The Laughing Falcon (20 page)

He was prepared to bargain; Maggie felt relief. “Who is this messiah?”

“A man of honour. They have placed him in an asylum, claiming he is
loco
, but that is one of their many lies, that is how they stop his tongue. We do not know what tortures he has been subjected to. One day you will meet him, briefly, perhaps, during an exchange. But, Miss Schneider, understand this well: though we are not murderers, in the end we must do what we must do.”

That created a chill and a silence; Maggie thought it wise to change the subject. “The sounds of the night are beautiful. What makes that plink?”

“Un martillito, a
tink frog. It is very tiny for such a big sound.”

The night was hushed but for those bell-clear tinks and the sibilant whispers of life in the trees. She shivered, not from the cold — she was still wrapped in her sleeping bag — but from his closeness. Despite her unease, she had begun to feel more
valiente
, confident enough to ask a favour. “Is there paper here? A pen or a pencil?”

“And you would write your novel?”

She spoke as brazenly as she dared: “You inspired me, Halcón, with your story about the lost Spanish mission. How true was that? Captain Morgan, the treasure boats.”

“The mission truly existed. This story of buried treasure is one of the great legends of my country, and all great legends are based on truth, yes?”

“Is that what you’re doing now — creating a legend?”

“Life creates its own legends, Miss Schneider, and a life worth living creates history. Napoleon defined history as ‘a set of lies agreed upon,’ but I am not so cynical. The chronicle I
write may be only a footnote, but …” He shrugged. “Life is a drama with many dangers; that is how I prefer to see it, to live it. I once wasted myself in an office – but that is another, duller story.” He looked contemplative, squinting into the smoke from the last puff of his cigarette.

His brief treatise had bared much about himself. Maybe he was, in reality, a historian who had read deeply of Napoleon, perhaps of other conquerors — and he appeared to share the personality complex coined in Napoleon’s honour, seeking fame, his own legend.

Not wanting him to leave yet, hoping to learn more, she blurted, “By the way, you will be in my book. You
could
have been the hero, but you lost the job.”

He laughed. “The thief of love. I cannot deny I enjoyed the stolen kisses; nor can I deny what my body felt. You were very pretty in the soft light playing on the waterfall.”

She wondered if this was just his typical blarney. Yet she had felt that pressure against her groin; they had both been aroused.

“Fiona Wardell was very disappointed in the light-fingered history professor.”

“Fiona – ah, the heroine of your book. And now who will she find to love?”

“His name is Jacques Cardinal. Unfortunately, he has problems. But he’ll have to do.” She told him she had borrowed the name from the owner of a kayak business in Quepos. “A drunken ruffian.”

“She will be sorry she rejected the professor.”

Relationship between captor and prisoner had taken on an oddly familiar character. Maggie was picking up innuendoes that added to the confusion she was feeling about him. She was finding it difficult to restructure him as a commando leader, to erase a former picture.

“But why would you not write the truth? Here is your work of literature. Here, under the stars, with this small band of men and women who dream of better worlds.”

“I dream of other worlds myself, Halcón, when I write; it’s my therapy. But I did promise to tell the story of Cinco de Mayo. I can do that, too.” She sensed he sought celebrity – probably his followers did, as well.

He stood. “One must not deny talent. And I will not deny a lady of such charm and of such … forthrightness. Is that the word?”

“Your English is very good.”

“I lived many years in the wastelands of America.”

Soon after Halcón left, Perezoso came by the tent with the reward for her collaboration: a pencil, a few sheets of blank paper, and a candle. Quetzal groaned in her sleep and rolled over.

Maggie wasn’t immediately able to write; Halcón was too much in her mind. A man of many layers, as bright and urbane as he was brazen and defiant. She must stay on guard against the pull he exerted: she was fascinated by a sense of danger that seemed to glow in him. She must not forget she was in peril; she was in uncharted jungle with a gang of revolutionary dreamers led either by a charlatan or a naïve utopian of the far left.

But surely he was committed to a revolutionary’s ethics. After all, he had surrounded himself with like-minded men and women; they had performed a daring political act, a raid on a guarded redoubt of a notorious senator. If he sought just financial gain, he could have picked a softer target of greater wealth.

She must remind herself he was acting outside the law; however dashing a villain, he was a kidnapper.

She closed her eyes and tried to visualize Fiona and Jacques and Spanish gold …

When Fiona lightly dug into the earth she realized the object she had chanced upon was not another rock. Carefully, she picked around the broken lid of a clay pot. As she began brushing the dirt from it, she felt a rush of excitement — a year had been scratched upon its surface: 1671
.

Despite the pall placed on this expedition by her bearish companion, she was thrilled to be at the threshold of a brilliant success. She beckoned to Jacques, and he rose from his own toil some distance away
.

As he bent beside her, he said, “You’re beautiful.”

She looked sharply at him
.

“I was talking to the pot lid.” He favoured her with the mocking smile that had begun so much to vex her
.

The broken lead tip of her pencil wobbled and fell out, and she gave up, dissatisfied with her meagre effort. The two characters were lacking joy. She disliked caustic Jacques and was not sure if, ultimately, she could picture him throwing himself in adoration at Fiona’s feet. She might well be sorry she rejected the professor …

But she was annoyed even more by Fiona – after a long hiatus between creative renderings, she had become a bore, and so had the plot. Her artistic juices were drying up. The likely cause: she was living a chapter of her own life far beyond her creative dreams. How could her imagination ever match this reality?

She would write a truer tale: an account of her jungle ordeal, one that honoured her commitment to be fair to Cinco de Mayo and Halcón. Anyway, publishers would be far less interested in buried treasure than the perils of Margaret and Gloria-May. The women’s magazine for which she had been cajoled to write might serialize it.

She blew out the candle and stretched out next to Quetzal and remembered again those two long kisses in the gardens of La Linda Vista.

Maggie woke at dawn to screams, and quickly crawled from her tent. She recognized the voice: Gordo, who sounded almost beyond terror. As she looked behind the tent toward
the stone sphere, she was stunned to see a gigantic boa constrictor wrapping itself around Gordo’s leg, its mouth clamped on his left boot.

Her campmates rushed from their tents, a melee of movement and noise:
“Culebra grande!
” Maggie was frozen, horrified, as Gordo struggled with the snake, which was at least four metres long. He tried in vain to crawl free, then managed to pull his pistol from its holster.

He fired two great blasts that echoed through the jungle valley. The snake freed its teeth from Gordo’s boot and jerked wildly, thrashing, banging its tail against the huge round rock. A moment later, Coyote decapitated it, and there came a sickening spume of blood. Maggie watched aghast as the dying boa continued to writhe and as Gordo, grunting and gasping, crawled free, his left boot streaming with blood.

Maggie felt faint at the sight of the injury, of all the blood, the entire awful spectacle. She stepped slowly backwards, almost stumbling against a tent. Tayra, still dressing, quickly emerged from it, then Glo’s head poked out from behind the entrance flap.

“Jesus freaking Christ, what was all that?”

Maggie explained. She assumed Gordo had fallen asleep under the sphere while on guard duty; the snake had seen his chubby leg protruding. “I think he shot himself in the foot.”

“How symbolic.” Glo ducked inside to dress while Maggie joined the group squatting around the injured man. None had paused to tie kerchiefs over their faces. Coyote was looking stern: had he not warned them about the dangers of the jungle?

As Buho came rushing from a tent with a first-aid kit, Halcón sliced the boot from Gordo’s damaged left foot and peeled away his blood-soaked sock: it was indeed a bullet wound. Everyone stood about helplessly for a few moments, then Glo burst from her tent, strode toward Gordo, and bent to examine the wound. “Okay, one of you useless pansies get
some water – warm water, heat it. Get his foot up in the air, pass me the goddamn gauze.”

Maggie looked on with awe and admiration as Glo went to work, staunching the flow of blood with gauze, applying an antiseptic solution. One of the two bullets had missed, but the other had shattered the bones in the arch of his foot.

Gordo continued to moan; Halcón began demanding answers from him, his temper frayed. If Maggie understood Gordo’s response, he was denying that he fell asleep, though no one seemed to believe that, and Zorro loudly scoffed.

Finally, a pot of warm water was delivered and Glo washed the foot, applied more antiseptic, then wrapped the wound with bandages. Halcón looked around, frowning, and, aware that the entire group had been seen by the hostages in clear daylight, he didn’t order them to put their kerchiefs on.

After the tents were struck and the camp was dismantled, Halcón called a meeting of the
colectivo
. They crouched in a circle around Gordo, whose propped-up foot was in a bulbous bandage. At one point, Zorro seemed about to cuff him, but Halcón snapped an order and Zorro lowered his hand.

Maggie joined Glo outside the perimeter. “Where did you learn first aid?”

“Down where I come from, you see a few gunshot wounds. I felt sorry for that fat little critter. You know what? These bozos look better with their faces covered.”

“Except for Halcón.”

“Doesn’t turn my crank, honey. The guy’s right out of some 1940s B movie.”

“I had a long talk with him last night.” Maggie was about to expand on that, but the circle broke and Halcón strode up to them.

“Señora Walker, I will thank you, but we must ask you to share some of the load today.”

She raised her middle finger. “That’s what I’m sharing.”

“I am starting to worry that Senator Walker may not be so pleased to have you back.”

“Y’all can kiss my ass.”

He turned to Maggie. “Remind your friend she is not on the plantation with her shuffling Uncle Toms.”

“I don’t think you’re doing the right thing, Glo,” Maggie whispered.

“I’d rather get fucked standing up than take it lying down.”

“Make friends, not enemies. That’s what I was doing last night with Halcón.”

“You cotton to that smarmy greaser?”

“Well, no, but … he’s the same guy who robbed me in San José.”

Glo’s mouth fell open. Maggie said nothing more because Tayra had joined them; she began tying the rope around Glo’s middle. “I’m sorry, but I have to do this.”

Coyote had fashioned a crutch for Gordo, but he needed to be carried as they followed the creek downstream for a few hundred metres. Halcón regularly took them wading up or down the creeks that bisected their path to confuse search dogs that presumably had sniffed clothing at the Eco-Rico Lodge.

A troop of spider monkeys swung past them, low in the trees, and while everyone else stopped to watch, Glo came abreast of Maggie, then flung a small garment into the bushes. No one else noticed, and though Glo’s strategem struck Maggie as a wasted effort, she gave her a conspiratorial nudge.

The climb up the other side of the
quebrada
was slow, Buho and Zorro having to wrestle Gordo up the hill. When he tried to walk with his makeshift crutch, he managed a one-legged hop. At difficult spots, they carried him. He seemed weak with shock, and blood was seeping through the bandage.

During breaks, Maggie recounted to Glo last night’s odd tête-à-tête with Halcón, urging her to find reassurance from his words, to join her in being a team player, offer to carry a backpack. Glo just shook her head. “I’ve done enough.”

Maggie was feeling far more sanguine since her conversation with Halcón. These idealists were unlikely to harm them; they seemed more a threat to themselves. Halcón’s revelation that they were using her and Glo as trade bait for Benito Madrigal encouraged her hopes for a safe outcome. Flirting with her like that, praising her – she couldn’t deny he had obtained the desired effect, though she told herself to resist his pull.

Her captors seemed to lack Maggie’s fortitude, some of them muttering complaints as the day began to wane and turn colder. The forest here was of immense oak trees festooned with moss and red-tinted bromeliads, the understory thick with stunted bamboo. The thin air was demanding on the lungs and, burdened with Gordo, they took frequent rests. Coyote would then sharpen his machetes on a flat file; their edges were dulled quickly by the dense undergrowth.

As the afternoon grew late, frequent patches of fog obscured their route – but also hid them from a helicopter that buzzed for a few moments overhead. They had heard, but not seen, three of them today, plus a few winged aircraft. Though they were hidden by the canopy, they would go still or hide behind trees, and a hand would be clapped over Glo’s mouth.

Gordo had to be hauled by rope up the steepest inclines; his expression had turned zombie-like and he whimpered incessantly. Buho, his feet rubbed raw by his boots, winced with each step. Perezoso, the young Romeo, had been bitten in the cheek — apparently by a small venomous spider — while plucking a spray of wild ginger for his Juliet. The poison had got into his glands, and he looked like he had a severe case of the mumps. Quetzal seemed too exhausted to offer him solace.