Nature of the Game (39 page)

“It's all right,” she said. “Go to sleep. You're safe.”

LAST TRICK

J
ud and Nora sat in the warm evening sun, a couple of old cats in lawn chairs outside her house, the empty highway off to their left, the café in front of them closed for the day. The sky shimmered pink and purple. Their eyes were shut, faces tilted up.

Nora sighed. “This is how I like it these days. Quiet.”

The sand on the desert was still.

“Don't have to be anybody,” she said, “don't have to do anything. Just sit. Breathe in. Breathe out. Smell the sagebrush. Know what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Jud. And it felt good. So good.

“'Course, I wouldn't mind seeing New York again. But not for a while.”

“I don't want to go anywhere,” said Jud.

“I don't want you to either.”

They let that discovery lay at their feet, unnamed. But the silence was easy, and they both felt that. Their eyes stayed closed.

“Unless,” she said, “you happen to be thirsty for some lemonade in the pitcher on the top shelf of my refrigerator.”

“Contingency adaptation,” he said.

“Whatever. That is, if you happen to be thirsty.”

“For lemonade. On the top shelf of your refrigerator.”

“Yeah. Just for instance.”

“Oh,” said Jud. He sighed. “No, I'm fine.”

Nora laughed.

A minute went by.

“I've got an idea,” said Jud.

“What?”

“There's some lemonade in a pitcher on the top shelf of your refrigerator. Why don't I get you a glass?”

“If you want,” she said. “Nice idea.”

“Thanks,” he said, and she heard him go into the house.

Eyes closed, she chuckled, called after him, “Why don't you have a glass, too?”

The air around Nora tingled with the change from daylight to dusk. She felt the sun's heat still trapped in the sand and rocks, the adobe walls of her house.

Ice-cold, wet glass pressed against her neck.

“
Jesus!
” she yelled, bolting upright in her chair.

“No: Jud,” he said, handing her a tall glass of lemonade, sitting down with his and a shit-eating grin.

She scowled at him, but they both knew it wasn't serious.

“I suppose you didn't bring the cigarettes,” she said.

“Lord, spare me from a never-satisfied woman,” said Jud.

“Climb down off the cross, hon,” she said. “We need the wood.”

His laughter echoed over the tumbleweeds. When he stopped, he took a drink of lemonade. Made a sour face.

“Not quite that old firewater kick, huh?” said Nora.

He shrugged, sighed. Reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter.

“God, you never make anything easy!” she said as he shook a cigarette out of the pack, handed it to her.

“No, but I share.”

One click of the Zippo lit both their habits.

“Ah.” She looked around where she lived
now
. “Not bad. Nice day. Enjoy it while you can. Soon, heat'll come. Which reminds me: remind me to call the phone company tomorrow, okay?”

“Why?”

“Somebody screwdrivered the shit out of the pay phone by the road. It's busted all to hell.”

“
I didn't know
,” whispered Jud. “When?”

“Beats me. A guy came in while you're dumping trash yesterday. He went to use it and found it pried apart. They even busted the receiver.”

“Damn kids,” she added. “You think they could come up with more original crimes.”

“I hadn't noticed it,” he said. “Hadn't … I should have been checking it every morning at six, I got … I've been …”

“Don't worry about it,” she said. “It's not your job.”

From this distance, the glass phone booth looked fine. His guts felt empty, his mind hollow.

“No accounting for everything in life,” said Nora.

Can't change it now
, thought Jud.
Can't let it matter. It won't matter. It doesn't. Move on to something important
.

“Why did you quit being a prostitute?” he asked her.

Nora took a drag on her cigarette, shifted in her chair, her eyes on him, her eyes far away.

“My last trick,” she said.

“When?”

“Nineteen seventy-eight,” she said. “August. I was living in Vegas, few but big-time clientele. Raking in the dough. Hadn't admitted yet that it was the booze drinking me and not the other way around.

“I had this customer, regular when he was in town, used to fly me around to meet him. Big shot, picture in
Time
magazine.”

“He flew me to Philadelphia. First-class round-trip, best hotel. Twenty-five-minute date. Ten thousand dollars.”

The sky was gray, shadows gaining substance.

“What did you do?” asked Jud.

Nora looked at the glowing tip of her cigarette. “I set him on fire.”

They said nothing until the light was gone from the sky.

“After that,” she said, “I felt this … good part of me crumbling. The kind part. The part that could still love. I'd had to think of … more exotic, more original things for him each time. After Philly, I knew that where that kind of stuff was taking me, I wouldn't be able to stay me. So I quit.”

“Then?”

“Then I got kissed by the tax man. His plan was to make me an example, fine me up the ass. Would have been my ass, too, except for the one decent lawyer in Vegas. He convinced the tax man that if they hit me with everything they could, they'd make me become a criminal again, and that wasn't very smart. Instead, they just took all I had. And I went to dealer's school.”

“You don't get to keep the money,” he said.

She frowned, but said nothing. The night chill descended on them. They couldn't make out the lines on each other's face. Their cigarettes glowed orange in the dark.

“When did you start drinking
for real?
” she asked.

“Didn't happen all at once,” he said.

“But the first time,” she said, “not the first time you partied or got toilet-hugging drunk, but
the first time
, the first time it
meant
something.”

“What is this?” he said, making it mostly a joke. “AA?”

“You're not anonymous,” she whispered. “And there's always a first time.”

A cricket chirped, a trucker barreled past and blew his air horn at the lights of the house by the side of the road. Then he was gone, roaring off into the big nowhere.

“Long ago,” Jud said. “Far away.”

And as he sat smoking in the cool desert darkness, Jud heard the echo of a man named Willy in a Santiago, Chile, hotel room: September 11, 1973.

“This is an ungood,” said Willy. “In the
minus
zone.”

It was four in the afternoon. There were three of them in the Santiago hotel room:

Jud
, standing at the edge of their fifth-floor window, watching the smoke billowing into the sky from the Moneda Palace.

Luis
, or whatever his real name was—they'd been strangers when they rendezvoused in Miami, and Jud assumed everyone else was also using a work name. Jud claimed to be “Peter.” Luis was a gray-flecked Cuban who couldn't be as old as he seemed. He was stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, the phone resting beside him. Waiting to ring.

Willy
was a brown-haired, bad-skin-under-his-beard, wiry guy. He was midtwenties, and his syntax said
Vietnam
, but they all knew better than to ask each other any true questions.

Rifles cracked somewhere up the street, answered by a burst of machine gun fire.

Jud looked toward the corner where he'd seen a tank a half hour before, but that street looked empty.

Willy drummed his fingers on the table with one hand while the other turned the dial on the room's AM radio. He got static. He was the commo expert. Such primitive fiddling was far beneath his expertise, but there was nothing else for him to do.

Waiting.

For the fourth man on the team to show up. To call. Waiting to
go
, waiting to
do
, waiting to say
sayonara
, South America,
adiós
, Chile, it's been good to know, better to go.

The fourth man was Braxton, sandy-haired, slow-talking side-of-beef Braxton. He was the boss. Jud was number two. Willy was commo, and Luis was the indig expert, the Spanish speaker backing up Braxton's Tex-Mex fluency. Luis was good with a gun, a bullet counter schooled in the Sierra Maestra with Fidel, then given graduate studies at the CIA's Guatamalan training camp for the 2506 Brigade fighting Fidel.

Their guns were in watertight bags in the toilet tank. Made it hard to flush. The toilet had been getting a workout since they'd gotten
the word
at ten
P.M.
the night before. They ordered up the last meals served by room service, popped dex pills, and made Jud's room command center. Willy set up his long-range transmitter that had been hidden in a
turista
portable AM/FM unit, but they were in radio silence, no one who'd call them, no one who'd respond.
Shit
, Willy'd said,
so much for advanced technology
.

Braxton was sixteen hours gone, thirteen hours overdue from a rendezvous
out there
, in the city.

Santiago, capital of Chile. An old city of low-slung colonial architecture, surrounded by the
pablaciones
, slums, and offset by
la cordillera
, the mountains. Almost three million people. Rampant poverty, but a country rich in poets, artists, and musicians, a country beloved by Anaconda and Kennecott Copper companies, which found billions in the mines of Chile, and by the International Telephone and Telegraph company, which owned 70 percent of Chile's phone company. In Chile, politics were passionate. Three years before, a Marxist named Salvador Allende had been elected president, a personal political triumph for this man who'd been campaigning for that post since 1952; in 1964, the CIA funneled $3 million to his successful political opponents.

Allende's 1970 election victory sent shock waves through America. Nixon and Kissinger were furious; ITT had spent almost half a million dollars to stop Allende's 1970 election. Executives from multinational companies and high American-government officials wrung their hands and bemoaned a new Marxist regime in America's backyard. ITT pledged $1 million to the CIA efforts to
control
Allende; in the Watergate era, ITT would become famous for such political pledges, including the $400,000 the company pledged to the American President's political party.

After Allende's election in 1970, the American President loosed his spy hawks and diplomatic dogs.

Those men compartmentalized their crusade.

Track I was an anti-Allende propaganda and economic program and diplomatic efforts by the ambassador to keep the Chilean Congress from confirming Allende as president. Although Track I's effects were often visible, its dynamics were kept secret from the American people.

Track II was kept secret from the American ambassador, the State Department, even from the White House-level 40 Committee that supposedly oversaw American foreign policy and intelligence operations. CIA agents using forged passports were sent to infiltrate Chile, contact extreme right-wing military officers, and encourage them to stage a coup if Allende successfully rode his popular election into the president's chair. Track II personnel were allowed to provide direct assistance to any such coup, but it was to be a Chilean affair.

Track III did not exist.

Jud and his team, the Track III group, had been in Santiago for nine days, flying down on documents they'd long since burned showing them to be a film crew for a television company, with delicate cameras that bored customs agents had no desire to unscrew. As he'd gone about his business in this capital city of a country torn by strikes, 300 percent inflation, and political street fights, Jud was struck by the overwhelming sense that this nation was on a train, gathering speed, racing toward some unknown destination.

And he had a ticket.

“Man, this is
fucked
up,” muttered Willy.

“Save it,” ordered Jud from the window. Like Willy, Jud had grown a beard for the mission, and his hair was over his ears. In Chile in 1973, as in America, long hair was hip. Nonmilitary.

“Braxton is supposed to have come back, Jack!” said Willy. “Without him, we got
zero
cover.”

Machine guns chattered outside their hotel.

Braxton's rendezvous promised to deliver credentials for the team to use. In case. For security reasons, credentials in a coup can only be issued just before the coup.

From the bed, Luis said, “These events have a clock of their own. Things happen. Develop.”

“That wasn't the plan, man,” mumbled Willy.

Their mission had two levels.