His language difficulties had more effect than his protestations. For the first time, Guapo’s heavy, cruel face showed some doubt. He sat slowly down again, peering hard at Gideon.
“So who are you then?”
“Look…” Gideon zipped open the fanny pack he wore near his belt buckle, in which he kept his passport, airplane tickets, and money (and for the moment, a miscellaneous collection of fresh cranial fragments), then fumbled through a wad of damp nuevos soles and tenand twenty-dollar bills to pull out the passport, its familiar blue cover somehow reassuring, as if he were at an airport and simply showing it could get him out of whatever this mess was. He opened it to the identification pages and pushed it across the table to Guapo. “See? Gideon Oliver, that’s me.” He tapped his photograph.
Guapo peered sulkily at it. “And how do I know it’s not fake? Why should I think you’re not trying to fool me?”
“Fool you? How could I know I was going to see you? How could I possibly know your Indians would come and get us?”
“My Indians, my damn Indians!” Guapo exploded, jumping out of his chair. He flung the passport at Gideon’s face. “Luis!” he called, and the man with the revolver came to sit at the table in his place. A snake-necked, fox-faced, crazy-eyed man with an inch of burning cigarette dangling from his lower lip, he was missing the thumb and first finger of his right hand. But with his other thumb, he steadily clicked the revolver’s hammer back, eased it forward, clicked it back, eased it forward… all the while keeping it pointed at the center of Gideon’s chest. Gideon did his best not to think about it, but his eyes kept returning to the moving thumb.
“Would you mind not doing that?” he said. “Or at least pointing it someplace else?” A mistake, he thought immediately.
Oozing malignance – whether it was general or directed specifically at Gideon was impossible to tell – the man smiled meanly, revealing yet another mouthful of discolored, rotting teeth, and kept on doing what he was doing. Click… click…
Gideon shrugged one shoulder in what he hoped was a show of unconcern, and turned to watch Guapo, who had stomped to the three Arimaguas, where they still hunkered down at the base of the wall with their rifles and their Inca Kolas. He began shouting at them, waving the big knife for emphasis. None of them looked at him, but only stared straight ahead. Split-nose was the only one who replied, his answers surly and curt. Like the others, he stared straight in front of him, into the middle distance, his eyes on a level with Guapo’s hips, as still, and as impassive, as a stone idol, and just about as grim.
A long silence after his last answer, and then Guapo suddenly lashed out, kicking the bottle out of the Indian’s hand and sending it skittering over the worn plank floor, spewing yellow-green liquid. Split-nose didn’t move a muscle: no start, no blink, no change of expression or focus. Guapo yelled even louder, a mix of Spanish and something else. Gideon couldn’t pick up most of what he was shouting, but he managed to make out imbecile and estupido. Split-nose’s answers were more of the same: monotonic and obstinate. He seemed unreachable, immovable, but Gideon suspected there would come a time when Guapo would pay for this.
Now would be a good time, he did his best to convey to Split-nose. Now would be a perfect time. But the Indian sat immobile and oblivious.
“What are they talking about?” he asked Vargas in English. The man guarding them frowned and watched them intently, as if trying to understand the words, but he didn’t tell them to be quiet.
“Guapo, he thought you were Scofield.”
“Scofield? Why would he think I was Scofield?”
“He sent the Indians to get him… and me. He told them Scofield was called ‘professor,’ and the fellow with the chopped-up nose, he heard me call you ‘professor,’ so he thought…” He shrugged away the rest of the sentence. “At least, I think that’s what they’re saying.”
“This Guapo, have you heard of him?”
Vargas nodded. “He’s a very big man, the boss in North Loreto,” he whispered, then stopped himself. With a wary glance at the man with the revolver to assure himself that he didn’t understand English (the obtuse, open-mouthed expression satisfied him), he went on: “A tough customer, a killer. He’d as soon take your eye out with that knife as-”
Guapo’s heavy returning footsteps silenced him. “Stupid bastards,” he grumbled in Spanish as he fell into the remaining chair and poured himself three fingers of aguardiente. “Trained monkeys would do better.” With a grunt and a sudden jerk he jammed the point of the knife into the tabletop, which Gideon now noticed was covered with splintery pockmarks from a hundred previous such spearings. There the knife remained, upright and quivering, about three inches from Guapo’s hand and five long, impossible feet from Gideon’s. And both Vargas and the guy with the gun and the itchy thumb now sat between them. Plan A – going up and over the table and through that opening in the wall – wasn’t going to work any more, that was clear. Guapo drained half the tumbler and smoothed his mustache with thumb and forefinger, a surprisingly dainty motion. “So where is Scofield?” he asked in a low voice, staring at the table.
A promising sign? Gideon wondered. He believes me?
“Professor Scofield has… has died, I regret to say,” Vargas stammered, clearly realizing how extremely unlikely it sounded. “Only last night.”
Guapo eyed him suspiciously.
“I swear it on the grave of my mother,” said Vargas. “A crazy person, a drug-crazed lunatic, threw him from the ship. He also threw another passenger, a-”
“And what do you say?” Guapo asked Gideon.
“It’s true. Scofield’s dead.” Well, that had hardly been established beyond doubt, but it was highly probable, and this was not the time for complicated answers.
“They’re lying,” said the fox-faced one. “Why are we wasting all this time?”
Thoughtfully, Guapo drained the tumbler and poured a little more, finishing the bottle. Another sip, another delicate smoothing of the silky mustache, and he turned to Vargas to address him directly for the first time, other than having told him to shut up. “And you, I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not Vargas.”
“No, senor, I’m Vargas, all right, that’s completely correct. Alfredo Vargas, Captain Alfredo Vargas, at your service.” His hand reached up to his braided captain’s hat, but it was no longer there, having been lost when he fell into the river.
“That’s good. I’m very glad you didn’t lie, my friend. You should be even more glad you didn’t lie. Now I want you to tell me exactly what happened to Scofield.”
“Of course, with pleasure-”
“And I want you to tell me exactly – exactly – what your boat is doing on the Javaro River.”
“Certainly, I have nothing to hide from you-”
Guapo held up his hand. “ You know who I am, don’t you? You’ve heard of El Guapo?” With a jerk, the knife was pulled from the table.
Vargas’s eyes followed it as if magnetized. “Of course, senor. Everyone has heard of El Guapo.”
“And have you heard of what happens to people who tell falsehoods to El Guapo?” With the point of the huge knife he gently, almost tenderly, touched Vargas’s left earlobe, then ran it around the entire ear. Gideon saw a single spot of blood where it nicked the top rim. Vargas sat through it as rigidly and motionlessly as was possible for a human to sit, although his Adam’s apple, beyond his control, glugged up and down a couple of times.
“Yes, senor,” he croaked through barely moving lips.
Guapo withdrew the knife, but his fingers remained around the handle. “Then go ahead. And don’t be nervous.”
Fox-face laughed nastily. “No, no, don’t be nervous, what is there to be nervous about?”
And so the story came out. The first part, about how Scofield and Maggie had been thrown overboard, and Maggie, but not Scofield, had been rescued, was told pretty much as it had happened. Gideon was asked to verify the details once or twice and complied. Guapo didn’t ask why Cisco would have wanted to kill Scofield. He seemed to accept Vargas’s description of a “drug-crazed lunatic” on the loose (which was accurate enough), and neither Vargas nor Gideon volunteered anything more about it. The simpler, the better. “You are very lucky you are not Scofield,” Fox-face said to Gideon with undisguised regret.