second round of cocktails. The liquor brightened them a little, like a cheap paint job on a clunker car, enough to show the room there was nothing wrong with their affairs. That was sufficient under the circumstances, Calderon thought. In business, especially business in the tightly knit Cuban community, appearance was 90 percent of the battle. The men ordered their usual lunches, too, all large lumps of costly protein, and appeared to eat. The service staff knew how little of it they consumed, but they did not count.
“So when does this start?” Garza asked.
“Today,” said Calderon. “Hurtado moves fast when he wants something done. That’s a good sign, I think.”
“Yes, marvelous,” said Ibanez bitterly. “He’s a credit to the human race. What will this entail, this protection he’s offering?”
“You won’t notice a thing. Some cars on the street, is all. The whole point is to move with discretion and remove whoever’s doing this.”
“I still can’t believe I’m involved in this,” said Ibanez, as if recounting a bad dream. “They came to my home! The maid found what they’d done when she went to walk the dogs in the morning, the door clawed…. She was hysterical, and the stupid bitch went to my wife. Two hysterical women, Jesus Christ, what was I supposed to say?”
“Yes, Felipe, we’ve heard all about your hysterics,” said Calderon. “But let’s not turn into women ourselves, hey? A few days and all this will be over. They will make some other stupid move and then”-he snapped his fingers-“gone. The Puxto will come through and we’ll be fine.”
“How can you be sure it will be days?” asked Garza. “Why not months?”
Calderon had feared this very question. He cleared his throat and said, “Hurtado thinks the pressure is coming from Colombian interests. He’s put the word out that we are moving up the schedule for the cut, more crews on the road, accelerated delivery of equipment, and so on. They will be, let’s say, stimulated to increase the pressure.”
“You’re using us as bait, ” said Ibanez in an outraged voice, rather higher in volume than was usual in the Bankers’ Club. A party at the next table looked over with interest. Calderon kept his own voice moderate, not without effort; he could feel the veins at the side of his head throb.
“Felipe, use your head. We’re all targets already. We’ve all been hit. Time is of the essence here, as is secrecy. There is a police investigation going on. Whoever these people are, it’s vital that we get them before the police do. Speaking of which, have they learned anything?”
This was directed to Garza, who had a nephew in the Miami P.D. and was their source of information in that quarter. Garza shrugged. “The usual stupidity. They’re planning to check out the local environmentalists, if you can imagine. Obviously, they know we’re all connected in a business way, and they’re curious about why Calderon wasn’t hit like we were. You cleaned up the mess too quickly, Yoiyo. You’re starting to look like their prime suspect.”
Calderon forced himself to laugh at this, and after a moment Garza joined him. Ibanez managed to move his face into a grimace that might have passed for jollity if the look in his eyes were ignored. Calderon felt a little better now. Laughing in the face of danger; it was what was expected of a man, after all. And the show of it had done some good, he thought. A table of Cuban businessmen at their ease and laughing; what could be more normal? They finished their coffee, speaking only of other, less contentious affairs. The waiter brought the check in its leather folder and laid it before Ibanez. Garza, however, reached across for it. “My turn,” he said.
But as his sleeve pulled back, Calderon saw to his shock that above his gold Piaget watch he had a thin bracelet of red and white beads. Like every Cuban, Calderon knew what this meant. It signified that the cool and ruthless Cayo Garza had solicited the protection of Shango,orisha of rage and war, and also that the man was a lot more frightened than he let on. Calderon wondered now if Garza knew something that he didn’t about the source of their troubles. A passing thought, this, serving only to lower his respect for the man and convince him all the more that only he himself was in firm control of the situation.
Now it is night and all these people are asleep: Jennifer and Professor Cooksey, Kevin and Rupert, Paz and his family, the Cuban-American businessmen and their families and friends. Wakeful still is a man named Prudencio Rivera Martinez, together with a number of his colleagues. They wait in vans parked near the houses of the men of the Consuela company. They are from Colombia and are good at this sort of work, patient and relentless. Each van holds three men, one alert, the others dozing on pads in the rear compartment. Prudencio Rivera Martinez is their captain, and he is in a modest rental Taurus, driving from site to site and around the neighborhoods involved, so that he will know them if need arises. At irregular intervals, he checks his men via cell phone, but tonight there are no problems, no disturbances.
Moie is awake as well, in his hammock high in the boughs of the great ficus tree. He has a plastic bottle of water and a small package of Fritos given to him by the little girl. He has never eaten a Frito before but finds them good and finishes the whole package. He likes the salt and the flavor of the corn. When he is a man he enjoys foods other than meat. There is a remarkable amount of meat on the streets of Miami America, he has found, much more than he expected, considering how many dead people there are. If Miami was full of Runiya, they would long ago have eaten all this meat. He believes that the wai’ichuranan have forgotten how to hunt. This is because they have machines that make food like a bird makes eggs. He has seen this with his own eyes.
Now he removes a clay jar from his net bag and sucks some powder into his nostrils. When he feels the yana arrive, he sings the song that opens the barrier between the worlds. The yana slides him free of his body, as a knife slides the fillet from a fish, and he floats into the dream world. But before he drifts entirely away he recalls, as he often does at this moment, what happened when he first gave the yana to Father Tim. The priest had laughed and would not stop laughing, and Moie was hard-pressed not to join him, although in all the generations since Jaguar gave yana to First Man, it was not recorded in the memory of the Runiya that anyone had laughed. Usually they were frightened to death the first time.
So later when they returned from the dream world Moie had asked the priest what was so funny, and Father Tim said that the yana gives you the eye of God, and to God everything must be amusing, as we find the stumbles and tantrums of small children amusing. They think it is the end of the world, but we just pick them up and give them food and a hug, knowing that their momentary pain will soon pass. And this is when Moie discovered that Father Tim was able to keep himself separate from the god when he traveled the dream world in the yana trance. This was a wonder to Moie, and the two men talked often after that about what Father Tim called ontology. Long, long ago, said Father Tim, everyone’s thoughts were like water, connected to every thing and part of every thing. There was no difference between people’s thoughts and the rest of the world and the fathers of the wai’ichuranan lived just like the Runiya. Then one of these ancestors had a thought that was made not of water but of iron. And soon many of the wai’ichuranan had such thoughts, and with such thoughts they cut themselves away from the world and began to slice it up into tiny parts. Thus they gained their great powers over the world, and thus also they began to be dead.
Then Moie understood the difference between even such a wai’ichura as Father Tim and himself. When Moie took the yana, he was Jaguar and Jaguar was him and he was part of the life of everything that was-animals, plants, rocks, sky, stars-but Father Tim could only be so in a flickering sort of way, as in some night when the moon was gone and the fire in the hut had died to coals. Through a glass darkly is how Father Tim described the sight he had of his Jan’ichupitaolik, and he said that he had to wait until he came to the land of the dead before he could be like Moie was. Were you not a heathen, Moie, he often said, you would be a saint.
So now it is Jaguar-in-Moie who travels like a vapor through the dream world of Miami. Distances in the dream world are not as they are in the world under the sun, so he is easily able to find all the people he needs to visit. He visits his allies and gives them dreams of strength and power, readying them for the struggle. To his enemies he gives dreams of dread. There are screams in the night in expensive districts; lights go on, pills are consumed in numbers, as is liquor. This is how battle is waged in Moie’s country.
At last he visits the girl, and the father and the mother. Here he finds something very strange. There is a tichiri around the child, and not only that, it is one that he doesn’t recognize, an alien entity, but quite powerful. Moie had not realized that the dead people could call tichiri, but apparently it is so. He wonders if this is the same as his discovery that there are different animals living in the land of the dead, or if it is like his mistake about the stars. He will ask Cooksey about this. Meanwhile, it is hard to enter the dreams of the father, and nearly impossible to enter the girl’s dreams. The mother is no problem at all, so he spends the most time there.
