Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  “There’s a cop,” Ralph said.

  “What? Where?”

  “Right in front of the wagon. That’s why he slowed down.”

  “Jesus,” said Corella. “All right. Stay with him.”

  Earl too had come back up onto the seat, and in an aggrieved way he said, “Damn it, Ralph, take it easy.” He was rubbing his other eye, not the one the girl had punched. He’d slammed that part of himself into the seat back on the way down.

  Both Ralph and Corella ignored Earl. Both were leaning forward, trying to see the police car beyond the station wagon. Now night was fully settling in, and they had only the station wagon’s headlights to show them the other car up ahead, with its bubble light on top of its distinctive police markings. A state trooper. Highway Patrol. “Damn damn damn,” said Corella.

  In the station wagon Mel was smiling from ear to ear. He wanted to rush up there and kiss that cop. He’d been really terrified when the Cadillac was catching up with him, but now he was safe, at least for the moment. He didn’t know what he’d do next, but for right now the people in the Cadillac couldn’t get at him.

  The state trooper was driving a Fury II. State troopers love Fury IIs. State troopers will go on driving Fury IIs until some car company puts out a car called Kill. Then state troopers will drive Kills. State troopers get their self-image from Marvel Comics.

  The Fury II and the station wagon and the Cadillac drove in a neat law-abiding row at fifty-five miles an hour, the legal speed limit all across this mighty land (thirty-two hundred miles wide), all three vehicles heading eastward on the Connecticut Turnpike. They drove thirty-three miles in thirty-seven minutes, and then the Fury II switched on its right directional. The state trooper was leaving the Turnpike.

  Mel hadn’t yet figured out a next move, so he decided he might as well stick with the state trooper. Maybe the people in the Cadillac would go away.

  In the Cadillac, Corella thumped Ralph’s shoulder, which Ralph loathed. “He’s taking that exit!” Corella said.

  “So’s the cop,” Ralph said.

  “Goddam it,” Corella said.

  The Fury II and the station wagon and the Cadillac peeled off like slow-motion dive bombers, curving away down the ramp one after the other, and lining up neatly at the Stop sign by the county road. The Fury II turned on its left directional signal. So did the station wagon. So did the Cadillac. The Fury II turned left onto the county road. So did the station wagon. So did the Cadillac. The Fury II drove through the under pass beneath the Turnpike. So did the station wagon. So did the Cadillac. The Fury II turned on its left directional signal. So did the station wagon. So did the Cadillac.

  “What the hell?” Corella was clutching the seat back very near Ralph’s ear. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, shit,” Ralph said. “He’s going back up on the Turnpike.”

  He did. They all did, the three vehicles in a row, back up onto the Turnpike, this time westbound. (Well, thought Mel, at least now we’re headed toward New York.) Once again they lined themselves out in a neatly spaced row and proceeded at fifty-five miles an hour.

  “What the hell is this?” Corella demanded. “Just what the hell is that son of a bitch doing?”

  “He’s sticking with the cop,” Ralph said. “We can’t touch him till he gets away from the cop.”

  “Goddam son of a bitch bastard.”

  Earl, sitting back in his seat, was pouting, though the other two didn’t know it. His good eye was hurting more and more. He did believe he was getting another shiner. Two black eyes. It wasn’t fair.

  The Fury II and the station wagon and the Cadillac traveled forty-one miles in forty-seven minutes.

  “He’s leaving again,” Corella said.

  “So’s the cop,” Ralph said.

  The Fury II and the station wagon and the Cadillac left the Turnpike, took the county road through the underpass, and got back on the Turnpike eastbound.

  “I can’t stand this!” Corella yelled. “What kind of chase is this! We’re on a goddam merry-go-round!”

  The state trooper, whose name was Luke Snell, had seen a Clint Eastwood movie on television the night before, and he was spending this tour of duty fantasizing activities for himself based on the plot line and incidents of the movie. Trooper Snell liked to make up stories while driving his Fury II, and often thought he could write stories just as good as that crap they have on TV. In fact, he had put a couple of his story ideas down on paper and sent them off with a reading fee to a big-shot literary agent in New York named Zachary George, and George had written a personal letter saying his material showed promise and giving him some hints on how to whip it into shape better. All of this fantasizing and story-creation took most of his attention, so he remained unaware of some of the things in the real world around him, such as the same set of headlights remaining at all times in his rear-view mirror.

  For the next hour and a half, the Fury II and the station wagon and the Cadillac moseyed back and forth on the Connecticut Turnpike at fifty-five miles an hour. Mel and Ralph were both worried about their gas. Earl was worried about his eye. Trooper Snell was elaborating his fantasies. Corella was having apoplexy.

  At a little before ten, the three cars left the Turnpike again, but this time when the Fury II reached the Stop sign at the county road its right directional went on. So did the station wagon’s.

  “Hey,” said Ralph. “Something happening.”

  “I can’t stand this,” Corella said. His chin was on the seat back next to Ralph’s head, and his breathing was in Ralph’s ear, which Ralph didn’t care for even a little bit. “I’m going crazy,” Corella said.

  The Fury II turned right on the county road and drove away from the Turnpike at forty miles an hour. Mel followed in the station wagon, wondering what was going to happen next. Ralph followed, in the Cadillac, wishing Corella would get his damn head out of his ear.

  The Fury II traveled four miles on the county road and then signaled for a right again. The Fury II turned in at the trooper barracks.

  “Hey hey!” yelled Ralph. “The cop’s going off duty!”

  “That son of a bitch’ll follow him into his garage,” Corella said.

  But Mel knew he couldn’t do that. Getting very worried now, he accelerated hard the instant the Fury II turned off the road, but those Cadillac lights stayed huge and threatening in his rear-view mirror.

  Have to keep ahead of them. Straddling the center line so the Cadillac couldn’t pass, Mel rocketed down the road as fast as the station wagon, his steering, and the laws of gravity would permit.

  Corella, who had sagged into something very like despair over the last two hours, was up and yelling again, pounding the seat top behind Ralph’s head, shouting, “We got him! We got him now! Pass the son of a bitch, Ralph! Pass him, shove him over, kill him, run him off the goddam road!”

  Mel, straddling the center line, came roaring around a tight curve and saw two headlights coming right at him. He thought he was dead. He screamed, and threw his hands up in front of his face, and the headlights passed him, one on either side of the car, and the station wagon raced out of control off the road onto the left and into the woods and ricocheted off several trees.

  Ralph was too absorbed in following the station wagon. Also, he too was startled when a pair of motorcycles suddenly flashed by him, one on each side. The result was, he went on following the station wagon longer than he should, off the road and into the woods. Ralph, however, managed to stop the Cadillac with his brakes rather than with the trees.

  By one of those coincidences that no novelist would every try to get away with, the two motorcycles were being driven by Jenny Kendall and Eddie Ross, the two NYU students who had been members of the Open Sports Committee. Both Jenny and Eddie lost some control of their machines when they found themselves in a near-collision with two cars in the middle of the road, but they managed to stop without injury, and Eddie yelled at the tail-lights in the woods, “Goddam crazies!”
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  “Maybe they’re hurt!” Jenny cried.

  So Eddie and Jenny left their motorcycles by the side of the road, with the Other Oscars strapped to the handlebars, and went back to see if anybody needed help.

  As a matter of fact, everybody needed help. Earl had hit his nose against the seat this time, and it was bleeding, and he was in an absolute rage. Mel, who had leaped from the station wagon with the statue in his hand, and who had run directly into a brier patch, was flailing around like a fly in a bottle. Ralph and Corella, both having leaped from the Cadillac in pursuit of Mel, were getting persistently confused in the darkness and kept capturing each other instead. “Cut it out!” Corella yelled, the third time Ralph grabbed him around the waist.

  “I can’t see anything!” Ralph complained, and proved it a minute later when he grabbed Jenny around the waist Jenny screamed, and Eddie came over and punched Ralph in the nose. Corella came over, attracted by the ruckus, and Eddie punched him in the nose. Earl came over, black eyes and bloody nose and all, and punched Eddie in the nose, so Jenny kicked Earl very hard on the kneecap and Earl sat down on the ground and said, “That’s it, I quit. I’ve had it.”

  Mel, meanwhile, emerging from the brier patch, had run away from the cars and the people and all the activity, and then he came to a pair of motorcycles parked by the side of the road, and to his utter astonishment they both had strapped to their handlebars little Dancing Aztec Priests exactly like the one he was holding in his hand.

  “Well, for Pete’s sake,” Mel said. Then, looking over his shoulder, he saw that the chase had gotten itself organized again, and everybody except Earl was running in this direction.

  Were these two Dancing Aztec Priests part of the sixteen Dancing Aztec Priests? How could they be, out here in the wilds of Connecticut, but on the other hand how could they not be? Either coincidence was too far-fetched for belief, but the likeliest of the options was that these were part of the sixteen.

  Take all three of them? With everybody running in this direction, there wasn’t time to untie them both from the handlebars. But then Mel remembered Jerry pointing out that the golden statue wouldn’t break, whereas plaster statues would break, so he briskly whacked one of the motorcycle statues with the Beemiss statue, and they both broke. Then he whacked the other motorcycle statue with the remains of the Beemiss statue, and that broke too. Then he got on one of the motorcycles, started the engine, accelerated, fell backward off the machine as it leaped forward, and landed on the ground as the riderless motorcycle spurted out onto the road and ran head-on into a gray Fury I, the personal car of Trooper Luke Snell, who was on his way home from work.

  AFTER A WHILE …

  There was a time in New York City history when “going up to Harlem” was a fashionable thing to do—dancing to Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, drinking doubtful gin in the uptown speaks—but that time is long since past. Most white New Yorkers these days have never been to Harlem, and hardly any of them feel the lack.

  Including Jerry. Never before had he visited that Dark Continent above 110th Street, and he headed up Broadway now with a certain tension in his shoulders. But there wasn’t much choice; he’d done three of the four statues on his list, leaving only the one in the possession of Harwood’s wife, whom the husband had called “Bobbi.” According to Harwood, who ought to know, Bobbi had gone off with her boyfriend, the same Oscar Russell Green who was the leader of the Open Sports Committee. He was on somebody else’s list, probably Floyd’s, but Floyd or whoever would only be looking for one statue in Green’s apartment, so it was necessary for Jerry to go up there himself, no matter how much he hated the idea. According to everything he’d ever read on the subject of Harlem, he was about to enter a combat zone.

  If you were to come to Harlem without knowing anything of its true history, you might think you were on the site of a once-powerful city that had been abandoned hundreds of years ago by its founders, maybe because of plague, or because the civilization of which it was a part had come to an end, or because creatures from outer space had landed and collected all the inhabitants and carried them away to Alpha Centauri to become goulash. Then, you might think, the empty city was left to rot and weather for several centuries of rain and snow and summer heat, and then some other people arrived—probably by dugout canoe from New Jersey—and moved into the empty hulks, and formed their own prímitive society in these relics of the past. Such things have happened in South America, and on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, so why not at the mouth of the Hudson? No reason why not. And in fact, when you come to think about it, that history is pretty close to the truth, isn’t it?

  When Jerry parked the station wagon on 127th Street, half a block from Oscar Russell Green’s address, he gave his hubcaps a lingering fond look before walking away, since he never expected to see them again. Then he moved on down the street to a squarish brick structure that was in rather better shape than most of its near neighbors, and he paused on the sidewalk to remark on the fact that at this very moment there were absolutely no bloodcurdling screams to be heard anywhere in the area. Nor were sirens wailing in the distance, nor were shots being fired. Nor was anybody running down the middle of the street waving a butcher knife. To a reader of the Daily News this was, at the least, bewildering. Shouldn’t the niggers be throwing each other off rooftops? “It’s quiet,” Jerry muttered to himself. “Too quiet.”

  This building turned out to be easy to enter via the credit card method, and the vestibule doorbells revealed that Green’s apartment was on the top floor. Jerry went up and listened at the door, to no effect, then looked around for a service door. Finding none, he went up on the roof instead, down the fire escape to what should be the right window, and found it smashed. Both halves had all the glass missing. If Floyd or whoever had already been here, he’d made an awful mess of things.

  Inside there was a bedroom, with lights on but nobody in sight. Jerry slid open the window, trying to be as silent as possible, but when he stepped over the sill his foot crunched on broken glass. Tiptoeing, trying to think himself lighter, he made his way across the crackling floor and had almost reached the far doorway when a reeling drunken black man staggered in, shouting angrily and waving a Dancing Aztec Priest over his head. “Here!” he yelled, as Jerry jumped backward, scared out of his wits. “Here’s what you want, goddam it! This is the third time tonight, what’s the matter with you goddam people? Leave me alone to get drunk, for Christ’s sake, goddam it!” And he slapped the statue into Jerry’s bewildered hand.

  Recovering, Jerry looked down at the thing, and saw at once that it had been broken in several places and glued back together, rather sloppily. It was also very sticky. “Well, no,” he said, and managed on the second try to put the statue down on a handy dresser. “I’m looking for Mrs. Harwood, that’s who I’m looking for.”

  “Mrs. Harwood? Bobbi?” The black man staggered back against the doorpost, blinking around the room as though she just might be here after all. “There ain’t no Bobbi here,” he decided. “Don’t I wish there was. You better believe it, don’t I wish there was.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Home.” He stuck his thumb in his mouth and did a disgusting parody of pipe-smoking. “With old Chucky-Wucky.”

  “No, she isn’t. She left.”

  “Yeah? Good girl. Think shell come here?”

  Jerry looked the black man up and down, considering him. “No,” he said, “I don’t think she will.”

  “Shit.”

  “Well, you can’t win them all. Any idea where else she might go?”

  “Orchestra,” the black man said.

  Jerry squinted at him. “What?”

  The black man reached his arms out in front of himself and made some sort of weird two-handed gesture. “Harp,” he said. “She plays the harp. Classical music. Symphony orchestra.”

  “Do that again,” Jerry said.

  Now it was the black man’s turn to squint. “What say?”

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nbsp; “That thing you did with your hands. Was that supposed to be playing a harp?”

  “Sure.” The black man did it again, the same weird gesture.

  Jerry shook his head. “Doesn’t look like playing a harp at all,” he said. “Looks like pulling in a pot at poker.”

  “What, are you crazy? This is pulling in a pot.” And he did a different weird gesture.

  “Now, that one,” Jerry said, “that’s something like playing a harp.”

  “You don’t know shit,” the black man told him. “What do you want Bobbi for, anyway?”

  “I may not know shit,” Jerry said, “but I know the answer to that question, and you don’t, and you can go screw yourself.”

  The black man looked offended. “That isn’t fair,” he said.

  “Then the hell with it,” Jerry said. “I’m not going to stay here and be insulted. Where’s the front door?”

  “I thought you were one a them fire escape types.”

  “Only coming in.” Jerry started past him, on his way to find the front door, then stopped and said, “Third time? Did you say I was the third one looking for that statue?”

  “There I was wrong,” the black man said. “I’ll admit it, I was wrong about that. What you are, you’re the first one looking for Bobbi Harwood.”

  “Tell me about these people looking for the statue.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  The black man considered that, then abruptly nodded and said, “You’re right. Okay, at first there was the goddam ballplayers.”

  “Ballplayers?”

  “Frank and Floyd. Kept throwin the goddam statue back and forth till they goddam busted it.”

  “Frank and Floyd, huh?”

  “That’s what they said. Then there was some tall skinny guy from McDonald’s.”

  “From McDonald’s?”

  “Had the napkin on his face. Looked like a beaver.”

  Was that the mob guys, the ones that wanted the box marked E in the first place? Somehow, the description didn’t sound right. Jerry said, “Anybody else with that one?”