River Tango: Acknowledgements and Chapter One

River Tango

Copyright

perri iezzoni

5/2013

Cover Design by Jesse Vital

Acknowledgements

            Thanks be to God for inspiring me in the creation of this work.

            Thanks to all the river guides who have taught me that being a river runner is a way of life: my brothers, Chris and Mario, Ted Newton and Larry Skinner.

             A special thanks to the tangueras who have been such a big part of my tango experience: Ljuba Lemke, Svetlana Howells, Sallie Bo Andrews and Olga McGuire.

            Thanks to the three wonderful women who helped me edit this book: Penny Rosenberger, Karen Lucey and Sue Dallon.

CHAPTER ONE

            Captain Jack Stueben awoke in his own bed in his beloved city for the first time in five months. It was late January. The Battle at Tora Bora was behind him as he lay in the comfort of a quilt and several finely woven cotton sheets. Only the gentle vibrations of the New York City metropolis breached his apartment twenty stories up in a high-rise building overlooking Central Park.

            Bunny Van Hooven, his childhood sweetheart, belly dancer and CEO of her own cosmetics corporation, lay beside him. Her ruby-red three-inch-high-heeled shoes hung from the bedpost. Once he saw her in the shoes at the heliport, Jack didn’t stand a chance.

            The soft touch of her skin next to his and the sweet smell of her hair seemed like a dream.

            It felt good to be back in the Big Apple, he thought, but he still suffered from brutal culture shock. Afghanistan was all rocks and cliffs, wool blankets, rifles smelling of Cosmoline, voices yelling in Pashtun and Urdu: people bleeding, people dying, people he killed, and one he should have killed and didn’t.  

            Now he was back in his loft where the temperature was set at 78 degrees. He shut his eyes and told himself he was getting old, getting soft.

            He rolled onto his belly and the blankets slid off his tired frame. A dog let out a tiny yelp from within Bunny’s Bellini handcrafted purse. It poked up its head and eyed Jack’s bare buttocks and long muscular legs.

            At 48, Jack Stueben was an outstanding physical specimen: six foot two inches tall with rock hard abdominal muscles from a lifetime of mountaineering, sit-ups and yoga. The only signs he showed of aging were the crow’s feet crowding his ice-blue eyes and the streaks of grey in his short-cropped chestnut hair. The flesh on his cheeks, hidden beneath a beard since the day the CIA ordered him to Central Asia to fight the Taliban, was unnaturally white.

            He couldn’t wait to shave it off when he received his orders to return state-side for R&R. After he boarded the military transport in frigid Chaghcharan, where he began tough negotiations on behalf of Stueben Incorporated for the rights to mine lithium and niobium, he went straight to the plane’s lavatory and dispensed of his facial fur.

            His beard was gone but not the memories of Tora Bora, of the World Trade Center bombing or of ‘The Agency’.

            When New York City was attacked, he gladly accepted the mission to the Far East, a mission for which he was more than well prepared, having spent a lifetime climbing mountains in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. Fluent in Hindu, Urdu and Pashtun, he was a lethal weapon fighting for America.

            Despite having been an inactive agent with The Firm for nearly twelve years, his anger more than made up for his lack of clandestine activity. The city he loved with all his heart and soul, the place where he played, loved and danced, was under siege, and he would do all he could to protect her.

            He had to do it because he was working with the idiots in Washington, the ones who always screwed up everything. They botched the Tora Bora assault, he thought, right when we had Bin Laden trapped. The Oil Boys were running the show and there was not much he could do about it…not much, but that didn’t mean he would do nothing. The political power lies in D.C. but the might of American business is in New York City.

            The Stueben family had been conducting business from their nest in Manhattan for over four hundred years, ever since the arrival of Peter Stueben and the first Dutch settlers. To Jack, New York was not an American city, it was the world, it was his world. All that lay beyond its borders were merely places where deals were signed to continue life in a city that never sleeps.

            On the cliffs of the south side of a nameless mountain in eastern Afghanistan, Jack waited for three days to escort an elite commando unit up a thousand feet of a smooth vertical rock wall to attack Bin Laden in his lair. The commandos never arrived. They were ordered to leave the capture of the man who masterminded the destruction on 9/11 to the Afghanis. Jack nearly froze to death waiting for soldiers who never came, waiting to hear his cover name, Joe Tango, called over the radio.

            Now he was here with his childhood sweetheart, Bunny. She attended the same boarding schools as he did growing up in Manhattan. She was his first climbing partner when he got his driver’s license and they could skip school to scale the cliffs in the Shawangunk Mountains west of New Paltz, New York.

            Maybe, he thought, he should settle down with her and start a family. They could adopt a couple of African babies like Brad and Angelina. She would gladly divorce her husband but they both knew Jack would never settle down. His sister, Klara, produced more than enough heirs to the Stueben fortune; Jack would be content to live and love in the city for the rest of his days without ever getting married.

            How long had he been asleep? It was dark outside and he could hear the muffled din of the street. He guessed it was 3 a.m. and rolled onto his side to stare at his companion.

            She awoke as if the weight of his gaze was enough to pull her from her dreams. She stared back at him for a moment, smiled and bolted out of bed.

            He rolled onto his back and stared once more at a crack in the plaster on the ceiling. One of these days, he told himself, he was going to get that fixed.  Then it wouldn’t be home, he rationalized as the strong smell of coffee brewing and the sound of Turkish tango music blew in on a gentle wind from the kitchen.

            Bunny popped back into the bedroom, bubbly and bouncing. She wore nothing but a sheer cotton sheet and a couple of see-through scarves to cover her melon-sized breasts and her very curvy waist. She held a handkerchief in front of her face hiding her nose and chin, showing only her animated big blue eyes. Her long brown hair fell about her small shoulders like water falling, splashing when it encountered her milky white skin.

            She started dancing to the music with the skill of a well-trained seductress. Moving in choreographed movements to the vibrant beat of the song, Bunny hopped about the room, accentuating drumbeats with hip bumps.

            She smiled broadly with the innocence of an adolescent on the verge of puberty. Bobbing around the room, she would fix her gaze on him as she seduced him with her rhythmic writhing. As she looked at him, he could see the lust in her eyes growing.

            She laughed loudly when the song ended and leapt on top of him, pulling the covers over them as they descended into a serious session of love-making. When they were done, she brought him coffee and kissed him tenderly as he drank it, still not speaking.

            He fell asleep after they made love again and woke three hours later to find her staring down at him, adoringly.

            “Bunny,” he said, regretfully, “I’ve got to go.”

            He didn’t want to go. He genuinely appreciated being here with her and he knew she felt the same way. It was like a great dance encounter when each person can feel that the other is truly enjoying the union. At times like these, even the simplest of movements achieve the ultimate romantic affect.

            He felt close to her and didn’t want it to end. She wasn’t safe with him; there were men out there who wanted to kill him or anybody he loved. There was one man in particular, a traitor named Frankie Hanks.

            He had to go. He couldn’t fight the urge to tell her he loved her, that he wanted to always be with her and that he’d never take another adventure ever again. He knew that was a promise he could not keep. He was a child of wealth, pleasuring himself, indulging in all of life’s mysteries and roller coaster rides was what he had been born to do.

            He could never stop and, if he did, someone would find him, someone with a gun and a bullet with his name on it.

            He had to leave because he felt compelled to speak those words to her and he knew it would be a lie. He loved her too much to lie to her; to hurt her like that. They had something special, and that was something he could not afford to lose.

            She continued to stare at him for a long time before taking a long, deep breath and said, “Andrew Jackson Stueben, you are not going anywhere until I’ve made sure you are getting the proper amount of rest and recreation.”

            She used the name his mother called him when they were children. Her brown hair framed her eyes perfectly as she leaned forward and narrowed her eyebrows as if to say, “I really mean it this time.”

            “Well,” he said with a tone of concession, “I better take a nice hot shower then.”

            He got up and went into the bathroom. Turning on the cold water, he pulled the shower curtain shut and went to the towel closet. Here he kept several base jumping parachutes in case he needed to jump out a window during a fire or in a situation like the one he faced now: held hostage by a woman intent on mothering him to an emotional precipice where he would feel compelled to take the final plunge into marriage.

            He grabbed a satchel, opened the large window filled with translucent panes of glass and looked outside to survey the jump zone. He could see the busy 97^th Street Traverse during the morning rush hour and one of the tunnels that allowed automobiles to pass beneath the pedestrians as they crossed the park, even on icy cold days in January. His breath formed a small cloud that dissipated quickly as he ducked his head back inside.

            In a minute, he attached the harness and was on the ledge, the main chute tucked snuggly into the crook of his left arm, the pilot chute clasped in his right hand. Without hesitation, he threw himself into the frigid air of winter and began plunging through 400’ feet of nothing towards the ground clad only in a harness, baby blue boxers and a white t-shirt.

            In 3 seconds, he plummeted 294 feet before his main canopy deployed, catching the wintry air in its embrace and slowing his descent to a few feet per second. Near the ground, he managed to catch an updraft close to one of the 97^th Street Traverse tunnels and landed at a walking pace on a snowy sidewalk next to the busy roadway.

            Quickly rolling up his chute into a ball, he hailed a cab and disappeared into the hustle and bustle that is New York City.

            By 8 a.m., he was at his mid-town office where he walked in barefoot, draped in his base-jumper’s silky wind sail.

            Anya, his secretary, greeted him heartily, her four-inch heels in stark contrast to the plain white t-shirt and blue jeans she wore. A lawyer with short-cropped brown hair well versed in international trade law, Anya was a lethal weapon in her own rite, possessing the two attributes no man should ever be pitted against: beauty and brains.

            She was his savior and secretary. She was paid  handsomely for her commitment to his secrecy and his family’s fortune.

            “Nice to see you’re baaaack,” she said smiling wryly, a slight hint of her Polish accent peeking through her words. “I’m guessing you’ll be needing shoes, a cell phone and some money. I’ll get right on it. Any progress on the Chagcharan lithium mine contract?”

            In a monotone voice devoid of any clue he’d been away for the last five months neck deep in land mines, horse shit, blood and bullets, he replied, “Yes, Anya, all three please. I’ve got a tango workshop on close embrace on 19^th Street at eleven and I don’t want to miss it.”

            He walked briskly past her through a large brown door into his office. The door shut with a muffled slam as part of the chute caught in the doorjamb.

            Inside his sparse office whose walls were spackled but not painted, he chuckled to himself as he recalled her shoes and how well they defined her as a woman of the West.

            He opened the door to a small bathroom with a shower, turned on the hot water, and let it run. He laughed when he thought that he wouldn’t be skipping out on his bath this time.

            He was glad to be back in his office with Anya at her desk. She was his connection to the pulse of the city. Through her, he could live his life to his own satisfaction. It didn’t hurt that she was a damn good tango dancer, too, in case he needed a practice partner in a pinch.

            Tango was the only partner to whom Jack could be faithful.  Like all tango dancers, she took him in when he was wounded. She lived in his brain where he worked on movements in moments of solitaire where the complex rhythms of her music echoed softly.

            A large oak desk inhabited the center of the room on top of an old oak wood floor looking out of place in this modern office space devoid of decoration. Against the wall-sized window, was a large couch where he often slept. He liked to be close to the hum of the city that rocked him to sleep like a mother singing a lullaby to an infant. Fifty stories up, there was not much noise from the street, only a soft vibration filtering in through the steel beams that supported his nest in the sky.

            He took a long hot shower and walked back to his office to find a pair of Converse sneakers, a couple of credit cards with his name rubber-banded to a wad of $100 bills and the latest smart phone with a yellow Post-it note indicating the phone number of the device.

            He peeled off the sticker, committed the number to memory and tossed it in the garbage can across the room.

            Opening a drawer in his desk, he produced a roll of duct tape, tore off two short strips and placed one on each of the bottoms of his sneakers to allow him to turn easily on a smooth surface for dancing.

            Picking up the phone, he familiarized himself with it, scrolling through the screens and menus before sending a text to Anya in the next room. He asked her to send flowers and chocolates to Bunny at his apartment.

            A few seconds later, he received a text back indicating that it was done. There were many smiley faces in the text.

            He smiled.

            By ten-thirty a.m., he was out the door and back on the street hailing a cab to go to an Argentine Tango workshop downtown.

            He caught the tango bug after attending a play on Broadway called Forever Tango in 1990. Afterwards, he went to a ‘milonga’, a place where tango, and only tango, is danced.

            As he rode in the cab, smelling heavily of incense and alcohol, the sights of the city whizzed by his window as blurs of bodies, buildings and automobiles of every sort.

            He remembered his first impression of tango culture. At first, he couldn’t figure out how the men were inviting the ladies to join them on the dance floor. They all seemed to know each other and spontaneously decided to get up and unite as a couple in what seemed like a very passionate embrace.

            The room was a small ballroom with two rows of marble pillars in the center. The floor was made of three-inch-wide oak boards and had a deep, rich golden patina after years of dancers walking and turning upon its hard surface.

            He asked a tall blond-haired woman in her fifties to dance because he liked her shoes. She smiled and met him on the floor. Slinging her left arm around his neck, she pressed her forehead to his cheek and waited for him to begin.

            “You know nothing,” she said plainly. “Sit down.”

            She indicated with her outstretched hand back to the place where she had been sitting, a row of simple wooden chairs and small coffee tables lined up against a wall.

            She called herself La Batata. She was the first woman to explain the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of tango culture to Jack. She was a singer who came that night to perform a song called Malena. She was a novice tango dancer, or tanguera, as women who danced tango were called, but she was Argentine and well versed in the rules and regulations of this cultural export from her homeland.

            He found it odd that an Argentine at her age would be learning the dance that hailed from her own country.

            “Cabaceo,” she spoke, looking him directly in the eyes with no intention other than to communicate and make sure he was listening, “is how we ask and are asked to dance.”

            She held a small plastic cup filled with red wine in her hands and rolled it around the interior ridge of her right hand from the thumb to her forefinger’s tip without spilling a drop.

            She continued with the seriousness of an elementary school teacher educating a young student on the fundamentals of language, “It is difficult for a man to ask a woman to dance, sometimes it is the hardest thing for him to do. His machismo is at stake and a man needs his machismo or else he is nothing in his own eyes. Cabaceo enables a man to ask without risk to his manhood. It is done with the eyes,” she put her cup down and pointed to her own two eyes with her two fingers and then to Jack’s eyes, “you make contact, eye contact, and, if she likes you or she just wants to dance, then she will nod. You can then walk over to her and escort her onto the floor. If she doesn’t like you or doesn’t feel like dancing, she will simply not make eye contact.”  

            Jack said nothing, listening raptly while watching the couples move around the dance floor. He found himself fascinated with their feet, the women’s elegant shoes tracing intricate circles on the floor and in the air with a certain kind of playfulness that he found pleasing and enticing.            The men moved with catlike precision and the confidence of lions.

            It was like no other dance he had encountered. He had learned ballroom dancing in college, a must for any young man or woman with a pedigree or someone who is socially ambitious, especially military officers. This dance bore no resemblance to anything he had ever encountered. There was no logic to it, no direct connection to any particular rhythm in the music of which there were many and yet, oddly enough, they did not appear to be out of sync with the songs. He could discern no correlation between the alluring, sensuous movements of the women and the cues given by their partners.

            He found the women, dressed in revealing skirts and high heels, to be very appealing, sexy, sometimes slutty, but always very seductive. He was transfixed by the movement of their feet on the floor, perpetually in motion, drawing soft imaginary lines like artists painting abstract images on the floor of the ballroom, inspired by the complex rhythms of the music.

            The taxi screeched to a sudden stop to avoid another cab that had pulled out in front of them. The driver yelled obscenities in Pashtun that made Jack smile, then laugh.

            At his destination, Jack paid the cabbie and headed into the lobby of a non-descript high-rise. A small marquis in the lobby indicated tango was on the eighth floor. He rode up in the elevator and arrived ten minutes after the class had begun. He paid the modest registration fee to an elderly woman sitting on a folding chair in front of a small card table.

            As he entered, a collective sigh swept through the women in the room, relieved to add another man to their choice of partners. Many women knew him and liked him. A handsome man with a billion dollar bank account, he had a host of women frequently stalking him. He had a reputation as a competent leader. He should be, he’d been doing this for eleven years and had been to Buenos Aires twice to learn from the natives.

            A woman once said to him after a dance, her face flushing and her knees wobbly, “Jack, you’re like a fur coat: not every woman can own one but all women want to wear one, a real one, at least once in their life.”

            The room was a lot like Jack’s office, devoid of decoration: a wood floor, walls, some with mirrors, a few benches lining the walls and not much else. The class was gender balanced except for two women who came as a couple.

            In the center of the room were the instructors for this class. A tall thin man of Serbian descent named Drago stood next to an extraordinarily attractive woman known as Olivia, who was dressed in a fluorescent pink, skin-tight dress. She had platinum blond hair. Her skin was very pale and she spoke with a Scandinavian accent.

            Jack Stueben easily found a woman to be his partner then directed his attention to the instructors. Everyone was excited about the subject being discussed: the tango embrace.

            Instruction was not something Jack needed. He was well acquainted with all aspects of this particular subject, as well as with most topics on the fundamentals of this dance. What he needed more than anything was to be back in the embrace of the tango community.            

            Argentine Tango was all about physical and emotional connection, he thought; it had nothing to do with verbal exchanges. To him it meant physical comfort without the need for verbal commitment.

            “What we are looking for in the embrace,” Drago began, speaking eloquently with the hint of a Balkan accent, “is a sensual connection. That means we are connected not only by the physical sense of touch but also by the other senses.”

            He took a short breath and looked around the room at each of the students, staring intently at all of them. When he came to Jack, the gaze of his grayish-blue eyes seemed to linger for an extended moment that Jack instinctively knew was a tool of assessment.

            The small hairs on the back of Jack’s neck stiffened when he felt the instructor’s eyes upon him. Out of place as it was, he sensed the beginning of a battle between two men when each sizes up the other before mortal combat.

            He dismissed this thought, attributing it to culture shock, jetlag or maybe even post-traumatic stress syndrome.

            Drago continued, “When we are in tango embrace, we are aware of our partner’s smell, the sound of her breathing. If our diaphragms are aligned, we are attached to each other’s spines, to our nervous systems. It takes a great deal of concentration to perceive all of these things but we must do this to begin the dance properly.

            The most difficult part of tango is to allow ourselves to relax while completely focusing on our collaborator; yet that is what we must do: join in the embrace and allow ourselves to feel and hear every emanation from our partner. When you can do this, then, and only then, will two people be able to move as one.

            Argentines do this naturally because it is a part of their shared heritage. For us it is difficult because we must learn how to relax and how to allow ourselves to connect without any barriers.”

            Olivia looked to him, nodded her head and turned her eyes to the rest of the class for affirmation of the teacher’s message.

             Jack turned to the woman next to him, an Amerasian woman. She was tall but not too tall, about five foot six or seven, he guessed. She was quiet and seemed a bit introverted.

            He offered his frame to her and let her be the judge of how close she wanted to get since he suspected she might be timid. He was totally in control. He’d done this a thousand times and was certain she was in for a real treat; he was going to light her up like a Christmas tree, watch her cheeks flush and hear her gasp as her breath quickened unexpectedly at the warmth of his body and his commitment to their temporary union.

            She placed her right hand on his extended left hand and grasped his thumb like the claw of a tiny bird alighting on a branch. Her grip told him he needed to move his arm a fraction of an inch towards her to complete the embrace and he did. Then she reached her left arm over his shoulder and across his back to place her hand on his left shoulder blade.

            She pressed her form to his. Her short black hair barely brushed his face. She elevated herself on her toes until her forehead was even with the top of his cheek. When she did this, he could sense the tautness of her tendons as she extended her legs to accommodate him. He found this arousing. He could hear the sounds of her breaths falling gently in his ear. She collapsed herself onto his frame in an act of submission performed to perfection.

            He was overwhelmed. He could feel the outline of her petite breasts against his chest yet she was light as a feather. It was as if she was not leaning on him at all. Her hair was clean and fresh, absent of any fragrance other than her own natural scent. He felt her ribcage expand as she pressed herself further into his embrace. She was completely acquiescent and ready to move at his command.

            He was lost in her femininity.

            The music began to play and he feigned to his left. She responded perfectly. He breathed her in, enjoyed the aroma of her body and moved to the side, transferring their weight to his left side. She followed without hesitation or resistance, as if she was a part of him who wanted nothing, who merely waited for him to move but was quite content to be still.

            He could feel the warmth within her. They had chemistry and their coming together created a heat that burned like fire. He was confused, how could he feel such a thing, he thought.

            With that question in his mind, she shut him down completely and cut off their connection. Withdrawing her arm, she lowered herself from tiptoe position until she stood flat-footed like an elevator returning to ground level.

            He was devastated. What had he done wrong?

            He saw the disappointment in her eyes as she looked to the instructors. Something deep inside told him this was a setup. He tried to ignore his instincts, thinking he was still out of sorts from a twelve thousand mile flight and the culture change.

            The woman stepped away from him and looked to her right. A tall figure blocked the sunlight streaming in through the window from the street.  It was the Serbian.  He was explaining something to Jack who was unable to comprehend the words of the instructor. He could only see the woman getting further away and the heat fading like a cloud covering the sun.

            Drago stood before him, his hand outstretched.

            “You’re restricting her movement,” the teacher said as he grabbed Jack’s hand.

            He said more but Jack didn’t hear a word.

            When the other man’s flesh touched his hand, he flashed back to Afghanistan. How many men had he killed in the last six months? This is how most of his victims died, with the touch his hand. Faces flashed in his mind of men who breathed their last breath with his arms wrapped tightly around their necks. 

            He switched to combat mode too late: the enemy already knew that he was aware of him.  He let his arm go limp, the rigidity disappeared from his posture and he allowed the other man demonstrate how to embrace the woman properly. His gut feeling told him the deathblow would not come here in front of all these people.

            “Good, good,” Drago said as he smiled broadly and displayed a light-blue sapphire embedded in his upper-left canine tooth.

            He forgot all about the Amerasian woman as he pretended not to be aware of the instructor’s intent. He could feel the eyes of the hunter upon him.

            The class was soon over and the students milled about waiting for two more teachers to arrive, Little Carl and Penelope.


Note: For an in-depth look into the mind of the Kayak Hombre, read his book, available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/River-Tango-perri-iezzoni/dp/1453865527/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369366756&sr=1-1&keywords=River+tango