Cry in the Night

by Hart, Carolyn G.

  Mercifully, I don’t remember too much about that horror-filled encounter. It was over quickly and we were running, his hand once again tight on my arm, down the alleyway. I do remember thinking gratefully that it was his other hand that gripped me, not the hand that had killed.

  We left the watchman slumped on the ground, smaller in death than he had been in life.

  When we reached the end of the alley, he stopped. I stumbled to a halt beside him, my breathing ragged and loud. No one moved on the broad, empty street. Vine-covered walls rose on both sides. Not a house could be seen. If I screamed, if I called out for help, no one would hear.

  The knife was no longer in his hand, but he could draw it quickly, more quickly than the watchman had been able to lift the whistle to his lips.

  We paused for an instant at the street, and then he hurried me across the cobbled stones and into the opposite alleyway. This time we didn’t go far. His motorcycle was well hidden in the deepest shadows.

  He untied the leather strip from my wrists then, astride the motorcycle, he gestured to me to climb on behind him. I debated. Could I possibly run? I knew the answer. I couldn’t outrun a motorcycle or a knife. I climbed on behind him.

  He grabbed my wrists, then pulled my hands around his waist and tied them. He kicked down on the starter and the cycle roared and began to lurch down the alley. Quickly the cycle picked up speed and turned into the street.

  The ride was a nightmare. We hurtled down streets I’d never seen, past billboards that were meaningless. All was strange, the buildings, the road signs, the parks.

  I had never before ridden on a motorcycle. The speed sucked my breath away, pressed against my face, pulled at my eyes. I could see only in a blur. Each swerve of the machine seemed perilously near disaster.

  When we reached the highway and the city began to fall behind, the road swooped and curved and turned back on itself in sometimes shallow and sometimes steep ascents. The speed plucked at my will, tore at my mind. We rode on and on, occasionally roaring through a little village with only one light or two to mark huddled buildings clinging to the hillside. The air grew colder and colder and soon there was nothing in the world but the hard sweep of the wind and hurtling machine. I don’t know how long we rode. An hour at least. Perhaps two.

  My face was pressed against his back. The rough cotton of his shirt rubbed my cheek. Finally, the cycle slowed. We plunged off the narrow road onto a one-lane dirt road that wound still higher among stubby pine trees. We rode perhaps another quarter mile and stopped. After the seemingly endless, wind-whipped journey, the sudden quiet jolted me out of my passive acceptance.

  An owl hooted not far away. The man turned his head to listen. There was a faint crackling as some animal moved along the hillside. I saw patches of sky through the trees. Stars glittered bright as sequins, but there was little light among the pines. I dimly made out tumbled boulders and rough, uneven ground with trees clinging tenaciously to the hillside.

  He untied my hands and helped me off the cycle.

  I was so numb and stiff, I was scarcely able to stand.

  He turned away, rolling the cycle off the road.

  Stiff as I was, unsteady on my feet, I didn’t hesitate. I turned and ran.

  He didn’t hear me for a moment. When he started after me, I swerved off the road and blundered down a steep slope, slipping and sliding on hoof-sized rocks. There was no place to go, but I kept on running, stubbornly, hopelessly, twisting and turning, stumbling on.

  As frightening as anything was the utter silence of his pursuit. He didn’t shout at me to stop. There was no sound but the slap of his feet, the rattle of rocks as he jumped down a slope.

  The angle of descent sharpened. He was close behind me. I dodged to my left and my ankle twisted under me. I fell, rolling over and over, rocks poking and jabbing against me until I brought up hard against the trunk of a pine tree and fell beside it. The sharp, clean smell of the pines reminded of a summer my mother and I spent in Minnesota, a happy, carefree summer. Now I huddled beneath the low-hanging boughs of a pine tree. Fallen needles were sharp against my face. Somewhere near, so near, a killer hunted me. I lay as still as the fallen needles. I waited.

  He stopped, too. He knew I couldn’t be far from him. I heard his heavy breaths and then they quieted. He was so close to my tree that, if I crawled a half yard forward, I would be able to reach out and touch his shoe.

  “I won’t hurt you.” He spoke softly.

  I wondered if we might be near a house. I knew in the same instant that it wouldn’t matter if there were people only yards way. Long before I could rouse anyone with a cry, he would be upon me. I lay as still as the waxy, sharp-tipped needles beneath me and waited.

  “Miss, miss, listen to me, miss.”

  If it weren’t so horrible, it would be funny. Miss, indeed.

  “I only want to talk to you.”

  I took a delight in how quiet I could be. Not the lightest breath, not the faintest rustle would betray me.

  “I know you can hear me. I know all about you. I’ve known since before you came to Mexico.”

  Have you now? I thought, but I lay unmoving in my needle-lined depression.

  “Listen.” Anger flickered in his voice. “You can’t fool me. You are here to buy the treasure for your museum. You have brought much money with you.” He paused and pine trees sighed in the gentle wind and night creatures scurried about on their nocturnal rounds. “Much money.”

  Now I understood that there was no hope for me. I had no money. When he knew I couldn’t give him the riches he had killed for, he would dispose of me as easily as a housewife swats a wasp.

  “I will have the money. It is mine. The treasure belongs to me.”

  To you and to the Ortegas and to the Mexican government and to the shades of Aztec gods and Lord knows who all else.

  “My brother found the gold . . .”

  His brother. I listened hard to that soft voice.

  “. . . so they killed him. They killed Raúl.”

  Everybody loves somebody. He loved his brother. The bitterness in his voice made the hair prickle on my back.

  He told me all he knew, how Raúl had realized that the señora did not ride aimlessly in the hills. Rather, that she searched for something and, when Señor Ortega was not at the hacienda, she rode all day, up and down the hills, the horse brought in lathered with sweat. One cool November day, Raúl followed Gerda.

  “There are some, how do you say it, old places?”

  Ruins? I thought to myself.

  “Big humps that look like hills but it is said that once they were temples. There was a dried stream bed that curved around the hill. It was near here that the señora hunted every day. She had looked long that afternoon and she was resting, sitting in the shade of a pine when Raúl found her.”

  I had trouble picturing blond and beautiful Gerda scrambling up and down rocky hills. After months passed, the hunt must have seemed hopeless to her. But that afternoon, Raúl found her. Gerda liked young men and Raúl was both handsome and ingenious. She shared her wine with him and told him an interesting story.

  Raúl’s brother obviously didn’t question what Gerda had told Raúl, but I could scarcely believe my ears. She was hunting, Gerda told Raúl, for a cave. She had a map. She showed him the map.

  “I didn’t see the map, you understand,” Raúl’s brother confided in that soft, whispering voice, “but Raúl told me that as soon as he saw the map, he knew why the señora’s search had failed.”

  My captor didn’t doubt what he was telling me, but I was sure Raúl had lied to him. I could believe in gold. I could even believe in a treasure trove. I couldn’t believe in a map with an X marking the spot. A map four hundred and fifty years old?

  His next words confirmed my skepticism.

  “The cave was marked on the map, but it shows so many paces from the road and Raúl knew the map meant the old road. This the señora did not know. She had come to Tlaxcala this past s
ummer and knew only the fine new road. She didn’t know the old road.”

  Neither did Cortés’s soldiers know the old road, buddy. But I didn’t say a word. I lay quietly in my burrow. Raúl has sold his brother a bill of goods. I wondered why.

  Raúl’s brother described what he knew of the map, the funny writing—what would be the romance of a treasure map without an exotic inscription?—the number of paces from an overhanging rock to the mouth of the cave.

  “He told the señora. He showed her the old road. They went together and together they found the gold so the treasure is as much his as hers, do you not think, miss?”

  It was cold on the hillside. The pine needles were like slick pieces of ice against my skin. I felt sure there was no treasure. It was all a mad fantasy, the treasure, this cold damp hillside, the eerily soft voice of the killer trying to coax me to come out of my hiding place, demanding money that I didn’t have.

  If he found me, I would soon not feel cold. I wouldn’t feel anything ever again. The touch of Tony’s hand . . . The killer would find me. There was no escape possible. What could I do? How could I persuade him that I had no money?

  I forced myself to face the truth. Even if I persuaded him that I had no money, he wouldn’t let me go free. I had seen him kill, watched his hand plunge a knife into a man’s throat.

  I pressed harder against the pine carpet, felt again the breathless emptiness of fear, so like the sensation of falling. I missed some of what he said but when I heard again, he was insisting, “The treasure belongs to me now because my brother found the cave for the señora. He told me about the gold that last night. He was drunk and I didn’t believe him. He told me how the gold looked, soft and shiny, bright as butter, he said.”

  For a moment that soft voice fell away. There was nothing but the gentle rustle of the pine trees and the clatter of rocks as he moved a step or so farther down the incline, ever closer to me.

  Even in the dimness beneath the pine tree I could now see something of the terrain, tumbled heaps of rocks and wind-bent trees. If I could see better, he could see better. No frightened creature of the night could lie more still than I. I might have been a part of the ground.

  “You come with me now,” he pled. “I will show the treasure to you. We will take the gold with us and go together for you to get the money. Once I have the money, you will have the treasure. Please, come now.”

  He assumed that somewhere I had access to money, much money. He must believe the money was in another place, waiting. That meant he was sure I had no money in my room at the Ortega house. I remembered the edge of slip that had shown from my suitcase. Someone had searched my room, must have told him there was no money hidden there. I thought of the little maid who had brought me hot chocolate and who had led me through the night to the gate into the alley and him. He kidnapped me to show me the treasure and then he was sure I would give the money to him, not to Gerda or Juan. He was so confident, but I was sure that there could be no treasure. No map and no treasure.

  Yet, he had killed for this treasure and he would kill again.

  My mind rebelled. Ancient Aztec gold would not be hidden in a cave marked upon a map by the “old” road. That road might be a hundred years, but not four hundred and fifty years old. Had it all been a dreadful mistake? Had Raúl fallen accidentally and his imaginings triggered his brother to murder for nothing?

  “Listen to me.” He was angry now, angry and determined that I should do his bidding. “I tell you, I followed Juan. I saw him today creeping like a shadow, hiding a suitcase in the cellars. It must be the treasure.”

  Today. He saw Juan move something today. That was why he had taken me captive tonight. At first, he had tried to frighten me, the note at the airport, the doll flung on my floor. When I didn’t go back to New York, he shot at me on the Avenue of the Dead. Now I realized he had intentionally missed. His plan then had been to prevent the transfer of the gold to a courier from the museum. His focus had been on finding the gold. Today when he followed Juan, he was sure that he could take possession of the treasure. He arranged with his sister, the little maid, to persuade me to come to the alley. He wanted to deal with me. I had money, he had gold, the transfer could be made.

  I had no money. I doubted, as I lay shivering on that cold hillside, that he had a treasure.

  If I moved, if I tried to run again, he would hear and catch me. If I lay still all night long, the sun would rise, its bright rays slipping down the hillside. Eventually, he would find me.

  I was cold. And angry. I did not want to die on a rock-strewn hillside in Mexico.

  I hated the sound of his voice. Now it rose as he implored me. In a dreadful fashion, the cadence was reminiscent of vendors everywhere in Mexico trying to sell you something—a ring, a horse made of straw, a serape, moccasins, balloons, postcards, necklaces, lace scarves, baskets, leather purses.

  “Please, miss, you come now, you will see. My brother, he told me the gold was soft and warm to the touch. Please, miss.”

  I wanted to shut away his voice, shut away the picture of hands lifted up, filled with gold, cajoling, bartering.

  “Miss, you come now. We will look at it together—” His words broke off.

  I heard the roar at the same instant, the growl of an MG changing gears as it climbed the hill. The road was just above us. The lights from the car whipped across the top of the pines. Loose gravel spun beneath the wheels as the car careened around a sharp curve. The lights flickered in the treetops only for an instant. The screech of the tires sounded scarcely longer. But the whine of the motor could be heard when the car was long on its way around the curving, twisting road.

  It was an MG. I knew it. I never questioned it. This road, this narrow twisting road, must belong to the Ortegas.

  Tony’s MG?

  When it was very quiet again, the sound of the car only a memory, I realized I was alone on the cold, silent hillside.

  Raúl’s brother had gone.

  Chapter 15

  It was much later that I learned why things happened as they did that frightful night, learned that Tony woke up the house, stormed up and down stairs, shouted when the twins led him to my room and I was gone, my purse on the desk, the bedcovers thrown back, my gown and robe a silken heap on the chair.

  Lights had flooded the Casa Ortega. When everything had been searched, when they were sure I could not be found, the twins, white-faced, told Tony all that they knew, and the bits and pieces and patches of information—the hint of gold, Juan and Gerda, my disclaimer to the old gentleman that I was involved—all added up to danger. It was then that Tony stormed up to Juan’s room.

  Juan was gone, too.

  I knew none of this as I ran, stumbled, fought my way against fear and the night and the deep-rutted road, knowing that ahead of me raced a killer, a killer who could move like a deer through the trees, a killer who would stop at nothing to claim what he felt was his. If only I could reach Tony first, if I could have the strength and breath to warn him, to shout, to save him from the danger he faced on my account.

  There is no time to dissemble when you are running for someone’s life. I didn’t question that I cared so much, that I would run until I dropped, that I would kick and claw and battle to save him. It wasn’t sensible. It wasn’t rational. I had lived my life being sensible and rational. Tonight that caution fell away.

  I remembered the way his hair glistened in the moonlight, black as a raven’s wing. I remembered the eagerness in his voice when he showed me the mosaics at the university. I remembered the way he laughed and took my hand the afternoon we walked up Reforma. Simple things, nothing to set the pulses racing, nothing but kindness and grace and good humor, qualities to build a life on.

  Hot stabbing pain in my side clawed like a live thing. I gasped for breath and sweat slipped down my face and back. More frightening than shouts or footfalls or racing motors was the silence. I might have been the only person in the world as I ran up the steep curving road.

/>   I rounded a bend and saw a dark sprawl of buildings that had to be the Ortega hacienda. No light shone. No one moved in the dusty foreyard in front of an immense wooden door.

  Where was the MG?

  Where was Raúl’s brother?

  I stopped and stared at the dark hacienda. It was utterly quiet. I hesitated, uncertain what to do. Every passing second brought danger closer to Tony. Should I batter on that huge wooden door? Hope that someone would hear and come and help?

  Struggling for breath, trying to think, I started for the door, then, at the last instant, turned away. Where was the MG? That was what mattered. Tony would not be far from the MG. The hacienda, like a huge sleeping animal, loomed above me. I ran to the right and passed a dozen dark oval openings beneath massive arches. Then I was at the end of the house. A dusty road angled up the hillside, away from the darkness of the hacienda. I saw the MG a hundred yards away. It looked as though the car had skidded to a stop. The driver’s door hung open. Light spilled out onto hard-packed earth. The headlights gleamed brightly, throwing into sharp relief the thick rank of pine trees that crowded up the hillside. The lights angled away from the tiled-roof building just past the car. A barn? Stables converted to a garage? Storerooms? Square cut pillars curved into big graceful arches to support pale whitewashed walls. The arched openings were even darker than the night. Somehow, though, the lights from the MG seemed more threatening than the dark arches because the headlight beams aimed pointlessly up the hillside.

  I reached the car and stopped to stare at the Saint Christopher medal dangling from the rearview mirror. I had noticed the medal the first morning when Tony took me to the museum. Saint Christopher had lost his place in the calendar of saints, but not in the hearts of travelers. I reached in and slipped the chain from the mirror and wrapped it around my hand until the round medal was in my closed palm. Then I turned and walked toward that big dark building. Gravel crunched beneath my shoes. My labored breathing was a rasping sound in the stillness. My lungs still strained from my wild run up the steep road.