Anything to delay, thought Snow. He needed time to think how to deal with this teensy fucker. He said he would and held up his cup to attract Itzel’s attention.
‘I have better coffee at my place.’ The man scraped back his chair. ‘Bring your pack. I’ll have someone wash your clothes.’
Hoping for guidance, Snow glanced at Itzel once again, but her eyes were glued to the countertop . . . perhaps a message in itself. He thought about taking a swing at the man, catching him by surprise, but doubted that would end well. Despite his stature, the man’s strength hinted at extreme physical competence, so running was probably out of the question.
The man preceded him into the empty street and established a brisk pace, heading for the pink building, but stopped abruptly and, putting a hand on Snow’s chest, said, ‘You know who I am. Don’t deny it.’
Snow believed that if he admitted to any knowledge, it would be a fatal misstep. He could feel his heart beating against the man’s palm. ‘I’ve never laid eyes on you before today.’
The man struck him in the face – it was a light slap of the kind used to wake someone up, but his hand felt like solid bone and the blow twisted Snow’s head around and made him take a backward step.
‘I think you have,’ said the man.
‘I swear, I’ve never seen you! I don’t know anything about you!’
The man seemed dispirited, as if he had been seeking not an admission, but rather had hoped to learn something. He started walking again, The gray light flattened things out – the hill with its two buildings resembled a painted backdrop.
‘You can call me Jefe,’ the man said. ‘That’s what everyone calls me, but it’s not who I am.’
Women peered from the windows of the pink building as they approached – one of them beckoned, soliciting a visit – yet Jefe paid her no mind and entered a door with an intercom mounted on the wall beside it. Beyond lay a tunnel with concrete walls and a ceiling less than a foot higher than Snow’s head, lit for its entire length by fluorescent fixtures. He pictured electric carts rolling along the tunnel, conveying grim uniformed men with side arms and secret orders and missile codes toward a command center. He kept an eye on Jefe, watching for a sign that Luisa’s pills were having an effect, but the man’s walk held steady and his conversation was terse and on point.
After three or four minutes, by Snow’s estimation, they came to a large paneled room with indirect lighting, a burgundy carpet, and three doors leading, he assumed, to bedrooms, kitchen, and so on. Its central feature was a long banquet table set about with high-backed chairs, the dining surface fashioned from an ancient church door carved with a complex scene that illustrated a typically Temalaguan confusion of cosmologies – anguished men and woman supplicating the angels who hovered just beyond reach, appearing both disinterested in their suffering and unaware of the doings of the less well-defined beings above them who looked to be doing a portage across the heavens with some kind of solar vessel. A mahogany sideboard stood against one wall, supporting an array of liquor bottles, ice buckets, and glasses, and mounted above it was a flat screen TV. Four photographic prints in aluminum frames hung on the opposite wall, each depicting a spectacular cloud formation. For all the luxuriousness of its appointments, the room stood two-thirds empty, far too spacious for such a paucity of furnishings, and this indicated to Snow that while its primary inhabitant might have an awareness of interior decoration, he was seriously myopic as regarded an overall aesthetic.
Jefe told him to have a seat at the table, spoke into an intercom mounted on the wall, and then said to Snow, ‘I’m going upstairs for an hour or two.’ He opened the door to reveal a stairwell. ‘Yara will bring coffee and whatever else you require.’
Snow had nurtured a faint hope that Yara had survived the disappearance of the cult, but that had been wishful thinking and now, hearing her name, her presence alluded to so casually, it was as if a bomb had gone off in his head, obliterating his ability to reason. Once Jefe had gone he stood up from the table and immediately sat back down, dizzy to the point of passing out. He stared at the two doors at the far end of the room, shards of memory falling through his mental sky, and when a woman entered, wearing a shapeless gray smock (a nightgown, his initial impression), moving stiffly, slowly, her hair close cropped, a monastic look, lines of strain on her face deeper than those he would have predicted a thirty-year-old to have . . . and when he recognized her to be Yara, his Yara, miraculously alive and still beautiful despite the attrition of time, he started up from his chair again, intending to embrace her, a great joy building, enfolding him like a garment he had prepared in anticipation of this day yet never thought to wear . . . but then he halted his approach. Her expression betrayed no trace of any kindred emotion, not an ounce of welcome or happiness. She wrangled a chair back from the table and collapsed into it, breathing shallowly. After collecting herself, she said, ‘You have some things to wash?’
‘Yara,’ he said. ‘It’s me . . . Craig.’
‘I know who you are. Show me your clothes and I’ll wash them.’
Baffled by her response, he asked what he had done to anger her.
‘Apart from running out on me?’ She sniffed. ‘Nothing.’
‘I tried to persuade you to come with me.’
‘You should have tried harder. You could at least have told me you were leaving. You didn’t have to sneak away.’
‘You don’t . . .’
‘I hunted for you everywhere. People thought I was demented, I went on about you so. You should have told me. I wouldn’t have tried to stop you and we could have said a proper goodbye.’
‘It was all . . .’ He gave his head a frustrated shake. ‘You don’t understand how much I beat myself up for abandoning you, but I was afraid. I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘I guess I shouldn’t blame you for being yourself.’
That stung him, but he reminded himself that these emotional post-mortems unfailingly began with a litany of bitterness.
‘You’re not truly at fault,’ she said. ‘You weren’t a part of what was going on. But it hurt and I hated you for a long time. Seeing you again brings back a great deal of anger and heart-sickness, but I suppose it’s just residual emotion.’
‘Yara, listen. I . . .’
‘Don’t bother. It’s all in the past.’
‘Maybe for you. It’s been my present for the last thirteen years.’
She laughed humorlessly. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a romantic at heart!’
‘Listen to me for a minute, okay?’
‘If you’ve come here thinking you can rekindle our affair, forget it. That part of my life is over.’
‘How can that be?’ he asked. ‘You’re still young, you’re a beautiful woman.’
She liked hearing that, he could tell, yet tried to hide the fact, thinning her lips in disapproval.
‘I didn’t come here for any reason I can name,’ he said. ‘I assumed you were dead. I may have hoped to see you again, but the hope wasn’t real. It was . . .’
‘Stop it!’
She slapped the table and, as if cued by that percussive sound, a mechanical grinding issued from the stairwell, growing louder with each passing second, impeding their conversation.
‘What the hell’s that?’ Snow asked.
‘He’s flying. Shut the door.’
Snow did as instructed, reducing the noise by half, and returned to the table.
‘Did you notice there aren’t any men in the village?’ Yara asked, cutting off his unspoken question. ‘Within a month after we came to Tres Santos, Jefe had killed them all. Some tried to run, he seemed to know when they ran, and where, and he hunted them down. He kills every man who comes here except for the PVO guys, and he’ll kill them once they’ve outlived their usefulness. I actually believe he gets along with men better than he does with women, but it’s like he’s obeying some beastly imperative, wiping out the competition.’ She paused. ‘He’s probably going to kill you.’