“Es un impostor,” he concluded.
“Impostor?” Santero said. He lowered the box a little. “Speak English. I can’t understand your Spanish.”
“I was sent to tell you they were using a stand-in,” Leaphorn said. “They heard about the plot. They sent someone made up to look like the general.”
Santero’s expression shifted from doubtful to grim. “I think you’re lying,” he said. “Stop trying to get between me and—”
From the crowd at the display came the sound of a woman screaming.
“What the devil—?” Santero began. And then there were shouts, another scream, and a man’s voice shouting: “He’s fainted! Get a doctor!”
Leaphorn’s move was pure reflex, without time to think. His only advantages were that Santero was a little confused, a little uncertain. And the hand in which Santero held the control box had only two fingers left inside that glove. Leaphorn struck at the hand.
Leroy Fleck said, “Excuse me. Excuse me, please,” and pushed past the woman he had been using as a screen and went for the general’s back. But he did it just as the general was turning. Fleck saw the general staring at him, and the general’s bodyguard making a quick-reflex move to block him. His instincts told him this was not going well.
“A letter—” he said, striking at the general’s chest. He felt the paper of the envelope crumple against his fist as the steel razor of the shank slit through the general’s vest, and shirt, and the thin muscle of the chest, and sank between the ribs.
“—from an admirer,” Fleck said, as he slashed back and forth, back and forth, and heard the general gasp, and felt the general sag against him. “He’s fainted!” Fleck shouted. “Get a doctor!”
The Muscle had grabbed him by the shoulder just as he shouted it, and struck him a terrible blow over the kidneys. But Fleck hugged the general’s sagging body, and shouted again, “Help me!”
It caused confusion, exactly as Fleck had hoped. The Muscle released Fleck’s arm and tried to catch the general. The Client was there now beside them, bending over the slumping body. “What?” he shouted. “What happened? General!”
Fleck withdrew the shank, letting the crumpled envelope fall. He stabbed The Client in the side. Stabbed him again. And again.
The bodyguard was no longer confused. He shot Fleck twice. The exhibit echoed with the boom of the pistol, and the screams of panicking spectators.
Chee was only dimly aware of the shouts, the screams, the general pandemonium around him. He was numb. He turned the mask in his hands and looked into it, with no idea what to expect. He saw two dangling wires, one red, one white, a confusing array of copper-colored connections, a small square gray box, and a heavy compact mass of blue-gray dough.
The security officer clutched his arm. “Come on!” he shouted. “Get out of here!” The security officer was a plump young black man with heavy jowls. The screams were distracting him. “Look,” Chee said, turning the open end of the mask toward him. “It’s a bomb.” While he was saying it, Chee was tearing at the wires. He dropped them to the floor, and sat on the back of the fallen manikin, and began carefully peeling the Yeibichai mask from the mass of blue-gray plastic which had been pressed into it.
“A bomb,” the guard said. He looked at Chee, at the mask, and at the struggle at the adjoining Incan exhibit. “A bomb?” he said again, and climbed the railing and charged into the Incan melee. “Break it up,” he shouted. “We have a bomb in here.”
And just then General Huerta Cardona’s bodyguard shot Leroy Fleck.
Joe Leaphorn’s hand knocked the control box out of Santero’s grip. It clattered to the marble floor between them. Santero reached for it.
Leaphorn kicked it. It went skittering down the corridor, spinning past the feet of running people. Santero pursued it, running into the crowd stampeding out of the exhibition hall. Leaphorn followed.
A man with a camera collided with him. “He killed the general,” the photographer shouted to someone ahead of him. “He killed the general.” On the floor near the wall Leaphorn saw fragments of black plastic and an AA-size battery. Someone had trampled the detonator. He stopped, backed out of the stampede. Santero had disappeared. Leaphorn leaned against the wall, gasping. His chest hurt. His hip hurt where the heavy camera had slammed into it. He would go and see about Jim Chee. But first he would collect himself. He was getting too damned old for this business.
Chapter Twenty-Two
« ^
Jim Chee sat on his bed, leaned back on his suitcase, and tried to cope with his headache by not thinking about it. He was wearing the best shirt and the well-pressed trousers he had hung carefully in the closet when he unpacked to save in the event he needed to look good. No need now to save them. He would wear them on the plane. It was a bitch of a headache. He had slept poorly—partly because of the strange and lumpy hotel mattress (Chee being accustomed to the hard, thin padding on the built-in bed of his trailer home), and partly because he had been too tense to sleep. His mind had been too full of horrors and terrors. He would doze, then jerk awake to sit on the edge of the mattress, shaking with the aftereffects of shallow, grotesque dreams in which Talking God danced before him. Finally, about a half-hour before the alarm was scheduled to rescue him from the night, he had given up. He had taken a shower, packed his stuff, and checked again with the front desk to see if he had any messages. There was one from Leaphorn, which simply informed him that Leaphorn had returned to Window Rock. That surprised Chee. It was a sort of courtly thing for the tough old bastard to have done. There was a message from Janet Pete, asking for a call back. He tried and got no answer. By then the headache was flowering and he had time to kill. Downstairs he drank two cups of coffee—which usually helped but didn’t this morning. He left the toast he’d ordered on the plate and went for a walk.
The mild early-winter storm which had been bringing Washington rain mixed with snow yesterday had drifted out over the Atlantic and left behind a grim gray overcast with a forecast for high broken clouds and clearing by late afternoon. Now it was cold and still. Chee found that even in this strange place, even under these circumstances, he could catch himself up in the rhythm of the fast, hard motion, of heart and lungs hard at work. The nightmares faded a little, coming to seem like abstract memories of something he might have merely dreamed. Highhawk had never really existed. There were not really eighteen thousand ancestors in boxes lining hallways in an old museum. No one had actually tried to commit mass murder with the mask of Talking God. He walked briskly down Pennsylvania Avenue, and veered northward on Twelfth Street, and strode briskly westward again on H Street, and collapsed finally on a bench in what he thought, judging from a sign he'd noticed without really attending, might be Lafayette Square. Through the trees he could see the White House and, on the other side, an impressive hotel. Chee caught his breath, considered the note from Leaphorn, and decided it was a sort of subtle gesture. (You and I, kid. Two Dineh among the Strangers.) But maybe not. And it wasn't the sort of thing he would ever ask the lieutenant about.
A dove-gray limousine pulled up under the hotel’s entryway roof, and after it a red sports car which Chee couldn’t identify. Maybe a Ferrari, he thought. Next was a long black Mercedes which looked like it might have been custom built. Chee was no longer breathing hard. The damp low-country cold seeped up his sleeves and around his socks and under his collar. He got up, inspired half by cold and half by curiosity, and headed for the hotel.
It was warm inside, and luxurious. Chee sank into a sofa, removed his hat, warmed his ears with his hands, and observed what his sociology teacher had called “the privileged class.” The professor admitted a prejudice against this class but Chee found them interesting to observe. He spent almost forty-five minutes watching women in fur coats and men in suits which, while they tended to look almost identical to Chee’s untrained eye, were obviously custom made. He saw someone who looked exactly like Senator Teddy Kennedy, and someone who looked like Sam Donaldson, a
nd a man who was probably Ralph Nader, and three others who must have been celebrities of some sort, but whose names eluded him.
He left the hotel warm but still with the headache. The material splendors, the fur and polished leather of the hotel’s guests, had replaced his nightmares with a depression. He hurried through the damp cold back to his own hotel room.
The telephone was ringing. It was Janet Pete.
“I tried to call you last night,” she said. “How are you? Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Chee said. “We had trouble down at the museum. The FBI got involved and—”
“I know. I know,” Janet said. “I saw it on television. The paper is full of it. There’s a picture of you, with the statue.”
“Oh,” Chee said. The final humiliation. He could see it in the Farmington Times: Officer Jim Chee of Shiprock, New Mexico, seen above wrestling with a representation of Talking God, from which he has removed the head, in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
“On television, too. On the ABC morning news. They had some footage of you with the mask. But I’m not sure people who didn’t know how you were dressed would know it was you.”
Chee could think of nothing to say. His head still ached. He wished with a fervent longing to be back in New Mexico. In his trailer under the cottonwood on the bank above the San Juan River. He would take two aspirin and sprawl out on his comfortable, narrow bed and finish reading A Yellow Raft on Blue Water. He’d left it opened to page 158. A hard place to stop.
“They said Henry Highhawk was dead,” Janet Pete said in a small voice.
“Yes. The police think Santero killed him,” Chee said. “It seems fairly obvious that it must have been Santero.”
“Henry was a sweet man,” Janet said. “He was a kind man.” She paused. “He was, wasn’t he, Jim? But if he was, how did they talk him into being a part of this—of this horrible bomb thing?”
“I don’t think they did,” Chee said. “We’ll never know for sure, I guess. But I think they conned him, and used him. Probably they saw the story in the Post about Highhawk digging up the skeletons. They needed a way to kill the general and they had a way of knowing their target would be visiting the Smithsonian, so they went out and made friends with Henry.”
“But that doesn’t explain why he would help them.”
“I think Highhawk thought Santero was sympathetic to what Henry was trying to do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that planting the tape recorded message in the mask was dreamed up by the Santillanes bunch. Maybe they knew he’d need technical help with the timer on the tape recorder and all that.”
“I’d like to think you’re right,” Janet said. “I’d like to think I wasn’t a complete fool. Wanting to help him when he was helping to murder a lot of innocent people.” But her tone was full of doubt.
“If I wasn’t right—If you weren’t they wouldn’t have had to kill him,” Chee said. “But they did kill him. Maybe he noticed something and caught on. Maybe they just couldn’t leave him around to tell all to the police.”
“Sure,” Janet said. “I didn’t think of that. I feel better. I guess I needed to keep believing Henry just wanted to do good.”
“I think that’s right,” Chee said. “It took me a while, but I’ve decided that, too.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I have a flight this afternoon back to Albuquerque. Then I catch the Mesa Airlines flight to Farmington, and pick up my car and drive back to Shiprock,” Chee said.
Janet Pete correctly read the tone of that.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea what I was getting you into. I never would have—”
Chee, a believer in the Navajo custom of never interrupting anyone, interrupted her.
“I wanted to come,” he said. “I wanted to see you.”
“Do you still want to see me? I’ll come over and take you to the airport.” A long pause. “If you really do have to go. You’re on vacation, aren’t you?”
“I’d like that,” Chee said. “A ride to the airport.” So now he waited again. He was able now to think about what had happened yesterday. The D.C. police would probably catch Santero sooner or later. He found he had no interest in that. But he wondered what Leaphorn had done to keep Santero from pushing the button. Chee retraced it all in his memory. Handing the museum guard the ball of plastic explosive. (“Here. Be careful with this. It was a bomb. Give it to the cops.”) He'd walked back to the STAFF ONLY elevator carrying Talking God's mask. He had pushed his way through the uproar of scurrying and shouting. He’d gotten off at the sixth floor and walked back to Highhawk’s office. He’d emptied an assortment of leather, feathers, and bones out of a box beside Highhawk’s chair. He placed the mask gently in the box and closed it. Then he searched the office, quickly and thoroughly, without finding what he wanted. That left two places to look.
He picked up the replica mask Highhawk had made, laid it atop the box, and carried it down the elevator to the exhibit hall.
By then the spectators were gone and two B.C. policemen were guarding the corridor. He saw Rodney, and Rodney let him through. Rodney was holding the plastic explosive.
“What the hell happened?” Rodney had asked. “Joe tells me this bomb was under the mask and you pulled it off. That right?”
“Yes,” Chee said. He handed the replica to Rodney. “Here,” he said. “Whoever did it sort of molded the plastic into the mask. Jammed it in.”
Leaphorn was standing there, his face gray. “You all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Chee said. “But you don’t look so hot.”
On the floor between the Yeibichai exhibit and the Incan display three men were sprawled in that totally careless attitude that only the dead can manage. One of them matched Leaphorn’s description of the little redhead with the shape of a weightlifter. Sooner or later he would wonder about what the redhead was doing here, and what had happened. When he did, he’d ask Leaphorn. Now it didn’t seem to matter. And then the morgue crew began arriving. And more plainclothes cops, and men who had to be, by their costume, the feds.
Chee had not been in the mood for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He walked out of the Tenth Street entrance and around the building. He checked parked cars. A wrecker was hauling an old Chevy sedan away from the towaway fire zone, but Chee was looking for Highhawk’s Ford Mustang. He finally found it in a staff parking lot.
It was locked. What he was looking for wasn’t visible inside, and it was too large to fit under the seat and out of sight. If it wasn’t in the car, he’d have to take a cab out to Highhawk’s place and look for it there. But first he’d check the trunk. Locked, of course. Chee found a slab of broken concrete near the sidewalk. He slammed it down on the trunk lid, springing it open. There was a box inside, wrapped in an old pair of coveralls. Chee took off the lid and looked in. The fetish representing the Tano War Twin smiled its sinister, malicious smile up at him. He took Talking God's mask out of the box from Highhawk's office, packed it carefully in with the fetish, put the empty box in the trunk, and closed it.
Two young men, each holding a briefcase, were standing beside a nearby car watching him break into the Mustang. Chee nodded to them. “Had to get this fetish out,” he said, and walked back to the Natural History Museum. He had left the box in the checkroom and went back to the exhibit.
There the FBI had taken over. Chee had unchecked his box and walked to his hotel.
Now, in his room, he was coming to terms with yesterday when the telephone rang again.
“Jim?”
It was Mary Landon’s voice.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s me, Mary.”
“You weren’t hurt? On the news they said you weren’t hurt.”
“No. Not at all.”
“I’m coming to Washington. To see you,” she said. “I called you yesterday. At the police station in Shiprock. They said you were in Washington and told me your hotel. I was going to call you and come. And
then last night—That was terrible.”
Jim Chee was having trouble analyzing his emotions. They were turbulent, and mixed.
“Mary. Why do you want to see me?” He paused, wondering how to phrase it. “I got your letter,” he said.
“That was why,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that in a letter. It’s the sort of thing that you say in person. That was wrong. It was stupid, too. I know how you feel. And how I feel.”
“How do you feel about living on the reservation? About the reservation being home?”
“Oh, Jim,” she said. “Let’s not—” She left it unfinished.
“Not get into that? But that’s always been our problem. I want you to come and live with me. You know how I am. My people are part of me. And you want me to come out to the world and live with you. And that’s only fair. But I can’t handle it.”
A moment passed before she spoke again, and her voice was a little different. “I wish I hadn’t told you in a letter. That’s all. That was cruel. I just didn’t think. Or, I did think. I thought it would hurt too much to see you like that, and I would be all confused about it again. But I should have told you in person.”
There was not much to say after that, and they said good-bye. Chee washed his face, and looked out his window into the window of the office across the narrow street. The man into whose office Chee’s window looked was looking down at the passing cars, still with his vest and tie neatly in place. The man and Chee were looking at each other when Janet Pete tapped at his half-opened door and came in.
He offered her the chair, and she took it.
“You don’t look like you feel like doing a lot of talking,” she said. “Would you like to just check out now, and drive on out to the airport?”
“No hurry,” he said. She was not exactly a beautiful woman, he thought. She did not have the softness, the silkiness, the dark blue, pale yellow feminine beauty of Mary Landon. Instead she had a kind of strong, clean-cut dignity. A classy gal. She was proud, and he identified with that. She had become his friend. He liked her. Or he thought he did. Certainly, he pitied her. And he was going to do something for her. What was happening to her here in Washington was nothing but miserable. He hated that.
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