“I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
“You see that dent?” Clete said. “Jesus, it damned near pinched the flow off completely.”
“What did?”
“Whatever hit the pipe there,” Clete said.
“What did hit the pipe there?”
Clete met his eyes. “I’ll guess a buckshot,” he said. “I think a metal-jacketed .45 bullet would have just gone right on through.”
The assassins of el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade had been armed with Thompson submachine guns firing copper-jacketed 230-grain bullets, and with shotguns firing 00-buckshot pellets.
What a stupid question for me to ask.
“Can it be repaired?”
“I
don’t know. I think it can be expanded from the inside; it’s close to the end. If it can’t, I’m fucked.”
“Among the many gentling effects I devoutly hope Dorotéa will have on you is the cleaning up of your language.”
Though they were not speaking loudly, their conversation was enough to wake Enrico. He opened his eyes and put his hand on the pistol grip of the shotgun, then recognized the priest and quickly rose to his feet. “Padre,” he said.
“Enrico. How are you feeling?”
“I am fine, Padre.”
“He’s lying through his teeth, Father,” Clete said in Spanish. “Isn’t that a sin? Lying to a priest?”
“One of the worst,” Welner said. “Unless, of course, it’s in a good cause.”
“Every morning, when I tell him to stay in bed,” Clete went on, “he tells me that he can’t sleep. So I let him come down here, and five minutes later he’s sound asleep and snoring like a sea elephant.”
“I just closed my eyes for a moment,” Enrico said.
“Two hours ago,” Clete said. He handed Enrico the piece of tubing. “See the dent?”
“Sí, Señor.”
“That’s why we had too much oil pressure,” Clete said. “Can you get that out of there? Without ruining the tubing?”
“Of course, Señor Clete.”
“If you rupture the tubing, I’m fu…in trouble, Enrico.”
“I understand, Señor Clete.”
“Father Welner and I are going up to the house.”
“Sí, Señor.”
[TWO]
There were perhaps twenty cases of wine and Champagne stacked against the side of the big house near the kitchen door. Clete reached into one of them and came out with two bottles. He looked at the priest and gestured at the stacked cases. “This goddamn thing is getting out of hand,” he said. “This is all for the reception.”
“The sacrament of marriage, Cletus, is not a ‘goddamned thing.’”