by Brian Hodge
“At home, the shamans of Iyakei-teri cultivated a new kind of ebene with their magic. But it was so different, it was not really ebene at all. It came to be known as hekura-teri — village of demons. It made them very fierce and feared, because they had a weapon none of the other villages possessed. Like before I was born, when men first were given shotguns.”
Justin frowned. “I’m missing something. What’s the difference between ebene and the other stuff?”
“It does much more. It takes one back to the days of the first men, before there were such gulfs between men and animals. When there was understanding between both, and spirits freely walked.”
Justin’s imagination swam with images. Trent gone jaguar. A she-wolf, captive, frightened. Human and animal, the gap bridged.
“Some hekura — some jungle demons — they hunger to eat the souls of men. The new powder allows them to do that for a time, to come inside and eat the noreshi. These hekura long to turn men against themselves, so they use the form of a man’s spirit animal against him. They can make a good man evil, and an evil man worse.” Kerebawa looked at them gravely. “Ebene shows to you the demons. Hekura-teri allows you to become one.”
The rains came later that morning, and Kerebawa walked beneath them. Trees stood behind the motel, a few sad, stunted palms. He longed to feel the water on his body, the air, the natural cool brought by the rains instead of the artificial cool of the room.
It had been good, finally, to sleep around others once more. Even if the surroundings were completely foreign to what he was used to. Good to feel a part of a tribe, if only a tribe of three.
For he trusted them, these two back in the room. He could smell no deceit about them, no treachery other than that born of their own desperate situation.
He felt pangs of cold sadness for Justin, so lost in this world. Kerebawa too was lost in his own way, but at least he knew where he belonged. Not so with Justin. For a time, though, he had seemed on the verge of remembering forgotten relics of his past. The idea of the noreshi had not fallen on deaf ears.
Perhaps he was descended from the Yanomamö after all. Kerebawa recalled the legends from the aeons-distant time of the first beings. There had come a devastating flood in those days, during which many Yanomamö drowned. Some escaped by climbing mountains. Others, though, cut down trees and floated on them to save their lives. They floated away to other lands and became foreigners, and their language changed into unintelligible gibberish. Kerebawa thought it likely that Noah, of Angus’s Bible, was one of these people.
In the same way, perhaps Justin was descended from one who had floated away. And was unsettled, forever trying to remember Yanomamö roots. Perhaps when there was time, he might help Justin remember.
The woman, April, seemed surer of herself and who she was. Kerebawa had never known a female like her. He’d seen plenty, from his previous trip north with Angus, and along this journey, but he had never come to be around one. So unlike the women of home. She spoke her thoughts, she challenged. At first, last night, Kerebawa had wondered if this boldness didn’t anger Justin, if he would hit her to keep her down.
In a way, Kerebawa secretly envied Justin for living in a land where he need not feel compelled to beat his woman. Kerebawa tried not to hit his own wife very often, and never very hard, and took no pleasure in it. But it had to be done, it was expected. It was their way. There was no respect for the man who laid no hands upon his wife, only scorn.
He tipped his face to the rain, let it wash down. Refreshing, if not as tasty as the rains of home. More bitter, sour.
He wondered where this journey would finally end. From Mabori-teri to Medellín, then on to Miami. Only to learn that he would have to continue on to this new land, called Tampa. For a time, it had been a bit like home, as he traveled the roads across the northern reaches of what the map called the Everglades.
The Glades had given him time to think of home, to wonder what life among the Yanomamö would be like if there were roads linking the villages as there were here. How easier the trade would be, and intervillage feasting, and warfare. Given the state of things here, as much as he understood of them, perhaps it was just as well the Yanomamö had no such things as roads.
Which did not mean the jungle remained pristine. Every year it shrank, literally, as the outer world encroached on their own. While the governments of Brazil and Venezuela, as he learned while growing into manhood, made provisions for the natives they displaced, claiming to know what was best. How sad — men who knew nothing of their lives, nor even how many centuries the tribes had lived there, deciding their fates.
A few times, while on the fringes of the Everglades, Kerebawa would stop and watch the horrifying tools of progress wreak havoc upon the land. Monstrous yellow machines, traveling on huge wheels or metal belts. Scooping out earth, pushing down trees, filling in waterlogged marsh. Stripping the world so that they could plant more buildings, and more, and more. Until the world was as tame as a dog on a rope.
He left the cover of the palms and wandered along the side of the motel toward the front. Rain had plastered his hair to his head. He pushed it off his forehead. Wished he could find some razor grass so he might give it a trimming.
Venezuela. Brazil. America. Maybe the diseases that got into men’s minds and made them unhappy with the way the world grew knew no borders. Maybe it infected them no matter where they lived.
And as he looked up and down Busch Boulevard, Kerebawa decided that he was sadly right.
Sunday afternoon was verging on evening, and all three of them were crowded about the round windowside table. The dinner hour; April and Justin had ventured out for a few minutes for food. Chicken, garden salads, and milk for one and all. Kerebawa especially looked to need a well-balanced meal.
The rain had become a soft, ambient patter on the overhanging walkway outside, counterpoint to the TV playing at low volume. Syndicated and local stuff. Kerebawa turned his eye in its direction now and again, half fascinated, half wary. April found his expressions oddly endearing.
“We haven’t accomplished anything since this morning,” she said. “A lot of talk, but we have to settle on something soon. We can’t just sit here.”
She looked at Justin, and he nodded, almost guiltily. Nerves maybe, inertia born of dread. That hesitancy to make the first move for fear it might be the wrong one.
“Are you scared?” she asked him softly.
He smiled faintly down toward his food. Glanced up. “I guess.”
“Me too.”
“Fear is not wrong,” said Kerebawa. “So long as it does not eat you.”
April probed thoughtfully at her salad. “My dad once told me something I’ve always tried to live by. He said that if you really want to accomplish something, the surest way to do it is take as many risks as you can. Not stupid ones, but calculated risks. It hasn’t always worked out for the best — believe me, Justin, we both know that — but I’ve always tried to live and work that way. I believe in it.” A sip of milk. “I’m all for taking some risks.”
“Good,” Justin said with a decisive nod. It made her feel better. Periodic doubts had wormed inside her since last night. Was he going to have the backbone to stand firm during this? Or was he, while still wobbly from the blows in St. Louis, going to crumble? Had it looked to definitely be the latter, April still wasn’t sure how she’d have reacted. Stay or go — not a frivolous decision.
“Let’s look at our strengths here.” Justin pointed to Kerebawa. “You’re a genuine warrior. And you know what we’re up against, as far as the drug goes.” Then to April and himself. “You know what we do best?”
“I draw, you write ads.” She rolled her eyes. “Now that’s pretty intimidating.”
He adamantly shook his head. “No. Those are just our tools. Between us, you and I have spent probably fifteen years getting inside people’s heads to push the right buttons. Make them buy something, or go somewhere, or think a certain way. We’re manipulators. T
his doesn’t have to be much different, just the stakes are higher.”
She paused in mid-bite. Intriguing way of looking at themselves.
“Can we fight Tony head-on? No. Can we outgun him? No. But we can damn sure try to outthink him. And the more we can mess with his mind, the better for us.”
So Justin’s thoughts had been whirring all along. Just in a different direction. April regarded herself as a detail-oriented person. Born for commercial art — details, spatial relationships. Tangible practicalities. Justin manipulated words. Words were more nebulous, requiring a broader scope, a grasp of concepts. It was a plus, actually, that they were two sides of the same coin.
“We want different things, but we can get them the same way,” Justin said. To Kerebawa: “You want the hekura-teri.” To April: “We want Mendoza off our backs.” A wry smile, hands spread palms up. “We just have to make sure that everything we do serves both of these aims.”
Kerebawa nodded, eyes shining. Eager to get to the fight, it looked like. “If he was my enemy at home in Mabori-teri, I would attack him first, by surprise.”
“I know where he lives.” April prodded her last bits of chicken. “But attack how?”
“Break into his condo if we can.” No hesitation.
“Enemy camps always can be crept into, if you’re wise,” said Kerebawa.
“Yeah, but why?” Definite unease at the prospect of carrying the fight past Tony’s front door. “Not just to show we can, I assume.”
Justin drained his milk, crumpled the little carton. “Look at things from Tony’s perspective. He’s got six kilos of skullflush, hekura-teri, call it what you will. He’d be a moron to keep selling it after what happened at Apocalips. But if he’s as greedy as any of the distributors I’ve ever met, he can’t bring himself to dump it. He probably can’t trust anybody else to store it, because then they might dip into it. So what does that leave?”
April grinned. “Sit on it and pray?”
“And hating every minute of it. You want a calculated risk, there you go.” He toasted her with his flattened milk carton.
“He could catch us.” There, play the devil’s advocate.
“Not if we’re smart.”
“It’s a pretty crowded area, where he lives. It’s not like he lives in a cabin in the woods. Somebody else might catch us.”
“Maybe. But what if they don’t? And what if that stuff’s there? We’ve got some definite leverage on him then.” Justin turned to Kerebawa. “What would your people do?”
“Watch and learn” — the answer was instantaneous — ”until he would show us his weakness.”
Justin nodded, parted the window curtain. Pointed out at the narrow slice of sky, unadulterated by Busch Boulevard glitz.
“There’s one weakness, right there,” he said. “The guy seems to do most of his outside work at night.”
Chapter 20
DOMESTICATION
Tony loved spy movies. From the fantasy James Bond epics to the real-world scenarios like The Falcon and the Snowman. He identified. Espionage and the drug trade were not all that different, not when it came down to basics.
You had your clandestine meetings. Your illicit exchanges. A healthy dose of paranoia, don’t trust anybody more than absolutely necessary, and even then cover your backside. Above all, the crucial spark plug that kept things moving was communication.
The lack of which was currently giving him fits.
No word from the Weatherman. Very distressing.
He’d been looking forward to returning from the weekend down around Fort Myers and hearing good news. The weekend had been pleasant enough, if boring. Lots of pool time, beach time. Sasha had frolicked, reddening her pale skin, and the two of them had had a fun slip-and-slide session on their bed with a tube of aloe gel. Lupo had read most of the time, Sophocles’ Theban plays, and had gotten halfway through Antigone before it was time to return to Tampa. But for the most part, Tony just sat around anticipating a return to good news. And tipping big so the staff would remember him in case he needed an alibi.
Monday evening now, and he hadn’t heard shit.
Nothing in the paper about a double murder, or on the radio, at on TV. Or — and this was most infuriating of all — from the flunky he’d hired to take care of things in the first place. This was not the way harmonious business relationships worked.
Tony sat restlessly on his balcony, overlooking the condo complex’s courtyard and pool layout. A few people down below, swimming and sunning instead of being good little drones and heading in for the traditional dinner hour. The quartet of big table umbrellas looked like bright, psychedelically painted mushrooms.
He looked beyond the pool, seventy or so yards across to an opposing building. A couple of good little drones grilling on their balconies, guys in barbecue aprons, looking like they needed chef hats. Farther beyond, past a mud flat overgrown with thick underbrush, lapped the Old Bay. A zigzagging boardwalk had been built over the mudflat, running a gauntlet of dense foliage, and it led to a lonely gazebo perched above the water’s edge. Sometimes he liked to meander out there, knowing full well that if somebody was out to kill him, it was a perfect spot to catch him alone. But somehow it always seemed so tranquil out there that death was denied admission. He could gaze out over the bay for hours, pretending the water was Bahamian or Jamaican, anything that seemed more exotic than reality. Someday, someday, he was going to be wealthy enough to buy his own island.
“Call, you fucker,” he muttered to the phone on the table beside him.
He sipped Evian water and watched the phone mock him. Its silence was conspiratorial.
“Hey.” A voice behind him. He looked around to see Sasha in the balcony doorway. “You look all stressed out.”
Tony shrugged and turned away, heard the screen door slide open and shut. Felt her hands on the back of his neck, tops of his shoulders. She played with his unbound hair. It all felt wonderful. His eyes grew heavier as she lingered, ministering to the knotted muscles. The strength of her hands belied their small size. Where had she learned to give a rubdown like that?
“Want to talk about it?” she said. Minutes later, must have been.
“You don’t need to know. Hell, I’ve let you see too much already.”
“Oh, come on.” Rubbing, rubbing. Bribery of the flesh. “Might make you feel better.”
“Who do you think you are, my wife or something?” He smiled; it had not come out unkindly. “This is all I need to feel better.”
Rubbing, rubbing. Magic hands. He floated, transcendent. “I never want to be a wife,” Sasha said after a while. Absently. And regretfully? Maybe so. “All the wives I’ve ever known all get this same look to them. Like they’re trapped animals, and they can’t get loose.”
“Was your mom like that?” And why was he asking, anyway?
“Yeah, she was.” Sasha’s hands began to falter, her rhythm becoming choppier. “I had a Barbie Fun House when I was little, can you believe that?”
He laughed. Had this fleeting image of a child in black, poking tiny safety pins through Barbie’s underdeveloped nipples.
“Then when Dad left, I burned it. ‘Cause it was all just a lie. All of it.” She was finding her rhythms again. “I’d rather be a mistress all my life. Mistresses seem so much better appreciated.” She planted a kiss on his back, between his shoulder blades. “Do you appreciate me?”
“Sure I do.” Tony searched his soul for the truth. Assurances were always easy to give. Saying the right words, easy. Did he mean it? Figured he must, to some degree. He at least cared enough to spare her hurt feelings.
Wasn’t that a kick in the head?
“You don’t have to love me,” she finally said. “Don’t even have to try.” The back rub was over. She eased into the white chair beside him. “I think it’s a figment of the imagination, anyway.”
He was enjoying this, decided to join in the game. Two could play as easily as one. “Love is just what you think y
ou feel right before you come. You get over it quick enough.”
Tony remembered growing up, the example his own parents had set. Remembered hearing them and their noisy bedroom sessions while he was trying to fall asleep. All the kids did. An apartment that small, you couldn’t help it. Their old man was as brutal as a Nazi guard with Mama. Doted like a fool on the kids, then turned around and beat Mama blue half the time. He could still hear his old man gasping how he loved her, bedsprings squeaking through the tissue-thin wail, and then there would be a grunt or two, and then the sound of open-handed slaps. Tony had learned at a very early age how to distinguish passion from pain, and how slim the distinctions were for some people.
So he and Sasha kicked the notions around awhile, the death of love and its nonexistence to begin with. Just a case of mistaken identity. They spoke of the balance of cosmic equations: Women got multiple orgasms, if they were lucky; men got backrubs.
Then she asked when she could have more skullflush. After all, he had promised. Tony told her soon, soon. All-purpose answer. Although now, as never before, he understood her deep-rooted desire to immerse herself in that green world once again.
He was feeling the urge to do it himself.
Not tonight, though. Tonight he felt like accomplishing something, and if it couldn’t be done, then at least he would know he hadn’t been sitting around all evening on his thumb.
“Feel like playing a little hide-and-seek tonight?” he asked.
Sasha’s eyes sparkled. “Anytime.”
He grabbed the phone and began to call in reinforcements.
Tony brought in four guys he frequently used for dirty work that required a certain amount of discretion. The more legs, the less time it would take to do legwork. The hired help divided into two teams of two, while he and Lupo and Sasha made the third.
And they searched. Divided up the club scene and prowled anyplace Tony knew April had ever frequented. Not that he expected anyone to find them living footloose and fancy free, but maybe someone would get lucky. Run into someone who knew her or the both of them, same as he’d lucked into learning that Justin was staying with her to begin with. They checked the clubs thoroughly, and all her friends that he knew of he divided among the three teams, the addresses mapped out so they could scout the homes.