By now Jesus was trembling. His voice skipped like a teenager’s. He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece so Viceroy Wilson couldn’t hear him begging.
“Please, Comandante, I’ve committed many bombings, kidnappings, even murders—all in the name of The Cause. What must I do to convince you to take me back?”
“Do something serious,” the old man said, his chest rattling. “And do it right.”
Jesus Bernal slammed down the phone and cursed. He returned to the sawhorse where Viceroy Wilson was working, snatched a hammer, and started whaling on a two-by-four. The warehouse was hazy with sawdust and marijuana smoke.
“So you didn’t get the job,” Wilson said through a mouthful of nails.
“I thought you didn’t understand Spanish,” Bernal snapped.
“In 1977 we had a placekicker named Rivera,” Wilson said. “From Mexico, I think. Used to give Spanish lessons on the team plane. One Sunday in Kansas City the motherfucker missed four straight field goals inside the thirty and we lost the game. That night a bunch of us got together and called Immigration.”
“You had him arrested?”
“The next day at practice.” Viceroy Wilson shrugged. “Football’s a tough sport, man.”
“So now you’re going to tell Wiley I want out.”
“Naw,” Wilson said. “Not if you stay through New Year’s. After that, I don’t give a fuck what you do.”
“I’m thinking of starting my own group,” Jesus Bernal confided.
“What you gonna call it?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“How about: The Ernesto Cabal Cabal.”
“Go to hell,” said the Cuban, still sensitive on the Ernesto issue.
“This new group,” Viceroy Wilson said, “what’s the mission this time?”
“Invade Havana.”
“Naturally.” With switchblades, no doubt. Viceroy Wilson started hammering again. Every once in a while he’d step back to see how the thing was taking shape.
Tommy Tigertail sat on a blanket in the corner, beneath a somber daguerreotype of Thlocko-Tustenugee, Chief Tiger Tail. Tommy’s eyes were open but unfocused; fresh from an Everglades passage, he had only just learned that Pavlov had been shot the week before in a beachfront swimming pool by the Fort Lauderdale SWAT team. Grief had robbed the Indian of all energy, and he had dropped his hammer and sat down in a trance. He feared it would be a night of dreams, when his fingers again would claw the wet bars of the dungeon where his great-great-grandfather had perished. On such nights Tommy’s soul wandered, keeping company with his warrior ancestor. Tommy knew what would happen if his soul should not return from its journey by dawn: He would forever become part of his own nightmare, and never awake from it. This was the fate of many anguished Seminoles, whose souls suddenly fled in the night; for Tommy Tigertail, such a death would be infinitely worse than anything the white policemen might do to him.
“Look at that crybaby,” Jesus Bernal said, scowling at the heartsick Indian. “Somebody shot his pet lizard.”
“You shut up,” Viceroy Wilson hissed at the Cuban, “or I’ll nail your nuts to your nose.”
Tommy Tigertail was the closest thing to a brother that Viceroy had found in the Nights of December. Between them was an unspoken bond that had nothing to do with the use of the Cadillac; it was a bond of history. In his post-heroin library days Viceroy Wilson had studied the Seminole Wars, and knew that Tommy’s people had fought not just to keep their land, but to protect the runaway slaves who had joined them on the Florida savannas. The magnificence of that struggle was not lost on Viceroy Wilson; he knew Tommy would never give him up. Viceroy had never trusted anyone so completely.
Jesus Bernal sensed that it was unwise and perhaps dangerous to make fun of the Indian, so he changed the subject.
‘I’m going to show the comandante a thing or two,” he said determinedly.
“That’s cool,” said Viceroy Wilson, turning back to his work, “long as you wait till after New Year’s.”
“We’ll see about that, negrito,” Jesus said bravely, after Viceroy Wilson had cranked up the circular saw and could not possibly hear him.
22
Brian Keyes never thought of himself as lonely, but there were times when he wondered where all his friends had gone. As a rule private detectives are not swamped with party invitations and that part Keyes didn’t mind; he wasn’t a lampshade-and-kazoo type of guy. But there were nights when a phone call from any sociable nonfelon would have been a welcome surprise on the old beeper. It wasn’t loneliness, really; aloneness was more like it. Keyes had felt it as soon as he’d quit the Sun; it was as if the quintessential noise of life had suddenly shrunk by fifty decibels. On some days the quiet tortured him; the office, the apartment, the stake-outs. Sometimes he wound up talking to the car radio; sometimes the damn thing talked back. Two years away from the Sun and Keyes still longed for the peculiar fraternity of the city room. It ruled your whole damn life, the newspaper, and even if it made vulgar cynical bastards out of everybody, at least the bastards were there in the empty times. Day or night you could walk into the Sun and find somebody ready to sneak out for a beer or sandwich. These days Keyes ate alone, or with clients so scuzzy he wanted to gag on the corned beef and rye.