by Mike Sager
Seede dismounted the bike, an eleven-year-old Honda, a vehicle choice that was more about parking than anarchy, though that was part of it too, the feeling of primacy that came as he drove unfettered through the middle of a rush hour traffic jam. In a way, Seede’s motorcycle—neither big nor showy; purposeful in an offbeat but well-considered fashion—seemed a perfect metaphor for Seede himself, a nobody from nowhere whose stubborn desire to type for a living had taken him further than anyone could have imagined. The Honda also figured prominently in his courtship of Dulcy—another stubborn quest. Of course, they hadn’t been on the bike together since she got pregnant. The larger her belly swelled, it seemed, the more insulated from him she became. Eighteen months into child rearing he felt more like an administrative assistant than a husband. He was always on call, there was no room for dissension. The boss was a ball-breaker: she who must be obeyed.
He locked the helmet on the frame of the bike, retrieved a woolen watch cap from his coat pocket, fit it onto his prematurely balding head. Patting his pockets, he ran a checklist of his paraphernalia. At twenty-nine he was considered by now a seasoned professional. He worked for an esteemed institution, the Washington Herald. He wrote front-page stories read by millions, some of them the most powerful people in the world. Yet, deep down, he felt like he never knew exactly what he was doing. Each time he started a new story it was like starting over from scratch. He wondered if everyone felt that way. When do you begin to know? Do you ever?
Crossing the street, he assumed a slight hitch in his step. In the ghetto a man’s walk is his vehicle; it places him on the scale between player and mark. Though the block seemed deserted, he knew he was being watched. He was short, dark, and bearded, with a hoop earring in his left lobe. Cops took him for a criminal. Criminals took him for a cop. It could be a hindrance or an asset. He could never predict which.
A burgundy Lincoln was parked down the way. Seede approached the driver’s side. The tinted window slid down with the usual electric hum.
“Your little buddies all tucked in for the night?” Jamal snickered.
Seede smiled ironically. He liked to say that he could spend an hour eating dinner with anyone on the planet. There was no harm in being open, but it was sometimes hard to explain; most people preferred the company of their own kind. Heat eddied from the window of the car, warming Seede’s face, radiating a potpourri of scents—the leather interior, Jamal’s cologne, his Newport cigarettes, the Christmas tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. Despite their apparent ease, the two men had only recently met. Long story short: Jamal stomps into the office of Debbie’s lawyer, mad as a hornet for losing her case, a slam dunk due to mandatory minimums. Lawyer, thinking fast, offers up the telephone number of a newspaper reporter he knows—Jonathan Seede. “Try it in the press,” he advises.
While Seede knew that getting the story assigned was a long shot—it was, after all, a family newspaper—he ran it by his editor anyway, partially because he owed the lawyer a favor, partially because he promised Jamal that he would, partially because a story idea rejected still counts as a story idea proposed (he had an unwritten quota), and partially because, in a newsroom peopled with the likes of FDR’s granddaughter and James Dickey’s son, having a real live pimp as a source counted for tons of street cred. As expected, the editor wasn’t interested, though he did urge Seede to maintain contact. Which was good enough to make it kosher for Seede, as a courtesy, to go ahead and phone the public information officer at the women’s jail and ask a few suspiciously innocuous questions. Mysteriously, right after Seede’s call, Debbie was moved to the protective custody wing. It wasn’t something Jamal was going to forget anytime soon. As he often said, “You do fo Jamal, and Jamal will do fo you.”
“So …” Seede said elliptically, moving to the matter at hand. “He’s in there?” He looked furtively over the roof of the car, indicating with his eyes the row house in front of which they were loitering. It was set back from the street on a little hill, one in a line of identical neighbors in various states of repair, conjoined like Siamese twins, sharing here a common roofline and there a common eave, distinguished as individuals only by abrupt changes of paint color as the eye moved across the property lines. A small yard in front of this particular house was encircled by a rusty iron fence; the grass was worn to mud, littered with broken bottles, food wrappers, and postage-stamp-size ziplock bags. A Big Wheel trike lay on its side. A staircase led to a wide porch. The front door was painted a festive shade of red.
“I don’t think he ever leaves,” Jamal said.
“And you’re sure he’s cool about doing an interview?”
“I let him know.”
“A’ight,” Seede said, his use of the slang sounding a note of false bravado. Let him know? What the fuck does that mean?
The sky was growing lighter. The streetlamps shut off with an audible click. Jamal detected Seede’s hesitation. “You need me to come with?”
Seede rapped the rooftop of the Lincoln two times with his knuckle. “I’ll call you later and tell you how it went.”
15
A pair of immense armored gates swung slowly inward, admitting a black paddy wagon into the basement sally port of the District of Columbia Central Jail.
Eight stories high, built of diarrhea-colored brick, the DCCJ loomed over a hazy landscape of empty lots, low-slung housing projects, storefront churches, and liquor stores in the far southeastern sector of the city, separated from the rest of Washington by the Anacostia River. The river and the area around it were named in 1608 by Captain John Smith for the Anacostian Indians, who hunted the abundant hardwood forests and fished the once sparkling tributary. After the Civil War, Anacostia was developed as one of the city’s first suburbs, a bedroom community for blue-collar workers employed across the river at the Washington Navy Yard, a source of the sewage and industrial waste that had, by modern times, rendered the river virtually lifeless. The first subdivision had restrictive covenants prohibiting sale or rental of property to Negros, mulattoes, Indians, Irish, and Jews. One hundred forty years later, 93 percent of Anacostia residents were African-American. A similar percentage could be found among the inmates housed within the eight-foot-thick walls of the DCCJ. Less than three years old, it was already overcrowded.
The paddy wagon pulled to a stop in front of the intake center. Officer Perdue Hatfield exited the passenger door, sauntered toward the back of the wagon, juggling his nightstick on its leather leash like the old-timers used to do, making it dip and twirl and dance. His three-to-midnight shift had been nearly over when the call came—officers requesting backup, an arrest at the Pope’s church. While it struck him odd that detectives from Internal Affairs had made a drug bust on the Strip, he did what he always did—followed orders unquestioningly and to the best of his ability, even if it meant putting in overtime to shepherd the hapless Pope and his merry men through interrogation, booking, and transport. As it happened, he had nowhere else in particular to go—his spider plant seemed to be perfectly okay at home without him. Plus he could use the overtime. He was thinking about buying a BMW direct from Germany. Back when he was in the marines, he’d spent a month in Bamberg, attending an antiterrorist course, something you had to take if you chauffeured a colonel or above. The highlight of the training was “evasion skills”—students were put through their paces on a high-speed track in specially tricked-out BMWs. Since then, owning a Bimmer had been one of Hatfield’s utmost goals. You could fly to Germany, go to the plant in Munich, pick up your car, drive it anywhere you wanted—a friend had suggested touring the wine country in France, but the thought of all those drunk tourists on the road gave him pause. When you finished, they’d ship the car to America, all for about the same price you’d pay at the local Mile of Cars. Just thinking about being behind the wheel of a machine like that made Hatfield feel alive. Like his grandma used to tell him: Life is full of suffering, Perdue: You need something to look forward to.
Now, at
the DCCJ, twenty-six hours since he’d last slept, Hatfield’s eyes felt twitchy—everything was moving slow, as if he was under water. Reaching the back of the paddy wagon, he unlocked the rear doors. Out spilled the Pope of Pot, hands and ankles chained. He was followed by Waylon, Louie, and Beta Max.
They shuffled through an electric sliding door and queued up as directed, noses against a cinder block wall. Across the room, the intake cage was built of steel bars and bulletproof glass, with a pass-through for paperwork. It housed a large woman in a tight white nurse’s uniform. She was sitting on a high stool before a computer terminal. Her white shoes were on the floor beneath her. The heels had been crushed, making them slip-ons.
“You first, your holiness,” Hatfield said, choosing to address his prisoner in respectful terms. The church was on his foot beat. On cold nights he sometimes stopped in for a cup of herbal tea.
The Pope of Pot stepped up to the counter, taking care to place his feet precisely in the red footprints painted on the floor. “Howdy, honey, howdy,” he sang. Though his manner was up-beat, his voice was thready and strained. His head was flushed an alarming pinkish red. Hatfield put the booking slip in the pass-through.
With the languid, economical motion of a city employee, the intake nurse retrieved the slip, returned her attention to the computer screen. Her three-inch nails click-clacked, clawlike, across the keyboard, glue-on jewels sparkling beneath the harsh fluorescent lights.
After some time, she looked up. “Michael David Rubin,” she recited. “You are now in custody of the District of Columbia Central Jail. I am going to axe you a series of questions.”
“Axe away, toots!” the Pope enthused. “Cut me up like Lizzie Borden!”
She shot him a withering look. “Are you injured or have you been in an accident in the last seventy-two hours?”
“Certainly my civil rights have been injured. I have been deprived of my liberty, but I’m fairly sure it was no accident. This whole thing is obviously a setup. It’s ridiculous! A huge misunderstanding. I am the Pope, you see? I speak with the voice and authority of God.”
“No injuries, no accidents,” Hatfield said.
“Any major medical problems?” she asked.
“I guess that depends upon your definition of major,” the Pope answered thoughtfully, “and upon your definition of medical. And of problem, for that matter. Problems are relative, I’d say. On the one hand, given the ooooof—”
Hatfield poked him in the ribs with his nightstick. Not hard, just a little jab, like someone knocking a stuck CD back onto track.
Waylon’s nose, as previously ordered, was still against the wall, which was painted industrial gray and smelled of vomit and ammonia. He craned his neck, trying to see what was happening to the Pope. “Harm him in any way and I will have your badge!” he bellowed.
“Fuckin A!” Louie yelled.
“Damn straight!” called Beta Max.
“Nose against the wall!” Hatfield reiterated, assuming now a command tone lest things deteriorate further—he was, after all, outnumbered. He turned back to the nurse, a bit agitated, a bit adrenalized by the notion of possible threat. “He’s healthy as a horse, ma’am,” he confirmed.
She pushed the form back out the window and Hatfield signed it, ripped off the top two copies, returned the rest to the nurse. He stuffed one of the copies—the goldenrod—into the Pope’s front pants pocket, a rather intimate gesture given the circumstances. The pink copy went into his own pocket. Then he guided his prisoner across the cement floor, toward a heavy steel gate, behind which stood a deputy.
An alarm sounded: a short metallic burst.
The gate slid open.
Hatfield reached for the ponderous key ring hanging from a retractable hook on his utility belt. He unlocked the Pope’s cuffs, replaced them in the holster on his belt, then gave the Pope a little shove, propelling him, like a toy sailboat across a pond, in the direction of the deputy. “Be careful in there,” he said to the Pope’s back.
The gate slid shut with a resounding clank.
16
Thornton Desmond made his way down the long, dim hallway carrying a silver tray, knocked at the door of Bert Metcalfe’s bedroom suite. Hearing no response, he let himself in, as he did every morning. He never knew what he’d find.
This morning, curiously, he found nothing. The room remained as he left it the night before, the curtains drawn, the Frankart lamp on the night table lit—its two slender nymphs rendered fetchingly in bronze, holding aloft a glass orb. The king-size canopy bed was unrumpled; the custom-tailored silk pajamas and matching brocaded robe that Thornton had laid out were untouched, as were the cookies and milk.
At the far end of the room was a door. Light filtered from beneath.
Bert Metcalfe was sitting at a library table in the private study off the bedroom. The walls around him were lined with shelves, crammed to the ceiling with leather-bound volumes. He was still wearing his pin-striped suit and loafers from the night before. A reading lamp cast a solitary ring of light.
“Coffee, sir?”
Startled, Metcalfe looked up from the journal before him. “Must you be so damn quiet, Thornton?”
“May I serve?”
Metcalfe rubbed his face; his stubble made a scratchy sound. The table was covered with dog-eared manuscripts, brittle maps, dusty letters, yellowed photos, antique newspaper clippings—the accumulated writings and personal effects of his grandfather, the original Bertram Hedgewick Metcalfe. He gestured toward an empty spot.
Thornton set down the tray, off-loaded the cup and saucer, the cream and sugar, a silver bud vase containing a red Sweetheart rose. “Is it everything you hoped for, sir?”
Like an archaeologist who had finally unearthed his long sought prize, the diminutive billionaire’s eyes sparkled with exhausted delight. “His family was middle class—from Manchester, England,” Metcalfe said. “They wanted him to follow in his father’s footsteps. I think he realized at some point that he’d be trapped forever if he didn’t do something decisive. At seventeen he took a boat to Canada—he went steerage—and ended up just beneath the Arctic Circle, living with a family of Eskimos.”
Metcalfe sifted through a pile on the table, came up with a faded photograph. “This is an eight-hundred-pound catfish. He landed it from a dugout canoe in the Caribbean. Do you believe the size of that thing? It looks prehistoric. And this is him later”—he picked up another photo—“in the Honduran jungle, when he was searching for the Master Skull.” A tall, thin, serious man squinting against the tropical sun, wearing a floppy hat, woolen jodhpurs, and knee-high boots. An extra-long-stemmed meerschaum pipe angled obliquely from his mouth.
“He sounds like a real-life Indiana Jones.”
“I know,” Metcalfe said, disappointment in his tone. “Everything anymore seems already done, doesn’t it? But think about it. In his time, in his era—the early 1900s, before flight—this guy was the real deal. He was a true adventurer, a man who followed his gut instinct to the ends of the Earth and back.”
“And you never had the opportunity to meet him, sir?” Desmond poured the coffee with flair, raising the carafe higher and higher as the cup filled—a dark, rich, stream issuing from the swan-neck of the silver spout.
“My father never even mentioned him. Like he didn’t exist. For years I had the impression my father was an orphan. He didn’t talk about either of his parents. Now I’m beginning to understand why.”
“We all have our sad stories, don’t we, sir?”
“That we do, Thornton.”
The butler placed the serving tray under his arm. “Will there be anything else then?”
Metcalfe looked up affectionately at his manservant. “How are the bunions, Thornton? Has Dr. Woo’s treatment helped you at all?”
He smiled gratuitously. “Fair to middling, sir.”
“Why don’t you have a seat?” Metcalfe gestured to a chair across the table. “You’ve got to hear some more of this.”<
br />
“If you insist, sir.”
“I do insist, Thornton.” Metcalfe reached to a shelf, pulled down a dusty souvenir coffee mug, set it on the library table. “You know how it is with rich folk,” he said, shoving the just-poured cup with saucer toward Thornton, “we have to employ people to be our friends.”
17
On a fine, sunny April morning in 1914, loaded with a veritable king’s ransom in kit and perishable supplies—enough to see a crew of fifteen through a three-month expedition—the Ninita pulled into the splintered but picturesque docks at Punta Gorda, 120 miles south of Belize, the capital of British Honduras.
Accompanying Bobbie and myself were Dr. Stephan Ambrose, medical doctor and leading authority on Mayan civilization, and also H. R. Stuke, a somewhat known Cornish watercolorist who had become fascinated by the region we proposed to explore and begged us to bring him along. As a lifelong devotee of the higher pursuits of fine art and personal expression, I succumbed to his requests—hoping, perhaps, that he could initiate my young ward into the secrets of his craft. It was a decision I would regret for a lifetime.
In Punta Gorda, as I had hoped, amid the thatched adobe dwellings of the soporific Caribs—small in stature with brownish red skin, thick lips, and fuzzy negroid hair, hailing originally from the territories surrounding the mighty Amazon River—we picked up further information about the existence of what I hoped was the Lost City of Tumbaatum.
