“See, I got a tattoo,” declared Wayland, and he sat upright in the rear seat and rolled up a sleeve to show Bob his wrist through the mesh screen.
Deputy Mathers’ eyes were on the road and he could not have seen much in the darkened interior of the car had he turned to look.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A butterfly, boss. See the wings?”
Bob Mathers stopped the car and turned on the overhead light so he could see the yellow wings depicted on the outside of Wayland’s wrist.
“This means we’re blood brothers,” said Wayland. “Friends forever. He’s a Spanish dude. Not Mexican. Most people calling themselves Spanish are really from Mexico, you know. Why don’t they say ‘Mexican,’ boss? Hell, I would rather say I was from Mexico than Oklahoma.”
“What did this guy... what did you say his name was?” asked Bob.
“Can’t tell you,” laughed Wayland. “I’m sworn to secrecy. I’m the only one knows his true identity.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Bob. “The man was in prison, or rather, a facility. The authorities, they would have records of him.”
The patrol car turned onto Lake Powell Boulevard and toward the jailhouse where the Page branch of the Coconino County sheriff’s department was located.
“When I said ‘identity,’” said Wayland, “I meant I was the one what knew his secrets. A man’s secrets are his real identity. He’s going to get me a job, a good job, one of these days.”
“Punks don’t give anybody good jobs,” said Bob as he parked the car in front of the single-story adobe building. “They only get you into deeper trouble.”
He took Wayland from the back of the car and helped him climb the steps to the doorway. Once Bob had the young man safely inside one of the small holding cells the sheriff’s department reserved for the town’s few habitual drunks, Wayland laid himself on the cot and began singing “Feelings,” a tune he knew Sheriff Anderson hated.
“Feelings, wo-o-o, feelings.
Feeling like I’ll never have you
Again in my life.”
“You sound exactly like Barry Manilow,” Bob told him.
He was not flattering Wayland; the young man had an uncanny talent for imitating the voices of others, and he truly did sound much like the famous crooner. From other portions of the building, from the night guards playing poker in the back and from the two other prisoners in their cells, there arose a loud, pained groan in response to Wayland’s performance.
“Shut that Injun up, Christ’s sake!” yelled the guards. “Why do you keep bringing that son-of-a-bitch in, Mathers? He sings all damned night and gets sick on his bed!”
“For my next number,” announced Wayland in a loud voice, “I will do Kenny Rogers’ ‘The Gambler.’”
“You gotta know when to hold ‘em—”
Bob put a finger to his mouth to signal him to be quiet. “Couldn’t you go to sleep, buddy? Rest up and I’ll see you get out in the morning.”
IV
02/18/06 12:54 Eastern Standard Time
Earnest Gusman opened his mailbox on the ground floor of his decaying tenement building and found the letter he had been hoping for, yet only half expecting. He hid it in the inside pocket of his shiny corduroy coat and quickly glanced around, making certain no one was watching him. Earnest backed up the first steps of the stairwell, keeping one eye on the busy street traffic he could see through the lobby door that was always open.
One of Earnest’s oldest fantasies, the one that kept him awake on hot, muggy nights, was the notion he was being pursued by killers, perhaps by some of the boys who sometimes machine-gunned people from the backs of motorcycles for their paymasters in the drug cartels.
Earnest passed up the five flights of stairs as silently as a ghost, tip-toeing past Senora Mendoza’s apartment on his floor, as he knew she watched him from the peephole in her door if she heard him. Earnest hated her. He hated her with an irrational hatred he had for everything that might harm him, and that was everything and everyone he met during his waking hours, and every phantom he encountered while he slept. He could see, in his mind’s eye, Senora Mendoza spying on him, her tiny white poodle tucked under one flabby arm while with the other hand she made notes that Earnest imagined her handing to the police or--even worse--to members of the underworld.
Earnest counted the steps from the fifth floor landing to his door, as he did every time: sixteen, seventeen...and he wiped away a few drops of sweat from his face as he reached for his key.
“No need to make any phone calls, you old bag,” he mumbled. “See how steady I am. Nothing for me to hide. My hand is barely shaking as I unlock my door.”
Earnest Gusman told himself not to look around like someone with something to fear, even as he glanced at the shadows farther down the hall way, where someone dangerous might be hiding. He undid the thread he strung across the bottom of his doorway each time he went out; it was unbroken, so he knew no one had been there while he was gone.
He bolted the door behind him and propped the diagonal steel bar against the middle of the door to make a secondary barrier against any unwanted entry. The electric lights were not working that day. Earnest had to pull a window shade up half-way to illuminate the room a little. When he had rented the flat the landlord had said he would be able to view the sea, and if Earnest had lived on the other side of the building that might have been true on clear days. From the side he had he could see only Cartagena’s wretched slums huddled against the hills that marked the city’s eastern limits.
Earnest put the envelope on the small writing table near the outside light and cut it open with his treasured mother-of-pearl knife.
Inside the envelope Earnest found a handwritten note that read in Spanish:
“I have found your Russian intelligence officer, namely Vladimir Petrovski, formally of the KGB, Special Operations. I will contact you again, when the time has come for you to recruit the forty select men. Here is some money to keep body and soul together while you wait. I scarce need to tell you that you must destroy this letter immediately.”
There was no signature at the bottom of the note.
In a smaller enclosed envelope were two one thousand American dollar bills, enough for Earnest to live modestly for three months in Cartagena. Because Earnest knew Mondragon would send him more in only two weeks, the money would suffice to let Earnest live like a king in his impoverished neighborhood.
V
02/23/06 20:02 PST
John Taylor opened his front door just after the bell rang a second time. Outside he found Erin Mondragon, dressed in a canary yellow suit that looked almost white under the porch light. Standing at the top of Taylor’s long driveway, and on the front step by the door, was a young man who bore an eerie resemblance to Al Harris, Erin’s old college roommate. At that point of the evening Taylor had drunk only two cocktails in his household bar, and he was in a very lucid, talkative state of mind.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” he said to Mondragon.
“We were around and thought we would take the chance you’d be home,” said the dapper Erin. “This is Eddie Harris, Al’s boy,” he introduced the tall young man wearing heavy black spectacles. “I told you; he’s an engineer in Wisconsin.”
“I loved your father,” said Taylor, putting his drink on the stand inside the door so he could shake Eddie’s hand. “Come in. Come in. What’s that you’ve got? A video?” Taylor asked of the black rectangular object Eddie was carrying.
“An old movie,” said the engineer, who was wearing the same sort of big-stitched blue work shirts Taylor remembered the elder Harris had favored.
“You used to like old war movies,” said Mondragon. “I thought you might like watching this one while we visited. It’s an old British movie, a good old ‘clout the Kraut in the snout’ film.”
“As opposed to a ‘slap the Jap in the yap’ movie,” said Taylor. “Take off your coats, get comfortable. They say the only thin
g worse than winter in San Francisco is summer.” The last sentence he spoke did not make a great deal of sense, but young Harris and Mondragon did not object.
The two guests looked about Taylor’s Eisenhower-era ranch style home, filled as it was with family pictures and old furniture rather than the artwork and decorator-inspired touches one might expect in a rich man’s home. Taylor set out coasters for his guests on the living room coffee table and brought them each an icy-cold gin and tonic, an inappropriate drink for that time of year. They did not object to that either.
The engineer popped the tape into Taylor’s VCR, and to Taylor’s delight the film was a 1954 black and white tale of stalwart men serving in World War II, the sort of film his father loved to watch when Taylor was a boy. The Dam Busters it was called, and it involved some British pilots bombing German hydro-electric dams in the Ruhr Valley. Taylor gathered from the technical briefings the actor/pilots held that they were using some sort of special bomb that skipped across the surface of the water and exploded against the dams.
“Who’s that actor?” he asked Mondragon of someone he thought he recognized. “His face is familiar.”
“Sir Michael Redgrave,” said Erin. “In this country, we know more about his daughters.”
“The one who was a rebel of some sort,” thought Jack Taylor aloud.
“Everyone’s daughter was a rebel of some sort in the Sixties,” said Mondragon.
When the movie showed the British bombs speeding across the German reservoirs and into the dams, Taylor asked if they had not used a special high explosive to destroy such massive structures.
“Not really,” said Eddie Harris. “They only needed to make a crack in the dams. The pressure from millions of tons of water did the rest. Sometimes the process took minutes, hours even, and then the dam broke open. A shaped charge would do the job even quicker.”
“A shaped charge?” asked Taylor.
The engineer explained that a shaped charge was a type of explosive developed on a much smaller scale for anti-tank shells. In such a device there were two explosions; the first blast flattened over a small portion of the target’s surface and the second explosion-that of the shaped charge-was propelled into a very small pin-point on the weakened portion of the target surface; a pin prick within a fist was how Harris described it.
“The trick is to hit the dam at about two-thirds of the way up from the base,” said Eddie. “Right there is the pressure point. If the dam fails there, it will eventually fail elsewhere.”
“Then this movie is based on fact?” said Taylor.
“Oh yes,” Mondragon assured him. “The RAF destroyed the Ruhr dams left and right. Turns out they were the most vulnerable targets the Nazis had.”
“I never would have guessed,” said Taylor. “Dams are so big...”
They watched the movie to its victorious conclusion, and Mondragon asked Taylor if he ever considered acting again.
“College was the end of that,” admitted Taylor. “I never had time for anything outside the company.”
“I used to think like that,” said Mondragon, rising from the sofa and pacing Taylor’s carpeted floor. “What do think about Chekhov?”
“I think he’s Russian,” said Taylor.
“You need to try him out,” said Mondragon and gave John a card bearing the telephone number and address of an acting troupe. “There’s a little theater group, a bunch of amateurs, putting on The Cherry Orchard in North Beach. In the original language, of course. I’m going to be the station master. The part of Fiers the butler would be perfect for you. Not too big, not too small, a pathetic old man. As I say, the play will be in the original Russian.”
“I don’t speak a word of Russian,” said Taylor, taken aback that Mondragon had made this suggestion.
“That’s where this girl comes in,” said Mondragon, and gave him another card. “A native born speaker. She can teach you a little grammar, some vocabulary, how to say your lines phonetically. Almost none of the other actors know Russian either. I remember how you picked up Spanish at Stanford.”
“I figured I needed it for the import business,” said Taylor.
“The girl, your tutor,” said Mondragon, “she is very pretty. In a pouty Slavic way. If you like older women, there are plenty of artistic types in the troupe and in the audiences at these things. Divorcees and aging trust fund babies. Why not have a bit of fun with a couple of them, eh?” He patted Taylor on the head in a familiar manner John thought was inappropriate behavior for a man he had not seen for many years. “We old boys need that sort of small diversion now that we’re out among the singles again. What else do we have to do?”
John did not care to hear his lack of a real job treated so lightly, but he promised to call the dialect coach if it would please Erin.
“Very good,” said Mondragon. “Alexandra is very pretty. I said that. Very, very pretty, in fact. Now that I think of her, I may need some teaching myself.”
“Ask about the fishing trip,” the engineer reminded Mondragon.
“What fishing trip?” Taylor asked.
“Oh, I mentioned to Eddie you might be going on a trip to Colorado with us this spring,” said Mondragon. “You and I talked about this already.”
“First acting, then Russian, now fishing in Colorado,” said Taylor. “What will you have me doing next?”
His mind was beginning to float on gin at this point of the evening. While he kept up his end of the conversation, it was not until he awoke the next morning that John Taylor asked himself how Mondragon had found his house in the first place.
VI
03/01/06 07:28 Arizona Standard Time
“Wake up, buddy,” Bob Mathers told Wayland Zah. “Time you got ready for work.”
Wayland rolled over in the bed and looked through partially closed eyes at the deputy sheriff. “What time is it?” He propped himself up and saw the alarm clock on the bed stand. “Not quite seven thirty! You mean it comes twice a day?”
“I was up at five,” said Bob, already clean shaven, showered, and in a pressed brown uniform.
“I’m feeling really Injun this morning,” said Wayland, pulling away the bedding and sitting upright.
“Uncle Wayland, you snore,” said Bob’s three-year old daughter Katie, who had slept down the hall from him and was peeking her tow head through the doorway of the guest room.
“I got sleep abnormia, baby doll,” said Wayland. “The government is going to give me a disability.”
“The word is apnea,” said Bob. “Come on. Get dressed. Your new job starts at eight fifteen pronto.”
“Uncle Wayland said we could call in coyotes today,” pled Katie, still at the bedroom door.
“Yeah, I was going to show how we do it in Tuba City,” began Wayland. “It’d be very multi-cultural. Give the child exposure to other ways of life. You and Becky would be almost progressive parents for once.”
“Your job at the airport begins today,” said Bob, handing Wayland the clothes the younger man had left hanging on a doorknob the night before. “Katie and you can call coyotes some other day.”
“You know,” said Wayland, reluctant to get all the way up, “I’ve had this revelation: I was thinking, what’s more important than children? Seeing how you work about a billion hours a day, and Rebecca works part-time, maybe I could hang around here and be a sort of nanny, or whatever you call a male nanny.”
“A ninnie,” suggested Bob.
“Anyway, I think Katie needs to be around an adult more,” said Wayland. “She spends all that time in day-care with other kids. I’d be glad to take up the slack for you and Rebecca. You know you can trust me. She and me get along great. You get one of those real nannies, like from England, and the next thing you know your life’s a made for TV movie. You can’t trust anybody who looks like Julie Andrews.”
“You’re getting dressed, buddy,” Bob Mathers told him. “Harold Peters is expecting you. All you have to do is fuel private planes. How hard can
that be?”
“I’m a funny one to ask,” said Wayland. “I’ve never done it before. Have you?”
He fumbled through his pants pocket, located some nail clippers and began trimming his toe nails, as if he had an entire morning of leisure ahead of him.
“Come on,” said Bob and knelt to put Wayland’s legs into the pants. “The deal was: you could stay with us a few days until you got back on your feet. Excuse us, honey,” he said, and shut the door so his daughter could not peek while Wayland dressed.
The young half-Navaho had a quick breakfast in the kitchen with little Katie, and Bob’s wife Becky had to scold the two of them when Wayland, the one person in the world Katie loved as much as her parents, made funny faces and the child got to giggling and swallowed a mouthful of milk down her breathing tube.
Becky liked Wayland, but she also liked her house in an orderly condition. Wayland Zah, although he was her husband’s pet project, and though she knew she should regard him as her brother in Christ as the elders had taught her to do-was clearly an agent of chaos and could be tolerated only to a point.
“Honestly,” she declared, and waved her spatula at Wayland and her daughter, “I’m not fixing you pancakes ever again if you two keep this up! I mean it!” she assured them when Wayland stuck out his tongue and Katie giggled again.
At 11:05 that Monday morning, Bob Mathers was on duty at the sheriff’s station when he received a telephone call from Harold Peters, the administrator at the municipal airport northeast of Page.
“That damned friend of yours got into a fight with Cliff Collingworth this morning,” Harold told Bob. “I had to let him go.”
“You couldn’t give him even one whole day?” asked Bob.
“Truth is, I fired him about forty-five minutes ago,” said Harold. “I didn’t get around to calling you till now.”
“Where is he?” He already had a call from a tourist broken down south of town and did not need to go chasing about Page after Wayland.
Deadly Waters Page 3