"It's awful."
The plane landed and Baqia was a madhouse. There was one hotel in the country, called the-Astarse. "If you be a spy," said the hotel clerk, "you be right at home here."
And, he said, they had recently had a vacancy because all the occupants in the room had been killed. There were more bodies lying around unburied in this hotel than in a big city morgue.
There was no room service and there was a very big lump in the bed. The lump was a dying man. He spoke Russian.
"How can I use that bed?" demanded Ruby. "There's a man dying in it."
"He be dead," said the clerk. "You wait. We see lot of lung wounds. They always kill. Don't worry you pretty little head."
Ruby went to the window and looked out into the street. Across the dusty road was the presidential palace. In the window directly opposite her was a fat black man looking like an overdressed doorman at a white hotel. He had a lot of medals. He grinned at her and waved.
"Congratulations, sweetheart, chiquita. You now selected as the lover of our sacred leader, Generalissimo Sacristo Corazon, praise his wonderfulness forever. He is the greatest lover of all time."
"He look like a turkey," Ruby said.
96
"Shut you eyes and pretend you getting a tooth drilled down below. He be over very fast, you don' even know how fast. Then you come back to me for some real loving."
Ruby sensed her survival depended on submitting. She could endure any man, provided it was just one man. And maybe she would luck out, steal Corazon's machine, and be on the next plane home before he knew it was missing.
There was no forma! greeting from El Presidente when Ruby entered his sleeping rooms. Corazon was nude except for his pistol belt. He kept a velvet-covered box near the side of his bed.
He acknowledged that he might not be up to par. He had grievous problems. He might have backed the wrong side in an international matter.
Would the beautiful lady, he asked, possibly accept only the second greatest lover in the world, which he was when he was not the greatest, that being when he was not worried about international politics.
"Sure. Go ahead. Get it over with," Ruby said.
"He is over with," said Corazon. He was putting on his riding boots.
"Oh, wonderful," said Ruby. "You're the greatest. My main man. Wowee. That is doing the do. Wow. Some lover."
"You really think so?" asked Corazon.
"Sure," said Ruby. One thing you had to say for the man. He was neat. He didn't even leave moisture.
"You like the Astarse Hotel?" asked Corazon.
"No," said Ruby. "But it will do."
"You meet anybody there? Like an old yellow man?"
Ruby shook her head.
97
"Or a white man with him who does strange things?"
Ruby shook her head again. She noticed he stayed very close to the velvet-covered box. It was like an old wooden table model television set. She saw a few dials underneath one folded-back flap of the blue velvet. Corazon put his body between her and the box and Ruby knew that it was the secret weapon she'd been sent to find.
"Sweetheart, how you like to be rich?" Corazon said.
"No." Ruby shook her head. This whole job had more bad omens than a flock of ravens flying over a torture chamber. "Ever since I been a baby, I think money's just too much trouble. And what I need money for? With a big beautiful man like you, Generalissimo." Ruby smiled. She knew her smile did things to men, but it did nothing to this man.
"If you no help me now, you not my woman," said Corazon.
"I'll just have to deny myself." She fastened her belt and blew the dictator a kiss.
"It not hard. You go to yellow man and white man and give them two little pills when they drink. Then you come back to your lover, me. Eh? Great plan."
Ruby Jackson Gonzalez shook her head.
Corazon shrugged. "I charge you with treason. Guilty as charged. Go to jail."
This little indictment and trial over with, Ruby found herself being manhandled to a prison compound seventeen miles outside Ciudad Natividado on Baqian Route 1.
Meanwhile Corazon knew he had to do something about the two Americans without delay. He had broken relations with the United States, put himself in
98
the hands of the Russians, and the Russians now claimed they had given forty-five lives to Baqia.
Which was true, but it only meant that forty-five Russians couldn't handle the two Americans.
And now the American woman wouldn't poison the pair and his own generals and ministers seemed to disappear, for fear they would be asked to attack the two devils in the Astarse Hotel.
The only one who was around was Major Estrada and Corazon did not want to use him. First, Estrada wasn't smart enough to do it and second, Corazon didn't want to lose the one man he knew who wouldn't kill him if he got a chance.
He thought briefly of going to the priest in the hills and throwing himself on his mercy. Maybe Juanita's prophecy could be made wrong. Maybe these Americans wouldn't team up with the holy man in the hills to overthrow Corazon?
He couldn't do it. It would loosen his grip on Baqia, and if that grip slipped he would be dead before the sun set. Show weakness and a dictator was finished.
There was only one thing to do. He had to make friends with America. This meant exposing himself to criticism from international organizations for human rights, which only recognized them for people who were friends of the United States. And it meant condemnation in the U.N. pickets in front of his three embassies in Paris, Washington, and Tijuana, and all sorts of general nuisance by people whose tails twitched when Moscow barked.
No matter. It would buy time. Make friends with America and maybe they would slow down whatever it was those two Americans planned to do. And that would give Corazon time to get into the hills and
99
get rid of that holy man. And with him dead Juanita's prophecy could not come true.
Corazon sighed. He would do it.
He sighed again. Ruling a country was hard work.
100
CHAPTER SIX
The cable was marked "Top Secret Super Duper," so the secretary of state knew it was from Baqia when the thin blue sheet, folded into a self-envelope, was placed on his desk.
The message inside was from Generalissimo Cora-zon and was brief:
"We starting relations with you again, okay?"
The secretary of state chewed a Mylanta for his stomach, which bubbled like a noxious vial of chemicals from a horror movie. Nothing in the curriculum of the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs had prepared him for this. Why hadn't they told him about people like Corazon and governments like Baqia's?
They had broken off relations two days earlier by announcing that they weren't going to have sex with America anymore. No reason. Now they were re-
101
opening diplomatic relations with a kindergarten note. Okay?
And it wasn't just Baqia, it was everywhere. Foreign policy seemed so easy when you were just lecturing about it. But when you tried to practice it you found the theories and the plans getting swamped by the people you had to deal with, people whose foreign policy might be dictated by whether or not they liked their morning meal.
And so the United States had lost its initiative in the Mideast, and every time they though they had put it back together that lunatic with a striped pillow case on his head would threaten to shoot somebody else and it would all come unglued. The United States had thrown its lot with the revolutionary rabble in South Africa and Rhodesia and, when the governments of those countries backed down with concessions, the revolutionaries rejected them. China seemed about ready to retreat back behind its traditional closed doors and no one knew who to talk to to try to prevent it.
And then there were natural resources. Was it some kind of cosmic joke of God to have the nitnats of the world breed and multiply over the oil and the gold and the diamonds and the chrome and the asphalt and now the mung?