folks,’ he said in a lectoral tone, ‘is field-stripping the human mind. Easy as pie once you get the hang of it.’ Ruy tried to speak, but succeeded only in making ugly dream noises. His hands scrabbled on the floor, his legs twitched, and he gazed up at Mingolla, his mouth working, his brow creased, as if trying to recall something important, something that would save him. ‘Doesn’t take long at all, as you can see,’ Mingolla said. ‘Be glad to give lessons.’
The Madradonas and Sotomayors were silent, their expressions ranging from the horrified to the bemused.
‘Know where you are, Ruy?’ Mingolla asked with vast solicitude.
Ruy looked worried. ‘I… unh… I…’
‘Real good, Ruy.’ Mingolla gave his shoulder a pat. ‘You’ll make a terrific soldier. Defending the Sotomayor honor. Shitting in the street, clubbing the other zombies. You’ll do just fine.’
Ruy ventured a weak smile.
‘But it’s gonna be tough. Know how tough it’s gonna be?’
Ruy had no idea, but was all ears.
‘Lemme show ya.’ Mingolla seized Ruy by the shirtfront and began to slap him. Each slap seemed to win a little battle in his heart, to wipe out the last vestiges of compassion.
Somebody grabbed Mingolla from behind, but he shook them off and sent a wave of hatred across the dance floor, a signal powerful enough to summon the army. The families retreated, leaving him and Debora and Ruy in a cleared circle. He studied them, and they returned measuring stares, looks of appraisal. He saw that they weren’t upset by what he’d done; they were merely gauging his relative worth, the risks involved in dealing with him. They appeared to have no conception of defeat.
‘We understand your reaction, David,’ said one of the Sotomayor men. ‘But we can’t let you take matters into your own hands.’
‘Show’s not over, folks,’ said Mingolla. ‘Time for the big finish.’
A noise behind him. He turned, saw Marina kicking Ruy, who was curled up, trying to protect his head. Mingolla caught her arm, ripping a seam of her silk dress, and backhanded her to the floor. She rolled onto her stomach, sat up, demented-looking, all her elegance dissipated. She went crawling back toward Ruy. Mingolla shoved her away with his foot.
Hubbub at the entrance, a scream, people milling.
Ragged figures were crowding through the door. Mingolla pulled Debora against the wall.
‘What did you do?’ she said, pushing him away.
‘They tried to kill me, dammit!’
‘You shouldn’t…’ She broke off, looking broken, defeated. Her shoulders slumped, and she stared out at the dance floor.
It was strange, those first moments of confrontation between the families and their former victims. Haggard men and women, stumbling, blinking at the lights, looking—despite the urgency of Mingolla’s powerful command— bewildered, uncertain, like beggars allowed into the throne room. Some stood fingering their rags, hands to their mouths, in attitudes of humility and shame. But only for a second. Then they shuffled forward, intent on their chore. The Madradonas and Sotomayors were aghast, less terrified than affronted… or so it seemed to Mingolla. And as the attack began they fixed their eyes on the army, confident, trying to influence them. It was only when they discovered that Mingolla’s influence was too ironclad for them to affect that they displayed fear, and by then the army was upon them. A grizzled heavyset man struck first, impaling a pale skinny woman with a pitchfork, walking her backward into the center of the room; she plucked at the tines, open-mouthed, too shocked to scream. An old woman stabbed at a fallen man, her head thrown back like that of a triumphant animal. Marina Estil turned to run and was struck in the neck with a hoe wielded by a young boy; he hacked at her, miring her white silk dress with blood. There was an awful clumsiness to these assaults, a dreamlike momentum, and had the odds been less, the families might have survived; as it was, quite a few were managing to escape out the door. But the odds were too great. All around the room, huddled groups of the families were trying to beat off dozens of attackers; their shouts and screams, bright splinters of sound, were too energetic to suit the slow murders taking place. The blood of the families shimmered like a rich yield seeping up from between the seams of the fake gray stones, and everywhere were instances of courage: Madradonas saving Sotomayors and vice versa, as if in death they were at last uniting in a common cause. He felt no pity for them, yet he saw in their dying a sad inevitability, a summation of centuries of death, a pattern resolving into a knot of blood and fear, cinching tight about the neck of a monster whose neck stretched back into colonial days. And he saw, too, the indulgence of his own act of vengeance, how it had been a reaction worthy of the families, equally as unthinking and with a typically horrid result. But he wasn’t tempted to interfere.
He guided Debora along the wall, shielding her against anyone who headed their way, warding them off with doses of fear, and they moved through the massacre unscathed, like saints immune to fire. But as they drew near the door, Mingolla began to feel an intense sadness and to hear a pure simple music inside his head, tones of crystalline purity. Faint at first, but stronger and more pervasive with every second. His step faltered, and he spotted the girl and the young crewcut man who had ‘entertained’ the gathering standing beside the door, their faces empty, their eyes squeezed shut in concentration. Bells and sadness, sadness and bells. Mixing into a fluid heavy as mercury, slowing and dimming him. He tried to throw off the sadness, to muffle the bells, but his panic didn’t catch, just flared briefly and went out, and it didn’t seem worth the effort to fight anymore. The sad blue music was killing him, chilling him, tolling and tolling, a mournful angelus that made him long to grow slower and slower, to fade with the vibration of the ringing notes, receding forever into a place he could almost imagine, gray and secret deep, the bottomland of the spirit, a little hollow large enough for the soul to curl up in and sleep, and even the screams and shouts were knitting into music, a choral counterpoint. He wondered why Debora wasn’t doing anything, why she was just standing there, wasn’t she going to help… it didn’t matter, it was better to fade, to lean against the wall and let the sadness and the music vibrate inside him, breaking down the structures of his thought, and it wasn’t really so bad, this emptying, this winnowing, like the way you disappear into sleep, cell after cell shutting down, vision narrowing… and then there was something hot inside him, something charged and driven, and he felt Debora joining her strength to his, that twisting fevered energy building into a red noise of thought, of anger and loathing for what was happening, and the little girl shrieked, staggered away, and the crewcut man began to shake, he was biting his lower lip, blood filming over his chin, and the music and sadness splintering into fragments of terror and cool sound.
Mingolla stepped close to the crewcut man, grabbed the front of his jumpsuit, kneed him, let him fall. He turned to Debora, pulled her through the door. ‘What the hell were you doing… waiting like that?’
‘You weren’t doing anything! Why should I?’ She reached out to him, but withdrew her hand. ‘For a second, I just didn’t care anymore… about anything.’
‘Dammit!’ he said. ‘You…’
‘Don’t tell me you didn’t feel like that!’ she said, halfway between anger and tears. ‘You feel like that all the time, and it’s all I can do to keep going in spite of it. I…’
She twisted away from him, and he stood a second, looking at her back. His chest ached with some feeling he couldn’t identify, and his face was hot. Debora was taking deep shivery breaths. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Let’s get outta here.’
As they climbed into one of the jeeps, a Madradona man, blubbering, came running up and struck Mingolla on the cheek, a feeble blow, but one that sobered him, alerted him to the fact that other men and women were converging on them from the corners of the parking lot. The man went to his knees, swayed, clutched at Mingolla’s leg. Mingolla kicked him away, gunned the engine, and sped off, weaving among the survivors, who cried out in frustration, reached for him with bloody hands. He turned down the street leading to the barricade, bouncing over the potholes. The crests of the distant hills were outlined in stars, the glowing walls jogged in his vision. Dark figures were scaling the barricade, some falling when gunfire flashed between gaps in the boards; but many more were making it over, and more still were massed at the foot of the wall. Mingolla laid on the horn, and some of the ragged men and women scattered; others stood and gawked, but he didn’t slow down. ‘Hold on!’ he said to Debora as the wall loomed high, and then, amid splintering boards and gunfire and the thud of bodies impacting the hood, they crashed through the barricade, slewed sideways in the dirt. He fought for control of the jeep, managed to straighten it out. Saw that they were in the middle of a battle much like the one they had fled. Groups of soldiers firing at larger groups of attackers on a field of yellow dirt tufted with grass that showed black in the moonlight. And
