sure of it." She stared. "I'll check on it."

"They followed me down here on the shuttle." She looked at her watch. "What time do you have?"

"Past noon. Twelve-oh-six. How about some lunch?"

"They're a little slow. Either that or Tim was a little late."

"How's that?"

"Friend of mine is calling Building Security at noon to say there are two armed women outside the building waiting to kill you."

"Sweet Jesus, girl." Charley grabbed the phone. "Security, this is Charley Becker-"

"They're both sort of dark, so my friend is saying they're Libyan. I thought that would cut the reaction time, but"-she looked at her watch-"I'm not too impressed, frankly."

"-you took a call a few minutes ago, it's false alarm-"

"Aren't the Libyans pissed off at you for not selling them something? High explosives, chemical weapons-"

The door banged open. Three of Felix's people pushed through, pistols drawn, followed by Miss Farrell.

"You all right, sir?"

"Fine."

"We found two women outside the building, they're armed. They claim-"

"It's all right, just, it's fine, let them go."

They left. Charley said, "That was a damn fool thing. Someone could have got hurt."

"That's right," she said, a study in imperturbability. "Maybe now it won't happen again." She slung her bag over her shoulder and stubbed out the cigarette.

"Leaving?"

"Gotta get back."

"Stay over, honey. We'll chopper out to the farm and have dinner. I'll fly you back to New York on the G-4. If Robertson isn't using it."

She kissed him on the top of his head. "Got a rehearsal."

"You got a show?" He brightened. "Why didn't you say? That's just fine!"

"Yeah." She grinned.

"Well, that's just, that's great. What is it?"

"Oh no."

"I'm not going to do anything, I promise."

"I'll save you and Felix tickets for the opening."

"Oh, come on, Tasha, tell me. All right, just tell me what it's about."

She said, "It's a very contemporary piece."

"Contemporary," he said suspiciously. "Contemporary about what?"

She considered. "It's about redemption."

"Redemption. It's religious?"

"No." She laughed. "Not exactly."

"This isn't one of those deals where you don't wear clothes. Now Tasha-"

"No. It's an adaptation of Jimmy Podesta's book."

"Who?"

"Gotta run. No more bullshit, okay?" She kissed him again, threw in a hug.

"The way you talk. Your grandmother would die."

"'I should sin to think but nobly of my grandmother.'"

"How's that?"

"The Tempest. Shakespeare."

"The outdoors one." Miranda's speech ends: "Good wombs have borne bad sons." The night he came to see it, she left the line out, earning herself a note from the director.

"I'll see you, okay?"

The moment she was gone Charley was on the phone. "Felix? Those women you got, they're no good… Well, I don't care who recommended them. We need to try something different. Meantime get someone over to the twelve-thirty shuttle."

2

It was one of those spaces on the lower Lower West Side, maybe a hundred seats and cold enough so that most people kept their coats on. Charley and Felix sat in their front-row seats, Charley staring glumly at the Xeroxed sheet of paper that served as the program, Felix adjusting the squelch on his radio.

"'Wired,'" said Charley. "What's that mean?"

"Drugs," said Felix.

"She said it was about redemption. She didn't mention drugs."

"Maybe it's about giving up drugs." Charley grunted. Felix massaged his disability, the torn cruciate ligaments in his right knee. One month away from his gold shield and he steps into a pothole chasing a perp down a dark street. He did a casual scan of the audience behind them.

There was a paragraph of bio on Tasha on the sheet. Nothing about the Lycee or the Virginia prep school with a name like expensive dessert wine. He'd been going to her plays since she was, what, five? He wasn't sure about the arc from the Virgin Mary in the school Christmas pageant to Alison in The Young and the Wired, but he'd given her standing ovations at all of them, except the outdoors Shakespeare one where she played the daughter of the sorcerer: eighteen, blossomed, floating out onto the grass, barefoot, her long hair laced with jasmine and baby's breath, in a body stocking glimmery with what looked like ground diamond dust in the spotlights. He had to close his eyes, finally, it was too much, he started to feel like the hunchback, Caliban. She noticed that he didn't stand at the end. It was days before he could look her straight in the eye, and when he did… The lights were coming up. There she was, saying,

"I don't believe this shit!" He felt Charley tensing next to him.

She and another actor were down on all fours on a shag carpet, desperate over having just dropped an "eighth" into it.

"Eighth of what?" Charley hissed at Felix.

"Cocaine," Felix whispered. Charley sat in his seat for the next two hours with his cigar clamped between his teeth like the pin of a hand grenade.

Backstage after it was over, he refused to shake Jimmy Podesta's hand. It might have developed into a scene but for the arrival of a photographer from The TriBeCa Times. They went back to the apartment, Charley, Tasha and the director, a young hotshot out of Carnegie-Mellon named Tim Tamarino.

Charley studied the young man. He was presentable, intelligent and articulate, though Charley wondered about the eyes; they were a tad soulful for his taste.

"Maybe your difficulty with the piece," Tim was explaining, "is that you're taking it too literally. For instance, when Alison goes into rehab, it's not just a drying-out place for cocaine addicts. There's a recontexturalizing going on. By rehab we mean that Alison is reinhabiting herself."

"You want some more meat?"

"Charley," Tasha sighed.

They had coffee afterward in the indoor patio with the columns from the Alhambra and the large mosaic pool. Charley tossed croutons to Confucius, the old carp, a gift of the Chinese government. He said, "I'm like the Arabs. I love water because I grew up in dry country." Confucius shoved croutons about noncommittally in the water. Tasha sat on the edge and dangled her fingers in the water. "I'm from Texas."

"So Tasha said."

"I was raised by nuns. Mexicans. They came over the Rio Grande when-"

"Pops," said Tasha, "Not with the How-I-started-from-scratch. It's kind of late."

"Well, I-"

"I'd be fascinated," said Tim.

"Some other time maybe," said Charley, reinserting his cigar.

Tasha came over and put her arms around him from behind.

"This is a very beautiful home, Mr. Becker," said Tim.

"Oh, this isn't home. Virginia is home. I can only spend so many days a year in New York or the IRS-"

Tasha kissed him on the top of his head. "Maybe you could tell Tim your life story and your IRS war stories next time."

Tim looked at his watch and said, "I better be off."

"Drop me?" she said.

"Sure."

"Don't you want to spend the night here?" said Charley. "We got your bed made up."

Charley had antennae like the National Security Agency and they picked up the microburst transmission that passed between Tasha and Tim.

"I want to go over some notes with Tim while they're fresh."

"Notes?"

"On the performance." She kissed him. "Thanks for coming, Pops."

"Pleasure," said Charley.

"How you lie." She smiled. Tim shook his hand, a good firm shake, the kind Charley liked.

"You'll let me know if you decide to sublet," he smiled.

"All right." Charley laughed. "I will."

On the way to the door he said, "I told her she could live here, it's hers anyway, but she likes it down there in Bey-root."

"Why don't you feed yourself to Confucius," she said.

"He'd choke, most likely."

"I don't doubt he would," she said, sounding so like her grandmother.

Natasha was ten months old when on one otherwise beautiful spring evening her father-Charley's only child-drove the Mercedes into an oncoming car, killing himself, the waitress he had just picked up and the four occupants of the oncoming car. The Maryland State Police lab fixed his blood/alcohol content at 0.43. At the service in the private chapel, the priest clung manfully to the theme: "It is not for us to judge Charley Junior." After the ceremony Charley locked himself in his study with a bottle of bourbon and his checkbook and sat down to write out the final payoffs incidental to his son's short life.

Charley Junior's wife did not attend the funeral owing to a headache. Charley thought of that as he wrote out zeros for the families of the waitress and the people in the other car. She was a coldhearted stunner from hunt country-long on breeding and short on cash-who'd married Charley Junior for his daddy's money, pure and simple. She moved with the baby to New York a few days after the funeral without bothering to inform Charley and his wife. Charley flew into a rage.

"Charley," said Margaret, "you'll do yourself no good if you turn the baby's mother against you."

He had no leverage. He'd given Charley Junior a large sum when he reached twenty-one-unwise, unwise-and now she had that. He went up to New York and saw her and did what he did well, he made a deal with her: she'd receive large monthly trustee fees in return for-letting Charley have the baby on weekends.

One weekend she arrived with bruises. Charley grilled the Mexican nanny. The nanny said she fell. She arrived with bruises another weekend and this time Charley put the nanny through a grilling that wouldn't have been out of place in Nuremberg. In tears the old woman told him: the mother was never there, and when she was she was drunk and when she was drunk she hit the child. Charley called Tasha's mother and told her he was keeping the child.

The FBI showed up at the farm two hours later and it was an ugly scene, the baby screaming and clutching at Charley, Margaret in tears, the Mexican nanny in tears, the FBI-mindful that they were dealing with a friend of the President's-straining to settle the matter without recourse to handcuffs.

A few weeks later the phone rang in the middle of the night, the Mexican nanny. Come quickly, she said. He made it in less than two hours, remarkable, given the distance, the hour and the FAA violations involved. He got past the doorman and pounded on the door. He and the mother screamed at each other through the door until the nanny let him in the service entrance. The baby was bleeding from swollen lips. He picked her up and started for the door. The police, summoned by the doorman, arrested him in the lobby and she charged him with kidnapping. Charley decided he would do his case more good by refusing bail while his lawyers negotiated with his daughter-in-law's lawyers. She dropped the charges. On his release, Charley went to the Yellow Pages and looked under "Investigators-Private" and the first entry he came to was A Security (followed by AA Security and AAA Security-they were hopscotching each other backwards to get the first listing) and the man who answered was Felix Velez, recently forced off the New York police force on a Disability. They met at a coffee shop around the corner.

The next day Tasha's mother was sitting in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel having drinks with a friend when she noticed that everyone was staring at her. She turned and there was Felix, holding a sign above her. It said: "Baby beater." After a dozen incidents-at the theater, on the sidewalk, during (and this was truly embarrassing) a runway show presenting Givenchy's fall line-she called Charley and said all right, let's talk.

3

She forced herself to read the paragraph one more time.

Rox Van Ander and Susie Schwartz are especially fine as a pair of postmodern Brenda Fraziers whose biggest problem in life seems to be where their next gram of cocaine is coming from. The third member of the trio, Natasha Becker, is another matter. Half the time she seems faintly embarrassed by her lines, the other half she spends playing emotional catch-up. You're left wondering if she isn't a member of the technical crew who had wandered down off the catwalk to give acting a try. It's not that she phoned in her part. She faxed it.

She'd gone out early to buy the paper, opened it at the newsstand and burst into tears in front of the Pakistani vendor, who figured someone must have died. She came back and undressed and poured about a half pint of high-viscosity sandalwood bath gel into the tub and stayed there submerged in an amniotic sac of hot suds for nearly two hours. She wrapped herself in the oversize terry and was sitting in the kitchen with her knees drawn up protectively against her chest, hair slicked back, sipping cambric tea.

The stuff about the catwalk should have done it, but no, he had to go back for another bon mot, the tweedy, hyphenated little dwarf. She fantasized him in old age, alone and miserable, all his friends driven away by bon mots, poor, living in an SRO hotel with no medical insurance and itching all over from a chronic skin condition for which there was no-

Tranquilo. Forget it. Forgive your enemies, like Pops says: makes them madder than hell. Next time she ran into E. Fremont-Carter she'd smile like a lady, tell him how much she enjoyed his work and then knee him right in the balls the way Felix taught her.

It dawned on her she hadn't read past the paragraph. He had good things to say about Tim's direction, a few obligatory jabs at Podesta. Nothing more about her fax instrument, thank God, no need to waste mots on a corpse, right? What a disaster. At least there was no show tonight. So what shall we do tonight, Tash? Suicide? Nah. Two things of Stouffer's macaroni and cheese and a quart of A amp; W root beer and get into bed with P. J. O'Rourke, or his new book, anyway. So why hadn't Tim called?

She jogged all the way down to the Battery and back, better than twice her usual daily distance. Tim still hadn't phoned when she got back. Felix called from Virginia. He'd just heard about it. He said he was coming up to New York and locate this E. Fremont-Carter and tear him a new asshole, and the way he said it she knew he would. He got her laughing. Ten minutes later her grandfather called, alerted by Felix. He wanted her to come down today, now, this minute, he'd have the chopper pick her up at the East River heliport. She'd be there in time for supper. Pops. What a piece of work. His solution to everything was-send in the helicopters; America in Vietnam. She cried, not because of what the tweedy dwarf had written, but because she wanted nothing more than to get into a helicopter and fly to the farm and be taken care of, but it would be giving in. "I can't, Pops," she said. "Got to get back on the horse." Her grandfather said he was proud of her and not to pay any mind to the press, they never got it right. She said she'd call tomorrow. She put down the phone, feeling better, and rang Tim.

He said he'd been out to brunch with the new head of Williamstown, who was talking to him about being the Boris Sagal Fellow this summer. "That's great," she said. "That's fantastic." He said it wasn't real money, but Williamstown was Williamstown. He went on about it until there was a pause in the conversation the size of the skating rink at Rockefeller Center and she said, "You want to talk about the weather now?"

That got a little laugh out of him and he said, "Why don't I come over." There was something weird in his voice.

"Yeah," she said, "why don't you."

She de-cocooned out of the terry and put on white stretch pants like thick leotards and a loose black cashmere sweater and her grandmother's pearls, brushed the shine back into her hair and Visine'd the red out of her eyes. She suspected some puffiness remained. So Tim would know she'd been crying. Hell with it. What was he expecting after a review like that-the Ivory soap girl?

There was no buzzer to let people into the building, so the drill was to call from the corner phone booth-assuming the crackheads hadn't jacked it-and she'd toss down the keys. She'd moved into this apartment in a huff and a hurry after finding out her grandfather had bought the last one-and there were certain drawbacks, such as the no-buzzer situation, the radiator situation and the fire-escape situation, since presumably fire escapes weren't supposed to quiver when you put potted plants on them. But she liked the idea of tossing keys down onto the street. It was a very ethnic thing to do, tossing your keys down to a lover in the street. Hard to imagine that on a Streetcar named Sutton Place.

Muffee!

Stanley! What are you doing in that revolting T-shirt?

She waited and waited and when the phone finally rang she was… indisposed. She had the answering machine set to kick in after two rings. She could hear Tim saying, "Natasha? Hello? I'm here. Are you there? Natasha?"-puzzlement turning to impatience turning to click. Oh God. Not the best time for this to happen. He hung up just before she picked up. She went to the window and yelled. She was about to run out after him when it rang again, a reprieve. She tossed the keys. It was four floors down and the key chain was heavy, since it had to hold all the keys necessary to open a New York apartment. Tim did a cool matador's sidestep and let them smash onto the pavement. Tim, so cool. He let himself in, came up the stairs and walked in. He gave her a kiss, but it was perfunctory, somehow.

She asked if he wanted something to drink. The way he said no was all business. He had his leather briefcase with him. Snap, snap. He took out the paper, prefolded to the review, and laid it on the coffee table. Wonderful. You want me to recite it from memory? Then he reached into his pocket and took out a small vial full of white powder, which he set on the table next to the review.

"What," she said, "is that?" though she knew exactly what it was.

"This," he said, "is your authenticity."

It had come up a few times during rehearsals, always to one side so as not to embarrass her in front of Rox and Susie, who, to judge from their authenticity, had hoovered half the Peruvian gross national product up their nostrils. Their authenticity was so for-real it wouldn't get past a dope-sniffing dog.

"Tim," she pleaded. He picked up the review and read the paragraph out loud, as though he agreed with it. Her eyes welled.

"It's complicated for me," she said. She hadn't told him about her alcoholic father or her alcoholic mother. She started to, once, but it sounded stupid and self-pitying. Why not just say she'd tried it once and was allergic. Everyone understood allergies; allergies are so much easier to justify than abstinence.

He read the paragraph out loud again. "Timmy," she said. "Please."

"Natasha, if the role called for you to play the piano, you'd take piano lessons. You don't have to become Alicia de Larrocha, but you'd want to know where your fingers went."

"Uh-huh, and to do Whose Life Is It Anyway? you'd want me to go sever my spinal cord?"

"That's reductionist. We're talking about locating a precise emotion. As it stands, you're improvising." He held up the review. "And it shows."

"Will you stop waving that thing."

"Actor's choice, Natasha. That's what it's about."

"Funny," she said. "I thought it was about whether or not I do snort cocaine."

"Louis Malle once told me, he said, 'You put an extra next to an actor and nine times out of ten the actor ends up looking like an actor and the extra looks like the real thing. Why?' You know how Louis talks-"

"No, Tim. I haven't met Louis Malle."

"You'd like him. And I think he'd like you." Tim did Louis Malle's accent: "'Because the actor is an actor. He isn't real.'"

"Great. So I should aspire to be as good as an extra, is this the moral?"

"I'm not into morals, Natasha." Tim stood up and went to the window. It was just for effect. "I spoke with Bernie and Karen this morning."

"Yes," she said, trying to sound casual, but he'd gotten her attention.

"I think I made it all right."

"Just tell me, Tim."

"They're not happy."

"They were happy Thursday night."

"Time flies. What's happened is they had a call from the Schumpelmann Organization."

"Oh," said Tasha. The show might move uptown? Tim was giving her this look: And you may not be coming.

"Thanks, Tim."

"Don't shoot the messenger." He sat down beside her and stroked her hair. "I just want it to work for you. I think we can get to where Bernie and Karen will be happy again. It's not over till the fat lady sings." The fat lady was Tim's code for the New York Times theater critic. "If we get to where we need to be before she sings I think we're all going to be happy, me, you, Bernie and Karen."

Actor's choice: her life had suddenly boiled down to making Bernie and Karen happy by snorting cocaine. In its own shabby way it was like Noel Coward having to sleep with a rich woman to get backing. What will you do, Noel? Hold my nose and think of England. So how do you hold your nose and snort coke? "All right," she said heavily.

"Do you have a mirror or something?"

Tim chopped it up into three-inch-long lines, perfect replicas of the lines of milk powder they used onstage. He rolled up a fifty-dollar bill, the same they used in the play, a preview-night gift from Bernie and Karen-maybe they'll have it bronzed if the show goes uptown-and handed it to her. Her fingers were shaking.

"It's all right," he said.

"Will you do it with me?"

"I don't do cocaine."

"Jesus, Timmy. I'm nervous."

"You'll be fine. And don't sneeze. This cost a hundred and a quarter."

"Where did you get it?"

"One of the ushers."

"Which one?"

"Whichever. I'm not sure I even know his name."

She stared at the cocaine. "Is it-"

"It's good," he said, "the best. Authenticity, right?"

She did one line, then another. It did not burn, which Tim said was a sign of good cocaine. Her gums went numb until she could tap her front teeth and they felt like pieces of tile. She felt enormous energy and confidence and segued right into her coke soliloquies, Tim nodding, making notes, even smiling here and there, something he never, ever did during rehearsals. She felt happy, as happy as she could ever remember. It was like freeze-dried happiness crystals, just add nose and boom. After a while it didn't even feel chemical. No question about it, Tim was right, authenticity was everything, she couldn't wait to get back up onstage-too bad no show tonight, she was ready, instrument tight as catgut-and mix it up with old Rox and Susie. Tim was chopping up more lines. She did the "coke whore" bit where she pretends to be fascinated, enthralled, mesmerized by the guy doling out the coke. She went into an ad-lib riff about how much she admired Tim's work and how she'd been following his career for so long. It was so authentic it actually seemed to annoy him.

Then came a point where no matter how long the lines were they didn't seem to work as well and suddenly the room began to feel very warm. She went to open the window and Tim said, "Are you kidding? It's freezing in here. Don't you have heat?" He went over and started inspecting the radiator the way men do when they pretend to have mechanical knowledge, getting down on his knees and saying in that male way: No wonder, there's no thromboggletoggle on this thing and I haven't got my tools with me. She would have been amused by this and maybe even incorporated it into the soliloquy she was doing, except she wasn't feeling well, she was feeling hot and it was getting hard to breathe. She felt her forehead. It was like ice. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking almost violently. Was this-was this normal? "Tim?"

The way he looked at her scared her. "Tim?"

"You okay? Tasha?"

She was on the floor now, looking up at the ceiling, which the super had been promising to have painted for the last five months-yeah, right. Someone was piling cinder blocks on her chest, making it very hard to breathe.

"Timmy?" It hurt to speak. Her throat was like a kiln. Tim was holding her forehead and her hand.

"Pops?" she said. "Felix?"

He pulled up her sweater and put his ear to the round of her bosom and listened. There was no sound, only the pounding in his own chest.

Fuck fuck fuck. Shit shit shit. Fuck fuck fuck.

He put his hand to her throat the way he'd seen in the Vietnam movies. Nothing, just his own pulse. His hand was shaking now. Jesus, what was this, transference?

Still on his knees beside her, he thought: Dial 911. He went for the phone and he had the phone in his hand when he thought: Hold on, hold on a second. What is the point of dialing 911 now? There was no emergency. She was dead. Sweet Jesus, this couldn't be happening. Please. Rewind the tape. We're going to shoot this scene over. Rewind, goddamnit, I am not happy with this scene.

The clock on the bookshelf said ten after six. Just move the big hand back five minutes, that's all. Five minutes. Okay, ready? Okay, let's take it from the middle of page 17: "She needs to go on a low-semen diet." There's no "rewind" on the machine, only "play."

You're panicking. Stop it. Think. Breathe. In, out-slow, in, out-slow. Okay. Call 911. All right. All right. All right. I'm going to. Just a moment here. What do I say? Do I say: There's been a little problem with cocaine here and… Jesus, this is not a "little problem" here, this is a major fucking disaster. The mirror, the coke, the razor, Bernie and Karen's fifty. Great. Wonderful. Is this your cocaine? No, Officer. Well, whose is it? You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney… What the hell happened? Is this what happened to the Kennedy kid, to that black basketball player? No. Those two were doing, like, massive quantities. There's still half a gram left here. Jesus, Ramirez, what kind of coke is this? So good you drop dead? You Puerto Rican piece of shit, Ramirez. Well, you're in it same as me, pal, up to your fucking-

Stop. Breathe from the diaphragm. Okay, flush the coke down the toilet. Wait a minute. They'll do an autopsy, they'll find the coke one way or the other. They'll find the coke and then I'm dead too. Might as well be. Probably end up envying her for Chrissake.

Look, make a choice. Call 911 or get out of here. It's not like you're going free. My God, this is going to be with you for the rest of your life. The rest of your life. Jesus, it's like Frank Capra in reverse, It's a Horrible Life. Rikers Island. Great. If you're lucky you'll get for a roommate the guy who killed John Lennon, or Joel Steinberg. Joel can keep me up all night explaining to me how he didn't really kill Lisa. It was really Hedda. Great, fucking great, Tasha. Is that what you want? Me and Joel fucking Steinberg in the same cell. Me and, and, and Mark David Chapman in the same cell? Mark can read to me from The Catcher in the Rye, tell me which of Lennon's songs he liked best, "Day in the Life" or "Imagine." Can you see me in there, Tasha? Doing Chekhov at Rikers Island with Black Muslims? The Three Sisters? Can you see it? After the show, instead of a cast party they sodomize the director. Maybe I'll get AIDS and they'll let me out early on humanitarian grounds. Tasha, for Christ's sake, get UP, please get up off the floor.

He was in the bathroom now, splashing water on his face. His heart was beating. He put his hand over his chest to try to slow it down.

He found a handkerchief in her bedroom and used it to wipe his fingerprints off the glass vial and the mirror. He wiped every surface he thought he might have touched. The fifty-better take that too. Knowing fucking Bernie, he wrote down the serial number.

Let's see. The review. The page was folded over to show the review. It was lying there right next to the coke. Move it a bit closer to the coke? Or is that too obvious? Yes, that's too obvious. Leave something for the audience to put together on its own. The review is fine where it is. Wait, is a cop going to notice something like a review? Should the paragraph be circled in red or yellow-highlighted? No, that's too much. But it needs something else.

He held the vial with the handkerchief and knelt and put Tasha's still-warm thumb and index finger on it-was she right-handed? yes, she was right-handed-and pressed them there. Then he held the vial up to the light and saw what looked like a print.

Okay, let's get this scene on its feet. Let's block the scene. The cops walk in the door, the first thing they see is the body. Then they see the coke on the table. Are they going to see the review? They'll come back to the review. The first cop leans over you and the second cop goes to the coke and puts his finger in it and tastes it and, like, nods. Good shit. Thanks to you, you rat bastard, Ramirez. Okay, then he sees the review, and he picks it up and reads it. And the second cop says: So why weren't all the locks on the door locked-

Keys. Good, the door needs to be locked from the outside so it looks like she locked it from the inside.

They were in the bowl next to the door. He put his ear against the door to listen. Did ears leave prints? No, Jesus, ears do not leave prints, you're being paranoid.

Using the handkerchief as a glove, he opened the door, let himself out and shut it. There were three dead-bolt locks to contend with. Jesus. That's right, he remembered her telling him that she lived in a three-lock neighborhood. The dead bolts were incredibly noisy. He was sure someone was going to see him before he got them locked. Boy they were noisy, so noisy he didn't hear her moan on the other side of the steel door.

4

Charley and Felix sat together in the back of the limousine, sinuses suffused with gun oil. They'd been cleaning shotguns when the call came from a Detective Mullen of the Sixth Precinct and they used what rags they had on hand.

Felix saw the crowd of reporters and TV people outside the main entrance to the bright blue brick-and-glass building on the corner of Thirtieth and First Avenue. He told the chauffeur to drive straight through the intersection to the side entrance on Thirtieth.

The reporters saw the limousine pulling up and closed in. Charley got out and was pinned against the car. The housekeeper had put a pair of woman's sunglasses on him, left behind by a houseguest, as he left, the Jackie O paparazzi-proof type, big and round, the kind that make you look like a stylish insect. Felix managed to get between him and the press, but he couldn't clear a path to the door that said:

PRINT YOUR NAMES ON ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES CLEARLY

They shouted at Charley and jabbed at him with their boom mikes, then there was a voice, familiar, practiced, New York-weary and seen-it-all-before: "All right, let's give them some air, let's move back, folks, that's it." Detective Mullen.

He got them inside and Charley found himself standing in a black marble lobby while Felix and the detective spoke to a black man behind a black desk. The outside of the building was done in a bright, almost gay, blue ceramic brick; the inside was all business. An inscription ran across the wall in raised steel letters.

TACEANT COLLOQUIA, EFFUGIAT RISUS. HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE.

What did that mean? All he recognized was HIC. Scripture? How was anyone supposed to know? Suddenly he was shouting at the old black man behind the desk and the man, with an air of no offense taken, was handing him a smudgy Xerox. "Let conversation cease, let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living." But what did that mean?

A man in a white jacket with script stitching that said Dr. Thomas E. Bratter was introducing himself in a kindly, confidential tone of voice. Charley and Felix followed him down a half flight of stairs and the smell shoved through the gun oil. They'd tried to disguise it, but when nature asserts its claims there is basically no arguing with it. Death would never be lemon-fresh or minty-green, no matter what they sprayed it with. Steps, yes, I see them, said Charley.

The meat lockers were arranged two-high along a large gleaming metal cube in the center of the tiled room. Autopsies were in progress behind glass doors on the outer wall. As they passed Charley heard bored voices saying, "The pericardial cavity contains twenty CCs of fibrinous yellow fluid. The pericardial surfaces are smooth and glistening." Another door opened: "… the septum is in the midline and the nares are patent. The ears are unremarkable and the external auditory canals are patent. The teeth are in poor repair."

They came to compartment number three. Charley and Felix saw their distorted reflections in the brushed steel, like faces at an amusement park. The typed card on number three announced: BECKER, NATASHA P. The needle on the temperature gauge pointed to thirty-six Fahrenheit.

Metal sounds: the door opening, ball bearings turning, click. He saw her foot. Her toe was tagged. A sheet covered the rest of her and he remembered when she was seven and cut up one of her grandmother's Pratesi sheets to make a Halloween ghost.

The sheet came back. Her skin was bluish and her mouth was open. Don't look at me, she said, I'm a mess. He touched his hand to her cheek and started at the coldness. Charley Junior had still been warm when he reached the hospital.

Then they were in a brightly lit office with the sun streaming in, coffee was being offered and declined. Dr. Bratter was being very courteous, and such a busy man too. Charley had read an article on him in the Times not two weeks ago about some personality thing between him and the mayor-

"How old was she, Mr. Becker?"

– apparently the mayor thought he… what? Sorry. Twenty-two. "Is there a history of coronary disease in your family?"

"No, my wife died of cancer and my son-we die of other things."

"Did your granddaughter use controlled substances?"

"No, her daddy and mother had, they were, they had drinking problems and she-she smoked cigarettes, that was her vice."

The ME looked over at the detective and the detective said that they had found a small container of cocaine at the scene. It was being analyzed. Charley shook his head and said that wouldn't have been hers. Dr. Bratter said-he put it this way-that "a white granular substance was visually observed in her nasal cavities."

A door opened and someone came in with a clear plastic bag. Charley saw white pants like thick leotards, a black cashmere sweater, pearls, panties. The ME was saying he understood how "difficult" this was and that he would try to expedite "things." What things? The autopsy. No, Charley said, I'm taking her with me now, I will not leave her in that place. The detective was explaining that it was necessary under law in these circumstances and then Charley was on the floor and they were loosening his tie and Felix was saying it's going to be all right, boss, it's going to be fine.

Another embarrassing funeral in the private chapel, another sermon on the theme: "It is not for us to judge." "How awful for poor Charley," whispered a friend of the family. He looked so slumped up there all alone in the first pew. The casket came in, covered with a spray of Arabian jasmine sent by the nuns. Felix in sunglasses walked in front as chief pallbearer. Tim, who had broken down and told Charley that they were lovers, walked beside it. You could see what pain he was going through. Bernie and Karen sent a nice wreath on behalf of the cast and crew. The organist played a Bach air as the winter light streamed brilliantly through the Chagall window and Charley's Labrador retriever, Spook, wandered in during the eulogy, wagging his tail, and walked up to Charley and began licking at his hand. It was the saddest thing. Everyone said afterward that the dog coming in was the saddest thing.

But the Chagall window was transcendently beautiful that day, everyone agreed about that too.

Charley had brought the chapel over stone by stone from Italy-after the fashion of self-made Americans desiring some instant background. Charley had been collecting Chagall's work since the late forties and went to him to make a stained-glass window behind the altar, a Crucifixion scene. Chagall told him that only a "vulgar, rich American would ask a Jew to make him a Crucifixion," to which Charley said he wanted someone with experience at crucifying saviors. He hired an astronomer to calculate exactly what day of the year the sun would be brightest through the window so they could dedicate it in its fullest glory; the astronomer mentioned in passing that if the chapel were angled fourteen degrees more to the south the window would receive 45 percent more light. Chagall demanded that the chapel be rotated on its axis. Charley, who had been paying the artist's staggering-and, for that matter, unitemized-bills without a peep, put his foot down and said no, which put Chagall into a work-stoppage funk that lasted almost a month, until Charley said he was going to hire Julian Schnabel to finish the damn thing if he didn't get back to work.

Finally it was completed and Charley bribed the Archbishop of Washington to come and consecrate it (by making a large donation to the renovation fund for St. Matthew's Cathedral). The veil came down precisely at 1028 hours on June 22, and it was a sight to take your breath away. Jesus was suspended in midair, his face a mask of peace and triumph. The Virgin Mary and disciple John were standing together. The centurion whose servant Jesus had healed a few days earlier as a favor was sitting on the ground with his face in his hands. The colors were-the whole thing seemed to move, they were so vibrant. It was Einstein's bent light that shot through it with hallucinatory energy. And the blood, good heavens, the blood. Chagall had used huge, uncut Burmese rubies for the blood that fell from Jesus' wounds. It dripped into a red river that ran across the bottom of the tableau, no calm, Stygian affair but a wild, roaring rush of whitecaps, the kind that shoots through narrow canyons. The banks were lined with calla lilies with snakes for pistils. Underneath the river was the inscription

HIC EST ENIM CALIX SANGUINIS MEI

which means in Latin: "For this is the Cup of My Blood," the words Jesus is said to have spoken to his disciples at the Last Supper. Right above the HIC was a man with bushy eyebrows and Xs for eyes, dipping a beer mug in the river: Charley, drunk on the blood of the lamb. "How 'bout that?" he said, actually flattered, counter to Chagall's intention.

The medical examiner made the call himself; that was decent of him. Charley was embarrassed over the episode in his office and apologized. Dr. Bratter said that was hardly necessary.

"It was a fresh myocardial infarction precipitated by a spasm of the coronary arteries," he said, reading from the report, which made it somewhat easier. "She died of a heart attack, Mr. Becker." He explained about vasoconstriction of the coronary vessels, something like that brought about by a lifetime of gorging on butter, or a thrombosis. Oxygen can't get through to the heart muscle, and it dies. The hard part: "As to the cause of the spasm," he said, "we determined it was due to a prolonged intranasal inhalation of high-potency cocaine, consistent with that analyzed by the police." Time of death was fixed at between eight o'clock and twelve midnight the night before she was found.

Tim was wonderful in the days following, calling Charley often to ask how he was doing, to chat, reminisce, to see if there was anything he could do. Charley was touched by his attentions and saddened to think that here was a young man he wouldn't have minded having as a son-in-law.

Tim phoned one day to say he had just spent over an hour with Detective Mullen going over-again-the messages he'd left on Tasha's answering machine. He called back the next day, sounding harried. Mullen had wanted to go over them again. "It was a little surreal, frankly," he said. "He actually asked me about my 'whereabouts' the night it happened. He actually used the word 'whereabouts.'" Charley said not to take offense, he was just a policeman doing his job.

"The worst part is thinking: Here I was calling her and leaving these pissed-off messages on her machine and she was there dead the whole time."

"You couldn't have known," said Charley.

"I might have known. I should have known. She was so serious about the Work. When that asshole's review came out that morning, I should have known."

"You think that's what it was, the review?"

"Sure it was. The paper was open to the review right there on the table next to the cocaine. That's where they found it. It's obvious, isn't it?"

Tim didn't call again after that, but he did send a thoughtful note saying how busy things were now that the show was moving uptown. He enclosed Jimmy Podesta's tribute to Natasha in The TriBeCa Times and said that E. Fremont-Carter was reportedly pretty shaken up by the whole thing. He said Podesta was going to dedicate the opening-night show to Natasha.

Charley was not pushy with Detective Mullen. He knew how people hate it when the rich start throwing their weight around. The presence of Felix-a former colleague of Mullen-provided a note of professional collegiality.

"We don't have any 'suspects,' Mr. Becker. It's not that kind of situation."

"What kind would you say it is?"

"It would appear to be a self-inflicted situation."

"Mr. Tamarino," said Charley, "you questioned him."

"Twice."

"When you question someone, do you reveal information to them about evidence?"

"Of course not."

"Of course. Could we hear those telephone messages?" There were five of them. Detective Mullen played them for Charley and Felix. In the first he said, "Tasha? Where are you? Natasha, hello, I'm here. Are you there, Natasha?" There was a two-hour gap between the first message and the second, and an average of half an hour between that and the third, fourth and fifth, all of them variations on the same theme: "Where the hell are you? You didn't show at the museum, how come?"

"The background sound in the first message," said Felix, "that's not a museum."

"I asked him about that," said Detective Mullen. "He changed it slightly. First time, he said he was calling from inside the museum, second time I asked, he said he used the pay phone outside on the street."

"So he changed his story."

"Not significantly," said Mullen. "Anyway, his whereabouts are accounted for. He was with a guy named Emiliano Ramirez, works as an usher at the theater, from five o'clock to seven-thirty at the Spring Street Bar and Grill and after that they went to a club downtown called Gulag. They were there from approximately seven forty-five until two A.M. The ME says she died between eight and twelve, so there we are. I can't say much for Mr. Tamarino's taste in clubs, but he was there, apparently."

"How do you mean?"

"How do I mean? The band at Gulag was called Tipper Gore and one individual I spoke with identified himself as Phlegm."

"What about the keys?"

"I can't account for the keys, Mr. Becker."

"But the door was locked and you couldn't find her keys."

"Correct. Also, there were no prints on either doorknob, which is unusual, but not conclusive. It's winter and people wear gloves."

"Murderers wear gloves."

"Yes, they do. But what motive did you have in mind? She seems to have been a very well-liked person from what I can gather."

"All right, but the keys. The building superintendent didn't let her in. Where are the keys?"

"I don't know where the keys are, Mr. Becker."

"What about the thing you said you inhale cocaine through? The straw. There was no straw."

"No. But a lot of times they roll up a dollar bill and snort it through that. Sometimes they use a hundred-dollar bill. It depends on the socioeconomics, if you follow. I had the bills in her wallet tested for trace amounts."

"And?"

"Two of them tested positive for cocaine. But that doesn't mean anything, necessarily. These days, seventy-five percent of all the bills in circulation that they test, test positively for cocaine. In Orange County, California, recently they tested twenty-four bills for cocaine and twenty-four tested positive."

"So it means the bills in her wallet weren't necessarily the ones used?"

"That's correct."

"So the keys and the straw, that's two suspicious pieces of evidence."

"No, sir. That's two missing pieces, not evidence. Look, Mr. Becker, I appreciate what you're going through. A lot of families go through exactly what you are. I've put more into this case than, frankly, I ordinarily would've, out of respect for who you are and all, and because Mr. Velez used to be on the force. But I want to be honest with you. The evidence does not support a continuing investigation. But-but-I'm not dropping it, I'm going to stay on it to the extent I can and as long as I can. I'll keep Mr. Velez fully advised. I'm afraid that's really all I can do. As I say, I appreciate what you're going through."

5

The District Attorney for the County of New York rubbed his eyes from lack of sleep. A U.S. senator from New York had been indicted the day before and he'd been asked to go on Nightline. The show started late due to the play-offs, then Koppel went over and by the time he got home to Pelham Manor it was two in the morning. Then he couldn't get to sleep because the stupid ass production assistant must have given him regular coffee instead of decaf and finally at four he popped a Valium only to be awoken at five by the baby screaming.

The Assistant District Attorney opened the door and walked in tentatively. He was still in his twenties, just out of Yale, or Harvard?

"Sit down, Ed." The ADA sat. It was only his second time in the holy of holies.

"What do we have?"

"The police think she may have been given the cocaine by the boyfriend, Timothy Tamarino. He's the director of the play she was in. But it's very soft. He-"

"You want some coffee? I've got to have some coffee. Helen, bring me and Ed two extremely large black coffees. How do you take it?"

"Black is fine," he said, though he took cream and sugar.

"Go on," said the DA, speed-reading the file: the police, the phone company report, the unanimous statements from Tasha's friends attesting to her drug-free lifestyle.

"It all hangs on the first message on the answering machine. Mullen, the detective in charge, questioned him on two separate occasions. On the first, Tamarino says he placed the call from the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. But in the background you can hear a boom box Dopplering past-"

"What?"

"A large portable tape cassette player-"

"Ghetto blaster."

"Right-going past, playing a U-z song, I believe"-he checked his notes-"right, 'Running to Stand Still.' The point is the museum doesn't allow people inside with boom boxes. Mullen confronted Tamarino with this the second time he interviewed him. That was probably a mistake. Tamarino said now that he remembered, he made the call from a pay phone outside."

"Goddamn right it was a mistake. Still, it's not much."

"No, it isn't. Mullen says the thumb and forefinger prints on the cocaine vial were so clean that they looked planted. Plus the door was locked and they can't find the keys."

"That's something."

The ADA nodded. "But the ME put the time of death at between eight P.M. and midnight and Tamarino was with someone at a club from seven-thirty to well after midnight."

"Gulag?" said the DA, reading. "For Christ sake. Where does it end? Discos named after Auschwitz? Dachau? Bergen-Belsen? Sometimes you just want to pull the handle and flush. So that's it?"

"Yes. As far as the Sixth Precinct Detective Squad is concerned."

"What do you think?"

"I think it's… very thin."

"Thin? It's cellophane. It's Saran Wrap."

"But I think it was Tamarino's cocaine. And I don't think keys walked out of there by themselves."

The DA sighed. "Missing keys. Not enough here for 220.3 and even less for a 125.15."

The ADA scrolled up the numbers on his brain screen: sale of a controlled substance, B felony; second-degree manslaughter, C felony. "Mullen said, off the record, that he'd be willing to arrest him and shake his tree to see what falls off, but I didn't think you wanted to go that route."

The DA stared into middle space. "You don't remember the Kennedy case, do you? David Kennedy. Couple of years ago, '85, '86?"

"April 25, 1984. The Palm Beach police charged two bellhops at the Brazilian Court Hotel with selling cocaine and conspiracy to sell cocaine. Six months later they both copped a nolo to selling and the conspiracy charge was dropped. Eighteen months' probation and expungement."

The DA nodded. "Good, Ed. That's good preparation."

"Thank you, sir. Sir? My name is Bill, actually? Bill Allard?"

"Jesus Christ. I didn't sleep. I'm sorry. Jesus. Of course you're Bill."

"By the way, I thought you handled that question very well."

"Question?"

"On Nightline, about whether you're interested in the AG job?"

"Oh, right. Okay, so the Kennedy case… what?"

"It was a very unpopular prosecution. Here are the editorials." He put a manila folder on the DA's desk.

The DA looked at them blearily. "You want to gist them for me?"

"'Prosecutorial zeal' is all over them. There's not a lot of support out there for rich white kids who OD on cocaine. And they had much more to go on in the Kennedy case than this one. They had witnesses who told the grand jury they heard one of the bellhops bragging about how he sold cocaine to a Kennedy. Even with that it was a no-win."

"You know who I feel sorry for in all this?"

The ADA shook his head.

"Ethel. What that woman's been through. Well, look, we're not going to let that influence us, but Jesus Christ, Mullen has to make his own decisions, damnit. What does he think this office is? This really, this really pisses me off."

"Yes, sir."

"You tell Mullen to make his own fucking decisions. If he's got a case, bring us a case. If he doesn't have a case, don't bring us a case. And while you're at it, tell him I do not appreciate the way this thing has been handled. Tell him I'm going to speak to Brown about this-personally."

"Yes, sir."

Helen said, "It's Morley Safer, from 60 Minutes."

"All right. We all set on this, Ed?… Morley?"

6

Charley sat by the light of the fire, Spook beside him, staring at the mailbox in the display case on the wall surrounded by all the leather-bound books.

The orphanage was started by Mexican nuns who fled over the border into Texas during the anticlerical hysteria of the revolution when three of their order were raped and crucified on saguaro cacti. They bought an abandoned farm on the outskirts of McAllen. They found him in the makeshift mailbox one cold winter morning, badly dehydrated and the color of plum, swaddled in a week-old comics section of The Star. They named him Karl Becker after the local fishmonger. All the children were named after local merchants. Sister Rosa Encarnacion had hit on the scheme. Herr Becker would show up every Saturday afternoon in his truck with whatever he hadn't been able to sell that week, cases of reeking skate and shark, sometimes a discolored eel or two. They changed his legal name to Charley when America entered the Great War in 1917, but the nuns went on calling him Carlos.

Old Raul looked up and saw Carlos bleeding from his nose and both ears and a tooth was gone, the second this week.

"Aiy, Carlito." He took the boy in and washed his face and plugged his nose and let him swish some homemade mescal around inside his mouth, which left a pleasing numbness on the boy's sore gums. He let him watch him prepare that night's dinner, some horsemeat donated by a rancher with two orphans named after him. Raul tasted the horse and chopped up another handful of the slender green serrano peppers he used liberally to disguise the rottenness of the meat. He held one perfect specimen up for Carlos to admire. Carlos reached for it. "Con cuidado," Raul urged. "I knew a man who went blind because he rubbed his eyes after holding a pepper." Raul told glorious lies. He had a scar on his belly from where he'd been knifed; he told Carlos that was where General Pershing had shot him while pursuing Pancho Villa after Villa's (and Raul's) historic attack on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. "Black Jack" Pershing had become the hero of the war with Germany, so Carlos was extremely impressed to know someone who had been shot by him. Raul said the bullet-made of silver-had been intended for Villa but that Raul had thrown himself in its path. Villa had not wanted to leave him there, wounded, but Raul insisted. Raul expertly sliced the pepper into thin strips and then cut those crosswise so that no piece was larger than the head of a matchstick. "The serrano is like Christ," he said, stirring the pepper into the horsemeat stew. "It takes all the sins of the world unto itself. That is why it is so full of fire." Carlos took a furtive pull on the bottle of mescal. Raul saw it but didn't say anything.

Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez came for him again that night, stuffing a gag in his mouth and carrying him, squirming, out of the converted barn that served as a dormitory, to one of the shacks. Lockmuller had a length of barbed wire. He looped it loosely around Carlos' neck while the others held him. "You bite me again and I'll strangle you dead." Carlos watched as Lockmuller unbuttoned his trousers. Gomez kicked him from behind. They'd demonstrated what they'd do to him on a polecat if he told the sisters: gouging out its eyes, cutting off its feet, then hanging it by its tail over a fire.

The next morning one of the nuns noticed Carlos wasn't saying his morning prayers along with the others. At first they thought it was willful and punished him for it, but as the weeks went by without the boy speaking, they began to wonder. They took him to the doctor who had five boys named after him. He poked about Carlos' mouth and couldn't find anything and suggested withholding food and water from him to see if that would get him to talk. Sister Imaculata announced to the other sisters her conviction that Carlito's muteness was the work of the Dark One. The priest who said Masses on Sunday in the old barn was a bent old man and kinder than most, but at the age where not enough oxygen was getting through to his brain. He came principally for Raul's mescal. Carlos recognized the smell on Padre's breath as he peered into his face, trying to see the Devil through the two small windows on the boy's soul. He hung a couple of rosaries around Carlito's neck and splashed him with holy water until he was sopping.

"Ego te expulso!" he shouted. Grappling with the Dark One required strengthening himself with Raul's mescal. Carlos calmly watched, dripping-wet with holy water, as the old priest invoked the Lord to drive out the evil inside him. The Devil was too much for him, however, and after one session the old man passed out on the floor. When he awoke he told of a dream he'd had in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and told him that she had taken away the boy's speech as a sign of Her Favor. Sister Imaculata wondered about this, having smelled his breath, but she knew herself that the ways of God are not to be fathomed, and a priest, even drunk, is a priest, and so kept her suspicions to herself.

A year went by and one night Carlos awoke from a bad dream to see three silhouettes moving out the door: Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez. He followed them to the tractor shed. He crept up to the door and peered in and saw the three of them sitting around an oil lamp with magazine and newspaper pictures spread around. He saw they were pictures of Amelia Earhart, who'd just flown across the Atlantic Ocean, wherever that was. They had their trousers off and were dipping their hands into a can of axle grease and rubbing them on what the nuns called the lugar del diablo, the Devil's playground, if you will. Carlos watched. The nuns preached hard against this particular form of sin, saying it was like driving nails into the hands of Christ. It explained why they hadn't been dragging him off in the middle of the night the last few weeks.

Around midnight the following evening the entire orphanage was awoken by screams of intense pain. No one had ever heard such screams, even the nuns, who had witnessed some terrible things in their time. There was a moon out and there they could see Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez in the yard with no pants, holding their groins in a way that left little doubt as to the location of their agony, which seemed to increase with every minute. They jumped into the well, but this seemed to have no effect. By now the sisters had habited themselves and were trying to get from the wretched three some clue as to the cause of their pain, but they could give no coherent explanation. They just screamed and ran around in circles until the doctor came. He gave them injections that made them pass out. When they came to, he questioned them. He went to the tractor shed and examined the axle grease, found small bits of Serrano pepper mixed up in it. He suspected the nuns. The sisters locked up Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez in the root cellar for a couple of days. They emerged blinking like salamanders and scratching at chigger bites. They ran off a few days later and never returned. Shortly afterward, Carlos' powers of speech returned, an event the nuns celebrated by holding a candlelit prayer vigil on the top of a small hill nearby, where they planted a small wooden cross made by old Raul.

Four years passed and the Depression was on and there was not much to eat, mostly rotten produce wriggly with weevils and tortillas so thin the sunlight shone through them. One night while they were sipping mescal to take the edge off the hunger, Raul started to tell Carlos about a still someone had over in Pharr and what money they were making selling bootleg liquor. Raul had a small still for his mescal; it only produced a bottle every two days. Raul made a sketch on a piece of cardboard.

Next day Carlos organized the boys into teams. He and the first team stole the twenty feet of copper tubing from Ambrose's hardware; the second took a hundred pounds of corn from the troughs of Diefenbocker's hog farm. They set it up in an abandoned chicken shed a quarter mile down the road. The first few batches proofed out at somewhere over the lethal limit, occasioning one case of temporary blindness. Raul fine-tuned the proportions, sending the boys off to steal various ingredients-vanilla, ipecac, molasses, sugar-until it got so it went down without taking the esophagus with it. Raul knew a man named Geronimo, in Donna who said he'd take all he could get and sell it to the truckers on the Harlingen run. Carlos negotiated Geronimo's price up by half and within a month they were bringing in fifty dollars a week, a fortune. Carlos and Raul kept ten for themselves, and gave the rest to the nuns in the form of anonymous weekly donations of chickens, rice, chocolate bars and comics. The nuns held another candlelit vigil on the hill and planted another small cross of thanksgiving. Then Geronimo got arrested for stealing tires.

This was not Geronimo's first arrest and this time the Hidalgo County sheriff said he was going to put him away forever. Geronimo used his only bargaining chip and-nursing a grudge over Carlos' knocking his price up so-told about Carlos and the still, leaving out that he was a boy over at the Mexican nuns' orphanage outside of town. Thinking that it might enhance his situation, he embroidered some, telling the sheriff that this Carlos had got a little carried away and killed a man; he laid it on thicker than barbecue sauce. By the time he was finished the sheriff was passing out shotguns and calling in extra deputies and giving the order, as they lay in wait in a ditch by the chicken shed, to fire at the first sign of trouble. Then the sheriff barked, "Put your hands up in the air or we'll shoot!" A figure darted out of the shack and started to run, the moon caught his tin belt buckle and one of the deputies thought it was a gun and opened fire and soon they were all shooting and by the time it was over nine-year-old Irving Mayer-named for the town haberdasher-was on the ground with his legs and back full of buckshot. Charley took some pellets from the same blast in his thigh, but kept going, disappearing into the high grass in the darkness.

The bishop up in Corpus handled it cleverly, bringing the reporter with him to Irving's hospital bed and apostrophizing in his heavy brogue: What kind of a monster does this to hungry orphan children?-leaving aside for a moment the Eighteenth Amendment. It went all the way up to the governor's office in Austin. The sheriff had to resign and ended up as a six-dollar-a-week guard at the state penitentiary, the only consolation being that was where Geronimo was putting in his time.

Two nights after the shooting, Raul was on his knees in front of his little shrine to the Virgin, begging her for the fiftieth time that day to keep him from being arrested, when he heard the door creak open and saw Carlos, filthy, limping and one leg covered in dried blood.

He poured moonshine over his leg and removed what pellets he could. He kept the boy hidden there with him for a week until he had his strength back.

"I'll go tonight," said Carlos. "You want to come with me?"

Raul shook his head and pointed to his eyes, opalescent with cataracts. He packed some food for him and they stood outside and embraced. "Wait," said Raul. He went back into the shack and emerged with a rosary that he said Pancho Villa had once personally spat on and pressed it into Carlos' palm.

Carlos had gone half a mile when he turned back. There was a row of sycamores along the road outside the orphanage, and he kept in their shadows until he reached the mailbox. He had often dreamed about his mother, very clearly. He could hear her weeping as she carried him to it, hear her tears falling on the newspaper she'd wrapped around him. In the dream he tried to hold on to her as she put him inside the mailbox; then he was inside the mailbox, suffocating and trying to get out. He always woke up at this point, crying for his mother. Once one of the nuns-a young one-took him back to her bed with him and caressed him, even his lugar del diablo, which gave him wonderful sensations of warmth and happiness. Unfortunately, the nun went away not long afterward.

He pried the mailbox off its oak post and, cradling it in his arms, ran along the dirt road to the barking of dogs. It was five miles to the railroad tracks and by the time he reached them his wounds were running. The tracks ran north, to Alice and Corpus Christi. He knelt by the rails and dug a hole and buried the mailbox, marking the spot with a cairn of stones. He said a prayer over it, swearing an oath to come back and get it someday, then stretched out by the mound of stones and fell asleep. The sky was just turning blue over the Gulf when the whistle woke him. It was a fast train and it nearly killed him climbing on.

Charley stood. Spook's head jerked upright as it always did when he thought there might be a walk in the offing. His eyes watched Charley as he went to the phone by his bed. The one word he recognized-"Felix"-did not signify a walk. He put his head back on the warm carpet and went back to sleep.

7

They were sitting in the front of the black sedan, trying to keep awake by drinking strong, hot Cuban coffee out of the thermos the cook had packed for their duck-hunting trip in the Chesapeake. Everyone thought it was a good idea for the two of them to get away. Tasha's death had been so hard. A little shivering in a duck blind off the Eastern Shore would be just the thing, no telephones, no staff, only the two of them, passing the flask in the pre-dawn chill waiting for a flight of mallards.

They were in Alphabet Town, a herniated bulge of lower Manhattan jutting out into the East River, where the avenues are named after letters.

Charley was no good at waiting-most self-made rich people aren't; Felix was. His eyes never strayed from the top floor of number 316.

Charley checked his watch for the one-hundredth time. Just after 3:30 A.M. Better not drink any more coffee. He was jittery enough and he was tired of pissing in the alley. He stared at the boat in the vacant lot next to number 316. What was a boat doing on East Eighth Street between Avenues B and C?

Her lines reminded him some of the first boat he got work on out of Port Aransas after running away from the orphanage. She was eighteen, maybe twenty feet, and riding a wave of smashed-up chunks of white porcelain from old toilets and urinals, heaved out the building, probably, that used to occupy the lot-afloat on a sea of crappers. There was a ratty old heavy black armchair with springs and foam stuffing coming out sitting on her foredeck. Charley wondered who sat in it on hot summer nights, drinking wine and dreaming of black marlin. She had a name. It was spray-painted large on her hull: NOAH'S 8^TH STREET YAGHT. Everything in this damn city was either misspelled or in Latin. He imagined God, fed up, with the enormity of the city's sins, loosing forty days and nights of acid rain and Noah's 8th Street Yaght rising up higher and higher, even higher than the World Trade Center, and coming to rest in the suburbs, atop Mount Kisco, the dove returning to Noah with a letter from the zoning commission saying his ark was in violation of local codes.

His eyes strayed to the car in front of them, a red Chevy, abandoned, up on blocks, the windows smashed in, glass all over, seats stripped. It had Connecticut plates and there was a bumper sticker proclaiming, somewhat risibly in the present context, BRAKE FOR WHALES. Whales were not a major concern in Alphabet Town. Here the mottoes tended more to: CRACK KILLS. LA LUCHA CONTINUA. OUR CHILDREN ARE DYING. A sidewalk Siqueiros had been busy painting heroic murals of veiny forearms impaled by hypodermic needles, eyes exploding from pent-up crack smoke. Someone had copied Edvard Munch's "The Cry" in a blackened doorway littered with vials and dried vomit. In Alphabet Town art was not for witty aperqus in rooms full of Chardonnay; it tried to keep you alive. But what, Charley wondered, did it mean: YOUR DICK IS IN YOUR HAND WAKE UP 1933?

Felix stirred in the passenger seat beside him, and now even Felix checked his watch. 3:56. Charley knew nothing was going to happen tonight-in his soul, he knew it, and knowing it made him hungry.

"You want a sandwich?" Felix said he'd have a roast beef if there was one left. He said he was tired of eating cucumber sandwiches. The chef was English. Charley found one that looked like roast beef and gave it to him. The thin sandwich was tiny in Felix's hand, all out of scale.

"How come"-Felix chewed-"he always cuts off the crusts? I never understood that."

"'Cause he's English. The English are more civilized than us. Margaret was always saying that."

"Why is cutting off the crusts civilized?"

Charley considered. "They feed the crusts to the pigeons so the pigeons don't have to eat garbage. The English eat a lot of pigeons, see."

"That doesn't sound civilized to me. I wouldn't eat pigeon."

"Hell, I don't know. What'd you used to talk about when you did stakeouts?"

"Getting laid. The Mets. How come the English cut the crusts off their sandwiches. That was a big topic of conversation."

Voices crackled over the police scanner. "Ten-sixteen, holding one. New York, one-five-six, Oscar Peter Bravo." Felix said they were checking a license plate. "Ten-ten, pick up aided case, Twelfth and Avenue D. Send a bus."

"Bus," said Charley. "What's that?"

"Ambulance."

"Aided case?"

"Someone needing assistance, alive or dead." The thought took form simultaneously between them: the blue skin, the open jaw.

Felix said, "We used to play this game. The boundary between the Ninth Precinct, where I was, and the Thirteenth is along Fourteenth Street, right down the median strip. Some guys from the Thirteenth would find a body on their side of the line. These bodies, they could be real unpleasant, so they'd haul it across the street and put it on our sidewalk and call it in as one of ours. We'd get there, and you could always tell if it had been moved, so we'd haul it back across the line and call it in and say: No, uh-uh, it's one of yours. And they'd come and haul it back and say: No, it's yours. Sometimes this went on for hours, back and forth, these poor stiffs getting dragged back and forth, back and forth."

"That's a terrible story," said Charley.

"Yeah, but now you're not thinking of her anymore." Felix sat up. "Here we go."

Charley said into the radio, "Uncle Bob, Uncle Sam." They were using NYPD radio codes: "uncle" for undercover.

"Uncle Bob."

"Stepping out."

"Roger."

Two men came out of number 316, walked down the stoop and turned east on Eighth Street, toward Avenue C. One of them was Ramirez. "Shit," said Felix.

"Who's that?"

"I don't know," said Felix. "Better let him go."

"No," said Charley. "I'm not sitting here another night." He said into the radio, "Uncle Bob. Go." Felix opened the door.

A blue van was parked in front of the abandoned Chevy. The side door slammed open and two men of considerable size jumped out, one with a Remington pump, the other a nickel-plated.357. They were wearing blue windbreakers painted with large yellow letters: DEA.

Ramirez and the other man turned and ran the other way but found themselves looking at Felix, also in a DEA jacket, pointing a Smith amp; Wesson Model 59.

"Federal agents," he said. "You're under arrest." The two DEA men took them from behind and spread-eagled them over the remains of the Chevy that once braked for whales.

"Toss 'em," said Felix. The DEA men frisked them. They pulled a Tando knife out of Ramirez's boot and a packet of tinfoil out of the front pocket of his jeans. Inside were two dozen tiny plastic Ziploc bags of crack.

"Hey, man," Ramirez said, "these aren't my pants." Amazing, the things they would say.

One of the DEA guys laughed. "Those aren't your pants?"

"No, man, swear to God."

"He says they aren't his pants."

Felix said, "Are you Emiliano Ramirez?"

"No."

"But those are Emiliano's pants. You're in violation of USC 841-3-1. You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law you have the right to a lawyer if you cannot afford a lawyer one will be appointed for you do you understand these rights? Comprende sus derechos?"

"Yeah yeah, man. Look, these aren't my fuckin' pants, man. I was up there, I put on the wrong pants."

"You put on the wrong pants?" Felix stared. "I'm going to have to talk to your valet, then." He turned to the other man. "What's your name, my man?"

"Ramon."

"What's your problem, Ramon?"

"I got no problem with you, man."

"I think you do. You been hanging out with my man Emiliano. I think you got a serious problem."

"No, man, no problem. I ain't hanging out with him."

Ramirez said, "These are his pants, man. He loaned me his pants."

"Hey, fuck you, man!"

"Friendship," said DEA. "It's a beautiful thing."

"Okay," said Felix, patting Emiliano's shoulder, "this one into the choo-choo. We're going down to the federal lockup, Emiliano. I hope whoever's pants those are put a toothbrush in them." One of the DEA men handcuffed Ramirez and put him inside the van.

Felix said, "Okay, Ramon." Ramon lifted himself off the hood. His hands were shaking. "I don't want to see you again, Ramon. Ever, do you understand?"

"No problem, man."

"If I ever see you again, I'm going to be unhappy."

"No problem."

"Go."

Ramon started walking west, toward Avenue B. Felix got in the car and pulled out into the street. "I think my man Ramon made a ca-ca in his pants."

He looked in the rearview for the van. It hadn't pulled out yet. Felix stopped. "What's going on?" They couldn't see.

Ramon had reached the corner by the church when the bullet hit him, a good shot at that distance with a pistol. He fell forward onto his face, blood spurting out of the tiny hole in the center of the back of his skull.

The van pulled out into the street and caught up. They had the light and got on the FDR northbound at Twenty-third Street.

8

It was going on midnight. He was at the corner of University Place and Thirteenth, about to cross, when he heard his name being called. He turned and saw the limousine at the curb. At first he thought it was Bernie's, then he saw Felix in the driver's seat.

"Charley?" He peered into the open window, saw the glow of a cigar.

"Well, don't just stand there," said Charley in a friendly way. "Get in."

"Actually, I'm on my way to a meeting."

"A meeting? At this hour?"

"Yeah."

"Well, get in anyway. I'm cheaper than any cab."

"I don't want to take you out of your way."

"Out of my way?" Charley laughed. "I got no meeting to go to. Come on, it's cold."

"You sure?" Tim got in. The glass partition was down. He said, "How are you, Felix." Felix did not return the greeting, which struck Tim as a little rude, frankly. Tim never liked Felix, the way he looked at him.

"Been trying to reach you," said Charley.

"I know. I'm sorry. It's been crazy. You heard about the show?"

"I did. I think it's great."

"I should have called."

"Don't apologize for being a success. I'm just happy I ran into you like this. What a coincidence, huh? In a city this size."

"Yeah. So, you… doing all right?"

"Fine. You?"

Tim sighed. "I'm doing all right. Industry is the enemy of melancholy."

"I like that. Is that Shakespeare?"

"Just a saying. It means-"

"I think I grasp it. I like it. I think I'll put that in our little newspaper. My company has a little in-house newspaper. Sayings of Chairman Charley sort of thing. I like to put inspirational things in it. I'll put that in. Don't you like that, Felix?"

Felix didn't answer. Charley whispered to Tim, "Don't mind him. Cuban, you know. Moody. I think it's all that sugar in the blood."

The streets were going by the wrong way. "Actually, I'm going uptown," said Tim.

"No problem," said Charley. "What time's your meeting?"

"Well, now. I mean, it's my meeting. It starts when I get there."

Charley chuckled. "It's good when they become your meetings. I remember when it got to the point they were my meetings. You know how I made my first serious money? Landing craft. I was coming home from the war-I'd been in the infantry-I was coming home from the war, getting on a ship, and I saw all these landing craft, miles of landing craft, sitting there with nothing left to invade, and I said to myself: I bet those could be had for a song. All I had to do was come up with the song. Now, Margaret's daddy, he was a terrible drunk, that's the only reason he would have let her marry someone like myself, first mate on a charter fishing boat. I never told you about how I married Margaret, did I?"

They were going into the tunnel. "Brooklyn?" said Tim.

"You know, when I first saw Brooklyn, there was ships fighting with each other trying to get space at the piers. Now look at it. Unions. Look back there," he said, toward Manhattan. "That's where Herman Melville first sailed from. You know what he wrote? He wrote something beautiful and true: 'Our souls are like those orphans whose mothers die in bearing them; the secret to our paternity lies in their graves, and we must there to learn it.' I didn't know it until someone explained it to me, but did you know Moby Dick isn't about whales."

"No."

"It's about orphans. I'm an orphan. That's why my family was so important to me."

"Charley, where are we going?" They were driving through an abandoned area of waterfront, into a warehouse on a pier. Tim saw an RV parked in a far corner. They pulled up alongside of it.

Felix opened the door for Charley. Charley got out. Tim stayed inside. "Come on," said Charley, "got someone I want you to meet."

"That's okay."

"Well, I can't introduce you if you stay inside the car."

"I can't."

"You can't? What do you mean?"

"I have agoraphobia."

"What?"

"Fear of spaces."

"Felix," said Charley, "we got anything in the first aid for agoraphobia?" Felix stuck his head in the door; Tim got out. What he saw inside the van gave him a bad start. Ramirez was sitting scrunched on a settee between two large men. One of the men was reading Architectural Digest, the other House amp; Garden. He saw another, similar-looking man by the kitchen area taking apart a coffee-making machine. He looked up at Tim in a way that was frightening for its apparent lack of interest.

Charley said, "I believe you know Mr. Ramirez there. That's Mr. McNamara on his left and Mr. Bundy on his right. And over there is Mr. Rostow. You making coffee, Mr. Rostow?"

"I'm trying to make cappuccino, but these instructions are in Italian."

"Plain coffee would be fine. Sit down, son," he said to Tim. "Mr. Ramirez has made certain allegations. He's said you called him around four-thirty on the day my granddaughter was killed in a state of some excitement and threatened to give his name to the police as the supplier of a certain gram of cocaine unless he met with you immediately."

"That's completely-"

"Hold on, hold on, I want to hear your side of it, but hear me out. He says you told him to meet you at this bar on Spring Street and made him stay with you until seven-thirty, when you both went to this place, Gulag, until after two."

"That's absurd. That wasn't it at all."

"Okay. The floor's all yours."

"I think I know why he's saying this, though. Yeah, it makes sense. He's probably the one who gave Tasha the coke."

Ramirez exploded. "You lying piece of shit. He's lying."

"I don't like that language, Emiliano."

Tim whispered, "Charley, what's going on here? This guy's a coke dealer."

"I know. We been watching him."

"Well?"

"That's why I'm curious why you'd be spending time with him. Successful person like yourself."

Tim sighed with relief. "Jesus, is that it? It was research."

"Research?" said Charley.

"You know the character in the play, Jose? The dealer? We want to change his part a little. One of the stage people told me about this guy here, works as an usher sometimes at the theater, only so he can sell coke. That interested me, so I decided to interview him and see what I could find out about the dope business. That's why we went to that place, Gulag."

"I see."

"He's fucking lying!" Ramirez shouted. Bundy swatted him on the head with Architectural Digest.

But Ramirez went on. "He called me on my beeper and told me she's dead, man, she fucking died and I'm gonna tell the cops it was you if you don't do like I say."

"Charley, please-"

"It's all right, son. I know it couldn't have been you anyhow. The medical examiner said she died between eight and midnight, and you were in that club with him then."

"Right."

"And you left her place at four-thirty."

"Right."

Charley grabbed a fistful of his shirt and pushed him against the wall. The Winnebago shook. "You son of a bitch."

"Charley, you've got me confused. I wasn't at her place." Charley reached under his arm and drew his old Army Colt.45 and put it to Tim's forehead. He said, "Talk."

"She called me. She was upset about the review. She said she'd bought cocaine from this usher at the theater. She said she was going to do the whole gram until she had the role authenticated. I pleaded with her not to do it. I told her it was dangerous. She said she didn't care. Christ, Charley, you know how she was. I rushed over, called her from the phone booth, that was the first message I got on the machine. She let me in. By the time I got there she was already flying. She'd done like half the gram. She was gone. Then she just keeled, dead."

"Why didn't you call for help?"

"She was dead, Charley. There was no heartbeat. I gave her CPR. She was dead."

"You should have called for help."

"She was dead. Either your heart is beating or it's not beating. Hers wasn't beating. I panicked, okay? I'd just heard the show might be moving uptown, my first real break, and, and I panicked, okay? I'm guilty of panicking. But that's all. The medical examiner doesn't know what he's talking about. She was dead at four-twenty or four-twenty-five. By the couch."

Charley threw open the door and went outside. He put his head against the metal side of the RV and pressed it there. Felix went to him. Charley moaned, "They found her in the bathroom. He left her to die."

Felix started up the steps. Charley stopped him.

Five minutes passed before the door opened and Charley reentered the RV. Tim was sweaty and pale. Charley said somberly, "I will not drag her good name through the papers. It's done. You'll have to live the rest of your life with this and I pray to God it drives you screaming off a cliff someday. Now get out."

"Charley, I feel badly-"

"GET OUT."

Tim closed the door behind him and breathed in the cold night air, still trembly. Felix said, "I'm supposed to take you back. Get in."

"I'll walk, that's all right."

Felix stared. "You wouldn't last two minutes in this neighborhood. Get in." Tim climbed in back, Felix in the front. He started the car. The glass partition slid up. Tim was grateful for that. He heard a hissing coming from beneath the seat. It seemed a little too loud for heat. He looked. Two streams of white smoke. He reached for the door handle; it was locked. It was a chemical smell, like, actually it was-Jesus-wonderful. He felt great. He'd never felt this great. It was so incredibly great, like a great opening night, only more… great.

Charley and Ramirez spoke in Spanish. "Who gave you the cocaine you sold to Tim?" Ramirez had not quite grasped the essence of his situation and was now demanding his lawyer and phone call. Finally Charley said to Ramirez that he could discuss the matter either with him or with the two men bookending him.

Ramirez said, "If I give you his name, he will kill me."

"No." Charley shook his head convincingly. "I promise you that will not happen. And I will pay for the information."

"How much?"

"Five thousand dollars."

The prospect of money seemed to relax Ramirez. "Fifty," he said.

Charley considered. "No."

"Forty-five."

"Ten."

"Forty."

Charley said, "Ten. And my offer is good for ten seconds. After that"-he nodded in the direction of McNamara-"our negotiation will proceed to another phase."

Ramirez gave a name and address in Hunts Point. Charley pointed to the crucifix around his neck.

"Are you Catholic, Emiliano?"

"Si si. Muy catolico."

"Hold the cross in your hand." Puzzled, Ramirez held the crucifix. "Repeat after me: I swear by the Holy Cross of Jesus and by His Holy Mother, the Virgin, that what I've just said is true, and if it is not true, then may I spend eternity in hell and may my grandmother, mother, aunts and sisters spend eternity in hell."

"No problem, man." That wasn't quite the right answer. Charley was disappointed in Emiliano. He cocked his.45. Ramirez produced a different name and address, and a phone number. Charley dialed the number on the cellular telephone and handed it to Ramirez, the.45 aimed at his head. "Prove it," he said. Ramirez called Uguarte and said he needed more "oranges." Amazing, the codes they used like someone listening in wouldn't know what "oranges" was.

Charley said, "Who do you want to get the money?" There were some awkward moments as Ramirez figured it out. He began to cry and that didn't help. He said to send the money to his mother, Rosa, and gave her address. Charley cocked his.45 and urged him to be a man. At which point Ramirez began blubbering. "Por el amor de Dios, un cura. Por el amor de Dios, un cura." Charley lowered the gun. Felix caught the stricken look.

"What's the problem?" he whispered.

"He's asking for a priest."

"Yeah. So?"

"Well, I can't shoot a man who's asking for a priest."

"Why?"

"You know why."

Rostow came over. "What's the problem?"

Felix said, "He wants a priest."

"Uh-huh. So?"

"So."

Rostow shrugged. "It's always like this. When you want a priest, there's never one around."

"You Catholic, Rostow?" said Charley testily.

"Presbyterian."

"Then I wouldn't expect you to understand."

Rostow looked at Felix. Felix drew Charley off to one side. "I don't get it. You're saying you want to take him to a church, then shoot him?"

"No," said Charley. "I'm not sure that's feasible."

"Okay."

"My bill's going to be high enough as it is, Felix. I don't want that on my tab."

"Okay," Felix said, shrugging. "I'll shoot him."

"No. We got a Yellow Pages on board?"

"What?" said Felix.

"A Yellow Pages, a telephone book, damnit. Hell with it." Charley punched 411. "Operator, give me the name of a Catholic church, please. Any church. I don't have a particular church. Look, it doesn't matter. Oh, for cryin' out loud. St. Mary's Church. Any St. Mary's. First St. Mary's you got… Fine. Yes… Thank you. Christ in heaven, where do they get operators like that, in the Soviet Union?" He dialed.

"Excuse me," Rostow was whispering to Felix, "but what the hell is going on here?"

"He's calling a priest," said Felix.

"Hello?" said Charley. "I'm sorry, I know it's late, but I need to talk to a priest… You are? Good. All right now, Padre, now listen up. Got a man here gonna die-he's slipping fast-and he wants to say his piece to a priest… No, there's no time, believe me, he's almost gone as it is… No, this is not a joke, on my heart, this is very serious."

Charley stabbed at the "hold" button and pointed the pistol at Ramirez and said, "Okay, Emiliano, I got your priest on the line. You say one word not directly related to your immortal soul and you'll be in hell before he can give you forgiveness and you'll spend all eternity there wondering why you were so damn stupid."

Ramirez's confession went on for a full ten minutes. Even Rostow, McNamara and Bundy were impressed. Charley felt indecent holding the gun to old Ramirez's head like that while he unpacked his sorry soul, but there wasn't much he could do about that.

Tim was discovered on the floor of his apartment next to a crack pipe and several rocks of the same, dead of an acute heart attack. They found massive traces of it in his lungs and blood, enough to kill several people. Everyone was stunned. This obsession with authenticity was getting out of hand. Who was next, the set designer? Theater people were calling the play MacWired, because it was starting to look as jinx-ridden as Macbeth. Bernie and Karen were horrified, though the publicity was frankly having a tremendous effect on sales. Jimmy Podesta wrote a piece for the Times Op-Ed. Charley sent a nice floral arrangement to the funeral, along with his regrets that he couldn't attend. He remained in seclusion on his island in the Chesapeake, but he did issue a statement through his company spokesman saying it was a tragedy such young and talented lives were being taken while the government refused to get serious about the problem.

9

Senior Agent Frank Diatri (that's Dee-atri), holding his yogurt and bran, stepped off the elevator of the nineteenth floor of 555 West Fifty-seventh Street in New York City, Divisional Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and right away everyone made a fuss.

"Frankie! How ya doin?"

"Great," said Diatri.

"Yeah?" said Gubanovich unconvincingly. "You look great."

How the hell were you supposed to look, like you just got back from a Carnival Cruise? Alice and Marge came up and started kissing him. "Oh, jeez, Frankie, we were so worried," Alice said. "Didja get the card?"

"Do you want some coffee, Frankie?"

"I'm not supposed to drink coffee."

"Oh, Frankie, I'm sorry! What am I saying?"

"Marge, it's okay. I'm fine. It's these doctors. They don't want you to do anything."

Marge said, "My aunt had the same thing."

Diatri stared. "Your aunt got shot?"

"No. But they hadda take some of her intestine out." She whispered, "Do you have to wear a bag?"

"No, Marge. Listen, I gotta go eat this yogurt. If I don't eat yogurt every two hours, I die."

"Aw, Frankie, you're sure a-here, you get another kiss."

"I'm going to have to get shot more often," said Diatri. He must have been stopped twenty times on the way to his desk, everyone wanting to know the particulars. It was a little embarrassing, to tell the truth. He hoped Marge hadn't been going around telling everyone he had to wear a bag. His desk wasn't too bad, except for a Styrofoam coffee cup by his phone that looked like a bacteriological experiment, with gray fur growing out of it. But there were flowers-white carnations-with a note saying: "From NADDIS with love." Aw. He recognized Phyllis' handwriting. He was always asking Phyllis to run his Narcotics And Dangerous Drugs Information System searches on the computer. Phyllis used to have a crush on him, but now she was dating a guy in Asset Seizure. Should have-probably just as well. But that was nice of Phyllis. People are always so nice after you get shot; except for Suzie. Suzie actually seemed a little put out when he got back after getting wounded the second time, like she would have rather had the monthly VA checks instead. Turning on Cronkite every night during dinner. Sweetheart, I just got back, can we not watch the war on TV every night, please?-

"Frankie!"

"Gene, hey."

"You look good."

"That's what everyone is saying."

"Listen, Frankie, what happened with Kincaid was a fuckin' disgrace. Five to fifteen for illegal possession of weapons. I mean, they should've nailed the fuck's ears to the wall with a Hilti gun."

"Hilti gun?"

"Nail driver. What the hell is that?" he said, pointing at the Styrofoam cup.

"It's just an experiment I'm doing."

"It's disgusting, Frank."

The Special Agent in Charge called him down to his office. "You look great, Frank."

Diatri gave his stomach a loud whack. "Never better."

The SAC winced. "I was just going over your medical. You were leaking pretty bad there."

"Two quarts," said Diatri.

"You know what the worst part of being shot is these days?"

Not this again. "How's Ellen, Jim?"

"Same-same. The blood. The blood is what scares me. I mean, I'm sure you got good blood."

"Yeah," said Diatri. "They test it."

"Me, I'd make them run it through fucking chlorine first. Then charcoal. You know what I'd like to set up? Our own blood bank. You know, I sent a memo to the AA about it."

"Good idea, Jim. And what did the AA say?"

"I haven't heard back yet. You know how it is down there."

"Oh yeah," said Diatri.

"So, what are we going to do with you?"

This was a very strange question, he thought, the kind you'd put to a summer intern, not a Senior Agent who'd twice passed up a promotion to Group Supervisor and five extra grand a year just so he could stay on the street. Diatri told people he did it to keep the five grand from going to his two exes. "Your medical says you're fit, but I thought we might, you know, ease back in."

"We?" said Diatri. "You sound like the nurses." He gave his stomach another demo whack.

The SAC winced. "Frank, will you stop hitting yourself?"

"What does it say?"

"It says you're okay-"

"Okay, then. What do you got for me?"

The SAC handed Diatri a sheet. It was court order for a wiretap. Diatri said, "A T-Three? Are you serious?"

"I got Title Threes up to my crotch, Frank. I could really use you."

Diatri stared. He twisted the ring on his wedding finger. It was a leftover from a UC job a couple of years ago where he had to look like a pimp. He bought all this stuff at one of those community-conscious boutiques on Times Square that sell Ninja swords, bull-whips, blowguns, choke wires and kukri knives. It looked like a Sicilian version of a West Point class ring, with a tiny photo of the young Frank Sinatra underneath a hunk of cheap blue glass. People gave him grief about it. Diatri continued to stare.

"Okay," said the SAC. He handed Diatri a folder. "We got a call from the Ninth Precinct."

"The Fighting Ninth," said Diatri, untensing.

"They found a body on one of their sidewalks yesterday. A Ramon Antonio Luis, local crack dealer. Twenty-two caliber in the back of the head. Puerto Rican kid works at an all-night gypsy cab place on the block told them he saw some people wearing our raid jackets. It's all in the 61," he said, handing Diatri the police report.

"We have anything going down there?"

"No. We had two groups out that night, one in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx."

"Is Internal Security working this?"

"They're… no. We gonna work this ourselves, then if it turns out there's something, Internal Security can get involved."

"I see this is a real red-hot case."

"Look, Frank-"

"Luis' biggest prior was for," Diatri read, "two ounces. Ounces, Jack? You want me to work someone who does ounces?"

"Someone maybe wearing our raid jackets popped the guy. It could be an important case."

"Yeah."

"Hey, if you'd rather work the T-Threes…"

Diatri got up. "No no. I'm honored. I mean, we can't have scumbags going around popping each other wearing our raid jackets."

"Personally," said the SAC, "I think the kid probably needs glasses. Frank, I'm sorry about Kincaid. If it's any consolation, they went fucking berserk in Washington over it. The administrator went to Bennett and requested a meeting in the White House."

"Uh-huh," said Diatri.

"The White House doesn't want to piss off the State Supreme Court, so they ended up not having a meeting."

"Uh-huh."

"Jesus, Frank, don't be so fuckin' nonchalant. I'm telling you the Administrator himself took it all the way to the fuckin' White House."

"I'm grateful, Jim. Truly."

"Don't let it eat you up."

"Hah. Hey, I've only got so much intestine left, right?"

"Right. That's it." Diatri started out the door. "Listen," the SAC said, "take your time on it. Ease into it. Remember what happened to Shamalbach."

Diatri sat at his desk munching lactose tablets and read over the 61 on the shooting of Ramon Antonio Luis, male, Hispanic, five-eight, 145, mid-thirties, fourteen priors, mostly assaults, B and A, possession, possession with intent, possession with intent, possession with… babum babum babum. Nothing interesting here at all except the caliber of the bullet that had interrupted such a promising career. Twenty-two long rifle, the "Devastator," same that Hinckley used on Reagan, the roach motel of small-arms ammunition: bullet goes in, can't go out, breaks up into little pieces. Generally, dopers wanted a lot of bang for their bucks: 9mms,.357s,.380 ACPs, 7.65s,.44s,.45s. Some were using the new 10mms. In this market, a.22 was unusual. The mob used to use.22s because they went in fast and clean and ricocheted around inside the skull, pureeing the old cauliflower.

Diatri couldn't remember his NADDIS access code. It disturbed him. It was like forgetting your Social Security number. "Sylvia, give me Gubanovich's access code, would you?" Sylvia looked good. What was that she was wearing, seamed stockings? Who'd have thought those would come back. There was nothing in NADDIS on Ramon Antonio Luis. A million and a half files in the database, and nothing on him. Two ounces was just nothing to get excited over these days; certainly Diatri wasn't excited. His Sig Sauer 9mm felt a little tight against his stomach.

The Puerto Rican kid at the AMANECER CAR SERVICE ABIERTO 24 HORAS on East Eighth Street reacted the way people usually reacted when they saw Frank Diatri flash his badge. Diatri could inspire nervousness even without showing ID. He was strongly built, just under six feet, genetically pre-tanned, with liquid brown eyes that glommed on to yours and didn't let go until you'd accounted for yourself. Despite the permanently disappointed look, he smiled easily and people were usually grateful for that; the Puerto Rican kid was. Diatri spoke Spanish with him. The kid said he was sure the jackets said D-E-A. Diatri had him step out onto the sidewalk. He pointed to an ad in a bus shelter on Avenue C and asked him to read what it said.

"A-t l-a-s-t S-t-r-e-e-p t-a-l-k-s."

"Veintelveinte," Diatri grinned.

He stood on the sidewalk by the Church of Santa Brigida where Ramon Antonio Luis had died. The blood had congealed into a three-foot-wide brown patch. Diatri thought of lying in his own pool of blood and the elevator door closing and the elevator going up and the door opening and the woman seeing him and screaming and running back to her apartment-Thank you, ma'am-and the elevator door going down to another floor and a little girl seeing him and screaming and running away. He was going to die in the elevator going up and down, up and down, with the doors opening and people screaming.

Detective Korn showed him the photographs from the scene. "A real fucking tragedy," he said.

Diatri looked at the close-up of the back of Luis' head. "Powder burns?"

"Not a speck," said Korn admiringly. "And a twenty-two pistol. Look at that shot. Right in the ten ring."

"Marksman, huh?"

"This," said Korn, "was a Samaritan."

"I'm getting a sense here," said Diatri, "that you didn't like Ramon."

"He sold crack."

"I know, but look at him here. And in front of a church. Someone could slip."

"You know what you do with that? Throw a little sand on it. Look," said Korn, "just between you and I, if you guys had something going on and something happened-it's not a problem for me."

Diatri laughed. "Aw no, you don't mean that."

Korn looked at him. "No," he said. "'Course not. I got a seventy-nine-year-old woman in Peter Cooper this morning someone beat to death with a steam iron after they raped her. Also I got a three-year-old kid whose father squashed his head in between the radiator bars because he was crying." He sighed. "They get such terrible deaths, these kids. Luis here, on my scale of one to ten, he doesn't even show up."

10

"How many?" asked Miss Farrell.

"Two," said Charley, scanning the clipboard she always met him with at the elevator.

Two ducks over five days? Miss Farrell was not herself an aficionada of blood sports, but still it seemed an inglorious bag. It surprised her that Mr. Becker would be hunting at all, the season being closed. He looked tired, she thought, though certainly better than he looked at the funeral. Usually he came from the island with more color in his cheeks.

She was just bringing coffee a few minutes later when she heard him shout, "Goddamnit!" He had The New York Times spread in front of him. He often swore when reading it, especially Mr. Safire's columns, but as she set the coffee down she noticed the paper was open to pages 2 and 3 of the Metropolitan section, not the editorial pages.

"Get me Felix," he said, not lifting his eyes from the paper. She studied her own copy of the Times while waiting for the call to go through. She found no clue to the old man's explosion. Felix came on. It was not a good connection. He said he was on the New Jersey Turnpike. She put him through. She couldn't resist listening to the conversation.

"You read the paper this morning?" said Charley.

"The paper? No."

"They with you?"

"No. Is there a problem?"

"You bet there's a problem. There's a very significant problem. Where are they?"

"At the dock."

"I'm coming back to the island. I'll see you there tonight. Out."

She used the excuse of bringing in an updated list of people who'd sent condolence letters. He'd tossed the paper to the side, but he'd torn a piece from the bottom of page 63. Back at her own desk, she compared the missing piece with her copy. All she found was a small story, a filler item:

MAN SHOT TO DEATH IN EAST VILLAGE

A man with a history of narcotics violations was found shot to death early yesterday morning on East 8^th Street shortly before dawn.

Police say Ramon Antonio Luis, 34, of no known address, was killed by a single gunshot to the back of the head. A spokesman for the Ninth Precinct Detective Squad described the killing as "clearly drug-related," but added, "We're pursuing this as we would any murder, vigorously."

It couldn't have been that. Then she noticed next to the story was the runover from the story on page 81, about the opening of Felix Rohatyn's new restaurant. Must have been that. Perhaps Mr. Becker was upset at not being invited.

There was a fog on Chesapeake Bay and it was just as well since it matched his mood. Charley walked up and down the wood-plank pier, grinding an unlit Upmann into a chewy wet stub. Spook, having given up on being thrown something to retrieve, had jumped in anyway and swam alongside, keeping pace with his master. Charley reached the end of the pier and turned around, Spook following. Back and forth, back and forth, boots clumping on wood, Labrador grunts in icy water.

Charley was trying to decide which one of them had done it. Rostow, he'd bet. Rostow had been "allowed to retire" from DEA after shooting the bodyguard of a Peruvian narco. Self-defense, yes, but they're so touchy down there about our people killing their people. It's not legal, strictly speaking. Only a sudden infusion of U.S. aid, which the State Department wrangled out of DEA's appropriations, got him out. They found him doing security for a manufacturer of high-speed dental drilling equipment in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

McNamara and Bundy he found through his friend the colonel, who ran the Army's SERE school at Fort Bragg. Survival Evasion Resistance Escape. Charley had given four hundred POWs a week at the Greenbriar Hotel after they got back from Vietnam, and he and the colonel had stayed in touch over the years. Charley had come down to visit the school, and was impressed. The colonel could take men scared to death of snakes and after they spent thirty days in that school of his, every water moccasin in his swamp would have four, five, sometimes six hungry troopers following after it trying to get to it first. The instructors were impressive, most of them having served with the Special Forces in Vietnam-as the colonel had before his five and a half years at the Hanoi Hilton-a number of them recruited by CIA into the Special Operations Groups. "Some of my executives are getting a little flabby," Charley explained. "I have in mind a program that would combine exercise, diet and survival. We have offices overseas, and you saw what Ross Perot had to go through to get his boys out of Teheran after that maniac took over. I'm thinking of calling it 'Upward Bound.' I mean, show me a man who'd chase down a water moc for his dinner and I'll show you one hell of a motivated manager." The colonel was only too happy to oblige him with the names of some of his former instructors. Charley interviewed dozens of them. Word spread through the company that the old man was setting up some kind of horrible fitness program. Miss Farrell got a call from the VP for sales asking if it was true all the divisional heads were being sent to some swamp in Louisiana to eat snakes. She hadn't heard anything about that, she said, but the gentlemen Mr. Becker was interviewing certainly appeared to be the kind for whom a diet of reptiles would pose no problem. "Jesus," muttered the VP.

Charley settled on McNamara and Bundy. Big Mac described himself as a hands-on kind of guy who had gotten very wet in Vietnam but who had drawn the line at eating Vietcong liver. "Something the folks in Psy Ops thought up," he explained to Charley. "The Vietcong, they believe that you have to be whole to enter heaven, so the idea was to take out the liver and bite a chunk out of it and leave it on the ground beside the body." He shrugged. "You want to know the honest truth, I was just never partial to liver in the first place." Bundy was a weapons specialist from Georgia, a sniper. His dossier was full of "CITATION CLASSIFIEDS" and he would not say what they had been for, other than to point at each and say, "Thousand meters, seven hundred meters in a crosswind, twelve hundred meters."

A few days after Charley had made his selection, Felix, posing as an FBI agent, paid McNamara, Bundy and Rostow separate visits, asking them if they'd been approached by a Mr. Charles Becker in connection with certain criminal services. They each denied it and reported the contact to Charley. It was something Charley prided himself on, being able to get the measure of a man right.

He heard the rumble of the engines through the fog and then saw the running lights, red and green, heading straight for the pier. Spook started swimming out to it. Charley told him to come back, stop being foolish, you can't fetch a whole boat.

Felix was at the wheel, looking ragged from not having slept in two nights, carrying a limp body up a four-story walk-up and then driving the other from Manhattan to Cambridge, Maryland. Ramirez was in a crate marked "Frozen Turkeys-Perishable." Spook came running down the pier, wet, and started barking at the crate as though it contained a year's supply of Purina Dog Chow. McNamara and Bundy, being the two largest, did most of the carrying as the procession moved by flashlight down the pier and along the shore and up the path that cut through the honey locust to the clearing of heather and moss where Charley, over Felix's strange objections, had decided he was going to put his garden. Sure enough, he started in as soon as they'd set the box down, none too gently.

"Boss," he said, "I wish we wouldn't put them here."

"Felix, we been over that."

"She had a special feeling about this place."

Charley said, "You remember that walrus tusk?" It was one summer he took Conquistador up to New England. They were in Nantucket and she found a walrus tusk in a shop; it had a hole drilled through the tip and a leather thong looped through it. She had the sweet arrogance of youth; was appalled to find a walrus tusk for sale in a store. She asked the owner what the hole and thong were for, and he said they'd used the tusk to club baby seals to death and the thong was just so they could hang the club on a nail in the wall after they were done killing the baby seals. That did it. She made Charley buy the thing-$500 worth of walrus molar-and scoured the town until she found a scrimshander to scratch "Save the Seals" all over it, and while he was at it, "No Nukes," and "Arms are for loving," and other slogans that made Charley groan to pay for.

"Yeah," said Felix. "So?"

"She said it was to get the 'negative energy' out of it. That's just what we're doing here. Getting the negative energy out."

"No no," said Felix, "you're putting negative energy in. This is a special place and you're filling it up with drug dealers."

"Think of them as fertilizer," said Charley. "I'm thinking of planting-it's too shady for roses. Maybe some ferns and wildflowers. Those meadow anemones she liked. Maybe some wild columbine. That's hardy. Lady slipper, blue lobelia." Felix was looking more and more like a basset hound, but it was something he could not explain, there was just no way he could explain it.

McNamara and Bundy dug and said they hadn't done any digging since the early seventies and wanted to know if there was Ben-Gay, because they were going to need it tomorrow. Charley kept looking over at Rostow, but he wasn't going to say anything yet. Spook kept barking at the crate. When the hole was deep enough they opened it up and tossed Ramirez in and shoveled it over. They all stood around for a moment wondering if Charley was going to call a priest on the cordless and ask him to say a few words.

Back in the cabin Charley waited until they'd settled in with beers by the fire. He took the New York Times clipping out of his pocket and put it on the coffee table. The men stared at it. Charley said, "All right, who did it?"

It was obvious. A CIA polygrapher had told Charley once you could usually tell if a man was lying if he looked up and wiggled his eyes.

"Rostow," said Charley. Rostow picked up the clipping and read it and put it down.

"A little collateral damage is inevitable," he said. The others nodded. So they were all in on it. Well, goddamnit.

"Collateral damage?" said Charley. "Hold on just a moment here. He was walking away and, and you shot the sumbitch!"

Rostow said, "Mac and Bundy and I agreed that a no-witness policy made sense." McNamara and Bundy nodded.

"Agreed? Who the hell are you, the board of trustees?" Bundy started flipping through Colonial Homes, Mac looking over his shoulder. During the Ramirez planning session the two of them had gotten into an argument over whether kilims went with Saltillo tiles. It occurred to him that he-rather, the late Mr. Luis-was the victim of the incentive package he'd put together. In addition to the million dollars-and the medical, the stock options-they'd each receive a CPI-adjusted yearly bonus of $100,000 for the rest of their lives, as long as the operation remained secret. It was meant to encourage mutual enforcing. If one of them said anything, the other two were likely to look him up and express their unhappiness over the loss of their retirement package.

"Well, damnit," said Charley, it being about all he could say.

Rostow said, "There wasn't time to get him a priest, but I did him in front of the church there. You must get some credit for dying in front of a church, right?"

"Right," said Mac helpfully, looking up from Colonial Homes.

11

"Book me five suites at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables," said Charley, charging out of the elevator from the rooftop chopper pad at his old velocity. He was still in his hunting clothes, tracking dust from dried mud. These hunting trips were certainly restorative, she thought; he no longer looked the broken man he was at the funeral. "For tonight," he said, peeling off his jacket and tossing it onto the sofa. He left a trail of clothes on the way to the shower, an old habit from his days on the shrimp boats along the Gulf coast. Margaret used to give him hell for it. Miss Farrell picked up his jacket. There was something on the sleeve.

"Tonight," she said absently, studying the stain. Charley took quick showers. He was on his way to his desk in the oversize terry bathrobe when Miss Farrell's assistant's voice said on the boom box in a worried tone, "Sir, there are two men here from the FBI to see you."

Miss Farrell looked at the jacket she was holding and folded it to her breast. There was a back way out of Charley's office; she headed for it. On her way out she heard Charley say, "Send 'em in. And can we have some coffee, please?"

They were in there twenty minutes. Miss Farrell couldn't concentrate. When the door finally opened, she looked up, stricken. She heard Charley say, "And the politician says to the Devil, 'What's the catch?'" The FBI men laughed. Charley followed them out. He shook their hands and said, "I'm sorry to cause you all this trouble."

"What was that about?" she asked.

"Oh," said Charley, "I strayed a little too close to Andrews on the way back from the island. Air Force Two was on final and, well, it's nothing, really, just… You know," he said, chuckling, "I used to let Tasha handle the controls sometimes and the same thing happened, we just kissed the inside of the Restricted Airspace and all hell broke loose. They scrambled an F-4, buzzed us, nearly knocked us down. Damn near wet my pants. Course, she thought it was the greatest thing ever happened. Tell Chuck to have Forty-nine ninety fueled for Miami with a five o'clock wheels-up. Now what do I have for today?"

"What's going on in Miami?" Miss Farrell asked.

"Office been swept this month?" They'd found a listening device in the sofa a few years ago after a visit by a man representing Futaki DSM Corporation. Charley left it there so he could feed it disinformation about Becker Industries' progress with SmartPlastics, until Futaki was convinced BI was a year behind schedule.

"Yes," said Miss Farrell.

Charley whispered, "Eastern Airlines."

Miss Farrell arched her eyebrows in appreciation, though on reflection she wondered why on earth Charley would want to acquire such a headache at this, well, stage in his life. "Do you want me down there with you?"

"I would very much," he sighed, "but Lorenzo is just paranoid about leaks. What's left of it, it's his company, so I have to play by his rules."

"Who's going?"

"Me and Felix. Plus some people from M and A." Mergers and Acquisitions.

She could feel his eyes following her as she walked out. He said, "Jeannie?"

"Yes, Charley?"

"Are you seeing anyone? I don't mean to pry. I just-"

"No."

"Well," he said, pleased, "perhaps when I get back you'd care to come out to the farm. As a guest, I mean."

She sent the clothes to be cleaned. The jacket she took home and soaked in lighter fluid and burned.

Felix, Rostow, McNamara and Bundy were waiting for him on the tarmac at Opa-Locka when the G-4 whined to a full stop Charley stepped out into the warm Miami night and reflected that Miami was one of few places where there was nothing unusual about a private jet being met by four large men with armpit bulges. He rode in front with Felix, another habit that drove Margaret nuts.

"How's it look?"

"It looks like it's not going to be easy," said Felix.

"Well, we're working our way up the food chain," said Charley. "The fish are getting bigger. What about the hotel?"

"It's nice. Which's good, because I have a feeling we're going to be here for a long time."

The Biltmore was a grand affair, built in the twenties at the height of the Florida land boom and subsequently vexed by the worst hurricane in the state's history and the stock market crash. Since then it had served a variety of inglorious functions, such as military housing, until finally the city of Coral Gables bought it-rather than watch it slide further into desuetude-pouring fifty million into it to restore it to its quondam Jazz Age splendor. Architecturally it was a tad difficult to pin down, and right away McNamara and Bundy fell to arguing over what was Mediterranean versus Moorish, Spanish Revival or Beaux Arts or Gothic Renaissance. Listening to them while he checked in, Charley was certain of one thing, anyway: no one would mistake them for a couple of hired killers.

He had sandwiches and coffee sent up to the Everglades Suite. "All right," he said, "what's the plan?" No one spoke up. "What's the matter?" said Charley. The sandwiches were on a platter. Mac reached for an olive and held it up to his eye and peered through the hole.

"Don't," said Bundy. "Don't do that."

Chin's beeper had gone off during the interrogation and right away it was clear he was more terrified by the prospect of not returning his boss's phone call than by these men who had plucked him somewhat roughly off the street, and in a way the reason had to do with olives.

The late Antonio Chin's boss was Jesus Celaya Barazo, the purpose of their stay in Coral Gables. For years he had been importing a thousand kilos of cocaine-one metric ton-each week from the Reynaldo Cabrera family of Medellin. Then, suddenly, Barazo announced he had found a new supplier and would no longer accept shipments from Cabrera. Since the loss to Cabrera's organization amounted to about $15 million a week-as well as his invaluable contacts in the Bahamian Defense Force-he sent three of his people to Miami to persuade Barazo to continue to buy his product. Two days later Cabrera received a parcel delivered by Federal Express, packed in dry ice-for a small additional charge. The box contained six eyeballs, each run through with one of those miniature plastic swords used to enliven canapés. Cabrera was himself no stranger to these kinds of interoffice memoranda; his own business protocol included slicing a man's throat open to his sternum and pulling his tongue out through it, the so-called "Colombian necktie," throwing men alive into pits full of tusked wild pigs and sundry other entertaining ways of inculcating in employees a sense of company loyalty. Nonetheless, Cabrera elected to cut his losses and seek alternate wholesale arrangements in the Sunshine State.

Barazo lived inside a walled compound in South Miami, at the corner of Southwest Sixty-fourth Street and Seventy-fifth Avenue. Not for him the glamour of a Key Biscayne or Coral Gables address, and just as well, since there were two federal warrants on him outstanding, which together could put him back in Danbury. Charley was somewhat surprised, if grateful, that a man with such legal difficulties should be living here under everyone's nose, but as they say, capital goes where it's well treated. Chin said the ground behind the wall was mined and beyond that were a half dozen Rottweiler dogs Barazo kept half starved so they'd stay mean. He fed them the remains of whatever animals he sacrificed to his Santen'a deities. And they say ours is a faithless age.

"I borrowed a gas company uniform and showed up at his gate," said Rostow. "This golf cart comes humming up with two guys with MACs. They pointed them at me. They said they didn't want the meter read."

"He's spooked," said Felix. "Ramirez, Uguarte, Sandoval, Chin. His people are disappearing. He probably thinks it's Cabrera finally getting some payback. He's not going to come out and play."

"Then we'll just have to go in there and get him," said Charley.

"In what, a tank?"

"We could blow him to DEA," said Rostow. "Apparently even Miami-Dade doesn't know he's here. The house is in someone else's name."

"What the hell good would that do us?"

"He might make bail. We could make our move while he's on his way back to the house."

"What if he doesn't make bail?"

"Then he's out of circulation. Having him whacked on the inside, hell, that's easy. And cheap."

"Then what? The trail goes cold. Come on now, boys, we can do better. I know it's tough, but you've been doing a fine job and I know we can do this."

Bundy said, "There's a tree line across the street from him, casuarinas, some are pretty tall."

"Go on."

"He has a pool. Chin said that's where he gets his exercise. I could get up there with a.308 and shoot him in the nuts while he was doing the backstroke, then we could get him in the hospital while he was having them sewn back on."

Charley thought about it. He nodded. "That's a possibility. But what if you missed? You might hit an artery or something. He might bleed to death."

Bundy looked at Charley. "Sir," he said quietly, "I do not 'miss.'"

"I'm sure you wouldn't, son, but it's, I don't know, it's messy."

Rostow spoke up. "Why don't we let him chill out for a while. Six months, whatever, let him get his confidence back. We could make it look like Chin just ran off on him, so he wouldn't think it was Cabrera."

"Six months?" Charley snorted. "That's not how I do business."

"I know. We Arc Light him," said McNamara.

"We what?"

"B-52s. That stuff you were telling us about they use on the space shuttle? HMQ?"

"X, HMX."

"Why don't we chopper over him at night and drop some on him."

"I'm not sure we're quite there yet, Mac," said Charley. "Boys, I think we're losing sight of something here. Barazo isn't the end of the chain. We got a whole other continent to deal with after we get done with him. Let's keep that in mind, all right?"

Felix said, "There's something we might as well look at now."

"Well?"

"This is a guy who puts toothpicks through people's eyeballs. Once we get him, how are you going to make him talk?"

"Damnit, McNamara, will you put down that magazine? You can design your damn dream house on your own dime." It was frustrating. "Felix," he said, "put on that tape of Chin. Now let's listen close, everyone. There's got to be a way. There's always a way."

"Whaddya got?"

"A cold," said Diatri. "I still got this cold, it won't go away."

"Yeah? That's too bad. On the Raid Jacket case, you got anything?"

"That's what I'm saying. This cold. That's what I got on the Raid Jacket case. I got it standing in the rain. You ever been out to Potter's Field? It's out on Hart Island. Let me tell you, this is a sad place. All those bodies that no one wants. And these City yo-yos they got doing the burying. They don't exactly lower you in. They just tossed this guy in. I mean, I thought the box was going to split open."

"Tossed who in, Frank?"

"Luis, Jim. The guy in the Raid Jacket case. That 'hot' case you gave me?"

"Right, right."

Diatri blew his nose. "Two weeks I've been sucking on zinc tablets. I thought maybe someone would show up at the guy's funeral. No one. So the guy's a scumbag, but scumbags have family-friends, even. You'd think someone would have showed up at his funeral. You want to know the truth, Jim, it was almost sad. I mean, if no one shows up to watch them bury you, it's like you never existed, right?"

"How are you doing otherwise? Your stomach?"

"My stomach is fine, Jim."

"Don't start hitting yourself, Frank. I just asked. Oh, by the way, Mr. Kelly called from DC. He asked about you."

"No kidding? So often when a man moves up in the world, he forgets the little people. Not Mr. Kelly."

"Take care of the cold, okay?"

The SAC walked off, leaving Diatri to blow his nose and sift through the personal effects of Ramon Antonio Luis spread out on his desk. The evidence clerk at the Ninth Precinct had mistakenly sent them to the FBI laboratory and it had taken two weeks to get them back, Detective Korn finally handing them over in a plastic bag held at arm's length as if it contained a live bubonic rat. A pack of Marlboros, a gold chain with the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Porsche key ring with a single key Technical Services said belonged to a Master's brand padlock, $1,200. Robbery was certainly out.

"I'm going out, Alice," he said.

"Okay, Frankie. Don't get shot."

Diatri stopped. "What did you say?"

Alice went on typing. "I said don't get shot."

"Well, what the hell kind of thing is that to say? Jesus, Alice."

"What's the matter with saying that? You're always getting shot. I just said, 'Don't get shot.'"

"Couldn't you just say, 'Be careful,' or, or 'Have a nice day' or something? 'Don't get shot'? Jesus."

Diatri stood on the sidewalk on East Eighth where Luis had died. The brown blood puddle was now just barely visible. He tapped the key ring against his palm. The last address the PD had for Luis was "Unknown."

They found him facedown, headed west, the bullet came from behind, so we know he was walking west. Okay, clean hit, middle of the night, probably silenced since no one heard a shot, professional, possibly, though why pay a pro to pop a lower-echelon scumbag? Still, looks like a professional hit, so… a professional would be waiting for him, and where would he know to wait for him? Diatri looked down the block. NOAH'S 8^TH STREET YAGHT? What was a boat doing here? Never mind the boat. The nearest building was number 316. A sign over the door said:

THIS LAND IS OURS. PROPERTY OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE JOINT PLANNING COUNCIL.

The door was open. Even through his cold he could smell the urine. It was a broken-down building, but underneath the accumulation of crud he saw the remnant of a parquet floor that in its day had been lovingly waxed and buffed. Families had lived in this building and raised children and filled vases with cut flowers and cooked meals and sung around the piano at night-crunch, a crack vial broke under his foot.

He tried the doors on every floor. No one home. He found the padlock on the eighth floor. Master's brand.

He unlocked it and, very slowly, pushed the door open, about an inch, until he saw the wire. He got down on his knees and with his nail clippers snipped it. He pushed the door open the rest of the way.

The wire ran from the door through an eyehook to the trigger of a sawed-off twelve-gauge held in a bench vise and aimed at the knees of whoever walked in the door. He broke the gun and examined the load. Number nine shot. Skeet load. Good spread.

The room was dark, not much light getting through the windows, which he guessed had last been cleaned when Kennedy was President. There were candles all over the place. Empty packs of Marlboros, Doritos, Oreos-the kind with extra filling. Bottles of Dos Equis Mexican beer. A Spanish-language glossy magazine open to a spread on Prince Andrew. There was a steel trunk by the sofa doing duty as a coffee table. Two pharmaceutically brown bottles on top, procaine and mannitol, dental anesthetic and baby laxative. He found the cocaine inside the trunk, about an ounce, not much, but it had the rocky texture and micaceous glint of the good stuff. People who didn't know better mistook numbness for a sign of purity; the baby laxative just added bulk-and made people have to go to the bathroom a lot. They could stretch the ounce by a third, anyway, and retail it for four thousand, more than enough, in this world, to justify shooting off someone's legs.

Diatri was looking through the rest of the apartment when he heard the creak of feet coming up the stairs. He drew his Sig Sauer and crouched behind the door.

"Emi?" he heard. It was a woman's voice, an old woman's, and scared. "Emi?" She pushed open the door and walked in.

"Hello, ma'am-aggh!" The woman shrieked and sprayed him full in the face from a hand canister.

"Ow!" Diatri shouted. "Shit! Ow! Shit!"

"Back!" she yelled. "Or I do again!"

"No! Federal agent! Policia! Ow!" He groped for his ID, waving it at her.

"Oo," said the woman. "Sorry. I think you are mogger."

Diatri stumbled toward a chair, moaning, holding his face.

"You okay, meester?"

"No, I'm not! Jesus. Get water, something."

"You wait, I get." She came back with a damp rag that looked like Egyptian mummy wrappings. Diatri took off his shirt and gave her his undershirt and wet it from a bottle of club soda.

"You gon to arres me?"

"Yes. Assaulting a federal officer with chemicals. Jesus. What's your name? What are you doing here?"

"I look for my son."

Diatri said, in a softer tone of voice, "Is your son's name Ramon?"

"No."

"What's your son's name?"

"I go now."

"No, ma'am. What's your son's name?"

"Emiliano Ramirez. He stay here sometimes. He missing for more than two weeks. I come here for two weeks to see, but I don have key. He take me to church every Sunday but he don come. I go to Missing Persons burro. Please don arres me, mister. My sister dying of cancer. You know cancer? If you arres me, she no have no one to-"

"Okay, okay. Look, let's-Jesus, that hurts-what is that?"

"Mes."

"Mace? Where'd you get-never mind. This is your son's place? Well, your son is in a lot of trouble, Mrs. Ramirez. No, not right in the eye, just, just let me have the bottle, thank you. You see what that is on the table there? That's cocaine, Mrs. Ramirez."

"He don have cocaine."

"You just told me he stays here."

"No."

"Yes, you did, Mrs. Ramirez. You just told me."

"His friend stay here. This not his place." She looked around. "Too dirty."

"Ramon Antonio Luis, do you know him?"

"No. Yes. That his cocaine. Luis is bad person, not like my Emi."

"What does your son do, Mrs. Ramirez?"

"He work."

"What kind of work?"

"He work in a theater. He's good boy. Never no trouble with police. Okay I go? My sister have to have inyection."

"Uh-uh. I'm afraid we're going to have to go talk to some people, Mrs. Ramirez."

The old woman began to cry and suddenly Diatri was telling her it was okay and letting her wipe her nose on a corner of his undershirt.

Diatri hadn't been inside a parish rectory in over twenty-five years. A lot had changed in the Church since then-Vatican II, a Polish Pope-but it was all depressingly familiar: the housekeeper with a hacking cough and wearing slippers because of her bunions, heavy furniture, heavy drapes, carpets that needed more than a Hoover and a warped print of a fifteenth-century Madonna who looked like she'd rather be in Philadelphia. The room in which she left him smelled of stale cigarettes, family problems and funeral arrangements.

The priest who walked in was in his mid to late forties, athletically built, with a wide, friendly face and eyes that augered through their thick lenses at Diatri, putting him instantly on the defensive.

"Father Rebeta?"

"Yes." He had a strong grip. "Detective Diatri?"

"Special Agent, with DEA."

"Ah"-the priest nodded-"drugs. Sit, please."

"Padre, I understand-"

"You were in the military."

"Uh, yes."

The priest smiled. "Italians don't say 'Padre,' but they do in the military. Where were you stationed?"

"Overseas. You found Mrs. Ramirez through-"

"Where overseas?"

"I was in I Corps, along the DMZ."

"Sure. Khe Sanh? Con Thien? Camp Carroll? The Rockpile?"

Diatri started twisting Old Blue Eyes around his pinky. The priest's eyes went to the ring. Diatri put his hands on his lap, out of view. "If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you how you and Rosa Ramirez found each other."

"No, of course." Father Rebeta told him about the strange phone call he'd received in the middle of the night. Diatri noted it took place the night after Luis was shot on East Eighth Street. The priest said that at first he was convinced it was a sick joke someone was playing, until he heard the man say, "Okay, Emiliano, I have your priest on the phone."

The priest said, "And the confession I heard, that could not have been a joke. I went to the police and told them. They told me it must have been a joke. The only thing I could think of was to go to Missing Persons and see if anyone had reported a missing Emiliano. They said they didn't give out that information but I made a pest of myself and sometimes"-he tapped his Roman collar-"this is good for something, and eventually they let me see their list. There were eight missing Emilianos. I was able to narrow it down to five on the basis of the date of the call, and after going to see the five people who'd reported missing Emilianos I came to the conclusion it was Mrs. Ramirez's son, Emiliano."

"And you reported this back to the police?"

"Yes."

"And-"

"And they couldn't have cared less. I got a lecture about their case load."

"What convinced you it was Mrs. Ramirez's son?"

"Intuition-and the time frame, I suppose," said the priest. Diatri caught it, a slight upward flicker of eyeball.

"This other voice," said Diatri, "it called you Padre, like I did?"

"Yes."

"Tell me about his voice."

"Deliberate, intelligent, commanding. Accustomed to being obeyed. Rather calm. His syntax was revealing."

"His what?"

"Choice of words."

"What about his choice of words?"

"He said, 'Got a man here gonna die.' He didn't say, 'I'm going to kill a man.' There's a difference, isn't there? Look at the way that first sentence is constructed. As though the man's death is an action independent of his own agency. As the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue."

"Seems to me you're hanging a lot on this syntax."

"Everything hangs on grammar, Frank. Everything. The soul reveals itself through language. Do you remember when Nixon started using 'we'? Everyone said he was being pompous, using the royal 'we,' but that wasn't it at all. It was the two Nixons talking, his superego splitting away from his self. He was talking, without realizing it himself, about the two Nixons."

"One was plenty. We're getting a little off the track here, Padre."

"Not really. Not really. I've spent almost twenty years of Saturdays sitting in a black box listening to people spill out their souls through words. I have an appreciation for the words they choose. Like a blind man, I suppose."

"I get to see their faces when they confess," Diatri said. "That way I can tell when they're pulling my chain."

"Oh"-Father Rebeta smiled back-"I can tell too."

"So what about the voice?"

"It was Southern, actually more Southwestern. Sharper, some twang to it. Texas maybe, Arizona, New Mexico. Someone from the Deep South would say, 'Got a man here gonah dah.' He said, 'gunna die.' It's a tighter diction, less elasticity, it snaps back faster. Also, his use of 'Padre' would be consistent with that. Unless, of course, we're talking about a military man, like yourself. But we're ignoring the more important aspect of it, aren't we?"

"If you say so." Must be a Jesuit.

"Why would a man who was about to whack another man in cold blood go to the trouble and risk of calling a priest in the middle of the night to hear his confession?"

Diatri said, "Because he's a Catholic himself."

"Yes, exactly."

"But if he's about to kill this guy, why does he care about giving him confession?"

"You tell me."

"No," said Diatri, "you tell me."

"It's obvious, isn't it? Because he's compassionate."

"He's about to kill the guy and he's compassionate?"

"Think it through."

"Are you a Jesuit by any chance?"

"I was, yes. But I'm diocesan now, as you can see."

"Uh-huh. Well, you're doing fine, so why don't you think it through."

"Okay." The priest smiled. "A Catholic would almost certainly know that sacraments cannot be administered over the telephone. The Church has changed a great deal, despite our current Pope, but she has not yet reached the point of Reach Out and Forgive."

"So?"

"So, the man who placed the call, knowing it didn't count, was doing it anyway, presumably to make the man he was about to… whack… feel better."

"Okay. Go on."

"On the other hand, though the confession was not, strictly speaking, valid, the very fact of the man's desiring confession would constitute volition-the desire for forgiveness. And as you no doubt recall, desire is nine-tenths of the law."

Diatri smiled. "So he's looking eight to ten centuries in Purgatory instead of a million consecutive life sentences in the Hot House?"

"We don't speak of 'Hell' the way we used to, Frank. We speak of Separateness."

"What did he tell you during this confession?"

"You know I can't tell you that, Frank."

"Why not? You said it wasn't a valid confession."

"No, but given the man's volition, I would treat it as such nonetheless. But nice try."

"That's very disappointing, Padre."

"I can tell you that his life had not been a paradigm of sanctifying grace."

"Well, that really narrows it down for me, especially in New York City. So many paradigms of sanctifying grace walking around."

"I am trying to help."

"Let's recap. You think you got a telephone call from a Southwestern Catholic compassionate guy who was about to kill a Hispanic scumbag named Emiliano. Does that about do it?"

"I'm certain he didn't mean for me to hear him say the man's name. I heard a phone tone just before that. I think he meant to put me on hold and pressed the wrong button. He said other things, but I couldn't hear."

Diatri leaned back in his chair and stared at the priest for a moment's effect. "Why don't you just tell me what it is you and Mrs. Ramirez are holding back."

They stared at each other for a good half minute. Finally the priest said, "On one condition."

"This is a federal investigation, Padre. No conditions."

"In that case, I can't really say."

"All right. I'll consider it."

"Consider it?"

"Favorably."

"In that case. Two days after I got the phone call, Rosa received an envelope through her mail slot containing ten thousand dollars. Five hundred used twenty-dollar bills."

"Funny how she neglected to mention that little detail to me. Does she still have the envelope?"

"No. I asked. She burned it. But there were no markings."

"That's really too bad. What about the money?"

"Spent. She bought a new television-"

"Great. Little Emiliano missing and she's the Queen of K Mart."

"-for her sister, who's dying of pancreatic cancer. That's one of the worst kind. The rest she's using on getting her into a private hospice out in Flushing."

Diatri stood up. "Thank you, Padre."

"Frank, may I ask you something?"

Frank. "Yes."

"Do all priests make you nervous, or is it just me?"

"You don't make me nervous."

"Then why have you been doing that with your ring the whole time? By the way, is that Sinatra?"

"It's, I gave up smoking. It's something to do with my hands."

"No it isn't." The priest smiled.

At the door, Diatri said, "If they got word there was going to be a major battle, they would fly in two things. Frozen steaks and priests. We could always tell when the shit was going to hit when we saw the frozen steaks and the priests. I haven't had a steak since January 1968. And I used to love steaks." Diatri shook his hand. "Thank you for your time, Padre."

13

"You want to cut?" said Felix.

Charley grunted no and said he wasn't going to play another hand if it was going to be another goddamn game with eighteen goddamn wild cards. He was half crazy from the waiting. Two weeks in the Everglades Suite-to hell with the vaulted ceilings and the great view-had him pacing like a stuck lion. A cage is a cage, even if it is Spanish Revival. Two weeks of waiting on a scared-stiff doper to come out and play. Two weeks of waiting, of playing poker, an eternity to a man like Charley. He was so bored he said he was thinking of buying Eastern Airlines just to have something to do.

"Why can't you just deal straight poker?"

"Because it's dealer's choice and I'm winning. I'm up $16,400. Nines, threes and sixes wild. Four, you get an extra card, cost you half the pot. Arrange 'em and roll 'em."

"That's whorehouse poker," said Charley. "And I'm not going to play it."

"All right," said Felix. "Then pay up."

"Just deal."

They rolled over their cards one by one and bet. Felix said, "Six kings." Charley shook his head the way he might at a tax increase. Felix pulled his chips over and methodically stacked them into the neat piles that annoyed Charley, who let out a cloud of disapproving cigar smoke and went and stood on the balcony. The lights of Key Biscayne glittered across the water.

"What about a tunnel?" Charley said. "We rent the house across the street and go in under the wall, under that minefield he's got. Minefields, in downtown Miami. What's this country come to, Felix? We go up into his bedroom and catch him with his pants down. Use some of that stun gas."

Felix finished stacking his chips. "Let's give it another week, boss."

"No, I'm sick of waiting. You tell Rostow and the boys we're going to meet right here tomorrow morning, ten A.M. We're going to meet right here and we're going to discuss a tunnel."

He knew better than to argue. It might pass of its own accord, like a low-pressure zone. He checked his watch and said, "I better go." He strapped on his pistol and gathered up his now-worn medical journals, resisting the weariness that attached itself to the task so as to not encourage Charley's tunnel scheme. He opened the refrigerator and removed the small saltshaker with the hinged lid. He shook the grains to make sure they were loose, checked the holes in the shaker to see they were clear and slid it into the pocket of his jacket. "Maybe tonight'll be the night," he said. Charley was still staring off toward Key Biscayne with his back to him.

"Ten A.M.," said Charley.

They'd chosen the hotel for its proximity to Neon Leon's restaurant on Southwest Seventy-third Street between Southwest Fifty-eighth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Place. Felix reached the Winn-Dixie-"The Beef People"-parking lot across the street ten minutes after leaving the Biltmore. He shut off the engine and checked his watch; it was two minutes to eight. At eight he saw Rostow emerge from Neon Leon's and walk toward him. He got in, shut the door, and let out a disconsolate belch. "Got any Pepto?" Felix nodded at the glove compartment. Rostow opened it. There were three new bottles of Pepto-Bismol. Rostow opened a bottle and took a long slug. He licked his lips pink.

"How's the squid tonight?"

"Sucks," said Rostow. He sat with the bottle of Pepto open between his legs. "I've been thinking-"

"So's the boss."

"-about Mac's idea. The incendiary. The problem is getting our own fire truck. We're getting hung up on the truck. It doesn't have to be a truck. Why does it have to be a truck? Why can't it just be an ambulance?"

"He's called a meeting tomorrow at ten. He wants to dig a tunnel."

"A tunnel." Rostow took another swig of pink. "I don't know if Bundy is going to go for any more digging. He says burying Chin put his back out. Says he's having lumbar problems. But I can't eat much more of this shit."

Felix crossed Southwest Seventy-third Street and walked into Neon Leon's. There was a Lucite copy of the Venus de Milo in the lobby, lit from beneath so that her stumps and severed neck glowed brightly. Felix wondered if this was intentional.

The maitre d' gave him a bright smile. "Dr. Allende! Like a clock!" He led Felix to his regular table, reserved for him every night the last two weeks, a well-lit corner booth where he could read his medical journals. Felix sat and, again resisting the temptation to sigh, spread his magazines out before him: New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Gastroenterological Review, The Lancet. Tonight he'd wrapped JAMA's cover around the new Sports Illustrated so that he wouldn't have to spend another night pretending to read about renal dysfunction.

His regular waiter, Ignacio, appeared. They spoke in Spanish.

"You're late tonight," Ignacio reproved him with mock severity. "Four minutes."

Felix made a clack-clack gesture with his hand. "Medical conferences give doctors an excuse to talk too much."

Ignacio nodded knowingly. "How long is the conference?"

Felix gave a world-weary shrug. "Until we find a cure for cancer. What's good tonight?"

"Nothing," said Ignacio.

"Okay, I'll take the nothing and some fresh fish, grilled, no butter, no sauce. And coffee."

"A sus ordenes," said Ignacio with his customary flourish.

As always, Felix asked if the squid was fresh-just to make sure it was on the menu-and, as always, ordered something else. Calamares en su tinta, squid in its own ink. A bowl of calamares en su tinta was a dinner out of Jules Verne: rubbery white tentacles rising out of a creamy, purple lagoon. What a strange obsession. Chin said that Barazo had developed a taste for it, even before seeing it for the first time, after someone told him it was the favorite dish of Juan Carlos de Borbon, King of Spain. (It isn't.) Barazo scattered hundred-dollar tips at Neon Leon's like autumn leaves; they were only too happy to have it, fresh, on the menu every night, over the objections of the chef.

Felix opened his New England journal of Medicine and scanned an article about a surgical procedure developed by doctors in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to repair kneecaps shattered by IRA bullets. The article interested him more than most, being familiar himself with the geography of knees owing to his own torn cruciate ligaments, but he was soon lost in the technicalities of the protocols and thumbing listlessly through learned articles on hyperthyroidism, shingles, and sundry -ectomies and -omas. Finally he switched to his concealed Sports Illustrated and read with fascination an article about a Mexican priest who supported his orphanage by wrestling professionally under the name Fray Tormenta-Brother Storm. Every Saturday Fray Tormenta would hitchhike into Mexico City from the town of Xometla and earn fifty dollars for getting into the ring and being brutalized by gigantic Aztecs with names like El Insolente and Torquemada. Felix learned that in Mexico wrestling is not faked; ears get bitten off, limbs broken, genitals… At dawn Fray Tormenta would return to the orphanage, usually unconscious in the back of a pickup truck, in time to say morning Mass for his orphans. Felix's eyes were burning by the end of the article. He was tearing it out to show to Charley when his beeper went off.

They did regular beeper checks, so he walked to the phone with no particular urgency. He dialed and reached Bundy in half a ring. Bundy's voice was urgent. He said, "He's moving. Two cars. The Package and a girl up front, three goombahs following. They just turned right on Sixty-second Avenue. He's heading your way."

Felix hung up and walked back to his table. He sat down and noticed that his hands were trembling. Ignacio appeared.

"Your fish, Doctor. Aren't you well?"

"Fine."

"You've been working too hard. That's no good. Who's going to take care of us when the doctors get sick, eh?"

Felix poked at his fish. It was pointless putting any in his mouth, since it had gone completely dry. Barazo was headed for the restaurant, would walk in any moment, a man who beat up teenage girls, cut off the heads of animals to propitiate Afro-Caribbean gods, put plastic cocktail swords into people's eyes. Felix explained to himself that it was entirely rational to be scared of a man like this, but this didn't help.

Jesus Celaya Barazo made a Miami entrance a few minutes later. First to enter was one of the bodyguards, two hundred and fifty pounds or so of Ray-Banned malevolence, followed by another of similar aspect, followed by the Package and his woman. She was dark and beautiful in the conventional way, but it was the dress that demanded attention, if it could be called that. Generically it seemed more of a wet suit, though one designed to attract, rather than repel, sharks: shocking white, with a neckline that plunged itself below the navel, clearly designated by means of a conspicuous opal. The lower half of her outfit consisted of rubber hot pants and the stays of a garter belt that stretched taut a pair of black nylons studded with rhinestones. Her five-inch heels made her taller than Barazo, and forced her to walk somewhat like a circus clown on stilts. The third goombah followed behind, meting out mind-your-own-business stares to those male diners unable to concentrate on their food. The rubber left little to the imagination, and Barazo's face showed his pleasure at the libidinous fission triggered by his woman's colliding nuclei.

He was himself a heavyset man somewhere on the dark side of forty with a short ponytail and, somewhat oddly, the mustache now permanently associated with Hitler rather than with Oliver Hardy. The rest of his face was concealed under a three-day beard and oversized red sunglasses. It was a face not open to the general public.

The maitre d' created deferential bow waves as he led the party to the corner banquette that Chin had told them was reserved only for him, much the way Jilly's in New York always keeps a table for Sinatra, even if he's singing in Australia that night. Two bodyguards took up positions on either side of the booth, hands thrust into shoulder bags that Felix recognized as the rig used by the Secret Service to deemphasize their Uzi submachine guns. The third kept by the door, scowling at anyone who entered.

Champagne arrived at the table. Felix watched over the top of JAMA, heart beating loudly in his ears, trying to keep his hands from rustling the pages. The girl sidled up against Barazo. From his own table, he could see beneath Barazo's table and what he saw alarmed him. Fear seized him. A man who has his female companion administer manual labor under the table while he contemplates a dish that would make most stouthearted men gag is no man to be trifled with. Felix wanted to get out of there, right now; he reached for his wallet to pay. They could dig a tunnel or drop a hydrogen bomb on him, but this was not going to work. My God, look at him. She's… Ignacio, quickly, the check. She's finished. A finger bowl? With flower petals in it. Now she was licking the fingers ostentatiously. Classy.

Felix opened his wallet to get money and there she was, looking up at him from her high school graduation picture, taken a few days before that night in the clearing on the island. He stared. He took it out of the sleeve and turned it over and read what she'd written there, ironic words, given what had happened a few days later: "To my best friend in the world, love, T." Felix turned it over and put it back in the sleeve and when he put the wallet away his hands were no longer trembling and his heart was quiet in his ears. When he looked back at Barazo's table he saw the maitre d' nodding with a smile that could have lubed the chassis of a half dozen stretch limos; and pressed the timer on his watch. During two weeks of ordering, he and Rostow had devised a squid algorithm. The calamares should arrive on Barazo's table in six minutes.

Felix waited three minutes and got up and started walking as if he were going to the pay phone. When he passed the counter on which the cooks set the dishes to be picked up by the waiters, he stopped. He peered over the counter. The kitchen was a sweat hive of activity. One of the cooks stood nearby, hunched over, clobbering the claws of stone crabs with a wooden mallet.

"Hola," said Felix. The cook looked up and nodded politely. Felix said in Spanish, "The food is good here, really good."

"Gracias."

Felix reached inside his pocket and flipped open the lid of the saltshaker. "I've eaten here every night for two weeks and each dish is better than the one before."

The cook smiled again, this time more easily. He said, "You must be getting pretty sick of it, then."

"Al contrario." Felix beamed. "I only hope I can eat my way through everything before I leave town."

"Have you tried the grouper? It's good. We poach it in a scallop broth with cilantro. It's nice."

"You know, what I really want to try is the calamares en su tinta. I bet that's really good."

The cook shrugged. "Well, if you like that sort of thing."

"You know, I'd like to try it, but I'm a little, you know, I didn't eat my first raw oyster till a few years ago. What's it look like?"

"Someone's just ordered some." He shouted, "Oye, Milton, dame los calamares." He set the dish on the counter in front of Felix. "Here," he said. "It's peasant food."

Felix leaned over to smell, the shaker ready inside his hand. "Urn," he managed. "Sabroso." The cook turned back to his half-hammered crabs.

A moment later a hand whisked the dish off the countertop.

"So," said the cook, looking up. "Are you going to order calamares?"

"I think I'll go for the grouper, thanks." Felix smiled.

"Good choice," winked the cook.

Felix returned to his table almost weightless with relief. He sat down and picked up his coffee cup and when he saw Barazo's table he nearly spilled it. There was nothing in front of Barazo.

Felix searched the other tables with his eyes and saw it. The bowl of calamares was in front of a middle-aged woman who was viewing it with some uncertainty. Oh my God, he thought, oh no.

In the next instant the maitre d' appeared at the table and grabbed the dish without so much as a beg-your-pardon and began berating a waiter loudly in the mother tongue. Idiota! Son los calamares del Señor Barazo!

The squid were set, with apologies befitting nobility, before Barazo, who began greedily to eat. He forked a tentacle and offered it to his girl, who made a face. Felix was sure that Barazo would have slugged her for that if they'd been alone. If they made it home tonight, probably he would. From this he deduced she was a new girl. Barazo ate without interruption. Felix remembered the old fisherman in Hemingway's story urging the great marlin to eat the bonito at the end of his line. When Barazo began to wipe the bowl with his bread, Felix got up and went to the phone. "Yellow Cab? I'm at Neon Leon's. Please send a taxi to pick me up." He went back to the table.

It happened suddenly. One minute Barazo was leaning back, smoking a cigarette, and the next he was bringing up squid with ballistic velocity, as if a poltergeist had performed the Heimlich maneuver on him. Truly, it was not a pretty sight.

Felix quickly made his way to the table, demanding in a loud voice, "What did this man have to eat?" The maitre d' had gone white. Waiters were rushing with towels, a new tablecloth, an empty salad bowl. The bodyguards, helpless in the face of having no one obvious to shoot, nevertheless directed their professional energies on the waiter with the salad bowl, punching him in the chest and sending him sprawling. The girl, whose person had received a copious share of Barazo's gastric ejecta, was screeching hysterically for towels. Barazo himself was pitched forward over the table making noises like a distressed sea lion.

"I'm a doctor," Felix shouted. "What did this man eat?"

"Squid," murmured the maitre d' almost inaudibly, "in its ink."

"SQUID? IN ITS INK?" Felix shouted back. "Exactly as I suspected. This man has food poisoning." The guard moved in on the maitre d'.

"No," he gasped miserably. "It's not possible. We use only the freshest…"

Felix was scribbling furiously on a notepad. He tore off the page and handed it to one of the bodyguards. "Call this number immediately. Tell them to send an ambulance. Tell them Dr. Allende is here at the scene." He turned to the maitre d'. "And a fortunate thing too!" The bodyguard roughly shoved his way through to the phone.

Felix located a dry area of Barazo's wrist, put his finger on it while looking at his watch and counted to ten. "Hm!" he said, shaking his head. "Hm."

The door burst open a remarkably efficient three minutes later as two heavyset men from the Emergency Medical Service rushed in with a collapsible gurney. Wincing only slightly, at the sight, they took Barazo's vital signs. Felix, somewhat caught up in the moment, kept barking orders at them; McNamara finally said, "We can handle it, Doctor, thanks."

They strapped Barazo onto the gurney and wheeled him out, bodyguards following. At the door Felix shouted back at the maitre d', "You better save the rest of those squid for the health inspectors!"

Bundy and McNamara pushed the collapsed gurney into the back of the ambulance. Bundy got in the driver's seat, Mac into the back. Felix climbed in. Then the bodyguard started in. Mac held up a hand. "Sorry, it's against reg-"

The bodyguard shoved him back brusquely, and when Mac renewed his complaint, pulled out a MAC 10 machine pistol and pointed it at him. "Drive," he said.

"All right," said Mac, "but that thing better be registered, because I'm going to report this when we get to the hospital, and there are always police at the Emergency entrance."

The prospect did not faze the bodyguard in the least: "Move it."

Bundy pulled out into the street with the siren going. Through the rear windows, Felix saw the other two bodyguards get into their car and pull out behind them. He was looking for Charley and Rostow's car when the bodyguard said, "Where we going?"

"Mercy," said Felix, putting a stethoscope to Barazo's chest.

"How come not South Miami? It's right there, four blocks."

Felix yelled, "Look at him-he's been infected with a, a staphylococcal enterotoxin." This much was true, a scruple (1.296 grams) easily filched from a microbiology lab in Stony Brook, New York. Felix said angrily, "Can't you see that he needs to be destaph, destaphylococcalized? They don't have the facilities for that at South Miami."

The bodyguard stared suspiciously. Felix shouted, "Do you want him to die?"

"Okay, but fast."

Bundy was doing seventy on the South Dixie Highway, northbound, siren screaming. Mac caught Felix's eye: move back, give me a clear shot. As Felix did, Bundy swerved to avoid hitting a car. Felix fell toward the bodyguard, who felt the bulge under Felix's arm. He reacted instantly. He dove into Felix like a linebacker, breaking three of his ribs and shoving him back into Mac.

His first shot went through the forward bulkhead, missing Bundy by a few inches. The second went into Mac's thigh. Felix grabbed the man's arm. The third shot went through the ambulance's rear window, shattering it. "Shoot him," Mac grunted. "Will you please shoot him?" Mac was pinned against the forward bulkhead by Felix. Felix, occupied by the intense pain in his chest and the bodyguard's 9mm, had no hand available at the moment to reach his own weapon. A second later Barazo's chase car slammed into the back of the ambulance. Felix heard another rib crack.

When he opened his eyes he saw the bodyguard's face, livid with rage, pressed up against his own, mouth open. He could see the fillings. He is trying to bite off my nose. Mac had reached around Felix and managed to get a hold of both the man's hands. Felix couldn't reach his gun, but flailing with his left he felt something come into his grip. It was the sphygmomanometer. He got it around the twenty-one-inch neck and Velcroed it shut. The bulb was hanging down the bodyguard's back. He had to reach to get it in his hand, putting his nose in dangerous proximity to the snapping teeth. He butted the man's nose hard with his forehead, causing himself extreme pain. Bulb in hand, he began to pump.

The blood-pressure cuff began to inflate. The bodyguard, realizing what was happening, struggled, but Mac held him tightly. Felix pumped and pumped and the bodyguard's face went red, then purplish. He made a sound like the person in the next stall in the public men's room usually makes. Finally he went limp. Felix and Mac pitched forward on top of him. Felix saw the pressure meter on the blood-pressure cuff: 300 over… nothing.

Mac tied a tourniquet above the two holes in his thigh. "Look at that," he said, pointing to his jeans. "I bought those new last week." Felix held his stomach and groaned.

Up front, they heard Bundy shouting into his radio, "Crossing Southwest Seventeenth Avenue."

"Where the fuck are they?" Mac said.

The plan called for Charley and Rostow to cut off any chase vehicle. "They pulled in front of them and the fuckers just kept on going. Drove right through them. They had to jack the wheel clear."

"Great," said Mac, staring at his seeping leg wound. "Can you move?" he said to Felix. Felix nodded. "Take this." He handed Felix a length of surgical tubing. "Unlatch those doors, tie this to them loose, so it'll give."

Mac said to Barazo, "Excuse me, but I need this," and undid his straps and pitched him roughly onto the floor. Barazo moaned. "Okay," said Mac, "let's get this one onto it." The bodyguard was heavy. The ambulance kept swerving and being slammed from behind by the chase car.

"All right," Mac panted once they'd gotten the inert immensity onto the gurney and strapped him in. The blood-pressure cuff was still around his neck, the bulb dangling behind. "Let them get right behind you," Mac was saying to Bundy. "Then when you hear 'three,' floor it, hit it hard. You ready?" he said to Felix. Felix, holding his rib cage, nodded.

Same principle as launching a bobsled, essentially. When Bundy hit the accelerator, Mac and Felix shoved. The gurney hit the doors, the doors blew open and the gurney with its two hundred and fifty pounds of meat took off. It went through the windshield of the car behind. The car veered off the road into a stand of palmettos thoughtfully planted to welcome people to Key Biscayne, and burst into flames.

Charley sent Rostow off with Mac to take him to Fort Lauderdale and let him out at a secluded part of the beach. Rostow would call the police and report a shooting. The police would arrive to find yet another mugging victim. Bundy took Felix to Mercy Hospital. Alone, he turned his attention to Barazo, tied securely to a chair that was bolted to the cement floor in the basement of the safe house. He sat and smoked a cigar until the staphylococcus had worked its way through Barazo's GI tract. He gave him some Coca-Cola to settle his stomach, and then turned on the tape recorder and began.

He explained what it was he wanted. Barazo told him to go fuck himself. Many times. Charley was a believer in letting a man get things out of his system first, so he let Barazo go on until he was exhausted. Then, with a you-give-me-no-other-choice expression, Charley put on surgical gloves and surgical mask and eye protectors and went to a corner of the semi-darkened room and wheeled out a stand from which intravenous bags are hung. He attached the tubing to the needle with nearly faultless verisimilitude, rolled up Barazo's sleeve-Barazo struggling-wet a cotton ball with alcohol and rubbed the inside of his arm, located a vein, nodded with satisfaction and gently inserted the long needle. (He'd done this for Margaret in her final illness, so he was adept.) This done, he produced a cooler, one of the playfully designed red-and-white jobs one associates with sun-drenched days at the beach. He flipped back the lid in full view of Barazo and removed a plastic bag full of red liquid. The label read:

DANGER: CONTAMINATED BLOOD

HIV-POSITIVE

Charley watched Barazo's eyes closely, and it was amazing what he saw in them: a clear readiness to die. Give the man that, his ruthlessness contained contempt even for his own life. "You know, Jesus," he said, appearing to adjust the bag one last time before opening the stopcock and letting the blood (Karo syrup and food coloring) seep into his veins, "while you're dying, you know what people are going to be saying about you, don't you? They're going to say, 'Ol' Haysoos making himself out to be such a tough guy and the whole time he turns out to be a maricon. How about that?'"

14

"Sorry about this," Diatri said to his Whole Crispy Fish Hunan Style, chopsticking through thick, crackled skin to steamy white flesh. The fish stared back with a Churchillian pout, lower jaw a-jut, eyes sullen with plum glaze.

Diatri said sympathetically, "Hey, it could have been worse. You could have been a lobster. You get dunked live in boiling water, then people wearing bibs with your picture on them fight over your claws. At least this is more dignified."

He considered: one dead scumbag on East Eighth, his missing roommate Ramirez, Ramirez's mother with ten grand through her mail slot, a smart-ass priest who thinks he heard Ramirez's confession over the phone in the middle of the night.

"Let me try something out on you," he said to the fish. "Ramirez and Luis get into an argument, Luis storms out, Ramirez follows him and pops him on the sidewalk, freaks out and splits and on his way out of town shoves ten grand through his mama's door to tide her over."

The sea bass frowned. "Why didn't he call her? Why did he leave the coke behind? What about the $1,200 they found on Luis? What about the raid jackets?"

"Maybe he wants his mother to think he's dead in case Luis' friends came looking for him. Maybe he didn't want to carry an ounce of blow on him after whacking someone. Maybe he freaked after whacking Luis and didn't think to take his money. As to the raid jackets, you noticed Detective Korn's attitude problem." Diatri whispered to the fish, "Did it occur to you that maybe the Ninth Precinct has some vigilante thing going?"

"That's crazy," said the fish.

"Yeah?" Diatri dabbed away the plum sauce from his lips. "You're so smart, how come you're on the menu?"

"You finish?" Diatri jumped. These Chinese waiters, the way they creep up on you.

"Yeah."

"Or you wan talk more with fish?"

"No, that's- I'll take some tea and the check."

"What fish say?"

"He said you use too much MSG." It was nine o'clock. It was time to go see Victor.

Diatri drove north on Third Avenue, toothpick in place and humming "You Gotta Turn the Lights Down Low If You Want to Boogie Real Slow." Dropping in on Victor like this always put him in a pleasant mood. Victor was a dope lawyer who had made one mistake a few years ago.

Victor was on retainer for the Ochoa family of Medellin. A teenage nephew of Jorge Luis Ochoa, son of Don Fabio Ochoa, founder of the illustrious dynasty, was caught coming through U.S. Customs at Kennedy Airport with a pet boa constrictor stuffed with twenty condoms full of cocaine inside it. His uncle called Victor.

A few days later, the Bogotá police, acting on an anonymous tip (from Don Fabio), arrested an Eastern Airlines baggage handler. They turned up trace amounts of cocaine, an empty box of El Gigante brand condoms-the same kind-and a National Geographic book on boa constrictors with the nephew's flight number written on the back. The baggage handler confessed that he had planted the cocaine in the nephew's boa while it was being loaded into the plane; his accomplice at Kennedy was supposed to snatch the snake at the other end, but had screwed up. The Bogotá magistrate handling the case forwarded the information to the U.S. Justice Department. The U.S. District Attorney decided to prosecute nonetheless, but Victor had his ducks all lined up and presented an impassioned Fourth Amendment-based defense to the jury: how would you like it if Big Brother took your dog Skippy away from you and sliced him up just to see if he'd eaten anything illegal? The nephew was acquitted. A few months later the Bogotá baggage handler quietly escaped from prison and retired on an annuity provided by Don Fabio.

Victor submitted a bill for two million dollars. The Ochoas paid well, but even they thought this was on the high side. Uncle Jorge transferred a million laundered U.S. dollars to Victor's Cayman Islands account. Victor, who had an ego problem, was outraged and decided to get even. He'd gone up against Diatri in court a few times. He called him and said he had something for him. He said to meet him at the new Central Park zoo, by the snakes. Victor thought that was a nice touch. At the meeting, he gave Diatri the name of Ochoa's New England distributor and the time and place the next shipment would arrive in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was a good tip, producing arrests and a 500-kilo seizure. (In those days, 500 kilos was a good haul.) A few days after the arrest, Diatri sent Victor a tape recording of their conversation at the snake house. Victor called up Diatri, hysterical, trying to make himself into Jesus and Diatri into Judas, an analogy Diatri rejected. "What do you want from me?" Victor cried. "What? What? What?"

"I want lunch," said Diatri.

"Lunch?"

"At that Four Seasons restaurant, the one where Kissinger and Cronkite and those people are always eating. I've always wanted to eat there."

Victor showed up, sleepless and pale. When they were seated, Diatri said, "How come we couldn't get a table closer to the fountain? I'm going to need binoculars to see Kissinger from here."

Victor said, "There's a hundred grand in the briefcase."

Diatri said, "Victor, if you ever offer me money again, I'm going to send that tape to Don Fabio and he's going to cut off more than your retainer. Forty bucks for sole meunierel. No wonder I've never eaten here before."

Diatri had learned over the years that showing up unexpectedly in the middle of one of Victor's dinner parties forced Victor to come to the point more efficiently.

The maid answered the door. "He have guests," she said.

"Tell him Mr. Frank is here, would you, please? From Manhattan Cablevision."

Victor appeared in the foyer clutching his napkin like a security blanket. "Are you crazy?" he hissed. "You know who I have in there? John Gotti, Jr."

"No kidding," said Diatri. "The one who punched out that woman? Classy guy. Is that carbonara? I love carbonara."

"Call me tomorrow at the office, Frank."

"Do you know a Ramon Antonio Luis or Emiliano Ramirez?"

"No. Look, he's got his people downstairs in the lobby."

"Is that who they were? I thought they were furniture movers wearing suits. That smells good. It's important to use the Italian parsley. My first wife was always using regular parsley and it's an entirely different taste. You know what I do? I add a little sour cream, but not too much."

"Look, I don't know those people."

"They're scumbags. Naturally I thought of you."

"What do you want me to say, Frank?"

"So what's Junior like? Chip off the old cellblock? Get it?"

"Jesus Christ, Frank."

"They're Alphabet Town scumbags. Ramirez disappeared and someone popped Luis in the back of the head. Twenty-two caliber."

"Shit happens."

"Manuel Uguarte from South Jamaica? You wouldn't know him? Carlos Sandoval, Flushing Meadow? They both disappeared recently. I thought, all these disappearances, maybe they're related."

"People disappear, Frank. I don't know-"

"Okay," said Diatri, pushing past Victor, "but I can only stay for a few minutes. I already ate."

"I don't know about any Ramirez or Luis. I've heard of Uguarte and Sandoval, okay? Uguarte buys from Sandoval, Sandoval takes deliveries from another guy who just disappeared. Antonio Chin."

"Chin. I don't know the gentleman."

"Twenty-Mule Team Tony-he runs the mules for Jesus Barazo out of Miami."

"Barazo? Barazo is in Honduras."

"No, he isn't in Honduras. He's in South fucking Miami."

"I'm shocked, Victor. Shocked. He's got two federal warrants out on him."

"Yeah, and he's making assholes out of you people, okay? I gotta get back inside."

"Tell Junior you're talking to Henry Kissinger. What do you mean these people are missing? How do you mean, missing?"

"Jesus Christ. Missing. Like the kids on the milk cartons."

"What else?"

"What do you mean, what else?"

"Victor."

"Barazo used to handle for Medellin. A lot. Then he cut some arrangement with someone else."

"Who?"

"No one knows. Barazo knows and no one asks Barazo, he's fucking-"

"Is he the guy who-"

"Yeah. So maybe Medellin is settling up. I don't know. That's all I know. On my mother's grave, that's all I know."

"Victor, your mother lives in Delray Beach."

"It's a figure of speech, okay, Frank?"

The next morning Diatri was on his way to the SAC's office when Golina from Intel said, "Hey, Frank, you hear about Barazo?"

Miami was in the middle of one of its periodic renaissances and three blackened corpses on the Rickenbacker Causeway was not the image the Chamber of Commerce was pushing this winter. Diatri had to keep ducking to avoid getting stabbed in the eye by pointing fingers. In addition to the two federal warrants, Florida itself had three state warrants out on Jesus Celaya Barazo, and here he'd been living right under everyone's nose at 7411 Southwest Sixty-fourth Street. The Metro Dade PD was pointing its finger at DEA, DEA was pointing at Metro Dade, and IRS-he was paying taxes, for crying out loud!-IRS was pointing right back at DEA; the Mayor's office was pointing fists at everyone and the C of C was ripping out its hair. Minefields, in downtown Miami? Goat heads in the garbage? Victor was right. Barazo had managed to make everybody look like an asshole. And where was he? His dental records didn't match the uppers or lowers of the blackened goombahs in the car. Victor said he bet Barazo was in Medellin. Revenge is a canapé best served cold, right?

The staff of Neon Leon's had all disappeared-vanished, apparently terrified Barazo's people would assume they were in on the hit. The owner had hung a CLOSED DUE TO DEATH IN FAMILY sign outside like a wreath of wolfbane. The police questioned the owner, who had not been there that night; he didn't know anything. Diatri had been parked in a van across from the man's home for two days when he saw a Gran Marquis pull up and two men get out. They did not look like Jehovah's Witnesses. One went to the front door, the other around back. Diatri got out and went to the back. He listened at the door, unholstered his Sig Sauer and went in. The sound was a woman sobbing, a man being struck in the face with open palms.

Diatri crept along a corridor toward the noise. He saw a swinging door and went in, keeping low, and found himself in the kitchen. At the far end was another kitchen door, which lead to the dining room. The voices were in Spanish. The woman's sobs were in Spanish. The man was saying he didn't know anything. He kept saying his squid was fresh every day.

Diatri searched for the spice cabinet and found what he was looking for, a half gallon of extra-virgin-what else, in a good Latino home?-olive oil. He emptied it onto the floor by the forward swinging door. He found an eighteen-inch cast-iron frying pan, good for paella, he imagined as he held it, cocked, in his hand.

He couldn't remember the Spanish word for fire. It was ridiculous. He spoke fluent Spanish. But the word refused to budge. That particular synapse was a damp wick. Finally he just said, "Fire!" He tried to make himself sound like a frightened female cook.

The man came through the door. He hit the oil and went backward. Diatri brought the frying pan down on his face, probably harder than absolutely necessary. "Que pasa?" said the other. He came through the door gun first. Diatri brought the frying pan side down on his wrist and broke it, then broke his nose on the upswing. The EMS technicians made jokes about the olive oil. The owner was beaten up pretty badly. Diatri went to the hospital with him and stayed with him and when he was released the man insisted on taking him to Neon Leon's and making him a paella. By the time Diatri left, with the address of Ignacio the waiter's cousin down by Homestead Air Force Base, the owner was overcome with gratitude and emotion and told him the dish would forever after be listed on the menu as "Paella Diatri." Diatri was genuinely touched. No family, two divorces, no children; getting into the car, he reflected that "Paella Diatri" was about all he was likely to leave to posterity. By then his stomach was starting to cramp up on him, and he was getting the cold sweat that always preceded these bouts. He stopped at a medical-supply store on the way to Ignacio's cousin's to pick up saline and an IV-rig.

They assigned him a young agent from Intel named Liestraker. Liestraker stood up when Diatri walked in, trying not to reveal the pain, and extended his hand and said how it was an honor. "Thank you," said Diatri. "You got any Rolaids?"

Liestraker grinned. "You ate Cuban?"

"Uh-huh. I want you to go to your AUSA and get a grand jury subpoena and check the registers of all the hotels in the Greater Miami area for a male possibly of Cuban origin posing as a Dr. Allende, mid-forties, five-ten, hundred ninety pounds, heavy athletic build, brown eyes, close-cropped haircut, no distinguishing physical characteristics, checking in December 7 or 8 and checking out December 22. Start with hotels close to the restaurant and work out, but cover all of them."

Liestraker said, "Cuban origin, no distinguishing marks? In Miami? Are you kidding?"

"No," said Diatri.

"Why hotels?"

"He wasn't from here, so he had to stay somewhere."

"How do we know he wasn't from here?"

"His Spanish accent was wrong, New York maybe. Also, he asked a waiter directions a couple of times."

"All the hotels?" These new guys.

"I've got to go… back to the motel. Call me."

Diatri was just inserting the butterfly needle into the antecubital vein when the phone rang. It was Liestraker. "Do you know how many hotels there are in the Greater Miami area?"

"No," said Diatri, reaching over and pulling the tubing around his upper arm with his teeth like a parrot. "Ha muny?"

"Four hundred and sixty-seven."

"Then you better get started." Diatri started the glucose drip. The first bottle would empty into him in an hour; the second always took longer. "Something else," he said. "Call round all the RC churches. See if anyone fielded any strange calls the night of December 21."

"Strange?" said Liestraker. "Strange how? Sightings of the Virgin Mary?"

Diatri had already hung up. He set the drip regulator and lay back and let the rattle of the old air-conditioning lull him to sleep. He dreamed he was underneath a waterfall floating on his back in a pool of cool blue water and standing at the top of the waterfall was Paulina Porizkova, smiling and beautiful, tossing a huge, huge Alka-Seltzer tablet to him that floated down toward him in Super Slo-Mo.

15

He felt badly for Felix, he truly did. Hunched over the gunwale, making sounds like a dying seal. Rrroaaaa. Having his ribs wrapped up tight as an Egyptian mummy, that couldn't help.

Charley dipped the washcloth into the ice water at the bottom of the cooler and put it on the back of Felix's sunburning neck. "You want a cracker? That might help." Charley's suggestion was followed by a basso profundo rrrruuuuua. Charley patted his back. "That's it. Let it out. Don't fight it." Take a cracker the size of the Ritz to soak up what was ailing Felix. Should have put on that scopolamine patch. Felix could be stubborn. Didn't want drugs, wanted a clear head.

The Gulf Stream was rocking the boat in the cleavage of D-cup bosomy swells. It was hot, the sun beat down on the [unclear] slick. Charley reached over the side and cut the line holding a perforated white bucket of mashed grunt and watched it descend. The water was so clear out here beyond the hundred-fathom [missing]. Small fish followed the bucket, pecking at the loosened chunks of greasy meat, darting and retreating with the glee of looters. Charley followed it down to where the water turned cobalt and the became a speck on its way to becoming a free lunch for great marlins. Suddenly it was many years ago and he could hear Margaret's voice.

"Daddy has a nervous stomach," she was saying.

"Ain't nuthin' unusual about that," said Charley, coiling a line.

Margaret smiled at him. "Isn't."

"Huh?"

"Not huh, Charles. And it's isn't," Margaret whispered, the [missing] her daddy couldn't have heard over the sound of his overboard retching. "You're not trying, Charles."

"Maggie-"

"Margaret."

"Why don't we get him inside. He's gonna sunstroke himself out here."

"Going to get sunstroke. Daddy," she said, "I want you to go inside now and lie down. Charles, you take that arm now." The captain stayed aloof at his controls on the cabin top while the mate helped the daughter of the drunk who'd chartered his deep-fishing boat get her father down below out of the scorching sun. The man had prepaid in full, so it was no skin off his ass; it was a mystery why a man who drank like that would come down Houston to Rockport to go deep-sea fishing when he couldn't [missing] stand. It was his genes that would kill Charley Junior, his son, on that road in Bethesda thirty years later. It's all Charley thought. You can run from that double helix, but you hide…

Rrrruh. Charley wrung out the washcloth and put it on [missing] neck. "You know," he said, "it makes you appreciate all the more what your people went through leaving Cuba in those leaky boats getting away from Castro."

Felix appeared to derive no consolation from this. Charley said, "We oughta head back into Cat Cay."

"No," Felix said, and spat. "I'm okay."

"We'll, I'm getting sick watching you. I'm taking her in." He climbed up onto the tuna tower and started the engines and throttled up to 2,100 and pointed her north-northwest. He said into the radio, "Papa Dog One to Bird Dog."

"Bird Dog."

"I got a sick sea dog out here I'm taking into the flat and level. You okay on supplies for tonight?"

"We got a severe mosquito situation here, Papa Dog."

"Well, I'm sorry about that but you boys are capable of handling that." Mac and Bundy had gotten a tad soft since Vietnam, considering Bundy had told him about a time in the Delta when he'd spent three entire days in his ghillie suit crawling across a hundred-meter rice paddy teeming with leeches, pinned down by snipers, so thirsty and hungry he started eating the leeches after the second day. Now he was griping about mosquitoes. "Roger that, Bird Dog. I'll bring some more of that bug juice with me." They used something called Skin So Soft, by the ding-dong Avon Calling folks, a bath oil that repelled bugs. Mercenaries smearing themselves with ladies' bath oil. Charley looked over at his radar screen and there it was, a green phosphorus dot at ten o'clock, bearing north and moving fast.

"Stand by, Bird Dog, we got a possible heading your direction." Charley put his binoculars on the horizon and waited. He saw her, bouncing off the Gulf Stream's crests like a giant flying fish. The speed these things were capable of took your breath away-or could give you a spine problem. Men with gold chains would turn up at boat shows with briefcases full of hundred-dollar bills-twenty pounds of hundreds to a million; that was how they counted their money, they weighed it-to buy the latest hot boat. U.S. Customs had some hot boats, but these-these boats were pure speed. Charley clocked her on the radar. Eighty-five miles an hour. "You up to this?” shouted down at Felix. Felix chambered a round into the shotgun he had velcroed under the gunwale for quick release. He looked up at Charley as if to say that dying could only be an improvement.

A minute later they saw the plane.

It was a twin-engine Piper Aztec, coming out of the southwest, less than a hundred feet off the water to avoid Miami Center. Fat Albert, the Customs aerostat over Cudjoe Key, might have picked it up, but unless they had a chaser on station, the plane would be on its way back to Panama with a bellyful of fuel and cash before they were clear of Cape Florida. The plane veered toward them. Charley and Felix scrambled to switch places, Charley in the fighting chair, Felix at the controls in the tuna tower. The plane swooped over them. Charley waved. It circled back toward them and for a moment Charley thought it might open up on them. Barazo said it was fitted with a fifty-cal, but that was probably bluster. If dopers started turning their planes into fighters, that was all the excuse the military would need to go after them with F-14s. Charley waved again. The plane flew past toward the beach on the west shore of Andros, where German U-boats used to put in. Charley saw him lining up for his final approach. "Papa Dog, you see him?"

"Roger."

"Going in."

Charley watched the plane with collegial interest. Setting down on a fifteen-degree-inclined sand beach was nice work. Most of these pilots were American boys, vets and crop dusters, Charley thought with a somewhat conflicted admixture of sorrow and patriotism. Look at him, he's got dry tanks, he's got to set her down on sand in a ten-knot crosswind with the possibility of the beach turning into a hot LZ if the Bahamian Defense Force decided Barazo's monthly retainer wasn't enough and leave himself enough room to touch-and-go if bullets start zipping through his windows; then there's the problem of where do you go, with maybe five minutes' fuel? He was going in. Charley found himself saying, "Tad more starboard rudder, windward wheel down first. Good. Real nice."

'Course, at these prices you were always going to find a pilot willing to take the risks. According to Barazo, Sanchez paid his pilots $2,000 per kilo. Five hundred kilos per load-a million dollars, for seven hours' flying. Fancy, Charley thought, switching places again with Felix, steering an erratic course toward the beach, a million dollars for seven hours' work. What did it work out to? Figure round trio, since the pilot had to haul Barazo's payment for the cocaine back to Sanchez on Isola Verde. Fourteen into a million… Lord in heaven, $71,428 an hour. About what Mike Milken was making.

"How you doing, Bird Dog? Bird Dog?"

Bird Dog panted. "He put down too far north. He's two clicks north of our position. Repeat-"

"I heard you. Get on the hump, son."

Felix said, "There's three of them in the boat." The Black Max had nosed up onto the beach right beside the Piper. They were refueling.

"Try to keep out of sight," said Charley. "They aren't going to fuss with an old man. But you look like a cop." Felix was pouring a beer over his shirt. Authenticity. You have to inhabit the role. They were a few hundred yards off the sand beach now, the water turning from turquoise to white. Stunning beach; it deserved better than this. Charley revved his engines into the red and throttled back, smoke and water churning. He went aground just a few feet offshore. The Hatteras lurched, Charley fell off his chair with a loud "Damn!"

He stumbled to his feet all wobbly. They were pointing their weapons at him, Ingrams and Uzis. Must have an aggregate rate of fire of 3,600 rounds. The pilot was Anglo, the others Latino.

Charley staggered and fell down and got up and gave them all a great big grin. "Howdy!" He let out a loud, beery belch. Charley had given thought to his wardrobe: black knee socks, Bermuda shorts, a beer-drenched T-shirt-stunk, in this sun-that announced, from neck to belly:

MY WIFE SAYS I HAVE A DRINKING PROBLEM.

I AGREE.

MY PROBLEM IS

I DON'T DRINK ENOUGH.

"This here island Biminimi? BimiNiñom-" Belch.

The pilot said, "Bimini's that way, about a hundred miles."

Charley looked in the indicated direction and sighed. "Damnit, Felix, I told you it wunt Binimi. Felix? My friend," he said to the men on the beach, "has imbibed himself, and he was the navigator." Belch. Charley peered. "Is that an airplane?"

One of the Latinos waded toward them, weapon first. He peered over the side into the well. Felix was lying on his stomach on a deck cushion, mouth open, arm across his face, snoring.

"Worthless." Charley shook his head. "No offense. Him being Hispanic and all."

"Fuck you, man."

"Well, whud I say?"

The pilot took a few steps. "What's the problem, man?"

"I don't know," said Charley. "Musta said something. Habla oosted español? You hablo español mooey-"

"Hey, shut the fuck up, man."

"And they says manners are dead," Charley grumbled. "You boys care for a cold beer?"

"Get this fucking boat out of here."

The pilot spoke to one of the other Latinos, who called to the one by the boat, "Spera, Chavo. Spera."

The pilot walked toward Charley's boat. He was in his late thirties, dirty-blond hair, and might've been handsome but for the ugliest scar stitched across his forehead, a real scar, the kind that says: "Scar." It looked like someone had sewn the top of his head back on with twelve-pound-test fishing line. He spoke to Charley in a jus'-'tween-us-white-boys. He had a Southern accent.

"Mister," he said, "you need to back your boat out of here now. Start your engines. Come on now."

But Charley was looking at the plane, entranced by the plane. "You landed that? Here?"

"I ran out of gas. These guys here were passing by and were kind enough to loan me some high octane. Best you move along now, mister."

"That's some flying, son," said Charley. "Frank Borman would be proud of you."

"Look, mister-"

"I'm going, I'm going. Rush rush rush. Everyone's in a rush. And they say it's better in the Bahamas."

"Papa Dog."

"What was that?"

He'd forgotten to turn off the radio. Once again, the human element fails us.

"Whut was whut?"

"Papa Dog, we are still one click from your position. Do you copy?"

The pilot pulled his gun out now. The Latino in the water was wading toward the transom and pulling himself aboard.

Charley was standing in the tuna tower, as exposed as a referee at a tennis match, and surrounded by McEnroes with machine pistols.

"Fuck is going on, mister?" said the pilot.

The other man came over the transom and pulled himself into the boat. Felix stirred, looked up, blinked. "Who are you?" he said, sounding drunk. The man hit him across the face hard with his MAC 10.

"Hey!" Charley shouted. The man aimed his weapon at the tower and fired. There were eight shots to the short burst; only one of them hit Charley, in and out the shin.

"Hold it," the pilot commanded. He waded aboard. Felix groaned. Charley dealt with the pain in his leg. The pilot was pointing his gun at him.

Charley said, "What the hell you boys so damn worked up about?"

"Get down off there." The pilot drew back the hammer on his.38. Charley came down the ladder, one excruciating step at a time. He fell down the last two rungs and landed on the deck by the ice cooler. The man with the MAC had Felix by the shirt and was about to smash him in the face again. Charley said, "Don't do that, please."

The man hit Felix again with his gun.

Charley's eyes flashed. "You tell your friend to stop that. Tell him now."

"He wouldn't take orders from Jesus Christ himself. Who was that on the radio?"

"How the hell should I know? Just tell him to stop. If it's money you're after, I got a coupla hundred in my wallet down below and some traveler's checks."

"Hey, man," said the Latino, "I ain't no fucking thief."

"No," said Charley, "'course not."

"I'm gonna shoot these fuckers now, man."

The pilot said, "Hold on, Chavo, okay? Just hold on."

One of the other men by the cigarette boat shouted, "Fuck is happening, man? Let's get out of here."

"I'm gonna shoot 'em now, man."

"Look, mister," said the pilot, "you wandered into a situation here."

Charley said, "If you're going to kill us, at least don't let me die with a dry mouth."

The pilot seemed unsure, then a flicker of compassion crossed his face. "Okay. Go ahead."

Charley reached for the cooler. "You want one?"

"Uh, yeah. Thanks."

Charley flipped back the cooler lid. "What kind you want?"

"It don't matter."

"I got different kinds."

"It really don't matter, mister. Anything."

"Bud?"

"Bud's fine."

"Miller?"

"Fine."

"I got Colt.45."

"That's nigger beer."

Charley said, "Maybe I'll have the Colt then." He shot the Latino in the arm. Felix ripped the shotgun from its Velcro sling and blew a hole in the man's back the size of a cantaloupe. The pilot turned toward Charley and found himself staring into the barrel of his Army-issue Model 1911. "Drop it," said Charley, "or I'll drop you like a dog."

The side of the boat splintered from automatic-weapons fire. Felix, the pilot and Charley hunched low in the well of the fishing boat, Felix firing a few aimless rounds over the side. Charley kept his gun pointed at the pilot's forehead. They heard the motorboat's engines start up, a powerful rumble, five zoo-horsepower outboards firing, churning sand and water, backing off the beach. Felix kilroyed his face over the side; one was at the wheel, the other firing at them. "They're leaving," Felix shouted. "Where the hell are they?"

"Humpin'," said Charley, breathing hard. "They're humpin'."

[Mssing] came a sound like a cannon from the tree line down the beach-made the Uzis and MAC sound like toy guns. A sound with balls. 165 grains of copper-jacketed lead leaving the barrel at 3,100 feet per second. It met up with the man's skull. He went over the side.

Rostow, wheezing from their mile-and-a-half with all the equipment, spotted through the binoculars. "One down," he said. Bundy brought back the bolt on the Winchester.300 magnum, placed another round in the receiver and chambered it slowly, gently, so as not to deform the copper jacket against the throat. He sighted through the scope. The driver, spooked by the fact of his companion's exploded cranium, was crouching beneath the dash, trying to back the boat out into deeper water.

Bundy lowered the rifle. "Let me have the fifty."

Rostow unslung the other rifle, a custom piece of gunsmithing. It was a fifty-caliber sniper rifle designed for SEALs and Special Forces by a firm out in Phoenix. It weighed twenty-one pounds, had a twenty-nine-inch barrel, took two to four ounces of pressure on the trigger and was mounted with a 20-power Leupold scope that created intimacy between shooter and target. Ordinarily a gun this size gives a fierce kick, but its designers had affixed a special muzzle brake to the end of the barrel that trapped the volcano of gas that followed the bullet out and deployed it to pull the gun away from the shooter's shoulder. Still, she kicked.

"You might want to use earplugs," said Bundy.

"Just shoot. He's getting away. Jesus Christ."

"Told you." Black smoke started to pour from one of the engines. Bundy drew back the fluted bolt, laid another cigar-sized fifty-caliber round and chambered it. He shot out the engines one by one. He took his time. The boat went dead in the water about a thousand yards out.

"More like twelve hundred," said Bundy.

"What now?" said Rostow, looking through the binoculars. The driver still wasn't showing himself.

Bundy took a round out of a different box. "I don't like to use these," he said. "They leave kind of a smear in the barrel. But ol' Jose out there isn't giving me a hell of a lot of choice in the matter." Bundy sighted and squeezed. At this distance it took almost two seconds for the tracer to hit. The back of the boat was covered with gasoline. It made a fireball against the western sky. The boat sank.

"Hope they like their meat well done," said Bundy, removing his earplugs.

16

Almost dawn. The cigarette ember glowed between his sweat-wet fingers. Her sexual energy was, Christ, miraculous. Smoke rose into the blades of the fan, making their obedient revolutions. Outside it was still, except for the occasional shriek of the howler monkeys.

He looked at her in the faint light. She was lying on her stomach with her hands flat against the mattress, face toward him, like Gauguin's kanaka mistress, Tehura, in the "Manao Tupapau," but without the frightened look. He reached and ran his finger along the cleft between her buttocks. Her eyes opened-they were such light sleepers. She ran her tongue over her lips. He shouldn't have touched her. He was dry inside, pumped out. He had to get some sleep. Morning already, Christ.

"I love you," she said. The only words he'd taught her in Spanish. He should probably teach her some more, but there was a purity to such a simple vocabulary; and it was all, really, that he wanted to hear from her.

She put her mouth to his ear and made a pinhole with her lips and inhaled, producing a most-urrnh-exquisite sensation, as if she were trying to suck out his brain. She was descended from head-hunters. Some of her people still performed the old rituals, trapping the soul inside the head by sewing up the lips, nostrils, and eyes and shrinking it in hot sand and resins. Only a few years ago a French photographer had left Manaus in search of a story and disappeared. Eventually a missionary priest was shown a head with blond hair and Caucasian features. Well, he thought, as Soledad plugged the vacuum she had created inside his ear with the moist tip of her tongue, if this is how they remove the insides, no wonder those puckered leathery faces all have that serene look.

She went back to sleep. He couldn't. He lit another cigarette. He wanted to have her painted. But after the manner of Gauguin’s "Manao"? Or Goya? The later Goya, after he'd gone mad from licking his brushes covered with lead-based paints. A parody of Goya might be just right. As "La Maja Desnuda," the naked countess that so inflamed Madrid society.

Or-he drew on his cigarette-after Manet's "Olympia"? Soledad lying on a divan wearing nothing but a black choker. Ideal! He was seized by a brilliant inspiration-where do these ideas come from? He would have the artist do the servant woman hovering at the foot of the divan in a photographic likeness of, hm… Ursulina de Gomayumbre, dowager duchess of Lima society, descended from practically everyone, one of Mama's oldest friends. He'd have copies made and display them in the window of the gallery on the Paseo. Ha! The old bag would drop dead of embarrassment. Or make her husband confiscate it. Better make copies. Better, make lithographs. If the point is merely to epater les bourgeois, a painting will do, but for revolution, it's lithographs you want.

He fell asleep. When he opened his eyes an hour later the room was warm already, flooding with light. There was a knocking on the door. Virgilio's voice, muted, urgent. "Niño."

"What?"

"It's Miami. The lawyer."

He got out of bed with the sheet wrapped around his waist like a sarong. He combed his thick black hair back with his hands, lit a cigarette and coughed. Ought to switch to filters. He went into the study, picked up the phone and gave the code so the lawyer would know it was he.

The lawyer made it sound as though he hadn't slept since the incident. In fact, all he knew was what he'd gotten from the Miami Herald. "Medellin," he said.

The news filtered through to the left side of his brain, which was not yet entirely open for business today. "I'm listening," he said.

"The police and the DEA are saying it's a turf battle."

"What do you hear?"

"Almost nothing. No one seems to know. Or no one's taking credit for it. But Chin, the one who does transportation, he disappeared a few days before Barazo."

"What do you mean, disappeared?"

"Just like that-disappeared. You want my opinion, I think Chin sold his information to our friends in Medellin and left the country."

"I'm not paying you for your opinion. I want to know what happened."

"I'm working on it, Niño. I haven't been to bed in two days."

He hung up and summoned Virgilio. Virgilio appeared, as if out of air. It was his virtue. "Have you heard from Sanchez?"

"He called from Isola Verde at four this morning."

"From Panama?"

"His pilot had just radioed him. He broke a strut landing on the beach at Andros. The Cubans had to bring him a part from Nassau."

"I don't like that."

"Neither did Sanchez. But what could he do?"

"Ariella should have changed the rendezvous point. As a matter of course, he should have changed the rendezvous."

"Si, Niño. I think he was trying to show continuity."

"He showed stupidity, Virgilio. I knew Barazo, Virgilio. I worked with him. And let me tell you, Ariella is no Barazo."

"Si, Niño."

"He's not strong enough to take over from Barazo. We're going to have to look for someone else. All right, when is the plane due into Panama?"

"This morning."

"What time this morning, Virgilio?"

"Ten."

"Then Sanchez should be here by"-he looked at his watch-"four o'clock."

"He said there's a front off the coast of Ecuador. That's why he was so pissed about the strut."

"Bring some coffee. I leave in-Christ-an hour. Strong, Virgilio. I didn't get much sleep last night."

Virgilio grinned. "Si, Niño."

He stepped into the shower and turned the two chromed handles. Cool water blasted out from sixteen nozzles, creating a Heraclitean vortex. He had flown two men over from Munich to install it. It felt so delicious. Sometimes he just let himself get lost in there with his thoughts. A little warmer. He soaped his groin. It was tender. Their teeth were filed when they were young; he was seriously considering flying in a dentist to round them off.

Barazo gone. Missing. Presumed… dead? No, if Cabrera was going to kill him, he'd kill him. Medellin was direct if nothing else. Subtlety was not an arrow in their quiver. If Barazo was missing they had probably taken him back whole to Colombia. But to take Barazo alive you'd need steel nets and tranquilizer darts and Christ knows what else, a shark cage. Barazo was an animal, no beauty of nature. The people you had to deal with in this business-que horror. Barazo was pure id. If Barazo ever bent over a flower it wasn't to smell it but to blow his nose on it.

They'd only met once, in Panama; the interview set up by del Cid. Barazo had the minister in charge of the Bahamian Defense Force on his payroll, an arrangement that went back to the days when he was making marijuana runs in DC-3s. He was a peasant, Barazo, a total crudity, something from underneath a rock-but a snob nonetheless, proud of his Bahamian connection: "I deal only with ministers, nothing below cabinet rank." He boasted of his friendship with Noriega. Doing business with him was one thing, but boasting of being Cara Pina's (Pineapple Face's) friend. My God, please.

"So," Barazo said, "why should I waste my time with you? Cabrera sends me seven hundred and fifty kilos every week."

"Because I can send you a ton. For the same price."

"How?"

"I'm vertically integrated." Barazo probably thought that was something to do with getting an erection. "I do my own farming, refining and transporting. I control every aspect of production. The families in Medellin and Cali want you and everyone else to think they're the only ones who get their hands on ether and acetone. I have access to the finest precursor chemicals in the world, Don Jesus." (It caught in his throat to call him that.) "I'm even thinking of installing a pipeline from Brazil. Well, I'm joking"-Barazo wasn't laughing-"but the point is, I take it from leaf to pasta sucia to pasta lavada to pasta basica to hydrochloride under my own roof. And I pass on my saving," he said, "to the wholesaler. Cabrera charges you twelve thousand U.S. a kilo, correct?"

"Ten," Barazo lied.

He was expecting that. "Then my price is eight, with a quarter again the volume. And a guaranteed purity of ninety-five percent."

"Bullshit."

"Testing for purity is as simple as… finding out if you're pregnant. Either you are or you aren't. If it tests out less than ninety-five percent, it's yours, no charge."

Barazo nodded.

"With that kind of quality you're going to pass along your savings to your people. Or," he added with a grin, "not." Barazo gave a little grunt. "By my own calculation, you'll be making about three million more a week. Before taxes, that is. Of course, if you're afraid of upsetting Cabrera, I completely understand."

"Cabrera fucks the sheep on his farm." Charming.

Two weeks later, Barazo Federal Expressed the eyeballs with the little matador swords. After that it made sense to tighten security around Yenan: booby traps-which were constantly blowing up monkeys and jaguars-Beni and his SAM-7; and for insurance, a monthly retainer to Garza in Bogotá in case Cabrera found out the identity of Barazo's new supplier. Redundancy, Virgilio; make sure you never run out of options.

So-had Cabrera finally decided after all these years to get his revenge on Barazo? Sanchez will have an insight when he gets here.

"What?"

"Niño, the plane! You'll be late!"

"What?" he shouted over the roar of the shower jets.

"It's eight o'clock, Niño. You've been in there an hour."

Yayo was waiting on the tarmac. Today the motorcade consisted of four cars: the armored Range Rover and three others, two in front, one behind. The lead car emitted from its front fender an electromagnetic pulse that detonated mines. It was developed by the Spaniards after the Basques blew Franco's chief of staff, in his armored car, over the roof of a building. El Niño got into the driver's side of the Range Rover. Yayo squeezed his Incan bulk into the front passenger seat. Flores rode in back and briefed him as they drove through the dismal traffic toward the slum of Las Barriadas.

"Channel 7 for sure, Channel 5 maybe. El Comercio says they're sending someone, but they always say that. La Republica is sending Gaetana. Oh, and guess what-¡Mira!'s coming."

"¡Mira!?"

"You know it's serious when ¡Mira! starts showing up, eh?" Flores joked.

Papa wouldn't permit the magazine in the house after it published photos of Franco's mistress, Chu Chu Valpina. "LA VERDADERA 'PASIONARIA'!" But the servants used to read it anyway in the kitchen, hovering over the pictorials of Gina Lollobrigida and Cantinflas and Ordonez the bullfighter and of course the royals. Royals were the mother's milk of ¡Mira! If Princess Anne fell off her horse, ¡Mira! treated it like the Second Coming. Once the pastry cook and the gardener got into a shouting fight in the pantry over an item in ¡Mira! saying that the Conde de Barcelona-father of the present King of Spain-was having an affair with Jacqueline Kennedy. (JFK was still alive.) Papa heard it and came in and tore the copy into pieces with his huge hands and discharged them both and cuffed him hard on the ear simply for being present. ¡Mira! continued to be a thorn in his existence. Just a few months ago he'd caught Soledad with a copy of it. An Indian girl who couldn't read, whose only Spanish was "I love you," staring, fascinated, at photographic spreads of Julio Iglesias and Joan Collins. He'd lost his temper a little, snatching it away and ripping it into pieces-just as Papa had, it only now occurred to him-and yelling at her with words she didn't understand: "Pretty boys! Sluts! Garbage!" He gave her a scare. She started to cry. Suddenly he's down on his hands and knees piecing the wretched thing back together, Julio's face, Joan's left breast…

"They'll do the Robin Hood angle, you can bet on it," Flores was saying. "Yayo can be Father Tuck."

"Brother Tuck," El Niño corrected. Yayo made no response, Uzi on his lap. El Niño said to Flores, "Try to keep ¡Mira! away from me."

They were going through a red light. It was one of the virtues of having an armed motorcade. At the far end of the intersection he saw a gamine, seven or eight years old, filthy, hair matted, half naked, holding a stick with a piece of rag attached to it. He braked. The security car behind almost smashed into them. "Shit," said Flores. "Niño, come on, we're late." But he was already out the door, Yayo following with his gun drawn, shouting orders at his men in the lead car to form a cordon. He was a nightmare to protect, like Gorbachev, always jumping out of cars. Someday-

The gamine saw large men with guns converging on her and turned and began to run. He caught her after a few feet. She struggled in his arms. He soothed her. "It's all right, beauty. We're not going to hurt you. I promise."

He held her tightly. The stench was appalling. Her right eye was runny with pus. Some of them this age had syphilis, gonorrhea, AIDS. By ten they were old; by fifteen, according to one estimate, 80 percent of them were dead.

Traffic was backing up behind the stalled motorcade. One of Yayo's men held up his submachine gun; the honking stopped. In respects, Lima is similar to Los Angeles.

Yayo had his frantic look. He whispered to Flores, "Is he wearing his vest?" Flores rolled his eyes-how should I know? "Please, patron," begged Yayo, "get back in the car. Please."

"What's your name, beauty?" He stroked her matted hair. "Where do you live?" There was no answer to that.

"Flores," he said, holding out his hand. Flores took out a roll and peeled off bills. He handed them to El Niño. El Niño took the whole billfold and put it in the gamine's sticky hand and closed his own over hers. The gamine grinned at him. She reached into her rags and produced a basuco cigarette and held it out to him. They made them from pasta sucia and tobacco: the high came mostly from the kerosene and hydrochloric acid and other chemicals, not from the coca. He stared at the crudely rolled cigarette in the sticky palm. He took it from her and said, "Thank you, beauty." The girl smiled.

He stood and got back in the car and drove the rest of the way in silence. Flores didn't say anything until they reached the edge of the crowd in Las Barriadas.

Flores' people had built a small stage in front of the building hung with the banner that said CLINICA LIBRE, and had set up food and drink stands, had hired musicians, put up lights and posters and loudspeakers. The atmosphere was that of a political rally, an election without candidates. His people were scattered throughout the crowd of five hundred to get the chant going, organizing their roars into iambs, "Ni-no! Ni-no!" Soon they were all converging on the stalled motorcade. Then the hot TV lights were on, bathing everything in that lurid glare. Dr. Nunez was on the stage with a microphone, shouting, "Let him through! Please, let him through! He's here! He's come! But we have to let him through!"

Yayo put himself at the head of the phalanx, but even Yayo could not penetrate this. They all wanted to touch him, to tear off a piece of clothing for a talisman. Their arms insinuated between Yayo's men, hands plucking at him. His blood was rushing, it was good, but thank God for Yayo's men, they'd tear you to pieces with their love otherwise. It made him think of when Papa had taken him to the plaza when he was very young to see the god Ordonez kill bulls. A total disaster. Ordonez put the sword into the bull, the bull hunched his great shoulder muscles and the sword flew out like a missile, followed by a tremendous gush of blood. He began to cry for the bull as it writhed on the ground while Ordonez strutted in his suit of lights. Papa, mortified, took him home and made him put on his sister's clothing, made him go to school in a dress for a week; regarded with satisfaction the bruises he returned with every day.

They had to lift him onto the stage over the heads of the crowd. He held up his arms to silence them, but they kept chanting. He shook hands with Dr. Nunez. Dr. Nunez made an Ecce homo gesture. Niño took the microphone from him.

"This is your clinic now," he said. "And no one will take it from you!"

Something went flying through the air and landed on the stage by his feet. A rosary. He picked it up and, smiling, shook his head. "Listen to me. Science is the answer to our problems. Not"-he waved the rosary-"this. This was brought by the Spaniards." He tossed it back into the crowd. "This"-he pointed to the whitewashed building behind him-"was brought by me!" The crowd roared.

"He's good," Dr. Nunez said to Flores.

"Yes."

"What does he want? I mean, he's not going to run for office again, is he?"

Flores made a face. "Pah-he's finished with that shit."

"So, why?"

"He wants to help people."

"Sure, but why?"

"He wants to make the government look like assholes."

"Ah," said Dr. Nunez, satisfied. He stepped forward and shouted into his microphone, "¡Viva El Niño!"

"Viva El Niño!" the crowd shouted back.

Rosaries flew through the air.

The reporters were negotiating their way through the crowd in front of the stage. He saw a blonde followed closely by TV lights. Antoniela Catamarca, Channel 7. Good-looking. Christ, a guy was putting his hand up her skirt for a grope. She hit him. The man just grinned. Kids were slicing at her cameraman's belt with razors.

"Yayo." He pointed.

Yayo and his people got her up onto the stage. She was shaken. "That filthy, disgusting cholo"-she pointed at the man-"he, he-"

"Don't blame him too much. Beautiful women like you never come to Las Barriadas. That was probably the happiest he will ever be in his life."

"Well, I don't know about that." But she was already adjusting herself in a compact mirror. She held his microphone to his lips; such an obviously phallic act, he thought. How do they manage it?

"This is the sixth so-called free clinic you've established in Lima," she began.

"Wait," said her cameraman. "I'm not getting power. Shit, those little fuckers stole my batteries."

The other reporters were on him now. He wondered which was from ¡Mira! He heard a man's voice say, "Sendero"; he turned away toward another reporter. The man said more loudly, "It's alleged that you're connected with Sendero Luminoso."

He turned toward the man. Robles, from El Comercio. He said into his own microphone, "Señor Robles here, from the great newspaper El Comercio, which only comes to Las Barriadas to hunt Communists, wants to know if I am connected to the Shining Path? I told him my connection is to you. What do you say?"

"Kill him!"

He turned back to Robles, who had gone pale. He smiled. "There's your answer. Next question?"

La Republica wanted to know why he wouldn't stand for the municipal elections in November. "I want to help Peru, not make things worse." The reporters laughed.

"What about the foreign debt?"

"It is Peru that is owed, not the other way around. Let the imperialists return all the gold and silver they took from us. Then let us look at the balance sheet."

"Brigitte Nielsen, the former wife of Rambo, is in Peru making a film. What is your opinion of her?"

"What?" ¡Mira! "I-have no opinion on this." Yayo, get this idiot away from me.

"Are you related to Julio Iglesias?"

"No!"

"But you're an Iglesias."

"I have not used that name for years," he said testily. He turned to Dr. Nunez. "Come on, let's see the clinic."

"Of course, Niño."

As they went in, reporters following, Flores nudged the doctor and whispered, "Remember, only the really sick ones."

"They're all 'really sick,' Flores." There was an old man gasping with asthma, a boy with a crushed leg needing amputation, several horrible worm cases, dehydrated infants. In one ward they came to a shrieking basuco smoker tied hands and feet to the bed because he had scratched the skin on his legs down to the bone. Flores whispered to Nunez, "Christ, Nunez!"

A man coughing up blood from consumptive lungs, a rabies case, drooling, blank-staring stroke victims, a failing kidney, cancers of the bone and throat, AIDS. The reporters had grown quiet. They came to a woman whose husband, Dr. Nunez explained, had gotten drunk on pisco and thrown a pot of boiling chicken grease on her.

Nunez whispered to El Niño, "Frankly, patron, it would be better if she died."

El Niño sat in a chair beside her bed and took her hand. She squeezed it. He said into her ear, "I am going to take care of you." She made a croaking noise. He stood and told Nunez that he would make an arrangement to fly her in his own plane to Texas, where there was a famous burn unit.

"Bravo, El Niño!" Flores clapped.

Outside in the hallway, El Niño whispered to Yayo, "Find the husband and return the favor." He was grateful to reach the outside again and hear the crowd.

Better still, to be back inside the cabin of the Falcon, climbing above the Andes. In truth, he hated Lima. It was a squalid remnant of a squalid conquest. The real Peru had always been on the other side of the mountains.

He drank a scotch and felt the tension go out of his neck. He was exhausted. An early dinner, maybe once with Soledad, beautiful, brown Soledad. Soledad was the real Peru. He should have kept her original name, but "Cicurrakka" was, well… Soledad was a good name, signifying her isolation, with him, between the two cultures.

A faint humming from beneath his feet, a shifting of hydraulic fluids… sometimes it was triggered by a noise, sometimes by a color, sometimes there was no trigger, just the memory of humming along in that idiotic vehicle, the golf cart, across oppressed lawns, her father talking about some snapping turtle that inhabited the pond between the seventh and eighth holes.

"Fearsome old thing. They tell me he might be forty or even fifty years old. They think he got the groundskeeper's dog a few years ago, can you imagine? Do you have them in Peru, Antonio? Snapping turtles? I imagine you've pretty much got everything down there."

He managed to shake it off. When he opened his eyes he saw not the manicured, artificial green of the golf course but the lush eastern slope of the Cordillera Oriental descending into the Huallaga Valley, cradle of the still-New World.

Virgilio was waiting with a pained expression. Virgilio worried all the time, it was another of his virtues.

He listened without comment to what Virgilio had to report. When they got to the house, he lit a cigarette and made Virgilio go through it again, word for word.

"When Sanchez didn't report in, I called the field in Isola Verde. No answer. I mean, the phone didn't even ring. Nothing. Finally Miguel calls me, scared out of his brain, like, like, like-"

"Okay, Virgilio. Go on."

"He said the pilot had called in saying there was a problem with the landing gear, and, and, and Sanchez was all pissed off because of the front off Ecuador and-"

"Yes yes."

"So the pilot called in a half hour out, with the proper ID code. Sanchez gets into his plane and gets it warmed up because he wants to leave right away as soon as they've got the money loaded-"

"Yes."

"And the Aztec appears and lands and taxis up next to Sanchez's Aerocommander and suddenly everything's in the shit, there's shooting and, and Nestor and Freddy are dead, and Julio's dead. Miguel said he got off some shots, then Sanchez's plane takes off and things start to blow up."

"What starts to blow up?"

"Everything! Everything! The hangar, the, the work sheds. Sanchez's plane flies over and everything starts to blow up. The next thing Miguel knows is he's lying in a field twenty meters away with his pants on fire and no hair. He's-"

"What about the money?"

"Gone, Niño. It's all burned. They must have dropped into the hangar or something with the bomb, or-I don't know, but Miguel says the whole place is full of burned hundred-dollar bills."

"Where's Miguel right now?"

"Shitting himself in the Balboa safe house. With no hair. I think he's drunk, Niño. He wasn't making any sense when I had my last conversation."

"All right, listen to me carefully. First, get the men assembled. Call Vidal in Tingo and tell him we need more men, twenty at least. Second, tell Beni to get his missiles ready. Three, get Miguel on the phone, I don't care how he is, it's important that I speak to him right away. Four, call Garza in Bogotá, tell him to get his team to Cabrera's place-never mind, I'll speak to Garza myself. Five, seal the place, nothing in, nothing out. Especially nothing out, understand? Do you understand, Virgilio?"

"Si, Niño." Virgilio ran to the door and stopped.

She was standing in the doorway, wearing a T-shirt that came down to above her waist. She had on nothing else. She smiled at him.

"Go upstairs." He pointed. "Now!" She gave him a hurt look and ran noiselessly up the stairs.

A few moments later the sirens went off, drowning out the sound of the jungle.

17

The square of projector light whitewashed the wall. McNamara sat by the carousel with his bandaged upper thigh extended, trying to get the mechanism to work.

Felix was on the couch, quiet. Ever since they started planting them here on the island, Felix had been acting morose. Charley could not figure it out. Tried to cheer him up and all he got back was grunts. Look at him, like he's just been force-fed a dead toad. His ribs are still hurting him. Charley's leg throbbed some. It was good the bullet had gone straight through. Probably should have hired a doctor at the outset. Mac and Bundy had some training, but it was starting to get wet-

"I'm going to have to do this manually," said Mac. "The advance mechanism's all screwed up."

The square of harsh light turned into a face, youthful with fine features, mouth open in laughter.

"Antonio Fabiano Iglesias y Caceres," said Rostow, using a pool cue for a pointer. "Father a wealthy Lima manufacturer and exporter. Deceased. Education: Markam, elementary school in Lima for rich kids run by German nuns; Culver Military Academy, South Bend, Indiana; Williams College, Massachusetts, BA 1970. University of Miami Medical School, dropped out after one year. Worked for father's company 1972; left 1972. Ran for Senate 1973 on platform of nationalizing various industries, canceling foreign debt and banning bullfighting. Defeated. Left Peru, resided Bogotá, Miami, Honduras, Paris, Zurich. Returned Peru 1979 following death of his father. Turned family residence into mental asylum." Rostow read from his notes: "Caused a stir among neighbors. Residence was in Miraflores district, where the rich people live. City government intervened on zoning grounds. Ran for Senate again." Rostow said, "This is strange-he announced his candidacy in a cemetery."

"Cemetery?" said Charley.

"Yeah," said Rostow, "he gave this speech saying since all the dead people in the cemetery had voted for his opponent the last time, he was going to get their votes this time around."

"Huh," said Charley.

"Lost election, left Lima. Said to be involved with Sendero Luminoso-Shining Path-guerrilla movement in Ayacucho. Moved to various Amazon district towns, Tingo Maria, Uchiza, Tocache Nuevo, eventually his own compound, Yenan-that's the next slide. Changed name to El Niño."

"The Kid," said Bundy.

"Christ Child," said Felix.

"Correct," said Rostow. "There was this weather phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean in 1982 where these warm currents caused all sorts of problems, floods and droughts. Caused eight billion dollars' worth of damage around the world, and fifteen hundred deaths."

"Don't seem right to name something like that after Baby Jesus," said Charley.

"South American fishermen named it," said Rostow. "It happened right around Christmastime. Next slide."

The square on the wall turned into a large-scale topographical map of northern Peru. "The upper Huallaga Valley," Rostow said, pointing with his cue toward a region northeast of Lima. "Here's Tingo Maria down here, and up here"-he placed the tip a few inches north of the town-"is his place. He calls it Yenan."

"Yenan? Is that a town?"

"Sanchez says it's named after a place in China. I don't really know what the story is with the name."

"Let's find that out." Charley made a note.

"Right. Okay, here's the deal. You've got your Andes Mountains running north and south like a twenty-thousand-foot wall between Lima and the Huallaga. And to the east of Yenan, you got three thousand miles of Amazon jungle. Between a rock and hard place."

"Now, the Huallaga's where they grow the best leaf in the world. The soil and the altitude are just right for it. Leaves there have an alkaloid content of.79; the stuff down here in the Valle de la Convencion is only about.33."

"The government in Lima didn't mess much with the Huallaga until Sendero moved into the valley in '83. I was there from '81 to '84, until I… When Sendero moved in to provide protection for the narcos, Lima got nervous. Sendero is bad fucking news. I mean, they make Iranians seem reasonable. Their hero, historically, is this Indian Tupac Amaru, who the Spaniards tied to horses two hundred years ago and tore apart. They buried the limbs in like four different provinces-the Spaniards were always doing this sort of thing; you can see why the whole place is so fucked up-and suddenly there's these rumors that the limbs are regrowing. The leader is this guy Abimael Guzman, they call him Presidente Gonzalo, I don't know why, and no one's seen him for like ten years. They're Maoist, basically, but they think the Chinese Commies are soft and forget the Soviets. When I was in Lima the lights would go out about every two hours because Sendero had blown up another pylon. They'll hang dead dogs from lampposts, kill people in ways you don't want to hear about. In Chimbote once they tied a stick of dynamite to a duck-a duck-and blew up a telephone exchange."

"Can't be all bad," said Mac.

"They started providing security for the dopers. It's a great arrangement. They charge a 'revolutionary tax' on every kilo. It works out great for everyone. This whole area here"-he circled the Huallaga-"is a zona rosa. The Red Zone. It belongs to them."

"Scandalous," said Charley, exhaling cigar smoke.

"Every now and then the government decides to do a little pecker flexing and they'll drop in some paratroopers for the photo opportunity, but the moment those boys hit the ground they run for the river-run-where the patrol boats are prepositioned for the extraction."

"Hm," said Charley.

"Now, what our boy did was, his innovation was to figure a way around Colombia. Traditionally the Peruvians only handle it up to a certain point. They take the leaves and soak them in these pits with kerosene and sulfuric acid, then skim off the residue. That's called pasta sucia-dirty paste. Then they wash that, right there in the river, and turn it into pasta lavada, washed paste, or pasta basica de cocaina, PBC. At that point they fly it into Colombia, where they refine it with ether and acetone, and some other precursor chemicals turn it into cocaine hydrochloride, the powder. This guy figured a way to do that himself and cut out the Colombians, which probably didn't make them happy. Sanchez said he owns his own chemical factories in Brazil."

"Vertical integration," said Charley. "Smart businessman."

"Extremely smart. If he's moving a metric ton into the country every week, then he's probably clearing two hundred million a year."

"Jesus," said Charley. "I don't make two hundred million a year."

"Next slide. Here's a sketch of Yenan, according to what Sanchez told us. Four-thousand-foot airstrip for his jets, barracks, drying sheds, soccer field, soaking pits, main house, aquarium-"

"Aquarium?"

"Maybe he likes fresh fish. Communications shed over here, and here," said Rostow, lowering his tone a good octave, "is the radar facility, which is where they keep the Stingers."

"Stingers," Charley grunted.

"He thinks they came from Peshawar, from the muj."

Charley shook his head. "I told Casey not to give those people Stingers. I told him it'd be nothing but trouble."

Rostow drew a circle around the compound with his pool cue. "The perimeter's booby-trapped seven ways from Sunday. Sanchez said that's how they get a lot of their fresh meat. Jaguar, tapir, they got these giant rats, apparently called capybaras. He said they're pretty good."

"I never ate jag," said Mac.

"It's like dog, but stringy," said Bundy.

"You never ate jaguar."

"I ate leopard once in Africa."

"When did you eat leopard?"

"In Angola."

"Bullshit."

"Boys," said Charley, "let's save the gastronomy for later, if you don't mind. Go on."

"That's about it. He's got himself a tight little asshole in there. He's got the Andes on one side, a jungle on the other, a security force from hell, Stingers, a mined perimeter. I don't want to sound downbeat, Mr. Becker, but this isn't going to be easy."

"Is that why you all signed on for this job?" Charley pulled himself up out of his chair painfully. "Because it was going to be easy? Mac? Bundy, is that why you boys signed on?"

"No, sir," said Bundy. "I signed on for the money."

Charley hobbled over to the projection wall. "Gimme a little more scale," he said. The sketch of Yenan disappeared, replaced by a large-scale map of Peru. Charley stared at it, cigar smoke curling upward into the projector light.

He said, "It's been right here the whole time, biting us on the ass."