Reflex (14 page)

Then she said something to Porfiro that caused him to look uncertain, but she repeated it. It was the phrase she'd used when they'd been introduced,
¿Que soñaste?

Porfiro said, "She asks, what did you dream? It is the way her people greet each other." He fingered something below his neck, under the fabric of his shirt. Almost reluctantly he added, "They believe dreams are about what has happened or will happen."

He doesn't like this.
She saw the gleam of a silver chain around his neck.
A crucifix?

She thought about some polite evasion, a white lie denying any dreams. She hadn't slept well at all since the night Davy left. With Sojee in the room with her the previous evening, someone who wasn't Davy, she'd tossed and turned most of the night.

Still, there was that weird sequence just before the dawn and she wanted to give them something back, something for the clues they'd given her.

"I had trouble falling asleep, but when I did I dreamed the same thing. I was trying to sleep but every time I rolled over to get comfortable, I would land on a pin. It would poke me and I'd throw it out of the bed, but the bed was full of them, and I didn't get to sleep until I laid a red bedspread over them."

Porfiro translated for her and Señora Ruiz questioned the man about his choice of certain words, narrowing the meaning to more specific choices. She looked back at Millie and asked another question.

"What color is your bedspread—the real one?"

"At the hotel? Green, with yellow orchids."

Señora Ruiz nodded, then asked another question.

Porfiro apparently didn't understand and Señora Ruiz rephrased it. He turned back to Millie and said, "She wants to know your
onen,
your clan—your totem. She says foreigners often don't know what their totem is." He made a very abbreviated sign of the cross and touched his shirt again.

Millie blinked. "I have no earthly idea."

Porfiro translated this and Señora Ruiz nodded and began talking again.

"She says to interpret your dream it would help to know. She thinks, from the symbols in your dream—the way you present the blood and snakes, that you are a female spider monkey, which makes you a distant relative of her clan."

"What snakes? What blood?"

He asked Señora Ruiz, then translated the explanation. "The pins. Thorns, pins, needles, a rope are all symbols of snakes. The red blanket is blood."

Millie shuddered. She felt the queasy fascination of a rational person for the supernatural.
I
know
there are things in this world I can't explain. Look at Davy.

"Does this predict the future?"

Porfiro checked. "She says it warns. A bad thing can be avoided through advance notice in a dream. It isn't unchangeable. I told you of her going into the jungle when the paramilitaries came? The night before she had a dream."

Señora Ruiz talked again and Porfiro resumed his translation. "If you're of the monkey
onen,
she thinks your dream tells of danger coming at night, when you would sleep, a danger waiting for you."

Considering the events of the day, this wasn't the most unlikely thing she'd ever heard. Gravely she asked "What does she suggest?"

"Do not sleep in that bed tonight. Go somewhere else."

Millie sent Porfiro and the family Ruiz home in a cab, paying the driver in advance.

Just before they drove away, Señora Ruiz had said,
"Ki'wenen tech. Ki'i ba' willik."
Millie, puzzled, looked at Porfiro, who shrugged. Señora Ruiz, seeing their confusion, said,
"Tenga cuidado para el qué sueña."

Porfiro made the sign of the cross, then translated, "Be careful of what you dream."

Millie stared after the cab long after it had turned out of sight.

Sojee said, "You off your meds?"

Millie shook herself. "Not on meds. Just distracted. Wondering, really."

Sojee looked around, her head twisting and turning. She grumbled, "It's bad enough being a paranoid schizophrenic without having actual people following you around and attacking you."

Millie turned west and began walking up the sidewalk. Sojee fell into step with her but looked over her shoulder often. The streets were busy both with cars and pedestrians.

Sojee said abruptly, "I've been asked to check back into St. Elizabeth's. I guess Hinkley misses me."

"Why? Do they want to treat your schizophrenia?"

"No. My psychiatrist got me a place in a drug study to treat my twitches. They're—" She switched to an exaggerated pompous academic voice. "—checking the efficacy of a combination regime of vitamin B-6 and tetrabenazine in the treatment of tardive dyskinesia and other hyperkinetic involuntary movements of the face." A man came out of a doorway and Sojee jumped, but he turned and walked east, the opposite direction.

Millie patted Sojee's arm. "When do they want you to check in?"

"They want me tonight or tomorrow."

"Ah. Do
you
want to?"

"Well, I wasn't too thrilled about it."

Millie raised her eyebrows. "Is there a chance of worsened effects? Dystonia?" Tardive Dystonia would expand her involuntary movements from her face to the rest of her body.

"Nah—and what side effects they've seen are controlled by reducing the dosage. Tetrabenazine seems pretty safe that way, but it's the hope/disappointment thing."

"If you don't try it, it won't not work."

Sojee nodded. "Yeah, but frankly it's looking better and better, now."

"To get off the street? Or to get away from my enemies?"

Sojee looked around again. "Well—you spend a night in a real bed, a safe bed, and it ruins you for a while. Makes it hard to stay up all night. Even in the shelters you've got people trying to steal your stuff or feel you up. You may be warm but you don't really want to sleep." There was a loud bang down an alley and she jumped.

Millie looked, but it was only a door flung open by someone carrying out garbage.

Sojee was holding her hand to her chest. "All right. I'm nervous about those guys who jumped us, too. Especially after hearing about Bloody Mary and your dreams."

"Ah. Not your usual story, was it?"

Millie's cell phone rang and she fumbled it to her ear. "Yes?"

"We'd like to meet." It was Anders.

"Hold on a minute." She looked at Sojee. "Would you like to go to St. Elizabeth's tonight?"

Sojee nodded.

Millie talked into the phone. "Ms. Johnson needs to go to St. Elizabeth's. I thought I'd take her in a cab, then I could meet you?"

"All right," said Anders. "Curtis will pick you up where you are. Just keep walking until you see him coming down your side of the street, then flag him."

Millie looked down the street at the cars, dim shadows behind glaring headlights. "It's quite dark now. It'll be hard to identify the right cab."

"His off-duty light will be on but he'll blink it, then switch over to on-duty as he nears you."

"All right. Please make it so."

After they dropped Sojee at St. Elizabeth's, Curtis took the white cab in a long circuitous route out past the National Zoo and then back again, toward the Mall. Millie closed her eyes and tried to rest. At least he wasn't whipping around traffic circles again and again.

Eventually they ended up at the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel. He pulled up to the side entrance and said, "They're in the Round Robin Bar."

"No tags?"

He snorted. "Puh-lease."

She felt severely underdressed as she threaded through the columns and furniture of the lobby with its elaborately carved ceilings and mosaic floors. She found Anders and another man sitting at a corner table of the bar where, a small placard informed her, Henry Clay introduced the Mint Julep to Washington in the 1820s. Both men stood when she came in. Anders pulled out a chair for her.

"Ms. Harrison-Rice, this is Dr. Henri Gautreau."

A waitress approached in a tuxedo shirt, cummerbund, black tie, and miniskirt.

Millie waited until her pencil was poised before saying, "Glenlivet, double."

Dr. Gautreau said, "Another Sam Adams." He had a very slight French accent.

Anders said, "I'll switch to coffee." When the waitress was gone he looked at Millie and raised his eyebrows. "A double?"

"I've had a hard day.
You
should know exactly how hard." She looked down at her feet. "I've still got blood on my boots!"

His glance flickered sideways to Dr. Gautreau. He held up his hands. "Acknowledged. It's just not over, you know."

It? The day, or the whole mess?
"Then you'll have to keep me safe, while I'm 'impaired.' " She turned to Dr. Gautreau and said brightly, "And what is Dr. Gautreau, when he is at home?"

He smiled. "I'm an anthropologist."

Anders added. "It was quite a coincidence, really. Our Mexico analyst pool has a couple of indigenous language experts but none of them knew more than a few words of Lacandon. Dr. Gautreau was attending a symposium at the Smithsonian this week."

Millie's eyebrows raised. "The Ruizes? When they weren't speaking Spanish?"

Dr. Gautreau nodded. He was dressed in a rumpled suit and his tie had clearly been removed earlier—bunched, it stuck out of the breast pocket of his jacket like a distempered cabbage. He had a tightly trimmed beard and long, wild hair pulled back from his face by a knotted piece of Guatemalan cloth.

"I hope I am able to help. I would not, though, if I hadn't been assured that Señora Ruiz and her family weren't the subjects of this investigation, but only witnesses."

"That's certainly my understanding, Professor." She looked at Anders. "The FBI isn't going to turn them over to the INS are they, because of their immigration status?"

Anders shook his head. "The FBI doesn't know about the Ruizes. They're helping us, but we're not giving them access to our raw ELINT."

Millie frowned and opened her mouth to speak.

He held up his hand. "Don't worry. We've already passed the datum about the angel on the ambulance door and they're scrambling. But they don't know about the Ruizes per se. We'll pass all the useful info."

Millie subsided. That had been her concern.

Dr. Gautreau frowned. "There are less than five hundred of her people in existence. Before I leave here, I'm going to offer to take them back with me."

"Was that five hundred before or after her village was wiped out?"

"Both. Señora Ruiz's second husband wasn't
Hack Winik,
but
Nahuat.
It was a
Nahuat
village that was destroyed when she fled."

"How do you know this?"

"I divide my time between the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and Chiapas. It's where I live. I'm painfully aware of each and every known atrocity in Chiapas. I've also met Nuk before."

"Her youngest daughter, the albino?"

"No. Nuk is also Señora Ruiz's first name. She originally came from Naha, the northern Lacandon community."

Millie looked at Anders. "Just how much of the conversation did you record?"

"There were a few words lost to ambient noises. Dishes on the table. Other diners. Not many. Signal processing is, after all, what we do."

"So what were the Ruizes saying, when they spoke in Lo—Lacandon?"

"Yes. Or,
Hach Winik
is what they would call it."

The waitress brought their drinks and Gautreau waited until she was gone before saying, "What was really interesting to me was the differences between what they said and what your translator said."

"He wasn't translating them correctly? Deliberately?"

"Oh, no—not deliberately. Most of it seems to be religious bias. For instance, every time he said God, Señora Ruiz or her daughters had either named a particular Lacandon god or said gods. The translator—Porfiro?—kept suggesting
La Madonna
for anything feminine, but she wouldn't have it, and he just fell back on God, finally."

"Was that during the interchange when she said that D.C. was on the way to Naha?"

"Yes. What she really said was that in a series of dreams it was revealed that she couldn't go home unless she came here first. That all her other choices were bad. She also said that now she could go home." He shook his head. "Obviously, this is where I'm meant to come in." His expression was matter-of-fact.

"Like she knew you'd help her home?" Anders snorted. "That's pushing things, isn't it?"

Millie stared at Dr. Gautreau, bemused. She pursed her lips, then said to Anders, "You're the one who said 'it's quite a coincidence, really.' "

Dr. Gautreau just smiled and sipped his beer.

Millie turned back to the anthropologist. "I heard them actually say
La Llorona.
Porfiro didn't make that up, right?"

"Yes, and no. The girls suggested
La Llorona
but first they suggested
U Na'il Kisin,
the wife of the god of death and earthquakes." He laughed. "At another point, their mother even suggested that their journey to D.C. was due to the intervention of
Hesuklitos,
but Porfiro didn't recognize that this is actually the inclusion of Jesus Christ in the Lacandon pantheon. They consider Christ the son of
Äkyantho,
the god of foreigners, and therefore a very
minor
deity." He shrugged. "They're quite open minded about other religions. Almost the Unitarians of Mesoamerica."

This is all very well but...
She took a large swallow of her Scotch, almost grateful for the burning sensation in her throat. "Is there anything they said, that we don't know, that will help us locate my husband?"

"Hmmm. I'm not sure if I'm the best judge of that. There were several things they did say that didn't get translated or weren't translated correctly. There was a speculation that your husband was actually one of the assistants to the rain god,
Mensäbäk,
who are the
Hahanak'uh
or "Water House Gods." In particular, they were thinking he might be
Xämän,
who also represents north. The
Hahanak'uh
create thunder when
Kisin
exposes his buttocks to them, making them angry." He frowned. "I've been around the
Lacandon
for fifteen years but I've never heard them talk about a living person this way."