“What the hell …” his voice growled in the night. It was then, with a grace and style entirely my own, that I vomited over his shoes.
“Drink it.”
I could smell the vomit on my breath. I didn’t want the Scotch, but I needed its antiseptic qualities. I took a gulp and liked the way it flowed like hot lava down my throat, scalding and melting the ice chips still lodged somewhere in the bottom of my stomach. Maybe if I drank some more I might even feel normal.
“That’s enough.” He took the flask from my hands and, holding it up, poured a small river down his own throat. I wondered if he could taste my breath on the rim. I was sitting on a log by the side of the path, his jacket round my shoulders. He was crouched in front of me, squinting through the crazy paving of one smashed lens, the other mercifully untouched. I was glad he was there.
“You all right now?”
I nodded.
“So, tell me.”
I did, making it as simple and as accurate as I could. And the sound of my own voice reassured me somewhat, which was all to the good, because when I reached the part about the telescope and the phone calls, thunder began to grow in him, a great rolling wave of it, which exploded over me as the snake sent me scuttling across the ridge for cover.
“Motherfuckers … stupid motherfuckers. Jesus, what kind of stunt—” He broke off, and the night shivered with his fury. He wrenched his attention back to me. “You sure about the snake? You sure it was a rattler?”
“I didn’t stop to check its fangs, if that’s what you mean. Yes, of course I’m sure.”
“God damn … I told them. Assholes.”
I suppose I might have got there faster, but I arrived in the end. “What do you mean? I don’t understand. Do you know these people?”
He stared at me as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.
“Tell me.” My voice, it now became obvious, was not entirely back within my control. We both noticed it rise too sharply.
“Yeah,” he growled. “I know them.”
“Who are they?”
“No one. Hired hands. Doing someone else’s dirty work.”
“Whose?”
“But she didn’t see any of it, right? The footprint, the snake, the phone calls … she doesn’t know about them?”
“I said, whose? Answer me, for Christ’s sake.”
“No, God damn it, you answer me first. She doesn’t know about that stuff?”
“No.” I took an angry gulp of air. “No, she doesn’t.”
“And she and Lenny won’t be back until tomorrow. They’re staying in the city. You certain of that?”
“Yes, I’m certain. She said she’d call, listen—”
“No, you listen. I’m going to have to leave you …”
“Like hell you are.” The words erupted so powerfully that even he had to pay attention. “What is this? What the fuck’s going on? Tell me. I have a right to know.”
“You will.” He was gentler now, concentrating on me hard. “But not now. Now I gotta do something, and you can’t come with me.”
“I’m not staying here.”
“No, I’ll take you back to the house. You’ll be safe there. They won’t come back.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“Because they’ve got eyes. They saw Elly leave. And it’s not you they’re interested in.”
I shook my head. “I’m still not going back.”
He brought his face close to mine and stared at me. I could smell the sweat on him. It was heavy and sweet and not unpleasant. I liked the bulk of him. It filled up the night and left me comforted. He nodded. “All right. You can come with me. But you’ll have to stay in town. There’s a place you can hang out. I’ll pick you up when I’m finished. But no questions now, right? You’re gonna have to wait for the story.”
“Where are you going?”
“I told you, you’re going to have to wait. Come on.”
He pulled me up from the log and, holding tight on to my arm, guided me toward the truck. His hand was hot and damp through the sleeve of my shirt, and his grip less than gentle. There had been more physical contact between us in the last few moments than in the whole of our strange, oblique relationship. What kinds of women did he love? Ones built in his own image? Or was it always the pursuit of fantasy? I already knew the answer. “Elly, are you all right?” Every giant has its Achilles’ heel. On the other hand, right now I was more worried about his eyesight.
“What about your glasses?” I said as I clambered into the passenger seat. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think he smiled. Behind the cracked lens he closed one eye, a kind of wink.
“We were both lucky tonight. I cracked the right one. The left works fine. I just wear the glass to keep the balance. Let’s go.”
Half an hour later I was sitting propped up at a dimly lit bar with padded leather stools and a large fish tank above the optics, where a sluggish octopus was clinging to the glass walls. J.T. had gone, and I had nothing to do but swallow black coffee and wait for his return. Outside it was getting on for dawn, but here it was perpetual night. In the half-light the place looked sleazy, but it was also sleepy and safe. J.T. was obviously a regular. Even the bartender was discreet, or maybe drunk enough to be lacking in curiosity. No doubt this kind of thing was routine for him, all in a night’s work. Whatever the conventions, no one bothered me. The pickups had all been had, and those left were too self-absorbed to care. At the far end of the bar, a man somewhere between forty and sixty sat hunched over a half-empty glass. He had looked up briefly when J.T. left but evidently found me less interesting than his liquor.
Across the room a man in a denim shirt was shooting pool with himself, taking every shot with a kind of glazed, slow-motion concentration. He had the air of someone who had not seen daylight for months, and had no intention of breaking the habit. I watched him as he stood, leaning on his cue, staring intently at the table, deciding on the next target. There was something about him that appealed to me. I liked the way he had chosen this as real life, above and beyond anything that went on outside. It was an exotic isolation, and I was impressed by it. I thought about my own life. I too lived temperature controlled, working and watching others, always on the other side of the white line, using distance and efficiency as my version of potting every shot. Except now I had broken my own rules. By stepping into Elly’s life, with all its pain and chaos, I had left the control chamber, I had become involved. And because of what had happened in the last six hours, and because I was about to learn more than even she knew, it was becoming my story as well as hers.
At the table the man had made his decision. His body stretched for maximum reach, he was trying a rebound shot to pocket the blue. A Tammy Wynette tape was soaking up the silence, but its level was low enough for me still to catch the crack as the white ball hit the blue and, at a perfect angle, sent it gliding gently toward the pocket. It was just a sigh away when momentum ran out and it came to rest, hovering on the edge of the hole. The man straightened up and regarded it with a neutral stare. I turned my attention to my cup. There was no going back now.
eleven
It was well into dawn by the time J.T. and I emerged from the bar. My eyes were beginning to smart with tiredness. I had reached that point where sleep seems an almost unbearable temptation. On the journey back, we spoke very little. I didn’t ask and he didn’t volunteer. Maybe I didn’t want to hear the explanation after all. As we drove over the ridge, the sky was a translucent gray-pink with shots of blue running through it, like veins under the finest of pale skins. The world was fresh and clean, and last night seemed a long time ago.
When we reached the cabin, he turned to me. “You look strung out. You wanna sleep? We can talk later. Before they get back.”
I thought about how it would be after two, maybe three hours’ sleep, how if anything I would be feeling even more dislocated. I shook my head. “No, I’ll hear it now.”
He got out of the truck. “OK.
But you need to wake up. You should take a shower.” I hesitated. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to shower in J.T.’s house. It smacked of a complicity, an intimacy, which we didn’t have, and which I was pretty sure I didn’t want.
He noticed my prevarication and bent his head back in through the window of the truck. “Listen. Maybe we should get a few things straight. You and I have got some things in common. We don’t like people too much, and we don’t spend a lot of time with them. But you got your nose caught in this honeypot. You were the one who came back and started asking questions, and now you’re gonna have to be the one to hear the answers. I know nothing about you except that you’re Elly’s friend and you’re looking out for her. That’s enough for me. I don’t want to know you any better than you want to know me, and I sure as hell got better things to do than make a grab for your tush. Now, you can take your goddamned shower anywhere you like. But I’m stopping here, and since we gotta talk, I suggest you save yourself a journey. OK?”
It was the kind of speech which, had it been delivered by someone else, would have been designed to wound. But not coming from him. He was right. Left to our own devices, we would not have passed the time of day together. But some have communion thrust upon them, and one of the things we had in common was a talent for bluntness over charm. It was acceptable to lay down some ground rules. People are easily offended where sex is concerned. Not me. I took myself out of the game a long time ago. I may have crossed some boundaries that night, but not all of them. I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me.
“OK,” I said. “Since you put it so eloquently, where do you keep the towels?”
The shower helped, but the cocaine worked even better. Innocent I may be, but stupid I am not. He had been awake for at least as long as I had, maybe longer, and there was something in the quality of his attention—an energy, clipped, almost impatient, that I thought I recognized. Professions can still be hobbies, and old habits die hard.
When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor by a small table with a slab of glass in front of him, and on it a mound of crystalline white powder. He divided off a small heap and began running it into lines along the edge of a razor blade. He handed me a glass straw and pushed the slab toward me.
“Just a little,” he said, carefully watching me. “It’ll help you listen.”
I did as I was told and took only what I thought I needed. It burned slightly as I drew it up into each nostril. I sat back and sniffed. Just like in the movies. Somewhere in the back of my head, I felt my brain kick-start, like a television picture jumping into sharp focus. At the same time I tasted a bitter liquid at the back of my throat. I swallowed and pushed the glass back in his direction. He hoovered up the remaining lines and picked the dust off with his fingers, running them along his gums. The ceremony completed, he sat back and snorted loudly.
“I didn’t figure you for someone who did coke.”
“I don’t. Usually. What gave me away?”
He shrugged. “Oh, I dunno. I just got the impression you were pretty straight.”
“Well, appearances can be deceptive. I thought you were supposed to have retired.”
“Yeah, well, it still has its uses.” He snorted again. “You want some more?”
I shook my head. He pushed the glass to the middle of the table. I waited. I got the feeling he was preparing a speech.
“One thing first, OK? Some of what you have to know goes back a way. When you’ve heard it, you can do one of two things with it. You can tell Elly all or some of it. Or you can keep it to yourself. But you open your mouth to anyone else, and someone will shut it for you. Do you understand?”
What is it they say about coke making you aggressive? More myths than there are ways to cut it. “Don’t threaten me, J.T.,” I said softly. “I’m not a member of your fraternity, and I’m not interested in becoming one. I may be straight, but I’m not stupid. Maybe we should both agree not to underestimate each other.”
Even university teachers learn how to deal with smart-aleck students. I was feeling just fine. He frowned at me but said nothing. I hadn’t expected him to. There was a pause. The silence before the story begins. We both recognized it. He moved his gaze from me to the little white hillock on the table between us. And when he did start talking, he kept his eyes there, as if she was the one he was really addressing.
“Me and Lenny go back a long way. But I go back further. I’ve been in the profession since 1970, got my training in Asia, a short tour of duty napalming villages in Vietnam. The perfect place for pleasure drugs: a lot of people looking to get wasted, and a lot of openings for anyone willing to keep the supply lines fueled. I was never very good at killing, but I had a certain talent for organization. And I was lucky. Six months in I took a piece of shrapnel in the head. It put my right eye on the wounded list and left my brain fit for active service. I spent my convalescence working on a few ideas, then a couple of months later I was on my way home, with an honorable discharge, a list of contacts, and a couple of kilos of sample raw material. The best grass in the world. Bringing it all back home, they called it. Why not? No one was employing veterans anyway, and as a soldier I’d been trained to break the law. First couple of years it went just great. Then they started shipping the boys home, and folks began growing their own. It was time for a change. So I switched products.
“Down south everything was humming. I went to Colombia. There were fortunes to be made in Peru and Bolivia, but it was more primitive there, and the paranoia stakes were higher. In Colombia, so long as you got in quick and knew what you were doing, the market was still open. If you paid the right people, you could even work with the law on your side. I had money to invest. And I had experience. I took a crash course in Spanish, and by the time Lenny arrived on the scene I had a police chief in each pocket and access to an airstrip up near the coast that didn’t even show on any of the official maps. I had people lining up to sell me top-quality stuff. I was set up real good. Lenny knew that. But then he knew a lot of things. He’d done his homework, and he wasn’t exactly short on bucks either.
“For him it was always a career. Like others train to be lawyers, he had set his sights on Moma Coca. For a while he just watched. Hung around. I knew he was there. He was either a narc or a novice. And I was very good at spotting narcs. He moved into my hotel, and he tried hard to get to know me.” He smiled. “He tried real hard. And in the end it worked.”
“I thought you were the one who didn’t like people. What made Lenny such an exception?”
He caught my eye briefly. “It was a long time ago. Could be I liked people more. Or could be that Lenny had a lot going for him. He was different then, less smooth, less sure. And he was hungry. When it came to detail, he didn’t know shit from shinola, but he had a lot of fancy ideas. Some of them pretty neat. And he thought about things. It wasn’t the most refined of professions at that time, and Bogotá had more than its fair share of assholes, people with big appetites and not enough between the ears to sustain them. Lenny was sharp, and he was good company. Maybe I saw myself in him—the eager apprentice. Whatever. I was looking to expand. Off-load some of the work. I wanted a partner, and you had to be careful who you picked. I was careful. I picked Lenny.
“And for a while there it worked just fine. I cut him in, introduced him to the right people, got him the right prices, showed him where to take his profits so they came back clean. He learned fast. People responded to him. He brought a touch of New England charm to the business. He was clever. He was also hard as nails. And he wasn’t content with present success. Sure he capitalized on old routes, certain blind-spot islands in the Caribbean where you could refuel and unload your planes without ever touching customs, and where you could register yourself as a company with a suitcase full of cash, no questions asked. But for every safe scam he researched another. He opened up new routes, trial runs, sending stuff halfway across the world—places no one would look for it—then rerouting it bac
k into the U.S. through a couple of hands he owned. It was easier then, sure. But he still did it. And got off on the risks. I tell you, he had a natural aptitude for the job. You had to admire him for it.”
And J.T. had. Whatever had happened since, the boys had had fun together. You could tell that from the look in his eyes. It wasn’t that hard to imagine. Elly had fallen for it. Why not J.T.? Yes, they must have made an impressive duo, the gruff bear king and his slender, suave accomplice. Comrades in battle. Nothing succeeds like success. America’s number-one export.
He moved his head sharply, changing the slide: “But he had his problems. His self-esteem started to expand at the same rate as his profits. A common complaint. He had some ideas about honing down the workforce. Thought if he paid the right people at the top, he could cut out a few of the middlemen. There were other guys trying the same trick, but they had a different kind of muscle behind them. I warned him what would happen, but he didn’t want to hear. He was looking to graduate from my advice. We had a connection out of Rioarcha, lifting stuff through the Capos islands and in through a back door. The deal was a dream, safer than government bonds. But Lenny decided he could run it himself, cut a few corners at source. He didn’t pay the right person, and they walked through his locked door in Santa Marta one morning and busted him with a couple of suitcases. Lesson Number One: everyone has their own police chief when they need him. I had to come in with a lot of money and one of the big boys to get him out. He learned, never made the same mistake again. But it was too late. It put him in my debt, and it finished us. He wasn’t too pleased, but he knew the score. He didn’t need me anyway. He was into his own trip. Bigger risks, bigger profits. I wasn’t interested. The business was already getting out of hand. The days of the small investor and the romance of the identical suitcase scam—all that was gone. With millions sticking dollar bills up their noses, the corporations were moving in, and they didn’t leave a whole lot of room for independent operators.