by Farris, John
"No problem, Señor Colon."
"Enjoy your good wine and this fine day." He nodded formally to me as he rose to go. "Esta en su casa."
I wasn't a wine drinker, but the stuff seemed smooth enough. A glass of wine and a little of the spicy avocado soup was about all I could handle. My stomach hadn't been dependable since I'd arrived in Guatemala. Maybe if I had been on vacation I might have enjoyed myself more. The ambience was satisfying—a well-run hotel, a terrace that was shielded from the heat of the early-afternoon sun, which made the humidity a little easier to take. But my beard itched and I had heat rash where I couldn't get at it in a public place, and I'd slept poorly in a foreign country. Exotic birds, monkeys, a weight of centuries in the dense atmosphere beside a timeless lake—even when I did fall asleep, I dreamed I was awake. Also I was pretending to be somebody else, which shouldn't have bothered me. But I couldn't adjust, because each day brought me to a new level, or depth, of disorientation. An hour ago I had traced Greg Walker back to the year 1840 in the old ledgers of Don Santiago Colon's remote guest house. I had photographed all of the ledger entries in that familiar handwriting with a dependable old Minox camera. The kind they had been using in spy movies since World War II. Then lunch, with a man who complacently looked forward to a lifespan of more than a hundred years. That would leave him, maybe, a few decades or even a full century short of Greg Walker's record—
On the other hand, Greg might not be the record-holder. All I had to do was spend a few more days culling the registration cards and books, looking for other signature traits that would match up (at nineteen-year intervals?), going back to the beginning of the Itzá Maya. But I didn't have the fortitude. I don't think I wanted to know. Greg Walker was enough for me to cope with, in and out of my imagination.
I looked around at the lunch crowd: every table was full. A few Americans, from what I overheard of their conversations, Europeans, Latin businessmen, local officials, a table of nuns in pale blue dresses. The Itzá Maya had become the most popular meeting place in the region, according to Francisco Colon. But it wasn't a health resort. There were no curative waters, nothing that promised an extension of your life in exchange for a few nights in residence. Greg Walker, in all of his identities, had never stayed for longer than two weeks.
I sipped some wine and stared at the lake and the remnants of a two-thousand-year-old civilization on the near shore. Crude pyramid shapes, hazy through thin drifting smoke that was sometimes visible all day on the horizon. The smoke created spectacular red sunsets every night.
He had a compelling reason for coming here, to what was still a remote part of Guatemala, sometimes accompanied by minor children. The terrace was a recent improvement, so nineteen years ago Greg had sat somewhere else with Bonnie Sullivan, probably in the flagged courtyard of the old hotel. Talking about—what? What did he say to her?
Time for me to become someone else, Bonnie.
Okay, why? Why not go on being good old Frederick Sullivan, someplace other than New Lost River. Was he afraid Roxanne would track him down? Was he sexually involved with his own adopted daughter? But there had been other adolescent children with him during his sojourns—a son as well as daughters. If I knew anything about Greg Walker, I knew he had never compromised Sharissa. No, it just wasn't part of his pattern.
They came, Greg and his alter egos and his children: they stayed for up to two weeks, they left.
He left.
He left, and became another person.
Either the children left with him, and became other persons too, or—
They didn't leave.
The grinding began again, at a level below my heart, in the diaphragm, the grinding feeling that I needed to throw up. I tasted soured wine.
But that made no sense—to bring adolescents here, abandon them or even kill them. Serial killing was one of the possibilities I'd considered. But I'd never read about a serial killer with a methodology remotely like that. Many of them were wanderers, but they acted much more frequently and compulsively. Greg hadn't always come with a daughter or a son. In 1840, as Junius Haithorpe of Alexandria, Egypt, a British subject, he had been the only registered guest during the month of January. There was a possibility he had come with servants, who might not have been registered. I didn't know what sort of man Junius Halthorpe had been, or what he did for a living. He might've been able to afford a family of servants, including a young maid or two; maybe someone like Sharissa whom he was particularly fond of . . .
I almost sobbed out loud, from one of the unexpected knifings of grief that had become more frequent as I looked into Greg Walker's astounding past. I had to push a wadded napkin against my mouth, thinking about her, remembering how long it had been since I'd seen Sharissa. It was more than just my obsession, which I'd learned to live with: I felt that if I didn't see her face soon, if I couldn't be reassured that she was still alive, I would go crazy.
I woke up on the morning of January 25, after another long night of itching and sweating and medication and whiskey on top of the allergy pills, woke up hearing her voice.
I got out of bed in my shorts and went groggily to the balcony doors, which were open. The sun had been up for an hour; the light was strong and it was already hot. I put my prescription sunglasses on.
"Out!" Sharissa called to someone.
I opened the screen but stayed inside the room. She was on the third of four AsPhlex tennis courts, her opponent a dark bow-legged man with silver hair—the resident tennis pro, who had once been a member of the Mexican Davis Cup team. I'd played him a couple of times since arriving. He still had power and more shots than I could cope with, when he was able to get to the ball, but arthritis in both knees had slowed him down.
I only glanced at the tennis pro. For the next fifteen minutes, while I scratched the rash that had spread to my testicles in spite of daily applications of Desenex, I stared at Sharissa; I drank her in: the quick, smooth, gliding steps I knew so well, the fierce two-handed returns, the pleased abrupt toss of her head when she smacked one by the pro. He'd been really good in his time and she couldn't beat him, but she played him even while I watched. I wished I could have cheered; I fantasized Sharissa looking up and seeing me—her astonishment, her pleasure. Her big grin.
Hey, Butterbaugh! Where the heck did you come from?
But all she would have seen was a half-naked guy with an unfamiliar beard and a hairpiece and a woody in his shorts, scratched up while he was trying to kill the maddening itch.
It was the fiery rash that finally drove me into the shower. And there my fantasies continued . . . to a climax that only partly calmed me down.
By the time I was dressed, Sharissa had left the courts. The pro was giving a lesson to a couple of women with weak backhands. The terrace had begun to fill up for breakfast. Sharissa wasn't there; probably she'd gone to her room for a shower of her own. But I saw Greg.
He was sitting at a table next to the low stone wall around the terrace. Francisco Colon was with him, drinking coffee, listening intently, nodding occasionally. I say occasionally, because I watched them for nearly half an hour, part of the time through a long lens while I took some pictures, and during the half hour his lips seldom moved and his eyes almost never left Greg's face.
Greg Walker was not just another tourist stopping at the Itzá Maya Hotel. He had been, for the better part of two centuries, an honored guest there. And I was sure Francisco Colon knew that—not only did he know Greg's history, but also his purpose in returning once again.
So much for the facts. Facts presupposed some sort of logic, but everything I had learned in the past few days was tormentingly illogical. I had to make myself better informed.
Soon I saw Sharissa again, taking a long flight of steps two at a time. Greg turned as she reached their table, her long arms embracing him from behind. She had acquired a deep tan on their Christmas cruise of the Caribbean, and afterward at the camp meeting in Venezuela. She looked thinner to me. But she seemed to
be in an upbeat mood after all that exercise with the tennis pro. She kissed Greg on the forehead. A proper little smooch, but it chilled me. I took the picture anyway, as Greg welcomed his daughter to breakfast with an affectionate smile.
They were staying in bungalow nine in the gardens. I spent most of the day deciding how to get the listening devices into their bungalow.
The staff of the Itzá Maya were accustomed to seeing me all over the place with cameras. Hotel security was heavy because of the hit-and-run activities of government troops and a concentration of FAR guerrillas in the vicinity. I had heard gunfire, way off somewhere, automatic weapons that may have included fifty- and sixty-caliber machine guns, and twice in the night there had been brief mortar barrages. It was common to see helicopter gunships zipping low over the lake in pairs. But I suppose word had gone out that I was okay with management. Nobody paid attention to my movements around the hotel and grounds, even in areas considered off-limits to guests, like the kitchen and the construction zones.
I decided the best way was just to walk in, as if I were staying in the bungalow myself which I did while Greg and Sharissa were at dinner the next night.
The locks on the bungalow doors weren't much; I could've taught any eleven-year-old kid how to pick one in under two minutes. But they hadn't bothered to lock the door behind them. The garden was surrounded by a dense hedge that grew berries in clusters and long, sharp thorns. It was impenetrable from outside the hotel's perimeter. Anyone trying to hack through the nine-foot hedge with a machete also would need to wear a suit of armor.
Three small units, each about the size of two Alka-Seltzer tablets combined. Power cell, transmitter, a hair-thin antenna, microphone the diameter of the lead in a number two pencil. Three separate ultra-high frequencies. A useful life of six to seven days. Range, up to four hundred feet. My room, on the third floor facing the gardens and with a clear view of bungalow nine, was about two-thirds of that distance.
In the tropic heat, the sticking power of chewing gum worked well. I popped a snooper under the table beside Sharissa's bed, another in Greg's room, a third in a wall-mounted light fixture in the living room, away from the hum of the small refrigerator and the sink in the kitchen area. Walked out with a smile and a wave and a "good night" for the benefit of anyone who might have observed me in passing, went back to my own room, sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with the receiver, which was also a Sony Walkman CD player if I happened to be in the mood to listen to Waylon or Hank Junior, and waited.
Quarter past nine, footsteps. The screen door slapping shut. Damn! And Sharissa's voice, as clear as if she were sitting on the bed next to me.
"How about a few hands of gin?"
"Shouldn't you call the folks?"
"It's two hours' difference. They'll both be asleep."
"I forgot. Okay, gin it is."
Two thousand dollars well spent, I thought. I'd been avid since their arrival to be as close as possible to Sharissa. But there was no way I could follow her everywhere she went. Now that we were all here, I had yet to figure out how I was going to get Sharissa on a plane for home without running into some major opposition from Greg. But for now I could lay back and hear her anywhere in the bungalow. The microelectronic ear I'd planted under her night table even picked up, when she left the bathroom door ajar, some familiar, intimate sounds.
And I was with her that night, all night, through her prayers, through whispers as she read passages from the Bible half aloud, through every restless movement she had in her sleep. Twice she spoke, sharply, disturbed in her dreams.
"I want a flower," she said. And, later, "The dog's all wet, Mom!"
Greg, in his room, snored. If his own dreams bothered him, he had nothing to say about them.
The next thing I knew, Greg and Sharissa had a couple of bodyguards. One of them was a young woman who wore combat boots and a photographer's vest and carried an Uzi. The other one was a kid, but he was impressively armed, too. The names were Veronica and Benito; Francisco Colon was their uncle. I assumed he had supplied the guards at Greg's request.
Nothing much happened for a few days.
Sharissa swam in the pool and played tennis with the hotel pro. She read, on the porch of the bungalow, or took trips into Cobían with Veronica. Greg spent a lot of time with Francisco, usually in his office at the hotel. I found out, at my nightly listening post, when Greg and Sharissa planned to leave for the Baptist Mission down-country.
Their sightseeing trip to Kan Petén was planned a couple of days in advance, so I had no trouble following them up to the site on one of the scheduled minibus tours.
I'd been aware of Greg's growing tension. He wore shades almost all of the time, even at night, as if his eyes had become abnormally sensitive to light. Twice he'd growled at Sharissa for no good reason. "You're so jumpy!" she complained. Yes, he was. And keeping a very close eye on his daughter. When he wasn't with Sharissa, Veronica kept her company. As if Greg wanted to know what Sharissa was up to every minute. She complained about that, too. Some days Sharissa seemed bored and sad. Once, late at night, she woke up sobbing.
She cried in the cafeteria at Kan Petén too, because of something her father had said to her, which I didn't catch.
The room was crowded and noisy. I was sharing a corner table with some tourists from Belgium, who carried as much camera gear as I did. We looked like a photography club.
Then Greg walked out, or almost walked out. He was stopped by a man with pathetically foreshortened legs in a wheelchair. The greeting was friendly, but Greg looked snakebit.
"You've made a mistake!"
It was obvious to me that the man knew Greg—or was it Fred Sullivan?—from somewhere.
"Nils Lagerfield. Uppsala University. We met before, here at Kan Petén—almost twenty years ago. Your lovely daughter was with you."
I had the autofocus Nikon around my neck with the lens cap off, and a few moments with nobody in the way; I snapped several pictures unobtrusively, from chest level, without looking through the hundred-millimeter-lens.
Then it was over; Greg stalked out of the cafeteria and, watching him, aware of a tautly concealed fury, I knew there was only one way to play this from now on: take advantage of his insecurity. Lean on Greg, and lean on him hard. Throw everything I knew or thought I knew in his face, pin him into a corner, take Sharissa and run like hell before he could react.
To get away with what I was planning, I thought I might need to recruit some help.
When the man from Uppsala University left the cafeteria with a couple of his colleagues, I followed them outside. Greg and Sharissa and their bodyguards apparently had left the site. Lagerfeld was having a leisurely argument with the friend who pushed his wheelchair along the walk to the museum building. He used a lot of hand motions when he talked, and looked as if he was enjoying himself.
They all went into one of the offices located behind the exhibition wing. I stayed outside in the sun near the helicopter landing pad, and took a few pictures of the Bell copter with pyramids in the backgrounds. It was hot, and sweat aggravated the heat rash on the back of my neck.
"There's some stuff the Kekchi use for that," a voice said behind me. "It stinks to heaven, but your skin clears right up."
I looked at the tall, red-headed archeologist Sharissa had been talking to in the cafeteria. "I'll pay anything," I said woefully.
He laughed. "I might have some in my kit. Let me take a look. Is that the new Nikon you've got there?"
"I couldn't part with it," I said. "I'll just have to go on scratching."
He laughed again. "No charge to a fellow sufferer. With my complexion, I get eaten up by everything. Mosquitoes, bottle-ass flies, Azteca ants. Where're you from, Georgia?"
"Little place called Sky Valley."
"I think I know where that is. Between Chattanooga and Atlanta? I live in Nashville when I'm not in places like this. Glen Hazen."
"C.G. Butterbaugh."
He opened a door
of the tinny-looking flying machine. There was a corporate logo on the door. BAYOU TECHE OIL. The rotors that drooped above us didn't fill me with confidence in the essential airworthiness of helicopters. Up close, they looked even more dangerous than they did in the air.
"You a professional photographer, C.G.?" he asked, as he rooted around in a gym bag, hunched awkwardly half inside the copter. There were seats for six, and luggage room, but it rocked with his every movement. The whiny things got to going real fast, then it just lifted straight up off the ground . . . no, thanks. "Not with National Geographic, are you?"
"I wish. No, I've won some juried shows, but I still have my amateur standing. Are you in the family oil business?"
"I'm an archeologist. Vanderbilt University. We leased the copter for a couple of months from an alumnus. He's back home in Louisiana trying to raise more money. In spite of the political situation, there's a lot of oil prospecting going on in the Petén. This baby's loaded with electronics. It even has forward-looking infrared, don't ask me why."
He backed out and closed the door. He had what looked like an old blue Vicks VapoRub jar in the palm of his considerable hand, covered with a piece of aluminum foil that was held down by a rubber band.
"Try this. Probably it'll sting at first, then your skin cools off."
I took off the rubber band and foil, and reacted.
"Yeah, well, the smell's a tradeoff for comfort. Throw some aftershave on top, and you'll probably still be able to get a date."
I dipped a couple of fingers into a grayish-looking mess, in consistency somewhere between mayonnaise and petroleum jelly. Rubbed it across the back of my neck.
"Indians bleed it from some root or other. It's like thin milk at first, then turns to jelly."
"Maybe there's money in it, for a couple of sharp entrepreneurs." I ruined a good handkerchief cleaning my fingers, but the smell lingered. Like rotting potatoes, mixed with a corrosive. "Do you know how to fly this thing?" I said, putting my hand on the helicopter. I yanked it back. The afternoon sun had turned the metal skin hot as a stove top.
