"Sshhh," they said as one.
I had lost track of which girl was which in the lovemaking. All I knew now was that one had a gold necklace and the other had a silver one. Just to move my hand I had to withdraw from a sea of warm flesh that tried again and again to make me forget time.
"This could develop into an international incident," I warned them.
"We are an international incident," Rosa teased. "You know, hands across the border."
"Not hands," Bonita corrected her.
"Can't you two be serious?"
"He sounds just like Fidel," Bonita pouted.
She shifted toward me so that I was sandwiched between their bodies. I felt a skillful hand slide down my thigh.
"Olé, and I thought he was finished," a delighter voice said.
"Who is that?" I asked.
"Does it matter?" lips whispered into my ear.
Let me tell you, in the dark all women are not the same. I knew who it was each time and it was no surprise when Rosa pulled away.
"Madre! We have to go now," she whispered. "They must have heard us in Havana."
"Not yet," Bonita sighed, her hips still locked to mine and riding out the last throbs of pleasure.
Needless to say, I was in no hurry to leave either, but what made us cut the encore short was the sudden opening of doors and the sound of running feet in the hall. In a second someone would be pounding on my door.
"Vamonos ahora," Rosa said.
They were going out through the balcony when the knock came. I knew who was there on the other side, one of Belkev's regular bodyguards, a balding, suspicious type. I took a last look to make sure the balcony was clear before opening the door wide enough to allow his popping eyes a peek.
"Didn't you hear that noise? Why are you here instead of protecting Comrade Belkev the way you agreed? Was someone in here?"
"Sure. The singing assassin. Let me know if you catch him."
I slammed the door and went back to bed, this time to sleep.
The bodyguard was still staring at me suspiciously the following morning when our happy entourage was taken by a guide on a junket through Aucanquilcha. Belkev appeared to be well rested and he was nasty; he'd slept through the whole rumpus. Bonita and Rosa looked like they'd be willing to play again and the rest of Belkev's harem eyed me speculatively. I kept my eye on the Aucanquilchans who manage to live 17,500 feet above sea level.
The exertion of walking into the town square was enough to exhaust Belkev, especially in the thin air. Even I felt my lungs demand oxygen and yet we were in the middle of a hardy, barrel-chested race of Indians who looked to be capable of outrunning the llamas that followed them. Wearing colorful, rough llama-wool ponchos, their highly slanted eyes shaded by red and green wool caps, they stared at the outsiders among them. They may have been small in stature but they were perfectly adapted to their rigorous environment, carrying on their lives atop a pinpoint of civilization set high in the sky by the starkly beautiful, treacherous Andean range.
We were in Aucanquilcha because it is one of the last strongholds of the Inca Empire. Much of the stonework of the village dates from the days of the empire; it is incredibly fitted, mortarless stone masonry that has survived five centuries of use, and the people milling around us were the purest descendants of the masons who had built it.
"I think I'm going to be seasick," Belkev muttered to me.
"Don't look for any sympathy from me, comrade."
"I should have killed you when I had the chance."
"Do you have the vest on?"
"Of course."
We entered a one-story building, one of the few modem structures in the village. It was a museum that was run by the state and the curator met us at the door, gaped at the unexpected number of females, recovered and directed his abrazo to Belkev. Belkev gave him a pair of half-hearted kisses on the cheeks and then disengaged from the embrace.
"I'd like to sit down."
"The air," the curator said sympathetically. "I always keep a little brandy on hand for visitors."
While Belkev sat gasping on a chair in the foyer, the curator fetched a small shot glass of brandy. He was giving it to Belkev when one of the bodyguards caught his arm.
"He would like you to take a taste first," I explained to the curator.
He hesitated but it was more from insult than fear of poison. After a haughty sip, he handed the glass to Belkev.
"Very good," Belkev thanked him. He downed the brandy in a gulp and belched loudly.
"You are Russian too?" the curator asked me with curiosity.
"On rental." He looked confused. "Never mind, it's an inside joke."
I left the group and wandered into the two exhibit rooms. It was an odd collection that the museum housed, consisting mostly of odds and ends that had been salvaged after the Spanish conquistadors had looted the land. Still, it was strangely effective. On one wall was a map detailing the extent of the Inca Empire, stretching nearly the length of the continent's western coast, and enclosed in cases around the other three walls were the pitiful remnants of that once great civilization.
I was aware that Belkev had come up behind me.
"The Incas ran their empire much as the Romans did," I observed, "conquering lands, colonizing them, building great roads a thousand miles long to link their cities, and bringing up the sons of conquered kings in their capital of Cuzco so that the new generation of nobility would be Incas too. No one can tell what heights the Incas might have reached if the Spanish had not arrived when they did. After all, the Incas were only beginning their empire when Pizarro and his men destroyed it."
"Some empire when a handful of adventurers could destroy it almost overnight," Belkev said mockingly. I think he was trying to save face after his humiliating arrival. In any case, the curator, overhearing the remark, bridled.
"The downfall came about only through an unfortunate combination of factors," he said testily. "Pizarro arrived at the end of a devastating civil war. The defeated side immediately joined the Spanish, in effect creating an Indian army under Spanish leadership. Second, the Incas were ravaged by epidemics of smallpox and measles, each brought to the New World by the Spanish. And, most important, the Incas were unused to European treachery. Pizarro visited the Inca emperor under a flag of truce, kidnapped him and blackmailed his armies into surrendering."
"Is this an attack on the good intentions of the Soviet people?" Belkev demanded unpleasantly.
The curator denied any such motivation; in fact, he didn't know what Belkev was talking about. Belkev looked as if he didn't quite believe the denial — and why should he when political attacks within the Soviet Union were subtly conducted in just such historical allegories? Somebody should have explained the situation to Belkev but I was rather enjoying the misunderstanding.
"The Europeans, that is, the Spanish, took every bit of art made of gold or silver and melted it down to ingots for shipment to Spain. What we have left of the sophisticated art of the Incas is mostly pottery and some woven artifacts," the curator went on.
Rosa recoiled at the little bit of pottery on a shelf before her. It was a ceramic jug whose spout was disguised as a tiny statue. The statue was of a man tied to a tree. He was naked, his genitals were heavily emphasized and a vulture was picking at his flesh. Even over a span of five hundred years, his pain carried through convincingly.
"This piece is from approximately two hundred B.C. It reminds us that the price of crime among the Indians was a heavy one. In this case the culprit was left to die by exposure to the vultures. After all, it was not easy to exist in these mountains and since the smallest theft could mean another's death, a criminal could expect the most hideous of penalties."
We moved over to another glass case. It took a second for the eyes to adjust to exactly what they were seeing and then there was no doubt about it. What we were looking at was a headless mummy folded up in a foetal position. It was richly dressed in a robe that was decorated with expertly wrought jaguars but my
eyes were captured by the abrupt termination at the neck.
"The bodies of the dead kept wonderfully well in the dry air of Chile," the curator remarked.
"Isn't there something missing?" Rosa asked.
"Oh, the head? Yes. This young man died in one of the Inca wars of conquest. It was common practice for a soldier to take the head of his enemy. We have graveyards full of headless corpses."
He led us to another display.
"As a matter of fact, the head was severed by one of these, I'm sure." He pointed to a wicked-looking instrument residing decorously in a velvet box. It resembled a knife but the handle came out at the back rather than at the end. The handle was decorated with inhuman-looking gods and the sharp edge of the moon-shaped blade glinted menacingly.
"We have some other artifacts typical of the Inca wars," the curator went on proudly. "A quilted suit made of cotton and used as armor, for instance. And a bow and arrow. The men of the mountains were famous for their skill with this weapon while the Indians of the coastline were best known for their spearthrowers. Once two hostile Indian armies came together and launched an artillery of slings and strangulating bolas, with which they had great skill. When the combat came down to hand-to-hand fighting, they fought with war clubs and this uniquely Inca weapon known as a 'Headbreaker.' "
The Headbreaker consisted of a pair of jagged bronze weights suspended from cords. The crusaders used much the same kind of weapon, but only against metal armor. The use of a weapon such as this on an unprotected head must have produced dire results.
The room had one more horror to delight us with. The curator must have been keeping it as his piece de resistance — a human skull strangely distorted and carrying in the elongated bones a gold plate.
"The pride of our exhibit," the curator told us, rubbing his dry hands together. "In many regions of the old empire infants' heads were deliberately deformed by applying pressure with boards. A child would grow up with a head that was excessively long, absolutely round, high or short, depending on what the local standards of beauty were. As you can see, the standard here was a long, narrow head."
"It looks like a snake's," Bonita said, recoiling.
"Interesting," Belkev observed, "but primitive."
"Ever hear of a nose job?" I asked him.
"The remarkable feature of this skull is, of course, the gold plate in the form of a triangle. This was done by trephining, the surgical removal of skull bone by cutting or drilling. It was actually widely practiced by the Incas of the mountains, although the survival rate for the operation was probably no better than even. Most trephining was done for medical reasons but there is a theory that it was done to some young men to mark them as personal bodyguards of the emperor."
"Why didn't the Spaniards take the gold out of this head?" I wanted to know.
"Ah, that's an interesting sidelight. This skull dates from one of the later Indian uprisings against the Spanish. It was during either the seventeenth or the eighteenth century, hundreds of years after the fall of the empire. The skull wasn't discovered until twenty years ago. Now, let us pass on to the other room."
The second room was full of woven articles. After a dutiful ten minutes of listening to the curator, the mayor of Aucanquilcha rescued us and escorted us to his residence for lunch.
Over beer, spiced cavie meat, a kind of potato called oca and pineapple, Belkev recovered some of his spirit.
"A very impressive museum," he said, "but you should come to Russia sometime and see a progressive folklore. Maybe I can arrange for one of our cultural advisors to come and help you with your national arts."
The mayor, who also dumpily looked like a local form of potato, smiled modestly.
"More beer, Comrade Belkev? Good. No, take the bottle. So, at last two great Communist parties join hands and work for the future. I have been a party member for years, as I suppose all of us here have been."
Belkev gave me a glare that was supposed to keep me quiet.
"I am pleased to hear that," he told the mayor. "I thought that your town might have been a little, let's say… backward. It's very encouraging to know that the people are participating in the socialist revolution."
The mayor paled a bit and Belkev was observant.
"Is there something wrong?"
"I'm afraid that we are not backward at all in some respects. Even here the MIRistas are busy with their revisionist lies. We have them under control, however, I assure you."
"You must crush them mercilessly," Belkev advised. "Just as we did with Trotsky."
"You killed him in Mexico, didn't you," I commented.
"A deviationist is the lowest form of life there is," Belkev snarled.
"Not in Aucanquilcha. You can't get any higher."
The mayor looked back and forth between us with dismay.
"Your humor is out of place, as usual," Belkev warned me over the table. "You'll pay for this when we get back to Santiago."
"Uh, perhaps you would like to see the wild vicuña herds in the mountains," the mayor suggested to change the subject.
That's just what we ended up doing, Belkev agreeing to the outing only after he learned that he could see the vicuñas from the back of a pack horse. We didn't see any vicuñas but the Andes were a show in themselves, breathtaking stalagmites that scraped the top of the sky. The Himalayas might be higher but they have nothing to match the perpendicular walls of the South American range.
We traveled cautiously on a narrow trail cut into the side of the mountain by Inca roadbuilders, zigzagging over mile-deep drops in a system that not only spoke highly of the Indians' engineering skill but also of their military foresight. There wasn't a spot on the trail that couldn't come under crossfire from at least two positions. It was built for ambushes.
"I think I'll go look at the edelweiss," I told Belkev's bodyguards.
"Edelweiss?" Belkev exclaimed. "There isn't any edelweiss here."
"I'll find some," I said and, leaving him to puzzle it out, I left my pony and climbed up the rocky mountain face. I was in the best of physical condition but my body was still adjusted for sea level and it was soon gasping for air. The Indians not only have abnormally large lungs, they have a higher count of red blood corpuscles that gives them an especially fast and efficient distribution of oxygen to their body tissues. Nevertheless, I climbed to a level a hundred feet above the trail and moved in tandem with Belkev's party down below, my lungs crying for air.
If an ambush were to be set up, it would have to be made from the high side of the hill. To begin with, it's easier to shoot down. More significant, one of Aucanquilcha's hardy Indians would have a much better chance to escape uphill for the very reason that I was having difficulty in traveling laterally.
There were moments when I felt as if I were walking on top of the world and I knew this was another effect of the lack of oxygen. I saw the people below me on horseback as if through the wrong end of a telescope and beyond them the Andes descended precipitously to where, far below, there was only a blur. I sat down to rest on an outcrop of rock and idly I began to look around.
I still don't know why I noticed the crouched figure. It was about three hundred yards away and as motionless as stone but instantly I knew what it was. I knew that as soon as Belkev's pack horse moved within range, the figure would spout a rifle with a telescopic sight. I knew it as well as I knew that I couldn't reach either the figure or Belkev in time to make a difference. I pulled the Luger out of my jacket, intending to fire a warning shot, and then I froze. Belkev's horse was inching around one of the innumerable zigzags and the sudden sound of a gunshot was likely to scare both the horse and rider off the miniscule trail.
Desperate now, I found the gun's silencer and screwed it on. Every second brought the Russian that much closer to certain death. Using my left arm as a rest, I sighted on the faraway target. As the rifle I'd expected to see emerged in the lens, I squeezed the shot off.
A tuft of dirt spurted up ten feet in front of t
he would-be killer. I had accounted for the fact that a silencer reduces velocity but I hadn't realized what a beating my gun had received in Tierra del Fuego. Now the figure turned and found me. The rifle barrel swung quickly in my direction.
With a ten-foot lead and a prayer, I hugged the trigger again. The top of the boulder he was leaning on sparked as the bullet hit and he slipped around behind the rock. Odds were that the slug had gone on and caught him in the chest but even so, I waited for his re-emergence. Below, unaware of what was happening, Belkev and company ambled on, taking in the view in the other direction. Slowly, never taking my eye off the boulder, I cut over the side of the mountain toward the man with the rifle.
But when I reached the spot, there was no one there. A spent bullet, flattened by impact with the boulder, lay on the ground. There was no blood. I knew in a second where my man had gone, though, and why I hadn't seen him leave. Directly behind the boulder there was the mouth of a small cave. I had to get down on my hands and knees to enter it. My gun was in one hand and with the other hand I flashed a pocket light around the walls of the musty interior. Nobody shot at me and I crawled in.
The cave expanded enough that I could move in a crouch, through sheets of spider webs and dust. The air was close and musky, stagnant like the air in a tomb. A ragged hole through the shrouds of webs told me where my quarry had gone and I followed, inching my way ahead behind the tiny beam of light. The cave led toward the center of the mountain and then curved back upon itself. The air began to be colder, fresher. I ran the last thirty feet with the knowledge that I was too late and sure enough, the increasing light told me that I was emerging at another exit, one farther down the mountain face. The rifle was lying right outside, abandoned. Its owner had disappeared.
I went back through the cave with the sense that I'd missed something. My pocket light picked up the pug face of an upside-down sleeping bat. My footsteps echoed, the sounds muffled by the tapestry of webs. Ahead I could see the light at the entrance. It made an even circle in the black cave and was too round to have been formed naturally.
I swung the beam against the walls and brushed back the dense webs. Carved into the wall there was a stone niche and in the niche there was a row of jars, each jar three feet high. A pattern of painted jaguars covered the jars, the colors faded. I reached out and touched the side of one of the vases.
The Inca Death Squad Page 6
