ViraVax (10 page)

Chapter 16

Colonel Toledo received his divorce judgment the morning the stitches in his fists came out. His hands were stiff and tender from their fury against Grace’s cabinets, so his fingers fumbled at the wire seal on the messenger’s packet. Inside, Rico found the validation paper and a personal note in Grace’s calligraphic hand:

“. . . really loving someone”
(the yearning brushed the edge of agony)
“means you are willing to admit the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away.” —Samuel R. Delany, “The Star Pit.”

I can’t avoid disliking you anymore.—G.

Rico crumpled it, smashed it, tossed it out the open window and into the rest of the garbage strewn in the street. He made a quick call, two quick sugared rums, and paced off the dingy cubicle of his life.

Twenty minutes later Rachel picked him up in her black Flicker and settled a bottle of Wild Turkey between his thighs.

“This looks like a ticket to trouble,” he said.

“Then you’re looking at it all wrong, as usual,” she snapped.

She’d said this before, after she’d called him by somebody else’s name. Considering they were making love at the time, he hadn’t yet found a right way to look at it. She white-knuckled the handgrips and did the smoky-tire all the way home. Then she handed him the pouch with the official DIA seal.

“Two in one day,” Rico muttered, “a goddamn big shot.”

Inside he found his official suspension on Defense Intelligence Agency letterhead, clipped to his severance paycheck. That, in itself, was a clear message that he was through. Solaris’s meticulous left-handed signature smudged in the middle of the “o.” The smudge looked genuine but that didn’t mean squat. Something as simple as a smudge gave a document legitimacy. A smudge said, “This is personal. See, I touched it myself.”

ComBase, the DIA brain, employed software that altered each electronic signature of every tight-ass bureaucrat with combinations of over a hundred smudges, squiggles, skips and runs. That permitted a volume business with a personal touch. Rico’s graduation project at the academy made the Agency millions and he got a commendation.

He tore the bank draft loose from the notice and stuffed it into his back pocket. For the second time in as many hours Rico crumpled a fistful of paperwork into a ball, smashed it flat with his fist and sailed it out the window.

After Rachel’s Wild Turkey came hard sex in the bedroom, more sugared rums. With the rum came rage, remorse and a wild Flicker ride to the airport. The two of them stumbled aboard a flight to somewhere before Rico passed out.

Ex-Colonel Rico Toledo woke up tangled in Rachel’s arms and legs, their tropical sweat prickling at him where they pulled apart. A muggy heat smothered everything but the familiar aroma of their sex. White sheets contrasted their skins—his, dark and brush-scratched; hers, schoolgirl pale. He sat up against the headboard, another hangover hammering his temples.

The Yucatan dawn made a white glow of his pants where he’d slung them across a chair at the bedside. Rico had stitched a ring into the right-hand pocket of those pants for safekeeping. Such a treasure should not be flashed among men of the children of the large, wormy bellies. Even with his connections, the stone took more of his severance pay than the IRS. Only Rico knew how much went into
that.
He liked the feel of it when he slipped on his pants. Its cool gold never warmed up.

The Agency left him enough to scrape by on for six months, if he stayed in Mexico.

A year, in the States.

But then he would be in the States and that was no picnic right now. He had set out to prove something by flying to the heart of the Yucatan. After at least two days of nonstop drinking, it was time he found out what.

Rachel Lear was half his age, with red hair and freckles the Latins called
pecas.
She had a prodigious thirst for men, and that remained more of a problem between them than their ages.

Unlike the pinch-nosed embassy crowd, the
campesinos
understood that it was not an unnatural thing for a man to love a younger woman. Many
campesinos
had been cut by their women, as well, and all of them drank when the bottle passed around. Colonel Toledo, the chameleon, had held a role so long that he had become like an insect in amber.

Rico marveled over his turn of luck as he sat naked in the lounge chair. He watched Rachel sprawl facedown to fill his hollow in the bed, her right hand tucked under her cheek, her right leg cocked to her waist. A tuft of red hair glowed between her legs.

The Yucatan was truly a place of magic, a place of ripples in the drapery of time. This was Latin America, but not a war zone. Not even a war country. Rico had fled here twice. In 1998 he tried forgetting a war. In 2010 he brought Harry and Grace to see the heart of the Maya empire, and to avoid some ugly but necessary steps that the Agency was taking all over Costa Brava in his absence. Grace had got histoplasmosis from exploring a Maya cave and Rico had spent most of that vacation in a hospital, but, like it or not, it made an excellent alibi when he returned to Costa Brava, and to the political fallout.

Now Rico tried to forget Grace, and that wasn’t working. He and Rachel had argued all night. It started . . . well, he pushed it out of mind. That would not discourage him now from enjoying the dawn of the day that everything would change.

A bone-white sunlight seared anything that was not stone, adding counterpoint to his headache. Rico pulled on his rumpled clothes and turned the window fan on high. The bearings howled and ragged blades shrieked against the frame. Not much of a breeze kicked up, and Rachel didn’t stir.

Rachel spoke Spanish, but she was shy because she’d learned it in school and most of the embassy staff enveloped themselves in English. She refused to speak it except between them, so Rico did most of the talking. She attracted people, men and women, so Rico talked a lot, but talking came pretty natural to Rico, in either language.

It’s sure a plus when you’re outspooking spooks
, he thought.

Rico Toledo, on the retirement track with the Defense Intelligence Agency, made a helluva tour guide.

Didn’t talk much at home.

Bob or Bernice, friends of Rachel’s from the beachside bar, flushed the toilet across the hall. They were Rachel’s age and on their spring break from college. Neither of them spoke Spanish and they didn’t have much time left. Consular flunkies and federal reps checked their registry at the guesthouse twice a day. Lots of good Americans jumped in the last few days, they’d learned that much. Rachel’s friends were pretty boring, but Rico had tried to deliver them some culture, anyway.

Rico gulped down the warm, flat beer he’d been saving, then poured himself a dark rum. He added sugar and lemon, then carried it to the veranda to sip with the parrot, who asked him his name over and over and over. By the time Rico finished his drink he was restless again and needed to move.

“Get up,” he said to Rachel. “Your friends are up and the car’s here.”

“Don’t order me around.”

She spoke into her pillow and he could barely understand her.

“Try this, okay? Okay?” she said. “Just tell me that the car’s here.”

He didn’t answer.

“Try it.”

Rico poured himself another Flor de Caña, mixed in the sugar and the lemon slowly, then set the spoon on the glass tabletop.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

She sat up cross-legged on the bed, her red blaze of pubic hair challenging his attention.

“If you’d said, ‘Rachel, the car’s here and your friends are up,’ I could’ve—”

“Can it,” Rico said.

He tossed back his sweet, dark rum and left for a coffee with their driver.

Rico and Rachel argued mostly in Spanish. They affected a conversational tone, so her friends wouldn’t catch on. Of course, their driver knew everything and became more nervous by the kilometer.

Their driver, Carlos, didn’t speak English. His left arm had been withered by polio and his car overheated crossing the tiny range of sierras between Merida and Uxmal. He topped off the radiator with water from a wine bottle. Carlos was a smooth, cautious driver.

When the argument with Rachel got more personal than Carlos could bear, he interrupted with a passionate assessment of the American football playoffs. At one point, with all but Carlos and Rico sleeping, a huge buzzard rose from the shoulder of the road and gyred once around the car, its black eye fixed on Rico the whole time. Rachel slept tucked up against him. Her long red hair whipped their faces in the wind.

Carlos launched into the old tale about the Soothsayer’s Temple and the sacrificial ball court.

“The man was birthed from a feathered serpent’s egg,” he said, “and became a man in one night. In one night he built the Pyramid of the Magician, Temple of the Sorcerer. You will see, it is a night’s work.”

Rico didn’t tell Carlos that he’d been here twice before, that he had lived with the Maya years ago and ghosted most of the jungles of the region. Instead, Rico kept him talking.

“And the sacrifice of the ball court?” Rico asked.

Rico could see Carlos was let down by this question, like he’d expected something more from Rico. Even the casual tourist has heard of the sacrificial ball game of the Mayas. Rico was flattered that Carlos expected better of him.

Carlos shrugged.

“Two teams, with captains. They wear equipment like your football, lots of pads. They try to slap a hard rubber ball through a stone hoop sideways on the wall. The winning team gets to run through the gallery, collecting jewelry and favors from the nobles. If the weather has been bad for crops, the winning captain has the honor of being killed. To save his people.”

Carlos didn’t seem interested in elaborating and recited this lecture in a bored monotone.

“How did they do it?”

A sigh, a
thump
of the withered limb against the car door.

“Cut throat, cut off head, open chest and take out heart,” Carlos said.

He added the appropriate gestures.

“Efficient,” Rico admitted.

Carlos shrugged.

“The ball court is nothing,” he said. “The Magician’s Temple, that is very special.” Carlos repeated, with a nod, “Very special.”

“What makes it special?”

“The place, the earth that it is on. Its position in that place. The centuries. You will see.” Carlos nodded his head at Rachel. “It will be good for you, the temple. You will see.”

Then he stopped the station wagon on the shoulder to add his last jug of water to the radiator. The only mountain pass that Carlos had driven was this pitiful saddle, just a hundred meters high at the summit. The only other breaks in the terrain for two hundred klicks were temples.

Carlos explained how sunset and moonrise faced off on the diagonal at the top of the Wizard’s Temple, making the inner chambers into alternating geometries of silver and gold, shadow and light. The staircase casts an undulating serpent of shadow against the walls. This happens once a year, and this is the night.

“. . . and you stand inside, at the top, and let the shadows divide you. Then good and bad will leave your body: good to the light and bad to the shadow. You walk out with your luck for the rest of your life.”

His glance shifted from the road to Rico’s eyes, back again. Then back.

“Who told you this?” Rico asked. “A teacher?”

“No, no teacher. Uncle. He was a bad one, my friend, and he came back cured of the women and
mescal.”

“Do you think I can be cured?”

This was the first time Rico spoke of the argument, of his relationship with the young woman. It felt possible in Spanish.

Carlos softened his voice almost to a whisper.

“There is no cure for love, friend,” he said, but the word he used for “cure” was “salvation.” He rattled his bent left arm against his door and shrugged a twisted fist skyward. “If my uncle is right, if there are these devils, then I will walk away from them tonight.”

Rico had no idea at the time that “tonight” meant “midnight” and “I” meant “we.”

They drove awhile in the relative silence of the road and the countryside.

Rico felt Rachel’s breathing shift. Now she stretched, and looked around, and Carlos aimed his attention straight ahead. Rachel’s eyes shone with an ice-light: cold, blue and clear. At dawn, driving the scrub jungle through heavy mist, he noticed her eyes had been a lush, snakeskin green.

By the time the five of them got to Uxmal their eyes were tired from afternoon sun off the hood. Everything seemed hazed in light, a fine white wash. Carlos preferred to wait with his car in a patch of shade, so they cleared the guard gate without him and walked to the foot of the Temple of the Magician. A busload of American college students climbed the steep face in a gusting wind, all shouting to one another in rude, idiomatic English.

To the left hunched a lone Jaguar statue, an altar. Several of the young people gathered around this one. Rico explained the Jaguar and fertility to Rachel and their friends, the Agency’s briefing version but a good one. From somewhere on the breeze came a whiff of tortillas hissing over charcoal.

A fat American girl about Rachel’s age jumped onto the statue, clasping its head in her dimpled thighs. Another girl shrieked, then turned to the rest and shouted, “Tim, Brian. . . Shelley sat on its face! You guys, it was
so
funny! She sat on his
face!”

“Must’ve been too big to get her mouth around it,” one boy commented, and they all laughed.

Rachel’s friend Bob reached for an empty Coke bottle that leaned against the Jaguar’s shoulder, but a little dark-eyed boy snatched it up first.

Rico pulled them away in disgust, sorry that he’d been seen speaking English at all. He and Rachel wandered the stones under a reddening sun and climbed the Wizard’s Temple just before sunset. Everyone else came down early, afraid of the treacherous footholds and the rising shadows.