Green Ice (45 page)

The
esmeralderos
did not know what was wrong at The Concession, but they knew it was something serious. There was a rumor line almost as fast and often more reliable than the telephone that ran between the mountain villages and the
barrio
.

Representatives of the
esmeralderos
showed up unexpectedly one morning at The Concession’s offices. Ten altogether, one on behalf of each of the most powerful families. They had on their black city-and-church suits and very pointed black shoes. Their suits were so tight their guns were obvious.

Argenti received them.

He was very cordial.

They were polite and reticent. They wouldn’t sit and had to be urged into accepting cigars.

They finally got around to telling Argenti what was wanted—double pay.

He asked for a reason.

They knew his asking was only a formality.

They gave him several reasons that he knew were lies.

Double pay would amount to five to six million more a year.

Argenti agreed to it as though he had a choice.

It wasn’t enough.

No money would be enough.

The
esmeralderos
wanted their old ways back. They were weary of having to be violent according to instructions, of killing not when they wanted but in keeping with some set quota. Order, alliance had taken too much from them. There were too few chances to express their
machismo
. That was their biggest gripe, the thing that The Concession had deprived them of. Authentic opportunities for a man to prove and re-prove he was a man.

On the third night after Argenti agreed to pay double to the
esmeralderos
, the headquarters of the mine at Coscuez was raided. Fifteen guards were killed. Only the superintendent knew the combination to the safe, so he must have opened it. The yield of ten days, about two thousand carats, was removed from the safe. Left in its place were the superintendent’s genitals.

Two days later an armored truck and its army troop escort of twenty men was set upon only a few miles from the main mine at Muzo. The truck was carrying all the emeralds that had been found in that most productive area over the past two weeks. It was a brief, intense battle. The troops were outnumbered and outgunned. The last of them knew there was no hope in surrender, tried to make a run for it. Grenades were lobbed, landed ahead of them, so they ran themselves to death.

Over two hundred killings occurred in mine territory that week. Twenty of those were
esmeralderos
. The families were already at one another. The old codes were being reestablished.

Bad news for The Concession.

And not one carat.

Each day before leaving the office Argenti met with Kellerman for a progress report. Kellerman’s dossier on Lillian, which he was still keeping to himself, was valuable now. She could hide anywhere—for a short while. However, those places where she was likely to be for any length of time were numbered, known. It was only a waiting game now. Lillian would emerge, with Wiley clinging to her skirts.

The emeralds, the three hundred million dollars’ worth?

Kellerman doubted Wiley and Lillian would move to market the emeralds. They certainly hadn’t. There wasn’t as much as a trickle of extra stones anywhere in the world.

Argenti said that if Wiley was smart he’d salt away the emeralds, leech off Lillian until the time was right. Although that would require endurance. He laughed.

The two men spent at least an hour or more recapping each day and discussing the next day’s tactics. The situation was becoming more and more critical, but Argenti remained in control. Kellerman had to admire Argenti under stress, not a chink in him. He didn’t even have dark circles beneath his eyes, looked as though he was getting good sleep.

Truth was, however, while Argenti gave his days to business, he kept his nights.

From the moment he arrived home, shut the door behind him, he let out his anger. He bellowed like a wounded, raging grizzly, tore off his clothes and prowled from room to room.

He was alone in the villa. The servants had fled in fear.

He detested everything, especially whatever was beautiful, fragile, irreplaceable.

“Quella vecchia troia!”
came out of him, guttural, as though he were bringing up phlegm. Those words looped in his head. He viewed everything through them. They required more expression. He printed them in red ink on the creamy-colored silk of a lampshade next to his bed.

He couldn’t stay still.

He turned on every light in the villa.

He rampaged downstairs, up and down again, and around. In the caretaker’s supply room he found several pressurized cans of enamel.

QUELLA VECCHIA TROIA

he sprayed in foot-high red letters along a beige damask-covered wall and diagonally up another wall to ruin a most believable scenic
trompe l’oeil
. The enamel ran from the bases of the letters. He enjoyed the effect.

Other surfaces asked for it. He scrawled, condensed, extended it, made it small or as large as possible. Around the belly of a grand piano, across the back of a needlepoint
bergère
, over the face of an Aubusson tapestry. Did it a letter to a square on the parquet Carrara floor and on the bottom of his blue-gray St. Anne marble bathtub.

He ran out of enamel long before he ran out of surfaces or the incentive. He dropped the last spray can into the bathroom wastebasket, and stood facing the floor-to-ceiling mirror, a kind mirror tinted slightly pink.

Looked at him looking at him.

The dark hair on his forearms glistened red from the mist of enamel that had settled on them. And the hair of his chest and the tighter hair of his groin, beaded with it, seemed to be bleeding. His nostrils were red where he had inhaled his hate.

A sob moved up into his throat like a bubble. His facial muscles made his eyes smaller and his mouth larger, and the sob came out as a strained whimper around the words
“No, dolce madre, no”
(no, sweet mother).

He pressed against the mirror to embrace, comfort himself. Left his red imprint.

Exterior cries intruded.

The window was open. They were the love cries of all the little creatures that ran wild and brave in the night grass.

He hurried to an adjacent room, where he removed his favorite shotgun from its fitted leather case. A Beretta SO2 over-under twelve-gauge. He also chose a pistol, a SIG 210 automatic, twenty-two caliber. And took along several cartons of shells.

On the second-floor landing at the top of the wide stairs he stopped to load the shotgun. He held it at his side in ready position.

Pull!

As though skeet shooting, he brought the gun up swiftly to the snug of his shoulder, swung it to target and fired both barrels.

The enormous settecento-style Venetian glass chandelier that hung over the reception hall shattered.

Two more shots and it was bare, like an inverted tree that had lost all its delicate crystal leaves.

Argenti went down to the main salon.

He sat on a velour-covered taboret in the center of the large room.

Across the room on a side table was a pigmented terra-cotta figure of a woman by Giovacchino Fortini, done in the 1690s.

Argenti blew it in half with the pistol.

To the right of that a glass case. Containing figurines of jade, pink and mutton fat and spinach green. Also a blue-and-white Ming bowl that had gone for $220,000 at Sotheby’s. And a pair of
famille-rose
vases with imperial-pink ground of the K’ang Hsi period.

One twelve-gauge shot destroyed them.

A
purpurine
and
sang-de-boeuf
porcelain cat by Fabergé.

A bronze of a young girl by Bugatti.

Another done in the sixteenth century by Alessandro Vittoria.

Blasted to bits.

His sights came upon a pair of rare Ming Buddhist lions of streaked brown and green and blue glazes. He found momentary fascination in their protruding eyes, the way they were reared back defiantly, their oversize ears alert and their whiskers proudly exaggerated. He mentally snarled at them a moment before he pulverized them.

For variation he splintered off the slender front legs of an eighteenth-century Florentine table, so the crystal-and-ormolu candelabra and the Lalique covered candy dish that rested upon it crashed to the floor. He thought of it as the price of dependency.

Paintings.

A Titian portrait of a lady done four hundred sixty-seven years ago.

Without hesitation Argenti shot the lady’s face away.

He peppered a Giacometti until the canvas hung in tatters, and he tortured a Modigliani, a portrait of the artist’s wife. He used the twenty-two pistol on the Modigliani, shot precise holes in the slitty eyes, forced open the prim mouth and created a pattern up the elongated neck. He put her out of her misery with the Beretta, both barrels. What shreds that were left of the canvas slid down the wall along with its frame.

“
Quella vecchia troia
,” he uttered.

That fucking old cunt.

Emphasis on
old
.

Lillian, of course.

33

East Hampton, Long Island.

Third town from the tip.

That was where they would lie and wait. Not hide. They had considered trying to hide but realized they couldn’t. The Concession’s reach was too long and relentless, and they honestly doubted they’d be able to put up with the drawbacks of total obscurity. Fading into the ways of some small town suited the predicament but not them.

So they’d decided on off-season East Hampton. Somewhere more crowded might seem safer but actually wouldn’t be, they reasoned. In a crowd how could they tell who wasn’t after them? It would wreck their nerves.

Isolation also offered another advantage, albeit slight. They might, when the time came, be able to notice whoever was after them a moment or two in advance.

Lillian’s East Hampton place was situated on the dunes of Georgica Beach. A two-story house, stretched out to make the most of its vantage. Forty of its windows presented the Atlantic, and a wide veranda ran its entire length. It was typical of the summer houses that were built along Georgica by monied people seventy-or-so years ago. Brown shake shingle siding with white trim.

The next, nearest house to it, similar in stance and profile, was five hundred feet down the beach. Between the two were mutual hedges so tall a ladder was needed to shear them.

On the inland side, four acres buffered the house from its town street, Lily Pond Lane. The grounds were not formally kept, or even too neat. There were a few oaks, real heavyweights. Wild flowers were allowed, black-eyed Susans and asters.

A private drive was surfaced with a crunchy, gray gravel. It didn’t run straight in, deviated enough so that only the peaks and chimneys of the house could be seen from the street. In summer, one section of the drive was like a tunnel, the way branches of tall lilacs meshed above it. White lilacs that dipped, bowed to bid sweet welcome, brushed against windshields.

But not now, in January, for Wiley and Lillian.

Now shrubs and trees were skeletal, dark. No way of telling what might be dead. Brambles were more apparent bare. They seemed to be everywhere: thorny wild roses and blackberries, formidable as barbed wire. Miraculous the way sparrows and finches flew so casually into such tangles without being wounded. Or perhaps they were.

Wiley and Lillian arrived from Haiti on the seventh day of the new year. A Saturday afternoon. Over all, the sky was low and leaden. The temperature in the twenties. They had called ahead, been assured the house would be made ready. The caretaker was part-time, a man from the town. The key wasn’t on the door ledge where he was supposed to have left it.

Wiley told Lillian to wait in the car while he searched for a way in. All the windows were shuttered. He went completely around, tried every door. When he returned to the main entrance, he found Lillian had used a frozen flower pot to smash a pane from the door and get to the bolt. She stood in the entrance hall, hugging herself, her head hunched down into her coat collar. She had on a wool cap, over her ears and brows. Only her nose and eyes were visible, watery.

It seemed colder inside. A dankness permeated the place and everything in it. There was that moldy odor the sea inflicts on such enclosed coastal places, actually the smell of deterioration. To counteract the sea, the interior of the house—floors, walls, ceilings—was varnished wood, years and years of coats. White sheets covered the furniture and were gathered and tied around lighting fixtures.

“I guess I should try to start some heat,” Wiley said halfheartedly.

“This wasn’t really such a good idea,” Lillian said.

“Well, we’re here now.”

“Palm Springs would have been better.”

“You have a place in Palm Springs?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Where’s the furnace?”

She didn’t know.

Wiley went looking for it, a door down to the cellar where the furnace would be. All he found were a lot of closets. Perhaps this was purely a summer house, and the caretaker hadn’t turned on the heat because there wasn’t any. However, that didn’t explain the absence of electricity, the dead phone and the lack of water from the faucets.

Wiley thought they should get to a motel and consider another place to make their stand. Lillian was sure to agree.

But Lillian wasn’t where he’d left her in the entrance hall.

He called out. Her answer was from somewhere upstairs, muffled. He went up to a long center hall, found her in one of the bedrooms.

Her clothes were thrown over a chair. She was in the bed beneath several blankets and two eiderdown comforters. All Wiley could see was her breath, a funnel of white. It looked as though the bed was smouldering. He suggested the motel.

“We’re here now,” she said.

“There doesn’t seem to be a furnace.”

“How about food?”

He had looked. The only thing in the pantry cupboards was a dried-up bottle of ant poison. Not even a can of peaches or tomatoes. Houses like this always had a lonely, left-behind can of peaches or tomatoes. “How hungry are you?” he asked.