Little Tiny Teeth

by Aaron Elkins

  “Would you mind not doing that?” he said. “Or at least pointing it someplace else?” A mistake, he thought immediately.

  Oozing malignance — whether it was general or directed specifically at Gideon was impossible to tell — the man smiled meanly, revealing yet another mouthful of discolored, rotting teeth, and kept on doing what he was doing. Click… click…

  Gideon shrugged one shoulder in what he hoped was a show of unconcern, and turned to watch Guapo, who had stomped to the three Arimaguas, where they still hunkered down at the base of the wall with their rifles and their Inca Kolas. He began shouting at them, waving the big knife for emphasis. None of them looked at him, but only stared straight ahead. Split-nose was the only one who replied, his answers surly and curt. Like the others, he stared straight in front of him, into the middle distance, his eyes on a level with Guapo’s hips, as still, and as impassive, as a stone idol, and just about as grim.

  A long silence after his last answer, and then Guapo suddenly lashed out, kicking the bottle out of the Indian’s hand and sending it skittering over the worn plank floor, spewing yellow-green liquid. Split-nose didn’t move a muscle: no start, no blink, no change of expression or focus. Guapo yelled even louder, a mix of Spanish and something else. Gideon couldn’t pick up most of what he was shouting, but he managed to make out imbécile and estúpido. Split-nose’s answers were more of the same: monotonic and obstinate. He seemed unreachable, immovable, but Gideon suspected there would come a time when Guapo would pay for this.

  Now would be a good time, he did his best to convey to Split-nose. Now would be a perfect time. But the Indian sat immobile and oblivious.

  “What are they talking about?” he asked Vargas in English. The man guarding them frowned and watched them intently, as if trying to understand the words, but he didn’t tell them to be quiet.

  “Guapo, he thought you were Scofield.”

  “Scofield? Why would he think I was Scofield?”

  “He sent the Indians to get him… and me. He told them Scofield was called ‘professor,’ and the fellow with the chopped-up nose, he heard me call you ‘professor,’ so he thought…” He shrugged away the rest of the sentence. “At least, I think that’s what they’re saying.”

  “This Guapo, have you heard of him?”

  Vargas nodded. “He’s a very big man, the boss in North Loreto,” he whispered, then stopped himself. With a wary glance at the man with the revolver to assure himself that he didn’t understand English (the obtuse, open-mouthed expression satisfied him), he went on: “A tough customer, a killer. He’d as soon take your eye out with that knife as—”

  Guapo’s heavy returning footsteps silenced him. “Stupid bastards,” he grumbled in Spanish as he fell into the remaining chair and poured himself three fingers of aguardiente. “Trained monkeys would do better.” With a grunt and a sudden jerk he jammed the point of the knife into the tabletop, which Gideon now noticed was covered with splintery pockmarks from a hundred previous such spearings. There the knife remained, upright and quivering, about three inches from Guapo’s hand and five long, impossible feet from Gideon’s. And both Vargas and the guy with the gun and the itchy thumb now sat between them. Plan A — going up and over the table and through that opening in the wall — wasn’t going to work any more, that was clear. Guapo drained half the tumbler and smoothed his mustache with thumb and forefinger, a surprisingly dainty motion. “So where is Scofield?” he asked in a low voice, staring at the table.

  A promising sign? Gideon wondered. He believes me?

  “Professor Scofield has… has died, I regret to say,” Vargas stammered, clearly realizing how extremely unlikely it sounded. “Only last night.”

  Guapo eyed him suspiciously.

  “I swear it on the grave of my mother,” said Vargas. “A crazy person, a drug-crazed lunatic, threw him from the ship. He also threw another passenger, a—”

  “And what do you say?” Guapo asked Gideon.

  “It’s true. Scofield’s dead.” Well, that had hardly been established beyond doubt, but it was highly probable, and this was not the time for complicated answers.

  “They’re lying,” said the fox-faced one. “Why are we wasting all this time?”

  Thoughtfully, Guapo drained the tumbler and poured a little more, finishing the bottle. Another sip, another delicate smoothing of the silky mustache, and he turned to Vargas to address him directly for the first time, other than having told him to shut up. “And you, I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not Vargas.”

  “No, señor, I’m Vargas, all right, that’s completely correct. Alfredo Vargas, Captain Alfredo Vargas, at your service.” His hand reached up to his braided captain’s hat, but it was no longer there, having been lost when he fell into the river.

  “That’s good. I’m very glad you didn’t lie, my friend. You should be even more glad you didn’t lie. Now I want you to tell me exactly what happened to Scofield.”

  “Of course, with pleasure—”

  “And I want you to tell me exactly — exactly — what your boat is doing on the Javaro River.”

  “Certainly, I have nothing to hide from you—”

  Guapo held up his hand. “You know who I am, don’t you? You’ve heard of El Guapo?” With a jerk, the knife was pulled from the table.

  Vargas’s eyes followed it as if magnetized. “Of course, señor. Everyone has heard of El Guapo.”

  “And have you heard of what happens to people who tell falsehoods to El Guapo?” With the point of the huge knife he gently, almost tenderly, touched Vargas’s left earlobe, then ran it around the entire ear. Gideon saw a single spot of blood where it nicked the top rim. Vargas sat through it as rigidly and motionlessly as was possible for a human to sit, although his Adam’s apple, beyond his control, glugged up and down a couple of times.

  “Yes, señor,” he croaked through barely moving lips.

  Guapo withdrew the knife, but his fingers remained around the handle. “Then go ahead. And don’t be nervous.”

  Fox-face laughed nastily. “No, no, don’t be nervous, what is there to be nervous about?”

  And so the story came out. The first part, about how Scofield and Maggie had been thrown overboard, and Maggie, but not Scofield, had been rescued, was told pretty much as it had happened. Gideon was asked to verify the details once or twice and complied. Guapo didn’t ask why Cisco would have wanted to kill Scofield. He seemed to accept Vargas’s description of a “drug-crazed lunatic” on the loose (which was accurate enough), and neither Vargas nor Gideon volunteered anything more about it. The simpler, the better. “You are very lucky you are not Scofield,” Fox-face said to Gideon with undisguised regret.

  Gideon nodded his agreement. Any way you looked at it, it was the truth.

  The rest of Vargas’s story, which he told with an occasional shamefaced glance at Gideon, and with many self-serving asides (“He talked me into it against my better judgment,” “Never have I done this before,” “It was my intention to do it only this one time, for enough money to upgrade my poor ship,” “I didn’t realize, I never thought, that we would be in a region of interest to El Guapo; had I known, I would never have agreed, never!”) was pretty much what Gideon was expecting by now. He had realized from the moment he had walked into the cantina and set eyes on Guapo and his men that John had been right: he, John, and Phil had gotten themselves into the middle of a drug-trafficking imbroglio. And Guapo’s original certainty that the Indians had brought him Arden Scofield, and his incensed disappointment that they had not, had made it clear that Scofield was the major figure in it.

  The substance involved was coca paste, Vargas said. He understood that there were sacks of it hidden within the coffee bags (he himself, of course, had never seen any of it, but had only taken Scofield’s word for it; he himself had no part in the arrangements, but only provided the space and transportation) that were to be deposited at the warehouse—

  “Was it you who had the warehouse bu
rnt down?” Gideon asked Guapo.

  “Hey — who told you to speak?” Fox-face said, but Guapo waved him down.

  “Yes, sure, that was my man,” Guapo said. “Do you think I didn’t know what was happening? Do you think I would permit such a thing? Do you think anything happens in North Loreto Province about which I don’t know?”

  “I guess not,” Gideon said, which seemed to please Guapo.

  “How many coffee bags?” he asked Vargas.

  “Forty or fifty, I believe.”

  “Forty-eight,” said Guapo. “And how much paste?”

  “About… about a hundred kilos, I think.”

  “A hundred and fifty,” Guapo said, his voice hardening. “Be careful, my friend.” He sat back, slowly rotating the knife in his left hand, its point gently rotating against his right forefinger. “And for whom was it destined?”

  “Destined? I—”

  “Think before you answer. Tell the truth when I ask you a question, and you may yet get out of this with your life, and maybe even with all your appendages.”

  Vargas fished in his pocket for his glasses and put them on, as if they might help him think more clearly. “Guapo… señor… I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, I didn’t want to know, I had no wish to be—”

  “It was destined for Eduardo Veloso of the Cali cartel, whose carriers were to pick it up tomorrow night,” Guapo said, and Gideon began to think that there really wasn’t much going on, at least in this particular aspect of the regional commerce, that got by El Guapo. “And how is it hidden? Is there some in all the coffee sacks?”

  “It’s in plastic bags — so I was told by the professor — not him” — a gesture at Gideon — “the other professor — in several of the sacks, fifteen or twenty of them, I think—”

  “Thirty,” said Guapo warningly.

  “Yes, thirty, that was it, that was it!” Vargas gibbered, the perspiration actually dripping off him onto the floor so that there was a little puddle on each side of his chair. Was he lying because he yet hoped to siphon off some of the paste for his own profit? Or was lying simply his instinctive reaction to stress? “Yes, thirty, that’s right, now I remember, of course. It’s thirty, all right. Now, señor, the honest truth is I do not know which bags it’s in, I was never told—”

  “That’s all right, Vargas. It doesn’t matter.”

  Vargas licked his lips. “Señor, you are only too welcome to come and take it, to take it all. I regret extremely that I allowed myself to be used in this way, that I caused offense to you. I only want to go home and forget I was ever so stupid. It would be an act of kindness to me to take it away. Please—”

  “What, and have the Cali people find out I have their paste? No thank you. I have no interest in taking any of it from you at all.”

  If wheels turning in one’s mind made a sound, the room would have been filled with grindings and squeakings from Vargas’s quick brain. His eyes darted right, then left, then right, as he assessed the rapidly changing situation. Guapo had practically said he would be allowed to live. Was he going to get to keep the paste — all of the paste — as well? Surely it was worth many thousands — hundreds of thousands — of soles. It would change his life, he could go away from Iquitos, leave all this behind him, start fresh in the south with a fishing franchise, down by Pucusana—

  Guapo could read Vargas’s thoughts as readily as Gideon could, and he laughed; a voiceless rumble that changed his expression not at all. “You are not going to keep any of it either, Vargas.”

  Vargas blinked. “Ah… no?”

  “No. You are going to throw it overboard. Into the river.”

  “Into the—? But, sir, as I told you, I do not know which bags it’s in.”

  “That doesn’t matter because you are going to throw all the coffee bags into the river. My Indian friends will take you back and will watch you do it. And my sincere advice is not to try and trick them. And never, never let me hear of you in this province again. Do you understand?”

  “I understand, Guapo, but all the coffee? I have no insurance, I will have to pay for it myself—”

  “Are you arguing with me? Negotiating with me, goddamn you? You should be thanking me for not burning your lousy boat and you with it,” Guapo said, looking as if it was still a distinct possibility.

  “No, no, Guapo, of course not, Guapo,” Vargas mumbled. “Whatever you say. Thank you for your understanding. I can promise you—”

  “And in case you’re wondering whether the Arimaguas have a number for ‘forty-eight’ (which was exactly what Gideon was wondering), I should tell you that they will have a bag with forty-eight pebbles in it. Each time a coffee sack goes in the river, a pebble is removed from the bag. When you have finished, you’d better hope that there are no pebbles left in the bag.”

  “Of course, Guapo,” Vargas said glumly.

  “And you,” Guapo said, turning to Gideon. “Now what are we to do with you?”

  “I have some good ideas,” said a grinning Fox-face. The burning cigarette stuck to his lower lip couldn’t have been more than a half inch long.

  “No, no, an American professor,” Guapo said, “I don’t think we want that kind of trouble. I’ll tell you what, Professor. You give me those pretty American dollars you have in that wallet of yours — you can keep the lousy soles — and I will send you back to the ship with your good friend the captain to go on with your life. You’ll have a good story to tell. What do you say?”

  Gideon looked at Guapo, at the big knife, at the leering Fox-face, at the other armed men, and sighed.

  “Sounds fair to me,” he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  SHOWERED, changed, his cuts and bug bites attended to, Gideon felt like a human being again. The hike back to the ship hadn’t been as bad as the one from it (the fire-ant mound was given plenty of room this time), and a glorious pint of carambola juice — looking like orange juice but tasting like cool, thinned-down papaya juice — that he had poured down his throat had brought him back to life. They had been gone a mere three hours, he was shocked to learn. It had seemed like ten.

  He had told his story to a fascinated, half-incredulous John and Phil and answered their hundred questions. Now they were lounging at the grassy edge of the thirty-foot bank overlooking the Adelita, having just watched a gray-faced Vargas, who looked like death on two legs, supervise the dumping of four-dozen sixty-kilo sacks of coffee — and presumably a fortune in coca-paste balls — into the Javaro River. The other passengers had watched from the deck, subdued, shocked — and no doubt thrilled — with the knowledge that Arden Scofield had been up to his eyeballs in drug-trafficking. The Arimaguas had disappeared back into the jungle, leaving their forty-eight pebbles behind in six neat rows, and the three-man crew that had dumped the sacks — Chato, Porge, and the cook, Meneo — were sitting on some logs along the muddy riverside a few yards downstream, taking a cigarillo break.

  “I knew that Scofield was a blowhard,” John was saying, “but a drug-trafficker?” He shook his head. “What a piece of crap. What did I tell you, Doc? Did I say it was all about drugs, or didn’t I?”

  “That you did,” Gideon said. “You were right, and I was wrong.”

  John’s hands flew up. “Phil, did he just say what I think he said? Write it down, nobody’s gonna believe it!”

  They sat companionably for a little longer and then Phil said: “Oh, there were some developments while you and Vargas were on your little junket.”

  “Oh?”

  “The guy that was shot with the nail gun? We found out who he was.”

  Gideon sat up. “You did? Who?”

  “Well, not exactly who,” said John. “We know what he was doing here, and why he got shot. And who shot him.” A ghost of a smile. “‘Nailed him,’ I guess we should say.”

  Phil took up the narrative from there. Two Indians, who said they were members of a peaceable, fairly well-assimilated Yagua settlement a day’s canoe journey upstream
, had appeared at the warehouse site not long before to collect what they said were their belongings — hammocks, cups and utensils, a few articles of clothing — from the platform house near the warehouse. Phil had gone to chat with them. They were frightened and shy and in a hurry to leave again, but Phil had wormed a surprising amount of information out of them with the aid of a couple of bottles of Inca Kola, a little rum, and two cigars. They had been the property’s caretakers and had been engaged for the past week in the construction work necessary to strengthen and enlarge the warehouse.

  “Who were they working for?” Gideon asked. “Who was paying them?”

  “I didn’t think to ask,” Phil said, and then after a moment, with some irritation: “Why would I ask that? Jeez. Anyway, they told me they’d been fishing for dorado from the bank about five o’clock yesterday afternoon when they smelled smoke. And when they climbed back up to the warehouse, they found this guy in the doorway, right in the act of setting a match to a pile of newspapers and scrap wood. A couple of other piles were already burning inside, on the wooden floor.”

  “Ah, that would have been Guapo’s man,” Gideon said. “One of the Arimaguas, I bet. He was an Indian, right?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You didn’t ask what he looked like?”

  “No.”

  “You’re kidding me. You don’t know if he had a bone in his nose, or was wearing a loincloth, or had shoes, or, or—”

  Phil sighed and looked at John. “What do you think, does he really want to hear the rest of this or not?”

  “Sorry,” Gideon said. “I’ll be quiet.”

  They had yelled at the man, who had turned, screamed something unintelligible back at them, and begun to fling burning pieces of wood at them. One of them — they wouldn’t say which — had threatened him with the nail gun, meaning to scare him off, but when a flaming chunk of plywood hit him in the shoulder the gun had gone off, and the man had been shot through the head and very, very obviously killed. Terrified, they had fled into the jungle. Today, they had come back for their things, unaware that the Adelita was moored below.