While Paz is becoming a god, Moie appears in the bedroom of Felipe Ibanez, slipping unseen past the guards Ibanez has hired. Moie has prepared for Jaguar to come, but Jaguar does not. In this case it proves unnecessary. Ibanez wakes from his usual nightmare, sees the small Indian, understands what he represents, and recalls what has been done to his colleagues. Wetting himself in terror, the businessman promises to dissolve the Consuela Company, to stop all cutting of trees in the Puxto reserve. He speaks in Spanish, and Moie understands. Moie starts to leave, but the man wants to keep talking. Moie has noticed this about the dead people, that they want to fill the air with words even when everything necessary has been said. Ibanez says that because Consuela will not cut the Puxto, it doesn’t mean that others won’t. There are many other timber operations. It’s Hurtado who is making the whole thing move, Hurtado with the contacts in the Colombian government, Hurtado who bribes the guerrillas and the paramilitaries who fight the guerrillas, Hurtado who wants the Puxto cleared so he can plant coca in the virgin territory and also for another reason that he now tells to Moie. “You have to kill Hurtado,” Ibanez shouts as the Indian departs. Then he presses the alarm button. In the ensuing melee one of the hired guards shoots another one, not seriously. No one sees the Indian, and the guards privately agree that the old fart was dreaming. Ibanez is already on the phone to his subsidiary in Cali.
While Paz is becoming a god, Hurtado stays in a mediocre residence hotel in North Miami. When he heard the news that Ibanez had pulled out of the Puxto operation, he summoned El Silencio to his room. “See, you didn’t believe me, but this is the proof. He’s behind this whole thing, Ibanez, thatchingada, one of the others must have got to him.”
“Are you sure? He was okay on the first shipment. It got to Miami with no problem.”
“To put me off my guard! He was very smart, smarter than I thought. Some of these old Cubans…this is a good lesson, Ramon, never underestimate the intelligence of your enemies, especially when they’re your friends.”
El Silencio studied his employer as the man paced back and forth in front of the blaring television. It was unlikely that anyone knew they were staying in this particular shithole, but Hurtado had the TV on whenever he said anything out loud. The boss did not look good. It had been a long time since Hurtado had been on the run, thought El Silencio, and even longer since he was afraid of anything. The arrests and losing those three men had got to him. He kept asking where was Martínez, as if he had the kind of instant information system here that he had back home. Who knew where thecabrón had run off to? Clearly he disappeared after the two men were killed and the girl escaped, and that was enough to get Hurtado upset all by itself. People did not run out on Hurtado. It had made the man twitchy.
“Do we know where Ibanez’s granddaughter is?”
“Yeah, somebody called and said she’s staying at that place with the fish pool, where the other girl was staying.”
“Go there. Get her. Cut off her tit and send it to Ibanez. And kill anyone else in that fucking house, all of them.”
El Silencio didn’t move. Hurtado glared at him. “Well?”
“Boss, you know, maybe this isn’t such a great idea. At home, sure, no problem. But there’s something going on here I don’t like. I don’t like it when I don’t understand what I’m up against…”
“It’s Indians. Ibanez and whoever he’s with-Equitos or the Pastorans, or somebody from Medellín-brought down a crew of Indians. You’ll see, we grab up his girl and he’ll give us the fucking Indians. We should’ve done it first thing, but how could you figure…?”
“I don’t know, boss, I think there’s something else…”
“Ramon, you’re thinking again,” said Hurtado sharply. “Stop thinking and go do what I said!”
El Silencio left the room without another word. After almost twenty years of working for Hurtado, he was about as independent as a toaster oven, but he could not entirely suppress the feeling that the organization was out of its depth for the first time. At home, for example, there would be no problem with the police. They owned the police, and the army, and the special incorruptible drug police who worked with the Americans, and should anyone appear on the scene who could not be bought, he could be killed. This was apparently not the case here in America. Also, Hurtado was persisting in his belief that a rival Colombian gang was behind this business, using Ibanez as a tool and Indians as soldiers. El Silencio thought this was unlikely, and he knew more about Indians than Hurtado did, being a quarter Indian himself. He’d heard stories from his grandmother about what some of those up-country Indians could do, and while he was not a particularly superstitious man, the carnage in the garage had given him pause. El Silencio had presided at a number of mutilations and he knew for a fact that the two gunmen had not been slashed by a human being. Nor was Prudencio Martínez a superstitious man. He was (had been) the most efficient crew boss the Hurtados had owned, and ifhe had pulled the plug, then what they faced wasnot just a bunch of Indians.
El Silencio walked down the dim hallway, which stank of chlorine from the pool and frying from the coffee shop, and went into a room. Here were his available troops, six men, all of whom looked up from the card game, the TV, the magazine, when he came in. He didn’t know them well, for he was not a crew boss himself and uneasy with command. He almost always worked alone, besides which he would have to leave one person behind to watch over Hurtado. This was even more disturbing.
They were all staring at him. Someone muted the television, which drew El Silencio’s attention: someone who could act independently, a little more alert than the others? Or he just didn’t care for what was on? The guy was named…something Ochoa, a veteran of the paramilitaries that the biglatifundistas used for protection against the Marxists, a solid shaven-headed man with a scar under his eye. El Silencio gestured to him.Delegate, that was one of Hurtado’s favorite words.Delegate andhold accountable. El Silencio had never had a problem with the latter of these, and now he was going to learn about the former. He took Ochoa to his own room for an interview.
While Paz is becoming a god, Geli Vargos is hiding out in Rupert Zenger’s house. The woman had arrived late one night with only the clothes on her back, having fled her grandfather’s house in the disturbances following the arrest of Hurtado’s men. Cooksey was kind, gave her a drink, questioned her gently.
“Was Hurtado himself arrested?”
“No, he was never there except once. My grandfather was terrified of him. But he mainly stayed at some hotel. There was this other guy carrying whatever orders he had…even the thugs were scared of him, but the cops got him, too. Then I heard they got sprung, and that’s when I left. I feel like such a coward! What do you think they’ll do to my grandfather?”
“Nothing, I imagine,” said Cooksey. “He’s covering for them, and they need him intact for the Puxto operation to go forward. I expect that they are not the primary threat to Mr. Ibanez. If he doesn’t stop cutting down that rain forest, I’m afraid…I mean what happened to his partners could well happen to him.”
When Geli understood what he meant she burst into hysterical sobs. Cooksey held her and stroked her back absently. In irregular warfare, he had been taught, there was a time to stir things up and a time to lie low and wait. This was the waiting time.
Paz returned home on the evening of the Sunday, eight days after he’d left. His mother drove him home.
“You’ll be all right,” she said when they pulled up to the curb. “You have my prayers and the prayers of everyone in theilé. Keep on the path of the saints.” They embraced, clumsily, as one does in the front seat of a car, and also because embracing had not been much practiced between them. Paz watched his mother drive off. He was carrying his bow and arrows and his model jailhouse, and for a moment he felt like a kid being dropped off to play at a friend’s house, holding toys, and the thought made him laugh out loud.
There was laughter coming from his house as well, from the patio in the back, and Paz went around the side of the house to join in the fun. Lola was apparently entertaining. Paz stepped into the patio and everyone stared at him as at a ghost. Amelia was the first one to respond. With a shrill “Dadeeeee!” she propelled herself at him and swarmed up him like a monkey. Paz had to put his emblems down on a chair so that he could hug her, which he did until she objected. He put her down and surveyed the party: Lola, Bob Zwick, Beth Morgensen, and an older balding man with a pleasantly ugly face whom Paz recognized as Kemmelman, Lola’s boss at the hospital.
Conversation sprang up again; everyone wanted to know all about what had happened. Paz ignored this, leaned over Lola, and kissed her.
“How easily I’m replaced,” he whispered. “And a Jewish doctor, too.”
“I won’t dignify that with a response,” she whispered back, but the dynamics of the group had changed. Kemmelman seemed to become uncomfortable, and shortly he stood and said he had to get home. When he’d gone, Zwick said, “So, give. Paz. Are you all holy now?”
“I am, as a matter of fact.”
“Yeah? Do something holy. What are these objects?” He picked up the bow and twanged it. “Or are they too sacred for me to touch?”
“No, they’re just symbols of my status, like your white coat.”
“Oh, so theyare sacred.”
The adults laughed, easing some of the tension, but Paz remained wary. There was something wrong with their faces, or maybe he was just seeing with new eyes. It was as if he could penetrate the social masks they displayed to the real person hiding beneath. It was not a pleasant experience: Zwick’s intellectual arrogance sheltering the frightened, driven nerd, Beth’s fear of loneliness generating a spasmodic seductivity…he found it hard to look at his wife. Married people, however intimate, require a reserve of privacy; he felt that he could violate that now, and the ability repelled him. Only Amelia seemed true all the way to the core.
There were questions about the ritual he’d just been through, and he found himself dodging these with studied humor, although he admitted to having been possessed by hisorisha, which Zwick explained away as arising from the effect of entraining rhythms, drugged food, and varying light levels upon the medial temporal lobe of the brain. Apparently it was well established in the literature.
Paz found this explanation more exhausting than the ritual itself. “What happened to Jenny?” he asked when Zwick at last ran down.
“She’s cooking our dinner,” said Amelia. “She’s a good cook, Daddy. We’re having shrimp. I helped peel.”
And here was the girl herself, carrying a steaming wok full of stir-fried shrimp and vegetables. Paz watched her place it on the table, amid applause. She looked up and he met her gaze. A chill flashed up his neck, blossomed out in sweat on his forehead. There was a mask there, too, but behind it was not just Jenny Simpson.
They ate and engaged in the usual chat, in which Paz joined when it would have been rude not to. They seemed like children to him; he was like sitting down at a kids’ birthday party, pleasant, unchallenging, slightly tedious. When they were done, he went out into the garden and picked a few ripe mangoes from his tree. He cut them up efficiently at the table and fed his guests the dulcet yellow flesh, together with the coconut ice cream that Jenny fetched from the freezer.
After this dessert was done, Paz said, “Who’s up for an expedition?”
“Where to?” Lola asked.
“I think we should go by Jenny’s old homestead. We could bring Professor Cooksey a little basket of mangoes.”
“They have plenty of mangoes on the property,” said Jenny.
“Well, we’ll bring a bottle ofaguardiente, too. We’ll sit around and drinkaguardiente and eat mangoes and talk. They have a big open-air pool with tropical fish in it. We could go skinny-dipping after we get high onaguardiente.”
“I’m up for that,” said Zwick, and Beth Morgensen produced a naughty laugh.
“Shouldn’t we call?” Lola asked.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Paz. “Dr. Cooksey keeps an open house. He’s a welcoming kind of guy. Isn’t that right, Jenny?”
Who shrugged and said, “I guess.”
“We’ll want bathing suits, those of us who require them,” said Paz.
They all piled into the Volvo and drove to the house on Ingraham. Paz took his bow and arrows along with the fruit and theaguardiente; no one asked why. As predicted, Professor Cooksey was home and perfectly gracious, as if he were used to groups of mainly strangers dropping by in the evening. Cooksey arranged them all around the big table in the terrace, and they drank a round from Paz’s bottle, chased with beers. Cooksey expatiated in a lively manner about the history and architecture of the house and its gardens, and about the construction and ecological design of the fishpond. Those who had not seen this marvel asked to see it, so Cooksey led the party into the garden. He switched on the underwater lights, and they all gawked.
Taking advantage of this distraction, Cooksey approached Jenny and said in a confidential tone, “I’m very pleased to see you again, my dear. Are you back for good?”
“Sure. I was just helping out over there.”
“Are you quite all right? You look different.”
“Yeah, well, I’m still a little bent out of shape from what happened.”
“Of course. You haven’t seen Moie since the, ah…”
“No,” she said. “Have you?”
“Not as such. But he’s certainly about.”
At that moment Scotty and Geli Vargos came down one of the paths. The woman stopped short when she saw the new people. She seemed about to retreat the way she had come when Jenny spotted her.
“Oh, there’s Geli!” she cried and ran to greet her friend with hugs and Jennyesque babble, at which Geli collapsed into sobs. Jenny led her away to a nearby bench, where the two engaged in what seemed like intense conversation. Zwick, Lola, Beth, and Amelia had missed this byplay and were now splashing in the shallows of the pool.
“I sort of figured you had her stashed here,” said a voice at Cooksey’s side.
“And why did you think that, Mr. Paz? Althoughstashed is not the word I would have used. Geli seems to be having family difficulties.”
“Oh, yeah, you could say that. Difficulties you arranged.”
“Again, arranged would not have been my word. I think that what’s happening here is something rather outside any concept of arrangement. Or perhaps, having been a copper, you see everything in terms of plots and conspiracies.”
“Tell me you don’t have anything to do with the guy who’s been blowing up pumping stations.”
“Oh, that. I suppose I had some purely theoretical discussions about how to make, shape, fuse, and detonate certain charges. Kevin and his friend were interested, and being a professional teacher, it’s hard for me to keep from sharing information at my command, especially as the same material can easily be found on the Internet. I suppose I was concerned that they not blow up merely themselves. I explained to them that it would be quite futile to restore the Glades by explosives alone, but, you know, impetuous youth. The terrorist’s name is Kearney, by the way. He worked at the zoo, which is where they got the jaguar droppings for the silly game they played at the houses of the Consuela people. He shouldn’t be hard to find.”
“You didn’t try to discourage them or call the cops?”
“No, I didn’t, although I just gave him to you. I would feel responsible were he to kill himself or anyone else. I suppose, being a scientist and a beneficiary of western civ, I should be quite against tearing it to pieces. But these children do so much less damage than western civ does to itself that it seems absurd to go bonkers about their pathetic efforts. When it does collapse, that will not be the way.”
Paz ignored this and said, “And obviously, you knew that Moie was doing these murders, and you helped him.”
Cooksey smiled at this. “Well, he hardly needed help. Moie and his spotted friend are quite capable of doing anything they please. As for going to the police…they’d think I was barking mad if I told them the truth. They’d thinkyou were as well, as I imagine you know.”
“Yeah, you got that right,” Paz admitted. “I’m curious about one thing, though. I already figured out that you got the names of the Consuela people from Ms. Vargos there, and that you got them somehow to this priest in the jungle. How did you know that Moie would come?”
Cooksey chuckled and rolled his eyes skyward. It was getting hard for Paz to see his face in the growing dusk, but he saw that. Cooksey said, “Honestly, my dear man, you give me far too much credit. Our Jenny will have told you about the death of my wife, how she exhausted herself trying to rescue some tiny portion of the living information being turned into money during that time, and so met her doom. What Jenny didn’t say, because I didn’t tell her, is this. First, the destruction of that particular patch of forest was a Consuela operation, and so all the calamities that followed in my life may be laid at the door of that firm. Second, after she died I went quite insane. I took acanoa and traveled upriver until I got to San Pedro Casivare, the last place on the map. I drank pisco. I had enough money to drink myself to death, which was my plan. There was one other fellow there who seemed to have the same thing in mind.”
“The priest,” said Paz.
“Just so. Father Timothy. Well, not to draw this out, we exchanged sad stories, and after that we drank a little less each day, and fished more. He decided to return to being a priest, to the extent that he resolved to seek holy martyrdom among a tribe of people we’d heard of, who routinely killed anyone who strayed within their borders. He convinced me that I owed it to my daughter to go home and take care of her. So I did; I took care of her by killing her. She was the image of my wife.”
Cooksey fell silent here. Paz waited, observing that Cooksey was staring at the group by the pool, and especially, it seemed, at the frolicking Amelia. The adults had removed varying levels of clothing. Zwick and Scotty were in their shorts. Jenny was entirely nude, as was Beth. Lola and Amelia were in suits, Geli in bra and panties. Someone had brought theaguardiente bottle out and a bottle of Mount Gay rum to keep it company; little remained in either. The first faint feelings of uneasiness prickled in Paz’s belly. There was something a little too exuberant about the scene. Geli Vargos, for example, had been depressed a moment ago; now she was near naked and whooping.
Cooksey began to speak again, distracting him from these thoughts. “The priest went to the Runiya, and I came here. When I found out who Geli was, I encouraged her to discover what Consuela was doing, and I passed the information on to the priest, who used it to achieve his martyrdom, a little late, but better late than never. I imagined that naturalists or environmentalists or whoever would pick up on that information and make a fuss. I assure you I did not expect Moie.”
“Why didn’t you make a fuss at this end? You had this whole environmental organization here.”
“Yes, well, that would have compromised Geli, wouldn’t it? She has, let’s say, mixed loyalties. She wanted to avoid what eventually happened, Colombian bad boys arriving in force. Also, as soon as we began to make the sort of stink respectable environmentalists can make, Consuela would have vanished in a tangled trail of dummy companies. And the cut would have continued. What I hoped for was that Father Tim would appear on the scene full of wrath, with photos and so forth. But in the event he somehow sent Moie. But you understand, of course, that something much larger is happening here.”
“What do you mean, larger?”
“Well, to begin with, why did you suddenly decide to arrive tonight with this group of people? A rather peculiar thing for you to do, yes?”
“I was advised to in the course of a…religious ritual,” said Paz, and felt stupid at how this sounded.
“Yes, I’d imagined something like that. You know, personally I have virtually no sympathy in that area: nothing to do with belief or disbelief, a matter of temperament, I suppose. Perhaps in reaction to my mother: she was always looking vaguely off and predicting events.”
“Did they happen?”
“More or less. Mum was a competent plain witch, and had been trained by several famous shamans. In any case, whatever talent she had didn’t pass on to me, although I can usually spot it when I see it in another. You have it-I noticed it when we met earlier-and of course our Jenny is in a class of her own.”
Here he gazed to where Jenny was poised on a flat rock at the lip of the waterfall, about to dive into the pool. The pool lamps illuminated her from below, setting red sparks in her hair, and giving to her face and body the appearance of a sculpted figure from a forgotten and terrible cult.
“Ah, magnificent!” Cooksey exclaimed softly when she had vanished in a splash of dark water. “But not entirely human. Do you know, when she arrived, everyone here thought she was mentally deficient, but that’s not the case at all. She’s perfectly competent at the ordinary tasks of life, and in at least one area, wasp taxonomy, she’s nearly brilliant, despite being a practical illiterate. She has what we call a feeling for the organism, very rare indeed. I think her story is that her upbringing was so perfectly dreadful that at an early age she simply drew a magic circle around some inner core of her being and sheltered there, while responding minimally to what was happening to her body. A perfectly empty vessel, perfectly open to…whatever. God. Gods. The pulse of nature. Moie thinks she’s quite something, and he should know. But back to tonight. Here you are, summoned in some way, and here we are, and why do you suppose that is?”
“I’m not really sure,” said Paz, “but it has something to do with my daughter. He wants her.”
“Yes, he does. I’ve tried to think why. Come with me, I believe the drinks table needs refreshing.” At that he moved off toward the house, and Paz followed. The night remained warm but not sultry, perfect in fact, and the breeze had dropped to nothing. Every blade and leaf of foliage was still as stone, and the larger trees and shrubs seemed to Paz to have a presence, as if they had personalities. It was very like being at abembé, the slight thickening of the air, the way living objects seemed to be haloed with tiny spirals of neon light. Paz’s head felt oddly heavy, as if the stones of hisorisha were really, rather than figuratively, sitting in his head, and behind him, intimately close, as if someone treaded on his heels, or was wearing his body like a suit of clothes, he felt the loom of his saint.
He didn’t follow Cooksey into the house but waited on the patio. For some reason he was reluctant to leave the outdoors, to suffer artificial structure around him. He spent the time (of uncertain duration-there was something wrong with the flow of time as well, he discovered) contemplating a banana tree, its goodness, the modest green beauty of its long leaves, the dense dark redness of its fruits. Then Cooksey emerged bearing a tin tray upon which sat an ice bucket, several bottles of various spirits, and a six-pack of St. Pauli Girl beer.
“And have you come up with any conclusions?” Paz asked as he snagged one of the beers.
“Oh, mere theorizing. I suppose all this comes under the heading of some things man was not meant to know, as in those old horror films, but it seems to me that this is in the nature of a reverse butterfly effect. You’re familiar with the term?”
“It’s from chaos theory. The butterfly in China makes the tornado in Iowa.”
“Just so,” said Cooksey, setting the tray down on the poolside table. The swimming party had now wrapped themselves in towels taken from the plywood box and were arranged on lounge chairs and smooth rocks. Only Amelia and Jenny were still playing in the water. There was something very Greek about the gathering now, thought Paz, and it wasn’t just the towels. He mentioned this to Cooksey.
“Yes, I was getting to that. It’s Pan come again. Real Eros has been drained from the world these many centuries and now it’s back in this little garden for the night. But to continue: a reverse butterfly effect would be when something gigantic and complex throws out something tiny and simple, which yet has a significance at some other level of being. I’ll tell you a little story.” He poured a healthy measure of scotch into a plastic cup and drank from it. “When I was quite a small boy, my mother took me to visit a relative of hers in a village by the sea, in Norfolk. It was late in the war, and when we arrived, we found that an errant German flying bomb had landed nearby and exploded. No one was hurt and there was almost no damage, but a small piece of metal from the blast had flown into this man’s garden and struck down an ancient Bourbon rosebush. The old gent was carrying on as if all of the Second World War had been a vast conspiracy to destroy this particular rosebush. Quite dotty really, but it stuck in my mind, the idea that immense enterprises produce these strange little catastrophes, and further, that from some unknowable vantage point these tiny events are significant indicators. On the one hand fifty millions of dead people, on the other a killed rosebush.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Paz. He was trying to concentrate on Amelia and Lola, to fix their location in his mind, so he could move to protect them when whatever was about to happen took place. For somethingwas about to happen: the queerness he had been feeling for the last few minutes (and was it really just minutes-surely it had been strange for a longer time) had turned to dread, and he felt something like madness plucking at the edges of his mind. He started to move toward his family. Cooksey drifted in his wake, still talking.
“Yes, it doesn’t makesense, not from our viewpoint, but perhaps there are others. There may be imperatives of which we know nothing, any more than the fig wasp does when she sacrifices her individual life for the preservation of her species. Studying the social insects gives one a somewhat different perspective about the survival of the individual, you know. In any case, when my family died, or was killed, I devoted a good deal of thought to the subject, descending at least partway into lunacy, as you might understand, being a family man yourself, but one thought did emerge that I rather fancied, which was thatsomething is trying to send us a message.”
“Something,” said Paz. He was now within a few yards of where Amelia and his wife lay, swathed in towels. Lola was rubbing her daughter’s hair. Zwick and Beth lay on one of the chaises, Scotty and Geli on the other. Jenny was standing, wrapped in a yellow towel, drying her hair with a green one. She was looking into the dark, dense foliage beyond the reach of the pool lights, as if waiting for something. Everything seemed to be moving too slowly, as it does in a dream. Behind him, Cooksey’s voice continued.
“Yes, the planet, for example, or its guardians, or the noetic sphere, however you want to describe it. You see at a certain point we decided that everything was dead, including us, and that it was perfectly all right to turn the entire substance of nature into some imaginary abstraction-power, or some idea of the nation, or race, or just at present it happens to be money. So let’s say thissomething has awakened after a long nap, not really long for something that’s been alive for four billion years, but long in our terms, and it noticed a little itch, a little raw spot, and it scratches idly, and that was the twentieth century, a hundred million dead from war and famine, but unfortunately we kept on, learning nothing, and now it’s a little more interested, because now we’re fiddling with the basic balancing mechanisms of the whole shebang. And now it turns out that great Pan wasn’t dead after all. Now he wakes up, not amongus, of course, because we’re dead, but among Moie’s people, and because of what happened to me I’m impelled, let’s say, to provide the impetus to bring him here.”
“And what does it all mean?” Paz asked, not because he thought Cooksey really knew, but to keep him talking as if his talking was a preface to whatever was going to happen and it had to wait until he was finished. Paz thought he needed a little more time. He also needed his bow and arrows. This was a new thought, and he felt his body turning away, being pulled back toward the Volvo. He lifted the rear hatch with some difficulty; for his hands seemed to have forgotten how to work the latch, and the whole vehicle seemed unhealthy in some way, hideous, something that should not exist. He walked back to the pool, holding the bow and the quiver of arrows. The last time Paz had actually shot a bow, the arrows had been tipped with suction cups. He had no idea what he was supposed to do with the things, only that it was necessary for him to have them in hand.
No one seemed to have moved; Cooksey seemed not to have finished, seemed to have been talking to the night. “…in any case, we could be seeing a new order of things, a nexus of some kind. We see this in evolution occasionally, a time or a place where speciation seems to move at an accelerated pace-we have no idea why. Now we may have a situation where a certain kind of unconscious evil is directly punished, a partial solution to the question of why bad things happen to good people and not the reverse. Someone gives an order and at the other end of a long chain of actors we have murder, destruction, rapine, the world ground to paste to change the registers in certain bank accounts. What would it be like if the hand that gave the order was then bitten off? Wouldthat change things, or are we so ungodly stupid that not eventhat would work. Or what if, as now, a child sacrifice were required? Wouldthat get our fucking attention?”
Cooksey’s voice had risen for this last phrase, but no one seemed to notice. Everyone was looking at Jaguar.