‘What happens to them?’
‘I don’t want to spoil it for you.’
‘I probably won’t ever see it. I’m more into games.’
‘They die,’ said Snow. ‘There’s no cure, no remedy, and the bladerunners, these special cops who hunt runaway replicants, they kill them.’
The kid thought this over. ‘You’d think they’d name the movie after the replicants.’
‘Yeah, you’d think. I guess Bladerunner sounded sexier.’
‘It’s kind of sad,’ said the kid after a few beats. ‘But I wouldn’t cry about it.’
‘The saddest part is the replicants aren’t just stronger and better-looking. They live more intensely than regular people, even the cops that shoot them.’
‘I knew a guy who got shot by the cops once, but he was an old sleazebag.’ The kid stripped off his shirt. ‘Fuck it!’
He did a racing dive into the pool and swam furiously yet efficiently, showing off several strokes, with an especially strong butterfly. Snow refocused on his troubles, but his thoughts kept returning to Rutger Hauer, tears in rain, and when Daryl Hannah killed the toymaker. Romantic bullshit. He wondered if the book was better. The kid hauled himself out of the pool, dripping, and sat down, gathering his hair into a ponytail and squeezing water from it.
‘You didn’t stay in long,’ said Snow.
The kid acted surlier than he had before swimming, as if his nifty strokes had proved a point. ‘I didn’t want to get caught.’
‘You’re a pretty good swimmer.’
‘I’m all right.’
He picked up his T-shirt and slung it over his shoulder, preparing to leave.
‘I’ve got a problem,’ Snow said, struck by the irrational notion that the kid might have answers, that he had been sent by God or fate or a controlling interstellar agency. ‘A decision I’m struggling with. That’s why I was so emotional earlier. It wasn’t about the movie.’
This put the kid on the alert. ‘Yeah?’
Without going into much detail, Snow sketched out his problem.
‘You’re joking, right?’ said the kid snottily. ‘Take a shit job in some dead-ass place or go have a big weird adventure in another country? Where’s the decision? I’d be down there already.’
Snow didn’t care for the kid giving him attitude. ‘If your old man let you go, you mean.’
‘Fuck you, you pussy!’
The kid hurried away toward the hotel.
‘Some oracle,’ said Snow.
V
Under a threatening sky, with the bumpy, leaden underbellies of the clouds passing low overhead, winded from altitude (eight thousand feet) and exertion, Snow sat on a ridge top high above Tres Santos, eating a chocolate bar and peering at the village through binoculars. Except for two striking additions, the place was as he remembered – an impoverished outpost of humanity whose sorrows were obscured by distance, lent the illusion of tranquility by a lack of definition. Tres Santos was laid out on a relatively flat stretch of ground bounded by two rocky hills, their lower slopes forested with pine, the boughs ghost-dressed with rags and streamers of morning mist. A red dirt road with ruts brimming with rainwater angled away between the worn hills, leading toward the village of Nebaj. Whitewashed one- and two-room houses ranged a cross-hatching of muddy streets, many having a vegetable plot and banana trees for a back yard, and there were wandering pigs, goats, a cantina with a hand-lettered sign above the entrance, Cantina Alhambra, and a couple of dinged-up mini-trucks, Toyotas, both painted a bilious yellow. Surmounting the hill to the east stood the most impressive of the additions – a stubby white building without windows or doors or any feature whatsoever, jutting up from the summit like a strange, geometrically precise tooth from a moldering green jaw. At the base of the hill, about one hundred feet from the edge of the village, was a long single-story structure of pink concrete block with multiple doors and windows – it brought to mind an elementary school annex.
He replaced the binoculars in their case and finished the chocolate bar. An updraft made him shiver. He pulled the cowl of his sweatshirt over his head and zipped up his windbreaker, wishing the overcast would lift. He’d forgotten how cold it could get in the highlands. He shouldered his backpack and started down the hill, losing sight of the village once he was among the pines. With every step he felt lighter, more buoyant, as though the stupidity of what he was doing, the sheer pointlessness, somehow allayed his fears. Near the bottom of the hill he caught sight of Tres Santos again and his resolve faltered, yet not until he set foot on the dirt streets did his pace slow and weakness invade his limbs. He felt as though he were going against an invisible tide flowing in the streets, striving to bear him back among the pines. From his previous visit he surmised that the men of the village were working in the fields that terraced the gentler slopes on the opposite side of the hills, but now their absence seemed evidence of desolation. The women, who normally would wave or peek from their doorways, hid behind curtains and the one person who came forth to greet him, a naked toddler gnawing on a pulped mango, was snatched back into the shadows by his mother. No music, no chatter. Tension was a stench into which the smells of ordure and diesel fuel and cookery were folded.
The Cantina Alhambra was dingy and cramped, with plaster walls adorned by a religious calendar and the framed photo of an elderly Mayan man in a shabby suit coat posing stiffly for the camera – a black crepe ribbon cut diagonally across a corner of the frame. Three wooden tables and eight chairs were scattered about, and fencing off the rear of the room was a crudely carpentered counter behind which stood a pretty girl of fifteen or sixteen with an impassive air, glossy wings of hair falling down her back, and strong Mayan features. She wore a white huipil with a pattern of embroidered roses across her breasts. At her rear was a doorway covered by a red-and-white checkered plastic curtain. She spoke neither English nor Spanish, only Mam, the language of the region, and Snow was forced to pantomime his desire for coffee. She produced a bottle of beer and a dusty glass. Snow decided it wasn’t worth the effort to attempt a more accurate definition of his needs. He carried the beer to one of the tables and sat with his back against the wall, looking out at the empty street, now and again glancing at the girl, who swiped idly at the countertop with a rag.
Sipping the tepid beer failed to improve his outlook. He’d wait here fifteen minutes, he decided, no more, and then walk about the village, see what developed. And then, depending on his state of mind, he would either approach the pink building – the whorehouse, he suspected – or he would get the hell out of Dodge. At the moment he leaned toward the latter. He had satisfied his commitment, he told himself. It had been without any real purpose, a romantic gesture, a sop to his conscience, a token idiocy. Now that he had come to Tres Santos and found nothing of consequence, seen nothing that bore upon Guillermo or the skull or anything in his past, he could go home with a clear conscience.
Wherever home might be.
He lifted the bottle to his lips and a slim, pale, diminutive man emerged from the back room, pushing aside the plastic curtain. In his early thirties by the look of him, the same height as the girl, at least a head shorter than Snow, with barbered dark brown hair and a loose-fitting, button-less white shirt woven of coarse cloth. He had a TV actor’s plastic beauty, a clever symmetry of feature that appeared to be the work of a surgeon whose intent had been to create the face of a male doll with sharp cheekbones and a square jaw, yet one capable of simulating a feminine sensitivity, this implied by the largeness of his eyes and the fullness of his lips. He brushed the girl’s hair aside and kissed the side of her neck, putting a stamp on the nature of their relationship. He nodded pleasantly to Snow, rested his elbows on the counter, and said, ‘Doing some exploring, are you?’