The Dragon Griaule (47 page)

So much fury was concentrated in Jefe’s face, Snow thought it might explode.

Yara’s words took on a blathering tone, as if she were counseling a disobedient child while straightening his collar. ‘You swore you’d pay attention to my advice. Well, I’m advising you now. You mustn’t lash out every time someone does something that doesn’t please you. You have to use some discretion.’

Jefe backhanded her, striking her side, releasing Chuy at the same moment. She reeled back against the table, shrieked and clutched her hip, and sagged to the floor. Yet after the briefest of intervals she sat up and continued her scolding, as though the shove had been but a trivial interruption. Jefe went toward her and Snow, thinking he was going to hit her again, came out of his chair and said, ‘Well done! A man has to maintain order in his house.’

Jefe’s head snapped toward him.

‘Without discipline at home,’ said Snow, ‘you can have no discipline. Who are these people to think they can rule you while you rule their country? It’s absurd!’

‘You should act from the standpoint of reason, not emotion.’ Yara managed to get to her knees. ‘You can’t simply react to events.’

Jefe turned back to her.

‘Reason, yes. But you can’t tolerate an insult to your authority.’ Snow began to understand where this byplay might lead. ‘There has to be a price.’

Helped by his friend, Bazan hauled the semi-conscious Chuy erect – his feet scrabbled for purchase on the carpet and he groaned. Hearing the commotion, Jefe whirled about, but was distracted once again by the dialogue between Yara and Snow.

Yara: ‘It’s important you keep things in balance . . .’

Snow: ‘Showing you have a temper has a certain value.’

Yara: ‘. . . or else you’ll lose control of the situation.’

Snow: ‘You can’t govern effectively unless people are afraid of you.’

An indecisive expression stole over Jefe’s face as they continued in this vein, and he became agitated when Bazan asked for permission to leave.

‘First and foremost, you have to learn self-control,’ said Yara.
‘You can’t expect people to respect someone who constantly yields to impulse.’

‘Chuy needs a doctor,’ said Bazan.

‘I agree with her,’ Snow said. ‘But the idea that you might be erratic, that you pose a threat, the iron fist in the velvet glove, that sort of thing . . .’

Bazan: ‘Please, Jefe!’

‘. . . that’s what’ll keep them in line.’

Jefe nodded in Snow’s direction – it seemed an acknowledgement – and headed for the stairwell, his composure restored.

‘The past is the past,’ said Yara. ‘We can’t afford to repeat it any longer.’

‘Neither should we utterly renounce it,’ said Snow.

‘For the love of God!’ Bazan.

Jefe dropped into a crouch and roared at him, an open-throated scream delivered with such ferocity that Snow feared it was prelude to an assault – but Jefe merely said, ‘Take your garbage and go. And don’t call me for a while.’ He slammed the door behind him.

Chuy’s head lolled back. Thick, dark blood eeled between his lips.

Snow pointed this out, saying to Bazan, ‘Your boy’s leaking.’

Though shaken by Jefe’s outburst, Bazan had recovered enough of his macho to curse Snow.

‘There’s a clinic in Nebaj,’ said Yara. ‘I think it’s open.’

Bazan might not have heard her. ‘I’m going to have your balls, man!’

‘Are you crazy?’ She limped toward Bazan. ‘Get out of here! Go! Before Jefe changes his mind!’

The men started down the tunnel with Chuy in tow. Bazan looked back and Yara flapped her arms at him shouting, ‘Go! Go!’

Once their visitors were on their way to Nebaj, to a roadside ditch or wherever Chuy’s destiny might bring him, Yara sank into a chair.

‘That’s the guy you’re going to put in charge?’ said Snow. ‘Really?’

Yara rubbed her hip, tipped back her head, and closed her eyes – her skin held a waxy pallor.

Scattered, unsteady on his feet, Snow sat down. ‘That prissy little fuck’s going to make Hitler seem like a day at the beach!’

She rubbed her hip again, glanced down at her hand.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

He worked to slow his breath, his heart rate, but his anger boiled over.

‘Do you actually fucking think he’ll be an upgrade?’ he asked. ‘A creepy teenager with the morals of Caligula? This sure as hell changes my view of dragons. I mean I figured them for noble beasts, at least to some degree, but they must have been like a gang of kids armed with flamethrowers, torching shit and getting off on it. Of course . . .’ He laughed scornfully. ‘I bet you’re going to sling some crap about how the act of transubstantiation squeezed his soul and it came out all scrunched and malformed like a balloon animal. Once he has his dragon body again, hey it’ll snap right back into shape! He’ll be the fucking lizard version of the Lion King!’

His head fizzed with adrenaline. In quick order he envisioned Chuy’s feet dangling, a tiny figure superimposed against a godlike immensity of clouds, and a vastness hung with silver chains.

‘The place with all the chains,’ he said. ‘Is that the . . .’

‘Can you help me back to my room?’

Rankled, he said, ‘How about answering my question first?’

The grinding noise kicked in upstairs.

Yara held up her right hand, showing the palm and fingers smeared with red.

‘I’m bleeding,’ she said.

Where the edge of the table had impacted Yara’s hip, blood seeped between her skin and one of the dark green lesions. Snow stopped the bleeding with compresses and then sat in a chair by the bed. She rested on her uninjured side, holding his hand, giving it a squeeze each time she experienced a fresh twinge of pain. It felt as though a colloidal weight, a gel compounded of hopelessness and something darker, colder, were shifting about inside his skull, forcing him to lower his head in
order to stabilize it. When he looked up he found her watching him. Her color had improved.

‘How you doing?’ he asked.

‘I’m all right.’

There followed an awkward pause – it felt awkward to Snow, at any rate – after which they both spoke at once.

‘You go,’ he said.

‘No . . . you.’

‘I don’t have anything specific to say. I was just going to make comforting noises.’

She wetted her lips. ‘I can help you, I think.’

A match head of bright emotion flared up inside him.

‘The lair . . . the place with the chains,’ she said. ‘It’s where he does the preponderance of his killing. He uses the chains to fly. It’s not flying per se – it’s acrobatics. But it’s amazing to watch. There are ledges on the walls where he . . .’

‘I didn’t see any ledges.’

‘Most of them are high up, too high to see, and the ones lower down blend in with the mural. You wouldn’t notice them unless you were looking for them. They’re where he perches. Where he rests between flights.’

‘This was part of your design, the ledges, the clouds . . . you gave them that kind of detail?’

‘It’s Griaule’s design,’ she said. ‘I only added one thing. In case of a malfunction, the chains can be disengaged from the ceiling tracks. There’s a separate code for each chain that permits them to be replaced. When we moved here, while Jefe was still too weak to fly, we had an engineer and some workmen in to make sure everything was ready to go.’

She took a sip of water and replaced the glass on the night-stand.

‘After I’d been with Jefe a few weeks, caring for him twenty-four seven, I realized how willful he could be and I began to worry he wouldn’t turn out as I hoped.’

‘There’s a shocker,’ said Snow.

‘I wanted a means of stopping him, so I bribed the engineer to provide me with a code that would enable me to bring down the central section of the chains all at once. At first I asked for
a code that would bring them all down, but he warned there would be a splashing effect – if all the chains fell they’d likely kill everyone in the room. I’ve been tempted to use the code several times, but until now I always trusted my original decision.’

He could guess what had changed for her, why she was now willing to act, and he wanted to be sure, to ask, Why now? because he doubted it had much if anything to do with Chuy – but he bit back the question, worried that if he pressed that particular button it would enlist a negative emotion and she might rethink her decision.

‘What’s the code?’ he asked.

‘In the lair there’s a panel at eye-level just to the left of the door. Inside there’s a keypad. Punch in seven-one-three-nine-one. It’s my birthday. Seven, thirteen, ninety-one. When it’s the right moment, you press Enter and down he’ll come. But I’ll be the one who enters the code.’

She sat up in bed, a process that required his assistance, and once she had resettled with pillows behind her, she said, ‘It’s best I do it, anyway. If he stays true to form, he’ll take you up to one of the perches and leave you there while he flies. I know the precise section of chains that will drop and I’m used to watching him fly – I know his timing and you don’t. But he may not allow me to go upstairs with you. In that case . . . he might leave you on the ground and have you watch him fly. Maybe you can use the code then. We have to make certain he brings me up with you. The way to ensure it is to act like we’re angry with one another and keep on arguing about how he should govern.’

‘How’s that?’

‘He was interested in what we said. If we can hold his interest, when it comes time to kill you, he’ll want me there to watch him end the argument.’

‘I’m not good with heights,’ Snow said after an interval.

‘You’re going to have to be.’ She rolled her neck to loosen the muscles. ‘There’s one more thing. You might have to finish him off.’

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I thought the idea was to make him fall from a height.’

‘The fall may not kill him. When he first started to fly he
took a number of falls – they laid him up for a day, but that’s all.’

‘How long a fall are we talking about?’

‘The longest was fifty or sixty feet.’

‘He fell sixty feet onto a concrete floor and lived?’

‘This time the chains will come down on top of him – that should do the job. But we have to prepare for the possibility that he’ll survive. I’ll bring a machete, but you’ll have to use it. I’m not strong enough.’

‘Can you get a gun?’

She shook her head. ‘No guns. Since the sniper incident, he hasn’t let anyone near him with a gun. He sniffs them out.’

‘He doesn’t worry about machetes?’

‘He sees me with one every day. I have to kill chickens and chop weeds in the garden. He’s not concerned about anyone killing him at close range.’

‘Jesus fuck!’

‘You can do it! If he’s not dead he’ll be stunned, chewed up in the chains.’

‘How about making him fall from higher up?’

‘He wants his audience to see everything. Generally he’ll strand whomever he’s going to kill on a perch close to the floor. Then he makes this tumbling run across the center of the lair that brings him in at around thirty or forty feet. He plucks whomever it is off the wall and carries them higher before he drops them. I’m familiar with that run, I can time it. Otherwise he flies erratic patterns, and the odds against my being able to time him go way up. We can discuss it, but that’s not the path I’d choose if my life were in the balance.’

Something about the plan, her sudden conversion to his cause, seemed flimsy and too facile by half. Of course it hadn’t been that sudden, the conversion – it had taken him more than a week to work this change, to make her reflect on her feelings for him, yet nonetheless it was a quick turnaround.

‘You look funny,’ she said. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘I was thinking . . . visualizing.’

They went over details. The chains, she told him, slid up or down, back and forth along their tracks, and their movements
could be modified by means of the keypad, but usually Jefe keyed in a code that initiated a pre-choreographed sequence. The trucks, the old yellow Toyotas parked on the streets of the village, belonged to the PVO. They looked like wrecks, but were kept tuned up and gassed, and could be counted upon to get them as far as the border. They could not stay in Temalagua once Jefe was dead – they’d be hunted. If they could reach the States, they could sit down somewhere and decide what to do next. And so forth. A multitude of ifs, ands, and buts attached to the plan. No matter how carefully it had been worked out, they would need to be very lucky. One thing in particular kept nagging at Snow, causing him doubt, and he finally asked why she had risked involving the engineer.

‘It wasn’t much of a risk,’ she said. ‘I had no choice, and I knew the PVO intended to disappear everyone who worked on the project.’

‘Yeah, but he might have blurted out your secret before they could execute him. He would have betrayed you if he thought he could save himself.’

A grave look veiled her features. ‘Give me some credit. I killed him before he had the opportunity to betray me. As soon as I was certain the code worked, I stabbed him. I explained to the PVO that he had tried to rape me.’

Snow, nonplussed by this admission, by the cool authority in her voice, ducked his head and scratched the back of his neck to hide his reaction.

‘You see?’ she said. ‘I told you I was damned.’

Over the next few days Snow concocted elaborate paranoid fantasies about Yara. His favorite, the one he kept returning to, was that her plan was a cruelty meant to extract the last drop of torment from him, a lie that would insure his docility as he was led to the slaughter. He imagined her taunting him as he waited to die, and her insistence that they sleep in separate beds in order to reinforce the notion that they were feuding, played into the fantasy. Now she was through with him, the trap set, and the distasteful (to her) act of intercourse was no longer necessary – thus her ploy. He stopped short of believing
this, yet when he recognized how dependent he was on her and thought of everything she had done to guarantee the dragon’s survival, he was tempted to think the worst of her.

‘You probably think it’s weird I haven’t told you I love you,’ she said the following night when Snow dropped by her room to wish her good night.