Mingolla had the urge to lose control, to begin cutting with his knife and screaming himself. He wound up beside the door Leon had entered, wedged it open, and a teenage boy slipped past him into the dimly lit room… slipped past and cried out as a knife flashed across his neck. Leon’s startled face peering out Mingolla pushed inside and backhanded Leon to the floor, and Leon rolled up into a crouch, the knife poised. But he faltered, his expression growing puzzled, then woeful under Mingolla’s assault of guilt and friendship betrayed. The knife dropped from his hand.
Mingolla bolted the door, kneeled beside the boy, and checked for a pulse; his fingers came back dyed with red. Leon had slumped against the rear wall and was weeping, his face buried in his hands. In the corner beside him, ringed by guttering candles, wrapped in blankets as gray as her skin, an old woman was trembling, staring fearfully at Mingolla. He snatched one of her blankets and used it to cover the dead boy. He picked up Leon’s kinfe, squatted next to him. ‘Who are you working for?’ he asked. Leon just sobbed, and Mingolla jabbed his leg with the knife, repeating the question.
‘Nobody, nobody.’ Leon’s Adam’s apple bobbed, his voice broke. ‘I wanted the rest of the drugs.’
Leon’s treachery brought home to Mingolla the full extent of his foolhardiness. The manchild strolling around Hell, contemplating its aesthetic, playing ineffectual good Samaritan. He was damned lucky to be alive. No more
‘No, please… God, no!’ The old woman crawled toward him, dragging a train of blankets. ‘I’ll die, I’ll die!’ Her voice articulated and decrepit, like a grating pain, like broken ribs grinding together. Her face a gray death mask with hairy moles, lumped cheekbones. Her death an accomplice after the fact to the dead thing of her life. Mingolla looked away from her, repelled, ready to cut Leon, full of cold judgment.
‘It’s not his fault,’ whined the old woman. ‘He’s not responsible.’
Mingolla had an answer for that, courtesy of Philosophy 101, but withheld it. ‘Whose fault is it, then?’ he asked, pointing at the boy with the knife.
‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what he’s…’ A tear the size of a pearl leaked from one of her rheumy dark eyes. ‘The things they made him do, the awful things… but he fought back. Ten years in the jungles. Ten years living like an animal, fighting all the time. You don’t know.’
Leon’s sobs racked his chest.
‘Who are you?’ Mingolla asked.
‘He’s my son… my son.’
‘Did you know he was going to do this?’
She didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, and you’d have done the same. All those drugs, so much money. You’re no different from us.’
‘No,’ said Mingolla, pointing again to the boy. ‘I wouldn’t have done this.’
‘Fool,’ said the old woman, and the screams and shouts from without, receding but still a measure of chaos, seemed to be echoing the word. ‘What do you know? Nothing, you know nothing. Leon… Oh, God! When he was seventeen, just married, the soldiers came to our village. They took all the young men and armed them with rifles and drove them in a truck to the next village, where the people were suing a big landowner. A real villain. And the soldiers ordered the young men to kill all the young women of that village. They had no choice. If they hadn’t obeyed, the soldiers would have killed their women.’ She looked sadly at the gray walls as if they were explanations, reasons. ‘You know nothing.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Leon. ‘God, oh God, forgive me!’
‘I know he tried to kill me,’ said Mingolla. ‘I don’t care what made him this way.’
‘Why should I bother?’ Leon’s mother gazed at the ceiling, her hands upheld in supplication. ‘Let him take my son, let me starve. Why should I live any longer?’ She turned a look of pure hatred on Mingolla. ‘Go ahead!’ she shrilled. ‘Kill him! See’—she pointed a knobbly finger at Leon—‘he doesn’t care, either. What’s it matter, life or death. In this place it’s the same.’ She screeched at him. ‘I hope you live forever in this godforsaken hole! I hope life eats you away an inch at a time.’ She tore at her blouse, ripping away buttons, baring the empty sacks of her breasts. ‘Kill me first! Come on, you devil! Kill
To fend off weariness he did more frost. He rejected the idea of returning to Alvina’s. There he would be drawn to listen to Hermeto’s reminiscences, feel renewed appreciation for Alvina, and that would only weaken him. He would wait here until midnight and then take care of de Zedegui. Take care of him in a straightforward fashion. No diversions, no tricks. He wanted a gunfight, a test of strength. Subtlety was not his forte, and he would be prone to bouts of foolhardiness until he gained more experience; he needed to reassure himself of the efficacy of brute force. A certain lack of prudence was corollary to the wielding of power, he thought; a credential of boldness. And if this attitude reflected a diminished concern for his survival, so be it: such a diminished concern would be an asset to a killer, for if one valued one’s own life too highly, such a valuation would be difficult to dismiss in regard to other lives.
Leon’s weeping began to perturb him, and he let him join his mother in sleep. He pulled out de Zedegui’s photograph, inspected it for clues. But that bland professorial face gave nothing away, unless its unreadability was itself a clue to subtlety. He hoped that was the case, that their struggle would be one of strength against subtlety: that would be the best proving ground of all. He dipped up more frost with the edge of the photograph. The drug was a solid form in his head, a frozen vein of electricity that soon began to prevent any thought aside from a perception of its own mineral joy. Mingolla’s nasal membranes burned, his heart raced, and he sat unmoving. He gazed at a spot on the wall, his resolve building into anger, like a warrior envisioning the coming battle, living it in advance, yet for the moment secure amid hearth and home, with his dogs sleeping at his feet.
It began to rain shortly before six o’clock, a hard downpour that drummed like bullets on the iron roof, drowning out every other noise. All over the Barrio, sections of the roof were being lifted, allowing tracers of rain to slant through the orange gloom, the separate drops fiery and distinct. People cast off their rags and danced, their mouths open, their torsos growing slick and shiny, and others caught the water in buckets, and others yet dropped to their knees, their hands upheld to heaven. Fires hissed and burned low. Smoke fumed, and a damp chill infiltrated the air. There was a general lightening of mood, a carnival frenzy, and, taking advantage of it, Mingolla strolled up to the oil drum fire at the comer of de Zedegui’s house and joined three old men who had gathered around it, convincing them that his presence was expected and welcome; out of the corner of his eye, he studied the four guards flanking de Zedegui’s door. He blocked, becoming invisible to the uncommon senses of the man he intended to kill, and thought how best to deal with the guards.
The old men were roasting snakes that had been pierced by lengths of wire; the snakes were crisp and blackened, their eyes shattered opaque crystals, their jaws leaking thin smoke, and underlit by the fire, the men’s faces were made into cadaverous masks of shadow and glowing skin. They offered Mingolla a portion of the meat, but he suggested instead that they share their bounty with the guards. This struck the three as a marvelous idea. Why hadn’t they thought of it themselves? They extended whispered invitations, and de Zedegui’s guards hurried over. When the guards slumped to the ground, put to sleep by Mingolla’s exertions, the old men expressed consternation, worrying that the meat might be tainted; but Mingolla reassured them and urged them to drag the guards off behind a pile of rubble, where they might rest more comfortably. That done, the old men returned to their snakes, paring slices of meat, tasting, and declaring that the snakes could use another turn, all as if nothing unusual had happened.
Five minutes later, de Zedegui came to stand at his door. He wore jeans and a green shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was more slender than Mingolla had assumed; his hair had grown long, falling in black curls to his shoulders, and his dark face was composed. He, too, was blocked, but on noticing the absence of his guards, he let the block slip. His heat was strong, but not as strong as Tully’s, and this gave Mingolla the confidence to let his own
