Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 14 - Little Tiny Teeth

by Little Tiny Teeth

  “It’s nothing,” said Gideon, who had been dabbing a tissue at his mouth. By now the bleeding, hardly copious to begin with, had almost entirely stopped.

  “Well, when we get to Leticia, I owe you the biggest, best dinner money can buy.”

  “Oh, I think a beer’ll cover it,” he said, smiling.

  She returned the smile. “You’ve got it. Anyway, as soon as I landed in the water my brain started working again and I screamed for help. Then when somebody yelled ‘Man overboard’—”

  “Me again,” Gideon said.

  “—he just climbed over and heaved himself into the river too.”

  Ah, and that was the second splash, thought Gideon. Until then he’d been uncertain whether he’d really heard two splashes, or if he’d imagined — dreamed — one of them.

  “I saw him hit the water,” Maggie continued, “but it was too dark to really see anything. Then you showed up and I thought it was him coming after me. I don’t know what happened to him. I hope he drowned.”

  “He probably just swam for the shore,” said John. “Probably made it without any problem too. The Javaro’s not much more than a hundred yards wide here. Maggie, do you have any idea of why he would have attacked you?”

  She shook her head slowly back and forth, still cradling the mug of hot chocolate. “I don’t have a clue. I guess he was… well, you know how he was.”

  “Yeah, the cheese slid off his cracker a long time ago,” Mel said.

  “I want to apologize,” a visibly disturbed Vargas said. He had run off to get some antibiotic cream and a supersized Band-Aid for Maggie, and having applied them, he was hovering over her with the pot of hot chocolate, punctiliously topping off her cup every time she had a sip. “I had no way of knowing the man was… was crazy, insane. I assure you, if I had any idea—”

  “Nobody’s blaming you, Captain,” John said. “All right, let’s—”

  “He’s not there.” Tim had returned. He was standing at the entrance to the dining room, looking sick and shaky, making no move to approach.

  “Hey, buddy, what’s the matter?” Phil asked.

  “I—” He had to steady himself on the doorjamb. It seemed to take all his courage to continue. “I checked Dr. Scofield’s room too. He’s not there either. He’s… he’s dead, I’m sure of it.”

  “Oh, hell, he’s probably still up on the roof,” Mel said, “sleeping it off. He lapped up a hell of a lot of ‘tea’ last night.”

  Duayne nodded. “Yes, that’s probably so. Yesterday morning, I was up there early to see the sunrise, and he was still in his deck chair, sound asleep.”

  Tim was shaking his head, back and forth, back and forth. “No… no…”

  “Well, why would you think he’s dead?” Maggie said irritably, perhaps vexed at being yet again shoved from center stage by Scofield.

  “Because—”

  “No, hold it,” John said. “Before we go there, let’s just see if he is upstairs.”

  “I’ll go and check,” Phil said, getting up.

  But Tim continued to shake his head, looking sicker by the second. “I’m telling you. You won’t find him.”

  PHIL soon returned, shaking his head. “Not there.”

  A search of the nonpassenger section of the ship by one of Vargas’s crew produced the same result.

  Arden Scofield was no longer aboard the Adelita.

  “Okay, Tim,” John said. “Let’s hear it. What’s going on here?”

  Tim had joined them at the table by now, and Vargas had had the galley scare up some hot, predawn picarones and honey for them, which all but Tim were attacking as if they’d had nothing to eat for a week.

  “I should have told you before,” Tim said miserably. “I almost did, really — but I never thought — I mean the idea that he would — Jesus Christ, I still can’t believe it! I mean—” And his face was in his hands.

  “Goddamn it, Tim—!” John began, but Gideon stopped him with a hand on his arm. He made up a cup of heavily sugared coffee for Tim and put it in front of him. “Tim,” he said gently, “take a couple of sips. That’s right, good. Okay? Now. Take your time. Who are you talking about? Who is ‘he’?”

  Tim lifted a haggard face. “Cisco. Cisco killed him.”

  In the general burst of exclamations that followed this, a thought flitted briefly across Gideon’s mind: it seemed as if an awful lot was being blamed on someone who wasn’t there to speak for himself.

  “He threw him overboard,” Tim continued.

  “You know that?” Gideon asked.

  “No, I don’t know it; how could I know it? But it’s obvious. That was the scuffling that Maggie — Dr. Gray — heard, don’t you see?”

  “Well, why would Cisco—” Mel began.

  With a wave of his hand John quieted him and retook command. “Captain, don’t you think you’d better run up to the wheelhouse and turn the boat around and go back and see if you can spot Professor Scofield? You might have a look for Cisco as well.”

  Vargas, at his usual station overseeing the buffet table, jumped to comply. “Meneo, you come too,” he said in Spanish. “I want you and Chato up front searching for them. Take the other lamp.”

  “Okay, Tim,” John said, “go ahead. Why would Cisco want to kill Dr. Scofield?”

  “He hated him, that’s why. That stupid spider in his bag? That was Cisco. That thing with the spear and the shrunken head? That was Cisco too. He just wanted to, to scare him, to humiliate him.”

  Gideon permitted himself a small, internal a-ha of satisfaction, and from across the table Phil doffed an imaginary hat in his direction.

  “You knew about that — about the spider and the shrunken head — and you didn’t tell anyone?” John asked, seeming to swell as he grew more stern.

  “I…” Tim’s expression had become more shamefaced than anything else. “I didn’t know about it at the time, no. He told me later, up on the roof that night.”

  “But you kept it to yourself. You didn’t tell anyone.”

  “I… no. I’ll tell you the truth, I thought it was funny — well, I did.” He paused to drink more coffee. “I thought he had it coming.”

  “And did he tell you he was going to kill him too?”

  A sudden twitch of his fingers jammed the cup onto its saucer, slopping coffee over the side. “No! It’s just that it makes sense now, after what happened to Maggie and everything. He threw Dr. Scofield overboard too. How hard would it have been to dump him over the side if he was all doped up from that tea?”

  “That’s a pretty big leap, Tim,” Gideon said.

  “No, it isn’t. Last night — I don’t mean tonight, I mean the one before — he told me, all mysterious and weird-like, that he wouldn’t be around the next day, that he had something to take care of, and that he’d be back the day after, or maybe not. Maybe we wouldn’t be seeing him anymore at all. He had other things on his plate. It all adds up now, but at the time, I never thought he meant to kill anybody, I just thought he was — Dr. Gray, you were there, remember?”

  “I was?” Maggie said, startled. She had been vacantly pushing the remnants of her picarones around her plate with her fork. She put the fork down. “Yes, that’s right, I was. I do remember that, Tim. But I thought it was just more of his wild talk, I didn’t take it seriously.”

  “Well, of course not,” Tim said eagerly, “I didn’t either, that’s my point. I mean, who knew what he was talking about half the time?”

  “But Tim, I never heard him say anything about the lance, or the spider—”

  “No, no, he wouldn’t say that in front of you. That was after you left, when we started on that mampekerishi shit he brought.” He winced. “Oh, hell, excuse me, I—”

  “Tim,” Gideon interrupted, “why would Cisco hate Scofield? How did he even know him?”

  Tim gathered himself together, visibly trying to collect his thoughts. When he sucked twice at an empty coffee cup, Gideon got up and got him some more, which he s
ipped equally absently. “I think everybody knows that old story about Dr. Scofield,” he said, addressing the whole of his rapt audience. “About how the Chayacuro attacked him and his friends, the two brothers?”

  Nods all around.

  “And how they had to leave the first brother after he got hit by a poison dart, and they heard the Indians chop his head off, and then the second brother got hit by a dart and died in Dr. Scofield’s arms?”

  They nodded again, expectantly now.

  “Well, it’s not true. He didn’t die in Dr. Scofield’s arms. Dr. Scofield just ran away and left him there to die. But he didn’t die. When the Chayacuro found him they knew him, see, because he’d done some fieldwork with them when he was working on his dissertation. They’ve got an antidote for the poison — they make it from sugarcane — and they gave it to him. He lived with them for three months, became what they call a shaman’s apprentice, got really deep into their drugs, and never went back to the States after that. He’s lived in South America ever since, in Bolivia and Colombia, I think, but mostly right around Iquitos.”

  “This can’t be going where I think it’s going,” John said.

  “Anybody remember his name — the second brother?” Tim asked.

  “Frank,” Mel said. “Frank Molina.”

  “That’s right. And Frank in Spanish is Francisco. And short for Francisco is—”

  “‘Cisco,’” breathed Gideon.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Duayne after a moment’s stunned silence.

  SIXTEEN

  THE fact that Cisco and Scofield had wound up on the same ship after thirty years, Tim continued, was just an unlucky fluke, not anything that Cisco had worked out ahead of time.

  “Hold it right there,” John said. “It’s not that I don’t believe in coincidences, but that’s a little too much to swallow.”

  “I’m just telling you what he told me,” Tim said, chewing vigorously. His appetite had caught up with him, and although the picarones were now cold and getting soggy, he was stuffing them in.

  “It’s true, what he says,” Vargas said, having just returned from the river search for Scofield and Cisco, which had been fruitless. There was no sign of them. “I could think of no one else who could be a guide for such a group as this. I went to him and offered him the job, and he took it.”

  “You’re saying he didn’t even know Scofield would be aboard?” John asked. “So we’re supposed to think he just carries around a giant spider and a shrunken head in case they come in handy? And a spear?”

  Vargas offered a supplicatory shrug. “No, no, of course not. I’m sure I mentioned to him the name, so yes, he knew Professor Scofield would be here. Still, it was I who went to Cisco, not Cisco who came to me.”

  “No, it’s too much of a coincidence,” John repeated, shaking his head.

  “I don’t know, John,” Gideon said. “Coincidence, yes. Too much of a coincidence? Maybe not. Look at it this way. Cisco’s been hanging around Iquitos on and off for thirty years. He knows more about ethnobotany — he practically has a Harvard doctorate in it — than anybody else in the area, and he’s familiar with the local shamans and what they do — plenty of experience in that regard. Well, those things are just what Scofield was interested in, right? And, if I understand it correctly, this was Scofield’s first Amazon expedition—”

  “Yes, that’s so,” Maggie said. “Until now, he’d held them down in the Huallaga Valley.”

  “So he needed someone knowledgeable to guide them. He asked Captain Vargas to find someone—”

  “Exactly right, exactly right,” Vargas said, nodding along.

  “And Captain Vargas quite naturally came up with Cisco.”

  “Exactly! Naturally!”

  “Okay,” John said, “I’m not convinced, but okay.” He turned to Maggie. “Maggie, you said you heard scuffling—”

  “I think I heard scuffling.”

  “—coming from Scofield’s cabin.”

  “I think it was from Arden’s cabin.”

  “All right, fine,” John said, showing some impatience. “But I don’t remember you saying you heard a splash. Do you think you heard a splash?”

  She looked blank. “A splash?”

  “If he threw Arden in, there would have been a splash, wouldn’t there? Right outside his cabin. Pretty much right outside your cabin.”

  Maggie frowned. “I’m not certain. Now that you’ve asked the question, it seems to me, maybe I did. But I can’t really say… no, I’m sorry, John, I can’t say for sure that I did.”

  Duayne lifted his head, sensing something in the air. “What’s happening? Are we turning around again? Why are we going back?”

  “No, we’re not going back,” Vargas said. “The river here, it’s making a big loop, a big bend. That’s what the Javaro is like.”

  “Tim, you got anything else to tell us?” John asked.

  Tim mutely shook his head.

  “Captain Vargas,” John said, “I think we need to turn this over to the police.”

  “The Colombian police?”

  “Well, it happened in Colombia, so obviously, yes.”

  “You want to go back to the checkpoint? You want to report a murder on my ship to Colonel Malagga?” Vargas was horrified.

  “Not a murder, we don’t know that yet,” John said. “A missing person for sure, a homicide, maybe—”

  “And an attempted homicide — on me,” Maggie said. “Let’s not forget that delightful little incident.”

  “Absolutely,” John said. “But yeah, I see your point about Malagga, Captain. What do you suggest?”

  “That we continue to Leticia. It’s not much farther ahead than the border is back. We’ll be there tomorrow night or Friday morning. There you will find a much more professional, more competent headquarters of police. Real policemen, not scoundrels like Malagga.”

  John nodded his approval. “Sounds good.”

  CAPTAIN Vargas was once again in a dither, and once again the cause was Arden Scofield, who was as much a source of trepidation and self-recrimination dead as he’d been alive. For the hundredth time, Vargas cursed himself for ever getting involved with the vile man. The problem was, what the hell was he supposed to do now? He knew next to nothing about the arrangements for the contraband coffee at the San José de Chiquitos warehouse. The plan had been for Vargas to unload the shipment of coffee as if it was no different than usual. Scofield would take it from there. But with Scofield no longer in the picture, how would it work? Were the sacks with the coca paste in them supposed to be treated differently in some way? He supposed so, but how? Would there be people there to receive them? If so, would they be in on what was in them? Acceding to Vargas’s own wishes, Scofield had kept him out of the loop on almost everything.

  Beyond that, he was unsure of whether to unload the coffee at all. Was there supposed to be some signal sent to the drug boss in Cali to the effect that it had been deposited? Undoubtedly, yes, but the identity of the boss was another thing he had foolishly not wanted to know and therefore didn’t know. Should he simply leave the coffee and let whoever else was involved worry about it? Should he not unload it, but rather take it back to Iquitos with him? And then do what with it? Did the Colombian boss know who he was? If so, what would be his reaction when he learned the paste was not at the warehouse but still in Vargas’s possession? He wouldn’t be pleased, that was certain. Had he already paid money to Scofield? Vargas didn’t know that either, but he imagined so, since he himself had already received money from Scofield.

  These were serious questions, life-and-death questions. The people in the cocaine trade were brutal in the extreme. When they were crossed, their vengeance was a terrible thing: death, certainly, but death in the most horrible ways imaginable. He himself had a cousin whose wife’s brother had been fed to ravening pigs — alive — because he had skimmed some trifling amount from the boss’s profits.

  He came to a decision. Not unloading the coffee
was out of the question. Somebody would come after him; there was too much money involved, and he had no wish to be fed to the pigs. He would simply unload everything, let events take care of themselves, and hope for the best.

  He closed his eyes and crossed himself. God would protect him. He was not a gangster, a criminal; he was weak, that was all — the most human of failings. He had been led down the garden path by a clever, deceptive man. Only let him get out of this with his skin intact, and on his mother’s grave, he would never — never — again…

  “SO what do we think happened, exactly?” Phil asked. “I’m a little confused. Somebody go over the sequence for me.”

  Phil, John, and Gideon were sitting in a nook at the rear of the upper deck, aft of the cabins. It was four-thirty and the first pale pink smears of the day were just beginning to show up ahead on the eastern horizon, although high in the sky, a single, torn shred of cloud was lit a flaming orange. The meeting in the dining room had broken up half an hour earlier, and the three had come up here to talk things over on their own.

  “All right,” John said. “Apparently Cisco came after Scofield and—”

  “When?”

  “Well, it would have to have been right before Maggie came out of her cabin.”

  “Where?”

  “Where?”

  “Where did he come after Scofield?”

  “In his cabin,” said Gideon. “Maggie heard them scuffling, remember? And Scofield’s room is right next to hers.”

  Phil nodded. “Okay, so he walks in on Scofield, who is not only asleep, but pretty much gaga from that crap he drinks, and drags him out of bed, and flops him over the side, is that it?”

  “Probably something like that,” John said. “Could be, he slugged him or… You know, I should take a look at the room, see if there’s any blood or anything.”

  “Okay, and then what happens?” Phil asked.

  “Then Maggie wakes up, goes outside, sees Cisco standing at the rail admiring his handiwork, and he turns around and sees her, and over the side she goes too, letting out a yell that Doc here hears.”