Saturday, July 29, 2017

Chapter 40. Yamantaka/Yamarani

Anna had sketched out maps the night before (tracing them from a Rand McNally) and we had our positions laid out for us. The most essential part of any operation is logistics and Ralph, on the excursion which Anna sent him out, thought of everything we needed to finish the acquisition of gear stage of the operation. He’d picked-up some toy compasses and a set of small two-way radios at a Radio Shack type store, spending the rest of his reserves he’d kept rolled up in a sock hidden away in an old stash place. He gave me a set of night vision binoculars he had from his drug dealing days. Anna figured I could use them more that he could from where she would have him posted. It was clear to Ralph and me whose operation this would be. He had a Minolta SLR with a telephoto lens that Max had also left in the apartment.

Anna tried on one wig and then another. She changed the make-up on her face several times too. Each time she came out of the bathroom she looked entirely different; taller, shorter, paler, and somehow tanned, skinnier, and so on.
“Ralph,” she said, “before we do anything else, take a shower.”
“What? I just did.”
“Wash off the cologne, no stink on an operation like this.”
Ralph stripped off and left the room.
She called out to him, “And don’t use that stinky soap. Irish fucking Spring.”
 The shower was already running as he yelled back at her, “You have perfume on. What’s the diff?”
“Just do it. I want them to smell me coming?”

I left the apartment to take a jog around the small park at the end of the cul de sac. Ralph had blackout curtains pulled when I got back to the apartment. It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the dark room. A single candle’s light flickered about a woman’s face that was nothing like Anna’s. It appeared clothed in its soft glow where she sat in a full lotus position. Ralph was at her side so I assumed the pose a few feet away and facing them.
Time passed. Once we sat long enough for Anna’s satisfaction, a faint Buddha smile passed her lips before she spoke, “The mansion’s a mandala castle, you know. Like the one hanging in the bedroom. A castle guarded by fierce Vajras.”
Ralph’s voice was distant, “I know, Max left it too. He told me what a mandala is, a circle kinda thing. That black dude in the middle with fangs diggin’ into a chick like he was fuckin’…  what’s that about? I thought it was ‘posed to be spiritual.”
“It’s a protector, a Vajra…, Daemon sometimes.”
“That what you mean, a Vajra?”
“Yes, the main one in the center, Ralph. Center yourself. Find your inner chi like you do in Kempo karate. Meld yin and yang. Your soul is the castle surrounded by fear and delusion. This one has four sides; white across from red and green across from yellow or gold, as in that case. Each guarded by several lesser daemons, or Vajras.”
 “You sayin’ that the Bird Dog guy is a demon fuckin’ with the Smurf guy?”
“Smurf? I like that. Smerdyakov… Papa Smurf fucking the Bird Dog. Uh, not exactly, but I like it. They are there to protect the treasure.”
“I’m taken the white side, Crash is taking the red and you stay where I drop you off outside the perimeter on the other side of the slough from the boat landing. You are there to watch the green and gold.”
Ralph grinned the way he did when he wanted you to know he got-it but was getting bored with it, “Green and Gold… I like the Packers. It’s time we go?”
 “I have gas money,” Anna offered, “Lets go fuck ‘em up.”
“That forty bucks is my fuckin’ money, honey,” Ralph pouted.
“I told you I was a whore. If I charged you what I usually get, you’d owe me lots more than forty bucks.”
“Okay, it was worth it, my sweet whore.”
 “We’re set then. Let’s go.”


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