Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

"April 25, 1984. The Palm Beach police charged two bellhops at the Brazilian Court Hotel with selling cocaine and conspiracy to sell cocaine. Six months later they both copped a nolo to selling and the conspiracy charge was dropped. Eighteen months' probation and expungement."

The DA nodded. "Good, Ed. That's good preparation."

"Thank you, sir. Sir? My name is Bill, actually? Bill Allard?"

"Jesus Christ. I didn't sleep. I'm sorry. Jesus. Of course you're Bill."

"By the way, I thought you handled that question very well."

"Question?"

"On Nightline , about whether you're interested in the AG job?"

"Oh, right. Okay, so the Kennedy case… what?"

"It was a very unpopular prosecution. Here are the editorials." He put a manila folder on the DA's desk.

The DA looked at them blearily. "You want to gist them for me?"

"'Prosecutorial zeal' is all over them. There's not a lot of support out there for rich white kids who OD on cocaine. And they had much more to go on in the Kennedy case than this one. They had witnesses who told the grand jury they heard one of the bellhops bragging about how he sold cocaine to a Kennedy. Even with that it was a no-win."

"You know who I feel sorry for in all this?"

The ADA shook his head.

"Ethel. What that woman's been through. Well, look, we're not going to let that influence us, but Jesus Christ, Mullen has to make his own decisions, damnit. What does he think this office is? This really, this really pisses me off."

"Yes, sir."

"You tell Mullen to make his own fucking decisions. If he's got a case, bring us a case. If he doesn't have a case, don't bring us a case. And while you're at it, tell him I do not appreciate the way this thing has been handled. Tell him I'm going to speak to Brown about this-personally."

"Yes, sir."

Helen said, "It's Morley Safer, from 60 Minutes ."

"All right. We all set on this, Ed?… Morley?"

Charley sat by the light of the fire, Spook beside him, staring at the mailbox in the display case on the wall surrounded by all the leather-bound books.

The orphanage was started by Mexican nuns who fled over the border into Texas during the anticlerical hysteria of the revolution when three of their order were raped and crucified on saguaro cacti. They bought an abandoned farm on the outskirts of McAllen. They found him in the makeshift mailbox one cold winter morning, badly dehydrated and the color of plum, swaddled in a week-old comics section of The Star . They named him Karl Becker after the local fishmonger. All the children were named after local merchants. Sister Rosa Encarnacion had hit on the scheme. Herr Becker would show up every Saturday afternoon in his truck with whatever he hadn't been able to sell that week, cases of reeking skate and shark, sometimes a discolored eel or two. They changed his legal name to Charley when America entered the Great War in 1917, but the nuns went on calling him Carlos.

Old Raul looked up and saw Carlos bleeding from his nose and both ears and a tooth was gone, the second this week.

"Aiy, Carlito." He took the boy in and washed his face and plugged his nose and let him swish some homemade mescal around inside his mouth, which left a pleasing numbness on the boy's sore gums. He let him watch him prepare that night's dinner, some horsemeat donated by a rancher with two orphans named after him. Raul tasted the horse and chopped up another handful of the slender green serrano peppers he used liberally to disguise the rottenness of the meat. He held one perfect specimen up for Carlos to admire. Carlos reached for it. "Con cuidado ," Raul urged. "I knew a man who went blind because he rubbed his eyes after holding a pepper." Raul told glorious lies. He had a scar on his belly from where he'd been knifed; he told Carlos that was where General Pershing had shot him while pursuing Pancho Villa after Villa's (and Raul's) historic attack on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. "Black Jack" Pershing had become the hero of the war with Germany, so Carlos was extremely impressed to know someone who had been shot by him. Raul said the bullet-made of silver-had been intended for Villa but that Raul had thrown himself in its path. Villa had not wanted to leave him there, wounded, but Raul insisted. Raul expertly sliced the pepper into thin strips and then cut those crosswise so that no piece was larger than the head of a matchstick. "The serrano is like Christ," he said, stirring the pepper into the horsemeat stew. "It takes all the sins of the world unto itself. That is why it is so full of fire." Carlos took a furtive pull on the bottle of mescal. Raul saw it but didn't say anything.

Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez came for him again that night, stuffing a gag in his mouth and carrying him, squirming, out of the converted barn that served as a dormitory, to one of the shacks. Lockmuller had a length of barbed wire. He looped it loosely around Carlos' neck while the others held him. "You bite me again and I'll strangle you dead." Carlos watched as Lockmuller unbuttoned his trousers. Gomez kicked him from behind. They'd demonstrated what they'd do to him on a polecat if he told the sisters: gouging out its eyes, cutting off its feet, then hanging it by its tail over a fire.

The next morning one of the nuns noticed Carlos wasn't saying his morning prayers along with the others. At first they thought it was willful and punished him for it, but as the weeks went by without the boy speaking, they began to wonder. They took him to the doctor who had five boys named after him. He poked about Carlos' mouth and couldn't find anything and suggested withholding food and water from him to see if that would get him to talk. Sister Imaculata announced to the other sisters her conviction that Carlito's muteness was the work of the Dark One. The priest who said Masses on Sunday in the old barn was a bent old man and kinder than most, but at the age where not enough oxygen was getting through to his brain. He came principally for Raul's mescal. Carlos recognized the smell on Padre's breath as he peered into his face, trying to see the Devil through the two small windows on the boy's soul. He hung a couple of rosaries around Carlito's neck and splashed him with holy water until he was sopping.

" Ego te expulso! " he shouted. Grappling with the Dark One required strengthening himself with Raul's mescal. Carlos calmly watched, dripping-wet with holy water, as the old priest invoked the Lord to drive out the evil inside him. The Devil was too much for him, however, and after one session the old man passed out on the floor. When he awoke he told of a dream he'd had in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to him and told him that she had taken away the boy's speech as a sign of Her Favor. Sister Imaculata wondered about this, having smelled his breath, but she knew herself that the ways of God are not to be fathomed, and a priest, even drunk, is a priest, and so kept her suspicions to herself.

A year went by and one night Carlos awoke from a bad dream to see three silhouettes moving out the door: Bryce, Lockmuller and Gomez. He followed them to the tractor shed. He crept up to the door and peered in and saw the three of them sitting around an oil lamp with magazine and newspaper pictures spread around. He saw they were pictures of Amelia Earhart, who'd just flown across the Atlantic Ocean, wherever that was. They had their trousers off and were dipping their hands into a can of axle grease and rubbing them on what the nuns called the lugar del diablo , the Devil's playground, if you will. Carlos watched. The nuns preached hard against this particular form of sin, saying it was like driving nails into the hands of Christ. It explained why they hadn't been dragging him off in the middle of the night the last few weeks.