'What? Ganja?'
'Another class. Schmeck.'
'How much?'
'More than two kilos.'
Pantucci made a face like he smelled something disgusting. He slapped Ralf on the cheek and twisted his ear till it hurt. 'You jooch.' He pulled Ralf by his ear halfway across the table until their noses were practically touching. 'You move dub with strangers until you get boxed. Then you cry for me. Right?
Why didn't you come to me in the first place?'
Ralf pulled himself away and slumped in the corner, looking vaguely disgruntled. 'Didn't know you moved it.'
'You bullshit so much your molars are brown. Thought you'd get more play elsewhere, eh? Or was it that two years in the can made me look ugly? Who's the muscle?''Gusto.'
Pantucci coughed up a thick salty wafer of phlegm, let it lay hot on his tongue for a moment, then hawked it into the sawdust. 'What a weasel you are. What'd you expect from woolheads? You think you're a brother?' He stared for a moment into the thin cold eyes opposite him, engaging the emptiness he saw there. They were the most remote eyes he had ever known.
They reminded him of Ia Drang Valley and long swamp roads. He shook his head and looked away.
'Give me the plot.'
'Eastoh's brother Henley copped in Seattle and crossed to the city while ! lined up Gusto. Along the way something happened. He went into a coma. None of the meds could pin it. By the time I found him in St V's, Gusto was working on me. Now I know Henley's got the stuff, but he lit out. I guess he still thinks I was responsible for his brother getting blown away at Ngoc Linh. We patrolled together. I don't know. I was thinking you might find him.'
'So you can cop and deliver to Gusto? I don't work for nates, mongoose.'
'Yeah, well I do.' The wings of Ralf's nostrils whitened. His hands were under the table. 'My ass is on the line. You going off on me, captain?'
'How do you even know Henley has it?'
'I don't. But I got to ride something.'
Pantucci looked down at his hands, which were barked with callus. He liked Ralf. He looked intense, but he knew he could trust him. 'Give me the man's profile.'
'You think you can find him?'
'It's on the rails.'
Pantucci had a villa in the mountains where he set up Ralf. There was an indoor swimming pool there and a live-in maid and cook. There was also a metalworking shop for retooling stolen goods.
Ralf spent a few hours in the shop trying to bore a hole in the strange rock he had found in Henley's room. It was no good.
The rock was harder than any known substance. An automatic drill press with a diamond bit didn't even scratch it. Ralf was amazed but too preoccupied with evening the score with Henley to think much about it. He liked the rock. He liked its heft and its silky texture. It was the size of his palm with a few natural holes on its edge. Eventually he was able to thread some wire through one of the holes, and he wore the rock around his neck like a talisman.
A few days later, Pantucci found Ralf catnapping on the veranda beneath a vine-tangled trellis.
Trembling smells of cedar bark and pine riffled in the air. Sunlight buzzed off dusty rocks. 'I found him,' Pantucci whispered.
Ralf leapt out of the sunchair. 'Where?'
'He left an hour ago for Haiti.' He waved a packet of paper slips. 'Here's your ticket and passport.
There will be money at the airport - and a gun permit. Go in peace, jooch. And remember. We're even.'
Ralf arrived in Port-au-Prince wearing dark glasses, a USMC muscle shirt, and black flight pants tucked into steel-tipped boots. He carried an attache with a few changes of underwear, twenty-five hundred dollars in traveller's checks, five hundred dollars cash, and his Walther automatic. On the flight, he'd taken his butterfly out of the attache and slipped it into one of the many pockets on his trouser leg.
As he was deplaning, Ralf scanned the crowd, but there were so many black faces, it was impossible to eye any of Gusto's goofers. It wasn't until he was shouldering through the mob in the pavilion that he was sure they were laying for him. He felt hard metal pressing against his spine.
'Awright, pogue, you're comin' with me.'
He recognized the voice. It was the hit man he had tumbled in the parking lot. He was nudging Ralf out of the crowd with the barrel of his gun. Ralf groaned loudly and dropped to the ground. As he fell, he palmed the butterfly, sprung it open under his chest, and swivelled his attache to block the gun. The goofer turned and bent down to free his gun for a shot. As he did so, Ralf rolled and stood up quick, forcing the barbed end of the blade between the man's ribs. With a neat twist, he severed the aorta and yanked his knife free by pushing the man away.
The crowd was dispersing fast, and Ralf lost himself in the knots of scurrying people. A few minutes later, he was in a cab heading into town. He booked into a cheap hotel in the East End and began asking around for Henley. No one in the city had seen him, and on his second day he went out to the dirt-farmer markets near the shantytowns. He had bought a white jellaba, and, despite the heat, he wore it so that he could carry his Walther inconspicuously. It was only a matter of time before Gusto's men would hunt him down.
In the native-dominated marketplaces, the talisman drew a lot of attention. No one would touch it, but everyone wanted to see it. Three boys with the fetal air of bay pirates - brash gold teeth, oil-soaked T-shirts, reversed crucifixes - tried to tug it off his neck. They questioned Ralf about it first, mumbled something in a language he didn't recognize, and then, just when he realized that he had missed some sort of cue, one of them snatched at the rock. The wire cord it was on bit into Ralf's neck and held. His eyes tightened to a squint, and he elbowed the boy in the mouth. The other two drew long cruel knives from their thigh sheaths.
Ralf spun on his heels and spartied in and out between the stalls heading towards the alleys of the shantytown. The boys ran after him, whooping and throwing fruit and rocks. In the alley, Ralf stopped short and curled around, both hands holding his Walther automatic way out in front. The boys fell over each other trying to pull up. They backpedalled slowly, and at the mouth of the alley one of them made a gesture Ralf didn't understand and cried, 'Cthulhu fhtagn? The sound of his voice had a shrill, frightening quality that unsettled Ralf more than the sight of their knives had. He decided to call it a day.
Henley Easton had lost complete control of his body. It moved by another will, and he merely observed.
The last days that he spent in his body were riddled with madness. The body itself began to alter rapidly after he found his way to the old man in New York. The old one's name was Autway, and he was a sorcerer, that is, he was a Voudoun gangan. He carried a calabash filled with snake vertebrae, and whenever he rattled it, the men in his presence responded. He never had to speak directly to them. The sound of the calabash was sufficient instruction.
When Henley's body began to change, Autway provided loose-fitting white trousers and a wide-sleeved anorak with a hood that allowed him to move freely and didn't chafe his sensitive skin. A black squamous growth that had begun around his foot wound and his mouth spread quickly over his limbs and torso, itching terribly and emitting a thick putrefying odour.
Autway salved his flesh with the pulp of crushed roots, and that somewhat eased the discomfort.
For over a week, they kept him in a spacious cellar hung with draperies of dark nubbling. Autway came down frequently with younger men, all of them dark with wide faces that had the cast of full-blood Indians. For hours at a stretch, they rattled gourds and chanted, 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.' The sounds they intoned had a peculiar effect on Henley. Hearing them, he felt starcalm, crazy-alive, glittering with energy. The rhythms were a vortex around him. It was a mutable, luculent sound, sometimes dark as the sea, sometimes stream-ingfire. Often, it would charge him so full of power that his body would rise and move about in lithe, sleek movements. The others would imitate him best as they could, but none could match the demonic fury with which his body wheeled and careened.