She took a sip of water and replaced the glass on the night-stand.
‘After I’d been with Jefe a few weeks, caring for him twenty-four seven, I realized how willful he could be and I began to worry he wouldn’t turn out as I hoped.’
‘There’s a shocker,’ said Snow.
‘I wanted a means of stopping him, so I bribed the engineer to provide me with a code that would enable me to bring down the central section of the chains all at once. At first I asked for a code that would bring them all down, but he warned there would be a splashing effect – if all the chains fell they’d likely kill everyone in the room. I’ve been tempted to use the code several times, but until now I always trusted my original decision.’
He could guess what had changed for her, why she was now willing to act, and he wanted to be sure, to ask, Why now? because he doubted it had much if anything to do with Chuy – but he bit back the question, worried that if he pressed that particular button it would enlist a negative emotion and she might rethink her decision.
‘What’s the code?’ he asked.
‘In the lair there’s a panel at eye-level just to the left of the door. Inside there’s a keypad. Punch in seven-one-three-nine-one. It’s my birthday. Seven, thirteen, ninety-one. When it’s the right moment, you press Enter and down he’ll come. But I’ll be the one who enters the code.’
She sat up in bed, a process that required his assistance, and once she had resettled with pillows behind her, she said, ‘It’s best I do it, anyway. If he stays true to form, he’ll take you up to one of the perches and leave you there while he flies. I know the precise section of chains that will drop and I’m used to watching him fly – I know his timing and you don’t. But he may not allow me to go upstairs with you. In that case . . . he might leave you on the ground and have you watch him fly. Maybe you can use the code then. We have to make certain he brings me up with you. The way to ensure it is to act like we’re angry with one another and keep on arguing about how he should govern.’
‘How’s that?’
‘He was interested in what we said. If we can hold his interest, when it comes time to kill you, he’ll want me there to watch him end the argument.’
‘I’m not good with heights,’ Snow said after an interval.
‘You’re going to have to be.’ She rolled her neck to loosen the muscles. ‘There’s one more thing. You might have to finish him off.’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I thought the idea was to make him fall from a height.’
‘The fall may not kill him. When he first started to fly he took a number of falls – they laid him up for a day, but that’s all.’
‘How long a fall are we talking about?’
‘The longest was fifty or sixty feet.’
‘He fell sixty feet onto a concrete floor and lived?’
‘This time the chains will come down on top of him – that should do the job. But we have to prepare for the possibility that he’ll survive. I’ll bring a machete, but you’ll have to use it. I’m not strong enough.’
‘Can you get a gun?’
She shook her head. ‘No guns. Since the sniper incident, he hasn’t let anyone near him with a gun. He sniffs them out.’
‘He doesn’t worry about machetes?’
‘He sees me with one every day. I have to kill chickens and chop weeds in the garden. He’s not concerned about anyone killing him at close range.’
‘Jesus fuck!’
‘You can do it! If he’s not dead he’ll be stunned, chewed up in the chains.’
‘How about making him fall from higher up?’
‘He wants his audience to see everything. Generally he’ll strand whomever he’s going to kill on a perch close to the floor. Then he makes this tumbling run across the center of the lair that brings him in at around thirty or forty feet. He plucks whomever it is off the wall and carries them higher before he drops them. I’m familiar with that run, I can time it. Otherwise he flies erratic patterns, and the odds against my being able to time him go way up. We can discuss it, but that’s not the path I’d choose if my life were in the balance.’
Something about the plan, her sudden conversion to his cause, seemed flimsy and too facile by half. Of course it hadn’t been that sudden, the conversion – it had taken him more than a week to work this change, to make her reflect on her feelings for him, yet nonetheless it was a quick turnaround.
‘You look funny,’ she said. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘I was thinking . . . visualizing.’
They went over details. The chains, she told him, slid up or down, back and forth along their tracks, and their movements could be modified by means of the keypad, but usually Jefe keyed in a code that initiated a pre-choreographed sequence. The trucks, the old yellow Toyotas parked on the streets of the village, belonged to the PVO. They looked like wrecks, but were kept tuned up and gassed, and could be counted upon to get them as far as the border. They could not stay in Temalagua once Jefe was dead – they’d be hunted. If they could reach the States, they could sit down somewhere and decide what to do next. And so forth. A multitude of ifs, ands, and buts attached to the plan. No matter how carefully it had been worked out, they would need to be very lucky. One thing in particular kept nagging at Snow, causing him doubt, and he finally asked why she had risked involving the engineer.
‘It wasn’t much of a risk,’ she said. ‘I had no choice, and I knew the PVO intended to disappear everyone who worked on the project.’
‘Yeah, but he might have blurted out your secret before they could execute him. He would have betrayed you if he thought he could save himself.’
A grave look veiled her features. ‘Give me some credit. I killed him before he had the opportunity to betray me. As soon as I was certain the code worked, I stabbed him. I explained to the PVO that he had tried to rape me.’
Snow, nonplussed by this admission, by the cool authority in her voice, ducked his head and scratched the back of his neck to hide his reaction.
‘You see?’ she said. ‘I told you I was damned.’
Over the next few days Snow concocted elaborate paranoid fantasies about Yara. His favorite, the one he kept returning to, was that her plan was a cruelty meant to extract the last drop of torment from him, a lie that would insure his docility as he was led to the slaughter. He imagined her taunting him as he waited to die, and her insistence that they sleep in separate beds in order to reinforce the notion that they were feuding, played into the fantasy. Now she was through with him, the trap set, and the distasteful (to her) act of intercourse was no longer necessary – thus her ploy. He stopped short of believing this, yet when he recognized how dependent he was on her and thought of everything she had done to guarantee the dragon’s survival, he was tempted to think the worst of her.
‘You probably think it’s weird I haven’t told you I love you,’ she said the following night when Snow dropped by her room to wish her good night.
He thought she must have told him and searched his memory, wanting to remind her of the occasion.
‘I’m not sure why I’ve been so reticent. I think I know why, but . . .’ She pretended to punch the side of her head. ‘Sometimes things get all screwed up in here. Anyway, it must be obvious.’
‘What’s obvious?’
‘That I love you.’
Her voice carried no conviction. She had draped a blue scarf over the lampshade, dimming the light, making it difficult to read her expression.
‘I don’t mean to sound tentative,’ she said. ‘I had to decide about Jefe first and then I wondered whether you really wanted me. And there were other considerations, other pressures. I do love you, but saying it has just seemed awkward.’