When they were finished and she lay flushed and satisfied in his arms, he kissed her closed eyes and said, "Aren't you going to ask me what I did with the girl yesterday? The blonde?"
"No. I am not going to ask."
"Afraid, huh?" he teased.
"Not afraid. I knew you had business to do. You would not stop loving me for a whore."
He pressed her hand in his. "I couldn't stop loving you for anyone or anything," he said. "I couldn't if I tried. But I want you to know I didn't do anything with her."
"Why not?" she asked, new worry lines creasing her face. "Now she will be suspicious."
Barney shrugged. "I found out what I needed to know. Besides, she was too repulsive. Something pale and snaky about her." He shuddered. "I don't know. I just couldn't do it. It would have been like rubbing up against a disease."
"That was very stupid of you. You will have to leave Hispania immediately."
"Not without you, I won't."
"I've got to sell the business."
"To hell with the business."
"It's worth $20,000 American."
"To hell with $20,000 American."
"Oh, you are so stupid, Barney."
"Yeah? Well, I happen to think I'm the smartest guy in the world." He tickled her. After all, I ended up with you, didn't I? I think that qualifies me for some heavy honors."
"Barney," she giggled. "Stop that."
"I must be the smartest, luckiest, happiest guy who ever lived, and you are coming with me to Washington tomorrow, where I will turn in my picture and get a nice, boring job that will keep me alive long enough to see our son grown and making his own mistakes. How does that sound?"
She hugged him hard. "Barney," she said, her eyes flashing sparks of gold.
"What?"
"I will go."
"You better. You're my wife."
"I will make coffee."
"What for? Get us packed. I'll go into town and make the arrangements."
"First we will have coffee," she said.
There were no beans for coffee in the kitchen.
"Forget the coffee," Barney said.
"No. I will buy the beans."
"Send someone for them."
"No. I know the right beans."
"You're the most stubborn woman I've ever met," he said as she wrapped a light shawl around her shoulders.
"Are you sorry you married me, my husband?"
Barney smiled. "No. I'm not sorry."
"Then I will get the beans."
Barney shook his head as she walked out the door. He set two cups on the table in preparation. He brought out two spoons. He poured milk into a colorful ceramic pitcher, which Denise said her mother had given her. He spooned the brown, coarse sugar into a thick bowl.
He waited.
An hour later, he walked into the garden to pick an orchid for the table. He placed it in a miniature vase Denise had bought a few days before.
He lit a cigarette. He waited.
Within another hour, Barney knew he would never see his wife again.
Instead, someone hurled a piece of her cotton shawl, torn and bloodied, through the window. Smeared on the shawl was a small brownish-red pulp. There was a note attached: "This is your wife and child."
The reddish pulp turned out to be tissue from Denise's uterus. Whoever had killed her had ripped open her belly to kill her baby. Barney's baby.
With a scream of vengeance, he worked his way through the house, destroying everything in his path. He saved the blonde girl's room for last. She was not there. As punishment for her not being there, Barney smashed every item in the room until every shred of furniture, of clothing, of glass was indistinguishable from every other.
Then he began.
He walked the streets quietly, looking, searching, hoping no stranger would approach him to talk, because he would kill anyone who came within killing distance of him. No one approached.
He entered the rain forest.
This time, when the sound came, he was ready. It was a clumsy sound, deliberate. If Barney were thinking, he would have known it was a trap. The sound had been too careless for a mistake. But the rage inside Barney heard the sound before his intellect did, and his rage responded eagerly, wantonly. He wanted to kill. He wanted to die.
The first man to show himself, a dark, squat young man who teetered out of the bush hesitantly, got a bullet square in the abdomen. The second caught one in the middle of his face.
Barney's rage fed on it. The sight of the man's features exploding into a fountain of blood drove him forward, wanting more.
Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a curved killing knife, the kind the jungle natives carved from gypsum found deep in a mountain's interior, flying above him in an arc. He ducked and rolled at just the moment when it would have sliced off the top of his head, and fired randomly into the bush. A wayward arm popped into view, then dropped heavily to the ground with a dying scream. It rang out in the wet forest, a fading echo that came from every direction and mingled with the frightened bird sounds before surrendering to the vacuum silence.
He walked over to the nearest dead man, who lay on his back, an expression of benign surprise on his face. His stomach was covered with blood, already congealing in the ferocious swampy heat. Barney kicked him.
Silence. They were all dead. Only three men. Then he knew it was a trap.
He could feel the eyes now, dozens of them, waiting in silence for Barney to empty the rest of his bullets into dispensable recruits. It was a trap, but he didn't care.
He fired three times into the air, then tossed the revolver to the side. "Come get me, you bastards!" he called.
"Bastards... Bastards... Bastards," the jungle echoed all around him.
"This is Bernard C. Daniels of the United States of America, and I am going to kill your president, so you had better come and take me to him," he called in Spanish.
"Gladly," a voice answered in English. A fat man gaudily dressed in a fairytale uniform of blue and gold and a feathered tricorn hat straightened his knees with great difficulty and rose from behind a eucalyptus tree. "You will come with me, Mr. Daniels of the Central Intelligence Agency," he said.
The officer snapped an order to the bushes and trees around him, and twenty-odd men, their bodies barely covered by ragged shards of cloth, appeared from nowhere. They were all young men, Barney noticed. Hungry men. They avoided his stare. Many of them had known Denise, he guessed. But hunger is a greater motivation than friendship.
He spat in the face of a young man who tied his wrists together with thick rope. The man said nothing.
"I curse your wife and child," Barney said softly in Spanish. He could feel the man's hands trembling as he completed the knot. 'They will die as my wife has died."
The man backed away, fear gripping his features.
"Get him moving," the officer ordered. Someone shoved Barney ahead. The man who had tied the rope around his wrists stood rooted to his spot, shaking.
"You. Move," the officer called. The man did not move.
The officer drew a gigantic magnum from a holster strapped to his thigh and fired point-blank at the young soldier. His chest opened up like a red, smoking mouth as he was thrust backward by the force of the bullet, his legs stretching out in front of him. The blast propelled his dying body into the ranks of the other soldiers. One screamed. "The cursed one," he screamed. "I have been touched by the blood of the cursed one!"
Quickly the other soldiers ran ahead, leaving him isolated and panicked, trying desperately to wipe the dead man's blood from his hands and chest.
The officer fired another shot and dropped him in his tracks. "Stupid jungle beasts," the officer said. "Move the prisoner along."
Mumbling to one another, soldiers guided Barney to the mountain cave. At the entrance they dropped behind as the officer grabbed the rope around Barney's wrists and raised his magnum to Barney's temple. "Blindfold him," he commanded, and a man rushed forward with a scrap of roughly woven cloth to tie around his eyes.