After I was over the ridge and across the rocky flats and into the narrow road with the heavy growth on either side, I slowed it and stopped it, turned the key off and set it on the brace.
Nora was amused and indignant. “Really Trav! My God, what were you trying to prove?”
“That we’re nutty harmless Americans. Smoke screen, honey. Anybody who went over that wall couldn’t possibly clown around in this gaudy machine the very next day. And I think the village damn well knows they had trouble up there last night. And what point is there in looking as if we had any special destination? When we come back, we’ll bomb them again.”
“It just made me feel so ridic…” Suddenly she began to make squeaking sounds and went into a wild dance, slapping at her feet and ankles. And at the same moment, one of them got me on the leg, a dark red ant with husky jaws and a sting like sulphuric acid. We leaped onto the machine and escaped, slapping the persistent ones off while in transit.
We bumbled along through sunny areas and through the jungly shadows where the trees met overhead. The previous mudholes were cracked and drying. I found that the most comfortable speed was about fifteen miles an hour. And it gave me time to inspect both sides of the road. Pebbles clinked off the festive mudguards. The fox tails rippled in the hot breeze of passage. Dust curled behind us. The woman clutched the back of my belt snugly. Once she shouted and pointed and I saw a flock of small bright parrots tilting and skimming through a shadowy green of the high trees.
We met a bus coming to the village. It came clanking and wheezing and shuddering along, going too fast for the condition of the road. The name on the front of it was El Domador. It blew a squawky horn at us as we waited in the shallow ditch for it to go by and the passengers whooped.
After it was gone, two hundred yards further, I found the place Felicia had probably been talking about. A smaller road, just a trace of a road, turned off to the left. It ended after about a hundred feet, in a little clearing which the jungle was reclaiming. I silenced our vehicle and we got off. The silence was intense. There had been a shack at the edge of the clearing. It had fallen in, and the tough vines were curled around the old poles of which it had ten fashioned. We could have been a hundred feet or a hundred miles from any other road. In a little while the bird sounds began again, tentative at first. Then the bug chorus started. Nora peered carefully and rather timidly at the ground, looking for ants among the tough grasses.
There was an eeriness about the place that made it more suitable to speak in a half whisper.
“This is where they brought that girl?”
“Yes. Three days after Sam took off.”
“Who were they?”
“Nobody from the house. Three days, it would be time to come in from somewhere else.”
And you want me to bring that girl here?“
“Yes.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll be here when you get here with her. I’ll have to walk it. I think her nerves are very good. I think she’s tricky and subtle. So we have to plan it carefully Nora. We have to make it look very good to her. So I’m going to give you some lines to say, and we’re going to go over them, and then you’re going to walk away from it, because I don’t want to give her a chance to read you.”
“Will she read you, dear?”
“I don’t know. At least I know enough not to try to overact.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sympathy and reluctance are a hell of a lot more impressive than imitation villainy, Nora.”
I arrived at the clearing a little before one in the afternoon. I had cut across country rather than going through the village. I had had to take cover from only one vehicle, a burdened fish truck laboring out toward the markets. I had sweated the layer of repellent off, and I rubbed on more. I paced and I worried about Nora. If Almah Hichin showed up, if Nora did exactly as I had told her, as I had demonstrated to her, if she had tried no improvisation, and had kept her mouth shut, maybe it would work.
I paced back and forth in the clearing. I cut a reedy-looking thing and tried to make a whistle. The bark wouldn’t slip. I kept stopping, tilting my head, listening. When I heard it, it seemed to merge with the bug whine and die away, and then it came back, stronger than before. Then it was recognizable as the doughty whirr of a VW engine. It turned into the overgrown trace. I saw at last the glints of dark red through the foliage.
It came into the clearing and stopped, ten feet from me. Almah Hichin was at the wheel. She stared at me, frowning slightly as I walked over to the car. I reached in and turned the key off. The top was down. Almah wore a dark blue kerchief, a pale blue sleeveless silk blouse, a white skirt, flat white sandals. She looked up at me with respectable composure and said in a reasonable tone, “May I ask who you are, and what this is all about?”
“No trouble?” I asked Nora.
“None at all.” She sat half turned toward Almah, holding my little bedroom gun six inches from Alma’s waist. Almah’s white purse was on the divider between the black bucket seats. I reached over her and picked it up and opened it. I saw her decide to snatch at it and then change her mind. Combination wallet and change purse, lipstick, very small hair brush, mirror, stub of eyebrow pencil.
I took the bills out of the wallet. Three U.S. twenties, a ten, and three ones. A wad of soiled peso notes. I tossed the money into Nora’s lap. I put the billfold back into the purse, snapped it, took a step back and slung the purse deep into the brush. I looked at the girl. Her eyes had widened momentarily. They were an unusually lovely color, a deep lavender blue, and their asymmetry made them more interesting…
“Won’t somebody find that?” Nora asked on cue.
“It isn’t likely.” I knew how the inevitable formula worked in the girl’s mind. Nobody expected her to be able to go look for it. I saw a slight twitch at the corner of the controlled mouth.
I took the coil of nylon line off my shoulder, separated an end and dropped the rest of it. “Clasp your hands and hold them out,” I told her.
“I will not!”
“Miss Hichin, you can’t change anything. All you can do is make a lot of tiresome trouble. Just hold your hands out.”
She hesitated and then did so. Her wrists looked frail, her forearms childish. I lashed them together, swiftly and firmly. I opened the car door, gave a firm and meaningful tug at the line and she got out, saying, “This is altogether ridiculous, you know.”
Nora slid over into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut.
“Enough gas to make Culiacan?” I asked.
She turned the key on and checked. “More than enough.”
I reached and plucked the dark blue kerchief from Almah’s blonde head and handed it to Nora. “This might confuse things a little.”
She nodded. She glanced at Almah. “How about her blouse too?”
“I’ll bring it along,” I said. “You don’t want any part of this do you?”
Her little shudder was very effective. “No, dear.”
“Neither do I. Park it up there in the shade, just short of that last bend. Okay?”
“Yes, dear. Miss Hichin? Please don’t be stupid about this. You see, we have a lot of time. The plane doesn’t come until eight to pick us up. You’re such a pretty thing. It will be very difficult for him if you… let it get messy.”
“Are you people out of your minds?” Almah demanded.
“I’ll handle this. You get out of here,” I ordered.
She spun the little red car around deftly and headed back out again. The motor sound faded, and then it stopped.
I picked up the rest of the line and led the girl over to the spot I had picked, near the ruin of the shack. I flipped the line over a low limb, caught the end, took it over to another tree, laced it around the tree and then carefully pulled until she had her arms stretched high over her head, but both feet were firmly on the ground. I made it fast. I went to her and reached and checked the tension of the line above her lashed wrists. I wandered away from her and lit a cigarette and stood with my back to her, staring off into the brush.