He pried his eyes from the page, looked around to see if he was still on planet earth.
Her impression was of a man either bored with life or defeated by its challenges …. Close up, he smelled rancid.
How had she got close enough to smell him? Had he met her? Where, in what alcoholic stupor? She’d spent a day at Manuel Antonio, they must have bumped into each other.
There seemed little likelihood that much could be salvaged of the nobility he once possessed. Her portrayal of him smarted, but he read on, fascinated. What had she done to him, this Cardinal fellow was a lout.
He raised his eyes from the page. Someone was at the soirée across the road who shouldn’t be there. That someone was Joe Borbón, shaved, shampooed, long-sleeve white shirt, hitting on a dark-haired damsel. Here was fodder for romance writer Nancy Ward, the killing machine plucking a hibiscus for Juan Camacho’s kid sister. He tried hard to swallow his rage.
Rocky,
I’m sending along another packet of pages of Harry’s Wild Adventure. I gave up trying to follow your testy urgings to rewrite Agent Wilder as more macho; I simply don’t possess the cooking skills to follow a recipe for the type of cardboard caricature demanded by the mass market. I intend that Harry bums you out; he is the creation of a depressive poet’s mind. Give him a break – he’s the local pariah, the town drunk avoids him, even the bugs don’t like him any more, he’s suffering from acute alcohol deficiency. He volunteered for this plot, didn’t he? He’s risking his life for R. B. Rubinstein’s standard fifteen-per-cent commission.
As Dr. Bleyer might put it, the patient is so conflicted with self-doubt and loathing that he has begun to separate from reality. Has he dipped into his mother’s gene pool? Or is mental illness contagious, did he catch it from the leader of the People’s Popular Vanguard? When he was seventeen, was he traumatized beyond repair by a decaying mouse in a beer bottle?
Reality has become so tenuous that suddenly Harry finds himself trapped within someone else’s novel and portrayed, I regrette say, as a person one might regret knowing. Looking into the mirror of her pages, he sees, in fact, an asshole. What ugly fumbling encounter had inspired her to create this Frankenstein’s monster? Though our hero sifts through the sands of memory, he cannot find this woman hidden there.
How dare she putter with Harry’s heart in her search for the wellspring of love? And what’s all this malarkey about a lost mission? Let it stay lost, dammit – all the Spanish gold in the world is piffle as against the infinite worth of Buff-Breasted Blue Warblers. A lost mission? That’s Harry’s story.
Since the standard motif of the romance novel requires the heroine to rehabilitate a sub-human lout, maybe there is hope that Dr. Wilder might yet salvage the nobility he once possessed. How disappointed Fiona will be when she finally drags him into bed only to find him incapable of satisfying the burning desire she has fought so hard to deny during the previous nine chapters.
“That’s all right.” Fiona smiled sweetly, barely able to suppress her laughter. “Lots of men can’t.”
Poor old Harry. He has taken to spending much time lying restlessly in his hammock, staring at the photograph of this skinny bespectacled farm girl from Lake Lenore, Saskatchewan. That jaunty smile, those knowing eyes, those dangling adjectival clauses.
I wish I knew where this is heading, Rock. I’m afraid for my character; he’s going to choke, I know it. I already feel beaten by the competition, I’ll never be able to summon the fortitude to enter one last saloon, as usual smelling of must and stale spirits and urine.
Jacques the Red.
THE DARKSIDE OF THE MOON
– 1 –
The night was black but for a faint hope of dawn and a wedge of waxing moon shining palely on seven exhausted, grimy figures trudging down a path in the lowland forest. They had come upon this trail yesterday after their quick and dangerous descent, and had camped near it, catching a daytime nap while a thunderstorm raged. As the clouds fled and they struck their tents, Maggie had watched the sun set gloriously over the infinite Pacific – now, after eleven hours of this moonlit march, they must be near the coastal plain.
Buho had given up on his boots and was faltering along the muddy path on blistered feet. He was in added distress — he had blundered into a tick-infested bush and was now scratching himself ferociously. He was given no time to stop and pick the ticks away: Halcón was urging them to quicken their pace, concerned they might meet early risers. Zorro was in too much pain from his wrenched shoulder to carry the heavy pack of weapons, so Coyote had taken on that burden, relinquishing his own pack to Glo — she was heeding Maggie’s advice to seek comity with the rebels.
This was a trail well travelled, and Maggie sensed Halcón had passed this way before, reconnoitring the area with Coyote. Although continuing to share confidences with Maggie, he had remained coy about their destination. Halcón had planned superbly – and with speed: Glo’s Eco-Rico holiday had been sprung as a surprise on her only weeks ago.
He was a few feet ahead of Maggie, a dim outline in the moonlight, and when he stopped suddenly and turned around, she carried into him, stumbling. His hand went out to steady her, and they engaged in a clumsy dance to gain balance, a step forward, a step back. It took him a moment to realize his palm was against her breast; he withdrew it abruptly.
The collision, she realized, occurred because Coyote, who had been walking fifty metres ahead, had hurried back to urge them from the trail. “Viene un hombre,” a man is coming. They hid in the foliage while a flashlight approached: a barefoot campesino leading a wheezing Brahma bull with a rope tied to a nose ring. Maggie crouched close to Halcón, and despite her anxiety and her almost numbing fatigue, felt flushed, her breast prickling where his hand had cupped it.
Maggie feared that Glo might bolt or cry out, but she remained still and silent until the man and the bull passed out of sight. She and Maggie had not lost hope they might yet be able to escape. That chance might come soon because the trail had begun to connect a scattering of human outposts, farms bordering the Naranjo River, swollen from the December rains.
As the eastern horizon began to glimmer with light, the trail gradually metamorphosed into a road that might, in dry season, bear four-wheel vehicles. Indeed, there was evidence of fresh tire tracks, a stirring in the mud where wheels must have spun before the driver surrendered and reversed down the hill.
They came to another clearing, with a campesino home: sheets of tin, wooden slats. The road closed up again within a canyon of trees, but as they rounded a bend, Maggie could see a distant flickering of light, too high up to be a flashlight. When they passed a farmyard, she saw an incandescent bulb on a pole.
Halcón hurried them along even faster; the sky was turning pink. Above, Maggie saw a limp power line. Here was a utility pole, and here a barbed-wire fence leading to a six-foot-high gate of welded rebar. Behind it was a narrow two-storey concrete structure.
Halcón flipped through a ring of keys, then opened the padlock of the gate, directing everyone inside the grounds. Glo at first hesitated, looking warily at the squat concrete tower with its rickety outer staircase and barred windows. Maggie wondered if they would dare lock them in such a depressing prison.
Halcón spoke to Coyote, who put a handgun in his pocket and hauled his pack up the stairs, unlocking a wooden door to a small room with a window overlooking the road. Halcón explained: “This is a bodega. Tools are stored below and there are quarters above. He will be the watchman.”
Maggie could hear the roar of the Naranjo River more distinctly as they descended along winding parallel tracks. A hundred metres on, a night-flowering plant was pouring out a dizzying perfume; bats were fluttering about its long white trumpets. Here were bananas, citrus, papaya, a tropical orchard hemmed in by the vine-choked jungle. Farther on, Maggie saw the outline of a dark mass etched in the rays of twilight, a two-storey house in a grassy clearing.
“You have arrived at the dark side of the moon,” H
alcón said.
The front of the house was faced with rock cemented into concrete; the walls appeared not merely lumpy but lopsided — as if the builder had not known how to use a plumb line. The second floor looked like an afterthought; it probably held a couple of bedrooms. The roof was white-painted steel, bolted to fasteners in the rafters.
The windows at the front were heavily barred with half-inch steel curlicues and hearts. Behind the grills were sturdy wooden shutters. A plate above the heavy-timbered front door read, “Darkside of the Moon.”
Again Halcón fished through his keys; after opening the door he reached inside – and lights went on. Maggie was forced to blink, the glare of the electric bulbs seeming unnatural. A bat squeaked by and flew out between the shutters that Halcón was opening.
He gestured Maggie and Glo inside while Buho stripped and sat under an outdoor shower and tried to pick off the ticks. Zorro and Tayra went off to the orchard to gather some fruit.
The house quickly lost its sense of gloom as Halcón walked its inner perimeter, pulling open all the shutters. A beautiful pale morning light streamed through wide arched windows, through which they could see the dense forest and hear the rumble of the river.
“You will each have a room to yourselves.” Halcón indicated a rough cemented staircase that led to the upper bedrooms. “The only toilet is downstairs. To amend, I can offer a hot-water shower.”
After Halcón returned outside to confer with his squad, Maggie and Glo wandered through the house, speculating in low whispers about how Halcón had acquired this house. Aside from one bedroom at the far end, the entire main floor was open, only a low concrete divider separating the kitchen from the living space. The kitchen was well equipped: a propane stove, a softly buzzing fridge. A back door was secured not just by a lock, but by lengths of rebar welded to the metal doorframe.
The staircase, which was almost comically out of plumb, was built into the front wall. The other sides of the house featured several wide arched windows, all barred — more hearts and curlicues — but open to small visitors. A violet butterfly wobbled in through one window and out another.
“This is a hiding place?” Glo said.
“A little airy, isn’t it?”
The living room held several wooden chairs, three hammocks strung from rafters, and cushions scattered on the floor for extra seating. Numerous books and magazines were lying about. Other diversions included a stereo and a fourteen-inch television, with a coat hanger aerial. Interior walls were fouled with guano; the dusty, streaked tile floor demanded the attentions of a mop. Maggie, a compulsive house cleaner, knew she could not relax until that was done.
“Filthy, but … Glo, this could be lots worse.”
“If you don’t mind living in a Yellow Submarine.”
The walls were painted garishly with wide rectangular blocks of yellow, orange, blue. A Trekkie might have lived here: a poster on the wall showed The Enterprise zooming through a constellation. She and Glo speculated that the owner, presumably a Pink Floyd fan, was a drug-addled escapee from North America, his vacation home innocently rented out to desperados.
Upstairs, they checked out the two bedrooms separated by a narrow corridor, the interiors dusty and spotted with bird leavings, bat droppings, and dead insects. Glo chose the larger room facing the back, with the queen-size bed. Maggie preferred the room facing the front: a single bed but also a writing table and a view of the orchard and green-clad mountains. On the brick patio below, Zorro was opening up several collapsible wood-and-leather rocking chairs, and Tayra was halving oranges and sweet lemons at a concrete table.
Downstairs, their tour took them to the tiled bathroom — the floor and ceiling were far from parallel, and the sink counter took yet another direction. The shower stall was in a large uncurtained corner, and looked enormously tempting.
“Flip you for it,” Glo said.
Maggie turned on the tap; the water came brown initially, then clear. “First, let’s make this prison a home. God knows how long we’re going to be here.” She began filling a plastic pail.
“The unstoppable Maggie Schneider.” Glo took up a mop.
Halcón and the others returned as Maggie was beating down cobwebs. Though the guerrillas protested their weariness, they were ultimately shamed into participating in a thorough cleanup that lasted into the afternoon. Buho brought a ladder from Coyote’s bodega and dusted the beams and rafters; he and Zorro washed the walls. Halcón swabbed out the downstairs bedroom, which was to serve as his private quarters. Tayra scrubbed the kitchen.
Maggie saved her own room for last. Her arched, barred window reached almost to the ceiling from a two-foot-high sill, and with the shutters open afforded a cooling breeze. The door had a heavy deadbolt lock, which pleased as much as surprised her. Less gratifying was the paint job – a jolting orange and yellow.
Her labours done, she set off for the shower. Downstairs, Buho and Zorro were in a coma-like sleep on hammocks; Halcón was napping, too, on an air mattress beside the locked front door.
This was not a palace, but no dank, rat-infested cellar, either. Maggie’s ordeal could yet have a happy ending — as long as the rescue team were not headed by some cowboy charging around with six-guns blazing, bullets ricocheting everywhere. Surely their liberators would be calm and careful: they had well-developed routines for hostage-takings.
Still, she felt she might be in more danger from her rescuers than her kidnappers, though she had concerns about Zorro’s shaky state of equilibrium – especially because Halcón had returned his pistol. The other firearms had been wrapped in burlap and placed in a lock-closet under the stairway, along with valuables from the Eco-Rico looting. Zorro’s gun stayed buckled in its holster, but she often saw him fondling its grip. He was not one to live with loss of face, and had become skittish and moody after being shamed in front of his comrades.
As she stripped in the bathroom, she anxiously studied the electric shower head, a contraption jury-rigged with wires and electric tape — but the walls of the stall were wet, so others had recently tempted fate and not been electrocuted. When she turned the shower on, the lights dimmed.
On a shelf were soap, shampoo, and a clean washcloth, which Maggie put to hard use, finding heaven under the streaming hot water. The window was unshuttered, so Maggie could see Tayra outside, a doughty slave to duty, working through a hill of laundry at a concrete pila. At night, Tayra would be stationed between the two upstairs bedrooms; Maggie or Glo would find it impossible to slip out without awakening her. The door to the outside would be locked, anyway.
Maggie towelled her body dry and turned to the mirror to brush her hair. Revealed was a sinewy, tawny body that had lost little weight despite the rigours of the last week, though her breasts had firmed up and her thigh muscles were well-toned. She affected a supermodel pout and struck a pose for the catwalk. “You were muy linda,” he had said, “in the soft light playing on the waterfall.”
Wrapped in her towel, she went upstairs. She had earned a long siesta.
– 2 –
Maggie was awakened by the rolling sputtering song of a house wren and saw it dart above a timber bracing just outside the window, where it was welcomed with a chorus of peeps. A nest, babies! Now she knew the source of the little drippings that she had scrubbed from the orange wall. The wren took flight to a nearby lime tree, then burbled another song.
She felt refreshed – how long had she slept? For a few hours, she realized; the sun was behind the trees, soon to set, throwing rays like spears between the boughs. She had not locked her door and saw, hanging to dry beside it, her undergarments and her two sets of clothes, freshly washed and placed there by Tayra. The army fatigues were torn almost to shreds, and the knees and elbows were unravelling from her khakis also. They were still damp, but she slipped them on. She felt like Raggedy Ann.
In the kitchen, Glo was helping Tayra, demonstrating her new-found team spirit, putting the finishing touches to a fruit salad: pineapp
les, bananas, papaya, citrus.
Before dinner, the colectivo — four without Coyote – held a brief meeting at the far end of the room. After vigorous debate, a decision was reached and announced to the hostages: they would all eat in front of the television set.
“We have agreed, with one abstention,” Buho proclaimed, “that we will allow the guests of our commando to watch the six o’clock news.” Halcón shrugged, obviously the abstainer. He was prepared to let the comrades have their little victories.
Maggie settled on the sofa beside Glo and attacked her plate of fruit salad while Zorro fiddled with the dial. He could find only one channel that offered more than fuzz and swimming colours, but it was one of the major San José outlets: Canal Siete. The headline item involved a vandalism of a front-yard crèche: it had been kicked apart, a plaster Mary and baby Jesus stolen. (“This event has shocked the nation,” Buho translated. “They should be thrown in jail,” muttered Tayra.) For balance, a happier story: a poor family winning a lottery after having had to borrow money for Christmas gifts. Buho translated with appropriate feeling.
Maggie was beginning to wonder if the hostage-taking had become yesterday’s news when the Channel Seven crew cut to a taped interview with a man named Jorge Castillo, the minister of public security. Halcón began making notes.
“This is about us,” Buho explained. “Archbishop Mora has withdrawn an offer to intercede, and Minister Castillo is offering a list of five others.” Stills of these offerings were paraded.
“Priests and politicians,” said Halcón. “Not an honest man among them.” He was grouchy; he was out of cigarettes.
“He is pleading with us to make contact,” said Buho.
Maggie started as she saw herself: another still, one of the photos taken at the lodge, her mouth agape as she interviewed Walker; then Glo filled the screen, wearing her cocktail dress and a comical come-hither look.
The Laughing Falcon Page 20