Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [98]
“Sí,” both of them said, nodding.
“Krill has done great injury to a friend of mine. The one down the slope, the ape, isn’t even a cipher.”
“What is this ‘cipher’? These kinds of words don’t mean nozzing to us, boss,” Eladio said.
“The fact you boys were raised up poor and ignorant isn’t your fault. Most of y’all’s mothers would have had you aborted if they’d had the money. But today there’s no excuse for ignorance in an adult. People in mud huts watch CNN. The Internet is available in a street-corner café. You boys have access to the same knowledge a university professor does. I suggest y’all start showing a little more initiative regarding your self-improvement.”
“We seek to please you, not to upset you, Señor Jack,” Eladio said.
“You did very well following Temple Dowling for me. You did well learning of the machinations of Negrito with the young lawman. But you haven’t given me Krill. Krill is the objective, not his monkey. Are y’all listening?”
“We ain’t perfect, boss,” the cousin said. His name was Jaime, and of the two Mexican killers, he was the less intelligent and the more recalcitrant.
Eladio looked angrily at his cousin, then turned his attention back to Jack, trying to undo any damage his cousin might have caused. “We can take Negrito alive and entertain him in ways he’ll understand,” Eladio said.
“Is he the kind of man who gives up reliable information when he’s in pain?” Jack said. “Or does he lie and tell you what you want to hear?”
“You are very intelligent, Señor Jack,” Eladio said. “Negrito has the strength of a mule and the brain of a snake. Pain means nothing to him. As a boy, he blew flaming kerosene from his mouth in a carnival. His putas say they can still smell it on him.”
Jaime chewed on a weed and took a watch with a broken strap from his shirt pocket and looked at it. “Eladio is right. If Negrito ain’t of no value, maybe it’s time we took care of him and also the American you don’t like at the whorehouse and get some sleep. What is of more importance? The cost of a bullet or the time we waste speaking of these men you say are worthless? Constantly talking of these men makes me resentful of myself.”
Jack’s face registered no emotion. It seemed as serene as a layer of plastic that had melted and cooled and dried in dirty lumps. He watched the lights in the sky and the dust that swirled off the desert floor and buttoned the top of his shirt with one hand as though expecting rain or cold. The Mexicans who worked for him were a mystery, an improbable genetic combination of Indian bloodlust and the cruelty of the Inquisition. The angular severity of their features, the way their skin stretched tautly on their bones, the greasy black shine in their uncut hair, the obsidian glint in their eyes at the mention of violence or pain made him wonder if they were remnants of a lost tribe from biblical times, perhaps an unredeemed race that had floated on the Flood far away from where Noah had landed on Mount Ararat. It would make sense. They were unteachable and killed one another with the dispassion and moral vacuity of someone who idly watches his children wander onto a freeway.
What was Jaime saying now? His lips were still moving, though no sound seemed to come from his mouth. Jack disengaged from his reverie and stared at him. “Repeat that?” he said.
“How come we ain’t at least killed the abusador de niños? He was at the whorehouse. We could have done it easy. Not even the policía would object to our killing such a man.”
“I don’t go in whorehouses,” Jack said. “Also, don’t speak to me of your policemen’s virtue. They’re jackals and will steal the coins off a dead man’s eyes. What none of you seems to recognize is that your country is ungovernable. Your national heroes are peons who decorated trees with the bodies of their fellow peons.