The Threateners (32 page)

Now she was dressed the way I’d seen her at our tour’s get-together party in Rio de Janeiro, in gray-blue chiffon with pale nylons and silver sandals; and she’d managed to fix her blond hair very attractively, even though it hadn’t had any professional attention recently. She was really quite a pretty woman, and I guess a world filled with nothing but skinny dames would really be kind of dull. Dressing myself, I found that my old blue-and-white seersucker suit had been expertly pressed, and my white wash-and-wear shirt had been ironed for the first time in its life. The dress shoes I’d brought along for such formal emergencies had been polished to a blinding shine. They had the same hidden features as my everyday shoes, and I checked and found that the armorer’s handiwork had not been disturbed, which worried me a little, since it was sloppy security for a bunch of pros. On the other hand, maybe they knew all about the hidden knives and figured they’d just let me think I was putting something over on them: how much damage could I do with a couple of little blades I couldn’t even reach without removing, and half dismantling, my shoes? I was tying my necktie when somebody knocked on the door.

“Coming,” I said. Belinda was making some nervous adjustments to her chiffon draperies. I waited while she fussed with herself; but at last I said, “Let’s not keep the don waiting.”

She gave the dress a final smoothing and threw me a bleak look. “I’ve got this weird feeling. . . . I guess I’m just hoping, after getting all dressed up like this, I don’t wind up getting blood all over it,” she said, and I knew she was remembering the sprawling, sodden bodies in the hut. Suddenly she stepped close and hugged me tightly, her body soft and warm under the filmy dress. “No, damn you, don’t kiss me, you’ll smear me. Anyway, I offered you a chance at something better than a kiss and you blew it. Now let’s get the hell out there and sing for our suppers.”

Palomino was waiting in the corridor. He indicated the direction and walked behind us. I knew he had a gun, he’d displayed one on the plane, but it occurred to me that I didn’t particularly want to escape. I’d done all right so far, just paddling dong with the current. Indications were that I was getting closer to
El Viejo
all the time, and I found that I was really curious about what he had in store for us after these elaborate preliminaries.

“No, señora, proceed to the front door, if you please.” Palomino’s voice checked Belinda, making her way through the lobby ahead of me, as she started to turn toward the sign indicating the dining room. Palomino continued smoothly, “When the streets are crowded, vehicles must come to the rear of the hotel, but it is not so crowded now. Please to step outside and enter the car that awaits us.”

The big, ornate hotel doors opened right onto a narrow street; you could see why tour buses and limousines were sent around to the rear during rush hour, whatever that might mean in Cuzco. The long black Cadillac was parked in front with two wheels on the sidewalk to leave some room for traffic to pass. It was still broad daylight, and I didn’t notice that the town was noticeably less packed with pedestrian humanity than before, but perhaps there were somewhat fewer vehicles.

I helped Belinda into the backseat of the car and followed her inside, noting that there wasn’t as much legroom as before because the jump seats had been set up; apparently more passengers were expected. Palomino didn’t get in; he left our door open and waited beside the car. Presently, four people emerged from the hotel. I knew two of them. Ackerman was behind, being led by a dark-faced gent in black. In front, with another black-clad escort, was Ruth Steiner in a blue linen dress I recognized; she’d worn it the night Belinda had first displayed her chiffon. The man beside Ruth tried to help her into the Cadillac, but she shrugged off his hand and started to get in unassisted—and stopped abruptly, seeing me.

“Matt!”

“Please to get in, lady.” That was her escort, getting impatient after a second or two and reaching for her arm again.

“Hi, Ruth,” I said. “Join the party.”

I held out my hand to help her, moving over to give her room beside me—to hell with the jump seat—aware of Belinda, on the other side of me, watching us knowingly. I guessed that she had some theories about me; and something had certainly made me fairly uninterested in the sexy lady with whom I’d just spent a week in fairly confined circumstances. I realized now that something had been started between Ruth Steiner and me one night in Buenos Aires—or maybe earlier, perhaps even back when I slugged her with a shotgun—and that I was enough of a one-woman man not to be very susceptible to other female stimuli until it was finished, one way or another. I felt Ruth squeeze my fingers tightly before releasing them, settling herself beside me.

On the sidewalk, Roger Ackerman was doing the standard Hollywood-hero bit. They always feel they have to prove something by resisting the irresistible. Palomino had moved in to help the other two men in black, but even though they were three against one, Mr. Ackerman was not, by God, going to let any goddamn greasers push him around—but of course they did, shoving him into the Cadillac and slamming the door on him. I heard the locks click. The two I didn’t know went back into the hotel. Palomino got into the front seat of the limousine and spoke to the driver. The big car started to move in its smooth and silent way.

Ackerman pulled himself off our feet and onto one of the jump seats. He started to straighten his tie and smooth his disheveled hair—and stopped, becoming aware at last of who sat facing him.

“You!” he said, staring. “But you’re dead!”

A paved highway took us out of town, but we soon turned off onto a winding gravel road and started climbing. At the top of the grade Palomino ordered the car brought to a halt; his voice reached us through the intercom.

“Perhaps the ladies would like to see the animals.”

The rear windows slid down silently. A group of Indians with broad brown faces, wearing bulky colorful costumes, moved toward us accompanied by over a dozen llamas. They were handsome beasts. The big ones were about the size of small cow ponies but more slenderly built; they had a proud, alert, independent look, posing with their heads held high on rather long necks. The little ones, leggy and very fuzzy, were being carried around like puppies by the Indian kids.

“Oh, God, aren’t they
cute!
” Belinda exclaimed, reaching out to pat one that was held up to her. “Can I give the little girl something?”

“It is expected,” Palomino’s electrified voice said.

“For Christ’s sake, did you kidnap us just to show us a roadside zoo?” Ackerman asked irritably.

Clearly being in the hands of a polite and considerate kidnapper bothered him. Maybe he was afraid that we were remembering that this wasn’t the way he ran his abductions; and feeling my chest still very sore, and seeing a small scab on Ruth’s lip, I did find the thought coming to mind. Belinda slipped some local currency to the kid at her window and gave the baby llama a final pat on the nose. The window glass slid back up and the car started to move once more,

but we did not resume the recrimination session that had been interrupted, perhaps because everything had been said.

Ruth had, of course, expressed conventional dismay at Ackerman’s perfidy. She’d pointed out that he’d sworn I’d be safe if she cooperated with him, but judging by his surprise at seeing me alive, he’d ignored that promise. Ackerman had acted very shocked at the accusation; he’d protested that she’d misunderstood his reaction completely. He’d merely heard from official sources the disturbing news that a male Caucasian body, naked and battered beyond recognition, had been taken out of the Parana River far downstream from the Iguassu Falls; it had not yet been identified. He, Ackerman, had assumed that the body was mine and that I’d panicked and tried to get away from Dennis and Belinda and had fallen into the river accidentally. Or perhaps Dennis, with a personal grievance, had exceeded his instructions, but there had certainly been no termination order from him, Ackerman. . . . At this point Belinda had called him a liar, describing what had actually happened at the river and why; this had led to an acrimonious exchange, which she’d brought to a conventional close by telling him he couldn’t fire her since she’d already quit. Then Ackerman had turned his attention to me. When we stopped for the llamas, he’d been telling me, in effect, that I was certainly going to be made to pay for my brutal assassination of a fine young agent with a promising career ahead of him who’d merely tried to murder me. . . .

Considering that we were all helpless captives in a locked vehicle, being transported against our wills toward an unknown fate at an unknown destination, this bickering was a big waste of time and verbiage. Clearly, instead of fighting with each other, we should have been figuring out how to cooperate against our captors. Still, the arguments had kind of cleared the air and brought everybody up to date on everybody else’s activities.

“How did they get you?” I asked Ruth, beside me.

“I was waiting in my room for Roger to take me down to dinner. When somebody knocked on the door, I opened expecting to see him; well, he was there, all right, but obviously a prisoner. I couldn’t react fast enough; one of those men grabbed me and had me out in the hall before I could slam the door shut."

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m fine.” She glanced at the man facing us. “Roger’s been a perfect little gentleman all week, even if his word of honor doesn’t seem to be worth doodlesquat. ”

Belinda spoke up from the other side of me: “I’m sure you’ll be glad to know, Ruth, that Matt’s been a perfect little gentleman all week, too, damn it. . . . God, look at those fields! You wouldn’t think a horse—or even a llama—could keep its footing up there, let alone pull a plow."

It was a magnificently rugged landscape in the low red light of evening, but the truly remarkable thing was that practically all the mountainsides that weren’t solid rock, no matter how high or steep, were cultivated. I wouldn’t have wanted to climb some of those fields, even on hands and knees; if you ever started sliding and rolling, there’d be no stopping you. You’d wind up with a heroic splash in the river a couple of thousand feet below.

Gradually, as we drove, the light faded and the peaks ahead lost the last light of the sun. The chauffeur turned on the headlights, and soon there was nothing to see but the twisty mountain road ahead and sometimes not even that as the beams swept out over a black abyss. Occasionally we’d pass a village with a few lights showing, but we met no traffic, which was just as well; there wasn’t room for much besides the big Cadillac. Often there didn’t seem to be room enough for that. Trying to keep track of the altitude—as far as direction was concerned, the fading glow in the sky more or less behind us told me we were moving roughly eastward—I sensed that the downgrades were generally somewhat longer than the upgrades, and I no longer had that tight, eleven-thousand-foot feeling in my chest. We seemed to have come down a bit, even though we were heading deeper into the Andes.

I remembered that the Machu Picchu ruins, which should lie in this general direction, were actually at a lower elevation than the city of Cuzco, according to the tour material that had been given us. But it didn’t seem likely that Don Gregorio was bringing us all together, all dressed up, for a visit to the lost city of the Incas that had been discovered, if I remembered correctly, by a gent named Hiram Bingham. Of course the local Indians had known where it was all along.

Then the chauffeur made a sharp turn off the main road, such as it was, and put the limousine to a steep climb up a track that would have challenged the borrowed little four-wheel-drive Subaru I’d left in New Mexico. The headlights gave us a glimpse of a couple of heavy stone gateposts going by; shortly thereafter we saw a large stone house ahead, with illumination of its own. There was a wide, lighted terrace in front of the house, and on it a wheelchair awaited us occupied by a white-haired man in evening clothes. A black-clad attendant stood behind the chair. A dog sat beside it.

“Please to disembark now,” Palomino said to us through the intercom. “Don Gregorio wishes to greet you. . . . But first a word of warning. Some in your party, perhaps all, have been seeking
El Viejo
with violent intentions. I will not threaten you; I will merely suggest that you wait to hear what your host has to say to you before you commit suicide by attempting to abuse his hospitality.”

The locks clicked and Palomino opened the door on Ruth’s side. We clambered out and approached the wheelchair in a straggling group. The seated man was, of course, considerably older than the photographs I’d been shown; they never manage to keep those file pix up to date. The hair had not been totally white in the last snaps I’d seen. However, the aquiline features were unmistakable, particularly the bold blade of a nose. The body was thinner than I’d visualized it, and the right leg was in a hip cast that was supported by the raised footrest of the chair. Vasquez waited for us to stop before him.

Then he said, “You are guests at Casa Coca. I joke. The name is Hacienda San Gregorio. Strangely, it was not named by me, or for me, but I heard the name and found that it filled my need for a pied-a-terre in this area. I am Gregorio Vasquez Stussman. This is Bravo." He patted the dog’s head. “Whatever plans you may be entertaining against me, please do not feel it necessary to harm Bravo. He is a very friendly dog.”

I heard Ruth make a choked sound beside me. Her hand grasped my arm tightly, and I remembered that this was probably one of the dogs that had chased her, and killed her rescuer, when she was escaping from her first kidnapping. I could see that Bravo was a very large young Chesapeake, but little more than a pup. He’d go seventy-five or eighty pounds already; he’d wind up close to a hundred when he got his full growth. He had a fine massive head and a tightly curling, yellow-brown coat. They are not attack dogs; they were bred to retrieve waterfowl under extremely rugged conditions; but unlike Labradors and goldens they are not blessed with unending tolerance. A Chessie may give you the first bite, but unlike his gender retrieving cousins—my lost Happy, for instance—he’ll sure as hell bite back.