Red Jungle (24 page)

in the bank that led back to their camp, he thought.

He made way for Katherine’s horse. She glanced at him.

“You can’t stay in Guatemala now,” he said almost automatically. “It’s suicide. They were going to murder you.”

“I didn’t know you were so chummy with her husband. What about you? Do you think Carlos isn’t going to find out about you and his wife?”

“That’s got nothing to do with this. You have to leave,” he said.

“How about I leave, if you do?” she said.

“Jesus Christ.”

“I’ll leave, if you come with me. You can’t stay with him.” She nodded toward Mahler. “He’s obviously crazy.”

Mahler came down the path with the injured horse. He was good with horses. The German seemed to have a special sympathy for them. They made way again; Mahler waded out into the river and bathed the horse’s injuries, then took out a topical antibiotic and spread it carefully over the horse’s deep scratches. The animal, sensing it was being helped, was still.

“Well, aren’t you going to ask what the hell we’re doing out here?” Mahler said. He stood up, capped the ointment, and shoved it into his army pants.

“It’s none of my business,” Katherine said defensively. “But I suppose it has something to do with antiquities. Bakta Halik is only over those mountains,” she said, “and I met you at Carl Van Diemen’s house. It’s not difficult to put it together.” Her horse brought its head up, its withers shaking. The sky— the bit they could see above the river—was already starting to cloud up.

Mahler looked at her and made a Jack Nicholson ain’t-thisall-grand face, and then looked at Russell.

“I don’t really give a damn. I mean, about whatever it is you’re doing out here,” she said quickly. “Stealing from the country, I suppose.” She shot a glance at Russell.

“Oh!!!! You see, Russell. . . . We’re stealing from the country!” Mahler’s voice boomed across the river and echoed back.
STEALING FROM… STEALING FROM… STEALING.
“Do you really think anyone in this rotten country gives one shit about what we might find? Do you think they would have found Tikal? Or any of it! They’re always too busy killing each other, or didn’t you notice last night?

“If it wasn’t for
me,
everything at Bakta Halik would have been carted away by the military and sold off. Everything! Who do you think went to the world press and stopped it? Huh?” Mahler yanked the injured horse around, its hooves clomping on the rocks. He came back out of the river, leading the horse, and faced her. “Let me tell you something. You’ve been here how long, a few months? Maybe a year? You don’t know anything about this country.
Nothing,
” he said angrily.

When it began to rain in the afternoon, they got only drips at first, then a kind of filtered dew-like rain, very soft, that clung to their skin and clothes. The floor of the jungle where they worked became a kind of insect-infested steam room, where even breathing was difficult. Russell looked back to where they’d brought the horses, far below him. They had climbed a hill where Mahler said he’d found something. There was a wall of green in front of them. The hill seemed especially overgrown. Mahler had said it might be something. So they’d begun, after a breakfast of cold tortillas and farmer’s cheese, to hack into the hillside.

Because of the heat, the three of them were working without their shirts on. Stripped to the waist, the sweat pouring off them, they hacked away. When it happened, they all heard it. Russell’s machete struck something. They heard the hard sound of steel on stone.

The machete handle vibrated in his hand. He pulled the blade back and saw where it had been bent. He thrust his hand into the wall of vines, and felt the damp stone.

“I found something,” was all Russell said. Mahler scrambled towards him, his long hair undone and wild.

“What did I tell you!” Mahler said, reaching into the hole with him.

TWENTY-ONE

A huge, blood-red neon Coca-Cola ball revolved perpetually above Guatemala City’s main traffic roundabout, where
Avenida Revolución
turned into
Avenida De Las Americas
. Russell had promised De La Madrid he would be at an important meeting at Madrid’s house at midnight. They had an announcement for the world press in the morning. It was going to be a real shocker, one that would either win the election for Madrid or send him into political oblivion. And it had been all Russell’s idea. They would propose pegging the quetzal to the dollar, to stop the hyperinflation that was destroying the country.

Russell pulled his car around the statue of Pedro de Alvarado
,
the infamous and brutal Spanish conquistador who’d been with Cortez. He drove into a tony neighborhood of high-rise luxury apartment buildings belonging to the rich, not too different from neighborhoods in Sao Paolo or San Francisco. At this time of night, the empty boulevard was impressive and cold looking, the high-rise buildings looking down on the world they commanded.

He pulled down a driveway and was stopped by a tall metal gate. He spoke into an intercom. Two men with shotguns stood in the shadows by the gate, making sure no one rushed the steel portal.

“It’s me; it’s Russell,” he said into the speaker in English.

“Okay.” He heard Carl’s voice. In a moment the gate swung open; he drove down a steep driveway to the parking garage and parked. The garage was full of expensive, late model cars, even a brand new yellow Ferrari. The building, with its posh condominiums, was home to several big-time drug dealers and bankers. They lived in the same apartment buildings, Russell had heard from his boss, so that it would be easier to launder all the millions of dollars a week the drug business was bringing into the country. Guatemala had become one of the most important linchpins in the international cocaine trade.

He stepped into the elevator. The Muzak played Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls.” He hit 12. As the door closed, he noticed two men in dark suits leaning against a wall of the parking garage, one of them with an Uzi in his right hand.

Carl’s maid opened the door. The Dutchman kept the apartment in the capital when he didn’t feel like driving down to his palace in Antigua. Russell followed a tiny Indian woman in a spotless black-and-white uniform into the all-white living room, with its view of the city. Carl and his lover were sitting around a white onyx coffee table, drinking wine out of long-stemmed French crystal glasses and watching “TRL” on MTV.

“Is Katherine ready? Her plane leaves in an hour,” Russell said.

“She’s getting dressed,” Carl said, lowering the sound on the TV. The jaguar scratches on Van Diemen’s face were red, and would leave an ugly scar. They’d gotten infected, and part of his right cheek had been cut away. There was a plan to rebuild his missing right cheek. In the meantime, Carl looked a little monstrous. Russell tried not to stare as he sat down across from him.

“I’m going to Europe again for my surgery,” Carl said. He looked over at his boyfriend. The kid looked sad, like a little boy whose mother was going to leave him.

“Good,” Russell said. He didn’t know what else to say. He didn’t really give a shit about Carl’s face. “Thanks for looking after my friend.”

“Of course. They say these claw marks are nothing. The surgery will fix my face,” Carl said, holding his wine glass. It looked like the son of a bitch had lost half his face, Russell thought. The jaguar had gotten him good.

“Of course, they’re nothing, dear,” the kid said. Carl had been keeping his right hand near his missing cheek; he dropped it to pat his boyfriend on his bare leg. The boyfriend was wearing pedal pushers and a tank top.

“I want to thank you for what you did for Carl out there,” the kid said to Russell.

“No sweat,” Russell said, trying not to stare. “Listen . . . can we talk?”

“Of course,” Carl said.

“We want to cut you in for a third. We found something. It might be
really
big,” Russell said. He stopped himself for a moment and looked at Carl’s boyfriend, then back at Carl. “Maybe a whole fucking Mayan city.” Carl leaned forward.

“What?”

“A city, a whole Mayan city,” Russell said. “On my property.”

“You’re joking,” Carl said.

“No. And we need money. I don’t have any. I’ve quit my job. We’ll sell you a third of the deal for a hundred thousand dollars cash. That’s what we figure we need just to keep going. We need cash. I have to pay off the Frenchman. And then we’ll need to hire a small army to guard the site. If the word gets out before we’ve had a chance to look into the temple we found . . . well, you know. The site will be stripped clean in a few days.”

Carl—obviously in shock—leaned forward so that he had one hand on the huge white onyx table in front of him. He was so excited it looked like he was going to get up and do a

fifty yard dash.

“Can I have a drink?” Russell asked.

“Of course,” Carl said. He was still staring at Russell. “You know what it could be worth. . . . If it’s true,” Carl said.

“A fuck of a lot, I guess,” Russell said. “We’ll be like fucking Cortez.”

“Even if we only took out the best. We’ll all make a fortune. No . . . more,” the Dutchman said. His eyes were animated. He’d forgotten all about his mangled face.

“Yeah, that’s what we think,” Russell said. “So are you in?” Van Diemen nodded his head quickly.

“Poppy, does that mean we’re going to be rich?” the kid asked. Russell turned to the kid.

“Keep your mouth shut about this, or. . . .” Russell glared at the kid. He wasn’t feeling right in the head. Maybe it was the days they’d spent in the jungle being bitten by everything there was to bite a man, or the heat as they worked cleaning off the first temple, or the excitement, or whatever. But he was feeling strangely angry since the gunfight. It was too much, he supposed, too much to try to pull down from the shelf, a whole fucking Mayan city. But he was game. He knew that with that kind of money, he could convince Beatrice to leave her husband. He would be rich, and he would simply take her and her kids and disappear into some apartment like this one, somewhere in the world. He’d steal the throne from under the Pope’s ass to have Beatrice.

The kid glanced at him, terrified.

“Poppy, he’s scaring me,” the kid said, huddling against Carl, his brown face pressed with fear.

“That’s okay. . . .” Carl put his arm on his boyfriend’s shoulders. “Pablo isn’t going to say anything, don’t worry.”

“Good. Because if anyone fucks with us, I’ll kill them.” He couldn’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. But he meant it. He was sure of that. He wanted Beatrice, and getting her wasn’t going to be easy.

“Dios mío,”
the kid said, shutting his eyes. He spilt some wine on his pedal pushers.

“No one is going to talk, Russell. You have my word,” Carl said again.

“I’ll need a hundred thousand dollars by tomorrow for the Frenchman. I want to pay him off. Get that over with. That way, I own the place outright. No question then.”

“How can Mahler and I be sure you won’t . . . how did you put it? Fuck
us,”
Carl said, smiling.

“Yes …Yes! How can Poppy be sure you won’t fuck
us?”
the kid said, looking at him sideways now.

“You can’t be. Can you have the maid get Katherine, please? I have to take her to the airport. And thanks for letting her stay here. I appreciate it. I won’t forget it,” Russell said. “I mean that.”

“You look tired,” Carl said, ringing a bell for the maid.

“Yeah, well. We’ve been busy.” He took out his cell phone and dialed the general.

“I think you should take a rest, a few days off,” Carl said. “You look exhausted.”

“We’ll all get plenty of rest when we’re dead,” Russell said, listening to the general’s phone ring.

Katherine came down the hall as he closed his telephone. She was dressed in clean jeans and a black mid-length coat. Her hair was pulled back. She crossed the room and gave him a kiss, and he kissed her back on the lips. He’d made love to her out there in the jungle, and he’d lied to her, and it was all designed to make her believe in him so he could get her on a plane and out of the country. He didn’t feel bad about it. Maybe, he thought, as he held her, it was all the lying he was doing that was making him strange in the head.

“Are you ready?” he said.

“Yes. Let me get my suitcase. Are you bringing much?” she asked. “My sister is picking us up at the airport, but she only has a VW.”

“No. Not much,” he said. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

Selva had sent him a big chase car, an American Suburban filled with his bodyguards. That was part of the deal. The Chevy Suburban was following him to the airport to make sure nothing happened. It was a short drive from Carl’s apartment.

He listened to Katherine make plans for their future. She said they would stay with her sister in New York until the paper reassigned him. Then they would see. She might quit her job, she said. She reached over and held his hand as they drove. He wanted to tell her then. But it felt mean, putting her straight about the way things really were, so he didn’t.