The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (120 page)

Sobs and swear words woke Alegría. The Salvadorian couples had managed to reach the arroyo while Alegría had dozed. The sun was low and motionless in the sky and reminded Alegría of a blowtorch she had once seen at a construction site; the torch had been on one side of a steel panel burning a hole through. She had only been a first-year architecture
student then, and the professors and male students had made lewd comments as they watched the torch cut the steel. They had forgot a woman was present; Alegría had got used to vulgarity in architecture school. Alegría did not move or speak. She watched the Salvadorian husbands half-carry and half-drag their wives on their backs and shoulders.

The four Mexicans were in better condition. They did not stop. They were walking in the shade of the north bank of the arroyo. Alegría could not see them, but she heard their voices in the distance; the men sounded strangely exhilarated as they talked. The shade in the arroyo would be enough; no need to wait. They would start walking now and be that much closer to the highway and water. Alegría watched the last Salvadorian couple disappear as they rounded a curve in the arroyo. She estimated the temperature was still above 110° F, but the humidity was also less than 8 percent. The real danger was dehydration, not the heat.

Alegría woke again after sundown. She had dreamed of nothing; the perfect, dark blank of nothingness. She had feared the torment of dreams about drinking water, or ice cubes in iced teas, and cold beer in chests full of ice. She had started walking; she could feel thirst take over the voice inside her head. Thirst was chanting its name over and over. Alegría put a pebble in her mouth because she had read in a novel once that a pebble might help. But the novel had not showed what happened after a while; novelists used poetic license that architects never got to use. After a while, the pebble in her mouth had not helped because all the saliva the pebble had stimulated had been used up. Alegría had read about death from thirst in Bartolomeo’s nasty little counterinsurgency training manual captured from the U.S. CIA. He had asked her to read everything because he loved her and he wanted her to know the risks. Thirst had seldom been used as a torture method by the CIA, the manual asserted, because the tongue swelled out of the mouth as thirst intensified, and the “subject” could not talk if he wanted to.

Alegría knew she had only hours to find water or reach help at the highway after she saw the Salvadorian women. The two had died in each other’s arms, sitting upright against the arroyo bank. The contents of both their purses had been emptied out on the sand. At first Alegría had thought the husbands or maybe even Mario’s treacherous guides had sneaked back to empty the purses. Then she had realized the two women had been delirious from thirst and had dumped the contents from their purses in a last desperate search for something to drink. One woman had drunk her French perfume; the empty bottle was in her lap.
Their expensive party dresses had held up under the ordeal very well; the fuchsia ruffles and pink crepe pleats had somehow remained clean and untorn, and only a little wrinkled. Alegría thought how odd death was to leave the party dresses without a tear or even a stain. She did not look at the faces, not for fear she might see black, swollen tongues or buzzard-eaten eye sockets, but because she had not noticed the women’s faces while they were alive and certainly did not want to bother with these Salvadorian cows now that they were dead.

The white arroyo sand reflected the light of the three-quarter moon so Alegría could see plainly a hundred yards away. She squatted in the sand and cupped her hand to catch her own urine. She drank it all. She didn’t see what difference it made when it was her own; men routinely required lovers or wives to swallow their sperm. The urine brought the saliva back, and Alegría hardly bothered to notice the identity of the corpses she passed. She wasn’t curious or interested in those who had died. They hadn’t meant anything to her alive, and now they meant even less. She alone was going to live; she herself would survive. Alegría felt euphoric each time she passed another corpse. Guatemalans and Hondurans seemed to die in twos and threes; the Mexicans dropped like flies, one by one alone. She had lost count, but she knew the “secret system”: each corpse she passed advanced Alegría closer to safety. The more the others died, the more likely it was that Alegría would be saved; that was only simple mathematics.

Alegría had walked steadily all night. After dawn she passed the corpse of one of the four Mexicans; his briefcase was gone; before he had died, he had torn off all his clothes. Alegría did not stop again until the rotting smell was left behind. Before the sun got high, Alegría searched for shade where she could sleep until darkness. The arroyo was much wider now and there were desert trees growing along both banks. In the shade, under the desert trees, Alegría sat down with her back against a tree trunk. At her feet, half-buried in the sand, were empty cans and brittle, cracked plastic bottles that had once contained water. Alegría held a plastic bottle up to the sky in both hands; when she had first seen the bottle partially buried in the sand, she had thought it might still contain some water. But then she had noticed the gaping hole in the lower half of the bottle, filled with fine white sand. Alegría tried to sleep, but she was too thirsty. She had been weeping when suddenly Alegría had had no more tears. Her eyes felt burned and swollen. Now when she urinated, she had difficulty passing more than a few drops, which burned her cracked lips and tongue.

Alegría refused to die. She didn’t care how weak and sick she was, she would sit there under that tree, and she
would not
die. She could feel the money belt with the pouch of emeralds against her ribs. Menardo used to spend hours examining and admiring them when he brought them out of the vault. Their intensity of color and the almost supernatural light that shone out of the emeralds, together with their flawlessness, made the emeralds worth millions. Only the Japanese had better emeralds, Menardo said. Now she had the emeralds. As long as she had the emeralds, Alegría refused to die. She was too thirsty to sleep, but she could think about the emeralds; they were hers now and they would keep her alive. In their endless depths of green, Alegría saw lagoons and pools of pure water surrounded by thick jungle leaves; the bluish-green light was a tropical rain-mist spread across the sky. She was determined not to die. Sonny Blue was in Tucson. So were hundreds of thousands in gold and in cash, even a town house. All that was hers now. She was going to live to enjoy it no matter how thick or dry her tongue got.

Alegría had not truly slept, but she had dreamed and hallucinated. From the shade under the tree Alegría had watched as the large basalt boulders and big rocks had slowly moved down the wash as if they were beasts grazing on the sand; next Alegría had heard the sound of a car engine, the Mercedes engine, and before she could move, she saw Menardo’s car driven by Tacho, moving slowly through the arroyos as if Tacho were following or tracking her. Alegría saw Tacho’s face clearly, but he did not see her; he seemed to be gazing out of the car window at the sandy ground where Alegría saw rounded stones transformed into human skulls the farther the car drove up the wash. Then the car disappeared, and Alegría could smell the dampness of rain in the air, although the sun burned in an empty blue sky. Alegría could smell roast turkey and saw that where the stones had been human skulls, there were now roast turkeys on silver platters that reflected the sun. Alegría heard voices from the direction the ghost Mercedes had taken; she could feel the blood in her veins begin to thicken, to dry up gradually in her veins. Her eyes no longer opened because the eyelids had swollen, then shriveled shut.

Alegría had always known life meant nothing, so dying was nothing at all either. She did not wish for her mother or father. There was no love between them. Her father would turn the story of her death into after-dinner conversation; her mother would say nothing, as if Alegría had never been born. Alegría rested her hands on her belly to feel the bulge of the pouch of emeralds inside her money belt. If her eyes dried
up forever, she would replace them with two big emeralds. A natural blonde as she was would look even more stunning with green eyes.

Alegría woke with water pouring off the top of her head, down her face and chest; she rubbed at her eyes with her hands. She heard a woman’s voice in Spanish call out, “This one’s still alive.” Someone knelt beside her with a canteen and helped Alegría rinse her mouth and tongue with water to moisten her throat so she would not choke when she drank. Alegría tried but could not focus her eyes. She could hear men’s and women’s voices in English and Spanish now. They gathered around her. Alegría could make out their shoes and their legs. Something was very familiar about the identical black shoes the women wore. Alegría thought it had to be another hallucination because she was surrounded by a half dozen Catholic nuns, and two Catholic priests. The nuns wore modern short veils, white blouses, and dark skirts; they were clearly
gringas
chattering excitedly in English. The dark woman who spoke Spanish returned with a woman who appeared to be her sister. They had both looked closely at Alegría, then shook their heads. She wasn’t one of theirs. They had expected none by that description: blond hair. It must be the
coyotes
now were crossing a higher class of people as the civil wars in the South worsened.

In the back of the van Alegría had managed to whisper in Spanish to one of them, “Please, no police or hospital.” Liria and Sarita had nodded in unison. Nothing to worry about, they told her in soothing tones. Relax. Sleep. Everything was going to be all right. Alegría tucked her knees up to her belly and felt the pouch in the money belt against her ribs. She closed her eyes and whispered to her emeralds, “Oh my little beauties! I love you, I love you; I owe you my life.”

ZETA HAD NOT HEARD from Awa Gee in days. He had not returned messages left at a computer answering machine. All his other phone lines had been busy, including a private line Zeta had been paying for, a line that supposedly was always open to her. Awa Gee
was obsessed with telephone lines, and in a closet he proudly showed Zeta his “official” telephone-lineman coveralls complete with a fake Asian name embroidered on one pocket. New identities were one of Awa Gee’s many specialities. Zeta did not ask, but she assumed Awa Gee tapped into other phone lines for special jobs.

Zeta went to find Awa Gee. He had recently located what he called his “dream house” in a block of seedy, crumbling bungalows on Glenn Street off Stone Avenue. Two large arroyos cut through the neighborhood where vacant lots and yards had been retaken by the desert plants, the creosote bush and paloverde, which had always grown in the gravel floodplains of the desert washes. Before Awa Gee had located the dream house, he had moved frequently. He was wary of being caught by the telephone company and seemed always to be listening for unfamiliar sounds. Night and day he expected federal agents to knock at his door. But worse than federal agents, Awa Gee feared and hated lightning. Awa Gee had ridden all around Tucson on his old Vespa scooter, looking for “safe pwace, safe pwace.” Awa Gee’s enemies were lightning, power outages, and any and all interruptions of telephone lines. The neighborhood Awa Gee had chosen was flat and had few living trees taller than mailboxes—all excellent recommendations against lightning strikes. Awa Gee used to close his eyes and pretend to shiver at the mention of lightning. A pellet-shaped aluminum trailer was parked next to the little house he had rented. He had bought the trailer; it was necessary to house all the small computers he had wired together for the hundred-digit project.

Whenever Awa Gee talked about lightning’s threat to his precious computers and programs, Zeta was able to detect a bitterness that Awa Gee kept concealed with his wide grins and apparent cheerfulness. They had been standing in the semi-darkness that Awa Gee preferred for work at his terminals. Awa Gee said U.S. military and foreign governments had taken steps to secure their computer centers much too late. Only rank amateurs and blunderers had ever been detected or identified for computer-network break-ins. The biggest heists, the best penetrations, would not be detected for years; millions and millions of dollars per hour had evaporated out electronic circuits. Awa Gee said international banking and finance were all part of a great flowing river where immense quantities might disappear before the river level fell noticeably. Theoretically, somewhere, someday, the figures would catch up with themselves and somebody would come up short; but in fact, unless all the
lights went out, the electronic river would never stop flowing, and the two-nanosecond lead that the deposits had would forever keep them ahead of the debits.

Awa Gee had a great deal of money in offshore bank accounts. He need never lift a finger again if that was his pleasure. Awa Gee collected “the numbers.” His prospective clients were asked to supply entry codes. Ninety-nine percent of his clients had been former employees motivated by revenge. His collection of numbers had saved Awa Gee the innumerable hours of computer time required for random “safecracking” as he called it. Of course he had always kept meticulous records of every entry and entry attempt he had ever made. To assure that he would not duplicate sets of numbers in his search for new networks to penetrate. Awa Gee screened prospective clients according to whether he had any interest in the particular network that was to be entered. Naturally Awa Gee could have demanded top dollar for his expertise, but he had been careful not to get greedy. Awa Gee called the global networks “a big-tit cow” he was going to milk and milk; but always before he had stopped short. Up until then. But now Awa Gee saw the day approaching when he must strip “the cow” of everything, milk her, then bleed her dry. On that day he would set loose a host of allied computer viruses and time bombs that would combine and interlock to alter financial records and data in systems around the world.