“An auction,” Blaine realized, “that’s what you’re describing, isn’t it? Tell me!”
“Yes! Yes!”
“And your bid?”
“Too low.”
“Who won?”
“I don’t know. Maybe no one. I was never told. I’m telling the truth! My correspondence with Marrakesh was general. It never got specific even when I was still in the bidding.”
“Correspondence with who in Marrakesh?”
“A man known as El Tan.”
“His address, what’s his address, damnit?”
Fass’s eyes darted wildly from left to right. “He can’t be reached directly. There’s a middleman, a snake charmer named Abidir from somewhere in Djema El Fna square. El Tan can be reached only through him.”
An instant of hesitation followed in which neither man knew what was coming next. The knife trembled in Blaine’s hand as he struggled to control his rage.
“I want to kill you, Fass, but that would be too easy and too quick,” he said at last. “You need to suffer longer for all those boys plucked up from the streets and served up to you here in your own private hell. So I’m going to let you live. But mercy’s got nothing to do with it, because when Vasquez finds out you let me escape — and believe me, he will — his means of dealing with you will be infinitely more colorful than mine.”
McCracken jammed the knife harder against the Greek’s throat as he stripped his belt free to begin tying him up. “Might even ask the fat man to send me a videotape of the proceedings. Have a swell eternity,” Blaine said, as he laced the Greek’s hands behind him. “You’ve earned it.”
Johnny Wareagle knelt in the meadow on the spacious Oklahoma land set aside for the Sioux Reservation. Behind him Chief Silver Cloud approached warily, stopping when he could tell the huge Indian was aware of his presence.
“I am sorry, Wanblee-Isnala.”
Wareagle stared straight ahead over the miles of rolling flatlands alive in the breeze. “There is no reason to apologize.”
“I think there is. The Sallow Souls wanted our land even though the courts ruled against them. They became cruel, angry, their spirits dark and rank. I had nowhere else to turn.”
Wareagle turned to look at the old man. He smiled reassuringly. “I am here. Nothing else matters.”
“I should have told you the truth, Wanblee-Isnala,” Chief Silver Cloud muttered, his bronzed, leathery skin looking suddenly all of its seventy years in the hard sun. His long gray hair flapped lightly. “Instead I invited you to a nonexistent convention. I knew you could not refuse that. I worried you could refuse involvement if the truth was made known.” The chief came closer, the way a wary hunter might to an animal he thinks is tame. “You are a legend among our people, Johnny. Your manitou evokes memories of the warriors of legend.”
“The hellfire did not make legends. It made memories,” Wareagle told him.
“What will you do?”
“Sit among you today.”
“And if the Sallow Souls come?”
“Then they will come.”
Wareagle had learned only yesterday of the hoax played upon him. Chief Silver Cloud explained that oil had recently been discovered on the reservation and the locals were enraged over the Indians’ stubborn refusal to sell off the mineral rights which would have brought prosperity to a depressed area. Today the locals were coming in with their own heavy equipment to clear the meadow. The local police had disassociated themselves, and the Indians were honor-bound not to turn outside their ranks for help.
So they had turned to Johnny.
He sat in the center of the two-lane road leading up to the reservation. Around him were a hundred other Sioux of all ages, men and women. The locals would have to run them over to get their equipment past, and while Wareagle felt certain they would not go that far, he knew they might come close. In his hands was a four-foot-long wooden staff that might have been a walking stick to someone seven feet tall. The staff was made of birch and he had finished fashioning it himself last night.
The convoy of heavy equipment passed over the last ridge and rolled toward them. Fifty feet away brakes squealed, and the convoy rolled to a halt. Wareagle saw that the first two trucks were packed with two dozen men who were now climbing down with chains, bats, axe handles, clubs, and assorted other weapons.
Wareagle rose with the eyes of all his people upon him, and with the staff held lightly in his hands, he approached the semicircle of men who held their ground before the idling trucks. He stopped a yard away from a mustachioed man with a baseball bat.
“You and your friends be best to move out and let us through, Indian.”
“It’s our land.”
The man smirked and gazed around for support. Wareagle towered more than a foot over him, but he had more man twenty backups who had now closed into a circle.
“‘Our’? Seems like ‘your’ since you’re the only one standing here. Don’t want to see you get hurt now, do we?”
“Then leave.”
“Can’t do that, Indian.”
The man’s bat came overhead fast, but Johnny’s staff rose even faster, deflecting it with one end and striking the man on the side of the head with the other. Three men charged from the rear, their weapons in motion, but Wareagle swung his staff in a wide loop that smashed one against another and took them all to the ground.
A man attacking from the front with a club was met with a savage thrust to the midsection while another closing from the rear was halted by an equally savage thrust backward. The biggest of the locals came at Johnny whipping a heavy chain roundhouse fashion. The Indian leaped in to close the gap and caught the chain in his fist as he launched a sizzling kick into the man’s groin.
Seeing an opening, another local swung an axe handle high for Johnny’s head. Wareagle avoided it by dropping to one knee as he brought his staff around hard into the man’s ribs. He was vulnerable on the ground and a pair of men sought the advantage by bringing their clubs straight overhead from both front and rear. Johnny angled his staff upward and blocked both at the same time, wood clacking against wood. The men raised their clubs again, but Johnny pushed his staff like a pool cue into the front man’s solar plexus and then sliced it backwards into the other’s groin.
The man with the mustache was scampering back for the cab of his truck, bleeding rather badly from the mouth and cursing up a storm.
Three men came at Wareagle with weapons flailing. Johnny ducked, lowered his staff, and tripped two of them up. Then he brought it back up fast enough to block another blow and follow with a combination strike to the man’s face and ribs.
The rest of the locals backed away fearfully.
The man with the mustache had pulled a pistol from his glove compartment and was bringing it up to aim it.
Wareagle never even seemed to look at him. In a blur the staff was out of his hand and flying. It cracked into the man’s wrist at the precise moment he squeezed the trigger. His single shot flew hopelessly errant, and he scrambled back into the cab of his truck.
Wareagle stood his ground and watched the others rush by him, a few stopping to drag their downed fellows along with them. Johnny backed away and returned to the throng of Indians who rose as he approached, gazing on him with awe. Chief Silver Cloud sought him out as the members of the convoy fled in their trucks.
“The spirits shine on you, Wanblee-lsnala,” he said, as mesmerized by what he had just seen as all the others.