Night of the Jaguar (26 page)

Or so Moie supposes; it is still unclear. He rummages in his net bag and takes out a clay flask. The girl says, “Are you going to change into a monster now?”

“Not now,” says Moie.

“How come?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“I do not. How come you live in this tree?”

Moie regards the child with a fierce expression, but she meets his eye without a blink. Over her left shoulder he sees her death hanging, well separated and glowing like a small star. He thinks of the word
interesting,
which he has learned from Father Tim, a word the Runiya lack. It describes a hunger Moie has not known existed, but, like pisco for some men, it is hard to give up once tasted. This girl is interesting, and not only because Jaguar has sent her to him.

“How come?” she asks again.

“I will tell you,” says Moie. “First, before anything, there was Sky and Earth. Each was separate from the other and they didn’t know each other’s language, not at all, so they were very sad. They had no one to talk to! But from their sadness there came Rain, who knew the language of both of them. And they were happy for a while. But then Sky wanted Rain to be his wife, and she agreed. This made Earth jealous, because he also loved Rain and he wanted her to be his wife. So they fought a war. Sky sent lightning to strike Earth, and Earth sent fires and smokes from inside him to choke Sky. Then Rain said Stop, stop, I will marry both of you. First I will be with Sky, then I will drop and be with Earth, then I will rise again to Sky. So they went on and on. Rain had many children. She had Sun and Moon. She had River. She was pleased that there were more things in the world, so she went to her husbands and said, It’s good to have many things. You must make things, too. So they did. Sky made stars and birds. Earth made plants and trees, and worms and insects and the swift animals. Earth was proud of these things and he boasted of them to River. River said, If you mate with me, we will make something even greater than these things. Earth said, If we did that, your mother, Rain, would be jealous. But River said she didn’t care about that and smiled over her shoulder at Earth. So he mated with her. So in time out of her womb came Caiman.”

“What’s that?”

Moie makes spectacles of his fingers and gnashes his teeth and writhes his body until she understands he is talking about a crocodile, like the one in
Peter Pan
.

“River told Caiman that he could only eat the creatures that put their feet to the water, but he was a wicked child and would not listen.
At that time there were no fishes. He left the water and chased the deer and tapirs and ate them, and ate trees and all plants, and the beetles and ants.”

“Crocodiles can’t eat trees.”

“Things were different in those days. Do you want to hear this story or not?”

“I do, but I mostly want to hear the part about why you live in our tree.”

“It will come where it comes in the story—” Moie begins, but he is interrupted by a shout from below: “Amelia Paz, are you up in that tree again?” It is Miss Milliken, sounding upset. Amelia slides from the hammock and stands on a broad, nearly horizontal limb. “I have to go now. Will you tell me the rest of the story later?”

“It may happen that I will,” says Moie. She smiles at him and disappears amid the leaves below.

Prudencio Rivera Martínez, on what he had good reason to fear might be his final day on earth, waited outside the security barrier for the arrival of the early direct Delta flight from Dallas–Fort Worth. Gabriel Hurtado never entered the United States via an international flight. Instead, he flew to Mexico City, where his organization picked him up and drove him to the border at Ciudad Juarez. There, with the aid of excellent forged Mexican papers, he crossed the border as a businessman of that nation, untroubled among the thirty thousand vehicles that drove north into El Paso on that day and every day. Hurtado’s attitude toward the United States of America was amused contempt, rather like that of a peasant for a particularly stupid, if vitally necessary, burro. The Americans had been trying to catch him for years, and yet he never had any difficulty entering the country in this way, or staying for as long as he pleased. His only complaint about U.S. homeland security was that the border controls were so porous that amateurs were encouraged to enter the drug business in numbers, driving down the price of his product. From El Paso they had taken the highway to Dallas, whence he and his companion had enjoyed a restful first-class flight to Miami.

Martínez saw the men emerge from the gate, Hurtado and a man name Ramon Palacios, although this name was infrequently used. At
the sight of this second man, Martínez felt some relief, because his presence meant that Hurtado was taking this crazy business seriously, that he thought their adversary was significant, and that therefore Martínez was not entirely to blame for the Calderón fiasco. The two men were both middle-sized and stocky, perhaps a little smaller than middle-sized, smaller than Martínez anyway, and dressed in similar pale sports jackets, open-collared pastel shirts, dark trousers, and shined slip-on shoes with brass fittings. Both had fat dark mustaches and dark hair combed back, although that of Hurtado was starting to recede. People said that Hurtado kept the man around because they looked alike, so that an assassin might become confused. Martínez thought this was a foolish opinion, since you would necessarily have to kill both of them together. Killing only one would do you no good, and Martínez thought also that if he had one shot at the pair he would hit Palacios before Hurtado, because while Hurtado was a dangerous enemy, you would have to be totally crazy to want El Silencio after you with a grudge.

Hurtado gave him a severe smile and a formal embrace, El Silencio offered an uninterested nod and continued his examination of the surroundings. Because of airport security, he was unarmed and therefore uneasy. They went to baggage claim in silence, and after the usual wait, the bodyguard picked out two small leather bags and an aluminum attaché case, ignoring Martínez’s offer of help. At the curb waited a black Lincoln Navigator with tinted windows, bought for cash two days previously. Hurtado always rode in Navigators at home, and Martínez wanted him to be comfortable. They entered the vehicle, the boss and his man in the rear and Martínez in the front seat. Hurtado greeted Santiago Iglesias, who was driving. The man knew the name and face of every man who worked for him and a good deal about their personal lives as well—for example, where their families could be found. It was one of the reasons he had lasted so long in the business, that and El Silencio. As they pulled away from the curb, Martínez heard the click of a lock opening behind him and various other metallic sounds. El Silencio was arming himself.

“What’s the situation, Martínez?” Hurtado asked, switching without preamble from his joking with Iglesias. No joking with Martínez; he was not yet entirely off the hook.

“I have two men in each of the two houses, and two vans on the street in front of each one. I also have a man at the ferry terminal in a car. It’s an island, and that’s the only way on or off.”

“No boat?”

“We need a boat?”

“
Pendejo,
of course we need a boat. Both homes were vandalized, and whoever did it didn’t come on the ferry. Therefore, they have a boat. Also, we’re based on an island, so we need a boat. Get one—no, two—and people to handle them, and make them fast ones. How are the clients?”

“They’re shitting themselves since Calderón got it. No trouble there. They’re like lambs.”

“Police?”

“Thumbs up their ass. They’ve been around to both the Garza and the Ibanez place. We get tipped off and disappear while they come around. Not a problem.”

“Yes, that’s what you said before Calderón got it. You know why I’m not more pissed off at you for fucking this up, Martínez?”

Martínez admitted he didn’t know.

“Because this saves us some trouble. Calderón would have had to go in any case. He knew things that the others didn’t and was starting to be a pain in the ass. So, if he leaves the scene a little early, it’s not a problem for me, and also, as you say, the others are in line. The only one we absolutely need at this point is Ibanez, to handle the logs and so forth. So, as far as JXFC is concerned, I assume the son took over.”

“No, the daughter, is what I understand. The son is some kind of
maricón
. He’s in New York. The daughter is running the company.”

“Good. I’m starting to feel better already. She won’t be a problem when the time comes. Now, what about these two
fregados
in the painted van?”

“Not yet. The plates came up empty. There’s no such number.”

“Fake plates? That’s interesting. That suggests a serious organization.”

From the front seat, Iglesias said, “They were funny plates. The numbers weren’t orange like the ones on this car and there was no palm tree.”

“They were out-of-state plates,” said Hurtado half to himself. He was not particularly angry. There was no reason that a gang of Cali
chuteros
should know that in America license plates varied from state to state. He explained this to his men.

“And it said
yova
on the top,” added Iglesias.

“
Yova
?” said Hurtado. “What does this mean,
yova
?”

“I don’t know, boss, that’s what it said, in big letters and there were clouds and some buildings on it, too, no palms. I-O-W-A,
yova
.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” said Hurtado. “This is the name of a state far away, and obviously it would do no good to run the plates there because it wouldn’t give us an address in Miami. I think these people are very clever, for Americans.”

“You’re sure they’re Americans, boss?” asked Martínez.

“They’re
using
Americans, and there isn’t a sniff at home of anyone working against us in this operation. Or so my friend here assures me.”

He meant El Silencio. Martínez thought that if El Silencio had been unleashed on the Colombian underworld with orders to find out if anyone was interested in the Puxto operation or was playing games in Miami, and hadn’t found anything, then it was fairly certain that nothing was going on. Using the rearview mirror he stole a look at the man. If half what they said about him was true, he ought to have horns and fangs and a tail, but he looked undistinguished, an ordinary Latin American fellow, except for the heavy scarring on his throat. The legend was that when he was ten someone had been killed in front of the miserable little shop his family ran in Cali and, as usual, the killers had taken out all the potential witnesses, his whole family: mother, brother, three sisters. Or others said that the family had been running some racket and became too greedy and got wiped as a lesson. But without doubt the family had been killed and someone had cut the boy’s throat, failing to kill him but damaging his voice box, so that he could only make a croaking whisper, and also without doubt at the age of fifteen he had found the man responsible for the murders and kidnapped him and kept him alive for six days and delivered him back to the place whence he came, still alive, but in a condition that shocked even the criminals of Cali. Thus he was brought to the attention of Gabriel Hurtado.

“What do you think about this cat business?” asked Martínez, to change the subject.

“A tactic to frighten us,” said Hurtado dismissively. “They must think we’re ignorant peasants frightened by magical animals. This suggests the Russians. Or Haitians. In any case, these
chingadas
are definitely the kind who won’t leave it alone, and so they’ll try for these other two
pendejos
we have and then we’ll have
them
. Isn’t that right, Ramon?”

El Silencio nodded, but naturally he said nothing at all.

O
nion sauce!” said Professor Cooksey. “Oh, bother! Oh, blow!”

Jenny looked up from her microscope and blinked. “Excuse me?”

Cooksey glared at her and said “Onion sauce!” again and grasped a handful of the yellow legal pages, reprints, and printouts that covered his desk in drifts, and threw them up at the ceiling. She stared at him.

“I feel like Mr. Mole,” he said. “This wretched paper and the atmosphere around this house. It’s not to be borne.”

Jenny knew what he meant. After the second killing, Rupert had become paranoid, or more paranoid than usual, although he said, often and loud, that they didn’t know
for certain
that Moie was involved in any violence and that the Forest Planet Alliance had always been vociferously against any hint of ecoterrorism, and if the police were to become involved, the forces of exploitation would be delighted to smear their good name. Therefore, Jenny saw, in a strange way the recent association with Moie was to be made a nonevent. Rupert had ordered the property scoured to remove any trace that Moie might have left behind and had ordered the elimination of any illegal substances. Scotty’s marijuana plants had been uprooted and mulched and carried off the property by dead of night, smoking paraphernalia had been deep-sixed,
and the library and computers had been scrubbed of anything that would have offended a troop of Mormon Girl Scouts. Luna had stopped talking to anyone but Scotty, and that only in short angry bursts. Scotty’s normally morose mien had entered the outer suburbs of clinical depression, and since he was largely responsible for the physical maintenance of the property, the grounds had lately acquired a seedy look, like a man with a bad haircut and a three-day beard. No one had mentioned calling the police.

“Who’s Mr. Mole?” Jenny asked.

“Mr. Mole. In
The Wind in the Willows
?” He observed her blank stare. “You don’t mean to tell me you’ve never read
The Wind in the Willows
?”

“I haven’t read
anything,
Cooksey,” she replied with an irritated sigh. “I’m illiterate.”

“Nonsense! Didn’t anyone ever read to you?”

“I don’t think so. Places I grew up they mainly stuck us in front of the TV.”

“Well, that’s a shame. And I intend to repair the lack instantly. This minute.”

With which he rose from his chair and darted to a bookshelf, where he took down a thin yellow clothbound volume, much worn.

“Here it is, and we won’t read it here, oh no. Tell me, do you like boats?”

“I don’t know. I never been in one.”

“Never been…
never
been in a boat? I call that child abuse. My girl, there is, and I quote, ‘there is
nothing
—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ That’s in this, too.” He waved the little book. “I tell you what, let’s utterly abandon our fusty academic labors, and this depressing and toxically earnest milieu, and head for the water. Are you game?”

She gave him one of her frank and shining smiles and a little shrug. “Whatever,” she said.

They took the old Mercedes, and a foam cooler full of beer and chips and sandwich stuff, which they sneaked from the silent kitchen like children stealing late-night contraband. Cooksey also brought a large stained rucksack full of various clanking gear, so that, he said, they
could consider it a scientific expedition and not mere disgraceful lazing about.

They drove for an hour or so down the narrow road through the Everglades until they arrived in Flamingo. Cooksey knew a man who rented out wood-and-canvas Old Town canoes so that, Cooksey said, they would not have to use an
aluminum
abomination, like paddling a boiler shop, and they did rent a sixteen-footer and carried it down a launch ramp, and Jenny sat in the prow, with all their gear behind her, and Cooksey put a foot in the craft and pushed off gracefully. They paddled across Whitewater Bay, a vast sheet of what looked like ruffled pale gray silk dotted with dark mangrove islands, that showed as the sort of silhouettes used in stage musicals to suggest tropic climes. It was easy paddling, with a stiff breeze behind them.

On the other side of the bay Cooksey steered them to a little beach composed of billions of tiny shells, part of a small island that the state had designated a campsite. This was Wedge Point, he said, and time for lunch. There was a cleared area ringed with cocoloba and poisonwood trees and one large tree bearing green fruit, which Cooksey said was lignum vitae. They spread their blanket in the shade of this tree and ate their sandwiches and drank two beers each. Then Cooksey leaned against the trunk of the lignum vitae tree and gestured for her to sit down next to him. He had the book out and she leaned against the trunk next to him and he read her
The Wind in the Willows
. She listened openmouthed, like a child. At some deep level she understood why he was doing this, that he was giving her something she should have had as a small girl, a simple thing, being out in nature with a man she trusted, having a story read to her, a story about nature and animals. He was curing her, in a way, and also curing himself, she understood that, too. He wasn’t being entirely selfless, but she didn’t know from what illness he suffered.

At a certain point in the reading, she said, “I don’t get this part. Who is this guy with the horns playing the music?”

“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn? Well, I think it’s meant to be Pan. He’s not dead to the animals, at least in this story. He’s their lord.”

“Like a god?”

“More like the spirit of nature itself. He’s shown in Greek art as a
faun with a set of reed pipes and furry legs and hooves. His shout makes us mad. It’s where we get the word
panic
. Apparently he plays no more. It was a famous story; Plutarch reports it in his essay about why the ancient oracles failed. A ship was passing the island of Paxos and the pilot heard his name called and then a mighty voice shouted out ‘Great Pan is dead.’ And then he heard the sound of weeping. It happened just around the time of the Nativity, so the early Christians believed it was a symbol for the end of the pagan world. You have absolutely no idea of what I’m talking about, do you?”

“No.”

He laughed, not unkindly, and said, “Then let us return to Rat and Mole.” Which they did, but he made her read the last chapter herself, and she found that she could actually do it, with a little help. After that, they went around the little campsite, putting out sticky traps, and Cooksey darted about with his butterfly net grabbing flying creatures from the air. While he did that, he talked about the fall of Rome. Jenny knew Rome only as a type of movie and had believed that it was all made up, like Conan and
Star Wars
. She was fascinated to learn that a civilization could collapse without nukes or robots like in
Terminator
and wanted to know why.

“There are many theories,” said Cooksey in response to her question, “and any number of great thick books on the subject. Some blame Christianity for sapping the fighting spirit of the empire. Others say that the riches from the conquests destroyed the small farmers who provided the strength of the legions. The empire started to hire troops from outside the empire to defend it and they weren’t as good as the Romans had been. There’s even a theory that lead in their water pipes made them stupid and crazy.”

“What do
you
think?”

He laughed. “My thoughts are valueless—I’m no historian. But my old dad was a pretty fair amateur, we spent a good deal of time poking around Roman ruins.
He
thought they just got tired. People get tired of life and so do civilizations. They didn’t believe in their gods anymore, and their political system was dead, just a gang fight among generals, and thousands of foreigners were pouring through their borders, and they couldn’t be bothered to keep them out because they needed
them, you see, to protect them from the even worse foreigners. So they pulled the legions back from the frontiers and everything sort of melted away, the schools closed, the books were used to start fires, and people forgot how to read and so on. And the buildings and roads crumbled because no one remembered how to fix them, and there was no money anyway and no trade.”

“That’s sad,” she said.

“Is it? Everything passes, you know. First the gods fail and then the people lose heart and the dark closes in. As now. I’ll think you’ll agree that the gods we worship are, if anything, less powerful than great Pan.”

“You mean like Jesus?”

“Would that we actually worshipped Jesus…good Lord, is that a Palmira?” With that, Cooksey brought up his butterfly net and stalked a small white butterfly marked with yellow and brown for several minutes, finally scooping it up in the gauzy folds and holding it up to his face, upon which shone a delighted grin. Jenny thought he looked now about twelve. He transferred the insect, still wrapped in the netting, into a wide-mouthed jar; when its fluttering ceased, he examined it through a hand lens.

“Did you kill it?” asked Jenny.

“Well, yes,” said Cooksey, peering. “By God, it
is
a Palmira. It’s an Antillean butterfly, almost unknown in these parts. It feeds on beggar-tick. My word, there’s another one!” He leaped and snagged this one, too; into the jar it went.

“I wonder if it’s breeding here now,” he mused.

“Not anymore, since you got here, if those were the only ones.”

He looked at her closely. “You don’t think I should’ve killed them, do you? I quite sympathize, but after all I’m a scientist and therefore a soldier in the legions of death. We kill to understand, and we think it’s justified therefore. Pan would not have approved. Do you know, our friend Moie thinks we’re all dead people, although he believes you are still a little alive.”

She was looking at the bright still shapes in the killing jar. “I don’t know…I mean, no offense, Cooksey, but I don’t think I could, like, do that for a living, kill things. It kind of creeps me out. Why is it important if they’re breeding here?”

“Well, because it might be yet another tiny sign that the tropics are moving northward in response to global warming. This is a Cuban butterfly, after all. In any case, we will dedicate the rest of the day to Pan and kill no more and merely observe the life around us. This, too, is science, and a quite venerable sort of science at that.”

So they did and spent hours observing the insect, marine, and bird life of the small island through hand lens and binoculars until the sun sank to touch the tops of the tallest trees and Cooksey said it was time they started back, because they would have to paddle into the teeth of the wind. But when they cleared the pass and entered Whitewater Bay again, they found that the wind had died away entirely and that the whole sheet of water was as calm as a millpond. Jenny had that very thought, although she had never seen a millpond. Another alien image, this one from the story she had received from Cooksey’s old book, but it was not the only one. Indeed, her head now seemed to contain many more rooms than it had, all decorated with pictures and furniture she could not remember, and connecting hallways that beckoned mysteriously. This was what regular people were like, she thought, all this stuff, because when you knew stuff, like the Roman Empire and fig wasps and global warming and the great god Pan, well, the stuff wanted to connect up with itself and out of that came new thoughts you’d never thought before, thoughts maybe no one had ever thought before. It was disturbing, like being dumped in a new foster home and not knowing what was going to happen; you wanted to sit on the bed they showed you and not move until someone told you what was what.

She didn’t want to think about all that just now and found she could still shut it down pretty much and just be, and sink into the easy paddling and the passing scene, the silver water like a tarnished mirror perfectly reflecting the peach-colored wisps of clouds and the orange disk of the setting sun, each stroke of her paddle meeting its twin coming up from below before vanishing in the swirl of the stroke. And above floated the birds, white egrets, gulls, once a flight of brown pelicans, in their peculiar prehistoric-seeming lumbering flight, each of these, too, with its twin below for the instant of passage. And looking back she saw their wake, two long lines extending into the unrecover
able past, and there was something nagging at her she wanted to ask Cooksey, what was it?

“What do
we
worship, Cooksey?”

“Pardon?”

“You said something about dying gods and all. And that we didn’t worship Jesus. It was just before you found that butterfly.”

“Oh, yes. Well, my mother used to say that when people stopped worshipping God they didn’t stop worshipping entirely. She thought the urge to worship was hardwired into humankind, like the urge for procreation. So they worshipped lesser gods, mainly themselves, as being most convenient, but also things like money, fame, and sex. Or youth. And these gods all fail, just like Pan did, being tied to corruptible and earthly things. Of course she was quite a devout Catholic. She was a Howard, you see, a very ancient Catholic family where I come from. Very unusual for an anthropologist to be a believer, they spend so much time picking apart the beliefs of the natives, but when people asked her about it she would laugh and say yes, yes, it’s perfectly absurd, but I happen to believe it’s all true. She had a deep sense of the weird, and I picked up some of it, which is why I suppose I get along with our Moie. He doesn’t think Pan is dead at all. It would shock him most awfully to suggest it.”

“How does he know about Pan? I thought that was the Romans a long time ago.”

“Oh, he doesn’t call him Pan. He calls him Jaguar, but it’s the same fellow, you know, although with somewhat sharper teeth. Yes, I suspect Pan is loose again in the kingdom of the dead people, and I’d bet he’s more than a little cranky after his long sleep. I imagine we’re in for some interesting experiences.”

“What will happen?”

“Nothing very nice, I suspect. The earth is becoming a little bored with us dead people. Moie, whatever he is, represents a symptom, a bit like that butterfly from the south. I mean, suppose you had a great mansion and invited some guests because you were a generous and kind lady. And suppose these guests started to behave in a rude and destructive manner…”