Dancing Aztecs (39 page)

He was dubious, but he said, “Maybe so. And all the museums, that's something else. I went to a couple of them on class trips when I was a kid, but whadaya get out of something like that? Nothing. Who knows, maybe today I'd get a kick out of it.”

“Like the Fire Department Museum,” she said. “You'd
have
to love that one.”

“Fire Department? Where's that?”

“Way downtown, near City Hall. It's full of terrific old fire engines. A friend of mine took me there one time. You
have
to see it.”

“Okay,” Jerry said. “As soon as I get back. Or, should I wait for you, and you'll take me?”

“I'm not going back,” she said, but she didn't sound happy about it. Positive, yes. Defiant yes. But not happy.

“You're not going back? Never?”

“I've left my husband,” she said, “and it's for real, and I'm never going back.”

“To him, or to New York?”

“Neither.”

“How come? Is he the mayor?”

“What?” She looked blank for a second, and then she laughed. “It's all connected in my mind,” she said. “It's a journey into independence. Or does that sound stupid?”

“No, I can see that,” he said. “If you're making a big move, you want to make a
move.”

“Right” she said. “If I'm leaving, I'm
leaving
.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “If you're throwing out the bath water, you might as well throw out the baby.”

She frowned at him. “Somehow that doesn't sound the same.”

“Why would anybody want to live anywhere except New York?” he asked her. “You're quits with your husband, so you punish yourself by living in some tank town somewhere.”

“Los Angeles isn't a tank town.”

“The hell it isn't. Los Angeles is three Long Islands next to each other. But no Midtown Tunnel.”

Laughing, she said, “If you're so crazy about New York, what are you doing way out here in the provinces?”

“Business,” he said. “I'm coming out to get something, and then I'm going right back.”

“All right,” she said. “But what if everybody felt the way you do? What if everybody wanted to live in New York?”

“They do. That's why they all hate New York so much—it's envy. But you know who the big guy is in the social set in Indianapolis? The one that just got back from a trip to New York. He could go to Chicago or St. Louis or any damn place, and all people say is, ‘How was the trip?' New York is the only place in this country he could go, when he gets back people say, “Tell me all about it.'”

She laughed again, and said, “Maybe
you're
the mayor.”

“I'm not so dumb,” he said, and a fellow in a yellow blazer came over to apologize, and to say they wanted to close up the dining room now for the night. “Sure thing,” Jerry said, and the two of them walked out to the semidark lobby.

The original idea in Jerry's head had been that he would scratch up an acquaintance with Bobbi Harwood, hustle her into bed—in
her
room—and grab the statue once she was asleep. He could be on his way back to the city before sun-up, he could be in Mel's living room—either with the golden statue, or with proof that this wasn't the right one—before noon. That had been the original idea, but something had gone wrong somewhere, and now he didn't know what the hell to do.

The problem was, she liked him. The other problem was, he liked her. Who could expect a thing like that from some ditzy broad that throws her husband's clothes out the window and takes off like an asshole for California? Who could expect that she
wouldn't
be a ditzy broad after all—except for maybe that Lincoln Center escalator idea—or that she would have such a nice friendly smile, or that she would act like a real human being instead of a bar pickup?

But without the original idea Jerry didn't have any idea at all, so it was with some variant on Plan A still in mind that he now said, “I'd ask you up to ray room for a nightcap, but I don't have anything to drink. But I'd like to go on talking.”

“So would I,” she said, smiling. “I wish I could. This has been a lot of fun, Jerry. You make me think I might want to visit New York someday.”

“It's a rotten place to visit,” he told her. “Do you want me to tell you why?”

“Yes,” she said, “but don't do it. I'd love to talk with you till morning, but I put in a seven-thirty call, and I've got a lot of driving to do tomorrow.” She held out her hand; the friendly brushoff. “I really did enjoy meeting you, Jerry.”

He took her hand, but didn't immediately release it. “Any reason you have to get up that early?”

“Several,” she said. “But the one that counts right now is that I'm not going to be a runaway wife shacking up with a strange guy her first night on the road.”

He released her hand and stepped back, a pained smile on his face. “All of a sudden, I run out of arguments.”

“I did enjoy meeting you, Jerry,” she said, and they exchanged a few more words in the same vein, and then she went away to her room and he went away to a phone booth and put in a call to Mel.

Who answered in person: “Yeah?”

“Mel?”

“Jerry! By God, what happened to you?”

“I'm out in the middle of nowhere. What's happening back there?”

“She's got it, Jerry!”

“What? Who?”

“Bobbi Harwood!” Mel's voice was running up and down its range, full of excitement, and behind him several other voices could be heard whooping and shouting.

“Bobbi Harwood?”

“
All
the others are checked out– It's
her
, Jerry, it's definitely her!”

For some reason he hated that “Great,” he said. “I'm on her trail.”

“Go get her, tiger,” Mel said.

“Right” said Jerry.

AT JFK …

“Foreigners,” said the driver of the CBS remote unit truck. “That's what it is; it's foreigners, they don't know shit.”

“You can say that again,” said the announcer, a guy named Jay Fisher, sitting beside him in the cab. The truck was a huge monster full of equipment, including its own generator, and it could send live pictures direct to the studio in Manhattan, which is what it was going to do as soon as those South American assholes in that South American asshole of an airplane got the hell onto the ground and got this goddam business over with.

The driver said it again: “They don't know shit,” he said. “An American, now, he'd come down in prime time, am I right? Make his point when there's somebody around to listen. Look what the hell time it is,” he said, and looked at his own watch to see. “Five minutes after fuckin' three o'clock in the morning. Who the hell's up now?”

“You and me,” said the announcer.

Inside the plane from Descalzo, circling for its final approach, drama had given way to exhaustion. The air conditioning had failed over northern Louisiana, and most of the passengers were now sprawled out asleep, with their mouths open; just like home. The pilot, the co-pilot, the stewardess, and Pedro himself were all dressed in strange oddments of this and that; for the pilot, it was the fifth complete set of clothing this trip. Fortunately, however, by Mobile, Alabama, Pedro had finally become inured to the processes of landing and taking off, and there had been no unfortunate incidents either there or later in Columbia, South Carolina, the ultimate refueling stop before New York. Perhaps relevant to that, there was also no more gluppe aboard, and Pedro was becoming increasingly sober. If he weren't so weary that he could barely keep his eyelids and gun raised, he would be terrified out of his mind.

Back in the passenger compartment, Edwardo and José
were
terrified out of their minds. They kept staring out the windows at all those lights down below; rows of lights, clusters of lights, masses of lights. At three o'clock in the morning, in a world of pitch-blackness, lights everywhere, white and amber and red.
That
was a civilization, by God!

Back in Quetchyl, the idea of hijacking an airplane to New York and then casually walking away in the confusion had seemed both clever and realistic, but the millions of lights told them, more than anything else, that they were about to face authorities who were less mean than Descalzan authorities only because they were so much smarter. They didn't
need
terror to do their jobs; they had brains instead. And light. And experience. And they'd seen bush leaguers before.

“We'll just walk away,” Edwardo whispered, his tongue tripping fuzzily over the consonants.

“Yes yes,” José said. He had the window seat, and he was staring down at all those lights.

On the ground, the CBS remote unit deployed itself within the area permitted by the police. Live shots presented a long-distance view of a really rotten landing;
SMASH
, went the DC-3, SMASH,
smash, smash, bap-bap-bap, rattle rattle rattle
, bouncing itself halfway down the runway, every thud making a noise like a television set dropped out a window. Sleepers bit their tongues, and awoke to a world gone mad. Phillips-head screws rained down onto the runway in the plane's wake, small pieces fell off and clanged away, and a lot of mice fell out of the overhead storage racks, wisps of wicker clenched in their teeth.

In the racketing command cabin, the crew flinched from Pedro, but his stomach was utterly empty, and his esophagus muscles were worn to a frazzle, and the worst he could come up with was a burp. Clinging to various metal projections with one hand, and to the madly waving gun with the other, Pedro fouled the air but nothing else, and at last the plane quivered to a halt and silence descended, like the mice.

The pilot, bleary-eyed and as worn as Pedro's esophagus, panted a little and then said, “All right, what now?”

“Everybody off the plane,” Pedro said.

The pilot spoke to the control tower, and shortly a lot of FBI men disguised as airport personnel surrounded the plane, and Lupe Naz opened the door, and the passengers all tottered out. The FBI men pointed many fingers toward the nearby terminal building, and the passengers staggered away.

Then the crew and Pedro came out, and a whole
bunch
of FBI men jumped on Pedro, who offered no resistance. He was hustled into the terminal building and into a fairly large room that had been set aside for this scene. The passengers were already in there, milling about and asking for the bath room, and now an FBI man with an exquisite Castilian accent demanded of Pedro, in Spanish “Jutht what do you thuppothe you're doing?”

Pedro had never heard Castilan Spanish in his life, and all he could do was blink. “I don't speak English,” he explained.

Another agent, who had been a Guevara-chaser back before switching to a domestic job, spoke to Pedro in the rotten slurred disgusting Spanish of Descalzo: “Whadaya trina do?”

Now, this was a question Pedro had known he would be asked, but which he could not answer truthfully, not if José and Edwardo were to get away. So Pedro had to tell a lie, and he had spent the last several hours deciding what lie he should tell. It had to be believable. It had to explain why he had gone to all this trouble to hijack an airplane to New York City. And now he gave the answer he'd finally decided on:

“I wanted to go to Radio City Music Hall.”

The FBI man looked at him. Except for the whine of passengers asking for the bathroom, there wasn't a sound in the room. Until all at once Lupe Naz, girl stewardess, yelled out, “Stop them! They're his collaborators!”

The FBI men all spun around, and there were José and Edwardo halfway out the door. “Hey!” said the FBI men.

“Bathroom!” Edwardo cried, with gestures. “Men's room! Great urgency!”

“They're part of the gang!” cried Lupe Naz, as several FBI men laid hands on Edwardo and José “They're all in it together!”

“No no!” cried Edwardo. “I never saw that hijacker before in my life!”

“They were in the men's room together!” cried Lupe Naz. “They are hijackers and deviants!”

Now, FBI men and hijackers have a comprehensible relationship, a simple matter of property rights, but between FBI men and deviants there is only a gulf, an abyss. The idea that these people had been in a DC-3 lavatory together was so repellent to these FBI men that their eyes lost all color, becoming slate gray, like the November sky just before a snowstorm.

Edwardo and José were shouting all manner of denials when they were upstaged by yet another event. Among the passengers in the plane, it will be remembered, were an American doctor on a malnutrition survey for the United Nations, and his Canadian assistant-mistress. The doctor, a man with a wife and three children in Racine, Wisconsin, having noticed that a UPI photographer had slipped into the room and was taking pictures of him consoling his assistant in a not entirely medical manner, now gave a whoop and a holler, flung his assistant-mistress from him, and began to wrestle with the photographer for his camera.

Several of the FBI men turned their attention to this new ridiculousness. The rest kept their attention on Edwardo and José. The remaining passengers milled around, bleating for the bathroom.

Pedro could use a bathroom himself. The door behind him was open, and possibly led to a rest room. Stepping through it, he turned right and walked for some time, and then saw a door with a silhouette of a man on it. Yes?

Yes. Pedro relieved himself, extensively, and then took a moment to wash his face and hands and neck and elbows and feet at the wondrous row of pearly white sinks along one wall. What a bathroom this was! All of the bathrooms in Quetchyl put together didn't have as much equipment as this, nor as varied, nor as clean and shiny. Pedro stayed in the bathroom for quite some time, admiring it, running water, flushing toilets, frowning in perplexity at the urinals—what were
they
for?—and generally having a terrific touristy time. Finally it occurred to him he ought to get back—those FBI men might get angry if he kept them waiting—so he left the men's room and with some difficulty found his way back to the room he'd left, and it was empty.