The Dragon Griaule

by Lucius Shepard

  Baffled, Snow asked what he meant.

  ‘Your act.’ Guillermo poured him a shot of tequila. ‘It never fooled anyone, you know. Some of us were angry – we thought you were mocking us. But when we realized you were using us to get close to the ladies, we understood and we laughed about it. Since you were a nice guy, we played along.’

  ‘I wasn’t a nice guy,’ said Snow. ‘I was a total asshole.’

  ‘Well, you looked nice, anyway. And you acted nice. That’s what counted most back then.’

  They drank and reminisced for a while and then Snow asked about Yara.

  Guillermo lowered his voice. ‘Did you hear about what happened to her?’

  ‘Only a little. I just read about it last week. I’m hoping to learn more. That’s why I came down.’

  ‘You must be careful who you talk to about this. Very careful.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘The PVO.’ Guillermo refilled their glasses. ‘The Party of Organized Violence.’ He knocked back his shot. ‘They showed up about fifteen years ago, but they didn’t make much of a splash and no one took them seriously until the elections last year when they gained a plurality in Congress. They’re thugs. Scary right-wing thugs. Extremely scary. If they win a majority in the next election, and everyone says they will . . .’ He affected a shudder. ‘They don’t like gays. Joselito, my husband . . . he thinks we should relocate to Costa Rica.’

  ‘What’s this have to do with Yara?’

  ‘After she vanished a reporter got into Chajul. You know, the village out near the skull? This one guy got in, but soon the PVO sealed off access to that area of the jungle with their militia.’

  ‘They have their own soldiers?’

  ‘Nobody fucks with them. They might as well be running things already. But like I was saying . . .’ Guillermo knocked back a shot – it looked as if it hurt going down. ‘I have a friend who knew the reporter. The guy said most of the villagers had already fled, but he talked to one woman who told him there was a big spill of heat from the jungle. Hot enough to make you cover your face, she said. Then rippling lights appeared over the treetops. All colors. She assumed it was a religious thing, Jesus was coming down on a rainbow carpet, so she went into her house to pray to the Virgin. She heard people in the street and swears they had come out of the jungle, but she didn’t see them – she was afraid and hid. That’s all she had time to say before the PVO turned up and carried her away. The reporter beat it out the back window.’

  The ancient keyboard player announced he was taking a break – the sounds of the Casio were replaced by Latin pop.

  ‘Can I talk to him?’ Snow asked. ‘The reporter.’

  ‘He disappeared,’ said Guillermo, giving the word ‘disappeared’ a certain emphasis.

  Snow covered his glass to prevent Guillermo from pouring him another shot. ‘I guess I don’t get it. Why were the PVO so interested in a screwball cult?’

  ‘You’d have to ask them . . . but that’s not something I would recommend. You don’t want to attract the attention of those guys.’

  Guillermo was called away to settle some issue at the bar and Snow, glancing around the room, caught a thirty-ish brunette at another table checking him out. She wore an orange-and-yellow print frock with a tight bodice that accentuated her cleavage and she permitted herself a half-smile before saying something to her companion, a plump blonde. The blonde cast a quick look in his direction and the women shared a laugh. Snow had an impulse to make a move, to indulge in his old life again, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Guillermo rejoined him and nodded toward the brunette.

  ‘Stay away from that one, man,’ he said. ‘She’s Juan Mazariegos’ mistress.’

  ‘He’s a bad guy?’

  ‘The worst. He’s a bigshot in the PVO. Half the women here are PVO.’

  Snow asked him whether it was safe to visit the encampment.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ Guillermo said. ‘But there’s no point. You know how quickly the jungle comes back. It’s all overgrown in there. Nobody lives in Chajul nowadays and Yara . . .’ He made a gesture of finality. ‘She’s gone.’

  Snow didn’t want to believe that and had nothing to say. With an inquiring look, Guillermo held up the bottle – Snow shook his head.

  ‘Man!’ said Guillermo. ‘Drink with me. Who knows when you’ll be back again?’

  ‘I might stick around,’ Snow said. ‘I don’t really have anywhere else to go.’

  ‘Then we’ll drink to you staying. I’ll fill you in on all the gossip. Ten years’ worth.’

  With reluctance, for he was not that much of a tequila drinker anymore, Snow let Guillermo pour him a double.

  Guillermo raised his glass. ‘Old times!’

  Snow hesitated before touching glasses and said, ‘La Endriaga.’

  Guillermo had been right. The site of the camp was overrun with new vegetation and all Snow managed to unearth were a few sections of rusted tin. Despite the witness report of extreme heat, there were no charred tree trunks, no scorched areas. Nothing. He poked around for an hour, but couldn’t even find ashes. What kind of fire could have vaporized the skull and left tin unmarked? The absence of the skull, of any evidence as to the cause of its destruction, started to make him jumpy and he soon returned to his hotel.

  Snow had saved his money over the past decade and could have survived for quite some time in Temalagua without a job, but he thought it prudent to find work and secured a position teaching English at a private school in the suburbs. Each morning he would ride the bus from the city center, where he had taken an apartment, and spend the better part of his day preparing the spoiled teenage sons and daughters of the wealthy – who, chauffered by armed bodyguards, arrived in Hummers and town cars and limousines – to deal with their equally spoiled peers in the United States. They were arrogant little monsters, for the most part. Sullen and disrespectful even to one another, they treated Snow with a polished contempt that, if one didn’t examine it too closely, might be mistaken for civility. He entertained fantasies of walking into a classroom with an explosive device strapped to his mid-section. He met regularly with their parents, advising them of learning disabilities and behavioral problems, and it was during such a counseling session that he encountered Luisa Bazan, a zaftig brunette of thirty-five years, mother of Onofrio, a lizard-like youth with a penchant for upskirt photography, a pursuit for which he had been threatened with expulsion (this threat unlikely to be acted upon, since Onofrio’s father was Enrique Bazan, in line to become the PVO’s defense minister after the elections).

  Approaching his thirty-ninth birthday, Snow had retained his youthful good looks and thus he was not greatly surprised when Luisa requested increasingly frequent parent-teacher conferences and that during these sessions they discussed Luisa’s personal life more than they did Onofrio’s scholastic failings. Luisa complained about her husband’s cavalier treatment of her, his mental abuses, his rudeness to her family, his lack of concern for her concerns, and hinted at more heinous offenses. Snow offered a sympathetic ear; he understood the implied invitation and was tempted to accept it – although she would soon fall prey to obesity, sublimating her womanly desires with sweets and starches and bi-monthly shopping trips to Miami, where she now (according to her) satisfied her every appetite, Luisa was still exceptionally attractive and her desperation to employ her physical charms before age and indulgence further eroded them was as palpable and alluring to Snow as an exotic perfume. But he held firm and, when one afternoon she flung herself at him, rather than rejecting her out of hand, an act that might have antagonized her and sent her running to Enrique, complaining that Snow had committed an impropriety . . . on that afternoon he told Luisa he was grieving for a lost love (only half a lie) and that she was the first woman in years to have pierced the shroud of his grief and touch his heart. He asked for time to clear his head, to adjust to this unexpected change – he did not want to come to her encumbered by any shred of the past, he said. She deserve
d better and if she could wait but a little while for him to purge himself of old feelings, then all things would be possible. Due to his experience with such women, knowing that what they wanted was something excessive in their lives, some form of drama to break the comfortable tyranny of their marriages, Snow anticipated that a make-believe drama would be enough to suit Luisa’s purposes and in this he proved correct. From that day forward their conferences were models of comportment, marred only by incidental brushes of skin against skin, as happened when he helped her on with her jacket or handed her paperwork, and smoldering looks redolent of their unrequited passion.

  If you had asked Snow why he stayed on in Temalagua after learning what he could about Yara’s fate – that is to say, very little – he might have answered because the cost of living was cheap and the weather temperate, but in truth he remained obsessed and began to make discreet inquiries about Yara’s activities during the period leading up to her disappearance. Over the next two years his life acquired an unvarying routine, teaching by day and by night and on the weekends pursuing his investigation via the Internet and in the various establishments (offices, shops, bars) mentioned in passing by Yara as places where she had collected or delivered sums of money. Yet for all his efforts, the sole result of his investigation came to him by chance. Some twenty months after his return to Temalagua, while leafing through the Sunday newspaper, he ran across an article on page six of the front section concerning the murder (by terrorists, the paper suggested) of one Hernan Ortiz, an official of the PVO. Accompanying the article was a headshot of the victim that showed him to have been a lean, cadaverous fellow with a distinctive shock of white hair in his forelock. Further photographs found on the Internet depicted a lanky man dressed in army fatigues. Snow thought instantly of the electronics store clerk to whom Yara had given the envelope stuffed with currency. He hadn’t gotten a close look at the clerk’s face, but given the PVO’s interest in Yara’s cult, her statement that some of the men to whom she had given instructions and money were military, and now this photograph of a man with an identical streak of white in his hair . . . he refused to believe it could be a coincidence.

  That same morning, a warm spring morning, Snow met Guillermo for coffee at Mocca’s, a popular sidewalk café on the Avenida with a façade of tinted windows and heavy glass doors. Snow did not make friends easily. A serial manipulator, he mistrusted the validity of his emotional investments in other people and as a consequence he mistrusted the people as well – yet if forced to characterize his relationship with Guillermo, he would have said they were friends. In addition to feeling comfortable around Guillermo, he envied his openness, his ability to discuss freely every aspect of his life, and thus their Sunday meetings had become a semi-regular occurrence. They sat in the shade of an umbrella that sprouted from the center of their table, emblazoned with a Flor de Cana logo, one among several dozen identical tables from which arose the laughter and chatter of over a hundred upper class Temalaguans. The traffic stream was less heavy and less clamorous than usual, and the smell of coffee contended with that of gasoline fumes. Waiters in red T-shirts and dark slacks glided about, bearing trays loaded with food and drink, and chased off beggars who had infiltrated the tables, where they were being pointedly ignored by people so at variance in aspect from themselves, so well nourished, richly dressed, bedecked with gold, jewelry, and expensive sunglasses, they might have been of a different taxonomic order, sparrows among peacocks.

  Guillermo dominated the conversation, commenting cattily on the scene, pointing to this or that local celebrity, tossing out bits of gossip, but when Snow showed him the photograph of Hernan Ortiz he had clipped from the newspaper and inquired about the man’s connection with Yara, Guillermo’s airy mood dissolved. He covered the photo with a napkin and said, ‘What is it with you? You live with this girl a few months, you leave her, and now, years later, when she’s dead, you want to know everything about her.’

  ‘Curiosity,’ said Snow. ‘The road not traveled and all that.’

  ‘Get yourself another hobby. This one could get you killed.’

  ‘Did you know Ortiz? Back in the day, I mean?’

  Guillermo made an exasperated noise.

  ‘Come on, man,’ said Snow. ‘You knew everyone on the Avenida in those days.’

  ‘Yes, I knew him. He was a punk. He used to run with a gang who hung around the bus station. They ripped off street vendors returning home at night to their villages. They’d beat the hell out of them for a few quetzales. They beat the hell out of people like me for fun. A couple of years later he turned up looking clean and presentable, working at the electronics store. Word was he’d joined up with a big organization . . . but he was still a punk.’

  ‘A big organization? The PVO?’

  ‘Keep your voice down!’ As Guillermo sipped his coffee, he darted his eyes left and right. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I’m telling you now.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me when I first got back? Or when I got involved with Yara?’

  ‘The PVO’ (Guillermo whispered the acronym) ‘weren’t that big a deal when you hooked up with Yara. It didn’t occur to me to tell you then. When you returned, well, call me sentimental, but I don’t want to see you dead.’ He dabbed at his lips with a napkin. ‘The reason I’m telling you now is to stop you from pursuing the matter. If you keep it up you’re going to make the acquaintance of some very unpleasant people and stir up a lot of trouble for your friends.’

  ‘Yeah, you keep saying that, but nothing ever happens.’

  A weary-looking Indian woman with an infant in one arm, clad in a dress gone gray from repeated scrubbings, its printed pattern all but worn away, stopped by an adjoining table and dangled four or five necklaces in the face of a man with chiseled features, wearing aviator sunglasses and a crisp, pale yellow guayabera. He looked off to his left, surveying the tables, and his companion, a pretty woman with a café-con-leche complexion, carmine lips, and rhinestone-studded sunglasses, exhaled a jet of cigarette smoke and said something that made him smile.

  ‘For your lady,’ said the Indian woman, gently shaking the necklaces, an enticement. Her voice barely audible, she murmured a litany of afflictions – the child was sick, they were hungry, they needed money to return home.

  The Indian woman noticed Snow was watching and moved toward him, an ounce of energy enlivening her face on having spotted an American. Guillermo looked away, but Snow, before the woman could begin her pitch, gave her ten quetzales, at least twice what she could have asked for, and selected one of the necklaces, a piece of poor quality jade upon which the design of a bird had been scratched, strung on a loop of black twine.

  ‘Why do you encourage them?’ asked Guillermo as the woman hurried off, a few paces ahead of a grim-faced waiter intent on evicting her.

  ‘The poor need to be encouraged, don’t you think?’ Snow slipped on the necklace. ‘And don’t tell me that I can’t give them all money. That’s a rationalization you use for not giving money to any of them. Besides, I was angry and I knew it would piss you off.’

  ‘You’re angry? Why’s that? Because I’m trying to keep you from getting into trouble?’

  ‘You’re not keeping me out of trouble. All I’m doing is asking questions of people I trust. And that’s basically you. I won’t take it any further.’

  ‘You’re a liar! Do you think I don’t hear things? People come up to me all the time and say, “That gringo friend of yours was in last night asking questions.” It’s a wonder you haven’t been picked up.’

  ‘Well, that’s my business, isn’t it?’

  Guillermo shrugged, as if to imply that Snow’s survival was of no importance to him. He had plainly taken offense at Snow’s characterization of him as an uncaring sort. True or not, he liked to think of himself as egalitarian and not class conscious in the least.

  ‘Look, I apologize,’ said Snow. ‘I told you I was angry.’


  Guillermo pretended to be interested in the goings-on at another table.

  ‘Stop this shit, man!’

  ‘What shit?’ Guillermo dug out his cell and checked for messages.

  Already bright, the sunlight brightened further, bespeaking a break in some thin pall of pollution.

  ‘Okay,’ Snow said. ‘How about next time we come out I’ll buy you a necklace? Will that put the roses back in your cheeks?’

  Guillermo’s struggled to maintain his indifferent pose, but the façade crumbled and he smiled. ‘Joselito will be so jealous!’

  Snow touched the black twine about his neck. ‘Maybe I should just give you this.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Guillermo. ‘It’ll have to be something much more fashion forward. I’ll help you pick something out.’ He shifted in his chair and sighed. ‘It’s such a glorious day I can’t stay angry. I think I’ll have a glass of wine. Do you want one?’

  ‘I’ll take another coffee.’

  ‘Days like this I feel I could fall in love with everyone.’ Guillermo laughed and patted Snow’s forearm. ‘Even you.’ He signaled a waiter and then looked soberly at Snow and said, ‘You do know I love you, don’t you?’

  His machismo enlisted, put off by this expression of sentiment, Snow said in a sardonic tone, ‘Oh yeah, sure.’

  Guilllermo shook his head sadly. ‘What an asshole you are! I thought you’d grown up, but I’ll bet you still think about love as something that makes you dizzy.’

  Two Sundays later when Snow dropped by Club Sexy to meet Guillermo, the place was empty except for a pair of solitary drinkers. Even the old keyboard player was absent. Snow asked Canelo, the black bartender with freckles and reddish hair, where everyone was and Canelo said, ‘Haven’t you heard?’ And when Snow said he had heard nothing, Canelo, who had recently grown a Van Dyke that, along with his piercings, his red skullcap of hair, and downcast manner, gave him the look of a sorrowful devil, told him that Guillermo and Joselito had been found dead in a barranca outside the city. Both had been tortured. He went on to say what a shock it had been to everyone and the club had been closed for three days out of respect, but now business was picking up again, especially at night, and some of the ladies had started coming back in. He might have said more, but Snow ran from the club, burst through the front door, and stood in the entranceway, letting the city’s polluted roar explode over him, a wetness in his eyes blurring the light, turning passersby into colored shadows. Canelo followed him out and told him to come back inside and have a drink.