I evaded details, and tried my best to comfort her.
But the girl was right. Jobe Applebee looked nothing like the person she said she’d known since childhood. Nothing at all like the terrified man I’d left alone to die.
6
Serpiente
Whenever Solaris asked Dasha where she lived-“Maybe I can visit you one day!”-she would shrink him with a withering look and reply: “I live on the islands. That’s all you need to know, because it’s all you can understand.”
Dr. Desmond Stokes and his staff lived on two islands in the southern Bahamas, part of the Ragged Island and Cays chain near Cuba. A couple hundred acres each, shores separated by a passage so narrow that tidal current roared between the islands like rapids down a river.
The main island had buildings, staff housing, a small, modem manufacturing facility that converted blocks of coral, cut from reefs, into holistic calcium tablets. The island was manicured, planted with citrus, avocado, and bananas.
On the second island, there was an airstrip, storage facilities, a few huts, a small lab equipped for extracting and preserving reptile poisons, a crane for stacking blocks of coral. Mostly, the second island was jungle. Wild things lived there. Wild things were kept for research. People on neighboring islands who practiced Obeah, a complicated religion similar to voodoo, wore special charms to protect them from the evil they believed existed there.
The first time Dasha saw Dr. Stokes’s islands was on the laptop screen of his personal assistant, Mr. Luther T. Earl. A tall, dried-up, Lincoln-looking man who wore bow ties and smelled of lavender, big white teeth when he smiled, skin the color of a black pearl. That’s what he claimed, anyway.
“Earl the Pearl,” he told her. “You can call me that, if you like.”
This was long before she found out Earl the Pearl was also Dr. Stokes’s organizational brains, and his front man.
Mr. Earl told Dasha they were actively recruiting someone “with unusual qualities” to take charge of security at his boss’s retreat in the Bahamas. There might be some personal work involved, too.
The woman had a pretty good idea what that meant, or they wouldn’t be recruiting staff at an executive security trade show at the Bellagio Hotel, Vegas. A couple thousand Soldier of Fortune types-fakes, guns freaks, and skinheads-paying money to attend lectures on how to survive the coming revolution, the ghetto monsters, and watching firepower demonstrations, rocking to the latest weaponry, out there in the desert, when they weren’t getting shit-faced on cheap booze.
Mr. Earl had rented a three-bedroom suite. Interviewed forty-seven candidates, he told Dasha later, but only three made it far enough to see pictures of the rich man’s tropical estate. The manufacturing plant was smaller than she’d expected, neon lighting inside, where employees wore masks and plastic gloves. They turned raw coral and seashells into vitamin pills that cured all kinds of diseases.
“We have thirteen employees, ferried in and out every day,” Mr. Earl said, “Dr. Stokes has a personal staff of three, counting me. If I find a top security person, we can hire more people. Your call.”
Dasha barely heard, she was so focused on what she was seeing. They were digital photos set to music; scenes from two green islands rimmed with sand beneath vodka-clear water that darkened incrementally as the bottom dropped away, jade green, forest green, turquoise, then purple, showing that the islands were actually mountain peaks, anchored solid and alone in a blue tropic ocean.
Golden beach and rain forest. Heat. Jesus. No wonder Dasha had to wait so long for an interview. She sat there in a hotel suite with a dozen tough-guy strangers, some wearing their black berets and camo, others dressed the way they imagined secret agent types would dress-black sport coats, black shades-all applying for the same job, but none wanting it more than Dasha.
Jungle waterfalls. A jungle river, steam rising…
Dasha had grown up outside Chernovo near the Volga River, which flowed south toward the Chechen border when the stinking ditch wasn’t frozen. She was one of five children born to a single mother who couldn’t afford to buy coal in a slum so cold that, between October and May, Dasha learned to identify neighbors by their eyes and whatever bit of nose their scarves left unprotected. Months went by, she saw only bits and pieces of her own body. Never naked all at once.
Sitting in the Vegas hotel room, seeing photos of the island-palm trees, coral mesas beneath blue water, sun-bright sand-she thought to herself, I’d kill to get his job.
Turned out, that was part of the deal.
Dasha, the ideal choice.
Of the couple thousand Soldier of Fortune types strutting around Vegas, she saw two, maybe three, people who had the look. Who’d been places, done some jobs. If you served in the military on the Chechen border, you learned to know the real ones at a glance. Operators. The others did their Hollywood hero impersonations. “When I shoot a man, he stays shot,” she heard some guy say one night, sitting, drinking martinis with Aleski at the pool bar.
They’d looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Aleski said loud enough for the whole room to hear, “Raspizdyay kolhoznii! Pizdoon!”
Stupid redneck! Fucking liar!
They both laughed and laughed.
They’d worked as interrogation specialists, Russian military. Dasha had also been recruited and trained by national intelligency, the FSB, or Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti. Made some money on the side feeding information to Chechen separatists before Dasha got sick of the gray winters, the gray architecture, the gray pasty faces of Russian men, and said fuck it. She was out of there.
Aleski was her operative partner. Played good cop to her badass cop, which wasn’t an act. He’d never put a move on her, never asked for anything, but was always there. Sexually, he had some kinks-the man liked being watched. Otherwise, Aleski was like a stray dog that followed the first person who walked by and didn’t try to kick him.
After Mr. Earl showed her the photos, he told Dasha about the unique security problems of owning isolated islands that, legally, were part of the Bahamas, but also had to interact with government con men from Cuba, only thirty miles away. The dried-up man asked how she’d handle certain situations.
“Create redundant cells to protect water, fuel, and mobility,” she told him. “Those are the necessities. All security problems can be reduced to those three things.”
“What about food supply? Water’s important, but people got to eat, too.”
Dasha replied, “Food is fuel. Water, fuel, and mobility-see how I compartmentalize them? If I make sure they’re secure, your islands will be secure.”
The man said, “Cool. Very cool.” His smile read: Impressive.
Mr. Earl the Pearl had a big brain behind that great big smile. The questions, she noticed, became more carefully couched.
“If your employer asked you to break the law, would you?”
A standard setup. Only an amateur would fall for it.
“No.”
“What if you were in a place where there was no law?”
“Is there such a place?”
“This is hypothetical.”
Dasha thought, Clever. Said, “In such a place, I would consider my employer the maker of laws.”
“You would carry out any order?”
“Reasonable orders. The man’s paying my salary.”
“Even murder? You wouldn’t kill a person if you were told to do it.”
Dasha had looked into Mr. Earl’s mean, judgmental eyes and nodded imperceptibly. Barely moved her head, in case this was a different sort of setup and she was being videoed. Waited for several seconds, sure the man knew her meaning, before saying, “Murder’s never legal.”
She got the job.
When unimportant people-people such as the young Cuban-asked where she lived, Dasha always said the same thing: “On the islands.”
A private place inside her was smiling. Where it’s warm.
In the first months, before Dasha asked to see hi
s body, Solaris thought of her as the Snow Witch, and Dr. Stokes as Mr. Sweet. Everything about her was pale and distant-icy. Solaris, who’d only seen snow in photographs, liked the word. It fit.
Witch: A woman who could make magic.
Dr. Stokes had translucent skin like rice paper, or refined sugar. He wore white gloves, and a paper device over his mouth and nose because the man was afraid of germs-or so said the Snow Witch.
Months later, when he knew her better, the two of them naked in the tobacco barn, Solaris said what he felt the first time he’d heard about it. “The man’s afraid of germs, but he buys the kind of nasty shit he does? Sewage? Water with invisible bugs? He’s crazy. He looks like what the Santeria people call ‘the Walking Dead’”
The Cuban was imagining the man in zombie-white makeup, with pointed teeth and ears, like a bat. Not so different from the way he actually looked.
Dasha replied, “He’s afraid of anything unhealthy. An uneducated boy like you has never seen diseases under a microscope. He has. If he knew I’d touched your yieldak, had your sweat on my skin and didn’t wash? He’d never let me in the car.”
The Chinaman had already told Solaris why the man ordered such strange things. Research.
Maybe true; maybe the Chinaman was making it up.
He’d also told him the doctor had invented vitamin pills and become rich. Made good investments, owned many businesses even though he was socialista at heart. Loved the old Cuba during the days of the Bearded One, which had something to do with him buying sugarcane acreage in the Everglades, west of Miami, a city Solaris dreamed of visiting.
“Probably because of the trouble he had in Florida, he hates the U.S. government,” the Chinaman said. “That’s why I pretend to give him a discount.”
Why did the Yankees bother growing cane? Cuba had once produced enough to sweeten the world, yet the arrogant imperialists had nearly strangled the island to death.
The Chinaman didn’t say that. One of the old villagers had told him. Gave him a speech. Solaris wasn’t interested.
So it was “Senorita Bruja Naver,” and “Dr. Dulce,” until the woman asked to see his body in the dim light of a tobacco barn that smelled of sour pepper, like a whiskey keg. Now she was “Senorita Serpiente.”
On her next visit, Dasha allowed him to touch her breasts. Part of the reward system. The third trip, she behaved as if he were invisible until she stepped into the building and bolted the door. Then, step-by-step, she instructed him on how he could please her.
Her body was different than the prostitute he’d been with. Different than women described by older men in the village-all they talked about was sex and baseball. Solaris felt very strange when he did what she asked him to do, yet it was impossible to refuse her.
As their helicopter lifted over the mountains, he’d gargled with rum, hacked, and spit into the sand. But he still loved the thought of her body, the way her pale skin burned beneath his hands.
During a recent visit, she’d held up a rubber balloon shaped like a plantain.
“If he learns how to control himself,” she told him, “waits until I’m ready, I’ll let him use this one day. But don’t expect it every time.”
Solaris had tried to hold back. God he’d tried. He’d thought about baseball, then about old women stirring beans, even imagined dogs farting. Nothing could dull the voltage of her fingers on his skin.
She was livid. Went looking for a towel and didn’t come back.
His last performance, a month ago, was worse. When he bragged to his friends in the village about what the blond Russian did to him in the tobacco barn, they’d spit and whistled in scorn. Called him a crazy liar. To prove himself, he’d borrowed a camera from an old man who’d once been the village Party captain. Solaris had wedged the camera into the barn rafters, lens pointed downward, a long piece of fishing line tied to the shutter release.
Just being in the barn, the way it smelled, imagining being with her, made it difficult to breathe.
Their small helicopter landed five days later.
When Solaris was naked, and she had her bra off, he tried to position her in a way so that her face and body would be visible to the camera, all the while feeling blindly for the fishing line that his stupid fingers could not locate.
“What are you doing?”
“Doing?”
“Yes, doing?”
“Trying to find a more comfortable position against this wall.”
“No, I meant him. What’s wrong with him?”
“Wrong?”
“Are you blind? Idiot!”
Solaris looked. “Oh.” The pressure of making a photograph had affected him in a way that imagining old women stirring beans, and farting dogs, could not. “I think… he’s learning control.”
The woman slapped his flaccid member, then slapped it again. “If this is what he calls control, I have no use for him. Or you.”
There was something vicious in her voice, a deeper pitch as if there were an angry man hidden inside.
Solaris had called after her, “Maybe he wants to listen to your lips, not your hands-”
Too late. She was dressing, already on her way.
The last time Solaris looked into Snake Woman’s face was in the final minutes of his life, hearing the man-voice inside her, seeing the revulsion that she felt for him-for men-as his eyesight and his hearing faded, recognizing both and wondering why those frightening qualities hadn’t alerted him before.
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, dry season, when coffee bushes were blooming white as snow on hillsides above the village baseball diamond, near the vegetable fields where he’d once plowed behind oxen.
The streets of Vinales were decorated with ribbons and candles that were lit each night. They hadn’t celebrated the holiday while the Bearded One lived, so the decorations seemed more colorful because they were unfamiliar.
This trip, three of them arrived in the helicopter. Dasha, dressed in black blouse and slacks; Mr. Sweet; plus the lardish-looking Russian man who sometimes accompanied them, black hair growing on the backs of his hands, and out of his ears like a wolf.
Mr. Sweet slid into the back of the waiting Volvo, never said a word, as usual, adjusting the paper mask on his face, not touching the door handles even though he wore gloves, his eyes sweeping the area but nothing registering.
He’d speak with the Chinaman, no one else.
The big Russian gave Solaris the familiar stare-contemptuous, aggressive. Solaris returned it: If you had the chance, cabron, you wouldn’t risk it.
Didn’t matter. When Dasha wagged her finger at Solaris, inviting him to follow her into the barn, he was so grateful that his voice broke when he said to her, “After the last time, I thought you were so disappointed in me that you would never-”
“Shut your mouth, fool. If your body wasn’t attached to a brain, we’d get along much better.”
Even with her bad Spanish, the woman could joke with him. That’s the way Solaris took it: This is how close we’ve become.
There was something different in her manner. She was rushed, a critical woman more critical than usual. And the hairy Russian shadowed her movements, but from a distance, his attention swiveling from Dasha to the Chinaman who was now sitting in the backseat of the limo with Mr. Sweet.
There was an energy in the air, volatile.
More than once, he heard the name Applebee mentioned-the disgusting little man who’d cried like a baby because he had to ride in the helicopter.
“I would spit on such a man!” Solaris had once bragged to Dasha. “Why bring such a person to Cuba? What use could he be?”
He was testing. Wanted to see how she reacted. He could picture the blond woman and Applebee off by themselves, whispering. The Chinaman had told him Applebee was there to confirm there were tiny creatures in the South African crates the doctor was buying, and also to test the local water supply.
The woman didn’t discuss business with Solaris, so she s
urprised him, replying, “He’s going to make me rich; that’s his use. He’s finding a cure for a parasite. A sort of worm.”
“What kind of worm?”
“The kind of worm people will pay anything to get rid of.”
That peculiar little guy with a microscope. It was impossible for Solaris to compete. “A man who cries isn’t a man. He’s worthless!”
“Worthless?” The woman’s tone was cutting-yes, her way of joking, he decided. “You’d be an expert on that”
Later, as he died, Solaris realized he’d misread more than just her sense of humor.
Never saw it coming.
7
By 11:30, I’d finished giving my edited statement to detectives. During the interview I told them that, because I’d left my cell phone with Applebee, I’d checked the log. The last two numbers dialed were unfamiliar. They’d been made while I was chasing the bad guys.
“It was either Applebee or whoever killed him.”
The cops were not pleased that I’d retrieved the phone. They said I’d maybe screwed up any chance of fingerprints. They copied the numbers, letting me see they were pissed off.
So maybe that’s the reason they told me I couldn’t leave: a mild punishment.
At twenty minutes before midnight, and with nothing else to do, I took aside an investigator from the Bartram County Medical Examiner’s Office to ask if she’d come to any conclusions about Jobe’s death. I’d assumed murder, but realized there was another possibility.
The investigator, whose ironic name was Rona Graves, replied, “Are you a relative? A close friend?”
“No. His sister’s a friend. I’d never met him.”
“Are you wondering suicide or murder? It’s really impossible to say right now. Too soon. Too much to sort out.”
We were standing outside, Applebee’s porch light casting tree shadows on sand, stars beyond the tree canopy, the two of us separated from a handful of curious neighbors by yellow crime scene tape. Ms. Graves, in jeans and a blue blouse with rolled-up sleeves, was an interesting-looking woman, with her Appalachian face, Latina cocoa skin, wild black surfer-boy hair cropped short. She had all the professional mannerisms, didn’t have to think about it: the voice, the wording, body language that served as a barrier. She’d been in the business for a while. But she could also wrinkle her nose to show you how hard she was thinking, or brush an elbow. Ways of letting you know there was a human in there.
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