Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  While Youngman stood and burned for an answer, Chee gestured to the white and the two men walked away from the plaza. The deputy heard the word “troublemaker” dropped, discarded the way a man would throw away an inferior item. Seconds later, the Buick and Caddy nosed into view and conspicuously squeezed through alleys to the mesa road.

  Youngman could hear the soft roll of fat tires in the dirt. Why did he hate Chee? Because Chee was right?

  “You’re laughing,” Stone Man said. “Is there anything funny?”

  Stone Man was the village elder Chee had been talking to. He wore a rag around his head. His flesh was ropy. Youngman had the sense, and the fear, that he was looking at his future self.

  “Not a thing, uncle. I guess all the Fire Clan priests are already in the kiva.”

  “Yes. I think Abner Tasupi was the last to go down.”

  “Abner? That’s not possible.”

  Youngman walked across the plaza to a kiva almost on the edge of the mesa. The clan feathers on the ladder were stirred by a wind that blew straight out of the San Francisco Mountains, visible on the other side of the desert at a distance of seventy-five miles. A kiva was a link to that Underworld from which the first Hopis crawled; in other words, it was a dark, tobacco-rank chamber in which destitute people secluded themselves to prepare the ceremonies that would keep their miserable world together. Juniper bushes tied to the ladder below the entrance hole blocked Youngman’s view. Stone Man followed him.

  “Abner’s dead.”

  “Oh.” Stone Man concentrated. “Well, you know, I only seen him from the back. You know, I seen eight fellows go down and I just thought the last one was Abner.” He watched Youngman nervously toe the stones around the opening. “You say he’s dead, I must be wrong.”

  Paine had stayed in Mexico after his father’s death. None of the Mexicans from the research station would work with him again but since the program was lavishly funded by American Agency for International Development money he was allowed to operate alone for a year. When he’d arrive in his Land Rover full of lab equipment and poisons the hill Indians would desert their village, a sight that always struck Paine as obscenely ridiculous because he came to kill death, not spread it. They’d watch, hidden, as Paine, his face strapped into a gas mask, carried into a cave canisters of barium carbonate, or arsenic trioxide, or thallium sulfate. When he left, the Indians would celebrate in the comic belief they’d driven off a demon.

  Even when the Mexicans did cut off his funds, it didn’t matter. Heart researchers wanted to study the vampire’s circulatory system, sonar researchers wanted to test the vampire’s ears, and psychologists were fascinated by the vampire’s intelligence. No bat mastered a Skinner box faster than a vampire.

  All the time, Paine was heading north following the survivors of the vampire colony from the cave where Joe Paine had died. One vampire roost, however large, was generally only part of a larger vampire colony. By implanting miniature radio transmitters on captive bats, he traced the survivors to new caves. When he poisoned those caves, the survivors would move to others.

  Their hours and movements became his. The distinctive marks of their feeding were the compass points of his life. A cave of their poisoned dead was his defeat, because his tracking equipment always recorded more survivors and yet more caves and Mexico itself seemed a lightless hall of caves, which at night it very much was.

  In this fashion, he tracked his bats up the Sierra Madre Occidental, along the oceanside Sierra de San Francisco and north to the foothills of Sonora. The hunt took two years and he did not know whether any of the original survivors still existed, but vampires were long-lived, intelligent, and adaptable. Finally, he had pursued his prey to the end of that hall of caves to the last cave before the American border. That evening, he tracked the silent chorus of a major colony of vampires crossing the border.

  No true colony of vampires had ever been reported in the United States, which was a classic puzzle to zoologists. From Northern Mexico to Argentina, through the Andean highlands to the swamps of Guyana, vampires flourished. At the U.S. border they’d always halted. No one knew why.

  But Paine’s bats didn’t come back.

  He recognized his great opportunity. Since there were no other vampire bat colonies in Arizona for his to merge with, at last he could destroy them all. Paine didn’t anticipate his next problem, however. No one would believe him. County medical officers, when asked about vampire bat attacks, laughed in his face. He stopped asking about bats and used more general queries about nighttime attacks and unfamiliar wounds, still without success. The vampires had disappeared.

  Paine started again with the Indian reservations, working north through the Gila River, Maricopa, Apache, Colorado, and Hualapai, finishing with the largest of all, the Navajo.

  He had found Walker Chee on the Black Mesa. The Navajo Tribal Chairman was leading a group of white men around the lip of what had been part of the mesa and was now the Peabody Coal Co. stripmine. The mine was an enormous inverted pyramid dug by layers, a pyramid all the more dizzying because it was such a sudden and overwhelming vacuum in which eight-story electrically powered shovels were dwarfed to the size of toys. Paine hung back by two limousines parked away from the lip as Chee strutted back and forth, pointing out elements of the operation to the visitors.

  “Over there, you can just see it,” Chee pointed to a chimney on the far side of the mine, “is the pulverizing plant. The Peabody people use fossil water to make a slurry of the coal and the slurry is gravity-fed by pipeline 275 miles around the Grand Canyon to the generating plants in Nevada.”

  One of the whites kicked a stone into the mine. He turned to Chee; he had the sort of pink head on which sunglasses became the most dominant feature.

  “About the Peabody folks. You’re givin’ them some trouble, aren’t you?”

  “No trouble, Mr. Piggot. Renegotiating. We get 15 to 25 cents royalty per ton. The state of Montana gets a minimum of 40 cents. We just want to bring our royalties into line. You take oil—”

  “That’s why we’re here,” the man called Piggot said. “We’ve been getting a 15 percent royalty. Arabs demand a minimum of 50 percent . . .”

  Paine watched the power shovels browsing a quarter mile deep in the pit. Steel cables dragged jaws over blasted ore. Overflowing, the jaws swung up, wheezed, rotated to dump trucks, and regurgitated tons of low-grade coal. They looked like brontosaurs lethargically feeding in a dry lagoon.

  “You wanted to see me.” Chee stepped aside from his group to Paine.

  “Yes. I understand that all medical queries have to go through you.”

  “Right.” The Navajo scratched his vest. It was hot by the strip mine. His eyes stayed hooked on Piggot.

  “I’ve been doing a kind of biological survey—”

  “Some other time,” Chee suggested impatiently. “I have an office, you know. Make an appointment.”

  “Well, I have a photo to show you.” Paine blocked Chee’s view with a manila envelope.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Just take a look.”

  “Some other—”

  Paine slid the photograph from the envelope. The picture was a color blowup of a vampire bite, a clean crater two millimeters deep into richly vascularized human dermal tissue.

  “Where the hell did you get that?” Chee reacted with anger.

  “I—”

  Chee grabbed Paine by the arm and forcibly led him another fifty feet from the lip of the mine. He started whispering furiously.

  “What are you up to? Who gave that picture to you? I’m trying to do business here and all I need is some white son of a bitch like you busting up a million-dollar deal with some story about plague. You know what those men over there are going to do if they hear the world ‘plague’? You ever seen a limousine vanish?”

  “I didn’t say anything about plague,” Paine said.

  The long moment that followed turned exquisite for Paine. In fact, his picture was of
a Mexican Indian who’d been bitten months before but he calculated swiftly and accurately.

  “You have a photo like this, too,” he told Chee. “You have somebody with wounds like this and he has plague. Do you know what made those wounds?”

  Chee didn’t answer.

  “Then you’re very fortunate,” Paine said, “Because I know, and you’re going to hire me.”

  That encounter with Chee at the strip mine was only the first. After, were more meetings at Window Rock and on the mesa, transfers of an unpublicized autopsy report from Chee and lists of equipment demanded by Paine.

  Now, in the dozing heat of midday, Paine was searching for fleas.

  The desert’s arroyos were still slightly dark, as if bruised by yesterday’s rain. Yucca stems vibrated through waves of warm air.

  The Painted Desert appealed to Paine. He appreciated the false sterility that masked such desperate adaptations of life as limbless lizards and giant saguaros. More than that, he savored the loneliness, the sense that he could go days, months if he wanted, without seeing another human soul. Other people, no matter how different, were mirrors of one’s self. Paine wanted no reflections.

  He drove over a sand dune to hard ground, where he stopped and climbed to the roof of the Land Rover. He’d seen one vulture earlier. This time through his field glasses he spotted two about half a mile up and two miles away, spiraling down a thermal. A third vulture joined them. Paine slipped down into the cab, throwing the glasses aside to get the truck into gear.

  A matter of minutes could make his work a hundred times more difficult. Paine pushed the Rover up to 30, running over mesquite and crashing through sand drifts. Already, without glasses, he saw more vultures descending the thermal. A deep arroyo about six feet wide stretched in front of Paine. He swerved right, found a rise, and shoved his foot to the floor. At 40, the Rover cleared the arroyo, bounced stiffly, and continued over a drift.

  Paine hit his horn. A mile off on a surprisingly green knoll was a truck in the middle of sixty or seventy vultures. Sheep carcasses covered the hill. Horn blaring, Paine drove into the scavengers, scattering them off his fenders. Red eyes staring out of black faces, the vultures hopped away, trying to gather air in their four-foot wing-spread. Paine braked and jumped out of the Rover, cocking his .45 as he hit the ground. He fired, taking the head off one bird. The rest scattered in a black wave, lumbering up. Paine fired again, straight up, just to keep them moving.

  Death, he’d long ago learned, was not a moment of calm. Without the squabbling of vultures, the hill still resounded with the vibrant activity of flies. When he left the vultures would return, and mice and smaller birds, a whole chorus of scavengers great and small. He only hoped he was in time.

  From the back of the Land Rover he took his aluminum case, which he spread open beside a lamb that had been reduced to head, feet, and a thousand flies fighting for room to lay their eggs. He tied on a surgical mask and slipped on rubber gloves. Around his waist he strapped a belt of his own design. In addition to a holster for his automatic, the belt carried in leather-and-felt cups an odd number of jars, syringes, scalpels, operating scissors, glassine envelopes, and a jeweler’s eyeglass.

  The truck stationed on the hill didn’t even have wheels, it was on blocks. The windows and windshield were smeared with blood from the inside. Paine grasped the handle of the door and stepped aside as he opened it.

  No one fell out. There was no body in the cab, although the seat and floor were covered with dried blood. Paine was disappointed, but at least the profusion of blood stains was a good sign.

  He walked among the sheep. As many as a hundred carcasses littered the hill, most of them ripped open by the activity of coyotes and vultures. The ground was torn up. He lifted a carcass with his boot and uncovered soil discolored by a dark pitch smelling of ammonia. That was better. He moved on in this pastoral setting until he found a ewe less disturbed than the rest. Although she was disemboweled, her intestines strung out on the grass, a fluttering of her nostrils showed she was still clinically alive. Paine squatted next to her. Some vultures landed to pick at farther away sheep. He paid them no attention.

  The forward area of the ewe’s chest was striped by shallow gouges seeping blood. Paine held a jar upside down almost flush over the wounds. Between the open lid and the wounds he stroked a paper card. A minuscule activity began developing in the jar. He moved the jar and card over all the wounds and then screwed the top on the jar. He fixed the jeweler’s loupe in his right eye and held the jar up to the sky. Eight, nine fleas hopped against the glass.

  There were over two hundred different species of fleas in North America alone. Magnified, the parasites of the Order Siphonaptera shared a basic equipment: wingless bodies, powerful legs, bristles in rows, and the sucking mouths that bestowed their Latin name. There were four species in the jar. Mice that had nibbled on the wounds had left rodent fleas, Xenopsylla Cheopis, eyeless fleas with double rows of bristles. The coyote that had ripped open the ewe had deposited two species: common Dog Fleas, rounded, with a moustache-like mouth comb; and blunt-headed, eyed Carnivore Fleas. There were two specimens of the last species. They had eyeless, helmet-shaped heads. A mouth comb like mimic teeth. Bat Fleas.

  For a moment, Paine was stunned by the magnitude of his luck. Overhead, the vultures watched him squat by other sheep and collect more specimens, and when he stowed them in his truck and drove away the birds all descended again through the rising air of the thermal to finish that work nature designed them for.

  Controlling his excitement, Paine drove slowly.

  Life was unfair. Usually, only the poor and geniuses realized this but Hayden Paine was admitted to the fact with his father’s death. It was Joe Paine who was the really first-rate immunologist, Joe Paine who back in ’44 led the Rockefeller Institute team that identified a mysterious paralytic disease killing hundreds of thousands of cattle annually as vampire-transmitted rabies. All the other authorities claimed the bat was an impossible vector. Under a microscope, the so-called derriengue virus didn’t look exactly like rabies. Besides, rabies invariably killed its host, yet the majority of vampires thrived on the virus that infected them. It took Joe Paine to prove that the rabies virus had mutated under the influence of its bizarre host and that the vampire alone of all species on earth was not vulnerable to rabies.

  Joe Paine’s abilities hardly ended there. Chee was terrified of plague? In 1967, the Paines, father and son, were in Saigon to study a disease raging among the refugees of the beleaguered city. Joe Paine overcame American and Vietnamese obstructions to identify the disease as bubonic plague carried by rat-infested rice. A small item among the horrors of war: there were 5,547 cases of plague in Vietnam in 1967.

  But always for Hayden Paine it came back to the caves. He suffered from claustrophobia. One step into the dark and his heart doubled its beat. The condition had come on gradually, accreting with experience. In the first year of vampire work with his father, the claustrophobia paraded as nervous energy. The second year, without understanding why—he’d been on spelunking expeditions with his father even as a boy—Paine had trouble breathing. By the end of the second year, adrenaline flowing like nitro through a bloodstream dark with lack of oxygen, he began passing out. The third year was the worst.

  In an age of sophisticated torture there is no more effective tool than claustrophobia. It combines elements of suffocation, desertion, blindness, and isolation from reality. All these elements operate in a cave, except that they are reality. When Paine entered a bat cave, his heart was already racing, each beat a muffled alarm. As the light of the entrance evaporated, his lungs became twin vacuums and his limbs numbed. With every step he felt the cave closing behind him. The glow of his helmet lamp was a ghostly moon without reference to him, like a glowworm in a coffin. Past the threshold of panic, he forced himself deeper into the cave, seemingly more steady as his sanity folded in. Within goggles, his eyes bulged. Even as he tried to concentrate on the techniques
of ropework or spreading a mist net of superfine thread, he tasted his hot and salty terror. Then someone would set off a flash and the cave would erupt into a whirlwind of panicked wings. When the sound of the wings and the lower-pitched cries of the bats made a dizzying roar, only then, occasionally, would Paine let go his scream of terror.

  He wasn’t stupid enough to think he was a coward. Unfortunately, he was intelligent enough to know the reason he returned to the caves was to mimic his father, and that in imitating a better man, he was a farce.

  No matter how many caves he went into and how competent he seemed, the secret panic blossomed. Until he took risks just to keep his eyes from straying to the enveloping dark. No one knew except his father, which was why Joe Paine had to go along when others hung back.

  So, unfairly, in that Mexican cave, it was the better man who’d died. Not without a parting gift, though. Like dross from a fire, Paine’s panic fell away and was gone.

  The desert sand had the quality of compacted ash. A desert, to Paine, was a land that was burned and constantly burning. For Paine, a relief compared to night.

  After thirty miles of driving, he stopped in the shade of a canyon of stark, yellow walls and set up his laboratory. Like his belt, it was a construction of his own design. Aluminum poles screwed horizontally onto the top rear of the Rover and telescoped backwards fifteen feet to supporting poles rooted in the dirt. Over this structure he hung a fine wire mesh tent that zipped tight around the open doors of the Rover and at an entrance flap at the other end. He staked the mesh taut to the ground through eyeholes spaced every six inches; the whole effect was of a cocoon growing out of the truck. Inside this cocoon he set up tables and equipment. From the Rover’s refrigerator, bowls of blood culture gelatines. Test tubes. Rubber-stopped jars of killing solution. Microscopes and slides. A square black box two feet high with a front hooded by black crepe. Alongside the box, he placed the jar of specimens from the sheep.