The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (95 page)

The baby seemed to sense David’s rising frustration and had cried for hours despite the best efforts of the night nurse, a chubby, young Colombian woman with three children of her own at home. Beaufrey had rented another suite for himself and Serlo on another floor because the baby’s crying had annoyed him so much. David had pretended he did not mind being left behind in the hotel suite with a crying baby and its nurse; but David had always been jealous of Serlo. Only a few nights before, David had demanded Beaufrey tell him everything he and Serlo did in bed together.

Beaufrey marveled at the odd chemistry. David pretended he was not jealous. But he had started fucking the chubby night nurse, who taught him to mix paregoric in the baby’s formula. Before the end of the week, David had begun leaving the baby with the nurse in the suite to join Beaufrey and Serlo upstairs in the penthouse for drinks and dinner followed by cocaine and videos of police torture, autopsies, or other new acquisitions. Beaufrey claimed he wanted David to see what others had done with “still-life studies” such as Eric, but Beaufrey had enjoyed watching the expressions on David’s face as the torture had progressed conveniently into the “autopsy” of the victim.

David had enjoyed watching torture and killing videos before; most men did. Beaufrey divided the world into those who admitted the truth and those who lied. But that night David denied the videos gave him pleasure. David had been sullen throughout cocktails and the lovely dinner Beaufrey had ordered in their suite. That night, David had leapt up from his chair the instant he saw the surgery paraphernalia appear on the video screen. David had left the hotel without stopping to check with the nurse about the baby. Beaufrey had to smile to himself. David’s reaction was too powerful to overlook; David was afraid to feel how much he enjoyed the scalpel sinking through skin and flesh.

Beaufrey always relied on intuition to know when a situation or a sucker was ripe. Beaufrey had been intrigued by the process of deterioration in Eric; now in David, he was beginning to detect a similar pattern. Separate David from G. and the gallery with all the ass lickers, adulation and hoopla, and David would diminish a little more each day until there was nothing. No David. He would no longer exist except
when he stared into the face of a baby. But soon David had not even looked at his baby.

David’s reaction had been typical of U.S. citizens too long insulated from foreigners and strange climates. At first, David had been exhilarated by the novelty. Cartagena had soon drained David, and he had lost a certain edge as the days passed and the hotel switchboard seemed unable to connect him with his gallery more than twice a week. Finally David had become depressed and weepy over imagined infidelities between Beaufrey and Serlo.

David was ripe. Beaufrey could feel his excitement rising as the final moves of the game were being made and it was clear his prey could not escape. Beaufrey had purposely waited three weeks in Cartagena to make the kidnapping seem more plausible. Seese would need time for everything to sink in; that Monte had been taken, that David was responsible, that her only hope was to hire someone to find them. Seese had old connections in Tucson who could track Beaufrey; that had been another reason Beaufrey was ready to make his new headquarters on the remote Colombian plains. Or at least these were the stories Beaufrey had already fed to David, who wasn’t completely stupid. The plan required enough time so retaliation by Seese was possible.

The flight to the
finca
had been scheduled for early the next morning. David had gone out with Serlo to buy darkroom equipment and supplies he would need at the ranch. Beaufrey had arranged for the four gunmen to enter David’s hotel suite and to leave the nurse unharmed, locked in a closet. The nurse had identified the gunmen as foreigners, Mexicans she thought. Beaufrey had specified Mexicans to further implicate the connections Seese had in Tucson.

The shock of seeing police, hotel staff, even journalists, crowded around his door had left David pale and withdrawn. Beaufrey had shown David to the red leather armchair and asked Serlo to bring them some brandy. Beaufrey did all the talking because his friend did not speak Spanish fluently. As soon as the police and other authorities had grasped the possibility the child’s mother from the U.S. had taken the baby, the excitement immediately subsided. Oh! Oh! That was a different matter! Very soon the hall outside the suite had been cleared of all but a few police inspectors who were required to complete reports.

Beaufrey had coaxed David to drink the brandy and to snort some cocaine to settle his nerves. Beaufrey wanted David to know he was
prepared to charter a return flight to the United States. Nothing was more important to Beaufrey than for David to find his infant son.

David had snorted a line of cocaine and settled back on the sofa with his eyes closed, pinching his nostrils shut with one hand. Beaufrey especially enjoyed watching David when David was angry or upset. David’s pouting mouth aroused Beaufrey. He had the urge to cross the room and lick the traces of cocaine powder from David’s nostrils. Dull or ordinary people were so much more interesting when you and they were drunk and high on coke, just as the most ordinary street boys became special after their nipples sported diamond or gold studs. Nothing stimulated the cerebral cortex like cocaine unless it was coffee. “The deadly ‘C’ plants from South America,” he said, giggling. Beaufrey was drunk. He was high. He must not giggle again because David’s baby had been stolen only hours earlier. He snorted more coke. A great tingling rush came over Beaufrey’s entire body all at once. Bliss! Bliss! Nothing matters but bliss! Beaufrey and David stayed in the hotel suite for two days while Serlo took all telephone calls from local authorities and police, who wished to contact the United States to locate the missing child’s mother. But after numerous assurances from Serlo that the infant’s mother had kidnapped it, police authorities marked the case file “inactive.”

Beaufrey persuaded David to fly with him and Serlo to the
finca.
David seemed to have forgotten he had kidnapped Monte in the first place, and that the police in San Diego might be looking for David. Or they might not be looking for him, since Monte was David’s own son and the child’s mother was an addict and a whore.

At the
finca,
David had regained much of his former vigor. He wasn’t going to let Seese keep the child. The child was his. Beaufrey had nodded and pretended to agree with everything David said. The first few days at the ranch had been a replay of the last days in the hotel in Cartagena, where Serlo had been relegated to the role of receptionist while Beaufrey and David had lain naked in the king-size bed snorting gram after gram of cocaine watching torture videos or soccer games on big-screen satellite TV.

SERLO HAD REMAINED perfectly calm. Only he, of all the others, had the rare gift of perfect calm. Serlo was there to keep watch; in all directions, farther than the eye could see, the infinite blue sky enclosed the plain. Serlo was
sangre pura;
years before they had all the mestizos and Indians relocated to work on their ranching operations in Argentina. The
finca
was to become a stronghold for those of
sangre pura
as unrest and revolutions continued to sweep through.

Serlo preferred that Beaufrey be dominant; danger was exciting. Their most engaging conversations together had concerned the importance of lineage. The United States had vulgarized wealth by allowing the lowest levels of humanity to worm their way into political power in a so-called democracy. Beaufrey and Serlo both agreed lineage was all that mattered. Those of highest lineage had never lost their great wealth; lesser lines of nobility had found themselves with lineages but no money.

Serlo had dedicated himself to a cause. Really it wasn’t as quixotic as all that; other great leaders and thinkers had shared Serlo’s concern. He believed the human race would die out without a proper genetic balance. All along the
droit du seigneur
had been aimed at constant infusion of superior aristocratic blood into the peasant stock, just as Serlo had heard his uncles laugh about the rubber plantations years before where they had raped six or seven young Indian women, not because they had been lustful men, they were not, but because they believed it was their God-given duty to “upgrade” mestizo and Indian bloodstock.

Serlo was the first to concede that a great deal of weak genetic material in the human population was Caucasian, the results of improper mixing of bloodlines. For example, the matings of Polish and Irish resulted in hybrid individuals worse than either of the parents. Serlo had studied at the private institutes for eugenics research, which even he had felt were questionable because researchers had refused to consider the factor of the mother. Serlo had studied a large body of psychological and psychiatric writings that clearly demonstrated that even the most
perfect genetic specimen could be ruined, absolutely destroyed, by the defects of the child’s mother. Serlo believed the problems that Freud had identified need not occur if a child’s “parents” were both male. The nature of the female was to engulf what was outside her body, to never let the umbilical cord be severed; gradually the mother became a vampire.

Serlo did not mind Beaufrey’s cheap street boys, or the gringos, not even Eric; how could Serlo have possibly felt anything at all about them? Jealousy was out of the question. Serlo had
sangre pura;
“blue blood” deserved “blue blood.” In the end there could be nothing better. The
finca
would become his research center. An institute also. They would be able to conduct research in complete seclusion. While Beaufrey was not interested in the scholarly details, still he understood simple political realities. Riches meant little if the cities were burning and anarchy reigned.

At the
finca
they would have everything; the underground vaults and storage units had been built to accommodate the bales of U.S. dollars, deutsche marks, and other currency put in storage by certain of Beaufrey’s clients. Other underground units contained giant, sealed tanks of water and barrels of wine. Other units contained immense stores of dehydrated foods. But Serlo had not stopped here; he had made a generous research grant to a young scientist from Geneva, who had traveled to Colombia and lived on the
finca
for a year as he designed and supervised the construction of an underground chamber or “Alternative Earth” unit. Once sealed, the Alternative Earth unit contained the plants, animals, and water necessary to continue independently as long as electricity was generated by the new “peanut-size” atomic reactors.

But Serlo’s interest in Alternative Earth module research extended far beyond mere survival or self-defense from anarchy with underground caches of supplies and weapons. In the end, the earth would be uninhabitable. The Alternative Earth modules would be loaded with the last of the earth’s uncontaminated soil, water, and oxygen and would be launched by immense rockets into high orbits around the earth where sunlight would sustain plants to supply oxygen, as well as food. Alternative Earth modules would orbit together in colonies, and the select few would continue as they always had, gliding in luxury and ease across polished decks of steel and glass islands where they looked down on earth as they had once gazed down at Rome or Mexico City from luxury penthouses, still sipping cocktails.

The colonies in earth’s orbit would periodically be recharged with water and oxygen from earth, but the Alternative Earth modules had
been designed to be self-sufficient, closed systems, capable of remaining cut off from earth for years if necessary while the upheaval and violence threatened those of superior lineage.

SERLO HAD ALMOST persuaded Beaufrey to forget the one-man theater experiments with Eric in San Diego when David had appeared on the scene with the woman not far behind. Serlo had never cared for beauty or virginity since neither were as lasting as one’s lineage, which not even death could diminish. Serlo never failed to take new visitors, such as David, down the long hall to see the portraits. Those along the north wall had been his mother’s lineage; these along the south wall were his father’s lineage, which was perhaps somewhat less distinguished.