Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  And would she be glad, if in time they did? She wasn’t sure of this man Jerry. He couldn’t have been more of a contrast with Chuck, which on the surface was a mark in his favor, but did she really want to make some sort of cross-cultural leap? Jerry seemed bright, but he was hardly an intellectual. Whatever he did for a living—some sort of salesman, she guessed—he was no faculty man. His friends, his interests, his life-style, would all be far removed from the life of the mind; despite occasional humid magazine articles about hard-hats being terrific lovers, Bobbi doubted there was ever much future for a couple who had nothing in common except heterosexuality.

  On the other hand, Jerry’s self-confident silence contrasted rather markedly with the loud insecurity of Hugh Van Dinast. If Jerry was totally unlike Chuck, Van Dinast was rather uncomfortably similar to Chuck, and undoubtedly even less satisfactory as a lover. (Chuck’s failure was not in his being mindless of her needs. Quite the reverse; he was so mindful of her needs, her desires, her whims, her moods, and her responses that everything invariably deteriorated into insecurity and mechanization. She hadn’t experienced a good spontaneous fuck in seven or eight years.)

  In the meantime, while her mind was full of sexual speculation their conversation could not have been more sexless. The tension thus created would have to be dealt with sooner or later, and one way to ease the pressure would be to bring sex, however obliquely, into the conversation, which Bobbi did when Jerry handed her the new Bloody Mary: “Trying to get me drunk, eh?” (A negative statement, full of layers of class assumption, an effort to dismiss him by defining him as sexually graceless.)

  But he looked at her with only the slightest trace of a smile and said, “Did you ever screw while drunk?”

  The question startled her—in an earlier day, she would have acknowledged that it had shocked her—and she automatically gave a truthful answer: “Yes, of course. Hasn’t everybody?”

  “How was it?”

  He wasn’t smiling at all now, but she risked a tiny smile of her own, saying, “One hardly remembers.”

  His expression changed, and for the first time in her life she truly understood the phrase “a cocky grin.” “I like to be remembered,” he said.

  She couldn’t help mocking him. “Ho ho,” she said, “you sure do talk a good fight.”

  “Right,” he said. He took the Bloody Mary glass out of her hand, threw it away into the view, and drew her close.

  (Novelists, when their characters drive cars, never feel compelled to describe precisely what the physical actions are of hands, feet, eyes, knees, elbows. Yet many of these same novelists, when their characters copulate, get into such detailed physical description you’d think they were writing an exercise book. We all know the interrelation between the right ankle and the accelerator when driving a car, and we needn’t be told. In sex, we all know about knees, thighs, fingers, the softness at the side of the throat, here-let-me-help, how’s-that, mf, mf, mf, mf. And if you don’t know it, you shouldn’t read dirty books, anyway; they’ll only give you the wrong idea.)

  THE HOUSEGUEST …

  Pedro had never seen so much.

  He had never seen so much anything. So much city, for instance; Edgar had transferred him from the airport bus to an automobile that was apparently Edgar’s own vehicle, a pink and white Mercury barely six years old with all its seats still in it, and had then driven him endlessly through cityscape after cityscape—could this all be New York—all the way across Queens to Jackson Heights. And when Pedro commented on the vastness of what he had seen, Edgar laughed and said, “This isn’t anything! All you saw so far is one part of Queens! There’s four other boroughs!”

  Remarks like that grazed off Pedro’s forehead and fell—incomprehensible and dead—to the floor at his feet.

  Another thing he had never seen so much of was people. Probably more living human beings, complete with heads and arms and feet and clothing, had passed before his eyes so far today than there were in all of Descalzo put together, counting Quetchyl and Rosie and the countryside and the mountains and the inbred Moogli people that lived in Elephant Fart Swamp. (Many of them, in fact, the people walking along the New York sidewalks, looked something like Mooglis.)

  Also cars; never saw so many of them, and not one of them an Army tank or an Army jeep or an Army two-ply truck. Not one. (Also, the few police he saw en route were virtually naked, with nothing more than a little pistol bolstered at their sides. Where were their sten guns, their bren guns, their BARs? What a lawless city this must be, with such unarmed police.)

  Then when he got to Edgar’s home, a neat small house with a full roof, one of a long line of similar neat small houses with full roofs up and down both sides of the street, he realized he’d never seen so much housing for so few people. Edgar turned out to have a fat jolly wife and three fat jolly young children, and they had half of this entire house all to themselves. Only one other family lived in the house, in the downstairs half. And just as Pedro was getting over the impact of Edgar’s kitchen and bathroom, he was asked to believe that the downstairs family didn’t share these plumbing wonders but had their own! Was that at all believable? Pedro watched closely, but so long as he was there nobody from downstairs ever came up to boil a chicken or take a shit. Incredible.

  Then there was the food. Edgar’s wife Rita started bringing out food, from the pantry and the refrigerator and out of closets and from behind the sofa and from under the bed and God knows where all. Such food! Mountains, mountains, mountains. Lakes, lakes, lakes. Pedro bad never seen so much food, and shortly afterward he had never eaten so much food.

  Food may not cure a hangover, of course, but who cares? A full belly is its own reward.

  While Pedro had been scoffing down, shoving it in with both hands and only pausing to chew the bigger pieces, Edgar had been giving Rita a slightly romanticized explanation of Pedro’s presence in this part of the world. It seemed that Pedro and José and Edwardo were three members of the pro-Democratic, anti-American revolutionary movement down in Descalzo, who had come north to try to present their case to the United Nations. Edwardo and José were now in the hands of the United States government, but Pedro would spearhead the effort to gain them asylum as political refugees. Pedro had a mysterious contact at a place called the Museum of the Arts of the Americas, who would provide funds and legal assistance in the struggle. So, after lunch, Pedro would seek out this Museum of the Arts of the Americas, and set in motion the rescue of his friends.

  “But first he’ll have a nap,” Rita said. “He looks exhausted. You could use a nap, couldn’t you, Pedro?”

  “Pedro doesn’t have time to nap,” Edgar announced. “He wants to get moving. Don’t you, Pedro?” And he looked at Pedro, who at that moment was in the middle of a huge rhinoceros yawn, showing a mouth full of chicken and tomatoes and cheese and pastrami with mustard and Sara Lee cheese danish and maybe one little remnant of Hostess Twinkie. “Well,” Edgar decided, “maybe you could use a little nap.”

  “And a screwdriver,” Rita said. “Would you like a screwdriver, Pedro?”

  Pedro looked himself over for loose screws. “For what?”

  “It’s a drink,” Edgar told him. “Vodka and orange juice?”

  “Oh. What’s vodka?”

  “Something to drink,” Rita said. “With alcohol in it.”

  “Like gluppe?”

  Edgar and Rita both looked blank; neither had ever heard of gluppe.

  Pedro said, “Does it make you drunk?”

  “If you drink too much of it,” Rita said.

  Pedro nodded. “Gluppe,” he said. “I’ll take one.”

  THE RAT …

  When he was sure she was really asleep, Jerry carefully slid his left arm out from under Bobbi’s shoulder and sat up.

  The world remained beautiful. High sun in bright blue sky, dark green forest, paler green glades and meadows, this sweet-scented secluded hilltop, the science fiction river of route 80 down below, the songs of bi
rds, the aromas of grass and flowers, the splendid beauty of the naked girl sleeping in the sunlight. Time to steal her statue and get the hell out of here.

  (All other thoughts must be ignored. Alternate plans made no sense. Yes, she was a terrific person to have sex with, and also to dance with and talk with and drive in a car with. Which wasn’t enough, and everybody knows it.)

  At least he could cover her, so she would get neither a burn nor a chill. Spreading her clothing over the warm hills and valleys of her body, he noted again the small pleasure lines at the corner of her sleeping smile, where the lightly tanned skin creased at the curve of lip. He’d like to kiss her there, but she might wake, so he simply spread her skirt and sweater and swiftly backed away.

  Down the slope, very fast, to the station wagon. Her suitcases and harp were in the back. He removed the two bags, opened one, and found the statue right away. (Her clothing fluttered through his fingers.) The creature glistened like radiation in the sunlight, its evil little green eyes staring at him as though they were brothers. “It wasn’t gonna work out,” he told the little bastard. “She’s some sort of symphony musician, married to a college professor, all that shit She’d look down her nose at me.”

  The green eyes kept looking at him, so he put the fucking statue under a blanket on the rear seat. Then he carried the suitcases partway up the slope leaving them where they couldn’t be seen from the highway but where she would have to find them on her way down. Then back to the car, to wrestle the damn harp out. She managed to carry the thing around like it was a roller skate, but with Jerry the harp would not cooperate. The shape of the thing was all wrong, and there wasn’t any sensible way to get hold of it, and the wheels kept hooking into different parts of the interior of the car.

  But he did finally get it out, a great tall gawky black triangle crammed with disapproval, and of course the wheels had no interest at all in rolling on grass. Struggle struggle struggle, half-dragging and half-carrying it all the way up to the suitcases and leaning it against a tree there, where it slanted like a weeping nun.

  Down to the car again, with one last look up the slope to that spot where she slept, invisible from here. If she sat up now, if she saw him—

  She didn’t. He started the engine, waited for a tractor-trailer to go by, and headed out onto the highway. In no time at all he was doing eighty on 80. Next stop New York.

  Well? Something the matter with you?

  THE LATE ENTRY …

  Six members of the Open Sports Committee—David Fayley, Kenny Spang, Felicity Tower, Ben Cohen, F. Xavier White, and Wylie Cheshire—sat in the living room of David and Kenny’s apartment and told one another stories about statues. And the more they talked, the more it seemed to them that something funny was going on.

  This meeting had been prompted by a phone call Wylie Cheshire had made to Ben Cohen this morning. After the two of them had compared notes—Wylie’s statue smashed on Wylie’s head, Ben’s statue stolen from Ben’s boat—they’d made some more phone calls, and not the least interesting discovery they’d made was that several committee members seemed to have disappeared. Among those still available, these six had gathered here to try to figure out what was going on, but they weren’t having much success. “Our trouble is,” Ben Cohen said at one point, “we’re coming into this too late. We don’t know what it’s all about.”

  Felicity unexpectedly said, “I do know something about the statue.”

  They all looked at her. Wylie Cheshire shifted his football player’s bulk on one of the little living room chairs (David Fayley winced), and said, “Well, let us in on it.”

  “I saw a copy,” she told them, “in the Museum of the Arts of the Americas. I took one of my classes there, from Liberation High. Some of the children have Hispanic parents on one or both sides, and of course it’s vital to reconnect the children with some sense of their heri—”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine,” Ben Cohen said. “But what about the statue?”

  “They have copies of some items in the museum,” Felicity said, “because the originals are still in their native land. And I distinctly remember seeing a copy of the Dancing Aztec Priest there, with a notice giving information about the original.”

  Kenny Spang said, “We probably ought to look into that.”

  “I’ll go down there, if you like,” Felicity offered.

  They would like. As for the others, they would continue to search for Oscar, and Chuck, and Bud, and Mandy, and everybody else. And try to figure out what was going on.

  THE RECIDIVIST …

  Jerry’s argument with himself was only half vocal. Every time his interior monologue came up with some other damn stupid pointless argument he invariably replied to it out loud: “How do I know she likes me?” he yelled at one point. “She doesn’t even know me!” And a little later he announced to the empty car, “No, I don’t have to give a damn what the other guys think, and that isn’t the point, anyway.” And somewhat farther east he slapped an angry palm against the steering wheel and shouted, “I know I’m as good as she is. She’s the one, with the goddam symphony orchestra and her goddam college teacher husband!” And a bit after that: “All right, all right, so what if nobody said anything about permanent? And if it isn’t permanent, then what’s the fuss all about?” And right on the heels of that one: “Bullshit! I hardly know her! Okay, she’s fine, she’s all right, there’s nothing wrong with her, some other time I could go for her, it’s just too bad we met this way, all right?”

  No U-turn said the small black-on-white sign marking the little dirt road that crossed over the central grass strip to the westbound lanes. “GODDAM IT TO HELL AND BACK!” Jerry screamed, punching the steering wheel and the seat and his own leg, and he made the U-turn, anyway, despite the sign and despite everything else, and beaded west as fast as the goddam drag-ass station wagon would carry him.

  Maybe she was still asleep, and she’d never know he was even gone.

  Maybe she woke up and hitched a ride already, and he’d never see her again. (Get herself murdered by some passing maniac?)

  But when he got there she was on the other side of the road, wheeling the harp along through the grass (how did she do that?), the suitcases already side by side on the gravel shoulder. Jerry didn’t waste time looking for any more No U-turns. He made a no-u-turn of his own, across the lumpy greensward, squealing to a stop at her feet, jumping out with a combined expression of relieved smile and repentant frown, saying forcefully, “Listen.”

  She pointed a finger at him. Her face was as hard as granite. “Where’s the statue?” she said.

  THE INTERROGATOR …

  Which wasn’t even the main question. The main question, of course, was Why? Everything else Bobbi already understood, and had understood almost from the instant she’d awakened, alone and stiff, on that sunny slope. Only in the immediate dislocation of coming to consciousness naked on the open ground in the sunlight were there any other questions in her mind: Where am I? Where’s Jerry? What’s happening?

  Well, all of those questions answered themselves almost at once. As they say in the detective novels, everything fell into place. Of course their meeting last night had not been accidental; a young man from New York, traveling alone, having dinner in a place that was usually closed by that hour. And of course he’d vandalized the Jaguar himself, in order to get her into his own car.

  But why? Just for a quickie in the grass? That made no sense at all, but what other reason was there? Hurriedly dressing, taking it for granted the son of a bitch had stolen her luggage—all of her clothing, all of her possessions, her harp—she was both relieved and bewildered to see her bag still here where she’d left it, with its cash and its credit cards and everything else still inside. Touching up her face and hair, checking her progress with the mirror in her compact she was astounded to discover tears on her cheeks. She was crying over the bastard?

  No, over the betrayal. The leavings of their picnic lunch were about her, the
crumpled papers, the nearly empty tomato juice jar, the melting ice cubes in their plastic bag. Giulietta Masina near the finish of Nights of Cabiria, when the guy runs away with her purse. Goddam it! Why had he done such a miserable thing?

  Partway down the slope she came across the harp and the suitcases, side by side. At that point his motivation utterly bewildered her, and it was due to her perplexity that she opened both bags and discovered the loss of the Other Oscar.

  So the only question left to ask was Why?; but she didn’t start with that one. She started with an irrelevant question, “Where’s the statue?” (when of course it had just been delivered to a confederate somewhere) because she wanted to hear him lie. Get the first bunch of lies out of the way, and then keep at him until she got the truth. Flag down another driver if necessary, bring in the police if necessary, but get the truth. After the lies.

  (It never occurred to her he might have returned to do her harm, or to murder her. That opportunity had come when they were isolated and alone—and when she was helplessly asleep—and if he hadn’t done it then, he never would. No, he was here to lie her out of suspicion.)

  “It’s in the car,” he said “On the back seat, under a blanket.”

  “What?” That was certainly a lie—he wouldn’t have come back without getting rid of the evidence—but it was the wrong lie. It was a lie that admitted the theft, and what was the point in that?

  Determined to get beyond bewilderment and obfuscation at once, Bobbi marched to the car, yanked open a rear door, flipped the blanket on the back seat out of the way, and found herself staring at the naked yellow ass of the Dancing Aztec Priest.

  “Well, shit,” she said.

  “Listen,” he said, less forcefully than before. “Let me tell you what happened, all right?”

  Now there’d be some lies. Folding her arms, leaning against the side of the car, glaring at his face in the clear sunlight, she said, “Go right ahead.”