Wet Work

Two months later

18

Charley stood on the bridge of the Esmeralda and surveyed with a squint the Amazon port city of Iquitos. A huddle of beggars surveyed him back.

He didn't feel right looking down as he did on them from his gleaming white high-tech perch. The yacht stood out so, here. Her pristine whiteness seemed to rebuke the filth about her. Lord, she seemed to be saying, when's the last time you took a bath?

At least, Charley comforted himself, he'd had the presence of mind to change her name from Conquistador. Be like steaming into Gdansk on a yacht named Blitzkrieg.

The beggars were trying to get his attention. They shouted, "Capitan! Capitan!" and polished the air hopefully with rags. Leishmaniasis had eaten away the nose of one man, leaving a hole, a sad and terrible sight. Charley waved back.

Conquistador had been Margaret's idea. She bought it without telling Charley after reading that Ibiz Fahoudi, the international arms dealer, was under financial pressures. She took Charley to Miami without telling him why and presented it to him as another of her faits accomplis. "Damnit, Margaret, it's a whorehouse."

"I'm going to make it lovely," she said. Yachts bored Charley; he felt trapped on them. He installed a cantilevered flight deck on the upper deck to allow him to fly his UAVs-unmanned aerial vehicles; model planes. Conquistador became a miniature aircraft carrier. Margaret would be below taking the sun on the fantail deck, Charley and Tasha would be on the flight deck reliving the battle of the Coral Sea, scale-model Avengers coming in too low on final and hitting the sides and blowing up, Margaret shouting up at them to stop, giving up, going on with her reading.

"Capitan!"

Charley reached into his pocket. He was an old-fashioned man, had never used a credit card-didn't believe in them-always kept a thick, comforting wad of cash. He peeled off a few bills and was going to crumple them and toss them down to the beggars, then that didn't seem right either.

A security guard looked out of his shed and saw them and came out waving his stick and shouting at them, "Fuera, fuera! Fuera!" just like Sister Angustia used to do when the chickens wandered in during Mass. Charley called down to the crewman standing watch at the gangplank to let the beggars aboard. The beggars came scrambling up, turning as they did to give the wharf guard various unmistakable hand signals. The man with no nose was grinning and made a hissing noise through his exposed sinuses.

Charley came down the stairs and there they were, standing improbably in the main salon. He approached them with his customary Chargin' Charley gait. The beggar nearest went into a half crouch, thinking he was going to hit them.

He shook their hands and asked their names.

"Okay," he said in his fluent Spanish, "I want to do some business with you. I want to buy some prayers."

The beggars nodded.

Charley said, "You're all Catholic, right?"

"Siii," they said together.

"No Jehovah's Witnesses or any of that?" One took out an old rosary looked like it might have belonged to one of the Apostles. Charley peeled bills off his wad, handing each a hundred dollars. "Okay, I want Hail Marys, a hundred of them."

"Si, patron." Another said, "What about some Our Fathers?"

"All right," he said, peeling off another round, "I'll take a hundred of them, too."

The beggar with no nose said, "Capitan, how about Acts of Contrition?"

"All right, fifty."

The oldest one, with an abscessed eye like a runny egg, stepped forward and said with gravity, "Patron, we cannot forget Our Lady of Lourdes." The other beggars murmured assent.

"How many you think she needs?"

"Pues," said the old man thoughtfully, "it's hard to say. Our Lady of Lourdes said, 'Pray to me.' She didn't say how much to pray, but…"

"Si," the others said, nodding.

"Prayer bandits," Charley uttered. He handed over the rest of his wad.

"Patron?"

Charley had already started back up the stairs.

"What's your name? So they'll know who the prayers are for."

"They're for Natasha."

They waved their money at the guard on their way out the gate.

Senator Gallardo arrived with his entourage on schedule. Charley was standing at the head of the gangway to receive him, Felix by his side. Felix whispered, "He's got a photographer with him."

Charley, grinning, whispered back, "You ever see a politician who didn't?… Felipe!"

"Charley!" burst out Senator Gallardo, giving him a manly abrazo. It was like old friends. Actually, they'd never met, but they'd spoken on the phone so many times over the previous months it felt like old friends.

The senator gestured at the enormity of it all. "I thought it was the Titanic."

Charley laughed, the senator's entourage laughed, everyone laughed. Charley said, "My yacht is your yacht."

"I accept!" Everyone laughed.

Felix introduced himself to the photographer, a woman. "Do you work for the senator?" he said.

"No no. Just sometimes. I'm free-lance."

"Press?"

"Sure."

"Are your pictures for the senator, then?"

"Yes."

"You see, Mr. Becker's a very private man. Just between you and me, he's a little worried about kidnappers."

"Ah."

"You'll only give these photos to the senator for his private use, then?"

"Yes, certainly."

Felix grinned. On those occasions when Felix smiled, light came into him.

The senator introduced the provincial governor, the mayor, the commander of the military district of Loreto, the commissioner of customs, to whom Charley expressed special gratitude for his assistance with the formalities.

"Well," said Charley, "would you like to have a tour?"

What a question!

He took them first to his Rogue's Gallery, a bulkhead aft of the forward lounge on which he'd hung pictures of himself with assorted nabobs and panjandrums.

"There's Kissinger. This one was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Carter."

"Human rights," said the senator.

"Right. There's Haig, you remember him. Here's the Emperor of Japan. He was a prince then. With a camera, wouldn't you know. That's the papal nuncio, he's a cardinal now. Prime Minister of Jamaica. This fellow here, now, he got himself beheaded by his chief of staff just a couple of months after this was taken. Terrible thing. Good man, too."

The senator said, "A lesson for us all," occasioning some mirthless laughter.

Charley took them to the bridge and showed them Esmeralda's sophisticated navigational system, especially the look-down, shoot-down radar mounted on the bow to detect the huge, hull-piercing logs and tree trunks that barreled down the Amazon's current at torpedo speeds.

On their way back to the main salon, Charley pointed out the table that had once belonged to Queen Victoria. "But that isn't the reason I bought it," he said. "I am reliably informed that Tallulah Bankhead once made love on top of that table."

He showed them the Art Deco gold-glass panels from the old Normandie, the brooding Vlaminck seascape, the gay Dufy water-color of the Cote d'Azur, Cocteau's sensuous sailor, John Steuart Curry's ancient graybeard mariner battling the furious storm alone on a sinking, wave-swept deck, the gentle Bierstadt coastal scene, various postrealist Mihanovics, Jean-Louis Bilweis' risible trompe 1'oeils of scuba divers and mermaids, Montague Dawson's tear-jerking painting of a Victory ship being machine-gunned by a U-boat as the crew jump over the rails into the flaming water, Manet's "Absinthe Drinker" mounted playfully over the bar.

"There's an interesting story behind that," said Charley, tending bar himself, as was his wont. "Manet painted a version of that painting and they damn near ran him out of town for it. You didn't paint drunks back in the 1850s. Just wasn't done. One of his buddies was Baudelaire. Baudelaire didn't much like it either, though he drank a lot of absinthe, I mean Baudelaire drank. And took drugs. And had syphilis. He had a terrible end but Manet stuck by him. After he died, Manet did another version of the same painting, with Baudelaire's face instead of the rag-and-bone man who was the model for the first. Scotch for you, sir, another scotch for you, Mr. Mayor, scotch for the governor, and that was a scotch and Coke for you, sir? Coming up. I had absinthe once. It's illegal, but they do a little bootlegging in a town in Switzerland near the French border. Can you imagine the Swiss doing anything illegal? Here you go, sir, Dewar's and Coca-Cola. Salud."

They drank for a while on the fantail salon and then dinner was announced. On their way to the dining room they noticed the Stele, and they all stopped. It had that effect on you.

"Magnificent," said the senator.

"Ain't it just?" said Charley. An art magazine had once said that Charles Becker could manage to make Michelangelo's "Pietà" sound like a '57 Chevy.

"Stele" stood about six feet tall, an upright slab of poured ferroconcrete interlaced with thousands of strands of fiber optics, so that its dull, rough-hewn surface was speckled with dots of astral intensity. It was named for the monoliths the ancients used to erect to their fallen warriors, or to make a holy place, or in some cases, probably, just because they felt like it. The fiber-optic strands were all connected to a noiseless electric motor inside its base that played a continuous, kaleidoscopic light show over a twenty-four-hour cycle. Pinpricks of brilliant cobalt blue turned crimson, then melted into oranges, yellows, greens and violets, producing a stained-glass window made by aliens: a dandelion burst of fireworks blazed, shimmering tendrils of light cascading slowly into a moonlit sea. Comets screamed across the universe, smashing into each other, exploding in luminescent chunks that hurtled furiously into the ocean below, sending up waves that climbed up and up and up, becoming a mountain that metamorphosed into a temple. Across the front of the temple appeared letters-Phoenician or Greek, perhaps-scratched out in a fiery ink, hot as molten lava, that seemed to flow from an angry Creator's fountain pen. Mene mene tekel upharsin. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting? Charley led his guests in to dinner.

The commissioner of customs squeezed the arm of the military district commander.

"Did you notice something?" he said.

"What?"

"His guests. They're all men."

"So?"

"Where are the women?"

"Back home," laughed the military commander. "Maybe he wants to try the canuweras." The canuweras are peculiar to Iquitos-Venice of the Amazon-prostitutes who ply their trade in dugout canoes.

"They don't look like businessmen to me. Look at them. They look like bodyguards. And what about these matchbooks? Conquistador?"

"Well, ask him. Myself, I'm going to eat."

Charley said, "We're having a very simple supper tonight, I hope you don't mind." Stewards entered with platters, cold pear soup sprinkled with mint leaves, poached guinea hen eggs on fried toast layered with chutney and carpaccio, miniature acorn squash stuffed with cold ratatouille and dusted with Parmesan cheese, green tomatoes in balsamic vinegar topped with a cilantro seviche.

"I'm trying to shuck some weight," Charley said, smiling. Stewards appeared with more platters bearing grapefruit sorbet in Siamese incense vessels adorned with candied violet blossoms. Then more platters, the main course: small filets of Chateaubriand wrapped in bacon, grilled mushrooms in beurre rouge, pencil-thin spears of fresh asparagus. Chateau Lafon-Rochet '66.

Charley spoke excitedly about the trip. He said he'd always dreamed of going up the Amazon, and now that he was in the Indian summer of his life he was finally going to do it. He said how grateful he was to the senator for making it possible.

The senator, overcome by the wine and Charley's companionship, suddenly turned to the military commander and demanded that two Peruvian Navy patrol boats escort the Esmeralda on her trip upriver.

Charley placed his hand on the senator's arm. "Felipe," he said, "that's most gracious, most generous, but hardly necessary. And of course, it would be a scandal if our friends in the press"-everyone chuckled-"learned that the vital resources of your fine military were diverted to protecting a silly old gringo off on a pleasure cruise."

"But, Charley," said the senator, "the Huallaga region is… bueno, un poco desequilibrado."

Lovely way of putting it: "a little unbalanced." Just a few weeks ago Sendero had floated twenty decapitated corpses down the Huallaga past a base where DEA men were stationed.

"Why not go up the Maranon River?" he said. "Ecologically speaking, the Maranon is fantastic." Everyone agreed.

"I don't doubt it for a moment," said Charley, signaling for the dessert, "but my heart is set on seeing the 'Eyebrow of the Jungle.' I've read so much about it, you see."

"Well," said the senator, "the 'Eyebrow of the Jungle' is in a situation of lamentable extremity. Since the 1970s, almost a million hectares of the forest has been cut down by the narcos for the cultivation of coca."

"Is that a fact?"

"Yes. And now as a result we have erosion problems. For the first time in seven thousand years, eh? When the Inca planted his little coca, he built trenches, with stone walls, with yucca plants interspersed here and there to keep the soil from sliding off the mountain. Now-pah!-you think the narcos care about erosion?"

"Deplorable," said Charley.

"And what they flush into the soil! The chemicals they use for the refining. In one year, Charley, fifteen million gallons of kerosene. Eight million gallons of sulfuric acid. Two million of acetone, two million of toluene and sixteen thousand tons of lime. In one year."

"Criminal," said Charley.

"Coca cultivation has become the Attila of tropical agriculture."

"I'm sorry, Felipe, the what?"

"Attila the Hun."

"Ah," said Charley, "dessert. I hope you like ice cream."

It was a map of the Amazon done entirely in ice cream: the jungle floodplain in pistachio; the river, snaking from the Atlantic to the Andes, a geographically precise vein of mocha fudge. The Cordilleras rose on vanilla slopes to sorbet summits of blue and boysenberry ices. Candied jaguars, marzipan toucans, caramelized coleoptera, licorice crocs and skulls of spun sugar. (Charley wondered, were the skulls in good taste?) Chef Ralph had contrived an active volcano that spouted wisps of vapor by means of a concealed chip of dry ice.

Charley handed the knife to the senator, saying he would be honored if he would make the first cut.

The senator made several false starts. Finally, with a smile, he put the tip of the blade into Lima-represented by a macaroon star. "Since everyone blames Lima for everything these days." Everyone laughed.

Coffee, brandy and cigars were taken on the helicopter deck. The commissioner of customs lit Charley's cigar.

"I found these in an ashtray," he said, showing Charley the Conquistador matches.

Charley puffed, looked at them. "Hm," he said, "how about that. Donald Trump was aboard couple of weeks ago, they must be from his boat." Charley winked, "Wouldn't you know he'd call a boat that?"

The abrazos at the head of the gangway were copious. Charley sent them all off with a case of the wine. Forty-nine ninety was fueled and ready at the airport to fly the senator back to Lima. The next morning it flew back to the States with the stewards and crew. Esmeralda cast off her lines at 0900 and Charley nosed her bow into the current. The beggars waved rosaries at him. He gave them three blasts on the ship's horn.

19

"Hey, Frank-Jesus, what the hell happened?"

It was Taccarelli, from Training. "Nothing, it's fine."

"Nothing? You look like a fucking hard-boiled egg."

"I fell asleep under the tanning machine. It's a little sunburn is all."

"Oh. Hey, uh, how's your sister, Frankie?"

Something about the way he said it. "She's much better, thank you, Al."

Taccarelli gave him a conspiratorial wink. "Gubanovich mentioned."

"Mentioned what, Al?"

"You know. Your stomach problem. Kincaid's bullet acting up?"

"Uh, yeah. It's nothing."

"You okay?"

"I'm much better, Al."

"Is it-"

Diatri sighed. "It's my bowel, Al. My small bowel, if you really want to know." These elevators.

"Gubanovich said you were Intensive Care the whole time."

"You two had a nice mention about all this, I see. Well, I got news for you, Alphonse. There's no such thing as Intensive Care anymore. No one cares. Except one of the cleaning ladies. She gave me a flower. It was dead, but it was nice of her anyway. Other than her, no one really gives a rat's ass. One night the guy next to me dies, right? One minute his heart monitor is going beep… beep… beep, then it's going beeeeeeeeeeeeeep, you know, we-now-conclude-our-broadcasting-day? Six minutes. I counted six minutes before they came. I'm yelling for them and I would've got out of bed except for this tube in me the size of a garden hose and I'm a little afraid my plumbing is going to come out with it if I get out of bed. Six minutes. You know what they were doing? They were watching the ball game. The guy was cold by the time they came in. He was a TV dinner. Suddenly they're charging in shouting, 'Stand back, stand back!' like I'm trying to block their way, and they start hitting him with the paddles. The fibrillator paddles. They must have hit him twenty times. They had this poor guy jumping like a frog. I'm telling the fangool with the paddles, 'Hey, he's been dead for a week. Why don't you thaw him out first. Put him in the microwave.'"

"Jesus. What hospital was it?"

"The VA."

"The VA? Oh yeah, right, Gubanovich said."

"Next time, I don't care if the SAC does find out. I'm not going back to the VA."

"I'll see you round, Frank. Take care of yourself, okay?"

"You bet. Hey, Al, listen, Gubanovich wasn't supposed to go shooting his mouth off. I mean, I don't mind you knowing, but-"

"Not to worry, Frankie. My hand to God."

Diatri went looking for Gubanovich to kill him. After all that, he goes and tells Taccarelli. Jesus Christ. Now everyone will be coming up and asking, "Yo, Frankie, how's the bowel?"

All that, to keep the SAC from finding out, driving himself to the VA instead of riding in an ambulance to a city hospital, where at least you stood a 50-50 chance, sweat pouring off, shouting out Sinatra songs to keep from passing out from the Red Meteor in his gut. Then when he could finally stand up, staggering with the rolling IV stand and a quarter down a corridor full of Korean War vets, calling the SAC on the pay phone and asking if he could take his back vacation now, effective right away. The SAC saying, "Jesus, Frank, we're up to our tits here. Plus we got the Bennett dog and pony show next week. It's a lousy time." Just then the loudspeaker blasting out, "Dr. Deaver, please report to surgery, Dr. Deaver…" and the SAC suspicious, saying, "Are you in a hospital, Frank?"

Diatri bending over from the Red Meteor, holding on to the IV stand. "Yes, I am, Jim. I'm here… I'm here looking after my baby sister."

"Jesus, Frank. What's wrong?"

"We're not sure at this point, Jim. But it doesn't look real great. They're going to be doing an exploratory. I just need to be with her right now."

"Of course, Frank. I'm sorry. Why didn't you say? Let us know what you need. Anything."

"Thank you, Jim. That means a lot to me."

Then after they finally release him-looking like hell on toast-it occurs to him to get under the tanning machine to get a little color back so the SAC won't wonder. Falls asleep and wakes up looking like Kid Hiroshima. Terrific. Now on top of all that, Gubanovich is going around telling people.

"Hey, Frank. How's your sister?"

"A lot better, thanks, Juanita."

"I woulda sent a card but I didn't know what hospital."

"I appreciate that."

"You lose weight?"

"Just a few pounds. I've been doing a lot of jogging."

"Take care, Frank."

He felt badly lying to people like Juanita. The phone rang. It was Liestraker, in Miami.

Liestraker… yeah, right, Liestraker. "So how's it going?" Diatri tore open a packet of chocolate powder and mixed it with the baby formula they had him drinking. Baby formula. He stared glumly at the dirty-looking bubbles.

"Reason it's taken so long," Liestraker was saying, "is there's 467 hotels in the Greater Miami area. We had to get grand jury subpoenas from the AUSA to look at their registers, and the subpoenas kept expiring, and I had to keep going back and…"

"Uh-huh." Diatri drank. It wasn't so bad.

"Then there's the Catholic churches. There's 118 of them. We didn't need GJSs for those, but just calling all of them, that took time. Also…"

What was his first name? Mike?

"Michael," Diatri interjected. "Let me explain my situation up here. The sixty days is up on my case, the Raid Jacket case I told you about. I had to file a Status Rep with my AUSA, and he didn't give me Concurrence to Continue. The reason for that is, I don't have anything. What I do have is an inbox that looks like Magilla the Gorilla used it for a toilet. Okay? So what do you got, Mike?"

"I've got five names. Hispanic males, medium height, strong build, mid to late forties, no distinguishing characteristics, occupying rooms in area hotels between December 7 and December 22."

"Okay. Now, I assume you already ran them through NADDIS."

"Affirmative and negative."

"How's that, Mike?"

"Yeah, I ran them through NADDIS, and no, none of them are in it. They're all NADDIS negative."

"Okay, shoot."

The names on Liestraker's list consisted of a Docal, Bollines, Quintaro, Velez and Ravines, respectively a United States Information Officer, a magazine ad salesman, a food wholesaler, a security consultant and a stockbroker. Liestraker gave him what he had on each. He said, "Ravines was busted in San Diego two days ago."

Diatri sat up. "Yeah?"

"He assaulted a contractor. He had this new roof put on his garage and it fell on his Mercedes and crushed it and he beat the shit out of the guy apparently. He's out on a bond. You want to talk to him?"

"No. Maybe. What about the churches?"

"One got a call about a demonic possession but it turned out to be D.T.s. Plus the usual stuff. No requests for confessions over the phone."

"Anything on Barazo?"

"Nada. His people have been pretty busy killing each other. We heard one group of them killed another group on a hot drop on Andros."

"Okay, Michael. That's good work. I'm gonna mention it to the Administrator if I ever see him."

Diatri stared at the five names on his list. Docal was in Bucharest, Bollines was in Tulsa, Quintaro in Chicago, Velez in Rosslyn, Virginia. He worked for a company named Becker Industries.

He got through to someone in Personnel at Becker and identified himself as a credit checker with Macy's department store. Mr. Velez had put them down as a reference, just checking… Right. Previous employer?… New York Police Department? Right, that's what it says here.

He dialed the main number again at Becker and asked for Security.

"Yeah," he said, "my name is Mariatri. I'm with the Policemen's Benevolent Association in New York and-"

"I'm sorry, we don't handle charitable contributions. You'll have to talk to Mr. Zahn, in Public Relations. I'd be happy to transfer you-"

"No, it's okay. I'm not calling for money, but I get that all the time. You say you're from the PBA and everyone is happy to transfer you. We're just updating our files here and I see one of our former members, Felix Velez, works there."

"Oh, fine. Yes, that's correct."

"Is he there, by any chance?"

"No."

"Does he have a title or anything?"

The voice was amused. "No, not really."

"See, we're doing a special issue in our magazine, a kind of 'Where Are They Now?' feature, you know, like the ones in Parade magazine? I was wondering how we should list him."

"He's in charge of personal security."

"Personal security?"

"For Mr. Becker."

"A bodyguard."

"Security specialist."

"Right." Diatri thought: Just what I'm going to end up as, security specialist. Holding doors open for rich people. If I'm not holding a specimen cup and telling people to go wee-wee in it. "Well, that must be interesting work, especially for someone like Mr. Becker. I guess he travels a lot. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine saw him in Miami a couple months ago."

"That's possible. I'm sorry, what did you say your name was?"

"I guess that about covers it. Listen, thanks."

Diatri dialed the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, where Velez had registered, and asked for the manager.

"Yes, this is George Diatriola, with the Miami Herald? Good morning. We're doing this story on where major executives and the like, you know, your basic captains of industry, stay when they're in town and it just came to our attention that Mr. Charles Becker of Becker Industries stayed with you a couple of months ago?… Uh-huh. What was the nature of his visit?… He didn't say. Well, a man in his position doesn't really have to say, does he?… Uh-huh. Eastern? Is that a fact? Well, you win some, lose some, right? I kind of wish someone would come along and take it over. It's a crying shame, to run an airline like that. I kind of miss Frank Borman. I don't know if he was a good manager, but I liked those commercials. Something about an astronaut, I guess. Well, Mr. Becker must think very highly of your hotel down there-here. We oughta do an article on the Biltmore… We did? Well, sure we did, but there was some feeling around here that it was a little, I don't know, superficial, so I was thinking that we should do another article. I'd certainly like to feature your name prominently in the article, if that's okay by you. Could you spell it for me?… I never would have been able to spell that. Is that a German name?… Swiss. That's a really beautiful country you have there. I like those, what do you call them, the chocolates come in that triangular tube?… There you go. I used to be able to eat three of those at a sitting. So did you grow up near the Matterhorn?… I'm sorry? An umlaut over the u. Uh-huh, two dots side by side. I'm not a hundred percent sure we can do umlauts, but I tell you what, I'm going to check personally downstairs with the printers and see what we can do… Thank you."

He dialed down to New York City police headquarters and had them fax up a record photograph of Felix Velez. Next he dialed Neon Leon's and got the voice saying, "I'm sorry, the number you have called has been disconnected." It was funny the way she said "disconnected" so upbeat, like it was good news, you were really hoping it would be disconnected.

He called Ignacio's cousin's number and got someone who'd never heard of Ignacio or his cousin. He called the owner, his paella buddy, and spoke to his wife, and tracked him down at a golf and tennis club in Dania.

"What happened to Neon Leon's?" he said.

"Business died after the Herald called it a 'hangout of local drug lords.' I never knew that. That cabron of a headwaiter never told me about that pig."

Diatri explained he was trying to reach Ignacio. The owner said Ignacio was having some immigration problems and was up in Jacksonville somewhere, or maybe Gainesville.

"What about the maitre d'?"

"I don't care where he is. He is a bastard!"

"All right. Could you try to locate Ignacio for me? It's very important."

Just then Marie said, "Frank, Mr. Colaris wants to see you."

"What for?" said Diatri suspiciously.

"Roberta told me it's got something to do with a physical."

"A what?"

"A medical. They want to set one up."

"How come?"

"I don't know, Frank. But you have been looking kind of sick."

"That's ridiculous. I'm fine. I'm too busy to have some stupid physical."

"Okay by me, Frank, but I'm not the Agent in Charge."

"Listen, Marie. Tell him I just got a tip from one of my CIs and I had to go out on it."

"Aw, Frank."

"Tell him I got good information on a five-hundred-a thousand-key shipment coming in by Greyhound into Port Authority, but I got to go UC on it real fast. You got that?"

"Frank."

"Marie, I'm not asking you to be the mother of my children, I'm asking you to tell the Agent in Charge that a possible major shipment of, of cocaine is coming in and I'm on it, okay? Okay, for crying out loud?"

"All right, Frank."

Diatri went out the emergency exit, walked down three flights and took the freight elevator the rest of the way.

He had to stall the physical at least until the bruises on his inner arms from the IV needles went away. Probably ought to build up his strength a little too. Jog, or something.

He walked down to the Port Authority building on Forty-second with the thought of scaring up a little action-though a thousand keys was going to be tough on such short notice. After a half hour of sizing up various nervous-looking guys clutching attaché cases a little too tightly, he realized he'd lost interest in the small hauls, the one- and two-kilo busts. He decided to head over to the Public Library on Forty-second and Fifth and just maybe read, look through old issues of Life magazine. He got very depressed on the way over. The Red Meteor was doing him in, it was only a matter of time.

He went to the main reading room and instead of getting old Lifes looked up Charles Becker in Who's Who. There was nothing in Current Biography, so for the hell of it he went to the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature.

There wasn't all that much on him. He was listed in a recent Forbes magazine roundup as the forty-eighth-richest man in the United States. Not bad. He'd married into a little money and turned that into a fortune. The American Way. Diatri wondered if these rich guys competed among themselves for the rankings. He visualized a rich man's marathon, except all the runners were in the back of chauffeured limousines that had racing numbers on their grilles. He went to the New York Times index and ate up hours sifting through that for citations.

He took his call slips to the microfilm desk and then went to the viewers. He flicked on the light, threaded the spindle and cranked the film through the viewfinder. It was warm, but he kept his jacket on since pistols in holsters tended to make people nervous, especially in libraries. He cranked for hours, hundreds and hundreds of yards of current events warping and woofing across the scratched glass lens. Mrs. Charles Becker went to the Metropolitan Ball in Mrs. Charles Becker died in 1975. Mr. Becker took Telemetries private. Crank. Mr. Becker sold Zacatecas Petroleum. Crank. What was he looking for? This was ridiculous. If he wanted to eat up time-page 63, Metro section-he should get on a plane to Miami with a good print of the Velez photo and take it to the maitre d'. He could get healthy in Miami, run on the beach, get some real sun instead of lying under that bastard tanning machine, all that remained of his second marriage. Page 63. Russian exiles finding difficulty adjusting to New Jersey. No kidding. He should check with Eastern Airlines to see if there was anything on Becker trying to take them over. Sanit Commission urges study of eastern Long Island landfill. Conservationists "cool" to idea. Shakespeare in the Park threatened by federal funding cuts. That would be a nice thing to do some night, Shakespeare in the Park. Editor's Note: Felix Rohatyn is not 93 years old, as yesterday's article stated. A feminist group "upset" by the "impression" given in yesterday's story that they advocated breast-feeding children into their early teens. Breast-milk had to be an improvement over the stuff they had him drinking. He wondered what breast milk tasted like. Heiress dead of apparent overdose. Nothing about Charles Becker on 63. That was annoying. You go to the trouble of looking it up and it's not there. He checked the date of the citation. 63, all right. Shakespeare in the Park… he'd always wanted to see Man of La Mancha. Maybe some night-

20

No one seemed to have any file footage of Charles Becker, not ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, not C-SPAN. Diatri wondered how it was possible for any human being in the latter part of the twentieth century, much less the forty-eighth-richest guy in America, to make it to his age without leaving a piece of himself on video.

He set up his office in a phone booth at the Public Library. After two days he found a field producer with WPIX who seemed to remember that she'd sent a crew to the New York City morgue that day, but they'd decided in the end that Natasha Becker just wasn't a big enough heiress.

"If it'd been Cornelia Guest," she said, "we would have gone with it."

Diatri watched the raw footage. He saw the old man in the Jackie O glasses being shoved up against his car by the crowd of shouting reporters. He recognized Felix Velez, trying to clear a path.

The problem was, he didn't say anything, just looked dazed as Velez and another guy, a detective, it looked like, hustled him through the crowd. Diatri felt a little sorry for the guy, watching him. He looked like he was about to go into shock.

He went back to the Public and cranked through microfilm.

He'd wound his way through twenty-seven miles of current events when he came to a 1981 story in the National Catholic Reporter saying that Becker had just given five million dollars to Mount St. Mary's College in Maryland.

He called up the college's development office. "Yeah, this is Murray Kempton, with Newsday? Listen, we're doing a big story on Charles Becker, the philanthropist? He made a very nice gesture to you, I know, back in '81. I was wondering if maybe you gave him an honorary degree… You did? Well, for five million, I'd give him one too. You hand those out at graduation, am I correct? Did he by any chance give a little speech to say thanks?… Is that right? Did you record it?… Uh-huh. You know, that's just what my article could use, because, as you know, he's such a private guy. I spent hours with him and would you believe he didn't mention anything about this five mil to me? Now, where exactly are you in Maryland?"

Diatri went straight from La Guardia to the rectory. Father Rebeta answered the door.

"Hello, Padre."

"Hello, Frank." They sat in the room of the Joyless Madonna.

"Are you… well, Frank?"

"Fine."

"You've lost weight."

"Let me play something for you," Diatri said. He had pre-cued the tape to start after Charley Becker was introduced. Father Rebeta listened. He made a steeple with his fingers and rested his nose on it. Diatri clicked it off.

"Ecce homo."

"How's that?" said Diatri.

"Behold the man. What Pilate said to the crowd."

"That's him on the tape?"

"Perhaps that wasn't the most apt allusion, under the circumstances. Congratulations, Frank. How on earth did you find him?"

"You're sure?"

The priest thought. "Yes," he said. "Though I don't suppose that would mean much in court, would it? I mean, a good defense attorney would take that apart pretty easily, unless you-"

"One step at a time, Padre. You're sure that's the same voice you heard that night?"

"No question. Do you mind if I smoke?"

He pulled an unfiltered cigarette-borrowed from the housekeeper-out of his pocket, wrinkled and bent. He straightened it with loving care so as not to break the skin, making a ritual out of it, as if smoking it was the one thing he had to look forward to other than eternal salvation. "I don't really smoke," he said, lighting up. "So who is he?"

"I don't mean to sound like a jerk, Padre, but that's privileged information." He stood up. "I better get back. Thanks for your help. We'll be in touch as the case develops-"

"Sit down, Frank. For heaven's sake. No one's flying in steaks."

It had been over twenty-five years since a priest had told him to sit down. And what do you know, he sat.

"Well," said Rebeta, "we know he's Catholic." He chuckled. "I suppose that's obvious by now. Texan, no formal education, self-made, rich, a defense contractor with a guilt complex-no, there's more than guilt at work here, some genuine, non-intellectualized religiosity-who's just bought himself an honorary degree from Mount St. Mary's College."

Diatri jumped up. "You Jesuit son of a-the whole fucking time, you knew! Get up! Stand up!"

"Why?"

"Because I'm placing you under arrest for withholding evidence in a federal investigation, and obstruction of justice."

"Oh, sit down, Frank."

"DON'T TELL ME TO SIT DOWN! You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to speak to-"

"Calm down, Frank. Just sit down and calm down. George Bernard Shaw said the most redundant sign in the English language was 'Fresh Fish Sold Here.' If it weren't fresh, you'd smell it; that it's fish, is also obvious from the smell; that it's for sale goes without saying; that it's here is most obvious of all."

"What the hell does a CNN anchorman have to do with this?"

No, George Bernard-it's all there on the tape. The accent, clearly west of the Mississippi, less elasticity to the vowels, the glottal stops are harder, it's more twang than drawl. So, Texas. As Oscar Wilde would have said, 'My dear, no one is from Arizona.' It's obvious he had no formal education himself, from the tone of awe. 'Halls of higher learning,' 'ivory towers of knowledge.' Believe me, no one who ever saw the inside of a university classroom would say that. It would therefore follow that he's self-made. It's clear that he has something to do with the old Military Industrial Complex from the way he hauls out that hoary old chestnut about beating swords into plowshares. Finally, it's unlikely that a school like Mount St. Mary's would be giving out honorary degrees to, well, sword makers if there hadn't been a little quid pro quo. St. Peter's Basilica in Rome was built on indulgences, forgiving sins for cash. Mother Church is eternal, Frank, but thirty-year T bills yield eight percent."

"But how do you know it's Mount St. Mary's?"

"The quaint self-deprecating bit about how giving him the honoris causa is the first mistake the school's made since 1808. There aren't that many old Catholic schools in America. Georgetown was founded in 1789-"

"All right, all right," said Diatri, defeated. "But if I find out that you knew about this and you're just yanking my chain I'm going to… be real disappointed in you, Padre."

"Frank, you've obviously been under a strain lately. If you don't mind my saying, you really don't look at all well. What have you done to your skin?"

"I do mind, as a matter of fact."

"Would you like something to settle your stomach?"

"Let me guess. It's elementary, right?"

"You're holding your stomach, Frank." Father Rebeta left and came back with a glass of seltzer water.

"So, who is he?"

"I can't tell you that, Padre."

"You could tell me in confession. To keep it confidential."

"Padre"-Diatri stood up and smiled-"you don't have time to listen to my confession." At the door he said, "When this is over, I'll buy you dinner some night if you want."

"I like steak."

"Okay." Diatri laughed. "Steak."

21

"Where the fuck have you been, Diatri? What do you mean going off like that? No one goes UC in this office without authorization! I almost put out an Agent Missing on you!"

"Will you calm down, please, Jim?"

"Don't tell me to calm down, Diatri! I'm your fucking superior!"

"I said 'please.'"

"You're suspended pending medical evaluation."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"What are you talking about, medical evaluation?"

"Look at you, Frank. You disappear for two weeks, you come back twenty-five pounds lighter with weird burns all over you."

"What's wrong with losing some weight? You're the one always posting bulletins about eating right and walking up stairs instead of taking the elevator."

"What about those burns?"

"I fell asleep in one of those tanning machines. What's the big deal?"

"Roll up your sleeves."

"What?"

"Roll up your sleeves."

"Are you okay? Am I hearing this? Roll up my sleeves? All right. Here."

"What's that there?"

"A bruise, obviously."

"A bruise from what?"

"From donating blood. Now you've got something against the Red Cross?"

"Let me see the other arm."

"Jesus Christ."

"Let me see the other arm. What's that?"

"A bruise."

"From giving blood?"

"No. As a matter of fact, that's from something else."

"What something else?"

"I fainted at the blood place and they had to give me some glucose. I'm a little embarrassed about the fainting. You're being very hostile, Jim."

"Frank, you've been acting strange. Someone saw marks on your arms in the locker room. You don't look good. You disappear for two weeks. What do you want me to say?"

"Well, frankly it's been a bit of a strain, what with my sister's disease. A little support and understanding would be nice."

"Yeah, well about your sister, Frank. I checked. You don't have a sister. You got no next of kin."

"She's more like an adopted sister, really."

"You're going to the doctor, Frank, or I call in IS."

"Internal Security? I don't believe this. You want to check my urine, is that it? Here."

"What are you doing? That's my coffee mug. Frank!"

"Mr. Becker's office."

"Good morning. Is Mr. Becker there?"

"No, he's not. May I ask who's calling?"

"This is Father More, from Mount St. Mary's College, in Maryland?"

"Good morning, Father."

"Good morning, my child. I was just calling to tell him that the Little Sisters of Mercy, with whom we have this affiliation, are making a special novena for him."

"Well, I'm sure he'll be pleased to hear that, Father."

"He's not in, then?"

"No, I'm sorry, he isn't."

"Are you, like, expecting him?"

"No, he's on his boat."

"His boat. Bless him, his boat. I remember him talking about his boat when he came to pick up his honorary degree here. So is he on the Riviera?"

"He's on the Amazon River, in Peru. Hello?"

"The Amazon. Well, God… bless him, the Amazon."

"He will be checking in. I'll tell him about the novena. I'm sure he'll be very pleased."

"Frank, I never thought it was dope. I never thought it was dope."

"Uh-huh. That's why you had me roll up my sleeves. Because you didn't think it was dope."

"Someone said they saw bruises! What am I supposed to think?"

"You're supposed to extend a little benefit of the doubt. After seventeen years, I would expect just a little benefit of doubt."

"Frank, why didn't you say something?"

"It's no big deal."

"You go hiding out in some fucking VA hospital so we won't find out you're sick from Kincaid's bullet. Giving yourself intravenous glucose treatments because you can't eat anything. No big deal?"

"A little stomach upset-"

The SAC read from the report on his desk. "'Evidence of a radio-opaque object, probably a bullet, lodged in the right paraspinal muscles at the level of the tenth thoracic vertebra.'" Stomach upset!

"'Radio-opaque object, probably a bullet.' Shows you what they don't know. I told them before they took the pictures. I said, 'I got 125 grains of semi-jacketed hollow-point still in me, so don't worry when that shows up on the X ray.' I told them all about it, how they decided to leave it in 'cause it was a little close to the spine. And look how they put it in the report. Like they just found King Tut. 'Probably a bullet.' What else could it be? Someone's key chain I accidentally swallowed with my eggplant parmigiana?"

"Frank, we all knew about the bullet. But-look what it says-'evidence of recent scarring in peritoneal cavity due to leakage of pancreatic and gastric juices.' You're leaking, Frank."

"You know what that means? Gas. That's all that means."

"'Multiple adhesions involving the small bowel with recurrent small bowel obstruction.'"

"Adhesions-"

"'Prognosis unfavorable.'"

"These people couldn't find an adhesion in, in a box of Band-Aids, I'm telling you. You remember they ran Sheppard out on a heart murmur three years ago? Sheppard ran thirty-eighth in the New York City marathon last year."

"I'm sorry, Frank."

"What are you saying, Jim?"

"I can't overrule the doctors, Frank. You've had a brilliant career. I spoke to the Administrator this morning and he told me he's going to be calling you later. I know some guys would kill for a Disability. You're forty-six years old, Frank. You got your whole life in front of you."

"Oh, terrific."

"I wish you wouldn't blame me for this, Frank. If it was me…"

"I broke the Raid Jacket case, Jim."

"The Raid Jacket case? The Raid Jacket case is dead. You didn't get a Concurrence from the AUSA."

"I broke the Raid Jacket case, Jim."

"You did?"

"We're talking conspiracy to impersonate federal officers, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to kidnap. We're talking conspiracy to violate the Neutrality Act. We're talking eight murders, probably more, and an ongoing violation of the Neutrality Act with conspiracy to murder. We're talking about a leading U.S. citizen with close ties to the U.S. government."

"Jesus. Who?"

"Would have made a beautiful case."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm out. You just said."

"Make sense, Frank."

"You got your whole life in front of you, Jim. I'm sure another case just like this will come up and jump you up to Deputy Administrator. Take care of yourself."

24

"Two months and even Eden starts to look like a prison, Virgilio. I'm restless too. But we can't have this."

"With respect, Niño, putting his arm in the piranha tank, it doesn't make anyone happier."

"Fifteen seconds. A couple of bites. In Saudi Arabia, Virgilio, they would have cut the arm off."

"I still don't think that makes them any happier."

"He stabbed Paco in the arm. It was a just punishment. Solomonic, in fact. Fifteen seconds, a few nibbles-"

"Nibbles?"

"Bites, then. The point remains. I'm not going to apologize for maintaining order. That's three incidents this week. Something had to be done or else we'll all start reverting here."

"Reverting?"

"To what's out there, Virgilio. To what we listen to every night in the trees. Our great-great-great-grandfathers."

"Niño, we need to get some women in here. Or the men are going to start fucking MS."

"No. We can't afford that now. It's a war, Virgilio. Just because they haven't made their move yet, it's still a war."

"Someone saw Ramon Lados with a cherimoya, in the drying shed."

"There's no rule about not eating in the sheds."

"He wasn't eating it, Niño, he was screwing it. Two days before that someone saw Lobi out behind the lab, with a mango."

Jesus. He'd ordered a mango for breakfast that morning. "All right. If you think it's so important, all right. Tell Eladio you want some pakis for tonight."

"I… why don't we just get some from Madariaga, in Tingo, like we usually do."

"Because Eladio is closer, and more secure than Tingo."

Virgilio had that pained, Gromyko look again.

"What is it, Virgilio?"

"The men say they want girls from Tingo."

"Why?" I'm not going to make it easy for you, Virgilio. There, he's averting his eyes. So the men don't want Indian girls. Don't want chunchas, eh? Don't want clean, tight, sweet-smelling Jivaro girls who know how to make a man's cock dance like a python? No, the men want diseased mestiza whores from Tingo with bloody underpants, three-day-old makeup and sour mouths from cheap pisco. Say it."

"It's…"

Oh, Christ, go on, put him out of his misery. Who wants a good liar for a number two?

"Okay, Virgilio."

"Thank you, Niño."

"But two girls only. Fly them in yourself, personally, and out personally. Take Zamora with you and don't tell that bucket of pus Madariaga that you're coming or it'll be all over Tingo."

"Sure. You know, I could fit four in the Cessna."

"Virgilio-"

"So the men don't have to share so much. For morale, Niño."

"Four, then."

He watched Virgilio bound off the veranda like a schoolboy on his way to the barracks to give the men the good news that they'd all have the clap by this time tomorrow. He followed him with his eyes until he disappeared into the barracks. He realized he was grinding his back teeth.

So you're going to take it personally? Of course not. Then why are you doing that with your teeth? I'm not. Be honest: you're pissed off. Sure, why shouldn't I be? It's insulting. They should… What? Shouldn't be racist? The whole country's racist. It's the most racist country in the world, Peru. That's what I'm trying to change. If a criollo like myself can take as his lover a Jivaro girl, others will follow. I'm trying to set an example. An example? Is that what it is? It wouldn't have anything to do with the quality of the fucking? All right, the sex is fantastic. Forget it, Tony. It can't happen here. Remember what Max Hernandez wrote: "One-quarter of Peruvians are whites who are unhappy that Pizarro didn't kill all the Indians. One-quarter are whites who feel guilty about what Pizarro did to the Indians. One-quarter are Indians ashamed of not putting up a fight against the invaders. And one-quarter are Indians who would like to kill all the others."

Your own men, the mestizos, they're caught in the middle. Their hatreds are vertical-they hate up and down. You're not going to change all that just by taking a jungle girl for a mistress. Concentrate on your own enemy.

He wanted to make love, right away. She wasn't in the bedroom. He called, "Soledad?" She wasn't there. The phone rang, Mirko.

"We just got a fax from Garza in Medellin. One of his people got into a problem with one of Cabrera's people."

"What kind of a problem?"

"A shooting problem."

"Christ, I told Garza, no contact. What happened?"

"Garza's man thought Cabrera's man knew he was being followed, so Garza's man shot him."

"Idiot."

"A shooting, in Medellin, it's no big thing. They shot two judges there just last week. Who's going to miss a sicario?"

"Cabrera! That's who. Jesus. Look, tell Garza, ask Garza if there's some way of making it look like an unofficial DAS job. A police revenge shooting for the judges. Something."

"Good idea, Niño. I'll get on it."

"Mirko, don't use the fax. And tell Garza he shouldn't be using the fax for these kinds of communication."

"He used that code of his."

"Garza's code could be deciphered by a goat. A stupid goat. Use the scrambler. I paid a fucking fortune for it and no one uses it."

"It makes your voice sound like a maricon's, Niño."

"Mirko."

"Okay, Niño."

Things were falling apart; the center was not holding. The men are demanding whores; Garza's people have fired a shot that might turn out to be like Princip's at Sarajevo; and Mirko won't use essential security equipment because he thinks it makes him sound homosexual.

He called out, "Soledad!" Where the hell was she? He needed urgently to make love.

He found her in the solarium, sitting cross-legged on the rattan sofa. She was wearing an aikido outfit. It was loose above the belt and showed the soft brown valley between her breasts, thank God, as he approached, swelling.

Her coloring books were next to her. She looked up, surprised, reached for one of the books, put it over her lap.

"I love you," she said.

He knelt. She embraced him, took two fistfuls of hair and pulled him to her. There was something diversionary in this.

"What have you got there?"

She caught his tongue in mid-sentence with her teeth.

"Kthhhhh."

He tugged. She held. He pulled. She held. He pulled. Her teeth clicked hard as he got free. He tasted stickiness, salt, blood.

"Why do you bite me?"

"I love you."

"I love you. What are you hiding?"

"I love you."

"Show me."

"I love you."

"What are you doing with this? I told you. This is bad."

"I love you."

He was tempted to roll it up and give her a good swat with it.

"This"-he waved it in front of her angrily-"no!" He flung it across the room, pulled open her aikido suit and took her, roughly, joylessly, in truth, cruelly. He left her lying on her stomach on a bed of crumpled coloring books, looking back at him-there it was again, this time with the eyes open-the look of Gauguin's kanaka, Tehura. "The night is loud with demons, evil spirits and spirits of the dead… perhaps she took me, with my anguished face, for one of those legendary demons or specters, the Tupapaus, with pale lips and phosphorescent eyes, who fill the sleepless nights of her people."

"I love you," he said. She turned away. He picked the troublesome object off the floor and continued out the door.

25

It lay on his desk, still rolled up from being clenched in his fist, as if it were afraid to unfurl in his presence.

What garbage. But what did she see in it?-she who had never been beyond the mountains, to whom even relatively primitive Yenan was a metropolis. What was the fascination, for her, in Julio Iglesias, the transvestite Lupe Maldonado or ex-King Simeon of Bulgaria?

¡Mira! hadn't changed much since Papa banished it from the pantry. Except now bosoms were permitted. Indeed, bosoms had been making up for decades of strict catolicismo. They bounced and jiggled on almost every page. Advertisements in the back promised larger ones, but you had to go pick them up at clinics in Buenos Aires. Morgan Fairchild, Joan Collins-Macchu Chu Chu-Oprah Winfrey, Ann-Margret, Jane Fonda, Maria Shriver, Carmen Cremosa-ah, after the bosoms come the serious journalism. SORAYA KHASHOGGI: ADNAN ES INOCENTE. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia Enjoy a Vacation in the Balearic Islands with Their In-Laws, Ex-King Constantine of Greece and Queen Anne Marie of Denmark. Oho. His Majesty water-skis. His Majesty falls. His Majesty gets up again. His Majesty enjoys a lunch of grilled sardines and octopus and afterward he will take a nap, as is his custom. Their Majesties are "concerned" about skin cancer. Aha. They use a sun block on their skin. Amazing. Stop the presses. The King and Queen are humans, like us. Just like we do. Her Majesty prefers it from a "tube instead of a jar." She is "rumored" not to like the "very greasy kind." Fascinating. And you would have thought just the opposite. An interview with Dolores Fontana, the astrologer. She says that Principe Felipe of Spain is secretly conducting a love affair with Duchess Fergie of York. It's his child Fergie is pregnant with. The English Queen "knows" about this and there is a plot in Buckingham Palace to say the child died at birth and to send it back secretly to Spain. The Pope knows about it. He's threatening to break diplomatic relations with England. Jupiter is aligning with Mercury, causing some problems for Virgo, and Capricorn is taking a shit on Aries. ZSA ZSA GABOR, JUZGADA POR ABOFETEAR A UN POLICIA. Ah, more bosoms. Good. We haven't had tits for at least four pages. Mother Teresa. A Turkish girl with no arms has had a vision of Mother Teresa, and Mother Teresa wants her to build a pedestrian overpass on the outskirts of Munich where she lost her arms after a car hit her. Senator Gallardo Visits with the American Billonario Charles Becker in Iquitos. He Is Flown from Lima in Becker's Private Jet to the Private Yacht and Back Again. Honestly, Gallardo, your country is falling apart and you're spreading your legs for a gringo with a big boat. Look at the two of you together. The billonario looks like he's screwed a few proles in his day too. Well, you two must have had a lot to talk about. How many people you've screwed between you?… Christ, "The Absinthe Drinker"!

"There's something about it. A boat like that, here. It's too out of context."

"He's a rich bastard," said Virgilio, looking through the magnifying glass. "Like Jota Erre."

"Who?"

"On Dallas."

"Dallas?"

"A program. It's… the men watch it sometimes."

"Gringo TV? They're watching gringo television, here, in Yenan?"

"Just sometimes. They're a little bored with the Chinese and Cuban films. They've seen them all a hundred times."

"Virgilio."

"I'll take care of it. Did you notice something in all the pictures?"

"What?"

"No girls."

"Maybe they're going to pick up girls in Tingo, Virgilio."

"They don't look rich. They look more like bodyguards to me. Especially this one. Bundy. And this one. He looks like he's been through the shit, eh?"

The ascots tied around the necks were wrong, somehow, like silk scarves on pit bulls. The names in the captions, Bundy, McNamara, Rostow, sounded familiar, and also wrong.

He put the magnifying glass over the Manet once again. He knew the original was in the Ny Carlsberg Glypotek, in Copenhagen. The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris had an engraving. It was unlikely this was a fake. Rich bastards like this didn't usually go for fakes. He's got Dufys and Picassos in there, a Vlaminck, a Gainsborough, obviously real. So this-my God, it had to be authentic. There was something different about it, but the photo was too grainy to tell. He needed to call Bendinck, in Brussels.

"Niño." Virgilio was pointing at one of the guests. "Look at the way this one is turning away from the camera. He doesn't want his picture taken. I know him."

"Rostow." Something about these names.

"Three years ago, in Tingo, you remember, a DEA guy shot and killed one of Pepi Campo's people?"

"The gringos had to buy him back for a lot of money. It was a big diplomatic mess."

"That's him. That's the one. His name was… it wasn't Rostow. There was a picture of him in La Republica. I remember. That's him."

"Call Yayo in Lima. Tell him to send a fax of it, right away. Immediately, Virgilio."

Bendinck called back and said that Manet's "Absinthe Drinker" was still in the Ny Carlsberg Glypotek. Rupert was his usual gleeful self. "Were you thinking of making a shopping trip?" he asked.

"I can't get away right now. Business."

"Pity. I know the Glypotek very well. I'd love to show it to you."

"Do you know it as well as the Kunsthalle in Mannheim?"

Bendinck laughed. "So, were you thinking of an oil or a sketch?"

"It's hard to tell. It's a black-and-white photograph."

"Does the face look like Baudelaire?"

"I can't tell. To be honest, Rupert, I don't remember what Baudelaire looked like."

"The first was done in 1859. The Salon rejected it-"

"I know-"

"He painted another oil version of it after Baudelaire died, in 1867. Baudelaire scoffed at the first one, which must have hurt, since it was a kind of homage to him. Collardet, the bum in the painting, is right out of one of Baudelaire's poems. I forget which, the one that ends: 'He ends up bloodying his head and stumbling on the cobblestones like the young poets who spend all their days erring and searching for rhymes.' Baudelaire finally went crazy from syphilis, absinthe, laudanum and everything else and some nuns kicked him out of their hospice because he kept swearing from the pain. There's Christian charity for you, eh? In the end, Manet was his best friend. He was there at the funeral, and there weren't many, believe me. It's Baudelaire's face in the second oil. Are you interested?"

"As I say, business is busy."

"Yes, it's in the news."

"What is?"

"Your business. Anyway, it wouldn't be nearly as complicated as Mannheim. It's in a private collection in the U.S. I'm sure the owner can be persuaded to sell."

"Let me think about it."

"Of course. I'll be out of town for a few weeks."

"Where are you off to?"

"Florence. I have a client who's crazy for Quattrocento."

The fax from Yayo wasn't the best quality but the face in the two photographs was the same. He stared from one to the other as he listened to the lawyer in Miami.

"He left DEA after that. Then he went to work for G. Gordon Liddy. You remember him? The Watergate guy. He had a firm down here called Hurricane Force, sort of a private commando team that was supposed to rescue kidnapped executives overseas. That folded, and he went to do security for Marcos, in Hawaii. After that-"

"Yes, good, but where is he now, Ruben?"

"I spoke to his ex-wife, the most recent one. He's got four. She told me he's a mercenary and he kills people and doesn't report the income."

"She told you that? Why?"

"She hates him. He owes her alimony. In fact, she asked me to help her find him."

"Who did you say you were?"

"The IRS. They always cooperate when you say you're the IRS."

"Good thinking. What about Becker?"

The lawyer went through what he had, mostly from Who's Who and the business publications.

"… 1981, formed buyback partnership with 3M Corporation and bought back all public shares of Zacatecas Petroleum, turned around and sold company to T. Boone Pickens for $1.2 billion… 1982 received Knight of Maltahood, or Knighthood of Malta, in recognition of services to-"

"Ya ya, okay, he's rich, he steals from the poor, gives a little back and gets a medal from the Pope. What else?"

"There's not very much on him. He keeps himself inconspicuous. This is all from business magazines. He… was in the papers last year."

"Yes?"

"There was… an incident involving a granddaughter."

"What incident?"

"She, well, it's-"

"Ruben, this scrambler costs forty dollars a minute."

"She had a little… OD."

"Of…"

"Yes, but obviously it's her own fault. You don't blame General Motors if you drive a little too fast and go off the cliff, right?"

The howlers and the capuchins were screeching at each other in the canopy beyond the perimeter. Beyond them the toucans complained and somewhere beyond that he heard the death commotion between a jaguar and a peccary.

Soledad lay naked on the bed, asleep with her thumb in her mouth. He looked from her to the slatted windows and imagined the noises had shapes that came through the window and surrounded her like Fuseli's nightmare creatures. He found himself wishing, for the first time since he had been here, for the reassurance of a city sound, a passing bus, a car horn, a truck, the shout of a cigarette vendor.

He turned to the picture of the gringo on his yacht. His yacht was registered with Lloyd's as Conquistador. Well, it showed he wasn't deaf to the nuances. But Esmeralda was a little clumsy. The conquistadors came also for emeralds.

Well, billonario, do I hand you over to Espinosa? They'll promote him to general, and that's good for me, too.

But does Espinosa deserve you? Espinosa, who wouldn't know a Manet from a Monet, or for that matter, a Manet from a Mapplethorpe.

And you're not the type to put your hands in the air and give up, obviously, since you've come all this way. We don't want bullet holes in "The Absinthe Drinker."

But why bring your Manet on a trip like this, billonario? I can understand the Dufy, the Vlaminck, the Cocteau. But the Baudelaire "Absinthe Drinker"? You don't go into battle with Manets-it's irresponsible!

A light touch is needed. Eladio is needed. Eladio, who can walk across a floor of wet paint and not leave a track. Eladio, who floats on the air of his own beliefs.

"Eladio," he said. "I have dreamed a great white canoe and a kurinku pataa, a pistaco who comes for the grease of your people to make fuel for his rockets."

26

"Obviously I wasn't going to bring it up this morning in front of everyone."

"I appreciate that, Dick."

"It didn't seem like something for the whole cabinet."

"God no. Who's in the loop on this?"

"It's a tight loop, John. A very tight loop. DEA, obviously, me."

"Well, let's keep it tight until, until we can…"

"Get a handle around it. Right."

"As of right now, it doesn't feel, I don't think we need to take it down the hall to him."

"We may not be there yet."

"I don't think we are there yet, Dick."

"Anyway, Bill confirms that he's on this river, the-"

"Bill is in the loop?"

"Well, it's Bill's satellite."

"The NSA has satellites. I would have thought as far as keeping a tight loop goes, that NSA would be better."

"Maybe. Maybe. It's just that Bill's satellites have been monitoring the compliance on the deforestation thing down there and it was on station and, anyway, they're Bill's pictures. Amazing resolution, by the way. You can actually read the lettering on the-"

"Okay. So where does it stand?"

"They're several miles west of the village of Shucushuyacu."

"That doesn't mean anything to me, Dick."

"It just means he's well on his way, basically."

"Where?"

"We don't know that."

"Well, why, why can't we just call him up on the phone, he's got to have a phone, and, and say, 'Look here, we know all about this and get your ass back here on the QT.'"

"There's an open-line problem. Our friends would be listening in."

"Well, we don't have to spell it out. Call him and say, 'This is the AG calling and turn your butt around, buster.'"

"Right. So your thinking is that I should make the call?"

"Well, it is your department, Dick. I mean, DEA is under your roof."

"Sure, but there might be a, a legal thing, a problem there."

"What kind of problem?"

"If I were to call him and say, 'Get back,' it might be construable as an offer, and I'm hardly in a position, oath-of-office-wise, to do that. There's another dimension. We've been kicking Peruvian butt for, for, for years over the extradition thing. Finally we're getting some cooperation and then bango, the top law-enforcement officer goes and, and in direct contravention of the convention notifies the, the perpetrator and doesn't tell GOP-"

"Government of Peru. I mean, it wouldn't be very bilateral of us, would it?"

"You're saying I should place the call?"

"Not necessarily. But I am saying we need to think through the who-makes-the-call situation."

"All right."

"There is the argument that it would carry more weight coming from you."

"Dick, I'm right down the hall from him, if you see what I'm saying."

"A hundred percent. Basically you're saying you're not sure you want to be in the tent on this."

"Well, I'm already in the tent, Dick. You've already put me in the tent."

"Right, well, I thought you'd want to be."

"But the essence of the thing is, is the deniability thing, as far as he is concerned."

"Absolutely."

"So I don't know if it makes sense for me to make the call."

"Well, I think that's, that's a feasible position. We can always fine-tune down the line. As the thing tracks."

"Why couldn't your man call? The one who brought this to you. Say, 'Look here, this is DEA, turn your butt around and, and, and get back here so, so…'"

"So we can arrest you the moment you set foot on U.S. waters."

"I see your point."

"And we'd still have the open-line problem, John. You can't keep a satellite conversation private. Hell, some, some, some, some kid ham operator in Detroit was listening in while Reagan was on Air Force One giving Cap the go-ahead on Grenada."

"Why couldn't he just talk in generalities? People do it all the time, when they don't want… Husbands and wives do it. I do it."

"Sure, but if some specifics get in… I'm not even sure the whole fact of talking to him wouldn't open us up to misprision. You might want to run that by Boyden."

"Jesus. This is…"

"Anyway, you see my point."

"I don't like this, Dick."

"I don't like it either, John."

"It's like, I don't know what it's like, a combination tar baby and can of worms."

"Right. It resonates that way for me, too."

"You know he was a contributor?"

"I didn't know that."

"Yeah. He was a delegate from Virginia."

"There's something else."

"What?"

"His company holds a contract with NASA."

"Oh hell."

"They make something for the shuttle."

"God. You know how he feels about the shuttle."

"Yes, I do."

"The shuttle is, it's, it's an American symbol. He'd feel awful if-he'd feel betrayed."

"I think we all would, more or less."

"Yeah, but for him it would be personal."

"It's not an easy call, John. I'm certainly glad it's not my call."

"Frankly, Dick, I see this more as your buck than my buck. At least from an administrative point of view."

"Sure, it's just, it impacts on up the chain, as you say. There's always, we might let nature take its course, though that might open us up to misprision. Again, I'd want to run that through Boyden."

"Look, never mind Boyden. You're saying, suppose the decision was to say, in effect, to hell with it, it's a Peruvian problem, let them handle it?"

"Right."

"Well, that's, that's certainly an option."

"Trouble is, parsing it out, ultimately it still ends up being our problem."

"How?"

"Well, he's going to be caught, I think we can take that for granted-"

"Wait a minute, I'm not sure I'd take that for granted. I mean, if he's done all this that you say he's done, I'd say he's, he's very, he's certainly capable, in a, a horrible sort of way."

"Sure, but, I mean, he's not in Kansas anymore, John."

"He killed people in Kansas?"

"No no, that's, I mean, where he is is a bad place. Even their military doesn't go in there if they can help it. Or if they do it's just for a quick in-and-out photo op, so they can say, 'We're on top of this.' This river he's on, they just floated twenty decapitated bodies down this river past a military base where we have a few people, just to let us know they knew we were there. It's a very bad place, the Huallaga. It's one of the worst places there is."

"I'm aware of that. I read the newspapers."

"Right. Sorry, didn't mean to, it's just, I don't see how he can't get stopped, by someone, whether it's the authorities or the other side, the Senderos or the dopers. And it'll get out. My God. Symbol-wise, we're talking Disaster City. The Latinos are unbelievably sticky about this sort of thing."

"This sort of thing? This sort of thing has happened before?"

"Not per se-"

"I've certainly never heard of this sort of thing happening before, unless you want to go back to the 1850s, the filibusters, whatsisname, the one who became President of Nicaragua. Walker."

"Right, Walker. It's just, historically, there's a heck of a lot of bad blood under the bridge, and you know, you just know, someone down there is going to stand up and say, 'This is a CIA thing, a JUNC thing, this thing was approved all the way, all the way on up.'"

"It is certainly not an approved thing. It's an outrageous thing, a, a, a, a vile thing."

"Right."

"And frankly it's, it's incredible, that he would get this-to this extent up the river without being caught."

"We did catch him. One of our men caught him, John."

"Well, he didn't catch him. He's, he's tooting his merry way up the Amazon. I don't see how he caught him, Dick. If he caught him, he, he'd be behind bars, consulting with Alan Dershowitz."

"Right, sure, I meant he caught him in the sense that-"

"I don't see that, Dick. I just don't see that. Here you say this guy started killing people in New York City last year."

"He's rich, he's got resources, he's-"

"He's a lunatic, Dick. The man is, is a cross between Ross Perot and, and, and Charles Manson."

"John, with all due respect, and believe me we're grateful, the appropriations support we've been getting from your shop is absolutely magnificent. I just don't think we ought to work ourselves into a shoot-the-messenger mode."

"All right, all right. Okay. Look, we better get a working group on this. But we better get some input from various, I guess we need more input than what we have now."

"Right. Can always use more input. Absolutely."

"But I want a tight loop."

"Absolutely. Tight."

"We want Bill, then? Well, we might as well have Bill in. I mean, he's already in the damn loop."

"We're bound to want his satellite again at some point."

"What about State? Do we want them?"

"My problem with that would be, they always viewfinder from the host country POV. They're just going to take the Peruvian angle and run with it. Or leak. Jim is, well, Jim is doing a superb, superb job, but, well, let's face it, John, Jim leaks."

"Uh-hum. There's another Jim problem. Jim and him are, you know."

"Right. The buddy thing."

"Right. If we loop in Jim, the first thing he's going to do is pick up the phone and-well, okay, Jim's out, for the time being. Anyway, this is just the option-formation stage."

"Fine, good. You probably want to get Ray in the tent."

"Ray-?"

"AsSecDef for SOLIC."

"Can you reconstitute that for me, Dick?"

"Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict?"

"Right. Is SOLIC part of JUNC?"

"I think JUNC is part of SOLIC."

"Oh."

"The Joint Unified Narcotics Command sits on SOLIC, is how I think it works. I'd have to look at the org chart."

"So, well, do we loop in JUNC, or-"

"I'd say, I'd say maybe not at this point. I see this more as a SOLIC thing at this point."

"I'm getting lost here, Dick."

"Right."

27

Beebeeb beebeeb beebeeb.

Charley awoke with a snort to find Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru lying heavily on his chest, his.45 stuck inside the pages as a bookmark.

Beebeeb beebeeb beebeeb. Stopped. Charley blinked the sleep fur out of his eyes and opened the book and tried to get the pages into focus. He was only up to Chapter 2, but he already liked what he knew about Pizarro, mostly on account of his being a bastard like himself, the illegitimate son of a colonel of infantry. Charley hoped he would not turn out to be a disappointment.

"According to some, he was deserted by both his parents, and left as a foundling at the door of one of the principal churches of the city. It is even said that he would have perished, had he not been nursed by a sow."

Suckled by a sow, now there's a man who's starting from scratch. Charley read on.

"This is a more discreditable fountain of supply than that assigned to the infant Romulus. The early history of men who have made their names famous by deeds in after-life, like the early history of nations, affords a fruitful field for invention."

It annoyed Charley that Prescott would give you a wonderful detail like that and then snatch it away-sarcastically at that-but he understood that Prescott had been blinded by a food fight while he was a student at Harvard and even then had gone on to write the immense stories of Cortez and Pizarro, so he was willing to cut him some slack. Besides, he wrote so fine, could raise bumps on your arm. And he probably had to hedge his bets in case some historian from Yale showed up with a piece of parchment signed by the owner of the sow saying it was all true and without his sow Pizarro would have starved in infancy and the official language of Peru would now be Japanese.

Beebeeb beebeeb beebeeb. The hell was that? It was coming from the bedside console somewhere. It sounded like one of those traveling alarm clocks, the small black-plastic German jobs. But he didn't own one. So what was this noise and where was it coming from? Inside the drawer? Just like Germany to make alarm clocks to wake the world out of a deep, soft sleep. There was nothing in the drawer. It was coming from under the drawer.

Beebeeb beebeeb beebeeb. There it was again.

"Felix," he said into the intercom, "I need you."

Felix couldn't figure it out either. It was definitely coming from inside the console somewhere. Charley wanted to take a crowbar to all that gorgeous bird's-eye maple paneling; then it stopped. Felix said it must be a loose circuit somewhere in the intercom system. Charley went back to Prescott. The thrum of Esmeralda's twin diesels began to work on him as Pizarro and his exhausted men hacked their way and came upon "an open space, where a small Indian village was planted. The timid inhabitants, on the sudden apparition of the strangers, quitted their huts in dismay; and the famished Spaniards, rushing in, eagerly made themselves masters of their contents… The astonished natives made no attempt at resistance. But, gathering more confidence as no violence was offered to their persons, they drew nearer the white men, and inquired, 'Why did they not stay at home and till their own lands, instead of roaming about to rob others who had never harmed them?'"

Good question, Charley muttered, eyelids getting heavy.

"Whatever may have been their opinion as to the question of right, the Spaniards, no doubt, felt then that it would have been wiser to do so. But the savages wore about their persons gold ornaments of some size, though of clumsy workmanship. This furnished the best reply to their demand."

A large log banged into the Esmeralda's steel hull so hard it jerked the book in Charley's hands.

"From the Indians Pizarro gathered a confirmation of the reports he had so often received of a rich country lying farther south; and there dwelt a mighty monarch whose dominions had been invaded by another still more powerful, the Child of the Sun."

His eyelids couldn't get a grip on his eyes; like trying to walk uphill on ice.

"It may have been the invasion of Quito that was meant, by the valiant Inca Huayna Capac, which took place some years previous to Pizarro's expedition."

Beebeeb.

Charley slept; and dreamed:

Tasha said to him, "I don't believe this."

"I'm doing it for you."

"Like hell. I will not be your excuse for mass murder, thank you."

"The way you talk."

"I can talk any way I want. I'm dead. I'm beyond you finally, Pops. I have to say it's almost a relief."

"No, you don't mean that. You don't know what you're saying. You're dead."

"How could you kill Timmy? I'm mortified."

"Yeah, well, I don't suppose Timmy is there with you, do I?"

"No one is here. I'm not here."

"Where are you calling from anyway?"

"Nowhere. I have to go now."

"Just tell me where. I'll send Felix to pick you up."

"Oh God, that would be great. I'm in-"

"PLEASE INSERT ANOTHER TWENTY-FIVE DEUTSCHEMARKS OR YOUR CALL WILL BE INTERRUPTED."

"Reverse the charges, operator. This is Charley Becker speaking."

"PLEASE INSERT ANOTHER TWENTY-FIVE MILLION DEUTSCHEMARKS OR YOUR CALL WILL BE TERMINATED."

"I'm telling you, I don't have any damn Deutschemarks. Don't you take dollars, for crying out loud?"

"Pops? Please-"

"THANK YOU FOR USING T‘N’T!"

"Tasha!"

He saw guards in watchtowers singing "Reach Out and Touch Someone" through loudspeakers.

He woke up.

"Felix."

"Jesus!" Felix had been sitting on the bow watching with fascination the confusion of the bats. His Uzi, which had been slung from his shoulder, was now aimed at Charley's chest. "Boss, you shouldn't sneak up like that."

Charley, in his bathrobe, said, "I wasn't sneaking. It's these slippers. What're you doing up?"

"I couldn't sleep. Rostow put real coffee in the urn. I'm watching the bats. Bundy says they're confused by the ship's radar. He says they're getting the radar beams mixed up in their own, that's why they're doing that, flying so close."

"ECM."

"What's ECM?"

"Electronic countermeasures. Jamming. Look at that. I never saw such a thing before. Whoa."

"You better sit down. They're all over."

"I've never seen a bat that size. And I've seen bats."

"I have a theory about that bat," said Felix. "I think he thinks the helicopter is an insect and he's trying to get it to fly so he can swallow it all in one bite. I don't really like it here, boss, you want to know the truth."

"I had a dream."

"I was reading the Cousteau book. You know the catfish in this river get up to seven feet long?"

"Catfish don't bite you."

"But what about the crocodile that eats seven-foot-long catfish?"

"It was about Tasha. She was upset with me."

"Sounds like her."

"She was upset about this."

"That's just your superego speaking."

"I don't think I got all that big an ego."

"Superego is the conscience. Freud started calling it that, so now all the shrinks do. Was she upset about burying them in her clearing on the island?"

"She didn't mention that. What is it with the bodies on the island? I don't see the problem."

"Forget it. She mention me?"

"Yeah, she said hi. Damnit, Felix, it was uncanny, it was like when she used to call home from Madeira."

"They got eels in this river."

"Eels?"

"Electric eels. Put out a hundred volts, enough to kill a man. Some people on Cousteau's expedition were attacked by iguanas."

"Now that's just nonsense. Iguanas don't attack."

"These iguanas do."

"I don't believe it."

"It's in the book. The men were in a canoe and the iguanas jumped down on them from the trees above. They tore apart their shirts with their claws."

"Well, I'm sure it was an aberration. I been around plenty of iguanas in my life and none of them ever attacked me."

"They've got a snake-"

"You ought to read something else, Felix. Look, they got snakes everywhere, practically. Hell, we used to eat snakes at the orphanage all the time. Rat snakes, long-nose, patch-nose, king, diamondback rattlers, all kinds of snakes. Used to go out and look for them on the Harlingen road. I've said grace over road-kill snakes."

"Yeah, well, these would say grace over you."

"I got no beef against God's creatures. There's a beauty in all of them, you just have to look."

"There's this one called a candiru. It's a catfish, technically. If you can find the beauty in this fish, it's all yours. It's the size of a toothpick, okay? And it swims up your dick."

"I don't believe a word of it."

"It's in the book. The natives believe it can swim up your dick while you're taking a piss."

"That is the most-look, I got all sorts of admiration for Cousteau, but you got to remember, he's French."

"What does that have to do with it?"

"Well, they're always exaggerating. Look at that revolution they had."

"Once it gets up into you, it throws out these little spines, like fishhooks. The pain is incredible. You can only get them removed by surgery. And where are you going to find a doctor out here?"

"It was so real. It was her, Felix."

"Rats the size of pigs."

"I was trying to get her to stay on the line, only…"

"Pink dolphins. Those are beautiful. They were the only things in this book I wanted to look at. But even them-the natives say that they screw human women and make them pregnant. It's in the book. I think I heard one the other night when we were anchored. Like a long sigh. Unnnnnhh. That's why the natives think they have souls, because of the sigh. You know why I think they sigh? Because they have to live in the same water with all those other things."

"There was this recording kept telling me to put Deutschemarks in the phone or I'd be disconnected. Deutschemarks. Maybe your buddy Freud could figure that out. It was like it was… Ma Hell speaking. Felix."

"What, boss?"

"You don't think, she can't be. I been over it a hundred times. It was a mistake. I cannot believe that God would send her to Hell for a, for a little mistake."

"She's not in Hell, boss. You want to know the truth, I think we're the ones in Hell."

"It is kind of gloomy at that. Reminds me a little of the Belgian Congo. I ever tell you about the place I saw there where all the parrots go to die?"

"No."

"You never seen such a place. Terrible smell."

"I'm going inside."

"Look out! Sweet Merciful Jesus, will you look at the size of him. Got a wingspread on him like a B-52."

28

"I really don't see how we're getting around the No Foreign Troops thing, Ray."

"'Troops' really means brigade strength. We're just talking about a unit here."

"A unit of troops."

"Well, strictly, legalistically speaking, sure."

"Well, strictly legalistically is, is sure as heck how the Peruvians are going to be speaking if this thing blows up in our faces."

"John has something there, Ray."

"Look, it walks like a duck, flies like a duck, smells like a duck. It's a duck. Let's just all face that. There's no way this thing is, is not a duck."

"It's quacking for me too, Ray."

"Okay, but I'm saying our chances of doing this are in the high eighties, low nineties."

"I'd like to believe that Ray, but, but we just, we just don't really have the track record to, to justify that."

"What about Panama? We managed Panama okay, didn't we?"

"Well, Ray, that wasn't exactly low-intensity. We had twenty-four thousand men involved in, in the Panama thing."

"And women."

"Yeah, all right. The point is, this is more of an Iranian-type thing, not a Panama thing. And you saw what happened there."

"We're not saying that happened on your watch, Ray."

"No, of course."

"In all respect, I disagree. I don't think we are talking about an Iranian-type thing. And if we should discuss the ten percent area where something goes, where the balls aren't breaking our way, then it can be finessed. We could hardly have finessed the Iranian thing."

"Finesse how?"

"Well, as a communications breakdown. You know, SOLIC assumed JUNG had cleared it with GOP, JUNG assumed SOLIC had cleared it with GOP."

"I don't like it, Ray. And I don't think he's going to like it either."

"Have you ever seen SEALs work, John?"

"Well, no. Obviously not."

"Let me tell you something about SEAL Team Six. These boys are, you should see them. Sometime just come down to Little Creek and see them."

"I'm a little busy here, Ray."

"Something like this, for them, it's, it's a Cakewalk. They could do this in their sleep. It's a straightforward helicopter insertion upriver of the yacht. Our boys float till the boat comes by, they glom on to the hull with these little limpet mines, bang, Mr. Becker's yacht suddenly has serious leak problems. Becker and his people have to abandon ship, end of mission. Our boys just keep on floating downstream to their extraction point. I'll tell you what, I'll look into, see if we can't put together an all-Hispanic team so they'll really blend. It's just not that complicated. We're talking about an in-and-out thing."

"I still don't like it."

"Okay. Then what about cutting GOP in?"

"No no no no. I don't think we're there yet. Bill, do you have people on the inside of GOP?"

"That's kind of sensitive, John."

"Bill, we're all Top Secret/Throne-cleared here."

"That's not Throne level."

"Well, what is it, then?"

"The classification is classified."

"Let's try to work together here, Bill. We're all on the same team."

"It's a question of compartmentalizing-"

"Dammit, Bill."

"We have assets within GOP, yes. That's all I can say, really."

"That's very helpful, Bill. Are they reliable?"

"Well, yes. That's why they're assets."

"Yes, but I'm new at all this, I wasn't dealing with this when I was governor, I mean, but it seems to me, especially with this Noriega thing going on, that all our 'assets' are, are having it both ways, collecting two paychecks. I'm just asking if they can be trusted, is all."

"Down there it's usually a pay-as-you-go. With something like this we'd probably be in a bonus situation."

"Wonderful. Do we have any friends, Bill?"

"How do you mean?"

"Does anyone like us, or, or work for us just on the merits? Or is it all just money?"

"Oh. It's all just money."

Esmeralda's anchor chain was taut, links squeaking from the strain of keeping 460 tons of yacht from being swept off in the Huallaga's swift rush. Farther out in the middle of the river, giant logs tore past. Charley had put her nose right against the riverbank, in still water; even so, a wake was burbling out behind her transom.

They sat around the table on which Tallulah Bankhead had allegedly once done the woolly deed. Its fine inlaid surface was covered by a padded tablecloth to protect it from the various metallic objects that were making their rounds: M-16 grenades, radios, collapsible-stock Cars M-16 rifles, CD players and speakers. Bundy was demonstrating grenade etiquette to the new people.

Charley turned on the video and pressed "play."

On came the Becker Industries corporate logo, the eagle holding the globe, which Tasha said looked like a bird trying to dribble a basketball, followed by footage of the space shuttle hurtling through the upper atmosphere. A few seconds later, there were two loud explosions and the solid-fuel rocket boosters separated from the orbiter and began their slow-motion tumble back to Mother Earth.

The voice-over began: "Originally developed for NASA by Becker Industries, High Mass Explosive, or HMX, represents the state of the art in plastic explosives. Here on earth, HMX has literally hundreds of uses. Lightweight, malleable and detonated exclusively by means of an eighty-five percent nitroglycerin power primer controlled by a two-stage safety microchip-also made by Becker Industries-HMX is the first choice of a growing number of government and civilian agencies. With an explosive power of three million pounds per square inch and a flash velocity of twenty-six thousand feet per minute-nearly twenty times the muzzle velocity of a.38 caliber bullet-it's clear why the professionals turn to HMX."

"This wasn't made for… us?" asked Bundy.

"No," said Charley. "Our sales people use it when they make their rounds. Fire departments, mostly. Police Emergency Services. It's good for when you need to get through a wall in a hurry. Plus some government agencies. Delta Force uses it."

"Oh, okay," said McNamara. "Play-Doh."

"How's that?"

"That's what Delta calls it, Play-Doh."

"You get more bang for your buck than with C-4," said Charley. "A lot more. Your basic C-4 just doesn't compare with this stuff. We package it for Delta special, to look like one of those family-size toothpaste pump dispensers. We add peppermint and candy-cane colors so it'll get past the dogs."

The screen showed technicians putting a stick of it inside an old armored car. "Watch this," said Charley. "That's a twelve-hundred-grain stick, less than a quarter pound. Watch."

"Jesus."

"I'm standing one hundred yards away when they did that. I took Natasha along. She was just a little girl at the time. Anyway, one of my earplugs was in wrong. Didn't hear right for a week after that. Hell of a sound."

Charley pressed "stop." He passed the V-shaped stick down the table. Bundy and McNamara were at ease with it; the others handled it as if it would go off if they breathed on it wrong.

"Not gonna bite you. You can put it in the oven, hit it, light a match to it, stick it up your ass and fart, it will not go off without the nitro chip. Okay now, you all met Hot Stick here. They don't call him that for nothing. He's won the Scale Masters Championship three times. That's the World Series of UAV flying, so listen up. Hot Stick, talk to us."

"Yes, sir. First I want to say that me and my crew are proud to be part of the team."

Bundy and McNamara looked at each other dubiously.

"If I could, I'd like to take the opportunity to give the boys a little background on UAVs."

"All right, but we got a full agenda."

"Roger dodger. These aircraft go by different names. UAV, for unmanned aerial vehicle, RPV, for remotely piloted vehicle, or just RC, for remote-controlled. People who don't know better call them 'model airplanes.'"

"Now, the UAV, as we know it, originated during World War II when the Army needed to train antiaircraft gunners. Up to then they'd been towing targets, banners or drogues, behind airplanes and letting the ack-acks bang away at them. The trouble was, they tended to lose pilots, so they started to think in terms of self-propelled vehicles. I know Mr. Becker here is familiar with Project Aphrodite. That was sort of our answer to Hitler's doodlebugs, the V-1 and V-2 rockets. The Navy would take B-17s and B-24s that were coming up on the end of their service lives, rig them so they were remote-capable, pack them full of high explosives. The pilot and copilot would get them off the ground and up over the English Channel and then bail out. They put a sort of TV camera on it so a third pilot, flying alongside, could guide the bomber to its target. That's how young Joe Kennedy was killed. The bomber he was flying blew up on him over the Channel."

"I think we're all set on the history, thank you, Hot Stick."

"Roger. Real briefly then, the technology has come quite a ways since then. In the fifties RPVs were basically just your stick-and-stringer balsa-wood units that took hours and hours to build. Now we make the bodies out of preformed fiberglass or foam core. Then in 1972 J. J. Scozzufavva and Bob Violett developed the first ducted-fan jet engine and turned the UAV world upside-down. Now we had twenty-three thousand RPMs, speeds of up to a hundred fifty miles an hour. From the ground, you cannot tell the difference between these aircraft and the real thing."

"Horseshit," said McNamara.

"Except perhaps in the field of sound. A ducted-fan two-stroker will give you scale speed, but it won't give you scale sound. That's where those CD players you boys will be planting around the target perimeter will come in."

Bundy said to McNamara, "Boys?"

"As the UAVs approach, they'll transmit a signal to the boom boxes and activate the CD sound track. Mr. Dolby here has figured out a way to give us perfect stereo. Right, Dolby?"

"Uh huh."

"As they approach the perimeter, the signal will trigger the boom boxes on the near side, then as they fly by, the signal will activate the boom boxes on the other side of the perimeter."

Dolby said, "The problem I'm having, I mean, are we limited to these small jobs here? I mean, they'll do it, but they're only hundred-watt. I was telling Hot Stick earlier, I could rig us up some four-hundred-watt, eighteen-inch subwoofers with tuned ports and really push some air, you know what I'm saying? Make these dudes think we're the Monsters of Rock. But we'd need more juice. We could get it out of that portable generator you got down in engine room."

McNamara said, "I'm not humping a sixty-millimeter mortar, eighteen-inch speakers and a damn generator into the jungle."

Dolby shrugged. "Too bad, man. Be a totally awesome sound."

"I think the hundred-watt speakers will do fine," said Charley. "Hot Stick?"

"The important thing will be for Mac to time his mortar bombardments to my flybys. Think you can handle that?"

Mac looked at Bundy. Bundy shrugged, as if it would be too much effort. Hot Stick proceeded, unfazed.

"I'm pleased to say our attack profile will include one of the first true turbine UAVs, built by Mr. Brian Seegers himself. Brian doesn't know about this particular application of his technology, but I'm certain that if he did, he would be proud to be taking part in the war on drugs."

Charley stirred. "This isn't the war on drugs, son. This is my war."

"Yes, sir. As you know, true turbines won't give you scale speed, only about a hundred miles an hour. But they will give you scale sound."

"I'm counting on it."

"I can deliver a hundred and ten decibels at a hundred feet. But the main advantage of the true turbine, for our purposes, isn't sound, but heat. Ordinarily these engines run so cool you can put your hand to the exhaust. Since we're not worried about reusability, I'm using a low-temperature grease in the shielded bearings and choking up on the ram air inlet, plus running a mix of thirty-five percent nitromethane into the fuel spray manifold. She's going to run hot."

"Hot enough to draw a heat-seeking missile?"

"I guarantee it. I'm pretty sure, anyway."

"Good, 'cause you're gonna be up there in the chopper with me. You don't think adding thirty-five percent nitro is a little on the combustible side?"

"No problem."

"Okay, talk to us about the attack profile. We're going in in three waves?"

"Correct. First in will be the A-10 Thunderbolt. One-to-seven scale. She's configured right for the turbines, plus the Peruvian Air Force flies Thunderbolts, so it won't look out of place."

"You got her all decaled?"

"'Fuerza Aerea Peruana,' yes, sir. I thought it'd be better to wait till the last minute, in case we got inspected back in Iquitos."

"Good thinking."

"Thunderbolt's radio designation will be Slow Boy. Now, the second wave will consist of the two F/A-18 Blue Hornets. They're one-to-twelve scale. These are just-I can't say enough about these aircraft. They just never let you down. These will be our real workhorses, with U.S. markings. They'll look like they just blasted off the deck of the Nimitz. Their radio designations are Slim Jim One and Slim Jim Two."

"The third and final wave is Fat Albert. We're assembling him right now. Fat Albert is a one-to-seven-scale version of the Grumman A-6E Intruder."

"Aw, shit." said McNamara.

"There a problem?"

"Go on," said Charley.

"We're going with the 6E configuration instead of the 6A on account of the increased payload factor. The Intruder carries two tandem triplets of five-hundred-pound bombs. Ours will be carrying two tandem triplets of six-hundred-grain HMX bombs. We're talking payload here. You boys who took part in the Vietnam conflict-"

"Conflict?"

"Well, we never actually declared war, as I understand. However, you may recall that the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong nicknamed this aircraft quote the Miniature B-52 unquote, and for good reason. I've never seen a one-to-one-scale A-6E in action, but I've read everything there is to-"

"I have," said McNamara. "I saw one wipe out a whole field of infantry once, just like that."

"I bet it was some sight, huh?"

"Yes, it was. First Batt, First Marines. It was some fucking sight."

"Uh huh. Well, shit happens."

Mac stared.

"Usually it was a Forward Air Controller calling up bad coordinates, not the pilot," said Hot Stick.

"Couldn't find enough of the FAC to ask him. Had to ask the pilot himself. Tracked him down up in Seattle afterward. That happens here, going to track you down."

"This probably won't mean anything to you, but I learned how to fly UAVs from Dennis Crooks and Bob Fiorenze."

"And I learned how to remove lungs from Master Sergeant Bob Ruckhauser."

"Boys, boys," said Charley, "we're all on the same team here, let's try to remember."

"Well, what about that accident he had?" said Mac. "You win one of your Scale Masters trophies for wiping out a section of grandstand, Dip Stick?"

"That was a faulty fuel-control unit."

"So?"

"We few," Charley murmured, "we happy few, we band of brothers."

"And even then I was able to get her into an easy graveyard spiral. You have any idea how hard that is to do? It wasn't my fault they all stood there with their binoculars like a bunch of sheep."

Charley said, "Now, I'm sure we all got things in our pasts we'd like to change if we had the chance. We can talk about it on the way downriver. What we need to talk about now is… What's the matter with him? Dolby? Has he been drinking?"

Dolby, sitting down at the end near the passageway into the salon, had pitched forward onto Tallulah's table.

"Damnit, Dolby, this is no time to take a nap."

Bundy saw it first, a sliver of bamboo protruding from the pony-tail. The end of the stick was wound with wool dipped in clay for ballast and a tight seal when the dart was propelled with a blast of air through the hollow shaft. The tip, coated with the sweat of a tiny black-and-yellow frog, was embedded a half-inch deep in the muscles of Dolby's neck, a short hop to the brain.

30

"I don't care if the Army feels left out, Ray. For God's sake."

"It's just, they feel there's an Army dimension to it."

"I don't see what. It's a river, isn't it? A river is water, isn't it? Water is Navy material, isn't it?"

"Sure, but if you look at the broader context-"

"This is exactly what happened with the Grenada thing. Every branch of the service had to have its thumb in the pie."

"From an Army point of view-"

"Same with the Iranian thing."

"We may be apple-and-oranging here."

"What happened to our loop here, Ray? Dick? This loop is getting out of hand. It's not even a loop anymore. It's a, a Beltway. You've got the Navy, the Marines, now you want the Army in on it."

"The Seventh Special Forces Group is on station down there, in Santa Lucia. The feeling is they have a feel for the area. Besides, John, this came from Colin, not me."

"It came from Colin?"

"Well, Colin is Army."

"We just keep adding to this, Ray. We just keep adding and adding and adding. You're going to come in here tomorrow and tell me there's a, a Coast Guard dimension. Why don't we get the, the Army Corps of Engineers while we're at it. Why don't we have them go down there and build a dam so he can't get upstream."

"It's still a tight loop. If it's the loop you're worried about, you know what the Airborne motto is."

"No, I do not."

"'Land softly, kill quietly.' You don't have to worry about leaks from the Army."

"I'm not worried about leaks. I'm worried we're going to need an aircraft carrier to transport everyone. And then you'll tell me we need submarines to protect it."

"It's just that SOLIC draws on all the services, John, so it's only natural that all the services would want, would want to input the thing. But I'll go back and tell Colin that you're dead set against the Army dimension. I'll just say, 'John says no Army.'"

"No. All right, look, if Colin wants the Army on board, if he really thinks-whatever."

"I think that's a good call."

"But I want it on the record that I think this thing is turning into a nine-hundred-pound gorilla."

"It just looks that way."

"Bill, what about things at your end? Are we nailed down?"

"I didn't think we were there yet."

"We're not, I just want to know if, is it nail-downable if we do get there?"

"We're more at the probing stage. We're trying to find out who knows what. You've got to know where to put the nails."

"I appreciate that, Bill. But when I take this package down the hall, I don't want to have to tell him, 'Everything's set except for Bill's end. He's looking where to put the nails.'"

"No, we're, we're working something inside DINTID."

"Direccion de Investigaciones de Narcoticos y Trafico Ilicito de Drogas. It's within PIP."

"PIP? Never mind."

"Policia de Investigaciones del Peru. Federales. Their version of the FBI. Though I don't think Dave would like to hear it put that way."

"Are we saying to them, 'We may need you down the line, stand by'? Is that the particular nail you're trying to figure out where to put?"

"That's close enough."

"Well, okay, but are they in a position to damage-control it if we get into the banana-peel situation?"

"That's the idea. The problem is containing the information. Down there the shit floats uphill, if you follow."

"No, I don't follow, Bill. I just don't want to have to go down the hall and tell him, 'The problem is that down there shit floats uphill.' He's not going to know what I'm talking about and I'm not going to know what I'm talking about."

"We're talking about corruption."

"Our-this asset is corrupt, is that it?"

"No, but you want to be careful. One individual we were using down there turned out to be drawing five paychecks, three of them from U.S. agencies. Us, DEA and Customs. And two from competing dopers. Counting his PIP paycheck I suppose that makes six."

"Well, that's just wonderful. That's just dandy. I hope whoever this new asset is has a little more, more self-respect."

"The guy with six paychecks had lots of self-respect."

"Entirely unwarranted, if you want my input. All right, are we, is that it, then? Dick?"

"There's something, I don't know if you want to put it on the table now or down the line. But say we get him back."

"That's the whole point, Dick, to get him back to the United States."

"Right, so are we then in a prosecuting situation?"

"You're darn right we are. We're in a very prosecuting situation. The man is a criminal, Dick. He needs to be locked up."

"Right, absolutely. But we still have the symbolism problem, space-shuttle-wise, and the international problem, plus the other problem."

"What other problem, Dick?"

"Well, let's assume he's going to have some pretty good legal representation. You want to talk about nine-hundred-pound gorillas, my God. You can imagine who's going to be on that defense team. And the opening statement to the jury is going to be that the U.S. government ought to be a, a co-defendant, because they knew all about it and that's misprision, and obstruction, to say nothing of convention violation and, and well, about fourteen other things."

"We're not there yet, Dick."

"And there's, you know, a lot of people are going to be cheering him on. The Rich Man's Bernhard Goetz. One man's war against drugs and, and we stopped him."

"From irreparably ruining U.S.-Peru relations, you're darn straight."

"I just don't think Joe Six-Pack out there frankly gives a shit about U.S.-Peru relations, John. Maybe the Op-Ed gang, but that's about it. I think Joe is going to be cheering for Charley Becker, you want my frank opinion."

"I'm just saying-"

"I know what you're saying."

"John, I think what Dick is saying-"

"I know what Dick is saying, Bill."

"Actually, I wasn't saying that."

"Saying what?"

"What you were telling Bill I was saying."

"Maybe the thing to do is go the ad hoc route. Let it ripen a little and look at it then."

"We could do that. We could definitely do that."

"I don't have any problem with that."

31

The shotgun pointed at his face was an old hammer-action twelve-gauge, Charley estimated from the width of the muzzle, possibly a sixteen, and covered with as much rust as the twentieth century had been able to provide so far, making it impossible to read the barrel markings and see if he was about to be killed by a Remington or a Savage. He would not have been musing on this but for Mac's quick reflexes. Seconds after Dolby had keeled into his bowl of eternal soup, Mac had pulled his 9mm pistol out and aimed at the Indian closest to him, whose needle-nosed bamboo spear had no doubt been dipped in something similar to whatever was now puddling in Dolby's stilled bloodstream.

Charley didn't allow his eyes to roam too widely around the dining room for fear of seeming rude to the man who was holding the rusty Winchester-or whatever it was-on him, but he thought there must be better than a half dozen of them. For the moment it was unclear who their CEO was. The pressure was definitely building, though, he could feel it in his eardrums, and it was just a matter of time before Hot Stick said or did something that would get them all killed before you could reach three-Mississippi, so he had to do something, only trouble was what?

It was like getting a dog outdoors on a cold winter's day, but Charley coaxed his zygomaticus muscles into a smile and said, "Hola," Spanish for hello. A little lame, but all that came to mind under the circumstances, and it had the advantage of utter neutrality. Only someone suckled on witch tit would take offense at that, and the man with the shotgun did not have an unkindly face. Charley had to read it through red achiote juice and purple tattoo stippling, but the eyes seemed to belong to a man he could do bidness with, as they say in Texas.

Think, now. My yacht is your yacht? My name is Charley, what's yours? Into these lucubrations intruded a keen desire to urinate. He did not relish the prospect of appearing incontinent in front of his men, so he said the next word that dog-paddled across the synaptic gulf: "Bienvenido." Welcome.

"Bien… venido," he heard Felix repeat. Soon there was a general murmuring of bienvenidos, except from Mac and Bundy, who were not the types to indulge in pleasantries, however strategic, with minatory strangers.

The Indians made no response to these imbecilic pleasantries, but neither did they open fire, and this Charley welcomed, even if he doubted they were going to be able to make an all-night mantra out of it.

The Indian's eyes went for a second to Charley's wristwatch, a quick flicker, then back to the crater he was contemplating making in the middle of Charley's skull. A gold Rolex was a small coal in Newcastle aboard a yacht like Esmeralda, but it was portable, certainly it was that, and Charley was rehearsing how to get it off his wrist in one easy and unthreatening motion when the Indian dropped his shotgun, just an inch but enough to reveal the objects dangling from the thong of dried capybara gut around his neck. Charley saw teeth which he recognized from the pictures in Cousteau as coming from the boto, from the pink dolphin. Between them was a crucifix. It was handmade, two polished twigs of dark wood tied together with human hair-crude, but truer to the genuine article than what swung from so many pierced earlobes these days.

Moving his hand very slowly, Charley pointed at the crucifix, then at his own chest, where he traced the outline with his finger hard enough to leave a little white welt template before the blood flooded back into the exsanguinated capillaries. The faded cross tingled on Charley's sternum. We share the same God or X marks the spot, he could take it either way.

Eladio leveled the shotgun at the pistaco's chest and tightened around the trigger. He told himself not to look directly into the eyes so the pistaco would not draw his strength out of him. Hunting pistaco was like hunting jaguar: you must not look into the eyes and you must not utter its true name or it will become ferocious.

The pistaco was pretending to be afraid of the gun. But Eladio knew that the pistaco could not be killed by a gun. They had to be crushed until the bones showed and the eyes were pulled out and burned so they could not follow you afterward. Truly, killing a pistaco was more difficult than killing a jaguar. He wanted to start killing this one before he made any more kistian signs on his skin, but he knew without turning to look that the two large pistacos, giants, truly, had been fast with their guns, and if he shot their headman they would kill his son Zacari and some of the others before they themselves could be killed. The large ones had the look of true grease stealers. How many had they cut up into pieces and boiled to get the human oil for their Challenger rockets? Already he could feel the pistaco's voice singing inside him. The killing must begin. He stood back so that the shotgun would get both the pistaco's eyes with one shot. True, it would be better first to crush the skull and then remove the eyes, but he saw no other way. The iwishin could tell him what to do, but the shaman was old and no longer went out on the hunt. He asked Tsewa, headman of the spider monkeys, who taught his ancestors the blowgun and the hunting songs. Tsewa told him to begin.

"Apu! Apu!" The voice came from the main salon. An Indian came running with a face like he'd seen God and spoke excitedly to the Indian whose finger, Charley was certain, was about an eighth of an ounce of trigger pressure from scattering his brain all over Tallulah's table, increasing its value as an artifact only marginally.

He was pointing in the direction of the salon, saying the same word over and over: "Tsugki. Tsugki." Charley saw there was something else in Shotgun's eyes now, the shadow of a doubt. His gun lowered a few inches, a useful barometric indication of how things stood between them. Shotgun looked at Charley and there were no words necessary, it couldn't have been clearer: I'm going into the next room to check out this tsugki situation my man here is telling me about, and you better pray I like what I see. Charley did pray, prayed like an EPIRB beacon in a shark-surrounded life raft beaming up SOS bursts at the cold stars above, hoping one of them was a plane.

They squatted and sat on the salon carpet in front of it. It was going through one of its waterfall cycles, shimmery, iridescent strands of blue light cascading over invisible rocks into a moonlit pool. When a new cycle began, they sighed in unison. Charley said, "Maybe it would be a good idea if you passed around some snacks and soft drinks. Nothing with caffeine."

Felix approached with a cordless phone and an Uzi submachine gun. He had two handguns tucked inside his waistband. Felix was armed. Everyone had undergone a personal defense buildup. Hot Stick had so many bulbous grenades dangling off him he looked like an overdecorated Christmas tree. Charley's.45 was bolstered, though with safety off. For the time being things were under control. What Charley feared most was a generator malfunction. Rostow was in the engine room making sure all the needles were in the black; Felix had been on the phone to the vice-president for Operations, up in Rosslyn.

He stood beside Charley, keeping his eyes on the Indians. "I've got someone on the line," he said. "Untermeyer found him through the Smithsonian. It's three A.M. his time. I explained it as much as I could. I thought you should speak to him. His name is Tierney. Untermeyer says he's an ethnographer."

"Ethnographer," Charley repeated in the dreamy tone of voice everyone was using, for fear a single hard consonant would spark the charged air inside Esmeralda's salon and turn it into a combustion chamber. "An ethnographer is someone…"

"He knows about Amazon Indians."

"Okay," said Charley. "Let's see just what he knows." He took the phone from Felix and punched the "hold" button and said in his Monday-morning voice, "Sorry to barge into your sleep like this, Mr. Tierney, but I got a little situation here could use some ethnographizing. I don't know what my associate here told you, but it boils down to I got about a dozen extremely hostile Indians here in my living room all making eyes at a piece of moving art I got on board, sculpture with lights in it, and they look like they're hunkered in for the wet season… How do I know they're hostile? One of my people's dead with a dart sticking out of him… No, they weren't provoked… I appreciate that, but the deforestation of the Amazon is not the issue here, Mr. Tierney. I happen to be a life member of the Sierra Club. Anyway, it was about to get worse when one of 'em started shouting, 'Soo-gi' and the rest of them went running in like they heard Elvis Presley was back from the dead and giving a free concert… I really couldn't spell it for you, Mr. Tierney… Uh-huh, uh-huh… Same linguistic group. You're saying they are the headhunters or they're related to the headhunters?"

"What?" said Felix.

"Related. All right, then. Good. Fine. Great." Charley cupped the phone and said, "They're just related… Yeah, I'm here. All right, you know what soo-gi means?… Uh-huh, uh-huh… Well, it's about five foot high, looks like a stele, you know, one of those stone deals they used to put on a dead warrior, got a motor in it runs light through fiber optics, does patterns… What kind of patterns? Patterns, like, I don't know. Right now it's doin' like a rainbow and they're moanin' and groanin'… Yeah, I can hold."

Eladio said to his son Zacari, "How do you think it works?"

"Tierney? You there?… Don't fall asleep on me now, we're almost finished."

Rostow, Mac, Bundy and Hot Stick were standing by with their weapons pointed at the congregation of Aguaruna as casually as it could be done without being rude, trying to provide comfort for Felix, who crouched next to the Stele, perspiring heavily over a soldering iron, a converter and a picnic cooler full of two dozen size-D batteries. The batteries were all soldered together in series. He soldered a wire from the negative end of the first battery and ran it to the converter, then attached another wire from the positive nipple of the last battery to the converter. The Indians seemed to regard his ministrations as unobtrusive, but the real test was coming.

"Ready," said Felix.

Charley said, "Everybody ready?" He saw Hot Stick reaching for one of his grenades. "No, Hot Stick."

"I've got to pull the hundred and ten plug before I can hook up the DC bank," said Felix.

"How long is that going to take?"

"I don't know, boss."

"All right, it's all right."

"I'm not an electrician," said Felix.

"I sure as hell hope you are," said Bundy.

"Okay," said Charley, "here we go. Don't shoot me, boys." He waded into their midst and stood in front of the Stele so as to block their view of it and addressed himself to Shotgun, sitting in the front row.

"On behalf of everyone, I'd just like to say what a real pleasure it's been to have you all visit with us…"

Felix pulled the plug. The Stele went dead. The Indians gasped.

"It was specially nice that you all could take the time to kill all of my crew, except for these gentlemen here…"

Shotgun was on his feet with an angry look.

"And I think I can speak for them when I say how pleased they are that you decided not to kill them as well…"

Shotgun aimed his weapon. It was about to end in a mutual massacre, an exchange of double-ought buckshot,.455 and.385, frog darts and bamboo blades, and before it was over Hot Stick would probably toss in one of his grenades just to make sure no one survived, when all of a sudden a fireworks display lit up the surface of the Stele.

The Indians sighed. And it was good.

They lowered it from davits into their longest dugout canoe.

Shotgun spoke to Charley. "Kurinku pataa," he said. The ethnographer yawned at the other end of the line that kurinku was a corruption of the Spanish gringo. Pataa meant headman.

The Indians paddled away in the darkness, the Stele upright in the dugout like a weird grandfather clock from another world. A red sun rose on its surface, burst into a fiery dandelion, then fell, streaming in tendrils through the vastness of space, into the black night water of the Huallaga.

32

"No. Absolutely not."

"DEA thought that under the circumstances, since it was their thing-"

"We've got the Navy, the Marines, the Army, now you want DEA. I knew this was going to happen, Dick. Why don't we just get a 747 to fly them all down there?"

"It's his case, John."

"It is not 'his case,' Dick. Not anymore. It's bigger than that now. My God, it's on my desk now."

"I realize that. It's just that DEA made a, a deal with Diatri."

"What do you mean?"

"Without bogging you down in the details, it, basically Diatri got a commitment from, from DEA that he would be in on the, that he would be part of the package."

"I don't understand. Commitment. Who are we talking about here, a, a GS-12?"

"Thirteen. He's a Senior Agent. He passed up a promotion to Group Supervisor so he could stay on the beat. DEA says he's good, very good. In fact, you remember the five-ton seizure in Jacksonville?"

"Of course."

"The one he went down there for, for the photo op and handshake?"

"Yes."

"That was Diatri's bust. Here's the photo of the two of them together. He even signed it for him."

"He signs photos for everyone, Dick. He's, he's that way. It's the noblesse oblige thing."

"Right, it's just-"

"I'm sure he's a fine agent, first-rate, but why the hell does he have to be part of the, the military aspect? Unless he's good with mines, for God's sake."

"As I understand it, they were about to medical him out on a Disability when he broke the case. He wasn't happy about that and apparently used the fact he'd broken the case as a bargaining chip to get them to keep him on."

"What kind of shop are they running over there?"

"A very good shop, John. It's just, the Administrator is very protective of his people. So he made the arrangement with him."

"Then he made one he wasn't able to keep."

"The sense I got is that if Diatri isn't part of the package, he's not going to be happy."

"I'm not in the happiness business, Dick."

"This is Sensitive City, here, John. I don't think it's going to do us any good if, if, you know, here we are doing the war on drugs and cashiering our front-line soldiers."

"In a war, if you get wounded, you get sent home. With honor."

"That's not how he sees it, apparently."

"I don't give a hoot how he sees it. I never imagined this job would entail haggling with, with GS-13s. It's not dignified, Dick."

"I hear you. But all they did was tell him he could be in on the package. After that they're, they've got a plan. They're going to stick him in Congressional Relations. Diatri doesn't know that, by the way. They'll tell him that once it's over."

"Congressional Relations? I would have thought, he looks a little rough-hewn for Congressional Relations."

"They like that. The rough-hewn look. It plays well."

"All right, he can go, but that is absolutely it. I don't want anyone else coming in here and saying, 'Oh, my Aunt Martha needs to go.'"

"Fine, right. When are you going to take this down the hall?"

"When he gets back from fishing."

"Good thinking."

"If we get into the banana-peel situation, I'll want you to be point man. Take over, damage-control it."

"Me? I would have thought Ray."

"You and Ray, I mean. I've already explained it to Ray."

"Uh-huh. What's your thinking as far as my, my being out front?"

"I don't want this washing up on his doorstep, Dick. We need to create some, some insulation. For his sake."

"Right."

"And I'm just down the hall from him, so if my doorstep gets wet, so does his, if you follow."

Only an hour of light left. Virgilio and Mirko sat dozing in the bucket seats of their respective high-performance boats. Their men lay about the wooden floating dock with their weapons on their stomachs, listening to the same Julio Iglesias tape they had been listening to all day and it was starting to get on his nerves. Eladio and his men should have been back hours ago. The yacht was only ten kilometers downriver from Yenan. Assuming they had made their attack the night before, that would give them more than enough time to be back here.

"Don't you have something else to play? Something classical?"

The man closest to the tape player said respectfully, "Si, Niño," and took out the Julio Iglesias and after a thoughtful rumination over the bag of tapes, made a selection to please his patron. Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," sung in Spanish by Charo, filled the muggy riverine air.

"Okay, Niño?"

"Yes," he said, too preoccupied to manage more than slight annoyance. He had in mind Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra or the Asturias of the incomparable Albeniz, who had run away from his home in Spain at the age of nine, stowed away on a boat to Central America and returned home a man of the world at the age of thirteen. He tried to lose himself in the endless permutations of the surface of the water as it tumbled downriver, toward his enemy billonario.

He felt it happening: the malarial memory coming back at him again. He was back on that accursed golf course with her father.

"It's not Amanda who wants to break it off, Antonio. She's terribly fond of you. She's doing it for me. I know you're from a very good family down there, but let's face it, everything's so darn unstable down there. I just wouldn't be happy thinking my daughter was going to be caught up in the midst of some political kafuffle. I don't know about you, but I'm dying for a gin and tonic. What say we head in? I must say, you're being awfully mature about all this, Antonio."

He wondered, for the sixth or seventh time, if he should have given Eladio a radio. No. Might as well tie a radio to a butterfly.

He had, however, given Eladio a briefing on the dangers of this particular pistaco. The pistaco mythology went back-as far as anyone could trace-to 1571. It was the Indians' way of explaining the Spanish Conquest. Sendero Luminoso had revived the myth in the 1980s as a way of turning the people against the Army, with tremendous effect. Tales of horror wrought by pistacos were retailed every day. Eladio himself had described to him, in nearly journalistic detail, a slaughter of 30,000 Indians by pistacos, how they had hacked off all their limbs and thrown them into a giant cooking pot and sold the rendered grease to the North Americans for their machines, especially the rockets that they sent into the sky to impregnate the moon and create monster children who would ride back down to earth on the backs of meteors, ghastly, shrieking creatures who vomited hot lava.

The forest was the cradle of extravagant animism. Eladio's people believed that everything had a soul, often more than one. And yet the legend of the pistaco, the troll-thug who kills to obtain human grease, was hardly peculiar to the Amazon. During World War I the British government's propaganda mechanism insinuated into the public imagination stories of the German "Corpse-Rendering Works," where the dead bodies of fine young English soldiers were melted down to grease German artillery pieces; while across the Channel stories were circulated about the British "Tallow Works" of like ghastliness.

He had told Eladio not to touch anything on the boat. Everything was possessed-especially the pictures-by iwanchin, the shadow souls who can turn themselves into anything, deer, owl, butterfly, in order to kidnap the children of the Indians.

Kill them quickly, Eladio, and touch nothing. The boat itself must be disposed of according to certain rituals, which I myself will perform.

So-where was Eladio? He tried to close his mind off from disturbing images of a firefight aboard the yacht. He saw "The Absinthe Drinker" shot up with holes, Baudelaire's manic eyes peering out from under the brim of his top hat, bursting into flames, the boat rocked by explosions-

"Esteban!"

"Si, Niño?"

"Turn off that shit! I said classical."

Puzzled, Esteban switched off Charo. The crepuscular sounds of the river reasserted themselves-frog, cricket, beetle, bird-until they were drowned out by an organ version of "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing."

34

Charley stepped out onto Esmeralda's flight deck wearing his flight suit and.45 snugged in its shoulder holster and took a deep breath. He hadn't slept but a few hours since the Indian attack, and for the first time since it had all begun, he felt his age. It was dark out, an hour to sunrise. Hot Stick was leaning over one of the UAVs-Fat Albert-adding nitromethane to the fuel mixture. Charley's nostrils tingled from the vapors; it woke him up, gave him a little energy charge. The smell was familiar somehow; then he remembered sitting in the back of the limousine with his sinuses full of gun oil, on the way to the morgue with Felix.

He reached inside the chopper for the radio handset. "Where is everyone?"

"Grasshopper Three, in position."

"Grasshopper Four, in position."

"One and Two, where are you?" Charley said. "State your positions, please."

Felix's voice came on. "Mac says we're a hundred yards from our position. I think we're lost. I can't see anything. Over."

Charley said, "Roger that. Stand by. We are preparing to launch." He gave Hot Stick the signal.

Hot Stick had the leaf blower going, funneling air into the turbines of the Thunderbolt to get them spinning. He held up the spark coil in his other hand and said, "Ready." Charley nodded. He touched the spark coil to the engine. A burst of flame appeared from the afterburner. Charley nodded again; Hot Stick hit the lever release on the catapult and the A-10 shot off Esmeralda's cantilevered flight deck.

Hot Stick maneuvered the joysticks on one of the five Futaba transmitters, bringing Slow Boy into a holding pattern above Esmeralda. The Futabas were all wired into a Toshiba laptop computer. He switched Slow Boy's controls over to the computer and got ready to launch the two F/A-18s, already positioned in the bow cats. Charley nodded; Hot Stick released the two levers and the Blue Hornets sailed off, climbing effortlessly as if their small size exempted them from gravity's demands, joining Slow Boy.

Charley and Hot Stick lifted Fat Albert out of its cradle and onto the catapult, gingerly, considering. Hot Stick fired its engine and sent it off. They watched the fireball climb and join the three orange specks circling two hundred feet above.

Charley was about to say some words he'd memorized from the St. Crispin's Day speech in Henry V when Hot Stick said, "Awesome, huh?" He climbed into the Hughes with his control apparatus and strapped himself in.

Charley crossed himself. Then he went forward to Esmeralda's flagstaff. He hauled it up the halyard: a red-and-white pennant followed by an "S" pennant, then a "Q" pennant and a "I" pennant. They hung there undramatically in the breezeless pre-dawn air. He climbed into the Hughes and closed the door and started the helicopter's engines.

"What's with the flags?" Hot Stick shouted over the roar.

"'I Am Attacking,'" said Charley.

It is tricky taking off from the small deck of a boat in a helicopter, and Charley was a tad rusty at it. You need to create what's called "ground-effect cover"-the cushion of air that holds the craft up. The moment a helicopter moves off over the water, it's like a trapdoor dropping underneath; you have to put your nose down to gain compensating forward speed.

Charley powered up to a hundred percent, moved off over the water and then pushed down on the cyclic stick between his legs, which put the chopper's nose down. He overdid it. Suddenly all he could see was river, coming up at him too fast. He pulled back on the collective, increasing the pitch of the rotor blades, and forcing more air over them, giving the craft lift. The skids dipped into the water. They were water-skiing. Finally the skids came out of the water. He gained speed quickly and climbed to a hundred feet.

"This is Dragonfly," he said into the radio. "I am airborne."

Hot Stick had lost all his color. Charley said to him, "That's the hardest part, taking off."

They were in the boathouse, everyone dozing. Eladio had still not returned.

Popo's voice came over the radio, loud and excited, "Niño, Niño! I have something on the radar. One definite target and something else, I can't tell, it's not clear."

"What's the position, the range?"

"Three kilometers. It's over the river, north of us."

"Where's Beni?"

"Asleep."

"Wake him up. Tell him to get the Stinger ready."

"Si, Niño. Should I give them a warning?"

"No. It can't be military. Espinosa always gives us notice ahead of time. Tell Beni to fire. Shoot the first thing he sees."

"Si, Niño."

Felix sweated. He was smeared with camo grease and weighted down by Dolby's Jungle Stereo System and his end of the 60mm mortar and expecting any second to hear the telltale click of a bouncing Betty mine before it made a stranger of everything from his waist down. Twice things had moved underneath his feet. They'd been walking since before midnight. He was profoundly grateful for the presence of Mac, on the other side of the mortar. Somewhere on the far edge of the compound, Rostow and Bundy were moving, alone, to their own positions, Bundy with his sniper rifle.

"There," said Mac, pointing at an area as black, to Felix, as the rest of it. But sure enough, as he focused, he saw the pinprick of electric light through the chiaroscuro of underbrush. "Let's not get too close," said Mac. "I don't want to get my dick blown off. Get that CD player ready. I'll get this set."

Felix said, "Listen-"

"That's them. Hey, sounds all right."

Charley's voice came on. "Dragonfly to Grasshoppers. Slow Boy is heading your way. Let's give him a big Texas welcome."

Mac offered Felix a mortar round. "You want to kiss it?"

"Why would I want to kiss it?"

"For luck."

"No."

Mac kissed it and held it ready. They heard the Thunderbolt whining by above them. Felix switched on the CD player; Dolby's subwoofers started to rumble out a low-frequency sound track of jets taking off the deck of a carrier.

Charley's voice said, "Fire one." Mac dropped the mortar into the tube. It arced over the trees and into the compound. They heard the explosion a few seconds later.

"Good shot," said Charley, watching. It had missed the chemical shed-the objective-by several hundred yards, but it hit another building Charley thought was a barracks but couldn't tell, the light was too dim. "Put the next about three hundred yards east."

"Roger."

Hot Stick had taken Slow Boy off computer and was making slow, come-get-me passes over the compound. Felix and Rostow's subwoofers were booming out their sound tracks (of planes taking off carrier decks) on either side of the compound. Mac's second mortar landed in the middle of the large grass field in front of the white house that Sanchez had told them was his residence. Charley was puzzled by the absence of people below. Where the hell was everyone?

"A little more to the east, about fifty yards."

"Dragonfly," said Rostow. "I got someone with what looks like a hand-held-yeah, it is, it is. It's the Stinger."

"Bring Slow Boy down there, low, real low," Charley said.

"Watch this," said Hot Stick, twiddling his joysticks. The Thunderbolt went into a slow, tight circle over the field; it seemed to hover.

"Good," said Charley.

"He's getting ready to fire," said Rostow.

"Bundy," said Charley, "can you see him?"

"Negative," said Bundy, peering through the scope of his Winchester.300 magnum. "I'm watching the house."

"All right, stay on the house, stay with the house." He had to be in the house, where the hell else would he be? He'd come running out of the house right into Bundy's crosshairs and-then they could all go home.

"He's fired, he's fired!" Rostow shouted.

They saw it launch, saw the orange trail roaring up at Slow Boy.

"What are you doing?" Charley shouted at Hot Stick when he saw Slow Boy break out of its tight circle and head off over the jungle.

"Giving him a run for his money," said Hot Stick.

"It's my money. Just let it… What are you doing?"

Slow Boy took off, Stinger in tow. It was an interesting sight, a grown missile chasing a little bitty airplane.

"Look here, Hot Stick, just let the damn missile connect with the plane."

"This is great!" Hot Stick said. "This is fantastic!"

"Never mind."

"Vehicles approaching," said Rostow. "Six, seven of them on the river road."

"Hot Stick!"

"Watch." Hot Stick turned Slow Boy around toward where the vehicles were pouring into the compound.

He didn't know what to make of it. It looked like a plane, and there was something following it. Jesus Christ! "Off the road!" he shouted at Virgilio.

"Tora! Tora! Tora!" shouted Hot Stick, putting Slow Boy into a dive.

Slow Boy and the Stinger punched into the ground fifty yards in front of him. The explosion blew Sancho's Toyota high into the air. The next thing he knew, his windshield had blown out and he and Virgilio were suddenly in the back seat.

"Nice going, son."

"Dragonfly, he's getting ready to fire another one. You better move away."

"Bundy, what's the situation with the house?"

"Nothing. No one's home. It's like Son Tay."

"Mac, Felix, start dropping mortar where the river road comes in. There's vehicles."

"Dragonfly, he's fired another missile. Get out of here, Dragonfly."

"Hold on," said Charley. He pushed forward on his stick, dropping the Hughes so hard the shoulder straps dug into their collarbones. Hot Stick's controls flew up out of his hands and banged into the overhead bulkhead, then came down and bounced off his flight helmet.

Charley pulled back on the stick a little late. The chopper hit the ground hard and bounced back up into the air, vibrating like a washing machine on spin cycle. The Stinger shot by the small clearing overhead.

The lower limb of the sun was now over the eastern horizon. The Stinger, seeking heat, turned toward it and set out dutifully to annihilate it, crashing to earth, some miles later, like Icarus, dismally short of its objective.

"You all right?" said Charley, regaining control of the Hughes and bringing it up out of the clearing.

"Shit," said Hot Stick.

"What is it?"

"The computer cable. They're off computer."

"Well, get back on manual."

"I can't fly three at once on manual."

"Never mind the F-18s, then. Concentrate on Fat Albert. We're going for the house."

"My transmitters-"

"Dragonfly, where do you want the next mortar?"

"Dragonfly, what is your situation? Over."

"We're going for the house. Bundy, what do you see?"

"Still nothing."

"Rostow, what about the cars?"

"Looks like two down. There's men all over, twenty or thirty of them."

"All right, stand by, I'm coming up. What about the Stinger man?"

"I'm looking for him. I'm in range now, I'm close enough for a shot if he-there he is, I see him."

"Well, shoot him."

"Fuck, he ducked behind a building."

"Stay on him. I'm coming up, we got a problem with the planes. They're flying on their own."

"Jesus-"

"You boys clear the area around the white house, repeat, clear the area."

"Roger, Dragonfly."

"Bundy, how far are you from the house?"

"About two hundred meters."

"Okay, stay low, you understand? Hot Stick, you got Fat Albert?"

"I can't find him, he's, he's-I don't know where he is."

"Where's the other two?"

"I don't know where they are. Brazil, they're in fucking Brazil!"

"Well, let's get them back to Peru. We ain't finished here."

He pulled himself out of the Toyota and ran to where the Stinger made a crater of Sancho and Luti and-it looked like-half a dozen others. He counted three fires around the compound, one in the barracks, an area near-Christ, the chemical shed. He directed Virgilio to take some men and start hosing down the area by the chemicals. He shouted at Mirko to locate Beni and tell him to stop firing Stingers at the billonario drogues. He turned toward the house, distant across the field, and saw the girl standing on the porch.

"I got it I got it I got," said Hot Stick. "I got Fat Albert."

"Good. We're going in."

"I can't find the others-"

"Never mind the others. Commence arming sequence."

"Primary safeties, off. Secondary safeties, off. She's hot."

"Turning final. Rostow, you let me know you see that guy with the missiles."

"Roger, Dragonfly."

Fat Albert whooshed by them leaving a smoky contrail.

"We're going in. Five hundred meters, four hundred meters-"

"Dragonfly," said Bundy. "There's a girl on the porch."

"What?"

"Repeat, a girl."

"Three hundred meters-"

"Abort."

"What?"

"Abort!"

"But-"

"ABORT!"

He saw the flash. It took a half second for the sound to reach him. He covered his eyes instinctively, and when he looked back he saw it, a perfect, insolent parody of a mushroom cloud, rising leisurely into the morning sky.

"Bundy, acknowledge, acknowledge."

"What the hell happened up there?"

"Bundy, this is Dragonfly, acknowledge. Hot Stick!"

"You said abort."

"Not into Bundy!"

"I wasn't aiming for him."

"Shut up. Don't say a word. Bundy, speak to me."

"Must have been an aileron."

"Felix, Mac, Rostow, can you see Bundy anywhere? I'm going in to take a look." Charley hovered over the smoking hole in the jungle behind the white house and craned his head out the window. The force of the blast had knocked over trees in a concentric pattern. Everything was on fire. Charley hovered as low as he could, flames licking up at the Hughes. It was dead in there. An armadillo couldn't have survived.

"Aren't we kind of low?" said Hot Stick.

Charley pulled his.45 out of its holster and pointed it at Hot Stick.

"What are you doing?"

"Take it!" Charley shouted at him. Hot Stick took the gun, looking confused. "Now shoot yourself!"

"What?"

"For incompetence!" He brought the helicopter up into cooler air. Below he saw the compound. Men running, vehicles, smoke, confusion. He saw a girl running across the wide field in front of the white house. She was without clothes. He heard a sound beneath his feet, like pebbles kicked up by a car's wheels.

"They're shooting at us, Mr. Becker."

"All right, everyone listen up. Get back to the ship. Get the anchor up and get going. I'll join up with you."

"What are you doing?" said Felix.

"We're going to stay here awhile, look for Bundy."

"We are?"

Charley flew a wide circle along the rim of the compound.

"They're shooting at us, Mr. Becker."

"'Course they're shooting at us!"

Charley flew off into the jungle. A quarter mile from the compound, he brought the Hughes into a stationary hover. He reached down and picked up a small Orvis bag off the floor and unzipped it, took out a grenade and handed it to Hot Stick.

"You know how to use these?"

"Uh-"

"You pull the pin, open the window and drop it out. Can you handle that?"

"What are we doing?"

"We're going flying." Charley took out a grenade with his left hand, put the pull pin in his teeth and gave a yank, chipping a crown. He put the chopper's nose down and gathered speed.

"Niño! The helicopter!"

He'd grabbed an AK from the weapons shed and was standing in the middle of the field with Soledad, who was evincing strange calm, under the circumstances, watching with childlike serenity the events around her as if they were taking place in another world. She said to him, "I love you."

The helicopter broke over the edge of the trees. He aimed the AK and fired off a burst, swinging the barrel with the deftness of a practiced trap and skeet shooter.

The helicopter disappeared over the far side of the compound. As it did he heard two explosions. The Range Rover lay on its side. Just bought it, too.

Charley eased back on the stick and brought the chopper to another stationary hover over the jungle.

"You all right?" he said.

"No!"

"Good. Here. I'm gonna take her in a little lower this time."

Charley tugged on another pin and eased forward on the stick. Treetops skimmed by underneath.

He slapped in another banana clip and planted his feet and covered the tree line with the barrel of the AK, just as his father had taught him to do when shooting from the number eight position at a low bird.

The chopper came out of the woods. He swung the barrel as he fired. Then saw the tiny specks tumbling out. He stopped firing and threw himself to the ground. The explosions were close this time. When he lifted his head, it was to see the girl's leg in front of him, she peering down at him with that remote stare of curiosity. "I love you."

The inside of the chopper filled with smoke; alarms buzzed on the instrument panel.

"What does that mean?" Hot Stick coughed.

"Means we're on fire."

"Jesus, we're on fire! We're on fire!"

"Here." He tossed Hot Stick another grenade. Charley pulled the pin, pushed down on the stick and began his last charge. For if he like a madman lived / At least he like a wise one died. More the reverse in his case, but the line came to him all the same.

He didn't lead it as much this time. He saw an arm reaching out of the starboard window and emptied his clip at it, saw sparks, smoke. He lowered the rifle and in the next instant heard the explosion and looked in the direction of the chemical shed in time to see five thousand gallons of ether and acetone igniting.

Charley felt something sharp in the vicinity of his right leg. The chopper kept wanting to turn in circles and he had to work the controls hard. He'd lost half his RPMs in his tail rotor, the oil pressure was down to nothing, loud knocking sounds were coming from the undercarriage and when he looked down to see what it was he noticed his pants leg was torn and wet.

"You okay?" he shouted over at Hot Stick. He couldn't see with all the smoke. He pulled the emergency-door release and instantly the air cleared inside. Hot Stick was slumped forward over his controls, held by his harness, hands limp by his sides. The left side of his helmet was holed where the bullet had exited.

He had almost no control by the time he saw the ship. He set down so hard on the deck that it bounced and the tail spun around and chopped up the antennae and part of the smokestack. Charley was knocked out from the impact. He dreamed it very clearly: saw the chopper drop into the water and sink bathyspherically, bub-bub-bubbling down into the silty murk of the Huallaga; then there were dolphins, pink dolphins like the kind you'd expect to meet only in a hangover, making faces at him through the Plexiglas bubble. He heard Felix's voice saying, "Boss, boss," but what was Felix doing, swimming with pink dolphins?

36

The fire burned into the afternoon. The heat was so intense the men kept dropping from exhaustion and dehydration. It began to spread toward the number four pozo, where an acre of coca leaves lay macerating in kerosene and sulfuric acid. If that caught, the Andes themselves would go up in smoke. He ran to the shed and started up the bulldozer and drove it out, stripping gears as he went and plowed a shallow trench between the advancing flames and the edge of the combustible pit. The handles were hot by the time the firebreak was complete.

He walked back to the field in front of the house. His beautiful field, which he used for croquet. Scarred, scorched. Soledad was crouched over something in the distance. She was wearing only white panties that emphasized the lack of any other article. He'd told her not to go naked in front of the men. It was not an easy concept to explain to Soledad, especially with his limited command of her language, until one day Eladio had told him of a saying among the men of the tribe: "Your eyes have gone bad from staring at the privates of too many women." He'd put it to her that way: don't ruin the eyes of my men, please, I depend on their eyes. He'd given her a brassiere, a very sexy one with lace; she fashioned it into a slingshot. For a moment he forgot about the fire and watched her. His eyes wandered across the field and fastened on something that resisted recognition. He approached and stared at it.

The markings on the fuselage said NAVY. It had gone in straight, skewering his croquet field with its Pitot tube. He stared.

"Samin," he shouted. "Give me your rifle." He raised Samin's AK and fired a burst into the repellent object, which obliged by exploding into small pieces that scattered themselves, like flaming leaves, over the already harrowed field. The girl, hunched over whatever it was, raised her head only briefly.

The needlelike Pitot tube was still stuck in the grass; the rest had blown up. He stormed over and gave the needle a good kick. It tumbled like a thrown knife and landed some feet away.

"Toy planes," he shouted. "He comes for me with toy planes!"

"Soledad!" he shouted. The girl made no answer. "What are you doing?"

Virgilio came running to say that they'd found Beni-or what was left of him. Virgilio thought he'd been shot before the fire did the rest.

"Good," said El Niño. "It saves me from having to shoot him myself."

Virgilio looked at Samin, Samin at Virgilio. Each decided it would be best to be somewhere else, and ran off, declaring a remembered emergency.

El Niño walked to where the girl was. "What are you-"

It was a howler monkey that had been blasted out of the trees by the force of the explosion when the chemical shed ignited. The monkeys had lost their fear of man over the years and clambered in the trees close to the compound to scavenge. Its fur was smoking.

She smiled at him and handed him a piece of torn-off flesh. Such bounty. Food from the sky-already cooked!

He wheeled away and staggered off. He took deep breaths, telling himself that his reaction was irrational, that she was Indian, to her it was just-food; then he leaned over and threw up.

Charley came to propped up on a pillow on the settee underneath the Gainsborough.

The pain was in his head, in the center of his forehead. He reached up and felt something sharp protruding. Felix was sitting beside him.

"What is this?" Charley said, fingering the object.

"It's a piece of glass. I'm going to get it out."

Charley tugged. His fingers were wet with blood; they kept slipping. Charley watched the blood course in rivulets down onto his chest and onto the Naugahyde settee. Margaret had chosen the neutral gray color because Tasha was always spilling things. He felt the blood puddle under his elbows. He blinked. A silvery jet of liquid flew through the air over his head. Felix had a hypodermic.

"What is that?"

"Morphine."

"No. Need a clear head." Felix tried to pull the glass out with tweezers. They kept slipping.

"Use pliers," said Charley. "Whiskey. Bring the bottle."

Charley stared up at Augustus John, third Earl of Bristol. He had never studied it from this angle, looking right up the earl's nose.

Felix returned with a pair of needle-nose pliers and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Charley took a long pull. Felix went to work. The piece of glass was in there. Charley groaned.

"Gimme that needle." He took the hypodermic and squirted the morphine into the whiskey, shook it up and took another long pull.

"I don't think you're supposed to drink it," said Felix.

"They do in England. Ain't that right, Augustus? It's called a Brompton cocktail-heroin and vodka. They give it to terminal folks." Felix went back to work.

"You know… Gainsborough hated to paint portraits?"

"Yeah," said Felix, getting a grip on the glass shard.

"What he really loved was landscapes. He married a woman with rich tastes and… he had two girls and they inherited their mama's tastes, so… he… had to spend all his time painting pictures of rich folks… to pay the bills."

"It's stuck, boss."

"Just give it a yank." Charley took another pull off the bottle. His mouth went numb. A pleasant, warm feeling spread through him. He said, "He liked to play the violin and be outside painting cows and blue skies. Instead he spent the whole time indoors with old Augustus here and ladies with long white necks. I bet he ended up hating rich people. I would have."

"I'm going to-hold on."

"You notice how they're all gray, the people he painted? I have a theory about that… he was saving his colors for the landscapes. Felix!"

"What, boss?"

"I killed Bundy. There was a girl on the porch. What have I done?"

"Just hold on, boss. It's coming."

"She had this tooth wouldn't come out, you remember that?"

"Yeah."

"Tried everything, string to the doorknob, crust of bread… oh."

Felix applied a pressure bandage. When Charley opened his eyes again he saw the pillow she'd embroidered for him that said AGE AND TREACHERY WILL OVERCOME YOUTH AND VIRTUE EVERY TIME, all soaked. He could hear Margaret. She was saying, "Oh, Charley, not my pillow."

He had the throttle opened up all the way. He was going dangerously fast. It was night. The river was a cafe con leche blur in the searchlight. Virgilio's and Mirko's boats were a quarter mile behind, struggling to keep up with him as he slalomed past logs and floating islands of canarana grass.

"Niño," said Virgilio over the VHP, "please, slow down. It's dangerous."

He could not tell Virgilio the reason for his speed. It had nothing to do with chasing the billonario. The truth was that he was trying to get away from the dead monkey. It had taken hold of his brain; he couldn't shake it loose. Even at sixty miles an hour it held on, jeering, chattering, smashing him with fists, pelting him with sapodilla fruit.

Large insects flew into his face, disintegrating, stinging. He felt the jolt as the boat hit the back of a crocodile, heard the whine of the propeller as it raced in air. The boat landed with a thud, engines churning.

Charley stood at Esmeralda's wheel. The current was running eight miles an hour, so he had to maintain at ten miles an hour for steerage. The riverbank was rushing past him at nearly twenty miles an hour. He was kayaking in an ocean liner.

His head was wrapped tightly. The morphine and Jack Daniel's gave him confidence. He could feel everything the ship was doing through his hands on the wheel; the water rushing by under her hull, the cushion between it and the bank, the propellers digging in when he increased speed, logs bouncing off. Most of all he felt the river carrying him to the sea. The sea was 3,500 miles away but the river would carry him. The river that began in a trickle of crystalline water in Lake Mismi, high up in the Andes, swiftly gathering mass and momentum, becoming a great brown snowball, seven million cubic feet by the time it reached the ocean; it could fill Lake Ontario in three hours. A river that could fill Lake Ontario in three hours could easily carry them to-

"Boss," said Felix. They were on the radar screen-three green specks astern, one ahead of the other. They appeared closer with each Stardust sweep of the cursor.

His bow light washed her transom with its beam. There she was. He throttled back. Eusebio, next to him, reached beneath the dashboard for the RPG-7 cradled in its box. It was Soviet-made, fired an 85-millimeter, 18.7-pound grenade 500 meters. Sendero used them against truck convoys and tanks.

Eusebio shouldered it and aimed.

"Aim for the stern. Low, right above the water."

"Si, Niño."

He imagined it clearly: the explosion, the boat going dead in the water, the billonario surrendering; saw the fuel tanks igniting, Baudelaire's eyes blazing at him from underneath Collardet's top hat as the paint melted.

He shouted at Eusebio, "No!" and knocked his arm upward at the moment of firing. The rocket arced over the boat in a feckless parabola, landing in the jungle and sending aloft a choir of outraged cockatoos screeching into the night.

Eusebio turned to him and said, "Why did you do that?" He was about to tell him when Mac's bullet hit Eusebio in the chest.

The river narrowed. Charley steered by radar, trying to keep the center in the middle of the green phosphorescent couloir. Felix shouted, "Starboard!"

Charley swung the wheel to the right. As he did, he looked to the left and saw the riverbank, revealed starkly in the bright halogen glow of the searchlight. He saw striations of red clay. It was beautiful.

Esmeralda struck the riverbank. She took it on the chine, a loud, hollow thunnng. Charley held on to the wheel, his feet went out from under him. When he pulled himself back up he could no longer see out the window. A large tree had crashed down onto the foredeck. He saw flailing in its branches. An arm emerged, then Mac, swearing. He'd been thrown from the top deck into the tree.

Charley looked at the radar screen. As he did, the windows on the right side of the bridge all shattered into a blizzard of Plexiglas.

The boat, pinned against the riverbank by the current, scraped forward slowly. Charley pushed the throttle to "full ahead." As she moved forward, she made a greasy squeaking noise against the clay bank. Felix appeared in the starboard doorway on his hands and knees. He held the Uzi over the railing and fired blindly. Grenades went off in the water with a whump sound, followed by plumes of water. Rostow was in the bows, tossing them. Mac disentangled himself from the tree and jumped back up onto the top deck and fired the M-60 machine gun. Charley kept his hand on the throttle. He became aware of something that did not belong. He could not see in the dark. He removed his hand from the throttle and the feeling came with it.

They followed in the dark. He looked up and saw the Southern Cross, the Magellanic Cloud. The riverbanks blazed with pulsations of fireflies. Virgilio shouted from his boat over the VHF, "Niño, they're shooting!"

Mirko's voice came on: "Niño! Why doesn't Eusebio shoot with the RPG?"

"Eusebio is dead. Keep firing. No grenades, do you hear?"

"But they're-why?"

"Just do it, Virgilio."

"Fire the RPG, Niño. Please!"

"Virgilio, you don't realize what they have on board."

"Gasto is dead, Niño! Davilo is wounded. I think one of my engines is hit. Shoot, please!"

"The boat is full of gold."

The beautiful word hung there, suspended in radio silence between the boats. He regretted it. The lie. To hold out the promise of gold, here, where his ancestors had slaughtered Virgilio's and Mirko's-but how else, what else would they understand?

"Gold?" said Virgilio.

"He has gold on board?" said Mirko.

"Yes."

"How much?"

"A fortune, Mirko!" he shouted angrily. "More than you can carry. Now move forward! Concentrate your fire on the bridge."

"Okay, Niño."

"Mirko," he said, "you go up the right side. Virgilio, you go up the left. Together now!"

It was moving up his arm. He said, "Felix."

"What?"

"Shine your light on my arm, would you?"

"Jesus," said Felix.

It was clinging to his upper arm, fans flared out, moving back and forth slowly like elephant ears. What was God thinking when he made these creatures? Charley wondered. It opened its mouth wider than a church door. Charley could see all the way down its throat, translucent in Felix's flashlight beam, a green tunnel that seemed to extend all the way down to its tail.

Felix shouted, "Boats moving up, starboard and port."

The radar showed a curve to the left a hundred yards ahead.

Charley said, "Hold your fire on the one coming up on our right. Let him come up. Let me know when's he's abeam."

Felix lay down on the deck and sighted through a hawsehole.

"He's passing the stern… not yet… not yet…" Bullets zippered into Esmeralda's right side. "Now!"

"Hold on." Charley swung the wheel to the right.

He saw the yacht begin to swing toward Mirko's boat. He shouted over the radio, "Mirko, reverse your engines! Get out of there!"

The yacht squeezed the speedboat against the riverbank. Two of Mirko's men saw what was about to happen and jumped off the transom. But Mirko had already reversed his throttles and the outboard engines had churned up out of the water. Mirko's men were shredded. In the next instant, the yacht drove the boat into the riverbank in a loud crackling of fiberglass.

He slowed and shone his light at the bank. The remains of the boat had fallen away. The men had been pressed into the clay like figures in a bas-relief frieze. There was Gorrati with his gun, Jimo, upside-down. Ay, Mirko. At the moment of death, Mirko had brought his arms up to protect his face. He stared at the tableau. He wished he had a camera, it was so unusual.

The iguana dropped off Charley's shoulder and ran out of the bridge upright on two legs, hopping from one piece of Plexiglas to another like someone escaping across ice floes.

They were firing at the boat on the port side. Charley heard the loud noise above him from Mac's M-60. Rostow ran aft along the deck with his grenade satchel.

Amorphous green splotches appeared on the radar screen. The antennae had been hit. Charley navigated through the hallucinations. There was a Navy base at Juanjui, eighty clicks downriver. At this rate they could make that by morning, if-ifs sprouted along the riverbank all the way to Juanjui. He switched on the radio and was rehearsing what he would say when he heard: "Esmeralda, come in, please"-perfect, mannered English. Please?

"This is Esmeralda," he said.

"This is Captain Pantoja of the Peruvian Navy. Stop your engines."

"This is Admiral Chester W. Nimitz of the United States Navy. Go to hell."

"Is that you, billonario?"

"Yes."

"Welcome to Peru."

"Thank you."

"The rocket-propelled grenade that went over your bow back there, it was a warning shot. It wasn't nice of you to kill the man who fired it."

"Sorry about that."

"The next is going to go up your culo. Do you speak Spanish?"

"Enough to understand you."

"I give you one minute."

Charley said, "Felix. That's our boy on the radio. I'll keep him talking. Tell Mac to shoot the one talking into his radio." Felix ran aft.

"You there?"

"Of course."

"What do you want from me?"

"What a question, billonario. You blow up my home, kill my men. I want to discuss your surrender. Reparations."

"What kind of reparations you have in mind?"

"Your boat."

"This old thing? I don't know, your river's a little narrow. One of your friends tried to pass me back there and you saw what happened."

"Thirty seconds, billonario."

His boat hit a small piece of wood. He put down the hand microphone so he could steer with both hands. Virgilio's voice came on the radio.

"Niño, what's happening? What do you want me to-" He saw the muzzle flash on the stern of the yacht. The sound was loud, like an elephant gun.

Felix came running. "Mac got him!"

Charley stared. It was over, finally over. He said, "Tell him, that's good shooting."

The archway of ifs stretching to Juanjui fell away. Charley knew: the sun would come up and they would make it.

He heard a shout from the stern. It sounded like "Incoming!" Then something kicked him in the back, hard, like a horse. It lifted him up and threw him forward, through the window.

38

He watched with mounting panic as the fire spread. Why should the ship burn so? He had only fired a single RPG.

"Billonario?"

Her stern was getting low in the water. She was sinking. What a disaster.

"Billonario, answer."

The yacht's bow swung around to face him, like a wounded mastodon raising itself defiantly on its front legs. She was going downriver backward.

He and the other boat followed, keeping their distance in case the cabron sniper who had killed Virgilio was still alive. The fire in her stern continued to rage. The RPG must have hit a fuel tank, but how was that possible? The fuel tanks were under the waterline, and he placed the grenade deftly in the transom.

A half kilometer later her bow went up on a mudbank in the middle of the river. Thank God. She wouldn't sink, at least. But the fire…

"Billonario, are you there?"

"Charley!" said Margaret. "You come down out of there this minute. You're too old to be climbing trees."

"I'm coming, sweetheart, you hold on."

Tasha was crying. She had climbed all the way to the top and was now frozen with fear and unable to come down. Huge bats were circling her. The bats were the result of a secret U.S. Air Force experiment using recombinant DNA engineering to splice bat genes and Stealth technology. There were serious cost overruns, and the bats escaped. Charley shot at them with his pistol, but the bats were able to jam bullets. He kept firing.

"Boss!"

"Felix, watch out!"

"Boss, stop shooting!"

"Huh?" He was in a tree. The pistol was in his hand. He was shooting. He was upside-down. Where was Tasha? Felix's face appeared in the branches.

"Bats, Felix!"

"Are you all right, boss?"

"What's happening?"

"She's on fire. Mac and Rostow are dead. It was an RPG. It hit the bar in the fantail. All the liquor caught fire. We have to get off."

Felix pulled Charley out of the tree on the foredeck.

"I had this dream, Felix."

"It's the morphine. Come on."

They crawled aft along the deck and went into the main salon. Charley coughed from the smoke. The emergency sprinkler system was going, everything was wet. The fire had already consumed the fantail and was working its way forward, making the wet carpet and walls hiss and steam. The gold-glass panels from the old ocean liner Normandie had shattered. The pieces glowed in the fire like Art Deco embers. Charley and Felix leaned against a bulkhead to catch their breath.

"We have to abandon ship," said Felix.

"See if they're still out there."

Felix went out on deck. He crawled back in and said, "Two boats."

"Are they together, on one side?"

"Yeah, the starboard."

Charley stared into the fire for several moments. He said, "We'll use the inflatable on the foredeck. Toss it over the port side. There's a Navy base downriver. The current'll take us."

They crawled together up the deck on the port side. Felix wrestled the emergency inflatable life raft off its cradle. It would inflate automatically as soon as it hit the water.

"Tie two lines to it," said Charley. "We'll toss it in together and each hold a line. Once it's inflated, we can get in. But don't let go of the line."

Felix tied the two lines and hefted the raft up onto the railing.

"Felix, listen to me. In case something happens, it's all with the lawyers, the lawyers will take care of everything. You understand?"

"No," said Felix.

"You're, I, you're my only family left, Felix. Who else was I going to leave it to?"

"That's crazy."

"It's all been worked out, Felix. It's all with the lawyers."

"We're going together."

"In case, is all I'm saying. When you get to the Navy base, contact Gallardo. That was a damn fine supper I gave him. Let him start earning his pay. All right, ready? Now, we got to hold on to that rope tight. That's one hell of a current. We'll be in Juanjui by breakfast time. Don't let go, no matter what. On count of three."

Charley gripped his line and seated himself on the railing. Felix sat beside him.

"One, two, three." Felix pushed the raft overboard and jumped in.

The CO₂ canister inflated the raft in seconds. Felix pulled himself aboard. By the time he'd climbed on, he was fifty yards downstream of Esmeralda. He could not see Charley waving to him from the deck, hear him call out, "Vaya con Dios, my old and good friend."

"Billonario, come in."

The fire was eating the boat. There was no more time. Rafi was on his way from Yenan with two more boats. The helicopter would take off at first light, but by then the boat would be a charred hulk, and the Manet… the Manet. How could the billonario have been so arrogant?

Gomez had taken command of Virgilio's boat. He signaled him over.

As it approached, he saw Virgilio's legs protruding from underneath a rubber poncho they had spread over him. They had covered him, not out of respect, but for morale.

He said to Gomez, "Take your men and go aboard and put out the fire."

Gomez looked at the flaming yacht on the mudbank. "But, Niño, what if they're still alive?"

"Then kill them."

"Maybe we should wait until dawn."

"By dawn it will be burned, Gomez!"

"So?"

"Gomez, there is gold on board. Bars of gold. Do you want it all to melt?"

"Pues… no, Niño, but, with respect, it's too dangerous. The sniper may still be alive. Let's wait for the boats and the helicopter."

"Gomez, you are dismissed. Pitu, take the wheel from that coward. Go and put out the fire."

"With respect, Niño, Gomez is right."

"You disgust me, all of you. Put Virgilio's body in my boat. I will not have him carried in a boat of cowards."

They put Virgilio aboard.

"Billonario, answer. We have to put out the fire. Neither of us wants the Manet to burn."

"Mohney?" Pitu said to Gomez.

"Manet?" Charley sat on a litter of Plexiglas crumbs in the bridge. The fine rectangular leather case lay opened in front of him, the finely engraved barrel and stock in two pieces on his lap. He fit them together and snapped them gently shut, then opened them and chambered two rounds of twelve-gauge double-ought buck. He could just hear his gunsmith. "Double-ought, sir? In the Purdys?"

"Billonario, we can't let the Manet burn."

How in hell did he know about the Manet? The pain in his head worsened. He took a light swig of whiskey and morphine. Manet? Had Gallardo told him? Was he on his payroll? Did everyone in the country work for the sumbitch? He reached for the hand mike.

"This is Esmeralda."

"Thank God, billonario. Are you all right?"

"Fine. Fine."

"Your ship is burning."

"I noticed."

"I want to help you put it out."

"Thanks, but you been enough help already."

"Is the Manet safe?"

Charley remembered Sanchez saying something during the interrogation about a room he had in the white house with paintings. Where he kept the surface-to-air missiles seemed more important at the time.

He opened the cabinet behind the wheel and rummaged through boxes.

"You and your men come out on deck. We will not shoot. You have my word."

"Son, you're a drug dealer. Your word just ain't enough."

"It was you who violated our last cease-fire, billonario. You killed a good man."

Charley found what he was looking for.

"Why you so hot for Manet?"

"Because he was the first modern artist with a social conscience. Because he told the bourgeoisie to fuck themselves. Because he was magnificent. What a question, billonario."

"What else you like about him?"

He's delaying. While the cabron with the elephant gun prepares to blow my brains out.

He crouched low in his seat. The men in his boat kept slipping in Virgilio's and Eusebio's blood. It was a mess back there, and not good for morale.

He said to them, "I need one brave man." No one spoke up. "Are you all women? Is there not one man aboard with balls between his legs instead of a tampon string?"

"Pues, si, Niño." It was Cacho.

"Bravo, Cacho. Take my pistol. I'll maneuver directly upstream of the yacht. All you have to do is float downstream to it. Get on the mudbank. Then get aboard. Go to the bridge. I'll keep him talking on the radio."

"What then, Niño?"

Cacho was a bit stupid. But this was why he was volunteering.

"Shoot him, Cacho. With the pistol."

"Bueno." Cacho began to strip.

"Cacho?"

"Si, Niño."

"Wound him. Don't kill him."

He went over the side. He turned to the other men. "Aren't you ashamed?"

"But, Niño, we can't swim."

"Billonario, are you there?"

The blade of Charley's penknife hovered over the stick of HMX. Charley calculated: if a foot of HMX was enough to blow apart an I beam or leave a thirty-foot-wide-by-twenty-deep crater in the ground, two inches ought to do it. Say, four inches. He cut off the piece and rolled it on the floor to flatten it, then pressed it onto his palm with the heel of his other hand, reminding himself of an old Mexican woman making a tortilla. That done, he took a nitro chip from its box and pressed that into the doughy tortilla.

The detonator was about the size of a pack of Camels, with a stubby, rubberized antenna and six safety switches. With HMX, redundancy in safeties made sense. In the center was a red button shielded by a hinged lid.

"I don't want to fire another RPG, billonario. Come out onto the deck with your men."

"My men are all dead." He put the tortilla and det box in a pocket and took a portable hand-unit radio out of its cradle and switched it to Channel 68.

He stood up. The pain shot through his head like a high-velocity bullet. He took one more pull of whiskey and morphine and set off on all fours like an old doggy.

It was a trick Tasha used to pull on the farm when she didn't want to come back to the house. He keyed the "talk" button and put his lips to the microphone and went: "PSSSSSSSSHHHT Esmeralda here PSSSSSSHT."

"Come in, billonario."

"PSHHHHHHHH breaking up, switching to Channel PSHHHHHH."

He reached the main salon. The fire had worked its way forward past the settee. The air was acrid from flame-retardant Naugahyde, the carpet felt soaked beneath his hands, and he dog-walked toward the stairs by the shattered Normandie gold-glass panels. He looked to his left as he went and saw Augustus John, third Earl of Bristol, melting in sizzling droplets of Gainsborough gray.

He started up the stairs. He felt something sharp and painful in his hands. He raised them and saw they were covered with hundreds of splinters of gold glass from the Normandie panels. There was no time to remove them. He continued painfully on up the stairs.

He reached the top. Carpet gave way to teak. He looked down and saw he was leaving bloody palm prints behind him, palm prints flecked with bits of gold. He crawled behind the marble bar and leaned against the wall and gasped.

"Billonario, are you there?"

"PSSSHHHHT I can't make PSSSSHHHHT."

It sounded like running water.

"What are you doing?" he said to his men. They were standing up, pissing over the side.

"The radio noise, Niño, it's making us piss."

"Put those back in your pants or I'll shoot them off."

"But, Niño, we don't want to piss on Eusebio and Virgilio…"

His palms flowed blood from a hundred small wounds. He dried them as best he could on a towel. He stood and gripped the frame of the Manet with both hands and pulled it off the wall. He sat down and put it on his lap, took out the HMX tortilla and pressed it onto the back of the painting. He stood up and replaced it on the wall and collapsed back onto the deck. The only bottle within reach was Pernod. He took a long swallow.

He set off at a crawl, following his own bloody trail of palm prints.

He was halfway down the stairs when he saw in front of him a pair of wet brown legs. He looked up. Cacho brought the butt of his pistol down on his head.

He sent up Manco first, then climbed aboard himself. He saw immediately that there was no hope of extinguishing the fire. Cacho was standing proudly over the semi-conscious billonario, holding two pistols on him, one of them a Colt.45 he did not recognize.

The billonario was very pale, even for a gringo. He was bleeding from the head and-what happened to his hands? Look at them. The bushy eyebrows gave him a fierce look, even in this state.

He leaned over him and said, "Billonario, where is the painting?"

The eyes opened. Blinked and peered.

"Where is the Manet?"

Cacho, seeking to please his patron, kicked the old man in the ribs to prompt him to answer. Niño hit Cacho in the throat with his own pistol, knocking him into a Mihanovic painting of a rowboat. Cacho gagged, clutching his Adam's apple.

"Billonario," he said gently, "tell me. Where is the Manet?"

"Upstairs. Over the bar." He seemed almost pleased to get it over with.

He bounded up the stairs and looked about. The teak deck was-there was a strange, bloody trail-hand prints. He followed them to the bar and looked up.

There it was. He stood, unable to move. It was magnificent. Give the billonario his due. On a lot of boats like this it would be a Leroy Neiman up there, or some idiotic nautical doggerel about the bar being closed for five minutes a day.

It was the Baudelaire "Absinthe Drinker" and no mistake. Baudelaire's pupils were dilated, looking directly at him, fixing him with the mad, ecstatic eyes of the lotus eater, absintheur, laudanum drinker, hashish eater: "I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me." Manet had caught all!

He took a step toward the blazing, orchidaceous eyes, but found his own drawn to the frame. There was blood on it. Blood was dripping from the painting. Something was sparkling in the blood. Gold?

He turned, ran and dove down the stairs a half second before the explosion.

39

The shaman sat in front of the lifeless stone, murmuring as he mixed his brew of ginger, nightshade, tobacco water and ayahuasca. Eladio and Zacari sat watching him at a distance. Inancia's new child cried inside a hut. At the edge of the village the dogs tore at the head of a peccary.

He finished mixing his brew, set the frothy gourd aside and began to blow over the surface of the stone.

Zacari whispered to his father, "That's a lot of bikut." He grinned. "He's going to have great visions."

Eladio said, "That is what I fear." Eladio had never told Zacari what took place many years before, when the tribe lived to the north, along the Rio Mayo. Eladio was fishing one day in the dugout when he heard the cries of a young girl. He ran to the source of the sound and saw the shaman forcing himself into Ampuya, a young girl of the village he was holding, bent over a log. She was not yet of age. She screamed. The shaman shouted at her to be quiet, that he was driving out an evil tsentsak. Eladio knew to be afraid of the shamans knew that they possessed great powers. He hid in the bush and watched in terror as the shaman brought his club down on the girl's head and broke it open; watched as he continued his work on Ampuya's lifeless body.

He ran back to the canoe and returned to the village. His father had been killed in a battle with the Tikuna. He told his mother what he had seen. She took him into the forest and shook him until his insides loosened, shouting at him that a pasuk had entered his body and given him an evil vision. She told him never to tell what he had seen, or the shaman would summon the wawek tunchi, the sorcerer.

But Ampuya, who had gone into the forest to gather warok berries, never returned. The men of the tribe searched until they found her body, half eaten. That night the shaman drank bikut and had visions of what had happened to her. She had been carried off by an iwanch and given to wild pigs.

Years later, after Eladio had come of age, another girl disappeared. The search lasted for days. Eladio was the most skilled hunter of the tribe. It was he who found her, buried, who saw on the body the signs. He reburied her and remained by her grave for five days and nights without taking food or water, dreaming of Tsewa, the ancient headman of the spider monkeys, who had taught his people the secrets of the hunt. On the sixth day an ajutap appeared to him in the form of a jaguar and spoke to him.

He found what he sought a half day later, sunning itself in a warm spot. The jararaca is very swift, but Eladio was pure from fasting and moved with speed greater than the snake's, catching it with his hand at the base of the skull.

He returned to the village that night and entered the shaman's hut without noise and found the pinig bowl from which he drank his bikut. He held the snake's mouth to the rim of the bowl and milked forth the waxy yellow venom. He took the snake back into the forest and asked its forgiveness for stealing from it and released it.

The next night the shaman mixed his bikut and drank it to have a vision of what had become of the girl, Chipa. He began to gasp and shudder and cry out. The tribe thought he was having a great vision, and would not approach him as he lay writhing on the ground by the fire.

Only Eladio approached. For this he was thought very brave.

He leaned over the shaman's ear and whispered, "It is my iwanch that kills you, old man." The shaman died. Eladio became headman of the tribe.

Now he watched the shaman drink from his bowl and shout at the lifeless stone. He signaled Zacari to walk with him down to the river. They sat in the branches of a wampusb tree, out of reach of crocodiles. Eladio had many wives and sons, but he loved Zacari best because he was the oldest.

"Tell me," he said, "why do you think the life has gone out of the stone?"

Zacari answered all his father's questions with questions, out of respect.

"Because the tsugki inside has fled?" He smiled at his father. "Because the tsugki feeds on the gold-and-black things the kurinku pataa tied to the side of it before he gave it to us?"

Eladio was pleased. "The gold-and-black things are empty."

Zacari leaned over the bough they were sitting on and spat into the water. A piranha dimpled the surface where it landed. "The shaman will tell us a vision."

"Trust only your own visions." Eladio stood. "They have these gold-and-black things at Yenan. I have seen them. Go there and tell El Niño we need some. Tell him the white men were not pistacos."

"With respect, Papi, how do you know?"

"Pistaco carries a knife, not guns, and a lasso made of human skin. He wears hair on his face. Tell El Niño that we killed most of them out of respect. Tell him to give us gold-and-black things. Take Kipu with you."

"Yes, Papi. What will you do?"

"I will stay here and watch the shaman. His vision may tell him to sacrifice Inancia's baby."

"What will you do if that is his vision?"

"As Tsewa tells me," said Eladio.

40

Diatri watched the oil streak along the window. He leaned forward and shouted at the Marine pilot, "What's with the oil?"

The pilot shouted back, "These planes are pieces of shit."

"How come we're in them?"

"Realism. It's what they fly. Reason they got such fuckin' long noses on them is they're always crapping out and the long noses gives you extended glide ratio so you can land on the fuckin' water, if you can find it."

There were three Pilatus Porter seaplanes. The SEALs were in the first. Diatri was in the second with the SOLIC commander and the JUNC leader. The third plane, fifty miles behind, would extract the SEALs after they had planted their mines on the yacht.

"You mean we're going all the way down there and we're not bringing him back with us?" Diatri had said at the mission briefing aboard the Air Force C-141 on the way down. It was a crowded flight for some reason, people from State, DOD, CIA, a Coast Guard medic-what was the Coast Guard doing here?-Marine pilots, Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and the Joint Unified Narcotics Command people.

"That's right," the JUNC leader replied. "Our mission is to disable the boat and get out."

"Whose plan was this?" Diatri asked. "Is this a JUNC plan?"

"That's all I can say, Diatri."

"Yeah, but it just doesn't make sense. The guy's an American citizen. We're just going to blow up his boat and leave him?"

"This is a JUNC op, Diatri. You're here as an observer. Observe."

Diatri leaned over and said to the SOLIC commander, "Am I missing something here?"

The commander said quietly, "I understand there's a political dimension."

The JUNC leader was in front with the pilot. He tapped the satellite surveillance photo on his lap and looked down at the river and shouted over the roar of the Pilatus' loud propeller, "We shoulda seen it already."

They followed the river. Diatri let the others do the surveilling. He was intent on the mountains to the west, huge, incredible mountains all blue and white. One towered over the others. He found it on his map. Huascaran, over 20,000 feet up, so high you had to gulp for your air. He had read somewhere that Hitler killed the King of Bulgaria that way. The King was being difficult. He wouldn't kill Jews; what's more, he told Hitler that if Jews were going to have to wear yellow stars, then he was going to start wearing a yellow star.

Hitler summoned him to Berlin to make him change his mind, but he wouldn't. Hitler knew the King had a weak heart, so Hitler flew him back to Bulgaria in an unpressurized plane at high altitudes, and the King died a few days later. Diatri told this story to the SOLIC commander. He thought about it and nodded in a professional sort of way as if to say: Yeah, that would do it. He didn't say much, this commander.

The JUNC leader said, "Hey, Diatri, I hear you're going to Congressional Relations after this."

"What?"

"Congratulations."

"Who told you that?"

"You know, on the topo map this valley looks just like a pussy."

"Who told you that?"

"I don't know. Something I heard. We shoulda passed it by now-there it is, up ahead. This is Cowpuncher One Actual, we got it."

Diatri looked down. He wouldn't have recognized it from the photographs. It looked like something abandoned on the Brooklyn waterfront. As they circled, he saw that some of her yacht whiteness remained along the hull. She was half up on a mudbank. There were people aboard her, a dozen or more dugout canoes tied to her. The JUNC leader took pictures with a video camcorder. The natives, seeing the military markings on the planes, began to scatter into their canoes. The JUNC leader laughed and shouted, "Didi mau len! Didi man len!" The Marine pilot asked what it meant. "Vietnamese," said the JUNC leader, "for 'Get the fuck out of here.'"

Zacari and Kipu followed the path of cashew trees through the booby-trapped perimeter and stepped out of the forest into the compound.

They stood for a moment surveying the damage. Smoke rose lazily from many places. The fire had been a great one. Kipu pointed to the burned-out Range Rover and the blackened human legs sticking out from underneath.

They crossed the large field toward the white house and came upon a dead guariba. Its flesh had been disturbed, Zacari saw, leaning over to inspect it. Kipu licked his lips and said they should take it back with them.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs leading to the veranda, Zacari heard the sound of his sister crying.

A moment later, El Niño appeared on the porch. He looked very bad. Some of his hair was burned away and there was dried blood from his ears and nose. He stared at them with a fierce look. He held a pistol.

Zacari held up a hand in greeting and said, "My father sends you his respect."

El Niño did not answer.

Zacari said, "He says to tell you that the kurinku in the great canoe was not pistaco."

El Niño stared as though the fire was still burning within him.

Zacari held out his upturned palm, revealing one of the gold-and-black things. "He sends me to ask you for more of these. They are good for the tsugki who lives in the stone the kurinku gave to us."

El Niño stared at the battery in Zacari's palm. He raised his pistol and shot Zacari in the face.

Kipu threw his spear, but suddenly many shots were being fired and the ground next to him was bursting with dust. He ran toward the edge of the forest. The bullet hit him in the leg before he reached it, but he dove into the bushes before the men running after him could catch him.

The natives had all fled into their canoes. Diatri and the others stood on the half-burned hulk of the Esmeralda. One of the SEALs held up a line with some pennants on it. "Commander?"

Diatri and the commander inspected it. "What is it?" Diatri asked.

"This is a code pennant, this is 'S,' this is 'Q,' this is 'I.'"

"So?"

"It's the international signal code. It means: 'You should stop or heave to or I will open fire on you.'"

Diatri sighed. "Looks like they didn't listen."

He made his way into the ship. She was partially heeled over on her side, making it like a walk through the fun house at the carnival. The top deck was gone. The main salon had the sour stink of burned leather. They'd stripped almost everything off her; it looked like they'd been working on pulling up the carpet when they ran off. He continued down another flight of stairs to the cabins. The passageway was dark. He turned on his flashlight, holding it away from his body as he'd been trained. On either side of the passageway were framed front pages of newspapers from the day after the Titanic sank. Diatri thought that was a strange thing to have on your boat. He made his way aft, to the master cabin.

It was stripped of everything, sheets, blankets, wall sconces, mattress, clothes. Somewhere in the jungle they were wearing cashmere blazers and ascots and whatever else rich people wear. Bermuda shorts? That would be a sight, Diatri thought, natives sitting around the fire arguing over how to make a really dry martini.

They'd torn the radio and intercom system out of the bedside table. Diatri peered into the gaping hole and saw a dead cricket on its back. Diatri reached in and removed him. Big little guy. How had he gotten in there?

He opened the drawer. There was a book inside: History of the Conquest of Peru, by William H. Prescott. He flipped through the pages. Mr. Becker-it was funny, but that's how he thought of him, as "Mr. Becker," maybe because he was rich-had underlined a lot. He came to a page that was almost all underlined and read:

"When the sentence was communicated to the Inca, he was greatly overcome by it. 'What have I done, or my children, that I should meet such a fate? And from your hands, too,' said he, addressing Pizarro; 'you, who have shared my treasures, who have received nothing but benefits from my hands!'"

"An eyewitness assures us that Pizarro was visibly affected, as he turned away from the Inca."

"When Atahuallpa was bound to the stake, with the fagots that were to kindle his funeral pile lying around him, Father Valverde, holding up the cross, besought him to embrace it and be baptized, promising that, by so doing, the painful death to which he had been sentenced should be commuted for the milder form of the garrote-a mode of punishment by strangulation, used for criminals in Spain."

"The unhappy monarch asked if this were really so, and, on its being confirmed by Pizarro, he consented to abjure his own religion, and receive baptism."

"Atahuallpa expressed a desire that his remains might be transported to Quito, the place of his birth, to be preserved with those of his maternal ancestors. Then turning to Pizarro, as a last request, he implored him to take compassion on his young children, and receive them under his protection. Was there no other one in that dark company who stood grimly around him, to whom he could look for the protection of his offspring? Perhaps he thought there was no other so competent to afford it, and that the wishes so solemnly expressed in that hour might meet with respect even from his Conqueror. Then, recovering his stoical bearing, which for a moment had been shaken, he submitted himself calmly to his fate,-while the Spaniards, gathering around, muttered their credos for the salvation of his soul! Thus by the death of a vile malefactor perished the last of the Incas!"

Next to the bottom of the paragraph, Mr. Becker had written "Disgraceful!"

Diatri heard a sound. He crept forward along the dark passageway, gun drawn, toward the source of the noise. At the head of the passageway he found the wine cellar. The bottles were gone. He shone his light down. The native looked up at him and smiled. He was smashed. A giant bottle of wine, the kind they name after Abyssinian kings was lying across his chest. It was the biggest bottle of wine Diatri had ever seen. The native sang:

He carried him, still singing, out onto the deck. The JUNC leader began to interrogate him in Spanish. "Where are the gringos?"

Diatri said in Spanish, "You're not going to get anything out of him."

The JUNC leader shook him. "Where are the gringos?"

"Hey," said Diatri. "Easy. He doesn't know anything."

"Stay out of this, Diatri," the JUNC leader shot back. The native stopped singing. He looked confused. They were all wearing Peruvian military uniforms. Why were they speaking English?

Diatri said, "I said, let him alone."

"Fuck off, Diatri. This isn't your business."

"You touch him again I'll make it your business."

"Stand down, both of you!" The commander.

Diatri stormed off forward. He went to the bridge.

There was rubble all over, shot-out windows, splinters of wood, pieces of metal, chunks of fiberglass. Everything useful had been stripped by the natives.

He saw a piece of chart sticking out from underneath-it looked like a stone slab. He saw the brackets on the rear bulkhead-it had come off the wall. He tried to lift it. Too heavy. One of the SEALs was standing watch on the bow. Diatri shouted. "Give me a hand with this, would you?"

The SEAL lifted it easily and leaned it against the remains of the cabinet. These SEALs, they were in extremely good shape.

It was an old stone of some kind, with figures engraved into it in a way that made them seem raised. A giant with one eye was hurling large rocks at some people in a sort of rowboat. The rocks were landing near them, lifting the boat up on the waves they created. Diatri stared more closely. Something was wrong with the giant's eye. It was like he was crying. The guy who seemed to be in charge of the rowboat was gesturing at the giant with a kind of Va fangool!

Diatri examined the chart that had been underneath. There were other things: a V-shaped stick of plastique, it looked like a box of computer chips, and a small black box with switches and a red button. The SEAL left. The SOLIC commander appeared in the doorway a few moments later, while Diatri was spreading the chart out on the deck.

It was a Defense Hydrographic Agency navigational chart. He saw "Yenan" written in red felt-tip ink over a spot west of the river. The commander peered over his shoulder.

"Yenan?" said Diatri.

"It's a town in China," said the commander. "Shaanxi province. It's where Mao and Zhou Enlai ended the Long March. It's a holy place, like Concord or Lexington. It was their headquarters from '36 to '47. They launched the final phase of the revolution from there."

"So this guy is into Chinese?"

The commander said, "The only real Maoists left are in Peru."

"Sendero."

The commander nodded. He saw the V-shaped stick. "Don't move," he said. He picked it up carefully, then the box of chips and the black box. He examined the stick and said, "It's not armed."

"What is that?"

"HMX. These are nitro-chip primers. Thirty grains of nitroglycerin in silicon. The computer chip inside is coded not to accept any radio signals except one coming from this"-he held out the detonator box.

"This is powerful?"

"Yes," said the commander. "Very powerful. Four million psi."

A shot. They ran out onto the deck. The native was lying dead from a bullet hole in his forehead. The JUNC leader was bolstering his sidearm.

"What the fuck happened? What the fuck happened?"

"He figured out who we were, thanks to you, Diatri. You spoke English in front of him and he figured out who we were."

Diatri lunged. The SEALs pulled him off.

"You fucking asshole, you killed him!"

"My orders are to leave the area undetected. You killed him, Diatri, not me."

"You fuck!"

"Diatri!" The commander took him by the shoulder and walked him forward. He was a strong man, the commander. He took him back to the bridge.

Diatri hit the chart table with his fist.

"It shouldn't have happened," said the commander.

"Oh, great."

"But it did happen. So what are you going to do about it? You're going to do nothing. When we get back, I will report this… crime. Be assured of that. Now you get yourself organized, mister. Is that understood?" The commander left.

Diatri stayed on the bridge, watching the river run past the ship. Her bow was pointed into the current. It seemed as if she were still moving upriver. He stood there watching the river. I hear you're going to Congressional Relations… Congratulations. Should have known. They were just keeping him happy until this was over.

"We've been ordered back." It was the commander.

"You told them?"

"The mission is scrubbed."

"We didn't find any bodies. They could be at this, this Maotown, alive, for all we know."

"The mission is over, Frank. Get moving."

"Wait a minute. These are-these are citizens. You're going to leave them?"

"Orders, Diatri. Do you understand?"

"No. I don't."

"Let's go, Frank."

"Fuck it. You go."

The commander said, "If necessary, I will have you carried back."

Diatri looked at him. "I would not advise you to try that, Commander."

They stared at each other. The commander took a step forward, Diatri put his hand on his pistol. The commander pushed past him and picked up the stick of HMX.

"All right, listen up. You take the primer, you insert the primer in the explosive. The explosive is malleable. These are the safeties, there are six. They must all be switched off or it will not detonate. This is the selector switch. The positions match the numbers on the nitro-chip primers. This is the test light here; if that's lit, you have power. This is the det button."

Diatri nodded. "Okay."

"This is a twelve-hundred-grain stick. The blast radius would be about a hundred meters. Do not be inside it."

"Okay."

"There's an inflatable life raft on deck."

"Yeah, I saw."

The commander started to leave. He said, "You are going to die, you understand that?"

Diatri stared.

"Do you want me to give a message to anyone?"

"Actually, that would be very helpful," said Diatri. He tore off two pieces of the chart and scribbled the same thing on both. "I leave it all to you. Frank." He folded them and on one wrote the name and address of his first ex-wife, and the other's on the second. He handed them to the commander. "Obliged."

The commander nodded. Diatri thought: This should be interesting. He said, "Could you do one other thing for me?"

The commander nodded.

"There's this priest, a Father Rebeta, at St. Mary's on West Thirty-ninth Street, right down by the Hudson River. Could you tell him… tell him that he should quit smoking."

The commander turned to leave. The seaplanes' propellers were turning. Diatri said, "Just tell him that I said hello. Tell him that."

41

He was in his private cable car eyeball-to-eagle-high over the Alps. She was skiing down a long, steep slope beneath him, her scarf trailing behind her. It was a stunning day, cool sparkling air, bright sun. Flawless. He was having coffee, settling down with The Wall Street Journal. He looked down. She waved up at him, he waved back. There was an explosion. The ridge of snow above her began to fall in slow motion. He tried to open the cable-car window to yell at her, to warn her. He pounded on it but it wouldn't open. He was yelling. Margaret looked up from her needlepoint and said, "Hush now, Charley." The wall of snow overtook her. She disappeared. All he saw of her was the scarf. He ran at the cable-car door and put his shoulder into it. It gave and he fell. An eagle flew by with a cigar in its mouth, scowling. He reached for the eagle and missed and went into the snow, bracing for impact, but kept going and broke through into clear blue sky. The snowbank was really a cloud. He fell. He yanked the ripcord. Nothing happened. He looked down at his hand and saw he was holding a watch fob and chain. He fell and fell. He saw the blue planet loom beneath, with hurricane-whorl eyes and typhoon mouth. The mouth bared wide, revealing rows of snowcapped teeth. His feet were starting to catch fire from the heat of reentry. Damnit, Margaret had forgotten to pack his ceramic shoes!

The blue planet turned into a face. The face said, "Tranquilo, billonario."

He was buried in snow up to his neck. No… no… it was a clean sheet that stretched before him, sloping gently upward at his feet.

He heard, "Otra inyeccion." He felt the cool alcohol rub on the inside of his arm, the prick of the needle, a warm river flow into his arm and chest.

"Thank you," he murmured.

"A sus ordenes, billonario."

"Do you have The Wall Street Journal!" Someone laughed. Why was that funny?

Charley reached for the phone to tell Miss Farrell to bring in The Wall Street Journal. They felt very heavy for hands.

"Your hands were cut, billonario. They were full of gold splinters. You should be happy."

He held them up. Something metallic tugged at his right wrist. It looked like a heavy-gauge fishing leader.

"Rest, billonario. We have a busy day tomorrow." The lights went out.

Charley murmured, "Just orange juice and black coffee, thanks."

Kipu's body lay in front of the stone, where he had died from his wound after telling what had happened at Yenan. Kagkui, his mother, held his head and rocked it as she spoke to his spirit. The shaman blew tobacco smoke over the body so that his soul could leave his body without being seen.

Eladio sat at a distance, cross-legged, grinding achiote pods into a wet, red dust with his thumb against the sacred yuka stone from the stomach of a panther. He painted himself and went into the forest to sing the anen songs and fast while the men rubbed darts on the backs of frogs and dipped arrow tips in the fang milk of the jararaca.

Reynoso knocked, put his head in. "He wants to see you."

El Niño stood. Soledad was curled up fetally on the bed facing away from him, still holding her cheek where he had struck her. She had not moved since it happened. He sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. She stared past him. He said, "They betrayed me, don't you see? They let the pistacos kill my men. If I had not killed Zacari, my men would have killed me out of anger. They would have killed you. It was necessary. Tomorrow I will send a gift to your father to make peace."

Soledad stared away. He left. Outside the room, he said to Reynoso, "Watch her."

He went downstairs to the basement room. Arriaga's men were huddled by the door. They stared at him with the usual suspicion, making him feel like an unworthy visitor in his own house. Arriaga required members of his personal bodyguard to prove their loyalty to him by killing with their hands a member of their family. He knocked and went in.

Arriaga's back was to him. He was looking at the painting.

"Goya," he said.

"Manet. 'The Execution of Maximilian.' But you're very observant. It was inspired by Goya's 'Third of May,' in the Prado."

Arriaga turned slowly in the chair to face him. "I have not come to discuss art with you, comrade."

"No, of course."

"You told your men there was gold on board the boat?"

My men. "My purpose was to take the American alive, with the yacht. The propaganda value is… impossible to estimate. The men were very agitated after the air attack. They only wanted to sink it. I reasoned that if they thought there was gold on board they would take a lighter touch."

Arriaga stared. He had learned not to fill Arriaga's conversational vacuums. Finally Arriaga said, "And?"

"We got him alive. Also one of his men. We spotted him with the helicopter, floating downriver on a life raft."

"And-was there gold?"

"No. As I say, it was a fiction, an incentive. But it worked."

"And what was your incentive in all this, comrade?"

"To present you with a gift beyond imagining, Comandante. A lot of my men died to get it. Shall we spend our time together examining my motives or may I get back to burying my dead?"

"No one is questioning your motives, Niño." Arriaga gave his vinegary smile as he exercised the prerogative of nullifying what he himself had just said. "What do you propose?"

He listened as El Niño explained his plan. "Good," he said. "Very good. I will communicate this to Presidente Gonzalo personally."

The mention of the name had great shock value; in another time and place it would be like uttering the sacred Tetragrammaton, YHWH. Arriaga was known to be one of the few Senderista cadres in direct contact with Abimael Guzman. Arriaga had never before spoken the name in his presence. It was both a compliment and a way of reminding him of Arriaga's significance.

"My communications equipment is temporarily out of order. But my own phone is at your service, of course."

Arriaga stared coldly. Guzman had not been seen in over ten years. It was said that Guzman's whereabouts were unknown-even to Guzman. To propose one's own phone to communicate with Sendero's founder and supreme commander was… a lapse of judgment.

"I will remain here while the plan is executed," said Arriaga.

"Good," El Niño lied.

"Do you have room for my men? This pathetic old man seems to have destroyed most of your infrastructure." It pleased Arriaga to use a word like "infrastructure" instead of "buildings."

"He was lucky. One of their bombs hit the chemical shed. That's what made the fire. My own house is at your disposal, Comandante."

Arriaga stood and stared at "The Execution of Maximilian." "The men in the firing squad, they're dressed up like penguins."

"Well, yes, you could put it that way."

Arriaga turned to him. "I do put it that way, comrade."

Diatri paddled the inflatable Zodiac out of the current, hugging the riverbank, watching with suspicion the logs that floated past him to see if they blinked. The light was fading and he seemed to remember that crocodiles mostly like to eat at night. He paddled until he thought he recognized a small muddy island on the map and put in to shore and set out on foot.

He told himself over and over that the animals, reptiles, birds, monkeys, bats and unspecified things shrieking in his ears were more scared of him than he was of them, though he knew this to be extremely false. Large insects swarmed in and out of his flashlight beam. Eyes the size of bicycle reflectors flashed at him. He kept touching the compass around his neck to make sure it was there. Rivulets of bug juice and sweat ran into his eyes and stung.

He marched in a southwesterly direction for two hours until he smelled smoke. He stopped to get his bearings, blood pounding in his ears. He saw the glow of light off to the south. He took a step forward and felt it, just below his kneecap.

"How do you feel, billonario?"

The face came into focus just as it had months ago on the wall of the cabin on the island.

"Now I see you're still alive, worse."

"You were asking for The Wall Street Journal. When I heard that, I knew you were going to make it. Here, drink some orange juice. Morphine makes you thirsty."

Charley gulped. It was cold and sweet. It tasted wonderful.

"Why did you do it, billonario?"

"Your dope killed someone I loved," said Charley.

"No no," said El Niño dismissively. "Not that. The Manet. The Baudelaire 'Absinthe Drinker.' How could you have done that?"

"You know how Eskimos hunt polar bear? They take a piece of sharp whalebone and bend it inside a chunk of seal fat and freeze it. The bear eats the fat, the bone straightens, the bear chokes."

"Yes," he said with barely controlled anger. "But you can replace seal fat."

"You can replace art."

"It's criminal, what you did!"

"Criminal, you say." Charley laughed. "Well, now." If the bone had not pierced through the bear's throat, perhaps he could at least make it stick in his craw. "The painting's a fake."

"No."

"A copy. You don't think I'd float down into your sewer with the real McCoy? That's back home in the vault."

"You're lying. I had a look before you blew it up. That wasn't a copy."

"Well, now, you won't ever really know, will you?"

El Niño walked toward the door. "Tell me, billonario. All this effort and expense-just for the granddaughter?"

"My way of dealing with grief."

"I still don't understand. No one forced her to inhale cocaine. You're a Catholic. You believe in the consequences of free will. What's the problem?"

"You are the problem."

"What's your understanding of me, billonario?"

"I'm not trying to understand you, son. I'm just trying to kill you."

"But all this effort, you must have done some biographical research."

"I lifted up the rock. You were underneath."

"Do you feel well enough to move? There's something I want to show you."

Charley was on a narrow bed on wheels. El Niño pushed him out into a damp, cement corridor. A man opened a door. It was dark inside, but the air was less humid. Charley heard an electric fan somewhere. He wondered if this was the room where he would die. He wasn't afraid. Was it the morphine? He said a Hail Mary. He'd been sure he was about to die a half dozen times in his life and each time he'd turned to a woman.

"Leave us," he heard El Niño tell his man. Alone in the dark, Charley waited for the fatal bullet or knife thrust. Instead he saw a spotlight brighten gradually on a canvas in front of him.

The Hapsburg emperor stood between his two faithful Mexican generals, Miramon and Mejia. He was wearing a sombrero. The muzzles of the executioners' guns seemed to touch the victims' chests. White smoke poured out. A crowd of spectators peered over the top of the enclosure.

"Do you know what Renoir said when he first saw this? 'A pure Goya, and yet Manet has never been more himself!'"

Charley stared up at the painting. He lost himself in it for a moment. "You rob museums on the side?"

El Niño smiled. "I use a service. A Belgian. He calls himself a 'deaccessionizer.' Rupert Bendinck, do you know him? He has a lot of North American clients."

"No. I pay for mine."

"Oh, believe me, billonario, I paid for this. What do you think? It's magnificent, eh?"

"It's lit wrong."

"You're very blasé. I'm giving you a private viewing of one of the greatest works of art of the nineteenth century. Alas," he sighed, "no longer open to the public. It was in the Stadtische Kunsthalle in Mannheim. Well, anyway, it was wasted on the Germans. Becker, that's German, isn't it? No offense."

"None taken."

"I suppose the Germans wanted it because it's anti-French, or anti-Napoleonic, which to them amounts to the same. You know the story? Louis Napoleon flattered the Austrian Archduke Maximilian into thinking that a nation of Indians and half-castes would accept a Hapsburg for their emperor. Metternich's comment when he heard about the scheme was: 'What a lot of cannon shots it will take to put an emperor in Mexico and what a lot it will take to keep him there.' As soon as your Civil War was over, Secretary Seward complained to Napoleon about the Monroe Doctrine. It was more than that, actually. He threatened him with war. So much for old friends, eh? So Napoleon, lacking his uncle's determination-lacking everything of his uncle, as a matter of fact-withdrew his troops and left poor Max to face Benito Juarez and the brown hordes, with only his two Quislings there, Miramon and Mejia. Max sent his wife, the lovely Carlota, to persuade the Pope to send his troops to intervene. The Pope declined. It was too much for Carlota. She went mad right there in the Vatican. She was the first woman to spend a night there. Do you think she and the Pope…? Manet's comment on the entire sordid affair was to paint the execution in the manner of Goya's 'Third of May, 1808,' in which the first-and true-Napoleon's troops are in the process of slaughtering a bunch of Spanish peons-and to dress the Mexican firing squad in French uniforms! Bravo, eh? He tried to distribute a lithograph of it. Napoleon censored it. There's the power of art for you, billonario."

"It's still lit wrong," said Charley.

El Niño went on, borne on the current of his passion. "I first saw it as a child. Papa took us to Europe on a Grand Tour. He was worried that his children were turning out insufficiently plutocratic. My sister and I were always hanging out in the kitchen with the servants. In Europe we stayed with Papa's faded noble friends. He thought that would do it, seeing the splendor that was once the Old World. We stayed in these freezing-cold castles that had been in their families since the Bronze Age. You know the kind. They still lived in them but they couldn't afford to heat them. So where did my sister and I spend our time? In the kitchens, with the servants, where it was warm." He grinned. "My father was proud of being descended directly from the Pizarros. Proud of being a Pizarro! My God. When my bad attitude matured into political consciousness, he comforted himself that I was the result of a regressive, Inca gene that one of our ancestors had brought into the bloodline one night rolling around in the mud out by the stables. The truth, really, is that Papa was a greater influence on me than Karl Marx or Mao or Presidente Gonzalo."

"The plan is to bore me to death, is that it?"

"You were an orphan by fate, billonario. I'm one by choice. Is your Catholicism a leftover sentimentality from the Mexican nuns, or does it provide you with the father you never had?"

"It provides a place for people like you."

El Niño laughed. "Ah yes. But surely it's still easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for billionaire defense contractors? Do you think I do this just for money?"

"No. Being godfather to all those crack babies must give you a fine sense of accomplishment."

"The suffering of the innocents runs through history. Look at your own religion. Every male child in Galilee slaughtered by Herod's soldiers to make way for Gentle Jesus. Look at your own country. What about the baby sitting in the ruin of Hiroshima, screaming for its mother? The little Vietnamese girl running down the road after being napalmed by Uncle Sam's F-4 Phantoms? The crack babies are casualties of a war, billonario."

"War," said Charley. "What do you know about war?"

"I know that I'm winning one against your country."

"I thought your problem was with your daddy."

El Niño smiled. "My problem has matured. My problem is with history. Do you know who Atahuallpa was?"

"Yes."

"Then maybe you'll grasp the concept, Atahuallpa's Revenge. You have to admit, it makes Montezuma's Revenge seem insignificant by comparison. An amoeba that gives you diarrhea is nothing next to an alkaloid that makes people kill themselves and each other for it."

"As I recall, it wasn't the United States that killed Atahuallpa."

"No, but the United States has long since become the conquistador of record in our own hemisphere." He started for the door.

Charley said, "Son, you're obviously educated, intelligent. Do you honestly believe all this bullshit? Or did you just work it out this way on paper to get you through the nights?"

El Niño looked at him, then at "The Execution of Maximilian." "That gets me through the nights. If I were what you think I am, then we would be sitting in a house outside Medellin decorated by Liberace, and I would be showing you a nude with big tits by-at best-Botero."

He summoned his man back into the room. They wheeled Charley down the corridor. He felt a needle go into his arm and went under.

42

Diatri pounded on his leg. It had gone to sleep. The wire that stretched across his shin disappeared into some bushes about ten feet away. It was tight, and that was a problem. Some booby traps were rigged to go off if pressure was relaxed. He reviewed the traps he was familiar with: bouncing Bettys, friction fuses, rat traps, frag wires. He shone his light at the wire again and all he saw was bushes. It was probably a rat trap wired to a shotgun shell, but it was well worth waiting until light to establish that for a fact. He checked his watch for the two hundredth time and saw that a whole three minutes had gone by since he last checked. Two more hours to sunrise. The numbness came humming up his leg. He checked his watch again. The trick-he remembered this from boot camp-was not to lock your leg. His leg wasn't locked. So why was it numb? Maybe some snake had bitten him and the numbness was… for Christ's sake, Diatri, relax, it's not a snake. Yeah? So what's all that slithering going on down there? Look, if it was a snake, you'd feel it. I don't know, they got, they got some small snakes here, these palm vipers. Will you stop with the snakes? It doesn't have to be a snake. It could be a spider. They have some extremely horrible spiders down here. It's not a spider. It's asleep, all right? They have frogs, you know, that are poisonous. Frank, frogs don't bite. Look, the Super Bowl is on back home. Why don't you play Super Bowl? There's the toss, San Francisco will receive. What time is it? Don't look at the watch. The kick is high! What was that? Diatri shone his light. Something skittered away. This was no good. He felt for his nail clippers. No nail clippers. Terrific. Wonderful. Now the leg was starting to itch. Great.

Denver won. Diatri figured that would take longer.

The sky turned a faint blue and the forest awoke in a mad avian chatter. He saw monkeys in the trees above him. One took an interest in him and swung down to a low branch above him.

"Have you got a pair of nail clippers?" Diatri asked the monkey.

The monkey dropped to the ground.

"Shoo!" said Diatri. "Get out of here." The monkey cocked his head and stared, came closer. "No, no, go away!" The monkey stopped two feet away. Weren't they supposed to be scared of human beings? Diatri made a face. He growled. "Arrrrr!" The monkey made a face. Great, Diatri thought.

The monkey reached for the wire. "No!" said Diatri. The monkey withdrew its hand and scowled. "Wire bad," said Diatri. "Wire bad. Bad wire! No!"

The monkey walked over to where the wire disappeared into the bushes. "Yo, hey, Bonzo! No!" Great, killed by a monkey. Diatri fished in his pocket, took out a disposable cigarette lighter. The bushes were rustling. He held it underneath the wire and spun the striker wheel. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Bonzo had disappeared. Jesus. He put the lighter inside his armpit, which was about the temperature of the sun anyway. He held it clamped there as sweat poured off him. Then he held it under the wire. A tiny blue ball of flame, barely enough to warm a cold mosquito, appeared. Come on, come on. The wire glowed red, then white. Come on. The blue ball of flame died. The wire cooled. Shit!

He looked up. Bonzo handed him the apparatus. It was a rat trap with a hole drilled through for a twelve-gauge shell. A nail was soldered to the bow as a firing pin. It was a live shell. The nail was against the primer. Why hadn't it gone off?

Bonzo made a face and lumbered off into the bushes. Diatri fainted.

"How are you feeling this morning?"

"Fine." His hands hurt badly. He had some blueness underneath the bandage on the wrist.

"Good. I have something to show you."

"It's a little early for art."

El Niño considered. "Similar theme. This you would call a 'performance piece.'" Two men helped Charley up and out of the building.

Charley blinked in the morning sun. They were in the large field in front of the white house. He noted with satisfaction the extent of the damage. The jungle was still smoking off to one side, where the chemical shed had been.

"You're amused?"

"Looks like you had some trouble here."

"Nothing serious. We will be back to full operational capacity in a couple of weeks. But that was good ether you blew up. Expensive."

"How about that." Charley knew he was being led to his execution. He was not afraid, and this fact pleased him.

They came to an open shed at the far end of the field. Charley saw three wooden tubs with hoses running in and out. Men were standing around expectantly. They looked at him and grinned to each other. Charley was aware of one group of men standing to one side, apart, somehow, from the rest. They were not grinning and bantering with the others.

"Good morning, comrades," El Niño said. "This is Mr. Becker, from the United States. He has traveled a long way to be with us this morning. Let us show our appreciation." The men laughed and applauded.

"You see." El Niño grinned. "Typical Latin hospitality."

A group of men appeared, dragging a man covered with a hood. They brought him to the edge of one of the tubs. El Niño gave a signal and they pulled off his hood.

"And this is Mr. Felix Velez, a friend of Mr. Becker's."

He had been severely beaten. One eye was swollen over and closed. He could barely stand. The worst was his hands. The fingers were grotesquely bent.

"Felix!"

Felix's face contorted into a smile. "Boss," he said.

Charley said to El Niño, "All right, you've made your point. I concede. You win."

"That's very accommodating of you, billonario."

"Whatever you want. Anything."

"Anything? And from the man who has everything."

"Including me. You can keep me."

"Billonario, for someone who's made so much money, you're a terrible negotiator."

"You want the painting?"

"But you destroyed the painting."

"I told you, it was a copy. I can have the real one here by tomorrow. By tonight."

"Delivered by the United States Air Force."

"No, no tricks. My own plane. I'm your collateral. Whatever happens, you keep me."

El Niño whispered, "You see that man over there? Do you know what he thinks of my Manet? He thinks the soldiers look like penguins. He's the number three Sendero cadre. So I told him, 'Yes, they look just like penguins.' What can you do with people like that? I ask you."

"I have a lot of paintings. Fine paintings."

"It's tempting."

"Do it, Antonio."

He turned toward Charley. "Antonio is dead," he whispered.

"I killed him." He grinned. "I tell you what, we'll put it to the men. We're a democracy here. Comrades, Señor Becker proposes to give us a painting in exchange for his friend there. What do you say?"

Charley shouted, "And gold."

"That's not going to work, billonario. My men don't care for gold. They're politically conscious." He said, "When I was a student in the States, there was this game show on television where you had to choose between the curtain and the box. America's contribution to world culture. So, comrades, do you want the painting, or Señor Velez?"

The men laughed. "Señor Velez!"

El Niño turned to Charley. "Vox populi, vox dicit. That's Latin, the real stuff." He nodded.

"The Amazon possesses the richest aquaculture in the world," El Niño said in the tones of a Marineland tour guide. "And among the many species we have, the candiru is one of the most interesting." The men laughed. "Technically a catfish, the candiru is very small, like a toothpick." The men laughed as if they had heard this before. "It has a great fondness for-how shall we call them?-mammalian orifices." Laughter. "And when the candiru finds one that it likes, it swims up it, like a salmon. Once it has arrived at its destination, it puts out little spines to hold itself there. People who have experienced this unique sensation say it is, well, very unpleasant. The pain of a single candiru can drive a man to chop off his penis with a machete." The men roared. "I wonder what the sensation caused by a hundred would be."

"No," said Charley. "Please."

"Let's find out." The men heaved Felix into the tank. He came to the surface gasping and tried to hold on to the edge with his mangled hands. A man standing by the tub brought the butt of his rifle down on them. Felix moaned.

"Felix!"

Felix's face began to contort. He gasped. The closed eye opened. He looked at Charley. "Boss."

One of El Niño's men began unwrapping the bandage of Charley's right hand. El Niño pressed a gun into it. It was Charley's own.45. Charley felt the muzzle of a gun at the back of his neck. El Niño leaned over and whispered, "Put him out of his misery, billonario. But I warn you, if you point that gun at anyone but Felix, you will die before you can pull the trigger, and I will keep your Felix alive for a week."

Felix saw what was happening. He gasped, "Boss, please."

"No!" Charley shook his head. "No!"

"Please, boss."

El Niño said, "You both have very good manners, I'll give you that. Everything is please."

"Stop this!" Charley shouted.

"You have the power to stop it, billonario."

"Boss," Felix shouted, "I slept with her."

"It's, it's all right, Felix. It doesn't matter."

"I slept with her, in the clearing, on the island. Please."

"It's all right."

El Niño said, "He slept with-the granddaughter? Oh, that's not good, billonario. But you know what they say about finding good help."

Charley aimed the gun at El Niño. The gun in the back of his neck dug in.

"Please…"

"Do it, billonario. Look how he suffers."

Charley pointed the gun at Felix. Felix smiled, nodded. Charley fired.

43

The compound appeared deserted except for one man with an AK in front of the white house that dominated the large open field. The place reeked of stale smoke. Diatri recognized another smell. He followed it until his eyes started to sting. It took his breath away, literally. The fumes made him gag. There were NO FUMAR signs all over.

He had seen pozos before, but none this size. It must be almost a hectare, he thought, two and a half acres of coca leaves macerating in kerosene and sulfuric acid and-something else, maybe ammonia or carbolic acid. Working his way around the perimeter, he found four more pits of nearly equal size. It was impressive; this was refining like they did in New Jersey.

He made his way back to the edge of the compound and put his binoculars on the white house. Where the hell was everyone?

He heard a shot in the distance.

He saw them. It was a procession, twenty or more, walking across the field to the white house. He focused on a man near the front with white hair and a bandage wrapped around his head. They were carrying him. His head was down. They carried him into the white house.

He waited until dark, until the crickets had a good heavy thrum going. He set the selector switch on the det box to the number-one position, disarmed the six safeties. He burrowed down and pressed the red button.

Nothing.

"You son of a bitch bastard piece of garbage," he hissed at the det box. He turned the selector to the number two position and pressed the button. This time, the earth moved.

A geyser of fire lifted into the sky from the second pit. Diatri watched, amazed at his own pyrotechnical creation. It was a volcano, Fourth of July and sunspot all at once. It was great.

Suddenly everyone was shouting and running out of the white house and a building along the field that looked like a barracks. A man appeared on the veranda and began shouting orders. He ran down the steps. Everyone followed in the direction of the pit.

Diatri crept to the back of the white house, then to the front. He peered around the corner and saw the sentry. "Psst, asshole." The sentry swung around and Diatri killed him with a short burst from his Uzi. He went inside. There were stairs. He went up them. He heard a voice coming from the head of the stairs. "Luis?"

"Si," said Diatri.

"What's going on?"

"This," Diatri said, killing him. He opened a door and saw her. She was lying on the bed, looking at him without fear, as if he might be room service with the iced tea and sandwich. There was a bruise on the left side of her face. She had on a man's shirt that came down just below the point of modesty. She had Indian features. She couldn't be more than… fifteen? A thin steel cable was fastened to a through bolt in the center of the floor; the other end was pressure-swaged around her wrist. Diatri sighed. There was always some bad sexual weirdness behind the doors he had been kicking in for so long, some naked guy with his dick all coated with cocaine and a terrified lock-jawed teenager underneath him.

"It's okay," he said. He held the cable to the muzzle of his Uzi and shot it off. He took her by the hand. They ran down the stairs. He opened the door cautiously, looked in both directions.

"Go," he said.

She looked at him.

"Go," he said. "It'll be all right."

She was fast. He had never seen someone run like that. He watched her until she reached the edge of the forest. She turned and looked back at him. She took off the white shirt and let it fall to the ground. Then she disappeared into the jungle and was gone.

Diatri went back inside. He found a door that led downstairs. He went down. There were several heavy steel doors. He opened one, and found the room empty except for a painting of-figured-a firing squad. The second room was full of weapons. The third door was locked.

He cut a salami-thin slice of HMX off one of the sticks on his web gear, inserted a nitro chip and pressed it against the lock. He went into the next room and pressed the red button.

He heard the explosion, but it came from outside. He looked down at the det box. He'd blown another pit by mistake. He set the selector to number six-the number on the corresponding nitro chip-and pressed the button. The explosion was more immediate. The blast knocked him to the floor.

The door was blown completely off its hinges. The air was dense with plaster dust. He coughed his way into the room and saw him.

He was coated with dust. He didn't move. Diatri leaned over the face and blew off the dust.

"Mr. Becker?"

Dead.

Diatri put his finger to the throat. There was a pulse.

"MR. BECKER!"

The eyes opened, but they were lifeless, glazed. "Mr. Becker, I'm Frank Diatri, DEA. I'm pleased to meet you. You're under arrest."

The old man shook his head and closed his eyes. Diatri rolled up his sleeves and saw the marks.

He got him over his shoulder and walked up the stairs. "You ready, sir? We're going to do this quickly. We're going to…" Diatri thought: What was the plan? There was no way he was going to hump the old guy back through the jungle to the Zodiac. This guy must have boats, though. All dopers have boats, fast boats. "We're going on a boat, Mr. Becker. Hold on now. Here we go."

He was only twenty feet from the forest when he heard "Halt!" He kept going. Bullets hit the ground around him. Diatri stopped.

They circled him. A man stepped forward, breathing hard. He was missing some hair. Everyone was out of breath. He said, "Put him down."

Diatri pointed to the stick of HMX on his web gear and held up the det box. He did a slow 360-degree circle so they could all see.

He said, "You're all under arrest."

El Niño stared. He said, "Gringo, it's been a bad night. Do not INSULT ME!"

They stared at each other. Diatri held the det box to his mouth and said into it loudly, "Charley Bird, this is Delta Baker Actual. Drop a sixty into that pit about a quarter click west of center field. Over." He pressed the button.

Another gonad-shrinking blast went off in the distance, hurling tons of half-macerated coca-leaf goo hundreds of feet into the air. Everyone watched.

"Thank you, Charley Bird," said Diatri into the det box. To El Niño he said, "You want another one?"

"No."

"Okay. Here's what's going to happen. My prisoner and I are going down that path over there. I see anyone following, anyone twitch, I'm going to call in an artillery enfilade that'll bring the fucking mountains down on you. You like snow? I'll give you so much snow you can turn this fucking place into a fucking ski resort. You got that?"

El Niño stepped forward. "That's a detonator in your hand, gringo, not a radio. Don't play games. What do you want?"

"Him."

He shook his head. "No."

"I'm taking him back to stand trial."

"We will take care of that, I promise you."

"Not in your courtroom." Diatri turned the detonator switch to the number nine position and placed his thumb over the button.

El Niño said, "Don't be foolish. You're not going to kill yourself for him. He's half-dead already."

Why not? Nothing to go back to. It was perfect and painless, instant disintegration, four million psi and into the cosmos in a blaze of quarks and protons. Go on, press it! Take all these shit buckets with you. Look at them. Thirty of them. Press it.

Diatri's thumb closed on the button. The old man moved. It was just a small movement, a breath going in and out of his lungs, but against Diatri's shoulder it felt close, like his own breath. A strange thing happened. The old man began to snore. With all this going on. Some of the men laughed. He'd had an uncle who used to do that, drop off right in the middle of everything and snore. He used to let Diatri steal money from his wallet.

44

He crouched on the floor by the through bolt, holding the cable, examining the parted end. At first he thought she must have cut it herself, but his forefinger came away with a smudging of lead.

Claudio stuck his head in. "Niño, it's Espinosa, on the scrambler." He picked up the phone on his desk. As he did, Arriaga appeared in the doorway.

"Hello, General," El Niño said. "I hope I'm not disturbing you, but I have something for you. I think you'll be very interested. Do you have your chart in front of you? Look at the river between Campanilla and El Valle. About five o'clock from El Valle, you see the mud island in the middle of the channel? You'll find there a large North American yacht, badly damaged, with an important gringo inside. Dead. I think it's best that way. His crew deserted during the fierce battle when you discovered them trying to leave the country with some valuable Inca artifacts on board, including an arm from the idol of Pachacamac. By the way, I'd like them back afterward… Yes. Yes. It's going to be a very big scandal. He's a significant gringo. He knows the President… Yes. Yes. A major embarrassment. You're going to be a hero. Make sure you have on your clean uniform when the TV people arrive… No, I'm-Angel, I'm just joking… All right. Fine, but not until after three o'clock tomorrow afternoon. I need time to prepare. How's Mariela? And Juanito?… With the Jesuits? Oh, watch out, he'll grow up to be a Communist!" Arriaga scowled. "Well, don't worry, he'll be too busy screwing all the beautiful girls, just like his old man, eh? Hah! Bueno, un abrazo. I'll be watching you on television. Don't forget to smile."

Arriaga said, "How much do you pay this pwta?"

"Not half what I pay you."

Arriaga walked to the desk and leaned over so that his face was close. His breath was unpleasant. He had been eating fried pork. A real cholo, Arriaga. "Comrade," he said, "you confuse bribery with revolutionary taxes. You should not."

"Of course." El Niño managed to smile. "It's been a difficult day." Arriaga left.

El Niño crouched again over the parted wire, looked at the still-rumpled bed where… He rubbed the sharp wires against his thumb. Perhaps there was less holding him here than he had thought. His bank accounts in Geneva, Brussels, the Cayman Islands, were all brimming over. There was, really, no need to continue working. Though business was starting to get exciting. He loved the apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris. The Manet would have to come with him. He couldn't leave that. Bendinck would contrive a way to get it back into the Continent. Rupert loved a challenge. The idol of Pachacamac would be his valedictory gift to his country. It was fitting.

A single bare bulb hung from a rafter. The walls and roof were corrugated tin, and though it was well after midnight, it was still hot inside and the cheep-cheep of cicadas and the grunting of frogs reverberated inside. Diatri kept putting his hand to his groin, where a few hours ago they had placed the jaws of a large set of bolt cutters. At first he had felt guilty. But he hadn't told them anything very useful, only who he was and who he worked for. He'd thrown in his Social Security number for good measure. He didn't know what was going to happen now, but he wished he had pressed the red button. So seldom does life offer such a clear-cut choice. Why didn't he press the damn button? Because Becker started snoring like Uncle Fabrizio?

He'd persuaded one of the two guards outside to bring a bowl of cool water and a rag. He dipped it in the bowl and squeezed it and laid it across the old man's head, which felt very hot. Once in Vietnam he'd-

The old man bolted up and looked at him and shouted, "Felix!"

Diatri jumped. The bowl clattered to the floor.

"No, sir. It's Frank Diatri. DEA."

"I thought you were dead. Felix!" The old guy was gripping him by the shoulder. He was strong. He peered deep into Diatri as if Diatri might be hiding Felix inside him. Finally, with a look of pain, he let go of Diatri and slumped back onto the pallet.

Diatri remembered from the photographs that he bore a resemblance, same build, hair, permanent tan, the old "olive" complexion.

"What happened to Mr. Velez, sir?"

The old man closed his eyes. Diatri looked and saw a tear roll out the corner of one eye, trickle sideways down along the ear and disappear.

There was a commotion at the door, unlocking, a sliding of bolts. El Niño entered, looked at Charley.

"How are we feeling tonight?"

"Fuck you," said Diatri. El Niño hit him in the face with the back of his hand. Diatri jumped up. El Niño put a pistol to his forehead. "Go ahead." Diatri sat down. El Niño said, "That was for letting the girl go." He looked at Charley.

"Billonario, are you well?"

Charley opened his eyes. Diatri had never seen such a look pass from one man to another. It seemed to unsettle El Niño, who said with apparent sincerity, "I'd give you some more morphine but they'll be doing an autopsy on you and I don't want… Well, I can give you some codeine if you want."

"You're a real prince," said Diatri.

El Niño gave a small laugh. "A count, more likely, if you worked it all out. Maybe a baron. But you'd need a team of genealogists and it would probably take them a month to establish it."

"What's the deal?"

"There's no deal. Well, actually, in your case, yes, there is a deal. Now that we know who you are. I assume you follow sports. You're being traded, to Medellin. It's more in the nature of a payment for a mistake one of my… incompetent associates committed. I just got off the phone with Reynaldo Cabrera. I'm sure you know of him. Certainly he seems to know about you. He's very eager to meet you. He wants you airmailed. You know that ranch he has outside the city, with a lake? He says to drop you in the lake. But not too hard. He has all sorts of things planned for you."

"What about him?"

"Oh," said El Niño, "that's all arranged. It's going to be on television. Ask Reynaldo to let you watch if you still have your eyes." He stood and went to the door. "Tell you what, as a personal favor I will ask Reynaldo to leave in your eyes until after it's been on. He can always amuse himself in the meantime with your other… parts. Good night."

A pair of eyes watched through the barred window opposite, then disappeared.

45

"Tearing open the door, Pizarro and his party entered. But instead of a hall blazing, as they had fondly imagined, with gold and precious stones, offerings of the worshippers of Pachacamac, they found themselves in a small and obscure apartment, or rather den, from the floor and sides of which steamed up the most offensive odors,-like those of a slaughterhouse. It was the place of sacrifice. A few pieces of gold and some emeralds were discovered on the ground, and, as their eyes became accommodated to the darkness, they discerned in the most retired corner of the room the figure of the deity. It was an uncouth monster, made of wood, with the head resembling that of a man. This was the god, through whose lips Satan had breathed for the far-famed oracles which had deluded his Indian votaries!"

"Tearing the idol from its recess, the indignant Spaniards dragged it into the open air, and there broke it into a hundred fragments."

And here, he thought, laying Prescott on the desk and picking up the dark brown arm beside it, the fingers angrily splayed in an attitude of noli me tangere, was the largest of those ancient fragments, passed down fourteen generations, father to son, father to son, to him, who, regrettably, had been forced to steal it rather than allow Papa to make a present of it to the National Museum so as to curry favor with the new leftist government so they'd leave his monopolies alone. He was only seventeen at the time, but he had staged it with precocious verisimilitude. The newspapers reported the theft.

ROBARON AL BRAZO DEL DEMONIO DE PACHACAMAC.

For the precious national relic to turn up, years later, on the boat of a North American art thief was a stroke of, well-he smiled-it would add a certain historical resonance to the outrage. Espinosa, that pig, had no conception of what was being handed to him.

He listened to the night sounds outside his window. The crickets sounded like the telephones that would soon be ringing: in the Presidential Palace, at the U.S. State Department, at the United Nations.

He crushed his cigarette and stared out the window toward the hangar. He had given Claudio discreet instructions. The twin-engine Aztec was ready, with enough fuel for Panama. "Maximilian" was rolled up inside a fly-fishing-rod tube already packed aboard. He'd be in Paris in twenty-four hours. What time was it there? He picked up the phone and made a reservation at his favorite restaurant, a small Gascon boite in the Dixieme.

Half hour to sunrise. His heart was thumping out extra beats from the coffee and the anticipation. He decided to call Claudio on the radio, just to check everything again.

Claudio didn't answer. That was annoying. Rogelio would be in the new communications room. He called him. Rogelio didn't answer. Intolerable.

He called Gomez on the intercom. Gomez did not respond. He charged to the head of the stairs and was about to shout for Gomez when he thought better of waking Arriaga. He went angrily down the stairs ready to kick Gomez in the balls for falling asleep on sentry duty. He banged through the screen door. No Gomez. Where the hell was Gomez?

He charged across the field, furious, toward the communications shed, rehearsing the speech that would put the fear of God-better, of the idol of Pachacamac!-into Rogelio, after which he would activate the sirens, authentic, vintage English blitz sirens. There was nothing to match them, and to hell with waking up Arriaga.

Rogelio was bent over the console, passed out drunk, the bastard. He aimed his kick at the back of his chair. Rogelio toppled onto the floor. His eyes were wide-open. He leaned over him and looked. He didn't see it right away-a tiny ball of wool dipped into clay at the end of a thin sliver of bamboo protruding from the hair at the base of his neck.

He smashed his fist down on the siren, grabbed Rogelio's Uzi and ran out the door.

WhoooooooooooooOOOOOOOooooooooooooo.

Diatri opened his eyes. What was this? World War II? For a split second, the exciting possibility dangled that it had all been an extremely bad dream. But there was the bare bulb above him, and the old man in the cot next to him. Charley was sitting up, eyes open to the widest, listening to the strange klaxons.

He burst through the barracks door, shouting at them to get up. They were all in their beds, his men, Arriaga's men, face up, mouths tightly shut like mummies, with red lines drawn neatly across their throats.

He ran back toward the white house. He saw something in the bushes around the side, a pair of legs. Gomez's. He didn't stop. He ran up the stairs and into Arriaga's room. Arriaga was leaning against his pillow, pistol in hand, staring dully, the tip of the dart shaft sticking out between his closed lips like a toothpick.

Charley unwound the bandages from his hands. Diatri crouched by the door. Charley nodded and began to shout, "Help, help!" No guards rushed in.

Diatri took several steps back and ran and put his shoulder into the door. It was made of tin and gave easily. He found himself on the ground outside between two dead guards. They each had arrows sticking out of their-Jesus. He grabbed one of their MACs and crawled back inside.

"Indians!" he gasped. "We're under attack by Indians!"

"Yeah," Charley said. "That can be a problem down here."

"Jesus. Indians."

"There's an airfield. Come on."

He moved slowly, turning continuous 360-degree circles like a tank turret, an Uzi in each arm, grenades dangling from the web gear on his chest.

The light was dim and the air-raid sirens made it impossible to hear movements. He fired bursts into every bush, any quivering leaf or vine. Chunchos. Were they playing a game with him?

"Eladio," he called out above the siren roar. "Don't be a coward. Show yourself."

He kept toward the airfield, reaching to the edge of the number-three pozo, the only one the gringo hadn't destroyed with his super-plastique. He heard something in the bushes to his left and opened fire.

"You hit?"

"No," said Charley.

"Where'd it come from?"

"I don't know."

"Keep your head down. Listen."

They heard, "Eladio? Eladio!" Diatri saw the look come into the old man's face. He started to crawl toward the voice. Diatri gripped his leg. Charley snarled, "Leggo my leg."

He was certain of it. There was something in there. He kept firing into the bush.

Diatri crawled after the old man, bullets cutting through the bush just above their heads, leaves falling around them.

He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade.

It landed next to the old man and just in front of Diatri. Diatri grabbed it and threw it. It bounced off a nearby liana vine and exploded.

The DEA gringo was knocked out, perhaps dead. His face was black and bleeding. The old man was stunned but was still gripping a submachine gun and looking up at him fiercely, trying to get to his knees. He let him get part of the way up before kicking the gun out of his hands. He aimed the Uzi at the old man's chest and was about to pull the trigger when he felt something sting the side of his face, like a wasp. In the next instant his legs went out from under him and he fell.

He could breathe. But he could not move. Eladio's face came into his vision, above him, then the girl's. He tried to speak to the girl, to explain, but he couldn't. He was paralyzed. It was, they used, he tried to remain calm, it was just a tree resin they rubbed on their darts when they hunted monkeys. The drug relaxed their muscles and made them fall to the ground. It would wear off.

Then he was being picked up and carried. Yes, good. Thank you. He was in the air-no, please, not that-he tried to scream but nothing came.

He looked and saw the billonario watching him from the edge of the pit. Please, help. He began to sink. He felt the most terrible burning in his eyes and tried to shut them but he couldn't. He tried to close his mouth, but it came in, rushing over his teeth in a scalding, tidal surge as the idol of Pachacamac gripped him by the throat and dragged him down into suffocating blackness.

Diatri felt something on his face, a woman's hands. They were smearing something on him, something greasy but very good, very soothing, very cool. He heard a voice through the blur. "Frank," it said. "You're going to be all right."

"My… face, I can't…"

"You're going to be all right. There's a real pretty nurse here with you. She's fixing you up. I'm going to give you a shot now, Frank."

Nurse? He tried to make the blur settle but it was like looking through moving water. He thought he saw breasts. He wanted to touch them, but then a warm river was flowing into him and he felt very relaxed. He was dimly conscious of being carried, of being placed in a comfortable chair, of hearing strange voices-kurinku pataa!-of a door shutting, of engines starting, of gravity forcing him back into his seat, of climbing and climbing, of a voice that kept saying, "It's all right, Frank, you're with me now, I'm taking you home."

46

"So your thinking is-"

"The thinking, Dick. This isn't, this is, what I'm trying to say, do you see what I'm trying to say, Dick?"

"I, yeah, I, I-"

"There's no case, after all."

"Well-"

"Well, what? DEA's guy has disappeared."

"We think he's dead. I mean, what else would he be?"

"Good. I mean, I didn't mean it that way."

"Of course not."

"He was, I gather he was pretty good."

"Apparently. Yes. Anyway, without him there's really no, I mean, I suppose we could reconstruct the case… but as you say, the thinking is-"

"The thinking is, there's a heck of a lot else to do. We're in a war here, Dick."

"Absolutely."

"The Noriega trial thing is going to be, well, it's going to be…"

"I understand, John."

"You do?"

"Yes."

"That's good, Dick."

"How do you, how do you want us to handle the boat situation?"

"I thought that might be better coming from Jim's shop. It's more of a State thing."

"Right. Right."

"American citizen goes on, on a vacation and he's attacked by drug people and his people are killed and, and it's, it's a terrible thing."

"Right."

"It's a question of spin, really."

"Yeah, it has to have the right spin."

"Jim's people are good at spinning."

"Oh yeah. I was thinking, actually this could be a win situation for us, war-on-drugs-wise."

"If it was spun right."

"Sure. Absolutely."

"Hell of a thing, Dick."

"Hell of a thing, John."