She got out, Luke bounding to the sidewalk behind her. He turned a complete circle, trying to see everything at once. He grabbed the camera he wore around his neck and began flashing off shots at a man beating a tambourine on the corner, chanting some kind of native song with a coffee can for money between his feet. Luke seemed content to fill up the camera’s digital memory card right here beside the cab.
Mira handed the driver his fee, plus what she hoped was a fair tip in pesos. She hadn’t studied the currency rates as closely as she’d planned, as there simply had been too much to do. “Gracias,” she said.
The cabbie accepted the fare and glanced at Luke, who was busy giving Jimmy Olsen a run for his snapshot money. “He is happy to be here, yes?”
“That is definitely true.”
“You two, you are brother and sister? Siblings?”
“Not just siblings.” Mira offered him a kind smile as she hoisted her bag and turned away. “We’re twins.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The sun detonated on the desert’s eastern horizon. Dawn happened in the Atacama like the Big Bang; the world went from a tiny singularity at night to full-on daylight. Suddenly everything was orange and slate and the white of old bone.
Gabe hurried around the observatory. Since the police had departed, he’d done nothing but think about the dead man, the Midnight Messenger, the man without a face. He put himself in that man’s place, running across the wasteland, running and sweating and running some more, finally pulling up for breath outside the observatory and dying without even knowing he’d been struck. Dying alone. That’s what ate away at Gabe, who knew aloneness the way other men knew a lover.
“Vicente!” Gabe called, searching for the maintenance supervisor.
Rubat had already dismissed the incident. He thought Gabe was hallucinating, smoking pot he’d procured from the locals. He ascribed the spilled blood to a wounded animal, and though Gabe had argued that there were no animals in this place—no rattlesnakes, no coyotes, not even any goddamn earthworms—Rubat had only waved a hand and muttered epithets in Arabic. “You want to stay on this project,” he’d said, “you stop crying the wolf.”
“Vicente!” Gabe found three men tending the small solar array behind the observatory. All three wore coveralls and caps. Gabe looked helplessly from one to the other. “Vicente?”
The man on the left said, “Hear you had a wild night, amigo.”
Gabe knew him by his voice. “Yeah. You could say that.”
“Something about a body?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But there’s blood.”
“Sí, I saw where the cops had dug it up.” He put down his socket wrench and wiped his hands on a rag. “Hey, you want to hear a good cop joke?”
“On any other day, Vic, yeah, but I need to use one of the four-wheelers.”
Vicente didn’t seem to hear him. “One day, everyone gets to arguing about who is the better police force. Our carabineros say they can catch a rabbit faster than the army and the American FBI. So they have a contest and set a rabbit loose in the forest.”
Gabe hardly heard him. He thought about the Messenger, the man he’d named for a comic-book character. What had he been running from? What the hell could possibly be out there? More importantly, what had happened to his body? Had someone dragged it away while Gabe was inside?
“The FBI goes into the woods,” Vicente said. “They conduct surveillance with illegal wiretaps and pay off all kinds of animal informants. After two solid months of expensive investigating, they conclude that rabbits do not exist.”
What about the boots and watch the man had been wearing? Did that imply he was a member of the military? And if he was, how did that change things?
“After that,” Vicente continued, “our steadfast Chilean army embarks on a rabbit-finding campaign. After a week with no luck, they burn half the forest down, killing God knows how many animals, and they consider the mission a success. They have a parade.”
Gabe swung his attention back to his friend. And Vicente was his friend, a rare and dubious honor. Gabe owed him more than just feigned interest.
“Finally, the carabineros take a crack at it. They go into what’s left of the forest. After only two hours, they come out, dragging a bear with bruises over most of its body, a bloody nose, and one broken leg. The bear is yelling, ‘Okay, okay! I’m a rabbit! I’m a rabbit!’”
Gabe smiled. “Not bad.”
Vicente laughed, a spirited sound that carried across the desert. “Not bad? You, my friend, should be chuckling your white ass off. I guess getting interrogated by the carabineros really wore you down, eh? You know what we call them here? Tortugas ninjas.”
“The Ninja Turtles?”
Vicente seemed to find it very funny.
“Well, it wasn’t an interrogation, and it wasn’t them. I had the honor of speaking with plainclothes detectives.”
“Oh, investigators, very impressive.”
Gabe touched the man on the arm. “I need one of the four-wheelers.”
“Isn’t this about the time of day you should be in bed? I heard that astronomers are like vampires.”
“In more ways than one. Is borrowing one of the quads going to be a problem?”
Vicente considered him. “This is serious?”
“Feels that way.”
“You really saw somebody get shot?”
“I need to get moving, okay? The tracks may already be gone.”
“Who shot him?”
“I don’t know. Gigante, maybe.”
“Why is it even any of your concern?”
“I can’t turn away from this. It’s … hard to explain. Call it accidental empathy.”
Vicente drew in a breath, held it, then exhaled loudly. “You going alone?”
“Not if you’re volunteering.”
“Say I am, if only to keep you from getting lost. What is it that we’re hoping to find?”
Gabe gazed in the direction of the desert’s heart. “Whatever was chasing him.”
* * *
They started at the blood.
The cops had taken it. Where last night there had been a Rorschach splotch of dried blood, today there was only a shallow hole. The crime-scene techs had carefully cut away that section of the ground, bagged it, and trucked it off to the lab in Calama. Though Fontecilla’s group had arrived by chopper, the blue-collar cops had driven six hours in a van full of forensic equipment, then turned around and hauled it all back.
Astride a green Arctic Cat 400 ATV, Vicente said, “Platypus.”
Sitting on an identical vehicle, Gabe looked up from his inspection of the ground. “Come again?”
“My son, Sergio, he loves the zoo. Everywhere we go, we visit the zoos. Buenos Aires, Mexico City, San Diego … The strangest thing I’ve ever seen is a platypus. Do you know this creature?”
“I’ve seen pictures.”
“The platypus is a mammal, like a fox, but it hatches from an egg like a turtle.”
“And why is this important?”
“Had you told me there was a venomous mammal that laid eggs, I would probably not believe you until I saw one for myself.”
Gabe knew where this was going. “And if I told you that I saw a man get shot, that I had his wrist in my hand to feel for a pulse, and that his body vanished when I wasn’t looking…”
Vicente held his gaze, wanting to believe.
He ran and died alone.
Gabe didn’t try to express what he felt, this weird kinship with a murdered man, this connection that pulled him along, farther into the unknown. “Come on.” He twisted the throttle and followed the boot tracks in reverse, wondering if he was going crazy.
They kept the ATVs on either side of the prints, moving at no more than fifteen kilometers an hour. They’d brought along more water than was necessary and both a digital and an analog compass; getting stranded out there in the open was a mistake you made only once. The tracks revealed the ripple pattern of the
boots’ soles, a pattern that Fontecilla had rightly called distinctive. Though the impressions were faint, Gabe was able to keep his eyes on them without needing to look up. He wasn’t going to crash into anything out here, so he could afford to drive with his attention fixed on the ground between them. Though he was usually crawling into bed by this hour, he tested the edges of himself but found no weariness. Too much stirred within him, a nebula of emotions. Fontecilla and the police didn’t believe him. Rubat had warned him not to pursue it. Yet here he was, trundling out in his faded boonie hat and sunglasses, for no other reason than to follow the strange pity he felt for a man he didn’t even know.
“If there was no body,” Vicente said, “then shouldn’t there be another set of prints?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, somebody had to come carry the body away, yes? There should be signs.”
“Maybe. The ground here is fairly hard. My tennis shoes hardly even make an impression. The only reason we’re able to see these boot tracks is because of their rigid soles. If someone was wearing moccasins or something, they’d probably leave almost no print at all.”
“They’re getting fainter,” Vicente observed.
It was true. The desert was eating the tracks, stiff soles notwithstanding. The ground had nearly erased all traces of the man’s passing. In a matter of hours, perhaps less, he would be nothing but a phantom running through the dark of Gabe’s mind.
“Let’s pick it up a little,” he suggested.
Vicente looked back. The observatory was already a kilometer behind them. “Is it safe?”
“I have a good sense of direction,” Gabe said. “We won’t get lost.”
“Famous last words.” Vicente gave his vehicle some gas, and in seconds the two of them had tripled their speed.
For a few moments Gabe did nothing but enjoy the breeze produced by the moving ATV. Around him lay a field of coarse soil and scattered rock. As the sun pushed higher into the sky, it unlaced the shadows to reveal weird contours and oddly buckled hills. Earth’s driest place was seemingly put together with spare parts, each of them alien and as arid as rust.
“Did he have a bota?” Vicente shouted over the growl of the engines.
“A what?”
“A bota! A wineskin, canteen, something like that.”
“Not that I saw.”
“So … how did he survive out here?”
He didn’t, Gabe wanted to say. He died right in front of me.
“Maybe he prayed to Illapa,” Vicente said, answering his own question. “He’s the old Incan weather god. They say he kept the Milky Way in a jug and sometimes poured out rain. What do you think?”
Gabe looked down and saw no more tracks.
Applying the brakes, he slowed the four-wheeler and searched the ground. Finding nothing but the patterns of swirled soil made by the wind, he turned a circle and inspected the area on either side of him. Maybe he’d veered from his original course, or perhaps the Messenger had approached from a different direction.
After ten minutes of searching in ever-widening swaths, he pulled up beside Vicente and hoped the man didn’t try another joke. Vicente was half Canadian, half Aymara Indian, a citizen of Chile but a patriot of American sitcoms. He had a way of timing his wit as if waiting for the laugh track. But he must have sensed Gabe’s mood, because he said nothing, only took a swig from a water bottle and belched dramatically.
“I know what I saw,” Gabe said quietly, eyes on the distant, angular hills.
“It happens out here.”
“That was no hallucination.”
“Of course not. The police have the bloody dirt clods to prove it.”
“And those tracks.”
“Sí. The tracks. But the desert has smothered them.”
“I’m not sure I can leave it at that.”
“You’re saying you want to keep this up, piss off Rubat, and get yourself sent home?”
“I’m saying it’s a shitty way to die.” He shook his head, wondering what Vicente looked like. Even as they sat beside each other on their matching ATVs, he felt separated from him by a chasm that Vic could never comprehend. Vic looked exactly the same as Rubat, exactly the same as the Sultan of Brunei, exactly the same as everyone else. Gabriel Traylin lived on a planet of seven billion people, but not one of them did he know on sight. “I’m just saying it sucks that he spent his last moments on Earth without—”
A light flashed in the hills.
“What?” Vicente noticed Gabe’s expression and turned in his seat. “What is it?”
Gabe squinted, trying to get a better look. There was nothing there. The desert was dealing wild cards again.
“I don’t see anything,” Vicente said, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Not surprising, though. Those UFOs, man, when they start moving, you really got to keep your eyes peeled. Know what I mean?”
Gabe saw it again. For a moment it was there, a mirror ricochet of sunlight, as mysterious as the pulsars that so often called to him from space.
“There’s something out there.”
Before Vicente could respond, Gabe goosed the throttle and charged after it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mira and her brother finished breakfast and went in search of the miracle man.
Apparently Chileans didn’t agree with that old saw about the first meal of the day being the most important, as the hotel’s café offered only coffee, bread, and pastries. Nevertheless, Luke fell in love with a caramel-flavored topping called manjar, slathering it over his toast. He said hola to everyone in the café, proud of his command of this foreign tongue, and the passersby were kind enough to return the greeting.
Things were different on the street.
The war zone common to American cities was no different here, with horns and digital advertisements and everyone walking too quickly. Having grown up in a rural town on the Missouri River, Mira had never learned to soldier through these battlefields. When she’d visited New York after college, she’d loved the shows but hated the stress. This morning, though, with so much at stake, she would storm the beaches bravely and see what waited on the other side.
Armed with a single address and a Spanish phrase book, she boarded a green and white Volvo bus, part of the city’s Transantiago system, and hoped she’d picked the right stop. Luke claimed a window seat, as always, and he spent the ride mesmerized, as always. Mira had converted eight hundred dollars before leaving the States, and if her spreadsheet was correct, she’d be forced to use her credit card only occasionally, which was good, since the thing was beginning to bend like an overloaded bridge.
“Gretel! Wow! Check it out!”
Outside the window stood a hundred-year-old statue of the Virgin Mary, arms held beneficently at her sides, tourists idling around her feet. The look on her face was neither kind nor aloof; Mira thought the mother of Jesus looked rather bored.
“She’s as pretty as the Statue of Liberty,” Luke said.
“Maybe a little shorter,” Mira suggested.
Luke laughed. “Yeah. A little. A little shorter.”
Mira glanced from the street to her phone and back again. She’d downloaded maps of the city. Currently she and Luke appeared to be about four blocks away from where X marked the spot. She felt the proximity in her stomach, where the nerves fluttered their wings. She’d been hoarding vacation days for the last fourteen months, and now that she was finally here, her most immediate concern was not what this visit might mean for her brother, but simply the fact that she might throw up all over the floor of this nice public-transit bus. A year and a half ago, some kind of magic had happened, and the man responsible was now only minutes away.
Luke turned to her. He looked very serious. His blond hair was the same color as Mira’s, and so too were his brown eyes. They’d inherited these from their mother, Cathy the Carefree, Cathy the Leftover Hippie, Cathy the OD’d.
“This is a great, super trip,” Luke said. “The super best!”
“We just got here.”
“We just got here and it’s the super best!”
She smiled. “Don’t forget to take pictures.”
His eyes widened. “Right!” He dug out his camera from his fanny pack and pressed the lens against the bus window.
Mira managed to keep her manjar down for the rest of the ride, and when she led Luke off the bus, he was still firing away with the camera.
“Don’t fill up that memory card too quickly, Mr. Shutterbug. There’s still plenty left to see.”
“Mr. who-bug?”
“Mr. you-bug. Let’s go. His place should be just down the street.”
They passed a group of boys wearing shin guards and soccer shirts—fútbol, she reminded herself—and a woman steering a baby stroller with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. The street was narrow, the flat-roofed buildings wedged tightly together in a way that was mildly claustrophobic. A delivery boy on a sputtering scooter wove through traffic and honked a horn that sounded like a wounded bird. He wore a yellow jersey, a replica of those enjoyed by the leaders of the Tour de France.
“Wait.” Mira stopped, her brother bumping into her. “I think this is it.”
Luke watched a jet leave a white exclamation point between the clouds.
“Yeah, this is the one.” Mira dropped her phone into her handbag and glanced down at herself. She wore jeans, sandals, and her favorite scoop-necked top. The outfit made her look either sporty or as if she were trying to be nineteen again; she couldn’t quite decide which. Then again, at twenty-seven, she wasn’t far removed from that young age. She’d been an adult by the time she was in junior high. Being your twin’s bodyguard did that to you.
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