In the lobby of the office building, Kevin looked at the list of tenants spread under glass before the guard’s station and was conscious of the guard looking at him. He found a hopeful line on the board and said to his companion, “You have those guys’ names, right?” Blank look. Oh, yeah, Spanish.
“¿Quienes los hombres de Consuela?”More blank. He cursed, and the guard looked at him a little more sharply. “No, ah-¿Como se llaman los hombres malos, los jefes de laConsuela Holdings?”
The brown face registered comprehension and the Indian took from his bag a piece of knotted fiber. As he untied each knot he said a name: Fuentes, Calderón, Garza, Ibanez. Kevin looked at the board. “Okay, there’s an Antonio Fuentes here. Let’s go make some trouble, Tonto.”
They rode up in the elevator to the twenty-third floor. The Indian was very still. Kevin was dancing on the balls of his feet and making a tuneless breathy whistle. When the car stopped, they got out and walked down the hall, looking at doors until they found one that readCONSUELA HOLDINGS,LLC in raised gilded letters. Inside, Kevin looked around and was disappointed in the amenities. His familiarity with world-bestriding firms was limited to what he’d observed in the movies. This place looked cheesier than his father’s office at the bank: a small carpeted area faced by a reception counter. A pretty Cuban secretary with long lavender nails was on the phone when they entered. She looked up and said something into the phone and pressed a button.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” said Kevin, “we want to see Fuentes.” And then the usual business about appointments, and then some shouting and nasty language from Kevin and the threat to call security, and then Kevin grabbed the Indian and went through a door while the receptionist frantically punched numbers into her phone. There was a little hall and at the end of the corridor another door and behind that a large corner office with a view of Biscayne Bay through windows on two sides and a large mahogany desk, behind which sat a small, dark man with dense silver hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. Kevin got in this man’s face and said what he had come to say, about how they knew what they were doing down in the rain forest, how they were illegally logging the Puxto Reserve, and they were going to let everyone know and make them stop it, and that this man (here he gestured toward the silent Indian) was the proof, he knew all about the illegal logging and they would go to the UN if they had to, they’d boycott, they’d demonstrate…
After three minutes of this, which included a lesson on why people and the fate of the planet were more important than corporate profits, Kevin ran down. The man had not said a word; he just looked at the two of them expressionlessly, his dark eyes showing nothing but a faint ennui, as if he were waiting for a train. Then three big men in blue-gray uniforms came into the office and said they had to leave. Kevin said he wouldn’t leave without a written guarantee that all illegal operations on the Puxto would cease as of this moment, at which point one of the guards grabbed his right elbow and wrist and did something that caused Kevin so much pain that he sank to his knees and had to concentrate to keep from wetting himself. None of the guards touched the Indian, who meekly allowed himself to be led away, while just in front of him, Kevin howled and threatened a host of violent retributions, all of which were beyond his power to accomplish.
He drove back to Coconut Grove in a good deal of pain. His wrist ached, and one of the guards had given him a couple of shots to the kidney in the elevator. Still, he felt good in a way he hadn’t in a long while. The fascists had shown their true colors at last, he had been met with the violence and brutality he had expected, justifying his own fantasies of violence. He observed his wrist on the steering wheel and was gratified to see it red and swelling slightly; he only regretted that no blood had been shed, as he thought there was nothing like a bashed face to elicit the sympathy he considered the key to real political action. As he drove, his clever mind reassembled the events of the recent past into a pattern more favorable to him. He summoned up fear in the face of Fuentes where there had been only contemptuous boredom. In his mind’s ear he heard the man trying to justify his crimes in a whining voice. These Kevin had destroyed in a series of brilliant retorts, which he now composed and polished. The guards had tried to subdue him, but he had used martial arts to send them sprawling; oh, yeah, and the Indian, they had tried to mess with the Indian andhe had avoided their fascistic grasp by means of strange jungle moves, and they had strolled out of there heads high, like a couple of action heroes. He glanced over at the small man sitting silent next to him. That was a problem, if he brought him back to the property they would talk to him, Luna knew Spanish and so did the Professor, which might screw things up. But why bring him back? Who knew what an Indian would do?
Kevin turned off Bayshore onto McFarlane, and almost as soon as he did so, he saw that the display and the rest of the FPA stuff was gone from in front of the library. Clearly the girls had called Scotty, and he’d come by with the truck. He parked anyway and got out of the van. To the Indian he said, “Vámanos, tenemos buscar las mujeres.” He went around and opened the passenger door.
“Come on, man,vamos, you go around that side.Busca allí. ” He gestured so the stupid Indian would know to go around the east side of the library. When he was gone, Kevin went inside the building and looked around for about thirty seconds. Then he got back in the van. Shit, I don’t know where he is, he explained to the people in his head, I went back to the library and you guys were gone and we looked and looked and then he was nowhere, man. He just disappeared. Kevin started the truck and drove off.
They all came running out to meet him when he pulled into the property, although his reception was considerably dampened when they discovered he had lost the Indian. Nor were they much impressed by his story. Luna was especially furious, and she had a mouth on her, too, to which she did not ordinarily give full vent when Rupert was around, but now let fly. He was an irresponsible moron, a lazy, lying, hopeless, sub-asshole piece of shit, who had just wasted practically the best piece of luck they had ever had, an actual witness from the rain forest, someone they could have written articles about, someone who could have appeared with them ontelevision, for God’s sake, a man travels three thousand miles, most of it in a canoe, to save his forest and his people, avoiding untold dangers and who should he run into but the fuckup of the Western world! Thus it went on for what seemed like a long time, with Rupert trying to get a word in edgewise, and Kevin screaming back mindless obscenities, and Scotty looking contemptuous and self-satisfied, and the Professor looking stunned, and the tears running slowly down Jenny’s face until he couldn’t stand it anymore and threw a flowerpot against the wall. In the stunned silence following this act he stomped back to their cottage cursing. Then the sound of the slammed door.
“He has to go, Rupert,” said Luna in the echo of that sound. “I mean it. He’s a lazy son of a bitch, he does nothing but lay around and smoke dope, he’s a disaster politically, and this last stunt is completely unforgivable. Jesus! We could have learned so much from him, we could have given him shelter…” She raised her eyes to heaven and clenched her fists in frustration, not a pretty sight. To Rupert she said, “So? Can weplease get rid of him?”
“What about Jen?” This from Scotty, earning a sharp look from Luna, who said quickly, “Oh, Jenny’s fine. No one has anything against Jenny.”
Jenny snuffled and said sulkily, “I’m not staying here without Kevin.”
“Whatever was meant to happen will happen, Luna,” said Rupert in his calm, maddening way. “And if the few of us can’t live here together peacefully, what hope is there for the world at large? Isn’t that right, Nigel?”
After a brief pause, Professor Cooksey said, “Quite,” excused himself, and went back to his workroom.
“Well,” said Rupert, “let’s all take some time to calm down, shall we? Jenny, could you…ah…deal with that plant?” And they all disappeared to their various lairs, leaving Jenny alone on the patio, staring at the shattered pot and the smear of earth on the bloodred tiles.
Night. Moie lies in his hammock high up in a great fig tree in Peacock Park in Coconut Grove. He watches the moon come up from the sea. He sees that Jaguar has nearly returned from his mother, and by this sign he calculates how long it has been since he left Home. He recalls the wordlonely, feels the feeling it represents, wonders if he will return there, and also wonders a little about the Firehair Woman, and if he will see her again. He has her smell in his nose and can easily find her, he thinks, even in this place of unbearable stench. If it is necessary.
But now he tests the air for another scent, one he acquired earlier in this strange day, that of the man Fuentes. He had not understood what the Monkey Boy had said to Fuentes, but the meaning was perfectly clear, as was the response of Fuentes. He feels Jaguar’s anger building in him and feels a faint sadness for the man, as he sometimes did when they gave a little girl to the god. Some things are necessary, however. It is not for him to judge. He chews some more of the paste he has prepared; after a few minutes he feels the god start to take hold of his body. Moie has never discussed this event with anyone. He has never known anyone who carried Jaguar except for his old teacher, who has been dead for years, and even when he was alive it was not something they discussed, any more than they concerned themselves with the circulation of their blood.
Moie feels numbness begin in his hands, his feet; the waves of numbness flow toward his center and meet in a certain spot in his belly. Sounds and smells fade; his vision grows dim, contracts, goes to black. Now he is out of his body and can see again, if dimly. He sees his body there on the tree limb, perfectly inert, its arms and legs hanging down. He regards it with only mild interest, no different from the interest he takes in the bark of the tree, its leaves, the little insects of the night crawling among them, the motion of the moon through the clouds. He is free in nature, indifferent to and perfectly accepting of its benevolence, its horrors. In this state of profound detachment he observes Jaguar unmake nature. First there is a man in a tree, and then there is some kind ofevent (not really, because event implies duration, and this occurs outside of normal time), and then the same place is occupied by a golden cat spotted with black rosettes, a creature with about four times the mass of the man. Inside this being is Moie, held like a memory in the consciousness of the god. He will recall what is about to happen as we recall dreams.
With the waxing moon high in the clear heavens, Jaguar descends from the fig tree. Like a slice of solid moonlight he flows out of the park and goes south, slipping through the sleeping yards, over walls and fences, to a chorus of frantic dog-barks. He encounters finger canals, and either works around them to the west or swims across. He is a good swimmer. There are few people out in these neighborhoods this late at night; they sleep secure behind their alarms and guard services. Jaguar stops at a canal bank and sniffs the air.
Antonio Fuentes is restless in his bed, in his fine house on the canal at Leucedendra. He can’t get theIndio out of his mind. The screaming American was nothing, but theIndio wasnot nothing, should not have been there at all, and the American should not have known about the Puxto cut, and should not have known that Consuela Holdings was behind the Colombian timber operation doing the cutting. There were several dummy corporations designed specifically to cloud that connection, so how could an ignorantIndio and a tree-huggingpendejo have worked it out? Answer: they could not, and therefore someone was trying to fuck them over, someone with connections down there in Colombia. That was the problem when you dealt with Colombians: there was no law at all, not even corrupt law; you never knew if you had paid off everyone who could screw up your deal, which is why they had a man like Hurtado involved.
He slips out of bed and into a robe and walks to the French windows of his bedroom. His wife stirs but does not wake. They both take sleeping pills, and he hopes he will not need another one tonight. It would make him groggy all morning, which he cannot really afford. He has called a meeting of the other principals of Consuela to discuss the threat represented by the incident in his office. He hopes they can resolve it without bringing the Colombian into it directly. Fuentes has squeezed the law many times during his career, but this is the first time he has ever done business with an actualnarcolista. Although officially, on paper, there is no connection. He doesn’t like it, but the profits are potentially enormous, and it is not like they are actually in the drug business themselves. Probably not actually, but the important thing is, he doesn’t have to know anything about it. And to make sure the insulation is still intact, or if not, to repair it. He thinks that the screaming boy should not be hard to find, if it should come to that.
Fuentes opens the French window and steps out onto the little balcony. The air is fresh and scented by night-blooming jasmine and the marine tang of the bay. He is on the second floor here and he can look out at the expanse of water. It is a clear night with a fat moon riding high above a single line of cloud. He can just make out the lights of Key Biscayne and Cape Florida to the east. Sometimes, he has found, a little pacing back and forth on this balcony will tire him enough so that he will sleep.
He takes a few steps and stops short. There is something wrong. What is it? Something he has forgotten to do? He glances back to the bedroom wall: the emerald gleam of the security light is on, the house is sealed. He hears a scratching sound overhead and starts violently, then allows himself a secret, self-deprecating laugh. Raccoons. He will have to have the man out with the traps again. But this whole incident has made him uncharacteristically jumpy. I’m nervous as a cat, he thinks to himself, and begins to pace.
He paces the ten feet, turns, and ten back, and his head while he paces is full of figures. He is the numbers guy in the group. Calderón had the Colombian contacts, Garza generated the seed money, and Ibanez has the machinery to turn the timber into cash, for there are still plenty of people whose hunger for prime mahogany precludes asking any questions about where it came from. It would be good if they had a survey of the area, how many trees they could expect per hectare and so on, to get a clearer picture. Using averages was fine, but they had heard rumors about the incredible density of growth in the Puxto, was it possible it was as high as four trees per? He does some mental calculation on that basis: the mesa was twelve hundred square miles, convert to hectares at 259 per square mile, and say itwas four trees per, that would be a million trees, figure average radius of a meter and a half, thirty tall, that would be, say, two hundred cubic meters of usable wood from each and…and in the midst of these ruminations he hears again that noise above him, a scraping on the tiles.
He raises his eyes to the roof, sees nothing, and resumes his pacing and his thought: two hundred million cubic meters of prime old-growth mahogany, Jesus! Although they’d have to play a little with the market because they wouldn’t want the price to drop much below the going fifteen hundred dollars per cube…but another sound interrupts his figures, like a cat’s purr but much louder.
Ararah. Ararararh.
Fuentes looks up again. No, not a raccoon.
Jimmy Paz walked into the kitchen of Guantanamera, his restaurant (actually his mother’s restaurant), and cast a practiced eye across the room. It was Wednesday, so the specials were seafood salad andajiaco criollo, a beef stew whose recipe had been in his mother’s family for generations, and which was famous among local aficionados of down-home Cuban cooking. Cesar, the chef, was accordingly prepping all the marine life-forms that would go into the salad-lobster, stone crab, shrimp, squid-and Rafael, the prep cook, was cutting and peeling the fruits and roots-malanga amarilla, yuca, green plantain, boniato, malanga blanca, calabaza, and ñame yam-that would go into the stew. Also at the prep table, to Paz’s surprise, was Amelia, who was carving flowers out of pickled mushrooms and radishes and also slicing lemons in half and giving them a scalloped edge, all for the seafood salad garniture. She was standing on a stool, and the apron she was wearing came down to cover her pink sneakers, as she was only three foot four.
“How come you’re not in school?” asked Paz.
“It’s a teacher’s work day. I told you, Daddy. And we’re supposed to go to Matheson after lunch. You forgot.”
“I did forget,” said Paz. “Do you think I’m the worst daddy in the world?”
The child considered this seriously for a moment. “Not in thewhole world. But you shouldn’t forget stuff. Abuela says you would forget your head if it wasn’t tied to your neck.” This last phrase was quoted in Cuban Spanish, with the Guantanamero accent Paz knew so well. The child was perfectly bilingual.
“I remember where you’re ticklish, and if you didn’t have that knife in your hands I would tickle youso much,” said Paz, and was rewarded with a giggle. “I’m busy, Daddy,” she then said, now imitating the mother, Doctor Mom, an extremely busy person at all times. Paz watched his daughter cut vegetables for a moment. She was slow but accurate, and respected the blade without fearing it. Her grandmother had let her peel carrots at four, and now, nearly three years later, she had many small paring tasks well in hand. The blade she was using was sharp as a scalpel, but Paz didn’t worry about it at all, because if she cut herself it would be a clean one, and getting sliced was part of the education of a chef. This was, however, an appraisal he had never put into so many words to the child’s mother. He put on his own apron and started cutting up meat for theajiaco: short ribs, flank steak, andtasajo, salt-dried beef.
Four hours later, Paz stood in seeming chaos as the lunch rush crested; seeming only, for the three men and the woman who made up the kitchen crew at the restaurant Guantanamera were like trained athletes or soldiers working on the edge of catastrophe amid flashing blades, boiling cauldrons, burners shooting out gouts of flame, pans spitting fat. The waiters shouted, the cooks shouted back, the dishwasher rumbled, and Jimmy Paz worked the grill station within a self-created egg of calm. The dozen or so pieces of expensive protein in front of him-marinated steaks, pork chops, snapper fillets, lobster tails, giant prawns-all cooking at different rates toward different degrees of doneness, on a grill whose temperature varied every couple of inches and that was gradually getting hotter overall as the hours went by-were all present as little clocks and calculations in his head, all perfectly unconscious but crowding any unwanted thoughts from his grateful mind. It was what Paz did instead of religion or meditation. Thus, now, thoughtlessly as a fish swims, Paz produced a meal for a party of four-a lobster, a steak, some pork chops, a handful of tiger prawns, all cooked to perfection and all ready at exactly the same instant. He loaded each entrée onto a warm plate and shoved them down to Yolanda, the line cook, to be garnished, sauced, veggied, and shipped out the service port. And another and another, until, and this was about two-thirty, there was a subtle slackening in the pace, and then the noise faded, there were only two or three things on the grill, and it was over. Paz went to the sink, splashed some water on his face, and drank an icy Hatuey beer down in two long swallows.
“Daddy?”
Paz looked up to see his daughter dressed for the dining room in a floor-length black skirt, a lavishly pleated white blouse (with a name tag that readAMELIA), shiny Mary Janes, and a red hibiscus stuck in her mass of pale brown curls: the world’s smallest hostess. This was herabuela ’s idea and confection, and so cute that people waiting for tables were often brought to their knees through excess of delight. She was very good at it, too, and it took a nasty customer indeed to bitch to this one about seating.
“Uncle Tito says he needs to talk to you,” said the child, “table eight.” She departed, and after buttoning his tunic and telling Yolanda to mind the grill, so did Paz.
The dining room at Guantanamera was high, cool, white, and gold, with rattan fans moving the air-conditioned air around; many-armed chandeliers cast the bright light characteristic of Cuban restaurants. It was in every respect except size a replica of the dining room at the great tobaccofinca where Paz’s mother had worked as a child before the revolution, and her mother before her, and back to slavery days, all helping to invent the cuisine of Cuba. Paz didn’t know how much of this pastiche was irony and how much was clever marketing. The original custom of the place had consisted of exiles nostalgic for the kind ofcomidas criollas that white Cubans believed only black people could authentically produce. That was one of the problems Paz had with his mother’s operation. The oldsters were running thin, the tourists were seasonal, and the yuppies did not much fancy sitting down in a room lit like a stadium to a meal rich in carbs and spicy greases. Paz was always trying to darken the room and lighten the menu, hence that seafood salad, but it was hard to tell anything to Margarita Paz.
Tito Morales waved him over. As always when he saw Morales, Paz experienced a stab of regret, tinctured with envy and some resentment. The man was a detective on the Miami PD, as Paz had been, before he discovered that shooting people was an experience he could not ever repeat and had resigned from the force. He himself had put Morales in the detectives, brought him in off patrol as his partner, and although Morales had his own partner now (significantly absent at present), he occasionally came by to have a meal and pick Paz’s brain.
Paz sat. “What’d you have?”
“Theajiaco.”
“How was it?”
“Incredible. I got Mina to make it a time or two at home, but it wasn’t anything like yours.”
“Just as well. You’re getting fat, Morales. You should’ve gone with the salad.”
Morales laughed comfortably. He liked having a man who sold food tell him he was fat. In the seven years Paz had known him, Morales had turned from a baby-faced kid into a solidly built man of thirty, wife-and-two-kids, and a competent, if not particularly brilliant, detective. If he required brilliance, he had Jimmy Paz for the price of a meal.
They bantered for a while about family, sports, the department and its discontents, the latest cop scandal, one of a seemingly infinite series of stupid Miami cop tricks. Then, the reason for the visit, besides Morales’s taste for Cuban stewed beef.
“We caught a weird one last night. Tony Fuentes got killed. You heard about it?”
“I saw it in theHerald. Struggle with a burglar and he fell off his balcony. The perp got away.”
“That’s what we’re giving out,” said Morales darkly.
“And what are you not?”
“The perp ate him. And we doubt it was a burglary.”
“That’s good police work, Tito. Your average burglar usually goes for the jewels rather than the liver.”
An odd look appeared on Morales’s face, and Paz thought that this was one reason why the man would never be an absolutely first-class police detective-he was far too transparent; basically, he was a nice, regular guy, unlike Paz. “How did you know it was the liver?” the detective asked.
“It’s the tastiest part, if you want to snack off a corpse in a hurry. I speak as a food service professional here. What else did he eat? Orit eat?”
“The heart and some thigh muscles. It was quite a scene, my friend. Fuentes was opened up like a can of beans in his garden. Somebody yanked him off his balcony a little past one-thirty this morning. They ripped his throat out first. He was probably dead before he hit the croton bushes. I sure as shit hope so, anyway. The wife got up at seven and found him. Aside fromthat, Mrs. Fuentes, how was your day?”
“You probably don’t like the Mrs. for it.”
“No, we’re stupid, Jimmy, but we’re not total morons. No sign of trouble in the family. Business rivals, the usual shit. The only unusual thing that happened to Antonio in the twenty-four hours prior was a couple of guys turned up at his office and yelled at him about how he was ruining some nature preserve down in South America somewhere.”
“These were Latino types?”
“No, one was a white-bread gringo. A hippie, the secretary said. Do we still have hippies?”
“He probably thought of himself as an anarchist.”
“Whatever. He was the one who yelled. Long blond dreadlock hair, in a black T-shirt with a logo on it, but she couldn’t ID it. They had to call security, and the guy was violent, wouldn’t leave. We drew a blank with the security guards on the logo, too. I don’t understand why nobody ever sees anything.”
“They’re mainly not trained observers like you, is why. Who was the other guy?”
“He was an Indian. At least that’s what they all agreed on. A little Indian.”
“Tomahawk or dot-head?”
“Tomahawk, but I got the feeling from the description he wasn’t a local type, more like one of those from south of the border. He had these tattoos on his face.” Morales drew lines with his finger on his cheeks and chin. “That’s what they do down in, like, the Amazon, right?”
“If you say so.”
“The other thing is, there was a cat there.”
“A cat? You mean at the crime scene?”
“Yeah. Or so it appears. A big one, like a cougar or a leopard. We took casts of the prints, and we’re waiting on the zoo guys to ID them. It sounds weird, but from the look of the wounds, the forensic people say that maybe the cat did them, you know? I mean, can you train a cat to kill someone? There was a weird story I remember reading in school about a guy trained an ape to kill for him…”
“‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ by Poe. He made that up in his head, though.”
“So how do you figure this?”
“It’s open and shut, in my view. Guy owns a tiger, he’s feeding him Friskies tuna out of those little tiny cans, and one day he says, ‘Fuck this, why should I keep opening these little tiny cans, two for a dollar twenty-nine, when I can feed Lucille here on Cuban businessmen for free.’ And there you have it.”
Morales laughed, but briefly. “No, seriously.”
“Seriously? You see this outfit I got on? The white color clues you in that I’m in the food service industry and not the weird crime detection industry.”
“The Major asked me to ask you, Jimmy,” said Morales with an appropriately serious change of mien.
“Oh, theMajor. Well, let me drop everything, then, and really focus on it.” Paz said this as sarcastically as he could manage, and as he did he felt an unpleasant pang of self-contempt. Major Douglas Oliphant had been pretty decent to Paz when Paz had been a detective under him, and did not deserve that. And was Paz getting more bitchy recently? He took a breath, released it. “I don’t see what I could do to help,” he said in a milder tone. “I mean, you’re going to do the obvious, check out the people who own big cats, follow up on the tree hugger and his Indian…”
“Yeah, of course, but what the Major wanted me to ask you about is the possibility that there could be some kind of ritual involved.”
“And I’m the expert on cannibalistic ritual?”
“You know more than me,” said Morales bluntly.
“Guilty. But I thought we agreed the perp fed him to the pussycat. Where’s the ritual?”
“Okay, not ritual, as such.” Morales paused, and Paz saw an expression appear on his face that he had often felt appear on his own: that half smile we put on when we are about to say something that will make us appear stupid, something unbelievable or absurd. “So there’s no, like, cult that, say, worships animals and feeds people to them?”
“In the movies, maybe. Why go fancy on it? A guy with a trained tiger is bad enough. Or a maniac who for some reason wants the murder to look like it was done by a tiger.”
A little pause here before the detective said, “Because there was no guy. The ground was nice and soft, the gardener had been there that morning and spread fresh compost around the plants. There wasn’t a single human footprint anywhere on the grounds, and there’s an eight-foot wall around the whole property, alarmed, gated, with no sign of forced entry.”
“A solo by the cat, then,” said Paz. “A wild animal escaped from one of those private zoos you read about, guy’s got fourteen half-starved Siberian tigers in a double-wide trailer…”
“Which escaped and made its way to Antonio Fuentes’s house and lay in wait on his roof until just the moment the man steps onto his balcony and jumps him, even though the area is lousy with dogs and cats and coons. There were peacocks wandering around there, too. It’s that kind of neighborhood. You think it just woke up that day and said mm-mm, gonna get me some Cuban entrepreneur tonight?”
A number of wiseass remarks flitted across Paz’s brain then, but he declined them all. Instead, he shrugged and said, “Fine. You got me baffled. What do you want me to say, Tito? It was more magic in Miami?”
“That’d be a start.” He paused here and then in a hesitant tone added, “It was a near full moon last night.”
“Oh, well, then. Definitely a werewolf. Or were-tiger, in our case.”
“Do theyhave were-tigers?”
“Dothey have…? Tito, for crying out loud, listen to what you’re saying!”
Morales laughed nervously and rolled his eyes, to show (falsely) that he knew the comment had been a joke. “Yeah, okay, but seriously, is there, like, any buzz about people using predators ritually, a cult…”
Paz stood up, suddenly tired of the whole line of conversation. “No, Tito, I’m fresh out of cults. I don’t fuck with that stuff, I never fucked with that stuff, and I neverwant to fuck with that stuff. What I want to do right now is take my kid to the beach. Sorry. Give my best to the Major.”
With that, he returned to the kitchen. Yolanda had served out the last of the lunches, and the grill was void of everything but burnt-on crud. He removed this with degreaser and a steel scraper, using more force than was called for, cursing under his breath. When the grill was clean, he changed into cutoffs, sandals, and a clean mesh T-shirt and went into the tiny office. The girl was sitting in her grandmother’s swivel chair drawing with crayons on copy paper. She was already in her red Speedo, shorts, and the pink sneakers.
“Where’s your grandmother?”
“In the front. She’s yelling at Brenda again. She got the orders mixed up on table two and the man yelled.”
“Let’s go out the back, then,” said Paz.
Matheson Hammock consists of a mangrove forest and a broad muddy beach lapped by tepid wavelets and is nearly the last remnant on Florida’s Gold Coast of what the entire coastline of South Florida looked like before white people decided that beach living had status. Amelia liked it because she was frightened of big waves and because the place was literally crawling with littoral creatures-several kinds of crabs, seabirds, jellyfish, and a variety of mollusks. She knew their names and their habits, and tutored Paz about this in a manner absurdly reminiscent of her mother. Not too long ago Jimmy Paz had been something of a Casanova and had not thought much about children before he got this one, but like many such reformed rakes it turned out that he was an excellent husband to a woman not all that easy to live with, and as for fatherhood, each time he looked at his daughter he grew weak with love.
She ran ahead of him on the beach, the lowering sun casting a long shadow ahead of her, causing panic among the herd of fiddler crabs she was chasing. This sun also made of her bouncing curls a golden nimbus about her head; she was golden all over; even her eyes were golden. Technically, as the child of a mulatto (Paz) and a white woman, she was a quadroon, and had she been born in Cuba a century ago she would have gone straight to the brothels of Havana. Now, of course, everything was just dandy for a mixed-race girl, no problems at all coming down the line for the little sweetheart. When Paz brought up his memories of middle school-where as a black half-white Cuban he had enjoyed the unusual honor of being abused by all three of the major races at once-his gut clenched. Naturally, now that the mom was an M.D., the talk was of private schooling in impeccably liberal venues, but Paz knew all about liberals, too. There was no escape.
On the other hand it was a lovely day, the child was healthy and bright, and all that lay in the unknowable future, Paz now demonstrating to himself his remarkable ability to shut down a line of disturbing thought, a skill that had brought him sane through any number of uncanny and terrifying events while on the police force. It was not for nothing that Tito Morales had consulted him on his cat or cannibal murder. No, shut down that line, too.
The child was approaching an area where dunes and beach grass extended toward the bay. She had been told repeatedly not to walk across such areas barefoot, but now did it anyway, despite Paz’s shouted warning, and picked up a sand spur in her foot and fell over and got another one in her hand. Shrieks, wails, refusal to let Daddy look at the burrs, hideous hopping about to avoid same; then the frantic capture, the forced removal of the burs, the child transformed from an intelligent, competent angel into a writhing animal across his lap. Then, the operation complete, exhausted whining, and a demand to be carried back to their blanket.
Which Paz was happy to do, foreseeing an end to the days of carrying, and not wanting to miss a single one. At their blanket, Paz offered her a pink, pilled item, laundered nearly to pulp, that she had needed for sleep during her entire conscious existence, to which came the reply, “I think I’m too mature for a security blanket, Daddy.”
“We could use it as a regular blanket, though,” replied Paz, and so they did, the girl curled up in the crook of his arm with the spurned item over her and asleep in minutes. Paz tried to read a newsmagazine, but after ten minutes of trying to figure out the latest corporate scandal, he, too, succumbed to nap time.
And awakened in panic: Amelia was not there. He shot to his feet and looked to the shore, and a tide of relief washed over him, because there was the red bathing suit. The beach had filled up a little with people taking a little fun time after work: a couple of families, some teenagers goofing around with a Frisbee, and some kids and a black Labrador dog splashing in the shallows. Amelia seemed to be in conversation with a boy standing in a Styrofoam dinghy bobbing in the small waves close to shore. The Lab was barking insanely at them, without apparent effect. Paz walked toward the water, and as he approached he saw that it wasn’t a boy at all, but a very short stocky man, darker than Paz, with straight blue-black hair and some marks on his face. There was something around his neck on a cord. When Paz came within twenty feet of the two of them, the man pushed the dinghy away with the aluminum oar he was holding, and, still standing upright in the stern, propelled the craft rapidly away with an odd swirling motion of its blade.
“Who was that, baby?” Paz asked.
“Just a man. He talked funny.”
“Funny English?”
“No, funny Spanish. I could hardly tell what he was saying. He said I had a beautiful chew it. What’s a beautiful chew it?”
“I don’t know, kid. You know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers when Mommy and I aren’t there.”
“I know, but he was in a little boat,” said the child, with the logic of seven years. “And he was sad.”
“Why was he sad?”
A shrug. “That’s what I couldn’t understand. Could we go for ice cream?”
Moie paddles on across the shining calm water. That morning he awoke in his tree hammock, with a full belly and a head filled with dreams of killing and the taste of hot flesh between his jaws. He packed his hammock and his black suit into his case, and wearing only his breechclout, he walked down to the edge of the bay. He saw that thewai’ichuranan had left boats floating and tied for anyone to take, just as the Runiya do, so he took one.
Moie’s boat is made of what he thinks is some crumbly white wood like balsa, and the paddles are made of metal and a kind of very hard red stuff and are too long. He has to stand and use one of them like a pole.
He goes south, hugging the shore, past Sunrise Point, past Tahiti Beach, past the canal on which stood the house where Jaguar had taken the man Fuentes. He doesn’t know why he goes south, only that it is the proper direction to go now. Presently, he comes to a long sand spit extending east into the bay that has manywai’ichuranan on it, although they are not fishing or repairing boats, but just sitting and eating or running around like dogs, and screaming in their monkey talk. He has to pass close to the beach on the course he is traveling, and there he sees the little girl, standing and looking out on the water as if she were waiting for him. She is wrapped in red cloth, as the Runiya do with the little girls who are left for Jaguar, and that attracts his attention. Also, he can see her death quite clearly shining behind her left shoulder. He had noticed already that thewai’ichuranan had their deaths showing when they were small children, but then they died, and the deaths went inside of them. By the age that this girl is, they are often all gone, so this was also unusual. Perhaps Jaguar has prepared this one for himself and Moie has to do something with her. But Jaguar is silent in his heart.
Nevertheless, he paddles close to her and says in Spanish, “Little girl, answer me! Are youhninxa?”
The girl says, “No, I’m Amelia. What’s your name?”
Of course he is not going to tell a little girl his name. “Tell me the truth,” he says, “should I take you with me and give you to Jaguar? You can come in the canoe, even though it is wrong for girls and men to be in the same canoe. But it may be that this isryuxit in the land of the dead.”
But the girl only stared at him impolitely and said nothing. Then he saw that a brown man was coming toward them, and there was something about the man that Moie didn’t like, he did not exactly trail his death like a real person, but there was somethingelse accompanying him, something Moie had never seen before. It frightened him. To the little girl, he said, “You have a beautifulachaurit, ” and then he stroked his boat rapidly away from the shore.