Fletcher shot him twice, once in the chest and once in the face. The face-shot tore off most of Ramón’s nose and right cheek, but the big man in the brown uniform came on just the same, roaring, the ciga-136
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rette still dangling from his eye, his big sausage fingers, a silver ring on one of them, opening and closing.
Ramón stumbled over Escobar just as Escobar had stumbled over the chair. Fletcher had a moment to think of a famous cartoon that shows fish in a line, each with his mouth open to eat the next one down in size. The Food Chain, that drawing was called.
Ramón, facedown and with two bullets in him, reached out and clamped a hand on Fletcher’s ankle. Fletcher tore free, staggered, and fired a fourth shot into the ceiling when he did. Dust sifted down.
There was a strong smell of gunsmoke in the room now. Fletcher looked at the door. The woman was still there, yanking at the doorknob with one hand and fumbling at the turn-lock with the other hand, but she couldn’t open the door. If she’d been able to, she’d have already done it. She’d be all the way down the hall by now, and screaming bloody murder up the stairs.
“Hey,” Fletcher said. He felt like an ordinary guy who goes to his Thursday-night bowling league and rolls a 300 game. “Hey, you bitch, look at me.”
She turned and put her palms flat against the door, as if she were holding it up. There was still a little nailhead of light in each of her eyes. She began to tell him he mustn’t hurt her. She started in Spanish, hesitated, then began to say the same thing in English. “You mustn’t hurt me in any way, Mr. Fletcher, I am the only one who can guarantee your safe conduct from here, and I swear I will on my solemn oath, but you must not hurt me.”
From behind them, Heinz was keening like a child in love or terror. Now that Fletcher was close to the woman—the woman standing against the door of the deathroom with her hands pressed flat against its metal surface—he could smell some bittersweet perfume.
Her eyes were shaped like almonds. Her hair streamed back above the top of her head. We’re not just fucking around, she had told him, and Fletcher thought: Neither am I.
The woman saw the news of her death in his eyes and began to talk faster, pressing her butt and back and palms harder and harder against the metal door as she talked. It was as if she believed she could 137
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somehow melt herself through the door and come out whole on the other side if she just pushed hard enough. She had papers, she said, papers in his name, and she would give him these papers. She also had money, a great deal of money, also gold; there was a Swiss bank account which he could access by computer from her home. It occurred to Fletcher that in the end there might only be one way to tell the thugs from the patriots: when they saw their own death rising in your eyes like water, patriots made speeches. The thugs, on the other hand, gave you the number of their Swiss bank account and offered to put you on-line.
“Shut up,” Fletcher said. Unless this room was very well insulated indeed, a dozen ordinary troops from upstairs were probably on their way now. He had no means of standing them off, but this one was not going to get away.
She shut up, still standing against the door, pressing it with her palms. Still with the nailheads in her eyes. How old was she? Fletcher wondered. Sixty-five? And how many had she killed in this room, or rooms like it? How many had she ordered killed?
“Listen to me,” Fletcher said. “Are you listening?”
What she was undoubtedly listening for were the sounds of approaching rescue. In your dreams, Fletcher thought.
“The weatherman there said that El Cóndor uses cocaine, that he’s a Communist butt-boy, a whore for United Fruit, who knows what else. Maybe he’s some of those things, maybe none. I don’t know or care. What I know about, what I care about, was he was never in charge of the ordinaries patrolling the Caya River in the summer of 1994. Núñez was in New York then. At NYU. So he wasn’t part of the bunch that found the nuns on retreat from La Caya. They put three of the nuns’ heads up on sticks, there by the water’s edge. The one in the middle was my sister.”
Fletcher shot her twice and then Ramón’s gun clicked empty.
Two was enough. The woman went sliding down the door, her bright eyes never leaving Fletcher’s. You were the one who was supposed to die, those eyes said. I don’t understand this, you were the one who was supposed to die. Her hand clawed at her throat once, twice, then was still. Her 138
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eyes remained on his a moment longer, the bright eyes of an ancient mariner with a whale of a tale to tell, and then her head fell forward.
Fletcher turned around and began walking toward Heinz with Ramón’s gun held out. As he walked he realized that his right shoe was gone. He looked at Ramón, who was still lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood. Ramón still had hold of Fletcher’s loafer. He was like a dying weasel that refuses to let go of a chicken. Fletcher stopped long enough to put it on.
Heinz turned as if to run, and Fletcher waggled the gun at him.
The gun was empty but Heinz didn’t seem to know that. And maybe he remembered there was nowhere to run anyway, not here in the deathroom. He stopped moving and only stared at the oncoming gun and the oncoming man behind it. Heinz was crying. “One step back,” Fletcher said, and, still crying, Heinz took one step back.
Fletcher stopped in front of Heinz’s machine. What was the word Heinz had used? Atavism, wasn’t it?
The machine on the trolley looked much too simple for a man of Heinz’s intelligence—three dials, one switch marked ON and OFF
(now in the OFF position), and a rheostat which had been turned so the white line on it pointed to roughly eleven o’clock. The needles on the dials all lay flat on their zeroes.
Fletcher picked up the stylus and held it out to Heinz. Heinz made a wet sound, shook his head, and took another step backward.
His face would lift and pull together in a kind of grief-struck sneer, then loosen again. His forehead was wet with sweat, his cheeks with tears. This second backward step took him almost beneath one of the caged lights, and his shadow puddled around his feet.
“Take it or I’ll kill you,” Fletcher said. “And if you take another step backward I’ll kill you.” He had no time for this and it felt wrong in any case, but Fletcher could not stop himself. He kept seeing that picture of Tomás, the open eyes, the little scorched mark like a powder burn.
Sobbing, Heinz took the blunt fountain-pen-shaped object, careful to hold it only by the rubber insulated sleeve.
“Put it in your mouth,” Fletcher said. “Suck on it like it was a lollipop.”
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“No!” Heinz cried in a weepy voice. He shook his head and water flew off his face. His face was still going through its contortions: cramp and release, cramp and release. There was a green bubble of snot at the entrance to one of his nostrils; it expanded and contracted with Heinz’s rapid breathing but didn’t break. Fletcher had never seen anything quite like it. “No, you can’t make me!”
But Heinz knew Fletcher could. The Bride of Frankenstein might not have believed it, and Escobar likely hadn’t had time to believe it, but Heinz knew he had no more right of refusal. He was in Tomás Herrera’s position, in Fletcher’s position. In one way that was revenge enough, but in another way it wasn’t. Knowing was an idea. Ideas were no good in here. In here seeing was believing.
“Put it in your mouth or I’ll shoot you in the head,” Fletcher said, and shoved the empty gun at Heinz’s face. Heinz recoiled with a wail of terror. And now Fletcher heard his own voice drop, become confidential, become sincere. In a way it reminded him of Escobar’s voice.
We are havin an area of low bressure, he thought. We are havin the steenkin rain-showers. “I’m not going to shock you if you just do it and hurry up. But I need you to know what it feels like.”
Heinz stared at Fletcher. His eyes were blue and red-rimmed, swimming with tears. He didn’t believe Fletcher, of course, what Fletcher was saying made no sense, but Heinz very clearly wanted to believe it anyway, because, sense or nonsense, Fletcher was holding out the possibility of life. He just needed to be pushed a single step further.