The Annihilators (13 page)

“You’d better take it down for me, if you don’t mind,” Ricardo said. “I can’t fight my way through all that cheesecloth when I go to bed. I’ve got some spray and roll-on stuff to use if they get bad; and I’m taking my malaria pills… Thanks. You know where the bottle is. Can I prevail upon you to do the honors, señor?” When I’d fixed us up with drinks and settled in a chair, he rolled himself up to comfortable talking distance and said, “Something serious, Sam?”

I tossed an envelope into his lap. “It depends upon what you consider serious, amigo. There’s what my agency knows about your friend and associate, Lupe of the Mountain. If you were already aware of his larcenous and treacherous propensities, forgive me for wasting your time.”

He regarded me for a moment, frowning; then he opened the envelope and began to read the lengthy dossier Miranda had prepared for me. I’d read it myself, earlier. An impressive gent, Lupe Montano. A ruthless gent who’d sacrifice his mother, friends, or girlfriend without turning a hair if his interests required it. Well, who was I to talk? The only real difference between us, I reflected sourly, was that Lupe’s interests almost invariably turned out to be financial, whereas I’m not all that concerned about money. Ricardo folded the dossier carefully and returned it to the envelope and looked at me.

“So?”

“That’s the man you want running your precious country?”

He shrugged, a little defiantly. “Is there a choice?”

I said, “You could go back where you came from and leave Rael where he is. On the record, there’s not a hell of a lot of difference between him and your
bandido
friend. Not enough to kill for. Or die for.” After a moment, when he didn’t speak, I went on: “Anyway, I thought you ought to know the kind of company you were getting yourself into.”

“Why?” he demanded. “Why did you go to this trouble, Sam?”

“A small matter of conscience,” I said.

“I see.” His eyes were cold. “Act helpful toward one Jimenez so you can feel free to act vengeful toward the others.”

It was a fairly shrewd observation. I reminded myself that there were a few brains in the family, even though they were not always employed to best advantage.

“Something like that,” I said. “Also there was a lady who had a thing about liberty and human rights and sentimental stuff like that. I didn’t get to put flowers on her grave, so I thought I’d make. a slightly different kind of gesture—in memoriam, so to speak.”

He was watching me carefully. “By sending me back to the U.S.?”

“Are you going?”

He shook his head. “No. What’s there for me? Should I spend the rest of my life sitting in this miserable chair watching your stupid TV? This is my home. Here I stay. One way or another.” He studied me thoughtfully. “But I fail to understand your gesture, amigo. How can showing me this record of Montano’s villainy, if you want to call it that, serve as a suitable memorial to your lost lady?”

I said, “Well, that rather depends upon what you do about it, doesn’t it?”

He frowned. “What can I do? I said I’m not going back.”

“I never expected you to.”

“And if I stay here and refuse to behave as the figurehead Lupe wants, I will undoubtedly wind up back in La Fortaleza where Echeverria will finish the job he left uncompleted. I don’t have many choices, my friend.”

“There’s one you haven’t mentioned.”

“What’s that?”

I spoke carefully: “You don’t have to be a figurehead just because Lupe says so.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. The idea had occurred to me. I think I would like to play a somewhat more important role here than was originally intended for me, but Lupe would never share the power…”

I spoke as carefully as before: “Men like Lupe don’t live forever, amigo. They’ve even been known to die rather suddenly.”

He stared at me, shocked. “I owe my life to Lupe Montano!”

“Sure,” I said. “And you’ll owe your death to him the minute he doesn’t need you any more. Or the minute it begins to look as if you’re getting too popular and powerful in the revolutionary movement. Have you got a gun?”

He licked his lips. “I will have. It is being arranged.”

“Not by Lupe, I’ll bet. He’ll want to keep you as helpless as possible.”

“How can you know Lupe’s motives? You have never met him.”

I gestured toward the fat envelope still lying on his lap. “He’s in there, isn’t he? And in my business I’ve known a hundred Montanos; and one characteristic all these outlaw Napoleons have in common is that they cherish their status tenderly, whether they’re heading a cell of spies, a gang of bank robbers, or a whole damn revolutionary army. Sure, Montano wants the name Jimenez on his side because with his record he can’t win without it; but he’ll be real careful to see that it doesn’t backfire on him. He’ll keep you as isolated and helpless and dependent as he can, amigo. Have you got anybody you can trust, really trust? These people who are arranging for you to get a gun—are they really yours and not Lupe’s?”

“They are mine,” Ricardo said firmly. “They are soldiers who fought with my father, outlawed by Rael. They joined Lupe of the Mountain because there was no other place for them. But they will fight for me.”

“Sure.” I regarded him for a moment, rather grimly. “Final question, Señor Jimenez. Can you manage a revolution all by yourself if you have to?”

He said, “I am my father’s son. He trained me well, I think.”

I said, “Well, there’s your answer. If it comes to that, and if you think the people will follow you.”

“They will follow a Jimenez,” he said. “But—”

“But what? Do I have to spell it out?” When he didn’t speak, I said, “Sooner or later there will be a confrontation, Ricardo. Maybe you can swallow what he did in the past as a bandit; but don’t kid yourself he’s going to change. Sooner or later he’ll do something you won’t want attributed to your name or your revolution. My advice is: Be just as sweet and docile as you can until it happens, but be ready for it. When you’re forced to challenge him, put it to him hard, and be sure you have plenty of firepower in the bushes when you do it, and your own gun in your hand. If he backs down, fine. Make him eat shit but good and he’ll be your boy instead of you being his. But if he just gets mad and arrogant
—I am El Jefe and I do as I please
!—and tries to slap you down like a kid, which is probably what will happen, just cut him down on the spot, bang. No more Montano. If you’re not up to that, you’ve got no business in the revolution business.”

There was a lengthy silence. Ricardo’s eyes had a shocked look; he licked his lips uncertainly. “I do not know if I am capable of killing…” He stopped. I didn’t speak. I saw a hard expression come to his face that reminded me of a certain military gent beside whom I’d fought many years ago. He nodded slowly. “I see. Yes. I will not plot against him, but if he defiles the revolution… Yes, it is good advice. I will be ready. After all, Lupe Montano is not really the man this country needs.”

I felt like a latter-day Machiavelli; and I hoped he could pull it off when the time came.

“Now you’re talking,” I said a bit sourly. “Pretty soon you’ll convince yourself that you were sent from heaven to save your suffering people, and you’ll have it made.”

He didn’t smile. His young face was grim. “Not from, heaven, amigo.” He touched the too-smoothly-repaired burn scar on his cheek. “From hell!”

One thing you learn in the business is how to sleep anywhere, on any reasonably horizontal surface, at any time, but somehow it didn’t work that night; and instinct warned me it wasn’t a safe place for me to dope myself with sedatives, although I keep some around for nights like that. So I lay in the dark looking up into the black recesses of the thatched roof of my pseudorustic cabin—like Ricardo I’d decided to dispense with the fancy mosquito-tent, and so far there had been no insects to bother me. Lying there, I was strongly aware of the long miles of tangled jungle just outside the newly landscaped hotel grounds and, strangely, of the brooding presence of the ancient pyramids and temples and caverns nearby, even though I hadn’t seen them yet. Somehow the face of the old man called Cortez was mixed up with these feelings; although I couldn’t have said how if anybody had asked.

But that was vague emotional-mystical nonsense. Since I had to lie awake, I told myself firmly, I might as well get a few things straight in my head, in particular the fact that the major question I’d come here to ask had been answered;
He was a great fighter, but he was a terrible president, Sam.
Ricardo had said it, letting me know that I could declare open season on Hector Jimenez at any time with no worry about depriving the poor people of Costa Verde of an irreplaceable liberator, or offending the small gentle wraith that still pursued me…

The sound of approaching footsteps drove the drifting thoughts from my mind. They were wrong footsteps, stumbling and uncertain; and I reached for the gun lying alongside my leg—under the pillow is too standard a hiding place. I eased back the sheet that covered me. There was a light rap on the door, and a whisper:

“Sam! Sam, please! Oh, God, let me in, I…”

When I reached the door, and got it unlocked and opened, she was leaning against the jamb with her forehead pressed hard against the painted wood, panting as if she’d run a hard race, and perhaps she had. She flinched when I put my arm around her shoulder, but allowed herself to be led inside. I locked the door behind us and reached for the light switch.

“No, not the light!” she gasped. “Please, I must look so…!”

“Don’t be girlish, Frances.”

I pressed the switch. She covered her face, frightening me for a moment into expecting something truly dreadful; but when I reached out to take her hands away she let them fall and let me look. It was only a bruise, but a pretty good one, reddening her left cheek from the corner of the eye to the corner of her mouth. She stood there in a slack way I’d never seen, allowing me to take it all in: the rumpled silk shirt coming out at the waist, the dusty and awry poplin skirt, and the laddered nylon stockings bloody at the knees. She’d also hurt her right hand. But what really concerned me was the shattered look in her eyes.

I said, “I hope you got the number of the truck.”

“Haha,” she said. Her voice was suddenly steadier, reassuring me. “When you’re
quite
through being funny, you might break out some Band-Aids. If you haven’t got any, there are some down in my—”

“I’ve got them. What happened?”

She licked her lips. “It was… it was really utterly ridiculous. I got lost. Down there at the dig. The new excavations have changed things. I took an old shortcut back here alone after my tour of inspection, and it was all changed and I got lost. And… and there were
things
… I mean, you’d think after all these years as an archaeologist I wouldn’t be susceptible to… to
emanations
from ancient tombs, would you? But, well, goddamn it, I could just
feel
the presence of the Lords of the Night…”

“The what?”

“Ah Puch, the God of Death, and the others… You’ll think I’m crazy, but it was something cold and black coming out of… Strange that their hell is a place of cold, not of heat like ours, isn’t it? Damn it, Sam, I panicked like a little girl, lost among all those broken temples, and I started running in the dark and took a bad fall and hit my face and almost knocked myself out…” She drew a long breath and looked down at herself ruefully. “God, I really made a mess of myself, didn’t I? My poor stockings! Well, I’ve got plenty of pantyhose along; but I hope I didn’t ruin my only skirt, or I’ll have to spend the rest of the trip either in jeans or a jersey dinner dress. Incidentally, Ah Puch is the Mayan name; the Melmecs called him Ixchal… What are you doing?”

I reached out to hold the back of her head with one hand; and moved her jaw around gently with the other. “Okay?”

“It hurts a little but…”

“Nothing grating, nothing loose? All teeth present or accounted for?”

She nodded. “Fix my hand first, so I don’t get any more blood on my clothes; it’s all over the bottom of my skirt already. God, how ridiculous can you get? I’ve never done anything like this before in my life! Fleeing from ghosts at my age!”

She had a real jag on now, and she was still talking as I guided her into the bathroom and washed off her hand and sloshed a bit of peroxide over the shallow lacerations on the heel of it, obviously caused by stone or gravel as she tried to break her fall. A medium-sized Band-Aid finished the job.

“Now,” I said, “slither out of those tights and sit down on the john so I can fix your knees.”

She was studying her face in the bathroom mirror. “Will it get worse?” she asked.

“It’ll probably color up a bit more by morning. But he missed the eye by enough; at least you won’t have a shiner to worry about. I think you can cover most of it with makeup…”

“Sam!”

“What?”

She was staring at me indignantly. “I just told you what happened!”

“Sure, baby, sure,” I said. “Now get those crazy-looking nylons off, what’s left of them, unless you’d rather have me take them off for you…”

“But Sam!”

I drew a long breath. “Damn you, Dillman, why do you keep trying this kind of nonsense on me? I’ve been moderately frank with you. I’ve more or less told you I’m a professional; I’ve even let you know pretty much what kind of a pro I am. And in the exercise of my nefarious profession I’ve been slugged in the face more than once. I’ve seen others smacked, men and women both; I’ve even smacked a few myself. And you’ve ripped the skin of your hand and scraped some of it off your knees. If you’d really fallen on your face, which isn’t easy to do, you’d have some bad scrapes there, too, wouldn’t you, instead of just a bruise? Somebody took a good swing at you and knocked you spinning, and you landed on hands and knees—hand and knees. Now let me see about those knees, will you, and just shut up altogether if you can’t talk without treating me like the village idiot.”

She started to speak angrily and stopped. I put my arms around her and led her, stiff and hostile, back out into the bedroom where I’d have more maneuvering space. I knelt before her and untied and removed her sturdy walking shoes. She lifted her feet on command, like a robot. I reached far up under her skirt and worked the nylon wreckage down her hips and thighs and legs; and whether or not the operation affected me sexually is none of your damn business. She stepped out of the stuff when I asked her to; but when I told her to sit down in a nearby chair she didn’t move.