The Annihilators (12 page)

Then we were released for lunch; and I took a taxi to the plaza and the
Restaurante Tolteca
, which turned out to be a rather formal establishment, as many of them are down there. I was glad I’d thought to put on a necktie in spite of the warmth of the day—we’d come down five thousand feet from Mexico City and the weather was quite tropical. Since I was moderately respectable in appearance, in spite of the camera bag I was lugging, the maitre d’ condescended to indicate to me the table of the señorita Matson.

Miranda was one or two ahead of me already; she always had been. A big woman with white untidy hair and a square brown face, she was wearing a seersucker pantsuit—well, I couldn’t quite make out the pants as she sat at the table, but I knew they were there because Miranda had never, to the best of my knowledge, been seen in a skirt.

“Hey, do you know what they charge for Scotch down here?” was her greeting to me. “Forty dollars a fifth! Forty bucks!”

I said, “What do you care? You’ve always been a bourbon baby. How are you, Miranda?”

“About the way I look, and that isn’t good,” she said. “Hell, you don’t look much worse than the last time I saw you,” I said, sitting down. “What are you doing in this hole, anyway?”

She shrugged. “Somebody thinks something’s going to break wide open here and they want a man on the spot when it happens and the closest thing they could get was me.”

“That’s pretty close,” I said.

“You bastard. What do you want to drink?”

“Whatever you’re having. If it hasn’t killed you yet, it probably won’t kill me.”

“Don’t count on it. Years of heavy exposure tend to build up the immunity, dearie.”

She gave the order. Apparently she already had the waiters trained to jump; the man was back in double-quick time. We saluted each other, drank; and then we looked at each other across the table for a moment, kind of catching up with the time that had passed since we’d last met.

The trouble with Miranda Matson was that she was a big ugly competent sophisticated woman who’d seen everything; but when she looked at you with her surprisingly—considering the amount she drank—clear brown eyes you felt sure that somewhere behind them was a pretty, innocent little girl begging to be let out. There were rumors about her sexual proclivities; I guess there always are when the lady is built like a horse. I was in no position to confirm or deny them and didn’t care. She was a hell of a reporter and a good friend when one was needed; but I didn’t think friendship had brought her here. As it turned out, I was more or less wrong.

“In case you’re wondering,” she said, “I owe you people one. One of your guys bailed me out of one of those halfass African countries where they’re always killing each other and anybody else who happens to be handy. I said if there was ever anything I could do; and when your big man in Washington found there was nobody in Costa Verde he could use but Miranda, he told me what I could do. Get it out of my purse, will you? I don’t even like to touch the damn things.”

I reached under the table and dug into the enormous leather bag she had sitting there and found the gun—a two-inch-barreled job by the feel, in a tricky little holster—and the small plastic bag of cartridges. I judged fifteen rounds or three cylindersful. Not enough to fight a war, but I might manage a small battle if I was careful. I tucked the stuff away in my camera bag.

“Whew, it’s a relief to be rid of that!” Miranda said. “And here’s the material on Montano you asked for. Don’t read it here; they don’t like to have people puking all over their nice white tablecloths.” She waited until I’d slipped the envelope into my jacket pocket, and went on: “Next, I’m supposed to tell you that Bultman’s gone underground, whatever that means. Got it?”

“Bultman underground. Check.”

“Now look around and see if there’s somebody you recognize, maybe from a photograph or description.”

I glanced around casually. It was a big, high-ceilinged room with elaborate lighting fixtures. There were, as Miranda had indicated, tablecloths on the tables, and linen napkins. There seemed to be other dining rooms, perhaps more intimate, behind the main one in which we. were seated. On the street side, big windows gave a good view of the main plaza of Santa Rosalia, and of the impressive cathedral on the far side. It was of stone construction, but the religious architecture was lighter and more graceful than that of the massive fortress-mission we’d seen yesterday. I noted two groups of armed and uniformed men out there, keeping watch over the tree-shaded square…

My glance stopped abruptly at a table by the window. Red-haired and red-bearded Latins do exist, but they aren’t common; and I had no doubt of the identity of the man I was looking at. Red Henry. Enrique Rojo. He was sitting at a table with three army officers in uniform; and in his dark business suit he looked more dangerous than all three military men put together. He was in his late thirties or early forties. He had a hawklike Spanish face. Mephistopheles with a henna rinse, I thought; but instinct told me this was nobody I really wanted to make jokes about.

“Pretty, ain’t he?” Miranda shivered slightly. “The Lord High Executioner of Costa Verde. I need another drink.”

It took us most of the following day to drive to Copalque. The bus was air-conditioned, which was just as well, since we were heading down into the real lowlands now, and the temperature increased significantly as the altitude diminished. For a while we ran between large sisal fields hacked out of the jungle and not very carefully cultivated. Maybe they don’t need to be, since the plant is kind of an overgrown agave cactus: a great sunburst of thick fleshy leaves with spiny points and edges. It looks like a tough, self-reliant desert plant that shouldn’t require much cultivation. They use the fibers for cordage. It’s not up to modern nylon and dacron, or even old-fashioned manila; but it’s still a thriving industry down here.

The road got progressively worse as we left the capital city of Costa Verde behind; but what really slowed us was being stopped at one roadblock and checkpoint after another. It was apparently the great local sport: Make the lousy rich Americanos climb out of their cool vehicle and stand in the hot sun while their papers are examined, and discussed with the guide, in minute and endless detail. Then on to the next bunch of sloppy, uniformed gun-toters—ironically, the weapons being waved at us were good old American Ml6s—and the next arrogant bantam rooster of an officer, who hadn’t had his hassle-the-gringos jollies for the day and was very happy to see us.

The Hotel Copalque, when we finally reached it, turned out to be a sprawling new tourist resort complete with swimming pool, gardens, and fountains, a real oasis in the strange, low, dry jungle they have down there. There was a main building with desk, bar, restaurant, and curio shop; behind it were the guest cabins, built in the oval native style with heavy whitewashed walls and thatched roofs. But it had been a long, dry drive with just a brief break for a picnic lunch in a village along the way, and most of the party made straight for the bar and to hell with luggage and accommodations. I got Ricardo a drink.

“Save a little time for me this evening, amigo,” I said. “I’ve got something to show you, but in private.”

He glanced at me curiously. “Sure, Sam. Whenever you say. I’m not planning on one of my long jungle hikes tonight.”

I went looking for Frances and found her by the hotel desk being her usual efficient self.

“Oh, there you are,” she said. She handed me a room key. “Oh, and here’s Dick’s too; you can give it to him. They’ve taken the suitcases out already. It’s the two single cabins right over there, no steps to negotiate. I’m just down the hill from you.” She glanced at me. The slight blush that came to her face was very becoming and made her look much less formidable and businesslike. “That’s information-information, not action-information, darling. We can’t… risk anything here; everybody knows Archie and me.”

I said, “Sure. But if I should decide that I desperately need pictures of the Temple of the Sun by moonlight, you wouldn’t let me go wandering around out there at night all alone, would you? I might get lost.”

She said, “There is no Temple of the Sun. Be good, Sam. When we first came here we slept in tents,” she said in a totally different tone, looking around the elaborate tiled lobby. “There was nothing here but the jungle and the past. But the government decided that if the Guatemalans could coin money at Tikal, and the Mexicans could cash in on Uxmal and Chichen Itza, Costa Verde had to have its little tourist goldmine, too.”

“Well, they’d better clean up their act,” I said. “They’re not going to get many tourists here if they subject them to the kind of stupid harassment we got today.”

“Shhh,” she said uneasily, with a glance toward where our guide was chatting with the desk clerk. “Please, not so loud!”

I said, “For a big, brave Americano lady you sure pick up the police-state mentality fast. What’s his name, anyway?”

“Ramiro. Ramiro Sanchez.”

“What can he do to you?”

She shrugged helplessly. “Well, he can report that I allowed to come along on our tour a representative of the press who was heard making loud derogatory remarks about certain government policies. He can recommend that, since we seem to use no discretion in our choice of participants, no more institute-sponsored expeditions be allowed; and perhaps our permit to dig here should be reviewed. Please, Sam. I don’t want to talk about it. Just call me a coward and forget it… Oh, there they are.” She was looking toward the archway leading to the main road, where three men had just appeared. “I’m going to take a quick run over to the dig to see what’s being done, so I’ll know where to bring everybody in the morning. The college-boy type is our resident supervisor, Marty Ellender, a Texas boy with a degree from Tulane. The other two…”

But the trio was upon us. I was introduced to Ellender, a lean, sandy young man in jeans and cowboy boots and a big hat; and the crew foreman, a chunky, middle-aged man with a dark Spanish-Indian face, named Porfirio Gonzaga. There was a little pause.

“Oh, and this is Cortez,” Frances said.

I hadn’t really had time to look at the third man before. He was short and sturdy, as most of them are down there, and very brown, and very old. He was dressed like Gonzaga, in a straw hat and white cotton pajamas, not particularly clean; but there the resemblance ended. There was nothing Spanish about this face. It was right off one of the old bas-reliefs we’d been seeing in the museums.

They had some weird ideas of beauty back in those days—well, weird to us. They thought a flat, sloping forehead was charming and strapped boards on their babies’ heads to achieve it; and they considered the loveliest eyes to be the ones that were slightly crossed. A bead mounted on the nose, which the infant tried to look at, helped to make the eyes turn inward permanently.

But it’s possible that this standard of beauty had originally been formed in accordance with existing hereditary factors and that artificial means had later been used merely to return to an appearance that had once come naturally. It seemed hardly likely that in the twentieth century, or even in the very late nineteenth when this Cortez would have been born, local kids were still being boarded and beaded; yet this old man had all the ancient features including the bold curved predatory nose. He did not offer his hand and I made no attempt to take it. I gave him a slight bow instead, which he acknowledged in kind.

“Señor Cortez,” I said.

He shook his head. “
Yo soy Cortez solamente, Señor Felton
.”

He was only Cortez. The name of the conqueror, worn proudly by the elderly descendant of the conquered—except that this man’s ancestors had lost their elaborate civilization, for reasons unknown, long before the whitewinged ships appeared along these low jungle coasts. Our eyes met and held for a long moment; then Cortez smiled faintly, as if he had seen something that pleased and satisfied him, and I had to admit that I was relieved. I wouldn’t have wanted to think I displeased this old man, although I didn’t know why.

“We will meet again, Señor Felton. Be careful.”

“It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Cortez.”

Frances said to me, “If I’m not back in time, tell everybody the dining room opens at seven-thirty… All right, Marty, let’s go.”

I watched them leave; and for once I wasn’t appreciating the nice controlled movement of the lady’s taut derriere under her well-fitting skirt. I did note that she’d dispensed with her suit jacket and changed to sturdy low-heeled shoes; but I was really watching the old man and wondering exactly what he had seen, and approved of, when he looked at me. There was a whisper of sound behind me, and I turned to see the wheelchair roll up.

“
Dios
, isn’t that
viejo
a beautiful specimen!” Ricardo said, watching the group go out of sight. “I tell you, we could use a few hundred like that old one, about a third the age, of course. Or a few thousand. Once they were the best guerilla fighters on the continent, maybe in the world; and to hell with your Plains Indians, amigo. Those were just light cavalry, good only for hit-and-run raids; but down in Yucatan people like that old man defended their jungles stubbornly and held the invaders at bay for decades after the rest of Central America had been conquered. Hell, they rose again in 1847 and just missed booting the Spanish off the whole peninsula; they fought again in 1860; and they were still giving Porfirio Diaz fits in 1910.”

“Says proudly a man named Jimenez,” I said dryly. “Whose side are you on, anyway, Buster? Personally, I’d have picked the Spanish side. They got to ride horseback.”

“But think of having to wear those cast-iron hats and vests in this climate!” He grinned at me. “Have you got my key? You wanted a conference, you said.”

Reaching his cabin, I let him unlock the door and open it, since doing this seemed to be a matter of pride with him. I picked up his suitcase and followed the wheelchair into the pseudoethnic structure, which was very picturesque. You could look up into the depths of, or maybe I should say the heights of, the peaked thatched roof—the thatch was either plastic or sprayed with something—and there was mosquito netting hung like a fragile tent over the bed, a romantic tropical antibug device I’d never encountered before, having always put my faith in window screens and smelly chemicals.