Instead he looked down at the seat next to him. A creased sheet of paper sat on the passenger’s side. The blueprint had been through a lot in the past five days. There was a bullet hole in the upper-left quadrant, a few drops of dried blood in the lower left. The creases from the time it had spent folded in his shoe were so deep they’d rendered the diagram all but useless—that is, if you wanted to attempt to duplicate what had been drawn there. But you could see what it depicted just fine.
He looked up at the porch. The man in the bathrobe was talking animatedly to no one, gesticulating so wildly with his bottle that twelve-year-old bourbon splashed all over him. A part of Melchior wanted to walk up there and pour the whole bottle over the decrepit figure and set it on fire. The Wiz would have wanted him to do it. The Wiz would have put the lighter in his hands. But that wasn’t the Wiz up there. The Wiz would’ve recognized his own car. The Wiz would have told him to get his ass up there and have a drink. Of course, the Wiz would have made him use the back door, but that was the Wiz for you: you could take the boy out of Mississippi, but, as the plantation house testified, you couldn’t take Mississippi out of the boy.
Melchior looked down at the blueprint again. At the time, he hadn’t been sure why he didn’t give it to Everton. Oh sure, he was pissed off. But he’d been pissed off at the Company a million times before, over substantive issues, like the refusal to support the Hungarian uprising in ’56 or the idiocy of sending fourteen hundred poorly trained men into Cuba on the heels of a wildly popular revolution. But now he knew that he could’ve never given the paper to Everton. Not even if Everton had shaken his hand and offered him the country’s thanks and given him a corner office and a secretary who didn’t wear panties. Because Melchior didn’t work for Everton and he didn’t work for the Company and he didn’t work for the United States of America. He worked for the Wiz, and even after Drew Everton had stared at him like a Klansman looking at a black man with his dick in the lily-white pussy of Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Melchior would’ve still walked across that wide green lawn beneath the shade of the towering beeches and up the bluestone steps flanked by those Doric columns and handed that piece of paper to the Wiz. All the Wiz had to do was cock a finger at him, say “Git on up here, boy,” as though he were calling his dog for dinner.
“Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest,” Melchior said to the empty car. Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.
The Wiz hadn’t taught him Latin, but he’d taught him that phrase. But that wasn’t the Wiz up there.
The Wise Men were on their own.
Camagüey Province, Cuba
November 1, 1963
Maria Bayo trembled before the tall man in the gray suit. He wasn’t a particularly big man—he was in fact as lean as a knife—and he’d done nothing to threaten the eleven-year-old. But there was something dead about his gray eyes and hair so blond it was the color of ice, and inside the gray suit his wiry body was taut as an icicle. Maria had never seen an icicle, but she thought it must be the worst thing in the world: water rendered hard as steel, and just as sharp.
“What is this barn used for?” the iceman said in heavily accented Spanish—the same Spanish used by the soldiers who wore uniforms with the hammer and sickle in their insignia.
Maria looked back at the car the iceman had driven her in. She hadn’t wanted to get in the car with him, but she had wanted to get out of it even less when she saw where he was taking her.
“It’s a mill, señor,” Maria said, looking back at the car, gauging how long it would take her to run to it. “No one uses it since the revolution.”
“There are tire tracks leading to the door, fresh bullet holes in the wall.”
Long before the Communists came to power, Cuba’s proletariat had learned to hide things from whoever was running the country. Whether it was a party official or tax man or sugar hacendado, the people in power made their money off the backs of the poor. But Maria was too scared to lie. Too scared to lie well anyway. Her brother had disappeared, and she was afaid she would disappear too.
“Maybe it was the American in the village. I never saw him in a truck, though.”
“How do you know he was American?”
“He wasn’t hungry.”
The iceman nodded, then leaned close to her. “And how do you know it was a truck, if you never saw it?”
“N-n-no one from my village comes here, señor. The dogs guard it. They kill anyone who comes close.”
“Dogs?”
“The wild dogs.” Maria’s head swiveled around, as if just mentioning the dogs could bring them. “They say the ones who guard this barn developed a taste for human flesh. Even one bite from them will make you sick.”
Pavel Semyonovitch Ivelitsch paused. His men had shot four of the animals when they arrived this morning—mangy skin-and-bones wraiths with sores all over their bodies. The men said the dogs had stalked them as though they were a herd of deer or tapir. They’d found a couple of human skeletons, too. Ivelitsch had assumed the dogs were rabid. But now he was wondering.
“Maybe the man was in a truck with something like this in the back?” He drew on the ground, a complex arrangement of squares and tubes.
Maria shrugged. “There are many trucks, but usually they are covered. Farmers want to hide their produce from the inspectors so they can keep some for the black market.”
“That is bad Communism.”
“Yes, but good for their wallets, and their stomachs.”
The iceman smiled, but at the same time he was using his shoe to rub out the image in the dirt. He moved his foot methodically back and forth until every trace of the drawing had been completely erased—so completely that Maria wished she hadn’t seen it, because he clearly wanted it to remain secret.
Just then Sergei Vladimirovich Maisky came out of the barn, the wand of a Geiger counter dangling from his hand like a golf club. He took off his headphones and scratched his bald, sunburned scalp.
“Nothing, sir.”
Ivelitsch had a hunch.
“Wave your wand over the dogs.”
“The dogs, sir?” Sergei Vladimirovich was a thin, bookish man, and his lip curled in disgust.
“Humor me.”
Sergei Vladimirovich walked over to the motley pile half hidden by some bushes. The carcasses hadn’t begun to smell, but there were so many flies buzzing around them that they could be heard from twenty feet away.
Seeing the pile, Maria’s eyes went wide with horror and she crossed herself. “You shouldn’t have killed the dogs. They will only send worse next time.”
Ivelitsch, who’d seen the mutilated corpse of her brother, thought perhaps the little girl was right, but he said nothing. He watched his man wave the Geiger counter over the grisly pile. After less than a minute Sergei Vladimirovich turned and ran back to Ivelitsch.
“You were right, comrade!” he yelled in Russian. “All of them! Trace amounts of radiation!”
Ivelitsch turned back to Maria. He squatted down, being careful not to put the knees of his suit on the dirt, and took one of her hands in his. It was a hot day, but his hand was as cold as the Arctic fields she imagined had spawned him.
“Do you know anyone who has been made sick by these dogs?”
Maria opened her mouth but nothing came out.
Ivelitsch squeezed her hand. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to press the chill to the bone.