“He has to go, Rupert,” said Luna in the echo of that sound. “I mean it. He’s a lazy son of a bitch, he does nothing but lay around and smoke dope, he’s a disaster politically, and this last stunt is completely unforgivable. Jesus! We could have learned so much from him, we could have given him shelter…” She raised her eyes to heaven and clenched her fists in frustration, not a pretty sight. To Rupert she said, “So? Can weplease get rid of him?”

“What about Jen?” This from Scotty, earning a sharp look from Luna, who said quickly, “Oh, Jenny’s fine. No one has anything against Jenny.”

Jenny snuffled and said sulkily, “I’m not staying here without Kevin.”

“Whatever was meant to happen will happen, Luna,” said Rupert in his calm, maddening way. “And if the few of us can’t live here together peacefully, what hope is there for the world at large? Isn’t that right, Nigel?”

After a brief pause, Professor Cooksey said, “Quite,” excused himself, and went back to his workroom.

“Well,” said Rupert, “let’s all take some time to calm down, shall we? Jenny, could you…ah…deal with that plant?” And they all disappeared to their various lairs, leaving Jenny alone on the patio, staring at the shattered pot and the smear of earth on the bloodred tiles.

Night. Moie lies in his hammock high up in a great fig tree in Peacock Park in Coconut Grove. He watches the moon come up from the sea. He sees that Jaguar has nearly returned from his mother, and by this sign he calculates how long it has been since he left Home. He recalls the wordlonely, feels the feeling it represents, wonders if he will return there, and also wonders a little about the Firehair Woman, and if he will see her again. He has her smell in his nose and can easily find her, he thinks, even in this place of unbearable stench. If it is necessary.

But now he tests the air for another scent, one he acquired earlier in this strange day, that of the man Fuentes. He had not understood what the Monkey Boy had said to Fuentes, but the meaning was perfectly clear, as was the response of Fuentes. He feels Jaguar’s anger building in him and feels a faint sadness for the man, as he sometimes did when they gave a little girl to the god. Some things are necessary, however. It is not for him to judge. He chews some more of the paste he has prepared; after a few minutes he feels the god start to take hold of his body. Moie has never discussed this event with anyone. He has never known anyone who carried Jaguar except for his old teacher, who has been dead for years, and even when he was alive it was not something they discussed, any more than they concerned themselves with the circulation of their blood.

Moie feels numbness begin in his hands, his feet; the waves of numbness flow toward his center and meet in a certain spot in his belly. Sounds and smells fade; his vision grows dim, contracts, goes to black. Now he is out of his body and can see again, if dimly. He sees his body there on the tree limb, perfectly inert, its arms and legs hanging down. He regards it with only mild interest, no different from the interest he takes in the bark of the tree, its leaves, the little insects of the night crawling among them, the motion of the moon through the clouds. He is free in nature, indifferent to and perfectly accepting of its benevolence, its horrors. In this state of profound detachment he observes Jaguar unmake nature. First there is a man in a tree, and then there is some kind ofevent (not really, because event implies duration, and this occurs outside of normal time), and then the same place is occupied by a golden cat spotted with black rosettes, a creature with about four times the mass of the man. Inside this being is Moie, held like a memory in the consciousness of the god. He will recall what is about to happen as we recall dreams.

With the waxing moon high in the clear heavens, Jaguar descends from the fig tree. Like a slice of solid moonlight he flows out of the park and goes south, slipping through the sleeping yards, over walls and fences, to a chorus of frantic dog-barks. He encounters finger canals, and either works around them to the west or swims across. He is a good swimmer. There are few people out in these neighborhoods this late at night; they sleep secure behind their alarms and guard services. Jaguar stops at a canal bank and sniffs the air.

Antonio Fuentes is restless in his bed, in his fine house on the canal at Leucedendra. He can’t get theIndio out of his mind. The screaming American was nothing, but theIndio wasnot nothing, should not have been there at all, and the American should not have known about the Puxto cut, and should not have known that Consuela Holdings was behind the Colombian timber operation doing the cutting. There were several dummy corporations designed specifically to cloud that connection, so how could an ignorantIndio and a tree-huggingpendejo have worked it out? Answer: they could not, and therefore someone was trying to fuck them over, someone with connections down there in Colombia. That was the problem when you dealt with Colombians: there was no law at all, not even corrupt law; you never knew if you had paid off everyone who could screw up your deal, which is why they had a man like Hurtado involved.

He slips out of bed and into a robe and walks to the French windows of his bedroom. His wife stirs but does not wake. They both take sleeping pills, and he hopes he will not need another one tonight. It would make him groggy all morning, which he cannot really afford. He has called a meeting of the other principals of Consuela to discuss the threat represented by the incident in his office. He hopes they can resolve it without bringing the Colombian into it directly. Fuentes has squeezed the law many times during his career, but this is the first time he has ever done business with an actualnarcolista. Although officially, on paper, there is no connection. He doesn’t like it, but the profits are potentially enormous, and it is not like they are actually in the drug business themselves. Probably not actually, but the important thing is, he doesn’t have to know anything about it. And to make sure the insulation is still intact, or if not, to repair it. He thinks that the screaming boy should not be hard to find, if it should come to that.

Fuentes opens the French window and steps out onto the little balcony. The air is fresh and scented by night-blooming jasmine and the marine tang of the bay. He is on the second floor here and he can look out at the expanse of water. It is a clear night with a fat moon riding high above a single line of cloud. He can just make out the lights of Key Biscayne and Cape Florida to the east. Sometimes, he has found, a little pacing back and forth on this balcony will tire him enough so that he will sleep.

He takes a few steps and stops short. There is something wrong. What is it? Something he has forgotten to do? He glances back to the bedroom wall: the emerald gleam of the security light is on, the house is sealed. He hears a scratching sound overhead and starts violently, then allows himself a secret, self-deprecating laugh. Raccoons. He will have to have the man out with the traps again. But this whole incident has made him uncharacteristically jumpy. I’m nervous as a cat, he thinks to himself, and begins to pace.

He paces the ten feet, turns, and ten back, and his head while he paces is full of figures. He is the numbers guy in the group. Calderón had the Colombian contacts, Garza generated the seed money, and Ibanez has the machinery to turn the timber into cash, for there are still plenty of people whose hunger for prime mahogany precludes asking any questions about where it came from. It would be good if they had a survey of the area, how many trees they could expect per hectare and so on, to get a clearer picture. Using averages was fine, but they had heard rumors about the incredible density of growth in the Puxto, was it possible it was as high as four trees per? He does some mental calculation on that basis: the mesa was twelve hundred square miles, convert to hectares at 259 per square mile, and say itwas four trees per, that would be a million trees, figure average radius of a meter and a half, thirty tall, that would be, say, two hundred cubic meters of usable wood from each and…and in the midst of these ruminations he hears again that noise above him, a scraping on the tiles.