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They walked back to Cooksey’s rooms. Je
“I’m sure Miss Vargos knows more about it than we do.”
“What do you mean, she knows?”
“I mean that your friend is the granddaughter of Felipe Ibanez, one of the principals of Consuela Holdings. Rupert told me last night.”
“I don’t understand. She was, like,spying on us?”
“Not at all. Rupert thinks it was something like guilt, a subject on which I believe he is by way of being an expert. Wealthy people who have grown rich from various forms of exploitation often have the urge to recover their self-respect through good works. Rupert, who as you may know was in public relations for a large oil company, is one such, and Geli Vargos seems to be another, although in her case it was the family fortune that bore the curse.”
“So she’s still on our side.”
“In a ma
“Heknew about this all along?”
“Oh, yes. He was quite upset when we all found out about the Consuela company’s plans for the Puxto from our little friend. Geli gave quite a lot of money to the organization, you know.”
“But the point for all of us was tosave the rain forest,” Je
“You’d have to ask Rupert that, and I’m sure you’d get a good temporizing answer. In any case, we have little time and we have to prepare this property to resist intrusion.”
“How? By throwing grapefruits?”
“Not quite. Scotty has a shotgun and a full box of shells. I think we can prepare some surprises for anyone creeping about in the dark. We’re in Scotty’s workroom if you’d like to join us.”
“Yeah, but first I got to tell Kevin about all this,” said Je
Kevin was lying in bed with the headphones on. The stink in the room made it clear that he had ignored Rupert’s clean-up-dope command. She obtained his attention by yanking his cable and, after the usual snarling from him, told her story, which he thought was hilarious, and he got in some zingers about how he’d been right all along about that Cuban bitch. She let this pass. When she told him about Cooksey’s plans and Scotty’s shotgun he said, “Big deal. I got a gun, too.”
“No you don’t.”
He reached quickly under the mattress, yanked out a big blued semiautomatic pistol, and waved it in her face. “Then what the fuck do you think this is? A pamphlet?”
“Where did you get it? And don’t wave it around like that.”
“Never mind where I got it. And fuck this pissy little operation anyway. I got something major going on.” He hopped out of bed and struck action-hero poses with the gun, crouching, whirling, pointing it clutched in both hands. She stared at his antics and with a part of her mind registered that he had obviously never had a pistol in his hands before. Je
“What do you mean, major?”
“You’ll read about it in the papers. Oh, I forgot, you can’t read the papers.”
She let this slide by. In fact, although she didn’t read the papers, her reading had improved a good deal over the past months. “Kevin, you’re so full of shit. Did you ever even shoot a gun like that?”
“Fuck you, yes! And you know, the best thing about pulling this thing off is after tonight I am gone from here, baby, and I won’t have to listen to you putting me down anymore.”
“What thing, Kevin? What are you pulling off?”
He gri
“And probably doesn’t smoke dope all the time either. What’s the operation? This is something that skank Kearney thought up, isn’t it?”
“He’s not a skank,” said Kevin, “and Kearney ’s not his real name.”
“Kevin, I don’t care what his name is. He’s nuts. And besides, you can’t go out anywhere now. Cooksey said there’s a bunch of gangsters watching the place.”
“Fuck Cooksey and fuck you. He’s an old lady anyway. I’m going.”
Je
In the work shed she saw that Scotty was at his pipe cutter dropping short pieces from a length of two-inch irrigation pipe. Cooksey was mixing something in a washtub, a pink jellylike substance with a sweet stink.
She wrinkled her nose and asked, “What is that stuff?”
“A kind of napalm. Soap flakes and gasoline and a little diesel. Would you like to help?”
She nodded. Under his direction she began to disassemble twelve-gauge shotgun shells, placing the shot and the gunpowder into different containers and snipping out the primers with an aviation shears. Cooksey poured his mixture into bottles, which he stopped with rags. Then he began to construct small objects out of lawn mower throttle springs, strips of sheet metal, epoxy glue, and small nails. After she finished with the shells, she watched him work. It was obvious from the way his long brown fingers moved over the materials that he had done this kind of work before.
“What’re you making?” she asked.
“Booby traps. Scotty, have you one of your pipes ready yet?”
Scotty handed him without comment a length of capped pipe with a small hole drilled through the center of the cap. Cooksey unscrewed the cap and glued a shotgun shell primer into the opening with quick-drying epoxy, and then, using the same adhesive, attached one of his springed constructs to the side of the pipe. He replaced the cap and locked the pipe into a table vise. He attached a long piece of flower wire to the device and handed the free end to Je
She pulled, the catch snapped, and a nail came down on the primer, producing a satisfying small pop.
“Splendid,” cried the Professor. “I see it’s like riding a bicycle.”
“Where did you learn how to do this kind of stuff?” she asked.
“Ah, as a youth I ran off to join the Royal Marines, over my mother’s strenuous objection, I might add. I ended up in the Special Boat Service.”
“Simply messing about in boats?”
“Yes, but at a very elevated level. They teach one how to mess about with this sort of thing as well. As I will now teach you.”
Margarita Paz lived in a low-rise condo near Marti Park, a building old for Miami, and inhabited by respectable, elderly Cubans. She had once owned a house near her restaurant but had sold it a few years ago and moved here. This was vaguely attributed to Paz’s lax progenitive abilities. Who needed a house when it was clear it would never be filled with grandchildren? Her condo was on the top floor, with a nice view of the park, and she had purchased it for cash, because it was the kind of building that no savings and loan in Miami would have financed for a black woman. Literal cash: she had seen the ad, determined over the phone (in Spanish) that it was still available, and had within the hour walked into the real estate office with a small suitcase from which she had extracted neat bricks of one hundred $100 bills, thirty-one in all. The white Cuban person behind the desk had grown somewhat whiter at this display; if a comic-book thought balloon had appeared over her head at the time, it would have contained the wordnarcolista. The papers got signed without delay.