The Curse of the Lost White City

by James Gray

  Conversation turned to Zarkin’s latest passion. “Jacques, this job could be a chance of a lifetime,” he said. “Once we sell enough artifacts, I plan to make Ciudad Blanca into a world-class archaeological center. Something like the ruins of Copan here in Honduras or the pyramids at Chichen Itza up in Mexico. It will be a major attraction, an important addition to the tourist industry in this country. Valeska will be in charge.” A waiter came over and refreshed our wine glasses. Zarkin stopped talking until the man had left. “Selling select pieces that we take out of there this year will allow us to turn the dream into a reality. There is an extensive worldwide market for these objects and the prices are skyrocketing.”

  “Don’t worry, Jack, there are enough artifacts to make everyone happy,” Valeska added, winking at her uncle.

  “Soon you’ll see the site with your own eyes. There is no other place like it in Central America, or in the world for that matter,” said Zarkin. He smiled and shook his head. “I can read your thoughts. You want to know where the site is, don’t you? But you’ll have to wait a little while longer before I reveal its location, my friend. Up until now, it has been a guarded secret between Barker and myself. Even Valeska hasn’t a clue, despite the fact she accompanied us once.”

  Valeska added, “When we flew out there, they wouldn’t let me even look out of the plane’s window until we landed on the river. I just know that it’s somewhere in the mountains, south of the Mosquito Coast.”

  “You’ll both learn its precise location soon enough. Now, Monsieur Legris, let me tell you more about your assignment. Twice a month, you will take Esmeralda from Roatán to a river entrance on the Mosquito Coast. You will pick up the artifacts then transport them to our depot in Port Royal, Roatán, where they will be cleaned and classified and safely packed in crates.” He took another sip of wine. “All you have to do is sail the yacht and make sure it arrives safely and on time to each destination. The ground crew will do the heavy work. Valeska represents me. Until we finish up with Barker, I want her to keep stricter control over the financial transactions. The people who work for me are specialists in what they do. Out there on the Mosquito Coast, we need a good navigator. After each delivery, $4,000 is for you. US dollars. Cash. If something breaks, call me and I’ll send somebody out to fix it. If you need anything or have a problem with anybody, let me know. I don’t want any trouble. And I expect you to keep your mouth shut. Officially, Esmeralda is a charter boat that visits the Mosquito Coast.”

  I nodded in agreement, but what the hell was I getting myself into?

  “And … I’m counting on you to keep an eye on Valeska. She’s all I’ve got.”

  I looked over to Valeska, then back to old Uncle Igor. “Okay, sir, count me in.”

  “Here’s to our new partnership.” As our glasses clinked, I couldn’t help wondering if I would ever be able to escape this arrangement in one piece.

  As if to ease my qualms, Zarkin handed me an envelope. “This is for bringing my boat to Roatán. There’s a little more than I promised. You’ve earned it. Welcome aboard.”

  So I had now joined one big, happy family: the beautiful, dynamic, sexy girl, her millionaire uncle, and a thriving business-in-the-making. I had just become my own victim, trapped in my own plan. I faked another smile, shook hands with Zarkin, kissed Valeska. It was getting late, so we finished our drinks and got in a waiting taxi.

  THE BUMPY RIDE BACK

  Zarkin sat beside the driver, and Valeska and I sat in the back. By now, Zarkin was rambling. He had begun to repeat himself. Valeska put her hand on mine, then gently moved it over me. I closed my eyes, feeling a little high from all the wine. I leaned my head back and enjoyed.

  “I’d rather spend the night with you,” she whispered in my ear. “But I need to take care of my uncle while he’s here. We’ll be together on the boat. Jack, I’m really looking forward to that.”

  Suddenly, bright headlights came up from behind. A big, dark pickup truck pulled alongside us. Our driver swore. There was gunfire. The driver slumped. Our car swerved. I felt weightless as our vehicle lifted off the ground and began to roll.

  “This must be it,” I thought. I remember flying through the air, cartwheeling free in a slow-motion spin and then landing face down on a cool, wet muddy surface. I felt no pain. I heard no noise. All I could do was attempt to float back up to the surface again, back to the place I was before. But the space I had once known was gone, and the future was dark and empty. Was this death?

  I vaguely remember beginning to focus on the shadows. On the ceiling above me, something small and dark crawled along slowly, stopping and then moving again. I closed my eyes.

  A bird cawed outside a window. Thin rays of sunlight cut through the lowered shutters that separated the brightness outside from the dankness inside. A nurse appeared and calmly began cleaning the mud off my legs with a cool wet sponge. She didn’t say a word, but I could feel the care through the slow movement of her hands. When the nurse left, her shoes made a clip-clop noise.

  I awoke sometime later. There was a small brownish dog sniffing at a pile of muddy clothes in the corner. They were mine. I had an IV that was connected to a half-empty bag of fluid. The skin surrounding the IV port was blue and swollen. My head was bandaged. My chest hurt so much I could hardly breathe.

  A doctor entered the open door and looked at me. He pulled a chair next to the bed and said quietly, “There’s nothing I can do for you here. You have too many fractures in your right arm. You need surgery as soon as possible. We just aren’t equipped for that at this hospital. You will have to be moved to a facility that can provide a higher level of services than we can.” He left before I could really comprehend what he had said, or even ask for something to reduce the hammering ache in my skull.

  I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of the words I had just heard. My entire body was throbbing with a deep, grinding pain that intensified as I lay there. Something was wrong with the right side of my head. It felt numb. I had serious injuries to my arm, my shoulder and my ribs.

  A nurse materialized beside me and shook her head at the tubes in my arm. “That’s not right, the needle isn’t in the vein. That’s why your arm is so swollen. This isn’t good at all. Who did this?” She unstrapped the tube connecting the needle in my arm. “You’re going to feel a pinch.” She found a vein with the needle. “Don’t worry, I’ve been a nurse for fifteen years. The swelling should go down now.”

  “What happened?” I didn’t recognize my own voice.

  “They found you at the bottom of a ravine. The driver is dead. Señor Zarkin is still unconscious. He received three bullets to his chest.”

  “And the woman?”

  “Only scratches and a slight concussion.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to relax.

  “You’re lucky. At first, they thought you were dead. Do you remember anything?”

  “Not much. Where are the others?”

  “In a room at the end of the hall. You need to go to a real hospital; this is just a clinic. The woman who was in the accident with you has chartered a plane that should arrive this afternoon to take you to Tegucigalpa.”

  “I want to see her.” For a second, I couldn’t remember her name.

  “She’s with Señor Zarkin.”

  “Oh yes, Zarkin,” the name was familiar.

  With much effort, I sat up slowly and swung my legs over the side. I stood up. The nurse helped me get my balance. A dull, throbbing pain shot through my right shoulder down to my arm. Every joint in my body ached. I shuffled down the dank corridor, pushing the IV pole.

  Zarkin was lying in a small, dark room that smelled of disinfectant and bug spray. His lips and eyes were swollen. His chest was wrapped in bloodstained white cotton. When Valeska saw me, she froze for a second.

  “Jack.” She looked frail. Her face was scratched and her fine black dress was covered with mud. She had an ice pack on one foot. Zarkin lay there, looking up at the ceiling, unable
to speak. His skin had lost its color. I tried, but I couldn’t say anything, and for a moment, the room started to spin. The nurse felt me go and held me up.

  “They weren’t ordinary bandits,” Valeska said in a low voice. She was trembling and there was fear in her eyes.

  “Barker?” I asked.

  “Who else? We were set up, Jack. I should have seen it coming.”

  A few hours later, I was loaded into an ambulance. Zarkin was on the gurney next to me. Once it reached the airport, paramedics wheeled us toward a two-engine plane. Valeska was a blur. There were a few nurses and a doctor standing around Zarkin. It didn’t look good. Everything seemed to be going too fast. I could feel Valeska’s hand caressing my face. I remember a door closing and the roar of the engines as they turned over. Then nothing.

  The next thing I knew I was a passenger riding in another kind of ambulance, racing at high speed through what seemed to be bumpy, narrow streets. I saw the world rushing by through the rear windows. Twisted electric wire attached to wooden poles, clouds of dust, street signs, beeping horns and billboards full of people with smiling white teeth and bottles of brown soda. This was Tegucigalpa, the heart of Honduras.

  When we finally arrived at the hospital, the medics unloaded us in front of the emergency department. They rolled me past groups of tired, ill people. Some were standing, others were sitting hunched over, and a few were stretched out on the floor. There weren’t enough plastic chairs to go around.

  No one said a word. They just moved aside as if they’d seen this before: a gringo being escorted by two or three paramedics, while the local sick and injured had to wait in the corridor for days before getting treated. My stretcher had a high-pitched squeaking wheel. The corridor smelled strongly of formaldehyde and I felt very cold.

  They placed my gurney in a tiny room and moved me carefully onto a narrow cot against the far wall. There were no windows. There was a single florescent light. It was a private room, albeit the size of a broom closet and located next to the morgue. In the corridor beyond the separation, I could make out people talking in low voices. After a while, a youthful nurse came and took blood, and soon after that, an orderly with a plastic pan asked me if I wanted to urinate.

  “Más tarde,” I said. (Later.) At that moment, I just couldn’t handle having to pee in a bedpan.

  A doctor came in and asked a few questions. Then a nurse injected me with a green painkiller. I passed out thinking about organ trafficking. Perhaps my body parts would pay the bill for the airlift to Tegucigalpa. The sound of the accordion door sliding open woke me up. It was another orderly with a plastic bottle of water and a small cup.

  “¿Un poco d’agua, señor.” (Would you like a little water, sir?) He seemed more sympathetic than the previous one.

  I drank straight from the bottle, my first drink since Roatán. Another doctor came in and pulled the door closed behind him. He wore a clean white coat and held a clipboard in one hand. He examined my arm and said, “Multiple fractures, but I can operate. It will be complicated, but I’m confident we can do a good job. This is the best hospital in the country.” I could barely see his face in the dim light.

  “You know best.”

  “But this surgery will cost you.”

  “How much?”

  “About fifteen thousand US dollars.”

  That was like another kick in the ribs.

  “No, gracias, Señor Doctor, I’m going back to Canada as soon as I can. I don’t have to pay anything in Canada. It’s free.”

  “Free? Canada is a socialist country?”

  “Yes, we have free health insurance in Canada. It covers everything.”

  The doctor looked at me suspiciously. He must have taken me for an American gringo, but the idea of having to deal with a Canadian gringo with access to free health care took some wind out of his sails. He tried to negotiate, he lowered his price, but there was no way I was going to pay. Finally, he left.

  For a few long moments, I lay there alone, thinking about my next move. There was really only one choice: return to Canada. But first, I had something more urgent to do. I managed to get up, wrapped myself in a sheet, stepped into the corridor and asked a nurse where the toilet was. She looked at me with an uncertain expression and pointed down the hall.

  I must have looked like a zombie. No matter, I walked on, pushing my IV pole past dozens of people waiting on white plastic chairs. Some ate snacks out of crumpled tinfoil, a few talked together in low voices, while others just stared blankly. I finally found the bathroom. It contained a single toilet and no light. Used toilet paper had been tossed in a corner, the sink was blocked with crud and the walls were filthy. Beside the rust-stained toilet, a sour-smelling mop sat in a dirty plastic bucket. If this was the best damn hospital in the country, I wondered what the others looked like.

  Later someone came into my room and gave me morphine. It felt good. When I awoke, I felt a little better and began thinking about how to get back to the coast, back to where I should have been before this mess got out of control. It wasn’t going to be easy.

  The door slid open and the orderly scurried into my room. “Señor Legris.” I nodded. The door slid shut, followed by another long silence. A few minutes later, the doctor came in, followed by another man in a suit whom I’d never seen before. The doctor went through his routine and fed me another dose of pills. The other man seemed to be some sort of administrator.

  “Where is Valeska?” I asked.

  “Calmos, calmos, Señor,” said the orderly. (Relax, sir.)

  A sharp pain ripped through my chest and I started to cough up a little blood. The orderly grimaced, wiped off my face and changed the top sheet. After that, I must have nodded off. When I woke up, the small room was empty, and for a while I just lay still and listened to the faint shuffling sounds that came from the corridor. Just when I was beginning to feel as low as I could get, the door quietly slid open and someone walked in. In the dim light, I could make out the outline of a woman.

  “Valeska?”

  As she approached my cot, her eyes widened. “Jack, what have they done to you?”

  “Luckily, not much. Do I really look that bad?”

  She took a breath and I could see a tear run down her cheek.

  “Hey, I am so glad to see you.”

  She sat down on the chair beside my cot and wiped her eyes with a towel. She looked as if she had been crying a lot.

  “Your uncle?”

  “He’s gone. The funeral was this morning. I can’t believe that this has happened.”

  “Valeska, I’m so sorry. This has turned into a real mess.”

  “And what about you? When are they going to fix your arm?”

  “They’re not. I have to go back to Canada.”

  “Canada? But are you strong enough to leave?”

  “Strong enough or not, I’ve got to get out of here.”

  Valeska lowered her voice. “Listen, I contacted some people in Roatán yesterday. The wreck of that taxi has disappeared. There are no traces and the police aren’t saying a word.”

  “It’s Dog Barker; he set the whole thing up. That piece of shit.”

  “He organized everything right under our noses. We were completely taken in.”

  But despite the tears and reality check, Valeska seemed completely grounded. She looked at my bandaged arm. “What do you need?” she asked.

  “A pair of shoes; mine were lost in the accident. And I haven’t eaten since I got here. Room service is lousy.”

  “I’ll go and get you something right now.” Valeska came back shortly with a pair of cheap rubber sandals, a can of V8 juice and a taco wrapped in aluminum foil. I ate like a refugee.

  “What about Barker and the boat?”

  “Evaporated, disappeared. And of course, I’m sure that there is still a contract out on me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was about to have legal shares in the company just in case this kind of thing happened except t
hat we never got around to it. The boat and everything else is owned by the same company, and with my uncle out of the way, it all technically belongs to Barker. But legally, it won’t be that easy if I am still in the picture.”

  “Got it. But there’s not much we can do here. Let’s get the hell out of this place as fast as we can.”

  “Are you sure that you will be okay to leave?”

  “What choice do I have? If I stay here any longer, they’ll probably take me into the room next door and start removing my body parts. Valeska, I’ve got to go back to Puerto Cortés. I know it sounds crazy, but I have to settle a few things before I leave for Canada.”

  “Okay, in five minutes, I’ll be outside the main entrance waiting in the car. Meet me there.” She helped me dress, then left the room.

  It was around 2 p.m. when I limped out onto the sidewalk in front of the hospital. The blinding sunlight reflecting off the buildings on the other side of the busy street made my eyes water. The late afternoon heat was suffocating. I thought I would pass out. To my right, a legless man sat on a piece of cardboard begging for money. I was thankful for my own legs. At least they still worked. Across the street, two armed guards stood on the steps in front of the Banco Atlántida building.

  But where was Valeska? I was just about to panic when a beat-up cream-colored station wagon pulled up in front of me. Valeska got out quickly, opened the front passenger door and helped me inside. For a long moment I closed my eyes and every part of my body screamed with pain. But I was free from that stinking dungeon. Before I was properly settled, Valeska got in on her side, put the thing in gear and stepped on the gas. As we weaved through the flow of busy traffic, a certain sense of liberation swept through my whole being.

  “Hey, Valeska, you saved my life.”

  “Yes, but hang on tight. We’re not exactly free yet.”