“Oh! Yes, sorry.” She bent her head, tied knots, then paused to look at his profile. He was reaching for the microphone, turning dials on the instrument panel. She leaned toward him: “Do you know someone named Vernon?”
He frowned at her. “Vernon What?”
“Never mind,” she said, and went back to tying knots. He gave her an irritable confused look, then started talking into the microphone in his cupped hand.
“It will be along here,” Vernon said, the van moving slowly as he watched the right-hand verge. The jungle was deep and green and moist, tumbled and piled up high on the right. Behind him, the journalists started gathering their paraphernalia.
“Yes, there it is.”
Vernon braked to a stop, then turned the van very slowly off the road and onto an up-tilted patch of eroded rutted ground, cleared barely as wide as the vehicle, with stones and dirt and roots under its wheels. Engine roaring, the van struggled up the slope, branches and vines scraping both sides. Vernon clutched hard to the steering wheel, as boulders tried to deflect the wheels and drive him into tree trunks or ditches. Even at two or three miles an hour, the van jounced so badly that everybody in it had to hold on.
Too narrow; too steep; impossible. Vernon stopped the van, switched off the engine. In the sudden humming silence, he said, “We have to walk from here.”
“Hold on, chum,” Scottie called. “The idea was, this place is accessible.”
“It’s just up ahead there,” Vernon said, pointing out the windshield. “We just walk up to it.”
“Accessible by vehicle, old son.”
“Not past here.”
Tom, the American photojournalism leaned forward to look past Vernon’s shoulder, saying, “A Land Rover would make it.”
“Too many of us for a Land Rover.” Vernon’s eyelids were fluttering, he was aware of black-and-white pinwheels at the extreme edges of his peripheral vision.
Scottie, all jollity gone, called, “There’s no villages easier to get to than this?”
“Oh, come along, Scottie,” Morgan Lassiter said. “Work some of that lard off your gut.” And she slid open the van door to climb out.
That did it. With a woman to lead the way, the men all sheepishly followed, climbing down out of the van, pushing past the leaves and branches, hanging their canvas bags of equipment on their shoulders.
“This way,” Vernon said. His legs were trembling, his knees were jelly, but none of it showed. “This way,” he said. Soon it will be over. “This way.” He started up the hill.
Why am I doing this? Kirby wondered. Of all the brainless things I have ever done in my life, this has to rank right up there among the best of them. Buying Innocent’s land, for instance; this could conceivably be even dumber than that.
In the first place, there’s no reason on Earth for this stunt to work.
In the second place, the woman I’m helping, this Valerie Greene riding along with me on this rescue mission, is the primary cause of all my recent trouble, and is someone I dislike so intensely I’m amazed I’m not at this moment shoving her out of the plane.
In the third place, whether the stunt works or not, the end result of trying it must be that the temple scam is blown permanently and forever. Innocent already knows too much about it, Valerie Greene is going to figure things out any minute now, and even the people on the ground are likely to catch on, once the fun is over.
In the fourth place, some of those people on the ground have machine guns and could possibly even shoot Cynthia out of the sky.
In the fifth place, it isn’t my fight.
Valerie, busily tying knots, said, “I really appreciate this, Mr. Galway. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“It’s nothing,” Kirby said.
The Quiche Indians of western Guatemala are not among the tribes who speak some variant of Kekchi. It was in a different language entirely—mixed with some Spanish—that the people welcomed the Gurruh soldiers, smiling at them, nodding, gesturing for them to sit a moment, offering them water.
The Gurruh looked around, not seeming to know what to do. They talked to one another in their-incomprehensible tongue, they smiled rather meaninglessly at the people, and they wandered around the outsides of the three huts, gazing at things. One of them picked up the female piglet and held it high with one hand around its neck, the piglet squeaking and its pink hoofs thrashing the air as the Gurruh said something to the other soldiers and laughed. Then he put the piglet down again.
There was some strangeness about these Gurruh, all the people sensed it. They weren’t like the first two groups, they didn’t exude the same air of self-sufficiency and disinterested amiability. One of them went into a hut uninvited, picked up an orange without asking, and came out eating it.
A young man of the village, an Alpuche, had been looking toward the trail that led down to the road. “Someone else is coming,” he said.
“Can you circle just once more!” Valerie Greene asked. She was tying nooses now.
Kirby, a bit annoyed, banked Cynthia hard and made a gliding swooping turn over the tumbled land below. “You’re the one says it’s urgent. ”
“I just want to be sure.” Noose in hand, she peered down at that disorderly maze of greens and browns. “Yes! There’s the stream where I— That’s the stream from this morning. See it?”
Kirby rolled Cynthia over and came back, while Valerie clung open-mouthed to her seat. “Got it,” he said. “Due north from there they said?”
“One—” Silence.
Kirby looked over and saw her distress. “Sorry,” he said, and turned Cynthia right side up. “One hour north,” he said. “On foot.”
“Yes,” Valerie said.
The false Gurkhas saw the people looking toward the trail up from the road, and unlimbered their Sterling submachine guns. The villagers, already sensing something wrong about these soldiers, now drew back, wide-eyed, and everybody in the small clearing grew silent, except the female piglet, still squealing and shrilling about the indignity that had been done her.
High above, the sky was clear and blue. Thick brush and great trees surrounded the clearing, arching high overhead, and smaller trees had been left to stand beside the huts for shade. Except in the very center, where steady sunlight shone on their plantings, the settlement was dappled with rays reaching through the trees, angling down to touch with creamy light this person, that hut, that finger resting gently on a trigger. At the narrow end of the clearing, a patch of hotter, brighter light backed by fuzzy greens and yellows showed the top of the trail up from the road.
An Espejo girl, eight years old, picked up the piglet and cradled it in her arms. Her thudding heartbeat calmed the piglet, which grew quiet.
A straggling group of eight people, hot and sweaty and sun-dazzled, appeared at the end of the silent clearing and came slowly in, looking around themselves.
Vernon saw the Gurkhas, saw them holding the machine guns, and moaned as he dropped to his knees, unaware of the journalists staring at him in astonishment. “No,” he said, too late.
“The last one,” Valerie said, tightening the final noose on the final neck.
“Good.”
The hurried work finished, Valerie for the first time had a chance to actually look at these things. She held a small statue in each hand, the identical little evil creatures capering there with the nooses around their necks. “These—” she said, and frowned. “Are you sure these are real?”
“Van parked there, in from the blacktop road. See it?”
She saw it, partway into the green jungle, white roof gleaming, front of the vehicle pointed west, away from the road. “This must be it!”
“And the visitors are here already.”
Valerie clutched tightly to the Zotzilaha Chimalmans as the plane banked and dropped low to the ground.
The sound of a passing plane was drowned by the chatter. Nine^ millimeter bullets stuttered across the clearing, chopping Scottie’s legs out from under him and punching Vernon’s
stomach three times, in a line just above his belt. People screamed and ran, and three villagers fell bleeding.
The plane was louder, not passing after all. Disturbed at their work, the false Gurkhas looked up as the plane roared through the clearing, sideways, right wingtip pointing down at them as though to say, “You. I see you.”
“Throw them!” Kirby yelled. “Throw them!”
Valerie was too busy to answer. She was lying on her side, against the side wall of the plane, elbow on the fixed part of the window. As quickly as she could, she pushed the little statues one at a time through the window flap.
Zotzilaha Chimalman. Out of the plane he fell, time after time, swathed in cotton material, the cloth pulling away in the breeze of his falling. The noose around his neck was made of four strings, tied to four edges of the cloth; enough of a parachute for such a little devil.
Two false Gurkhas lifted their Sterlings, but the plane was already through the clearing and gone, circling. The people were running into the jungle, the journalists lay flat in the sunlight. Creatures floated down out of the sky.
Cynthia made a hard, tight circle through the air, left wing straight up and right wing straight down, and once more she crashed through the clearing. More demons plummeted from her side.
A false Gurkha aimed his Sterling at one of the things parachuting toward him. He peered through the metal arch of the foresight protector, focusing on the gray^brown figure in the air. He recognized it. A great fright struck him and he stared, forgetting to shoot.
Vernon, curled in a tight ball around the agony in his stomach, wept, and blamed the Colonel for everything.
A false Gurkha clutched a statue out of the air, held it in his hand, stared at it in disbelief. Dirt clung to it, as though it had just come from the grave; some of the dirt was now on his hand. Suddenly, he flung the thing away. He thought his hand was burning. Stepping back, his foot rolled on a statue on the ground; it tried to trip him, bite him, bring him down. He shrieked, threw away his Sterling, and ran.
“There aren’t any more!” Valerie cried.
Kirby lifted Cynthia up and away. Valerie tried to see back to the village. “Wait! What’s happening back there?”
“Give them a minute to think about it. Then we’ll go back and
What was this airplane? How had it come to be exactly where the false Gurkhas were, exactly at the moment when they were starting their work? Had they been betrayed? Were other enemies on the way?
These were the rational problems, the sensible questions, the meaningful dilemmas. They were as nothing beside the creatures hanging in the sky.
Twenty Zotzilahas floating down through the dappled air, falling one by one to the ground, gathering their cotton cloaks about themselves, grimacing and winking and grinning at the false Gurkhas, three more of whom flung away their guns and ran for the jungle.
“Come back!” the leader shouted, and fired after them, missing.
Another, backing away from the devils, saw the leader turn eyes and gun in his direction and he fired first, killing the leader 11 times.
Two more murderers in Gurkha uniform ran away into the jungle, these keeping their weapons.
Valerie stared back at the anonymous green. She wanted to see. Fretfully, she said, “Could they be that afraid of clay?”
“Their ancestors were.”
The false Gurkhas had been brought up in Christian homes. They had been taught to know and to love God and the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints. They had been taught to despise Satan and all his works. They had risen above such education, and struck out to live their own lives by their own rules.
No one had ever told them they had to believe in the Mayan gods and the Mayan devils. Those beings were there in the stories, that’s all, there in the drawings and the cloth designs and the carvings, there in the rites and ceremonies that a minority of their older relatives sometimes engaged in. Nobody had ever told them they had to believe in Zotzilaha Chimalman, and yet none of them had ever in his heart doubted that the cave of bats existed, the forked road to eternity existed, the evil hater of mankind was there in the darkness just waiting the opportunity to drag them down to eternal death.
He flies, Zotzilaha, he comes out of the sky like a bat. He is full of tricks and malevolence. If he catches you when your heart is black, you’re doomed.
When the sound of the plane was heard again in the clearing, there were only five false Gurkhas left in it, four living and their leader, who was dead. The dead one lay surrounded by images of Zotzilaha Chimalman.
When the silence in the clearing ended, filled up instead by the growing buzz of the airplane, the last four of the false Gurkhas faded away into the jungle.
The plane roared overhead again, and gone, and Vernon opened his eyes. Through his pain and tears he could see the villagers clustered around their three fallen relatives, the journalists gathering around Scottie. Hiram Farley, separate from both groups, bent to pick up one of the figures that had fallen from the plane.
Vernon closed his eyes. Everything he saw was red. The pain in his stomach was duller and his brain seemed to move more slowly.
When he opened his eyes again, Hiram Farley was standing over him, hefting the little statue in his hand. “Well, Vernon,” Farley said.
Vernon slowly blinked. With his mouth open to breathe, dirt was filtering in, coating his tongue and teeth.
“Now why, Vernon,” Farley said, “would Asian soldiers be afraid of a Central American devil? Something tells me you can answer that question. ”
Vernon looked at Farley’s dusty boots. He mumbled something. “What was that, Vernon?”
“They didn’t even kill me,’ I said.”
21 CHICKEN ESTELLE (SERVES FOUR)
“That isn’t south Abilene,” Valerie said.
Kirby Galway turned the little plane in a long slow parabola, out and around, while down below a man and woman chased goats from the long green field surrounded by forest. At one end of the field was a squat brown house with several additions, and behind it patches of cultivation. “No, it isn’t,” Galway said.
She gave his bland profile an extremely suspicious look. “What is it, then?”
“Where I live.”
“Why are we going there?” After all she’d been through, must she now defend herself from this man’s attentions?
Galway made minor adjustments with the plane’s controls; its nose was aimed now at that long field, with the tiny house and the tiny people at the far end and the goats all cleared away. He said, “I want to talk to you before you talk to Innocent.”
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you when we’re on the ground.”
She watched him, but he had nothing else to say. But wasn’t what he’d already said significant, didn’t it mean once and for all that Kirby Galway was not in league with Innocent St. Michael? If there was some secret he wanted to keep from Innocent—and what else could he be planning?—it meant they weren’t partners in crime after all.
So which one was the criminal?
And what was the crime?
It was all too confusing. She had seen the temple, exactly where it was supposed to be, where she and the computers had both predicted it would be, and then two weeks later, at the precise same spot, it was gone. She had seen Kirby Galway with Whitman Lemuel from that museum and had known it meant they were stealing rare Mayan treasures and smuggling them out of the country, but when she’d at last held several of those treasures in her hands she’d found herself doubting they were real. She had thought Vernon was working for Galway or Innocent or possibly both of them, and now it seemed to turn out he’d been working only for himself. And what had Vernon been trying to do? Get his hands on the (fake) treasures of the (nonexistent) temple? She shook her head, and spoke her frustration aloud: “What is everybody up to?”
He laughed. “I’m actually going to tell you,” he said, and the plane bounced on the uneven turf, bounced again, landed, settled, and s
lowed to a sedate roll as they neared the house, where the man and woman stood waiting, smiling.
“I’m beginning to remember,” Valerie said slowly, “that you’re a very bad man. You are, aren’t you?”
“Extremely bad,” he said, and the plane turned toward a copse of trees on the right.
“Except when you’re rescuing people,” she acknowledged.
“My one saving grace,” he said, and the plane stopped in tree shadow. Galway switched off the engine, and the silence flowed in like a wave.
There was no door on her side. She had to wait while he unstrapped and climbed out, then follow him, crawling across his seat and accepting his hand to balance her as she made it down to the ground.
The air here was very warm and heavy after so long in the plane, and she found herself stiff and sore when she tried to walk. The couple had come over to greet them—the man short, the woman much shorter—and Galway led Valerie around the wing to make the introductions: “Estelle Cruz, Manny Cruz, this is Valerie Greene.”
“How do you do?”
“Hello, hello, hello.”
When Manny Cruz smiled, he had many more spaces for teeth than he had teeth, but somehow that merely made his smile look happier. And for such a gnarled little woman, Estelle Cruz’s smile was surprisingly shy and girlish.
Galway removed both those smiles by then saying, “Miss Greene is an extemely annoying woman who has absolutely loused up everything I’ve been doing here.”
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 43 Page 27