“No.” He upended the pint, let the last of the Scotch trickle down his throat. Then he dropped the bottle on the floorboard, and searched the glove compartment for another. There should be Gentleman Jack. Or had he drunk that already?
And where was Muller going? The road wasn’t familiar. Bumper—to—bumper traffic. In the cloudless western sky, the sun was going down.
Edson unsnapped his seatbelt, felt around in the dust and grit under the seat. “Where in hell are we headed?”
A sigh. “Out past Candangolândia, sir. You remember. You are to meet with someone there.”
No, Edson couldn’t remember. He sat up. Out the windshield, taxis. He had never seen so many taxis. “Um. Traffic.”
“All headed for the airport, sir.”
Maybe there was a pint in the console. The traffic was making him nervous. “Everyone flying.” It would be nice to fly. He rummaged through the papers in the compartment until he touched the cool welcome of glass.
“The U.N. has warned foreigners to leave. You remember.”
He didn’t. And it didn’t matter. He’d discovered an unopened pint of Seagram’s. He twisted off the cap and filled his mouth with whiskey.
Wait. Had something important happened today?
“What time is it, Gilberto?” Edson rarely called Muller by his given name, but people should try things. Life was experimentation, after all, and Edson was an explorer.
Someone had said that to him once. We’re explorers, you and me. Where in the world had he heard that?
“About five o’clock, sir.”
“When is the deadline over?”
“Midnight tonight.”
Edson took another drink. “We will go down in flames. We will go down in history.” Perhaps he should do something official. Make sure the hospitals had gasoline for their generators. The Americans could certainly knock out the power. Any six—year—old with a toaster could do that.
Something about children. Something ...
The traffic came to a halt. A horn blew. Again, again. Edson leaned his head back, closed his eyes. “Ah, listen, Muller. The car horn: our National Musical Instrument. We should get to our feet. We should put our hands over our hearts.”
Muller’s exasperated sigh.
“We should cover our balls, Muller, before it is too late.” He opened his eyes. Nearer the airport. Planes came and went, lights blinking red as maraschino cherries. “If I had a cherry,” he said, “I could make a whiskey sour.”
Traffic started to unclog. Muller hit the accelerator, then braked abruptly when the car in front came to a halt.
Edson bumped his forehead against the padded dash, and laughed. “If I had whiskey sour mix, and ice.”
Planes. Something about planes. The memory darkened. Edson sat up straighter, took another drink.
And then the traffic was crawling off toward the spur to the airport, and their Mercedes was picking up speed. Edson closed his eyes again. Planes crashing? No, that wasn’t it. A little plane. A baby plane with a broken wing. How strange. Memories hissed through his mind like static.
He dozed. Muller woke him. Edson sat up blinking. A sea of beige grass. They were in the goddamned desert. Had Muller brought him here to shoot him? Edson fumbled for the door latch. “Where the fuck?” he asked.
“Way to the other side of Candangolândia.” Muller sounded tired. He should take some time off.
The door opened and Edson fell out.
Strong arms caught him. “God, Edson.” A sigh. Was everyone in the world tired? “What scheisse. You’re drunk. Gilberto, he’s drunk.”
“I know.”
Edson would have stood up and shown them, but he was tired, too. He perched on the ledge of the doorjamb, patted the velour seat behind him. Where had the bottle gone? “Bottle,” he said.
“I need him sober. He has to okay a goddamned plan of mine, Gilberto.”
Piehl? The voice sounded like Piehl’s. But Edson’s head was too heavy to lift. All he could see was scuffed dusty shoes, baggy tan slacks.
“Why is he sitting like that? Is he going to puke? Christ, Gilberto. Can’t you make him pull himself together?”
The crunch of footsteps on dry foliage. Muller’s voice. “There’s no time. If you want a question answered, just go ahead.”
Piehl. Squatting eye level now. Such blue eyes. “Like the sky,” Edson said. He put his hand out to touch them, but Piehl jerked away.
“Edson,” he said. “Listen to me. The Japanese is in the Valley. Do you understand?”
The Japanese? What were they doing there? Edson thought the Americans were supposed to invade. Piehl seemed to be waiting for an answer so Edson nodded, hugely. “Yes.”
“Edson? This is very important.”
Had he touched another man’s face? Or ... maybe that man had touched Edson’s. A squeak—a door opening? No. The scrape of a beard against his cheek. Yes. That was it. God. And it had felt ...
“He is with Xuli. You remember Xuli. The mãe de santo. Edson?”
He nodded. But no, that couldn’t have happened. He was imagining a man’s kiss. Give him a woman, now ...
“I’ve figured out how to use our Japanese boy. We must consider the next few years, after the Americans have taken over. And how we can damage them today. Here is my idea. We use Sato to terminate Kinch and the CIA station chief. The Japanese government will be in the shit hole, and nothing can be traced to us. Clever, right? I will expect a bonus for this, Edson. Everything is set. Xuli has our boy programmed. I’m ready to order him activated, and all I need is your approval.”
Brown girl. Nipples like maraschino cherries. But when Edson imagined touching them, the breasts elongated. Not breasts anymore, but ... No.
Piehl was exasperated. “Edson, damn it. Can I have your verbal okay?”
What had he asked for? The Americans were going to bomb—sometime soon now. And Edson had received word that Japanese had invaded the Valley. Nothing mattered anymore. “Of course you can,” Edson said.
* * *
Roger had looked at his watch for the fifteenth time when it happened: exactly one hour to the minute after the nap began, McNatt’s eyes popped open. He sat up and swung his feet over the side of the bed. His face wasn’t puffy, and his eyes didn’t look sleepy. His fucking clothes weren’t even wrinkled. How’d he do that?
He picked up the conversation where he had left off. “The ‘I want.’ It’s a human urge that ... Oh. Forgive my poor manners, Roger. Do you need to use the facilities?”
McNatt was certain to go with him. Roger would have to whip it out and try ... “Thanks. I can hold it.”
McNatt went to the refrigerator and came back with a pair of Brahma Chopp. He held one toward Roger. Condensation beaded on the bottle’s sides. A wisp of mist rose up from the open longneck. Over half a liter of Brazilian brew, stronger and heavier than the single can of Miller Lite Roger would nurse over the course of an evening. Half a liter. Jeez. That could set Roger on his ass. It could make him forget things. I want, Roger thought fiercely, and took it.
McNatt straddled the chair, propped his elbows on the backrest. “There are two kinds of love, really: one that is inward and body—fixated; and one that is outward and spiritual. Those pilotless UFOs? Those massless lights? Dr. Grabbel was quite taken with them. But I know that they are a part of Freitas which still feels a need to prevent violence. That is why we see them around military planes. They are Freitas’s unconscious effort at salvation.”
McNatt took another swallow of beer, propped his chin on his crossed arms. “Interesting, isn’t it? To achieve what he has, Freitas must have had sainthood in him. Then something happened—I would certainly like to know what—and he became a romantic. Have you ever loved someone, Roger? Loved them very, very deeply?” A twinkle of mischief. “I think perhaps you were a bit smi
tten by Ms. Bonfim.”
Roger took another drink. His sinuses buzzed. Drugged? He looked at the bottle and saw to his surprise that he had downed more than half. He realized, suddenly, horribly, that he had to take a piss.
“And when you love someone a great deal, you know how that love makes you ache, and therefore you hate the person, too?”
“Um.” Piss very bad.
“And so you beat them sometimes, because of it. You hurt them to make yourself well again. That love makes you weak. And if you lose control of yourself, you are nothing. Absolutely nothing. You are so afraid of losing control, in fact, that if the person ever tried to leave you, you could kill them and it would be like self—defense. You see, Roger? The ultimate consequence of romance is murder. I have thought about this a great deal.”
“Have you ever. And—Control, huh?” Aw, Jeez. Any minute Roger was going to lose control. There was a firehose of a piss waiting impatiently in his bladder.
McNatt picked up the empty bottle, took it to the kitchen, and wiped the glass clean with a cloth. No. Stop. He was wiping Roger’s fingerprints off. There would be nothing to show Roger had ever been in the house. He’d die without leaving a mark, be buried without a headstone. He wanted to leave something behind, if only his name carved in the wall.
McNatt tossed the bottle into a trash bag and brought Roger another. “You’re letting me run on and on. Don’t let me bore you,” he said.
“No, no! Absolutely. This is just—wow. I mean. Fascinating stuff. We could talk all night. However long you want, Doug.”
“So nice hearing a man of your caliber call me Doug, Roger. I mean that in the sincerest way.”
The pants. Any minute, the pants. Then it would be over on the stomach, Roger, thanks for calling me Doug. Would you mind so very terribly putting your ass in the air and spreading your cheeks so I can give you some of that inward, inward love?
“Before you, I had never encountered anyone who had the intellectual capacity and the experience in the paranormal to follow what I am saying. It gets lonely for me.”
“Understand. But you need to be strong, Doug. Fight that. Fight that urge. See—”
“Necrophilia, for example.”
Whoa! Panic pumped freon through Roger’s veins. He didn’t need to piss anymore. He could hold gallons and gallons. An entire swimming pool of piss. And he was strong enough to pull the bedframe through that door. He could run faster than McNatt, even dragging the iron bed, and maybe even the house, behind him.
“After all, it’s not a big step from romance to necrophilia.”
Roger wanted to say something calming to McNatt, that he understood completely, that the theory was certainly compelling, but his throat was too dry to emit more than a sympathetic wheeze.
“If you love someone, you expect them to become a vessel for your wishes. But there’s the free will problem. That stubbornness. And when you insist, the complaints. A corpse is so much more tractable. And there is another sort of allure. As I told you, I can clearly recall the first dead animal I saw. I literally could not pass it up, just as none of us can pass a car wreck without peeking. After my first dead cat, I began to explore the neighborhood for others. There is a process that the corpse goes through—I’m sure you’re well acquainted with it.”
“Absolutely.” Roger’s voice was back, albeit weak. “No question about it. Well acquainted, if not actually what you’d call friendly terms. Childhood? Where was that?”
“Philadelphia.”
“Philadelphia !”
“Shame the insects eat it.”
“Yes! Too bad about ... Liberty Bell. Birthplace of—”
“And when the corpse is gone, you feel ... I don’t know, Roger. Such a loss. It hurts, losing it. Like losing a woman. And so you go out and make your own ...” McNatt blinked. Then laughed uproariously.
“Ha ha,” Roger said, and hoped he was smiling.
“Make a corpse just of your own, I mean. Not a woman.”
“Um. I see.”
“Although ...” McNatt drained the last of his beer, went to get himself another.
Although. Although. The word walked on ten—pound hobnail boots across the floor of Roger’s mind.
McNatt detoured to the bathroom. The sound of pissing went on for a long, long time. Roger tried to focus on something besides the bladder—tickling noise. At last a flush, the hiss of a faucet. McNatt emerged, straightening his zipper.
“Roger, I must tell you: it is such a joy to finally share these thoughts with someone.”
“Joy. Yes. And sharing. Never know. Maybe we could take in a ball game. Do some bass fishing.”
McNatt sat, leaned forward confidentially. “To squeeze something you love.” His hands cupped a globe of air. “To squeeze the life out of it, as you would a kitten. That is the essence. That’s what I tried to capture with Martinho, but I didn’t—”
A sound at the door. In one fluid move, McNatt was on his feet, the pistol in his hand.
Jerry. Oh, man. It was Jerry coming through the door like a Vegas show—tune—humming guardian angel. Jerry. Roger didn’t know when he’d been so happy. “Hey, somebody. Hey. I gotta take a leak.”
But that’s when Roger noticed that Jerry was carrying a familiar suitcase. And a camera case.
Jerry shot him a look. “How’s he been?” he asked McNatt.
McNatt put the gun on the table. “Quiet. Tonight?”
Roger’s Samsonite.
“Stroke of midnight,” Jerry said. “I hear their Army chief of staff sent a quiet little word to the embassy that he wouldn’t fight, and wouldn’t put up any AAA. Shit. Leaving the city wide open. You believe that? Guy sees that Freightliner Super Chief barreling down the road at him, and he’s crapping in his pants scared. The only one in this whole fucking country with a lick of sense. But General Davis doesn’t understand shit from Shinola about Brazilians. He’ll orchestrate the attack by the book. You know how that goes—you being one of the grunts.” He looked around. “There’s no TV in here, Mac. There’s no TV. Shit. Spades.”
“Gin,” McNatt said.
“Hearts.” Jerry put down the suitcase, took a pack of cards from his pocket, and tossed them on the table. He opened the refrigerator, got out a beer.
McNatt walked over—oh, shit—McNatt himself was coming to unfasten Roger’s handcuff. Then it was up and to the john, McNatt giving Roger his normal taciturn treatment, like nothing had ever been said between them.
Roger hoped that whatever happened at midnight wasn’t also going to happen to him. He saw Jerry kneel and wipe the Samsonite down.
ABC News Special
... eerie. Brasília isn’t a bustling commercial center like São Paulo, or an entertainment mecca like Rio. It has always marched to its own sedate drummer.
Doesn’t seem to be anyone outside. Are they pretty much keeping their heads down?
No, Peter. Actually there were a number of people in the streets earlier, ah, with cameras—a sight that I found very, very moving. Brasília is every bit as sophisticated as Washington, D.C., yet here were its citizens, wandering around like tourists, taking pictures of their favorite buildings—in effect, telling their city goodbye.
Um. The architecture is irreplaceable.
Yes indeed, Peter. And, uh, despite its youth, I suppose, quite historically significant. While I was at the plaza, There in the Monumental Axis, I passed a woman stroking the wall of the official pigeon house. Well, I suppose I should explain that, the Pombal. Ah, you see, Peter; when Brasília was built, there were no nearby cities—nothing for hundreds of miles—and they had to import their pigeons.
Funny.
At any rate, the woman was stroking the side of the Pombal and very, very earnestly instructing the birds that when the bombs began to fall, they should fly away. I tell you, Peter. I’ve covered ot
her wars, but I’ve never lived through anything as poignant as this. And never has a city seemed as fragile.
JACK’S PERFORMANCE was so flawless that Dolores felt at once proud and ashamed of him. A river of passengers streamed around their sidewalk island of baggage, while at a taxi stand Jack argued with a driver. The Peruvian stood propped against his taxi’s door. Jack was down in his face. “Ho—tel?”
Dolores wondered if he was trying too hard. Only a Brazilian would be as loud. Only an American would be as demanding.
It was typical Lima weather—a day of almosts: not nearly sunshine, not quite rain. The city smelled of car exhaust and ocean. Mist beaded on the windshields of the rusting taxis; drops of moisture wormed down the windows.
In slow, patient Spanish the driver tried to explain again that the Lima hotels were full. All full. That if the señor wanted to pay for a trip to Callao, there might be a room there.
Jack looked exasperated. “Ho—tel?” He leaned his head on his folded hands and theatrically mimed a snore. “Ho—tel?”
“Oh, give me a break,” Jaje said. “He’s telling us to go down the road to Callao. That’s not that far. We can afford—”
Dolores caught her wrist in a warning squeeze. “Let your father handle things.”
Jaje tsked and pulled her arm away. She glared at Jack. “Oh, come on,” she muttered under her breath. So far the spy game merely annoyed her.
Come get your kid, Ana, Dolores thought. I’m tired of this.
What had Ana said at Jaje’s thirteenth birthday? Children are puppies—they take over your house, tear up your furniture, shit all over your life. Too cute to punish.
Cute. Jaje put her hands on her hips, tapped her foot, and pouted at the equivocal border where fog ended the world—a brat. Indulgent Brazilians bred millions like her. No wonder they grew up without a sense of duty. No wonder they grew up laughing.
The mist swaddled the airport, muted the honk of the horns, hushed the roar of the planes. Under the glare of the airport lights, it sequined Jaje’s brown curls. When she shook her head, she struck rainbows. “Tell him to give it up. Please? Pl—eee—ze? I’m hungry.”
Cradle of Splendor Page 21
