Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  “In the first place,” he said, “that wasn’t any accidental meeting last night. I followed you from New York.”

  She took a deep breath. “You son of a bitch,” she said, “you’re trying to confuse me.”

  “I’m trying to tell you the truth.”

  “That’s what’s confusing me. Go ahead, let’s hear some more of it.”

  “Okay.” He looked pained and uncomfortable. “I didn’t know you, okay? All I knew about you, you were some half-ass broad throws her husband’s clothes out the window and takes off.”

  “What? Wait a minute, are you a friend of Chuck’s?” No, not a friend. “Did he hire you?” A private detective, sent out by Chuck to get the Other Oscar. Was Chuck that crazy?

  “You mean your husband?” Jerry shook his head. “He doesn’t have anything to do with it. I met him once, that’s all, and you were right, you shouldn’t stick with him. But the thing is, I didn’t know you, you know what I mean? So I figured you’re this nothing broad, I’ll just dance you around a little, cop the statue, and take off. Like, if I’d come up to your room last night, that’s the way it would of been. No fuss, no trouble, you’d still have the Jag this morning, on your way to sunny Cal.”

  “So you admit you vandalized that car.”

  He shrugged, with the hint of an unrepentant grin. “Sure. I couldn’t keep chasing any Jag forever with that beat-up clunker of mine. That’s my sister’s car, by the way, the cops towed mine away yesterday when you went into the building where your orchestra is.”

  “Orchestra? How long have you been following me?”

  “That’s where I picked you up,” he said. “I was looking for you for a while before that.”

  Now she narrowed her eyes, peering at him more closely and more suspiciously. “Have I seen you someplace before?”

  “Well, a couple of times,” he admitted. “The first time was when you left your place, after you threw the clothes out the window. I was down by the street door, trying to get in.”

  She had no memory of anyone there when she’d stormed out; she’d been pretty singleminded at that point. “Where else?”

  “We went up in the elevator together, when you went to the auto transport place.”

  “Right!” She pointed a finger at him, as though she’d finally trapped him in some clumsy falsehood. “That’s where I saw you! So what in hell is it all about? What are you doing all this for?”

  “To get the statue,” he said.

  “The statue? The Other Oscar? But what for? Why?”

  “Because it’s real gold,” he said. “And the eyes are real emeralds, and it’s worth a million dollars.”

  THE COUNTRY COUSIN …

  Pedro couldn’t sleep. He had eaten, he had drunk vodka, he had showered, he had entered this clean bed with the cool sheets, and now he couldn’t sleep. He lay here, and lay here, and lay here, and finally enough was enough. Up he got, dressed himself in the neat clean clothing Edgar had loaned him, and left the bedroom.

  Rita was watching a soap opera on television when Pedro came out (Television!) Looking up, she said, “Can’t sleep?”

  “I got to go to the museum.”

  “I understand. Your comrades need you.”

  “Yeah,” said Pedro.

  “Let me make you a cup of coffee before you go,” she said, getting to her feet. “Edgar had to go to his class.”

  Pedro followed her to the kitchen. “His class? He still goes to school?”

  “Part-time at Long Island University,” she said proudly. “He’s going to be an accountant some day.”

  Pedro sat at the kitchen table. “What’s an accountant?”

  “A man who counts money.”

  “Sounds like a good job.”

  She laughed. “It is.”

  But why would anybody have to go to college to learn how to count money? If Edgar was still a schoolboy at his age, he couldn’t be much of a man. Pedro look at his host’s plump, friendly wife, and said, “You like to fuck?”

  She knew country boys. She gave him an easy smile and said, “Only with my husband. He’s very terrific.”

  “Okay,” Pedro said, and when she’d made the coffee they sat at the table together and drank it, while she described to him how to travel on the subway to the Museum of the Arts of the Americas, which according the phone book was on 53rd Street in Manhattan, near Fifth Avenue. First she described it all to him, and then she wrote it all down, in large block letters that he could read. Then she also wrote down their telephone number (they had their own telephone!) so he could let them know what happened, and after that she gave him a couple of subway tokens (with instructions for their use), and two five-dollar bills, a loan he could repay once he’d rescued his companions. And at last she gave him a kiss on the cheek, and told him, “You’ve a very brave man.”

  “Okay,” said Pedro, and left, and walked across a buzzing, cluttered, bewildering, overpopulated, deafening, and utterly alien dream landscape to the subway entrance. The only comforting touch was that posters and billboards along the way did some of their advertising in Spanish. That made it a little more like the real world.

  The subway, on the other hand, wasn’t like any world at all, and having a lot of instructions posted in Spanish didn’t begin to help. Pedro managed to put his token in the slot and make his way through the turnstile, but after that he just stood there, stunned, unable to move in any direction. Vodka and ignorance had carried him this far, but now he could go no farther.

  He couldn’t even run when he saw the cop coming. He stood there, and the cop arrived, and the cop said something. Pedro stared at him. Then the cop said, in Spanish, “You don’t speak English?”

  Pedro shook his head.

  “You speak Spanish, don’t you?” (This cop was one of the results of the New York Police Department’s campaign to find policemen who are at least fairly fluent in Spanish. New York City, since the Second World War, has become a bilingual city, with one third of its population Hispanic Subway notices are in both English and Spanish. El Diario is a major newspaper. Every public school report card is bilingual, and there are now two local Spanish-language television stations; the girls on Spanish-language soap operas are prettier, but more volatile.)

  Pedro nodded. “I speak Spanish,” he agreed.

  The cop said, “Where you headed?”

  Pedro couldn’t remember. He jerked his arm up and shoved Rita’s instructions toward the cop, who read them, nodded, and said, “You want the F train to the city. Go over that way.” And he gave Pedro careful directions.

  Once Pedro was moving again, things got better. He went to the concrete platform the cop had pointed out, and after a while an incredibly loud train came shrieking and screaming into the station, and when it stopped the doors all opened without anybody’s assistance, and Pedro stepped aboard. Behind him, the door slid shut again, still without the aid of a human hand.

  There were available seats, but as Pedro headed for one the subway jerked forward and Pedro found himself sitting on the floor instead. Two male passengers, both laughing, approached him from opposite directions, helped him up, brushed him off, and sat him down on a seat. Then they chuckled comments to one another, moved away in opposite directions, and left Pedro sitting there, clutching his seat with both hands.

  Roar roar roar roar roar went the train, past stations without stopping, and when it did stop the signs said Queens Plaza. Fwip, opened the doors, and fwip, they closed again, and the train hurtled on.

  It was several stops before Rockefeller Center, and Pedro was so benumbed by then that he nearly missed it The words on the platform signs slowly sank into his culture-shocked brain, and when finally he realized he was here he pitched himself willy-nilly through the snicking doors and would have fallen if he hadn’t run into a blue-and-orange trash barrel.

  Sixth Avenue, when he climbed up to it, was—Well, there just wasn’t any point trying to absorb anything any more. Pedro found a Spanish-speakin
g citizen on his fourth attempt and was given directions to 53rd Street. He walked, paying little attention to the traffic until a horn-blaring truck nearly drop-kicked him over the American Metal Climax Building. After that, he moved so cautiously that other pedestrians kept hitting him with elbows, shoulders, purses, attaché cases, shopping bags, rolled-up newspapers, and small children. He persevered, however, found 53rd Street, turned left, and came eventually to a gray stone building with its name chiseled into the stone over the massive doorway:

  MVSEVM OF THE ARTS OF THE AMERICAS.

  What would Pedro find in here?

  Confusion compounded. There was a charge for admission, which he couldn’t understand. Neither the woman at the desk near the entrance, nor the uniformed private guard standing behind her, could speak a word of the language Pedro shared with most of the artisans whose work was on display in this building, but eventually a janitor was found who could speak Spanish and who helped Pedro pay the buck-fifty. But when Pedro asked whom he should see about the payment for the Dancing Aztec Priest, the janitor got the wrong handle on the question, and it came out as, “He wants to see our copy of the Dancing Aztec Priest.”

  Directions were given by the woman at the desk, via the janitor, and off Pedro went through the cool empty rooms filled with swag. But when he reached the right spot there was nothing there but a fake copy of the Priest, capering on a green marble pedestal. And not a very good copy, either; José’s were a lot better than that.

  As Pedro stood there, trying to figure out what to do next, a brown-skinned girl approached, took pen and notebook from her shoulder bag, and began to copy the information on a notice (English only) attached to the front of the Priest’s pedestal. Pedro, pessimistic but not knowing what else to do, said to her, “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, turning a helpful face toward him. “I’m a teacher, you see, and many of my students have one or more Hispanic parents. I must communicate with them in the language they speak at home, if I’m to be really useful to them in any way. Can I help you?”

  Pedro gestured at the imitation Priest. “I want to know where I can get my money for the Priest,” he said.

  The girl frowned at him; she hadn’t understood. “I’m sorry?”

  Pedro looked at her. She was beautiful. She was like a movie star in the movies. She was the tallest, thinnest, cleanest, brownest, most incredibly beautiful and lust-making woman he had ever seen. He said to her, “You like to fuck?”

  That she understood. “Yes,” she said. Putting pen and notebook away in her shoulder bag, she grabbed Pedro by his thick-fingered hand. “My name’s Felicity,” she said. “Come along, we’ll take a cab to my place.”

  THE FELLOWSHIP …

  “You’re driving too slowly!” Krassmeier insisted, and pounded the seat back next to Corella’s ear, ā sight that would have done the long-suffering chauffeur Ralph a world of good to see. Let Corella find out what it was like to have the goddam seat back pounded next to your goddam ear. Let him see how much he liked it.

  He didn’t like it at all. “Cut out that pounding!” he yelled. “I’m not driving too slow! You wanna get stopped by a cop, waste half an hour getting a ticket? I’m doing a steady sixty-four!”

  The bronze Oldsmobile, filled with Corella and Oscar Russell Green in front and Krassmeier, Bud Beemiss, and Chuck Harwood in back, was not in fact going too slowly. If anything, it was going a bit too fast. Had they being doing a steady sixty-one for the last four hours, they would not have zoomed past Jerry and Bobbi’s picnic spot before Bobbi reached the side of the highway with her first suitcase. As it was, she’d just been awakening on her hilltop when they’d driven past, and was out of their sight.

  Not only that, they’d also seen the station wagon, though they didn’t know it. In the first place, “Jerry Spaulding” had put a false license number on that motel registration card to go with his false last name, so Corella and party were now looking for a license plate that probably didn’t exist at all on this road. And in the second place, they’d had no reason to pay attention to the dark-green station wagon when they’d seen it, because it had been going hell for leather the other way.

  The five men had been cramped together in this car a long long time, and they were all getting irritable. They were also hungry, and every one of them was in increasingly desperate need of a men’s room. With the atmosphere also poisoned by the mingled smokes of Corella’s cigar, Chuck Harwood’s pipe, and Krassmeier’s cigarettes, it was not a happy vehicle.

  And now Chuck, in the back seat with Krassmeier and Bud Beemiss, twisted around to look out the rear window—elbowing Bud pretty badly in the process—and mildly said, “Here comes somebody who isn’t as afraid of the police as you are, Corella.”

  Corella glared at the rear-view mirror. A dark automobile was coming lickety-split in the left lane. “Let him get picked up,” Corella groused. And he doggedly maintained his sixty-four as the other car rapidly overtook them, passing on their left.

  “There she is!” Bud suddenly yelled, and in waving his arms around he gave both Krassmeier and Chuck a mean flurry of elbows.

  “Stop that!” Krassmeier slapped at Bud’s waving arms.

  “There she is!” Bud insisted, and now everybody looked to the left, at the dark-green station wagon passing them, and that was Bobbi in the passenger seat!

  “That’s her!” Oscar shouted, up front beside Corella, and he thumped his fist onto Corella’s leg.

  The station wagon was ahead, was moving away. “Stop hitting me!” Corella yelled, but everybody else was yelling louder:

  “Stop her!”

  “Catch them!”

  “Run them off the road!”

  “Hustle, man, hustle!”

  Gotta hustle.

  THE FAST FRIENDS …

  Flashback:

  Jerry told her the rest of the story as they sat together in the car, parked by the side of the road. “I have a little independent trucking outfit at Kennedy,” he started, and told her about the Spanish alphabet, the box marked A, the box marked E, the million-dollar statue, the dispersal of the sixteen candidates, the several searchers, the gradual winnowing of the prospects, and the ultimate discovery that hers indeed was The One. She listened, wide-eyed, not interrupting, and at the finish she gazed with awe at the golden behind of the statue on the back seat. “A million dollars,” she said.

  “Maybe more.”

  She frowned at him. “Then why come back?”

  He became immediately uncomfortable. Drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel, looking past her left ear and then her right ear, he said, “Well— I just did, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “How do I know? I mean, why not? Can’t leave you out here. Somebody come along and sex-crime ya, something.”

  “You got away with it,” she pointed out, “and then you turned around and came back. After all, the statue is mine.”

  “Yeah, I know.” And he looked glum, as though he too realized he’d behaved with less than brilliance.

  “Do you expect me just to give it to you?”

  “I don’t know, lady.” Irritation was popping to his surface like bubbles on fudge. “I come back, all right? We’ll work it out later. So now we’ll go to New York.” And, under her level gaze, he started the engine, jammed it into gear, and kicked the station wagon out onto the highway.

  Flash forward:

  “I’ll give you the statue,” she said.

  He showed her a sudden frown. “You’ll what?”

  “Well, not exactly give,” she said. “I tell you what I’ll do. You’re supposed to split with your brothers-in-law, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you can share your part with me.”

  “That’s an eighth,” he told her. “You want an eighth, instead of the whole thing? A hundred grand instead of a million?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re both unre
al. A hundred grand, a million. What difference does it make?”

  His look at her this time was keen and unbelieving. “Come on, kid,” he said. “You know better than that.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So what’s the idea? Why you being so good to me?”

  “Because I think you’re in love with me,” she said.

  He laughed, trying to hide how much he was pleased. “In love with you! I don’t even know you!”

  “Maybe once you get to know me you won’t love me any more,” she said, “but right now I think you do.”

  “Is that right? I’m in love with you, huh?” He steered out and around a slowpoke bronze Oldsmobile; he himself was doing ninety-three. “And what about you?”

  “Maybe once I get to know you I won’t care for you at all,” she said.

  “And in the meantime?”

  “I think you’re terrific, if you want the truth.”

  “Is that love?”

  She frowned. “Love is such a big word.”

  “You don’t mind hitting me on the head with it,” he said.

  She grinned at him, and he grinned back, and she said, “You know what I’d like to do?”

  “Me, too,” he said. “There’s some woods over there.” And he put on his right directional, to let that bronze Oldsmobile behind him know he was going to pull off the road and come to a stop.

  THE OMNISCIENT VIEWPOINT …

  The hawk was looking for a nice plump rabbit, or maybe a good juicy field mouse. Hanging in the middle of the sky, just to the south of route 80 in eastern Union County, Pennsylvania, the hawk held its wings outspread, catching the updrafts, watching the ground for movement.

  Movement ensued. A dark-green Ford station wagon slowed and left the concrete of the highway and came to a stop off the road, just at the edge of the field the hawk was studying. The front doors opened and Jerry and Bobbi emerged, just as a bronze Oldsmobile squealed to an angry shuddering stop, angled across the front of the Ford, the two vehicles almost touching. All four of the Oldsmobile’s doors opened; Corella leaped out of the left front, Oscar leaped out of the right front, Krassmeier lunged out of the left rear, and nobody emerged from the right rear because, after opening a mere three inches, that door of the Oldsmobile stuck the left corner of the Ford’s front bumper. Therefore, as Oscar and Krassmeier and Corella all ran toward Jerry and Bobbi and the Ford, first Bud and then Chuck crawled out the left rear doorway of the Oldsmobile.