Luis rolled his eyes.
"The others, they’re downstairs?" Hector asked.
"Like children," Ponch said. "They don’t know what they’re looking for, much less where to find it."
"Idoya, bring the children."
"Don’t worry. They have money. Just give them a show."
Luis watched the old woman as she passed out cups and walk out. He wondered if she was a cousin, and if she had the early-aging disease that made a younger person look old.
"Tell me, Luis," Hector said. "Do you know what the family business is?"
"A bit of everything," Luis said. He took a sip of coffee, nearly gagged. "That’s why I figured I could just drop in and pick up some fast cash. I’m not joining any business, or crew, or gang, or whatever you got going on around here. You’re all too old for me, anyway."
The coffee’s bitter taste and thick, oily texture lingered. The peppermint and petroleum aftertaste crept from mouth to nose like smoke. Combined with its slightly burnt aroma, the quick sip choked him. He put the cup down, catching Ponch watching him through a bemused expression.
"He has principles," Ponch said. "No drugs. No guns."
"Very wise," Hector said. His smile remained fixed like a mask as he spoke. "I agree. We don’t deal in drugs, and guns are useless here, though I can’t say the same for every stage of our work."
Despite himself, Luis found himself guessing at what Hector might be talking about--perhaps some kind of forging operation, or selling stolen art. Maybe a complicated financial scam. The pitch was intriguing. Hector, he realized, was the salesman. Ponch, the bait. He sensed a con, and was suddenly eager for the cash so he could leave.
Hector tilted his head and leaned forward slightly, never taking his gaze off of Luis. "My sister Idoya’s children, for example, went back to the old country. They live in the jungle, where the freedom better suits their nature. They help the family back home in the procurement end of the business. There, sometimes, weapons are useful.
"At the transport stage, yes, guns are also occasionally useful. But some of our captains prefer to let pirates have a taste of what they came to steal. They can be cruel, sometimes, our captains."
Hector’s gaze passed through Luis for a moment. His shoulders relaxed, and a different kind of smile seemed eager to curl his lips. He recovered, pointed a stubby finger at Luis.
"My own son, like your father, wanted no part of what we do. We no longer speak. It is a choice. I have no anger toward him, and would welcome him if he chose to have me back in his life."
He opened his hands, palms up, like a priest, and raised his eyebrows slightly to reveal sorrow and acceptance. His face was a masterpiece, a Caravaggio or El Greco. The moment brought Luis back to college art courses, where the girls liked cheap dates to museums and long Saturday afternoons that turned into late Sunday mornings.
The touch of drama made Luis weigh money against involvement. So far, he hadn’t seen anything dangerous. But he hadn’t heard anything real. He didn’t want to ask questions because he was certain he wouldn’t like the answers. He kept quiet, hoping the talk would either become more than bullshit or blow over like a disappointing hurricane.
Ponch frowned, snapped a finger.
Hector sat back, folded hands over belly. His smile faded, his gaze dropped, as if someone had turned off the switch.
"Our business starts with the rawest of material. Information. This--I--am a storehouse for this material. One of many, of course."
Luis glanced at the book shelves.
"No. Those are second-hand, for the walk-ins. We don’t write things down. We don’t put what we know in computer systems or talk on the phone so others can record us. We gather our information the old-fashioned way. Listening. We communicate in person, in abandoned places, like this, in a language no one understands."
Luis tried to remember what he’d heard Ponch and Idoya say to each other, but the sounds slid from his attention.
"We use information to find things only certain kinds of people need. Often they come to us with what they need. Sometimes, we seek them out, bring those things to them. All in secret, of course."
Luis had to take a guess. "You’re thieves and smugglers. Maybe poachers." It had to be artifacts, like Indiana Jones meets the Incan crystal skull, or smuggling illegal animals. If there was anything actually going on at all.
"Our family has offices throughout South America, from Callao to Rio Grande Sud, from La Guaira to Port Williams, even in the Amazon’s heart, in Puerto Maldonado, in Humaita, and in the Caribbean, from Cienfuegos to Port of Spain. Everything that lived and still lives, all that falls from the sky, all that the earth spits up, that the wind and sea delivers, all that our ancestors and the mountains and deserts and jungles made is a part of our heritage. The blood of Cañaris, Quecha, Caral Supe, Moche runs through us, feeding our strength and determination. This is our family; this is what you belong to."
Ponch bowed his head, closed his eyes. The slight, smirking curve of his lips failed.
"You only use ships?" Luis asked.
"Yes."
"They have jets now," Luis said.
"For what we carry, water is safer. Our offices are always near water, flowing, tidal. My trade comes in through the Port of Newark, across Manhattan to Queens. Water makes it easier for things to be carried away."
Luis shook his head. Almost laughed. He’d almost believed. But the junkyard stock downstairs, coupled with Hector’s grandiosity, was all that was for sale. The danger wasn’t in relic trafficking, secret sex clubs or banking schemes. It was in counting on a crazy family for a few dollars’ worth of work.
Ponch picked up his cup of coffee, slowly drained it. Hector took a sip, set his back down on the desk.
"Are you guys on the same meds?" Luis asked. "Or are the conditions different?"
"You can’t talk to him like that," Ponch said. He turned to Hector. "He needs to see. To hear what else is mixed in our mestizos blood."
"But you have to prepare them," Hector answered. "So they have something to hang on to, when the time comes."
"Nobody prepared me."
"That was a mistake."
"How much longer are you going to need me?" Luis asked Ponch. "I don’t think that guy and his girlfriend are going to pull anything on you."
"Stay. We’re expecting a delivery. You can give the men a hand."
Luis settled in to wait, resisting the temptation to pick a moldy paperback from the shelf to read. Ponch tipped the cup into his mouth, tapping the bottom to get the last, oozing drops. Hector continued to sip.
Idoya returned, opened the door and passed through first.
Mike nearly knocked her down as he brushed past her. He strode up the book aisle, long strides eating up ground. "What the hell is this?" he shouted. "It’s like homeless depot down there. Just a lot of crap. We paid a finder’s fee, we made arrangements. You think you can get more money out of us? You think we’re going to take this shit from you?"
Luis raised his leg to kick a book rack down on the boy. But Ponch was already standing, one hand raised in a conciliatory gesture, his smile bright, his expression sympathetic. "We never said what you wanted was downstairs."
Cynthia passed Idoya, who quickly sidestepped her with a clever dance pass. Ponch turned his attention back to Cynthia when she chose the aisle in which he sat. She looked to him, he smiled. She nodded her head as she passed, waited at the end the aisle, blocking his view of Mike and Ponch.
By the time Luis stood up and got around her, Ponch had his arm around the boy’s waist leading him around Hector’s desk, to the bookcases, safe and cabinets that filled the back wall.
"--saw the flames myself," Ponch was saying, pointing to the ceiling as if it was a movie screen, "coming out of the sky, thought it was going to start raining stars, no lie, that thing was big and it was throwing off colors like sparks, so much that it hurt my eyes. But I saw it go down," he said, pushing Hector gently out of the way, "
right in front of me, and the funny thing was that there was no sound, no crash, no explosion. Not even a shake of the trees. The whole jungle became quiet. The ciacadas lost their voices, the galagos froze in the trees."
Ponch stopped in front of a two-door cabinet stained with paint. Hector backed away around the other side of the desk. The more he talked, the thicker his alcohol breath filled the room.
Luis came in behind Ponch and Mike, not sure which one he’d try to save if something happened.
Fiddling with the lock, Ponch went on about his jungle adventure. "It was like a frog landed and you didn’t hear the splash. But I was brave, and I did my duty. I went deeper into the jungle, found trees knocked down. And in the middle of the trees, there was a crater, and at the bottom of the crater, there was a stone almost buried in the ground.
"And I got scared, I’ll be honest with you. Because it was like something swallowed up the blast of that rock landing, sucked up the fire and pulled back the wind and smoke and used it all up like a liter of rum. But I went on down the crater. Slid a little, because the sides were slick, like glass. And cold."
"You’re worse than my drunk uncle," Mike said. His fists were balled and shaking, his face red.
Luis got behind him, and pursed his lips to keep from saying, "Bet your drunk uncle never fucked your girlfriend." Because, in that moment, he thought maybe that’s what drunk uncles were supposed to do.
"And I got to the stone," Ponch continued, "and put light on it, and it was smooth like a cannon ball, but looked like a huge gourd. It was colder than the crater," Ponch said, finally tossing the lock aside. He opened the doors, reached into the pitch black space. A faint cloud of dust billowed out. "Colder anything I’d ever touched. It didn’t burn, like dry ice. The cold just seeped into me, reached deeper, like a knife, the point penetrating, the edges slicing, the grind radiating a freeze that locked blood and muscle and made bone brittle."
Light came on to reveal a chamber lined with shelves packed with goods. Ponch stepped through, motioned for Mike to follow. Luis came in behind him, glancing back to see Hector, smiling, invite Cynthia with a sweeping gesture into the room.
He followed close behind her. Luis felt a twinge of jealousy. Ponch was one thing, but he’d be damned if he’d let Hector jump that line.
"I let go of the rock, of course," Ponch said, "and called my cousins, who were better equipped to handle the find. But that was my start in this business, and I’m sorry we no longer have that stone for sale, but if you look closely I’m sure you’ll find what you are looking for."
Ponch backed up as Mike came to the chamber’s center. Luis stepped to the side, bumped into something. Cynthia came through, and he put a hand on her shoulder, smiled. She smiled back, glanced at Mike standing open-mouthed near the room’s center, smiled at him again. She came around to stand beside on his right, both hands clutching the backpack straps.
Luis felt rather than saw Hector pass by. His attention was fixed on the mummified corpse, dressed in faded robes, sitting balled up on a shelf behind Cynthia. His gaze moved on to the huge bone jutting out from the shelf next to his hip. Cynthia barely looked at both, ignored Mike and the others. Instead, she scanned the shelves, pausing, peering, searching for something.
"Please feel free to touch," Hector said, taking center stage. "I know that, for what you need, you must often feel the thing you believe might satisfy you. Unlike my cousin, you will not be left alone and at the mercy of the cold. We are here to guide you, to help you. Look carefully, and don’t be afraid. Things will happen you do not expect. That’s a good sign. Once, I brought a mummy like the one by your young lady to the attention of a buyer. He was drawn to it immediately, and at his touch, the corpse exploded, as if it had been waiting for him through all the time of its burial, and the tiny thousands of living things writhing inside it covered him, penetrated him, left him for many hours in a state we thought was death. It was a good thing my Idoya counseled patience, because the man did eventually wake up. He collected the specimens still living, bagged the mummy’s remains, and paid us twice the sum we’d agreed on.
"Not that we expect such generosity from you young people," Hector said, bowing his head. "We are fair, and would never bargain after setting a price."
Luis squeezed past Cynthia, but couldn’t get her attention away from the shelves. He headed for Ponch as Idoya came in and took his place next to Cynthia. It was obvious she and Hector were making sure the money didn’t go anywhere.
The shelves were filled with skulls, human and animal, bones, mummified humans and creatures, carvings, rocks, instruments and tools. One shelving unit was dedicated to books, very old by their bindings, the ancient ones rolled in bone or wooden tubes, all sealed in plastic. Some skulls looked like museum pieces, massive relics of a primal age when life was bigger, more vicious.
Behind glass doors, another set of objects drew both his and Mike’s attention. Luis slipped by quickly to let the boy get at what he wanted. What he saw, moist, thick, perhaps pulsing or quivering on steel shelves, did not make him want to take a closer look. Just the quick sight of what might have been living rock, or chunks of dark, eternal flesh, made him feel freezing cold behind his sternum, as if the center of his life had fallen into the grip of something terrible, like a child catching a fly to see what would happen when its wings were pulled.
The smell of the room caught up to him, just then. Beyond the dust and the stale dampness, there were hints of ammonia, petroleum, and a deep, salty tang that lingered in his nostrils and made him feel like he was drowning.
"You were expecting a hundred illegals to jump out and take your job?" Ponch whispered to him.
"Fuck you," Luis said.
"Mike," Cynthia said, stepping forward, pointing to the cabinet.
"Yes," Hector said.
The couple opened the cabinet, reached in as if they were petting kittens and puppies.
Two knocks echoed through the chamber.
Luis glanced at Ponch, then at the wall behind him.
"Not yet," Ponch said, smiling as he put a hand on Luis’ chest. "You see," he said to Mike, "you didn’t have to wake the dead." To Luis, Ponch said, "Go downstairs. Let them in. The gate buttons are right next to the door. Let them in, close it up. Fast. We’ll be along soon."
Ponch gave him a gentle push. Luis headed out, trying to catch Cynthia’s gaze. But she was captivated by the display. Mike tried to show her one of the lists they’d exchanged but she pushed his hand away, reached in, picked something up.
He passed Hector with the knapsack over his shoulder holding hands with Idoya. They stared straight ahead like rapt parents watching the children in the school play.
"Thank you," Cynthia said.
"They kill us with ‘excuse me,’" Idoya said. "Bury us with ‘thank you.’"
"Not anymore," Hector said.
Downstairs, Luis opened the rolling gate. A small Mercedes-Benz panel truck, white, headlights off, waited outside. Above the cab, a large, rectangular pod was connected to the cargo space. Two men sat in the cab.
The truck rolled in, the engine cut off. As the gate came down, the two men popped out, unlocked the back door, rolled it up.
Luis shivered. The gust of frigid air was sudden and surprising, like walking into a meat freezer on a mid-summer day. He looked at the pod over the cab, thinking it might be a refrigeration unit. But the truck’s engine was off, and whatever was inside the container was not making a sound.
The two men stepped aside. Short, powerfully built, with thick black manes, they had the look of Andean soccer players who could grind down European players in their home stadiums. They distracted themselves by crossing arms and staring into the warehouse’s darker corners.
"What do we have to unload?" Luis asked, coming around the truck to open door.
A loud thump from the office shook the rafters. Luis checked the office door. Dust drifted past the overhead lights. The two men talked to each other briefly in the sa
me tongue Ponch and Idoya had used. Luis listened like he did when decoding local hip hop tracks from around the world, using years of city living and working in different neighborhoods. He picked up a couple of Spanish words, recognized Portuguese, the Quechan word for ‘two." Another language, harsh, guttural, threaded itself through their conversation, dragging in Asian, European and even Arabic sounds, rendering the patois incomprehensible.
Luis stepped to the edge of the cab, peered inside. The darkness was impenetrable. He thought a curtain had been set up to protect whatever was inside and reached in. His flesh prickled. A thousand needles seemed to stab his hand and forearm. He jerked back his arm. The two men laughed.
Luis found a few loose gravel stones by the truck, picked them, whipped them in while stepping back. They vanished without thumping against a curtain or clanging against the metal cab wall. The polar bear he’d half-expected to charge out failed to appear.
Another thump, stronger, louder, rattled the shelves. He felt the impact through the floor. Glass and metal objects fell, broke. A man screamed.
Cursing, Luis bolted for the office. Behind him, the high-pitched howl of a sudden wind gust chased him. The gust lifted him as he took the first few steps, and he tripped, the rail catching his chin. He rolled, gathered himself, while his face throbbed and he tasted warm blood.
Below, the two truck men retreated to the cab. A bright glow spread from the back of the truck, at first a flickering orange with blue tints. Luis thought a fire had started in the back, but he couldn’t smell anything burning and there was no smoke. The light changed, deepened to a light shade of violet, cast shadows on the floor and against the gate. Luis imagined a kind of supersonic wind tunnel fan, with its own spot light, and streamers, designed to produce a theatrical effect for an outdoor play. Maybe something for a Shakespeare in the Park production, where a leisurely walk along the all-day lines of picnickers waiting for free tickets so often got him in with a friendly college group for a good, and free, night out.
The wind stopped as suddenly as it had started. The light flashed randomly from one end of the spectrum to the other, as if his vision couldn’t recognize its true color. The streamer shadows became thinner. Something slapped the truck’s inside wall.
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