I didn’t want him to know I was armed. "No," I said. "Are we going the right way?"
He said, "It’s just a little farther, as you will see." He stepped ahead to lead the way. "The reason I have pointed this out to you, about the luck, is that I have wasted mine, used it all up. Understand?" He looked back at me and his teeth flashed; they seemed strange—too even, as if they’d been filed off to the same height. He licked his lips. "You see, when I fight, I always want at least two compadres—a lucky one and a skillful one. Three people make a good team: a lucky one, a skillful one, and an intelligent one—that’s me: The intelligent one. I make good decisions fast. I have the second sight, and get hunches about what to do." He turned and smiled his strange smile, making the heads of the beasts on his tattoo twist as if to gaze back at me.
His eyes seemed to be asking if we could be friends, but because of his Indian blood he didn’t dare ask the question openly to me, a man of obvious European heritage. If this were Jafari’s man, he’d be talking like this to get me off guard, I realized. He would feign instant friendship, like a Haitian with a basket to sell. I didn’t say anything.
We turned into the side portal that was out-concourse-three and pulled the cart down a huge hallway lined with empty benches, past a couple of robots that polished the dusty floor till the onyx tiles shined. I expected to see the man with the gray slacks, but didn’t. At the end of the corridor was a door with a sign: Allied Earth Customs Office. Processing for Destination Baker.
I unloaded my luggage from the cart and dragged it to the customs office door. At least one of Jafari’s men was in that office, and I knew I didn’t have a chance of getting past customs. I toyed with the idea of leaving, just dropping the chest with Tamara in it for someone to discover. Perhaps I can still walk away from this, I thought. But the idea was absurd.
Perfecto grabbed one end of the teak chest and began dragging it through the door. I didn’t follow, and he smiled up at me as if begging permission to help. I grabbed the other end of the chest and carried it into the office.
The customs office was lined with comfortable chairs and could have seated a hundred people, but only twenty ragged men and three women were present, all dark-skinned Latin Americans who carried all their possessions in sacks. I looked around the room for someone, anyone, who appeared out of place. Each gray face was the same. All the mercenaries looked dejected, ragged and dirty. A couple had lost limbs, and it was common to see black plastic fingers or silver arms. One tall, thin cyborg wore a silver face that looked like Buddha; a green star was set in his forehead, and rays spread out from it across his brow and down his cheeks. An Indian with crooked teeth was singing a sad song and playing a blue-plastic guitar, while half a dozen men with lowered heads sang along.
One of the singers wore gray pants and black combat boots.
He lifted his head and looked at me, his dark eyes smoldering, but didn’t miss a note in the song as he lowered his head again. He couldn’t attack me with twenty witnesses in the room.
I considered walking out, but knew he’d follow. Besides, I knew who he was—and if I attacked at the right moment, I’d have the element of surprise. And all I had to do was see who he communicated with, and I’d know the identity of his accomplice. I decided to play the hand fate had dealt me.
An anglo woman behind a desk waved me forward, then glanced down at her computer terminal. I left Tamara by the door and stepped up to the desk.
The anglo woman didn’t even look at me or bother to ask if I spoke English. "You should have been processed in Independent Brazil and boarded a shuttle," she said, nodding toward a monitor screen on the wall: The monitor showed an interior port of the Chaeron crammed with thousands of Latin Americans as they unloaded from a shuttle. I was surprised to see so many people, to know that they had already escaped Earth. Though I was only separated from them by a thin wall, I felt unsure that I would ever make it to the ship. "You’ve only got a few minutes. We’ll need tissue samples for a gene scan. Roll up your sleeve and step over here." She got up from her desk and went to an x-ray microscope in a corner of the room.
"My genome is on record," I said, rolling up my sleeve. My hands shook. "I don’t have any illegal genetic structures." Getting a full gene scan takes hours; it would never be done in time.
She looked at my shaking hands and said mechanically, "This won’t hurt. It’s standard procedure for the Baker run. We have to verify the natures of all your upgrades."
She took a plastic tissue sampler with a dozen small needles on it and stuck it in my wrist, then pulled the sampler out and put it in a compartment of the microscope and flipped a switch. The microscope made some grinding noises, then began reading my genome, flashing pictures of my DNA on several monitors. I was relieved to see that each screen read a separate chromosome instead of cross checking for accuracy. It saved a lot of time.
Over by the wall a pleasantly drunken man said to a compadre, "I don’t understand—Now who ... who are we going to fight?"
"The Japanese."
"But I thought we worked for the Japanese?" the drunk said.
"Sí. We work for Motoki, and they are Japanese. But we are going to fight the Yabajin, and they are Japanese, too."
"Oh. Yaba ...Yaba—what kind of a name is that?"
"It means barbarians."
"But I don’t want to fight barbarians—" the drunk said, genuinely hurt, "some of my best friends are barbarians!"
"Don’t tell anyone, or we might not get the job!" a third man warned.
Once the lady behind the desk saw that the microscope was working, she asked for my ID; I gave it to her and submitted to a retina scan, then she said, "When the shuttles from Independent Brazil have unloaded their passengers, we’ll open the doors and begin final processing. Your immunizations will be given on ship. Until then, have a seat and relax, Mr. Osic."
I took a seat near the door, away from everyone else, and pulled the chest with Tamara in it near me. The man with the gray slacks kept singing. He didn’t speak to anyone or make any overt signals. I wondered what people would think when they opened my trunk in customs. All they’d find was a zombie-eyed—Flaco would have loved that, would have called her "Zombie Eyes"—emaciated, little witch with a skull full of nightmares. Yet I clung to her.
A man just a few seats away was telling a joke: "I had a friend in Argentina who was awakened one night by someone pounding on the door: He thought it must be the Nicita Idealist Socialist Secret Police, so he ran and hid in his closet. The pounding continued, till finally the visitor broke down the door and forced his way into the house, then opened the closet: Before my friend’s eyes stood Death, all dressed in black.
"My friend shouted, ‘Praise God! I thought it was the secret police!"
"Death opened his mouth in surprise and said, ‘They’re not here yet? I must be early!"
The joke brought only a few chuckles. Yet as I thought of it, I realized that the man in gray slacks was one of them: One of the secret police in the joke. It was not a comforting thought.
Perfecto went through the same procedure I had, then came and sat next to me.
The customs agent fed my ID into her computer, and began punching in commands. This made me nervous. Sweat began breaking out on my brow and upper lip. If Arish’s death had been reported, she would know in a matter of minutes. On the far side of the room, five men sat along one wall. One small man with a pencil-bar moustache and long hair, smoked a thin cigar. He was positioned so he could see the computer terminal, and he stared at it intently. He was different from the others, abnormally attentive. His white shirt was bright and clean. Not rumpled and dirty, as was the attire of most of the rest of us. He stared at the monitor, then glanced up at me. Abruptly, the customs agent switched off her computer and rose from her chair. She didn’t look at me as she left the room.
"Gringa pubic hair," a big mestizo muttered as the customs officer walked out the door. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and laughed bec
ause we had all been made nervous by the domineering gringa’s presence.
"Perhaps our smell finally drove her out," one of the Indians joked, and everyone laughed.
One heavy-set man across the room said, "So, Perfecto, you have decided to come with us after all?"
"I did not decide; the people of my village decided for me," answered Perfecto.
"I’d have thought you’d be alcalde of that dirty little village by now," the heavy-set man said.
"Ah, no. My wife gave birth to our eighth child three months ago. And just last week we found that she was pregnant again. When people heard of it, they became outraged and blamed me. Even the dogs snap at me."
Everyone laughed, but some of them gave him knowing glances, begging him with their eyes to say more.
"Unfortunately," Perfecto said, "I have not made love with my wife since the last baby!"
Among friends, such an admission would have brought loud laughs. But only a few people chuckled, while Perfecto laughed hard, painfully.
Across the room, the man with the clean white shirt and pencil moustache got up from his chair, stretched, and went over to the customs officer’s computer. The hair rose on the back of my neck, and I fidgeted. He inserted one of my ID cards, and switched the computer on.
"Eight children!" a woman exclaimed, "You’re lucky they didn’t kill you!" Perfecto laughed again, almost maniacally. I looked again at the cut above his eye and a bruise on his jaw, just above the tattoo. Perhaps someone had tried to kill him, or at least tried to hurt him badly.
The man at the computer seemed to read my files with interest. My stomach churned; I couldn’t decide what to do with my hands. Then he began punching many buttons, accessing files that had nothing to do with me. His actions caught the attention of the men he’d been sitting with. I wondered what he found that so interested him, and would have stopped him if I could have done so without attracting attention.
Jafari could have sent this man, I thought. Then I realized he could be making calls over the computer, notifying Jafari’s men that he’d found me. I became very frightened but pretended to ignore him and reached up and wiped the sweat from my brow.
"Señor, are you all right?" Perfecto asked.
I glanced over at him. "I’m fine, thank you."
"You don’t look well," Perfecto said.
"I don’t feel well," I answered truthfully.
"Malaria?"
"What?"
"You have malaria," Perfecto said. "I have seen it many times! People who have malaria turn pale and shake and sweat, just as you are doing."
"Yes, I have malaria," I said, glad that he did not see my fear.
"Shall I get you a doctor?" he asked.
"No, thank you," I said, "I am a doctor." Across the room, one of the singers chuckled, and I wondered if he chuckled because he could read my body language and knew I was afraid. My fear would give me away if I didn’t do something quick. I would have reached for my medical bag and taken a tranquilizer, but I’d left my bag in the trunk to be a pillow for Tamara, and couldn’t risk opening it. My fear cramped my chest, and made my breathing ragged. I remembered the "conquistador cocktails" I’d taken from Arish. I didn’t know the strength of the prescription, but I was close to Arish’s body weight, so I took a capsule and broke it between my teeth. It tasted like garlic, so sweet, so strong and heady. Like warm whiskey, it burned my lips and gums for a moment, then as the cocktail began to take effect my face went numb.
Perfecto nodded, apparently satisfied that I had taken care of myself. He looked across the room to the computer where the man with the pencil-bar moustache was smiling, enjoying himself.
I felt my head swing forward as if it were a weight on a pendulum that travelled in a wide arc, and at the same moment I felt as if I were pushed into another world where I experienced heightened lucidity. Even though everything was blurred around the edges, if I looked at something straight on I saw it’s every crisp detail. I could read Perfecto’s entire life story in his appearance: The veins in his neck throbbed, and the movement made the little lion’s head on his tattoo lash back and forth, and I suddenly understood what the tattoo represented, and what Perfecto was—a chimera, one of the genetically upgraded men Torres had created to fight the wars in Chile. Yet because his ears weren’t deformed, as were the ears of chimeras who had sonar, and because he was in his thirties, he must have been one of the early models, a truly upgraded human rather than a humanoid species. His eyes were wide-set, for greater depth perception; his thick hair concealed an enlarged skull, for greater intelligence; his neck and backbone were massive so that his frame could support the huge muscles of his body.
Most people considered it taboo to marry such a creation, or even to carry its child full term. A chimera is even lower than an Indian. When he had fathered eight children, his community would truly have risen in an uproar. I saw all this in the throb of a heartbeat, while the cocktail slid down my throat, burning and numbing my neck and esophagus.
I looked at the other people in the room, and saw that most of them were lost in reflection. Their eyes had the dulled quality I associated with the refugiados: burned-out, lifeless, empty of hope. They had fought many wars in South America, and lost them all. All of them were poor; their dirty clothing attested to the fact that they lived in houses without floors. Only the man in the silver face was unreadable. And across the room was the man in gray slacks. He sat rigid, ready for action, and he purposely avoided looking at me.
I gauged the tension levels of the others in the room. Three men and two women were of the same age and build as Perfecto—they were chimeras, and I realized they were banding together, perhaps to settle in a new world where they could form a community so they would not be outcasts. On the ship would be many chimeras; knowledge of mercenary jobs would have spread through their community by word of mouth. I could read this in their faces as easily as reading the stories that Brazilian woodcarvers etch into the handles of their machetes. Only the man with the moustache and cigar seemed out of place. Different. His eyes glittered as if he stared into candlelight. He was aware. He was quieter than others, more dangerous. He was looking at me.
It all seemed fascinating. Even the gray walls and a wad of paper beneath one chair fascinated me. My hands stopped shaking and my breathing felt less restricted, but my chest was thudding as if a rabbit were kicking against my ribs. I imagined I felt the cocktail slide into my belly and sit, burning like a live coal. Everyone was looking at the man behind the computer console. He was fascinating. He wore a fascinating clean white shirt, and when he moved his arm it left a fascinating white afterimage in the air behind it. His pencil-bar moustache and narrow face were fascinating. Like the face of a rat or a whorehouse owner. He was a leader here. He was a whorehouse rat, and he was hitting the buttons on the computer and laughing loudly in a fascinating manner.
His voice slurred. I heard him in slow motion. "My friends," he said, "I have interesting news:" Fascinating. "Among us is a dangerous murderer!" Fascinating.
"No!" someone said. Oh, yes, I mouthed.
"It’s true!" Whorehouse Rat said. Fascinating. "Even today, in Panamá," Panamá ... Panamá ... Panamá ... "this murderer slit a man’s throat!" Each word was like a fruit, like a ripe avocado. I could see his mouth forming the words, and when each syllable had grown and ripened on his tongue, he let it roll past his lips and plop to the floor. Fascinating. I knew something was terribly wrong: I couldn’t think straight, and I wondered if it was because of the pill I’d taken, and yet I didn’t connect the problem to the morphine levels in the cocktail.
I did not like what Whorehouse Rat was saying. The cocktail burned in my stomach like a glowing ember, giving off waves of heat. I could feel the heat winding its way up my entrails, and I knew that if I kept my mouth closed, it would envelope my brain, consume me. So I opened my mouth and purposely spit the heat at Whorehouse Rat.
A yellow ripple in the air, like a fiery wheel, floated acro
ss the room as I blew the heat toward Whorehouse Rat. But just before the shimmering yellow ring reached him, Whorehouse Rat’s skin turned blue and cold, so that when the ring enveloped him it only managed to bring his body heat up to normal. I swore under my breath because he had defeated my magical attack, so I blew wheels of fire at him in rapid succession and watched them float across the room as the syllables plopped from his mouth, one by one: "Pan a má, has, just, learned, where, the, kil ler, is. E ven, now, sta tion, se cur i ty, comes, to, take, the, vi cious, a ni mal, back, for, a, quick, ex e cu tion."
So, they are on their way to get me, I realized. And now I will die. This should be fascinating. The wheels of fire enveloped the Whorehouse Rat, but instead of burning, he moved his hand in the air and formed a mystic symbol. The fire closed around him like a womb, and he stood protected in a burning halo. He had defeated my attack, but I knew that all I had to do was hold my breath and the fire in me would build, would grow to a critical point until I could no longer contain it and I would blow apart like a fission bomb, killing us all. But before I did that, part of me realized I should try to escape.
I stood up and staggered around, smiling at the people in the room. Behind me were only empty corridors—no place to hide. I looked at the door that led to the airlock and beyond that to the ship. It was locked. I blew a ring of fire at it, to see if it would melt. It didn’t. The faces of the people around me expressed various degrees of surprise, shock, and amusement at my predicament.
Whorehouse Rat laughed, and instead of plopping like avocados to the ground, his next words rushed like water churning through rocks. "Not even have I told you the good part! This fellow’s victim, the man so brutally executed, was known to some of you: Arish Muhammad Hustanifad!"
A stream of water exuded from Whorehouse Rat’s mouth, splashed against the walls, filled the room, knocked me to my knees and drowned the coal of fire in my belly, leaving me cold and naked. Several people gasped.
On My Way to Paradise Page 8