Not now. But before leading the girl outside I took another look to confirm I wasn’t imagining it.
No.
Applebee’s eyes had a glazed, dreamy look, as if he were enjoying himself. His pale lips were contracted into a slight smile. It was the mild, secure smile that you see on the faces of children as they retreat into the arms of a parent. It’s the smile that forms when they realize they’re safe from all harm.
Applebee had retreated to some far, safe place; vanished somewhere inside himself. If the man’s expression mirrored his last, fading sensibilities, then he’d experienced something that pleased him, but also surprised him a little. Maybe it was peace . . . or just an absence of turmoil, which is another form of liberation.
Later, when I made the dreaded call to Frieda, that’s the way I would describe her dead brother: peaceful.
I talked with her after first speaking confidentially to her husband, telling him what had happened, seeking his advice and permission. I said to Frieda that Jobe looked as if he’d died peacefully, set free in a way that couldn’t have been painful.
I evaded details, and tried my best to comfort her.
But the girl was right. Jobe Applebee looked nothing like the person she said she’d known since childhood. Nothing at all like the terrified man I’d left alone to die.
6
serpiente
Whenever Solaris asked Dasha where she lived—“Maybe I can visit you one day!”—she would shrink him with a withering look and reply: “I live on the islands. That’s all you need to know, because it’s all you can understand.”
Dr. Desmond Stokes and his staff lived on two islands in the southern Bahamas, part of the Ragged Island and Cays chain near Cuba. A couple hundred acres each, shores separated by a passage so narrow that tidal current roared between the islands like rapids down a river.
The main island had buildings, staff housing, a small, modem manufacturing facility that converted blocks of coral, cut from reefs, into holistic calcium tablets. The island was manicured, planted with citrus, avocado, and bananas.
On the second island, there was an airstrip, storage facilities, a few huts, a small lab equipped for extracting and preserving reptile poisons, a crane for stacking blocks of coral. Mostly, the second island was jungle. Wild things lived there. Wild things were kept for research. People on neighboring islands who practiced Obeah, a complicated religion similar to voodoo, wore special charms to protect them from the evil they believed existed there.
The first time Dasha saw Dr. Stokes’s islands was on the laptop screen of his personal assistant, Mr. Luther T. Earl. A tall, dried-up, Lincoln-looking man who wore bow ties and smelled of lavender, big white teeth when he smiled, skin the color of a black pearl. That’s what he claimed, anyway.
“Earl the Pearl,” he told her. “You can call me that, if you like.”
This was long before she found out Earl the Pearl was also Dr. Stokes’s organizational brains, and his front man.
Mr. Earl told Dasha they were actively recruiting someone “with unusual qualities” to take charge of security at his boss’s retreat in the Bahamas. There might be some personal work involved, too.
The woman had a pretty good idea what that meant, or they wouldn’t be recruiting staff at an executive security trade show at the Bellagio Hotel, Vegas. A couple thousand Soldier of Fortune types—fakes, guns freaks, and skinheads—paying money to attend lectures on how to survive the coming revolution, the ghetto monsters, and watching firepower demonstrations, rocking to the latest weaponry, out there in the desert, when they weren’t getting shit-faced on cheap booze.
Mr. Earl had rented a three-bedroom suite. Interviewed forty-seven candidates, he told Dasha later, but only three made it far enough to see pictures of the rich man’s tropical estate. The manufacturing plant was smaller than she’d expected, neon
No.
Applebee’s eyes had a glazed, dreamy look, as if he were enjoying himself. His pale lips were contracted into a slight smile. It was the mild, secure smile that you see on the faces of children as they retreat into the arms of a parent. It’s the smile that forms when they realize they’re safe from all harm.
Applebee had retreated to some far, safe place; vanished somewhere inside himself. If the man’s expression mirrored his last, fading sensibilities, then he’d experienced something that pleased him, but also surprised him a little. Maybe it was peace . . . or just an absence of turmoil, which is another form of liberation.
Later, when I made the dreaded call to Frieda, that’s the way I would describe her dead brother: peaceful.
I talked with her after first speaking confidentially to her husband, telling him what had happened, seeking his advice and permission. I said to Frieda that Jobe looked as if he’d died peacefully, set free in a way that couldn’t have been painful.
I evaded details, and tried my best to comfort her.
But the girl was right. Jobe Applebee looked nothing like the person she said she’d known since childhood. Nothing at all like the terrified man I’d left alone to die.
6
serpiente
Whenever Solaris asked Dasha where she lived—“Maybe I can visit you one day!”—she would shrink him with a withering look and reply: “I live on the islands. That’s all you need to know, because it’s all you can understand.”
Dr. Desmond Stokes and his staff lived on two islands in the southern Bahamas, part of the Ragged Island and Cays chain near Cuba. A couple hundred acres each, shores separated by a passage so narrow that tidal current roared between the islands like rapids down a river.
The main island had buildings, staff housing, a small, modem manufacturing facility that converted blocks of coral, cut from reefs, into holistic calcium tablets. The island was manicured, planted with citrus, avocado, and bananas.
On the second island, there was an airstrip, storage facilities, a few huts, a small lab equipped for extracting and preserving reptile poisons, a crane for stacking blocks of coral. Mostly, the second island was jungle. Wild things lived there. Wild things were kept for research. People on neighboring islands who practiced Obeah, a complicated religion similar to voodoo, wore special charms to protect them from the evil they believed existed there.
The first time Dasha saw Dr. Stokes’s islands was on the laptop screen of his personal assistant, Mr. Luther T. Earl. A tall, dried-up, Lincoln-looking man who wore bow ties and smelled of lavender, big white teeth when he smiled, skin the color of a black pearl. That’s what he claimed, anyway.
“Earl the Pearl,” he told her. “You can call me that, if you like.”
This was long before she found out Earl the Pearl was also Dr. Stokes’s organizational brains, and his front man.
Mr. Earl told Dasha they were actively recruiting someone “with unusual qualities” to take charge of security at his boss’s retreat in the Bahamas. There might be some personal work involved, too.
The woman had a pretty good idea what that meant, or they wouldn’t be recruiting staff at an executive security trade show at the Bellagio Hotel, Vegas. A couple thousand Soldier of Fortune types—fakes, guns freaks, and skinheads—paying money to attend lectures on how to survive the coming revolution, the ghetto monsters, and watching firepower demonstrations, rocking to the latest weaponry, out there in the desert, when they weren’t getting shit-faced on cheap booze.
Mr. Earl had rented a three-bedroom suite. Interviewed forty-seven candidates, he told Dasha later, but only three made it far enough to see pictures of the rich man’s tropical estate. The manufacturing plant was smaller than she’d expected, neon
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