Nightlife (8 page)

Listened. Now the kid was singing a more agreeable tune. Standing there in a junior high office, using the phone between classes on the pretense of calling a parent about a doctor’s appointment or some other good one.

They signed off and Tony compressed the aerial back down. A minute later he heard the front door open, close. Heavy footsteps.

“In here,” he called out. Lupo joined him, carrying a couple of boxes that looked as if they might hold reams of paper, were it not for the airholes punched around the sides.

“Good news,” Lupo said. “They had plenty of white ones this time.” He set.the boxes on the floor and opened the first. A dozen furry little white mice squirmed inside, pink feet scurrying, pink tails flicking about.

“Ah, bless you, Lupo. You know how to brighten a day, don’t you.”

Lupo shrugged modestly. He looked very fit and resplendent this morning. He was far more the morning person than Tony. The guy didn’t need but four, five hours of sleep a night. Tops.

Tony reached in to pluck up a mouse at random. Held him aloft by the tail, watching his four legs flail like nobody’s business. All that energy, wasted. And for what? Futility.

Tony dropped him into the piranha tank, watched the nearest fish home in on the splash and make short work of little albino Mickey. A few quick chomps, and a wet cloudburst of red. He dropped another, this one squeaking, into the tank’s opposite end. Zap. Two more flashes of chomping silver, and it became an underwater tug of war. The rest of the piranha were beginning to get the idea. They were used to this game. Among others.

Tony held two by the tails this time, one in each hand. Looked back at the smiling Lupo, who got just as big a kick out of this as did Tony.

“Just like feeding popcorn to pigeons,” Tony said.

And let the mice fall.

The Venezuelan savannah burned under a sun that seemed to grow hotter with every passing day. Coarse grasses wavered in breezes too pitiful to offer much relief. On the crude but serviceable airstrip at Esmerelda, an equally crude but serviceable cargo plane rumbled down the runway, tentatively cleared ground, then seemed to gain confidence and pulled up into the sky.

In its belly, Kerebawa white-knuckled the safety harness that strapped him into his seat along the inner fuselage. The vibrations were nothing short of terrifying, like the convulsions of a sickened animal readying to lose a recent meal.

He still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of flight, even though the late Angus Finnegan had tried to allay his fears once by referring to a plane as a canoe with wings. That helped, and once in the air things were usually fine, although turbulence still gave him fits. Not so long ago, though, the mere thought of flight was enough to chill the spine of an otherwise brave warrior.

“What if we crash into the
hedu kä misi?”
he had asked Angus on that very first flight, to Caracas. He was referring to the next layer of the Yanomamö cosmos, hovering overhead at some undetermined altitude.

“The
hedu kä misi
is too high,” Angus had told him. “We could never reach it. No man could.”

Kerebawa had nodded. Then, “What if we crash into God-teri?”

Angus had frowned, looking puzzled. At last he had answered, “We’ll not crash there unless God calls us to.”

Two years ago, that had been. In comparison with that younger Kerebawa, he was quite the world traveler by now.

The cargo plane, now as then, was piloted by a man named Barrows. An old friend of Padre Angus, immense of belly and bald of head. His copilot, Matteson, was almost a complete opposite—tall and lean with his hair pulled into a graying ponytail. They ran a helter-skelter circuit between Miami and numerous cities across northernmost South America. They frequently touched down in Esmerelda, bringing supplies to the missionaries working among the Yanomamö. In turn, they bought plantains and other fruit and sold them to produce wholesalers in the cities. Both had been dismayed over Angus Finnegan’s demise. And reluctantly agreeable to aiding Kerebawa as he sought to continue Angus’s work.

They had already proven their worth as allies. For so much had already happened to get Kerebawa this far.

Medellín is Colombia’s second largest city, founded in 1616 by Spanish Basques settling in the New World. It’s nestled in a lush valley between two stretches of the Andes Mountains, five thousand feet above sea level and only six degrees north of the equator. Such logistics give it spring-perfect weather all year long. Medellín is world-renowned for the beauty of its orchids, and it is one of Colombia’s chief industrial cities. It has more than a few parallels with American cities—a juxtaposition of mirrored-glass office buildings with working-class ghettos struggling against poverty.

In the past ten to twelve years, it has rapidly become to the cocaine trade what Sicily is to the Mafia. A criminal mecca, center of a worldwide network. The Cartel. Exporters who found it far more profitable to work in cooperation rather than as independent rivals.

Standing on a sloping mountainside above the city, invisible within dense foliage, Kerebawa could smell the city’s fear. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people who never knew if death by gun or knife was moments away. You don’t ascend to the top of the coke heap without a cheap price on human life.

Angus Finnegan had never been here, but he understood it. That much Kerebawa had been able to divine while poring over the Padre’s papers after his death. A wealth of sometimes incomprehensible information obtained by trading medical supplies to a network of leftist guerrillas fiercely opposed to the Cartel. And who sometimes worked in clandestine fashion with the American Drug Enforcement Administration. Angus had been a man possessed about compiling the information once word spread that “traders” from the west were visiting Iyakei-teri.

As the hawk flies, Medellín lies better than eight hundred miles from Esmerelda. Once Kerebawa understood the enormity of the distance, after studying Angus’s maps, he felt the shame of disgrace rising within. The distance was too vast. He would fail to avenge his friend’s death.

Then he remembered the sky-men, who soared close to God-teri. Barrows and Matteson. And recognized a name on the map he had heard them talking about.

Bogotá.

They had told him he was crazy, a rain-forest savage wanting to fly with them all the way to Bogotá so he could disappear into the jungle bordering the runway. Kerebawa knew he had to be crafty about travel, for he had no Padre to explain the complexities of civilization, and no pockets for the papers civilized men always demanded to see.
Crazy.
But it wasn’t any skin off the pilots’ noses if his mind was made up.

He traveled light, carrying a machete, his bow and arrows, and a bamboo quiver of arrow tips. A cloth roll for his tobacco and
ebene
powder and maps and pictures and a few other odds and ends.

Angus had taught him the way white men measured time. When Barrows told him they would be back in Bogotá in two weeks, he knew precisely how long they meant. And that he had enough to keep him busy in the meantime.

Kerebawa felt quite the adventurer when leaving a remote stretch of the airport for the mountain jungles. Relieved, too, for they felt a lot more like home than the belly of the flying canoe. As well, he thought himself quite clever. He’d just reduced his distance to travel solo to 150 miles or so. With two weeks to cover the distance to Medellín, find Vasquez and the
hekura-teri,
then return to Bogotá to wait for the skymen.

Kerebawa descended the slope outside of Bogotá, and walked until the miles took him to the north-flowing Magdalena River. At its banks, he fashioned a disposable canoe out of tree bark and made the traveling a lot easier by letting the river carry him better than half the journey.

He traveled over mountains, through jungles, across dense valleys, past immense trees stretching up like the legs of some great antediluvian beast. And through it all he felt the pull growing stronger. You lived in the jungle, thrived there, by becoming a part of it. Feeling its rhythms inside bones and soul. Bending to its will rather than fighting it. And in turn, it would open up its mysteries and let you see and hear and smell and taste all the things an outsider would never notice.

The
hekura-teri
had been born of jungle. And he could sense its path across the face of the sky.

Kerebawa would daily perform, alone, the same rituals that went on back home in Mabori-teri. He had no one to blow the
ebene
through a tube for him, so he sniffed it from his fingertips until he had enough to open his eyes to even deeper mysteries. The mysteries of the
noreshi,
his soul. And the spirit animal to which his soul was aligned.
Noreshi
referred to either as well as both, for the two were inseparable. The fate of one was the fate of the other.

And during his
ebene
trances, he would sing and chant and dance, then look to the sky to see a large hawk, his spirit animal, circling aloft in the distance, in the direction of the next day’s travel. The hawk was far wiser than he, with keener senses. No doubt the bird could
see
the trail left by the passage of the
hekura-teri.
And guide him.

It reminded Kerebawa of one of his favorite Bible stories Angus had taught him. The man called Moses, leading his people out of slavery into a new land. Following signs in the sky. Cloud by day, fire by night.

He followed the hawk for five days, until it hovered in circles over a sprawling home of white stucco and red-tiled roof. Far down the mountainside. In the distance, Medellín-teri lay like a scattering of enormous jewels. But they were poison. The stink of fear was like morning mist that winds could never blow away and sun could never burn off.

So long a journey, now ended. While the hard part was just beginning.

He eased his way down the mountain, at one with the jungler Ferns, vines, creepers, palms, underbrush. The chattering of monkeys and the calls of birds. Keeping soft, silent. Stripped to the skin as his forefathers would have been, before the white men taught them shame. Wearing only his waistcord.

Kerebawa came within scant feet of the edge of the jungle and the start of a clearing. He shook his head. All these hard-looking
shabonos
looked alike. He dug through his cloth roll and found a picture of the home of Hernando Vasquez. Compared the picture with real thing. At least they
seemed
to match.

Ebene
time. For once he dispensed with the noisier aspects of the ritual. When he looked skyward, he saw the departing hawk, and that cinched it for him. Here the traders would learn the true wrath of the Fierce People.

Kerebawa stole about to various vantage points. He scaled trees, pulling with callused hands and pushing with callused feet, until he had better views of the area. Wise warriors always know the lay of the land before a raid.

And this place did not look good.

The house, with perhaps a hundred yards between it and the jungle at the clearing’s broadest point, was guarded by six men. Four in back, two in front. With wasp-guns.

They were the
sicarios,
assassins employed by Vasquez and men like him. As guards, as hit-men. Like the Yanomamö, they too learned savagery at a young age. Most were anywhere from early teens to around twenty years old. The young were more dangerous, always thought they were immortal. And gave less thought to pulling a trigger.

Kerebawa knew none of this, only that they were many to his one. Arrows would be of limited value against this enemy. He’d have to resort to a variation of the
nomohoni,
massacre by treachery.

And for that, a wise warrior is patient. To plan carefully.

For two days he watched their routines. Noting by the position of the sun when they came and went. He moved like a wraith through the surrounding jungle to watch the house from back, front, both sides. A few times he caught sight of an older man who moved among his inferiors with the authority of a headman. Kerebawa consulted his pictures. Hernando Vasquez. The back of the photo was stamped with the phrase,
DEA SURVEILLANCE PHOTO
.