“Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher looked at Escobar and straightened the fingers of his left hand. The muscles of that arm were still twitching, but the twitch was subsiding. He thought that when the time came, he would be able to 132
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use the arm. And if Ramón shot him, so what? Let Heinz see if his machine could raise the dead.
“Do we have your attention, Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher nodded.
“Why do you want to protect this man Núñez?” Escobar asked.
“Why do you want to suffer to protect this man? He takes the cocaine. If he wins his revolution he will proclaim himself President for Life and sell the cocaine to your country. He will go to mass on Sunday and fuck his coke-whores the rest of the week. In the end who wins? Maybe the Communists. Maybe United Fruit. Not the people.”
Escobar spoke low. His eyes were soft. “Help us, Mr. Fletcher. Of your own free will. Don’t make us make you help us. Don’t make us pull on your string.” He looked up at Fletcher from beneath his single bushy eyebrow. He looked up with his soft cocker spaniel eyes. “You can still be on that plane to Miami. On the way you like a drink, yes?”
“Yes,” Fletcher said. “I’ll help you.”
“Ah, good.” Escobar smiled, then looked at the woman.
“Does he have rockets?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Many?”
“At least sixty.”
“Russian?”
“Some are. Others came in crates with Israeli markings, but the writing on the missiles themselves looks Japanese.”
She nodded, seeming satisfied. Escobar beamed.
“Where are they?”
“Everywhere. You can’t just swoop down and grab them. There might still be a dozen at Ortiz.” Fletcher knew that wasn’t so.
“And Núñez?” she asked. “Is El Cóndor at Ortiz?”
She knew better. “He’s in the jungle. Last I knew, he was in Belén Province.” This was a lie. Núñez had been in Cristóbal, a suburb of the capital city, when Fletcher last saw him. He was probably still there. But if Escobar and the woman had known that, there would have been no need of this interrogation. And why would they believe Núñez would trust Fletcher with his whereabouts, anyway?
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In a country like this, where Escobar and Heinz and the Bride of Frankenstein were only three of your enemies, why would you trust a Yankee newspaper reporter with your address? Loco! Why was the Yankee newspaperman involved at all? But they had stopped wondering about that, at least for now.
“Who does he talk to in the city?” the woman asked. “Not who he fucks, who he talks to.”
This was the point where he had to move, if he was going to. The truth was no longer safe and they might know a lie.
“There’s a man . . .” he started, then paused. “Could I have that cigarette now?”
“Mr. Fletcher! But of course!” Escobar was for a moment the concerned dinner-party host. Fletcher did not think this was playacting. Escobar picked up the red-and-white pack—the kind of pack any free man or woman could buy at any newsstand like the one Fletcher remembered on Forty-third Street—and shook out a cigarette. Fletcher took it, knowing he might be dead before it burned all the way down to the filter, no longer a part of this earth.
He felt nothing, only the fading twitch of the muscles in his left arm and a funny baked taste in his fillings on that side of his mouth.
He put the cigarette between his lips. Escobar leaned further forward and snapped back the cover of his gold-plated lighter. He flicked the wheel. The lighter produced a flame. Fletcher was aware of Heinz’s infernal machine humming like an old radio, the kind with tubes in the back. He was aware of the woman he had come to think of, without a trace of humor, as the Bride of Frankenstein, looking at him the way the Coyote in the cartoons looked at the Road Runner.
He was aware of his heart beating, of the remembered circular feel of the cigarette in his mouth—“a tube of singular delight,” some play-wright or other had called it—and of the beat of his heart, incredibly slow. Last month he’d been called upon to make an after-luncheon speech at the Club Internacional, where all the foreign press geeks hung out, and his heart had beat faster then.
Here it was, and so what? Even the blind found their way through this; even his sister had, there by the river.
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Fletcher bent to the flame. The end of the Marlboro caught fire and glowed red. Fletcher drew deep, and it was easy to start coughing; after three years without a cigarette, it would have been harder not to cough. He sat back in the chair and added a harsh, gagging growl to the cough. He began to shake all over, throwing his elbows out, jerking his head to the left, drumming his feet. Best of all, he recalled an old childhood talent and rolled his eyes up to the whites. During none of this did he let go of the cigarette.
Fletcher had never seen an actual epileptic fit, although he vaguely remembered Patty Duke throwing one in The Miracle Worker. He had no way of knowing if he was doing what epileptics actually did, but he hoped that the unexpected death of Tomás Herrera would help them to overlook any false notes in his own act.
“Shit, not again! ” Heinz cried in a shrill near-scream; in a movie it might have been funny.
“Grab him, Ramón!” Escobar yelled in Spanish. He tried to stand up and struck the table so hard with his meaty thighs that it rose up and thumped back down. The woman didn’t move, and Fletcher thought: She suspects. I don’t think she even knows it yet, but she’s smarter than Escobar, smarter by a mile, and she suspects.
Was this true? With his eyes rolled up he could see only a ghost of her, not enough to really know if it was or not . . . but he knew. What did it matter? Things had been set in motion, and now they would play out. They would play out very fast.
“Ramón!” Escobar shouted. “Don’t let him fall on the floor, you idiot! Don’t let him swallow his t—”
Ramón bent over and grabbed Fletcher’s shaking shoulders, perhaps wanting to get Fletcher’s head back, perhaps wanting to make sure Fletcher’s tongue was still safely unswallowed (a person couldn’t swallow his own tongue, not unless it was cut off; Ramón clearly did not watch ER). Whatever he wanted didn’t matter. When his face was where Fletcher could get at it, Fletcher struck the burning end of the Marlboro in Ramón’s eye.
Ramón shrieked and jerked backward. His right hand rose toward his face, where the still-burning cigarette hung askew in the socket 135
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of his eye, but his left hand remained on Fletcher’s shoulder. It was now tightened down to a clamp, and when he stepped back, Ramón pulled Fletcher’s chair over. Fletcher spilled out of it, rolled over, and got to his feet.
Heinz was screaming something, words, maybe, but to Fletcher he sounded like a girl of about ten screaming at the sight of a singing idol—one of the Hansons, perhaps. Escobar wasn’t making any noise at all and that was bad.
Fletcher didn’t look back at the table. He didn’t have to look to know that Escobar was coming for him. Instead he shot both hands forward, grabbed the butt of Ramón’s revolver, and pulled it from its holster. Fletcher didn’t think Ramón ever knew it was gone. He was screaming a flood of Spanish and pawing at his face. He struck the cigarette but instead of coming free it broke off, the burning end still stuck in his eye.
Fletcher turned. Escobar was there, already around the end of the long table, coming for him with his fat hands out. Escobar no longer looked like a fellow who sometimes did the TV weather and talked about high bressure.
“Get that Yankee son of a bitch!” the woman spat.
Fletcher kicked the overturned chair into Escobar’s path and Escobar tripped on it. As he went down, Fletcher stuck the gun out, still held in both hands, and shot it into the top of Escobar’s head.
Escobar’s hair jumped. Gouts of blood burst from his nose and mouth and from the underside of his chin, where the bullet came out.
Escobar fell flat on his bleeding face. His feet drummed on the gray tile floor. The smell of shit rose from his dying body.
The woman was no longer in her chair, but she had no intention of approaching Fletcher. She ran for the door, fleet as a deer in her dark shapeless dress. Ramón, still bellowing, was between Fletcher and the woman. And he was reaching for Fletcher, wanting to grab him by the neck, throttle him.