in piles like giant old chicken bones; engine blocks were strewn in the weeds like the droppings of a T. rex; conical mounds of more severely rusted smaller parts had wildflowers growing on their slopes. Moving through the weeds, Joey turned up nests of mud-caked and/or broken plastic parts, snake pits of hoses and belts cracked by the weather, and decaying cardboard parts cartons with Polish words on them. He was fighting tears of disappointment at the sight of it.
“Lot of rust here,” he said.
“What is rust?”
He broke a large flake of it off the nearest wheel hub. “Rust. Iron oxide.”
“This happens because of the rain,” da Rosa explained.
“I can give you ten thousand dollars for the lot of it,” Joey said. “If it’s more than thirty tons, I can give you fifteen. That’s a lot better than scrap value.”
“Why you want these shit?”
“I’ve got a fleet of trucks I need to maintain.”
“You, you are a very young man. Why you want these?”
“Because I’m stupid.”
Da Rosa gazed off into the tired, buzzing second-growth jungle beyond the fence. “Can’t give you everything.”
“Why not?”
“This trucks, the Army not use. But they can use if there is war. Then my parts are valuable.”
Joey closed his eyes and shuddered at the stupidity of this. “What war? Who are you going to fight? Bolivia?”
“I am saying if there is war we need parts.”
“These parts are fucking useless. I’m offering you fifteen thousand dollars for it. Quince mil dólares.”
Da Rosa shook his head. “Cincuenta mil.”
“Fifty thousand dollars? No. Fucking. Way. You understand? No way.”
“Treinta.”
“Eighteen. Diez y ocho.”
“Veinticinco.”
“I’ll think about it,” Joey said, turning back in the direction of the office. “I’ll think about giving you twenty, if it’s over thirty tons. Veinte, all right? That’s my last offer.”
For a minute or two, after shaking da Rosa’s oily hand and stepping back into the taxi he’d left waiting in the road, he felt good about himself, about the way he’d handled the negotiation, and about his bravery in traveling to Paraguay to conduct it. What his father didn’t understand about him, what only Connie really did, was that he had an excellent cool head for business. He suspected that he got his instincts from his mother, who was a born competitor, and it gave him a particular filial satisfaction to exercise them. The price he’d extracted from da Rosa was far lower than he’d allowed himself to hope for, and even with the cost of paying a local shipper to load the parts into containers and get them to the airport, even with the staggering sum that it would then cost him to fly the containers by charter to Iraq, he would still be within parameters that would assure him obscene profit. But as the taxi wove through older, colonial portions of Asunción, he began to fear that he couldn’t do it. Could not send such arrantly near-worthless crap to American forces trying to win a tough unconventional war. Although he hadn’t created the problem—Kenny Bartles had done that, by choosing the obsolete, bargain-basement Pladsky to fulfill his own contract—the problem was nonetheless his. And it created an even worse problem: counting the costs of start-up and the paltry but expensive shipment of parts from Lodz, he’d already spent all of Connie’s money and half of the first installment of his bank loan. Even if he were somehow able to back out now, he would leave Connie wiped out and himself in crippling debt. He turned the wedding ring on his finger nervously, turned it and turned it, wanting to put it in his mouth for comfort but not trusting himself not to swallow it again. He tried to tell himself that there must be more A10 parts out there somewhere, in some neglected but rainproof depot in Eastern Europe, but he’d already spent long days searching the internet and making phone calls, and the chances weren’t good.
“Fucking Kenny,” he said aloud, thinking what a very inconvenient time this was to be developing a conscience. “Fucking criminal.”
Back in Miami, waiting for his last connecting flight, he forced himself to call Connie.
“Hi, baby,” she said brightly. “How’s Buenos Aires?”
He skated past the details of his itinerary and cut straight to an account of his anxieties.
“It sounds like you did fantastic,” Connie said. “I mean, twenty thousand dollars, that’s a great price, right?”
“Except that it’s about nineteen thousand more than the stuff is worth.”
“No, baby, it’s worth what Kenny will pay you.”
“And you don’t think I should be, like,