“Aren’t you cold?” the target asked.
Javier had been waiting to start this conversation for the past half hour. He had his responses already selected, branched, planned for. “Only a little. I didn’t think it would really be this cold.” He made a show of staring at the other guy’s mouth. His target was in the process of growing a vacation beard. It was going pretty well. “Wow. I can even see your breath, it’s so cold.”
The other guy squinted. “I can’t see yours.”
Javier smiled. “I don’t breathe. It just looks like I do.” He used it as an excuse to come closer. “See? Watch my chest. I’m talking to you normally, but…” He pointed. “My chest still rises and falls on meter.”
The other guy stared at Javier’s chest. His gaze moved up to Javier’s throat, then his mouth. When it hit his eyes, Javier knew he had him. The other guy didn’t know it yet, but Javier did.
“Ricardo Montalban,” Javier said, holding his hand out.
The other guy laughed and shook it. “That’s a joke, right?”
“Of course it is,” Javier said. He held his target’s hand for just a second longer than necessary.
“So, you’re traveling under an assumed name? This is your alias?”
Javier held a single finger up to his lips. “Ssh. Not so loud.”
The other guy smiled. “Manuel,” he said.
“Do you go cruising often, Manuel?”
The double meaning still existed, in Spanish. Even in the snowy twilight of the wonderland, Manuel’s blush was visible. He was young, Javier realized. Or at least, inexperienced.
“It’s my first time,” he said.
Of course it was.
“Mine too,” Javier lied. “It’s so… big. I feel like I’ll never see all of it.”
Manuel nodded. “It almost feels too big.”
“No such thing.”
They both laughed at the same time. This was going extremely well. Javier wondered what he had worried about.
“It just feels like a bit too much. I had to get off the boat, today,” Manuel continued. “I went to the rainforest.”
Javier replayed his conversation with Aaron. “Chirripó?”
Manuel nodded. He was about to start saying something more, when Javier began drifting away from the crowd, down the path they’d just walked. It was lit by furolitos in waxed paper bags. A false moon hid behind scudding clouds above them. Javier was beginning to understand the romance of winter. He had never experienced the season this way – his coldest Christmases were rainy, and nothing more. But the dry snap to the air, the length and colour of the shadows, they made you want to climb into bed with someone.
“It was really something,” Manuel said. “Hot as hell. And wet. Really, really wet. I think I may have ruined my socks.”
Javier nodded. He understood immediately why Manuel was not getting laid. At least, not by the kind of guys he was attracted to. One did not talk to people who were out of your league about wet socks.
“Did you see any wildlife?”
Manuel shook his head. “Some birds, but nothing big. Even the sloths were hiding. They say there are more jaguars, now, but I’m not sure I believe it.”
“I saw a jaguar, once.”
“In a zoo?”
Javier shook his head. He leaned against the tree. It smelled pleasantly of balsam. It reminded him of Amy. Hiding in trees in the rain, with her and Xavier – back when Xavier was still Junior. Back when he was small enough to carry in the crook of one arm.
“Where, then?”
Javier blinked. “In the wild,” he said. “Not far from here, actually. Years ago.”
Manuel’s eyebrows rose. “Wow.”
“She was just lying right out there on the branch of this huge tree, sunning herself.”
He and she had both been sunning themselves, actually. He was maybe a month old. He’d wandered out on a limb because his father was gone, probably killing drones, and he was hungry and he needed the sun. So he took off all his clothes and lay down on the branch. It wasn’t until he was completely comfortable that he noticed the jaguar above him. She was on another branch, staring at him intently. He still remembered the pink of her tongue against the white of her muzzle. How the inside of her spots was just a little bit darker than the fur outside, as though, as in the legend, she’d been burnt by the very last of God’s fire.
“Were you scared?”
“Only a little.”
Actually, it was a lot. He’d been very scared. Big cats tended not to attack people, of course, but he was in her territory and she probably wanted him gone. He had no idea what her teeth could do to hollow-core titanium, but he’d seen the carcasses other jaguars left behind. They dislocated the necks of their prey with their paws. They bit through the shells of ancient turtles. Javier was tough, but he wasn’t that tough. He tried to sit up, but then she started moving, too, so he lay back down. They spent the next hour that way, eyeing each other.