Seville, Spain
Charlotte Rush slapped the tape recorder on the café table and sat back, letting her eyes trace the geography of the clouds – tattered rags of cotton – that were being marinated in a washed-out blue above them. She liked it here. It was such a far cry from Starbucks cups and cubicles like coffins. The ambiance was nothing like the concertos of car horns and police siren overtures. Things were natural here. Things were fresh and new and saturated with atmosphere. Something other than the high-maintenance, octane-caffeine cocktail driven gilded-cage Americana.
Spain.
With air that tasted like the skirts of Flamenco dancers and smelled like stucco roofs and Picasso with chipping paint.
She could live here. Godssakes, she could die here.
In the direction of the tape recorder she recited, “June second, 1992. Interview with Mr. Benjamin Partridge.” She looked over at the bull-necked man opposite her, his face rutted with chiseled crevasses and painted the color of dying incandescent lightbulbs by cigar smoke. His tie was loosened. His lips were tight.
He was playing with an unlit cigar.
“Let's make this quick, kid. This heat is killing me.”
Charlotte smiled, “You're living in the wrong place I guess.”
“Live? This is where I get drunk. This is where I come when I wanna dust my feet of the crummy bureaucratic whores in Washington who rape the constitution and snap me legal handcuffs. And then I fly somewhere else. Somewhere with a cooler climate and different selection of booze.”
“Spain's a shot of tequila.”
He nodded and tapped the cigar on the table. “Yeah. And you can quote me on that.”
“So what's the weather like in Israel?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Your bombs are going off all over the place there. Your guns are making beautiful music there. Hot place to be. Just jumping.”
“Gotta make a living, kid. One day, when you've got a real job, a job that doesn't involve pasting mud all over reputations that've taken a lifetime to build, you'll realize that.”
Charlotte smirked. “What about the people who aren't living anymore, huh? What about the dead kids lying in the streets with holes punched into their stomachs?”
“No. None of this guilt stuff. I don't talk the language of sentimentality, honey. I talk bank account numbers and dollar bills. If they're paying out real money, I could care less what they're doing with my weapons.”
“You know this is going to be front page, right?”
“Screw the front page. You want a statement, I'm making one. I'm a capitalist. I sell weapons to the highest bidder with only my stockholders in mind. I'm not in the business of world peace, I'm in the business of signing deals and popping corks.”
Around them, people's voices rolled down cobblestone streets like loose coins, skipping down gutters and executing graceful pirouettes as they made stationary orbits on stair steps and café entrances and at the feet of tourists and men and women on their way to work. Ringing like discarded bullet shells, they faded into the smothering heat. Heat that filled open living rooms like rubber cement. Heat that asphyxiated flies and painted grass brittle, dull colors.
People sweated their voices.
Their voices slipped from their pores and down their faces and tinkled to the sidewalks as coins.
And the streets were littered with the corpses of flies and liberated dimes.
Charlotte sat back and watched the road ahead twitch and shiver like a mile of ribbon, asphalt ripples caused by people's footsteps and breathing and sweat droplets. Partridge slipped the cigar between his lips and wiped crown-jewels of sweat from his hairline with the back of his hand.
Charlotte felt disgust percolating in her stomach.
The guy was everything she had come to hate. The embodiment of decadence and apathy and consumerism. He was like some kind of industrialist poster child, sitting there with in an Armani suit and smoking a ten dollar cigar. Rolled tobacco that dripped blood. Blood that spattered his designer suit and dripped down his face.
The blood of a thousand gutted children.
She smiled at Partridge.
He smiled back. And his teeth were stained with crimson.
“Okay. So you're in this to make a profit. You take a profit from a sub-machine round and turn it into nice green numbers on your bank statement,” she said.
“Not that green.”
“Whatever. I've got another question for you. Are you a religious person, Mr. Partridge?”
He smirked. “Religion is a difficult thing to define.”
“You think there's a God?”
“Sure. Why the hell not?”
“So do you have any moral convictions? Any limits? Is there a line drawn somewhere you wouldn't cross.”
Partridge stared at her.
Charlotte shook her head and leaned forward. “The people over there are like children. Children on a holy playground with grudges that last with for an eternity. And you're putting guns in their hands. Your tossing them missiles and bullet clips and feeding the flames. Is that crossing the line? Would you hand a kid a pistol and tell 'em to go take care of their own problems.”
“It's not the same.”
Charlotte slammed her fist against a table and the tape recorder shuddered. “You bet it is! It's exactly the same. Except these kids are paying you for the privilege. They're slipping you checks so that you can give them the means to put craters in that playground. And frankly, honey, you're just too gutless to see past your own rationalizations and into the mirror!” She could feel her chest heaving and her expression twisted like blistered paint. She knew she was being unprofessional, she knew she was making enemies, but for God's sake, his ignorance – his indifference – hit her like something physical. As if he was throwing bricks at her.
All of her articles like windows.
Splintered pieces of ink-stained glass strewn across the ground; dead soldiers in ideological streets.
He was spraying acid all over her carefully crafted philosophy of mankind:
Sociopathic maniacs who had good intentions and a at least a small streak of humanity.
“Are you finished, Ms. Rush?”
His words were daggers. “I could just talk hours with you, sir.”
“I bet you could. I'll be expecting something good in the papers tomorrow. Maybe even a photo of me and horns sticking out of my forehead penciled in. Talk to your editor about it. I'm sure Washington would eat it up.”
“Listen – ”
Benjamin Partridge held up his hand and shook his head, getting to his feet slowly. “Sorry, hon. You crossed your own line. You stabbed calm and collected in the back five minutes ago.” He slipped a lighter out of his pocket and touched it to his cigar – blooming embers – and smoke stumbled from his mouth like the breath of an industrial skyline.
“Give my regards to tequila, will you?”
