Chee nodded.
“You’re a hell of a lot of trouble. My folks always warned me about associating with you Head Breakers.”
“No more head breaking,” Chee said. “Now we Navajos kill folks with our kindness.”
“Head Breakers” was a pejorative Hopi term for Navajos, the traditional enemies of the Hopi since about the sixteenth century. It suggested Dashee’s tribe considered them too unsophisticated to invent bows and arrows.
“You’re telling me Lieutenant Leaphorn believes all this nonsense too,” Dashee said. “The Legendary Lieutenant is endorsing this.”
“He’s the one who figured it out. Found the pipeline on one of his maps.”
“Oh, well,” Dashee said. “We better take my truck then. If we’re going to be busting in on these people, we want to make it look official.”
“I’d say head east over to Gallup, then south through the Zuñi Reservation to Fence Lake, then State Road 36 through Quemado, and then down to Lordsburg. Get a motel there, be up early and ...”
Dashee was glowering at him.
“I see you already have my route all planned. You took ole Cowboy for granted again.” Dashee shifted into his copy of Chee’s voice: “ ‘Just go on over to Second Mesa and get Cowboy. He’s easy. He’ll believe whatever you tell him.’ ”
“Ah, come on Cowboy. You know—”
“Just kidding,” Cowboy said. “Let’s go.”
“I owe you one,” Chee said.
“One?” Cowboy said. “You already owe me about six.”
21
Budge got Winsor’s Falcon 10 jet ready to fly and reassured himself that arrangements had been properly made to clear this journey into Mexico. Then he found a comfortable chair in the transient flights waiting room and sat trying to decide what to do. Progress on that was slow. Memories of Chrissy kept intruding.
The first time he’d met her, almost the first moment in fact, she had made him aware that she was not the usual type of young woman Winsor sent him to collect. He’d been following his standard limo driver pattern, arriving about fifteen minutes early, waiting about ten minutes, and then ringing the bell and announcing that he was early but available at her convenience. But this time Chrissy had spoken first.
“Oh, my,” she had said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m late. I’ll hurry. I’ll be right down.”
The young women Winsor had previously collected had without any exceptions actually been late, had never apologized, had never hurried, and had never shown any interest in whether he minded waiting out in the frosty darkness. They were so far away on the upper side of the class barrier that limo drivers were invisible to them. They showed no more interest in who was driving the car than they would for the spare tire in the trunk. The first few times he’d done this chore, he had ventured a friendly welcome, or one of those “nice evening” remarks. The responses, if any, had been cool and terse, letting him know that it was pushy and intrusive of him to dare to speak to a debutante from whichever expensive and exclusive finishing school had finished them.
Chrissy had been different. She had hurried out of the apartment house entry and reached the car in such a rush that she’d had her hand on the door handle before he could get there to open it for her.
“Golly,” she said. “I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting. My dad taught us that being late is really rude. It tells the other person you think you’re more important than they are.”
“Actually, I was a little early,” Budge had said. And when they were en route he ventured a “nice evening” remark. This time it had touched off a conversation. Chrissy actually introduced herself to him. And so it had gone. During the dozens of times he’d been her driver since that day, they’d become friends in a strange sort of way, answering one another’s biographical questions, exchanging opinions of current Washingtonian uproars and controversies, agreeing that this city was interesting but had more than its share of people way, way too driven by greed and ambition. And gradually it became more and more personal.
“I guess I’m one of those greedy ones, too,” Chrissy had said one day. “I came here to try to get into law school at George Washington University, and I did, so now I’m in it, and making good grades, and I’m surrounded by lawyers. And by law students. And all they seem to think about is either getting money or getting power. And I’m not sure anymore I want to be one.”
“Yeah,” Budge had said. “I used to be a political activist. ‘Power to the People,’ you know. Or, as we used to shout over in Catalonia when I was a kid, ‘A la pared por los ricos’—‘Firing squad for the rich folks.’ Dreamed of being the czar of the universe. I was going to reform everything, start with the soccer rules, work up to the United Nations, and then see what I could do with human nature.”
“But no more?” she asked. “Did you give up on all that?” Her voice sounded sad, but maybe that was just to play along with his joke.
“It was just a dream,” he said. “My family was always on the wrong side, from the fight against Franco and the fascists to running to South America and getting with the losing side down there.”
“Well, now you’re a success. You’re making a lot of money,” she said. “I know you’re not just getting paid to drive the limo. You’re sort of an aide to Mr. Winsor. I’ve heard him talking about you.”
“And what did he say?”
“Well, once I heard him tell Mr. Haret, the man who works with Congress for him, he told him that you were the only one he had he could absolutely count on. And on the telephone once, he was telling someone that when things get out of control he turns it over to Budge, and he knows Budge will fix it.”
“Did he mention why he can depend on me?”
“No,” she said, then hesitated. “Unless he said you owed him a great big favor. Maybe that was it.”
“It was.”
“So what was the favor?”
“Let’s see,” Budge said. “How can I explain it. It gets very complicated. But I guess the bottom line is he keeps me from being deported, and that keeps me out of jail.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “How does he do that?”
He sighed. “Here’s where the complexity comes in. In Guatemala, and other places like that, the Central Intelligence Agency uses people like me, sort of off the record, and when things go wrong they get some of them out, somewhere safe, or maybe even into the United States. Arrange papers for them so they can get lost in the crowd. All quietly, no papers signed, nobody admitting anything. So if I started telling my story—not that it’s very interesting—to the newspapers, or if someone else did and some committee called me to testify about what happened down there, the CIA would swear they never heard of me, and nobody could prove otherwise.”
“Oh,” Chrissy said, sounding thoughtful. “But how does Mr. Winsor keep you from being deported?”
“By keeping his mouth shut,” Budge said.
Chrissy produced one of those “what do you mean by that” looks.
Budge considered how to explain. “Let’s say I was no longer a true and faithful servant and became more trouble than I was worth. Mr. Winsor is now keeping me from being deported very simply. Just not tipping off the Immigration folks, or by refraining from telling one of his lawyer friends in the State Department that the people now running my former country have a warrant out for me under my former name. If he wanted me deported, he’d simply make a telephone call to the right person.”
Silence. Then she said: “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so nosey.”
“No offense taken,” Budge said.