The Juror Page 27

  Annie’s trying to sleep. Her head droops forward.

  An antsy hen leaves its basket in the seat up ahead. It tries to perch on the seat-back in front of Annie. The bus lurches and the hen opens its wings and flutters them against Annie’s face. She starts. The hen ogles her with one eye. Annie has never strangled a chicken and she wonders what it would feel like. But the hen seems to read her look, and it hops back into its basket.

  Annie prays for sleep. Anything. Even just a little drifting around the fringes of this rage would do her good.

  She and Oliver spent all night in the bus station, waiting for this bus. Afraid to rent a car. She didn’t have any of Juliet’s credit cards, and she didn’t want to use one of her own—because then the investigators might find out she was down here.

  They’d know, and then he’d know.

  Salsa music blares on the bus driver’s radio. The windows are open, and the fragrance that rushes in is a mix of exhaust and cedary woodsmoke and rancid garbage and some kind of tropical nightbloom.

  He knows anyway. Because they’re all working for the Teacher. The whole thing with the investigators was a ruse, a setup. Even the trial itself was a trick. They want an excuse to kill my child, so they set up the trial and Juliet’s murder and they’re waiting for me to make a slip.

  Oliver barks, with a laugh, “All right, who laid it?”

  No one back here knows English but they all understand Oliver’s disgusted sniff. The women laugh and the owners of the hen laugh. The word is passed around. Finally a drunk, with breadcrumbs and flecks of perhaps butter clinging to the stubble on his chin, rises and bows to Oliver. He seems to be confessing to the crime.

  The others laugh at him, and Oliver laughs as hard as anyone. Plainly he’s having a good time down here. She’s seldom seen him so excited, so cheerful. He hasn’t complained once since they boarded the plane. Get him away from that video screen, get him out on a renegade jaunt like this, he thrives. Right now he’s laughing so hard he has to clutch his stomach.

  But Annie thinks that the Teacher is watching him.

  She thinks that the Teacher knows precisely where they are. She thinks that somehow he’s found a way to listen in on Oliver’s laughter. This fear is so vivid that she puts her hand on his shoulder and tells him, “Not so loud.”

  “Why not?” he says.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Because these people don’t know what you’re laughing at.”

  “We’re all laughing at the same thing. At the guy who farted.”

  “OK.”

  The bus pauses, to squeeze a few more passengers aboard. Out the window a horde of orphans gathers. Wheedling, whimpering, hawking peanuts. One of these kids has no legs and he rides a sort of low-slung soapbox cart, propelling himself with his hands. As the bus pulls away he races alongside it, digging his knuckles into the asphalt, staring up at Oliver and Annie, saying nothing, just keeping up.

  “Jesus, Mom,” says Oliver. Horrified and rapt. “This city, it’s like a nightmare, isn’t it?”

  She hadn’t noticed.

  THE TEACHER gets gas and then parks and goes into the all-night coffee shop of this rest area. He uses the men’s room. When he comes out, he goes out the rear door. Back to where all the trucks are. The vast lot is lit up like a ballfield. He crosses to the edge of it, to a copse of dark beech trees and a picnic table.

  Eddie’s waiting there.

  He says, “Vincent, she’s gone.”

  The Teacher takes note of how the skin tightens at the back of his neck just below the hairline.

  Says Eddie, “I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. Can’t use the phones no more, Vincent. They gotta be on to us. Shit’s gonna come over the dam. I mean it’s gonna come over the fuckin dam.”

  The Teacher says evenly, “She disappeared?”

  Eddie nods.

  “When?”

  “This morning. I think the fuckin feds got her in a safe house somewhere. Or the state, she’s working for the state. She’s working for somebody now.”

  The Teacher weighs the possibility. Then he shakes his head. “No. She’s been learning too quickly, and she needs some air. But she won’t betray us.”

  “You fuckin crazy? They got to her, Vincent. Time for us to say goodbye. Go down to Curacao, they’ll never find us. What the hell, we did our best for Louie. Let’s go. Right now. Leave your car here. Get my daughter, we’ll take the early bird to Miami.”

  The Teacher asks, “Where’s Frankie?”

  Eddie shrugs. “Now? Four in the morning? He’s asleep for shit’s sake.”

  “I need him to check out the woman who owns that gallery. Annie’s close to her, she might be hiding with her. Or maybe with the man she called Turtle. In that picture of him it looked like he was somewhere in Guatemala. We need to find out if—”

  “We need to get the fuck outta here!”

  “No. Flight’s not called for. What we need now is to maintain the pressure. Annie’s stunned, that’s all. She’s in a vulnerable state. A friend of hers died last night.”

  “What friend?”

  “That doctor.”

  “Died?”

  “According to the papers she took her own life.”

  “You killed the doc? Oh Jesus, Vincent, what did you do that for?”

  “There’s no suspicion of foul play.”

  Eddie glowers at him.

  Thruway headlights ooze up and down the trunks of the beech trees.

  “Eddie.”

  “What.”

  “The Sage is impartial. The Sage sees the people as straw dogs. So don’t stare at me. If there are things you don’t understand, I’ll try to explain them.”

  “I don’t want your fuckin explanations, Vincent. All I want’s this shit to be over. If they clip you? They gonna clip me too. You know what I’m saying? I’m saying you’re being a fuckhead. I’m saying I love you, but it’s time for you to take a break.”

  The Teacher looks at Eddie’s dark-socketed eyes, and at all the flesh-baggage beneath them. “You’re not sleeping these days, Eddie?”

  “Who gives a shit?”

  “Are your dreams keeping you awake?”

  “Like what dreams?”

  “Do you ever dream about Annie?”

  “Fuck you. She did what we asked her to, OK? Now let her the fuck go.”

  “I’d like to. I can’t. It’s as though we were married, Annie and I. How can I let her go?”

  OLIVER and his mom ride in the back of a pickup with fifteen people from T’ui Cuch, on a precarious dirt road that switchbacks higher and higher into the mountains above Huehuetenango.

  Oliver has made a friend, Juan Calmo Cruz, a kid about his age or maybe a few years older. Oliver is teaching Juan Calmo a little English, and Juan Calmo is teaching Oliver a little Mam—the local Mayan language.

  Oliver points and says, “Cigar.”

  Juan Calmo points and says, “Sich.” He flicks imaginary Groucho-ashes.

  Oliver points and says, “Woman.”

  Juan Calmo practices getting his mouth around the globe of that word: “WO-mun. WO-mun.”

  Oliver shivers and says, “It’s cold.”

  Juan Calmo doesn’t understand.

  “Mom, what’s cold in Spanish?”

  “I forget. Fría?”

  “Sí, frío,” says Juan Calmo. He regards their thin shirts. He turns and leans over the cab of the pickup, toward the driver’s window, and shouts something.

  After a while they pull up at a little thatch-roofed store on the side of the road. Juan Calmo takes Oliver and Mom inside. He helps Mom to bargain, and she buys Oliver a heavy cotton shirt with red and white stripes like Juan Calmo’s—like the shirts of all the T’ui Cuch men. Also a woolen jacket embroidered with the figure of a bat.

  She buys herself a heavy wool coat lined with rabbit’s fur.

  When they get back into the pickup everyone applauds.

  These T’ui Cuchians look nothing like the mo
on-faced lowlanders on last night’s bus. These people are tall, with carved cheekbones, emphatic chins, a cocky grace to their stance. They sit steady, even on this jolting ride, with their shoulders thrown back.

  The road climbs up to the top of the mountain, then dips again. Into the belly of a cloud. Oliver and Juan Calmo stand side by side behind the cab and look forward, the white wind in their faces. They stand silently, bouncing along for nearly an hour.

  Then the mist lifts, and they can see down this long valley of Oz-green acres to a hillock girdled by mountains. And there, amid cornfields and potato fields and dwarf apple trees, is the village of T’ui Cuch. Merely a cluster of thatched roofs. And way up on a slope above them, the stone ruins of a church. And smoke. And waterfalls tumbling down the steep sides of the mountains.

  Oliver turns. “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re here.”

  She raises her eyes. Her expression doesn’t change. She asks Juan Calmo, “Conoce, conoces… un gringo… se llama… Turtle?”

  “Cómo?” says Juan Calmo.

  “Or Walter Reisinger?”

  “Cómo?” says Juan Calmo.

  She shouts over the wind. “Walter Reisinger?”

  Juan Calmo shakes his head.

  She asks some others. Nobody knows the name.

  She says, “Es un, un médico?”

  Again they shake their heads.

  Oliver takes out his little dictionary and looks up the word for turtle. “Tortuga?” he tries.

  “Ah! Claro!” Several at once: “Tortuga!”

  The driver blasts the horn and comes breakneck into the village. A furry pig runs out of its pen and grunts at them. This grunting gets pigs and dogs started up all over town.

  The pickup stops at the village market and Juan Calmo and his mother volunteer to guide them down to the casa of El Tortuga. Most of the others join the company. They walk down through cornfields, down narrow flowery lanes. Oliver’s suitcase bumps against his leg. Now and then they pass a knot of T’ui Cuchians, a few words are exchanged and the company swells. Oliver hears the words novia and esposa.

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “They think you’re Turtle’s wife. I think.”

  Oliver looks around and there must be thirty or forty T’ui Cuchians with them now, grinning and laughing.

  They pass a waterfall and keep descending.

  They come at last to a long squat building with a tin roof and a sign that says Clínica. Beside it there’s a little home with a garden and chickens.

  Outside the door is a wooden turtle on a post.

  “Tortuga!” the crowd cries. “Tortuga!”

  And this guy comes out and Oliver for a moment is a little disappointed. Come all this way for this dork? Whose posture is even worse than Oliver’s, and who’s pig-eyed and balding up top and ponytailed and scraggly-bearded, and who has repaired the broken earpiece of his glasses with a bit of electrical tape? Plus when he smiles at Mom it’s sort of a horsey smile.

  Is this the kind of guy you travel thousands of miles to see? Well, only if you’re on the run, like us, thinks Oliver. Only if you’ve got no other choice.

  SARI’s in her office at the travel agency with the door shut, and locked, and Eben pushing her against it. Out there telephones are chiming, ticket printers are clattering. But that’s somewhere else. Sari’s concern is this man’s lips, this man’s bothersome shirt buttons.

  He takes her hands and lifts them up and gently kisses them. It seems a subtle way to slow her down, to deflect her ardor.

  “You don’t want to make love to me now?” she whispers. “You can make love to me right here, Eben, please.”

  He doesn’t answer. He slides his fingertips along her arms, all the way up till he can stroke the undersides of her breasts with his thumbs. But there’s something absent to his gaze.

  “Eben?” she says. “Are you all right?”

  “I just wanted to see you.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s not, it’s. Well. Business…”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m in trouble.”

  “Darling, what?”

  “Today one of my friends got a contract from Pemex to build a new pipeline out of Mexico. Pete Mordacai. Billion-and-a-half-dollar contract from Pemex.”

  “That sounds like good news.”

  “It should be. Except yesterday this futures fund that I’ve been advising bought up a mess of West Texas Intermediate crude futures. Before the announcement. The futures took a favorable tick, and we cashed in. Looks like insider trading, and I’m taking the heat.”

  “Was it insider trading?”

  “Not on my part. You ought to know by now, Sari, I’ve got insane scruples. But yes. I’m fairly sure that the manager of the futures fund made a secret trip to Guatemala in the last few days. Some of the Pemex people were down there for the Americas Fair. I think she had a secret meeting with them, made some payoffs and got the word.”

  “So why are you in trouble?”

  “I can’t prove it was she. If I, if I could even prove she went to Guatemala City, that’s all I’d need to clear my name. But I can’t.”

  “Wait. You need to find out if this woman went to Guatemala in the last few days?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know how I’d do that.”

  “Maybe I can help,” says Sari. “Let me make some calls.” She twists her monitor to face her. “What’s her name?”

  “Annie Laird.”

  “You know where she lives?”

  “In Pharaoh. Seminary Lane.”

  “Didn’t you call me from Pharaoh one night? You said you were on the road and—”

  “Yes. That’s who I was meeting, Annie Laird. I thought she was just a client. I thought I could trust her. Now because of her they’re going to break me into pieces.”

  “No,” says Sari. “No, I won’t let them. But this could take a while. I’m going to have to call you.”

  “Sari, you’re an angel.”

  ANNIE wakes up in the middle of the night at the crowing of a cock. At first she’s terrified. But then she remembers where she is. Turtle’s cottage. Guatemala, far away, safe. She gets her breath back, and her composure, and finally she’s glad for the interruption.

  In her dream she was a UPS driver, making pickups at hospitals, taking in cratefuls of broken glass.

  This moonlight is much better than her dream.

  The lace shadows of leaves. A night bird starts singing and it sounds like water pouring through rocks. She sits up a little so she can look across the room to where her child is sleeping. Not much to see. A curved ridge of lumps on that far bed. The shiny knoll is likely an elbow. She waits to see him breathe.

  He does, the mound stirs a little.

  Then Turtle, lying beside her, whispers, “Annie?”

  He looks better like this, with his hair loose. With his lips puffy from sleep.

  “I’m OK,” she tells him. “Hold me.”

  He lifts his arm out from under the blanket and draws her to him. Her cheek on his. Smell of his hair, familiar Turtle smell. But his hand keeps moving. Slipping around on her back. Dropping down her spine, on some kind of expedition. “No, please,” she says.

  “OK.”

  He relaxes. They lie there, and finally she hears his breathing deepen again, and she thinks, This is all right, just like this. Lie here and listen. What’s the point of dreading the morning? It’s not morning yet. Listen to Oliver’s breathing and Turtle’s breathing and that water bird, and let this night go on and on.

  But the sun comes up in a rush.

  Turtle makes them huevos rancheros and a paste of black frijoles. An old woman brings them a basket of warm weighty tortillas, corn-yellow.

  Juan Calmo comes by and he takes Oliver out to show him around.

  Then Annie and Turtle walk on down through pear orchards and through open fields to a hidden stream-gorge, a waterfall. The su
nlight is blinding, the sky is an immaculate blue and so dark it wouldn’t surprise her to find stars in it, broad-day constellations.

  They sit on a mossy rock by the stream and he says, “Well, now will you tell me?”

  She tells him.

  She tells him everything—but it’s all one thing. It’s all about the Teacher. It’s everything she’s managed to glean or guess about his workings. How he seduces. How he overwhelms. How he always gets there before you, how you can never know how far he’ll go.

  By the time she’s done, it’s nearly noon. The sky is no longer quite so blue. The mist is starting to flow down from the mountains.

  “So no one knows you’re here?” says Turtle.

  “Not yet. I don’t think.”

  He considers a moment. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. Get the hell out of there, that’s what you should have done from the start. You’re safe here, Annie. This is about as far away from Westchester as you can get. The people here are my friends.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “Most of the men have fought in the army, or against the army. Or both. They have rifles. They don’t mind using them. It’d be harder than hell for anyone to get in here and hurt you.”

  “OK.”

  “You’ll like it here. I’ll take you up tomorrow and show you the mountaintops. There are Mayan altars on all the mountaintops.”

  She smiles. “I wish I had more time.”

  “More time? God, Annie, listen, you can stay here as long as you—”

  Then he catches her drift. “Hold it. You can’t—”

  “I have to, Turtle. I have to go back. But I need you to take care of Oliver. There’s no one else in the world I’d trust.”

  “Annie, wait a minute.”

  “If he comes back with me, that man will kill him. You’ve got to take him.”

  “No. Wait. You’re not leaving! No way I’m letting you go back!”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  “Annie.”

  “That’s not your choice. Your choice is, you can take care of Oliver, or you can send him home with me to be killed. I’m asking you to take care of him.”

  “For how long?”

  “Till it’s finished.”