Beautiful Blood

Breque gestured to the heavens—he might have been importuning a deity. “I’ve always thought of myself as a ruthless politician, a skilled manipulator. Now that we are both facing the possibility of death, I felt that honesty might prove a comfort to us both. As I’ve grown older, I’ve softened my stance, but even in my salad days, I could never match you as regards ruthlessness and manipulation. You are relentless in the practice of those arts. Perhaps the fact that you don’t appear to have aged…perhaps it is not merely appearance. That might explain why you have failed to grow more understanding of other men’s frailties.” He stood. “At any rate, there it is. You have regained the advantage over me. I have no cards left to play.”

“I realize that is what you wish me to think,” Rosacher said. “But I would not be the man you judge me to be if I accepted your statement as fact.”

Breque threw up his hands. “Think what you want! I’m done with this discussion.”

“We’ll talk further upon my return,” said Rosacher—despite himself, he felt badly for Breque.

“I’m certain you will return,” Breque said. “Griaule is clearly your protector. But is he mine? That remains to be seen.”

+

Though they began their journey at night, Cerruti and Rosacher thereafter traveled by day, leaving Frederick to follow their scent. The days passed without significant event. At night, Rosacher could hear Frederick moving out in the brush, beyond the light of their campfire, and on those nights when he did not hear the beast, to ease his mind Cerruti would summon him and Frederick would materialize as a puddle of shadow or a heap of blackness, staying in sight just long enough to fray Rosacher’s nerves.

The hours that proved the most onerous for Rosacher were those between dusk, when they pitched camp, and when they went to sleep. Simply put, Cerruti was a bore. He regaled Rosacher with stories about minor wounds he had suffered, tooth problems, illnesses he had endured, encounters with poisonous plants and pests such as fleas and lice, as well as afflictions of unknown origin. As he told it, his life had been spent in a condition of mild constant pain, and this was the only subject about which he was at all voluble. In opposition to his usual taciturn manner, he related his experiences with a kind of crude eloquence, describing his various injuries and symptoms in detail. He seemed to have relished each abrasion and cut, each festering sore and fever and runny nose. Everything they saw reminded him of some incidence of sickness or impairment, and whenever Rosacher tried to turn their campfire chats to a subject more to his pleasure, Cerruti would answer in a terse fashion and then go on with his litany of medical woes. Not even Frederick, a topic about which Rosacher thought that Cerruti would wish to display his expertise, warranted a detailed response. When asked to expound on Frederick’s method of communication, the shape he preferred to assume, or any other facet of its behavior, Cerruti would provide an answer both brief and uninformative, leading Rosacher to suspect that he knew considerably less than he pretended and was glossing over his ignorance. He wondered, too, if Cerruti had as much control over Frederick as he claimed and whether or not, when the time came to unleash his pet, Cerruti would be able to reel it in.

They crossed over the Temalaguan border on the sixth day, passing into a region of dense jungle that impeded their progress and brought to Cerruti’s narratives of illness a new level of intensity. They camped that evening near a bend in the Rio Coco beneath a canopy of aguacate trees, on a patch of packed earth that had been cleared of vegetation by the passage of tapirs and various other animals—it had rained earlier in the day and their tracks pockmarked the moist clay. Ordinarily Rosacher would have chosen a different place in which to camp. It was obviously part of a trail leading to a watering hole and as such was sure to attract predators; but with Frederick lurking nearby and his rifle to hand, he felt secure. As dusk blended into full dark and the vine-hung canopy vanished from sight, he would have expected to hear the droning of insects and the liquid repetitions of frogs, but the only sounds he heard before falling asleep that night were those of Frederick’s predation—a high, thin squeal cut short—and the crackling of their fire and the whining constancy of Cerruti’s voice celebrating each new mosquito bite with a narrative of past travails.

“I was up on the coast a’ways once, not far from Buttermilk Key, traveling in a caravan,” he said, slathering his arms with a pale yellow ointment that, he claimed, would drive off any six-legged creature. “That was the worst place I ever saw for bugs. When the wind off the water died, you could stick your arm out the window of the wagon and it’d turn black with mosquitoes in a second or two.”