Didn’t he find Lillian desirable?
Only cerebrally so. She was a beautiful woman by womanly standards, but spoiled. Many times over. Spoiled by experience. Practiced and physically demanding. He had long ago given up trying and failing with her sort. (It made him despondent to think that somewhere Karen was now a thirty-year-old issuing children and sexual directions.)
He no longer had any uncertainty about his libidinal preference, or any misgivings. Over the years, that which pleased him most had determined him. No use fighting it and no shame. But he would never tell Lillian. Somehow he would keep it from her, be more careful, extremely discreet. Until the exile was lifted, until her body ran out of patience.
That was where this Mr. Wiley fit in. That was the reason for having gone through the complications of setting up Mr. Wiley so that he was five million on the down side. That was the only reason Mr. Wiley was not dead by simple elimination. Argenti could have had it done at any time by the point of his finger.
Mr. Wiley would serve.
Evidently, from what he’d gathered, Lillian found Mr. Wiley a fairly good bedfellow. All the better. Argenti wouldn’t begrudge her that. People in their class were always sweeping things under the rug. Well, he, Lillian and Wiley would sweep everything under the rug and all get under there with it.
The telephone. His direct line to Conduct Section was ringing.
Kellerman was on to tell him, “The report is she landed in Mexico City an hour ago and went immediately to her house in the Pedregal section.”
“Wiley was with her?”
“Of course.”
“Good. If he runs out on her, kill him. Did you by chance have that talk with Robayo?”
“The Senator wants a retirement fund,” Kellerman said.
“Wants?”
“Demands.”
“That was not in the original terms.”
“So I reminded him.”
“Doesn’t he realize the new Senator from Boyacá will assume his responsibilities and, as well, his rewards? Merda, if he kept only a third of what went to Switzerland for him these past seven years, he is a wealthy man.”
“He gambled.”
“That much of a loser?”
“He seemed to enjoy not winning.”
“Well, we can’t stuff his mouth with money,” Argenti said.
“Unless you’re prepared to keep stuffing.”
“Wait until he is out of office. Meanwhile, go along with whatever he wants.”
“Exactly.”
After the phone call Argenti remained at his desk. He poured more of the Montrachet and moved a paperweight that was one pound of pure platinum, polished and engraved with his three initials in Spencerian script. He took up a letter from the man in Amsterdam, an associate in the international minority organization called The Golden Triangle. Members traded material and local advice. Many prominent men. This man in Amsterdam had some exceptional color snapshots. A sample was enclosed: the girl in a most delightful, gawky stance, hand shielding her eyes from the sun, crotch barely glossed—the golden triangle. Not a hint of guile, unless it was her underpants around and under one foot, toes peeking out.
Argenti tried to think what in his collection he might offer in exchange. Something of quality that had used up his interest.
He opened the desk drawer.
There was the red Cartier box.
He placed it on the desk and pressed the lid up.
The ring Lillian would accept.
The diamond, a few points over twelve carats, flared at him, even in that low light.
He got up, bolted the only door. Drew the drapes over all the windows and returned to his chair behind the desk.
Even then he was uneasy, glanced around.
Slowly, he brought the first finger of his right hand to the ring.
Even the slightest change in his point of view caused the diamond to differ in its refractions. It was a round cut, what those in the trade called a brilliant.
The tip of his finger was only a half inch from it.
It would be the first time since.
He dared. Touched the diamond and quickly withdrew his hand, as though to avoid being burned.
He glanced around the room again.
Shook his head as though to shake away a spell.
He had been ridiculous.
He took the diamond from the box, looked into its table, that largest facet on its top, gazed into its cold, clear substance. He rubbed the diamond on the back of his hand and on his wrist where his life was represented by his pulse.
He put it in his mouth, moved it about in there with his tongue.
The System?
He spat the diamond out with such force it landed halfway across the room.
26
Lillian hummed a few bars of an old Beatles song and went on nonstop into some of another and another.
Content. There were mattresses on the floor, candles stuck around in their own melt, incense and a nice edge of apprehension in the air.
She picked up the long wooden spoon and stirred the black liquid in the pot. The Kennedy City house came with a gas stove, but the stove had only two burners. So, she had been at it practically all day. That morning she had cooked up a pot of zuki beans and a pot of brown rice. She was glad she hadn’t lost her touch with rice. It came out neither stuck together nor stuck to the bottom.
Now what she had cooking on the back burner was a pair of coveralls. Dying them black. The pot could only hold one pair at a time, so with three pairs to do, it would take a while.
On the front burner was a small cast-iron pot containing lead. The lead was just now beginning to melt. She was ready for it.
Wiley offered to help.
She told him he could put out his cigarette and watch.
She placed four bullets on the counter next to the stove. Set them upright. They were four of the hollow-point forty-fives the gunsmith Cordero had made for her. The lead nose of each bullet had a hole bored in it, about three eighths of an inch deep, one eighth in diameter.
Wiley wanted to know what she intended to do with them.
“Don’t ask so many questions,” she told him. “I have to concentrate.”
Using a regular glass eye-dropper, she filled the nose hole of each bullet with ordinary water. Then, she took up another dropper, similar but made of stainless steel.
The lead was melted by now.
She sucked some of it up into the length of the stainless-steel dropper, careful not to get too much, because the lead was hot enough to burn through the dropper’s rubber vacuum bulb.
She held the dropper less than an inch above a bullet, making sure it was exactly over the nose hole. She squeezed the dropper bulb, gently. A bead of the molten lead grew until it fell by its own weight exactly on the hole. Immediately it cooled and hardened.
The object, she explained, was to seal the water in the hollow of the bullet. Perhaps it looked easy to do, but if the lead wasn’t dropped precisely, if it was off even slightly and left a little opening, the water steamed and escaped.
She examined the bullet she’d just done. “A perfect seal,” she said.
He assumed it was something she’d done before, wondered for what reason, asked her.
“I’ve only heard about it,” she said. “They call these hydraulic bullets.”
“What good are they?”
She didn’t say, went back to it. She had difficulty sealing the second bullet, didn’t get it sealed until her fourth try. Several others also gave her trouble, but after about an hour and a half of intense effort, she was through sealing all eighteen. She used a fingernail file to remove any excess lead from the bullets, making their gray noses smooth. She inserted the bullets into two clips, nine to each. Shoved a clip into the stock of the Colt forty-five automatic.
Wiley went out with her to the backyard.
“You’re not going to shoot it here?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Wha
t about the neighbors?”
“They’ll think it’s a backfire. Besides, noise doesn’t bother people much until they get to be middle-class.”
There was a plank, a piece of one-by-ten about three feet long. She propped it up against the cement-block foundation of the house. She stood off about fifteen feet, cocked a bullet into position, raised the pistol and fired at the plank.
A regular forty-five-caliber bullet would have made a regular forty-five-caliber hole in the plank, nearly the size of a dime. A regular hollow-nose, or dumdum bullet, as they are called, would have made a hole the size of a dime going in and a hole as big around as a silver dollar going through and out the back.
The hydraulic bullet blasted the plank apart.
Lillian explained why, as much as she knew about it.
Upon impact, the lead bullet slug compressed. However, water was one of the few substances known that could not be compressed.
Wiley knew that from high-school physics. A cubic foot of water remains a cubic foot of water no matter how much pressure is exerted upon it from all sides.
Thus, when the slug hit, its compression, its give, so to speak, met with the absolute stubbornness of the water inside it. Force against counterforce caused explosion.
Wiley picked up what was left of the plank. He imagined what a bullet like that could do to a person. “What are you going to use it for?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” she said.
They went into the house.
She put the gun away and finished dying the coveralls. Wiley strung a line for them to dry on. They sprayed the crash helmets black, and Lillian cut soles from the foam rubber, which she glued to the bottoms of the combat boots.
Off and on all day Wiley had fussed with his socks, pulling them up. The reason was, he had four of Lillian’s ten-thousand-dollar bundles stashed in them. Lillian had the other ten-thousand bundle tucked into the front of her bikini panties, which, of course, exaggerated her mons veneris. There weren’t any good money-hiding places in the unfurnished house, and the Cubans gave the impression they would cut throats for a lot less. That afternoon, when the Cubans were playing masochistic catch, several wild throws had put baseball dents in the car Wiley had rented from Hertz. Lillian believed they’d done it on purpose.
Early the next morning, Miguel showed up. He, Lillian and Wiley packed the car and left for the training site.
It was ten days to Christmas.
27
Fires were not uncommon in the barrio.
The average was about one a night. More than that during the Christmas season, with all the candles, fireworks and aguardiente.
On this Christmas Eve four fires broke out there.
Someone finally notified the fire department.
The firetrucks passed through red lights with their usual priority but, otherwise, they only sounded as though they were hurrying. It was a barrio alarm.
Thus the fires got a big blazing start.
Barrio inhabitants crowded around and got in the way of the hoses.
Firemen accepted swigs. Kids tossed firecrackers at the firemen’s boots. It was festive, more like a celebration than an emergency.
None of the officials on the scene gave any thought to the coincidence that all four fires had started at precisely ten o’clock, or that their locations corresponded to the four corners of Argenti’s building.
At that same hour that night, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk skirted the mountains southwest of the city. The sky could not have been clearer. It was as though the Savior had ordered all the stars and a full moon out. No wind; heaven seemed to be holding its breath.
From an altitude of two thousand feet the pilot of the plane identified the straight, brighter-lighted city artery below as Avenida 13. He used it for a heading.
Wiley was next to the pilot, in a tight squat position on the floor, facing aft. Lillian and Miguel had the passenger seats. They were all cramped in by equipment, had been for over an hour. Their spines and legs were complaining.
The door of the plane had been removed on Wiley’s side. Raw air blew in. Still there was the smell of marijuana. Droppings of the stuff filled every crack, crease and angle of the plane’s interior, and whenever the plane was in flight a fine marijuana dust was stirred up. Wiley was willing to bet a good going-over with an Electrolux would have yielded at least a pound. Little doubt what the plane had previously been used for.
The pilot was one of Miguel’s part-time comrades. Carlos Johnson by name. His father was an American merchant seaman who had jumped ship at Buenaventura in 1950 and never worked another honest day. Carlos had learned English from his father. One adjective described everything, whether it deserved it or not. Such as now, when he poked Wiley and shouted over the noise of the propeller: “About three fucking minutes.”
Wiley felt not entirely in register with reality. And as though he was under a slight general anesthesia. The metal floor of the plane was hard on his ass bones, but that was inconsequential. He was looking directly at Lillian. Her face seemed small inside the helmet, a little-girl game player. They had tried to talk during the early minutes of the flight but had to shout and couldn’t keep that up. That wasn’t the reason they were silent now. Wiley was thinking that he wasn’t going out that door. They weren’t ready, he wasn’t. Ten days of training wasn’t enough.
Only ten days ago had been the first time. At twenty-five hundred feet over a plateau near Pacora. Carlos was to instruct them. He’d learned from a guy who’d learned from a guy who’d learned in the army. A lot had been left out along the line.
Ordinarily, such training included extensive preliminaries on the ground, theoretically what and what not to do, how and how not to do it. Carlos’ method was like teaching someone to swim by throwing him overboard in the middle of the Atlantic.
He had them put on their chutes.
He took them a half mile up.
One at a time they stood in the open doorway.
“People have to fucking bail out all the time,” Carlos said. “Don’t worry.”
They didn’t jump.
He shoved them out with his right foot.
Suddenly they were in a tumble of earth over sky over earth, not knowing which way was up, grabbing at the nothing of the air while the fear of falling stopped their breaths and spurted their adrenaline. They had to fight through freeze to pull the ripcord ring.
“Unless you pull the ring, you won’t feel a fucking thing,” Carlos had said.
Their parachutes flowed up and filled out and saved them. They floated down wherever the wind happened to take them, landed at least a thousand feet from the patch of open field that had been their target.
“Not so fucking bad,” Carlos later said while showing them how to pack their chutes.
Marianna had brought good chutes. Thirty-two-foot Para-commanders of black nylon, the kind with slots in the rear of the canopy that gave the jumper a certain amount of maneuverability. The Paracommander came with a reserve chute attached to the harness across the front at waist level.
One thing Carlos constantly reminded them was to be careful with the reserve chute any time they were up in the plane. They should keep their left hands over the ripcord handle of the reserve chute to protect it from being pulled accidentally. He never told them why.
Lillian found out.
One afternoon the plane dropped sharply into a large air pocket.
Lillian grabbed.
The reserve chute sprang out.
She tried to contain it with her arms, but it billowed and caught the wind stream on the open side of the plane. Then the entire chute was out and inflating behind the plane while she was still in the cabin. It would snap her against the fuselage with force enough to break her. There was only one thing to do, and she had about two seconds to do it. She dove out, just missed by inches losing her head on the plane’s tail fin.
Another time Wiley’s main chute malfunctioned because he hadn’t packed it right. When the chute
opened, two suspension lines weren’t straight down from the canopy as they should have been but looped over the top of it and down the wrong side. What experienced chutists call “a line over.” It caused Wiley to go into a spiral, a downward spiral, of course. Completely out of control. Carlos hadn’t said what to do in such an event, but Wiley wanted to live enough to pull the reserve chute.
Then there was the jump when Miguel’s ripcord handle stuck, and he struggled with it longer than he should have. From twenty-five hundred feet to the ground is about an eighteen-second fall. Miguel misjudged the time and the ground, had used up fifteen seconds before he went to his reserve chute. It popped open loudly and grabbed just enough air so he could land without serious injury. His left knee knocked him unconscious.
How many jumps had they made in those ten days?
Wiley knew exactly.
Thirty-two each.
He also happened to know it took a falling person, such as one whose parachute failed, only twelve seconds to be falling at a rate of 176 feet per second—120 miles per hour—which is terminal velocity. He was disturbed by the term terminal, the death connotation to it.
It brought to mind Endicott, the man who had flashed by Wiley’s office window on his way down from the top.
Anyway, over the past ten days, since that first do-or-die jump, they had all covered a lot of air. Carlos’ crude, accelerated course was terrifying and frequently painful, but within a week they got so they could maneuver their chutes and come down in that small open patch three out of five times.
That had been out in the country in the daytime.
Not over a city.
At night.
Wiley was sure he wasn’t ready. But then, he doubted he’d ever be.
They were coming up on target now.
Four fires to starboard.
No difficulty finding Argenti’s building. It stuck up from the barrio like a misplaced monolith.
Green Ice Page 29