Everything's Eventual

   Escobar removed his cigarette from the center of his mouth, looked at it, dropped it to the gray tile floor, stepped on it. Then he looked at Fletcher and smiled. "Very sad, of course. Now I ask you some questions, Mr. Fletcher. Many of them—I tell you this frankly— are the questions Tomás Herrera refused to answer. I hope you will not refuse, Mr. Fletcher. I like you. You sit there in dignity, do not cry or beg or urinate the pants. I like you. I know you only do what you believe. It is patriotism. So I tell you, my friend, it's good if you answer my questions quickly and truthfully. You don't want Heinz to use his machine."

   "I've said I'd help you," Fletcher said. Death was closer than the overhead lights in their cunning wire cages. Pain, unfortunately, was closer yet. And how close was Núñez, El Cóndor? Closer than these three guessed, but not close enough to help him. If Escobar and the Bride of Frankenstein had waited another two days, perhaps even another twenty-four hours . . . but they had not, and he was here in the deathroom. Now he would see what he was made of.

   "You said it and you had better mean it," the woman said, speaking very clearly. "We're not fucking around, gringo."

   "I know you're not," Fletcher said in a sighing, trembling voice.

   "You want that cigarette now, I think," said Escobar, and when Fletcher shook his head, Escobar took one himself, lit it, then seemed to meditate. At last he looked up. This cigarette was planted in the middle of his face like the last one. "Núñez comes soon?" he asked. "Like Zorro in that movie?"

   Fletcher nodded.

"How soon?"

   "I don't know." Fletcher was very aware of Heinz standing next to his infernal machine with his long-fingered hands folded in front of him, looking ready to talk about pain-relievers at the drop of a cue. He was equally aware of Ramón standing to his right, at the edge of his peripheral vision. He could not see, but guessed that Ramón's hand would be on the butt of his pistol. And here came the next question.

   "When he comes, will he strike at the garrison in the hills of El Cándido, the garrison at St. Thérese, or will he come right into the city?"

   "The garrison at St. Thérese," Fletcher said.

   He will come to the city, Tomás had said while his wife and daughter now watched cartoons, sitting on the floor side by side and eating popcorn from a white bowl with a blue stripe around the rim. Fletcher remembered the blue stripe. He could see it clearly. Fletcher remembered everything. He will come at the heart. No fucking around. He will strike for the heart, like a man who would kill a vampire.

   "He will not want the TV station?" Escobar asked. "Or the government radio station?"

   First the radio station on Civil Hill, Tomás had said while the cartoons played. By then it was the Road Runner, always gone in a puff of dust just ahead of whatever Acme Road Runner–catching device the Coyote was using, just beep-beep and gone.

   "No," Fletcher said. "I've been told El Cóndor says 'Let them babble.' "

   "Does he have rockets? Air-to-ground rockets? Copter-killers?"

   "Yes." It was true.

   "Many?"

   "Not many." This was not true. Núñez had better than sixty. There were only a dozen helicopters in the country's whole shitpot air force—bad Russian helicopters that never flew for long.

   The Bride of Frankenstein tapped Escobar on the shoulder. Escobar leaned toward her. She whispered without covering her mouth. She had no need to cover her mouth because her lips barely moved. This was a skill Fletcher associated with prisons. He had never been to prison but he had seen movies. When Escobar whispered back, he raised a fat hand to cover his own mouth.

   Fletcher watched them and waited, knowing that the woman was telling Escobar he was lying. Soon Heinz would have more data for his paper, Certain Preliminary Observations on the Administration and Consequences of Electrifying the Shit of Reluctant Interrogation Subjects. Fletcher discovered that terror had created two new people inside him, at least two, sub-Fletchers with their own useless but quite powerful views on how this was going to go. One was sadly hopeful, the other just sad. The sadly hopeful one was Mr. Maybe They Will, as in maybe they really will let me go, maybe there really is a car parked on the Street Fifth of May, just around the corner, maybe they really mean to kick me out of the country, maybe I really will be landing in Miami tomorrow morning, scared but alive, with this already beginning to seem like a bad dream.