Green Ice

by Gerald A. Browne

  “Well, I don’t know, but I’d say if he hasn’t lost both hands he’s in jail somewhere.”

  Laughing with her was wonderful, Wiley thought. That’s what the self-improvers ought to get into, how to laugh together.

  He took out a cigarette, used the car’s lighter. She immediately opened her wind wing all the way and asked him with a please to do the same. He had expected one of her usual antinicotine remarks, such as how coated with gook his lungs had to be. This time, however, nothing. Perhaps she was temporarily conceding for the sake of his nerve.

  In that case … without even one more drag he flipped the cigarette out.

  “I want to know what to expect up there,” she said.

  Back on that again: the top of The Concession.

  Maybe if she knew what they’d be up against she’d back off, he thought. No need to overelaborate. The truth was bad enough.

  He told her what he’d been shown and told by Argenti that afternoon at The Concession when he’d become a carrier.

  A cadmium-steel plate, one solid piece, locked horizontally into position, blocking the elevator shaft at the next-to-the-top floor. Stairways also ended at that level.

  So, there was no way up to it.

  Radar and listening devices on the roof prevented a helicopter from getting anywhere near it without being detected.

  So, no way down to it.

  The vaults were not ordinary modern vaults with twelve-inch-thick impervious doors and intricate multiple combinations and time locks.

  Worse.

  The vaults were behind walls of cadmium steel, absolutely plain walls without a dial, knob, wheel or anything.

  No way of knowing how they opened.

  “But weren’t you there when Argenti opened the vaults?” she asked.

  “Right there.”

  “He must have pushed a button or something.”

  “He was standing about six feet from the wall and even farther away from anything else.”

  “With his foot.”

  “Nothing there but floor.”

  “Then he must have had a remote control thing. Probably something as simple as a television channel switcher.”

  “I looked. He didn’t have anything.”

  “Well, the vault didn’t just open itself.”

  “That’s how it seemed.”

  “You missed something, must have.”

  “Possibly. At the time it wasn’t all that important.”

  By then they were on Avenida 58, El Saletre Park on the right. Kids were playing football, Wiley saw, dribbling with the sides of their feet and with their toes and heels. No hands allowed. Couples and family shapes punctuated the grass. It was a large park. Wiley noticed particularly one man alone, lying front up with his legs spread and arms out as though he’d fallen back dead. He could be dead, and when night came everyone would go off and just leave him there, Wiley thought. The man had a paper bag over his face.

  “God, we’ve got a lot to do,” Lillian thought aloud.

  Wiley agreed with a grunt. Preoccupied with the man in the park, he must have forgotten to filter out the pessimism.

  “You still think we can’t do it?”

  It came to him at that moment. “The radar,” he said, matter of fact.

  “What about the radar?”

  “It’s up there strictly for looks.”

  “You mean it’s not real?”

  “Oh, it’s real enough probably, but it can’t do the job it’s supposed to. It’s a type that’s called KU-band. Which has a frequency of about fourteen thousand megahertz. Used for tracking air-to-air missiles, guided missiles, things that require distant coverage.”

  “So?”

  “The roof of that building, what can it measure? Three hundred feet by two hundred. That’s about it, I’d say. Argenti’s radar couldn’t define anything that close, and even if it did pick something up, one sweep and the blip of it would be gone, not like a plane or missile that’s in the air for a longer while.”

  She was impressed, had my man written all over her face. “Then we don’t have to worry about the radar.”

  “But,” he reminded her, “the listening alarm up there is a different matter.”

  23

  That night Lillian gave Wiley a promissory peck on the mouth and asked for a compliment on the way she looked.

  He told her lovely.

  Her little insincere thank-you smile said she’d expected something stronger.

  Fuckable, he thought as she snapped her evening bag shut and went out. A few moments later he heard her voice and Argenti’s in the drive below. She was into that same buoyant role as the night before. Wiley resisted going to the window. Two car-door slams and she was gone.

  Wiley tightened his stomach muscles as jealousy delivered a body blow.

  La materia verde, he thought, jealousy, the green stuff.

  He had planned to stay in. But when the first ten minutes seemed like an hour, he freshened up, went down to the garage and borrowed one of Argenti’s cars: the yellow Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer 365, because it was the one most conveniently parked.

  The last thing he’d steered was that jinxed jeep, a far cry from this twelve cylinder, 380 horsepower beauty. He turned left out of the drive, went north on Carrera 7, which soon became a carretera, highway. The speed indicator on the Ferrari’s dash offered 250 kilometers per hour, which in miles is about 155. First straight stretch, Wiley took 100 miles of it, found it enjoyable and helped himself to 20 more. He had the urge to take it all, defy a road sign that warned of a curve ahead with a safe speed of 40, floor it and see where to hell he got.

  His life time divided into fast fractions.

  At the last split second he shifted down and barely managed to match the curve with a curve.

  He’d played footsie with death, teased it with his toe. Only for a moment, but now, as a result, came an intense sense of vitality. The blood in all his parts seemed to be hurrying to the hollow of his chest, bringing tribute. Some laughter came up out of him like silver bubbles along with some swear words. His palms weren’t even moist.

  He turned the Boxer around and drove at a modest, contented speed back to the city. Along Carrera 7 and the main way, Avenida Caracas. He cruised the central area, following his whim, left or right or straight ahead.

  He might just happen to see Lillian. Where was she at the moment? Somewhere decorating Argenti’s ego. Wiley pictured Argenti slipping his hands around, stealing touches here and there, and Lillian having to cooperate.

  To prevent his imagination from getting to him, Wiley gave himself a different problem.

  The vaults.

  He hadn’t been completely honest when he’d told Lillian there was no way of knowing how the vaults opened. From a professional point of view, and certainly electronics were involved, there could only be so many possibilities. Not many at that.

  First it was unlikely Argenti had preset the vaults to open at the exact moment they did. Under those circumstances, Argenti would surely have glanced at his watch a few times. He hadn’t, that Wiley recalled. No, it had been spontaneous. Rule out a preset timer.

  How about a heat-sensitive setup? Not unless Argenti’s body temperature differed from the average. Rule that out.

  Also, it was improbable that it had been anything as obvious as a pressure device at a certain spot on the floor.

  Same went for an automatic remote-control unit concealed somewhere on Argenti’s person. Even if it worked on frequencies like a touch-tone telephone, any expert could analyze its circuitry and unscramble it. Argenti would have considered that.

  Wiley thought it down to two possibilities. Purely speculation, of course, but he was quite sure Argenti’s installation, the mysterious little open-sesame trick Argenti believed so dumbfounding, involved either one system or the other.

  If he’d taken a closer look at those vault doors, the surfaces of the panels, he’d know now whether he was right.

  What differenc
e did it make? There was no way of getting to the vaults. There was satisfaction, though, in outwitting Argenti, even if only mentally.

  So much for that. He’d walk some.

  He parked the car in a lot near the Plaza Bolívar.

  On a side street he came upon an open barber shop, a small two-chair place with no customers at the moment. Wiley could use a trim.

  As the barber covered him, he visualized ending up with a white-necked electric clip à la Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Barbers seldom hear the requests of their victims. However, this one was a whiz, clicked his scissors with admirable precision, trimmed away little by little and asked for Wiley’s approval as he proceeded. It was enough to make Wiley feel maybe his luck had changed.

  A man came in for a shave, occupied the other chair. He read El Tiempo for a few minutes and then struck up a conversation with Wiley. His name, he said, was Raphael Bermudez. He was about Wiley’s age, evidently meticulous about his appearance. This was his second shave of the day. He had on a pale-lavender shirt and a navy tie. A pinky ring set with a single fair-sized pale emerald, not kelly.

  “Call me Ralpho,” he said in English, which seemed to be the only English he knew. He had never been to the United States because, he said, from all that he’d read and heard it was a cruel country. He was surprised when Wiley agreed. “Most norte-americanos, tell them that, they want to break your face,” he said, “which is a very unreasonable attitude. If someone tells me Colombia is a cruel country, I am a Colombian and I agree, because it is true. Anyway, you are a very unusual norteamericano.”

  Wiley paid and overtipped. As he left the shop Ralpho was having the hairs in his nostrils clipped.

  Out on the street, Wiley took a few steps and a small boy ran smack into him, bounced hard off Wiley’s legs and went down onto the sidewalk. A boy of about eight, a skinny little waif in tattered clothes, his skin caked with city grime. He lay there writhing, whimpering. A nasty spill, he had to be hurt, Wiley thought. He kneeled beside the boy, and as he did, about ten other boys came at him. They brushed, jostled and grabbed at Wiley.

  Ralpho came quickly out of the barber shop. He shouted, shoved the boys away, kicked one in the seat of the pants, sent them scurrying. The one who had taken the fall made a miraculous recovery, jumped up and gestured obscenely at Wiley as he ran off.

  They were bagos, Ralpho explained, boys of the street, homeless. They were called bagos because they usually slept anywhere in paper or burlap bags. They were the best pickpockets in the world. Had they gotten anything from Wiley?

  He checked. His watch was gone. Without his feeling it, they had slipped it off his wrist. But he still had his money, his passport and the emerald, that one emerald he’d taken as a souvenir from his carry to Paris. If it hadn’t been for Ralpho those little piranhas probably would have stripped him down to his socks. Wiley thanked Ralpho and offered to buy him a drink.

  Ralpho accepted, knew just the place.

  Club Carrencol on Calle 25.

  Nothing fancy from the outside, a two-story place. Inside, an atmosphere like a whorehouse, bare walls and floors, so much smoke in the air that every breath was like taking a puff. There were twenty rooms containing plastic-topped tables and substantial chairs—and men.

  This was Friday night, by machismo tradition the weekly night out. Man’s time to overindulge in whatever he chose: drink, boasts, self-pity—usually phases of each, as the night passed.

  The men had on their best black suits, their hair slicked. Guitarists went from room to room, nearly sobbing songs about loves lost or impossible for some reason. Many of the lyrics touched upon infidelity, as though it were inevitable. Always it was the woman who strayed, often inadvertently and not because of lack of attraction. Forgiveness never exceeded the explanation that she could not help herself, nor was she ever reaccepted.

  Wiley and Ralpho stood at the bar. They drank straight aguardiente and sucked on sour orange slices for a chaser.

  “How long will you be in Bogotá?” Ralpho asked.

  “I’ll be leaving anytime now,” Wiley told him. He noticed a man at a table nearby, sitting straight and still with tears streaming down his cheeks.

  “Tomorrow he will be happy,” Ralpho said, “because he leaves all his sorrow here tonight.”

  Wiley looked around. Many of the men seemed on the verge of tears. The music accompanied their emotions.

  “They are having a marvelous time,” Ralpho said.

  “In America we call it the blues,” Wiley said.

  Ralpho nodded. “Blue is a beautiful color.”

  Wiley had to turn from the room as another welled-up man let go. It could be contagious. He asked Ralpho, “What do you do?”

  “I have a store.”

  “What kind?”

  Ralpho thought a moment, exonerated himself with a shrug and confessed, “Actually, here is my store.” He patted his jacket pocket. “I sell emeralds along Calle 14.”

  The coincidence amused Wiley. “How’s business?”

  “There is much competition. But I have been honest most of the time, so I do well. I do not think I have cheated more than eight, maybe ten customers this year.”

  “Norteamericanos?”

  “Yes. Would you be interested in an emerald or two?”

  “No.”

  “I would not cheat you.”

  “I believe you, but no thanks.”

  “You are an unusual norteamericano. I would like you to be treated fairly. I would sell you a good stone for whatever it cost me. No profit for me.”

  If he only knew, Wiley thought. He had his hand in his pocket, rolling his souvenir emerald between his fingers. It was about ten carats. He took it out and showed it to Ralpho.

  Ralpho was unreadable as he looked at the stone.

  Impressed, Wiley thought.

  Ralpho took out a loupe to examine the stone under magnification. “How much did you pay for this?”

  “Someone gave it to me,” Wiley said.

  “In that case, you lost nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is not an emerald. It is only emerald quartz.” He handed the stone back to Wiley.

  “You must be mistaken.”

  “I am a third generation street dealer.”

  … Who is trying to take me, Wiley thought. “How much is the stone worth?”

  “Next to nothing.”

  “Would you give me fifty dollars for it?”

  “As much as I like you, no.”

  Wiley tried again. “It’s yours for fifty.” He placed the stone on the bar in front of Ralpho.

  “You need money?” Ralpho asked.

  “No.”

  “Then let us have another drink.”

  Wiley was stunned. He picked up the stone. “Emerald quartz?”

  “You do not believe me, ask that fellow over there.” He indicated an older man at a table. “He is also a dealer.”

  Wiley had to know for certain. He went over to the older man, who verified Ralpho’s contention. The stone was worth no more than an ordinary pretty pebble.

  Wiley returned to the bar. He apologized to Ralpho and ordered a double, downed it quickly.

  That five-million-dollars’ worth of fine quality goods he’d carried to Paris had been worthless?

  God, what a job they’d done on him.

  It had been a charade from the start. Wine Face and Hairpiece had been Concessionmen, hirelings of Conduct Section. Probably there was no one named Forget. Anyway, whoever lived in that Place des Vosges apartment had been in on it, had been home all that afternoon.

  Such an elaborate scheme, but it had been relatively easy for The Concession with its facilities.

  But why?

  The obvious reason. Argenti wanted Wiley down. Not just down; he wanted his knee on Wiley’s neck. If it hadn’t been for Lillian, no doubt Argenti would have eliminated Wiley. Then again, if it hadn’t been for Lillian, Wiley wouldn’t have been implicat
ed at all.

  Wiley recalled Kellerman’s interrogation in the projection room in Lillian’s presence. No wonder Argenti wouldn’t see Wiley in private. And Argenti’s expressed disappointment in Wiley, and his insistence that Wiley was into The Concession for five million. Only the night before last at dinner, Argenti had mentioned it again.

  Other parts of it came back to Wiley now: his sweating it out through customs, his freezing his ass on the bench in Paris, the wear on his nerves, the fears and the guilt he’d endured. Not to mention the kick in the balls from Wine Face.

  All the while Argenti had been looking down his throat.

  Argenti had made him feel small.

  Made him look bad.

  Rubbed his nose in it.

  That devious, welching son of a bitch, Argenti.

  Now it was Wiley’s turn.

  Argenti owed.

  Would pay, Wiley vowed.

  No effect from the five aguardientes he’d had. He walked straight and fast to where he’d left the Ferrari, drove it south on Carrera 10, went left on Calle 1 for three blocks and stopped. From there he had a good view of Número 1, The Concession’s building. He was only slightly surprised to see Argenti’s limousine parked in front. The chauffeur slouched in it, probably expecting an all-night wait. With the barrio all around, he’d better have the limo’s doors locked, Wiley thought.

  The steel-and-glass tower was black against the night sky, defined only by the reflections of the city that played upon it. A section of the thirty-third floor was lighted. Conduct Section, Wiley recalled, was on thirty-three, and of course that was where the controls would be located, with someone on duty round the clock. The only other lights were on thirty-four, next to the top, Argenti’s private floor.

  Wiley reminded himself that he wasn’t there to be jealous.

  The building.

  If he could, he’d blow it to bits, reduce it to rubble, bring it down to the level of the barrio that it stood in. But, hell, that would only inconvenience Argenti for a while. He’d just put up another building.

  No. The ultimate satisfaction, Wiley thought, would come from the idea Lillian had latched onto: taking the frosting right off the top of Argenti’s piece of cake.

  If possible.