Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

He shook their hands and asked their names.

"Okay," he said in his fluent Spanish, "I want to do some business with you. I want to buy some prayers."

The beggars nodded.

Charley said, "You're all Catholic, right?"

" Siii ," they said together.

"No Jehovah's Witnesses or any of that?" One took out an old rosary looked like it might have belonged to one of the Apostles. Charley peeled bills off his wad, handing each a hundred dollars. "Okay, I want Hail Marys, a hundred of them."

" Si, patron. " Another said, "What about some Our Fathers?"

"All right," he said, peeling off another round, "I'll take a hundred of them, too."

The beggar with no nose said, " Capitan , how about Acts of Contrition?"

"All right, fifty."

The oldest one, with an abscessed eye like a runny egg, stepped forward and said with gravity, " Patron , we cannot forget Our Lady of Lourdes." The other beggars murmured assent.

"How many you think she needs?"

" Pues ," said the old man thoughtfully, "it's hard to say. Our Lady of Lourdes said, 'Pray to me.' She didn't say how much to pray, but…"

" Si ," the others said, nodding.

"Prayer bandits," Charley uttered. He handed over the rest of his wad.

" Patron? "

Charley had already started back up the stairs.

"What's your name? So they'll know who the prayers are for."

"They're for Natasha."

They waved their money at the guard on their way out the gate.

Senator Gallardo arrived with his entourage on schedule. Charley was standing at the head of the gangway to receive him, Felix by his side. Felix whispered, "He's got a photographer with him."

Charley, grinning, whispered back, "You ever see a politician who didn't?… Felipe!"

"Charley!" burst out Senator Gallardo, giving him a manly abrazo . It was like old friends. Actually, they'd never met, but they'd spoken on the phone so many times over the previous months it felt like old friends.

The senator gestured at the enormity of it all. "I thought it was the Titanic ."

Charley laughed, the senator's entourage laughed, everyone laughed. Charley said, "My yacht is your yacht."

"I accept!" Everyone laughed.

Felix introduced himself to the photographer, a woman. "Do you work for the senator?" he said.

"No no. Just sometimes. I'm free-lance."

"Press?"

"Sure."

"Are your pictures for the senator, then?"

"Yes."

"You see, Mr. Becker's a very private man. Just between you and me, he's a little worried about kidnappers."

"Ah."

"You'll only give these photos to the senator for his private use, then?"

"Yes, certainly."

Felix grinned. On those occasions when Felix smiled, light came into him.

The senator introduced the provincial governor, the mayor, the commander of the military district of Loreto, the commissioner of customs, to whom Charley expressed special gratitude for his assistance with the formalities.

"Well," said Charley, "would you like to have a tour?"

What a question!

He took them first to his Rogue's Gallery, a bulkhead aft of the forward lounge on which he'd hung pictures of himself with assorted nabobs and panjandrums.

"There's Kissinger. This one was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Carter."

"Human rights," said the senator.

"Right. There's Haig, you remember him. Here's the Emperor of Japan. He was a prince then. With a camera, wouldn't you know. That's the papal nuncio, he's a cardinal now. Prime Minister of Jamaica. This fellow here, now, he got himself beheaded by his chief of staff just a couple of months after this was taken. Terrible thing. Good man, too."

The senator said, "A lesson for us all," occasioning some mirthless laughter.

Charley took them to the bridge and showed them Esmeralda 's sophisticated navigational system, especially the look-down, shoot-down radar mounted on the bow to detect the huge, hull-piercing logs and tree trunks that barreled down the Amazon's current at torpedo speeds.

On their way back to the main salon, Charley pointed out the table that had once belonged to Queen Victoria. "But that isn't the reason I bought it," he said. "I am reliably informed that Tallulah Bankhead once made love on top of that table."

He showed them the Art Deco gold-glass panels from the old Normandie , the brooding Vlaminck seascape, the gay Dufy water-color of the Cote d'Azur, Cocteau's sensuous sailor, John Steuart Curry's ancient graybeard mariner battling the furious storm alone on a sinking, wave-swept deck, the gentle Bierstadt coastal scene, various postrealist Mihanovics, Jean-Louis Bilweis' risible trompe 1'oeils of scuba divers and mermaids, Montague Dawson's tear-jerking painting of a Victory ship being machine-gunned by a U-boat as the crew jump over the rails into the flaming water, Manet's "Absinthe Drinker" mounted playfully over the bar.

"There's an interesting story behind that," said Charley, tending bar himself, as was his wont. "Manet painted a version of that painting and they damn near ran him out of town for it. You didn't paint drunks back in the 1850s. Just wasn't done. One of his buddies was Baudelaire. Baudelaire didn't much like it either, though he drank a lot of absinthe, I mean Baudelaire drank . And took drugs. And had syphilis. He had a terrible end but Manet stuck by him. After he died, Manet did another version of the same painting, with Baudelaire's face instead of the rag-and-bone man who was the model for the first. Scotch for you, sir, another scotch for you, Mr. Mayor, scotch for the governor, and that was a scotch and Coke for you, sir? Coming up. I had absinthe once. It's illegal, but they do a little bootlegging in a town in Switzerland near the French border. Can you imagine the Swiss doing anything illegal? Here you go, sir, Dewar's and Coca-Cola. Salud. "

They drank for a while on the fantail salon and then dinner was announced. On their way to the dining room they noticed the Stele, and they all stopped. It had that effect on you.

"Magnificent," said the senator.

"Ain't it just?" said Charley. An art magazine had once said that Charles Becker could manage to make Michelangelo's "Pietà" sound like a '57 Chevy.

"Stele" stood about six feet tall, an upright slab of poured ferroconcrete interlaced with thousands of strands of fiber optics, so that its dull, rough-hewn surface was speckled with dots of astral intensity. It was named for the monoliths the ancients used to erect to their fallen warriors, or to make a holy place, or in some cases, probably, just because they felt like it. The fiber-optic strands were all connected to a noiseless electric motor inside its base that played a continuous, kaleidoscopic light show over a twenty-four-hour cycle. Pinpricks of brilliant cobalt blue turned crimson, then melted into oranges, yellows, greens and violets, producing a stained-glass window made by aliens: a dandelion burst of fireworks blazed, shimmering tendrils of light cascading slowly into a moonlit sea. Comets screamed across the universe, smashing into each other, exploding in luminescent chunks that hurtled furiously into the ocean below, sending up waves that climbed up and up and up, becoming a mountain that metamorphosed into a temple. Across the front of the temple appeared letters-Phoenician or Greek, perhaps-scratched out in a fiery ink, hot as molten lava, that seemed to flow from an angry Creator's fountain pen. Mene mene tekel upharsin. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting? Charley led his guests in to dinner.

The commissioner of customs squeezed the arm of the military district commander.

"Did you notice something?" he said.

"What?"

"His guests. They're all men."