The detonator was about the size of a pack of Camels, with a stubby, rubberized antenna and six safety switches. With HMX, redundancy in safeties made sense. In the center was a red button shielded by a hinged lid.

"I don't want to fire another RPG, billonario. Come out onto the deck with your men."

"My men are all dead." He put the tortilla and det box in a pocket and took a portable hand-unit radio out of its cradle and switched it to Channel 68.

He stood up. The pain shot through his head like a high-velocity bullet. He took one more pull of whiskey and morphine and set off on all fours like an old doggy.

It was a trick Tasha used to pull on the farm when she didn't want to come back to the house. He keyed the "talk" button and put his lips to the microphone and went: "PSSSSSSSSHHHT Esmeralda here PSSSSSSHT."

"Come in, billonario."

"PSHHHHHHHH breaking up, switching to Channel PSHHHHHH."

He reached the main salon. The fire had worked its way forward past the settee. The air was acrid from flame-retardant Naugahyde, the carpet felt soaked beneath his hands, and he dog-walked toward the stairs by the shattered Normandie gold-glass panels. He looked to his left as he went and saw Augustus John, third Earl of Bristol, melting in sizzling droplets of Gainsborough gray.

He started up the stairs. He felt something sharp and painful in his hands. He raised them and saw they were covered with hundreds of splinters of gold glass from the Normandie panels. There was no time to remove them. He continued painfully on up the stairs.

He reached the top. Carpet gave way to teak. He looked down and saw he was leaving bloody palm prints behind him, palm prints flecked with bits of gold. He crawled behind the marble bar and leaned against the wall and gasped.

"Billonario, are you there?"

"PSSSHHHHT I can't make PSSSSHHHHT."

It sounded like running water.

"What are you doing?" he said to his men. They were standing up, pissing over the side.

"The radio noise, Niño, it's making us piss."

"Put those back in your pants or I'll shoot them off."

"But, Niño, we don't want to piss on Eusebio and Virgilio…"

His palms flowed blood from a hundred small wounds. He dried them as best he could on a towel. He stood and gripped the frame of the Manet with both hands and pulled it off the wall. He sat down and put it on his lap, took out the HMX tortilla and pressed it onto the back of the painting. He stood up and replaced it on the wall and collapsed back onto the deck. The only bottle within reach was Pernod. He took a long swallow.

He set off at a crawl, following his own bloody trail of palm prints.

He was halfway down the stairs when he saw in front of him a pair of wet brown legs. He looked up. Cacho brought the butt of his pistol down on his head.

He sent up Manco first, then climbed aboard himself. He saw immediately that there was no hope of extinguishing the fire. Cacho was standing proudly over the semi-conscious billonario, holding two pistols on him, one of them a Colt.45 he did not recognize.

The billonario was very pale, even for a gringo. He was bleeding from the head and-what happened to his hands? Look at them. The bushy eyebrows gave him a fierce look, even in this state.

He leaned over him and said, "Billonario, where is the painting?"

The eyes opened. Blinked and peered.

"Where is the Manet?"

Cacho, seeking to please his patron, kicked the old man in the ribs to prompt him to answer. Niño hit Cacho in the throat with his own pistol, knocking him into a Mihanovic painting of a rowboat. Cacho gagged, clutching his Adam's apple.

"Billonario," he said gently, "tell me. Where is the Manet?"

"Upstairs. Over the bar." He seemed almost pleased to get it over with.

He bounded up the stairs and looked about. The teak deck was-there was a strange, bloody trail-hand prints. He followed them to the bar and looked up.

There it was. He stood, unable to move. It was magnificent. Give the billonario his due. On a lot of boats like this it would be a Leroy Neiman up there, or some idiotic nautical doggerel about the bar being closed for five minutes a day.

It was the Baudelaire "Absinthe Drinker" and no mistake. Baudelaire's pupils were dilated, looking directly at him, fixing him with the mad, ecstatic eyes of the lotus eater, absintheur, laudanum drinker, hashish eater: "I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me." Manet had caught all!

He took a step toward the blazing, orchidaceous eyes, but found his own drawn to the frame. There was blood on it. Blood was dripping from the painting. Something was sparkling in the blood. Gold?

He turned, ran and dove down the stairs a half second before the explosion.

39

The shaman sat in front of the lifeless stone, murmuring as he mixed his brew of ginger, nightshade, tobacco water and ayahuasca. Eladio and Zacari sat watching him at a distance. Inancia's new child cried inside a hut. At the edge of the village the dogs tore at the head of a peccary.

He finished mixing his brew, set the frothy gourd aside and began to blow over the surface of the stone.

Zacari whispered to his father, "That's a lot of bikut." He grinned. "He's going to have great visions."

Eladio said, "That is what I fear." Eladio had never told Zacari what took place many years before, when the tribe lived to the north, along the Rio Mayo. Eladio was fishing one day in the dugout when he heard the cries of a young girl. He ran to the source of the sound and saw the shaman forcing himself into Ampuya, a young girl of the village he was holding, bent over a log. She was not yet of age. She screamed. The shaman shouted at her to be quiet, that he was driving out an evil tsentsak. Eladio knew to be afraid of the shamans knew that they possessed great powers. He hid in the bush and watched in terror as the shaman brought his club down on the girl's head and broke it open; watched as he continued his work on Ampuya's lifeless body.

He ran back to the canoe and returned to the village. His father had been killed in a battle with the Tikuna. He told his mother what he had seen. She took him into the forest and shook him until his insides loosened, shouting at him that a pasuk had entered his body and given him an evil vision. She told him never to tell what he had seen, or the shaman would summon the wawek tunchi, the sorcerer.

But Ampuya, who had gone into the forest to gather warok berries, never returned. The men of the tribe searched until they found her body, half eaten. That night the shaman drank bikut and had visions of what had happened to her. She had been carried off by an iwanch and given to wild pigs.

Years later, after Eladio had come of age, another girl disappeared. The search lasted for days. Eladio was the most skilled hunter of the tribe. It was he who found her, buried, who saw on the body the signs. He reburied her and remained by her grave for five days and nights without taking food or water, dreaming of Tsewa, the ancient headman of the spider monkeys, who had taught his people the secrets of the hunt. On the sixth day an ajutap appeared to him in the form of a jaguar and spoke to him.

He found what he sought a half day later, sunning itself in a warm spot. The jararaca is very swift, but Eladio was pure from fasting and moved with speed greater than the snake's, catching it with his hand at the base of the skull.