In these unbearably long, unbearably empty moments after completion, Maceo Encarnación ached for Constanza Camargo as he had ached for no one else in his life. The fact that he was exiled from her was like a pain inside him he could neither reach nor cure. That it was his punishment, that it was deserved, made it no easier to bear. On the contrary, it enraged him. Not all his wealth, his dark influence, or his corrosive power was of any use to him. When it came to Constanza Camargo, he might as well be the lowliest beggar in the shit-strewn dirt of a backwater marketplace, sickly and destitute. He could not cajole her, he could not coerce her, he could not reach her.
Stepping back, he zipped his trousers. He felt sweaty and oily. His skin reeked of the flight attendant’s nether regions. She had dressed herself while facing the airplane’s richly fabricked bulkhead, and now strode off on long, powerful legs to resume her regularly scheduled duties, without a backward glance.
Maceo Encarnación, staring at the fabric, saw a mark where her damp forehead had pressed into it with the force of his strokes. Smiling, he caressed the stain with his fingertips. It was a sign of surrender, the stain of sin.
Constanza Camargo possessed her own stain: the sin of her serial adultery. A week after her husband’s death, she had fallen down the stairs of her house, having been roused in the middle of the night by the ghostly sound of his voice, which she had either dreamed or imagined. Her beautiful bare foot had missed the first tread and down she had tumbled.
Crawling along the ground floor runner, she had found a phone and called Maceo. By that time, their affair had burned itself out; he hadn’t heard from her in months. Nevertheless, he hadn’t hesitated. He had found her the finest spinal surgeon in the country, who had promptly repaired the herniated disc caused by the fall. Unfortunately, as happens in a small portion of spinal procedures, she had developed peripheral neuropathy, a painful and degenerative condition that defied treatment. Nevertheless, he had made certain she had tried them all. Now her wheelchair was a constant reminder of how she had betrayed Acevedo Camargo. As it had with her husband, desire had bisected destiny, altering its course.
And what of the surgeon who had operated on Constanza Camargo? Six months after he had announced that her condition was irreversible, he had taken a week in Punta Mita with his mistress. A young man, up early, jogging at the water’s edge through the misty morning, had come across two human heads, neatly severed from their bodies. At first, the police assumed they were a drug dealer and his mistress, a member of a rival gang who had tried to work territory outside his own. When the true identities of the heads came to light, the local police were at a loss as to motive, let alone as to who the perpetrators might be, and the incident was soon buried in hurried paperwork and forgotten.
Maceo Encarnación’s mind returned to the present. Moments after being left alone, having checked his watch, he went down the aisle, past the flight attendant, who was busy making his dinner, and into the cockpit where the pilot and the navigator were listening to cumbiaon their iPads, awaiting his instructions. The pilot spotted him first and removed his earbuds.
“Time to get under way,” Maceo Encarnación said.
The pilot had an unspoken query in his eyes. He knew that Nicodemo had not returned.
Maceo Encarnación nodded, answering his question. “Time,” he repeated, before returning to his seat and strapping in. Up ahead, in the cockpit, he could hear the pilot and navigator talking as they went through their pre-flight checklist.
The pilot contacted the tower, spoke and listened, then spoke again, and taxied the jet into their slot for takeoff.
To be frank, I don’t know why I’m here.”
General Hwang Liqun looked around Yang Deming’s apartment. The old man was the foremost feng shui master in Beijing and, as such, much in demand. He was somewhat taken aback that he was sitting in a spacious apartment in an ultramodern beehive of a building near the Dongzhimen subway station. Filled with shiny surfaces, polished wood, marble, lapis, and jade, it seemed filled to overflowing with reflections. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, through the brownish Beijing smog that resembled a sandstorm fixed in time that had blown in off the Gobi, could be made out Rem Koolhaas’s immense CCTV building.
General Hwang Liqun would never admit it, but he was impressed that Maricruz had been granted an appointment, and at such short notice! To be sure, she was married to Minister Ouyang, but still, she was a foreigner, albeit one whose grasp of the delicate intricacies of Mandarin was a damn sight better than many people Hwang Liqun encountered in his daily schedule.
“I think,” Maricruz said to the General, as she accepted a cup of Ironwell tea from Yang Deming’s narrow, blue-veined hand, “that you must very well know why I invited you here.”
At this, the old man smiled, nodded to Maricruz, and, much to the General’s astonishment, kissed her on both cheeks before unfolding himself like an origami stork, and, with bare feet, padding out of the room.
Maricruz indicated the small, squat iron teapot. “Will you join me?”
The General nodded in an officious and rather stiff gesture that telegraphed how ill at ease he was.
After he accepted her offering and they had sipped in an increasingly tense silence, he said, “Now, if you please...”
The General was in his early sixties, older by two decades than Minister Ouyang. Theirs was a friendship born of necessity that had gradually formed its own very real parameters. The two men shared a pleasing and deep-rooted practicality, a vital trait in modernday China. They also had a vision for China going forward into the twenty-first century and beyond. Their real shared bond was the importance of new and innovative sources of energy and the belief that the origin of these new energy sources would come from Africa, a continent that, through the efforts of both men, was fast becoming a Chinese stronghold. There were, of course, obstacles to the two men’s ambitions, both for themselves and for China. The most potent and immediate threat was the reason Maricruz had called this meeting, and why the venue was so unorthodox as to fly under every official Party radar in Beijing.
“We are here, in relative isolation and complete security,” Maricruz said, “because of Cho Xilan.” Cho was the current secretary of the powerful Chongqing Party. After the last Communist Party Central Committee, Cho began his outspoken attacks on the status quo, arguing that ideology was being eroded in the frantic clamor to expand China’s presence abroad. By “abroad,” of course, he meant Africa, and by taking this stance he had put himself in direct opposition to Minister Ouyang and the General. Cho had decided to cleave to a party line of “building a moderately prosperous society, steeped in the ideology of socialism,” and in this way avoid the cultural unrest flaring in the nations outside the Middle Kingdom, an economic divide between the upper and under classes.
“There is a war coming, General,” she said.
“This is China. There are no internal wars here.”
“I can feel it in my bones.”
“Can you now?” the General said with a smirk that spoke of superiority.
“I come from a country steeped in the blood of class warfare.”
This comment served only to more firmly establish his smirk. “Is that what the drug trade is all about?” He produced a strident laugh. “Class warfare?”
“The drug trade here in China was begun by foreigners, foisted on the population of the coast, making it dependent on the fruit of the poppy. On the other hand, we Mexicans control our trade and have done so from the beginning. We sellto foreigners and use the profits to fortify ourselves against the endless corruption of regional governments and the federales. We are people who were born into poverty. We ate dirt with what scraps we could forage, but with every breath we took, we dreamed of a free life. Now that we have that free life, we know how to hold on to it. Can you say the same, General?”