Dancing Aztecs

by Donald E. Westlake

  Mel and Wally didn’t so much blend into this scene as disappear in it. Since both were obviously unfamous, unsexy, unuseful, and uninteresting, nobody saw them. They walked around the patio side of the house, entered through the open french doors, and nobody saw them.

  Inside, a five-man rock group was getting along famously without its fifth man, the Fender bassist moaning in ecstasy upstairs. They were getting along so famously, in fact, that it was impossible for people to hear one another talk, so Mel merely rapped Wally on the side of the head with a knuckle and pointed toward a staircase visible beyond the next doorway. Wally nodded and went away, rubbing the side of his head.

  The statue wasn’t downstairs. Mel moved through the throng, taking a puff on a stick here and a stick there, munching a fried chicken leg out of a big silver tureen—the trendy movie directors had never exactly made it clear how the guests were to be fed—and looking everywhere for the statue, but it just wasn’t to be seen. After twenty minutes, Mel found himself at the other end of the house, and he stepped outside to clear his head for a minute, get some relief from the rock music, and gaze thoughtfully at the people playing an imaginary game of tennis on the tennis court. (Some imagination; if they were going to be cutesy, the imaginary game to play on a tennis court should obviously be golf.)

  “Here’s the statue.”

  The voice, which was Wally’s, had come from over Mel’s head. Looking up, he saw at first only the clear blue sky of late afternoon, but when he turned a bit he saw Wally himself, standing at an open second-story window with his canvas overnight bag in his hand. “You wouldn’t believe what they’re doing up here,” he said.

  “You got the statue?”

  “Here,” Wally said, and tossed the bag out the window.

  It never occurred to Mel to catch it until the thing had already thudded onto the slate walk at his feet. Then he looked down at it, looked up at Wally, and said, “What’d you do that for?”

  “I thought you wanted it.”

  Mel went down on one knee and opened the bag’s zipper.

  Wally called, “Is it the right one?”

  Mel withdrew from the bag a broken-off dancing leg. “No,” he said, dropped the leg, and ran like hell.

  IN TEXAS …

  Dallas-Fort Worth; now there’s an airport. The Descalzans gaping out the tiny windows at all those expanses of gray concrete couldn’t believe their eyes. It was as though all the pillboxes from World War II had been gathered together in the same place. No Descalzan eye had ever been able to gaze over such incredible distance without seeing one tree, one dog, one piece of shit. No Descalzan had ever seen such flatness, such smooth regularity. The movie theater in Quetchyl, which had so often showed them the tall buildings of New York and the tall hills of Los Angeles, had never prepared them for such a thing. It was like some early saint’s vision of the City of the Dead, full of da Vincian perspective.

  The FBI men in bathing suits, pretending to be fuel company employees as they ineptly refueled the plane, seemed so proper to this setting, so clean and gray and nonhuman, that the Descalzans were reduced to nervous laughter at the sight of them. Pointing and giggling, they succeeded only in making the FBI men even more annoyed.

  Reporters and photographers and TV news teams had been kept inside one of the squat broad buildings, where they could gaze out at the scene through the huge tinted-glass windows. The Descalzan plane, with its unknown hijacker on his incomprehensible pilgrimage—why would a Quetchylian want so earnestly to go to New York?—was becoming a news sensation. The plane’s first three stops, in Central America and Mexico, had fueled both the aircraft and the interest of newsmen everywhere. It was too late now for the network news programs (seven to seven-thirty P.M. Eastern Daylight Time), but blurred footage of the plane being fed gas, lit by the lowering sun, was being transmitted live anyway to television stations all across the country.

  In the control tower, FBI men were recording the conversation between the controller and the Descalzan pilot. A part of the conversation went as follows:

  “Tower?”

  “Yes?”

  “We need some clothing here.”

  “Clothing? Okay. For the hijacker?”

  “Well no. For me and the co-pilot and Miss Naz.”

  “Say again?”

  “Miss Naz. Our stewardess.”

  “Clothing for your stewardess?”

  “And the co-pilot and me.”

  “Why?”

  “Well— The fact is, it turns out that landing makes this fellow throw up.” The pilot sounded very sad.

  IN AMERICA …

  Traveling by road from New York to Los Angeles, one enters America somewhere in Pennsylvania and leaves it in northern Utah. The two coasts, which are very similar to one another, are not America, nor is Utah, nor is Nevada. In America, for instance, the only place you can be sure of a sensible drink and a decent meal and an inoffensive room for the night is the Holiday Inn, which is not at all true on either coast, nor in Nevada, where there are better places, nor in Utah, where there isn’t any place at all. Another difference is that Americans are gregarious friendly smiling people wearing pastels, whereas Coastals are nervous paranoid in-group people wearing either loud colors or black. Yet another difference is that the fifty-five mile speed limit for the most part doesn’t exist in America, but Coast people take it very seriously. And yet a further difference is that Americans chill their red wine.

  Bobbi Harwood entered America, at the wheel of Hugh Van Dinast’s Jaguar XJ12, at eleven minutes before ten P.M., and Jerry Manelli, driving his sister Angela’s Ford station wagon, entered America seven seconds later. Neither of them noticed.

  Bobbi was mostly noticing the Jag. What a terrific car! Years of her life wasted on a man who refused to learn how to drive or own a car, while all the time cars like this were being manufactured and sold and operated and parked and traded-in and stolen and fixed and loaned and borrowed all over the world. If she’d needed any more confirmation that she’d made the right move in leaving Chuck, this silver-gray beauty was it.

  Jerry too was mostly noticing the Jag, but with more complicated emotions. He’d finally picked up the station wagon from Angela several hours ago, down on Seventh Avenue, while the two women were having lunch. He’d also picked up a sandwich and a cup of coffee to munch on in the car while waiting, and it’s just as well he did, since those two women were in the Buffalo Roadhouse forever. Jerry, parked across the street in front of the Tamawa Social Club, which happens to be the very seat and substance of Tammany Hall, became bored enough to lie on the ground and howl by the time Bobbi and Madge, full of hamburgers and Bloody Marys, came back to the Jaguar and drove it away on the complicated route—because of one-way streets—required to bring it once again to a stop in front of Madge’s apartment. With Bobbi waiting at the wheel, and Jerry waiting at the other wheel half a block behind her, Madge went into the building and came out a few minutes later with the two suitcases.

  Jerry gazed at those two suitcases with covetous eyes. Somewhere within one of those bags was the Dancing Aztec Priest, wrapped in a sweater or skirt, surrounded by hair curlers and scarves. Most of the sixteen statues had already been checked out, and the odds were steadily increasing that this was the one, the big one, the million-dollar baby. Jerry could almost see it in there, golden and gleaming, dancing away, green eyes glinting with the knowledge of its secret.

  The bags were put in the trunk, and the women had an extended farewell scene on the sidewalk. Embracing, kissing, talking, nodding, more embracing, crying, more talking, more kissing, more crying, more embracing—What were they, a pair of dikes?

  All right, already; it was over. Into the Jag went Bobbi, and at last they got moving. Over to Sixth Avenue, up to 31st Street, and a left turn directly into the Lincoln Tunnel traffic jam, backed up halfway across Manhattan Island. What with all the screwing around, Bobbi hadn’t managed to get under way until quarter after five, and she and Jerry we
re stuck in the middle of the rush hour.

  They crept through the tunnel, two cars between them, and got to New Jersey fifteen minutes later. A not too painful run across routes 3 and 46, and then at last they were on Interstate 80, and Bobbi immediately put the Jag’s ears back and let ’er rip.

  Directly into the Vascar trap. “Eighty-three point six in a fifty-five mile zone, miss. License and registration, please.”

  Jerry, who’d had both feet pressing the accelerator to the floor while the Jag was rapidly dwindling in the distance, had fortunately noticed the anonymous little blue van parked on the side of the road and brought himself back down to sixty-two before the Smokies got a reading. At a demure fifty-five he passed the parked Jag, traveled another four miles, and stopped on the shoulder for ten minutes until she came by again, doing sixty-three and a half.

  Neatly and discreetly across New Jersey, over the Delaware River into Pennsylvania at the Water Gap, and by then it was nearly seven and Jerry was getting hungry. Bobbi, however, was still grooving on the car, and once away from Stroudsburg she let it out once more. Jerry, pounding the steering wheel annd kicking the accelerator, strained after her, but over a rise she went and when he topped the rise in his turn she was gone.

  Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch. He didn’t know her ultimate destination, he didn’t know where or when she would stop to eat or sleep, and he couldn’t count on the Highway Patrol to handicap her for him every damn time.

  Maybe she’d slow down after a while. The Ford would run at over ninety, it’s just that it couldn’t get up there as soon as the Jag. Once she tired of testing the Jag’s limits, maybe he could catch up with her.

  Unless she left the highway, stopping for a meal or for the night.

  Twenty miles, thirty miles, forty miles. No sign of her. Unconsciously he was slowing down a little, thinking things over. Okay, what’s the worst that could happen? She could leave the road, and he wouldn’t know where. But she’d get back on the road, wouldn’t she? This thing has to be a long-haul proposition, she isn’t taking a car to some place like Erie, Pennsylvania; people don’t do that sort of thing, hire an auto transport outfit for some minor little hop. It’s to Chicago at the very least, more likely even farther, maybe out to the Coast somewhere.

  Okay, fine. He eased even farther off the accelerator, coming down to just over sixty. He could drive through the night, that’s all. It would mean a night without sleep, but at a steady sixty he could do it, and somewhere along the line he would of necessity pass the place where she had socked in for the night. Then, at six or seven in the morning, he would stop by the side of the road and wait, and sooner or later she would pass him by. It was hell of a way to do things, but it was the only solution he could come up with.

  And if she didn’t pass him tomorrow morning? Well, Madge had to know the final destination, so Jerry could call Angela around eleven in the morning and tell her to have Frank and Floyd go lean on Madge and find out where Bobbi Harwood plans to come to earth. So while the situation was completely rotten, it wasn’t quite hopeless.

  He had just about reached that conclusion when he saw the headlights nearing in the rear-view mirror. Coming fast; a state trooper? Wouldn’t that be a bitch, after he’d already slowed down. Slowing even more, he watched the headlights grow, watched them rapidly overtake him, and then they swung out and passed on his left, and it was her! The Jag’s interior light was on, and she was in there eating a sandwich, a plastic coffee cup atop the dashboard. The way she was nodding her head, she had the radio on and was listening to rock music.

  Son of a bitch; she gets to stop and eat. Jerry accelerated in her wake, and found that now she was doing a steady eighty. Fine. Keep that up, lady, and we’ll get along just great.

  A few minutes later, her interior light went off. And a few minutes after that, zip, zip, they entered America.

  IN LINE …

  The neat spare office at Winkle, Krassmeier, Stone & Sledge was neat no longer. Meals had been eaten here, cigars and pipes and cigarettes had been smoked here, arguments had raged here, ashtrays and half-full coffee containers and punches had been thrown here, ties and shoes and jackets had been flung off in exhaustion or fury here, and inoffensive plaster statues had been torn to pieces here. The place looked, in short, like a rented summer cottage on September 15.

  After the decapitation of the Fayley-Spang statues, there had been only four Dancing Aztec Priests unaccounted for, all held by women: Bobbi Harwood, Felicity Tower, Mrs. Dorothy Moorwood, and Mandy Addleford. Then Mrs. Dorothy Moorwood finally surfaced, via phone from her estate in New Jersey, sounding all bubbly and gurgly. Oh, there was such a party going on, no one could hear the phone at all! Oh, the poor Other Oscar, someone dropped it out the window and it just smashed all to bits!

  Three to go. Then Oscar dialed Felicity Tower’s number yet again and damn if this time she wasn’t home. (She’d hung around after the funeral for a while, because certainly Bad Death and his associates would be too boorish and blind to know they should treat her like a lady, but all she’d gotten was one nine-year-old boy wanting her to autograph a baseball. “AH the best, Tom Seaver,” she’d written, and had gone weeping home in a taxi.) Oscar asked his question about the statue, heard about the two sex-crazed white men who had broken it, and finally managed to hang up. “Not Felicity’s,” he told the others.

  But Mandy just refused to be home, so finally Oscar and Bud went up to the Bronx together in search of her, leaving Chuck morosely on the phone, still tracking down his missing wife, while Corella paced the floor with a cigar in his teeth and Krassmeier brooded like an evil walrus on the sofa. These three were still at the same occupations when Oscar and Bud came back two hours later, with more negative news. “Mandy’s place was empty,” Oscar said. “We broke in, and her statue was there, with a finger missing.”

  Krassmeier made another notation on the master list. He paused, frowned at the list, counted, counted again, looked around at everyone and said, “Fifteen.”

  Corella stopped pacing. “Fifteen? One to go?”

  “Bobbi,” said Oscar. “Bobbi Harwood.”

  Oscar and Bud and Corella and Krassmeier all turned to look at Chuck Harwood, who was talking on the phone. “Thanks, Madge,” he was saying. “Bye.” Then he hung up and looked at the four men looking at him and said, “That was a friend of Bobbi’s. Some guy she thought was me called for Bobbi there this morning after Bobbi left. Bobbi spent last night there, and she just left in a car for California.”

  IN THE MOOD …

  After dinner, Bobbi sat over a final cup of coffee and watched the old folks dance. “How MUCH Is That Doggie in the Window?” asked the accordion, while the guitar and drums went chop-chop-chop, and the fellow holding the clarinet smiled under his long nose at the folks having a good time. (When he smiled, his face was an upside-down T.)

  Bobbi had arrived at this Holiday Inn, not very far from Oil City, Pennsylvania, a little after eleven. She had wanted to make it as far as Ohio tonight, but the quick sandwich in her car just hadn’t quelled her hunger pangs, and in any event she’d felt herself tiring, so upon seeing this joint’s sign she’d come right in, saying to the desk clerk, “Can I still get something to eat?”

  “Usually,” he’d said, “our kitchen is closed by now, but we’re having a high school reunion tonight. If you hurry, you should still have time for dinner.”

  She’d hurried, and she’d had time for dinner, but her first view of the high school reunion had given her pause. It was a fiftieth reunion, a couple of dozen seventy-year-olds chortling and hollering around a bunch of tables connected in a big U next to the dance floor. The waitress, a stocky charmer who’d had a local beauty parlor do its level best to make her natural hair look like a cheap wig, had been smiling and cheerful and gregarious, humanized and sentimentalized by all those beaming survivors. Bobbi had ordered a Gibson on the rocks, Roquefort dressing on the salad, shrimp scampi, neither the baked nor the f
rench-fried potatoes, a half-bottle of Blue Nun liebfraumilch, a cup of coffee, and a sambucca. No sambucca? Okay, anisette. (The waitress hadn’t been sure about the anisette, but after an extended conference with the bartender back she had come with the clear liquid in a proper little glass.) And now she was sitting and watching the high-school crowd (most of whom had finished their meal with some variation on apricot brandy) table-hop and dance and laugh and wave and tell stories and generally goof around.

  Bobbi was not the only nongrad present, three other tables also being occupied. In a corner were a fiftyish couple in pastels and blued hair, who were eating steaks and pointedly not talking to one another; they did their silent quarrel so well that it testified to years of practice. At another table near them was a stout rumpled salesman eating Yankee pot roast and reading a newspaper that seemed to be called the Meadville Register & Sun-Democrat. And beyond the celebrators was a youngish man of about Bobbi’s own age, eating surf and turf and drinking Heineken’s beer and giving the reunion crowd little squints and frowns, as though he didn’t quite get it.

  Well, in fact, Bobbi didn’t quite get it either. It seemed somehow as though that group had some sort of specific reference to herself and her departure from Chuck, but what? Studying them, sipping her coffee and her anisette, she felt herself giving the group the same little squints and frowns as the young man across the way.

  Well, what was the story with these oldsters? They were locals, obviously, who had stayed local. Most of them looked reasonably prosperous. The men tended to be dressed in styles rather too young for them, and the women were dressed as though for church. Some of the men seemed to have heard of alcohol before, but every last one of the women was made giggly at the very thought of liquor in a glass.