Bel Canto(12)

“They don’t seem to be in any hurry to kill anyone,” Edith Thibault whispered to her husband, her lips touching his ear.

For as far as the eye can see there is nothing but white sand and bright blue water. Edith walking into the ocean for a swim turns back to him, the water lapping at her thighs. “Shall I bring you a fish?” she calls, and then she is gone, diving under a wave.

“They’ll separate us later,” Simon said.

She wrapped her arm tightly around his and took his hand again. “Let them try.”

There had been a mandatory seminar last year in Switzerland, protocol for the capture of an embassy. He assumed that the rules would apply for overthrown dinner parties as well. They would take the women away. They would— He stopped. He honestly didn’t remember what came after that. He wondered if when they took Edith, if she might have something with her, something of hers he could keep, an earring? How quickly we settle for less! thought Simon Thibault.

What had been a few pockets of careful whispering at first was now a steady hum as people returned from the bathrooms. Having stood up and stretched their legs, they didn’t feel as obedient on the floor. Quietly, people began to have tentative conversations, a murmur and then a dialogue rose up from the floor, until the room became a cocktail party in which everyone was lying prone. Finally, General Alfredo was driven to shoot another hole in the ceiling, which put an end to that. A few high-pitched yelps and then silence. Not a minute after the gun went off, there was a knock on the door.

Everyone turned to look at the door. With all of the demands, the shuffle of crowds, barking of dogs, chop of helicopters dipping overhead, no one had knocked, and everyone in the house tensed, as one tenses when one does not wish to be disturbed at home. The young terrorists looked nervously at one another, taking deep breaths and slipping their fingers into the empty loop of the trigger guards as if to say that they were ready to kill someone now. The three Generals conferred with one another, did a bit of pointing until there was a line of young men on either side of the door. Then General Benjamin drew his own gun and, nudging the Vice President’s shoulder with the rounded edge of his boot, made him get up and answer the door.

It only stood to reason that whoever was on the other side of the door had every intention of coming in firing and better they serve up Ruben Iglesias to this mistake. He got up from the nest he had made by the empty fireplace with his wife and three children, two bright-eyed girls and one small boy, whose face was sweaty and red from the work of such deep sleep. The governess, Esmeralda, stayed with them. She was from the north and did not hesitate to glare openly at the terrorists. The Vice President kept looking at the ceiling, afraid that last bullet might have nicked a pipe. That would be a hell of a thing to deal with now. The right side of his face, which changed and grew hourly, was now swollen into a meaty yellow red and his right eye was shut tight. Still the wound bled and bled. Twice he had had to get a new dinner napkin. As a boy, Ruben Iglesias prayed long hours on his knees in the Catholic church that God would grant him the gift of height, a gift He had not seen fit to grant a single member of his extended family. “God will know what to give you,” the priests had told him without a hint of interest, and they were right. Being short had made him the second-most-important man in his government, and now it had very probably saved him from serious injury as the blow had landed more on the strong plane of his skull than the comparatively delicate hinge of his jaw. His face served as a reminder that everything had not gone smoothly the night before, another good message to those outside. When the Vice President stood, stiff and aching, General Benjamin put the slender broomstick of the rifle’s barrel between his shoulder blades and steered him forward. His own condition, always exacerbated by stress, had begun to bloom one tiny pustule at the end of every nerve and he longed for a hot compress almost as much as he longed for revolution. The knock repeated itself.

“I’m coming,” Ruben Iglesias said, not to the door but to the armed man behind him. “I know where my door is.” He knew his life was probably over, and the knowledge of this fact gave him a temerity that he found useful.

“Slowly,” General Benjamin instructed.

“Slowly, slowly, yes, tell me, please. I’ve never opened a door,” the Vice President said under his breath, and then opened the door at his own pace, which was neither slow nor fast.

The man waiting on the front porch was extremely fair, and he wore his white-yellow hair neatly parted and combed back. His white shirt with a black tie and black trousers made him look very much like an earnest representative of an American religion. One imagined there was a suit jacket that had been surrendered to the heat, or perhaps it was off to show the red-cross armband that he wore. Ruben Iglesias wanted to bring the man in out of the harsh sun. Already his forehead and the tops of his cheeks had begun to burn red. The Vice President looked past him, down the path through his own front yard, or what he had come to think of as his own front yard. The house, in fact, was not his, nor was the lawn, the staff, the soft beds or fluffy towels. Everything came with the job and would be inventoried upon their departure. Their own possessions were in storage and there was a time he had thought hopefully that their things would stay exactly where they were while he and his family made their inevitable transition into the presidential mansion. Through the narrow opening of the front gate he saw an angry knot of police officers, military personnel, and reporters. Somewhere in a tree a camera flash popped a bright light.