John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 20 - Cinnamon Skin

by Cinnamon Skin(lit)

  A small herd of turkeys came strolling out of the brush, gabbling softly among themselves, stopped aghast when they saw us, whirled, and went back to cover swiftly, looking back over their shoulders, telling each other how dangerous we were to turkey life everywhere.

  We heard her faint cry and looked up and saw her standing, beckoning to us. My watch said she had been alone up there for a little more than an hour.

  "She wants us to climb up there," I said.

  "Up that?" Meyer said.

  "Come on. Just don't look down."

  "Dear God," he muttered, and came padding along behind me.

  When we got to the base of it, we could no longer see her up there. I put the flashlight down and looked at the dimensions of the steps. They were about twenty inches high and only about eight to ten inches deep. So the way to go was almost on all fours, to lean into the slope and use the fingers on the steps for balance. I told Meyer this would be the best way, and I heard him sigh.

  Once one was into the rhythm of it, it was not bad. The full heat of the day had not yet arrived. It was a long climb. I tried not to think about going down. I waited near the top until Meyer was on the same level, about six feet to my left. She bent and caught his hand and helped him up the final tall step. I scrambled up. She smiled at us. She encompassed all the world in one sweep of her arm and said, "Look! Just look!"

  I did not feel at all comfortable about standing on that small flat top. It was only about four feet by eight feet, and it fell steeply away in all directions. We were so high above the jungle that it looked like a dark green shag rug. The sun was two widths above the horizon. She pointed and said, "See that little silvery glint out there, like a needle beyond the trees? That's the Caribbean. Over thirty miles from here. Look down that way. See? There is the pink car. It is so glorious up here in the morning!"

  To my relief she sat down, legs hanging over the rubbly slope on the side opposite the one we had climbed. We sat on either side of her. She pointed out smaller pyramids that poked out of the trees.

  I said, "Is it part of being Maya? I mean, to come here when someone has died?"

  "Not really. I don't know. Maybe they did that. It all ended hundreds of years ago. By the time the Spaniards came, it was already over. Archaeologists make up stories about what it was like in the Mayan cities, trying to read old stelae and glyphs, and other archaeologists translate in some other, way and make furious objections. We do know that the classical period ended five hundred years before the Spanish came. The Maya abandoned their cities and temples, moved away, went off into the jungles. Why? No one knows. They thought it was because the land would no longer produce. But that has been proven false. They dug channels through swamps, piled the muck on the center rows between the channels, grew water lilies, and racked them up onto the long mounds to decay there. It was sophisticated agriculture and very productive. Tikal was the greatest city of all, to the south of where we are, in Guatemala. Perhaps two hundred thousand people lived there. It was a center of commerce on the rivers and the sea. This Coba was one of the strange old cities. Like Chichen, Uxmal, Palenque, Bonampak, Yaxchilan. I have been to the others, but it is only here in this place I feel... part of it. As if it pulls upon my heart. We were a bloody people long ago, even before the Toltec, with rites, ceremonies, processions, blood sacrifices. And we had measurements of time going back eight million years. I was in Canada when my father died. When I was able to come back, I came to this place as soon as I could, and I sat here at dawn and said his Mayan name one hundred times as the sun came up. They gave him the name Pedro Castillo because they could not say his real name."

  When she said it, it sounded like "Pakal." But the P was more explosive than the P sound in English, and there was a coughing sound to the x. The r, was odd, as if during it she moved her tongue from the back of the roof of her mouth toward the front, giving it the value of "ulla."

  "It was believed that he was descended from priests. Some priests became kings and then became gods. He would have been seen as a tall man anywhere, but he was very tall for a Maya. And my Mayan name is..."

  If I'd had to spell it, it would have been Alklashakeh. The vowels were purred, the sibilants rich.

  "It is all over," she said, "and yet it isn't over. I do not know why I was moved to say his name, and William's name, one hundred times at dawn from here. But it made me feel better both times, as if they were afloat in death and I had moved them to a safe shore. Do you know that deep in the jungle there are small secret villages where men with guns still guard hidden idols from everyone except the deserving Maya? The holy figures sit there in the dark huts, remembering everything."

  She shrugged off her sadness and asked us to swivel around to face in another direction, toward a small nearby body of water and a cluster of tile-roofed buildings.

  "There is the hotel," she said. "There is a lake in front of it. See? And the old Mayan road went across that lake on a causeway, and it went all the way through the jungle, all the way to Chichen Itza. It was wide enough for a carriage, but they did not have wheels, it is said. If they did not have wheels, then why does one ancient wall at Chichen clearly show the meshing of the cogs of three wheels as in the gears of some machine? If they did not have wheels, how is it so that a giant roller was found here at Coba, weighing tons, and was used to crush and flatten the limestone out of which they built that road? It went off that way, beyond that lake, for fifty miles. It is now all narrow and rough. But it is a trail that goes from here to Chichen and from Chichem to Uxmal. We were not animals. There was a culture here."

  Meyer shook his head. "I'm not ready for all that, Barbara. I am still trying to comprehend the thing I am sitting on here, to comprehend the skill and devotion and determination it took to raise up this gigantic pyramid. I was about to say in the middle of nowhere. For them it was perhaps the middle of the universe."

  She looked questioningly at me. "Was it worth getting up in the middle of the night?"

  "It was. It is."

  "You came up the right way. Go down the same way now, backward. Look down between your thighs and around your hips to see the next steps. If any rock step wiggles, take your weight from it at once. Sometimes they fall. People fall with them. Tourists burst their brains on the stone. There is talk about making it forbidden to climb the pyramids. What is life if all risk is taken away? Go down now, if you are ready. There is only one more thing I want to say to myself up here."

  By the time we reached the bottom, with almost simultaneous sighs of relief, Barbara was on her way down, quick-moving, graceful, assured. She turned and jumped down the last few steps, dusted her hands, smiled at us.

  She walked toward us in the bright shadow of morning, in a flow of side light, her skin the shade of coffee with cream, or of cinnamon, fine-grained, with a matte finish, flawless and lovely.

  We walked back to the car slowly, and she told us what she knew of the place. We took a side trip down a narrow winding path to look at a stele, a huge one, broken into three parts and re-erected, protected by a thatched roof, the carving on it so worn it was almost invisible.

  At the ticket shack, she called the man out and walked over to the side with him, talked to him, gave him some money. We got into the car and drove to the hotel we had seen from the top. It was by then seven fifteen and there were six Japanese in the dining room having an exotic breakfast of huevos rancheros. We sat where we could look out at a small garden. She insisted that it would be her treat.

  "Now then," she said, as coffee cups were refilled, "you know the other name this person uses?"

  "And a post office box number in Cancun," Meyer said. "Box seven ten."

  "There is no mail delivery down the highway," she said. "You rent a box in whatever city you are near. And near can be eighty miles."

  "In any direction?" Meyer asked.

  "Only going south.. Along the highway toward Merida, for example, you would not go that far before you would get your mail in Valladolid. T
ell me. What is his name?"

  "Roberto Hoffmann."

  She sat so very still I had the feeling she was not even breathing. Then she slumped. "For one moment I thought there was something I would remember about that name. All I know is that I have heard it. I do not know when or where. But it is a common name. Anyway, there will be no trouble finding him. No trouble at all, if such a person exists."

  "What will make it easy?" Meyer asked.

  "The Maya network: Listen, my friends. All up and down this coast and off into the deep jungle, the Maya do the hard work. A lot of Mexicans have come in to work at the hotels, but in some of them, like the Casa Maya, it will be all Maya workers from one village. There is one man who has a big ranch. He has important political jobs. He is like the jefe of all the Maya. He can spread the word that Barbara Castillo wants to know where is this Roberto Hoffmann. If he lives in Quintana Roo, someone will know him. There are lots of strangers now, houses being built, people coming from Venezuela and Honduras and Germany, building houses by the sea. But the Maya do construction, make gardens, roads, string wires. Someone will know. I will leave the word with him on our way back. It is beyond the place I showed you, Akumal, but not far beyond. With a stone wall done in the old way."

  "We have a photograph of him back at the hotel," I said.

  "Good. Because how he looked is not very clear in my memory. He had... a nice ordinary look. Just one more, pleasant person who smiled a great deal and said agreeable things. Are you sure?"

  "Almost positive."

  She pursed her lips in thought and then asked, "Why would such a man want to marry that woman, your niece, and then kill her?"

  Meyer told her Cody Pittler's story. She understood at once. "Aha!" she said. "He is killing Coralita over and over and over. He is punishing them and himself for being evil. But that does not include killing my Willy."

  "I would guess that-"

  "We will find out," she said. "We will find out soon."

  On the way back we stopped at the ranch on the west side of the road. She walked from the driveway to the ranch house and was gone for about ten minutes. She came back and said, "He was not there, but I left a note. He will get word to me. I told him it is urgent."

  Twenty-three

  THERE was no word from Barbara Castillo the rest of that day, or all day Saturday or Sunday. On Sunday evening when we came back to the hotel at nine, there was a note to come to her apartment.

  As she held the door open and we walked in, once again I was aware of the physical impact of her. She had all the presence of one of the great actresses, along with such vitality you could almost feel the electricity. It was like walking under the power lines that march across a countryside. In the field under the lines you can feel the hair lift on the nape of your neck and the backs of your hands.

  She wore white shorts and a red blouse, no jewelry at all. She was barefoot. I had noticed before that her hands and feet did not fit with the slenderness of the rest of her. They had a broad, sturdy look of strength and competence.

  She clasped her hand around my wrist. Her hand was quite cold and damp. She tugged me toward the couch. I sat beside her, and Meyer sat in the nearest chair.

  "I know about him!" she said. "Many many things. I showed Ram¢n the photograph you let me take, and it is the same, but with a mustache now, and the hair much darker."

  "Who is Ram¢n?"

  "Oh, a nice shy little man, very broad and strong, very polite. He is Maya. One of the jefe's employees drove him in in a truck to tell me about the man he works for, Senor Hoffmann. He has worked for Senor Hoffmann for, he thinks, eight years. He went to work for him shortly after the big house was built, one year or maybe two afterwards. Remember I pointed out the road to Playa del Carmen, where we can go to Cozumel by passenger ferry or small airplane? To find Mr. Hoffmann, you go down almost to the water and turn left, to head back toward this direction. It is a public road and it goes for maybe a mile. At the end of it there is a big iron gate and a warning not to enter. Once you are through the gate, the driveway winds through some gardens and then comes to the house. It is a big house, with a beach in front of it and a lagoon beyond it, with a boathouse and garages and servants' rooms. Mr. Hoffmann is very rich, Ram¢n says. But compared to Ram¢n almost anybody would seem rich. I asked what kind of work Mr. Hoffmann does. Ram¢n said that he often goes on business trips and stays for a long time. Many months. He is a residente. He has the proper documents. He speaks Spanish as good as any Mexican, and better than most Maya. There are six servants, including Ram¢n. He has no woman, this Hoffmann. He does not have friends who visit him. He does not give parties. The only time he leaves his house and grounds is when he goes out in his boat to fish or into the jungle to hunt tigers. Or goes away on a trip. He has a big shortwave radio receiver and a big aerial. He listens to it a lot. Now he has a television set. Of course there is no station he can hear, but when he came back from the United States last year he brought American movies and a machine to play them over his television. Sometimes he lets the servants watch one. Oh, and he has an exercise room, with machines in it."

  "Did you say tigers?" Meyer asked.

  "Tigers? Oh, yes. They are big tawny jungle cats. Wildcats or panthers. Do you know that men used to gather chicle in the jungle to make chewing gum? They tapped trees. The men who gathered the chicle were called chicleros. They shot the panthers. Then it became possible to make the juice in a laboratory. No more chicleros. The chicle trails are overgrown. The panthers are returning. They used to say the panther is the second most dangerous creature you can meet in the jungle. The most dangerous, of course, was the chiclero. They were wild rough men. So he fishes and hunts and stays by himself."

  "What about William Doyle?" I asked.

  She put her cool hand back on my wrist and tightened her grasp. She looked down and spoke so softly Meyer leaned forward to hear her. "On that day William dropped me off, Ram¢n said a man came in a small gray automobile. I showed him a picture of Willy. Ram¢n said possibly it was the same man, but he could not tell, they all look so much alike to him. They went out fishing in the boat. Usually a servant named Perez went along when Hoffmann fished, but he did not go that day. When the boat came back, Hoffmann was alone. He said he had let his visitor ashore at the house of a friend, and he would come back for his car later on. And in the morning, the gray car was gone."

  "I'm sorry."

  She lifted her head to look at Meyer. "You were right. William must have known somehow, maybe by accident, that Hoffman and Evan Lawrence were one and the same. It was not healthy to know that. William thought he was a friend."

  "Hoffman seems to have all the conveniences," I said.

  "Oh, yes. Ram¢n says they have a good well, which is very unusual in this part of Yucatan. And there are two big generators which came in long ago by ship, and tanks which hold many gallons of diesel fuel. Thousands, Ram¢n said. But it is probably hundreds. Also there is a tank and a pump for the gasoline for the car and the boat. With our little car, all he had to do was take it out onto the highway and find a place to run it off the road into the jungle. The village people would soon take everything from it. What was left will rust away very quickly. He could walk back by night, ducking out of sight when traffic came. It is no problem for him. I loved the little car. It was like a fat friendly little dog. It tried hard but it could not run very fast."

  "Does Ram¢n understand he is employed by a bad man?"

  "He does not want to think that. But it doesn't matter what he thinks. He will do whatever his people tell him is necessary."

  "The others too?"

  "If they are all Maya. And if we ask them, through the jefe."

  "If he goes hunting he has guns there," I said.

  "I forgot. Many many guns. And there are burglar alarms, Ram¢n said. No one can approach the house at night, or come in the lagoon in a boat. A loud siren sounds. The children of the servants have set it off by accident, and they have been very frig
htened."

  "And he is there now," Meyer said.

  "Yes, of course. Ram¢n thinks it will be a long time before he goes away on a trip. Perhaps not until next year, not until the spring. Then he will probably leave from Cozumel, Ram¢n said. That is where he departs. Once a week Ram¢n comes to Cancun to look for mail in the box. Some years there are no letters for Don Roberto. Some years one or two."

  She released my wrist. We sat there with our separate thoughts. We were together, but alone in our minds.

  Meyer stood up and paced and came back to stand facing us, looking down. "One aspect of this keeps bothering me," he said. "And it goes right back to the beginning, back to Coralita. We have no proof of anything that happened that night. All we have is a commonly accepted hypothesis which has never been checked out with anyone who was there at the time."