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 reco
gnize.
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.'"
Wet Work Page 24
