Her instincts told her that whatever was going on here, she was meant to take part in it.
She sighed and put her notebook computer back on her crossed bare legs. A little practiced Google searching turned up some background on her mystery correspondent, Dr. Cogswell with the curious first name. He had a respectable if not extraordinary curriculum vitae. He had worked for Monsanto, apparently researching ways to make agricultural insecticides safe for creatures that weren't insects. From there he had gone to a professorship at an agricultural college in Nebraska, from where he had recently retired to the warmer climes of Albuquerque. Along the way he had contributed numerous articles on cryptozoology – the study of creatures whose existence was not acknowledged by science – to various publications. More recently he had been an active participant in Usenet newsgroups and on the Web.
He struck her as one of those scientists who, despite genuine intelligence and knowledge, tended to go a bit bizarre as soon as they set foot outside their own specialties. Nonetheless, he was as close to a lead as anything she had. Unless she wanted to hang around and try to interview the next tourist to encounter the Santo Niño before he, she or they fled home – as almost all the previous claimants had.
She reread Cogswell's message then hit Reply. He had suggested they meet for lunch.
So be it.
The morning air held an edge as Annja pushed the glass door of the motel lobby. Not enough to cut – just enough to make itself known. It was the sort of cool you tasted as much as felt – along with the inevitable exhaust fumes from the vehicles streaming past a parking lot dotted with cars whose windshields were white blazes of reflected sun. And a hint of that ubiquitous piñon smoke. Annja already knew she would associate that scent with New Mexico for the rest of her life. Adjusting the strap of her shoulder bag, she strode forth into the full light of the sun in search of breakfast.
From directly above her head a hissing, roaring sound cut loose.
She ducked. She almost summoned the sword.
She looked up to see a gigantic bloated shape, blotting the painfully blue high-desert sky mere feet overhead.
And then a chubby arm waved at her from a wicker-looking basket hanging from beneath the vast, globular shape, and a smiling little face appeared framed by blond pigtails.
"Hi, lady!" the little girl called from the gondola of the hot-air balloon. The man standing beside her, wearing a bright yellow jacket, did something that caused another jet of blue-edged yellow flame to shoot up into the open mouth of the envelope. Rising slowly, the balloon, painted in jagged horizontal stripes of blue and red, swept across busy Coors Road and off over a shopping mall.
Beyond it the sky was full of balloons. The weather was different down in the Lower Sonoran life zone than up North, where a glance showed her dark banks of cloud piled high above the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains flanking the central river valley. That was a boon to participants in the vaunted Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, it seemed.
What struck Annja was that the sky really was full of balloons. Some took bizarre form. She saw cartoon character heads, a taco, a fire hydrant and at least one totally implausible cow. Mostly they were standard fat-teardrop shapes like the one that had overflown her, painted in a dizzying range of colors and patterns.
She had paid little attention to the balloon fiesta. It didn't really impinge on the dig, eighty miles or so north. It struck her as just another gimmick to draw in tourists, and as such, of small interest to her. She was concerned with ancient things, things that lasted. Not tacky ephemera.
But nothing she had ever seen in her life had quite prepared her for the sight of several hundred hot-air balloons in the air at once.
Her shoulders rose and fell in an exaggerated sigh. "Okay," she said aloud. "I'm impressed."
She had turned to face toward the uneven wall of the Sandia Mountains, a blue backdrop to the lower balloons. She was facing right back toward the motel lobby entrance.
Her eye happened to fall on the newspapers displayed in dispensers in front of some juniper bushes beside the door. There she saw, beaming at her, the beatific countenance of Santo Niño himself.
She rushed to the rack. The likeness was plastered all over the front of a local alternative-looking paper calling itself by the unlikely moniker Alibi.It was free. Bonus, she thought.
She plucked one right out. The painting was almost breathtaking in its sheer kitsch. The Holy Child was portrayed as a huge-eyed waif in cloak and robe and weird hat.
Splashed across the image were the words Holy Kid Sightings At Chiaroscuro Fest! Below it the legend continued:
"Holy publicity stunt! Albuquerque art prodigy Byron Mondragón attracts nationwide attention to local gallery opening, just as his current favorite subject puts in personal appearances all over the state.
"Whoa," Annja said. A rumble from her stomach reminded her of her prime mission of the moment.
Folding the paper, she tucked it under her arm and strode off to her rental car. She was assured of interesting breakfast reading material, at any rate.
Chapter 11
"Hi! Welcome to Chiaroscuro!" the gorilla said as Annja swung in through the open ironwork gate.
She nodded and smiled to the black rubber mask. After all, the sign out front did say Chiaroscuro Guerrilla Art Compound.
She had smelled the place even before she saw the entrance.
She parked on a sidestreet that lay just north of the gallery. The surrounding houses ran to painted cinder block and squeaky-tight little lots, scrupulously clean and tended for the most part, but giving a definite air of staving off the encroachment of far less appealing environs. It was not so much poverty – certainly not by the standards of Mexico, to say nothing of South America – as a prevalent hardness. On the drive down Broadway she'd seen a few too many small packs of lean young men with slouching backs and out-thrust jaws to feel any too complacent.
But the smell that greeted her on the warm late-afternoon air as she walked the half block south was totally inviting. It was a warm smell as of something cooking, a wonderfully pungent smell that teased with faint hints of familiarity. It did seem to sting, slightly, at the edges of her eyes.
The entrance was not terribly obvious. It was a narrow gate of black wrought iron wedged between down-at-heel storefronts with stucco peeling off in tectonic plates and soaped-over windows. She would have missed it but for a group of kids with colored spiky hair and piercings you could see at thirty yards who drifted in ahead of her.
The welcoming smell grew stronger as she walked on past the tall guy in the gorilla suit. She found herself in a short passageway with big, irregular slate flagstones. The sun, falling toward the cinder cones on the West Mesa behind her, cast her shadow long before her. A door stood open into interior afternoon gloom in a brown building to her right. To her left was a big picture window revealing a crowd of people drifting among art exhibits visible on the other side. The music of a live ska band came from somewhere ahead.
The compound opened to her right onto a courtyard with benches and grotesque twisted-metal sculptures and an ash tree with small, bladelike leaves just beginning to turn in the middle of it. People drifted or clumped among them in the mingled soft shadow and curiously rich buttery light of late afternoon, drinking from plastic cups, chatting and laughing and smoking. Not tobacco exclusively, her nostrils told her. They were mostly but not exclusively young. She spotted Goths, retro punks, hipsters, hippies and a wide selection of unclassifiables.