The Empty Trap (3 page)

The sun baked him, drying the moisture out of him. From the height of the sun he guessed it was early afternoon when he reached the long sand slide. He looked down at the water far below and knew he had to reach it. He looked back the way he had come and he felt pride. He laughed aloud and it was a curious croaking sound. He tried to say Harry Danton’s name, but he could not articulate. He sensed the bright edge of delirium again, and fought back to logic and precarious sanity.

If he got onto the sand, he would go down. That was evident. But he could not go feet first. The left leg would crumple under him and turn him and he might roll. If that started, he would roll and bound among the hard stones. There had to be stability in the slide. The left arm had only limited usefulness. He would have to be able to see, and he would need some slightly effective method of steering himself. He thought about it a long time. Finally, with great effort, he tore a strip from his shirt. He crossed his ankles, left ankle across the right, and bound them clumsily. That way the left would not flop loose and dig into the sand. He eased himself out onto the sand slope. He moved slowly at first, head raised, elbows digging in. As he picked up speed he began to move directly toward a large boulder. The top inches of sand slid along with him. He dug the right elbow deeper and it swung him to the right. He almost lost control. He passed the rock so closely it gave his left elbow a sharp painful crack. This was the steering method the bobsledders used. He went faster. He was taking more sand along. The sand flowed over the smaller stones. He yelled in crazy triumph. Then there were more
rocks ahead, and these were jagged ones. It was harder to steer. He clawed with his right hand, trying to dig himself sideways. He missed the rocks but he had lost stability. He had turned and began to roll. He rolled violently down the last of the slope, across hard ground, finally came to rest in the heart of a clump of dense shrubbery, unconscious.

In the blue of dusk, in the odd reflected light of the last of the sun on the mountains to the east, he crawled to the brook. He drank until his belly felt tight. He spewed up the water weakly and waited a long time and then drank sparingly. When he knew he would retain it, he crawled into the brush that would protect him from the morning sun.

In mid-morning he crawled out and drank. He had expected to feel stronger, but he felt weaker. He rolled onto his back, shaded his eyes, and looked up the dizzy cliff face. He tried to pick out his ledge, but he could not.

I got down from there, he thought. I got down alive. And it would have been a good trick for a whole man. I can tell myself I did that much. I have water and shade. Two ingredients. I need a doctor and food. What is today? It was the ninth of May when they found us. I went over the edge at dawn on the tenth. Yesterday was the eleventh. This will be the twelfth. Sunday morning then. A Sunday in May.

He tried to guess where he was in relation to the smashed car. He closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct how it had looked from the tree. At least it had not burned. It would be wise to get near the car, but not too far from the water. A man on a mountain might
spot the car. He might climb down to investigate. There was that frail chance.

It should be in that direction, on the far side of the stream. Two hundred yards, perhaps. Maybe more. I can try it. There’s nothing else to do.

He thought for a moment and then his heart began to pound. The car had not burned. Sylvia had liked to keep things in the glove compartment. Cookies, crackers, candy. Her appetite had never softened the trim lines of her body. There would be something there. Enough to give him another day, perhaps. Or two. He began the laborious crawl. He knew it was the only way he could move. Even if he could find a stick and pull himself erect, the bad leg and bad arm were on the same side. If only it could have been the right leg that was bad …

From time to time he strained up to see the terrain ahead. When the far bank looked better, he pulled himself through a shallow place in the stream, and took time out to soak himself in a pool a foot and a half deep. Water stung the hurts of his body, the knee and elbows raw with crawling.

On the far bank he found a bush with dark berries. He plucked several and could not decide how he could eat them. His jaw hung slack, badly broken, he knew. He pulped the berries in his fingers, and stuck them into the back of his throat, worked them down with his tongue. They were violently bitter and he coughed them out. The cookies and crackers would be a problem. Perhaps they could be pulped in water, in some sort of container, possibly a hub cap, and drunk like soup.

He moved on under the height of the sun. He stopped when he heard a curious sound, a flapping and croaking sound. He moved toward it. He saw a black ugly bird rise, croaking, tilt creaking wings and soar down again. Another bird came up and went down. He crawled and parted the brush and saw them in an open space, tearing, quarrelling, wings outspread, a tumult of hunger. He closed his eyes when a shift of the wind brought him the sour-sweet smell of what they had been fighting over. When he opened them again he saw, under the moving blackness,
the soiled shreds of pistachio green and of yellow. He cawed at them, a furious sound of anger coming from the broken mouth at this ultimate indignity. He hurled small stones and crawled with painful haste. They went away and sat like deacons on the limbs of low barren trees, observing him. He could not look at what was left of Sylvia, could not bring himself to look. They seemed to recognize his weakness, and they moved closer.

For the rest of the afternoon, he worked with the furious energy of insanity. He used the stones close to her first, straining with the heavy ones. But there were not enough. He had to go further away each time, and many times he had to go so far they returned to her, the bolder ones, and he had to drive them away when he came back, pushing the stone along in front of him. He worked through the heat of the day with the mindless determination of a half crippled ant, and he made the cairn bigger and stronger than it had to be made.

Once it was done, his strength ebbed away from him and he lay on his back. The birds seemed to give up; some of them flew away. He watched them work themselves up out of the canyon, laboring up on black wings, circling higher until at last they came into the wind currents off the peaks and circled up there on motionless wings, in evil grace, before gliding off to some unknown place. But there were other birds who waited.

He turned his head and looked at the cairn. He wished he could speak aloud. But he could make the words in his head, and make them so clear he could read them as though he printed them carefully.

“This is a prayer. I have not prayed in many years. It isn’t for me. It’s for her. Her name was Sylvia. She sinned. She was a beautiful woman. She was twenty-six years old when she died. She died in terror and in shame and in degradation. She paid more than enough during the last hours she had on earth. She had her hell then. She doesn’t need any more. Take care of her, somehow. Please.”

He crawled to the stream and drank. He knew he could not crawl much farther. He knew the car would have to
wait until the next day, if there would be a next day for him. He crawled into the shelter of the brush and lay on his back and watched, through green leaves, the end of the day. And he thought of how she had been in Mexico City.

They had driven down from Juarez in three days. The increasing distance had not given her peace of mind. Rather she had seemed to grow more frightened, day by day, pale, nervous, irritable.

“We’re safe now,” he told her.

“We’ll never be safe. We shouldn’t have done it. We shouldn’t have tried to do it, Lloyd. We were crazy to try it. We were insane to even think of it. You don’t know what they’re capable of. You don’t know how he’ll feel about this. He can’t let a thing like this go. We’ll never be safe.”

“Don’t worry about it. Let me take care of things.”

“You can’t take care of things. You don’t understand them. You don’t know how they are.”

She refused to be calmed. He found a small and inconspicuous hotel in Mexico City, a hotel with a parking lot in the rear where the car would be well concealed. He left the money locked in the trunk compartment. It seemed to be the safest place. He took ten of the hundred dollar bills. He had an idea how such things were managed. She refused to leave the small suite. He went out alone. He knew how careful he had to be. When they had been making plans he had managed to find out, without arousing suspicion, the names of those Latin American countries where citizenship could be arranged. There were three of them. He had no luck with the first consular official. His hints were coldly ignored. At the second place he had luck, even though the man made him uneasy.

The man was named Señor Rillardo, and he had a small unclean office, a look of greed, a rumpled suit, and very small fat white hands.

“You would like to become a citizen of my country?”

“Yes sir.”

“It is necessary first to have a visa and then, after you are there, you make application for an immigrante permit.
Then, in two years, if there is approval, after simple tests, you receive first papers. You have a passport?”

“No sir.”

“Ah! That makes a problem. What do you have?”

“This. My tourista card.”

Rillardo took it and looked at it. “This is your name?”

“Yes, it is.”

“You could get a passport, Meester Wescott?”

“I would not care to go back and ask for one. For personal reasons.”

“For, perhaps, legal reasons?”

“I am not wanted by the law, Señor Rillardo.”

Rillardo spread his small hands and said, “Then?”

“I have an enemy. A very powerful man.”

“I see.”

“I have understood that … in cases of emergency … your government is sometimes understanding. Certain shortcuts can be arranged.”

Rillardo’s face lost all expression. “It is possible. But such things can be very expensive.”

“There is some money.”

“How much?”

Lloyd smiled. “Isn’t that the question I should be asking? Assume there is enough. What can you provide?”

“This is not a promise. I do not commit myself or my … associates, Meester Wescott. But if there was enough, this thing could be done. By personal examination and approval I could make of you a citizen of our nation, and I could issue you a passport here. Then air transportation could be most easily arranged. However, this is no guarantee against extradition. We do not offend our very powerful neighbor.”

“No one will want to extradite me.”

“I can name a figure. You must understand that I must make gifts to very many people. Our small country has a great number of officials. Many of them are men of great probity. For them the gifts must be ample. I would say, for you, it could be done for … in American dollars … twenty thousand.”

“That is too much!”

Rillardo smiled sadly. “Safety is always expensive. Security is a rare commodity in a troubled world, my friend.”

Lloyd thought for a moment. “Perhaps, if I were to make you a personal gift, Señor, completely aside from our transaction, it might be that you could talk your friends into a lower figure.”

“A gift?”

Lloyd took out the automobile permit issued him when he had crossed the border and handed it to Rillardo. Rillardo pursed his lips. “Such things are difficult. There are Mexican customs to consider. It is not easy.”

“Certainly you have friends in the Mexican customs department.”

“Acquaintances, only. What is the color of this vehicle?”

“Red and white. A red like the border of that magazine on your desk. As you can see it’s a recent model. It has fifteen thousand miles on it. It is a handsome car. I will have no further use for it … if we should have a meeting of the minds.”

Rillardo laid the permit on his desk. “And what do you think would be a fair figure, Meester Wescott, for what you wish me to do for you?”

“May I first ask a question? If one lives quietly in your country, how much does it cost to five there, in American dollars?”

“Quietly? I must have more information.”

“A small rented house not too far from a city. A full time maid and gardener. Good food. Perhaps a small swimming pool. Very little entertaining. Reasonably modern utilities.”

“For that … for a man alone, I should say it could be done adequately, even with a certain style, for twenty-five hundred dollars a year.”

Lloyd did a rapid computation. Say three thousand a year for two. Twenty from a hundred and ten would leave ninety. Thirty years.

“This is my offer, Señor Rillardo. I will pay the twenty thousand you ask. In cash.”

The black eyebrows went up. “I do not understand?”

“For both of us. There are two of us. Here is her tourista card.”

Rillardo took it and read the name aloud. “Miss Sylvia Kennedy. This is difficult. You make it difficult for me. Can you not be husband and wife?”

“Not legally. You can call us that, if you wish.”

“I see. She was the woman of the man you speak of?”

“His wife. She used her birth certificate to get her card. She walked across the bridge.”

“Perhaps you took the money of this man too?”

“That should not concern you, Señor.”

“You are correct. I must apologize.”

“Can it be done?”

Rillardo thought for a long time, frowning, fingering the corner of the auto permit. He smiled. “I can do it. But she must be called your wife.”

“All right. What’s the next step?”

“I must have ten thousand American dollars. I can issue the passport in two weeks time. There are certain things that must be checked first.”

“Can you give me a receipt?”

“Of course not! That is absurd!”

“I will give you five thousand. I will give you the final amount when we board the plane.”

“You make it more difficult.”

“I am sorry.”

Rillardo sighed heavily. “Then I shall arrange it your way. Have you the money here?”

“I will bring it to you.”

“Today, please.”