Snow did not believe Luisa had bought into his story. She maintained a cool and disaffected mask throughout and he had been planning to amp up the emotion, to say that he expected nothing of her, he realized how badly he must have hurt her, and he would go his own way if that were her wish, etc. . . . but at this juncture she drew him into a passionate kiss, drowning him in perfume, engaging him with tongue and breasts, eliciting cheers and approbative comments (‘Fuck, yeah!’ and ‘Dude, if you don’t hit that, I will!’ and the like) from the nearby twenty-somethings, some of whom had been eavesdropping. Luisa blushed and led Snow from the bar, accompanied by a smattering of applause, and into the elevator, where unrestrained kissing and fondling supplanted the need to speak, and thence to her suite on the ninth floor, an interior decorator’s wet dream of ‘travertine floors, faux-zebra-skin rugs, Calcutta marble counters, and petrified wood accent tables . . .’ (Out of boredom he had read and re-read the hotel’s brochure while waiting for Luisa.) Amidst this hideous thousand-dollar-per-night splendor the evening held few surprises, yet Snow was unsettled to discover how demanding Luisa was in the bedroom. He felt like a German Shepherd being put through his paces. Harder, faster, deeper. Heel. He supposed her aggression and dominance were due to her enforced docility at home. Thankfully he had procured a supply of Viagra and was able to perform up to her standards, emerging from the training run unscathed apart from a bite mark or two and a sore tongue.
Around noon they went shopping for lingerie, a brief excursion that saw her buy a variety of peignoirs, bra-and-panty sets, and a number of more risqué costumes. Upon their return to the Bon Temps, Luisa put on a fashion show, modeling each and every item, breaking from the process for bouts of coitus interruptus. Their involvement had been so all consuming that it had frustrated Snow’s desire to extract information from her about the PVO, but the fashion show afforded him an opportunity to ask his questions. He had thought that he would have to be subtle in his interrogation, but once he got her started Luisa spoke freely about her husband’s lack of character and his nefarious activities. One typical exchange went as follows:
Luisa (from the next room): Here I come, baby!
Snow: Okay!
(an interval of several seconds)
Snow (hushed): My God.
Luisa: It’s pretty, no?
Snow: That’s not the word I’d use. You look . . . incredible. Amazing. There are no words. Enrique’s eyes are going to bug out when he sees you in this.
Luisa (sternly): Enrique never see me like this. Never. These clothes . . . they are for you. No one else.
Snow: Don’t you have to show him stuff that proves you went shopping?
Luisa: I buy some junk at the airport . . . at the duty free shops. Here. You like me like this?
Snow: Oh, yeah!
Luisa: You ready for me?
Snow: What do you think?
Luisa (giggles): Look. I can slide this over like so. And then I can sit like . . . Ohhh! That’s so nice!
(a minute or two of strenuous breathing)
Luisa (playful): Let me go, baby. I don’t want you to come yet.
Snow: You’re going to fucking kill me.
Luisa (laughs): I’m going to try.
During a viewing of the next outfit:
Snow: I don’t get it. Won’t he be able to tell you bought lingerie from the receipts?
Luisa: Enrique don’t ever look at the receipts. He don’t do nothing. I take care of the receipts, the bank, everything. That’s how I know where he goes on and the presents he buy for women. Puto pendejo! Lambioso! He don’t care if I know about them!
Snow (casually): Where’s he go on these trips?
Luisa: Mexico, sometimes. But mostly he goes to Tres Santos.
Snow: Tres Santos? That’s a little speck of a village. At least it used to be. What’s he do there?
Luisa: It’s where he meets the Jefe. The guy who runs the PVO. How’s this?
Snow: Very sexy. Beautiful. So what’s his name?
Luisa: Jefe. They just call him Jefe ’cause he’s the boss, the chief. He don’t like names. He got lots of secrets and he don’t ever leave Tres Santos. Enrique says he’s a really weird guy. He spend all the time flying inside this big building.
Snow: I’ve never heard of anything like that – flying in a building.
Luisa: I don’t know nothing about it. That’s what Enrique says.
Snow: What’s Enrique do? Does he fly, too?
Luisa: He fucks whores. I can smell them on him when he come home. And I can tell there are many because of the clothes he buy for them. Clothes like this. Different sizes.
Snow: I don’t recall there being any whores in Tres Santos. The population couldn’t support them.
Luisa (impatiently): Well, they got some now and Enrique buys them presents. Why you care? You want to talk about Enrique or you want more of this?
Snow: It’s just I can’t believe he goes with whores when he has a beautiful woman like you.
Luisa (coyly): You like these, eh?
Snow: When you shake them like that, I can’t think of anything else.
And again:
Snow: Maybe he’s a fag. You ever think about that?
Luisa: Enrique?
Snow: Maybe the reason he goes to see the Jefe so often is because they’re fucking.
Luisa: No, not Enrique.
Snow: You say this Jefe’s a weird guy. And powerful. Power can be sexy. Enrique wouldn’t be the first person to switch teams in that kind of situation.
Luisa (uncertainly): Jefe’s got a woman, but . . .
Snow: But what?
Luisa: She’s sick or something. I don’t know.
(a pause)
Luisa: I’m going to try on that black lace thing. What you call it?
Snow: A peignoir.
Luisa: Yeah, I’m going to try that on.
Lastly:
Snow: If you wear that tonight, I’ll rip it to shreds.
Luisa: You can rip up anything you want. We buy more next time.
Snow: You make me so crazy, I might hurt you. Accidentally, of course.
Luisa: You hurt me last night, baby. Did I complain?
(she hums absently)
Snow: You know, the more I think about it, the surer I am that something weird is going on with Enrique and Jefe. You say Jefe lives alone, unprotected? No guards, no soldiers?
Luisa: He don’t need them. Everyone is scared of him. Every time they walk around in the village, the people hide. Enrique say Jefe laughs when he sees that.
Snow: Right, and yet you’re telling me there are a couple of dozen whores in the village. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe the presents Enrique buys, maybe he does that to cover up what’s really going on. What’s he tell you he does with Jefe?
Luisa: They talk about the elections, about they going to get the country back on the right track. Make the army stronger.
Snow: (mutters unintelligibly)
Luisa: Huh?
Snow: Nothing.
And so it went. Sex, driblets of information extracted, more sex, the sole interlude an excursion out onto Collins Avenue and the Mynt Lounge, an exclusive club whose doorman dropped the velvet rope for Luisa, glanced suspiciously at Snow, and ushered them into a surprisingly drab room with black theater carpeting and spacious booths with Mynt green lighting and black walls painted by video projectors (at the moment they were playing what looked to be clips from the SeaWorld aquarium – manta rays and sharks and barracudas, oh my), presided over by a high priest DJ wearing robes adorned with Illuminati-type symbols, mystic eyes, ankhs, radiant objects, who spun anthemic techno at ear-bleeding levels, the dance floor jammed with cavorting models in micro-minis and drug dealers and their clients butt-shaking their way to Jesus or, more likely, the Big Red Dude, and a swank of celebrities, foremost among them in terms of personal power, a black-clad movie director named Brett (a purveyor of cinematic dog shit, in Snow’s view), the Annoying Ego-monster Incarnate with a Van Dyke that reminded him of Guillermo, who swaggered over to their table trailed by his personal assistant, a diminutive clean-shaven imp or familiar also dressed in black and bearing a bottle of designer vodka and three glasses (the imp was not permitted drink, apparently, lest he grow great with self-importance), and following an exchange of cheek kisses with Luisa, the Bearded One inquired of Snow his place in the world, a shouted conversation that evolved into a tiresome supercilious put-down once Brett ascertained that his place was lowly, though Snow wasn’t altogether sure whether or not he had fallen prey to paranoia, because Luisa had earlier that evening slipped him a large blue capsule whose contents wreaked havoc with his judgment and caused the inside of his eyeballs to itch and filled the air with lime spiders and their dark, astonishingly complex webs in which Snow could detect patterns revealing of both past and future, presenting him with the once-in-a-lifetime ability to anticipate the onset of consequential events, but that he wasted on foreseeing the approach of a model with icy eye shadow and breasts like highway emergency cones who slithered up shortly before they headed back to the Bon Temps, insisting that Brett and Luisa do jello shots off her lovely, tanned tummy, as an afterthought including Snow in the invitation, though not the imp – thoroughly disoriented at this juncture, he complied, pretending to be flattered, delighted, eager, but found the experience unpleasant, like licking puke off a still-convulsing corpse, and then lifting his head from this ghoulish feast he saw that the legion of the beautiful damned on the dance floor had broken out sparklers and were waving them around, setting fire to the webs, sending the spiders scuttling for cover, and a booming female voice exhorted everyone to ‘. . . feel free . . . while there’s time to be free!’, words to live by, advice Snow took to heart and went out into the soft warm air lit by the glowing, buzzing, neon cuneiform sign language of the Bauhaus hotels just off the strip, the noise from Collins Avenue – whooping groups of revelers, the purr and growl of muscle cars, sexy and dangerous, dripping with reflected light – a relief by contrast to the din of Mynt, and as they walked he tried to recall a clever phrase he had come up with, something about performing a glitterectomy on the nation, but removed from the environment that had bred and nurtured and defined it, the fundamental relevance of the phrase fizzled out, and Snow along with it.