a largish packet filled with white powder. He tapped some of the powder onto the overfold of the packet and began dividing it into lines with the knife.
‘What’s that?’ Alvina leaned in over his shoulder. ‘
‘Frost.’ He chopped at a granular lump. ‘It’s like cocaine… stronger. Want some? You won’t be able to sleep.’
‘No, not now. Aren’t you going to sleep?’
‘I don’t want to be groggy at three.’
He fitted a drinking straw to his nostril and snorted five fat lines in rapid succession. The skin on his forehead tightened.
‘The guards will take that from you.’
‘We’ll see,’ he said.
He did three more lines. His thoughts began an agitated dance, and he imagined blue-white crackles of electricity sparking at his temples. The drain was bitter at the back of his throat.
‘Get some sleep now,’ he told her.
He extinguished the light and sat by the door. The lights were off in the adjoining room as well, and only a faint glow penetrated from the street, along with faint music and babble. Patches of shinier black like worn velvet appeared to be floating on the dark, and Mingolla wondered if—just as the chipped porcelain of the sink, the dinged cot, the splintered table—the darkness in cheap hotel rooms bore signs of previous occupancy. He thought about the Nicaraguan and was a little worried. Although he was stronger than Tully, and Tully was one of the best, he would be facing the Nicaraguan on his own territory… a dangerous territory. He would have to be very cautious. What most worried him was the Nicaraguan’s craziness, the morbidity that must have prompted him to seek refuge in the Iron Barrio. Craziness was a variable for which he could not prepare, and he only hoped it would prove a weakness.
Alvina snored lightly. He made out the shape of her body, lying on her side, facing away from him. The frost had boosted his natural horniness, and he kept having to grapple with his erection, shifting it to a more comfortable position. He really would like to fuck her. To fuck history, do it doggy-style, kneeling and balls-deep in history’s meat, overlooking its scarred plain and chunky ass. And he thought that was in essence what he was doing by working for Psicorps. Fucking the history of rebellion, of the Army of the Poor, of brutalized peasants and Indians. He was the bad guy now. This had crossed his mind before, but never with such immediacy, and fired by the exhilarating clarity of the frost, he pictured himself on a movie poster, MINGOLLA in flaming letters, his figure towering above burning villages and screaming hordes, mento-rays beaming from his eyes. Then he saw it from another viewpoint. Saw himself sneaking along a corpse-choked alley, hunting for a victim. He couldn’t understand how he had come to this pass; he could perceive the events leading to it, but that alone explained nothing. It seemed to him that he must have been tricked, or that he had tricked himself, or… Alvina mumbled in her sleep. Damn, he wanted to fuck her! Not even fuck her, just be close to her, with someone. He was scared, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. Anybody would be scared with the Barrio in their future. He would lie down next to her, that’s all, lie down and hold her, feel his drugged heart slugging against her scarred back, and know that if she could survive horror and deprivation, he could make it, too. He needed that consolation, that creature comfort. He stripped, padded to the bed, and eased in beside her. She stirred but did not wake. But when he put an arm around her, inadvertently touching her breast, she looked at him over her shoulder, the whites of her eyes luminous. ‘Go back to sleep,’ he said. He couldn’t help cupping the breast, letting the stem of the nipple slip between his fingers, making it stiff. His erection pronged her ass. Without a word, she cocked her knee, and he slid between her legs, rubbing back and forth, feeling her moisten. He worked a finger into her cunt, then two fingers, swirled them around, her muscles sucking him deeper, hips grinding. She must want him, he thought. In her mind they would be brother and sister in league against a Nicaraguan monster. And he wanted her, not just anyone, her, wanted her big Commie ass to milk him dry, wanted union and redemption and control. He flipped her onto her stomach, came to his knees behind her, and slipped in with a slick effortless motion, pushing inside until none of him was showing. He held her by the waist, liking the elevation, the combined sense of intimacy and distance. He withdrew a little, watched himself move in and out. He ran his hands along her flanks, molding them. Reached down and squeezed a hanging breast, folding her face into the pillow. Not a sound from her, but that was guerrilla tactics, biting back their cries to keep their position secret, screwing under cover of midnight and ferns. He rode her hard, trying to drive sound out of her, trying to make her squeal, relishing the way her ass churned, forgetting to listen for her cries, and everything, fear and lust and drugs, balling up into a blazing knot, tightening and then unraveling into a thread of sweet languor, leaving him sweaty and gasping atop her.
She turned away after he withdrew, tension signaling her resentment. ‘I didn’t mean…’ he began.
‘You paid,’ she said coldly.
He was ashamed, and he saw he would have to repair the damage done, shore up her trust, maybe establish affection. But he was also contented, pleased with himself, with his conquest of history. The repairs could wait, he thought; for now he wanted her to know exactly whom she was dealing with, even if he didn’t know himself.
At three-thirty Mingolla and Alvina stood among a group of women—a couple of dozen at least—waiting for the bus that would transport them to the Barrio. Nobody spoke. The night was starless, moonless, and wind seethed in the grasses along the side of the road, pouring off the unfeatured blackness of the sea. Behind them lay a collection of huts, a true barrio, their thatch looking as bedraggled as molting feathers in the wash of light from their doorways. Headlights came from the north, swelled and resolved into a white schoolbus with neat black lettering above the windshield that read DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS. The bus braked with a squeal, its door hinged open, and three short wiry men piled out, their pistols drawn. They wore street clothes, and red masks like those worn by wrestlers covered their heads. Mingolla saw that the masks were not merely red, but depicted flayed faces with anatomically correct renderings of muscle and tendon. Horrid things that made the men’s eyes look glittery and false, their mouths becoming simple black holes each time they spoke. When they spotted Mingolla they cut him out from the milling women, pushed him down in the grass, and trained their pistols on him. ‘Wait!’ he said, projecting camaraderie and trust. The pistols wavered, lowered.
‘Who are you?’ asked one of the men, helping him up.
Mingolla led the men aside, gave his name, and told them he was with the government, that he intended to work undercover in the Barrio, seeking intelligence from a certain prisoner. He asked their names.
‘Julio.’
‘Martin.’
‘Carlito.’
He asked if they would be on duty the next night, and they said yes; he told them to expect him to be among the women when it came time to drive them to work. He thought it strange that he could so easily work his will upon men with such fearsome visages, and his dominance made clear the petty resources of the evil that funded them. They hustled him onto the bus, and as he had instructed, they shoved him into the seat beside Alvina. ‘How did you manage it?’ she whispered after the engine had kicked over.
‘Bribes,’ he said.
She absorbed this and nodded. ‘You’ll do well in the Barrio.’
They drove for half an hour past coconut plantations and brush, then turned onto an unmarked road; the road widened into the plain of packed dirt that fronted the Barrio. Mingolla had seen aerial photographs of the place, showing it to be a singlestory building with a roof of corrugated iron that spread across miles of defoliated jungle. Seeing the building at ground level was in some ways less impressive, for it had the appearance of a long warehouse atop which masked guards were posted—not an unexpected sight in Latin America; yet he felt rather than perceived its size, as if it possessed a gravity and atmosphere subtly different from the surrounding land. And closer, deeper within that sphere of influence, able to make out particulars, he understood the full menace of the prison. Spotlights swept over the roof from the nearby jungle, the beams causing the bloody masks of the posted guards to flare like matches, illuminating thick coils of smoke that twisted blue and ponderous like the tails of demons whose bodies were lost to sight in the heavens. Above the main gate—a sliding metal door—and also swept by the spotlights, the bodies of eight men and women were depended from crude gallows, all gashed and burned to such an extent that Mingolla couldn’t believe any of them had survived to be hanged. Through the windows of the bus came a terrible smell compounded of charcoal cookery, smoke, the cloying mustiness of death, the sickly sweetness of people living cramped together, and God knew what else… a thousand smells blended into
