Papageno

I always come out here after a job, because no one knows where I am. It's like being on the moon. The dry lakes and cinder hills and Joshua trees stretch for hundreds of miles. The jeep is parked in my cave on the high ground and all I have to do is wait for the signal on the short wave. While I wait, I live off the land and play my cassette and write in my diary and watch time pass with the shadows on the ridge line.

Most people would tell you that deserts are sterile places, but that is not true. There is water here in every cactus, and there is life wherever you look. There are insects, rabbits, hawks, lizards, coyotes, snakes. You just have to know where to find things.

I killed a rattlesnake this morning. It was curled very close to my face as I woke up. I suppose it had settled near me for warmth during the night. When I opened my eyes, there it was, not three inches from me, eye level, and as I stared at it, I could hear its tail start to shake like beads in a gourd. If I had blinked, I would be dead now, but I rolled over, fast, and the rattler struck the back of my sleeping bag. I jumped out and grabbed my entrenching tool and smashed its head. I will make a belt out of its skin and a choker out of its rattles. I am lucky in the desert.

It is a good life out here and sometimes I think about staying forever.

"Your Mexican connection is screwing you," I said to Giordano. He had sent his bodyguard away and we were alone in his kitchen. The tax forms were spread on the table and he was squinting at the numbers. We were trying to decide what had to be laundered and I talked about his options.

"The IRS is probably going to write up a reciprocal agreement with the Bank of Mexico," I said, "and if that happens, Skipsey won't be able to help us. OK, do we go through Bueno, then?"

"I don't trust him," Giordano said. He stood up to stir a pot of sauce on the stove. He wiped his hands on his apron--yes, he was wearing an apron.

"I don't trust him, either," I said. "But the Nevada skim is supposed to show up in Cuernavaca."

"Change it," he said.

I wanted him sitting down, so I kept talking. "OK, we'll work the Bahamas harder."

(continued on page 162) Papageno (continued from page 140)

"Yeah. Good," he said.

I put the new signature cards on his place mat. I knew he would have to sit down to sign the cards. He did, slowly. I took out the calculator and turned it on. He checked it with a flick of his eyes. Then he went back to reading the cards while I talked.

"Murdoch is short-weighting all of the silver, even the dollars, but the receipts don't check with the totals. I think that's happening south of the border. Now all we've got to do is keep it out of domestic income, so I'll open a chain of offshore accounts for shell corporations. The IRS can't find that. And we'll change the Nevada route completely; different pilots, different flight plans. I think we'll be OK."

"We better be," he said as he leaned forward. He signed the cards slowly. He was breathing like an asthmatic. It was five days before he was supposed to testify and his nerves brought on his illnesses.

I held the calculator in my hands and pointed it at his right temple. I pushed the safety. Then I shot him. I shot him six times, once through the roof of his mouth, because I had to make it look right and proper, a family hit, and it was the method to deliver a shot through the mouth if it was the mouth that caused the concern. Giordano was about to testify before Congress re our Cuban connections, and that was reason enough for many of his own people to want him quiet.

"Ca va mieux?" I asked his corpse. I could hear Mozart in my head as I pushed the trigger mechanism back into the slot. I was singing to myself while I dusted the table, the glasses, anything I might have touched. It is not that I was happy, but I needed to stay calm, and Mozart did that for me.

I ran out the back door just as I heard the bodyguard come in the front door.

Falcone met me with the taxi in the alley. I hopped in and we took off. I talked to the back of Falcone's head as he drove me to O'Hare.

"You need more insulation for the barrel housing," I said. "It got hot in my hands." I studied the calculator and wondered who had invented such a thing. "The silencer baffles rattle. Somebody should fix that." I was shaking and I could not hear Mozart anymore. I tossed the calculator onto the front seat.

"Glad you liked it," Falcone laughed.

He was smoking a cigar, but I could still smell his lime after-shave. He stopped the taxi at the edge of the forest preserve and threw a regular .22 pistol into the woods. Not too far. Someone would find it. People would think what we wanted them to think. The .22 had been prefired. Its barrel was identical to the barrel in the calculator. The fingerprints of the bodyguard had been carefully etched into the weapon. It was all very cute.

"We'll let you know when it's cool, OK, Gene?" Falcone asked me as he let me out on the airport ramp.

"OK, I'll be listening," I said.

"OK, man. Good job, hey." Falcone offered his hand out the window. "So where you going to be, huh?"

I did not shake his hand. "See you," I waved. I turned my back on him and went into the terminal and flew to Palm Springs by way of Los Angeles.

When I came out to the desert that time, my jeep got stuck in a gully during a flash flood. I stayed under my shelter half and wrote in my diary and waited for the sun to bake the mud. I did not like being out on the flatland, where people might see me. It was very quiet after the storm. I trapped a wild rabbit. I know how to do things like that.

Last night I drove south across the lava flow that lies east of the Bullion Mountains. The Marines were firing illumination rounds toward Mesquite Lake. The flares looked like burning seeds while they were hanging from their parachutes. I sat up on the ridge line and watched the fireworks: 105s, 155s, high explosive and white phosphorus, barrages that sounded like God's own thunder. After it was over, I drove back here to my cave and I played my cassette and sang like a madman:

"Der Vogelfänger bin ich, ja Stets

lustig, heissa, hopsassa!

Der Vogelfänger bin bekannt

Bei alt und jung im ganzen Land."

I pretended that I was in Vienna for the first time, a young kid with stars in his eyes hearing Mozart and eating chocolate at Demel's and making love with the streetwalkers who gathered near the cathedral. I was 19 then. I had spent the summer in East Germany on French papers. I was supposed to assess how the young people felt and thought in Magdeburg and Leipzig and other forbidden places. Then I was to come out through Eisenach and take a vacation in Vienna, write up a report, talk to debriefers. In Vienna, I went to Die Zauberftöte every chance I got. Then I talked to our people and told them what they did not want to hear: that there were 22 Russian divisions in-country, that there were no young people to meet, because they were all in government service, that the state was highly organized and that you had to run machine-gun nests and guard towers to get back on the autobahn. Revolution? Not hardly. But that was in 1956, two months before the Hungarian Revolution, and our people thought that all of Eastern Europe would soon be in flames. They heard only what they wanted to hear, and then they asked me to drive the Simca back to Paris and sell it for whatever I could. They called it my honorarium. I did not know what the word meant.

The desert is a community of energy. Its rhythms are as neat as Mozart's. There is a sense of order here: Lizards eat insects; rabbits eat vegetation; hawks eat rabbits; coyotes eat anything. Everything works until people arrive. When the Marines come up from Twentynine Palms or when the bikers ride out from Los Angeles, then things start to go wrong. I wish the desert were always empty and I did not have to worry about people.

I had to kill an old man three days ago. He was a prospector and he stumbled past my cave in the early morning. It was my fault, I suppose, because I was not being careful, and if I had not been listening to the short-wave, perhaps it would have gone differently.

I pretended that it was good to see him. I gave him a full canteen from my water bags and we talked: of homesteading, mineral rights, weather patterns, gold mines, silver speculation. He smiled like a toothless monkey. We watched a Cessna flying over Kelso Peak and the prospector nodded at my jeep, which was covered with camouflage netting.

"You think that son of a bitch knows we're down here?" he asked.

"No. Not unless he's got special lenses," I said.

"I'll bet he's a revenuer," the old man laughed.

It was his last laugh, even though I would not have chosen death for him if I could have helped it, even though I could tell that he had survived great chaos in his life and probably deserved to live. But it was him or me. Possibly, Falcone sent him. How was I to know? I used to trust Falcone, but now I don't trust anyone.

"Say, there, buddy," I yelled after I had gotten upwind of him, after the atropine injection and the cloth over the mouth and the deep breath that I (continued on page 272) Papageno (continued from page 162) held while I shot the cartridge straight into his face when he turned toward me again. He looked very surprised, as if I had spit at him. The VX sent his heart into fibrillation and he died immediately with all the symptoms of a coronary: purple face, blood in the mouth, eyes frozen open. There was music coming from somewhere and it stayed with me while I drove to the Barstow road and dumped the body, leaving it for vultures, knowing that if someone found him, there was no way an autopsy could reveal anything. Coroners do not run radioimmuno assays on old mule skinners. They do not go to Washington for the reagents or to England for the glass-retractile index. And if that old bastard was a plant, and if Falcone sent him, then whatever they ran could not be published.

The East Germans still work with curare, but I find that too clumsy. You have to scratch the skin, which leaves evidence, and it takes a brush contact to deliver it. When Mulking died down by the docks in Istanbul, our doctors found a small welt on his hand. So we knew what had happened. The method left nothing to appreciate. It was obvious, direct, unsubtle.

Method is everything. You must learn to match the method. Hit men have their M.O.s. Fashions change. You learn to bend with the times like a rice shoot in water. You try to be as graceful as a birdcatcher.

I am letting myself grow a beard out here. With my track shorts and shoulder holster and .45 and running shoes and sweatband, I must be quite a sight. No one knows where I am, and that is OK. My answering service tells people I am in Istanbul again on loan to British Petroleum for an audit. Why not? Sometimes I dream that I am sitting in Bebek with the Bosporus lapping at the sides of the restaurant and the raki curling like smoke over the ice in my glass. Nedim and I argue again about Chekhov and in my dream I am eloquent.

"You don't understand," I say, "that death is an aid to art. The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov's best play. It is also his last play. He died shortly after he wrote it. He sensed his death, Imperial Russia's death, and it gave him more reason to work well. Death helps. Mozart wrote his best opera just before he died." In my dream, Nedim's eyes cannot handle that thought and they go blank; but even in my dream, I understand that Nedim has been scarred forever. His own father was hanged alongside Menderes. All of our money could not save him.

People do not seem to accept death the way animals do. For example: I caught a chuckwalla this afternoon. It was sunning itself on a rock near Cadiz, Lake. It was more than a foot long, and when it heard my steps, it ducked into a crevice and blew itself up like a balloon.

"Hello, chuckwalla," I laughed. "Do you think I can't pull you out of there now?" I reached in and cut its throat. Blood and air rushed out like steam from a casing. There was no struggle, no histrionics. The chuckwalla and I understood the terms. Everything was neat and simple between us.

Tonight, if I build a fire, I will roast the chuckwalla and the sidewinder and I will toast yucca fruit and make tea with juniper leaves. I will eat cactus berries for dessert.

No one can touch me. I could live here for years. If people will just leave me alone.

I think I saw a light tonight in the valley north of Danby Lake. There were thunderheads over the Piute Mountains and it is possible that it was raining on the dry lake bed. Maybe someone down there had to use lights to survive. The thing I do not like about it is that I did not know anyone was there. I must be getting sloppy.

"We are now sleeping with the Devil," Madden had said. "We want you to join us."

We were eating steak in that small restaurant in Florence. Madden had come up from Palermo to see me. He was on sabbatical. He knew everyone in the Italian labor movement and he spoke of the organization we were infiltrating.

"They're a fact of life," Madden said, "like dirt. They are there under all of us. We've needed them since World War Two. We still need them. Very badly."

"I don't see where I come in," I said. The white-tile walls of the restaurant gleamed like mirrors of milk.

"You have the credentials," Madden said. "You're clean. Ivy League. Marines. They like that kind of thing. You bring a certain respectability with you."

"It's good for country clubs," I said. "But that's about all."

"You'd be surprised." Madden said. He was eating meticulously. He did not know that he was going to die in a cell in Cienfuegos years later.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"Let us know where their money is going, who they're working with. That sort of thing. We'll never use you for anything but surveillance. We want to use them, not prosecute them. Trust us, Gene. We'll even feed you information to make you look good. You'll be the best damned accountant they ever had. Just trust us."

I sat there drinking wine. I did not speak for a long time. Then I said, "Machiavelli lived right across the river. They kept him under arrest most of the time. You know what he had hanging over his fireplace? The handcuffs he'd worn in prison. How about that?"

Madden saw no connection. He was tired. He wanted to wrap me up. "We think you could do the job," he said firmly.

"You remember how you recruited me the first time?" I asked. "'You don't learn to pick locks at Princeton.' Remember how you used to say that? 'You don't learn to jump out of airplanes at Princeton.' Sound familiar? My own Renaissance and Reformation professor. Putting stars in my eyes. And you're still trying to do it. You got me to go into East Germany twenty years ago. You used me in Laos and Turkey. Off and on. Contract work. Little moments. Lots of dollars. Now you want me to go do the books for some people in silk suits?"

I spoke with conviction, but secretly I was wavering. The price of exertion was climbing. My energies were being newly metered by me. Something inside me was burning out, like a lamp in a mine. I was bored; bored with my family, my colleagues, my life. There was an itching inside my head, as if a thousand cockroaches were running through my brain, and I was wondering if my middle years would be spent playing golf with fat men. Madden was offering me an exciting life again. A voice whispered to me, "Take the job. They won't use you for much. You'll have a goodlooking secretary and a lot of money and things will not be dull."

Madden saw my eyes shift. He did not say anything directly. He simply moved on with the proposition. "We need a C.P.A. we've worked with. One we trust. We think we can get you inside. They admire sound financial advice. Your track record is good."

"I can make people money and I can save them money." I said. "I used to think that was the most exciting thing in life."

Madden began joking with the waitress. It was very late and we were the last people in the restaurant. The waitress did not know that Madden liked slim young boys with cute butts, and for a time she thought he might go home with her. When he turned abruptly cold, she smiled at me and made the sign of the horns.

"Finita In commedia," she laughed.

"Not quite," I said under my breath.

So I went to work for Madden and Company again, and I began to counsel aging padrones about real estate, stocks, commodities, Liechtenstein incorporation, exotic investments, daring dodges. I became known as a man who could save millions. I established the reputation of a guru, a clairvoyant, and my work was so good that it seemed miraculous, as if I had access to grand-jury testimony and IRS memos and Justice Department sitreps. Which I did.

I have a copy of the new tax code in my jeep. When I get bored, I read it and laugh and laugh. The people who wrote that are the best comedians in America.

My cave is near the top of Old Woman Mountain. It is like a fortress. I have laid trip wires down all the paths. They will set off flares if anyone tries to get up here. There will not be any more accidental run-ins with prospectors or anyone else. I have transmitters wired down the slope and I have my Starscope and my grenades and my .45. I am good at my work, a renaissance man. I can reconnoiter or figure an itemized deduction.

Only the high ground is safe. That is what Pulaski used to say. "Love the high ground--hate the low ground," he preached. "Don't let nobody get above you, Poppa Gene," he said. Pulaski was the first one to call me by that name. He thought the way I played The Magic Flute to myself all the time was funny.

Pulaski was an old Southeast Asia hand who had worked with the French at Dien Bien Phu and then stayed around for the next war. He worked under AID cover out of Vientiane. I was attached on temporary duty to his office from the Marines. He taught me a great deal, and he was a talented man who deserved more than he got.

"Everybody down the slope from you is a pissant," Pulaski would lecture me on patrol. "But don't let nobody get on top of you, understand? Everybody above you owns you. OK?" Pulaski talked like a coal miner, which is what his father had been, and he kept his bad grammar like a badge. He liked to say ain't in the presence of generals. The fact that he also had an M.A. in Asian studies from Columbia was not something he mentioned much.

One time, after we had seeded the trail with special transmitters that were disguised as animal droppings, a technician flew out from Travis to examine what we had done wrong. He was picking up incredible noises on his monitor and he was ordering air strikes that produced no joy. "There's something out there," the man said, shaking his head. He wore yellow shooting glasses and a tan canvas hunting jacket with a bird pouch in the liner. He looked like an ad for a sporting-goods store.

"There ain't nothing out there but a bunch of monkeys," Pulaski laughed.

"That's not what the print-outs show," the technician said. He talked as if his mouth were full of cheese.

"We know where the Pathet Lao is." Pulaski sighed. "Our people tell us. Your transmitters must be hearing things."

"There's a large concentration of troops out there." The man pointed at the overlay on the map. He was studying an area southeast of the Plain of Jars, down toward the panhandle of Laos.

Finally, to shut him up, Pulaski and I choppered in and rappelled down through the trees. We lay on the forest floor for two days, on our backs, pointing in different directions, nibbling salami and salt tablets. When the jungle got used to us, we saw the monkeys. They began throwing the transmitters through the trees again and bouncing them on the deck.

I started to laugh. "Foxtrot Six." I radioed back, "what we got here is a baseball game."

"Say again?" the handpiece crackled.

Pulaski grabbed the mike. "The best laid plans of Sperry Rand gang aft a-gley." he said.

There was a long silence, and then the thin voice of the technician asked, "Uh, is that a mayday?"

"Negative." Pulaski smiled. "You got monkeys throwing your shit around. That's what you've been hearing. Do you copy? Mable-Omaha-Nancy-Kilo-Easy-Yankee-Sugar. Monkeys. Is that a Roger?"

"That's a Rog." the voice said quietly. "Easy-Yankee-Sugar."

When we got back to base camp, the technician was already gone.

The monkeys are not there anymore, so do not go looking for them. Between Agent Orange and saturation bombing, they have all gone bye-bye. There are not any leaf monkeys or squirrel monkeys or howler monkeys or Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys. We wiped them out. We did not get rid of the Pathet Lao, but we sure took care of those monkeys.

Pulaski is gone, too. He plowed into a hill near Pakse. I was on the radio with him, coordinating close air support, and Pulaski was flying air observer for the Royal Laotian Air Force. He brought his Cessna down for a look-see, but he cut it too close. "Uh-oh," he said to me just before he hit. "Sayonara, Poppa Gene."

"Sayonara, buddy," I said after he disintegrated in a bright ball of fire.

All of that happened very early, before there was any perception Mainside that we were at war. I flew back to Vientiane that evening and resigned my commission on the spot. There was nothing they could do. because I knew too much, so they let me go. I packed Pulaski's footlocker and shipped it to his wife in Indiana, and then I went back across the shining sea and decided to make a lot of money and forget where I had been. I went to business school and got a C.P.A. I got married and had kids and went to the opera when I could, and I watched everyone around me, including me, start to get fat and bored. Then Madden came along and showed me a way out. I left my family and found excitement again. It was a fair trade.

There may be a nest of coral snakes in the cave next to mine. They look like Egyptian jewelry, all black and red and gold, and I think I will try to net them tomorrow morning. Their venom makes excellent contact toxin. It will be a game between me and them, and I will have to be fast. Accurate and fast.

Poisons interest me. The sting of the scorpion, for example, is highly overrated. I have tested that on myself with the Superstitiona scorpions that I keep in the jar by the radio. The Superstitiona has two eyes on each side of its head. I wonder what that is like. Quadruple vision.

My thoughts are getting scattered because the wind is picking up. It is hard to concentrate on my diary. I heard something about an hour ago that turned out to be a desert clog running the ridge line. That animal does not know how close it came to being blown away.

I write these thoughts, and then I burn the pages when I am done. It is not a waste, any more than talking is a waste. It is a way of keeping myself company. I would not say that I am lonely, exactly, but I do know that I am tense, and I wish I could trust Falcone more. He asked me too many times where I was going. He talked a little too kindly, smelled too lime-sweet, and I find myself wondering if he followed me out here. It is a paranoid thought, but it is there. I hated Miami and I hated that job.

Falcone was in my Marine basic class. He was one of the few there who had not gone to college. He set the obstacle-course record and he fired expert in all weapons and he was battalion honor man. We thought he was being groomed for great things, but then he disappeared and no one knew much about him. There were stories that he set a free-fall parachute record at Fort Benning, that he was seen at the Navy's Seal School, that he had been killed at the Bay of Pigs. Somebody told me just before I flew out of Kadena for the final time that Falcone had been stationed on Okinawa and was looking for me. That was the last I heard of him until Madden mentioned that Falcone would be my case officer.

"I don't think I want him." I said slowly.

"He's the best we have." Madden smiled, "and, besides, you do not have the luxury of choosing your superiors." Madden held up his hands before I could say anything else. "Gene." he said, "believe me, this is the man for you. He'd done it all: pit boss, Teamster, delivery boy, driver--he's been there and back. He'll help your cover, believe me."

"I remember your lecture on the Medici." I said to Madden. "Do you feel like you're working for them now?" It was a wiseass question and I did not expect an answer.

But Falcone did have their trust and he did get me introductions to the right people. Without him, none of this could have even begun. So? Do I owe him? Or does he owe me?

Miami was more than I bargained for. It was almost a month ago. but it seems like it was this morning. I did not want to go through with it and I told Falcone.

He shrugged. He was not impressed. He knew--I think he really knew--that there was something in the work I liked, and that if he waited. I would eventually do what had to be done.

"Take him out any way you like." Falcone told me. "Nobody will find him. Just cut him up a little, like the locals would do. You know the Cubans. Make it their M.O."

"Why don't you do it?" I dared him. We were sitting in a bar in Key West. Falcone smelled like key-lime pie. He was wearing his standard shaving lotion made out of aloe cactus and limes.

"You bring him to me. I'll do it." Falcone said. "But I can't get to him first, remember? That's your job." He was speaking with a smirk on his face, as if the conversation were a matter of form, a discussion to please my conscience, the way a pimp might talk to a John.

"They're going to put all this together sometime," I said. "Somebody will figure out that I was the last one with both of them."

"No way." Falcone laughed. "They already offed the bodyguard on the last hit. We made it look like him. didn't we? Huh? Poppa Gene, what's happening in your nerves, man? We'll take care of things. You are Priority One, baby. You're the tax man, remember? You wear three-piece suits and talk nice. Blue blood, Ivy League. Continental, all that shit. Just, do your thing and we'll cover for you. We'll make you look good. Just take him out."

I tried to argue, but Falcone knew my brain was itching with cockroaches and my arms were ready to work and there was something about killing that pleased me, Falcone knew that I had felt alive and powerful only a few times in all my years and the addiction was there, the exciting moment when I could play God. I think that is why I hate Falcone most of all. He had killed before, I was sure of it, but he could walk away from it. I needed it.

Rizzoli was sitting by his pool when I walked in. He was alone. He had his scams that only I knew about, and he did not want his people hearing too much.

"We'll do some commodity spreads," I said, "Butterlly spreads." I raised my hand like a boy scout. "I swear they're almost legal," I tried to joke.

He did not laugh. He was eating caviar on toast, egg and onion on the side, white chianti bottle in the ice bucket. He did not offer me anything. Sitting in his canvas deck chair under the awning by his private pool, he looked like a fox, like a dead silver fox. He was on the docket for subcommittee examination within the week.

I put some commodity-price charts in front of him on the table. "Here's how it works," I said, I was talking very calmly. "You put a silver spread on. One side is this year--it's the loser. You show a big loss. You deduct it. But what the IRS doesn't know, see, is that you've covered yourself by taking an opposite position, same commodity, same pit. the next year. We branch you off into lots of Subchapter S corporations, and they each take the maximum deduction. OK? You can defer year after year after year. Big losses that aren't losses. You can roll over profits ad infinitum."

Rizzoli smiled at my high language. He reached up and patted my cheek. "Bravo, Professor," he smiled. That was all right. He did not know that his street snobbery toward his accountant was going to be the death of him.

I moved behind him while I talked. I wanted the high ground. I talked of false dating and forged trading cards and deals off the floor of the Board of Trade, and with my pen as a pointer. I showed him gaps in the chart action while I was shifting my weight.

There was a moment of frozen time, like the eye of a hurricane, and then I kneed him in his kidneys. He gasped. His spine arched like a bow. I cracked his Adam's apple with the edges of my hands, and then I held his windpipe, his carotid arteries, and nothing moved for a minute or two. When I knew he was dead, I let him go. He slumped to the ground. I picked him up in a fireman's carry and dumped him into my car trunk in the garage.

As I drove off Key Biscayne, it started to rain. There was something dirty about the rain. It had smoke and chemicals in it, like the breath of sewage and dogs. I whistled Mozart as I drove along. I tried to find him on the FM, but he wasn't there, so I sang to myself and let the music make order for me. Life was not plastic and bitter then: it was not overcrowded and cheap: birds sang like flutes: parks were green and empty and trees were 1000 years old.

Falcone was waiting at the canal with the oil barrel. He was holding an Uzi under his raincoat. He looked like a Borgia with the rain dripping off his nose.

"You do the cutting," I said. "I'm no butcher." I posted myself as an outlook while he wrapped the wrists and ankles in chains and made the proper incisions. I had a headache and I tried to hum to (concluded on page 286) Papageno (continued from page 283) myself to make it go away.

When Falcone was finished, I helped push the barrel into the canal. It did not sink completely.

"They'll find him," I said.

"I don't think so," Falcone said. He was breathing heavily.

"He may sink a little, but he'll be gassy within the week. He'll come back up," I argued.

"Let him," Falcone laughed.

"They'll think what we want them to think?" I asked.

"Exactly."

"Revenge within the Syndicate?"

"Yes," Falcone said, and then he pulled on my arm. "Come on, Gene, let's haul ass," he said. He ran to the car and we drove to the Everglades. The rain followed us. The interior of the car smelled like a lime tree.

I tried to nap, but there was no music in my head. After an hour, Falcone turned off the main road at a sign that said Monroe County Road Crew. I did not know where we were going.

"Back in the Dark Ages," I said, "when Madden first got me to take this on, I was supposed to be used strictly for surveillance. Nothing black." We were passing Quonsei huts and a generator. The rain had stopped. A Beechcraft Bonanza sat in the heat at the foot of a red-dirt airstrip.

"You should've seen this place in Sixty-one," Falcone laughed. "Then we had business."

When I got out of the car, I thought I could smell dinosaurs and coal deposits. Everything seemed ancient and slow. I felt very old. I knew I was supposed to hurry, but I could not hurry. The prop wash from the Beechcraft blew moisture out of my eyes.

"Where you going this time, Gene?" Falcone asked me again.

"Same place," I smiled.

"Really?"

"Really," I said. "It's my little secret."

"You want to share?"

I looked at Falcone's face. I did not like the smile on it or the thoughts behind it. "No," I said.

"I was just wondering," Falcone shrugged, "You know, in case we got to get in touch or something."

"Use the short wave," I said coldly.

"OK," Falcone patted me on the back. "OK, Gene."

"Es siegle die Stärke," I smiled.

"German?" Falcone asked.

I nodded, "'Strength is the victor,"' I translated. "Mozart wrote it. Hitler perverted it. Now everybody uses it."

"You're a very cultured man." Falcone said as he helped me open the cockpit door. He waved at the pilot and threw my briefcase on the seat.

The engine noise was high. "Culture?" I yelled in Falcone's ear. "It doesn't mean a thing anymore. The Kommandant of Buchenwald loved Mozart. So what?"

Falcone was waving his forefinger in a circle. He wanted the engine revved higher and me out of there. "Don't miss your plane," he shouted to me.

"Any one of us can kill anything. Better we should leave it to the monkeys," I said. I climbed in beside the pilot. He was a young blond man who looked like a clerk at an insurance counter.

"Let us know where you are when you feel like it," Falcone shouted through cupped palms. The edges of his hands were dark with calluses.

"Yeah, Sure." I gave him the Sicilian high sign. "Or, better yet, why don't you come find me?" I smiled. "It gets boring where I go."

"I might do that," Falcone yelled.

I closed my door and tightened my seat belt. The plane bounced down the runway, pulled up over the trees and banked hard toward the west. The pilot paid no attention to me. He was flying me to New Orleans, and then I was to be on my own, which is the way I wanted it.

It is dawn now. I have written all night. There have been no sounds on the speakers. Maybe my transmitters washed out. A rainstorm hit about three A.M.

The light disappeared on Danby Lake. All the lakes around here are dry lakes and sometimes people camp on them. To the west are the Ship Mountains. Cadiz is beyond them. I will have to go into Cadiz soon for more gas. I carry four extra jerry cans, but nothing lasts forever.

The air is fresh and clean. Even now it is warm in the early-morning sun. I know that this is going to be a hot day. That is all right. The wind has died down. I am safe here.

There are jet contrails in the sky over Turtle Mountain. I will watch them break up slowly like smoke signals. What else is there to do now? It is boring sometimes, but I know how to occupy myself. I will live off the land, drink cactus water, eat berries, listen to Mozart, sing, talk to the snakes, smell the limes.

the desert is filled with skilled killers-- but papageno is the best

"I held the calculator in my hands and pointed it at his right temple. Then I shot him."

"I looked at Falcone's face. I did not like the smile on it or the thoughts behind it."