“I am here tonight,” Vernon told them. “I am introducing myself, and I will spend the night in the hotel, so we can get an early start tomorrow.”
“Well, good fellow!” the sharp-nosed man said. “Johnny on the spot, that’s the ticket. Introducing yourself, are you?”
“My name is Vernon.”
“And how do you do, Vernon? You’ll find that I am Scottie. This ravishing lady to my left is Morgan Lassiter, a world-class lesbian and ace repor—”
“Just because you never got any,” Morgan Lassiter told him, but calmly, as though she were used to him — or possibly to his type. Her accent was anonymously Midlantic, as though she’d learned English from machines, on Mars. She nodded in a businesslike way at Vernon and said, “Nice to see you.”
“And you, Ma’am.”
“This lot,” Scottie said, and interrupted himself to bang his whisky glass on the table, crying, “Shut up, you berks! Vernon’s here to introduce himself. And here he is, our driver, Vernon. Bright and early on the morrow he shall whisk us from this hellhole here out to the other hellhole over there, and then back again. Back again is included, am I right, Vernon?”
“Yes,” said Vernon.
Scottie gestured this way and that. “Over there is Tom, a fine American photojournalist, just chockablock with all the latest American photo journalist technological advances, isn’t that right, Tommy?”
“Fuck you in the ass,” Tommy said.
“Chahming,” Scottie said. “Next to him is Nigel, the dregs of humanity, not only an Australian but an Australian newspaperman, until he forgot himself once, told the truth, and was exiled to Edinburgh.”
“What Tommy said,” said Nigel.
“Never does his own research,” Scottie commented. “Here beside me we have Colin, the demon scribbler of Fleet Street, and beside him is Ralph Waldo Eckstein, who won’t tell anybody why the Wall Street Journal fired him, and—”
“What Tommy said.”
“Yes, yes. Now, Vernon, lad, you’ve probably been told we are a party of six, is that not right?”
“That’s right,” Vernon said.
“But here we are, as you can plainly see, a party of seven. Did Morgan give birth? Perish the thought. In fact, perish the little perisher. No, what has happened is that even here in this pit of nullity, this farthest outpost of Empire which Aldous Huxley quite rightly said was on the way from nowhere and to nowhere, journalists seek one another out, come together for comfort and liquor and the latest lies. That gentleman over there, with the truly wonderful moustache, is one Hiram Farley, an editor if you please with a most famous American magazine called Trash. No, I beg your pardon; Trend.”
Hiram Farley leaned forward with his meaty forearms crossed on the table and looked unsmilingly at Vernon. He said nothing. He seemed to be exploring Vernon’s eyes, looking for something, traces of something. A cold finger touched Vernon’s spine. He knows, he thought. But he can’t know, get hold of yourself. Vernon blinked.
Scottie said, “Mr. Farley would very much like to come along with us tomorrow, if he may. Busman’s holiday and all that, the old fire company horse hearing the bell. Please say yes.”
“Yes,” said Vernon.
15
Devil Dance
Twenty little devil-gods stood on the rattan mat, knees turned out to the sides and deeply bent, arms flung wide to show their bat webs, eyes glittering with evil, mouths stretched back in a violent smirk out of which forked tongues curled, poised to strike. In the flickering candlelight, the massed group of 20 demons seemed to move, shimmer, almost to dance, their eyes staring back at Kirby, who blinked, cleared his throat, and said, “Fine, Tommy. Very effective.”
“They get to you, don’t they?” Tommy held the candle lower, the movement causing the creatures to alter their knee bends and roll their eyes, while their shadows magnified and swooped on the far wall of the hut.
“They’re real good, Tommy,” Kirby said. Behind him, outside, a low-key party was under way, partly in hospitality at the presence of Kirby and Innocent and partly a vigil, waiting for word of Valerie Greene. Rosita and a couple of the others were still out there in the darkness somewhere, occasionally calling, but everyone knew they wouldn’t find their Jungle Queen tonight. At first light they’d look again, hoping nothing bad had happened to her, reeling around stoned and lost in the darkness.
Innocent was in another hut right now, being shown some of the blankets and dress material the villagers had made and dyed themselves, so Tommy had taken the opportunity to bring Kirby here and show him he’d actually been at work making the promised Zotzes.
Zotzilaha Chimalman, replicated 20 times, danced in the candle-light on the rattan mat. Each figure was about 10 inches high, seven inches wide, formed from clay, hollowed out as an incense burner. Buried and dug up again, all of them had been knocked together a bit to simulate age and rough treatment, each one subtly different, showing the specific touches of the half dozen artisans who had worked on them.
Fakes. Mockeries. Tiny clay imitations of an ancient long-dead superstition, but still brimming with the potency of dread. Zotzilaha Chimalman hated mankind and had the power and the genius to do something about it. Kirby had never been a Maya, but nevertheless he felt uneasy in the presence of this naked malevolence. He could understand why it was so hard for Tommy to turn his hand to the creation of such a being, and even more so for the other villagers, whose straightforward relationship with life and the spirits and their ancestors had never been corrupted by exile to the outer world.
Over the candle flame, Tommy’s eyes gleamed at Kirby almost as gleefully as the demons’: “Had enough, Kimosabe?”
“They’re fine, Tommy,” Kirby said, calm and dignified. “Thanks. And, uh, let’s get the hell out of here.”
Tommy chuckled, and they went outside to a clear night full of stars, with a moon about seven months pregnant. The villagers liked to party, but were troubled by the disappearance of their Sheena, and therefore merely sat in groups, murmuring together. The little plastic radio had been turned off; no salsa music from Guatemala tonight. A horizontal scrim of marijuana smoke hung at nose level. Jars of home-brew clinked against stone. The mountains that had swallowed Valerie Greene were black against the western sky.
Innocent was no longer admiring materials but sitting on them. A bulky old mahogany armchair had been brought out of one of the huts and set near the largest fire, then draped with colorful cloths; black-and-white zigzags over red or rust or orange, bright red and deep blue diamonds in alternating patterns, representations of flora and fauna so stylized by centuries of repetition as to have lost all hint of their original realistic nature. Upon this soft throne sat Innocent, smiling upon the fire and the shyly smiling villagers, in his left hand a large Hellman’s Mayonnaise jar mostly full of what to drink.
Crossing toward him, Kirby thought at first it was merely the ambiguity of the firelight that made Innocent’s face look so much softer and less guileful than usual, but when he got closer he saw it was more than that. “Innocent?” he said.
Innocent turned his smiling face. He wasn’t drunk, and he wasn’t participating in the gage that was being passed around. It seemed as though he was just, well, happy. “How are you, Kirby?” he said.
“I’m fine.” Kirby looked around for something to sit on, found nothing, and sat on the ground beside Innocent’s left knee, half turned away from the fire so he could continue the conversation. “How are you, Innocent?”