'Zamora did this,' Jonny said. The image was clear. The prison infirmary had fixed him up nicely and, all their doctors were Committee recruits: bloodless and faceless; company men all the way.
'It was obvious. He had lead the Committee to the Croakers. Right to Ice's room. Now he was leading them to Conover. Oh fucking hell-'
'What is it, Jonny?' ask Conover.
'Jonny's hand moved involuntarily to his cast. I got shot earlier,' he said. 'I got shot and Zamora had them wire me. It's in my goddam shoulder.'
Conover approached him, shaking his head sympathetically.
'I'm truly sorry, son. It's an awful thing to have done,' he murmured.
'We'll have to cut it out, of course. You can't go around beeping the rest of your life.'
Jonny laughed, when he thought about it. Zamora could not let him off that easily. The insult had been there all along; all that had been required was for him to recognize it. There was, Jonny had to admit, even a kind of twisted beauty to it.
Conover called the driver out, and spoke to him for some time in quiet Spanish. When they parted, the driver opened the trunk and unrolled a cloth-bound set of surgical instruments. He helped Jonny off with his coat and pulled back the top of the Pemex jumpsuit.
When he removed Jonny's cast and xylocaine patch, he did it with such sureness that Jonny was sure the man had been a medic at some time.
Jonny felt a cool punch of compressed air on his arm as the driver injected him with something from a pressurized syringe.
Seconds later, Jonny was flying. The driver set him on the rear fender and hooked a small work light to the inside of the trunk lid.
Before Conover retreated inside the car, Jonny heard him say: 'When you find it, bring it to me.'
The driver held out a small device that looked like an old fashioned tattoo needle, but which Jonny recognized as an Akasaka laser scalpel. In Spanish, the driver told Jonny to concentrate on the hanging light.
He did not feel a thing.
Later, when the car was moving and Jonny was sacked out on the back seat, still high on whatever they shot him with, he heard voices in the midst of conversation. His shoulder ached with each heartbeat. But he seemed to recall that his shoulder always hurt, didn't it? Eventually he recognized Conover's voice.
'We each do our bit as best we can, of course. Zamora is a vicious, greedy prick, but a sterling leader of men. I've seen him pull many strange stunts in my time. However, I have never before known him to betray a sense of humor.' He glanced at Jonny. 'Have you?'
Jonny just rolled away and fell asleep. 'I'd like to go home now,' he said, but nobody heard him.
A dark, sour smelling harbor glittering oily rainbows amidst sluggish waves. Men talking in a circle some distance off, a litter of shapes around their feet; another painting came to him, Tanguy, this time. Sharks- the bleached carcasses of dead sharks, stripped of their flesh by birds and their jaws by souvenir hunters, strewn across the sand like some hallucinatory crop ready for harvest. Down the beach, a roofless merry-go-round, half- collapsed, dangling a string of bloated wooden horses into the dirty water. The flares of gas jets miles away.
Jonny rubbed grit from his eyes and tried to focus on the circle of men outside on the beach. He had no idea how long he or they had been here. He was very thirsty.
From what Jonny could see, only two men were doing all the talking. One was Conover, who was easy to spot, towering above the rest, the glowing dot of his cigarette tracing erratic patterns in the air. Behind Conover stood Ricos, scowling into the ocean wind, his pompadour flailing around his ears like a dying animal.
The man Conover was talking to was considerably shorter, but very board, wearing the white dress uniform of a Mexican Naval officer. A jet foil with the name Sangre Christi painted on the bow floated a few meters out in the harbor, rolling gently with the surf.
Two small Zodiac crafts were beached nearby, one overloaded with sealed metal containers. The identification numbers on the Sangre Christi indicated that the ship was from the Gobernacion fleet stationed in San Diego, but she was running no lights, and the flag on her mast was Venezuelan, not Mexican. When the moon broke through the heavy cloud layer, Jonny got a good look at her crew, spread out in a semi-circle around the Zodiacs. About half wore naval uniforms; the others were dressed variously in jeans and leathers, pale gringos and dread- locked blacks numerous among the crew.
'That's it then,' Jonny thought. 'They're pirates.'
Picking up the tequila from Conover's traveling bar, Jonny took a drink. The pirate captain pointed back to his ship and shouted something. Warmed by the tequila, Jonny's thoughts drifted back to his own time as a dealer.
Jonny always picked up a buzz when he was pushing or setting up a meet that was wholly divorced from the rest of his life. Part of it was the thrill an ex-Committee boy felt at having gone over to 'the other side.' Another part of it had something to dowith vague notions of changing the world, but he attributed this to youthful folly, regarding it as a consequence of spending too much time sober.
Groucho's casual remark equating Jonny's dealing with revolutionary politics had disturbed him. It saddled him responsibilities he had no intention of trying to fulfill. The world (at least Los Angeles, which was all he knew of the world), as Jonny perceived it, was little more than the natural battle of competing organisms, like the virus he had seen on the micrograph at the Croakers' clinic. Each viral unit was incomplete until it had taken over a living cell and used that organism to replicate itself, and the one-percenters and gangs of the city followed the virus's pattern. Inertia swept them along in a perpetual hustle, moving in time to the endless rhythm of commerce; most knew nothing else. And, as was the way of nature, the strongest viruses ate the weaker. The strongest viruses were the Committee, the lords and the multinationals, Jonny thought, forces that were overwhelming and, in the end, incomprehensible to him.
Did the Croakers really believe they could change a world run by Zamora or Nimble Virtue? Even Conover was just a business man who had his own reasons for being there. And Groucho was too damned small to play Atlas, Jonny thought.
He wondered where Ice was at that moment. He felt certain that she was all right; she seemed to have a talent for staying alive.
In his mind, however, Sumi had become one with the ruined apartment. If Zamora really had her, she was lost. Jonny loved both women (something which he was quick to point out as the single distinguished feature of his character) but he felt he owed them something more that.
The door opposite Jonny opened and Conover leaned in. Salt mist sparkled on the smuggler lord's shoulders and the wide brim of his hat. He smiled at Jonny. 'How are you feeling?' he asked. 'We'll be through here in just a few minutes. These boys are playing it to the last row. Hand me that box by your feet, will you?'
Jonny looked at the floor of the Cadillac and found a small black lacquered box with brass fittings in the shape of lotus petals.
His head spun as he picked the box up. Conover smiled as he took it.
'Thanks, son. Sit tight. Have a drink,' he said.
Watching the smuggler lord cross the colorless sand, Jonny was overcome by a sudden and overwhelming sense of loss. As if he were adrift in some vast and infinite ocean with no land in sight. He had the strong urge to bail out right there, to run from the car and to keep running. But for some reason he stayed. If he drifted long enough, he thought, a landfall was bound to appear. Besides, he was drugged silly. Where would I go if I ran, he wondered. On the beach, the pirates were smoking and passing a bottle. Jonny raised his tequila to them and decided to remain in the car. Drifting, he knew, was what he was best at.
Outside, the pirate captain was nodding as Conover ceremoniously handed him the small box. The pirate opened it for a moment, waved briskly to a couple of men by the Zodiacs. They made their way through the sand slowly with several containers, setting them a few meters from Conover and Ricos. That done, they retreated quickly from the smuggler lord's presence. Jonny caught a quick movement of one pirate's hand. He had crossed himself, Catholic-fashion.
Ricos flicked open a butterfly knife and slit the metal strips that bound the top of one container. Reaching inside, he pulled out a white brick wrapped in heavy plastic and handed it to Conover.
Jonny looked around the car, wondering where Conover's chauffeur had gone. When he looked back at the beach, the pirates were moving out, pushing their Zodiac's into the surf. The moon lit, briefly, the rubber floats that
