The Vice President lifted his fingers to his cheek but Messner held his hand down. “Don’t touch it.” He looked around the room. “The Japanese man, is he still here?”
“Where would he go?” Ruben asked.
Messner glanced around at the bodies at his feet, all of them warm and taking even breaths. Really, he had seen worse.
“I’m going to call for the translator,” the Vice President told the Generals, who looked away from them as if they had not noticed that Messner had arrived. Then finally one of them glanced up and gave some sort of brief, sideways gesture with his eyebrows that Ruben Iglesias took to mean, fine, go ahead.
He did not call for Gen, but walked the long way around the room to get to him. It was both an opportunity to stretch his legs and to take inventory of his guests. Most people gave something between a wince and a smile upon seeing him. The side of his face really was swelling horribly without ice. The stitches already strained against the burden of keeping his face together. Ice. It wasn’t like he was looking for penicillin. There was plenty of ice in the house. There were two freezers, one side by side with the refrigerator in the kitchen and one in the basement just for storage. There was also a machine in the kitchen that stood separately and did nothing but pour forth ice all day into a plastic cabinet. And yet he knew he was not a favorite with these Generals, and to request so much as a cube might mean the closing of his other eye. How lovely it would be just to stand with his cheek resting lightly against the cool white metal of the freezer door. He didn’t even need the ice, that would be enough. “Monsignor,” he said, stepping around Monsignor Rolland on the floor. “I am so sorry. Are you comfortable? Yes? Good, good.”
It was a beautiful house, a beautiful rug on which his guests crowded together. Who would have thought that he would one day live in such a house with two freezers and a machine that made only ice? It had been a spectacular piece of luck. His father lifted baggage onto flatbed carts, first for the trains and then for the airlines. His mother raised eight children, sold vegetables, took in needlework. How many times had that story been told? Ruben Iglesias working his way up. The first in his family to finish high school! Worked as a janitor to put himself through college. Worked as a janitor and a judge’s clerk to put himself through law school. After that there was a successful career in the law, the correct steps on the unstable ladder of politics. It made him as attractive a running mate as his height. Never in the story did they mention how he had married well, the daughter of a senior partner he had made pregnant during a festive Christmas party, how the ambitions of his wife and her parents pushed him forward. That was a decidedly less interesting story.
A man on the floor near the tapestry wing-backed chair asked him a question in a language Ruben believed was German. The Vice President told him he did not know.
Gen the translator was lying very close to Mr. Hosokawa. He whispered something in Mr. Hosokawa’s ear and the older man closed his eyes and nodded his head almost imperceptibly. Ruben had forgotten all about Mr. Hosokawa. Happy birthday, sir, he thought to himself. I don’t suppose there will be any factories built this year. Not too far from them was Roxane Coss and her accompanist. She looked, if this was possible, even better than she had the night before. Her hair was loose and her skin glowed as if she had been waiting for this opportunity to rest. “How are you?” she mouthed in English, and touched her hand to her own cheek to indicate her concern for his injury. Perhaps it was the fact that he had had nothing to eat, maybe it was exhaustion or blood loss or the onset of an infection, but at that moment he was quite sure he would faint. The way she touched her face, did it because she could not stand and put her hand to his own cheek, the image of her standing and touching his cheek, he sank down to the floor, balancing on his toes, putting his hands down in front of him, and dropped his head forward until the feeling passed. Slowly he raised his eyes to hers, which now looked panicked. “I’m well,” he whispered. At that moment he noticed her accompanist, who frankly did not look well at all. It seemed that if Roxane Coss was able to extend such compassion to him she should take a look at the man lying next to her. His paleness had a decidedly gray cast, and while his eyes were open and his chest moved in a shallow way, there was a stillness about him that the vice president thought was not good at all. “Him?” he said softly, and pointed.
She looked at the body beside her as if she was noticing it for the first time. “He says he has the flu. I think he’s very nervous.”
Speaking in the very smallest of whispers, the sound of her voice was thrilling, even if he wasn’t exactly sure what she was saying.
“Translator!” General Alfredo called out.
Ruben had meant to stand and extend his hand to Gen, but Gen, younger, made it to his feet more quickly and reached down to help the Vice President. He took Ruben’s arm, as if the Vice President had been struck suddenly blind, and led him forward through the room. How quickly one could form attachments under circumstances like these, what bold conclusions a man could come to: Roxane Coss was the woman he had always loved; Gen Watanabe was his son; his house was no longer his own; his life as he knew it, his political life, was dead. Ruben Iglesias wondered if all hostages, all over the world, felt more or less the same way.
“Gen,” Messner said, and shook his hand somberly, as if offering condolences. “The Vice President should have medicine.” He said this in French for Gen to translate.
“Too much time is spent discussing the needs of a foolish man,” General Benjamin said.
“Ice?” Ruben offered himself, as suddenly his mind was filled with the pleasures of ice, of the snow on the tops of the Andes, of those sweet Olympic skaters on television, young girls wearing handkerchiefs of diaphanous gauze around their doll-like waists. He was burning alive now and the silver blades of their skates shot up arches of blue-white chips. He wanted to be buried in ice.
“Ishmael,” the General said impatiently to one of the boys. “Into the kitchen. Get him a towel and ice.”
Ishmael, one of the young boys holding up the wall, a small one with the worst shoes of all, looked pleased. Maybe he was proud of having been chosen for the task, maybe he wanted to help the Vice President, maybe he wanted a shot at the kitchen, where surely trays of leftover crackers and melted canapés were waiting. “No one gives my people ice when they need ice,” General Alfredo said bitterly.
“Certainly,” Messner said, half listening to Gen’s translation. “Have you reached some kind of compromise here?”
“We’ll let you have the women,” General Alfredo said. “We have no interest in harming women. The workers can go, the priests, anyone who is sick. After that we’ll review the list of who we have. There may be a few more to go after that. In return we’ll want supplies.” He produced a piece of paper, neatly folded, from his front pocket and clamped it between the three remaining fingers of his left hand. “These are the things we’ll need. The second page is to be read to the press. Our demands.” Alfredo had been so certain their plan would turn out better than this. It had been his cousin, after all, who had once worked on the air-conditioning system of this house and had managed to steal a copy of the blueprints.