‘Could be I’ll go back into the killing business. The world can always use another assassin.’
The robot’s great oval head twitched. ‘I’m sorry you have so much resentment.’
‘It’s not resentment,’ said Mingolla. ‘It’s disgust.’
‘I’m aware that—’
‘You aren’t aware of shit!’ said Mingolla. ‘The things you bastards…’ He caught himself, not wanting to lose it completely. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe all I can do is try to fix what you people have broken.’
‘Don’t you understand?’ said the robot. ‘That’s exactly how I feel.’
‘Really?’
‘Do you think I’m without feeling?’ the robot asked. ‘Don’t you know how appalling I find what we’ve done, what we’ve had to do?’
The robot embarked upon what Mingolla was coming to view as the classic Sotomayor rap, You Can’t Make an Omelet without Breaking Eggs, and We Will Spend Our Lives Redressing All Wrongs. Izaguirre’s version was superb, heartfelt, and eloquent, and Mingolla had no doubt that he believed every word. He promised Izaguirre that he would give serious consideration to his proposal and that he would try to put his resentments behind him; but after the robot had trundled off to visit relatives, he found that his tolerance of the proceedings had been reduced to zero. The scales had fallen from his eyes. Everywhere he looked he detected the residues of old hatreds. Whispers behind hands, scowls, poisonous stares. And there were fresh hatreds as well. Those he detected in the standoffishness with which the Madradonas and Sotomayors treated their new allies, the drug-induced psychics. The shoddiness of the party, the schmaltzy music, the whirling unlovely couples, the mutant sideshow, the high tech grotesquerie of Izaguirre’s robot: the sinister aspects of all this seemed to have undergone an intensification. He might, he thought, have been standing in Berlin decades ago, watching the burghers ratify their allegiance to the lean, cold National Socialists, disguising their intrinsic meanness and paucity of spirit with shabby pomp and sprinklings of glamour. This gathering had no less potential for nastiness, for vicious perversion, and he perceived in it the shape of the world to come, one not so different from the old. The feud would resurface, with the added bloodiness of a new feud between the families and their drugged creations, and the result would be a world of back-fence wars and heavy tensions and near-apocalypses. Or perhaps a total apocalypse. The families’ propensity for oversight might well allow for this significant difference. But whatever ultimacy they might contrive of the future, of one thing Mingolla was sure: he would not survive to see it. Wherever he turned, people looked away from him, not wanting to be caught staring. That consensus interest alone was enough to damn him. Sooner or later somebody would decide that he was too powerful to trust, or would make a judgment based on a more personal issue.
He spotted Debora standing with Tully and Corazon on the far side of the hall, and he crossed to them, bumping into ungainly Madradonas and graceful Sotomayors. ‘I’m gonna take a walk,’ he said to Debora as he came up. ‘You be all right?’
‘You look pale,’ she said. ‘Are you sick?’
‘Something I ate.’
‘You be missin’ all de fun, mon,’ said Tully drunkenly; he gave Corazon such a fierce squeeze that Mingolla half-expected to see her rosy eye pop out.
‘I’ll go with you,’ said Debora; but she didn’t seem eager to leave.
‘Naw, I just wanna walk a little. I’ll take Gilbey and Jack, and I’ll catch ya back here or at the pension.’
He turned to go, but she stepped in front of him. ‘Is anything wrong?’
It was a temptation to tell her all he’d been thinking, but he knew she wouldn’t buy it. Nothing serious,’ he said. ‘I’ll see ya later.’
As he headed for the door, various of the families acknowledged him with smiles and nods. So sincere, so unassuming. He smiled back, hating them all.
Clear night, the stars pointy and bright, so regularly spaced that the strip of blue darkness overhead looked like a banner laid across the rooftops. Mingolla felt at ease walking out among the dead. The dead could be trusted, at least. Their dim urges were not informed by greed or lust; their memories did not inspire perversity, but were merely unresolvable longings for a world they could not quite recall. He liked the silence of the street, too. Silence was a blue-dark flow through the claustrophobic canyons of the barrio, carrying his reflection smoothly along in the windows of the stores, past the logjams of shadowy figures in the gutters, and he thought it might not be so bad to enlist in those shadow armies, to breathe the poison that made them slow, to follow the orders that permitted them to indulge in the last real reason for living. He increased his pace, swinging his arms, marching, and Gilbey and Jack had to break into a stumbling run to keep up. At last he stopped in front of the store that once had sold religious items and looked at himself in the ranked mirrors. An infinity of starlit Mingollas, all of them dark, with glittering eyes. Studying the reflections calmed him. He turned his head, and the reflections followed suit. He put his hands on his hips, moved toward the window, and an army of Mingollas, bold and undaunted, approached for consultation.
Pity, he thought, that they weren’t magic mirrors. He’d summon his friends and family to appear, give them the benefit of his wisdom. Not that he had a lot to give. Just one word: Panama. He’d say it differently to each of them. Softly to old girlfriends, to Long Island Woman, letting them know how lucky they were as Americans to be insulated against so much painful reality. And to his old buddies, he’d offer it as an admonition, shock them into draft-dodgery. And to his father, yeah, to his father he’d pronounce it as a cross between a whisper and a hiss. The word would cloud the mirror, translating into a gas the color of the night sky and the shadows, one that would envelop his father’s head and convey to him the dark flash of being, send him reeling, choking on quintessential Panamanian truth, and a moment later actuarial reality would knock on the door, and Mom would have lovers in Florida till she was eighty. Wow! What a gal!
Panama.
Not what he’d expected, nosiree!
He hadn’t reached the topless country of white beaches, the tanned coast of movie star tits and coco locos, the loll of brochureportrait dewy daughters of the idle isles, and you got American money, Jim, this land is your land, for rape, rent, and shopping mall development… whatever’s your pleasure. No, he’d reached the bloody republic of history, where Colombian pirates raided the coast and screwed their victims’ corpses, where once a band of white sailors had become headhunters and cannibals, where Chinese railroad workers had drowned themselves by the hundreds when their opium ran out, where a little weed grew that gave you the power to raise armies of the dead.
Where a man named Carlito had been born.
Panama… little shiver of three syllables.
Then the word seemed to acquire a new meaning, to tell of green hills rising beyond a barricade, of Daríen, the cloud forest, the lost tribes, the witch-men and their thoughts like streamers of mist.
That Panama, now… that might just be an option after all.
Jack and Gilbey edged closer as if his longing for escape had spoken to them, and something stirred in the gutter at Mingolla’s feet. A thin shred of a man wrapped in tatters of brown cloth, stinking of garbage. Mingolla went to his knees beside him, looked into eyes empty and doting as a dog’s. The man’s lips were scabbed, and his nose had been broken; strings of bloody mucus hung from his nostrils, thick and webbed like macramé. He reached out his hand, clutched at Mingolla’s arm, and Mingolla, his bitterness swept away, began to work on the man’s mind. Behind him, a rustling, a shifting, but he paid it no attention.