The Embedding

TWO

The police captain flew in by helicopter, a war-surplus Huey Iroquois Slick, in the midst of a downpour, and wanted to interview Charlie Faith immediately.

Jorge Almeida, Charlie’s Brazilian adviser, put his head round the door-a slim serious individual with hot dark eyes and a light milk chocolate skin suggesting perhaps an Indian grandparent.

“Visitors, Charlie,” he called against the rattle of rain on the tin roof.

Jorge was proud with a truly Brazilian pride of this Amazon Project now opening up half of a country that was itself half a continent, but which had lain dormant for so long: had remained a subconscious landscape, peopled by fantasies of El Dorado and lost cities and giant anacondas that could outrun a horse. Jorge despised these fantasies almost as much as he despised the savages haunting the jungle like ghosts of this dreamscape. From the safe, hitherto uninvolved distance of Amazonia he tacitly supported the military régime that had sworn to tame and civilize this land. His own talents had been approved by two years at the National Civil Engineering Laboratory in Lisbon, and resentment lurked in his soul at being subordinate to a yanqui engineer, however temporary the arrangement. Charlie wasn’t blind to this, but they were stuck with each other and usually made the best of it.

Charlie’s head throbbed with a trace of hangover hardly improved by the drumming on the roof and he was having trouble maintaining radio contact with the Project Control Centre nine hundred kilometres north at Santarém.

Damn visitors, he thought. More lousy priests.

He was a small, once muscular man, whose muscles had turned to flab since his days in the army; whose hair had thinned out since then, till it lay plastered stickily over his scalp in short brown fronds-a wet, serrated, dying leaf. The knobbly upturned end of his nose stood out from his features, softened with large greasy pores and slightly too large-as though he’d spent a few years with a finger up each nostril stretching them. Capillary breakdown had started to lay red spiders over his cheekbones some time ago.

His daydreams, as well as his daily radio call, focussed on that two-bit town Santarém—the exit point from this hole in the jungle. A strange anomaly of a place was Santarém: a hangover from the American Civil War. Confederate soldiers who refused to go along with General Lee’s surrender settled there and their descendants lived there to this day, hard by other leftovers of American presence through the years-Henry Ford’s settlement Fordlândia, now derelict, his Belterra, also abandoned: two reminders of the great rubber boom that had reared a rococo palace to opera in the heart of Amazonia, at Manáus, and brought La Pavlova a thousand miles upstream to dance for the rubber barons. Nowadays Santarém was filled with a fresh influx of Americans, to advise on the building of the great primary dam that would stretch sixty-five kilometres across from Santarém to Alenquer, with a twinbasin lock set in the hard rock, deepwater harbour, turbines and transmission lines; and oversee the construction of the dozen subsidiary dams of the future inland sea that would soon balance, on the globe, the Great Lakes of the northern hemisphere.

A vast sea would embrace the Amazon. Estimates were, it would cost half a billion dollars to map the whole region adequately from the air. But only half that sum to flood it and erase the embarrassments of geography forever.

Charlie’s own subdam consisted of ten kilometres of tamped-down earth faced with bright orange plastic carved out of the middle of the jungle. A lake fifteen thousand kilometres square would back up behind it, nowhere too deep for the big timber dredges to haul out the wealth of trees it drowned. A million trees. A billion trees. Who knew the number? Hardwoods, mahoganies, cedars, steel-woods. Silk-cotton trees and garlic trees and chocolate trees. Balsa, cashews, laurels. So many trees. So much land. And so much water. All useless to mankind, up till the present.

Damned rain, thought Charlie. Rots the soul. But at least it was speeding up the filling of the lake, bringing measurably closer the time when he could get the hell out of here.

“Who are they, priests from the camp?”

“No, it’s a political police captain and a couple of his sidekicks. It’s queer, I’ve never seen—”

He looked worried; flashed a quick grin of bravado.

“Careful what you say, hey Charlie? Remember, you’re a long way from home.”

Charlie regarded the Brazilian dubiously.

“Is that meant for friendly advice? I guess I’m okay politically.”

“They came by helicopter. Can you hurry up, Charlie? They’re impatient people.”

“Damn it, I’m on the air. Oh never mind, I can’t hear anything but static anyway. Santarém, d’you read me? Reception’s terrible. I’m signing off now-call you back later, okay? Over and out. Get a bottle of brandy, Jorge, huh? I’ll see them in here—”

Jorge was turning to leave when a hand shoved the door fully open and propelled him into the room. Three men pushed their way in and looked round, at radio, dam models, drip buckets, hammock with dirty sheet on it, open charts and records, stacks of Playboys.

The Captain wore a crisp olive uniform with a jaunty red spotted neckerchief, black leather boots, a holstered pistol. But if he had a reasonably military air about him, his two companions looked more like capangas, the thugs hired by landowners and developers in the Brazilian outback. A ratty vicious-seeming halfcaste. And a massive Negro with teeth almost as black as his skin and web-creamy eyes of bloodshot curds and whey. They wore the same style boots with stained khaki trousers and sweatshirts. The Negro crooked a submachine gun under his arm. Ratface had an automatic rifle with burnished bayonet attached to it.

Jorge was heading around the Negro when a sharp rap of the gun across his ribs halted him.

“Stay here and listen, Almeida-it concerns you as well. Mr Faith, I suppose you don’t speak Portuguese?”

The Captain spoke good English with an American accent, but his smile held no real humour in it, only a kind of gloating chilly anticipation.

“Sorry, I understand some. Jorge usually translates for me.”

“We shall speak English then.”

“Jorge was just going for drinks. You could drink a glass of brandy?”

“Excellent. We shall have some brandy. But not my pilot.”

Charlie stared from Ratface to Negro, confused.

“Which one’s the pilot?”

“Neither of these, obviously. My pilot stays with his machine to look after it.” The Captain spoke to his men quickly, they grinned broken greedy grins and the Negro let Jorge past.

“So you’re wondering to what you owe this interruption of your useful work? For which we Brazilians are truly indebted to yourself, need I say, and to your companions in all these filthy jungle holes. Uncivilized here-such a far cry from Rio or Sao Paulo?”

“Fact is, I came direct from Santarém-never saw those cities.”

“That’s a shame. Let’s hope you have a chance to spend some of your bounty in our fine cities and enjoy real Brazilian hospitality after this vile jungle. It’s wonderful that you are flooding it, Mr Faith. Minerals, civilization, the new wealth—”

Was this character and his two thugs planning to roll him for his wad of dollars and cruzeiros? It hardly seemed to merit a special helicopter trip. Yet Charlie recalled that business of customs clearance for essential technical equipment at Santarém, when officials had rolled the whole outfit to the tune of several grand under the guise of customs fees. He hoped it wasn’t his turn.

Jorge reappeared with bottle and tumblers, slopped a few fingers of spirit into them and handed them round.

The Captain accepted the brandy from Jorge and sniffed it with a gesture of connoisseurship wasted on that particular juice. The Negro and Ratface drained theirs straight down then wandered about the room rifling through papers and looking into drawers and cupboards while the Captain talked.

“My name is Flores de Oliviera Paixao, Mr Faith. Captain in the Security Police. The Negro is Olimpio, the other one Orlando. Please remember their names, you may see a lot of them and need to ask their help.”

Olimpio glanced round and grinned at the mention of his name, but Orlando just carried on rummaging through Charlie’s things with quick furtive scrabbles of his free hand. Whenever the halfcaste’s bayonet caught the light, Charlie felt a cold squirming sensation in his guts that stopped him arguing about the cavalier way they were treating his room. His mind wandered back to the Nam and the same species of bayoneted rifle in his own hands as he rooted through a jungle hut. The blade had bathed in the guts of a dark-skinned rat of a youth very like Orlando, who went for Charlie with a knife thinking he was saving his sister. Ah, but the sister-cowering in a corner with big doe eyes, tiny cone-shaped breasts pushing at her shirt, the long black pigtails of a schoolgirl. Likely as not she’d never been near a school. She was beautiful. Orlando scrabbled vaguely and stupidly through Charlie’s equipment like a ghost of that thin boy, who had somehow seized the American soldier’s weapon from his hands in that hut a decade ago and lived on to threaten Charlie with it now, instead of dying.

“Mr Faith?”

Was it his imagination, or was the rain easing up? The outline of one of the slumbering bulldozers waiting on the cement apron outside was sharpening. Soon bulldozers and graders and rubber-rollers and tampers could all be floated downstream to Santarém; and he could be flown out of this hole…

“Yes, Captain?”

“You may be aware that not everyone in our fine cities is quite so hospitable to Americans nor so concerned with the values of civilization. There are alien beings loose in our society. You know who I mean?”

“I guess I do. The Reds. The Urban Guerrillas.”

“How should that affect us?” Jorge asked nervously. “That’s a thousand kilometres away from here, beyond the jungle. Terrorists operate along the coastal strip and in the cities—”

“How much you know, Almeida!”

Jorge emptied his own brandy and shrugged.

“It’s common knowledge.”

The Captain nodded.

“These people loot and assassinate and kidnap for ransom and plant bombs that kill and maim innocent people—under the banner of socialism. Of caring for the common man. How do they care about people by planting bombs in crowded shops? But that’s the Communist ideal—to break down civilization in blood and disorder. Then step in with the vain promise of a better world. You’ll understand this, Mr Faith-I hear you’re a Vietnam veteran? Happily Communists haven’t done so well lately. They cannot kidnap ambassadors so easily. Their leaders are in prison. Their exploits no longer claim world interest. Failed men is what they are. But vicious in failure, like rats in a trap. It is the acts they plan in their despair that bring me here, Mr Faith.”

Paixao took a thin cigar from an inside pocket, inspected it doubtfully before slipping it between his teeth. Ratface hurried to his side with a flickering lighter.

“Reliable information is in our hands that in their rage and despair, and to buy themselves some of the notoriety they hanker after, the terrorists intend attacking these wonderful dams. But we’re not sure exactly which dams, or when, or how, Mr Faith. Our informants weren’t sure. Or I assure you they would have told. Ilha das Flôres prison is persuasive that way.”

The rain was certainly slackening off-but its fingers still tapped out a rhythm on Charlie’s skull. “Yeah, I can believe they would have told,” sweated harlie.

It wasn’t so much the hints of torture which Paixao dropped with such a contemplative smile, as the spook boy with the bright bayonet that worried him, however.

“Some terrorists are certainly coming to harm the Project. But how? By damaging the lockgates at Santarém while some foreign-flag vessel is passing through? By killing some American engineers? I doubt they will try to kidnap anyone. Santarém isn’t the town to hide out in. Nor the jungle either-this isn’t the Sierra Maestra in Cuba. Those city men can’t hope to hide with the labourers or rubber tappers along the rivers. Too stupid and venal, those. Someone would betray. Nor do you melt away into the interior of the jungle without killing yourself-unless you happen to be an Indian, and I hear they’re so primitive they eat soil for supper. Indians want nothing to do with our urban terrorists. Maybe they put a few poison arrows in the backs of our road-builders-but for their own private reasons, to be left alone to eat dirt, not be inoculated with the filth of Mao or Marx.”

“I heard that gangs have been attacking towns up north. What d’you call ’em-flagelados?”

Charlie was aware that the Captain might find the remark annoying-he intended it to be. The man’s smoothly bullying tone irritated him.

Paixao nodded curtly. He blew out a cloud of smoke.

“Beaten Ones, yes. They attack villages for food with some degree of gang structure. That’s in the north-east.”

“Maybe these Beaten Ones have been organizing politically? I recollect your government didn’t realize for a whole damn year you had any urban guerrilla problem. You thought they were just gangsters. Aren’t I right?”

“Because they behaved like gangsters. Still do. Except that no gangster would indulge in such senseless violence. However, Amazonia is not the north-east, Mr Faith. There are no gangs here the guerrillas can infiltrate. Consider the size of the area. The lack of roads. Impenetrability of the jungle. Terrorists can’t operate in this region without giving themselves away. Paradoxical, in view of the size, but there it is. We must assume they’re ready to sacrifice themselves. But doing what? Murdering someone like yourself? You’re vulnerable so we’re here to protect you, you see. Is your dam as vulnerable as you are, in your professional opinion?”

Charlie glanced uncomfortably at Jorge. ‘His’ dam. The Brazilian stared back at him expressionlessly, tapping his finger on his empty glass slowly.

“It isn’t my dam, Captain. I’m just here till the floods have been and gone. It’s Jorge’s kingdom then.”

“You call this a kingdom? You must be joking. I’ve seen the miserable hovels clustering like flies round your construction camp.”

You interfering, contemptuous bastard. Relations were touchy enough with Jorge already.

“There are no lock gates to damage,” he said hastily. “A hovercraft ramp is all we’ve got here. Just a strip of concrete. Nothing could hurt the dam itself short of a nuclear explosion—”

Charlie could see Jorge suffering agonies of pride.

“Even a large dynamite bang wouldn’t do much damage. The soil would absorb the blast. This is a broad earthfill type of dam, not one of your thin concrete jobs. The danger’s not from sabotage but from nature. If the dam was ever overtopped by floodwater, spillage would cut right through it then. Or supposing the water level suddenly sank on the lake side-that’s the pressure face-the saturated earth below the seepage line might slide before it got a chance to drain. That won’t happen, we’ve got good seepage control. The whole of the lake face is covered with strong plastic sheeting—”

“I saw it from the air. Pretty.”

“Then the base of the dam is concreted using the local gravel, and there’s a rock filter on the downstream side for seepage to drain away—”

“Couldn’t an explosion tear holes in your plastic, Mr Faith?”

“Wouldn’t matter if it did. I tell you, it’d take one hell of a punch to burst this baby open.”

“Then it must be you they are coming here to kill. But not to worry, Mr Faith. Have faith. We shall scour the waterways till we catch our prey. They’ll have to come by water, you know.”

“Mind you, it is a pretty critical time for the dam right now, floodwise—”

“Better the death of your dam than your own death, Mr Faith? I appreciate your feelings. Don’t worry—we shall be your guardian angels. Yours too, Almeida, since we have to keep you alive as inheritor of the kingdom. How many courtiers will you have, I wonder?”

“There’s a staff of ten,” Charlie said quickly, “and their families. They’re already living here—”

“Have you a family too, Almeida? No? Then I guess there’ll be consolations for the flesh down in the village?”

Maybe it was Paixao’s technique to anger people deliberately to test their political loyalties? That seemed like an overgenerous assessment to Charlie’s mind. Jorge, without taking time out to ask himself why the Captain might be acting the way he did—cunning or nasty-mindedness—blurted:

“I don’t have to take these insults. I trained two years in Lisbon as a civil engineer—”

“Why didn’t you build this dam yourself then?” shrugged Paixao. “Presumably they trained you to—”

Jorge turned his back on Paixao, stared out of the window rigidly.

Some more of the dam was visible now. The plastic-covered face cut a shocking orange slash through the dull green landscape. Along it, pairs of jaribu storks stood side by side like stiff husbands and wives on a promenade.

“Why, with all due respect to Mr Faith, the yanqui overseer?”

“Let me explain, damn it,” Charlie shouted, furious. “Jorge’s perfectly well qualified and skilled. It’s just that Portugal’s mountainous terrain made them concentrate on high arch dams—not this sort of long low earth dam we happen to have more experience with in the States. And it was our Hudson Institute drew up the blueprint for this scheme way back in the late Sixties. That’s why I’m here. Not because Jorge is no good. He’s damned good. Knows a damned sight more than me about some things. Like dam models. Who do you think made those there?”

Paixao dropped his cigar butt on the floor and crushed it out thoughtfully.

“Supposing that this dam did burst, what effect would there be downstream?”

“In that unlikely event—let me emphasize how unlikely it is—I guess the millions of tons of water in the lake would just have to flood downstream as far as the next dam in line.”

“If that dam bursts?”

“Forget it, Captain! It’s about as likely as a visit from outer space.”

“No sweat then, Mr Faith. It must be you the terrorists are after.”

“I’m sorry, Jorge, truly,” said Charlie humbly, when the three men had gone.

“Charlie, sometimes I think the cure is worse than the disease. Terrorists there may be, but—” He shrugged emphatically.

“I know what you mean, pal.”

That blazing hut in the Nam. Smoke hovering over it in the dusk. A man with a bayonet fighting a boy with a knife. So confident that there wasn’t any need to pull the trigger even. And a doe-eyed girl staring on sick with fear….

“Do I know what you mean! Jorge, let’s take ourselves out on the dam and clear our heads.”

Tapping fingers had fallen silent at last.

“We’ll go down to the café tonight, okay? Hell, but we two people have nothing to quarrel about!”

A bitter smile was all Charlie got from Jorge, though they walked out on to the dam together, while the last of the rain drifted down gentle as mist.

They heard the chatter of the Huey Slick echoing off the water. It seemed not to be flying away in a straight line, but circling.

Soon, Charlie realized there were two distinct sounds. The noise of the helicopter and the puttering of an out-board motor across the tree-infested lake.

The two sounds coincided for a while, then the helicopter passed out of earshot as the boat moved closer.

Presently it came in sight from behind the drowning trees—a twenty-foot shallow draught boat with an awning rigged up to shelter the two white cotton-robed figures in it. One of these raised an arm in salute.

“I guess they’re coming from a safe direction, those ones. There’s nothing but jungle and Indians for a couple hundred miles that way.”

Jorge looked slyly at Charlie.

“You think so?” He gave a soft chuckle.

Charlie slapped him on the shoulder with a show of playfulness that seemed phoney to him as soon as he’d done it.

“Hey Jorge, quit trying to scare me will you? I can recognize them all right. It’s those two priests.”

The boat reached the point where the ramp entered the water. The two figures climbed out and beached it on the concrete, then started up the long slope.

“Heinz and Pomar, wasn’t it? One was full of beans. The other guy had cheeks like ripe apples…”

“What a spectacle!” Father Heinz cried as he came in earshot. “An orange banner across the world like on the flag of Brazil itself. I tell you, it’s like a great festival flag in these dingy forests. Something almost miraculous. A sash of honour. A perpetual sunrise flooding the landscape.”

The priest puffed from the effort of scaling the slope, but his native garrulity overcame the need for oxygen.

“Believe me, Mr Faith, seeing this appearing through the rain like a great frontier between savagery and civilization, it was a welcoming home indeed!”

“Oh, you remembered my name?” grunted Charlie as the men shook hands.

The priests looked white and thin and tired from their stay in the jungle. The beans had fallen out of Heinz, the red was drained away from Pomar’s cheeks. Charlie reckoned it must be two or three months since he saw them setting off.

They weren’t quite home yet. ‘Home’ was ten kilometres further downstream—the complex of concrete-floored tin-roofed huts, the kitchens and dispensary, church and school, made ready to receive whatever exodus of Indians there might be from the drowning jungle.

To date, the resettlement camp only held about a third of the number that had been predicted from aerial surveys of the thousands of square kilometres being flooded. The planes had dropped bags of fish hooks and knives and pictures of the Safe Village and the Great Orange Dam, with photographs of the faces of contact men like Heinz and Pomar.

Charlie was about to say something else—ask how they’d got on—when he heard a jeep engine further out on the dam.

He squinted at the distant rainmist, saw the jeep speeding along the freeboard towards them, still a couple of kilometres away.

Charlie recognized it for one of their own jeeps. Still, the sight had him worried briefly—stuck out on the limb of the dam like this.

“It’s just Chrysostomo,” Jorge explained sweetly. “I sent him along this morning.”

“Yeah, good. But you know I’m not so jumpy about the impending arrival of my killers that I can’t recognize one of our own vehicles! Hell, these terrorists seem pretty much like a myth now that our friend has flown off. He’s his own worst terrorist.”

Jorge grinned and walked off to meet the jeep.

“What’s this then, Senhor Faith?” bubbled Heinz. “Did I hear you say terrorists?”

“It’s nothing—just a scare. A Security Police Captain flew in a while ago. Why don’t you two people come indoors and have a drink? And I’ll see about getting your boat over the ramp then.”

“So that’s who it was. A helicopter flew over us. We waved. I saw them take photographs.”

He took them indoors, poured a generous shot of brandy for himself, then emptied the remains into the same tumblers as Orlando and Olimpio had used.

Priests reminded him of army chaplains. A sour memory. But he wanted a drink. And he tried to keep his own rule banning solitary drinking during daylight hours.

“Somebody wants to blow up the dam,” he shrugged phlegmatically. “Or kill the yanqui who built it.”

“How terrible,” exclaimed Heinz. “Your work is a blessing. How can people not see this? After the gloom and ignorance of the jungle savages—”

Pomar, the younger priest, did quietly recall the occasion when the Archbishop of São Paulo had ordered notices pinned to the church doors throughout his archdiocese denouncing the torturing of priests and lay workers by the security police. Maybe guerrillas, although misguided men and atheists—

But Heinz recollected something that rankled more.

“We met a Frenchman living with one of the jungle tribes. He aroused my suspicions, Mr Faith. This man was in a kind of despair. He compared the behaviour of the natives in Africa, who fight the Portuguese government with Chinese weapons, with the impotence of the savages here to do anything, as though he regretted it.

I say maybe he was a terrorist.”

Charlie shook his head; he remembered the foxy-featured Frenchman passing over the dam during the latter stages of construction.

“No, he was some kind of anthropologist. He came this way. A pretty hostile type. But not a terrorist for my money. Some halfcaste brought a letter of his a few weeks back addressed to England to be put on the plane—”

Charlie glanced at the empty brandy bottle.

“Would you people like another drink? I’ll get a new bottle.” However he made no move to fetch one.

Heinz rose to his feet.

“We must get along to the reception centre before it’s dark. You’ve been kind, Mr Faith. But please don’t ask us how many Indians we expect.” The priest shook his head in a fury of frustration. “That village where the Frenchman was, was the last straw! These Indians simply cannot comprehend. I think they will just sit still and drown! We tried getting through to them with the story of the Flood. Oh, they sat and heard! Then they merely laughed.”

Pomar grasped the older man’s arm sympathetically.

“They will digest it their own way. Surely then they will come out of savagery to safety in their own good time, when the flood has risen some more. And remember, Father, not all the tribes were so awkward as that one.”

“Which is why I didn’t trust the Frenchman! I think he had been tampering with them—polluting them. Why else did they tolerate him, and mock us?”

“Sounds like a rough trip,” Charlie sympathized, though he wasn’t really very interested.

“Oh, it’s so often this way,” grumbled Heinz, pursuing the memory of failure, like a dog hunting a lost bone. “You think you’re making progress. Then you’re swept back to square one. You build somebody up. Then he betrays your trust. You discipline with just reward—and create only a mockery of morals. These Xemahoa Indians weren’t worse than usual. They didn’t use any violence against us. They were just maddeningly different. There was no real communication. This Frenchman could have helped us. But he got excited and refused. After a while he even refused to let his interpreter translate for us. When we tried to reason with him to make him see the need to move these people to the reception centre, he just stared through us, switched on his tape recorder and played some rigmarole in French. Some poetry, he said. But it was nonsense. I couldn’t make head or tail of it. Maybe it was his own obsessive stupidity that appealed to these savages!”

“At least we sowed the seed, Father. God will see to its germinating. Believe me, all the Indians will be trekking this way soon, needing our help.”

“The dam will see to that,” laughed Charlie. “Never mind about God. Give them another couple of weeks, they’ll see there’s no choice. Even your oddball Indians, when they get wet enough.”

In the darkness, studded by sharp stars and sailed in by scudding whale-like clouds, Charlie and Jorge walked down to the cluster of shacks and hovels that straggled away from the tin-roofed homes of Jorge’s staff. Each man carried a torch, flashing it ahead down the wet dirt track. Charlie also had a revolver with him.

Paraffin lamps gleamed from the café and some of the tin homes. A few open fires burned outside the shacks and hovels.

“They ought to be hooked up to our electric supply. I mean our staff ought to be,” muttered Charlie, more sensitive to the darkness since the Captain’s visit.

“There’s a hierarchy of light, Charlie. We see by the electric, those under us by paraffin, those under them by wood and starlight.”

They headed for the café, a rambling structure with screen windows, a dozen tables inside, a kitchen out back and a staircase leading up to a bedroom perched on top of the main structure like a shoebox on top of a suitcase.

A couple of Jorge’s men sat silent over beers. The mulatta woman sat at another table looking dazed, with her Indian friend. Charlie wrinkled his nose as he smelt traces of Lanca Perfume on the hot wet air—the faint reek of scented ether. Jorge and he sat at a vacant table. The slim quiet Indian boy with the squint eye brought them cool beers from the paraffin icebox in back. They smoked.

After a while, Jorge nodded to the two women, who stood up unsteadily, and walked over to their table. Jorge’s workmen looked on impassively. Out in the jungle, something started to scream. Some animal or bird.

The mulatta fumbled in her bag for the small gilt perfume spray with the compressed ether in it. She offered it doubtfully to Charlie. Charlie shook his head. Jorge also refused, swallowed his beer. The woman took a crumpled handkerchief out of her bag and sprayed some ether on it, pressed it tight to her nose and inhaled deeply.

“Silly bitch will pass out,” snapped Jorge, leaning forward and jerking the handkerchief away from her glazed happy features. “She’s high enough already.”

Her Indian friend snatched the handkerchief out of Jorge’s hand before the Lanca could evaporate and pressed it to her own nose.

“Charlie, the last time you went with the mulatta—”

“Okay, Jorge.”

Jorge took hold of the mulatta’s hand and raised her very delicately and gentleman-like, talking to her with surprising tenderness in Portuguese, at which she giggled dazedly. Then Jorge departed with her, leaving Charlie with the dazed Indian woman who only spoke a bastard form of Portuguese worse than his own.

He smoked, and watched her across the table, while beads of moisture cut trails down the side of the misted beer bottle.

Then she was a doe-eyed dark-skinned girl with long black pigtails and a snub nose who was staring up at him fearfully as he slid his bayonet past that boy waiter’s flashing knife, into his guts, where he gave it a sharp twist to the right and the left….