helped her up, and they retreated farther into the fringe.
‘It’s stopped,’ she said.
‘Naw, look. It’s coming again.’
After a couple of minutes they realized that the object was in fact two objects, one light, one dark, and that they were advancing at a leisurely clip, moving forward fifty or sixty feet, stopping, then moving forward again; and after a couple more minutes they saw that the objects were a horse and a wagon. The wagon was a little house on wheels with a peaked roof, the walls painted dark blue and illuminated with five-pointed gold stars and a crescent moon; the horse was white, dappled with gray. No one was driving. The reins were lashed to a peg on the driver’s seat, and the window and door were black with shadow. There was something horrible about the wagon’s approach, the way it lurched emptily like a body without bones, and this, allied with its archaic appearance, lent it an omenical potency.
The wagon drew abreast of them and stopped. The horse shifted in its traces, eyes rolling, ablaze with moonlight; it was an old horse, its breath wheezy. When Mingolla stepped out onto the road, the horse tossed its head but stayed put: it was as if it wanted to run, but was obeying a set pattern of stopping and starting, and Mingolla had caught it just right. He grabbed the bridle, held its head. The horse’s eye swiveled, regarding him with fear, and Mingolla—taken by its sculptural beauty, its madness—knew the horse had been trifled with by someone like him, some drugged genius of the new order, and had been coerced to move haltingly along this desolate road for no reason other than that of the most pitiful folly. He was more affected than he had been by the terrible human results of similar folly. Human beings were liable to such, but horses, as beautiful and stupid as they were, should not have to put up with that kind of crap.
Debora came up beside him, and he handed her the bridle. ‘See if you can gentle him,’ he said. Then he hauled himself onto the driver’s seat and ducked inside the wagon.
Before he determined the wagon’s contents, he knew by intuition that it held nothing good, that it held nothing much at all, and that whatever he found would be testimony to a knowledge not worth having. An instant later he felt dread. But that was just fancy. He realized that his first intuition had embodied the true essence of terror, the comprehension that everything we dread is simply a reminder of insignificance, one we assign a supernatural valence in order to boost our morale. An angle of moonlight cut across a pallet on the floor. There was a faint cloying smell as of something once alive and unhealthy. Mingolla hesitated, not sure he wanted to poke around more. He spotted a gleam in a rear corner and reached for it. His fingers touched a slick paper surface, and he picked up a sheaf of glossy photographs, each showing a black woman intimately involved with a fat white man. His toe struck something that rattled against the wall. He groped and came up with a handful of bones. Human bones, neither fractured nor exhibiting any other sign of injury. Finger bones and sections of spinal joint. They took the light and made it seem a decaying tissue stretched between floor and window. And that was all. Except for dust and the idea of dissolution. Whether the wagon and its contents were a contrivance, a message sent from one playful maniac to another, whether one recognized it as such, Mingolla was certain that its effect upon anyone would be to make him aware of his triviality, his unlovely organic essence. He climbed back onto the driver’s seat, feeling mild giddiness and nausea. The light was so vivid in contrast to the wagon’s darkness, he thought he might breathe it in and exhale shadow.
‘What’d you find?’ Debora asked.
‘It’s empty.’ He jumped down.
‘He’s better now,’ said Debora, stroking the horse’s nose.
‘I’m gonna unhitch him,’ Mingolla said. ‘Let him graze.’
They led the horse uphill through the accumulating mist to a clearing bounded by twisted spreading trees with black bark as wrinkled as the faces of old, old men, and they watched him graze, moving a step, munching, moving another step. Here he looked at home, serene and natural. His dappled coat blended with the mist, making it appear that he was either materializing from or disintegrating into the ghostly white ribbons clinging to his shoulders and haunches, his head sometimes vanishing when he bent to pull at a clump of grass. Moonlight slanted through the mist, haloing every object, creating zones of weird depth, coils of smoky glow, as if some magical force were dominating the clearing and illuminating its shapes of power. It was partly this perception of the magical that roused Mingolla’s desire, the hope that he could evoke a magic of his own and forget the foulness of the wagon. He pressed Debora against one of the trees, opened her blouse, and helped her skin down her panties. ‘It’s too damp,’ she said, pointing to the dewy grass. He lifted her a little to demonstrate an alternative. Her breasts were cool, gleaming with condensation, and felt buoyant in his hands; her eyes were aswim with lights. He drew up her skirt, lifted her again, and as he entered her, she threw her arms back around the trunk, her legs scissoring his waist. The stillness of the night was banished. The horse whuffling, munching, and the muffled noises from the jungle were gathered close, sharpened and orchestrated by the wet sounds of their lovemaking, their ragged breathing. It was a white act, seeming to kindle the moonlight to new brilliance. Mist curled from Debora’s mouth, tendriled her hair, and seeing her transformation, Mingolla felt that he, too, was being transformed, changing into a beast with golden eyes and talons, gaining in strength with every thrust, every cry she made. Afterward he supported her against the tree for a long time, too weak to talk or move, and when at last he withdrew, when he turned to the clearing, he expected to find that the horse had disappeared, that it had been dissolved by their good magic. But there it was, shoulder-deep in a white sea, staring at them without curiosity, merely watchful, knowing exactly what it had witnessed, its eyes steady and dark and empty of questions.
Several nights later Ruy invited Mingolla and Debora for coffee in his tent, while Tully and Corazon were gathering kindling. Ruy had apparently given up all rights to Corazon, preferring to concentrate on Debora, and though he had stopped making overt attempts at seduction, his eyes were always on her, and much of his conversation was suggestive. Mist curled through the tent flap, glowing in the radiance of a battery lamp, and Ruy lay on his sleeping bag, a coffee cup balanced on his stomach, talking about Panama, telling them more of what his long-ago passenger had purportedly told him. As he spoke, his language and his inflections grew more and more refined, and at last realizing that he was revealing himself to them, that there was no further use in circumspection, Mingolla asked, ‘What are you, man? Madradona or Sotomayor?’
Ruy set down his cup and sat up; shadows filled in the lines of his face, ‘Sotomayor,’ he said. ‘Of course most of us have grown accustomed to using other names.’
‘Why…’ Debora began.
‘Why haven’t I told you before? Why am I telling you now? Because I…’
‘Because it’s a game he’s playing,’ Mingolla said. ‘Everything’s a game to them.’ He wanted to ask Ruy about the horse, but was afraid he might lose his temper. ‘And we’re supposed to believe you playful fuckers are capable of making peace with one another.’
‘We have no choice,’ said Ruy haughtily. ‘You know a good bit of it. Would you like to hear the rest?’
‘Sure,’ said Mingolla. ‘Entertain us.’
‘Very well.’ Ruy sipped his coffee. ‘Toward the beginning of the last century, the wiser heads among us concluded that the world was headed for disaster. Nothing imminent, you understand. At least in terms of that generation’s happiness. But they could see the development of conflicts and forces that would menace everyone. They realized that the feud had to end, that we had to turn our energies toward dealing with these questions. And so we met in Cartagena and made a peace between the families.’
Mingolla spat out a laugh. ‘Altruists!’
‘That’s right,’ said Ruy. ‘You have no idea how great an altruism was required to overcome centuries of hatred. It wasn’t only that we had to end the feud; we had to become colleagues with our bitter enemies, because the logistics of creating a worldwide revolution were…’ He couldn’t find an appropriate term and shook his head. ‘We had to initiate breeding programs to begin with. The families were not large in those days, and we needed more manpower to infiltrate the political arena, the military, the intelligence communities. That’s been the purpose of programs like Psicorps and Sombra… to swell our ranks. It’s taken us more than a hundred years, but finally we’re ready for a takeover. There’s not an agency of any importance in Russia or the United States whose strings we can’t pull.’
‘Then why haven’t you pulled them?’ Debora asked.
‘We’ve made a number of mistakes over the years. Despite the accords of Cartagena, many of us were unable to put aside our bitterness, and from time to time the feud would flare up. We overlooked most of these flare-ups. After all, things were going well overall. But then’—Ruy let out a long, unsteady breath — ‘then we made
