“Ho—tel?” Jack waved a fistful of cruzeiros that would have been pesos had the cambio not run out.
Down the line of taxis, the bills caught a driver’s attention. “America!” More Mexican than Peruvian, all wavy hair and swarthy skin and Cesar Romero moustache. “Hey. Over here, America. I espeak the English.”
They picked up their bags and walked to him through the fading pewter day.
As they neared, the man frowned. “No dollars? Cruzeiros? After tomorrow, sin valor, no?”
Jaje opened her mouth, preparing for argument. Dolores butted her with the overnight bag.
Jack blinked, the picture of confusion. “Excuse me? After tomorrow—what?”
The driver tossed their suitcases into the trunk of his elderly piebald Chevrolet. “We stop on the way, no? You exchange. No cruzeiros, you understand? No Brazil money. Then I take you my wife cousin house. He go stay at my brother—in—law. Get in, you get in, pretty lady, please.” He gestured to the sullen Jaje. “You esmile, no? So pretty when you esmile. And lady?” He gave Dolores’s split lip a double take. A swift glance at Jack. Without another word, he got in the car.
The interior stank of mildew and stale cigarette smoke. The upholstery leaked a dingy fluff. Jaje sat next to Dolores, jiggling her leg. “If we’re going to stop someplace, I need some mousse.”
From the front seat, Jack turned around to look at her in astonishment. It was going to be an interesting next few days.
“Caught in war, America?” The taxi took off at breakneck speed through the fog, dodging suitcase—burdened wraiths.
“Not America.” Jack held onto the bench seat so hard that his knuckles whitened. “Canada.”
“Canada! You tell my wife cousin. He not charge you so much. Americans are pigs, no? And Brazilians are without shame.”
Dolores could see it coming. She pinched Jaje’s arm to head it off. The girl scooted out of arm’s reach and gave Dolores a look before turning her face to the window.
Not quite a São Paulo taxi ride. When he was free of the airport traffic, and into the clay—colored houses and clay—colored streets, the driver slowed down.
Black vultures perched in knobby trees, overlords of Lima’s dun Hell. It was a land without flowers, without a blade of grass. A maze of decaying churches and narrow alleys, where drab—clothed Indians shuffled.
“Go find Peru refrigerator, estereo, Inca Cola,” the driver was saying brightly.
Jack looked exhausted, his eyes half—staff. He turned toward the streaked window and the row of darkened storefronts beyond, and yawned.
“Now it is only GE or Climax. Coca—Cola or Guaraná. Once we make Peruvian, but no more.”
“Uh—huh,” Jack said, his tone absentminded.
The sun, a tarnished dime in a nickel sky, was headed down. Day would slip from dim to dark. Dolores yawned, too, and wondered if she would be able to sleep once the lights were out, and silence returned.
The taxi driver shrugged. “Myself, I say, let Brazil and America fight. May they kill each other dead.”
* * *
The shuddering of the house brought Roger awake. It was night. He’d been asleep, and now he felt almost sober. His head was stuffy, his eyelids swollen. He was lying on the bare mattress, belly down. His shackled hand was numb.
Another tremor. The iron springs jangled. Earthquake? Not a bad one, not a killer. Still, it went on too long.
He raised his head. McNatt and Jerry were dark shapes at a dark window where orange lightning flashed.
Jerry’s soft, mumbled, “There ...”
McNatt shifted. His hands were to his face. “See it.” Oh. That was it. He had binoculars. A pair of binoculars.
The lightning flashed again.
Jerry’s baritone, “Hey. Over there, Mac. No. Look east. See?”
McNatt’s quiet, “ ... if Freitas can even help it.” He took the binoculars from his eyes.
Jerry said clearly and with amusement, “So fucking weird. Swear to God, Mac.”
Roger rested his cheek on a pillow that smelled of dust and feathers. A flash of yellow brightened the room, was followed by noise and rolling shudders and McNatt and Jerry’s Fourth of July murmurs of awe. Roger drifted in and out of a beery doze where everything was fantasy: the hush, the man—shaped shadows at the window, the strobing dark.
“You ever get instructions on this guy?” Jerry asked.
“Yes.”
Death threaded McNatt’s voice. It tied up all of Roger’s loose ends. Funny, how he couldn’t feel frightened.
“After Cabeceiras. Then they say he’ll be of no further use.”
Jerry said, “Too bad.”
The pair stood wordlessly for a while. Just two good friends at a window.
McNatt, the shorter shadow, gave the binoculars to Jerry, the tall silhouette. He turned to the table, toward the room. “I’m telling you, Jerry, those UFO lights can’t hurt anything. They come directly out of Freitas. They’re an autonomic reflex.”
“Uh—huh. Except Machado says other universes.”
“He doesn’t know.”
Silhouettes shoulder to shoulder now. “Standing next to the guy every formal occasion I’ve ever seen, and he doesn’t know. So tell me, if he’s not channeling some alien, how’d this Freitas get the technology?”
McNatt’s voice, still as the shadows. “It’s inside us—all of us. Everyone knows what Freitas knows. In fact, from working at meditation diligently, I myself have begun receiving glimpses. Didn’t you notice that the Cessna we shot down could not have fired on our pilot? Its acquisition system was disconnected. Have you asked yourself why?”
A snort. “If you possess all knowledge, Mac, why the hell do I still beat you at cards?” The click of footsteps. Jerry returned to the window. “Man!” His cry was startling. “Oh, man! You gotta see this!”
McNatt stood upright. A calm, “That is really amazing.”
“Goddamn, Mac. Goddamn. Flying saucers, some kinda weird soul shit—it doesn’t matter. I’ve never seen anything so pretty.”
Roger sat up. The bed creaked. He sensed, rather than saw, McNatt turn.
A soft, “Awake, Dr. Lintenberg? Would you like to watch your UFOs?”
“Oh, yes,” Roger said. “Please.”
McNatt came over, gently undid the cuff, and together they walked to the window.
Bombs fell north: on the Military Sector, through the campus of the Meteorological Institute. The spine of the city became embers. Above and through the smoke, gaily colored lights whirled like exotic jungle birds, like children’s kites—Freitas’s burning angels.
Beautiful, the death of Brasília. And somehow, not frightening at all.
* * *
An unexpected sound awakened Dolores to the sight of an unexpected room. An arm was wrapped about her. She and the person behind were lying, body spooned to body, like she and Harry had lain during the mild first years of marriage.
The sound was a car horn; the arm was Jack’s. There would be a lot she would have to get used to.
Whispers. She sat up, chilled by wintry panic. Jack rolled over, snoring and oblivious. A shadow stood in the doorway.
“Aunt Dee?” Jaje. And such a small voice.
Blue flickering light from the neighboring room. Jaje always slept with the TV on.
“Aunt Dee?” Her fragile, newly learned sophistication had vanished. Jaje was sobbing. “I’m scared.”
“Coming, hon.” Dolores got out of bed, put Mrs. Nelson Albright’s Republican—pink robe on over Mrs. Nelson Albright’s floor—length gown.
Jack grunted a sleepy, “What?”
“It’s okay, baby,” Dolores whispered. Jaje put her arms around her. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’ll come sit with you awhile. You have a bad dream?”
In the doorway
Dolores halted. The nightmare was sitting in the living room: CNN playing to an empty couch a silent war movie.
* * *
The world ended with flashes of lightning, roars of thunder. The driver door of the Mercedes was open, and Muller was outside, screaming, “But where is the president?”
Edson sat up in his seat, scrubbed his face.
They were parked on Avenida das Naçðes. Through the windows Edson could see soldiers. A knot of Nando’s soldiers. And over the thunder a captain was shouting, “I think at Alvorada. Perhaps at Granja do Torto.”
“She can’t be!” Muller had left his suit coat in the car. So unlike him. His tie was undone and hanging to either side of his neck, a limp, striped snake. “I just drove by there. Alvorada is rubble and the Granja is burning! Where is she?”
So Freitas is dead, Edson thought. The news orphaned him.
“I don’t know!” The captain was beside himself. His voice was wild, his gestures disjointed. “In the Axis, all communication lines are being jammed. We can’t find General Fernando. You must wake Director Carvalho so he can explain to the Americans that we are not shooting at them.”
“He is drunk!”
A bad taste in Edson’s mouth. He ran his tongue over his teeth, grasped the door handle, and got out of the car. Muller spun toward him as if he were seeing a ghost.
The time had come to put fear and whiskey away. Nando was missing; Ana dead. There was no one else to turn to.
The captain cried, “Senhor Director. Thank God! Please. We must do something. The Americans keep bombing. I think they believe the lights are attacking them, sir.”
The lights. Edson held out his hand. “Give me those binoculars.”
The captain took them from his neck and gave them to Edson. A few blocks away, fire sirens whooped.
South Embassy Row was perilously near the bombing, but the Americans had planned for that. The bombers were coming in so low that Edson could see their dark bellies reflecting the fire on the ground. What did they call that type of sortie? A milk run? Around the planes, brightly hued sparklers.
Freitas was still alive.
The captain screamed in Edson’s ear. “Can’t you tell them? Please tell the Americans we mean no harm!”
“No use.” Edson shook his head. “They already know.”
Bastards. An easy excuse the U.N. had. Probably captured by CNN and beamed live to a satellite hookup—UFOs were visual proof of Brazil’s resistance.
A bomb struck too close. The captain ducked. His soldiers took cover by their APC. The wind shifted, sending oily smoke boiling down the street. Orange cinders flew upward like a swarm of Freitas’s lights. Where they landed, they stung. The normally mild—tempered, mild—tongued Muller surprised Edson by brushing at his arm and shouting “Pôrra! Pôrra!” In the distance a row of palm trees flamed like torches.
It was time. Edson could do it. He told Muller, “Let’s go.”
Seeing them hurry to the car, the captain wailed, “But what are your orders?”
Edson cupped his hand to his mouth, shouted back, “Stay out of the bombs’ way.” He climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door.
Muller stared blankly at the shower of sparks. A nearby banana tree was suddenly pocked by blowing embers. “Where to now, sir?”
“Cabeceiras.”
A flick of a look. A question.
There was no one else. “I am going to destroy the Door.”
* * *
Dolores wrapped the blanket more firmly around them both. Entwined together on the couch, she briskly rubbed Jaje’s ankles. “Cold legs. Oooh. Icy feet,” she said.
A smile that had a short half—life. “Warm heart.”
Beyond the unfamiliar living room, in a stranger’s kitchen, Jack puttered. On the TV screen Brasília erupted in shades of night—vision green.
A rhinestone sparkle of bursting bombs. Then an explosion so huge that the cameraman twitched, and sent the view momentarily skyward. “No,” Jaje breathed. “Was that Itamaraty?”
The CNN newscaster was saying so, her voice high pitched and helium—squeaky with excitement.
“They’re way down at the Mirage Hotel. They can’t tell, sweetie.”
The picture dissolved. Sound became static.
Susan? the anchor called. Susan? You still there?
A last burst of static, then a picture of the dancing lights and the fires and a That was close, Bernie. The TV tower went.
Pan to show the direct hit.
Bernie? I wish you could see the colors of these lights, there in Atlanta. I know ... the viewers at home. How do I describe this? They are magnificent. All colors of the rainbow. Bright blue. A deep purple. Orange. Just every conceivable color. And very, very fast. I imagine they’re a distraction to the pilots of those bombers. I would think, ah, they’d have a hard time trying to avoid a midair collision. Very odd antiaircraft artillery, if it is actually ‘triple A.’ Long pause, so long Dolores could hear the ceaseless rumble in the background. But in a strange way, very pretty.
Jack came in balancing two bowl—sized coffees with milk, and set them on the end table. “You guys look comfortable.”
“Where’s yours?” Dolores asked.
“Um.” A vague, sleepy gesture. His face was all lumpy hills and valleys, a topographical map of some rich brown land. “Later.” And he shuffled back to the kitchen.
Jack. A man who knew poverty and crime, literature and art, and—more importantly—kitchens. Dolores smiled at his retreating back. The pajamas from the red suitcase were too small, the sleeves ending two inches above his wrist, the pants high as waders.
“You think Mom’s okay?”
Dolores rocked her. Warm in the room, yet Jaje was shivering. “Your Mom’s a survivor, honey.”
Susan? Can you bring us up—to—date?
An overloud Yes! as she strained to be heard above the explosions. It is now, ah, an hour and a half past the commencement of Allied bombing which began at one A.M. our time. We understand that most of the sorties are American, with some British and some French. Quite a bit of destruction in the Monumental Axis ...
Susan? We should explain here that Brasília was built in the form of an airplane ...
Yes! The Military Sector is toward the tail of the plane, if you will, and the main government buildings comprise the nose. And Bernie, at this moment, urn, two—forty—three A.M., those parts of the city seem to be in ruins.
“I want to call her,” Jaje said.
Dolores stroked her hair. “You can’t, baby. Maybe tomorrow when things settle down.”
“But I didn’t tell her I love her.”
Kindness was what lies were made for. “She knows.”
* * *
Cabeceiras sat in a white firestorm of floodlights, two armored companies surrounding it. Not militia, but career soldiers trained in riot control.
A guard stopped the Mercedes at the gate. “Senhor Director. All entry is forbidden by presidential orders.”
Edson took a chance. “The president is dead.”
The sergeant, a blue—black Bahian, flinched as if he had been slapped.
“Is General Fernando here?”
Shouted questions from troops near an APC. The sergeant called, “Dead! She is dead!”
“Damn you, soldier! I asked you a question! Is General Fernando here?”
The sergeant turned, still wearing his grief. “No, sir.”
Then Edson had to. There was no one else. “I have taken charge of the presidency. Open up that damned gate.”
Shock. A palm—out gesture to wait. The sergeant hiked his rifle higher on his shoulder and ran off through the floodlit evening, calling for a colonel.
Muller turned to look at him, probably wondering if he was still drunk.
Out
of the lights’ glare the colonel came, a gruff Paulista. “Director Carvalho. What is this bagunça? You give orders? No. This is an Army situation.”
Edson got out of the car, trying not to stumble. “Why is this area lit when bombs are falling on Brasília?”
A puh of impatience. “By General Fernando’s order. The Americans see at night as well as they can during the day. We don’t fear bombs at this locale, Senhor Director. We fear the Special Forces. Get back in your car. Go home.”
“Have you heard from General Fernando?”
A quick shift of the colonel’s eyes. “No.”
“I will not tell you that I have spoken to him.” Edson put his hands to his chest, a show of candor. “I will not lie to you. But answer me this: when he said to keep visitors away from Cabeceiras, did he specifically mention me?”
The colonel seemed unaccountably interested in the tread of the APC. “No.”
“Then why won’t you let me in?”
The colonel hiked his hands on his web belt. “Bombers over Brasília. Cruise missiles at the factories in my beloved São Paulo. And in all Brazil, we are the only troops allowed weapons.”
Edson looked around at the tanks. “As I can see.”
“And this is by presidential order, with General Fernando’s agreement. You seem absent in this equation. Let me be blunt. I have heard stories about you, and they seem to be true, since you come here stinking of whiskey. Drinking to forget? To celebrate? I don’t care. The Army never broke faith with the people. Must I remind you that it was not a general who made us a dictatorship again? Now you tell us that Presidente Ana is dead, and this may even be true. But I will not obey your orders, or of anyone in O.S. If the office is to pass to someone, it must pass to the Army.”
An instant of pique, then Edson laughed. “My dear colonel. How can I argue with the truth? I am a complete pile of shit, and not worthy to be president. I totally agree.”
The colonel searched his face. “In writing?”
“Yes, yes, yes. I will agree in writing.”
Quick orders, a scrawled note. Edson signed with a flourish, and the colonel waved the car on.
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