Life During Wartime (57 page)

Marina stepped forward and addressed the crowd. ‘I believe we should show our appreciation to Carlito for this great work, for bringing forth flowers from these stones.’

The crowd applauded, and the applause evolved into a chant of ‘Carlito, Carlito, Carlito!’ that ended only when the dance music was struck up again. Mingolla stared into one of the punchbowls, thinking that he’d seen six-legged movement among the floating bits of rind and fruit pulp.

‘Hello, David,’ said a high-pitched female voice at his shoulder.

He spun about and looked up into the robot’s eyes. Behind occluded crystals, the cameras swiveled.

‘Don’t you recognize me?’ The robot clasped its hands over its ample belly.

For a moment Mingolla was at sea; but then, remembering the chopper and its divine pretense, he penetrated the disguise. Izaguirre,’ he said.

‘Good to see you again,’ said the robot. The pudgy pink face seemed to be regarding him with paternal favor.

‘Are you here in person?’ asked Mingolla, hoping this was the case, not knowing what he would do, but hoping all the same.

‘Oh, no. I’m in Costa Rica. But I’ve been keeping my eye on you.’ He essayed a daffy wink. ‘I’m most impressed with the work you’ve been doing.’

‘Are you now?’

‘Indeed! It’s remarkable. The results you’ve achieved put my poor efforts to shame.’

‘You’re just saying that.’ Mingolla offered the robot punch and spilled a cupful over its stiff yellow dress. Gee … lucky you didn’t short-circuit. By the way, what is your work? Entertaining at birthday parties?’

‘Still angry, I see. That’s good, David, that’s good. Anger can be a useful tool.’ The robot dabbed at the spill. To answer your question: No. No birthday parties. My work is much like yours, though I’ve been limited to producing singular effects as opposed to the overall rehabilitation you’ve been attempting.’

‘I haven’t been attempting shit. Just passing the time.’

‘Don’t belittle your efforts. No one would put in the hours you have without a strong commitment.’

‘Beats hanging out with your nieces and nephews.’

‘I won’t insist you agree,’ said the robot. ‘However, I do have a proposal for you. I’d like you to come work with me after all the loose ends are tied up down here.’

‘Naw,’ said Mingolla. ‘I’m going home, gonna sit on the beach.’

‘You can do both.’

‘You work in the States?’

The crystal eyes tracked back and forth across the dance floor. ‘I see no harm in admitting it at this juncture. Yes, I have a home there. I think you’d find it an amiable atmosphere.’

‘Where is it?’

The robot gave out with a fey titter. ‘I believe I’ll keep you in the dark about that for the time being.’

Not as much in the dark as you think, asshole
, Mingolla said to himself. Some place with dry desert heat and a lot of horny people. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Scared of me or something?’

‘Not really, David. You’re quite formidable, I admit. But we’ve been around for a long time, and we know how to deal with strength.’ The robot trundled back a foot, then forward the same distance, as if gearing up for a leap. ‘Now about my proposal …’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘A talent like yours won’t lie dormant, David. What else is there for you to do?’

‘Could be I’ll go back into the killing business. The world can always use another assassin.’

The robot’s great oval head twitched. ‘I’m sorry you have so much resentment.’

‘It’s not resentment,’ said Mingolla. ‘It’s disgust.’

‘I’m aware that—’

‘You aren’t aware of shit!’ said Mingolla. ‘The things you bastards …’ He caught himself, not wanting to lose it completely. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe all I can do is try to fix what you people have broken.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ said the robot. ‘That’s exactly how I feel.’

‘Really?’

‘Do you think I’m without feeling?’ the robot asked. ‘Don’t you know how appalling I find what we’ve done, what we’ve had to do?’

The robot embarked upon what Mingolla was coming to view as the classic Sotomayor rap, You Can’t Make an Omelet without Breaking Eggs, and We Will Spend Our Lives Redressing All Wrongs. Izaguirre’s version was superb, heartfelt, and eloquent, and Mingolla had no doubt that he believed every word. He promised Izaguirre that he would give serious consideration to his proposal and that he would try to put his resentments behind him; but after the robot had trundled off to visit relatives, he found that his tolerance of the proceedings had been reduced to zero. The scales had fallen from his eyes. Everywhere he looked he detected the residues of old hatreds. Whispers behind hands, scowls, poisonous stares. And there were fresh hatreds as well. Those he detected in the standoffishness with which the Madradonas and Sotomayors treated their new allies, the drug-induced psychics. The shoddiness of the party, the schmaltzy music, the whirling unlovely couples, the mutant sideshow, the high tech grotesquerie of Izaguirre’s robot: the sinister aspects of all this seemed to have undergone an intensification. He might, he thought, have been standing in Berlin decades ago, watching the burghers ratify their allegiance to the lean, cold National Socialists, disguising their intrinsic meanness and paucity of spirit with shabby pomp and sprinklings of glamour. This gathering had no less potential for nastiness, for vicious perversion, and he perceived in it the shape of the world to come, one not so different from the old. The feud would resurface, with the added bloodiness of a new feud between the families and their drugged creations, and the result would be a world of back-fence wars and heavy tensions and near-apocalypses. Or perhaps a total apocalypse. The families’ propensity for oversight might well allow for this significant difference. But whatever ultimacy they might contrive of the future, of one thing Mingolla was sure: he would not survive to see it. Wherever he turned, people looked away from him, not wanting to be caught staring. That consensus interest alone was enough to damn him. Sooner or later somebody would decide that he was too powerful to trust, or would make a judgment based on a more personal issue.

He spotted Debora standing with Tully and Corazon on the far side of the hall, and he crossed to them, bumping into ungainly Madradonas and graceful Sotomayors. ‘I’m gonna take a walk,’ he said to Debora as he came up. ‘You be all right?’

‘You look pale,’ she said. ‘Are you sick?’

‘Something I ate.’

‘You be missin’ all de fun, mon,’ said Tully drunkenly; he gave Corazon such a fierce squeeze that Mingolla half-expected to see her rosy eye pop out.

‘I’ll go with you,’ said Debora; but she didn’t seem eager to leave.

‘Naw, I just wanna walk a little. I’ll take Gilbey and Jack, and I’ll catch ya back here or at the pension.’

He turned to go, but she stepped in front of him. ‘Is anything wrong?’

It was a temptation to tell her all he’d been thinking, but he knew she wouldn’t buy it. Nothing serious,’ he said. ‘I’ll see ya later.’

As he headed for the door, various of the families acknowledged him with smiles and nods. So sincere, so unassuming. He smiled back, hating them all.

Clear night, the stars pointy and bright, so regularly spaced that the strip of blue darkness overhead looked like a banner laid across the rooftops. Mingolla felt at ease walking out among the dead. The dead could be trusted, at least. Their dim urges were not informed by greed or lust; their memories did not inspire perversity, but were merely unresolvable longings for a world they could not quite recall. He liked the silence of the street, too. Silence was a blue-dark flow through the claustrophobic canyons of the barrio, carrying his reflection smoothly along in the windows of the stores, past the logjams of shadowy figures in the gutters, and he thought it might not be so bad to enlist in those shadow armies, to breathe the poison that made them slow, to follow the orders that permitted them to indulge in the last real reason for living. He increased his pace, swinging his arms, marching, and Gilbey and Jack had to break into a stumbling run to keep up. At last he stopped in front of the store that once
had sold religious items and looked at himself in the ranked mirrors. An infinity of starlit Mingollas, all of them dark, with glittering eyes. Studying the reflections calmed him. He turned his head, and the reflections followed suit. He put his hands on his hips, moved toward the window, and an army of Mingollas, bold and undaunted, approached for consultation.

Pity, he thought, that they weren’t magic mirrors. He’d summon his friends and family to appear, give them the benefit of his wisdom. Not that he had a lot to give. Just one word: Panama. He’d say it differently to each of them. Softly to old girlfriends, to Long Island Woman, letting them know how lucky they were as Americans to be insulated against so much painful reality. And to his old buddies, he’d offer it as an admonition, shock them into draft-dodgery. And to his father, yeah, to his father he’d pronounce it as a cross between a whisper and a hiss. The word would cloud the mirror, translating into a gas the color of the night sky and the shadows, one that would envelop his father’s head and convey to him the dark flash of being, send him reeling, choking on quintessential Panamanian truth, and a moment later actuarial reality would knock on the door, and Mom would have lovers in Florida till she was eighty. Wow! What a gal!

Panama.

Not what he’d expected, nosiree!

He hadn’t reached the topless country of white beaches, the tanned coast of movie star tits and
coco locos
, the loll of brochureportrait dewy daughters of the idle isles, and you got American money, Jim, this land is your land, for rape, rent, and shopping mall development … whatever’s your pleasure. No, he’d reached the bloody republic of history, where Colombian pirates raided the coast and screwed their victims’ corpses, where once a band of white sailors had become headhunters and cannibals, where Chinese railroad workers had drowned themselves by the hundreds when their opium ran out, where a little weed grew that gave you the power to raise armies of the dead.

Where a man named Carlito had been born.

Panama … little shiver of three syllables.

Then the word seemed to acquire a new meaning, to tell of
green hills rising beyond a barricade, of Daríen, the cloud forest, the lost tribes, the witch-men and their thoughts like streamers of mist.

That
Panama, now … that might just be an option after all.

Jack and Gilbey edged closer as if his longing for escape had spoken to them, and something stirred in the gutter at Mingolla’s feet. A thin shred of a man wrapped in tatters of brown cloth, stinking of garbage. Mingolla went to his knees beside him, looked into eyes empty and doting as a dog’s. The man’s lips were scabbed, and his nose had been broken; strings of bloody mucus hung from his nostrils, thick and webbed like macramé. He reached out his hand, clutched at Mingolla’s arm, and Mingolla, his bitterness swept away, began to work on the man’s mind. Behind him, a rustling, a shifting, but he paid it no attention.

Then Gilbey said, ‘Watch it!’

Mingolla glanced up, saw figures silhouetted against the stars, looming above him, and one, cowled, its face an oval of darkness, swung at him with something long and crooked. He twisted away, but the club struck the side of his head, sending white lights shooting through his skull, and he fell on his back. Gilbey hauled him up, dragged him onto the sidewalk, and he had a dizzy glimpse of hundreds of people choking the street, shuffling forward, making no sound other than the glutinous passages of their breath. Eyes like holes cut in dirty sheets, and weapons at the ready.

Glass shattered.

Gilbey jerked him around to face the store. Jack was smashing the window with his crowbar, clearing away hanging icicles of glass. Gilbey dragged him through the window, into the mirrored showroom. He kept blacking out, floating back to consciousness, seeing himself in the mirrors. Open-mouthed; a black forking of blood from his hairline. Behind them, the army converged on the broken window, pressing inside, unmindful of the spears of broken glass that pierced them. Mingolla tried to strike at them with his mind, but couldn’t focus and was pulled past his floundering mirror images and down a narrow corridor toward the back door. The knob turned in Gilbey’s hand, the door gave a little, but was stuck. Gilbey dropped his machete and wrangled with the knob.

Mingolla leaned against the wall, looking down at the machete. It was a long way off, spinning, receding, and he wasn’t sure he could reach it. But if he could reach it … well, he knew about machetes. Yes, indeed! He bent at the waist, swayed, and in righting himself, managed to scoop up the machete. The hilt was greasy with Gilbey’s sweat, the rust and blood on the blade gleamed in the light from the transom. Its heft stabilized Mingolla, and he turned to face the army.

The corridor was just wide enough for two abreast, and the army surged into it, grunting, bumping into each other, unable to master the tactics of two-at-a-time. Mingolla swung at the first to come within range, slashed a chest, a belly, drawing lines of blood in gray flesh. Two of them fell, then a third. He chopped at the shoulder of an old woman whose shawl had slipped down to blind her, he spitted a young man and kicked him away. With a screech, the door came open, and Mingolla backed into an alley almost as narrow as the corridor. Blocked at one end by a high brick wall, at the other by more of the army. Gilbey took a stand beside him, wielding a two-by-four, and Mingolla, retreating toward the brick wall, slashed the gut of a shirtless man whose skin hung in folds about his waist. He should be feeling something, he thought. Fear at the least, because he likely was going to die: there were too many of them, their heads bobbing, eyes slits of ebony, pale skin showing through rents in their clothing. And regret at killing his ex-patients. Surely he should feel regret. But it was as if the blow to his head had reduced him to their state, to an emptiness empowered by a command, swinging the machete, a little faster and more accurate than they, yet equally singleminded. No shudders flowed along the blade – their lives weren’t stubborn enough to produce such phenomena – and when their blood spattered him, it dripped from his arms with the slowness of heavy machine oil. Flesh Dummies with Real-Life Organs. There was a sweet brainless appeal to cutting them down, a muscular pleasure in a stroke well conceived and nicely executed, and Christ, was he ever doing a good job! Piling up the bodies. They slipped and flailed as they clambered over the pile. Easy to pick off. He swung, connected, biting to the bone. Swung, connected, swung, connected. Should be a work song to sing while he
chopped.
Well, I’m gon’ take dis machete … Jesus fuck!
The alley snapped into horrid focus for Mingolla. He saw his last victim writhing as slow as an earthworm at his feet, shoving guts back into his belly. Once again he tried a mental assault, and as he did, this time succeeding, he realized that in hiding his power from the families, he had hidden its true extent from himself as well.