Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  John felt he did as well as, if not better, than most of the other actors in his group. Nonetheless he was discouraged whenever he heard Mondragon perform, for his old friend from college enunciated the language of Chekhov like a native speaker. He alone made Miss Lubov’s bosom swell with approval when he recited the few lines the station master is given in the play. Though Mondragon did not converse with John much during rehearsals, Erin made a point of coming to see him backstage before the performance. Erin brought Miss Lubov with him and saw to it that she was more civil to John than she had been on previous occasions.

  “You need to forget yourself,” Mondragon advised him as they were putting on stage make-up together. “Older Russians are bold, presumptive. So are young Russians. You must emote. Be a ham. Let your hot Scythian blood dominate your personality.”

  “I’m an old school Wasp, not Russian,” said Taylor, although John Taylor in truth had no cultural identity, no religion, no traditions, no sense of history beyond the history of the family business.

  “You’re an actor,” said Mondragon, speaking with more passion than the moment should have demanded. “You’re a blank slate on which a world of possibilities can be projected.”

  The two men and Miss Lubov were in an elementary classroom, near the school auditorium containing the stage on which the play was to take place. There were children’s crayon drawings on the wall and perhaps three dozen people, mostly relatives and friends of the performers, gathering in the hallway outside. Taylor did not see why in such a setting Mondragon cared so much about a production almost no one would see.

  The performance went as well as could be expected. The non-Russian actors butchered their lines. The handful of Russian speakers in the audience at first laughed and then occasionally booed as the play progressed and more words were mangled. The majority of the performers were nonplussed by everything that happened. They were mostly North Beach bohemians, and they and their friends in the audience were good-natured sorts having great fun speaking and hearing a new kind of gibberish. At the final curtain the friends in attendance cheered for a couple minutes before they went off en mass with the performers for late dinners and some recreational drinking.

  “You were not too bad, John,” Mondragon consoled Taylor. “Alexandra will still, of course, have to work with you some more.”

  “We’re putting on the other play?” asked Taylor. He was so happy to be getting out of the heavy greatcoat he had worn on stage and his thick pancake make-up that he could not bear to think of several more months of Miss Lubov’s company.

  “Yes, The Seagull,” said Mondragon. “You will be Shameyef, the estate manager. A retired lieutenant, a man of the world, but a bit set in his ways.”

  “Shouldn’t the director decide who gets what part?” asked Jack, amazed that Mondragon could tell what role Taylor would be playing when auditions had not yet been held.

  “Well,” said Mondragon, “I have a part in managing the troupe. You’ll see: Shameyef will be fine for you.”

  On the first Monday following the performance Miss Lubov again brought her morose, disappointed person to Taylor’s home. She brought with her another vocabulary list, some new verb conjugations for Taylor to learn, and scores of angry outbursts she released in Taylor’s living room.

  “Why do Americans not learn?” she asked him at one juncture. “Is it in the water you drink that you are stupid?”

  “Since I am such a burden to you, why do you come here?” Taylor asked.

  “Mr. Mondragon,” she said, “promises he is going to gain for my father the general a visa.”

  “Is he former KGB?” asked Taylor, thinking that the father’s profession might explain the daughter’s personality.

  “Mr. Mondragon is not even a Russian,” said Alexandra. “Why do you ask such an odd question?

  IX

  07/28/06 10:10 CDT

  The address on the order form intrigued Ben Lander more than the order itself. Ben a part-time clerk at the Radio Shack in Hinkley, Ohio, showed the typed order form to Shari, a girl working with him in the store’s stock room that morning.

  “Twenty-three CPUs without accessories and twenty-three radio controlled cars,” he read to her.

  “So?” she asked as she searched through the stacks of video games for the copy of Death Head a costumer out front had requested.

  “Look,” said Ben, trying to show her the form. “This guy lives in Montecual, Venezuela. Like, where’s that?”

  “In South America,” said Shari.

  Young Ben had thought he liked Shari, until she began taking pleasure in making him look foolish. She had a slight case of facial acne, as he did, nonetheless he thought she was prettier than Ashley, his regular girlfriend. Poor Ashley worked the evening shift at Chick-fil-A, and using the deep fryer had ruined her complexion.

  “I meant, like, where in Venezuela is that?” he said.

  “Oh, darn it,” said Shari. “I don’t have any Venezuela maps in my purse today. Imagine that.”

  Ben grumbled something about college girls and went into Mr. Hendrix’s office and opened a search engine on the computer. Montecual, he discovered, was in the south of Venezuela, far from the populated regions of that nation, on a branch of something called the Aracua River.

  “What the heck does he want with radio controlled toy cars way out there in the Amazon jungle?”

  He reread the name on the order form: Charles Carello. Ben punched the name and address into the Radio Shack data base and found the same Charles Carello had purchased twenty-three video monitors from the store in Modesto, California, and twenty-three embedded chips made for use in digital cameras, from the Hollywood,

  Florida, branch.

  What’s he using this stuff for? Ben thought.

  He took a print-out of Mr. Carello’s strange purchases back to the stock room to show to Shari, confirming her suspicion that he was trying to impress her, or at least trying to get her attention.

  “Why don’t you do your work?” she said. “I already have a boyfriend,” she added, with a vicious twist of her mouth.

  “Well, excuse me for living!” said Ben.

  He tore up his copy of Charles Carello’s purchases and resolved not to think of the subject again. He wished to heaven Shari had not caught him looking at her legs earlier that day, for now that she knew what was on his mind she was never going to let him forget it.

  X

  07/28/06 11:02 Atlantic Standard Time

  At about the same time the clerk in faraway Ohio was wondering what this Charles Corello wanted with the peculiar equipment he was ordering, Ed Harris, the engineer Mondragon had brought to Taylor’s home and who sometimes used the alias Charles Corello, was welding together two halves of a large metal cigar-shaped casing inside a

  roomy compound south of Montecual, Venezuela. Kenneth Greenley, an old friend of Ed’s late father and a former Army aviator who had grown too old to fly for either commercial or military services, polished the welded seam shiny and flat after Eddie pulled back the glowing electric rod.

  “The surface is not going to be particularly smooth,” Kenneth commented over the sharp hum of his grinder. “Will that throw it off track?”

  “In instances when the torpedo has to travel a great distance,” said Ed, “yes. These will be going six hundred meters or so, probably less."

  Abe Wilson, a machinist from Eddie’s father’s bankrupt aerospace company, came across the concrete floor of the metal building to show the other two men the propeller blades he had made in a clay mold and finished on a grinder.

  “I’ve increased the rotor’s sweep by a quarter inch like you wanted,” he told Ed and tossed the metal pieces from gloved hand to gloved hand. “Hot.”

  “This afternoon you and Kenneth are going to put another set of stabilizer fins on this baby while I figure out what needs to be done with this damned guidance system,” said Ed.

  “Cheap Japanese workmanship,” said Abe of the guidance
chip that had not been responding properly all week.

  “Is this Colonel Method going to be much help to us?” asked Greenley.

  “I’ve told you,” said Eddie, “right now he’s working with the shipments. Anyway, Mondragon says he’s more of a doer than a builder, whatever that means.”

  “He’s not some gun nut, is he?” asked Abe. “We really don’t need a crazy on this job.”

  “No, he’s as sane as any man in his line of work,” said Ed. “We’ve been allotted the time to do this ourselves. Twenty-one of the torpedoes are operational, and we have two months for the last two.”

  “Till your Mr. Mondragon cuts it down to two days,” interjected Kenneth.

  For twenty-four long months the three of them had battled jungle heat and the slow pace at which parts had arrived from North America while they cooked the plastique and built the torpedo shields and electronic motors from naval scrap and the twenty-three guidance systems from odds and ends of computers. The finished products of their labors were piled in racks along the metal building’s west wall, looking like giant sausages laid out length-wise in a butcher’s display case.

  “We’ll do whatever he asks,” said Ed of Mondragon.

  As for Erin himself, who also went by the alias Charles Corello, he was that day in San Francisco, inside a rented office and sending an e-mail to Ed Harris, informing him that another shipment, this one from Ohio, would shortly be arriving at the Venezuelan station. Needless to say, Mondragon had paid for this transaction with a money order.

  “Who knows what the real Charles Corello’s credit is like?” Mondragon typed on the computer keyboard.

  XI

  07/28/06 14:23 PDT

  As for the real Charles Corello, he was on that Friday working as a counselor at the Second Chances halfway house in Fresno, California. After a hectic morning he had met his third client of the afternoon, Milton Francis, a former gang member recently released from prison after doing five years on a weapons charge.

  “How’s Milt today?” Charles asked, entering the sparsely furnished counseling room and tossing Milton’s file on the table.

  “Don’t you fucking talk to me like you know me!” Milton snarled at him. “I don’t know you. I don’t know any fucker in a tie.”

  Charles fingered the stubby ends of his blue denim tie. That morning he had regretted that it, and his blue cotton shirt, were the best clothes he had, and never would he have guessed that anyone would have taken his humble wardrobe as a sign of superior status.

  “I come from where you do,” said Charles. “Six years ago I was sitting where you are now.”

  “So you did time,” Milton mocked him. “Everybody in this fucking place did time. Couldn’t you find any honest counselors? I got to talk to some fucking ex-con all the time?”

  “You have a past,” said the resolute Charles, sticking to the script the counselors were instructed to use, “that does not mean you will not have a future. You have a point, too, about ex-cons; true, we’re mostly ex-cons ourselves here at Second Chances. No one cares about you like us, the ones that have been through the same system. And I’ll be talking to your parole officer, when you are assigned one. Things will run smoother for you if you cut out the swearing and listen to what I have to say.”

  He sat at the table and glanced over Milton’s record another time.

  “How do I know you’ve been there?” asked a less hostile Milton. “You could be lying. If you’re a home boy, why are you calling yourself ‘Charles?’” he said, clicking a fingernail against Corello’s name tag. “Shouldn’t you be a ‘Carlos’ or something?”

  “My real name is Carlos,” he told Milton. “Or it used to be. You will find, Milton, it is better to play by the man’s rules in some cases. Some of these yahoos think I’m Italian. Look,” he said and pulled down his collar, revealing a long, angry scar. “I got that in a knife fight in ‘96. I lost two quarts of blood and was on an IV for eight days straight.”

  “Eww,” said Milton in approval.

  “My nose has been broken three times, first when I was seven,” said Charles and showed Milton how loose the cartilage was. “I also have this.” He pulled back his shirt sleeve and showed Milton a yellow butterfly tattooed on his wrist.

  “I know that!” declared Milton in recognition. “Let’s see--east side LA?”

  “Yes,” said Charles.

  “Los Locos Boys?” guessed Milton.

  “They were further south,” said Charles. “Los Hermanos, the brothers. What that had to do with butterflies, I forget.”

  “It helped in prison, huh?” asked Milton.

  “Indeed,” said Charles pulling down his sleeve. “I remember this one dude, an Indian guy, a Navaho, I think; can’t think of his name, he got the same tattoo for protection.”

  “A gangsta wanna be,” said Milt. “We had those in South Central, too.”

  “No, this guy was different,” recalled Charles. “He was the only Indian in Solano State I knew of. He needed the protection bad. He was lucky; as a Native American he could ask to be transferred to a federal facility. They sent him to some place called Boron. Could we get started, Milt? I’ve got five more clients today. Now, have you had a chance to look at the Job Corps brochure?”

  XII

  11/12/06 15:38 Mountain Standard Time

  The autumn had come and the calendar was moving quickly toward the holiday season when Mondragon proposed to Taylor it would be a good time to go fishing on the Colorado.

  “It’s too late in the year,” was Taylor’s reaction when Mondragon asked him after the final rehearsal of The Seagull. “Snow will be out there by this time in the fall.”

  “In the mountains,” conceded Mondragon. “Not where we’re going. The Grand Valley stays warm in winter. Ed Harris--you remember Ed? Tall boy, well not a boy, about twenty-nine, I think--he and I will be around your place at six on the morning after the performance. We’ll have a lovely daylong drive out across the Great Basin, slip across Nevada to I-70 in Utah, and go straight over to Grand Junction, Colorado. We’ll be staying there overnight. You’ll love how the high desert looks this time of year.”

  “Six in the morning?” said Taylor, for during the idle days since he lost his business he had fallen into the habit of sleeping until eight o’clock every day.

  Mondragon wiped off the last dollop of his stage make-up and was gone without making a reply. Taylor would have liked to ask Mondragon if another Russian language play was in the works. He had taken ten consecutive months of lessons from the beautiful but stern Miss Lubov, and had she been twice as lovely as she was Taylor could not have endured her in his house another day. As his enunciation of Russian improved, and he made fewer and fewer mistakes when she asked him to construct grammatical sentences, she had taken to lecturing him more and more on the shortcomings of American civilization.

  “No wonder your poor people are trash,” she said, “if you are a rich man and you are merely intelligent enough to breathe.”

  On another occasion she had offered this thought: “This country makes everything big because you think size compensates for your little thoughts. You have big cars, little art. Big rockets, little beliefs. Big houses, big stadiums, dirty little wars. Do you really think the rest of the world hasn’t noticed?”

  Taylor thought he was beginning to understand why the birth rate in Russia was falling like a stone dropped down a bottomless well. The country had the good sense to kick out the sour Miss Lubov, yet the Miss Lubovs of the would were undoubtedly like termites--if there was one like her there would be millions more in hiding. Were the other Russian women anything like Alexandra, Taylor understood why Russian men would rather drink vodka than make babies. After his short time with her he was already drinking more whiskey than he did when he was running his business.

  As soon as the performance of The Seagull had ended, Taylor hurried home and drank himself into such oblivion he forgot Mondragon was coming for him in the early morning. So
mehow Taylor got on board Erin’s big Cadillac SUV. John did not realize where he was until they were east of Reno and deep in the heart of Nevada. Ever his bright breezy self, Mondragon, dressed in a red flannel shirt and khaki pants, was at the wheel when Taylor awoke.

  “Ah, coming around, are we?” said Erin. John stirred from his sleep. “You already know Ed,” indicating the other passenger in the front seat. “I don’t think you’ve met Colonel Michael Method, U.S. Army Special Forces, retired.”

  Taylor saw across the backseat from himself a sixtyish man wearing a t-shirt on the front of which were emblazoned the wings of the Airborne Rangers and the motto: DEATH FROM ABOVE. The stranger had the body of a thirty-year-old tri-athlete, a blond buzz-cut hairdo the meanest drill sergeant would have worn with pride, and bronzed skin that appeared to be as thick as dragon’s hide. Method wore mirrored sunglasses in which Taylor could see himself make an uneasy smile for the toughest-looking man he had seen outside a B-grade movie.

  “Special Forces?” said Taylor. “Really?”

  “Colonel Method knew Al Harris,” explained Mondragon. “The Special Forces are but one item on his resume. An interesting man. Very long history.”

  The colonel appeared to Taylor as someone having the sort of history that needed to be confessed to a priest. “That is only my first impression,” he told himself. A man Method’s age was probably a grandfather; he might have a pet, and give generously to charities. Those little scars on his cheek and his hands could have come from anywhere. Perhaps he had cut himself opening a can of baby food. My God, he thought, is that a holster he has on his right hip? Maybe he’s a sportsman. Sportsmen have guns, don’t they?

  “I was in the Army Reserves,” said Taylor to the ex-soldier. “Once. Years ago. I was a quartermaster, sort of, for a while.”