After Burden's phone call, the man's heart began to fibrillate. He was used to that and recognized the onset of his familiar disturbance. Something happened to you when you took off all your clothes and covered your body with the colors of earth and vegetation. You began to slough off your human-ness. And that was good.
Wearing only tennis shoes that he'd also smeared with camouflage paint, he began moving up through the lake-level woods to the hillside. The mosquitoes formed a whirring aura around him, and he felt as though he were suspended in the sound of time but not touched by it. He moved through the darkness in a cocoon of timelessness.
The move up the cliff was slow, but not especially difficult. This was simply a steep climb, with a couple of spots where the placement of feet and fingers was important but not critical. He was careful not to dislodge any rocks and send them crashing noisily into the brush.
The pool was set solidly into the stone face of the bluff, but the deck that surrounded it was supported by thick, stolid concrete pilings sunk into the rock face below. When he reached the pilings he stopped to rest a moment before climbing the last twenty feet by crawling over the boulders that had been pushed over the bluff when the pool was built. Then he reached a cinder-block room that housed the pool's plumbing underneath the deck. From there stone steps led up to a tall louvered gate that opened onto the deck and pool area.
He crouched at the gate a long time, holding the little duffel bag with his clothes and a few other things. When he heard no one talking, he carefully unlatched the louvered gate, which opened up into a blind corner of the pool area, and moved inside. He laid the duffel bag in the shadows against the house, unzipped it, and took out the small, dull gray automatic pistol that Burden had given him. It was specifically modified to fire subsonic “cat's sneeze ”loads. The rounds had soft lead noses that exploded on impact.
The pale light coming through the glass walls-it looked like television light-threw too much illumination onto the deck and pool. He wouldn't be able to cross to the other side from here. Leaving his duffel bag, he went back out the gate and made his way down the first flight of steps. At the first turn left, he stepped right into the brush that separated the houses along the cliff. To avoid the noisy vegetation as much as possible, he hugged the outside walls of the house.
When he reached the front corner of the house, he snuggled up under a large shrub and waited. He knew Luquin's security. At night, someone always stayed outside in the dark. He waited. The living human being made noises.
He waited. He heard his own blood in his ears. Not too different from the whirr of passing time. He waited.
The guard farted. The man adjusted for the distortion of the architecture and vegetation. The front of the house was a U-shaped courtyard. And luckily, there were hedges. He eased down on his side, his bare back against the house, and advanced under the hedges, groveling inch by inch.
The guard yawned with a groan. The man corrected his audio perception. He was closer than he thought. A few more feet, mulch and twigs digging into his skin. The hedge took a left turn at the patio's edge. The man waited, then slowly eased his head from under the hedge. He saw the guard about two and a half meters away in a lawn chair.
When he shot the guard, there was only the muffled pop of his skull and a soft splash on the stones. The man was quickly on his feet. He took the AK out of the guard's lap and laid it on the stones. He left him lolling in the chair.
He went to the front door and tried the knob. It was unlocked. He opened the door by millimeters and heard the television. Good. He eased his head around the door. A foyer, lucky. Roque would be within twenty feet of Luquin. As he made his way through the foyer, the television threw a pale, flickering light through the opened doorway. There were no other lights on. Lucky again.
He saw through the room's glass walls to the lighted deck outside where he had just been standing a few minutes before. Making sure there were no lights behind him, he eased forward and saw Luquin lounging on the sofa, facing the television. He was nodding off, hardly awake. Another step forward, but no Roque.
Suddenly he heard a toilet flush down the hall and turned just in time to see Roque coming around the corner at the other end of the hallway, fumbling at the zipper of his pants. He was hardly on his guard and probably had been nodding off in front of the television too before he got up to go to the bathroom. The man straightened his arm out horizontally in the dark hallway, and Roque walked right into its muzzle.
The cat sneezed, and Roque's head flew back as if he'd been hit with a mallet, and his feet shot out from under him. He hit the floor with a sloppy whump, half a second after most of his brain hit the hallway wall.
The man wheeled around and was standing in front of the huge entertainment screen facing Luquin while Luquin was still trying to get to his feet. When he finally righted and steadied himself, the man was holding the remote control on the screen. The sound went off.
They stood facing each other in the silence, the coffee table between them.
“Sientese, ” the man said. Luquin's expression was slack, and the pale light from the screen was jumping all over his face, heightening his expression of shock. “Sit down, ”the man repeated in English.
Luquin dumbly complied, collapsing into the exact spot from where he'd struggled so hard to get up a moment before. The man walked to the coffee table. Then he stepped around it, looming over Luquin, his camouflaged genitals dangling an arm's reach away from Luquin's face. The man sat down slowly on top of the coffee table, his knees almost touching Luquin's knees.
“Take off your shirt.”
A couple of beats passed before Luquin began unbuttoning his guayabera. When he had it off, the man reached out and took it from him. Slowly he began wiping his face with it, smearing away the paint, his eyes latched on to Luquin's eyes as firmly as if they had been little hands holding him. Luquin stared, watching as the color of the man's flesh emerged from underneath the paint. His eyes narrowed a couple of times involuntarily as he tried instinctively to recognize the man underneath the paint.
Suddenly he realized who it was.
Luquin went limp and sank back on the sofa. The odor of feces filled the room as Luquin's mouth sagged in stupefaction. Some men have a sixth sense about their last moments, something that tells them that this time it will not be a close call. Often such an intuitive certainty is dumbfounding, and that moment of realization sucks everything out of them. That's the way it was for Cayetano Luquin. Now there were only two things left: death, and the fear of death.
The man was surprised by this sudden collapse. He had always anticipated that Luquin would fight insanely, like a rabid coyote. This was unanticipated. But it meant nothing, one way or the other.
“Get on the floor.”
Luquin looked at him blankly, without comprehension.
The man stood. “Get on the floor.”
Luquin hesitated, then slid sideways off the sofa and onto the floor. He didn't know what position to take on the floor, so he kind of knelt there, almost on his side, eyes rolled at his adversary.
“On your back, ”the man said. Then, standing over Luquin, he bent and unbuckled Luquin's belt and then the waistband of his trousers. Then he flipped off Luquin's expensive alligator loafers. He grabbed the bottom of his silk trousers and pulled them off. He stood back, looking at him.
“Pull off your underwear.”
Luquin rolled around on the floor, squirming out of his feces-soaked underwear.
“Stuff them in your mouth.”
Luquin did, without hesitation.
Then the man went back to the coffee table and sat down again. He looked at Luquin, studying him. His body was surprisingly well kept for a man his age. Almost athletic.
“What do you think, Tano, ”the man asked, “is fear different for different people? Is there only ‘fear,’a single thing that is the same for everyone? Or are there fears? ”He thought a moment. “A child's fear. Do you think it's different from a man's fear? ”He paused as if he were letting Luquin contemplate that. And then he said: “How could it not be?
“And how long can a human being be afraid, Tano? ”the man asked in a quiet, conversational tone. He waited for an answer, as though he actually expected Luquin to respond. “A few days? Weeks? Months? ”Pause. “To me, it seems that after a time, and that time is probably different for different people, fear turns into something else. For you, a person so experienced in such things, who knows, that period of time might be… endless.”
He pondered this a moment.
“What do you think? ”he asked Luquin again. “You're something of a philosopher on the subject.”
Luquin lay on the floor transfixed, his fecal-drenched underwear hanging out of his mouth, his forearms raised, wrists cocked back in a posture of benumbed disbelief.
“Here's what I think, Tano, ”the man continued. “I think that after a lengthy time, if that thing which causes fear continues and does not go away, then fear itself is transformed, almost like a chemical reaction. It turns to horror. And that, I think, is a more intense experience. Horror is miedo profundo.”
The man noted that Luquin's eyes were beginning to acquire the glassy look of disassociation. A film covered the eyes in such moments, like a cataract, though not milky in that way, but rather glittery, reflective, so that the film caught the light and obscured the eye behind the reflection.
The man studied Luquin in the pale, flickering light of the television, the perfect aura for what was about to happen. It was just the right shade of pale. And its jerky light was just the right modulation for horror.
Luquin was motionless, his forearms still raised, wrists still cocked back.
“Let us explore together these philosophical questions, Cayetano, you and I. You, el maestro del horrible. And I the novicio. Between us, surely, we can come to some deep and secret understanding of this timeless subject.”