Dance for the Dead jw-2

by Thomas Perry

  As she stumbled down the steep path to the huge collection of ramshackle dwellings, she could see small shapes of people below, their shadows long in the bright dawn sunlight. One of them pointed upward and yelled something, and then men began to stream out of the shelters and gather in the center of the village. She could see them talking and pointing, and she could feel their excitement growing until, when she was dragged to the edge of the village, their voices rose in a shout that was harsh and deafening, full of hatred and glee. It grew louder as she moved closer to it, until she could feel her stomach vibrating with it, and the men started to fire their guns into the air, a ragged powpow pow powpow, like popcorn popping.

  They prodded Jane and Mary across the dirty, mud-caked snow between the huts and pushed them into a big pen made of upright pine logs sharpened at the tops. Jane looked around her and saw to her surprise that there were dozens of other people already inside - men clinging to their wives and children, trying in vain to reach around all of them with their arms, other men who looked as though they had run the gauntlet on the way into the little pen, with limbs broken and faces streaked with blood from blows above the hairline, women with eyes swelled shut and missing teeth.

  "What's going to happen?" asked Mary.

  Jane said, "The fighting has gone on forever. So many people get killed that the main reason for it now is to get prisoners to adopt."

  "Adopt? We're grown women."

  "When people are killed they capture someone to take their place - their name, their work, their family."

  The gate across the pen opened and about fifty warriors streamed in, painted and armed as though they had just returned from battle. They were agitated and angry, some of them in a frenzy, dancing from one foot to the other like boxers and shouting in the incomprehensible languages of enemies. One by one and with reluctance, they took notice of something behind them and stepped aside to let the one Jane had been watching for pass among them to the front.

  Jane hung her head like the captives around her to give her a chance to study him without attracting his attention. She looked from his feet upward. He was big and muscular, wearing a clinging, whitish leather shirt that seemed to have been stitched together from many small pieces. Around his neck and shoulders hung a gateasha of six rows of small white wampum beads. When she forced her gaze to move upward, she nearly fainted.

  He was wearing a Face. It was a scalp mask, painted bright red, with round staring copper eyes and the clenched teeth that made it resemble both the rage of battle and the ghastly grin of a rotting corpse. It was terrifying to see a Face here. She could tell that this was an old Face, the features that a supernatural being had shown to some virtuous Seneca ages ago in a dream. The Seneca had carved to free the Face from the trunk of a living basswood tree, given it presents of tobacco, rubbed it with sunflower oil, and fed it the same mixture of corn-meal and maple sugar that the warriors ate on the trail to battle. It didn't merely represent the supernatural being; it was the supernatural being. It gleamed with power strong enough to cure disease and change the weather, but on this man that power became the force of evil and witchcraft and death.

  The Face approached and stared at her with its round, empty eyes. Jane could see now that the necklace was made not of little white shells but of human teeth. As he moved on, she realized with revulsion what the leather must be: strips of skin flayed from human beings. The Face walked around the pen, stopping in front of each captive to turn its round-eyed, unreadable gaze on him for a second or two, then moving on.

  Finally the Face came back to where Jane was standing. The Face stopped and pointed at Mary. At once a warrior appeared out of the mob and poured a bucket of black, greasy paint over Mary Perkins's head. The paint streamed down to her shoulders and ran along her arms to her fingertips.

  Mary gasped and sputtered. "Why did he do that? What is it, some kind of joke?"

  "No," said Jane. She could feel waves of nausea that started in her chest and moved down to grip her belly.

  Mary shivered with cold. "It must be an initiation, right?" Her voice was tense and scared now, and a little sob was audible in it. "Why me?" she wailed. "What do they want me to do?"

  Jane tried to speak, but what she would have to say was impossible to put into words. The black paint was the sign that a captive had been selected to be burned.

  19

  Jane awoke in the darkness with her heart pounding. She walked to the window. The snow had stopped sometime during the night, and now the sidewalks and streets were white and still, but in the east the sky had changed enough to tell her there was no point in going back to the couch. She raised her hand to touch her forehead and rubbed away the beads of sweat that had formed there. She had been denying what she knew about Barraclough, and the knowledge was fighting its way to the surface in dreams.

  She moved quietly into the kitchen and put the coffee on. Then she sat and listened to Mary waking up and remembering and making her way toward the smell of the brewing coffee. The door opened and Mary walked out into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, and stood at the sink to drink it. "I've been thinking," she said. "I've been on my own most of my life and I think I can stay out of Barraclough's way if I don't do anything stupid." It was a question.

  "It can be done." Jane sat still. It was time already. She would have to work up to it gradually, tell Mary what she knew and let her draw her own conclusion. "You just have to avoid doing anything stupid."

  "Like getting my picture in the papers," Mary offered.

  "Right," said Jane. "You might want to keep it off things like credit cards and driver's licenses too. Barraclough is the regional head of a very big detective agency, so he can probably find a way to have your picture circulated. You know, a reward for a missing person."

  "I guess I can," Mary said. "And keep from getting arrested."

  "Or fingerprinted."

  "That's what I said."

  "You've got to keep from being a victim too. If your house is burglarized or your car is stolen, they fingerprint the owner so they can identify prints that aren't supposed to be there. Some states take your prints for a driver's license. And a lot of employers require it; if you need to be bonded or licensed or need a security clearance, it's hard to avoid. Most companies hire a security service to handle the details and report the results - a service like Intercontinental."

  Mary Perkins glared at her. "You're trying to scare me."

  "Yes," said Jane. "It's better. I don't want to hear you sometime saying, 'Why me?'"

  "All right," said Mary. "What else?"

  Jane stared at the wall. "Well, they're not just passively waiting for you to turn up. They're searching. I know that because I talked to somebody who was hired to help. But the easiest way is to get you to come to them. You know - an announcement in the paper says some rich aunt of yours died and the following eighty people are named in the will. Or the help-wanted section says there's a job for a blue-eyed woman age thirty-four and a half and five feet four and seven eighths who's good at arithmetic. Or a personal ad says a wealthy widow with a large secluded mansion wants a roommate: a quiet female nonsmoker from the South who plays cribbage, or whatever else you do but not everyone does. Barraclough is perfectly capable of renting houses in the ten most likely places and having ten women sit there for a month waiting for you to show up."

  "He'd do that?"

  "Sure," said Jane. "It's quick, it's easy, and it's cheaper than the alternatives."

  "What are those?"

  "Well, you have a history. There are people you were close to. They'll go see them. Maybe watch to see if you come for a visit, or maybe bully them into telling what they know. If you ever left clothes anywhere when you started running, they'll have translated the labels into places where you might buy the next batch. The more expensive they were, the fewer places to buy them, and they know you'll need spring clothes or risk standing out. They'll also use them to construct a projection of how you're likely to look now.
so they don't miss you in a public place: exact height, weight, style, and color preference. Then there's chemical analysis."

  "What do they have to analyze?"

  "If you wore perfume or cosmetics when you wore the clothes, they'll identify them and add them to your profile. If you love Thai food or going to the zoo, they'll know that too."

  "That's crazy."

  Jane shrugged. "No crazier than having people meet us in airports all over the western half of the country. Intercontinental is an enormous detective agency, much bigger than most police departments. There isn't a city in the country that doesn't have a crime lab with a trace-analysis section. There's a machine called a gas chromatograph that vaporizes whatever substance they find and identifies it. There's no question Intercontinental has one, and probably an emission spectrometer and an electron microscope. If you're in the business of tracking people for money, that stuff pays for itself quickly."

  "You're making it sound hopeless."

  "Not hopeless. It just takes some thought."

  Mary protested. "But there are thousands of people in this country nobody can find."

  "Millions," said Jane.

  "Well, who are they? You can't tell me they all get caught."

  "It depends on who's looking for them and how hard. A lot of them are divorce fugitives: the man who doesn't want to pay alimony or the parent who loses custody and takes the child out of state. Somebody else runs up a debt or embezzles a few bucks. Unless the person is foaming at the mouth and shooting people at freeway rest stops, the only ones who are very interested are the local police back home. Then there are a few million illegal aliens. There's not much reason to look for them because nobody gets any benefit from finding them. There are also personal cases: some woman breaks up with her boyfriend and he threatens her. There's practically no place where the police will do anything to help her, so she moves away and changes her name. There are millions of people hiding under assumed identities, and the reason most of them don't get found is that nobody's looking."

  "What you're saying is that if anybody tried, they would."

  "No," said Jane. "What I said is that it depends on who's looking and how hard."

  "You think I'm going to get caught, don't you?"

  Jane hesitated. "You can take that chance, or you can choose to take other chances."

  "What does that mean?"

  "He's not going to give up. He has lots of trained people at his disposal in offices all over the country, and he can probably dream up a charge to get the police looking for you too, if he wants to. If you learn fast and never make a mistake, he might not find you." Jane looked at her closely. "Or you could make a mistake - intentionally."

  Mary's eyes widened and the color seemed to drain from her face. "You want to use me for - "

  "Bait. Yes. What he's doing isn't just evil; it's also illegal."

  "I can't. I don't have the money. You're wrong. He's wrong."

  "It doesn't matter. He thinks you do, and he wants it. That makes him predictable, and that can be turned into a weakness. Your chance of trapping him and getting him convicted might be better than your chance of hiding from him."

  "No. I won't do it." Mary looked at Jane defiantly.

  "Suit yourself."

  "Are you leaving this morning?"

  "I said I'd help you get settled."

  "But I told you I wouldn't do it. You can't use me as bait."

  "I heard you."

  For the next six days, Jane Whitefield waited. When Mary woke up she would find the quilt folded neatly and stowed beside the couch. Jane would be in the middle of the only open space in the small living room going through the slow, floating movements of Tai Chi.

  On the sixth day, Mary Perkins said, "Why do you do that?"

  "It keeps my waist thin and my ass from getting flabby."

  Mary repeated, "Why do you do that?"

  "It helps me feel good. It keeps me flexible. It helps me think clearly and concentrate."

  "Don't worry," said Mary. "I'll shut up."

  "You don't have to," said Jane. "Part of the idea is that after a while the body makes the movements flow into each other without consulting the conscious mind much."

  "What's that one?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "They all have names, right?"

  "Oh. 'Cloud Hands.'" Then her body was in a radically different position without much apparent movement. " 'Golden Cock Stands on Leg.'" Her body continued to drift into a changing pattern of positions.

  Mary watched for a long time. "Where did you learn to fight?"

  "By fighting."

  "No," said Mary. "I mean fight like that."

  "This isn't exactly about fighting. It's about not fighting. Your opponent is fighting, but you're watching. He attacks, but you've already begun to yield the space. He strikes, but you're not really there. You only passed through there on your way to somewhere else. You bring his force around in a circle, add yours to it, and let him hurt himself."

  "The mystic wisdom of the mysterious East."

  "It's practical. I'm a very strong woman, but no matter what I do, I'm going to be smaller than any man who's likely to try to hurt me. If I fight him for the space between us, I'll get hammered. He's using one arm and maybe his back foot to throw the punch. I'm bringing my whole body into one motion to add force to his punch and alter its direction just a little. For that fraction of a second I have him outnumbered."

  Mary put on her coat, walked toward the door, opened it, turned, and said. "You should have let your ass get flabby. It might have made you more human." She went out and closed the door. That night she came home late and tiptoed past Jane on the couch.

  Two hours later Jane opened her eyes and acknowledged that she had heard Mary come out of her room again. It was three a.m. and she was sitting in the big easy chair staring at Jane.

  Mary said, "You're trying to wear me down. You're staying in the corner of my room and not saying anything to convince me, just putting yourself in front of my eyes wherever I look so I'll have to think about it."

  Jane said, "You've spent time with people who take what they want."

  "I was one of them."

  "Then you can predict what Barraclough is thinking as well as I can. You don't need any arguments from me."

  Mary sat back in the big chair with her hands resting on the arms. "Why haven't you mentioned the little boy?"

  "Why should I?"

  "I've lived by convincing people to do stupid things they didn't want to do, so I know how it's done. The little boy is an overlooked resource. Here I am, unmarried and alone, and anybody who is alive can feel her biological clock ticking away. I've reached the age where women start getting too many cats. The little boy is alone and probably scared. Barraclough has already robbed him, and now he'll kill him."

  "Will he?"

  "You know he will, and that's why you're here. If the kid's dead, the cops will run around bumping into each other for a couple of months and then forget him. If he's alive, there's always the chance that Barraclough will wind up sitting in a courtroom across the aisle from an innocent ten-year-old."

  "Not much chance."

  "But as long as the kid is alive, there's also the chance that he'll live another ten or fifteen years and find out who killed his four best friends and left him broke. Barraclough will be thinking he doesn't want to wake up some night and find a young man who looks vaguely familiar holding a gun against his head." Mary waited a few seconds. "So why didn't you mention him again?"

  Jane sat up and stared at her. "People are killed every day. Why would I imagine you would pick him out of all the thousands and say, 'You're the one I've chosen. I've trained myself since I was a baby to ignore the screams of the dying because if I let even a little of the sound in I couldn't hear or think of anything else. But for you I'll risk my own life.'"

  "You're right, I wouldn't." She leaned forward. "But not saying it is the argument, isn't it? I'm supposed to
think of doing it, and if I think of it, I have to admit a second later that I'm not the kind of person who does that, and wonder why not."

  "I apologize for telling you about him."

  "But he's the reason why you're doing this, isn't he?"

  "There's not much more I can do for him. I was in a fight, and all of the people on my side except Timmy are dead. That's all."

  "I don't suppose the money has anything to do with it."

  "For me? Not this time."

  "You're above that kind of consideration."

  "Hardly," said Jane. "I have enormous expenses. But money is not a pressing problem. Once you have what you need, it's hard to get yourself to lean over a cliff to reach for more. And I can't even spend what I have. A fancier house or a lot of expensive jewelry raises my profile and maybe gets me killed."

  "Then why does this kid's money matter to you?"

  "Or your money either? It's important only because it's what Barraciough wants. He uses it to grow stronger. I don't want him to succeed. I don't want to feed him."

  "Why do you care?"

  "I'm the rabbit, he's the dog. I run, he chases. He's good at it, and he's getting better. He's using Intercontinental to recruit young guys with nothing much to do and criminal records that make it unlikely that anybody else will ever pay them to do anything. He's picking out the ones with a certified history of violence and training them to hunt."

  "We're finally getting down to a reason that means something. You're afraid he might get to be a problem, aren't you? Not just to people like me, but to you."

  "He already is. If I let him get stronger, eventually he'll kill me."

  Mary slumped back in her chair and breathed a deep, windy sigh. "At last. Thank you."

  "You haven't changed your mind, have you?"