The Juror Read online

  “I didn’t—Zach, I’m sorry for what I did—”

  “You were scared.”

  “I didn’t understand you. Now I do, Zach—”

  “I know that. Still, what’s destined can’t be halted. True? Self-evident? The force of one rain-fed orchid will crush the universe. Oliver is destined to be killed in the morning. I think we both understand that now. God, we fought it, though. Didn’t we? You and I, didn’t we look like fools trying to interfere? And Juliet, stepping into the path of that fate, didn’t she look like a clown? We were like a troupe of circus clowns—”

  The stewardess brings them their drinks. He gives her a twenty-dollar tip, she gives him a flirtatious smile. When she’s gone Annie asks him, “Zach, instead of, of…”

  “Killing Oliver?”

  “Yes. Why don’t you just kill me? I mean take me somewhere and torture me and kill me in some really interesting way? Wouldn’t that be satisfying?”

  He gives her a look full of concern. “Annie, listen, I don’t want to kill anyone. It’s just that I know what I’m going to have to do. Do you remember that night in your studio? When I told you that if you would only trust me, then Oliver would be safe—but if you betrayed me, then no matter what the personal cost to me, then Oliver would suffer. Do you remember that? And I begged you to believe me, I begged you. But how could I ask you to trust me when mistrust, and betrayal, and faithlessness are rooted in who you are? Change your character? I could have as easily asked you to change the pattern of the stars. Do you understand? I know that I can’t change what’s going to happen. I can only witness. I can only watch, in agony, as you hold the body of your dead son in your arms.”

  “But Zach, Zach, please—”

  He puts his fingers to his lips.

  “Ssshhh. Relax. Cut the universe a little slack, OK Annie?”

  He envelops her hand in his own, and he holds it tight. He thinks what a long strange ride it will be, just the two of them, sitting together like this, and there’s much for them to talk about. So many questions he wants to ask her. Fear and sorrow and rapture at the same moment. He takes a sip of his drink. And it tastes like liquid silver.

  ANNIE, four hours later, descends to the tarmac of the Guatemala airport. She pushes through the mob of passengers toward the terminal. The Teacher is twenty paces ahead of her. He looks back at her once, and winks, then weaves on through the crowd.

  They enter a long broad hallway, at the end of which are the booths for customs. The Teacher moves quickly, and when the queue forms, he’s near the head of it.

  A customs agent, a woman, summons him to her booth.

  Now, Annie thinks, now should I call for the police? But no, he can still see me. He could still kill me, and kill himself, and the assassin will get to Oliver.

  So she has to stand there and watch as he flashes his floppy smile at the agent, as he breezes through.

  He vanishes into the baggage claim hall.

  Now.

  In a moment he’ll pick up his rental car, he’ll start toward T’ui Cuch, too late to catch him.

  Now.

  She steps out of line. The passengers around her raise a complaint. She walks right past the woman in her booth, who shouts after her.

  “Murderer!” Annie says to the air. “He’s got a gun! He’s a murderer!”

  She points. There’s someone in front of her now, in a uniform. And other uniforms are coming.

  “He’s got a gun!” she cries. “Stop him!”

  They answer in Spanish.

  “I don’t speak Spanish. Gun! The man in the blue suit! Doesn’t anyone speak English? Please, stop him! Stop him!”

  One of them tries to hold her. She wrestles her arm away, keeps moving. She sees a glass-walled office to the right with several uniforms coming out, coming toward her. She stumbles that way, shouting.

  Again she’s snared.

  A voice at her ear, speaking English, says, “What is the matter here?”

  A small trim police officer.

  She says, “There’s a man with a gun! Up there! Up there. Blue suit, red tie, an American. Stop him! He said he’d kill someone! STOP HIM!”

  “Who are you?”

  “He sat next to me! Please, he’s going to kill someone.”

  “Who is going to do this?”

  “Blue suit! Red tie!”

  “What color of suit?”

  “Blue suit! Red tie! Handsome! Guapo! KILLER!”

  The man mutters to his aides. A melee, cops coming from everywhere. “How do you know this man!”

  “Killer! He’s got a gun!” What’s the word? “Pistola? PISTOLA! PISTOLA!”

  Now her shouts cause an uproar in the lines. Some woman panics and screams, and the scream catches fire and spreads. The shrieking and the echoes of the shrieking are deafening.

  “How do you know that he has a pistol?” shouts the officer.

  “HE SHOWED IT TO ME! FOR CHRIST SAKE! KILLER! ASSASSIN!”

  THE TEACHER, standing in line at baggage check, hears the commotion, the uproar, swelling behind him. He knows what it means: Annie is struggling again.

  He knows that her struggling is foolish, but he loves her foolishness. He smiles. He doesn’t look back. He takes a breath.

  The baggage checker walks away from his post to see what’s going on.

  The Teacher shuts his briefcase. He heads for the wall of glass doors.

  “Señor?”

  He turns. A policeman is standing there. And two security men are coming toward him. Indicating that they want him to put his hands up.

  Two more cops are crossing toward him from the baggage carousel.

  He pulls out his HK and takes down one of the cops. He fires at the other but misses. Instantly he’s the center of an eruption, a concussive wave expanding from the muscles of his heart outward, toppling hundreds of people at all points of the compass.

  He fires two more shots, and two more waves of mad panic spread outward. He runs out onto the street. He has only to raise his HK and a path is cleared for him. Ten steps across the street. Hurtling down a flight of stone stairs and over a fence and alongside a culvert and into a dense slum of tin-roofed shacks, a warren, a maze, he’s perfectly safe. Annie, struggle as hard as you like and I won’t love you any less for it, but there’s other work as well, a work of meditation. You should be preparing yourself for the morning.

  ANNIE begs this Officer Foncea to understand. “You have to find him tonight. Tonight. My child, tonight!”

  “But you say that your child is in T’ui Cuch. This man, this teacher you call him? He is here in the capital.”

  “But he’s going to T’ui Cuch.”

  “T’ui Cuch is hundreds of miles distance. The teacher of your son is on his feet. The car rental agencies are alerted, no one will rent him a car. All the police of the capital is looking for this man. There is no danger for your son tonight. In the morning we will inform the Guardia in Huehuetenango. They will visit T’ui Cuch. They will visit your son—”

  “Tonight! Please!”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes! They’ve got to go there tonight. Oh please!”

  “Tonight is not possible. Tomorrow is the day of All the Saints. That is the feast day of T’ui Cuch. There is no telegrams to T’ui Cuch tonight.”

  “But you could call there!”

  “I am certain there is no telephones in T’ui Cuch.”

  “OK, but you could call Huehuetenango. They could drive up there.”

  “Yes. Exactly. This is a good, a good… idea.”

  “You’ll call them?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Now! Please. Oh please God. Please call them now.”

  “I cannot call them now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I cannot make this call.”

  “Why not?”

  “It will be made at the headquarters.”

  “No, here, please
. I’ll pay for it.”

  “I will first need to file my report.”

  “God damn! Damn you!”

  She looks away. Looks out the office at the customs booths. Already another planeload of gringos, another line.

  “Is this from California?” she says.

  “This? No, this is the Aviateca. From Miami. The flight from San Diego arrived two hours ago.”

  “Two hours? Two hours?”

  The policeman asks her, “Why are you no relax? The teacher of your child, we will find him soon, I am certain.”

  “But there’s another one! Another killer! He was on that flight!”

  “To kill your child?”

  “Yes!”

  “Why they kill your child?”

  “Please! Listen, the New York, the New York State Troopers! Just call, call an Investigator Carew in New York—”

  “The New York—I’m sorry?”

  “The troopers. They know this man! This man is a killer! Please!”

  “I will call them.”

  “From here? Now?”

  “I cannot call from here.”

  “You bastard! Call them right now! These men are killers! If you don’t do what I say, I swear I’ll have you fired!”

  “You will what? Are you threaten me?”

  “Yes! I’m threatening you, I’ll have your job!”

  “If you threaten me I will arrest you. You think because you are from the United States—”

  “I’m not threatening you, I’m begging you, please, just let me call Carew, I’ll pay for the call, please how would it hurt you to let me call—”

  “This is Guatemala. The New York policemen can do nothing in Guatemala.”

  Then the officer raises his eyes.

  She hears a voice behind her. “Annie?”

  She turns. It’s Johnny.

  “Where is he, Annie?”

  “He got away. How did you—”

  “I came on the Aviateca flight. First I had to get my daughter off to a friend in Curaçao. Where’s your kid, Annie? We got to get to your kid.”

  Says Foncea, “Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend of the lady’s. You?”

  “I am Officer Rogerio Foncea.”

  “Well, Captain Foncea, can I speak to you a moment in, uh, in private?”

  Twenty minutes later, Johnny’s driving and Annie’s navigating the little Celica they’ve rented. On the winding highway that rises steeply out of the city, Johnny careering through both lanes and sometimes even sliding onto the thin right shoulder to gun past a lumbering truck. He’s driving like a fiend. But still not nearly fast enough for Annie. He tells her, “Thank God a couple hundred dollars was enough to shut the creep up.”

  “Johnny,” she says.

  “My name’s not Johnny. It’s Eddie.”

  “Eddie. We have to stop. I’ve got to call Carew.”

  “Who’s Carew?”

  “The New York State—”

  “Forget it.”

  “But they could, they could send a helicopter.”

  “They could but they won’t. Not in time. Think about it. This guy Carew, he’d have to call his boss. Then his boss would have to call his boss. Then that guy’d have to call the fuckin FBI. The FBI’d have to call, I don’t know, the fuckin State Department. Twenty more calls and six weeks later somebody’d send a helicopter to Brazil. Forget it, girl. It’s just us. Holy Jesus.”

  A herd of cattle are crossing the road. Eddie lays into the horn and veers and the car lifts onto two wheels and they thread a needle between a pair of horned steers. But Annie scarcely notices. “Is there another killer?” she asks. “He told me there was someone from California.”

  “Yeah? Well that was a story for you. That was a bedtime story, to keep you quiet. Nah, there’s nobody come here from California. There’s nobody come here but just him. But Jesus, he’s enough, isn’t he?”

  15

  The Path of Scorched and Scoured Love

  THE TEACHER drives over the crest of a hill in an old Z-car, and looks down this packed-dirt hinterlands highway, and spies another car on the road far ahead of him.

  A pair of taillights, glowing through a thick membrane of dust.

  It still strikes him as an absurd extravagance that he had to kill for this jalopy he’s driving—that he had to proffer two bullets to the head of some rich Guatemalan mama’s spoiled girl-child as she waited for a red light not far from the airport. It’s certainly not a car worth killing for. It’s out of tune. The steering feels far too plush and the tires too fat. The tachometer is palsied. The headrest is still uncomfortably sticky from the previous owner’s blood.

  But this is the vessel granted. The Teacher’s not complaining. This Z-car is no odder, nor any less stunningly appropriate, than any vessel the Tao picks out to bear its cargo. And for all its infirmities, it’s still much more agile than the car ahead. The Teacher gains quickly. And when he’s close enough to see the tag of that car up ahead, he sees that it’s a rental.

  There’s a twinge in his gut.

  He speeds up. He’s been missing her, he’s desperate to be near her again. He comes to a curve and takes it at seventy-five, closes in.

  He flicks to his high beams.

  There are two people in that car. In the passenger seat, the shape of Annie’s head. Faint, haloed. He’s thrilled. A wire stretches from one end of the universe to the other, and it’s full of juice. Where this wire happens to cross another such wire, a spark is created. A blinding throb of passion, a roaring howl in the darkness. Then the wires are fused. No matter what you do, my stubborn bride.

  She turns to look back into his fierce-headlight gaze.

  He can see that her face is full of animal fear and confusion. She’s tender and childlike and afraid. Her image wavers and wobbles because the Teacher has tears in his eyes. She says something to her driver and then she raises a pistol. She points it back at the Teacher’s car.

  She fires, and her rear window shatters. The bullet wanders off into space.

  The Teacher hangs back, biding his time.

  He waits until he comes to a bend in the road, a long seesaw S-curve, and here he pours on the gas. The driver of Annie’s car is trying to block him from getting by, and that driver is clever, but the Teacher feints once to the right and once to the left, and then as they break out of the curve he downshifts and comes burning along on Annie’s side of her car. The Teacher has no music, but one high ledge of his brain plays a Vivaldi allegro motif to another. He rolls down his window and squeezes out a precise sequence of shots from the HK. Not that he wants to hurt her. He doesn’t dream of hurting her. But he needs to distract her from her fantasy of stopping him. So he fires over her head, one shot after another exploding her car’s windows as he comes. But even with the glass shattering all about her she doesn’t cringe. She calmly draws aim. He can’t believe her courage. He’s so proud of her. He fires a final shot, and it sails over her head and slaps into the windshield in front of her driver.

  The driver grabs her head, forces her to duck. And hits the brakes at the same moment.

  And the Teacher takes the opportunity that’s been handed him. He crushes the gas pedal under his foot and surges ahead of them, loses them in his dust.

  But before he does he gets enough of a look into that car to see Annie’s driver. To see that he’s his oldest friend in the world.

  ANNIE and Eddie drive on in the dark, rising higher and higher into the mountains. The cool air whistles in through the busted windows. But it doesn’t whistle loud enough for Annie. She’s going crazy with frustration. Why does this fool slow down at every nothing nuisance bend in the road? Sometimes he slows so much there’s no wind-whistle at all, nor any sound from the tires. The tires should be screaming, because when they’re not screaming they’re losing, we’re losing, we’re still hours from T’ui Cuch and we’ll never catch him if the tires don’t scream, doesn’t he realize that?

  She says, for the
fifth time, “Please let me drive.”

  “No,” he says.

  “Please! Why not?”

  “You’d kill us. You want to drive so fast you’d kill us.”

  She sits silently for a moment. Then she says, “You’re still working for him.”

  Eddie says, “I’m going as fast as anyone fuckin can. I think we’re gonna die anyway, I’m goin so fast. But at least with me driving, we got a fuckin chance.”

  “You’re still working for him.”

  “Christ.”

  “If you’re not working for him, why didn’t you let me kill him?”

  “When he was shooting at you? He was gonna kill you, Jesus Christ, why don’t you shut up?”

  She says, “He wouldn’t have killed me.”

  They sweep through a narrow pass, black scarps pressing in, the road twisting along and the car twisting with it.

  “Yeah, well, you’re right,” he says. “Maybe you’re right, he wouldn’t have killed you. You understand him? ’Cause I known him all my life, and I don’t understand shit about him.”

  “I could have killed him.”

  “All right.”

  “Let me drive.”

  “No.”

  They pass a cluster of mountain cottages, then another. A road sign announces some village. Lights. A stew of lights up ahead.

  He comes down hard on the brakes.

  “No, don’t stop!” she cries. “Whatever it is, who cares what it is, just go!”

  But how can he? The way is blocked. They’ve come to the edge of some town and there’s a chain across the road and a crowd of revelers on the other side of it. Marimbas and dancers and the smallest Ferris wheel that Annie’s ever seen. All right out in the middle of the road, and a string of dim cheerless yellow lightbulbs hanging over them.