Moondogs - Alexander Yates [52]
Ignacio gazes about the suite, horrified by his own carelessness. He can only imagine his fingerprints—his bare footprints for God’s sake!—spattered about the room like flecks of fallen snow. His spit on that leftover sushi. His dandruff flaked over Howard’s documents. Moving slowly, as though to avoid further disturbing the very air of the suite, he puts his shoes back on. He closes the sliding glass door to the balcony. He and Littleboy slip out of Howard’s room, hanging a Do-Not-Disturb sign on the handle as they depart.
They ride the elevator back down in something of a haze. Charlie Fuentes’s get-out-the-vote rally has turned down Ayala Avenue, and they can hear the whistles and drums and chanting as they return to the lobby. None of the concierges hassle them as they cross the shining expanse of polished marble. In fact, other than the raucous sounds from outside, the vaulted space has turned quiet and still. Ignacio notices that everybody—the guests, the staff—is at the far end of the lobby, huddling in a couch-strewn grove of mustard-yellow columns. There are flat-screen televisions mounted to some of the columns. Everybody is watching them.
At first he thinks it’s just election news, but as Ignacio passes he hears the word kidnapped. He stops for a moment to listen.
“Please can we go?” Littleboy asks.
“Hush. Just a second.”
The report is about that headless body discovered in Iraq over the weekend. It turns out that it was the body of an American who was working in Baghdad. His kidnappers have released a video today. A video of the beheading. The American squats in an orange jumpsuit with a line of black-clad masked men behind him. Reading in Arabic. Chanting in Arabic. Hollering in Arabic. The video cuts out and the news anchor explains why.
“Please, can we go, please?”
Littleboy tugs at Ignacio’s arm, but he won’t budge. His gaze has drifted from the television to the audience. To the suited, jeweled businesspeople looking up at the screen. Every one of them—the pale blondes and brunettes and redheads—is transfixed. And they are terrified. More terrified, Ignacio realizes, than even he is. More terrified than he could ever be. And this heartens him tremendously.
Chapter 10
DANCER AND THE GREEN DRESS
Even though he was exhausted, Benicio slept poorly. He woke intermittently to kick off his travel clothes, drink all the bottled juice in his minibar, and have a long pee. He had the dream again—the one about snow falling in the jungle—but this time it was different. His father was there, standing on a path beneath a forest of palms, watching as the flakes floated down through the frond canopy. Snow covered the way forward and it covered the way back. His father took up a handful and it scattered from his grip like down in the wind. But the wind was just the air-conditioning. Benicio was in his room, awake, facing a picture window set before his bed like a hospital television. The sun was just above the horizon, burning.
He lingered under the warm blankets for a moment, getting his bearings. It was Friday morning, just after dawn. His suite, filled as it was with orange light, was beautiful. In fact, it was beyond expectation. The front door opened up to a carpeted sitting area that was larger than his living room back home, and unapologetically decadent. Long red couches and armchairs were arranged around a crystal-topped coffee table, upon which sat a varnished wooden bowl brimming with fruits that—aside from a banana and a Fuji apple as big as a grapefruit—he couldn’t identify. Atop the fruits sat a single white and burgundy orchid, cut high and jagged at the stem but still looking fresh and alive. The orchid was one of perhaps fifty placed about the room with no apparent thought to diluting the effect—they sat in a soap dish by the sink, sprouted from a delicately arranged pot of smooth stones and moss on his bedside stand and filled two vases flanking the front door. All were bright and odorless. All nodded at