Pattern for Panic (16 page)

I said, “I'd like to see Mr. Villamantes, please."

She shook her head and answered in English, “He isn't here."

“It's important. When will he be back?"

“Not for at least a week. He is taking his vacation."

“I see. Thanks. Where can I find him?"

She stared blankly at me, lips pursed. “I don't know. He is on vacation. Perhaps he went to Acapulco. Perhaps to Fortin de las Flores. I am not sure."

“It's a very important transaction, I've spoken to him."

“What is your name?"

“Bloom.” I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “Sam Bloom."

She squeezed her lips more tightly together and opened a drawer. She fingered through some white cards. “You have not spoken to him, Mr .... Bloom."

“He must not have mentioned it to you."

“He would have.” She bit harder on the lemon.

I looked at the closed door in back. The guy at the other desk got up and walked over to me. “What you want to see him for,
amigo?
"

“Business.” I looked from him to Sourpuss. “It's so important I'm willing to pay well for any information. I'm anxious to settle the deal."

The young guy smiled slightly and shook his head. “Can't help you,” he said. “Come back in a week."

I looked at that frosted-glass door again. I took a breath and walked toward it. The guy grabbed my arm.

I stopped. “Get out of my way."

He stared at me, mouth tight, then he shrugged and let go. So I figured the next office was empty. It was. I went back into the front office. The man and woman were both at their desks. Just for hell I said, “Thanks, comrades.” The guy started to get up, then sat down and smiled stiffly. Pruneface swallowed her lemon, I went out, onto Juarez again. At the corner I looked back, up three floors in the Edificio Real. I could see the guy standing at a window, looking down at me. I flagged a cab.

It was already after noon, and I was a few minutes late for the meeting with Amador. I hoped he'd done some good; the threads, the leads, were melting away. Emilio was the last one. I paid the driver and got out on Zaragoza, then went inside the building, wiggled a finger at the middle-aged gal behind the desk, and trotted up the cement steps. Amador's apartment was up one flight, down the hall and around the corner. I reached the top of the stairs and turned to my left, started walking down the long hallway.

I saw him come around the corner at the hall's far end, maybe fifty feet away. At first I wasn't sure it was Amador; then I got closer and recognized him. There was something a little funny about him though. He stood for a moment a few feet from the corner, one hand outstretched and pressed against the wall, then he swung his right foot forward and brought his left hand up against his chest. He took another step, stumbled and almost fell.

I ran toward him. “Amador!” I yelled. “What's wrong?"

He had stopped and was standing in the middle of the hallway, both hands pushed out in front of him like those of a blind man finding himself suddenly in a strange place. His hands twitched, jerked a little. I reached him and stopped in front of him, fright making my heart beat faster. There was a lumpy gash at the side of his head, a little trickle of blood congealing there.

“Amador! What's wrong with you?"

There was an expression on his face that I had never seen on anyone else's face before, fear, panic, a gagged but screaming horror like a scream that shrieked only in his brain, echoing, crescendoing there behind his staring eyes. His mouth was open and his eyes were stretched so wide they seemed enormous in his head, staring, staring, staring. His hands pawed at my coat, flapped loosely against me, and breath hissed from his mouth; there were noises in his throat as if he were gagging. His knees buckled and he started to fall.

I grabbed him, tried to hold him up as he went to one knee. I could feel his body twitching, shaking, jerking in my hands. His head rolled loosely to the side, hung like a dead weight against his shoulder, and he rolled the staring eyes up toward me.

“Amador,” I said, “Amador.” I eased him down to the floor, laid him on his back and loosened his tie and belt. His knees came up from the floor and flopped down again; his hands slapped once together; there was a last faint rasping sound in his throat. He didn't move again.

I ran back to the stairway, shouted down it, “Get an ambulance. Quick. Understand?"

“
Sí.
What is it?"

“Quickly, quickly. A man is dying."

Her startled gasp followed me as I ran back down the hall. But Amador wasn't dying. He was dead. He had no pulse, no breath. I knew it was my imagination, but it seemed that already his flesh had begun to lose its living warmth, to cool, grow cold and clammy. And his eyes still stared, as now they would always stare, even after his lids were closed. I think the worst of it all was looking at his eyes, knowing they would continue to stare against his closed lids, until even those lids rotted and fell away within his grave, until the eyes themselves were gone.

And now I would never really remember him as the nice, smiling guy who had said,
"She is one classy vegetable, you will observe—no matter who is wrong, the Captain is right—"
Whenever I thought of Amador I would remember his eyes, the look that I had seen there. It had been like
seeing
a scream that shrieked of panic and strangeness and the knowledge of death.

I shut my eyes and pressed my hands against them, trying to think. I'd first seen him come around the corner; he must have been coming from his room. I thought of the gash on his head, as if he'd fallen—or someone had struck him. I straightened up, pulled out my gun, then walked to the corner and around it. The door to his apartment stood open.

I stepped to the door, gun ready. There wasn't anybody in sight. I looked around inside the room, inside all the rooms, but I was alone here now. In the front room again, I saw a chair tipped over on its side; near it on the carpet there was a small, dark spot. I got down on my knees, looked at it, touched it. It was blood. This must be where Amador had fallen. But he hadn't got that gash from falling; he'd been hit, his head cut, and then had fallen here on the carpet.

A few inches from the spot of blood, something glittered in the light. I bent closer, looked at it. It was glass. Little slivered pieces of glass, some powdery, some with curving sections, as if it might once have been a small tube, or tiny vial.

I felt dizzy all of a sudden. I got to my feet, shook my head. The dizziness went away, then came back again. My skin felt cold and I could feel perspiration clammy on my forehead. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them, wiped my hand across my forehead and looked at the moisture on my fingers. My little finger trembled nervously, independently of the others, as if a tic were there, the muscles making it twitch erratically.

This was crazy. I felt weak, a little nauseous. All of a sudden, without reason. And a thin thread of fear wound itself in my thoughts. The dizziness swept over me again and I could feel my heart pounding rapidly, the blood hammering at my temples. What was wrong with me? What was happening to me? I tried to fight down the irrational fear but it swelled like a bubble in me, a bubble that burst and sent coldness all through my body. The coldness coursed over my skin, clutched at my throat and made it difficult to breathe. I looked at the tiny bits of glittering glass on the floor, backed away from them until my shoulders were against the wall, my hands pressed flat upon the plaster behind me.

I shook my head again. I was acting crazy, letting my imagination run away with me and fill me with imaginary symptoms, unreasoning fears. It was the strangeness of this, of watching Amador die, seeing that frozen scream in his eyes and the contortions of his face. It was that and my dream, my nightmare, and listening to the doctor tell me crazy things, crazy things that he had felt, the shortness of breath and coldness of skin, fright swelling into panic, faintness and dizziness, that and the death of shaggy apes, staggering and falling, suffocating and dying, and their bodies melting into black putrescence.

I couldn't think. It was as if my brain were ice and thought was frozen there. I couldn't remember now what was dream and what was true. And, unreasoning, I felt the fear growing in me, eating at my will. I fought it, on the edge of panic, held it with an intensity of effort that twisted my mouth, pulled my lips back against my teeth. Suddenly I realized I was staring blankly across the room, and that my eyes must look now as Amador's eyes had looked to me.

I slid along the wall and reached the door, went out and walked around the corner. My entire body was cold, as if coldness seeped from my flesh down into the marrow of my bones. I rounded the corner and stopped as I saw Amador again. He lay quietly, his arms loose at his sides, mouth hanging open and his head still almost touching his shoulder. Revulsion rippled in my stomach, slid in my throat. I went by him and down the hall, fighting to keep myself from running.

I heard voices when I reached the top of the stairs, and I looked down them feeling the dizziness growing, mounting, as if to make me fall, plunge down the cement steps. Below me, at the desk, I could see men, police. I heard a siren moaning outside, probably the ambulance. And then I recognized the policeman at the desk: Emilio. Captain Emilio.

He turned and started up the steps and I whirled around and ran the length of the hall. I didn't even stop to think. I just wanted to get away from him, not let him see me. I went down the back stairs and out of the apartment building, and in the sunlight I felt better. I leaned against the rough wall of the building for a minute, my heart pounding, breath short, dizziness still with me. I told myself that it was because of my running, and my fright. But my legs were weak. The back of my legs seemed almost liquid.

I flagged a
libre
and climbed in, told the driver to go around to the front of the apartments on Zaragoza. Air blowing in the open window helped, made me feel less faint. Out front I could see the police cars and the ambulance from the American British Cowdray Hospital. I told the driver to park half a block away, remembering that Buff had been taken from the Prado in an ABC ambulance—but that didn't have to mean anything. The ambulance had undoubtedly been a fake.

Then I saw white-coated men bring out the body, covered with a sheet. A small crowd of the inevitable curious ghouls had gathered and were craning their necks for a look. Policemen came out and climbed into their cars, then they and the ambulance drove away.

“Follow the ambulance,” I told the driver.

I thought I knew now what had been wrong with Amador, what had killed him—and what was wrong with me. But I had to be sure.

I waited at the end of the hospital corridor, the heavy odor of ether, medicines, the almost indefinable hospital smell, in my nostrils. I could see Captain Emilio sitting in a chair tilted back against the wall down near the visitors' desk, a big gun in the holster at his hip.

The ambulance had come here to the ABC Hospital—and so had Emilio, alone in his police car. He had spoken to the doctor briefly, then sat down in the chair. The doctor was an Englishman, James, who had given me a couple of prescriptions for the usual tourist disorders shortly after I'd hit Mexico City, and had taken fifteen minutes from his busy schedule for a little conversation. So he knew I was an L.A. detective—if he remembered.

He had gone into a room only twenty feet from where I stood, and I wanted to talk to him. I wanted it bad. The doctor was in there now with what was left of Amador. I'd been waiting more than an hour, keeping an eye on Captain Emilio, when the door opened behind me and I turned to see the doctor come out.

I walked up to him. “Dr. James. Pardon me."

“Yes?” He was a short, serious-looking man with brown hair and mustache, a preoccupied expression on his face. He wore a white medical gown which was a little stained. “Oh, hello, Mr ...."

“Scott. Amador was a very good friend of mine. He's the man you've just been—"

He shook his head. “I'm sorry. It was too late when the ambulance got there. The officer had him brought here, in case there was a chance. But there wasn't."

“Why the policeman, Doctor? The Captain in the hall."

He was peering at my face. “You don't look well yourself, Mr. Scott. Are you all right?"

“I'm O.K. Why the cop? Hope you don't mind my asking."

“No, I suppose it's all right. Captain Emilio is anxious to get a written report, which is why I've just been doing an autopsy—I'm sorry, perhaps I shouldn't have said that."

“Forget it. I'm familiar with autopsies. Something funny about this one?"

“Yes—it's outside my experience. I'm going to have to call in some help."

“If you can tell me, if you will, I'd like to know what you found."

I'd spoken with more intensity than I realized. The doctor seemed startled and peered at me again, then he said, “I'm not sure what I've found. It's new to me. Something has happened to tissues and nerve pathways. I'm not sure just what; have to check further. Some nerve parts have been destroyed."

“I see,” I said slowly. “Doctor, what, precisely, was the cause of death?"

“It's complicated by many factors, of course, but death was actually caused by suffocation.” He paused. “Mr. Scott, are you sure you're all right?"

“Just a little dizzy. There's—nothing you can do. Thank you, Doctor.” I stopped to catch my breath. “You say Captain Emilio asked for a written report?"

“Yes."

“Isn't that unusual?"

“A little. It's happened before. And this is an unusual case."

“Yeah.” I wondered how Emilio had known so quickly that it was an unusual case. “Thank you, Doctor."

Well, I'd found out. I knew what Buffington was doing now, even if I didn't know where or all of the why. I remembered again Dr. Buffington talking to me that night—only last night in the Monte Cassino. I thought of my dream.