ilitary work ingrains certain assumptions into a fellow. A person who won’t talk is suspect. They’re choosing belligerence. They’re hiding something. These two women don’t seem sharp enough for subterfuge, but you never know. The lower classes, after all, are where you find your Communists, unionists, folks with nothing to lose.

“She can’t talk?” Strickland asks. “Or chooses not to?”

“Can’t, sir,” Zelda says.

The throb in his arm fades to the background. This is interesting. It explains why this Elisa Esposito has kept this shit-hole job. Not obstinacy but limitation. Probably all explained on page two. He closes the folder, though, and gives her a long look. She can hear just fine, that’s for sure. There’s a raptness to her that is startling. Her eyes are locked onto his lips in a way most females would consider indelicate. He looks harder, wishing for buchité vision, and sees raised scar tissue in the shadow of her shirt collars.

“Some kind of operation?”

“They don’t know,” Zelda replies. “Either her parents did it to her, or someone at the orphanage.”

“Now why would someone do that to a baby?”

“Babies cry,” Zelda says. “Maybe that was enough.”

Strickland thinks back to Timmy’s and Tammy’s infancies. How each time he’d returned from DC to Florida, he’d been stunned by the Lainie he found. Exhausted, floppy-limbed, fingers puckered from baths and diapers. Now suppose you worked at an orphanage. Suppose there wasn’t one baby, or two, but dozens. He’s read military studies on sleep deprivation. He knows the kind of dangerous ideas that begin to seem sane.

He wants to tell Elisa to stretch out her neck so he can watch the gray light of the monitors slide across the satiny extrusion of scars. The ferocity of Elisa’s eyes make her wild; the wounds indicate that she’s tamed. It’s an appealing combination. She fidgets under his stare and crosses her legs. Well, there you go. Just a regular girl after all. Except here’s something else he wasn’t expecting. She isn’t sporting the rubber-soled shoes of every other janitor he’s seen. These are coral pink. He saw shoes like this all the time in Japan. Painted on the sides of Air Force bombers. Worn by pinup models. In real life, though, hardly ever.

Elisa Esposito stares at her clasped hands, just like they all do, then appears to recall something. She digs into the pocket of her smock, withdraws a tiny, bright object, and holds it out. She looks somber, which makes the monkey motion of her other hand so strange. She’s rotating a thumbs-up fist over her tits. She’s a certifiable fruitcake, he thinks, until the Negro pipes up to remind him of sign language.

“That means she’s sorry,” Zelda says.

Elisa is holding his wedding ring. This, too, he’d assumed had tumbled down the asset’s gullet. Lainie will be glad to see it. He, however, feels no emotion about it. He searches Elisa’s face but can’t find anything dishonest about the offer. She didn’t steal the ring, nothing like that. Her expression is sincere. The circular pattern of her hand over her breast seems less simian, more sensual. He has a sudden, strange realization. His new aversion to light and loud noises—here’s a woman built as if to those specifications. A woman who works in the dark of night. A woman who can’t make a peep.

He makes a cup of his left hand and allows her to place the ring into it. It feels ceremonial, an inverted wedding.

“Can’t put it on just yet,” he says. “But thanks.”

The girl shrugs and nods. Her eyes don’t leave his. Damn, it’s almost unnerving. He hates it. He kind of likes it. He looks away—that’s unusual—to her pink shoes, bouncing in midair. Pain blurts up his arm for no reason at all. He grinds his teeth and reaches for the bag of candy and instead opens the desk drawer. The bottle of painkillers is right there, glowing white amid Eagle Black Warrior pencils. Sweat pops from his forehead pores, and he tries not to wipe it. Wiping sweat isn’t a dominant gesture.

“That’s the first thing,” he says. “Second thing is, F-1.”

The Negro opens her mouth. Strickland slashes his hand to shut her up.

“I know. You signed the papers. I know all that bullshit. I don’t care. My job’s to make sure you comprehend the gravity of that signature. You’ve been here fourteen years? That’s nice. Maybe next year you get a cake. I hear fourteen years, you know what I think? Fourteen years is plenty of time to get lazy. Now, Mr. Fleming told you you don’t clean F-1 unless he says. Here’s what you don’t know. You disobey, you don’t deal with Mr. Fleming. You deal with me. And I represent who? The US government. We wouldn’t have us a local problem. We’d have us a federal problem. Is that understood?”

Elisa’s top leg slides off her lower. A positive, submissive sign, though he mourns losing sight of the shoe. Right then, one of the telephones begins to ring. The balloon of acid under his temple bursts from the noise and courses down his left arm, pooling under the wedding ring in his palm. A call this late? He flexes his bad hand, hoping to fight off the ache.

“Let me finish. You may have seen some things. So be it.”

He’s seeing things, too, streaks of red, tainted blood pumping directly into his eyeballs. Red—it’s the red phone ringing. Washington. Maybe General Hoyt. He’s got to get these girls the hell out of his office. Undaunted, his rivalry with Deus Brânquia rises from the swamp, the quicksand, the black depths of misery. The red phone, the red blood, the red Amazonian moon.

“Final words, now, listen, just listen. It doesn’t take a genius to know we’re dealing with a living specimen here. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter at all. All you need to know is this. That thing in F-1? It might stand on two legs, but we’re the ones made in God’s image. We’re the ones. Isn’t that right, Delilah?”

The worthless woman can’t muster but a whisper.

“I don’t know what God looks like, sir.”

The pain is absolute now. He is aware of individual nerve endings. It’s as if the lights inside his body have been switched on. Fine, he’ll take the painkillers. He’s already gripping the bottle. He’ll answer the red phone with cheeks full of half-chewed pills. Manufactured drugs, after all, are what civilized men ingest. And he is civilized. Or will be. Very soon. This phone call might even be the proving ground. Decisions are being made about the asset. And to advise about that he will need control. He thumbs off the lid of the painkillers.

“God looks human, Delilah. He looks like me. Like you.” He nods the women toward the door. “Though let’s be honest. He looks a little bit more like me.”