"What is that?"
"Morphine."
"No. Need a clear head." Felix tried to pull the glass out with tweezers. They kept slipping.
"Use pliers," said Charley. "Whiskey. Bring the bottle."
Charley stared up at Augustus John, third Earl of Bristol. He had never studied it from this angle, looking right up the earl's nose.
Felix returned with a pair of needle-nose pliers and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. Charley took a long pull. Felix went to work. The piece of glass was in there. Charley groaned.
"Gimme that needle." He took the hypodermic and squirted the morphine into the whiskey, shook it up and took another long pull.
"I don't think you're supposed to drink it," said Felix.
"They do in England. Ain't that right, Augustus? It's called a Brompton cocktail-heroin and vodka. They give it to terminal folks." Felix went back to work.
"You know… Gainsborough hated to paint portraits?"
"Yeah," said Felix, getting a grip on the glass shard.
"What he really loved was landscapes. He married a woman with rich tastes and… he had two girls and they inherited their mama's tastes, so… he… had to spend all his time painting pictures of rich folks… to pay the bills."
"It's stuck, boss."
"Just give it a yank." Charley took another pull off the bottle. His mouth went numb. A pleasant, warm feeling spread through him. He said, "He liked to play the violin and be outside painting cows and blue skies. Instead he spent the whole time indoors with old Augustus here and ladies with long white necks. I bet he ended up hating rich people. I would have."
"I'm going to-hold on."
"You notice how they're all gray, the people he painted? I have a theory about that… he was saving his colors for the landscapes. Felix!"
"What, boss?"
"I killed Bundy. There was a girl on the porch. What have I done?"
"Just hold on, boss. It's coming."
"She had this tooth wouldn't come out, you remember that?"
"Yeah."
"Tried everything, string to the doorknob, crust of bread… oh."
Felix applied a pressure bandage. When Charley opened his eyes again he saw the pillow she'd embroidered for him that said AGE AND TREACHERY WILL OVERCOME YOUTH AND VIRTUE EVERY TIME, all soaked. He could hear Margaret. She was saying, "Oh, Charley, not my pillow."
***
He had the throttle opened up all the way. He was going dangerously fast. It was night. The river was a cafe con leche blur in the searchlight. Virgilio's and Mirko's boats were a quarter mile behind, struggling to keep up with him as he slalomed past logs and floating islands of canarana grass.
"Niño," said Virgilio over the VHP, "please, slow down. It's dangerous."
He could not tell Virgilio the reason for his speed. It had nothing to do with chasing the billonario. The truth was that he was trying to get away from the dead monkey. It had taken hold of his brain; he couldn't shake it loose. Even at sixty miles an hour it held on, jeering, chattering, smashing him with fists, pelting him with sapodilla fruit.
Large insects flew into his face, disintegrating, stinging. He felt the jolt as the boat hit the back of a crocodile, heard the whine of the propeller as it raced in air. The boat landed with a thud, engines churning.
***
Charley stood at Esmeralda's wheel. The current was running eight miles an hour, so he had to maintain at ten miles an hour for steerage. The riverbank was rushing past him at nearly twenty miles an hour. He was kayaking in an ocean liner.
His head was wrapped tightly. The morphine and Jack Daniel's gave him confidence. He could feel everything the ship was doing through his hands on the wheel; the water rushing by under her hull, the cushion between it and the bank, the propellers digging in when he increased speed, logs bouncing off. Most of all he felt the river carrying him to the sea. The sea was 3,500 miles away but the river would carry him. The river that began in a trickle of crystalline water in Lake Mismi, high up in the Andes, swiftly gathering mass and momentum, becoming a great brown snowball, seven million cubic feet by the time it reached the ocean; it could fill Lake Ontario in three hours. A river that could fill Lake Ontario in three hours could easily carry them to-
"Boss," said Felix. They were on the radar screen-three green specks astern, one ahead of the other. They appeared closer with each Stardust sweep of the cursor.
***
His bow light washed her transom with its beam. There she was. He throttled back. Eusebio, next to him, reached beneath the dashboard for the RPG-7 cradled in its box. It was Soviet-made, fired an 85-millimeter, 18.7-pound grenade 500 meters. Sendero used them against truck convoys and tanks.
Eusebio shouldered it and aimed.
"Aim for the stern. Low, right above the water."
"Si, Niño."
He imagined it clearly: the explosion, the boat going dead in the water, the billonario surrendering; saw the fuel tanks igniting, Baudelaire's eyes blazing at him from underneath Collardet's top hat as the paint melted.
O death, old captain, it's time!…
Pour out your poison to comfort us!
While the fire burns our brain, we yearn
To plunge to the bottom of the abyss,
Heaven or hell, what does it matter?
To the depths of the Unknown to find the new.
He shouted at Eusebio, "No!" and knocked his arm upward at the moment of firing. The rocket arced over the boat in a feckless parabola, landing in the jungle and sending aloft a choir of outraged cockatoos screeching into the night.
Eusebio turned to him and said, "Why did you do that?" He was about to tell him when Mac's bullet hit Eusebio in the chest.
***
The river narrowed. Charley steered by radar, trying to keep the center in the middle of the green phosphorescent couloir. Felix shouted, "Starboard!"
Charley swung the wheel to the right. As he did, he looked to the left and saw the riverbank, revealed starkly in the bright halogen glow of the searchlight. He saw striations of red clay. It was beautiful.
Esmeralda struck the riverbank. She took it on the chine, a loud, hollow thunnng. Charley held on to the wheel, his feet went out from under him. When he pulled himself back up he could no longer see out the window. A large tree had crashed down onto the foredeck. He saw flailing in its branches. An arm emerged, then Mac, swearing. He'd been thrown from the top deck into the tree.
Charley looked at the radar screen. As he did, the windows on the right side of the bridge all shattered into a blizzard of Plexiglas.
The boat, pinned against the riverbank by the current, scraped forward slowly. Charley pushed the throttle to "full ahead." As she moved forward, she made a greasy squeaking noise against the clay bank. Felix appeared in the starboard doorway on his hands and knees. He held the Uzi over the railing and fired blindly. Grenades went off in the water with a whump sound, followed by plumes of water. Rostow was in the bows, tossing them. Mac disentangled himself from the tree and jumped back up onto the top deck and fired the M-60 machine gun. Charley kept his hand on the throttle. He became aware of something that did not belong. He could not see in the dark. He removed his hand from the throttle and the feeling came with it.
***
They followed in the dark. He looked up and saw the Southern Cross, the Magellanic Cloud. The riverbanks blazed with pulsations of fireflies. Virgilio shouted from his boat over the VHF, "Niño, they're shooting!"
Mirko's voice came on: "Niño! Why doesn't Eusebio shoot with the RPG?"
"Eusebio is dead. Keep firing. No grenades, do you hear?"
"But they're-why?"
"Just do it, Virgilio."
"Fire the RPG, Niño. Please!"
"Virgilio, you don't realize what they have on board."
"Gasto is dead, Niño! Davilo is wounded. I think one of my engines is hit. Shoot, please!"
"The boat is full of gold."
The beautiful word hung there, suspended in r
adio silence between the boats. He regretted it. The lie. To hold out the promise of gold, here, where his ancestors had slaughtered Virgilio's and Mirko's-but how else, what else would they understand?
"Gold?" said Virgilio.
"He has gold on board?" said Mirko.
"Yes."
"How much?"
"A fortune, Mirko!" he shouted angrily. "More than you can carry. Now move forward! Concentrate your fire on the bridge."
"Okay, Niño."
"Mirko," he said, "you go up the right side. Virgilio, you go up the left. Together now!"
***
It was moving up his arm. He said, "Felix."
"What?"
"Shine your light on my arm, would you?"
"Jesus," said Felix.
It was clinging to his upper arm, fans flared out, moving back and forth slowly like elephant ears. What was God thinking when he made these creatures? Charley wondered. It opened its mouth wider than a church door. Charley could see all the way down its throat, translucent in Felix's flashlight beam, a green tunnel that seemed to extend all the way down to its tail.
Felix shouted, "Boats moving up, starboard and port."
The radar showed a curve to the left a hundred yards ahead.
Charley said, "Hold your fire on the one coming up on our right. Let him come up. Let me know when's he's abeam."
Felix lay down on the deck and sighted through a hawsehole.
"He's passing the stern… not yet… not yet…" Bullets zippered into Esmeralda's right side. "Now!"
"Hold on." Charley swung the wheel to the right.
He saw the yacht begin to swing toward Mirko's boat. He shouted over the radio, "Mirko, reverse your engines! Get out of there!"
The yacht squeezed the speedboat against the riverbank. Two of Mirko's men saw what was about to happen and jumped off the transom. But Mirko had already reversed his throttles and the outboard engines had churned up out of the water. Mirko's men were shredded. In the next instant, the yacht drove the boat into the riverbank in a loud crackling of fiberglass.
He slowed and shone his light at the bank. The remains of the boat had fallen away. The men had been pressed into the clay like figures in a bas-relief frieze. There was Gorrati with his gun, Jimo, upside-down. Ay, Mirko. At the moment of death, Mirko had brought his arms up to protect his face. He stared at the tableau. He wished he had a camera, it was so unusual.
The iguana dropped off Charley's shoulder and ran out of the bridge upright on two legs, hopping from one piece of Plexiglas to another like someone escaping across ice floes.
They were firing at the boat on the port side. Charley heard the loud noise above him from Mac's M-60. Rostow ran aft along the deck with his grenade satchel.
Amorphous green splotches appeared on the radar screen. The antennae had been hit. Charley navigated through the hallucinations. There was a Navy base at Juanjui, eighty clicks downriver. At this rate they could make that by morning, if-ifs sprouted along the riverbank all the way to Juanjui. He switched on the radio and was rehearsing what he would say when he heard: "Esmeralda, come in, please"-perfect, mannered English. Please?
"This is Esmeralda," he said.
"This is Captain Pantoja of the Peruvian Navy. Stop your engines."
"This is Admiral Chester W. Nimitz of the United States Navy. Go to hell."
"Is that you, billonario?"
"Yes."
"Welcome to Peru."
"Thank you."
"The rocket-propelled grenade that went over your bow back there, it was a warning shot. It wasn't nice of you to kill the man who fired it."
"Sorry about that."
"The next is going to go up your culo. Do you speak Spanish?"
"Enough to understand you."
"I give you one minute."
Charley said, "Felix. That's our boy on the radio. I'll keep him talking. Tell Mac to shoot the one talking into his radio." Felix ran aft.
"You there?"
"Of course."
"What do you want from me?"
"What a question, billonario. You blow up my home, kill my men. I want to discuss your surrender. Reparations."
"What kind of reparations you have in mind?"
"Your boat."
"This old thing? I don't know, your river's a little narrow. One of your friends tried to pass me back there and you saw what happened."
"Thirty seconds, billonario."
***
His boat hit a small piece of wood. He put down the hand microphone so he could steer with both hands. Virgilio's voice came on the radio.
"Niño, what's happening? What do you want me to-" He saw the muzzle flash on the stern of the yacht. The sound was loud, like an elephant gun.
Felix came running. "Mac got him!"
Charley stared. It was over, finally over. He said, "Tell him, that's good shooting."
The archway of ifs stretching to Juanjui fell away. Charley knew: the sun would come up and they would make it.
He heard a shout from the stern. It sounded like "Incoming!" Then something kicked him in the back, hard, like a horse. It lifted him up and threw him forward, through the window.
38
He watched with mounting panic as the fire spread. Why should the ship burn so? He had only fired a single RPG.
"Billonario?"
Her stern was getting low in the water. She was sinking. What a disaster.
"Billonario, answer."
The yacht's bow swung around to face him, like a wounded mastodon raising itself defiantly on its front legs. She was going downriver backward.
He and the other boat followed, keeping their distance in case the cabron sniper who had killed Virgilio was still alive. The fire in her stern continued to rage. The RPG must have hit a fuel tank, but how was that possible? The fuel tanks were under the waterline, and he placed the grenade deftly in the transom.
A half kilometer later her bow went up on a mudbank in the middle of the river. Thank God. She wouldn't sink, at least. But the fire…
"Billonario, are you there?"
"Charley!" said Margaret. "You come down out of there this minute. You're too old to be climbing trees."
"I'm coming, sweetheart, you hold on."
Tasha was crying. She had climbed all the way to the top and was now frozen with fear and unable to come down. Huge bats were circling her. The bats were the result of a secret U.S. Air Force experiment using recombinant DNA engineering to splice bat genes and Stealth technology. There were serious cost overruns, and the bats escaped. Charley shot at them with his pistol, but the bats were able to jam bullets. He kept firing.
"Boss!"
"Felix, watch out!"
"Boss, stop shooting!"
"Huh?" He was in a tree. The pistol was in his hand. He was shooting. He was upside-down. Where was Tasha? Felix's face appeared in the branches.
"Bats, Felix!"
"Are you all right, boss?"
"What's happening?"
"She's on fire. Mac and Rostow are dead. It was an RPG. It hit the bar in the fantail. All the liquor caught fire. We have to get off."
Felix pulled Charley out of the tree on the foredeck.
"I had this dream, Felix."
"It's the morphine. Come on."
They crawled aft along the deck and went into the main salon. Charley coughed from the smoke. The emergency sprinkler system was going, everything was wet. The fire had already consumed the fantail and was working its way forward, making the wet carpet and walls hiss and steam. The gold-glass panels from the old ocean liner Normandie had shattered. The pieces glowed in the fire like Art Deco embers. Charley and Felix leaned against a bulkhead to catch their breath.
"We have to abandon ship," said Felix.
"See if they're still out there."
Felix went out on deck. He crawled back in and said, "Two boats."
"Are they together, on one side?"
"Yeah, the starboard."
Charley stared i
nto the fire for several moments. He said, "We'll use the inflatable on the foredeck. Toss it over the port side. There's a Navy base downriver. The current'll take us."
They crawled together up the deck on the port side. Felix wrestled the emergency inflatable life raft off its cradle. It would inflate automatically as soon as it hit the water.
"Tie two lines to it," said Charley. "We'll toss it in together and each hold a line. Once it's inflated, we can get in. But don't let go of the line."
Felix tied the two lines and hefted the raft up onto the railing.
"Felix, listen to me. In case something happens, it's all with the lawyers, the lawyers will take care of everything. You understand?"
"No," said Felix.
"You're, I, you're my only family left, Felix. Who else was I going to leave it to?"
"That's crazy."
"It's all been worked out, Felix. It's all with the lawyers."
"We're going together."
"In case, is all I'm saying. When you get to the Navy base, contact Gallardo. That was a damn fine supper I gave him. Let him start earning his pay. All right, ready? Now, we got to hold on to that rope tight. That's one hell of a current. We'll be in Juanjui by breakfast time. Don't let go, no matter what. On count of three."
Charley gripped his line and seated himself on the railing. Felix sat beside him.
"One, two, three." Felix pushed the raft overboard and jumped in.
The CO2 canister inflated the raft in seconds. Felix pulled himself aboard. By the time he'd climbed on, he was fifty yards downstream of Esmeralda. He could not see Charley waving to him from the deck, hear him call out, "Vaya con Dios, my old and good friend."
***
"Billonario, come in."
Wet Work Page 23