Cry in the Night

by Hart, Carolyn G.

  Gerda was facing us, moonlight full on her face. He stood with his back to us. She clung to his arm, all soft femininity. In the sharp white light of the moon, her hair shone like silver.

  I looked down at Francesca and wished for her sake and for Rita’s that they were not here beside me. There was no surprise on the twins’ brown expressionless faces. No surprise at all.

  Gerda said something more. He shook his head and started to turn, pulling away from her hand.

  My heart stood still. I knew that head, the shape of it. The man standing there wasn’t Tony.

  “Juan.” Her voice was imploring.

  Juan swung around, his face hard, angular, dangerous. His mouth twisted contemptuously.

  Of course the man was Juan, not Tony. One brother’s voice can certainly sound like another’s. Juan’s lips had closed on Gerda’s. Not Tony’s. Never Tony’s.

  Gerda clung to Juan’s arm.

  He said something in a mocking tone.

  Gerda moved closer to him, pressed against him, slipped her hands up and around his neck. He hesitated for an instant, shrugged, murmured something, and bent his head to hers.

  It was dreadful how glad I was. I didn’t at that moment care at all that they were lovers. At least, not until I looked at the girls again. I hated for them to see this passionate encounter. It seemed hours before that embrace ended.

  When Gerda and Juan had gone, when it was utterly quiet in the garden again, Francesca gently touched my arm. We moved on. None of us said anything. I didn’t know what I could say. Perhaps they knew better than I that there was nothing to say.

  They led me to the door that had opened so briefly my first night. It was this door that Tony entered last night. He had been there while Juan and Gerda were whispering in the vine-covered bower.

  The twins tapped on the door softly. Maria answered. She hurried us inside and latched the door after us.

  This room did not match the rest of the house. There was no hint of luxury here. Instead there was simplicity and dignity and a sense of place. It was an austere room furnished with a narrow, dark wooden bed, a chest of drawers, a rolltop desk, two leather chairs. The crucifix above the bed dominated the room. Christ in his agony was here.

  Señor Herrera was propped up in the bed. He held out his hand and I hurried to take it. I was shocked at its lack of substance. He was very old, his hair a wispy white, his creased and wrinkled face a faded khaki color. His black eyes were vivid and alive and fearful.

  “You have come”—and his voice was a faint as the faraway murmur of wind chimes—“from Vicente?”

  I realized after an instant’s pause that he meant Dr. Rodriguez. I hesitated.

  He saw that hesitation and struggled up on one elbow. “If you did not come from Vicente, how can you be here to help me? Did the girls make a mistake, misunderstand?”

  I smiled reassuringly. “I am here to help. There is no mistake. I will help you if I can.”

  He rested back on his pillow and listened. I explained how I had come to Casa Ortega to return the Sanchez manuscript.

  He interrupted me. “Why did you bring it back?”

  “The Ortega family requested the return of the manuscript.”

  His weak voice was emphatic. “That is not right, not right at all. The manuscript is mine. I loaned it. I did not ask for its return.”

  So the return of the manuscript had been an excuse to decoy a member of the museum staff to the Ortega house. Since Señor Herrera had not asked for the manuscript, he suspected the worst when I arrived. It had been he who cried out in the night upon learning of my arrival.

  I told him how he had not been alone in suspecting me, of the warning thrust on me at the airport and of the torn-apart doll.

  Maria interrupted here to say something in Spanish. He listened and nodded, then urged me to continue. His dark eyes were shocked when I described the shooting on the Avenue of the Dead. I told him of Jerry Elliot and the concern by the Department of Antiquities and he seemed both elated and at the same time grieved.

  He looked past me to speak to Maria. “I put everything in God’s hands. I wrote out the message, asking for help. I thought I had done my duty.”

  I wished I had not had to tell the tale I told, obviously implicating a member of his family. It was intolerable to him that the antiquities he had spent his life studying should be spirited out of Mexico. But that he should bring disgrace upon some member of his family was intolerable, too. I understood his dilemma. I squeezed his hand gently.

  “I wasn’t sure,” he said sadly. “But I was afraid.”

  Here was the heart of it. Now I would learn what had prompted him to write Dr. Rodriguez, what had forged the chain of death that linked New York and Tlaxcala.

  His story was a simple one. Maria had come to him in early winter and told him of Raúl’s death and of the whispers of gold and treasure and how Raúl had boasted the evening before he died of gold that would make him richer than a king.

  He dismissed the tales as gossip and nothing more. He didn’t connect rumors of gold with his grandson Juan’s visit to his room the next week. He was pleased, excited Juan had come to see him.

  “It had been since midsummer since I had seen him,” the old man said apologetically.

  The visit had been such a pleasant one. Somehow the conversation had turned to the antiquities trade and museums reputed to buy stolen goods. He and Juan spoke of my museum, one of the worst offenders.

  “I see,” I said tiredly. I did. I saw more than the old gentleman could imagine. The sequence was clear now. A treasure, a fabulous treasure, discovered by an unscrupulous young man. What then? Chests of gold can’t be hawked on the street corner. A little discreet investigation, a letter to the museum, perhaps describing the treasure well enough that the recipient knew that here was the find of the century.

  “Did you mention a particular person at the museum?” I asked tensely.

  He shook his head gently.

  The letter had gone blind to the museum. It would have been received in the main office, that same office where I saw the fateful notice on the bulletin board. The secretary there would open and forward it to the appropriate section. The letter must, of course, have been guarded, but some hint must have been made about gold—that and the letter’s origin in Mexico would be enough to direct it to the Mesoamerican section. Received there, it would be part of the nut mail and with that section’s egalitarian system the letter went to the next staff member in line to answer nut mail.

  Who had read that letter and sensed its authenticity?

  Dr. Rodriguez? Michael Taylor? Karl Freidheim? Timothy Simmons?

  One of them.

  Dr. Herrera, of course, knew none of this. He didn’t think at all about his conversation with Juan. At least, not until his son-in-law, Tony and Juan’s father, spent an evening with him in early December.

  Señor Ortega often came in the evenings to play a game of chess and share a glass of wine with his first wife’s father. They talked of family and the hacienda, of the grandchildren’s plans. Toward the end of this particular evening, Dr. Herrera remembered the moment perfectly, his son-in-law asked if he had started a new project, a paper perhaps for a scholarly magazine?

  Señor Herrera was puzzled. It had been several years since he had worked. He had ideas, yes, but he no longer had strength. His son-in-law knew this so Señor Herrera was surprised and asked, “Why did you think I was writing again?”

  His son-in-law told him how pleased he had been when he paid his telephone bill for the month to see three calls to New York. To the museum.

  Señor Ortega told of the calls tactfully for he knew the old gentleman, El Viejito, sometimes forgot things.

  The old man knew that sometimes he did forget so he didn’t make an issue of the phone calls. The conversation moved on to other things. Days passed but Señor Herrera worried about the calls, felt uneasy. He had Maria get a copy of the bill. He checked the number. The calls were t
o the museum, to the extension that belonged to the Mesoamerican Department.

  A warning bell clamored in his mind. Gold in Tlaxcala. Juan’s visit. The museum in New York, a museum that in the past had not been too fastidious in the sources of its treasures. But surely his old friend Vicente Rodriguez would not permit the finest of Mexico’s art to be stolen.

  On the one hand, the old man feared the loss of a great treasure from its homeland. On the other, he dreaded the discovery that one of his daughter’s children was conniving to smuggle away his heritage.

  Señor Herrera lay very still when he had finished, his hand limp in mine. I feared for a moment that the strain had been too great on his heart. Maria was frightened, too, for she pushed in beside me and took that limp, shadow-light hand in her own and called to him.

  He opened his eyes after a moment and smiled up at her and murmured something in Spanish.

  She answered him soothingly, then turned to me. “Enough. He has spoken enough.”

  “I know,” I said quickly. I looked down once again for that aged hand was plucking at mine. He was tired, very tired now, but still he whispered, “I am so sorry.”

  I held his hand in mine. “You have no reason to be sorry, señor.”

  He nodded. “Last night, Tony came and he was so worried. I told him everything, but I told him you were here to take the treasure away. You must tell him I was wrong.” His voice faded away.

  I held his hand and my heart sang. That was why Tony had gone to Tlaxcala; that was why he had urged me to go back to New York.

  Not because he was guilty.

  “Please,” Maria urged. “You must go now. El Viejito must rest.”

  “Thank you, Maria. I will go. Reassure him that I will protect the treasure.” I looked down at his shadowed face. “Tell him not to worry.” Then I said, and the words were out before I weighed them, “tell him Tony and I will see to everything.”

  Her face softened a little, warmed to me. “He has been so afraid.”

  “We will make sure the treasure is saved.”

  But was it a promise I could keep?

  All the way back to my room, the girls and I slipping from the safety of one dark shadow to another, I tried to decide what to do. There was no question in my mind that I must do something. Up to now, I had been buffeted this way and that by events. Now I had committed myself to act. The strain had eased in the old man’s face at my promise. It was time I made things happen.

  Once at my room, I beckoned the girls inside.

  “Francesca”—and I made no excuse for my question—“what did Juan and Gerda say to each other?”

  “In the garden?”

  I nodded.

  She frowned. “I couldn’t hear all of it. When they came up the steps, she was asking him to”—Rita paused, then said carefully and slowly, and I knew she was trying to remember the exact words—“to ‘move it tonight,’ my stepmother said. ‘Please, Juan. Do it for me.’ Juan said something I didn’t hear, and then she kissed him and I didn’t hear the rest.”

  Move it tonight.

  Move what tonight?

  My heart gave a funny little leap. Was she asking Juan to go out in the cold light of the moon and swoop over a mountain road, covering in an hour or so the hard, rugged country that had taken Cortés’s soldiers four days to cross when they fled Tenochtitlán? Could Juan hurry to a hidden cache and gather up gold that had been lost for four hundred and fifty years?

  Jerry had described to me what might be in the Treasure of Axayacatl, intricate works of the softest hammered gold, ear spools and pendants, nose plugs and whistles, headdresses, breastplates, discs. Each piece would likely reflect the highly original mythology of the Aztec people. Jaguar heads and feathered serpents, a writhing skirt of snakes, the soft teardrops of falling rain—all of these and more might be captured in gold.

  Tonight?

  I don’t know that I consciously made a choice. Jerry had given me his home and office telephone numbers and told me to call at once should I discover anything.

  I may, as I stood there, have remembered that and remembered also when he put me into the cab and said, “For God’s sake, be careful, Sheila.” If I thought about it at all, it was only in passing for there was really no choice to be made.

  “Francesca,” I said urgently, “get Tony for me. Quickly. Tell him that I’ve talked to your grandfather, that I’m on his side. Please hurry. It’s very important.”

  When she left, Rita close behind her, I dropped my robe and gown on a chair and slipped into a navy double-knit dress and white sandals. I don’t really know exactly what I had in mind. I do know that I never questioned my decision to call Tony, to tell him everything. I hoped that perhaps he and I might be able to put everything back together again. If we could find the treasure—perhaps we could follow Juan or demand that he show it to us—if we could find the gold, get it to safety, then we could see what might be salvaged out of the mess.

  I didn’t think about Raúl, the clever, boastful young man, so ambitious, so early dead.

  I was brushing my hair back, twisting it into a bun, when there was a soft knock at my door. I snatched up my sweater and ran to the door. I opened it and was startled to find the little maid there, the one who had brought me hot chocolate the first night.

  She looked nervously over her shoulder, then gestured to me to follow her. Somehow I had expected the twins to return with Tony, but perhaps he felt the children had been through enough for one night and sent them on to bed.

  To my surprise she led me downstairs—her finger to her lips—and out onto the terrace by the poolroom. I half expected her to turn toward the colonnaded wing. Instead she hurried me down the center path of the garden, then veered off to the right to scurry down the wooden steps that led toward the garages.

  She didn’t stop at the garages. I paused and asked in my guidebook Spanish, “¿Donde está Tony?”

  She clapped her small, warm hand over my mouth, whispered something I didn’t understand, and tugged at my sleeve. We started off again. We passed the garages, dark and barnlike, and turned down a narrow brick walk that ran beside a tall, prickly cedar hedge. It was utterly secluded with scarcely enough space between the garage wall and the hedge to look up and see the stars.

  I slowed down again.

  She yanked on my arm, whispering.

  When I stubbornly stopped, she gestured ahead at a huge wooden door. She stepped in front of me and lifted the heavy crossbeam. The door slowly swung out. She paused to let me go first. “He must talk to you, señorita. My brother is waiting for you.”

  I tried to see ahead of me but that sweet-smelling hedge grew tall enough to block out the moonlight, making shadows as thick and black as a pool of oil.

  I stepped hesitantly to the opening. Her brother? Someone who needed to see me? Midway through the door, something moved at the periphery of my vision. I swung around as arms reached for me.

  Chapter 14

  He was incredibly strong. One arm held me pinioned against him. The other crooked about my neck, pulling my chin high and my head back against his chest. I couldn’t move.

  The wooden door slammed shut behind me. I heard the crossbar drop into place.

  If he pulled my head any higher, my neck would break.

  There is a point beyond fear where terror envelops you and the world is reduced to a frantic struggle to survive. Nothing existed in the world but the agonizing strain as my neck arched back and back. I was held in a hard, unrelenting grip, unable to move.

  His voice was a harsh, hot breath against my cheek. “Be quiet and you will be safe.”

  My heart thudded erratically. My head throbbed from pain and fear. I knew I was even nearer death than I had been when the bullets pitted that ages-old pavement on the Avenue of the Dead. I trembled, but I no longer fought to be free. Gradually he loosed his grip, easing the strain on my throat. Quickly, before I realized his intent, he pulled my hands behind me, twisted a leather strap around
them, and tied the ends in two quick twists.

  I was still frightened, terribly frightened, but I had wit enough to realize that I was not hurt. He could easily have strangled me if that had been his intent.

  He herded me down the alley. The way was rough and rocky. His hand was hard on my arm. Far ahead a lamp marked the alley’s entry into the street. We were not far from the street when a flashlight beam danced around the opening into the alley and a musical whistle trilled.

  My captor lifted me as if I weighed no more than a pillow and plunged half a dozen steps back into the obscurity of the alley, pressing both of us against another wooden gate recessed in a wall.

  I knew better than to make even the tiniest of noises. The man holding me signaled his intent clearly. Menace emanated from him in waves.

  The watchman almost passed us.

  His flashlight was loose in his hand. He hummed a tuneless hum. His shoes scuffed leisurely along the rocky ground. He was in no hurry. A few feet from us, he paused and swung the light up to run along the rim of the wall. The light illuminated him for a moment, gray cap tipped to the back of his head, shirt a bright striped pink and yellow.

  I don’t know what alerted him. Perhaps he saw the white of my sandals. I hope not. Perhaps it was the glint of my captor’s knife blade. He saw something. He stopped and swung the beam of the flashlight toward us. At the same moment, he lifted his whistle to his lips.

  My captor moved quickly, yet one strong hand still gripped me. The knife in his other hand swung up to slash the watchman’s throat. The arc of blood from the severed vein was visible for an instant in the light of the flashlight. The light clattered to the ground, its beam trained on nothing.

  The watchman fell heavily forward. There was a hideous noise in his throat, then silence.

  I knew who my captor was now. I saw his face for a moment in the watchman’s light. It was that memorable face glimpsed at the airport and once again in the shadow of a bush at Teotihuacán, straight black hair and flaring sideburns, taut coppery skin, black eyebrows slashing sharply upward, thin, tough mouth. I knew who he was and now I knew what he was, a killer. One of life’s pirates. As vicious as a piranha. I was his prisoner.