“One—” Silence.
Kirby looked over and saw her distress. “Sorry,” he said, and turned Cynthia right side up. “One hour north,” he said. “On foot.”
“Yes,” Valerie said.
The false Gurkhas saw the people looking toward the trail up from the road, and unlimbered their Sterling submachine guns. The villagers, already sensing something wrong about these soldiers, now drew back, wide-eyed, and everybody in the small clearing grew silent, except the female piglet, still squealing and shrilling about the indignity that had been done her.
High above, the sky was clear and blue. Thick brush and great trees surrounded the clearing, arching high overhead, and smaller trees had been left to stand beside the huts for shade. Except in the very center, where steady sunlight shone on their plantings, the settlement was dappled with rays reaching through the trees, angling down to touch with creamy light this person, that hut, that finger resting gently on a trigger. At the narrow end of the clearing, a patch of hotter, brighter light backed by fuzzy greens and yellows showed the top of the trail up from the road.
An Espejo girl, eight years old, picked up the piglet and cradled it in her arms. Her thudding heartbeat calmed the piglet, which grew quiet.
A straggling group of eight people, hot and sweaty and sun-dazzled, appeared at the end of the silent clearing and came slowly in, looking around themselves.
Vernon saw the Gurkhas, saw them holding the machine guns, and moaned as he dropped to his knees, unaware of the journalists staring at him in astonishment. “No,” he said, too late.
“The last one,” Valerie said, tightening the final noose on the final neck.
“Good.”
The hurried work finished, Valerie for the first time had a chance to actually look at these things. She held a small statue in each hand, the identical little evil creatures capering there with the nooses around their necks. “These—” she said, and frowned. “Are you sure these are real?”
“Van parked there, in from the blacktop road. See it?”
She saw it, partway into the green jungle, white roof gleaming, front of the vehicle pointed west, away from the road. “This must be it!”
“And the visitors are here already.”
Valerie clutched tightly to the Zotzilaha Chimalmans as the plane banked and dropped low to the ground.
The sound of a passing plane was drowned by the chatter. Nine-millimeter bullets stuttered across the clearing, chopping Scottie’s legs out from under him and punching Vernon’s stomach three times, in a line just above his belt. People screamed and ran, and three villagers fell bleeding.
The plane was louder, not passing after all. Disturbed at their work, the false Gurkhas looked up as the plane roared through the clearing, sideways, right wingtip pointing down at them as though to say, “You. I see you.”
“Throw them!” Kirby yelled. “Throw them!”
Valerie was too busy to answer. She was lying on her side, against the side wall of the plane, elbow on the fixed part of the window. As quickly as she could, she pushed the little statues one at a time through the window flap.
Zotzilaha Chimalman. Out of the plane he fell, time after time, swathed in cotton material, the cloth pulling away in the breeze of his falling. The noose around his neck was made of four strings, tied to four edges of the cloth; enough of a parachute for such a little devil.
Two false Gurkhas lifted their Sterlings, but the plane was already through the clearing and gone, circling. The people were running into the jungle, the journalists lay flat in the sunlight. Creatures floated down out of the sky.
Cynthia made a hard, tight circle through the air, left wing straight up and right wing straight down, and once more she crashed through the clearing. More demons plummeted from her side.
A false Gurkha aimed his Sterling at one of the things parachuting toward him. He peered through the metal arch of the foresight protector, focusing on the gray-brown figure in the air. He recognized it. A great fright struck him and he stared, forgetting to shoot.
Vernon, curled in a tight ball around the agony in his stomach, wept, and blamed the Colonel for everything.
A false Gurkha clutched a statue out of the air, held it in his hand, stared at it in disbelief. Dirt clung to it, as though it had just come from the grave; some of the dirt was now on his hand. Suddenly, he flung the thing away. He thought his hand was burning. Stepping back, his foot rolled on a statue on the ground; it tried to trip him, bite him, bring him down. He shrieked, threw away his Sterling, and ran.
“There aren’t any more!” Valerie cried.
Kirby lifted Cynthia up and away. Valerie tried to see back to the village. “Wait! What’s happening back there?”
“Give them a minute to think about it. Then we’ll go back and
What was this airplane? How had it come to be exactly where the false Gurkhas were, exactly at the moment when they were starting their work? Had they been betrayed? Were other enemies on the way?
These were the rational problems, the sensible questions, the meaningful dilemmas. They were as nothing beside the creatures hanging in the sky.
Twenty Zotzilahas floating down through the dappled air, falling one by one to the ground, gathering their cotton cloaks about themselves, grimacing and winking and grinning at the false Gurkhas, three more of whom flung away their guns and ran for the jungle.
“Come back!” the leader shouted, and fired after them, missing.
Another, backing away from the devils, saw the leader turn eyes and gun in his direction and he fired first, killing the leader 11 times.
Two more murderers in Gurkha uniform ran away into the jungle, these keeping their weapons.
Valerie stared back at the anonymous green. She wanted to see. Fretfully, she said, “Could they be that afraid of clay?”
“Their ancestors were.”
The false Gurkhas had been brought up in Christian homes. They had been taught to know and to love God and the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints. They had been taught to despise Satan and all his works. They had risen above such education, and struck out to live their own lives by their own rules.
No one had ever told them they had to believe in the Mayan gods and the Mayan devils. Those beings were there in the stories, that’s all, there in the drawings and the cloth designs and the carvings, there in the rites and ceremonies that a minority of their older relatives sometimes engaged in. Nobody had ever told them they had to believe in Zotzilaha Chimalman, and yet none of them had ever in his heart doubted that the cave of bats existed, the forked road to eternity existed, the evil hater of mankind was there in the darkness just waiting the opportunity to drag them down to eternal death.
He flies, Zotzilaha, he comes out of the sky like a bat. He is full of tricks and malevolence. If he catches you when your heart is black, you’re doomed.
When the sound of the plane was heard again in the clearing, there were only five false Gurkhas left in it, four living and their leader, who was dead. The dead one lay surrounded by images of Zotzilaha Chimalman.
When the silence in the clearing ended, filled up instead by the growing buzz of the airplane, the last four of the false Gurkhas faded away into the jungle.
The plane roared overhead again, and gone, and Vernon opened his eyes. Through his pain and tears he could see the villagers clustered around their three fallen relatives, the journalists gathering around Scottie. Hiram Farley, separate from both groups, bent to pick up one of the figures that had fallen from the plane.
Vernon closed his eyes. Everything he saw was red. The pain in his stomach was duller and his brain seemed to move more slowly.
When he opened his eyes again, Hiram Farley was standing over him, hefting the little statue in his hand. “Well, Vernon,” Farley said.
Vernon slowly blinked. With his mouth open to breathe, dirt was filtering in, coating his tongue and teeth.
“Now why, Vernon,” Farley said, “would Asian soldiers be a
fraid of a Central American devil? Something tells me you can answer that question.”
Vernon looked at Farley’s dusty boots. He mumbled something.
“What was that, Vernon?”
“‘They didn’t even kill me,’ I said.”
22
CHICKEN ESTELLE (SERVES FOUR)
“That isn’t south Abilene,” Valerie said.
Kirby Galway turned the little plane in a long slow parabola, out and around, while down below a man and woman chased goats from the long green field surrounded by forest. At one end of the field was a squat brown house with several additions, and behind it patches of cultivation. “No, it isn’t,” Galway said.
She gave his bland profile an extremely suspicious look. “What is it, then?”
“Where I live.”
“Why are we going there?” After all she’d been through, must she now defend herself from this man’s attentions?
Galway made minor adjustments with the plane’s controls; its nose was aimed now at that long field, with the tiny house and the tiny people at the far end and the goats all cleared away. He said, “I want to talk to you before you talk to Innocent.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re on the ground.”
She watched him, but he had nothing else to say. But wasn’t what he’d already said significant, didn’t it mean once and for all that Kirby Galway was not in league with Innocent St. Michael? If there was some secret he wanted to keep from Innocent—and what else could he be planning?—it meant they weren’t partners in crime after all.
So which one was the criminal?
And what was the crime?
It was all too confusing. She had seen the temple, exactly where it was supposed to be, where she and the computers had both predicted it would be, and then two weeks later, at the precise same spot, it was gone. She had seen Kirby Galway with Whitman Lemuel from that museum and had known it meant they were stealing rare Mayan treasures and smuggling them out of the country, but when she’d at last held several of those treasures in her hands she’d found herself doubting they were real. She had thought Vernon was working for Galway or Innocent or possibly both of them, and now it seemed to turn out he’d been working only for himself. And what had Vernon been trying to do? Get his hands on the (fake) treasures of the (nonexistent) temple? She shook her head, and spoke her frustration aloud: “What is everybody up to?”
He laughed. “I’m actually going to tell you,” he said, and the plane bounced on the uneven turf, bounced again, landed, settled, and slowed to a sedate roll as they neared the house, where the man and woman stood waiting, smiling.
“I’m beginning to remember,” Valerie said slowly, “that you’re a very bad man. You are, aren’t you?”
“Extremely bad,” he said, and the plane turned toward a copse of trees on the right.
“Except when you’re rescuing people,” she acknowledged.
“My one saving grace,” he said, and the plane stopped in tree shadow. Galway switched off the engine, and the silence flowed in like a wave.
There was no door on her side. She had to wait while he unstrapped and climbed out, then follow him, crawling across his seat and accepting his hand to balance her as she made it down to the ground.
The air here was very warm and heavy after so long in the plane, and she found herself stiff and sore when she tried to walk. The couple had come over to greet them—the man short, the woman much shorter—and Galway led Valerie around the wing to make the introductions: “Estelle Cruz, Manny Cruz, this is Valerie Greene.”
“How do you do?”
“Hello, hello, hello.”
When Manny Cruz smiled, he had many more spaces for teeth than he had teeth, but somehow that merely made his smile look happier. And for such a gnarled little woman, Estelle Cruz’s smile was surprisingly shy and girlish.
Galway removed both those smiles by then saying, “Miss Greene is an extemely annoying woman who has absolutely loused up everything I’ve been doing here.”
Estelle glared at Valerie, who gaped at her accuser in shock. Manny said, “This is Sheena! So she is alive.” He didn’t sound happy about it.
“That’s right,” Galway said. “The temple scam is dead, everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket, and I’ll probably have to move out of this country.”
The Cruzes were both terribly shocked. Estelle looked as though she might leap on Valerie and claw her to death, while Manny said, “Move from this house, Kirby?”
“It isn’t her fault, Manny,” Galway said. “She didn’t do it on purpose; she’s just stupid and ignorant.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Valerie said.
“She thought she was doing right,” Galway went smoothly on, “so I don’t blame her. And now she can help me in one little way, and that’s why I brought her here, to tell her the whole story, and I’m sure she’s going to want to help out.”
Valerie looked at them all suspiciously, even Estelle, whose manner was just as mistrustful as her own. “I won’t commit any crimes,” she said.
Galway gave her an enigmatic look: “If I were going to commit a crime, Miss Greene,” he said, “you’re about the last person I’d ask to be my accomplice.”
If that was an insult—and it did seem to have been intended as such—it had to be one of the strangest insults in history. Feeling mulish and put-upon, Valerie said, “That’s all right, then.”
Manny said, “Whadaya want her to do, Kirby?”
“Let’s talk over lunch,” Galway said. “I’m starved.” Looking at Valerie, he said, “How about you?”
Dear God! Her stomach! In all the excitement and activity and confusion, she hadn’t even noticed, but all of a sudden her stomach gave her such a hunger pang she actually gasped from it. Food? When was the last time she’d eaten? Nothing at all today, nothing since last night, on the run, when she’d eaten those tortillas.
The very thought made her head swim.
“Right,” Galway said, correctly reading her expression. “We’ll just wash up and then eat out here, Estelle, okay?”
Estelle nodded, tentatively smiling again, waving at the outdoor table beside the house.
Galway said, “Kids all in school? Just the four of us? What are we having?”
“Escabeche,” said Estelle.
ESCABECHE (Ess-ka-bet-che)
One hen.
Two large onions.
Spices.
Kill, pluck and separate the hen. Stew in water one hour, adding cloves, pepper, and chopped-up chilis to taste.
While hen is stewing, prepare tortillas in usual manner, and thinly slice onions.
Add onions to stew for the last 15 minutes.
Serve stew in large bowls. Place napkin in bottom of basket, place tortillas in basket, close napkin across top, place in center of table.
Place small bottle of Pineridge Hot Pepper Sauce on table.
Open four bottles of Belikin beer, place on table.
Stand back.
“Oh, my, this is good,” Valerie said.
“There’s more,” Estelle told her, beaming from wrinkled ear to wrinkled ear.
“More beer?” Manny asked. “Kirby? Valerie?”
“Oh, yes,” everybody said, and Valerie was surprised to find herself smiling at Kirby, who grinned back and reached for another tortilla.
Kirby. Valerie. They were on a first-name basis now, ever since he had shown her into his susprisingly neat and Spartan apartment to clean up before lunch and she’d said, “Which door is the bathroom, Mister Galway?” and he had looked at her and said, “I don’t like to be called Mister Galway except by the police, and I refuse to call you Miss Greene any more, so what shall we call each other? Shall I call you Fido, and you call me Spot?” So that was that.
Sunlight gleamed on the yellow hair on Kirby Galway’s arm as he raised his spoon and ate. She kept glancing at him, thinking he had a good laugh and an easy self-confident manner, and it was too ba
d really that he was such a villain. If, in fact, he was a villain.
Was he not a villain? At his most furious with her, when he was waving that sword about, he hadn’t actually used it on her. A villain—and Valerie had met some villains now—would certainly have sliced her head off at that point, and thought no more about it.
Nor was he even a vile seducer. The contrast between this lunch and the eating of conch with Innocent that time was so extreme it almost made her laugh out loud. Innocent had been so smooth and so accomplished, and had just filled her mind with thoughts of sex. Kirby Galway laughed and told jokes and ate his escabeche and didn’t try to manipulate her at all, made not the slightest effort to fill her mind with thoughts of sex.
And if her mind was filled with thoughts of sex, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, making her blush—they’ll think it’s the hot sauce, and it almost is—she knew enough psychology to know it was merely a mormal reaction to being in safety after a period of extreme danger and extended physical stress.
And, of course, the sun gleaming on the yellow hair on Kirby’s arm.
He looked up and caught her eye and grinned, and she looked down at her bowl, suddenly flustered. Then, afraid she’d given herself away, she looked over at him again and he was frowning slightly at his own bowl, thinking about something.
Time to change the subject. “Listen, Kirby,” she said. “You wanted to tell me something.”
“Right.” He nodded at her, his brow clearing. “You’re right, Valerie,” he said. “It’s time I told you what’s been going on.”
“Good,” she said, and went on eating while he talked.
23
HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN REAL ESTATE
Kirby told her the truth, almost every last little bit of it. “My big mistake,” he started, “was when I bought some land from Innocent,” and then he went on to tell her about the land, his finances, his meeting with Tommy Watson and the other Indians, his invention of the temple and the Indians faking the artifacts under Tommy’s direction, and Kirby himself going off to find his suckers in America to buy the fakes. “They think they’re breaking the law, so they don’t tell anybody about it.”
High Adventure Page 27
