Fallen Idols (47 page)

“We have you a fine room,” she told them in thick Spanish-flavored English.
“Dos camas
.”

“Air-conditioned?” Tom asked hopefully. “¿Air
aconedicionado?
” He had four years of college Spanish—he would do the talking when Spanish was required.

“No,” she answered, favoring him with a sad smile that revealed more teeth missing than intact.

“No problema
,” he assured her.
“¿Ventiladores?
” He pointed to the ceiling fans.

“Sí
,” she answered, smiling more broadly.

“Then we're in business,” he told her.
“Muy bien
.”

They rode the creaking copper-paneled elevator to the third floor and walked halfway down the narrow hallway to their room. “I'll bet we're about the only guests they've got here,” Tom said. He ran his hand along one wall of faded wallpaper that featured flamingos, macaws, and other wild birds in a bright green forest.

“Probably,” Clancy agreed. “These old places aren't popular anymore, without air-conditioning and video rooms and pools.”

“That's too bad,” Tom said. “There's something to be said for genteel decay.”

The mattresses on the two narrow beds were thin and swaybacked, but the sheets looked clean. Threadbare towels were laid out on the beds, along with sealed bottles of water for drinking, and cellophane-wrapped glasses. At the end of the hallway, the bathroom door was open. They could see a sink, a toilet, a bathtub. It looked clean.

They tossed their bags on the beds and left, locking the door behind them. They kept their passports, wallets, and necessary documents with them—if their clothing and toilet articles were stolen they could be replaced, but not their identification, cash, and credit cards. Bypassing the elevator, they walked down the stairs, through the empty lobby, and out into the street.

The streets in the center of the city were narrow. Some were cobblestoned, as they had been for over a century. Many of the side streets had never been paved at all; they were no more than dirt cart paths that had been worn smooth over the years.

This part of the city was the original settlement. It had been established by the early Spanish invaders, who, after subjugating the native population by killing most of them off, had erected houses and other buildings in the style of their own country. These structures were built to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scale, so the streets and sidewalks, meant to accommodate people, horses, and carriages, were cramped, a tight squeeze for modern cars and trucks, which cruised up and down them without regard for stop signs or traffic lights, creating mini-traffic jams at every intersection.

It was almost five in the afternoon. Siesta was over, the streets were full of life. The brothers edged their way along the main avenue's congested sidewalk, rubbing elbows with locals and a few other
turistas,
passing street vendors selling a mishmash of goods—knockoffs of Gucci and Prada handbags, Polo golf shirts, Rolex watches, Hermès scarves, as well as crude hand-carved wooden Maya artifacts, old music cassettes, sandals, blankets, shawls. Hundreds of items—anything a tourist, which to any native's eye they certainly were, might want to take back home.

A group of American kids, clothes filthy, hair long, some of them in Rastafarian dreadlocks, sat on the sidewalk, panhandling.

“Spare change?”

They ignored the kids. One of the girls, her blond hair matted, her bare feet dirty from road dust, jumped up and lightly grabbed on to Tom's shirtsleeve.

“Got any dope, man?” she asked in a breathless whisper.

“No.” He looked her over. She couldn't be older than eighteen.

“Wanna buy some? Good shit, Jamaican. Good price.”

He shook his head. “No, thanks.”

“Blow job for five dollars?”

He shook his head. “Not today.” He pulled away from her.

“Faggot,” she called after him, halfheartedly.

They ate dinner at an Indian restaurant—tandoori chicken, vegetable curries, shrimp, riata, rice, washed down with decent local beer. Afterward, the Sri Lankan proprietor, who was also the chef, served them thick Turkish coffee and tiny snifters of Rémy Martin. The bill, including a generous tip, came to twenty-five dollars American, which Clancy put on his Visa card.

“You could live like a king for almost nothing down here,” Tom observed as they walked along the busy sidewalk again.

“Except you'd be living here,” Clancy said.

“There's worse places,” Tom replied. “You could have a little motel or shop, live on the beach, what's wrong with that? Open up a branch of Finnegan's, I'll bet it would do well.”

“When I retire,” Clancy said. “Let's head back. We'll have a couple of beers at the hotel and take it mellow.”

The half-dozen drinkers gathered in the Excelsior bar, four men and two women, looked like refugees from a Graham Greene novel. Europeans, Clancy thought, as he and Tom walked in. Europeans don't look like Americans. He didn't know why that was, they came from the same root stock, but he'd seen enough Europeans in his bar and in his work to know that most of the time that was true. A couple of them, one man and one woman, were in their thirties; the rest looked a decade or more older. They all had the faces of seasoned drinkers. They sat in two groups at two adjoining tables. No one was sitting at the bar. The bartender was washing glasses.

The other patrons looked up as the brothers sat down at an empty table. One of them, a pale-complexioned man with sparse reddish hair and rimless glasses, saluted them with his highball glass. “It's serve yourselves here, gents,” he informed them in an oatmeal-thick Irish brogue. “The barmaid left early.”

“By about ten years,” laughed the younger of the two women in a husky, also Irish or English, voice. She, too, had red hair, a deep luxurious auburn pulled back from her face in a long, thick braid halfway down her back. She was pretty, with an Irish-English woman's fair, freckled complexion. She shook a Marlboro from a pack on the table, lit up.

“What do you want?” Clancy asked Tom.

“A shot of tequila and a beer.”

Clancy walked to the bar and ordered their drinks—he knew bar Spanish, which was good enough for in here.

The woman smiled at Tom. “Smoke?” she offered. She pushed her pack toward him.

He smiled back. “No, thanks.” An attractive woman, he thought. I wonder if she's with any of these guys. A quick size-up was that she was a friend to all, a lover to none.

He thought, yet again—it was like a song stuck in his head he couldn't shake—of Diane. This was an attractive woman sitting here, but not in Diane's league. Which was becoming a problem—he mentally compared every woman he met with Diane, and they all came up short. He had to get rid of that song and replace it with a better one.

“Americans,” the Irishman said.

“Yep,” Tom answered.

“From whereabouts?”

“The Midwest. Chicago.”

“Good town, Chicago,” the man said approvingly. “Good drinking town.”

“You know it?”

“I've been through.”

Tom grinned. “Ever been to a bar called Finnegan's?”

The man scrunched up his face in thought. “Don't think so. Is it in the center of the city?”

“North side.”

The man shook his head. “I only know Michigan Avenue. You stay at a hotel, you do your job, eat and drink locally, go to the next assignment. Nice pub, Finnegan's?”

Tom resisted the natural inclination to brag on his brother's place. “They pour an honest shot,” he said.

“I like that,” the man said. “Have to try it the next time I pass through.”

“You won't be disappointed,” Tom promised him. “What sort of work do you do?” he asked. “You sound like you travel in your job.”

The man nodded. “Journalist. Freelance video. Right now I'm with CNBC. Me and Anton here.” He nudged die man seated next to him. “The mad Hungarian. He's my soundman. We're a team. Anton and Patrick.”

“All Hungarians are mad,” the man called Anton said gaily, in a middle-European accent. “Except not me, tonight.” He held up his glass. “I have my faithful companion to keep me in good company,” he added with a laugh.

“You're all journalists?” Tom asked. “Broadcasters? Thanks,” he told Clancy, who had returned to the table with two shot glasses of tequila entwined in the fingers of one large hand, two bottles of beer with a local label in the other.

The man called Patrick nodded. “Burt and Dickie”— he pointed to the other two men—”are stringers for Reuters and the BBC. Lorna's a reporter.”

Lorna was the redhead with the pretty face and the long braid. Burt and Dickie raised their glasses in acknowledgment.

“All except Vera,” Patrick went on, nodding to the other woman.

Tom looked over at Vera, who was sitting at the table with the two Brit stringers. She was the oldest one here. Fifty, maybe a few years over that. If faces are a road map of life, Tom thought as he looked at her, she had been in many places and seen many things. She's as old as mom was when she was killed, he realized with a shudder of sadness.

“And you?” he asked her. “What's your game?”

She smiled politely. “I own an art gallery. In Amsterdam.” Another smile. “And your game, as you Americans put it? What's yours?”

“I'm a physical therapist,” Clancy answered. “He's a mathematician,” he said, pointing his thumb at Tom.

“On holiday?”

“Yep. Always wanted to check this part of the world out.”

Tom leaned a bit closer to Vera. “Is that why you're here?” he asked her, glancing at Clancy. “Buying art?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“What kind?” he asked.

“Native work,” she told him. “There is a big market in Europe now for indigenous Central and South American art.”

“Contemporary art?” He traced a finger around the rim of his beer bottle.

“Yes,” she replied. “And older pieces, too. From the the 1930s and 1940s. Whatever appeals to me, that I can afford.”

Tom knocked back a hit of tequila. It was mediocre in quality, hot and rough going down. “What about real old stuff?” He paused. “Maya.”

She frowned. “Do you mean from the ruins?”

He nodded.

She shook her head vehemently. “No,” she said firmly. “That is forbidden.”

“I've heard it happens anyway,” he said.

“It is an abomination,” she replied fiercely. “It is like stealing a child from its parents.”

“So it isn't done?”

She shook her head. “It
is
done. But not by scrupulous dealers. Not by me,” she added emphatically.

“Good for you,” he told her. “I have heard about it, though. The thievery.”

She made a face. “Some people will do anything for money.”

Clancy drank some tequila, chased it with a swallow of beer. “Do you ever go out to the sites?” he asked her. “Are you interested in that?”

“Of course,” she answered. “Who wouldn't be? They're spectacular.”

He toyed with his bottle for a moment. “I've heard of this really incredible place, in the south. It's called …” He stopped for a moment, as if trying to recall it. “La Chmienea. Have you ever been there?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“It's not worth seeing?”

“Oh, no. It is beautiful, from everything I've heard,” She said. “But it's not a good place for foreigners to visit now.”

“Why not?”

“There were problems. With what you were talking about.”

“Looting?”

She nodded.

He knew he was pushing, but he couldn't help it. “By who?”

“Some of the Americans who were working there,” she told them. “A famous archaeologist, who was in charge, and an art broker, a woman named Diane Montrose.” She shuddered. “An unscrupulous woman. There were stories of thefts they were involved in.” She sipped from her glass. “And there was a terrible incident at the same time, that stopped everything in its tracks.”

“What kind of incident?” Tom asked, trying to sound uninformed.

“A woman who was one of the team there was killed. Shot to death.” She paused. “Why do you want to know?” she asked with a curiosity that bordered on suspicion. “Are you in the art trade, too?”

“No,” Tom said quickly. “We're just tourists. We want to visit some of the sites, like that one.”

“Why in the world did you choose this hotel?” Patrick interjected.

Because we stayed here one time with our parents, went through Tom's mind. The woman who was killed, and her archaeologist husband who you say was stealing the country's treasures.

“Tourists never come to the Excelsior,” Patrick explained. “Only drones like us, on limited expense accounts. And Vera, who has a weird romantic streak.”

“I abhor tourist hotels,” Vera said, smiling and patting Patrick's hand. “La Chimenea would be a good site to see,” she told them. “But I don't think you should attempt to go to that one. They don't want foreigners there anymore. Particularly Americans, like you lovely gentlemen.”

Tom drank down the rest of his tequila. What a downer. They'd been in the country less than twelve hours, and already they were being hit with these accusations. Where there's smoke there's fire, he thought. And the smoke was awfully damn dense.

“I'm bushed,” he said, standing and stretching. “I'm turning in.”

Clancy stood also. “Nice meeting you all,” he told the correspondents and Vera. “Thanks for the company and the conversation.”

“Good luck on your travels,” Patrick said cheerfully. “Be careful as you move about the country,” he advised them. “It can be dangerous here.”

We know, Tom thought. We've lived through it.

The following morning, Manuel drove them across the city for their meeting. The capital building, a large neocolonial structure of impressive ugliness, was situated on a high knoll overlooking the main business district.

Manuel pulled up in front. “I will be in there,” he told them, pointing to a cantina across the square. “Leave everything with me except your necessary documents. Things do not move quickly around here,” he warned them. “Be patient.”

They went inside and gave their names to a military aide who was seated at the reception desk. Behind him, a security gate barred further entrance into the building. The aide located the brothers on the appointment list, and placed a telephone call.