Merry hung up the phone, put his smile back on, and looked at Haere, who decided that the carefully acquired tan made the smile seem whiter than it really was. The tan went well with the crinkly eyes and the lean jaw and the straight nose. It was all capped by a thatch of ginger hair that fell down over the high forehead in a careless wave. It all seemed calculated to produce an impression of warm, quick inteligence, and Haere was quite willing to buy it if only Merry wouldn’t smile quite so often.
“Draper... Haere,” Merry said slowly, spacing the name. He frowned as if trying to remember where he had heard it before. “Politics, isn’t it?”
“Politics,” Haere agreed.
“Whatever brings you down here?”
“Vacation?”
“Here?” Merry didn’t try to hide his disbelief.
“Perhaps a little business?”
Merry shook his head as though business was simply awful. “Well, good luck is about all I can say. But if you want some advice—”
He was interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Crane with note pad in hand. She looked at Merry, who nodded. Mrs. Crane turned to Haere.
“One,” she said. “The Friends clinic. They never heard of any Dr. Blaine, so they couldn’t be expecting him. Two, there was no J. Blaine on the Tucaereo flight from Houston yesterday — or the day before, for that matter. Three, I talked to Suro, who said he failed to arrest any gringos yesterday, although he might get around to it this afternoon after lunch.”
“Commander Suro is something of a kidder,” Merry explained.
“Yes,” Haere said. “He seems to be. So does the mysterious Dr. Blaine. What about this Dr. Rice? Has he turned up yet?”
“From where?” Mrs. Crane said.
“From wherever he disappeared to.”
“Joe Rice hasn’t disappeared anywhere,” she said. “It was Joe Rice I just talked to at the clinic.”
Chapter 29
The road that Citron followed out of the capital was a narrow blacktop, much potholed, and patched in long stretches with gravel. It led through an exurbia of shantytowns built out of scrap lumber and plastic sheeting and cardboard and flattened tin cans. The road then curved up into the mountains, where no one at all seemed to live other than a few farmers who grew straggly plots of corn and raised small herds of goats and the occasional chicken.
The sub-subsistence farms gave way to what seemed to be neglected or abandoned coffee plantations. Citron checked his odometer. At precisely 3.6 kilometers after the coffee plantations began he started looking for the side road that was marked on the rough map slipped to him by the busboy in the Inter-Continental restaurant. He almost missed the side road because it was virtually hidden by some tall broad-leafed plants. They looked like poinsettia to Citron, although they were actually higuerilla or palma Christi or, more commonly, castor-bean plants. Citron did notice they had been carefully planted to obscure the dirt side road that turned out to be not much more than a rutted path.
Citron backed up and eased the Ford slowly through the screen of broad-leafed plants, which noisily scraped against the car’s sides.After bouncing slowly along the dirt path for 1.3 kilometers, Citron stopped the car and turned off the engine.
He watched as the one-armed man stepped out from behind a clump of bushes which, for all Citron knew, were coffee plants. The man was fairly tall, at least six feet, and thin. His right arm was missing. The stump poked out from the sleeve of a clean blue T-shirt. In the man’s left hand was a pistol of some kind. Citron noted that it was a revolver. Over his eyes the man wore a pair of dark, gold-framed aviator glasses. He was a narrow-faced, grim-mouthed man, and Citron judged him to be in his middle thirties. Beneath the clean blue T-shirt was a pair of white duck pants that were soiled with smears of either dirt or oil.
The man moved slowly over to the Fiesta. The pistol was not aimed at Citron, but rather at the Fiesta itself, as if the man were prepared to kill the car should it make any sudden move. When he reached the right-hand door the man shoved the pistol down behind his belt and used his left hand to open the door. He took the pistol back out, climbed into the car, and looked at Citron.
“You are Citron?” the man said in Spanish.
“Yes.”
“I am Mr. X.” This time he said “Mr. X” in accented English.
“Right.”
“We wait.”
“For what?”
“To see if you were followed.”
“I see.”
They waited five minutes in silence. Citron found it to be a comfortable wait without strain or tension. It was, he thought, something like waiting with an old and troubled friend. Citron had often waited like this with other Mr. Eckyses in other countries until they decided to speak of their hopes and fears. Finally, the one-armed man broke the silence with an observation. “You speak very good Spanish.”
“Thank you.”
“Your friend, Mr. Haere,” he said, pronouncing Haere “Ha-air-ray,”“his Spanish is not quite so good.”
“No, I suppose not.”
There was another silence, which lasted a full minute. “That is why I telephoned you.”
“Because of my Spanish.”
“Yes. My English is poor.”
“For what other reason did you telephone?”
“You do not know?”
“Not exactly.”
Mr. Eckys smiled without displaying any teeth. It was a slight smile, almost wan. “Suppose I said I was a bandit and that we intend to hold you for ransom.”
“Good luck.”
“You mean there is no one who would pay for your safe return.”
“No one.”
“You are a poor man yourself?”
“Very poor.”
“Yet you wear a fine watch.”
“A gift.”
“From a rich friend perhaps?”
“My mother.”
“Then your mother is surely rich and would pay well for the return of her son.”
“I fear that you do not know my mother.”
Mr. Eckys twisted slightly in his seat and raised the pistol so that it now was aimed at Citron. “I will take the watch.”
Citron shrugged. “It is yours,” he said and started to slip it from his wrist.
“Keep it,” Mr. Eckys said. “It was a test. A rich man would hesitate. A poor man would not.”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
Mr. Eckys frowned as he considered the question. “I am not sure,” he said finally, “but it is true. Perhaps it is because the poor have nothing to lose but their lives.”
“I can see you are a deep thinker,” Citron said.
“I think from here,” Mr. Eckys said, tapping himself on the heart with the muzzle of the pistol. “You may start the engine.”
Citron nodded and turned the key. “Where do we go?”
“Another two kilometers.”
“And then?”
“I will show you where it took place.”
“What?”
Mr. Eckys smiled, this time displaying a set of large white teeth. “The betrayal. That is why you are here, isn’t it? To learn the details of the betrayal.”
“Yes,” Citron said, putting the Fiesta into drive. “That is exactly why I’m here.”
They drove the two kilometers in silence until Mr. Eckys said, “Stop here.”
Citron stopped. Mr. Eckys used the pistol to point to a low mound, no more than a foot high, which was covered by weeds. The mound was perhaps seven feet wide and nine feet long. “We buried them there, all of them,” Mr. Eckys said.
“Who?”
“Myself and my comrades. We watched from over there.” He pointed to a stand of trees.
“I mean, who was buried?”