Lying in bed, he gave the situation a turn or two, but soon dozed off, waking some time later (an hour or two later, judging by his stupor) with the impression that someone else was in the room. He slit his eyes and saw a man standing beside the bed – just his trouser legs – and pretended to be asleep. The seconds slogged past. His circulatory system whined, his heart thudded and then he felt the man’s breath warm on his cheek. Recalling Yara’s talk about Jefe’s savagery, picturing him squatting beside the bed, sniffing out his fright and deliberating his fate, it was all he could do to refrain from shouting and scrambling away – yet he kept his eyes shut and his respiration normal until he heard the faint click of the door closing. Still terrified, he went over to the sink and splashed cold water onto his face. The mechanisms of his thought were gummed up, gears clotted with a sludge of fear. He pulled on his jeans and, after making certain the coast was clear, with no plan in mind, a frightened man making for the known, the familiar, he padded along the hall toward Yara’s room. Her door was open half an inch. He eased it wider.
She sat naked upon her bed, applying ointment to her pale skin, to the edges of what appeared in the dim yellow light of a reading lamp to be dark green slashes (not unlike a tiger’s stripes in form) that curved along her legs and torso and back. She was fleshier than she had been in her teens, her breasts larger and more pendulous, her pubic hair unruly, yet she was still beautiful, exquisitely proportioned, and thus after understanding that the dark green areas were some sort of growth, a hard, unyielding substance similar to the diamond-shaped convexity centering her tattoo, her tramp stamp, the likeness of a dragon’s scale, an implant she’d said . . . after understanding this he felt a mix of revulsion and sympathy and arousal. She set the tube of ointment on the bedside table among a phalanx of medicine bottles, opened a plastic container, and squeezed a dab of lotion into her palm. The diamond shape of the original scale (Snow now assumed it to be a scale) had lost its integrity and become a blotch occupying much of her lower back, the epicenter from which this apparent contagion had spread – as she reached behind her with the lotion, twisting her neck about so she could see to apply it, she caught sight of Snow. She gasped and fell onto her side, dropping the container and scrambling to cover herself. Snow entered the room and she said, ‘I don’t want you to see! Please!’ He perched on the side of the bed and laid a finger on her lips to mute her speech. Her eyes brightened with tears. ‘Please,’ she said again. He had questions, but knew what she needed from him. He picked up the plastic container and began to rub the lotion in, concentrating on places where the scale merged with the skin. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed, but he continued his ministrations, kneading the lotion into her skin, and felt stress draining from her body. Once he finished with her back, he turned her toward him and focused his attention on the stripes (he viewed them now as veins of a strange mineral) crossing her abdomen and fettering the slopes of her breasts, gripping and partly supporting them as would some cruel instrument of bondage. She searched his face, searching it (he suspected) for some twitch that would trigger her detectors, an aberrant expression conveying an excess of pity, a delight in the perverse, anything apart from an acceptable devotion. He maintained a calm, dutiful exterior, intent upon his task, and she surrendered herself, she closed her eyes and let him work. Before long, sighs escaped her lips, musical and daft, like the delicate sounds a contented infant might make. An urgency in her flesh manifested as a shudder, an arching of the back. Careful not to jostle her, he lay down and cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. Her mouth was slack, but soon she responded and when he broke from the kiss he saw that the lines of strain around her eyes and mouth were less deep, as if years had fallen away. He touched her belly, her nipples, the soft places between the stripes of her affliction – she caught his hand and whispered, ‘I want you, but you can’t come inside me. It’ll hurt me if you do.’ He was too riveted on her to explain that this act, born of empathy, had evolved into one of desire. His decade-long obsession had been given release and he was redeemed by her pleasure, he needed nothing else. He eased his fingers into the heated damp of her, eliciting a cry, but not one of pain. As he guided her through a prolonged and convulsive orgasm, he pressed his face close to hers and said, ‘I love you.’ He kept on repeating the words, a counterpoint to her moans, as if this inculcation were a proof of love, until her thighs clamped together, trapping his hand, and she lay with her head tight against his chest, trembling, enduring the final aftershocks.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
She nodded, but gave no further reply, her breath coming in shudders.
It began to feel awkward, holding her that way and not speaking, and he asked if she wanted him to leave. Another nod. She must be, he decided, ashamed of what had happened, or confused by it, or both.
He got up and adjusted his belt. ‘Will I see you in the morning?’
An affirmative noise.
He started to tell her once again that he loved her, but thought she might not want to hear it. He went to the door, peeked out into the hall.
‘Craig.’
She had pulled the sheet up so that her head and shoulders were visible, and – separated by an expanse of the white cloth, appearing to be part of a separate body – her right leg from the knee down, marked by dark green striations.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If not tomorrow, soon . . . he’ll bring the women from the pink house.’
‘The prostitutes?’
‘Yes, and others. He’ll throw a party. The women will be dressed provocatively. Whatever you do, don’t flirt with them. Ignore them. Act as if you’re offended by their interest in you.’
‘All right.’
‘It’s a test, something he does in order to discover whether or not you’re interested in his women. If you don’t show interest, that will buy you some time.’
He expected her to say more, but when nothing was forthcoming he peered out into the hall again.
‘Craig.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I . . . never mind.’
‘What about you and me?’ He turned from the door. ‘Will that piss him off?’
Time became elastic, stretching out into a single un-demarcated moment. At long last she said, ‘I’m not his woman.’
Over the next days all Snow’s questions evaporated, those dating from years before as well as those arising from his encounter with Yara. It was obvious she had been correct in her belief that there was magic in the world, albeit of a dire sort. The striping of dark green scale that defiled her body could not be explained by any means other than her contact with the dragon. It had to be a physical consequence of their unnatural spiritual union, a punishment levied upon her for consorting with beasts, a curse she had accepted in order to achieve her ends. He was nearly persuaded to her opinion that Jefe might be a force for good and, left to his own devices, would allow Temalagua to determine its destiny – but the recognition that he would be long dead by the time such a future came to pass diminished his enthusiasm for the idea.
As Yara predicted, on the night following their encounter Jefe herded a group of approximately twenty attractive women into the dining room, all clad in lingerie. Judging by Luisa Bazan’s story, Snow accepted that her husband Enrique had purchased every scrap of silk and lace that adorned them, but that Luisa’s accusations of infidelity were without merit, or else (if he were to believe Yara) Enrique would be dead. Among the women was the girl from the cantina, Itzel. Jefe thrust her at him and, expressionless, she attempted to fondle his genitals. Snow, as instructed, rejected her. Before long the room was aflutter with drunken, chattering, underdressed women who came at him singly and in pairs, making much over him, cooing and caressing, while Jefe watched icily from a doorway. Snow was impervious to their tender assaults, affecting boredom, brushing them off, winding up alone in a corner and thinking that Griuale’s legendary subtlety must have gone glimmering along with his memories, because Jefe was nothing if not unsubtle. He felt he would have been able to see through this deception without Yara’s help, and he speculated that Griaule may never have been a subtle creature, that his reputed prowess in this regard had been exaggerated due to his bulk (even a gross manipulation would be perceived as a subtlety when the manipulator was roughly the size of a county in Rhode Island) and to the ease with which people could be manipulated, thanks in large part to their eagerness to absolve themselves of responsibility and shift blame for their behavior onto an outside influence, as if they were at the mercy of forces beyond their control.