A silencer.
Gabe bolted to his feet, aimed himself at the lightless observatory, and hurtled toward it. He would never recognize his mother’s face, but he knew her laugh and gentle touch, and he recalled with sudden clarity how she’d whispered Love you, Peekaboo the day he’d left for Chile. He was still a kid, really, and had no business being down here, having grown up in the shelter of his room, away from the accidental social encounters that might cause his condition to bring him grief. Gabe thought of her as he ran, wondering how far he’d get before the next whispered gunshot sent him down, to slake the Atacama’s endless thirst with his blood.
CHAPTER TWO
He made it.
No bullet carved the night and found him. No brother of Bigfoot hurled a rock with the force of a medieval catapult.
Gabe threw himself through the door and ran down the corridor, the darkness parted by red lamps that would not disrupt the night vision of those who worked here. The tiles squeaked beneath his shoes.
He passed offices, the rec room with its foosball table, the lounge with its TV that usually played those maddening British sitcoms or equally excruciating soccer matches. Gabe was nobody’s patriot, but he always sided with the U.S. when it came to proper football. He turned right and found the two oldest men in the facility bent over a bank of computers with multiple monitors. On those screens, analogs of the universe turned and spiraled and flowed in the language of math. He could identify neither of them, but he shouted anyway.
“Rubat!”
He frightened them. Montero jolted and barely kept his coffee mug from toppling to the floor. Gabe knew it was Dr. Montero because he always wore house slippers inside the observatory. But his face looked absolutely no different from that of the man beside him.
The other man hissed an Arabic curse, which meant it had to be Rubat.
“Call the police,” Gabe said, his lungs like sentient things, greedy for air.
Rubat yanked the glasses from his featureless face. “Police? What is this you say?”
“Someone’s been shot.”
Montero made the sign of the cross.
“Out there.” Gabe pointed. “At the power shed. He’s down, bleeding. I think he’s dead, but I’m not sure.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, just call the goddamn cops!”
And he was off again. He’d never been a runner. He was already short of breath, which was pitiful, really, because he was lean and young, and you never knew the night in your life when a nail would go missing and it would be up to you to keep the kingdom intact. For want of a treadmill, the astronomer was lost.
He flew into the night.
The openness struck him again, as it always did. You had a sense out here that Columbus was wrong. Go too far into the desert and you’d find that place where it snapped off and left you with nothing but deep space, where distance was reckoned by how long it took for light to get there.
A dozen suns suddenly burned behind him. Rubat and the staff were throwing switches inside, causing the powerful spots to flash to life. In moments the ground was illuminated as brightly as a prison yard, exposing Gabe as well as his destination.
Something was wrong.
Was he so unnerved by the event that he’d forgotten where the man had gone down? Had the stranger fallen on the other side of the shed?
Gabe circled the metal building, which was now fully revealed in the powerful klieg lights mounted on poles around the observatory’s perimeter.
He saw nothing.
He stopped. Panted. Turned a complete circle.
No body lay on the ground, dead or otherwise. The Midnight Messenger was gone.
* * *
The cops down here used yellow tape, just like those in the States.
Gabe sat on the base of the Kepler statue, coffee between his hands. The uniformed officers, the Carabineros de Chile, had set up a cordon despite the fact there wasn’t a body to protect.
Evidence, Gabe thought, remembering his television crime shows. They’re preserving possible evidence against contamination.
They’d come by helicopter from Calama, the nearest major city. They were nuts about safeguarding foreigners. When they spoke to Rubat, you might have thought he was the pope. Gabe knew they would get to him eventually, and he let his coffee go cold and sat at the stone feet of the man who first correctly described the motion of the planets. That was a hell of a thing. Kepler’s sculpted feet should have been big enough that everyone could have sat at them. Gabe thought of him as the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
“Gabriel?”
He looked up and forgot Kepler when he saw two men who could have been anyone. On the left was Rubat, identified by his lab coat and the way he said Gabe’s name. The other, in a suit, was as anonymous as unmolded clay.
“Are you well?” Rubat asked.
“Wolf.”
Rubat crossed his arms. “I do not understand.”
“The story about the boy who cried wolf. That’s what you’re thinking, right? I’m delusional or stoned or just making it up. I’m crying wolf. But they probably don’t know that story in Yemen, I guess.”
“Are you doing that? Crying the wolf?”
Gabe took a swallow of his coffee. It wasn’t worth sipping; you either had to man up and swallow it or quit clutching it like a security blanket. “Maybe if I hadn’t touched him I’d say it was just the desert. Some kind of night mirage. But I touched him. I felt him.”
The figure in the suit said something in Spanish.
Gabe didn’t have much of a handle on the local lexicon, and Rubat knew even less.
The man spoke again.
Gabe just looked at him, looked at that face that his brain saw the way it saw a white sheet, looked and waited, and then a voice from behind him said, “Kepler was the Earth-around-the-sun gentleman, was he not?”
Gabe turned. He saw only another suit. This one was a bit rougher at the seams, and the shoes were penny loafers, of all things. But those weren’t pennies in the little slots. They looked like—
Peso loafers, he realized. He wished he had the heart to be amused by that.
“Kepler, yes?” the man asked, his voice accented only lightly by his native Spanish.
“Copernicus,” Gabe said.
“Ah. Of course. I did not always sleep through science class. But on those days when Antonella Savedra took the seat in front of me, it was more difficult to concentrate.” He extended his hand. “Braulio Fontecilla, Policía de Investigaciones.”
Gabe clasped his hand. “Gabriel Traylin.”
“You should have seen her.”
“Who?”
“Antonella. She was seventeen. I was sixteen, the youngest in my class. My mother, she enrolled me a year early because I could read. Antonella had the blackest hair I had ever seen. Or ever will.”
Gabe held the man’s gaze not because it did him any good, as Fontecilla remained a voice and body without facial distinction, but because he knew that cops liked that from a guy, especially guys with shady stories.
“I know he was out there,” Gabe said.
“I agree with you. Either that or you purposely stained the ground with blood to mislead us, which would not be the strangest thing I have seen in my days, but it would be—what is the word? Nonlikely?”
“Unlikely.”
“Yes. Unlikely. As I said, we found blood.”
“Yeah. Something … hit him in the head.”
The other man, Fontecilla’s partner, produced a notebook. He was one of those clever South Americans who apparently habla’ed ingles but preferred not to. He wrote as Gabe recounted what had happened.
By the time he finished, Rubat had also taken a seat on the statue’s base, hands folded carefully in his lap. Fontecilla stood a short distance away, fists thrust in his pockets, looking up at the stars. Gabe realized, belatedly, that the man wore a hat. A trilby, he thought it was called. He hadn’t noticed it before because he�
��d been too intent on holding the man’s stare so as not to look suspicious. He had no intention of telling them about the prosopagnosia. Like everyone else, they would simply find it too goddamn bizarre to be true.
“… and when I came back out,” Gabe concluded, “there was nothing here.”
Fontecilla made no comment for a while. Gabe grew tired of pretending to be interested in his face. He let his eyes trail back to the stars. He looked in the direction of Centaurus. There, a mere fifty light-years away, was a rock known as Lucy. As it turned out, Lucy was a planet-sized diamond, ten billion-trillion-trillion carats in size.
“You are certain he was dead?” Fontecilla asked.
“I thought so at the time, yeah.”
“Then I must ask the obvious question.”
“I don’t know what happened to the body,” Gabe said. “I was gone only for a few minutes. When I got back from the observatory, the only thing left was blood.”
Fontecilla absorbed this. His partner shifted uneasily. Gabe had the growing sense that the two of them were telepaths, trash-talking him in their minds.
“Look,” Gabe said, “I don’t know what else to say. That’s the way it happened.”
“Do you own a gun, Señor Traylin?”
Though the desert night was cold, it couldn’t account for the chill along his arms when he realized what Fontecilla was implying. Gabe was a nobody. He lived an uneventful life. Flying here to South America was the boldest thing he’d ever done. He’d never even had a traffic ticket. And now this. This missing body. This cop thinking he was suspect.
“You do not need to answer that,” Fontecilla said, letting him off the hook—at least for now. “Sometimes these questions, they just come out of me. It is what we call a bad habit, yes? As far as we can see, no crime is here. We have a bit of drying blood, nothing more.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“And prints.”
Gabe looked up. “You’ve got fingerprints?”
“Finger?” Fontecilla shook his head. “Foot.” He pointed toward where the technicians were putting away their gear inside the yellow tape. “Tracks. Two pairs, one I would guess matches your expensive sneakers.”
Gabe looked at his shoes. He’d bought the pricey cross-trainers before signing on for this gig. The left one chafed his heel. “You didn’t find any others? Anything … bigger?”
“Why would you ask that?”
Gigante, he thought. The creature killed the man and carried him away.
“No,” Fontecilla said, “we found only two sets. But the other pair, it was not shoes.”
Gabe searched for and found the man’s eyes again. “What do you mean?”
“This possibly dead stranger you say you found, he was not wearing shoes like yours or mine. He had boots on. Boots with a very distinctive sole. Boots like a soldier.”
Gabe tightened his fingers around the coffee mug. “He’s military?”
Fontecilla spread his hands as if to say he didn’t know, while above them all, Kepler stared toward the heavens, searching for an answer in the cosmic dust.
CHAPTER THREE
Luke looked earnestly at the flight attendant and said, “You have very large breasts.”
Standing behind her brother, Mira winced.
Thank God, the stewardess didn’t slap him. Like a veteran poker player, she read his face and understood something basic about him. She kept her own face rigid in a smile. “I hope you’ve had a pleasant flight, sir.”
“I’m not sir,” Luke said, “I’m Luke!”
Mira intervened—she was always intervening. “I’m sorry, ma’am, he didn’t mean it.” She felt the heat in her cheeks. “Well, actually he did mean it, but not in the way it sounded.”
“Quite all right.” Still the smile held, as carefully balanced as a walker on a high wire.
“He just says what he sees.”
“It’s okay, really.”
“What’s okay?” Luke asked. “Sis, what’s okay?”
“You,” Mira said, nudging him in the back. “Now get the train moving before we derail for good.”
“What train?”
“Never mind.” She passed the flight attendant and tried to match the politeness level of the woman’s smile. She almost got there. “Thank you.”
“Thank you. And enjoy your stay in Santiago.”
Mira ushered her brother from the jet, shrugging the blush from her face as she always did. The distractions helped. New airport. New city. New continent. This was it, her best shot, her Rocky Balboa moment, here in this foreign land. Mira had never been out of the country before, so she put on what Luke called her Danger Cap and tried to take in all the signs and sounds and not get them lost on their way to a taxi. Luke wore his Danger Cap when crossing the street and running the hot water for a bath. It was his way of focusing. More than once, the invisible Danger Cap had kept him from being hurt.
And more than once it had failed him.
“Wow, look at that!” Eyes wide, Luke pointed at something, maybe the man with the guitar on his back or the woman with the bright dolphin tattoo. “Wow, wow, and wow!”
“No time for sightseeing,” Mira told him. “It’s baggage claim or bust.”
“Bust what?”
“I don’t know. Bust somebody in the lip if they lost our luggage, I guess.”
Luke stared transfixed at the black conveyor that summoned suitcases from a hole in the wall and drove them around like a weird carousel. Mira knew he was stationary for the moment—he was obsessive when it came to new visual stimuli—so she pardoned her way through the suits and skirts and wrestled their two bags into compliance.
“Let’s go, Eskimo,” she said.
The bags had wheels. Luke said it was like pulling a wagon, but not as fun. Still, he made the occasional whoosh noise as he dragged his things.
Beside him, Mira sent her eyes dashing here and there, thankful that her small arsenal of Spanish phrases would not be put unduly to the test: Most of the signs were also printed in English.
“Cool place,” Luke decided. “Cool people, cool clothes, coolcoolcool.”
“As a cucumber,” Mira agreed, listening with only one ear. From somewhere came the sound of a Chilean tonada. Mira had learned about such things when researching this trip, this last mad gambit to make sense of her brother’s breakthrough. For nearly a year she’d been saving, planning, and secretly hoping. Maybe this was finally the place.
Maybe.
* * *
The taxi ride bombarded them.
The first bombs were the lights. Santiago was an architectural cluster of the old and the new, but in the neon signs, digital billboards, and constant headlights, it gave up its cultural contours and became a city like every other city, pulsing and loud.
“Pretty,” Luke said, nodding and nodding, his wide head going up and down, up and down. “Pretty like Grandma’s.”
Their grandmother prided herself on the artfulness of her Christmas lights. Luke loved her house. Then again, Luke loved everything. He was a child of love, one of the blessed ones, they said, who never tasted the brine of hate or the week-old milk of jealousy.
Mira envied him as often as she wished things had been different.
He turned to her, his smile visible in the back of the dark taxi, revealed in the passing red and purple shades. “Sure is fine, ain’t it, Gretel?”
“Yes, Hansel. It’s fine. But we don’t say ain’t.”
He grinned to say that he knew that and then stuck out his tongue. Despite his differences, sometimes he was just an ordinary, obnoxious brother. They were all alike.
“You are here for wine, yes?” the cabbie asked.
Mira leaned forward. “I’m sorry?”
“Wine. Colchagua Valley tour. Many popular wineries. Many tourists.”
“Uh, no, that’s not us. We’re not tourists.”
“Easter Island? It is Easter Island for you, then?”
“I’m afraid not.”<
br />
Luke cocked his head. “Easter Island?” He blinked, the epicanthic skin folds of his eyelids one of the many characteristics of Down syndrome, a disorder about which Mira was as knowledgeable as all but a handful of specialists. Screw the PhD. She didn’t need one in order to read and memorize and read some more. “An island of Easter?” Luke asked. “A whole island of Easter candy?”
The driver had barely given them a glance when they climbed in, so he hadn’t noticed there was anything different about Luke. Either that or he was damn good at being polite. “No, no, it is the place of the big faces. The statues, you know? Tall rocks, tall eyes. They watch the sea, and they wait.”
“Wait for what?” Luke asked. The question was sharp with curiosity. Luke’s mild retardation was marked by instances of pure inquisitiveness, tiny spot-welds that made him into something more. He was Mosaic Down, which implied a hell of a lot but most importantly meant that his IQ was in the upper zone of the Down community. Yet he couldn’t live safely on his own for several reasons, one of which was his come-and-go memory. He would forget to close the front door, to turn off the stove, to keep metal out of the microwave. Thus he had lived with Mira for all of his twenty-seven years.
“Wait. For. What?” He said it slowly, carefully shaping each word, followed by rapid-fire: “Waitforwhatwaitforwhat?”
The taxi driver lifted a hand and gestured vaguely. “Sometimes waiting for something is better than seeing it arrive. Do I make sense? My English, it comes mostly from television.”
“Sadly,” Mira said, “that’s where Americans also get their English.”
“You learn a lot from Miami Vice.”
“I didn’t think that show was on anymore.”
“I own the first four seasons on DVD.” He smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “I wanted to be Don Johnson when I grew to adult, you know, and now I am driver for tourists.”
“We’re not tourists,” Mira said again, but too softly for him to hear.
Luke stared out the window, his nose an inch from the glass.
Minutes later, the cab pulled to the curb outside the hotel. Even at well past midnight, the sidewalks boasted their share of humanity. Women in designer jeans hung on the arms of dark-eyed beaus in leather jackets. Strung-out drifters skulked in groups of two and three, the cherries of their cigarillos like extra eyes beneath their sweatshirt hoods. The hip-hop from the stereos of students clashed with the traditional radio stations and their cueca dance numbers. Brightly glowing signs made promises in Spanish that Mira didn’t understand.
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