YBARRA, CHIEF OF POLICE
All Fredericks said, when he'd turned it over to him, was: "Now we know."
Cotter glanced up and saw him strip the phone with a decisive tweak. "What're you going to do?"
"Make two reservations on the first plane that we can get to take us anywhere near there."
Chapter Eighteen
The PHANTOM tribesmen and their captives were going up the mountain now like figures in a dream. And he was one of them. Awake in that dream, yet unable to escape from it. They were going up the way that he and she had ridden so many times in the morning, up toward the spring, up toward the eventual cleft that she had once yearned so to attain.
They went single file, heads low, wending in a long serpentine procession under the night sky. The sky was dark, but the mountainside was white as borax under the starlight, and its sheen was strong enough and clear enough to reveal every changing play of muscle on their naked backs as they went laboring upward, to seam their
sculpturesque spinal indentations with fluxing shadow lines. They were so photographically realistic to his fear-taut eyes, they were so unbelievable to his logic-demanding mind. They should have thinned out, faded away in the starlight; instead little stones and pebbles rocked uneasily under their tread, clods of earth were dislodged by their substantial passage and fell back to rest again.
They moved with the terrible, grim silence all war parties afoot had once had, in the days before the wheel was invented and war became explosive. Each one stepped in the same place and along the same way the one before him had trod, with never a variation, never an overlap. A little low-clinging dust spurted out at the sides of their course, like foam tracing backward from the prow of a ship.
The whole thing was horror incarnate. He was gorging on horror. Digesting it, sweating it. But horror had a central point, a focus. Horror wasn't this long line of softly padding apparitions in whose midst he was being towed along. Horror wasn't the binding of his hands behind his back. Horror wasn't the blows he received every time he faltered or tried to get out of line. Horror wasn't any of those things.
Horror was that palanquin swaying up ahead, and what it held in it. Borne shoulder-high at the very head of the procession, so that even this far back the starlight showed him the white form, the oblivious head nestled within it. A head that did not look back to see where he was. A head that held no thought of him, that did not know him any more. A form that sat content, in passive acceptance of its journeying and of its destination.
That was horror, for him. And every time he looked up there, he groaned.
They were clever. A shrewd, primeval intelligence directed these forays. There were no torches to light their way, to look from a distance like fireflies climbing up the mountainside and betray them to the enemy civilization below and behind them in the lowlands. They hadn't fired the house, either. When it was come upon again, it would be as it had been last; untouched, unaltered. Only empty. Nothing to show what had happened. Only the stars would know.
A voice suddenly called out to him in English. It came from farther back, from somewhere af the very end of the long, toiling line. A hoarse voice, broken, frightened, just as he knew his own would be if he were to use it Hke that, rawly naked against the night. English; he'd never known before how beautiful one's mother tongue could be. He'd never known how much he loved it. It must be hell, he thought, to die and not hear English any more. That must be worse than the fact of death itself.
The call was: "Jones! Jones! Where have they got my little girl? What have they done with Chris?"
And then, before he could answer, he could already hear the vicious blows falling, beating the voice quiet, smothering it to extinction. He knew if he spoke back, that was what he'd get too.
He braced himself, drew in his breath, and let go into the night.
"She's up front, Mai. They've got her by—by that thing they're carrying. She's fastened to it, walking along beside it."
The blows came down like rain—tough, leathery rain —and he went down first on one knee, then on both, then rolled over, but they kept following him like nettles clinging to him. The first few he could hold out against, but the ones that followed added their own pain to the pain of the first, until there was too much pain all at one time, and his voice seemed to break from him in shrill outcry, not through his mouth alone, but at every flaming, stinging pore.
He was dragged erect, thrust forward again, stuffed back into the long line, floundering at first like a weighted sack that threatens to fall first on this side, then on that, until at last he had steadied himself, regained the rhythm of the interlocking, piston-Hke ascent. He was conscious through it all of only one main thing: That form up there aloft had not shifted, that serenely held head had not turned to look back at the sound of his cries in the aboriginal night.
He groaned deep down inside him, but it wasn't from the blows he'd just had.
They were traveling steadily upward to meet the sun, which was coming up toward them unseen on the other side of the mountains. The sky alopg their crests was paling to an electric blue, brightagainst the eyes. It was like looking at a sheet of smooth gas flame, spread out in curtain form. They began to throw shadows on the ground, the long line of them, where there had been only even darkness before.
Day was coming between two centuries. Breaking on the mountaintop, midway between two ages. And these people in whose hands he was were hurrying back to regain their own, before the day came.
His eyes centered on the heel of the individual directly before him. Coppery red; rising, falling, rising, falling. It had blood on it. It was alive. It left an impress. It was real. Where had it come from? Where was it leading him to?
They had entered the cleft now, that secretive tuck in the living rock flesh of the mountain along which he had followed Mitty that day to where she stood wreathed by smoke, signaling to the unburied past. Her palanquin for a while skimmed the surface of the ground—or seemed to—the bearers under it hidden by the cleft in which they trod. It was like a skiff or boat sailing on solidified waves of rocky earth. The top of an occasional feather cropped up before or behind it. The figure in it was motionless as a doll; motionless as the living idol it had been transmuted into. The sun, about to blaze upward into un-trammeled space, was filling the air with golden motes now, like a sort of vaporized pollen.
Then suddenly the slow-coursing litter was submerged, sank from sight, as perpendicularly as if it had been sucked into quicksand. It had been ahead of him around a curve, so that he could mark its going at a tangent, as on a curving train one can sometimes see something ahead before one's own car has breasted it.
When finally this turn, the last convolution of all along the trail they were following, had straightened out and was no more, he received for a moment a startling impression that the toiling line ahead of him was telescoping itself into nothingness, consuming itself individual by indivdual until soon there would be nothing left of it. For the mountain face, obliterating the cleft, rose squarely before them; no one was going up that surface, and yet the distance between himself and it kept lessening man by man.
But this was just for a moment, and because the shoulder before him impeded full perspective ahead. At second glance he discovered the palanquin standing empty and at a tilt on the upcurving ground to one side of the defile, with two members of the party who had detached themselves bending over it, rapidly dismantling it into its original components of staves and branches. Evidently they wished to leave no telltale vestige of it behind.
A few paces beyond them, marking the party's actual extinction point, which had bafiled him until now, a curious slab of rock, tapering, triangular, and looking almost planed in its smoothness of surface, rested upright against the frontal rise that blocked off further advance, that choked off the sunken defile. Beside it was its complement, a black chasm in the rock face, which matched it in every detail of proportioning, as though one had been pried away from the other. Which
it obviously had. Into this neddle-like fissure, little more than hip-wide, one by one the marauders blotted themselves out, lowering their heads to a point at which they could safely be trusted to pass through. Two of their number, larger and more powerful than the rest, stood waiting by the reversed slab or rock, to draw it around after them and seal the fissure up after the last of their cohorts had gone in. He balked instinctively as this terminus of light and of the known, this maw of the past and the unknown, crept up flush with him. It was not the fear of suffocation that gripped him, made him rigid with recalcitrance; it was rather the premonition of entering upon some totally different plane from this point on, of leaving the world behind in a sense even worse than that of physical death.
The heel before him that he had watched was gone now; a curtain of darkness fell over it. It was his turn now. He bucked and tried to bolt sideways. The tilt of the defile facing would have defeated him even had he been unhindered. He went up it two, three steps by sheer momentum, then started to fall back again, pulled down by gravity. A hand seized his bound arms, wrenching him back to his starting place. Another caught at his neck, forcing his head down low. He was propelled forward.
The lips of rock narrowed over him, sucked him in. Darkness.
For a little while, as he went stumbling on, propelled like that, there was a little ghostly light behind him, where the opening was; the memory of light, glinting feebly on the moist rock walls and chill rock floor of this tunnel passage.
Then suddenly it was blotted out, too suddenly for lengthening distance alone to have killed it. There was a grinding and hollow reverberation, back there where it had been, carried forward along the bore, and the entrance slab had been drawn into place, sealing the opening up.
A drop of sweat rolled down his face, chilled before it had even left his pores. The present was gone. The past had claimed him for its own.
Chapter Nineteen
THE SECOND-FLOOR corridor in the government building at Puerto Santo was cool and twilight-dim compared to the broiling glare of the streets outride. It was not the most uncomfortable place in town to have to sit and wait for any prolonged length of time, as Fredericks and Cotter were having to do now. It was no mere passage but a broad gallery, tile-floored and roofed by a succession of stone archways. Set within the arbitrary subdivisions these created along the wall space were a succession of rather monastic doors. As a matter of fact, the building had once been the Palace of the Inquisition.
Opposite the first of these doors, first both in importance and in location, was placed a wooden bench, back to wall, and on it sat Fredericks and his companion, beginning to wilt now after their third successive day of interminable waiting. Facing them, on guard before the stubbornly closed portal whose entrance they sought to gain, stood a high-cheeked, flat-nosed mestizo soldier, in rather sloppy-fitting khaki, a very efficient and unsloppy-looking Mauser planted stock to floor before him.
Cotter came back to the bench, after a brief period of pacing back and forth to relieve the tedium of posture, and sank down on it once more.
"This one's keeping us waiting the longest of all," he grunted bitterly.
"The higher you go, the harder they are to see."
"Well, we've worked our way up to the top. After him there's no one." He leaned forward, let his hands hang down dejectedly, elbows to knees. "If there was only an American consul in the place we could appeal to, maybe we could get some action, slash through some of this red tape."
"An American consul wouldn't be able to give orders over the heads of the departmental officials. Besides, there isn't one. This country's not even important enough to have one of our consular representatives accredited to it. It's lumped in with one of the neighboring republics, and the same consul takes care of both."
Cotter dispirtedly let his head dangle now, in alignment with his hands. Then presently he raised it again.
"What's the good anyway?" he remarked. "We're too late. It's a solid month since it happened." Then he added, "If that's what it was."
"If that's what it was! What else was it?" Fredericks caught him up sharply. "Do you have to be told? They disappeared completely, from a place right on the slope of the mountain. The drums were heard. Let others doubt it. We should know what that means, of all people."
Cotter elevated his eyebrows in moody acceptance of the rebuke, but he let it go without answering.
"You're willling to turn around and go back, I see." Fredericks had turned toward him, was looking at him steadily. "Well, I'm not."
"It's not that, exactly. But if it's too late, what then? What good will it do?" He elevated his shoulders, let them drop again. "What do we owe him, after all?"
"Life," said Fredericks quietly. "We—that is, I—am responsible for this happening to him."
"No, you're not. Who told him to run off with her? Who told him to bring her down here, of all places?"
"I have a peculiar sense of duty, then. Indirect and roundabout. But a strong one. You go back if you want to, Cotter."
Cotter smiled crookedly, looked down at the floor. "I have a peculiar sense of duty too. Not toward them, but toward you. Anything you say, that goes for me."
The door had opened and the soldier stiffened to attention. A short, plump, bustling figure in beige linen emerged, mopping at the back of his neck with a handkerchief. He was saddle-complexioned. A tiny needle-pointed mustache and almost equally diminutive Vandyke beard suggested three black rays or spokes surrounding his mouth, which was rounded to clasp a projectilelike cigar. He struck off down the tiled corridor toward the stairhead with a quick-sounding, hard heel beat that was somewhat akin to the bite of castanets. An odor of mingled cigar smoke and expensive toilet water back-washed after him.
"That's him, now,'' Fredericks whispered hastily.
"That little—? No, it isn't. It can't be."
"It is, I tell you. He must be going out for his siesta. If we don't get him now, we won't get him again until four or five this afternoon." He jumped up, took a quick step or two across to the soldier, and whispered, "El mini' strop"
The man didn't answer openly, fearful of being overheard by the receding figure, but he gave a surreptitious nod of the head.
Fredericks hurried down the corridor after him and overtook him at the turn.
"Ministro, a moment of your time. We have been waiting three days to see you."
His manner of speech was staccato, to match his footfall and other mannerisms. "A question of what?"
"The disappearance of four persons from Finca La Es-condida on the twenty-fourth of last month."
The Minister of the Interior had halted, hand to iron-wrought stair rail. "Ah, yes. I remember now. I have a request on my desk, referred to me by my subordinate."
"Could you—could we ask you to consider it?"
"It means to go in there again, and it is very hot. I was just leaving." He sighted down the length of his cigar toward the sun-scalded patio below, to which the stairs led. Evidently his powers of making a decision were as rapid-fire as the rest of his personality. Suddenly cigar and head had both swung around and he was aheady on his way back toward the door from which he had just emerged. Fredericks hung behind for a moment, taken by surprise. Then he quickly rejoined him.
At the door the minister motioned him back to the bench. "Wait out here. I will familiarize myself with it a second time. The details have escaped me."'
The door closed and some twenty minutes went lethargically by.
"What's taking him so long?" Cotter asked at last.
"I don't know. I suppose the original memorandum has collected a lot of additional reports along the way, like a snowball that keeps growing, and he has to read the whole batch of them. Bureaucratic red tape is pretty much the same the world over."
A blurred voice called out something from behind the door, echoing cavernously. The soldier took a quick side step, threw the door open behind him, and motioned them in.
The minister's mood had be
en affected for the worse by the delay they had caused in his personal plans. He let them stand before him for the space of several uncomfortable minutes, thick underlip pouting sullenly, while he completed reading the last of a litter of papers of all sizes clipped together before him. Then he looked up.
"The request is refused," he said briskly, and made a motion to shunt aside the accumulation before him.
Fredericks flashed a look of white-faced dismay at his companion. "But senor, these people's lives are at stake. Surely—"
"It is regrettable, of course. However, this is simply an accident of nature. They have become lost, and may have died of exposure. There is no objection to your organizing a private search party if you wish to do so, of course. But there is no necessity that I can see for providing a military escort, as you ask us to. I see nothing in this case to warrant it. There is the expense involved, and my department is not wealthy. Frankly, we have other things to do. This not a matter for us, senores."
"But a military escort, and a good-sized one, is essential if we hope to bring them back. It is the only way of saving their lives."
The minister swept a lazy hand back and forth before his face, as though brushing away insects. "I cannot take the responsibility of dispatching a detachment of soldiers inland to an uninhabited valley, as you ask me to do.
Against whom? Against what? When our men march, they must have something to march against."
Fredericks brought his palm down despairingly against the desk. "But the valley is not uninhabited. That is what I have been trying to tell everyone!"
The minister regarded him coldly. "You have been trying to tell us, senor? It is a well-known fact that it has been uninhabited for five hundred years. Do you two gentlemen, who have just arrived down here, think you can tell us things about our own country that we do not know ourselves?" He waited to let this sink in. "I have soldiers on the very premises from the regions lying closest to there. Just a moment, I will convince you." He raised his voice and shouted: "Guardial"
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