Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

He was pointing in the direction of the salon, saying the same word over and over: " Tsugki. Tsugki. " Charley saw there was something else in Shotgun's eyes now, the shadow of a doubt. His gun lowered a few inches, a useful barometric indication of how things stood between them. Shotgun looked at Charley and there were no words necessary, it couldn't have been clearer: I'm going into the next room to check out this tsugki situation my man here is telling me about, and you better pray I like what I see. Charley did pray, prayed like an EPIRB beacon in a shark-surrounded life raft beaming up SOS bursts at the cold stars above, hoping one of them was a plane.

They squatted and sat on the salon carpet in front of it. It was going through one of its waterfall cycles, shimmery, iridescent strands of blue light cascading over invisible rocks into a moonlit pool. When a new cycle began, they sighed in unison. Charley said, "Maybe it would be a good idea if you passed around some snacks and soft drinks. Nothing with caffeine."

Felix approached with a cordless phone and an Uzi submachine gun. He had two handguns tucked inside his waistband. Felix was armed. Everyone had undergone a personal defense buildup. Hot Stick had so many bulbous grenades dangling off him he looked like an overdecorated Christmas tree. Charley's.45 was bolstered, though with safety off. For the time being things were under control. What Charley feared most was a generator malfunction. Rostow was in the engine room making sure all the needles were in the black; Felix had been on the phone to the vice-president for Operations, up in Rosslyn.

He stood beside Charley, keeping his eyes on the Indians. "I've got someone on the line," he said. "Untermeyer found him through the Smithsonian. It's three A.M. his time. I explained it as much as I could. I thought you should speak to him. His name is Tierney. Untermeyer says he's an ethnographer."

"Ethnographer," Charley repeated in the dreamy tone of voice everyone was using, for fear a single hard consonant would spark the charged air inside Esmeralda 's salon and turn it into a combustion chamber. "An ethnographer is someone…"

"He knows about Amazon Indians."

"Okay," said Charley. "Let's see just what he knows." He took the phone from Felix and punched the "hold" button and said in his Monday-morning voice, "Sorry to barge into your sleep like this, Mr. Tierney, but I got a little situation here could use some ethnographizing. I don't know what my associate here told you, but it boils down to I got about a dozen extremely hostile Indians here in my living room all making eyes at a piece of moving art I got on board, sculpture with lights in it, and they look like they're hunkered in for the wet season… How do I know they're hostile? One of my people's dead with a dart sticking out of him… No, they weren't provoked… I appreciate that, but the deforestation of the Amazon is not the issue here, Mr. Tierney. I happen to be a life member of the Sierra Club. Anyway, it was about to get worse when one of 'em started shouting, ' Soo-gi ' and the rest of them went running in like they heard Elvis Presley was back from the dead and giving a free concert… I really couldn't spell it for you, Mr. Tierney… Uh-huh, uh-huh… Same linguistic group. You're saying they are the headhunters or they're related to the headhunters?"

"What?" said Felix.

"Related. All right, then. Good. Fine. Great." Charley cupped the phone and said, "They're just related… Yeah, I'm here. All right, you know what soo-gi means?… Uh-huh, uh-huh… Well, it's about five foot high, looks like a stele, you know, one of those stone deals they used to put on a dead warrior, got a motor in it runs light through fiber optics, does patterns… What kind of patterns? Patterns, like, I don't know. Right now it's doin' like a rainbow and they're moanin' and groanin'… Yeah, I can hold."

Eladio said to his son Zacari, "How do you think it works?"

"Tierney? You there?… Don't fall asleep on me now, we're almost finished."

Rostow, Mac, Bundy and Hot Stick were standing by with their weapons pointed at the congregation of Aguaruna as casually as it could be done without being rude, trying to provide comfort for Felix, who crouched next to the Stele, perspiring heavily over a soldering iron, a converter and a picnic cooler full of two dozen size-D batteries. The batteries were all soldered together in series. He soldered a wire from the negative end of the first battery and ran it to the converter, then attached another wire from the positive nipple of the last battery to the converter. The Indians seemed to regard his ministrations as unobtrusive, but the real test was coming.

"Ready," said Felix.

Charley said, "Everybody ready?" He saw Hot Stick reaching for one of his grenades. "No, Hot Stick."

"I've got to pull the hundred and ten plug before I can hook up the DC bank," said Felix.

"How long is that going to take?"

"I don't know , boss."

"All right, it's all right."

"I'm not an electrician," said Felix.

"I sure as hell hope you are ," said Bundy.

"Okay," said Charley, "here we go. Don't shoot me, boys." He waded into their midst and stood in front of the Stele so as to block their view of it and addressed himself to Shotgun, sitting in the front row.

"On behalf of everyone, I'd just like to say what a real pleasure it's been to have you all visit with us…"

Felix pulled the plug. The Stele went dead. The Indians gasped.

"It was specially nice that you all could take the time to kill all of my crew, except for these gentlemen here…"

Shotgun was on his feet with an angry look.

"And I think I can speak for them when I say how pleased they are that you decided not to kill them as well…"

Shotgun aimed his weapon. It was about to end in a mutual massacre, an exchange of double-ought buckshot,.455 and.385, frog darts and bamboo blades, and before it was over Hot Stick would probably toss in one of his grenades just to make sure no one survived, when all of a sudden a fireworks display lit up the surface of the Stele.

The Indians sighed. And it was good.

They lowered it from davits into their longest dugout canoe.

Shotgun spoke to Charley. " Kurinku pataa ," he said. The ethnographer yawned at the other end of the line that kurinku was a corruption of the Spanish gringo . Pataa meant headman.

The Indians paddled away in the darkness, the Stele upright in the dugout like a weird grandfather clock from another world. A red sun rose on its surface, burst into a fiery dandelion, then fell, streaming in tendrils through the vastness of space, into the black night water of the Huallaga.

"No. Absolutely not."

"DEA thought that under the circumstances, since it was their thing-"

"We've got the Navy, the Marines, the Army, now you want DEA. I knew this was going to happen, Dick. Why don't we just get a 747 to fly them all down there?"

"It's his case, John."

"It is not 'his case,' Dick. Not anymore. It's bigger than that now. My God, it's on my desk now."

"I realize that. It's just that DEA made a, a deal with Diatri."

"What do you mean?"

"Without bogging you down in the details, it, basically Diatri got a commitment from, from DEA that he would be in on the, that he would be part of the package."

"I don't understand. Commitment. Who are we talking about here, a, a GS-12?"

"Thirteen. He's a Senior Agent. He passed up a promotion to Group Supervisor so he could stay on the beat. DEA says he's good, very good. In fact, you remember the five-ton seizure in Jacksonville?"

"Of course."

"The one he went down there for, for the photo op and handshake?"