“Very problem,” he said. “Isla Arenillas not very big. Oh, five miles and two miles, but the jungle is very dark at night. Your father walk far?”
“He might. But I think he would want some place dry to sleep. I don’t think he would sleep... under the stars.”
The desk clerk examined the cigarette and nodded with concern. “Possible that if he is a little, you say, loco?”
“Yes, a little loco maybe.”
“Possible if he walked to other side of island to Hotel Cora and got lost on his way back. Hotel Cora closed two years, but it is soon to be built again,” he noted proudly. “Possible he is lost in the jungle. Hotel is very dark at night.”
“There is nothing on the other side except the Cora?” Shephard asked.
“Only where the new hospital will be. Jungle is gone there now. New hospital will be Seesters of Mercy. Built by loco man of God with many pesos. Dollars really. He is American, Reverend Chephard.”
Shephard considered Mercante’s penchant for sliding in and out of derelict hotels and apartments, his talent for picking lairs away from — but somehow in the very midst of — where someone would look for him. It wasn’t beyond possibility that he would hide in the Cora, and its closeness to the Sisters of Mercy made all the more sense. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more it fit into Mercante’s twisted logic. And if Mercante was there, perhaps he would be sleeping, an easy mark for a morning visitor.
“How do I get to the Cora? I want to go there.”
“Oh, señor. You must wait until light. Long walk, three miles now. Very dark and the path is full of iguanas and many cucarachas.” The clerk held up two forefingers about three inches apart. Some cockroaches, Shephard thought.
“I can’t wait. The poor man could be wandering that path right now, very terrified. Comprende?”
The clerk sighed and rose from his stool, tapping across the lobby in his hard shoes. Outside, he led Shephard past the first row of rooms, the porch lights of which swirled with moths and outsized winged beetles. Translucent lizards clung to the walls, darting intermittently. He stopped at the end of the cement sidewalk, as if going any further would offer him a personal risk. The clearing to which he pointed seemed large and passable enough.
“Here the path is wide, but farther away it will be small,” the man said gravely. “About a half of mile from here, it will go to the right and to the left, and you go to the right. At the end you will be on the beach again, and the Cora is left, on a hill over the water. I don’t think she has her lights because it is very expensive here. If your father is on the pathway, you will hear him because the jungle is quiet except for the monkeys and some pigs but they will run away. If you find a wild pig and babies, you should run first. They can be very, very muy peligroso. Comprende, señor?”
“Oh, yes. Thank you. I have a lucky sea lion’s tooth.” Shephard produced the tooth, which shone dully in the lights of the porches.
The footing was soft and moist. Shephard felt his heels sinking as he moved into the clearing and past the first cluster of banana trees. He stopped in the darkness for a last look at the light of the hotel, then located the moon, which was a full quarter now and clear in the eastern sky. He could see the pathway winding ahead, a shade darker than the trees that crouched at its borders. Another thirty yards, around a gentle right-hand bend that brought him under a bower of some sort — the smell was of honeysuckle — he stopped again and realized that even in so short a distance the jungle had consumed him fully. It seemed to hump around him in rounded forms that looked ready to uncoil. A dark shape cut across the pathway ahead of him, dragging a reptilian tail into the vegetation. He moved to the other side and continued, ducking low again under the banana leaves, using the moist trunks for balance where the trees threatened to choke off the path. Holy Christ, he thought, his mind filling with visions of fat tarantulas dropping like rain from the trees.
He lit a cigarette and began scuffing his shoes, slapping the leaves that reached out from the foliage. Halfway to the other side of the island — what he guessed was halfway, at least — he stopped dead in front of a huge iguana poised athwart the pathway in front of him. While Shephard choked his fear back down, he waited for the beast to move, but it didn’t so much as twitch.
He bluffed forward a step, muttering a curse. Another step toward it — he was now within charging distance, Shephard guessed — the animal proved to be nothing more than a branch. He kicked it to be sure, picked it up, and brushed the damp earth from one end. Continuing on his way, he smacked the plants and trees around him like a city dweller whose lantern had blown out in the woods. Five minutes later the pathway forked and he bore right, quickening his pace.
The trail narrowed. He used his stick to part the fronds and began to hum a song that kept changing into other songs. At a small clearing he stopped and tried to find the moon again, but the tangled jungle over him offered only darkness. He noticed that the sounds — the piping of night birds, the occasional chatter of monkeys — always diminished around him, resuming only when he had moved on. He filled this portable silence with the whacking of his branch and a muttering threat to the jungle as it encroached onto his slim passageway.
A fat shape with tiny legs shot across the path ahead of him, followed by three more of the same, but smaller. Muy peligroso, he thought, very dangerous, the wild pigs. In the silence he heard them cracking through the jungle floor, a shuffle, a snort, then nothing.
Just as the jungle had choked the path into nothingness, he broke through a wall of fragrant foliage and saw the silver water of the Caribbean sparkling ahead. He threw the branch toward it with a silent blessing and watched it thud onto the powder-white sand. And just as the desk clerk had said, the dark shape of the Hotel Cora stood profiled against the sky on a hill overlooking the sea, a quarter mile to the west. It was completely dark, recognizable only by its angular symmetry against the blue-black sky.
Shephard followed the perimeter of the jungle, which zigzagged along a series of peaceful coves. The sand was soft underfoot, and the air was tinged with the clean and reassuring smell of ocean.
The outline of the Hotel Cora grew larger as he rounded a small lagoon. Behind him he could hear the busy chatter of the jungle, and in front the ocean against the shore. He stopped for a moment to look behind him and studied the series of tiny footprints that trailed off into the darkness from which he had come. The far side of the lagoon ended in an outcropping of dark rocks, which in the pale moonlight he saw was alive with iguanas, loafing in and out of each other’s shadows. No wonder they eat them, he thought, big as pheasants.
He cautiously rounded the rocks, looking up when he reached a dilapidated boardwalk that had once served as an entrance to the Cora. The hotel stood above him, large and decrepit, the sagging posture of the unused. Against the main wall, which was now covered by foliage nearly to the center, the words Hotel Cora were written in graceful wrought-iron letters. One of the wooden double doors was all but torn away, left dangling by a disfigured hinge. An iguana pulled itself across the porch, then dragged its dark weight up the decaying flanks of the colonnade. Shephard could hear its claws finding their way through the rotted wood. He studied the three floors of darkened windows, only a few still with glass. Two years, he thought, may as well be two centuries in the jungle. The glass of an upper-story window, the one farthest from the entrance and nearest to the water, seemed for an instant to move.