“Curse of de Blood Witch,” she said, and chuckled. “Dat ain’t nowhere de way of it.”
The bathroom door opened and Margery, followed sheepishly by Gammage, entered. Gammage’s white dress and turban were of a piece with Madame Anaya’s, only his were decorated with tiny blue skulls; his face, arms, and sandaled feet were coated with mahogany boot polish. The effect was both gruesome and laughable.
“Oh, God!” said Madame Anaya.
“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” Gammage said sourly.
The colonel stood. “It’s twenty minutes’ walk to the point. We should go now.”
Gammage looked down at his glistening brown arms. “Man, I don’t know about this shit.”
Margery rubbed his shoulder. “It’ll be fine once you get out onto the beach.”
“Now you shed dat dress fah you leave de boat,” Madame Anaya said to Gammage as he moved toward the door. “And Benito he fetch it to me.”
“Hey, you’re welcome to it,” Gammage said with false bravado. “It doesn’t do a thing for my hips.”
She gave another quivery, silent laugh. “Darlin’, you hustle yo’self on down to Barrio Clarin, you gon’ get more action den you can handle.”
The colonel opened the door, peeked out to see if the corridor was clear, then beckoned to Margery and Gammage. They eased past him, and as he closed the door he heard Madame Anaya say, “You tell dat ol’ mon, I gon’ make him rueful ’bout de television.”
The wind that earlier had risen now swooped in off the water in long powerful gusts, giving roaring voice to the palms, their crowns tossing and swaying like an exalted crowd under a mesmeric preacher’s thrall. Surf pounded in over the break, exploding in phosphorescent sprays, and racing clouds cut just below the high-riding moon, now and then dimming, but not obscuring, its light. Through a gap between trunks, the colonel saw men and women moving their hips and waving their arms under the thatched canopy of a shanty bar to the rhythms of a small steel band. A rich yellow light englobed them, and beyond, for a backdrop, a deep green undulation of shrubs and sea grape, shaking their branches as if in mimicry. At that distance, unable to hear the liquid metallic arpeggios, the shouted vocals, it seemed to him that all the complicated grace of the dancers, the children chasing each other in and out among them, and the jittery attacks of the drummers served a more oblique principle than mere abandon, that their madness was orchestrated toward some end, a mysterious providence being invoked.
From the heat of late afternoon, the temperature must have dropped twenty-five degrees. The weather had driven most people inside, and so the colonel and Gammage came to the landward end of Punta Manabique without incident. “I’m not gonna hug you, Maury,” Gammage said as they stood together. “’Case somebody’s watching.”
“I appreciate that,” the colonel said. “Though it might do wonders for Madame Anaya’s reputation.” He gazed toward the seaward end; even in the strong moonlight, the thrashing foliage and shifting shadows made it impossible to determine if Benito Casamayor’s boat was at hand. “You’d better hurry.”
“I’m gone. But once Carbonell’s over, I’ll come back and we’ll hoist a few.”
Gammage stood there a moment longer, a vastly ludicrous figure with his turban, his boot-polish skin, and the dress alternately belling and molding to his thighs. The disguise failed to hide his anxiety. “See ya, Maury.” He hesitated another moment, turned, and went trudging off among the palms that bounded the little ridge guarding the point.
The colonel watched him out of sight. Then, head down against the wind, he started toward town, making slow progress in the tacky sand. He felt disconnected from the events of the night. Though concerned for Gammage, for Margery, he was unafraid of what might happen to him, and not because he was assured of his immunity. Either he did not especially care what happened, or else he believed he could do nothing about it. There was evidence to support both conclusions. Perhaps, he thought, they were more-or-less the same, related products of a larger mental circumstance. The wind chilled him; the concatenations of the surf were assaultive in their loudness, affecting his nerves. His unsettled mood deepened. Despite wanting to see Margery, he came to dread the noise and the crowd at the Club Atomica. Instead of going directly to the club, he decided he would first visit Tomas and let him know how the plan had turned out.
The corrugated metal door of the Drive-In Puerto Rico had been rolled almost all the way down, a half-foot-high gap of light showing beneath it. Tomas must be putting his bills in order, the colonel told himself, or working on his mural. He picked up his pace, slogging into the wind, eager to see the old man. As he came abreast of the steps that led up onto the deck, he made out a shadowy figure sitting at a table close by the door. “Tomas?” he called, mounting the steps. “What are you doing out here? Aren’t you cold?”
Someone pushed him hard, planted a hand between his shoulder blades and sent him reeling forward. He righted himself and saw a short dark man in fatigues standing at the top of the steps, training a pistol at his chest—his lined face had the vaguely oriental cast of a Mayan, and his jacket bore a sergeant’s insignia.
“Man, are you crazy?” Furious, the colonel took a step toward him. “I’ll have your balls!”
“Colonel Galpa!”
Carbonell had risen from his seat by the door. His presence was not completely unexpected, and the colonel was not shocked to see him; but he felt a kind of fatalistic incredulity, such as he might have experienced on hearing a gloomy prognosis from his doctor.
“Where is Tomas?” he asked.
“Where is the journalist… Gammage?” Carbonell came toward him, easy in his walk, like a cat sauntering toward his favorite chair after a big meal. The wind had not mussed a strand of his slicked-back hair. He folded his arms and waited for the colonel to respond, his face empty of emotion. He was in his shirtsleeves and on one of his cuffs was a dark spattering. In his left hand was a silvered automatic pistol.
“He is gone,” said the colonel. “Within a few hours, I imagine, the world will know what you are.”
“The world already knows. The world doesn’t care.”
“Then why concern yourself with Gammage?”
“A loose end,” said Carbonell. “I hate them.” He stepped back to the door, leaned down and rolled it up head-high. Inside the restaurant, Tomas was sitting on a cane-backed bar stool, lashed to it; his head was down, and there was blood on his shirt. Behind him, his mural had a zodiacal value, like those Hindu renderings of a higher plane, rife with gaudy emblems of illusion. A hurricane lamp rested on the bar, painting the scene with orange light and shadow, adding a gloss that made its brutality seem artful. The colonel could not tell if the old man was alive. Grief and rage contended in him.
“I’ll kill you for this,” he said to Carbonell.
“Please… let’s avoid histrionics,” said Carbonell. “We’re both soldiers. We both have our duties to perform.”
“You call this duty? This is the act of an animal!”
“At times it is my duty to act so.”
“Don’t hand me that!”
“Had you been ordered to fire your rockets into an enemy city, an action that would kill innocents, would you have obeyed? Of course you would. Now you can afford to speculate on the morality involved. But in the moment of war, you would not have hesitated. Your war may have ended, Colonel. But mine goes on.”
“There is no war except the one you prosecute against your own people. Even if there were, torturing an old man is not…”