The Dream Merchant (34 page)

They would all shoot on the count of three. Jim aimed for the center of the storyteller's chest. One. Two. Jim squeezed it off and the man crumpled and went down on his side. Jim tried to shut out the gunfire of his men. His other target was confused, like a turkey trying to decide where to run. Jim shot him in the neck.

Jim's men had dropped two of three beside the cantina. The other one ran into the forest.

Okay. It was the best they could have hoped for. Jim wasn't concerned about the one who had run off. There was no telling if there were more men inside the buildings or if Ramon had patrols coming back in. They'd wait and watch.

In the jungle, it always seemed miraculous, the way night fell like a black curtain. Jim and his men stayed on the hill, listening, dozing. It felt like a reprieve.

*   *   *

At dawn, he walked back into his camp. The air was still and chilly and perfectly lucid. The four men lay where they had fallen. The buildings were all empty. Everything hung in the balance. It could have gone either way. He might still have left the clearing with his dreams.

That was the moment. But Jim sat on the dirt for a while across from the cantina and shook his head. He felt this powerful emptiness close over his arms and chest like a net. There was no answer to it. No moves to make. Nothing. It was too late now.

One of the men was calling to him from the direction of the sluice box. Jim came ahead sullenly like a big kid. He didn't want to open that door. He had never smelled anything like it before. Maybe his father long ago.

Jim and the men started pulling bodies from the gully beside the sluice box, but mostly it was Jim. He pulled and lifted with wrath. He wrenched them out of the gravel, hoping, but no, he saw the two of them very quickly, Luis and Martha, who was wearing her white apron. Oh, their legs and arms were tangled; he couldn't get them out of the gully. He pulled them, but they were stuck in the gravel.

He was fierce or he couldn't have done it, one body after the next covered with flies and maggots. He was soaked from the effort. Some of them he couldn't recognize at all. Many faces were gone altogether. It was too horrible to look and Jim rolled them onto their bellies. Luis hadn't wanted to stay behind. Twenty bodies Jim counted, but Ribamar wasn't here. Jim wanted to run away, because he was scared that he hadn't looked closely enough and that Ribamar might be lying on his belly beside the others. Jim couldn't bear to turn them all over again.

One of the men was calling him and he tried to tune him out. No, Ribamar wasn't here. None of the men had scars on their backs. He wasn't here. Enough of this.

There were more bodies in the little creek that fed the dam. It was a lottery and Jim was expected to make each selection. If he could just will it his way, please, just once.

Four more bodies. Two girls. One of them was wearing red sandals and a skirt. She had no face at all. It took him a moment to understand. He'd bought her the imported sandals in Manaus, but she hardly ever wore them. No, impossible. This wasn't her. He took a breath. She wouldn't be here. It was one of the other girls. Why had they killed the girls? He tried to keep moving down this path. They were innocents.

She'd gone back to him in the city. It was settled. Her father had said so. He loved her. He'd had a plan. The sandals stuck in his mind. Angela didn't like heels, even little ones. She loved to walk in her bare feet. He'd wanted to take her back to Florida. She was trying to be beautiful for him. She was just a poor girl.

It wasn't his fault. She didn't need to dress up for him. He would have taken care of her. He would have kept her safe in the big house. He loved it when she walked in the field in her bare feet. She'd hiked here for two days from her village to surprise him and fly back with him to Manaus.

There was so much he wanted to give to her. The flies began to settle on her legs, and he brushed them away. He would give the money to her father and mother and beg them. Her parents would love him. He'd convince them. He'd go to them and weep. Forgive me.

Ribamar wasn't in the creek. Jim needed to find Ribamar. That was the only answer. Maybe the bodies could then disappear and Jim would be able to move on. Luis had dreamed of bodies crowding his bed. Luis had pleaded; it was embarrassing. Ribamar must be alive. Nothing could kill him. Ribamar moved through the bush like a spirit. Jim couldn't push the red shoes out of his head.

Jim headed into the jungle behind the barracks. One of the gunmen tried to follow and Jim waved him off. He plowed right into branches and vines, let them beat against his face. He wanted to feel it. He was hoping the little cats came to him in the light when he could see. He craved them with their whining baby sounds and yellow eyes. He'd kill them. He'd fling them against the trees and laugh. Let them rip his chest and neck. He'd kill them all.

Jim fell asleep curled beneath a tree and when he woke up it was night. Maybe he'd be eaten before the morning. The idea made him happy and he closed his eyes and waited.

*   *   *

In the morning he was walking again. He and Ribamar always headed this way, working south along a dried creek. They could always find something to shoot for Martha. Every fifteen or twenty minutes Jim pounded on the base of a
sumaumeira
tree and the sound echoed deep into the forest. He'd been swimming way offshore. He'd wanted to get out so far he couldn't make it back to land. But as the morning grew hotter he wasn't so sure which way to go. He was feeling hungry and light-headed, losing his clearest intentions in the heat. He wanted to do the right thing, but Jim was walking back to who he was. He began thinking of breakfast and a good bed. He walked on and on, beating the tree trunks to locate his conviction, but he couldn't capture it back; he was hungry. He couldn't keep going like this, deeper into the jungle. But he kept walking while making little bargains like a salesman. Only another half hour and he'd turn back. Maybe he would return to Florida. He had money there. He would need to get back to the river before dark. Ramon's men would be out searching for him. But once he had decided to turn around, it felt pleasant to keep moving ahead a little farther. It felt like he was being pulled ahead, gliding. The heat and thirst were playing with his head and Jim was moving much more slowly when he heard the distant sound. Two beats, just the way he and Ribamar had practiced. Jim beat his stick against a tree and there it was coming back to him. Ribamar was alive and sending back the signal. He had stayed alive for Jim, living in the trees for nearly two weeks, waiting to tell him.

After another half hour Jim pushed through a dense tangle of vines and limbs and there in a tiny clearing was the old man sitting on some leaves and leaning against a thick tree that had been his drum. Ribamar was exhausted and weak, but he wasn't surprised. He had a serene expression. He had envisioned this moment for days; he willed it. Not one word, but he reached out his arms to Jim like a man who had been waiting patiently for his family to come for him.

*   *   *

One last stop.

He knocked on her door.

It's Jim, he said.

There was a pause. He knew she would quickly reinvent herself. When she threw open the door she embraced him. Oh, I'm so relieved, Iliana gushed. I thought he'd killed you. I tried to reach you in Florida. Jim could feel the emotion rippling through her body. She was a marvel.

He had never visited her little hotel room that was dark and dreary with all of her failures and disappointments. He slowly took it in. She had money now and the prospect of much more, but Iliana kept this lonely place, maybe as a reminder to keep herself sharp.

Let me see you, he said, but she held on to him tight. She knew.

He pushed her away and looked at her face. Her expression was wounded and needy, as though she wanted to touch his cheek but couldn't quite manage it.

No foreplay. He grabbed her by the neck, the thumb and fingers of his right hand digging into her windpipe as if he'd wrench it out of her throat.

How many points did he give you? Jim asked, Twenty points? She shook her head.

Thirty points? Thirty points to kill them all? Even the girls? Tell me.

She tapped his leg, an old habit. He let her breathe.

She gasped. Don't, she managed, before he throttled her again.

Tell me. He squeezed until she turned bright red and her eyes bulged.

She gasped, Fifty percent.

Equal partners, he said, very good. But you know he would have killed you in a few days. It would never have held up.

She looked at Jim with terrified little-girl eyes.

When Jim had imagined killing her, it was very satisfying. In the jungle he played it over many times in his head, and each time she fought like a devil. She coiled around him like a python, scratched him with her nails, or she reached for some hidden weapon and then he broke her neck. But at the moment, the real moment, she didn't do anything of the sort. She yielded. She hung limp like a rag. She gave herself to him.

He let her breathe. Jim couldn't do it. They were both breathing very hard. She began to cry. He shook his head no as if to say, Okay, okay. It's finished. He gave her a last embrace.

She sobbed. I didn't know he would kill them. Believe me. She cried.

I do, he answered. She probably didn't know. Ramon wouldn't have told her.

I never thought he'd kill everyone. There was no reason. They would have all given up and gone to work for him. He didn't need to shoot the girls.

Jim nodded, but she'd made a mistake. Don't keep selling when a deal is already agreed upon. She'd woken Jim and his mind was racing again. “Everyone” stuck in his mind. Did she know that Angela was in the camp, had been shot and thrown into the ditch? She must have seen Angela from the window of the plane? Did it gladden her? Of course it did.

I'm going now, he said to her slowly. I'm leaving Brazil. She looked at him with pleading eyes. I don't want you to go, Jim. He smiled, because she was so quick and nimble, but she had misjudged him. He was watching her eyes. She was still whimpering but already thinking about the money and how to handle Ramon. Maybe kill him. She'd have to kill him to ever see the gold. You had to admire her. But Jim had played these games his whole life and no one was a better reader of intention.

After a pause, he said, There's a whole part of the story you don't know about yet. It's the one good part, the only good part.

Jim opened her front door and Ribamar walked in, still dressed in torn, stained shorts, his wound seeping through a clean bandage, and he smelled from the jungle. Ribamar said something to her in a quiet voice, and Jim stepped out and closed the door behind him.

 

33.

In the fall of 1983, while Jim was still recuperating from Brazil and beginning a new life with Phyllis in Florida, Marvin Gesler was living in a rooming house in the East End of London. For more than two years he had been spending cash he had taken from his safe in Toronto while rushing to leave the country one step ahead of the police. Whenever he left his sparsely furnished room, he dressed in a long coat and sunglasses, fearing that he would be identified by the police and extradited to Canada for tax fraud. He spent most of his waking time on park benches, riding buses, or wandering aimlessly.

Marvin was a very wealthy man with secret accounts in Geneva and the Cayman Islands, but he was afraid to travel to these places to collect his money. He believed that if he entered one of these financial institutions and identified himself he would be arrested and flown back to Toronto.

Finally, when he was down to his last three hundred dollars and there was no other alternative besides life on the street, Marvin took a train to Geneva and walked into the chilly front room of the Anker Bank in the city center. He had never been here before.

He presented his passport and driver's license while dreading that the pencil-thin bank manager would check a computerized list and make a phone call. Marvin was thinking about spending the next twenty years in prison and he wasn't listening.

The banker patiently repeated his question. Marvin gathered himself, gave his password, and then asked for $1 million in cash. The man nodded and Marvin tried to control his nerves. In fifteen minutes the banker had returned with Marvin's briefcase filled with large bills. Marvin didn't bother to count the money. He said thank you, and then, as an afterthought, he asked for the wire transfer protocols for future transactions.

Marvin walked to a travel agency while trying to decide where he should go. He might have chosen any destination on the planet. He was a fugitive. He suspected that no one, save his elderly parents, cared if he lived or died.

With cash, he paid for a one-way ticket to Nassau. The Bahamas came to mind because Marvin had traveled there a few times with Jim.

Marvin walked through customs at the airport in Geneva without incident. He boarded the plane, got off in Nassau, showed his driver's license, and passed through Bahamian customs. It began to dawn upon him that outside of Canada, no one cared about him and his legal problems. The joke was that he had jailed himself for two years, worried, and lived on pennies for no reason. How could he have been so stupid?

Marvin Gesler had nearly $60 million in his bank accounts, but this wealth, and the knowledge that he could access it, didn't make him happy. He could no longer remember what it felt like to work on a project that excited him or to have an inspiring idea or to enjoy reading a novel. This exceptionally smart man had lost the capacity to think. He had become idle and useless. What good were the millions?

One afternoon, while shuffling along the beach in Nassau, he had a thought that was both obvious and very powerful. He missed Jim. The good times had shut down when Jim left their business. Marvin had made terrible mistakes; indeed, he had destroyed himself and everything he had built over many years. Really, Marvin had ceased to exist.