“This you want?” she whispered. “Turn some bad day to good things?”
“This I want.”
“This you have, Tuh-rrrravis.”
“You are fine.”
“Sank you ver‘ motch. You are doing some thing in Mexico… how you say?… peligroso?”
“Dangerous? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”
She held me tightly and made a small growling sound in her throat. “Some person hurting you, Elena will fix. Tear out some eyes. Cut out some tongue. Breaking all bones, verdad?”
Something came flickering in through the back door of my mind, but by then everybody had become too busy to notice, and so the thought sat patiently out there in the back entryway until somebody had time to notice it.
I got around to noticing it when she lay purring into my throat, tickling weight of long heavy dark hair fanned across my chest. I eased the blanket up over her without awakening her. The thought that had come into the back of my mind was a memory of how the primitive warriors of history dreaded being handed over, alive, to the women of the enemy tribe. There had been a very convincing savagery in Elena’s threats about what she would do to whoever harmed me.
Rockland had gone to Eva Vitrier’s estate in La Colonia, and he had managed to take Bix Bowie away in Bundy’s car. Bundy had been wickedly pleased to learn that Eva could become emotionally involved, infatuated, with a girl she saw on the street and contrive to invite the girl and her friend into her home. The two girls had been her guests for a long time. It would seem plausible that they might tell Eva Vitrier some of the rancid highlights of their vacation in Mexico, the same things Nesta had told Meyer.
So sooner or later Mrs. Vitrier would reveal, calculatingly or accidentally, her desire for the Bowie girl. In view of Bix’s passivity about being used in physical ways, perhaps an actual affair had begun. Safe to assume that Minda McLeen would be opposed, and also fair to state there was very little she could do about it. So the note to Harlan Bowie about coming to get Bix may have come from Minda. Perhaps the girls quarreled over Eva’s attentions to Bix, Minda demanding that Bix leave, Bix refusing. So Minda left.
Knowing Rockland’s past abuse of Bix, knowing Rockland was responsible for her addiction, knowing Rockland was responsible for her death that Sunday evening, what would happen to Rockland if he went back to the Vitrier house? She could very well have mutilated him in exactly the ways I had seen. The flaying and blinding could even be said to be a symbolic expression of her attitude toward male sexuality. And perhaps her wealth enabled her to employ muscle she could trust-muscle that could overpower him, truss him up, leave him alone for her savage attentions, and then dispose of truck, camper, and body in one package.
So then Wally McLeen would be a waste of time. But it was set, so we’d lose nothing by going through with it. I thought of a twelve-second system for opening him up, and knew it would draw a wide dazed blank He was one of the nice little people you meet on a Honda.
Elena suddenly began to jerk and twitch and make muffled little yelping sounds. I woke her up, and tenderly and gently quieted her down. She said it had been a terrible, terrible dream. I had been broken into tiny bits, and if she could put them together in time I would live. But the little wet pieces kept crawling away in every direction as she tried to reconstruct me.
Sixteen
THURSDAY was another bright, hot, beautiful morning. I had spent the time after driving Elena to town, sitting at the desk in the room and going through Rockland’s little red notebook. There were Miami and Miami Beach addresses, and addresses all over the country, presumably people who had stayed at the Sultana and who had subscribed to one of Rockland’s services-in one way or another. It would be logical for him to keep such a record.
The notes and reminders were too cryptic to be of any use. Things like “L.2 Sat aft”; “2 doz, suite 20B”; “$100 Reb in 7th.” As they were chronological, I could get enough hints to figure out when notes were made. He didn’t make many. There was a notation of the cost of new tires in pesos and dollars, made before they got to Oaxaca. And just a few addresses after that, Bundy, the Vitrier estate, the hotel where Bix and Minda had stayed, and one that read, “I. V. Rivereta, Fiesta D, Mex City.” All the rest of the pages were completely blank. On the inside back cover was his social security number.
At breakfast I checked out my twelve-second system with Meyer. “If I start edging up on him, he has time to adjust, assuming he’s our nut, which I doubt. So I will drop it on him suddenly and from considerable altitude, and we will watch his throat and his mouth and his eyes like a pair of eagles, and no man living can make a fast enough recovery to hide every part of it, especially when I come on very amiable and kindly and understanding.”
I told him the approach. He approved. He had watched me do it before. He had seen it work and seen it fail.
So we drove out to the turnoff to Yagul. We could see it a couple of miles north of the main road as we turned off, old stone patterns atop a rounded hill which bore faint traces of the old horizontal terracing. I drove across flats and then up the steep winding road to a wide paved parking area. There was an old sedan there with Mexican plates, and the small Honda. That was all.
As we got out, a large Mexican family came down the worn path from the ruins and started getting into the sedan, arguing about who would sit where. We went up the path. A gnarled little man came trudging out of a shady spot to collect the small government fee and give us our handsomely printed tickets. He went back to his place in the shade, his back against raw rock. From there he could look out across the valley, with all the ruins behind him.
The morning sky was a deep rich Kodachrome blue. A buzzard wheeled in the updraft from the hill slope, making sounds very like a pig. Tall clumps of cactus with big red blossoms grew out of the stony soil. It was indeed quiet. Two buses moved along the valley floor toward Oaxaca, stolid, silent beetles.
We came upon the traditional ball court, a long sunken rectangle with sloping sides of carefully fitted stone, with the high place where the priests sat and watched, and the lower places for the other spectators. Tricky bounces off those side walls. Iron rings set into the stone at either end, now long rusted away. Archeologists believe that the captain of the winning team was beheaded. It was some sort of honor to strive for. It meant a permanent place in the record books. It would keep a team from running away with the league. Perhaps the same theory as the cellar team getting first draft choice.
We looked at the front of the long temple, at the altars, at the peak of a distant knoll beyond the edge of the temple front wall, and saw, silhouetted against the sky, along with some twisted little trees, a dumpy figure semaphoring its arms at us, and a faint hail came upwind.
We found the stone steps that would lead us up to the temple level. A lot of it was restored. When they restore, they stick pebbles in the mortar between the new courses of stone. The academic mind saying, “See? This is all fake. We stuck it on the way we think it used to be.”
Behind the temple farade there were small courtyards and unroofed stone walls forming a maze of small rooms and corridors. After we came to two dead ends, I found a toe hold and climbed up and picked out the right route toward Wally’s little hill. We came out the back of the temple complex and went up a narrow and winding footpath, puffing a little in the unaccustomed altitude.