Players (19 page)

“I never intended it to get there.”

“You saw the basement. George didn’t. Take advantage.”

“I knew how far.”

“These things really go off, Lyle, when they’re put together properly. It accomplishes nothing. It’s another media event. Innocent people dead and mutilated. Toward what end? Publicize the movement, that’s all. Media again. They want coverage. Public interest. They want to dramatize.”

“I never thought of reaching the point where either way I turned.”

“The whole plan was and is stupid. A lot of ridiculous theatrics and it’s just childishly, stupidly worked out. Imagine being so lacking in resources and strategies that you have to base a major operation on this tentative alliance, this weak, weak, weak relationship with someone who works for the very entity that’s the target and who stands to lose everything and gain nothing from the whole affair. If there’d been any way I could have prevented what happened to George, I’d have done so at any and all cost.”

“I’m aware.”

“We’ll talk more when you get here,” Kinnear said. “We’ll talk about New Orleans. Things happened you wouldn’t believe. I worked on Camp Street for a while. I’ll give you one guess who came looking for office space at five four four Camp. His Fair Play for Cuba period. And who kept turning up at a bar called the Habana. It gets more interesting than
that. Mazes, covert procedures. Strange, strange, strange relationships and links. We’ll talk.”

Marina, when she picked him up outside the old Fillmore East, 3 p.m., barely looked his way. She drove east, saying nothing. They’d entered a new phase, it appeared. Lyle, in a T-shirt and old trousers, carrying only four or five dollars and no ID but wearing his watch, hung his right arm out the window, feeling drowsy. She parked behind a Mister Softee truck. They walked several blocks and through a vacant lot and then one more block, past milling children and men playing cards at a table on the sidewalk, to a five-story tenement building. A man with a German shepherd sat on the stoop. The dog barked as they approached and the man, shirtless, a huge lump on his shoulder, hooked four fingers onto the animal’s collar as Marina and Lyle went past. Another dog, this one in a second-floor apartment, started barking as they mounted the steps. Shat ap. Facking cacksacker. On four, Marina took out a set of keys. They climbed the last flight.

The apartment was furnished sparely. Lyle stood by the window, looking out at a large ailanthus tree. When Marina started speaking he turned toward her and sat on the window sill. There were several cardboard boxes nearby, filled with hub caps and automobile batteries. A yard or so of bright orange material, nylon perhaps, stuck out of a knapsack. A man emerged from the bedroom and walked between Lyle and Marina on his way to the toilet. He was young and moved quickly, making a point of not looking at Lyle as he went by.

“In prison there’s nothing that can’t drive a person to self-destruction. This is the purpose of jails. Vegetables not cooked
right. No TV for twenty-four hours. Things like that are enough. Everything is broken down. All your strength and will. You have to be dependent on the environment to give you an awareness of yourself. But the environment is set up to do just the reverse. The exact reverse.”

(It was roughly here that the young man crossed the room.)

“Lyle, we have to be honest. Now if never again. I want you to know about my brother. In his life there has always been an element of madness. I use that word instead of a more clinical one because I don’t want to be evasive. I want to give it as forcefully as I can. To those who knew him, there was never any certainty that it wouldn’t come at a given moment. Violence, rage, threats of suicide, actual attempts. You had to be prepared to kill him, or love him, or stay away. There was nothing else. Rafael was ready to die. This is the single most important thing about him. Everything around him, all of life, all of people, was an attack on his spirit, his weakness. I witnessed some of this, previews of his death. To be his comrade, or his sister, you had to be willing to accept the obligations that went with it. His behavior, everything he was and did, this was your duty to accept as your own life. He had to know you accepted it. I saw blood more than once.”

The toilet flushed. Then the door opened and the man crossed the room again, touching Marina’s hand this time as he walked past her. Lyle estimated height and weight.

“It’s important to know this about Vilar because in a way everything we’re doing here, or about to do, comes from him, originates with his plans, his philosophy of destruction. I’ve talked of one aspect only. He was brilliant too. He had university degrees, he could discuss ideas in any company. And
he could manufacture bombs. He was an angel with explosives.”

“And you?”

“I’m less interesting,” she said.

“I doubt it.”

“I wanted you to hear the truth. In the past I’ve been guilty of sanctifying my brother. I have no doubt that on the floor of Eleven Wall that day with George, there were elements of self-destruction. About myself, there’s little to reveal. I’m determined to use this chance we have. To cause serious damage at the Exchange, at this one place of all places in the world, will be a fantastic moment.”

“Attack the idea of their money.”

“Do you believe in the value of that?”

“I do, actually. The system. The secret currents. Make it appear a little less inviolable. It’s their greatest strength, as you said, or your brother, and to incapacitate it, even briefly, would be to set loose every kind of demon.”

“To announce terrible possibilities.”

“I believe that,” he said.

She called the other man by name, Luis. He stood in the doorway, an elaborate leather band on his wrist. He had the same look Lyle had seen on the faces of a thousand young Latins in New York, boys standing outside supermarkets waiting to deliver groceries, or edging through the rhythmic quake of subways, one car to the next—a secret energy, a second level of knowledge well-nourished by suspicion, and therefore negative and tending to resist, and dangerous. It was present in his eyes, the complex intelligence of street life. You learn to take advantage. You make them pay for being depressed by your existence.

“He wants to use propane.”

“I picked up tanks,” Luis said. “They’re very small. Good size for what we want. I found out about the powders. We have a good mix. Then we add propane in these tanks.”

“He wants a fireball.”

“When the thing goes, you get a fireball from the propane. Cause more damage that way. All he has to do is get me inside and show me a place to conceal it good. It’s exact. I’m making it so it’s exact. No loose ends, man.”

“How big will the whole thing be?” Lyle said. “You can’t walk out on the floor with a shopping bag.”

“Hey, I’m telling you. The right size. Just for what we want.”

“He has a touch, Luis.”

“We’ll rip out that place’s guts. Hey, you know the sound fire makes when it shoots out of something?”

“Sucking air,” Lyle said.

“All he has to do is get me inside.”

“Luis has hands. Right, Luis?”

“It’s a little different, bombs. I’m taking my time.”

“You should see what he does, Lyle. Credit cards, a master. Sometimes he gets moody, though. We’re working on that.”

“I go to the library. Whatever you want to make, once you know how to use the library, it’s right there. I go to Fortieth Street. Science up the ass they got. Technology, all you want.”

“Luis has a parachute.”

“I wondered.”

“Where did you get it? Tell Lyle.”

“I stole it in Jersey off some nice lady, she had it in her car.”

“Orange and sky blue.”

“I saw it sticking it out there,” Lyle said.

“A radio and a blanket came with it.”

“Common thief,” she said.

“A little more time, I would of had the engine block.”

“When people come up, he tells them he’s with the government. They see the parachute, he says CIA. He tells them he has to keep it nearby, it’s in the manual.”

“CIA, man.”

“The manual has a whole page on how to care for your parachute.”

“I say, Hey man I can’t go with you tonight if you’re taking all those people because then there’s no room in the car for my parachute.”

“He has to keep it nearby at all times.”

“It’s in the manual.”

Luis stepped out the window and onto the fire escape. Lyle leaned out, watching him climb the metal ladder to the roof. He felt sleepy. Ninety minutes from now he would have to be back at the apartment picking up his things.

“When do we do it?”

“Two days at most we’ll be set.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirty-two,” she said.

“He looks younger, much.”

“He’s developed a manner. A dozen ways. He’s very quick, he slips away. You never know he’s gone until you look for him. Don’t believe what he says necessarily. He likes to make up a character as he goes along. He doesn’t necessarily want you to trust him or respect him. I think he likes to appear a little stupid when he doesn’t know someone. It’s a strategy.”

“He refers to me in the third person.”

“His manner.”

“Even when he’s looking right at me.”

“Luis has lived here half his life. To you, he seems one thing. To us, another. Your view of our unit is a special perception. An interpretation, really. You see a certain cross-section from a certain angle. And everything was colored by J., who occupied only a small and routine area of the whole operation. Of course you couldn’t know this.”

“How many others are there?”

“You know what you have to know.”

“No more, no less.”

“Obviously,” she said.

“A good policy, I guess.”

“It’s clearly the way.”

“Do I believe Luis when he says he’s making a bomb by looking things up at the library?”

“I don’t think I’d believe that, Lyle, no.”

“His manner again. A technique.”

“Luis traveled with my brother to Japan and the Middle East. He’s acquired a number of skills along the way.”

“Plus a parachute.”

“The parachute you can believe. I would believe the parachute.”

Several minutes passed. The taxed amosphere grew a shade more serene. Lyle moved from the window to a chair nearer Marina. The stress of truth-telling became less pronounced, of performances, strategies, assurances. Luis by leaving didn’t hurt matters. He would be careful, Lyle would, not to ask the precise nature of her relationship with Luis. You know only what you have to know. First principle of clandestine life.

“What happens to you?”

“I vanish,” he said.

“They’ll know he was your guest. You had a visitor that day. You brought him on the floor.”

“I’m gone.”

“Of course there’s another way. No need for Luis to set foot inside the Exchange. You bring the package in. You leave it. This way you can’t be identified with a second party.”

“Middle of the night, it goes.”

“This is cleaner, obviously.”

“No second party.”

“Think about it,” she said.

He studied her face, an instant of small complications. Her eyes measured reference lines, attempting to get a more sensitive bearing on the situation. To the commitment she sought, endlessly, the tacit pledging of one’s selfhood, he sensed a faint exception being made. Not all agendas called for rigid adherence to codes. There were other exchanges possible, sweeter mediations.

“J. said you and George.”

“True.”

“It was part of his least convincing scenario. He told me you’d been to bed with George.”

A short time passed. It was decided they would have sex. This happened without words or special emanations. Just the easing sense Marina had loosed into the air of possibilities other than death. She seemed to take it as a condition. Sex: her body for his risk. Not quite a condition, perhaps. Equation would be closer. It was old-fashioned, wasn’t it? A little naïve, even. He hadn’t seen it that way himself (he didn’t know how
he saw it, really) but he was satisfied to let her interpretation guide them toward each other.

The bedroom was fairly dark, getting only indirect light. He thought her gravely beautiful, nude. She touched his arm and he recalled a moment in the car when she’d put her hands to his face, bottles hitting the pavement, and the strangeness he felt, the angular force of their differences. Nothing about them was the same or shared. Age, experience, wishes, dreams. They were each other’s stark surprise, their histories nowhere coinciding. Lyle realized that until now he hadn’t fully understood the critical nature of his involvement, its grievousness. Marina’s alien reality, the secrets he would never know, made him see this venture as something more than a speculation.

She had a thick waist, breasts set wide apart. Bulky over all, lacking deft lines, her legs solid, she had a sculptural power about her, an immobile beauty that made him feel oddly inadequate—his leanness, fair skin. It wasn’t just the remote tenor of her personality, then, that brought him to the visible edge of what he’d helped assemble, to the pressures and consequences. Her body spoke as well. It was a mystery to him, how these breasts, the juncture of these bared legs, could make him feel more deeply implicated in some plot. Her body was “meaningful” somehow. It had a static intensity, a “seriousness” that Lyle could not interpret. Marina nude. Against this standard, everything else was bland streamlining, a collection of centerfolds, assembly line sylphs shedding their bralettes and teddy pants.

They were both standing, the bed between them. Light from the air shaft, a stray glare, brought a moment of definition to
her strong clear face. She was obviously aware of the contemplative interest she’d aroused in him. She put her hands to her breasts, misunderstanding. Not that it mattered. Her body would never be wrong, inexplicable as it was, a body that assimilated his failure to understand it. He nourished her by negative increments. A trick of existence.

She knelt on the edge of the bed. He watched the still divisions her eyes appeared to contain, secret reproductions of Marina herself. He tried helplessly to imagine what she saw, as though to bring to light a presiding truth about himself, some vast assertion of his worth, knowledge accessible only to women whose grammar eluded him. The instant she glanced at his genitals he felt an erection commence.