“You’re protecting him right now,” Cielo pointed out.

“Don’t split hairs.”

Julio made a face but held his tongue. Julio had dreams of political power—and of course Emil was a threat to that.

The old man approached. He stood before Cielo and addressed him directly, excluding Julio. “I trust you.”

“Thank you.” He felt miserable but he met Draga’s watery eyes. By playing along with the farce he was, in an ironic way, betraying the old man. It filled him with guilt.

“I trust you,” the old man said, “not to try to circumvent Emil after my death.”

“And what if he turns against us?”

“Then you’ll do what you must. I’m not an oracle, nor a psychiatrist. I think he has it in him to be a leader but he wants more training, more discipline, more experience. These things you can give him.”

Emil might have the makings of a tyrant, Cielo thought, but he didn’t have it in him to be a leader. The old man was wrong—blinded by the sentimentality of blood relation. But no purpose would be served by arguing the point now. Familial prejudice was stronger than reason.

I’ll have to give him my word now—and break it later. Dismally Cielo said, “All right.”

The old man straightened—now he was brusque: “The next step is the acquisitions. You know enough to be circumspect. You’ve got my list of dealers? Yes, of course—you wouldn’t have misplaced those. Very well, I hope to hear from you.”

Cielo stood up with Julio at his side. The old man gravely shook their hands; Cielo saw a wistful sadness in Draga’s eyes when they withdrew.

At the front of the house a Volkswagen was drawn up, keys in the ignition. They settled into it and when Julio put it in gear he said, “The old man’s still quite an adventurer.”

“I suppose we’ll just have to string him along.” Cielo fastened his shoulder belt. “We’ll buy the ammunition and the ordnance. After all, we’ve got the money. We may as well go through the motions—it’ll please him.”

“Do we owe him so much?”

“We owe him everything,” Cielo said, “beginning with our lives. Take me home first, then we’ll go on to meet the others.”

He wanted to see Soledad first—he needed to draw strength from her.

The smell of Soledad’s talc was thick in the room. He called out and heard her answer, faint in the back of the house; he went through and found her waiting for him, combing her fingers into her long dark hair and lifting it loosely, high above her head. She gave him a blinding smile and it immediately lifted his spirits.

“You see? I’m home unharmed. You can release the hostages.” He made a joke of it but after she kissed him, running her tongue around his mouth, she stepped back out of his grasp and hugged herself.

“What’s wrong?”

“You were gone so long,” she said.

“I’m back now.”

“For how long?”

“Who can say. What difference does it make? Lets take what we have.”

Her smile, then, was sweet and shy. Fourteen years, three children, and she still had the slender quickness of a fawn doe. She took his hand and led him to the bedroom.

He sat at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around the coffee cup and his eyes returned at intervals to the clock. When Soledad came into the room she made a face. “I wish you’d learn to put the toilet seat down.”

“Did Elena get over her cold?”

“Sure. It’s been weeks. She has a new boy friend. Very rich and fourteen years old.”

“I hope he doesn’t keep her out at night. At fourteen these days they’re more worldly than we were at twenty.”

“She has a head on her shoulders,” Soledad said. “She inherits that from—well, God knows not from you.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “I don’t care if she retains her virginity—”

“At thirteen?” He was shocked.

“—but I do care that she not give it away too cheaply. I’ve told her that. She knows what I meant.”

“Por Dios.”

“Well it’s not the same world anymore, querido.”

“I feel old.”

“Not in bed, thank God.”

She was going past the table; he arrested her, reaching out for her hand, pulling her into his lap. Her arms slid around his neck and he tasted her mouth. The hoot of the VW’s horn outraged him. Soledad looked toward the window. “Julio?”

“Yes. I asked him in but he preferred to wait in the car. He’s reading a science fiction.”

“How long will you be?”

“I’ll be home tonight. Fairly late.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s something I have to do.”

“Something you don’t want to do.”

“Well it’s got to be taken care of.”

“Let someone else do it. Julio, Vargas.”

“It’s not something I could shift onto someone else.”

“Then I’m sorry, querido. I’ll go out and buy a bottle of Bourbon for tonight.”

“Two bottles,” he said on his way out the door.

Julio shifted down into second and made an abrupt unsignaled turn into a one-way street and stopped the VW almost immediately at the curb. Cielo twisted around in the seat to watch the boulevard. Traffic streamed past. No cars turned into the one-way street. If any had, Julio would have backed out into the boulevard and gone on his way, leaving the tail stranded halfway down the one-way street. It was a simple device designed to prevent pursuit, one of many in Julio’s bag of tricks. He was always the one who took the wheel; Cielo was a mediocre driver.

They went along Highway Three to the east, bottled in by heavy traffic as far as the El Verde turnoff where Julio turned south and picked up speed. In town they doubled back on several packed-earth streets; there was no tail and they emerged from the town with church bells ringing noon behind them. On the country road a horseman drove a bunch of cattle across, delaying them five minutes, and then they caught up with a farm tractor and couldn’t get past it until they were over a hill. The mountains ranged up ahead of them, tier upon tier, shades of pastel green. Sugar cane on the right, pasture on the left; Julio turned the VW into a narrow driveway between fences. There was the smell of manure.

Vargas and two others ranged along the porch of the farmhouse trying not to resemble lookouts. No weapons were in evidence but they were near at hand out of sight. Cielo walked along to the end of the porch. Julio sat down on the wooden bench, pressing back the dog ear on the page of his paperback galactic-empire saga. Vargas turned to go into the house and Cielo said, “Ask Kruger to come outside.” Old Draga had infected him with a paranoia about indoor microphones.

When Kruger came out Cielo said, “Any problems?”

“Luz was complaining there’s no television set. When do we go up to the camp?”

“Maybe tomorrow. Julio and Vargas will scout it first. We want to know if anybody’s been there.”

“Nobody’s likely to find it unless they know where to look. And the guards we left there—”

“The guards could be dead or in jail and there could be an ambush waiting for us,” Cielo said. “Let Julio scout it first—he knows how to go in for a look without being spotted.”

“You have a good head for security,” the German admitted. Kruger was slight, almost delicate with a little round head and wide thin lips that gave him an ascetic appearance. He talked with a Bavarian hiss. He was forty-six, much too young to have been a Nazi, but some of the others joshed him by greeting him with stiff-armed Heils and addressing him as Mein Führer. Kruger didn’t seem put off by it; he had a healthy sense of humor. At first he’d been a mercenary but the Bay of Pigs had made a believer of him.

Cielo said, “Keep your eye on Emil. I want him here at nightfall.”

“I understand.”

Darkness came. A light from the porch fell obliquely through the window bars, painting stripes across the floor. Emil stood at a cracked mirror in the hallway. A sprig of hair stood up disobediently at the back of his head, glistening with the water he’d used to try and stick it down. He was hacking at it with his palm.