She had never felt this with anyone. Never known such an agony, never known what a tender sad thing love could be. She’d got up this morning hating him for making her long for him, for destroying all her carefully constructed defenses with his muscular embrace or his harsh laugh, for subverting her prejudices by making her love him in spite of — because of? — his ridiculous masculinity, his reckless gaiety and resolute foolishness, his violently assertive intensity. It was melodramatic, absurd — she truly was obsessed by him: In the night she’d thought of all the years she hadn’t known him; and she’d been jealous of all the women he’d ever known; and she’d kept thinking that at best he’d make the kind of bully husband who never touched the dishes.
He kept patting her shoulder and there-thereing her. It was imbecilic. She pulled herself away, snuffled, dragged a sleeve across her eyes. “Don’t just let me sit here with egg on my face.”
She peered at him, trying to clear her eyes. “God damn you, it’s not that I don’t want to live without you — it’s that I can’t. And I don’t know what the hell to do about that.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, ducks.” He took both her hands. “You’ve eaten your way right through me like termites.”
“What a suave line you have there.”
He wrapped himself around her, more like a wrestler than a lover but his rough kiss dissolved her, made her feel as if her colors were running and blending into his own.
They were tangled together on the couch. Past Harry’s shoulder she saw Santana in the doorway, not smiling.
“God invented the fist so that we could knock before entering.” She began to sit up.
Santana’s expression never changed. He had a rolled newspaper in his hand. She watched him approach: He unfolded the paper and held it out for them to see. It was in Spanish but she recognized the photograph — Rosalia Rojas very young, her hair straight down over her shoulders and her smile bright and expectant: yearbook photograph.
Harry swung his legs around and got his feet on the floor. She saw his jaw creep forward to lie in a hard straight line. He looked from the newspaper up into Santana’s face. “¿Donde está?”
“¿Pues — a la policia?”
She said, “Goddamn it. What is it?”
“Sorry, ducks. Seems the game’s been called on account of death.”
“Rosalia?”
Harry, naked, left the towel when he strode across the room. “Get yourself ready to travel.” He disappeared.
“Oh, the poor thing. She was so—” She followed him as far as the door. “Why her?”
He was climbing into underwear. “Gunning for both of them, I guess. The paper makes it out to be a mugging.”
“Isn’t there a chance—”
“No.”
She pressed her cheeks with her palms as if to reassure herself of her own reality. I must look a fright: She ought to do something about her hair. But she didn’t move from the doorway. “You want to put me on a plane.”
“Ducks, I want you to stay alive.”
She said, “She was such a breezy kid.”
“She was all right,” Harry acknowledged.
“Maybe now at least they’ll reopen it in Washington.”
“I doubt it. They’ll just pull the covers up over their heads. They’ve got an out, haven’t they — nobody can prove it wasn’t an ordinary robbery attack.” He buttoned up his short-sleeve khaki shirt and left the tails out over his Levi’s. Then he sat down to lace up his roughout-buck boots.
“What are you going to do?”
“Find out how Glenn wants to play it. Give him a hand if I can.” He looked up. “This gives him a stake in it, doesn’t it?”
“What about you?”
“Ducks, you’re my stake in it.”
“I don’t want you killed, Harry.”
“People have been trying to kill me for twenty-five years. Don’t worry about me.”
She went back across the front room for her boots. Santana stood in the kitchen doorway — neither drinking nor smoking nor eating nor reading; simply waiting.
She tried to comb her hair. Turmoil enveloped her — she had always tried to exercise control over the events of her life and because she was able and intelligent she usually succeeded but now they were racing by too quickly and she felt adrift.
Harry was with Santana talking Spanish when she emerged. Santana came away, heading back past her to her room. She said, “Don’t bother, I didn’t pack it.”
Santana hesitated and Harry scowled. She said, “Down in the Amazon basin the jaguars hunt in male-female pairs. When two of them pounce on a big tapir that outweighs both of them put together, the battle can be kind of fierce. We were down there on location once and I saw it happen. It can look right dicey, as you’d say. But the outcome’s always the same.”
“That’s kind of fanciful.”
She said, “Please don’t sell me short.”
Santana looked on with stiff disapproval.
Harry said, “Okay, ducks. We’d better pick you out a gun.”
Chapter 14
Cielo walked fretfully to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the thin mist. Kruger was down there striding back and forth like a colonial officer, whipping a stick against his britches; Cielo measured the distance again with his eye and turned back toward the mountain.
Vargas’s eyebrows lifted — he was awaiting Cielo’s signal. Uneasy, Cielo shook his head and went back to the trees, crossing the flat rock where the helicopter had set down last night, passing two field guns and the crated mortars. The field pieces were small ones, three-inchers.
He had another close look at the oak to which the block-and-tackle was cabled. It was the biggest tree in the vicinity and looked as substantial and monolithic as a granite mountain and Kruger, the engineer among them, had passed on its suitability as an anchor for the cable but Cielo was troubled by doubts because water was easy in the rain forest and the rock subsurface was close beneath the soil — even the biggest trees had no need to drill roots very far down; it made for a shallow purchase.
Kruger had dismissed it. The oak, he’d pointed out, was old enough to have survived a hundred hurricanes. It would support the weight of a Sherman tank, let alone a small mountain howitzer or a crate of rockets.
Vargas came across to the oak. “Before long the sun will burn this off. We need to be under cover by then.”
“All right.” He still felt nagged by reluctance but he forced himself away from it. “Let’s get started then.”
He went to the rim and watched the cable pull taut over the guy pully. The crate — twelve hundred pounds — began to skid and tilt; then it was lifted off the ground and swung far out. Vargas and two of the men prodded it with poles to slow its pendulum swing. After a time it settled down, twisting a bit in the air, hanging clear out over the face of the cliff.
Down below Kruger was watching with his neck craned back, his face pale in the mist. He began to make beckoning gestures with both hands and Cielo relayed these signals to Julio who shifted the gears and began to pay out cable from the donkey engine’s winch drum. The heavy crate began to descend, well out away from the face of the cliff, and Cielo sat back on his haunches and relaxed; it was working splendidly.
The donkey engine banged away methodically and down at the mouth of the cave Kruger had stepped to one side and was reaching up to guide the crate to its seat on the flatbed cart that waited to receive it. Four men clustered around the swaying load while it dropped slowly amid them. There was a second donkey engine in the cave, only seven horsepower but enough to winch the dolly into the cave.