Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

" Yes. "

"That was Diatri's bust. Here's the photo of the two of them together. He even signed it for him."

"He signs photos for everyone, Dick. He's, he's that way. It's the noblesse oblige thing."

"Right, it's just-"

"I'm sure he's a fine agent, first-rate, but why the hell does he have to be part of the, the military aspect? Unless he's good with mines, for God's sake."

"As I understand it, they were about to medical him out on a Disability when he broke the case. He wasn't happy about that and apparently used the fact he'd broken the case as a bargaining chip to get them to keep him on."

"What kind of shop are they running over there?"

"A very good shop, John. It's just, the Administrator is very protective of his people. So he made the arrangement with him."

"Then he made one he wasn't able to keep."

"The sense I got is that if Diatri isn't part of the package, he's not going to be happy."

"I'm not in the happiness business, Dick."

"This is Sensitive City, here, John. I don't think it's going to do us any good if, if, you know, here we are doing the war on drugs and cashiering our front-line soldiers."

"In a war, if you get wounded, you get sent home. With honor."

"That's not how he sees it, apparently."

"I don't give a hoot how he sees it. I never imagined this job would entail haggling with, with GS-13s. It's not dignified, Dick."

"I hear you. But all they did was tell him he could be in on the package. After that they're, they've got a plan. They're going to stick him in Congressional Relations. Diatri doesn't know that, by the way. They'll tell him that once it's over."

"Congressional Relations? I would have thought, he looks a little rough-hewn for Congressional Relations."

"They like that. The rough-hewn look. It plays well."

"All right, he can go, but that is absolutely it. I don't want anyone else coming in here and saying, 'Oh, my Aunt Martha needs to go.'"

"Fine, right. When are you going to take this down the hall?"

"When he gets back from fishing."

"Good thinking."

"If we get into the banana-peel situation, I'll want you to be point man. Take over, damage-control it."

"Me? I would have thought Ray."

"You and Ray, I mean. I've already explained it to Ray."

"Uh-huh. What's your thinking as far as my, my being out front?"

"I don't want this washing up on his doorstep, Dick. We need to create some, some insulation. For his sake."

"Right."

"And I'm just down the hall from him, so if my doorstep gets wet, so does his, if you follow."

Only an hour of light left. Virgilio and Mirko sat dozing in the bucket seats of their respective high-performance boats. Their men lay about the wooden floating dock with their weapons on their stomachs, listening to the same Julio Iglesias tape they had been listening to all day and it was starting to get on his nerves. Eladio and his men should have been back hours ago. The yacht was only ten kilometers downriver from Yenan. Assuming they had made their attack the night before, that would give them more than enough time to be back here.

"Don't you have something else to play? Something classical?"

The man closest to the tape player said respectfully, " Si , Niño," and took out the Julio Iglesias and after a thoughtful rumination over the bag of tapes, made a selection to please his patron . Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," sung in Spanish by Charo, filled the muggy riverine air.

"Okay, Niño?"

" Yes ," he said, too preoccupied to manage more than slight annoyance. He had in mind Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra or the Asturias of the incomparable Albeniz, who had run away from his home in Spain at the age of nine, stowed away on a boat to Central America and returned home a man of the world at the age of thirteen. He tried to lose himself in the endless permutations of the surface of the water as it tumbled downriver, toward his enemy billonario .

He felt it happening: the malarial memory coming back at him again. He was back on that accursed golf course with her father.

"It's not Amanda who wants to break it off, Antonio. She's terribly fond of you. She's doing it for me. I know you're from a very good family down there, but let's face it, everything's so darn unstable down there. I just wouldn't be happy thinking my daughter was going to be caught up in the midst of some political kafuffle. I don't know about you, but I'm dying for a gin and tonic. What say we head in? I must say, you're being awfully mature about all this, Antonio."

He wondered, for the sixth or seventh time, if he should have given Eladio a radio. No. Might as well tie a radio to a butterfly.

He had, however, given Eladio a briefing on the dangers of this particular pistaco . The pistaco mythology went back-as far as anyone could trace-to 1571. It was the Indians' way of explaining the Spanish Conquest. Sendero Luminoso had revived the myth in the 1980s as a way of turning the people against the Army, with tremendous effect. Tales of horror wrought by pistacos were retailed every day. Eladio himself had described to him, in nearly journalistic detail, a slaughter of 30,000 Indians by pistacos , how they had hacked off all their limbs and thrown them into a giant cooking pot and sold the rendered grease to the North Americans for their machines, especially the rockets that they sent into the sky to impregnate the moon and create monster children who would ride back down to earth on the backs of meteors, ghastly, shrieking creatures who vomited hot lava.

The forest was the cradle of extravagant animism. Eladio's people believed that everything had a soul, often more than one. And yet the legend of the pistaco , the troll-thug who kills to obtain human grease, was hardly peculiar to the Amazon. During World War I the British government's propaganda mechanism insinuated into the public imagination stories of the German "Corpse-Rendering Works," where the dead bodies of fine young English soldiers were melted down to grease German artillery pieces; while across the Channel stories were circulated about the British "Tallow Works" of like ghastliness.

He had told Eladio not to touch anything on the boat. Everything was possessed-especially the pictures-by iwanchin , the shadow souls who can turn themselves into anything, deer, owl, butterfly, in order to kidnap the children of the Indians.

Kill them quickly, Eladio, and touch nothing. The boat itself must be disposed of according to certain rituals, which I myself will perform.

So-where was Eladio? He tried to close his mind off from disturbing images of a firefight aboard the yacht. He saw "The Absinthe Drinker" shot up with holes, Baudelaire's manic eyes peering out from under the brim of his top hat, bursting into flames, the boat rocked by explosions-

"Esteban!"

" Si , Niño?"

"Turn off that shit! I said classical ."

Puzzled, Esteban switched off Charo. The crepuscular sounds of the river reasserted themselves-frog, cricket, beetle, bird-until they were drowned out by an organ version of "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing."

Charley stepped out onto Esmeralda 's flight deck wearing his flight suit and.45 snugged in its shoulder holster and took a deep breath. He hadn't slept but a few hours since the Indian attack, and for the first time since it had all begun, he felt his age. It was dark out, an hour to sunrise. Hot Stick was leaning over one of the UAVs-Fat Albert-adding nitromethane to the fuel mixture. Charley's nostrils tingled from the vapors; it woke him up, gave him a little energy charge. The smell was familiar somehow; then he remembered sitting in the back of the limousine with his sinuses full of gun oil, on the way to the morgue with Felix.