Heaven Is High (20 page)

At least they hadn't gunned her down on the highway, Barbara thought. Too many possible witnesses? Traffic was sparse, but there was traffic. The sedan windows were darkened, no one could see in, see her. Philip had been out of sight. No witnesses to an abduction. They could have shot her and Philip on the dirt road, but they hadn't. They were taking her to the finca. Put the gun to her head on the plantation? Bury her in a field of marijuana? She knew she was close to hysteria, and bit her cheek hard.
Think! Don't panic
. Her only thought was that there was nothing she could do.

They passed the decrepit, useless
ORANGE WALK
sign, then made the turn onto the narrow paved road. How far had David said it was, two and a half miles, three? Today the road was as dim as before. She could hear no howler monkeys from inside the closed sedan. The next turn was onto the gravel driveway, and soon the brightness ahead signaled their approach to the clearing, the beautifully landscaped grounds of the finca.

The driver stopped near the steps to the verandah. He got out and opened Barbara's door. She didn't want him to touch her again and got out. He took her by the arm and hurried her up the steps and down the verandah to where Julius Santos was seated, watching her approach.

“My dear Miss Holloway,” he said in his silky voice, “how very nice of you to stop by again. Please, sit down.”

When she didn't move immediately to the chair opposite Santos, the man holding her grasped her shoulder and pushed her down.

“It's most uncomfortable having to look upward when talking to one who is standing,” Santos said. He had a tall, sweating glass of juice at hand that he lifted to take a sip. “Since you scorned my hospitality on our last meeting,” he said, “I won't risk your disdain by offering you a refreshment on this occasion.”

When she continued to be silent, his eyes narrowed a bit. “What? No protestations! No cries that I can't do this to you? That I can't get away with it? Not even any questions? You surprise me, Miss Holloway. You, an attorney without a single question.”

“What do you want from me?” she said.

“Not a thing. Absolutely nothing at all. I had thought I might ask you a few questions of my own, but there's no need now. It matters not at all what you planned to do for the bastard pretender, what scheme you had in mind for her. And I accepted that you couldn't tell me where my dear niece might be found and questions in that regard would be fruitless. Again, no questions. Mrs. Owens failed to appear for her scheduled appointment, of course, and she will be apprehended and deported forthwith. No clever spokesman on her behalf appeared and she could make no meaningful appeal. So that matter is settled satisfactorily. And as for my dear niece, Robert has told me what I need to know. Another little matter will be settled soon. So, I need nothing at all from you. It's immaterial what your plans were when you embarked on this mission.”

He took another drink. “You made a serious mistake by coming here, Miss Holloway. My American friend is dispensable, however it is convenient to have him remain where he is, and I'm afraid you have made that quite impossible. It crossed my mind that I might offer you a substantial sum to forget you saw him, but I'm afraid I find you untrustworthy, like so many of your fellow Americans. But you especially since you abused my hospitality by coming here under false pretenses.”

When she continued to look at him in silence, his face darkened. He leaned forward and said coldly, “You look at me the way I was looked at in New York, in Los Angeles. Arrogant, uncouth, vulgar Americans treating me like a filthy Mexican immigrant, drawing away from me as if I carried a disease, expecting me to give way to them on the sidewalks. Checking to see if a law officer was nearby to come and drag me away if I so much as glanced at their women. You think you're so superior, all of you. You come here to my hacienda and act as if I'm not worthy of courtesy.”

His voice became raspier, harsher as he said, “I've been cheated all my life. Treated like an ill-begotten beggar all my life. My father, my brother, all of them, treating me like a piece of dirt. I offered my brother a fair partnership and he treated me with contempt. My dear niece was contemptuous when I offered her a compromise. And you dare come here and regard me with the same kind of contempt.”

He stopped and took a long drink of juice. When he spoke again, he had regained the smooth, silky tones as earlier. “It doesn't pay to treat me so, Miss Holloway. There is a certain honor to be closely held, protected. Those who treat me with contempt do not come to a happy ending. Still, you do not speak. No pleas for mercy even. But I am a gentleman and I extend mercy to you. Initially I had thought to let Manuel”—he nodded at the man standing by her side—“and his friends have sport with you. They would enjoy that, of course. But I decided no. Usually when one denies himself a pleasure there is a reason, and I confess my reason outweighed the pleasure I would have had watching you being possessed by Manuel and the others. But it was not to be. When they perform an autopsy on you in a few days, there can be no internal damage to cause an investigation. No, it must be seen as a simple accident. At daylight you and the boy will indeed go to the waterfall, where, unfortunately, there will be a tragic accident, clearly identified as such.”

He spoke in rapid Spanish to Manuel, standing at her side. The man took her purse from her and handed it across the table to Santos. He looked inside, pulled out the Eliot volume and flipped through it, replaced it, then did the same with her notebook. He handed the purse back to Manuel, who dropped it into her lap.

“Still no words, Miss Holloway?” Santos asked mockingly, rising from his chair.

She stood and Manuel grasped her arm in a hard grip. “A few, Mr. Santos. If people regard you with contempt, it is because you are contemptible, a little man with others to do your bidding as long as they have weapons and you have money to pay them. You are a man who has fed on hatred and resentment for a lifetime, and such a diet has poisoned you and all you touch.”

Santos came around the table and slapped her viciously. “Something to remember me by through your long night,” he said. “Take her to her room,” he ordered. He turned and walked into the house.

With a viselike grip on her arm, Manuel propelled her through a room, out the back to a wide covered walkway that encircled a courtyard where a fountain threw water high into the air. He took her around the corner, opened a door, and pushed her inside. The door slammed shut.

The room was a sparsely furnished bedroom, with only a bed, a stand holding a lamp by it, a dressing table, and chair. A second door was to a bathroom. A sliding glass door with drapes was open and screened, and on the verandah outside a guard had already been posted. He was stretched out on a chaise. She closed the drapes. Then she sank down on the side of the bed, shaking hard.

She did not move again until the shaking subsided. She crossed the room to look inside the bathroom where a tall bottle of water was on the counter. She opened it and took a long drink, even as she thought it would not do for her to be badly dehydrated when they performed an autopsy. That might arouse suspicions. He had thought of that. With a shudder she examined her face in the mirror. Her cheek was bright red, already swelling, and it ached. No broken tooth, no broken jaw, just bruising and swelling. That could be attributed to a fall. Her arm hurt where Manuel had gripped it so hard. It would be bruised, too, she knew, and didn't bother to inspect it.

Nothing was in the drawers of the dressing table. Nothing in the room could be used as a weapon of any sort. And it was getting hotter by the minute with the drapes closed. She returned to the sliding door and opened the drapes a few inches. The man in the chaise looked up and she stepped to the side, out of his sight.

Sitting on the side of the bed she tried to think of what she could do, if there was anything she could do. After a few minutes she stood and looked again at the chair by the dressing table. She turned it over and examined the legs, how they were attached to the seat. It was a little chair, the legs held in place by two braces with screws, and no doubt with glue. After considering it for a minute, she returned to the bed and dumped the contents of her purse onto it. A fingernail file might do, she thought, and searched for it. She brought the chair to the bed and worked at unscrewing one of the legs. When the file began to cut into her finger, she wrapped it in a bit of the sheet and returned to the screw, praying that the file would not bend, would not break. At last the screw yielded, and she was able to get it out. She started on the second one.

When both screws were gone, she began to work on loosening the glue that still held the leg in the bottom of the seat. It didn't move. After another drink of the water, which was disgustingly warm, she returned to the leg and continued to try to move it back and forth, back and forth, and finally she felt it move a fraction. She put it down to rest her hand, to run water over it, and splash water on her swollen face. Back in the bedroom, she continued to work on the chair.

Back and forth, back and forth. She heard a faint breaking sound and applied more pressure, back and forth, back and forth. At last the leg came free with a jagged edge where it had broken.

She held it and raised it over her head, swung it around. It was too lightweight to do damage, she realized, too short, but it was more than she'd had an hour earlier.

She replaced the chair by the dressing table where it looked all right, at least until someone tried to sit on it. She put the leg under the sheet on the bed.

Now what? she asked herself, sitting on the side of the bed again. It was four thirty, less than two hours until dark. She was drenched with sweat but unwilling to open the drapes wider to let any breeze in, unwilling to be under the gaze of her guard. When she glanced out the narrow opening she had available, she saw him on the chaise with a magazine. He was smoking a cigarette.

Now what? she asked again, looking at the things she had emptied from the purse. Comb, wallet, Eliot, passport … her notebook was there, and three pens. She picked up the notebook and a pen, opened to a clean page, and started to write.

“Today, my driver, a boy named Philip, and I were apprehended by three men.…”

She wrote a detailed account of exactly what had happened, what Julius Santos had said, included the slap, and her imprisonment. When done, she signed and dated it.

Then, after thinking a few minutes, she picked up the
Four Quartets
and started to flip through it, looking for a half page that was blank. She had annotated the volume at various times with margin notes, notes following text, crowding some pages to the margins. She found a suitable page at the end of “The Dry Salvages.”

She copied what she had written in her notebook, signed and dated it, then closed Eliot. It had become too dark in the room to read any of the poetry, or even to proofread what she had written. She reached for the light switch but withdrew her hand and instead went to the bathroom, turned on the light there, and left the door partly open when she returned to the bedroom. It was enough.

Now what? From outside she could hear voices, men talking, laughing. In a few minutes silence returned. She smelled marijuana. Her guard was smoking. A bit of breeze was drifting the smoke into the room. When it grew darker, she decided, she would open the drapes wider, maybe cool the stifling room a little. Sweat was running down her back, down her temples, her arms and legs. Her hair was plastered to her neck.

A dim light came on outside the glass door. Between the light from there and the bathroom light, she knew she would not turn on the bedroom light to be watched by anyone. And so what? she asked herself derisively. To watch her sit on the side of the bed?

They had gotten to Robert, and he had told them where to find Anaia, she thought despairingly. Tortured first? Probably, but he had told enough to put a smug look of satisfaction on Julius Santos's face. No papers had been delivered to her hotel. Had Papa Pat been waylaid, the papers seized? Again she thought of the satisfaction Santos had shown, and she wanted to weep. And that poor boy, Philip. That confused, gullible boy who believed Hollywood stars knew how to keep age at bay. They had gotten to him, too. Intimidation, threats, bribery? It didn't matter. She doubted he had survived that savage blow to his head. All her efforts for nothing. Binnie, Martin … they would wait for her, hoping, praying for a miracle.

Did Santos know yet that she had petitioned for an extension of time? She shook her head. That didn't matter, either. In fact, it would make it worse for Binnie if an extension had been granted and she failed to show up at the new time. Even that ploy would backfire and make matters worse.

She should have turned them over to an expert in immigration law, she thought, cursing under her breath. The sensible thing to have done, what Frank would have advised, what her first thoughts had been, steer them to an expert and bow out.

She stood and paced the room for a few minutes, trying to quiet her recriminations, but it was too hot to continue, and she went to the bathroom to bathe her face and arms again, then stood regarding herself in the mirror. In the distance she could hear the howler monkeys. She nodded. Exactly what she wanted to do. Scream and howl. The howling was picked up by another group, closer. A predator was on the prowl; the warning system activated.

She thought of the dense black jungle, of the howler monkeys communicating trouble, poisonous snakes and spiders, bats, alligators.… And slowly she began to make a picture in her mind of exactly where she was positioned. Where this room was. Where the driveway and gravel road were. She returned to the bedroom and picked up her notebook and pen and took them back to the bathroom, where she lowered the seat on the toilet and sat down with her eyes closed, visualizing where Julius Santos had been sitting, how far she had been forced along the walk by the courtyard to this room.