Orinoco

by Dan Pollock

  With the gate now open enough for them to squeeze through, Oscar turned to the smaller Chucho and explained, one last time, the route the brothers should follow to reach the Proteus construction shed unobserved, and exactly what they should look for once inside. Chucho nodded rapidly; Angel would do whatever his brother told him.

  “Buena suerte,” Oscar concluded, “and be quick, for God’s sake.” Then he hunkered down, his back against the gatepost, as the brothers departed on their stealthy mission. He marveled at how silently and quickly they melted into darkness. Oscar decided the pair might work out after all.

  A moment later his nose was twisted painfully.

  “Wake up, old man!”

  Oscar opened his eyes to find a monstrous blob towering above him. Then Chucho was kneeling close and grinning. Then Oscar caught the hovering gleam of teeth and eyes—the blob was Angel.

  Oscar turned to Chucho: “What happened?” he whispered urgently.

  “No problem, Oscar. We got it.”

  Oscar now saw a sack dangling in front of his face, then suddenly being swung around his head.

  “Angel, are you crazy!” he gasped. “You want to blow us into bloody bits!”

  “But, Oscar, you said this stuff was stable,” Chucho said.

  “Imbécil! I said it depends on what kind you got!”

  “We must have got the right kind, because it didn’t go off when Angel dropped it on the way back.”

  “Hijo de la chingada! Angel, just set the bag down—gently!—and let me see.”

  Oscar, now completely wide awake, directed his flashlight beam into the bag. Inside were five kilo-size bricks of what looked like C-4 in fiberboard wrappings, intended obviously for ore blasting. Oscar breathed a profound sigh of relief. Though one of the most powerful explosives on earth, C-4 was also extremely stable.

  “We did good, boss?”

  “Very good, Chucho. Except you forgot the fucking detonators.”

  Chucho gestured back into the bag.

  Oscar lifted a brick, revealing copper-sheathed electric blasting caps and coiled wire. All they’d need now were six-volt batteries and a windup clock.

  Oscar scrambled to his feet. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Angel shut the gate, and Chucho fastened a new padlock on the hasp. Then the trio headed back along the fence toward the road.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Cessna came in from the east with the midmorning sun behind it, chasing and finally catching its own shadow as it settled into a perfect three-point landing. The little twin-prop plane ran the length of the ranch strip, then taxied to the pathway leading to the ranchhouse, offloading Jacqueline Lee and Enrico Tosto. Then the pilot—a retired Venezuelan Air Force captain—continued on to the tie-down area near the stables. At Sam’s suggestion, Enrico had located a qualified flier through the international Cessna Pilots Association. Up until yesterday, the former officer had been managing his Tropiburger franchise in a city in northeast Venezuela, and he had jumped at the chance to escape his smoky grill for a few days.

  Enrico offered to shoulder the camera bag on the brief hike to the ranchhouse, but Jacqueline waved him off. She was used to lugging it on shoots. They had been an hour aloft, first watching the dozers and graders chewing at the flanks of Cerro Calvario; then moving north where more graders were pushing a railroad corridor across La Promesa property, while relays of trucks dumped loads of gravel and burned clay for the track bed; and finally surveying the adjacent area across Route 16 where the mine workers’ encampment was being laid out. The pilot had made several low-flying passes at each location, to give Jacqueline the best camera angles.

  The sights had not been pretty, but, for his part, Enrico had enjoyed watching the Korean-American girl doing her thing. Her lustrous hair had whipped in the wind-blast as she poked the compact Handycam through a gap in the side window. Frequently she had twisted around to share some intense reaction to what she had just seen below. At such times, Enrico would listen and nod in understanding, but he tended to pay more attention to her artful gestures and compelling facial expressions than to her jet-propelled commentary over the headset.

  Why was it—as he had wondered many times in regard to his sisters-in-law—that so many young ladies spoke with such bewildering rapidity? Were their brains that much more skillfully linked to their tongues, so that sentences and paragraphs were delivered in machine-gun bursts, while poorly wired male brains had to search haltingly for each next word? Whatever the reason, this particular young lady was certainly pleasant to listen to, even if one missed an excitable word or phrase here and there.

  He glanced over at her now as she suddenly pirouetted once around, scanning the savanna and the sky-domed horizon, before resuming her lanky forward stride.

  “I can see why you love it out here, Enrico, and Sam, too. Have you ever been to his Oklahoma ranch?”

  “A few times.”

  “Is it anything like this?”

  “In many ways the land is very similar. Of course, the Lazy S is at least four times bigger than La Promesa. Samuel has around twenty-two thousand acres up there. And his Casa Grande is truly grand—and most impressive. But if you ask me, the house is too big for him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Why? Because he has no one to share it with.”

  She laughed. “Sam told me you were always trying to get him married. To one of your sisters-in-law, wasn’t it?”

  “There was some truth to that, but no more. I have told Romalda to forget this.” Enrico fingered a cigarette out of his shirt-pocket pack and lir it, after determining that Jacqueline was upwind.

  “Ah? I take it you’ve finally decided he’s a hopeless bachelor?”

  “No, señorita, I don’t think so. If you ask me, I think Samuel is ready to be saddled.”

  “You do?”

  “Most certainly I do.”

  “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  Enrico smiled and shrugged elaborately. Jacqueline stopped in her tracks.

  “You think I’m the one who should saddle your jefe? Did Sam talk to you about me?”

  “He said nothing in words. But I know him very well, señorita. I watched the way he looked at you. And I saw him when he came home after riding with you. It had been many years since I had heard him whistle. I didn’t know the tune. Also the next day, at my cousin’s wedding, Samuel acted like a happy young llanero who just got paid. All night he drank and danced with everybody.”

  “Well, the drinking part I was aware of.”

  “Yes, I am truly sorry for that. But you know, Jacqueline—” she had suggested he call her Jake, but he preferred the more formal and feminine name—”the thing that happened with Samuel and the woman—la rubia oxigenada—how do you say, blonde from a bottle?”

  “Peroxide blonde?”

  “Peroxide, yes. This was nothing. Nothing!”

  “I believe that now, Enrico. In fact, according to your little theory, I suppose it was my fault. First I made him whistle, then get drunk, then fall downstairs. Isn’t that what you’re saying, all this peculiar behavior of Sam’s, you attribute to my influence?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. But I think yes. Perhaps.”

  They resumed their progress toward the rear courtyard in silence. Then, after a moment, Enrico cleared his throat and tentatively launched a different approach.

  “You know, señorita, men of a certain age, they do not necessarily lose their power. On the contrary. When it comes to matters of love—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Enrico! I can’t believe we’re having this conversation!”

  “I am sorry, Jacqueline, if I speak improperly.”

  “No, no, you’re absolutely proper. In fact, you sound almost Victorian—except that part about saddling Sam like a horse. Look, I’m very flattered, Enrico. In fact, I think I’m probably blushing. But, if you don’t mind, I’d rather we just drop it, okay?”

  “As you wish
.”

  Enrico stepped on his cigarette, held open the back door, then saluted nonchalantly as she entered the air-conditioned ranchhouse. He, meanwhile, had livestock and llaneros to look after.

  Along the tiled corridor, Jacqueline passed the den and smiled in at Romalda, who was curled on the leather couch, and her sister Anacleta, standing behind an ironing board, both watching television. Bernardo had been banished from daytime TV and was out on horseback somewhere being a tenderfoot llanero. The young man apparently loved it.

  She found Dr. Laya behind a big mission-style writing table in his guest bedroom, wearing his Oakland A’s baseball cap and speaking Spanish on the telephone. The cap, she had learned, concealed a bald spot no larger than a quarter—or a two-bolívar coin. He waved at her, then pointed to the handset and mimed the word interview. Jacqueline sat on the corner of the bed and leafed through a catalogue of pre-Columbian art.

  After a few minutes, Arquimedeo hung up. “I was speaking to a reporter for one of the Caracas dailies, El Nacional.”

  “Really? That sounds good.”

  “Right now, it is very hard to be hopeful—”

  “Wait, Dr. Laya. Is it all right if I shoot while we chat?”

  Arquimedeo nodded. Jacqueline had earlier prevailed on him to let her film his candid reactions from time to time, for edited inclusion in her final documentary. Despite his dubious assent and initial self-consciousness, the archaeologist seemed gradually to be relaxing into the process. She dug into her bag, quickly mounted and positioned the Handycam atop a tabletop tripod and let it roll.

  “Now. You were saying it’s hard to be hopeful.”

  “Yes, I was. And I say that, having just received—less than an hour ago—some fantastic news from the university. The bone flute fragment—the one Félix stole—returned a radiocarbon date of seven thousand B.C., plus or minus a century. Nine thousand years old. That makes it one of the earliest artifacts ever discovered in the Orinoco region.”

  “But that’s wonderful! Won’t that help your case?”

  “I doubt it, Jacqueline. My allies in the cabinet have already done all they could. I understand several left-wing factions staged a street demonstration supposedly on my behalf yesterday, but mostly, I suspect, to condemn the influence of Proteus and all other multinationals in Venezuela. Unfortunately, that sort of thing probably hurts me at the moment.”

  “Was the demonstration on TV?”

  Dr. Laya nodded. “One of my colleagues videotaped it, so I can probably arrange to get you a copy. Is that why you ask?”

  Jacqueline nodded. “I still don’t see how the government can ignore such scientific evidence. They can’t possibly believe Félix.”

  “Of course not. It is truly maddening. And, you know, Jacqueline, the irony is that our government is actually doing many good things to preserve primitive cultures. For instance, deep in the rain forest, we are finally working to preserve the Yanomami and other indigenous tribes from contamination by our culture. We have set aside a jungle biosphere of forty thousand acres and doing everything possible to stop illegal prospectors, who use mercury to extract gold, then poison the streams and rivers with the residue.

  “So, you see, even the Yanomami have a lobby. But the Arawaks who carved this flute are long vanished. Who cares about them anymore? And the government’s mathematics are simple. My work generates no money, no jobs. In Caracas, they weigh thousands of private-sector jobs against a dozen dedicated volunteers, and a mountain of iron ore against a scrap of old bird bone. Who do you think wins?

  “No, I’m afraid that flute is the last relic we’ll get from Cerro Calvario. I, too, can’t believe it. I look out that window and I see that reddish hump on the horizon, and I think about what is happening so close. If only I could have had another six months. Or even a month.” He sighed. “So, what did you see going on over there? I haven’t heard any blasting yet.”

  “I’ve got it all on tape, if you’d like to see.”

  “Your description will suffice.”

  “Well, it looks like they’re just grading around the base so far. And they’ve moved most of the equipment tents below the South Hill.”

  “Did you see my erstwhile colleague there? But perhaps you didn’t fly that low?”

  “He’s there. When we flew over, a bare-chested man came out of one of the tents and looked up. He probably had Marta Mendes in there.”

  “They haven’t touched my summit trenches yet?”

  “Not yet, Dr. Laya. It looks like there’s a lot of preparatory work they need to do—cutting the terraces, laying the track, stuff like that. So maybe there’s still hope. Tell me about your morning. Did you line up any other interviews? What about from other countries?”

  “Well, I’m told there’s an ITN crew filming the mop-up in Yucatán from Hurricane Jessica, and the chairman of our anthropology department knows the producer, and he’s trying to lure them down here afterward to do an interview with me. I understand their footage sometimes gets picked up by CNN.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  Jacqueline had just managed to mask an instinctive reaction of professional jealousy. She had come to regard Dr. Laya and his cause as her exclusive documentary domain. But there had been no such agreement between them. The archaeologist was perfectly free to invite in ITN or CNN or anyone else he wanted to. And, if anything could now put pressure on Caracas to change its policy, it would be high-profile media exposure. Her film project, on the other hand, would require weeks or months of post-production even after she concluded taping, and frankly, it was more likely to further her own ambitions than Dr. Laya’s.

  It took Jacqueline a few seconds to hack her way through this thicket of self-interest. And she emerged with the consoling thought that even if somebody else’s interview with Dr. Laya were broadcast all around the globe, it would probably be highly edited and quickly forgotten. Even so, it might whet the appetite for her own film, which would eventually emerge in hour or half-hour documentary form and have far more impact.

  She switched off the videocamera and smiled over at Dr. Laya. “You know, you’re an awfully good sport, Doctor.”

  “I have many fine qualities.”

  Arquimedeo smiled and blinked back at her. His chin was up, and clearly he was putting on his staunchest face. Yet he reminded her suddenly of a forlorn child in his baseball cap, with his scrawny arms and legs and delicate features behind the wire spectacles. Jacqueline felt an impulse to go to him and comfort him in her arms—an impulse she wisely checked.

  She had enough complications with men already.

  Chapter Thirty

  Get off—now!”

  “Make me!”

  “I’m serious. I’ll throw you off.”

  “Bet you can’t!”

  Félix Rosales was flat on his back and held in pubic clench by Marta Mendes, who knelt astride his hips, rocking and bouncing his backside relentlessly against the ground under the sleeping bag. To make good on his threat, Félix gritted his teeth, contracted his abdominals and jackknifed his upper body, bringing him suddenly face to face and torso to torso with the sweat-slick young woman.

  “Now, come on!” he commanded.

  Her eyes remained half-hooded and lust-glazed, as her head shook defiantly. When he reached to force her, her strong arms flew around him first. Félix fought free, seized her upper arms and shoved her sideways. Marta yelped as they came uncoupled, then toppled onto her side. But she rolled up giggling, flailing her muscular legs—and nearly flattening his tumescence with one playful heel-kick at his exposed inner thigh.

  “Damn you, Marta! Stop it—and listen!”

  Outside, a truck motor could be heard laboring on the rugged South Hill perimeter track.

  “A mining truck, so what?”

  But this one sounded different—and closer. Félix crawled over Marta, peeled back the tent flap and saw a dust cloud part to reveal one of the Proteus Land Cruisers. It swung around and pulled to a stop
a few feet from the control pit, which had lain untouched in the three weeks since Arquimedeo and Félix had completed its stratigraphic profile. Félix ducked inside.

  “Get your clothes on! They’re from Proteus!”

  “So? You don’t work for them.”

  “Well, you work for me, dammit, and I’m telling you to get your damn clothes on!”

  Félix kicked his legs into his khaki shorts, zippered up gingerly over his bulge, stuck his feet into huaraches, wrestled into a muscle shirt, pawed at his lank forelock. He turned to find the Portuguese fisherman’s daughter still sprawled bare-ass on the sleeping bag, and still eyeing him hungrily.

  “Don’t be long, lover.”

  “Do what I say, Marta, or the party’s over.” Félix spoke in a muted growl, having heard two doors open and shut outside. “Those guys just might poke their heads in here.” Finally she rolled her eyes theatrically and reached indolently for the cotton briefs which hung from a nearby tentpole, and Félix crawled through the flap into the sun.

  Two men were out of the truck. Félix knew them both. The big sandy-haired man in the golf shirt was Owen Meade, the local mining honcho, and the smaller and older Hispanic guy with steel glasses was Meade’s boss, Ray Arrillaga, whom Félix had met on D.W. Lee’s ship, the Kallisto.

  They greeted him and shook hands, both speaking Spanish. “Ray asked to have a look at your operation,” Owen explained, shading his eyes with a clipboard and squinting down into the five-foot-deep control pit. “Kind of quiet here.”

  Félix nodded. “We just got the last of the equipment and tents moved over yesterday, with the help of some of your guys. We’re still sorting things out.”

  “You say ‘we,’” Ray said. “Where’s the rest of your crew?”

  “Actually, I haven’t had a chance to get a new digging crew. I thought you knew, most of them walked out with Dr. Laya.”

  Ray nodded. “Right. Academic solidarity and all that. But can’t you recruit volunteers from other campuses?”