“Shrieking.” The first businessman tried to read the reporter’s notes, which were upside down from his point of view and cursory. He didn’t enjoy talking to newsmen. When you dealt with the fourth estate, accuracy was your social responsibility. You could still be misquoted, of course. You wouldn’t be the first.
“Kind of a screek,” the second businessman offered.
“She’s paying for everything,” said Schilling. “Don’t even ask me to be chivalrous.”
“She was big,” said the first businessman. “For a woman.”
“She was enormous,” said Schilling.
“She was as big as a football player,” said the first businessman carefully.
“She was as big as a truck,” said Schilling. He pointed with a shaky finger to the register. “She lifted it over her head like it was a feather duster or a pillow or something. You can write this down,” he said. “You can quote me on this. We’re talking about a very troubled, very big woman.”
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” the second businessman said.
“What’s not a good idea?” asked the reporter.
“Women that size,” said the second businessman.
“Just look what she did,” said Schilling. Rage made his voice squeak. “Just look at my bar!”
• • •
PATRICK HARRIS HAD BEEN a DEA agent for eight years now. During those eight years, he had seen some action. He had been in Mexico and he had been in Panama and he had been in LA. He had been in one or two tight spots, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t help out with the dishes at home.
Harris knew he asked a lot of his wife. It couldn’t be the easiest thing in the world, being married to a man who disappeared into Latin America for days at a time and might not even be able to get a message out that he was still alive. Harris could run a vacuum cleaner over a rug without feeling that he was doing his wife any favors. Harris could cook a meal from the very beginning, meaning the planning and the shopping and everything, without feeling that anyone needed to make a fuss about it.
He stood with the French bread and the Gruyère cheese and the imported Emmentaler Swiss in the nine-items-only-no-checks checkout line, wondering how he could use the tomatoes, which he hadn’t planned to buy but were cheaper and redder than usual and had tempted him. The woman in front had twelve items. It didn’t really irritate Harris. He was only sorry that it was so hard for some people to play by the rules.
While he waited for the three extra items to be tallied and worried in an ineffective, pleasant way over the tomatoes, he read through the headlines. Evidence of prehistoric alien cannibals had been found in Peruvian cave paintings, and a statue of Elvis had been found on Mars. A husband with bad breath had killed his wife merely by kissing her. A Miami bar had been destroyed by a sort of half woman/half gorilla. Harris saw the illustration before he read the story, an artist’s rendering of Queen Kong in a black dress and bonnet. He looked at the picture again. He read the headline. One of his tomatoes spun from the counter to the floor. Harris stepped on it, squished it, and didn’t even notice. He bought the paper.
He had never been in so much trouble in his life.
• • •
THE DOORS WERE HEAVY and padlocked. A hummingbird dipped through the entryway twice, held for a moment over an out-of-season fuchsia, and disappeared. The largest of the MPs tried to shoulder the doors open. He tried three times, but the wood did not give. One of the women smashed through a window instead. Harris was the fifth person inside.
The soldiers searched for fugitives. They spun into the hallways, kicked in the doors. Harris found the dining room on the other side of some broken glass. The table was set with china and the flatware was gold. An interrupted meal consisted of rack of lamb, braised carrots, curried peach halves served on lettuce leaves. The food had been sitting on the china plates for at least twenty-four hours.
He started into the library, but one of the MPs called to him from farther back in the house. The MP’s voice sounded self-consciously nervous. I’m still scared, the tone said. Aren’t I silly?
Harris followed the voice down a hallway and through an open door.
The MP had her rifle slung over her back. In her hands she held a large statue of St. George, spear frozen over the neck of the dragon. The dragon was considerably smaller than St. George’s horse.
Behind the MP, three stairs rose to an altar with red candles and white flowers and chicken feathers. The stairs were carpeted, and a supplicant could kneel or lie supine if the supplicant weren’t too tall. The room itself was not carpeted. A black circle had been painted on the stone floor, with a red triangle inside. The four cardinal points of the compass were marked.
Harris looked east. The east wall was a wall of toads. Toad-shaped stones covered every inch of seven shelves, and the larger ones sat on the floor. The toads were all different: different colors, different sizes. Harris guessed there were four hundred, five hundred toads. “Why toads?” Harris asked. He stepped inside.
The MP shook her head and put the statue back on the altar. “Shit,” she said, meaning nothing by it, merely making conversation. “Is this shit for real?”
One of the smallest toads was carved of obsidian. Its eyes were a polished, glassy black; it was no bigger than Harris’s thumbnail. It attracted him. Harris reached out. He hesitated briefly, then touched it. At that moment, somewhere in the room, an engine cycled on. Harris started at the sound, closed his hand convulsively over the toad. He looked at the MP, who gestured behind him.
The noise came from a freezer back by the door. It was a small freezer, not big enough to hold the body of an adult. A goat, maybe. A child. A head. Harris looked at the MP. “Groceries,” he said.
“Stash,” the MP suggested. This made opening the freezer Harris’s job. Harris didn’t think so. He would have stared the MP down if the MP had only looked at him. Harris watched to be sure the MP wasn’t looking. He put the black toad in his pocket and went to open the freezer. He was simply not thinking about the toad. Otherwise he would never have taken it. Harris was DEA, and even when he was undercover he played by the rules. Taking the toad marked the beginning of a series of atypical transgressions. Harris was at a loss to explain them. It was not as though he wanted the toad.
The freezer worked laboriously. When Harris and his wife were first married, they’d had a noisy refrigerator like this. They would argue: arguments of adjustment, kitchen arguments as opposed to bedroom arguments, as vehement and passionate as they were trivial. And the refrigerator would be a third voice, grumbling in dissatisfaction or croaking in disbelief. Sometimes it would make them laugh. Harris tried to resurrect these comfortable, pro-appliance kinds of feelings. He closed his eyes and raised the lid. He opened his eyes. The only thing inside the freezer was a stack of pictures.
Harris pushed the lid up until it caught. Some were actual photographs. There was a Polaroid of the General’s wife seated in a lawn chair under a beach umbrella, a fat woman who’d left the marks of her nails on more than one of the General’s mistresses. There were some Cubans, including Castro, and some Americans, Kissinger and Helms, pictures cut from magazines, but real photographs of the President and the ex-President. There was a fuzzy picture of two men shaking hands on the steps of a public building. Harris recognized one of the men as the Archbishop. The edges of every picture had been dipped in red wax.
• • •
HE STILL HAD the toad in his pocket that night when he attended a party at the home of Señora Villejas. Many American officers were there. Señora Villejas greeted him at the door with a kiss and a whisper. “El General llego a la embajada con calzoncillos rojos.” The General had turned up in the Vatican embassy wearing red underwear, she said. She spun away to see that the band had refreshment.