White Bird (A Mayan 2012 Thriller)

by Tom Rich

  Ten minutes later, down in the lobby, Franz apologized to the bar employees, none of whom seemed upset by Sylvie, signed for her drinks, then carried her over his shoulder to an elevator.

  Sylvie waved and blew kisses over Franz’s shoulder. “Woodrow, Woodrow, such a lovely town. They lllllove me here. Simply lllllove me. Goodbye, my people. Goodbye.” The elevator door closed. “Okay, sucker, let’s ride this thing.”

  Franz set Sylvie on her feet. He inserted a card and punched in the penthouse code. “My, someone’s been a bad girl.”

  “Moi? Surely not moi. I’ve been as faithful as ever faithful can be.”

  “Same dress two days in a row? Someone hasn’t been home to change.”

  “That? Oh, The Birds. Tippi Hendren wore the same dress three days in a row. That’s why nature went berserk and killed everybody, ’cause she was such a saaa-lut!”

  “So that’s what it was all about.”

  “You missed my Carmen Miranda dance. Dan-sezz, I should say. I performed it every hour on the half-hour on the bar top. They didn’t have any yes-we-have-no-bananas so I made a hat out of lemons and limes and those shiny red cherries. What it lacked in height it made up in garnishability.”

  “Remember what this dress is about?”

  “Umm, fuckability? You’re about to make me a member of the Between the Floors Club? STOP! THIS! ELEVATOR!”

  “Ouch. So loud.”

  “Albert Finney, The Dresser. With a slight variation, you may have noticed.”

  “The dress, my little Maya queen.”

  “My hot, hottie Fred MacMurray.”

  “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “We did it already?”

  “Last night? The dark cavern? The torches? The black knives and stingray spine?”

  “Ohh, yeah. We went out to some location. Or was that a sound stage?”

  “Look, Vee Vee, don’t worry about the substance abuse. That’s going to be taken care of soon as we’re finished with this project. But right now I need you in a certain state of mind. I know this sounds confusing. You’ll just have to trust me on this.”

  “It’s about some movie we’re doing after Penance, right?”

  “I had to cancel Penance, Vee Vee.”

  “What? Whoa ho, mister! Then you better cancel Breeze or Breeze is going to cancel you.”

  “Kenneth Fabritzi will be no problem. Every man has his price. Fact is, what Breeze can do is crucial to my project.”

  “What he can do. What Breeze can do. You just don’t know the people who Breeze knows. You just don’t know.”

  “Oh?”

  “How do you think he financed those movies of his?”

  “So, Mr. Cool-as-a-Breeze knows some shady people. Not surprising. That doesn’t make him a problem. A little more interesting. But not a problem.”

  “Shady? Ha! You may have more money than God but those people could blot out the sun. Shit! Is Breeze here? He’s staying in the penthouse?”

  “Relax. He has half a floor of a downtown hotel with all the trimmings. Right now Breeze is experiencing more Hoosier hospitality than a hog finds joy in a bog.”

  “Fuck me. Fuck me like Cochise on Indian fucking day. This is Corn City.”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe. And you, my lovely, are about to become its queen.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “How you like your chicken, Antony?” asked Lydell Wade.

  “Ah-ight,” said Antony Phillips.

  “This is exactly what I was talking about when I told your mamma on her deathbed I’d be looking out for you,” said Lydell. “You see that it’s your time to step up, and I’m right here to give you what you need.”

  Antony nodded. He was having dinner in Lydell’s kitchen, the man his late mother referred to as Antony’s uncle. But Lydell wasn’t his mother’s brother. A cousin, possibly. Antony thought there had to be some blood tie since his mother never refused Lydell whenever he came around for money or a meal or a place to stay for a few nights.

  “Don’t like the bread, Antony? You ain’t touched it none.”

  “I don’t eat that shit.” Antony leaned back, put his hands behind his head.

  “Yeah, stay hungry for the entrée. That’s a good way for a boy your age to be. Stay hungry so you take the important things that come your way. That’s good instincts showing through, Antony. You gonna be all right. Your mamma wouldn’t have to worry none about you.”

  “I ain’t got the money on me,” said Antony.

  “I know you good for it. You just do what you gotta do. Get a nice customer base built up at that school where you at and everything take care of itself. Just one thing. I ain’t got it in rock like you asked for. But that’s a good thing. Starting kids out on blow is a better way to go. Teaches them what they can handle before it’s time to step up. Know what I mean?”

  Antony nodded.

  Lydell left the room. He returned with a small package. He placed it on the table and slid it toward Antony.

  “Don’t need to cut it none,” said Lydell. “Just split it into whatever size sells best. Smaller the better. You know what to charge?”

  “I know all that.” Antony put the package in his pants pocket. “You come by work tomorrow. I have the money then.”

  “Damn, son, sounds like you got your plan working. See, I knew you was gonna be all right. You making it so I wasn’t lying to you mamma.”

  ~ ~ ~

  The late, great Night Town boasted a selection of over 200 beers from around the world. Aly Roarke thought Jones Pelfry must have something similar in his refrigerator; every time he went to his kitchen he returned with a beer from a different country.

  “Norwegian,” said Pelfry as he came into the living room, a bottle in each hand. “Room temperature. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Hey, just so it’s not light beer.”

  There was a knock at the door. Pizza delivery. Pelfry paid. He set the steaming box on the coffee table.

  Aly flipped open the box. “Thin crust is the only way to go.”

  “Thinner the better,” said Pelfry. “Far as I’m concerned, crust is nothing more than a utensil to get the ingredients to your face.”

  “With you on that one,” said Aly. She leaned forward to take in the aroma.

  Pelfry pulled the slices apart. “Couldn’t eat pizza when I lived in Chicago. Just like eating cheese and sauce spread on a bread loaf.”

  “Ugh. I stick to Mexican when I’m up there. At least tortillas are made out of—”

  Aly and Pelfry looked at each other.

  “Pizza in a bowl?” said Pelfry.

  “It scares me when we think alike.”

  Twenty minutes later Pelfry closed the lid on a box of white, denuded triangles. The two sat quietly sipping beer.

  Aly broke the silence. “Would that be a State Department thing? Dr. Arbanian, I mean. Should I call them? Would they be trying to get in touch with me? Someone must have missed him by now. Or—wow—maybe they think I’m dead. Maybe someone from our village… Yo, Jones? Still here?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m boring you?”

  “Just thinking about the correlating colors in our little caper.”

  “You’re hooking up Clove’s beers with the Four Horsemen again?” Aly waggled her beer bottle. “Jungian archetypes, hello.”

  “Not so much archetypes as synchronicity.”

  “Synchronicity? I see.” Aly took a swig. “And?”

  “Jung once painted a picture that seemed to him Chinese in style and subject matter. Why, he painted it, he had no idea. Soon after, with absolutely no prior knowledge of the painting, another scholar sent Jung a text dealing with Taoist alchemy. The text explained to Jung exactly what his painting was about.”

  “Not a coincidence, is what you’re saying.”

  “Another time he was awakened by the sensation of having his forehead struck, followed by a pain in the back of his head. Turned out a patient of his had shot h
imself in the head at the exact moment Jung had awoken. Jung didn’t see this as being psychic so much as being privy to the collective unconscious, an entity he believed connects all humans in a common mind.”

  “Considering new crime solving techniques?”

  “Think about your so-called Four Beers of the Apocalypse. Could be a joke on Clove’s part. But there’s always some truth to a joke. Elsewise it would fail to resonate.”

  “You think Clove is tapped into something the rest of us aren’t.”

  “Her book about the end time? She takes that seriously enough.”

  “Jones, we’ve got a legitimate investigation going on here. And now you’re drifting off into…I don’t know what. But it sounds like you’re leaving me alone on getting justice for Arby.”

  “I had this experience out in a field one night. Where one of those drowned boys was found. There were a lot of crazy things going on out there. Like images of men fornicating with lambs.”

  “And me sitting here without mint jelly.”

  “Anyway, I couldn’t shake that image. Meanwhile, I’m getting the crap kicked out of me by three rednecks.”

  “That would be the bruises on your face.”

  “After that I had a vision of Kurtwood Franz as one of the Four Horsemen. This was before you filled me in on the People of the Maize and their end time. Just before. And look how things are connecting. The different murders, the fact that I’m the only investigator linking the four together. Linking them to Franz, no less. And here I was getting the shit kicked out of me as my own private Revelations played itself out.”

  Aly rolled her eyes. “Man, this is exactly what I didn’t want to get into: you think bringing down Franz will prevent the world from ending.”

  “‘And behold, a pale horse, and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him; and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence.’”

  “Cripes.”

  “Kurtwood Franz is a major player in the power grid’s instincts for survival. A player I saw as the Pale Rider.”

  “A vision you had from a drug, right? That Trish scored for you.”

  “A drug naturally produced by a planet that’s desperate to save itself from man’s corruption. Trish told me you were a tree hugger. So who’s leaving who alone here?”

  “Look, maybe a part of you thought you were going to die when those guys were beating you. Your mind turned to Revelations as our culture’s prevailing story of doom. A mind, by the way, under the influence of a drug. There’s your synchronicity.”

  “Not just Clove’s Four Beers and the Four Horsemen lining up.”

  “Ri-hight. The four birds in Mayan mythology.”

  “A mythology that deals with the End Time. You told me the Mayans had a cyclical view of time: disaster, rebirth, disaster, rebirth. But you also stressed this whole thing with Ukit Took could prove that—”

  “I know, I know. That human corruption might bring the cycle to a final end.”

  “If a true End Time is approaching, it could be that common symbols from different cultures are collapsing toward each other as time and space compress.”

  “You’re saying that now Clove, The Bible, and Mayan mythology all carry equal weight? Can I be the one to tell Clove about her promotion?”

  “Don’t forget all these connections are being made as a result of you and I meeting at the End of the World.”

  “Actually, just outside.”

  Pelfry spoke slowly, his voice dropping: “Yes, we haven’t quite arrived, have we?”

  “Woo-oo.” Aly made creep-show fingers.

  Pelfry drew into himself. He darkened, suddenly looked devoid of energy. Aly wondered if she’d struck a nerve. Did this guy really believe what he said? Maybe he was outsmartassing a smartass. Whatever, Aly felt herself being punished; Pelfry’s sudden withdrawal in plain sight caused her to feel the room closing in. She wanted to sneak off to call Trish and ask about this passive-aggressive nut job boyfriend of hers. Or had Trish never seen this side of Jones Pelfry? Aly couldn’t imagine vivacious, fiercely independent Trish putting up with a sullen manipulator. But Aly couldn’t call Trish.

  And here Aly was friendless again, because where she almost had a legitimate shot at finding justice for Arby, she now had a professional investigator spinning off into mysticism and prophecies of doom, and who knew where the guy was now, he was so distant while being only four feet away. Fishhook, at Ukit Took’s pyramid, seemed to withdraw into another time right before her eyes. And the guardian of the young storyteller when Aly was told the story of Ukit Took and the Winaq, how that woman made herself not present at the campfire, not present in the moment. And Captain Weeks, in his office, drifting away. And now Jones Pelfry, right here, right now! Aly wondered if she was spreading something. Something she’d picked up in Ukit Took’s pyramid when Fishhook nearly took off her head with his machete. She’d felt her self draining away; everything that she was disappearing down the dark hole in the pyramid’s floor; down the temple’s ol. Now she again felt the ol draining her; dimly lighting her with the burden of having seen the Ch’ak of Ukit Took and his blank stela. I might be the only living person to have seen them in their proper place. Because of that, the ol can concentrate on me and me alone. But now its darkness has gotten Jones, just like when those others were near me. That darkness so thorough, so complete; the nothingness Fishhook described before he nearly—

  Aly jumped when the landline in the apartment went off. “Shit!”

  The Jones Aly knew—the one she’d eaten pizza in a bowl with—returned. He answered, then held out the phone.

  Aly reached. “Your Pale Rider, no doubt. Good. Someone less creepy to talk to.” She took the phone. “Hello?…Yeah…Yeah…Uh huh…Right, that would be me…No, Tikal first, then down near Copan. We never actually got to Copan… Right…Okay… Okay…Yeah, that’s what I had in mind…Sure, we’ve already met. She’s a real nice lady. It’ll be good to see her again…Uh huh…Bye.” She passed the phone to Pelfry.

  “Sounds like that went well.”

  “I’m in. Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Good work. But tell me something. And I want you to be completely honest.”

  “Only way to be.” Aly took a swig of beer.

  “Good. Do you feel at all threatened? This could get dangerous.”

  “Hmm. It’s not like he wanted a secret meeting. Beforehand I have to check in with… Tell you what, even if I do get killed? It’ll be worth it just to see the look on Hell’s Hoosier Harpy when she gives me a pass to Franz’s office.”

  36: Next Day

  Sylvie kept low creeping between cars. She shadowed Antony until he stopped in an empty parking space. She pounced. “Gotcha!” She grabbed him from behind and held hard against him, wanting to make a lasting impression in case he came through and she was going to be stuck in Corn City for awhile.

  The sneak attack momentarily startled Antony. Sylvie let go. Antony turned nonchalantly.

  “Know it was me?” asked Sylvie.

  “I knew.”

  “Didn’t think I could surprise you. Still, a gal likes to keep things interesting.”

  Antony stared over Sylvie’s head.

  “So, Antony, been to the candy store?”

  Antony handed her the package.

  Sylvie’s eyes popped at the quantity. “Whoa. Nice.” She opened it carefully. “Look, I brought a nice chunk of change here.” She stuffed ten folded fifties into his front pants pocket. “But let me know if this isn’t enough. I’ll be seeing you again. Real soon.”

  “The Lakers are coming to town. I got seats.”

  “Ohhh, Antony, I can’t. See, there’s this movie being made, and— Oh, does Jack travel with the Lakers?” She eyed Antony to see if he caught the reference. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen him. But I really, really can’t. I promise, next time. If you do see Jack, tell him I’m still waiting for him to give me those a
sbestos panties he says I need. If I owe you for this, let me know. I’ll be in touch.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Aly sprinted across the visitor’s lot of Franz World Headquarters. She pulled the door open and climbed into Pelfry’s Mustang. “Man, I blew that so bad. Shit!” She folded her hands, bowed her head. “Sorry, Arby.” She pulled the door closed.

  “Didn’t see the artifacts?”

  “That guy got things so turned around on me.” Aly breathed hard from running. “He got it so that I was the one who had the artifacts and that he needed to get them from me to help out the People of the Maize.”

  “You called them that? Not Mayans?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. Maybe?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened as best you can.”

  She tapped on the dashboard and steadied her breathing. “Well, I told him I was on the project he sponsors down in Tikal. I said, ‘Yeah, man, I was down at Tikal when Arby got the word on the sly about something down near Copan,’ and Mr. Franz said, ‘Oh?’”

  “Hold on a second. Did you use the name Arby for Phillip Arbanian the very first time you mentioned him?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “You think so, but you’re not sure.”

  “No, I’m sure, because I said—”

  “And Franz knew who you meant?”

  “Yeah. That’s important?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Go on.”

  “Okay. So I told him that Arby took just myself down to this village near the Honduran border. I said, ‘Because, you know, Copan is right near the border of the two countries,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I think I heard that somewhere,’ like a real smartass, and I felt like saying… Sorry, I guess I’m getting off track.”

  “Not at all. That he was flippant says something.”

  “Oh? Yeah, I guess. He sure didn’t look worried.”

  “Please, continue.”

  “So I told him we set up camp in this little village and that Arby went out every day. Sometimes he’d be gone two and three days at a time and that one time he took me and that I saw the Ch’ak of Ukit Took and the blank stela that’s supposed to fill in with the story of the end of the Fourth Creation. The whole time I acted like I wasn’t looking at him, but I really was, and he kept smiling and looking me up and down like he wanted to screw me. But that was probably just a ploy to keep his face from revealing tells. Especially when you consider who he gets to screw every night. Know who I mean?”