Bitter Truth (38 page)

“Mr. Shaw, why are there bars on your windows?”

From across the room, still staring at the photograph, he said, “Because of the first time I heard the fire speak.”

“When was that?”

“Years and years ago. When I could still walk.”

“What was the word it repeated the first time?”

“ ‘Jump,’ ” he said. “ ‘Jump. Jump. Jump.’ ”

I think all of us in this world carry our own individual hells, like a turtle shell on our backs, hauling it about from place to place, the burden so constant we often forget how its weight is twisting our bodies and spirits into grotesquery. This hell is the cost, I believe, of being human and humane, and better that, I figure, than the oblivious, spaced-out bliss promised by places like the Church of the New Life. But never have I seen an individual’s personal hell so objectively and oppressively rendered in his surroundings as I saw in the room of Kingsley Reddman Shaw. Wherever he was jumping to when he ruined his legs, he was jumping to a better place than this.

I blinked into the sunlight outside Veritas. Nat had progressed in his work to the hedges on the other side of the doorway. He saw me standing on the steps and without climbing from his ladder he shouted out, “Had a pleasant meeting, Mr. Carl?”

“How long has he been like that, Nat?”

“For as long as I’ve been here. But it’s gotten worse over the years.”

“How old was he when he jumped from the window?”

“Twenty-five or thereabouts, but by then he had not been out of the room for six or seven years.”

“I’ve never seen such a horrible place in my life.”

“N’aren’t too many like it. That was his grandfather’s room until the elder Mrs. Shaw moved her son into it. Much of the furnishings were left over from Mr. Reddman’s time.”

“Even the cougar.”

“Mr. Reddman bought it from the farmer who killed it. We’ve tried to remove it but Mr. Shaw won’t allow us.”

“And the painting of Faith Reddman Shaw?”

“Mr. Reddman commissioned it, a portrait of his only surviving daughter.”

“What was he like, this Claudius Reddman?”

“A hard man, Mr. Carl. Even in his last years, when he dedicated himself fully to philanthropy, he was hard. Do you know what his last words were?”

“No.”

“At the end it was his lungs that rotted out. Tumors the size of frogs, I was told. The doctors kept him delirious on morphine to hide the pain. That last night, the elder Mrs. Shaw, she made sure I was there, to run for whatever the nurses needed. He was crying and shouting out and had to be restrained with leather straps. And the final thing he said before he shivered into death was, ‘It was only business.’ ”

Nat laughed at that, and turned back to his hedges, opening the shears and clipping off two shoots of green at once.

It was only business. I wondered if that would satisfy the Pooles for whatever injustices by Claudius Reddman they believed shattered their world. Well, whatever price was paid by the Pooles, it was being paid by the Reddmans too. After what had happened to Kingsley, it seemed like overkill to go after the heirs.

I had an uneasy feeling driving down out of the Main Line, back to the city along the expressway. Kingsley Shaw had said his mother was still alive and it was she who was killing his children, but as he said it he seemed to show no overt sadness over the death of his son, or of his daughter six months before, and he seemed to have no worries for Caroline or Bobby. He said his mother was alive and killing his children and still he was begging me to take him to her. Was her spirit still alive? Could she somehow be responsible? I remembered the way I bounced off the walls when I had first seen Hitchcock’s
Psycho
and I wondered if somehow Kingsley was bringing this tragedy down around himself, all in the name of his mother. I could see him in that room, in his wheelchair, wearing a black dress and black bonnet, a knife in his hand, screeching music in the background. I resolved on the Schuylkill Expressway, passing the very spot where Raffaello’s Cadillac had been ambushed with me inside, I resolved then and there to never ever take a shower at Veritas.

It was late afternoon already when I parked my car on Spruce Street and walked up the stairs to my apartment and found Caroline Shaw waiting for me. I went to her and put my arms around her and told her that her brother Edward had been murdered.

Part 4

Dead Men Raining

Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations
.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON

43

San Ignacio, Belize

S
AN IGNACIO IS a beat old frontier town, the capital of Belize’s wild west and the gateway to Guatemala. Its narrow streets, crowded with colorfully stuccoed buildings and lined with open sewers, wind haphazardly up the sharp hillside on which it has grown. It is a city built for logging and the gathering of the sap of the sapodilla tree, which is processed into chewing gum, and though chewing gum is now largely synthetic and logging no longer takes place, the city still has the feel of a logging town, unpredictable and good-natured.

I am staying at the San Ignacio Hotel, just down the hill from a set of Mayan ruins with the comforting name of Cahel Pech, which means the place of ticks. My hotel is an old colonial outpost with a fine swimming pool. From the balcony of my room I can see the thick jungle that chokes the hills surrounding the city. I sit on the balcony and stare at the wild green of the jungle and wonder what the man I am seeking is doing right now, wonder how much he is enjoying his wealth in this tropical swelter. He has a fortune at his disposal, the whole of the Wergeld Trust, as he so brazenly let me know by the name on his account at the Belize Bank, but instead of hiding out in Paris or Rome or on a boat docked alongside a hidden cay in the Caribbean, he has come to the jungle. It was wise of him, I guess, in planning for his infinite future, to try to grow accustomed to the heat.

I am close to him now, closer than I truly believed I would find myself when I left the United States for this country. I felt his proximity on the top of El Castillo in the ancient Mayan ruins of Xunantunich and went out to confirm it on the streets of San Ignacio. The Belize Bank branch on Burns Avenue was a whitewashed building, trimmed in turquoise, just across from the New Lucky Chinese restaurant. While Canek Panti waited outside, I spoke to the assistant branch manager on the second floor. I like assistant branch managers, they are usually so willing to please without wanting to disturb their bosses, but this one was no help. “I am unable by law to tell you anything about that account, sir,” he said, and no importuning, no playacting, no flashed American dollars would change his mind. I was puzzled that no one in the bank recognized the picture, but then, I figured, he had had a servant do his banking. He must trust his servant an awful lot if he trusted his servant to do his banking.

We checked out a joint called Eva’s on the main strip of the city, a blue-painted shack, where, Canek told me, foreign travelers and expatriots congregate. I sat at a table under a slowly spinning fan and ordered a black bean soup called
chilmoles
and a beer. The Belikin was good and cold and the soup was good and hot, loaded with stewed chicken, a white hard-boiled egg bobbing on the surface, and the owner of the place, an expat Englishman named Bob, was talkative. He tried to book me on a river trip or in a tourist lodge in the jungle, but all I wanted to know was if he had seen the man in the photograph. “Never,” he said, “and most of the visitors who come through town end up stopping here.”

“Any word,” I asked, “of a foreigner who has set up a ranch in the jungles nearby?”

“Not someone who hasn’t come through here. Most of the ranch owners take lodgers and use us to help book their places. But it’s a big jungle, mate. If you wanted to get lost you’d have no problem getting lost here.”

After Eva’s, Canek left to make arrangements to stay with people he had in the area. I had hired him as my guide, at ninety-five dollars a day for as long as I was in the west, and he seemed pleased by the arrangement, as was I. A friend in foreign places is rare, and one you can trust, as I trust Canek Panti, is even rarer. And who better to guide me through these jungles than a Mayan? Alone now, I took a walk around town. There were few beggars in San Ignacio, no one on the street trying to peddle me dope, and I enjoyed the walk despite the heat. I showed my photograph to storekeepers, to passersby, to the old folk sitting in the town circle at the mouth of the bridge, but no one recognized the man I am hunting. I asked the mobs of taxi drivers I saw on every corner with no better luck. I even thought to check out the waiters at my hotel. There is a restaurant overlooking the pool and it is a rather nice place that is rumored to serve the best steaks in Belize and if someone wanted to slip out of the jungle for a cocktail and a hearty meal this is where he would slip, but they all examined the picture, one after another, and shook their heads.

While on my walk, a car with speakers on top trailed a huge colorful placard through the city’s streets. The placard was advertising the Circus Suarez, in town for one night only, with its prime attraction:
“7 Osos Blancos Gigantes.”
The lady at the hotel told me that people were coming from all over the Cayo to see the circus and that children were being asked to bring in stray dogs to feed the seven polar bears. The circus tent was raised just up the hill from my hotel and I walked the grounds before the circus was to start, searching the waiting mob for the face of a killer. I searched until the crowd surged madly through the tiny entrance of the tent. I didn’t go in myself. I felt enough out of place in Belize as it was; I didn’t need to see seven polar bears doing tricks in the heat of Central America.

As I walked back down the hill to my hotel, walking along a shallow open sewer, I saw something sitting in the thin stream of excrement. I stepped closer. It was a frog, a huge frog, muscular and still, as big as a head, sitting silent, breathing darkly, staring back at me with deep menace. I spun around quickly, filled with an urgent panic, certain I was being followed. There was no one there.

The next day was market day in San Ignacio. Canek had volunteered to go off to the outlying farms to show around the photograph, so I strolled the market alone. It was set up in the middle of a dirt plaza not far from the river. Ragged trucks from the outlying farms were displaying their fare, forming an alley in the shape of an L, and buses had come bringing shoppers from all over the Cayo. Men in hats, cowboy hats or dirty baseball hats, were sitting on the covered beds of their trucks or sitting on plastic pails or standing before sacks of rice, sacks of beans, piles of cucumbers, boxes of tubers, cartons of eggs, melons and onions, peppers and carrots, black beans, pumpkin seeds, shoes, cabbages, more shoes. Women sat on the ground in front of herbs spread out on empty canvas bags. The men and women were talking Spanish or the strange language I had heard Canek speak with the ferryman, Mayan. Across a stone wall were stretched yards and yards of used clothing. I stared at everything as if my eyes were hungry, the fruits, the people, the blazing colors, showing the photograph, getting smiles but no positive response. Until a handsome young man with a round face and a mustache nodded his head in recognition.

He wore a wrinkled white long-sleeved shirt and grayed jeans and sandals and tightly slung around his shoulder was the strap of a bag, with only a piece of sheepskin to keep it from digging into his shoulder.

“You recognize him?” I asked.

He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.

“Where did you see him?”

He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.

“Do you speak any English at all?”

He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.

“Can I buy you a Belikin?” I said, stressing the name of the beer and lifting my hand as if I was chugging.

He answered in Mayan and nodded his head and smiled warmly. He walked with me to Eva’s, where the owner served us up two beers and brought his cook from the back to act as my translator. His name was Rudi, the man from the market said, and his story was intriguing as all hell.

He had been working on his family’s farm when a man, not a foreigner, came up to the house in a truck and said he needed to buy a great deal of supplies. Rudi sold the man what he could from his farm and went with him in the truck to the other farms in the area to purchase the rest. For what he couldn’t buy at the farms he went to the same market where I had found Rudi and bought sacks of rice, sacks of beans, crates of chickens, piles of assorted vegetables and roots. When the whole load was put into the truck the man offered Rudi one hundred Belizean dollars, about fifty dollars American, to help him deliver the produce. Together, Rudi and the man drove the truck to a spot on the Macal River, just past one of the jungle lodges, where an old wooden canoe with a motor was beached and tied to a stake. Rudi and the man loaded up what they could on the canoe and began to motor south, up the river. It was a long trip upriver and often Rudi and the man had to get into the water and walk the canoe through mild rapids. Finally, the man guided the boat to the riverbank beside a pile of big rocks and beneath a giant
kepak
tree, bigger and older than any Rudi had seen by the river before. The man told Rudi to unload the produce onto the bank while he carried it, load by load, up to the site. Rudi was ordered not to leave the river under any circumstances and when the man gave the order he fingered the intricately carved handle of his machete. The man then hefted a sack of rice and disappeared up a path into the thick jungle. He was gone for twenty minutes before he returned for another load. It took an hour to unload the first boat and three boatloads to take the entire contents of the truck up the river. On the last of the three trips upriver, when the boat was approaching the pile of rocks and the giant
kepak,
Rudi saw a man staring out at them from the jungle, a foreigner. He was there for just a moment before he disappeared but Rudi had seen him clearly. And the face he had seen peering out of the jungle, he was sure, was the face in the photograph.

Canek and I spent the next day making arrangements, finding a canoe, getting together any supplies we might need. Tomorrow we are going onto the river, searching for the pile of rocks and the great ancient
kepak
tree that will lead me to my quarry. Canek tells me that
kepak
is the Mayan word for the cottonwood tree and that the Mayans believe that when the last of the cottonwoods die, all life in the rain forest will be destroyed. The tree seems a fittingly dire symbol for the man I am hunting. He bought the destruction of Jacqueline Shaw and Edward Shaw for his own vile purposes and now it is time for me to start making him pay. He’s there, I know it, on the river, and I know he knows I know it. Of the people to whom I showed the picture, someone knows someone who knew to get in touch with him, I am sure. He could have killed me had he wanted to long before I arrived in San Ignacio, but he wants me to come. Maybe his new jungle life is lonely and he wants the company. Or maybe he needs someone to whom to crow. He is expecting me and I won’t disappoint him. I am very close now to collecting my fortune, I am sure. And if he has other ideas, if he intends for me to be another victim, I figure I’ll be perfectly safe as long as I’m with my friend, my guide, and my protector, the honorable Canek Panti.

My arms and face are covered with mosquito bites. On the balcony of my hotel room I examine those I can closely in the sun, wondering which of the swollen swaths of flesh contain the squirming larvae of the botfly the nun had so kindly warned me about on the flight into Belize. I wonder if the man I am chasing knows how to suffocate the beefworm with glue and Scotch tape or instead lets it grow within him, like he let the evil inside him grow and fester. I know now the root of that evil, I have seen the ledgers in which it was documented in even rows of precise numbers. Some crimes are forgotten the moment they are perpetrated and it is as if they had never occurred; some crimes live on forever. The tragedy of the Reddmans was that the crime in those ledgers was of the latter. It is still alive, still virulent, still cursing the perpetrator’s heirs a century after its commission.