Before they leave the grounds, Felipe jumps back out of the car into the freezing night air. Like Maria Rosa, he is a local. Diaz smiles. He has witnessed this ridiculous rite many times though it is true that it has so far protected his life on their many trips on Death Road. Felipe takes a bottle of pure alcohol from the trunk and splashes the liquid on each tyre, blessing the vehicle with a cha’lla. After taking off again, he stops at various points along the road to appease the apus mountain spirits, by making offerings of mamacoca coca leaf, and adding a rock or two to several of the many rock cairns by the roadside that mark where people have died. Fortunately tonight, perhaps because it is so late, none of the mangy rabid dogs come out to him angling for food. There are many deaths along this road, and not just from dog bites. Several vehicles per month tumble over the side, plummeting for 1,200 to 3,000 feet down precipitous sheer cliff drops.
Tonight Felipe meets no oncoming vehicles, or one of them would have had to back up along the track several hundred feet to squeeze past the other—terrifying at the best of times, unthinkable at night.
While Hernandez’s adored silver-grey 1957 Mercedes 300SL Gull Wing is the best car in the world, according to him, with state-of-the-art fuel-injection being just one of its features, it is hardly the most appropriate car for this particular pastime. When Felipe has to lift the upward-opening door to climb out for one of his rituals, he has to avoid parking under the many rock overhangs or his boss would whine about the hand-tooled llama leather seats getting soaked from the drips.
Diaz affectionately calls his car Rosinante, after Don Quijote’s scraggly horse. He loves this car and as a bonus, has found its whisper-quiet action useful.
Ten miles along the road, Diaz instructs Felipe to pull over at a wide bend, his favourite thinking spot, and to switch off the headlights. “The light will interfere with my thoughts,” he says. He pushes up his half of the door and, with some difficulty, his rotund frame spills out of the automobile, leaving Felipe at the wheel. He buttons his coat, pulls on his hat and gloves and waddles over to the edge, carefully. He sucks in the chill air. Apart from the stars and a fingernail of moon, there is nothing to see. Everything is black, even his thick coat. He is cold and, even though he knows it will only make a psychological difference, he takes a cigar case and lighter from his inside pocket and extracts his own Cuban, biting off the end and lighting it up.
Felipe’s sharp eyes catch a split-second glimmer in the rear vision mirror. It isn’t Diaz; his Chilean boss is twenty feet ahead of the car and is humming that damn Bésame Mucho again.
Felipe turns silently, his intense eyes scanning, his hand imperceptibly reaching for his shoulder holster—in this country you can’t be too prepared—but he sees who it is and his arm relaxes. Stupidly, he eases off the brake so Rosinante can canter quietly down the slope in the moonlight but her tyres crunch the stones and snap Diaz out of his contemplation of the evening’s events.
Before Diaz can complete his head-turn, a shot rings out and the bullet punches through his neck, catapulting him over the edge.
Like many before, and after.
Diaz’s favourite tune floats through his head as he falls: como si fuera esta noche, la última vez; as if tonight is the last time.
Music can be prescient. Barrientos was right.
12
ISABEL’S CAMPAIGN MANAGER crossed his legs, tugging the navy blue extra-fine merino wool cuff down over his red sock just so. Gregory Samson knew they were silk Zegnas; the socks, that is. The suit was Armani, made from Australian super-fine wool, but Gregory wasn’t one to shout out his discernment for fear it would be yet another way to bring attention to his prematurely balding head.
The only obsession Gregory fussed over more than his appearance, apart from his fix of Diet Coke twenty-four hours a day, was managing Isabel: her program, the ads, the slogans, her speeches, whom she spoke to, where she went, how she got there, what she said, where she ate, what she drank—usually water, occasionally a Virgin Mary—what TV programs she appeared on, what TV she watched, what she wore, and more importantly, what she didn’t wear. Once, he had tried to get her to wear high necks to hide her scar, but she refused, saying, “I am what I am.” She did go along with greys and blues though, to distinguish her from the shouty reds and other bright colours so many other women politicians favoured and to avoid, as Gregory said, the inevitable cliché with Rosa being her middle name. Gregory worried about every detail.
He wasn’t as snug with Isabel as family, he knew that, but he was as close as any outsider could get. At least he believed so. Maybe not as close as Democrat Spencer Prentice—a relationship Gregory considered weird—but close enough. Nothing but nothing went to Isabel without it coming to Gregory first—everyone in the campaign knew that—unless some pushy press reptile managed to slither past, in which cases the candidate annoyingly did as she pleased, which was usually fine he had to admit, and which infuriated him even more than the reptiles themselves. But really… it was his job to keep her clear of the mundane and, despite her instincts, there was no way she could see all the balls being tossed at her. She was only human, a weakness his campaign strategy had turned into a strength… a giant, hopefully sustainable and therefore unbeatable 70-percent strength.