Smoke and Mirrors

by
Melody Clarke

Part One

The Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded brilliance from its novice agents, then spent the rest of their careers trying to make them stupid again.

And it happened with stealth, like when he was seven with a chipped tooth and smiling Dr.
Flannery tipped him back in the dental chair.

"'Look up at the picture of the puppy, Francis," Dr. Flannery had said. And then it happened so fast he didn't see the needle till it hit him. He didn't even notice he was numb.

But the time comes when you do notice.... like when you don't hurt.

Like when something that should hurt, doesn't.

La Plaza de Mestizos was empty. The dark La Plaza masonry was too hot to be touched, with all its struggling fauna either sweltering or parched. All he could do to quiet his nerves was scatter some seed to any available pigeons.

But the nerves were determined to awaken.

He had in his band all the dull, dry data...he had only to open the door to the banging at his brain.

Like Dr. F1annery's sneaky needle, he simply hadn't seen this until he had no other choice.

Mana Blanca and The Black Hand. Too neat.

And too harmonious.

Chance does not make beds with hospital corners, Vincent, he used to say. Artists always betray themselves in their style.

There were Vinnie's final contacts with.........

The White Hand Death Squad was hubbed within.....

The Justice Department share-cropped half of.........

"'Welcome to Costa Rica/' Frank said,  feeding the lone remaining pigeon.

.....was about to say as much myself," spoke a voice from behind him.

MCPIke turned quickly to find a stranger there, a tall man with chrome-colored hair that once-apon-a-time-ago was probably blond.

To match his silk suit and glib smile, he wore some husky cultured scent - Eau de Bureaucrat. But the image was gainsaid by his raffia hat and a pair of snake-skin sheep-kicking cowboy boots.

Frank tossed the bag of seed into a trashbin, sneering for a moment at the stranger. "Lemme guess. You're the smiling tour guide who'll take me to Terranova?"

"That would depend," said the stranger.

"Did anyone think to give you a name when you were born?

"Yeah, they named me Frank McPike. And I'm just dyin" to know yours.."

The glib smile became a chuckle. "My mother named me Jordan and Daddy made me an Earl. Are you Terranova's Field Director?"

"No. I'm his Mary Kay representative."

The chuckle kindled a laugh. "Yes, you are his Field Director. Vincent said I might know you by your dull couture and your glib tongue. So pleased to make your acquaintance."

Frank eyed him dourly. "And I like you already. Other than your manly shoulders, slick, you got somethin' with your face on it?"

Earl sighed and reached around to his handbag. "All right; be tedious and stand on ceremony if you must," he said, withdrawing from the handbag a black leather wallet. He badged McPike, then tucked the wallet away. "I am a Central Agent, satisfied? Now why don't we gambol across to the cantina down yonder and have some tea whilst we talk?"

McPike exhaled, feeling like a very old man in a very strange place. "I make it a policy not to gambol in public, Agent Earl And I don't care to talk. I just wanna see my friend."

"All in its time, Field Director, all in its time. Have a heart and humor me with hometown talk I beg you. Here, I am the mother parish of the Odium Theologicum and there are so few new faces in the life of an Anti-Pope."  Earl gestured toward an assembly of buildings and people. "La Cantina is just across the quad."

La Cantina was just across the quad - and down a street not quite as long as the fucking Straits of Magellan.

Part Two

The small cafe amounted to an electric grill behind a wooden bar, a traffic tap and an open air veranda.

Ten small salt-eaten tables spanned the small red-tiled piazza - dark red, because the darker tiles were a bargain in San Juan. As you drove through the Mestizos villages, their poverty glowed darkly at you from the stands to the strand. Their mother's people had worshiped and mastered the sun. Their father's people had vanquished their mother's people.

Beneath Frank's shoes, the red tile burned with an absolute memory of the sun.

Jordan Earl led the expedition to a table in a shadowed comer, beside a lazily circulating fan.

He dropped his hat in the center of their table. He reached into his handbag for something swaddled in white paper. The tissue paper peeled away, a fine china cup and saucer emerged.

Earl clapped his hands together to make thunder. "Agua! Ca1iente! Pronto!" he called to a nearby waiter.

"Por favor;" Frank added in apology, flashing a brisk look at Earl. "J know for a fact that they're big on manners your side of the MasonDixon, sport. So what happened to you, Earl, take a header off the playpen one hot afternoon?"

"Ouch, you do bite, don't you?" Earl shook his head. 'We're supposed to be on the same side, remember? Men like us are strangers here."

"Men like us are strangers everywhere. Jordan. You wanna stop jerking my chain now so we can talk some business?" Frank. leaned closer with a bull-dog glare, his words dispensed individually through tightly-set teeth. "Do you know where Agent Terranova is or don't you?"

The hot water arrived. Earl poured it to his cup, then removed a tea bag from his handbag. He smiled to himself, dabbling the shucked tea bag shyly at the water.

Finally, he sipped from the Copenhagen cup and relaxed purposefully into his chair. "How do you think I found you?"

"I've made contacts with the local color. Something tells me you're the Company's local color commentator. And I'll wager you're a Big Sheep in Brother Love's flock, too."

"I fear you would lose your wager. on a technicality. Not the sheep, but the good shepherd himself." Earl tapped the lash of his string tie. "At your service, Director McPike."

Frank's glasses escaped down his nose. "You're Brother Love?"

"A regrettable moniker, that. One acquires nicknames in this line of work. Do you have it nickname, Agent McPike?"

"Impatience."

Jordan sneered. "And not for the flower I expect. Very well," He set his tea cup down.

"Agent Tenanova is alive and well, and quite safe. 1 will take you to him presently. But first I must tell you of that to which Vincent has become aligned. Before you enter the loop, you must understand its nature." Earl pulled his wallet from his handbag. "Do you know much about cosmology, Agent McPike?"

Frank rolled his eyes toward the brazen sun.

"I contribute every year to the Public Broadcasting System."

"Then behold this. and teU me what you see."

McPike was handed a 3xS card - it bore what looked like a constellation. Or the Dinkythe-Dog puzzle he'd solved on the airport matchbook - which attested to his future lucrative career as a professional freelance artist.

Frank handed it back. "Gee, I'd really like to play conect-the-dots with you, Earl. but I got a life to live. Is there a point here I'm missing?"

"This is a porta-pattern," Earl answered his own question. He referred to a deck of cards he had earlier positioned on the table. "On these cards are every possible economic paradigm in the western world. With this information, a man might become unimaginably wealthy. With this information, self-interest becomes a high art."

"You're a minister and an economist? So, tell me, slick, all that eye of the needle stuff in Sunday School was just opiate for the masses, is that it?"

Earl strook his head. "Moncy is neutral. Bureaucracy is the square root of all evil, Agent McPike. lt divides, mechanizes. alienates. People from people, soul from self. My system offers oconomics as your life's new matrix, where the trend may be your friend. A star to steer it by, so to speak."

"Fascist theology. How enchanting."

Part Three

"That's such an ugly term."

Another thread snapped on McPike's patience. 'Will you please tell me what in hell this has to do with Virlce Terranova.? I know all about you all I need to know. I know you're a Shriner, 1 know you're a tax-payer. And I also know You're the Company's ersatz-Bible-and-flesh-peddler to the local Mestizos. Not to mention the neighborhood nose-cardyman....

Jordan lifted a hand for forbearance. "True I distribute various locally legal substances which fall into that most revered category of Jeopardy, potes and potables. Doubtless you are wondering how I rationalize those seeming contradictions to myself."

"For one tenibIe moment."

He nodded. "It is terrible, said Brother Karamazov, because it has not been fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles- just so you can't see where Terranova falls within my plans.  I have begun something I like to call Revelation Camp, of which your Vincent is now a part. It is where all contradictions exist side by side - all our fellow travellers, of whatever stripe. Community is, shall we say, difficult in our line of work? And so I offer safe harbor from the sun."

Jordan lifted his tea, sipped it, a smile rising over his moistened mouth. "Frank...may I call you Frank?"

"If the spirit moves you."

"Frank, do you know much about gravity? The binding force that charms the physical universe, I mean, the music of the spheres."

Frank drew a steadying breath. "Preach me your sermon then get to the point."

He tasted the tea again, as he played with another thought.  "Gravity is not a force, Frank, as so many think. It is not itself coherence.  It is an act of violence flinging matter into space and allowing it to find its own nature, its own place in the higher harmony of things. That is how a new system is born. Out of violence." The smile spread widely over his mouth. "How much do you know....how much do you really know...about Vincent Terranova?"

"He's my friend."

"Not a word you take lightly, I understand. Still, with a friend, we know enough not to look in certain places, lest it wound our graven image. You know him so well that should I shine a light on certain areas, you would know to look away." Earl leaned farther forward. "But suppose I made you look?  Suppose I forced you to confront something in Terranova's nature? Something so extreme that chaos would result. An inner violence from which a new harmony would emerge. One born of your own nature."

"I make a point of looking in the dark places Earl. That is my own nature."

"Is that so?" Jordan chuckled. 'Then, tell me, what do you know of Vincent's sexual preference?"

Frank shifted slightly in his chair, trying not to seem so utterly thunderstruck by the question. "Only what I've stumbled on by accident. What in hell does that have to do with you?"

''Oh. it doesn't. But it does with you I expect." He smiled again.  "And what of your own orientation, Frank? Straight and right and 36 regular?"

"I missed the orientation, Earl. I married at twenty, so I make it up as I go along. And that's none of your business either."

"Hm, you do not maintain, nor do you dispute. Interesting. Possibly the tactical maneuver of a temperamentally honest man unwilling to lie. And at that, I'd never believe you are merely a straight man. You're far, far too witty." He sipped his tea. "When one lives in the jungle as I do, one listens closely to the drums. And the comptroller's drums around you two say the most gloriously interesting things.

"That's all bllshit. Jordan, and you know it." McPikt> rose out of his chair, his back to the piazza. ''You tell me where my friend is, and you tell me now. I'm getting Vince out of here, and I'm gettin' us the he1l away from you before I have to Martinize the stench out of my worsteds,"

"Very well," Jordan laughed, easily and without offense.

He finished his tea and clacked the cup to saucer with the bright, sharp sound of shattering ice. "Go to Revelation Camp, at the old Vanguard Compound. Vincent has taken a house there and is waiting for you. I promised him I wou1d send you to him straight-away. And Frank?"

McPike found himself reacting to his name, for one moment devoutly on his way to Vince, but then turning back on reflex, because the last words of Jordan Earl had coiled him like a spring. "What is it?"

"For what it's worth, I don't think you'll be leaving." Jordan Earl stood, stowing his Copenhagen set in his handbag, then returning his southern smile to Frank. "I think that you'll have a taste of Vincent's darkness and then follow your own nature. Become one of us. I expect you and Vincent to stay with us for a very long time. I do believe that is what Vincent wants."

Frank shook his head firmly. ''What Vince wants or what you want for him? 1 don't know what he wants, I don't know from your bullshit, I don't wanna join in any reindeer games. I want my friend, Jordan, and I want out of here. But let me give you one little lifetime guarantee"  Frank stepped closer, to slide the clasp of Earl's bolo tie all the way to his throat. He tapped his face. "If you've messed with Vinnie Terranova's head, I'm comin' after yours."

"How chivalrous and sweet of you," Ead said, unruffled. sliding the bolo clasp back down. "Perhaps Vincent was right about you after all. Go to him now, Frank, he waits for you. And thank you kindly. for our conversation. But I do expect we will be seeing one another again."

With that, Jordan Earl smiled, replaced his hat, and turned on his $500 heels to wind his way back through La Cantina.

And Frank watched. after him. until he was a small beige dot blending into the wind-swept calles of old San Juan.

Part Four

The Vanguard once was called the Red Alliance, back when the world still hosted hot and cold running wars. Their front line yielded, they'd now assumed the tempest role in the regional teapot. And the recent global warming enacted political drought conditions where even red streams had run dry.

Old guerrillas never die, some wiseguy once told him, they just buy a better suit.

And John Hull's Triangle Trade compound peered out at him through the thickening fronds, keeping company with ghosts.

The road juggled the Jeep harder as they moved deeply into the jungle.

Costa Rica reminded Frank a bit of Viet Nam. The same soft green silence, the same co1d mountain mist rising frail and white like the warm breath of angels. Even while parachuting into VC-sprayed probing fire, Frank could remember nowhere more beautiful than Viet Nam.

And just like Nam, driving through San Juan you'd see a farmer's field sacked, a village burned. The two sides hadn't faced off like the regional neighbors, but the Vanguard and the Costa rested uneasily with each other. For ten years they'd played a take-no-prisoners game of army man, both sides funded by the standard kibitzer coterie. But in recent years the Bear 'n' Bird were politely told to go to hell and Costa Rica started mending its own fences.

The local government was a utilitarian pastiche. It was hard to tell who was enemy, who was mend. In such jungles slept Brother Love and a hundred bigger monsters.

Frank wondered where in that dark, green jungle slept Vinnie Terranova. And if Vince was in that jungle - and even if he wasn't - McPike feared the local welcoming committee like Death itself.

As the Jeep growled angrily through the vigilant quiet, walking Mestizo women would stare curiously in their wake.

The Jeep reached the compound by nightfall.

A sign read Camp Revelation.

A smiling Mestizo man ambled up to thejeep, proffering a b1ack-teethed smile. "You are Brother McPike."

"And here Mom told me I was an only child."

The old man laughed, fanning himself with his Caballo hat. "Brother Earl called. He say you go to big yellow house one mile down right road. And have a nice day."

One mile down the right road was a brace of mud huts that all gazed attentively toward a center square. On the left, was a young blackeyed boy-waving a fetch stick at a small, bouncing dog. On the right, a gaggle of children in washed-out denim kicked futilely at an airless ball. Frank thought of the Idds he'd St"en at the airport. Teen-agers with Brother Love pig-bladders slung across their shoulders, trundling brightly painted wagons throughout lnternationale. Wagons with guns and bladders with crack, young kids keeping up with the local joneses.

You need anything, said the driver, they have.

Bureaucracy is the square root of all evil, like Brother Love had said.

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