Talking God Part 17

"I have to talk to somebody. It's an emergency."

"No time now. You call back. This evening."

The line went dead.

Fleck looked at it. Hung it up gently. Walked back to his car. It made no difference at all really. He could wait.

He had waited less than five minutes when the iron driveway gate creaked open and the limousine emerged. After it came another, equally black. They turned downtown, toward Capitol Hill.

Leroy Fleck trailed them in his rusty Chevy.

The limos did left turns on Const.i.tution Avenue, rolled past the National Gallery of Art, and pulled to a stop at the Tenth Street entrance to the Museum of Natural History. Fleck pulled his Chevy into a No Parking zone, turned off the ignition, and watched.

Seven men emerged from the two limos. Fleck recognized The Client. Of the others, one carried cameras and a camera bag, and two more were burdened by a movie camera, tripods, and what Fleck guessed must be sound recording equipment. The remaining three were a short, plump man in a fur-collared coat; a tall, elegantly dressed man with a mustache; and a burly, hard-looking weightlifter type with a crooked nose. The driver from the front limo held a black umbrella over Mustache, protecting him from the wet snowflakes until the entourage reached the shelter of the museum entrance. Fleck sat a moment, sorting them out in his mind. The plump man would probably be the amba.s.sador himself, or at least someone high on the power ladder. The elegant man would be a visiting Very Important Person, the one he'd read about in the Post Post. Judging from who got the umbrella, the visitor outranked the amba.s.sador and rated the personal attention of The Client. The weightlifter type would be the VIP's personal muscle. As for The Client, Fleck had pegged him long ago as the man in charge of security at the emba.s.sy. In all they made a formidable bunch.

Fleck climbed out of the Chevy without bothering to take the key out of the ignition or to lock the door. He was finished with the Chevy now. No more need for it. He trotted up the museum steps and into the entrance foyer. The last two cameramen from the limo delegation were disappearing through a doorway into the central hall. They hurried into a side hallway to his right, under a banner which read THE MASKED G.o.dS OF THE AMERICAS THE MASKED G.o.dS OF THE AMERICAS. Fleck followed.

There were perhaps fifty or sixty people in the exhibit of masks. Two-thirds of them looked to Fleck like a mixture of standard tourists. The rest were reporters and television cameramen and museum functionaries who must have been here waiting for Big Shot and his followers to appear. Now they were cl.u.s.tered around the elegant man. The Client stood a little aside from the central knot. He was doing his job. He was watching, his eyes checking everyone. They rested a moment on Fleck, then dismissed him and moved on.

The Client would have to be first, Fleck decided. He was the professional. Then he would go for the VIP. Fleck was conscious that he held two advantages. None of them had ever seen him and they wouldn't be expecting an attack. He would have total surprise on the first one he hit, and maybe a little surprise left on number two if there was enough confusion. He would need more luck than he could expect to take out the third one, but it was worth a try.

A cameraman's strobe flash lit the scene. Then another one. They were setting up some sort of filming apparently, with the VIP over by the display of South American stuff. Beside Fleck was an exhibit of masked dancers, big as life. Apparently some sort of American Indians. Fleck stooped, slipped the shank out of his boot, and held it in his palm, the honed blade hidden by his sleeve. Then he waited. He wanted the crowd to be exactly big enough. He wanted the time to be exactly right.

21.

"This Miguel Santero, was that his name? This guy with the mutilated hands, did you see any sign of him around here last night?"

Leaphorn was standing exactly in front of the vertical line formed by the junction of the elevator doors, staring at the crack as he asked the question. It seemed to Chee that the elevator was barely moving. Why hadn't they looked for the stairs? Six flights. They could have run down six flights while this incredibly slow elevator was dropping one.

"I didn't see him," Chee said. "I just had a feeling that it was Santero on the telephone."

"I wish we knew for sure how he connects," Leaphorn said, without relaxing his stare at the elevator door. "Three slim threads is all we have-or maybe four-tying him to the Santillanes bunch. The FBI connects him, but the FBI has a bad habit of buying bad information. Second, after Santillanes was killed going to find Highhawk, Santero went out and found him. Maybe that was just a coincidence. Third, the little red-headed man who killed Santillanes seems to have been following Santero too."

The elevator's floor indicator pa.s.sed three and sank toward two. Leaphorn watched it. He got Chee to explain how the displays were arranged. He told Chee what he'd seen in the Post Post about General Huerta Cardona demanding return of the Incan mask. If he felt any of the anxiety which was causing Chee to chew relentlessly on his lower lip, he didn't allow it to show. about General Huerta Cardona demanding return of the Incan mask. If he felt any of the anxiety which was causing Chee to chew relentlessly on his lower lip, he didn't allow it to show.

"What's the fourth?" Chee said.

Leaphorn's mind had left this part of the puzzle to explore something else. "Fourth?"

"You said maybe four thin threads."

"Oh. The fourth. Santero's mangled hands and Santillanes' teeth. They were broken out, I think. The pathologist said there was nothing wrong with the man's gums." He looked at Chee. "I think that's what decides me. Santero is one of the Santillanes people. The FBI had this one right. Describe him to me again."

Chee described Bad Hands in detail.

"What do you think we're dealing with here?"

"I'd guess a bomb," Chee said.

Leaphorn nodded. "Probably," he said. "Plastic explosive in the mask, and someone there to detonate it when the general is in exactly the right place."

The elevator creaked to a halt at the ground floor.

"I'll get the mask," Chee said. "You look for Santero."

Finding Santero proved to be no problem.

They rushed out of the elevator, through the door into the museum's main-floor public display halls and down the corridor toward the MASKED G.o.dS OF THE AMERICAS MASKED G.o.dS OF THE AMERICAS banner-Chee leading, Leaphorn puffing along behind. Chee stopped. banner-Chee leading, Leaphorn puffing along behind. Chee stopped.

"There he is," he said.

Santero had his back to them. He was standing beside an exhibit of Toltec masks, watching the crowd, which was watching television crews at another exhibit. Bright lights flashed on-a television crew preparing for action.

Chee turned his hurried walk into a run, dodging through the spectators, staggering a teenaged girl who backed into his path, being staggered in turn by a hefty woman whose shoulder grazed him as he pa.s.sed. The Yeib.i.+.c.hai itself had drawn only a few lookers. Curiosity about the television crews and the celebrity at the Incan display was the magnet but Chee had to push his way through the overflow to reach the exhibit. He was forcing himself not to think two terrible, unthinkable thoughts. He would reach the mask and there would be a bomb under it and Bad Hands would detonate it in his face. He would reach the mask and tear it off and there would be nothing under it. Only the molded plastic head of the manikin. In the first thought he would be instantly dead. In the second he would be hideously, unspeakably, terminally humiliated-living out his life as a public joke.

Chee pushed aside a boy and vaulted over the guardrail into the Yeib.i.+.c.hai display. Up close, the manikin representing Talking G.o.d seemed even larger than he'd remembered. He gripped the fur ruff at the throat of the mask. Behind him he heard a voice shouting: "Hey! You! Get out of there." He pulled up on the leather. (It will explode, he thought. I will be dead.) Through his fingers, the mask and head seemed to be one-a single ent.i.ty. The stiff leather wouldn't pull loose.

"Hey!" he heard behind him. "Get away from that. What the h.e.l.l are you doing!" A security guard was climbing over the railing.

Chee jerked at the mask, tilting the manikin against him. He jerked again. The mask, the head, all of it came off in his arms. The headless manikin toppled with a crash. "Hey!" the guard shouted.

Leroy Fleck had several terrible weaknesses and several terrible strengths. One of his strengths was in stalking his prey, attaining the exact place, the exact time, the exact position, for using his shank exactly as Eddy Elkins-and his own subsequent experience-had taught him to use it. The secret of Leroy Fleck's survival had been finding a way to make his kill instant and silent. And Fleck had managed to survive seventeen years since his release from prison.

He was stalking now. While he watched the crowd and waited for the moment, he slipped the shank out of his sleeve and an envelope out of his pocket. He put the shank in the envelope, and carried it in his right hand, deep in his right coat pocket where it would be ready. The envelope had been Elkins' idea. "If witnesses see an envelope, they react like they're seeing somebody handing somebody a letter. Same with the victim. But if people see a knife coming, it's a totally different reaction." That had been proved true. And the paper didn't get in the way at all, or slow things down. With the handle of the shank ready between his thumb and forefinger, he watched The Client carefully, and the VIP, and the VIP's muscleman, and the amba.s.sador, and the rest of them. He concluded from the way the man moved, and the way he watched, that the still photographer was also the amba.s.sador's bodyguard. Partially on the basis of that he had changed his strategy. The VIP would go first. The Client second. The VIP was the one that mattered, the one who would best demonstrate that Leroy Fleck was a man, and not a dog that could be spit on without retribution.

He could do it right now, he thought, but the situation was improving. It became clear to Fleck what was happening. The VIP had called some sort of press conference here at the Incan display. That brought in the television cameras, and TV crews attracted the curious. The bigger the crowd got, the better the odds for Fleck. It would multiply the confusion, improve his chances of getting two, and maybe even three.

Then he saw Santero-the man who always wore gloves. It was clear to Fleck almost immediately that Santero was also stalking. Fleck watched. Santero seemed to have two objectives. He was keeping out of the line of vision of The Client, and he was keeping the VIP in sight. Fleck considered this. It didn't seem to matter. Santero was no longer the enemy. The man had probably come here to try something. But if he did, it could only be helpful to Fleck. He could see no problem in that.

Just as he had decided that, he saw the two Indian cops. They hurried into the exhibit hall together. Then the tall one broke into a run toward him, and the older one headed for Santero. Here Fleck could definitely see a problem. Both of these men had seen him, the older one clearly and in good light. No more time to wait for a bigger crowd. Fleck pushed his way past a man in a raincoat, past a television light technician, toward the VIP. The VIP was standing with a well-dressed fat man wearing bifocal gla.s.ses. They were studying a sheet of paper, discussing it. Probably, Fleck thought, they were looking at notes for the statement he intended to make. If he could handle it, Fleck decided he would take the VIP from the back. He slipped his right hand from his pocket, crumpling one end of the envelope as he gripped the shank handle. Then he moved, Fleck fas.h.i.+on, like lightning.

Leaphorn always thought things through, always planned, always minimized the opportunity for error. It was a lifelong habit, it was the source of his reputation as the man to handle impossible cases. Now he had only a few seconds to think and no time at all to plan. He would have to presume that there was a bomb, that Santero held the detonator, that Santero was working alone because only one person would be needed. Santero's presence, lurking where he could watch the general, seemed to reinforce some of that thinking. The man was waiting until the general moved up to the position closest to the bomb. And the detonator? Probably something like the gadget that turned his television on and changed the channels. Grabbing him wouldn't work. He'd be too strong and agile for Leaphorn to handle, even with surprise. He'd simply point the thing and push the b.u.t.ton. Leaphorn would try confusion.

Santero heard him rus.h.i.+ng up and whirled to face him. His right hand was in his coat pocket, the arm rigid.

"Senor Santero," Leaphorn said, in a loud, hoa.r.s.e, breathless whisper. "Venga conmigo! Venga! p.r.o.nto! p.r.o.nto! Venga!"

Santero's face was shocked, bloodless. The face of a man interrupted at the moment of ma.s.s murder.

"Come with you?" he stammered. "Who are you?"

"Los Santillanes sent me," Leaphorn said. "Come. Hurry." Santillanes sent me," Leaphorn said. "Come. Hurry."

"But what-" Santero became aware that Leaphorn had gripped his right arm. He jerked it away, pulled out his right hand. He wore a black glove on it, and in the glove he held a small, flat plastic box. "Get away from me," Santero said, voice fierce.

There was a clamor of voices from the crowd. Someone was shouting: "Hey! You! Get out of there." Santero turned from Leaphorn, backing away, starting at the sound of a second shout: "Hey! Get away from that."

Santero took another step backward. He raised the box.

"Santero," Leaphorn shouted. "El hombre ahi no esta el general. No esta El General Huerta Car dona. Es un-" Leaphorn's Arizona-New Mexico Spanish included no Castilian noun for "stand-in" or even "subst.i.tute." "Es un "Es un impostor," he concluded. impostor," he concluded.

"Impostor?" Santero said. He lowered the box a little. "Speak English. I can't understand your Spanish."

"I was sent to tell you they were using a stand-in," Leaphorn said. They heard about the plot. They sent someone made up to look like the general."

Santero's expression s.h.i.+fted from doubtful to grim. "I think you're lying," he said. "Stop trying to get between me and-"

From the crowd at the display came the sound of a woman screaming.

"What the devil-?" Santero began. And then there were shouts, another scream, and a man's voice shouting: "He's fainted! Get a doctor!"

Leaphorn's move was pure reflex, without time to think. His only advantages were that Santero was a little confused, a little uncertain. And the hand in which Santero held the control box had only two fingers left inside that glove. Leaphorn struck at the hand.

Leroy Fleck said, "Excuse me. Excuse me, please," and pushed past the woman he had been using as a screen and went for the general's back. But he did it just as the general was turning. Fleck saw the general staring at him, and the general's bodyguard making a quick-reflex move to block him. His instincts told him this was not going well.

"A letter-" he said, striking at the general's chest. He felt the paper of the envelope crumple against his fist as the steel razor of the shank slit through the general's vest, and s.h.i.+rt, and the thin muscle of the chest, and sank between the ribs.

"-from an admirer," Fleck said, as he slashed back and forth, back and forth, and heard the general gasp, and felt the general sag against him. "He's fainted!" Fleck shouted. "Get a doctor!"

The Muscle had grabbed him by the shoulder just as he shouted it, and struck him a terrible blow over the kidneys. But Fleck hugged the general's sagging body, and shouted again, "Help me!"

It caused confusion, exactly as Fleck had hoped. The Muscle released Fleck's arm and tried to catch the general. The Client was there now beside them, bending over the slumping body. "What?" he shouted. "What happened? General!"

Fleck withdrew the shank, letting the crumpled envelope fall. He stabbed The Client in the side. Stabbed him again. And again.

The bodyguard was no longer confused. He shot Fleck twice. The exhibit echoed with the boom of the pistol, and the screams of panicking spectators.

Chee was only dimly aware of the shouts, the screams, the general pandemonium around him. He was numb. He turned the mask in his hands and looked into it, with no idea what to expect. He saw two dangling wires, one red, one white, a confusing array of copper-colored connections, a small square gray box, and a heavy compact ma.s.s of blue-gray dough.

The security officer clutched his arm. "Come on!" he shouted. "Get out of here!" The security officer was a plump young black man with heavy jowls. The screams were distracting him. "Look," Chee said, turning the open end of the mask toward him. "It's a bomb." While he was saying it, Chee was tearing at the wires. He dropped them to the floor, and sat on the back of the fallen manikin, and began carefully peeling the Yeib.i.+.c.hai mask from the ma.s.s of blue-gray plastic which had been pressed into it.

"A bomb," the guard said. He looked at Chee, at the mask, and at the struggle at the adjoining Incan exhibit. "A bomb?" he said again, and climbed the railing and charged into the Incan melee. "Break it up," he shouted. "We have a bomb in here."

And just then General Huerta Cardona's bodyguard shot Leroy Fleck.

Chee looked up to see what was happening. And then he finished brus.h.i.+ng the fragments of plastic out of the mask of Talking G.o.d, and straightening the bristling row of eagle feathers and the fox-fur ruff. He picked it up in one hand, and the ball of plastic explosive in the other, and climbed over the railing and out of the exhibit. He wanted to show Leaphorn they'd guessed right.

Joe Leaphorn's hand knocked the control box out of Santero's grip. It clattered to the marble floor between them. Santero reached for it. Leaphorn kicked it. It went skittering down the corridor, spinning past the feet of running people. Santero pursued it, running into the crowd stampeding out of the exhibition hall. Leaphorn followed.

A man with a camera collided with him. "He killed the general," the photographer shouted to someone ahead of him. "He killed the general." On the floor near the wall Leaphorn saw fragments of black plastic and an AA-size battery. Someone had trampled the detonator. He stopped, backed out of the stampede. Santero had disappeared. Leaphorn leaned against the wall, gasping. His chest hurt. His hip hurt where the heavy camera had slammed into it. He would go and see about Jim Chee. But first he would collect himself. He was getting too d.a.m.ned old for this business.

22.

Jim Chee sat on his bed, leaned back on his suitcase, and tried to cope with his headache by not thinking about it. He was wearing the best s.h.i.+rt and the well-pressed trousers he had hung carefully in the closet when he unpacked to save in the event he needed to look good. No need now to save them. He would wear them on the plane. It was a b.i.t.c.h of a headache. He had slept poorly-partly because of the strange and lumpy hotel mattress (Chee being accustomed to the hard, thin padding on the built-in bed of his trailer home), and partly because he had been too tense to sleep. His mind had been too full of horrors and terrors. He would doze, then jerk awake to sit on the edge of the mattress, shaking with the aftereffects of shallow, grotesque dreams in which Talking G.o.d danced before him.

Finally, about a half-hour before the alarm was scheduled to rescue him from the night, he had given up. He had taken a shower, packed his stuff, and checked again with the front desk to see if he had any messages. There was one from Leaphorn, which simply informed him that Leaphorn had returned to Window Rock. That surprised Chee. It was a sort of courtly thing for the tough old b.a.s.t.a.r.d to have done. There was a message from Janet Pete, asking for a call back. He tried and got no answer. By then the headache was flowering and he had time to kill. Downstairs he drank two cups of coffee-which usually helped but didn't this morning. He left the toast he'd ordered on the plate and went for a walk.

The mild early-winter storm which had been bringing Was.h.i.+ngton rain mixed with snow yesterday had drifted out over the Atlantic and left behind a grim gray overcast with a forecast for high broken clouds and clearing by late afternoon. Now it was cold and still. Chee found that even in this strange place, even under these circ.u.mstances, he could catch himself up in the rhythm of the fast, hard motion, of heart and lungs hard at work. The nightmares faded a little, coming to seem like abstract memories of something he might have merely dreamed. Highhawk had never really existed. There were not really eighteen thousand ancestors in boxes lining hallways in an old museum. No one had actually tried to commit ma.s.s murder with the mask of Talking G.o.d. He walked briskly down Pennsylvania Avenue, and veered northward on Twelfth Street, and strode briskly westward again on H Street, and collapsed finally on a bench in what he thought, judging from a sign he'd noticed without really attending, might be Lafayette Square. Through the trees he could see the White House and, on the other side, an impressive hotel. Chee caught his breath, considered the note from Leaphorn, and decided it was a sort of subtle gesture. (You and I, kid. Two Dineh among the Strangers.) But maybe not. And it wasn't the sort of thing he would ever ask the lieutenant about.

A dove-gray limousine pulled up under the hotel's entryway roof, and after it a red sports car which Chee couldn't identify. Maybe a Ferrari, he thought. Next was a long black Mercedes which looked like it might have been custom built. Chee was no longer breathing hard. The damp low-country cold seeped up his sleeves and around his socks and under his collar. He got up, inspired half by cold and half by curiosity, and headed for the hotel.

It was warm inside, and luxurious. Chee sank into a sofa, removed his hat, warmed his ears with his hands, and observed what his sociology teacher had called "the privileged cla.s.s." The professor admitted a prejudice against this cla.s.s but Chee found them interesting to observe. He spent almost forty-five minutes watching women in fur coats and men in suits which, while they tended to look almost identical to Chee's untrained eye, were obviously custom made. He saw someone who looked exactly like Senator Teddy Kennedy, and someone who looked like Sam Donaldson, and a man who was probably Ralph Nader, and three others who must have been celebrities of some sort, but whose names eluded him.

He left the hotel warm but still with the headache. The material splendors, the fur and polished leather of the hotel's guests, had replaced his nightmares with a depression. He hurried through the damp cold back to his own hotel room.

The telephone was ringing. It was Janet Pete.

"I tried to call you last night," she said. "How are you? Are you all right?"

"Fine," Chee said. "We had trouble down at the museum. The FBI got involved and-"

"I know. I know," Janet said. "I saw it on television. The paper is full of it. There's a picture of you, with the statue."

"Oh," Chee said. The final humiliation. He could see it in the Farmington Times: Times: Officer Jim Chee of s.h.i.+prock, New Mexico, seen above wrestling with a representation of Talking G.o.d, from which he has removed the head, in the Smithsonian Museum in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Officer Jim Chee of s.h.i.+prock, New Mexico, seen above wrestling with a representation of Talking G.o.d, from which he has removed the head, in the Smithsonian Museum in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

"On television, too. On the ABC morning news. They had some footage of you with the mask. But I'm not sure people who didn't know how you were dressed would know it was you."