The people didn’t believe the man and woman, but on the other hand these strangers seemed to have no ulterior motive, so they smiled and nodded and thanked them for the information. The man and woman said the town also had a weekend market if they ever had excess produce to sell, and had a Roman Catholic church, if the villagers were interested. (They were.) And a school for the children. (Maybe later.)
Cautiously, after that, the people broadened their contacts with this new land. A few occasionally went to the Catholic church, though they weren’t yet ready to talk to the priest, who was nothing they’d ever seen before, being neither Indian nor black nor Spanish. A sale of yams in the market had produced cash; crumpled pale-green Belizean dollars with Queen Elizabeth II on them and frail-seeming Belizean coins, which they kept in a sack in one of the huts, not sure yet what to use them for.
The man and woman, in the meantime, having returned to the capital at Belmopan, had entered this new settlement of refugees onto a map. The two families by chance happening to be of equal strength there, the man and woman named the settlement Espejo-Alpuche.
21
Zotz
“Valerie,” Innocent said, “what do you expect us to do about it?”
The false Gurkhas, irritated and uneasy at the disappearance of the tall American woman, hacked their way northward through the jungle.
“There isn’t time to radio for help!” Valerie cried.
No one in the van noticed Vernon moaning and shaking his head and punching his thighs as he drove, because Scottie was telling a story involving female Siamese twins, an Israeli Nazi-hunter and a one-kilo package of. uncut cocaine in a box marked Baking Soda.
Kirby stood frowning westward, thinking hard, brooding at those tumbled dark mountains. “It’s worth a try,” he said.
The false Gurkhas came to a gravel road and boldly crossed it. A British Army jeep went by as they did so, bluish gray, and the two uniformed Brits inside it waved as they passed, the false Gurkhas waving back.
“Tell me what to do,” Valerie said.
Kirby said, “I need thin cloth, cotton, the thinner the better, and a lot of it.”
Tom, the American photojournalism called out, “Vernon, how the hell much farther is this damn place?”
“Oh, twenty-twenty-twenty minutes, no more,” Vernon told him, showing an agonized smile in the rearview mirror.
Innocent stared at the dancing leering Zotzes: “What are those things?”
“Devils,” Tommy told him.
Halfway up the slope, Kirby stopped to look back. Valerie and Rosita and Luz Coco were cutting and hacking the sheets into squares or rectangles or ovals, a foot and a half or two feet across. None of them were making the circles he’d asked for, but it didn’t really matter. Half the village was running in and out of huts, looking for string. Tommy and Innocent came together out of one of the huts, each carrying a cardboard carton; they started this way.
Kirby nodded, and hurried on over the hill to start Cynthia.
One of the young men of the village came into the clearing. “Soldiers coming,” he announced.
Everyone stopped what they were doing to stare at him or move closer to him or ask, “Who? Which soldiers? What kind of soldiers?”
“Gurruhs,” said the young man, which was as close as they’d come so far to the word Gurkha.
Twice in the last several months Gurkha patrols had moved through here, short black-haired men who held their shoulders proudly and handled their strange severe weapons confidently and yet smiled with amazingly bright teeth. The Gurkhas were a different kind of soldier, without the sullenness and fear and cruelty and tendency toward petty crime — and sometimes major crime — of the soldiers of their previous world. When the young man said, “Gurruhs,” they all smiled and relaxed. That kind of soldier. Fine.
Valerie, her arms billowing with cloth, came over the barren hilltop and saw Kirby Galway just getting into his plane. Innocent and Tommy were partway down the slope, carrying their cartons. Rosita and Luz followed Valerie with the rest of the cloth, and a half dozen villagers straggled up the slope in their wake, carrying bits of string, cord, twine and rope.
Is this going to work? Valerie frowned, thinking of the innocent villagers about to be slaughtered. Against murderers and machine guns, this? But what else is there to do?
She hurried down the farther slope.
Crouched on the blacktop in front of the van, Vernon shook open the map, holding it by its very edge with his fingertips as he guided it to the ground. It slipped from his grasp; he slapped at it. Just out of sight in the brush, Scottie had found a hollow log to piss resoundingly against. Across the road Morgan Lassiter, the woman journalist, was out of both sight and hearing for the moment, having gone discreetly away with a handful of Kleenex. The other news gatherers strolled around the empty road, yawning and stretching. Hiram Farley, the Trend editor, came over to place his Frye boots beside the map and say, “You know where this place is, do you?”
“Oh, yes,” Vernon said, looking up at him, squinting as though he stared into the too-bright sun. Farley’s face showed nothing, his eyes were level and patient. Why do I feel he knows my soul? But that’s just foolishness; if he knew the truth, he’d stop me.
There was some wistfulness in that idea.
“Everything’s fine,” Vernon said.
Innocent said, “Kirby, this is a crazy idea.” With some difficulty he had climbed up on the wing and was leaning in at the plane’s open door so he could talk to Kirby above the engine noise. Wind whipped at his clothing, and the plane trembled all over. “A crazy idea,” he said, more loudly.
Kirby, studying his instrument panel, gave Innocent an impatient look: “Do you have a better one?”
“Radio the police. Radio the British soldiers at Holdfast,” meaning the small British Army detachment out near the Guatemalan border.
“I’ll do that, once we’re airborne, but it won’t do much good. If Valerie’s right, there isn’t time to send for help. At the very worst, maybe we can slow them down.”
Innocent looked past Kirby at Valerie in the other front seat. She was riding with him because she was the only one with a hope of leading him back to where she’d been. Now, her head was bent forward, she was busily tying strings to cloth. Her profile rang like a gong in Innocent’s soul. “By God, she’s alive,” he said.