Across the Spectrum (44 page)

Concepçion tried not to babble in relief. “Señor, I fear so.
I mean to—remove it. With Señor Esteban here. And another. We will try to find
it, here in Puno. But if we cannot . . .”

Gamarra flinched. Vivanco lowered his head a little, looking
up under his brows. Then he said, with a new, harsher grate in his voice,
“Señora, whatever you ask, tomorrow, the engine crew will attempt.”

∞

“Señora, I swear, we have looked everywhere! The steamer,
the wharf—I examined every piece of baggage, Esteban saw all who passed the
ticket-office. We cannot find either of them!”

Ramon Flores was almost inarticulate with terror and
frustration. And fear learnt from a bad master, Concepçion thought. Well,
Edouard always said, action wrecks every plan. “I could have missed them, at
the gangplank,” she said, “in the station. The streets.”

Would I had this
brujo’s art, querida
, Edouard chuckled in her ear,
to wile men and pass invisible. How I would shake those idle gangers of
mine!

If this one has such an art, she asked herself, how will it
help to search?

How will it help, to say that now?

“Señores,” she said firmly, “tonight, they may be anywhere.
Tomorrow, they must be on the train. We must watch straitly, on the platform,
so we cannot miss Jesus. After that, it is a matter of patience. Remember, by
daylight, the other must be asleep.”

They looked back at her, half credulous, half uncertain. I
must be confident, she told herself, as a foreman, as Edouard would be. I must
bolster, not destroy their trust.

“Remember, if you do encounter the brujo, hold fast to your
cross. Pray to Mary, to Pachamama of the Indians—so you believe, no matter
which. And do not—do not! look into its eyes.”

∞

The hotel was thin-walled, rackety with drinkers and
others working off their impatience, her bed lumpy. None of it would have
mattered, Concepçion knew as she tossed, had there been any form of surety in
her mind.

The vampire must be on the train when we leave, she told
herself for the fortieth time. His slave must carry him. His slave we can find.

Or might he board in the darkness, in human form? If he
could reach my cabin unnoticed, escape unnoticed, can he pass locked doors and
conceal himself somewhere we never imagined? In the coal, under the carriage
floors, on the roof?

When the faintest hint of grey paled the window she could
bear no more. Fifteen minutes later, in her warmer shirtwaist, skirt and shawl,
she was in the street.

I can scan the alleyways, she told herself, on chance of
sighting Jesus. Go down to the station, patrol around the train, till dawn.

Puno’s ragged main thoroughfare stretched ghost-misty
between blots of building to the paling stars. Any street lamps had gone out.
Under building eaves deeper shadow blotches marked the poorest travelers,
swathed in a blanket or serape, emitting a faint undertow of sound. Grunts,
sighs, snores. Somewhere in a distant back street a dog was barking. Somewhere
else, cold and bitter as the air, a cock crowed for the approaching dawn.

Concepçion paced half a block, another. The station façade
coalesced before her, its broad arch identifiable even in the gelid dark. Then
in the maw of an alleyway, a boot clicked on wood. A man half-grunted,
half-gulped. Something hissed.

Concepçion’s heart stood still in her breast.

Then her hands flew to her reticule, to the crucifix about
her neck. She whipped the chain over her head and about her fingers and with
miraculous deftness wrenched out her brand-new Ladies’ Magnesium-Powered
Personal Illuminator. She took three long strides into the darkness’s maw and
scrabbled for the switch..

Light blazed. The darkness snarled like a furious cat. White
brilliance drove the picture into memory indelibly as a lightning strike.

A man jammed against the boarded alley wall, head back in a
parody of ecstasy, bulging eyes, gaping mouth. Dangling hands, a mass of shadow
folds from the upthrust serape, the black shape of the vampire pressed beneath,
head fastened like a tick’s to the naked throat.

One hand gripped the man’s jaw, forcing his head up, holding
him in place. The other made a white blot at the vampire’s groin. The black
velvet trousers gaped. He held himself as at a urinal, and something streamed
down against the other man’s leg, thick and black as tar, with a
throat-stopping stench.

Concepçion cried, “Madre de Dios!” and swung the cross.

The light snuffed. She heard the vampire curse. Something
thumped, something flew by so close she staggered as from the passage of a
train. Then the shuddering dimness held only stench, and the victim’s body,
settling amid a slow rustle of garments like a just-felled tree.

∞

Concepçion managed not to actually fall out of the alley
mouth. She laced her stays looser than most, but they cut breathing so she
could only scurry, eyes clinging desperately to the fitful black blur ahead.
Making for the station. Mother of God, let me not lose it! It must be going to
the train . . .

Blackness flitted across the station façade and vanished in
the entry arch. Lungs bursting, Concepçion rushed through onto the platform.
Men criss-crossed under the coldly glaring lights, train, engine, station crew.
Nobody staring, nobody shouting. Oh, Dios, did no one see where it went?

Sheer instinct sent her to the locomotive: the train’s head,
its motive force, the province of the man who had kept it here. “Señor
Vivanco!” she gasped.

And as by magic he was beside her, saying sharply, “Señora,
what is wrong?”

“The brujo.” Concepçion coughed in the raw Altiplano air. “I
saw him in the street. I think he came to the train.”

She felt rather than saw Vivanco spring alert. Then he
shouted, “Roberto!” over a shoulder. And to her, brusquely, “What do we seek?”

“A man—small, very upright, a high mestizo. Black
old-fashioned coat. A face like an Inca. Proud. Proud as Pizarro. But if you
see him, do not approach! He will spell you with his eyes.”

She heard the sharp intake of breath and caught his sleeve.
“Or else . . .”

“Or else?”

She tried not to make her voice small. “Look for a bat. A
vampire bat.”

∞

“Señores, I most sincerely ask your pardon.” Concepçion
bit her lip. “I have taken you all from your work. Disrupted the station.
Perhaps delayed the
Internationale
. But there is a man, a, a creature.
Involved with the murder, in Guaqui. We must find him! Because one way or
another, he
will
be on this train.”

The assembled men’s silence was its own reply. They think me
hysterical, if not crazy. But if I tell them the truth?

Vivanco was abruptly again beside her, saying loudly,
“Dismiss. We must finish the work.” Drawing her into the half-arches behind the
platform, he kept hold of her elbow, eyes scanning her face. As abruptly he
said, “What will you do?”

Concepçion’s tears burnt away. Her spine stiffened. “My
helpers and I must check the passengers. The brujo may be on board, but his
servant is not. If we can find, we can follow him.”

Vivanco’s eyes narrowed.
You will not
, that look
asked,
give up?

“Señor, I delayed the train at Guaqui, so you were forced to
hold it here. There is a man dead, back down the street, because this—brujo—was
delayed too.” She saw the sudden appalled guilt in his face. “Señor, you are
blameless. But I let even the dead lie, to follow this creature. While I may
stop it, I will not give up.”

For an instant he was silent. Then he touched right hand to
temple as if saluting Don Jose. “Send,” he said, “if you have need.”

∞

“Señora, señora!” Ramon Flores all but fell into
Concepçion’s sleeper, exclaiming at the top of his lungs. “We found him, we
found him after all!”

Concepçion nearly fell off the bunk herself. “Madre de Dios!
How? Where?”

“I remembered what you told us.” Flores grabbed the door
jamb giddily. “Pray if you meet him, to Mary or Pachamama. And we had not found
them—the train loaded, pulled out, there was no stop before Juliaca.” He was
too overstrung in the wake of desperation to laugh, even in joy. “So I prayed,
señora! Pachamama, I begged. Show me. Just show me, where . . .
Oh señora! It was as if my eyes cleared, and there he was! Rolled in his
serape, under the provision shelf in the second-class galley, the door was
open, I looked straight in!”

“Blessed Pachamama!” At that moment Concepçion could have
kissed him. “But he, did he see you?”

“No, no, señora! His head was down, as if he slept.” He
danced on the shuddering floor as the train rattled down a slope. “Now, señora,
now what do we do?”

“Find the brujo.” Concepçion hardly had to think. “He must
be close. And in bat form, or they had seen him, in the earlier search. Quick,
Señor Flores, back to second class. Pray to Pachamama as we look.” With a faint
pang, she wished that she, too, could invoke Grandmama’s Aymara earth goddess.
“I will call on Mary myself.”

The vampire was in the galley too. Above the range-hood, a
rod spanned the car to hold up pots and pans. The vampire was still little more
than a black smear among the utensils, but it was there. The long-handled hook
for fetching pans down leant beside the range. Concepçion stared up, clutching
her crucifix, prayer ebbing on her lips. We have found him. Now, what do we do?

“First, we get the Indian out.” Ramon Flores was still
jittering beside her. “I can bring a conductor. If I pray to Pachamama, he
should see too. That one should not be in the galley, and be sure, he has only
a third-class ticket. We can take him all the way down there.”

“Yes.” Whatever noise Jesus made, the vampire would not
wake. With Jesus out of earshot, what could they not do?

Grandmama’s permanent remedies for a brujo were close to
Stoker’s for Dracula: stake the sleeper’s heart with hawthorn wood. Cut off the
head, fill the mouth with garlic. Expose all to the sun, and let it burn up the
undead flesh. But how do I behead a vampire bat?

Superimposed ran pictures of Don Sebastian in her cabin,
rapier upright, ancient as Pizarro, haughty as a hidalgo, immaculate in white
stock and black velvet coat. Whatever horrors he had wrought, his presence
demanded a death with dignity.

However undignified the death he dealt. The lightning-etched
scene in the alleyway flashed past her too. Dios, how he must hate that. Why,
in heaven’s name, must even a Dracula piss when he feeds?

The train noises blanked. Instead she heard her brother,
dead of fever these seven years, laughing in her ear beside her grandfather’s
herd-fire, hissing, “’Cepçion, ’Cepçion, come and see!”

Dragging her to the recumbent, slumbering cow, to crouch,
stifling giggles, as the small black shape of a vampire bat planed to earth, to
waddle, on its wingtips, to the cow’s side. Scale a shoulder, bare the two
razor-sharp front teeth, and bend to feed.

And begin to urinate, a bare minute after it drank.

Concepçion gasped. So this one is truly a vampire-bat?

Then the other memory overrode everything, Grandmama by her
hearth, smiling as Roberto closed his shrilling narrative. “Abuela, it started to
pee
!” And adding lore of her own. Yes, vampires walked rather than risk
rousing prey by a direct landing. And did Roberto know the secret of how they
flew?

“Oh. Oh, Dios.”

Ramon Flores stopped babbling and stared at her. Stared
harder as she took her hands from her cheeks and twitched like a crazy woman
and demanded, “How far is it to Juliaca? Quick!”

∞

The
Internationale
slid majestically up to the
platform in Juliaca. Brakes squealed, the locomotive let out a bullfrog roar of
steam. More steam wreathed the driving wheels as Concepçion cascaded
inelegantly from the first-class doorway and tried to run among the station
scrimmage to the cabin side.

“Señor Vivanco!”

The engineer came down in a leap. “You have found it,” he
said.

“I have found it, por Dios. And I think I know how to deal
with it. Señor, only tell me: is this engine a Baldwin too?”

He looked at her almost as Ramon Flores had. But he nodded
immediately.

“Truly, thank God.” For what seemed the first time in
minutes, Concepçion breathed. “One favor, then, señor. On the down grades,
after Crucero Alto—maybe over Colca Canyon—I mean to pull the emergency cord.”

Vivanco nearly reared back like a horse. “Señora—!”

“And then I want you to blow the whistle. As hard, as high
as it will go, so long as the steam lasts. Or until I pull the cord again.”

“What?”

“Then, please God, we will be rid of our brujo.” She could
feel the flush of mad inspiration, of madder excitement, in her cheeks. “Por
favor, señor. This once, ignore the regulations. The train will take no harm,
and nor will any other passenger. A great many people will be saved . . .
if you can do this one thing.”

Vivanco stared as if she had grown the devil’s horns. Then,
slowly, his face changed. Abruptly, he made a little half-bow. “When you pull
the cord,” he said, “the whistle will blow.”

∞

Concepçion stood in the second-class galley door, pot-hook
in hand and mouth oven-dry. By the connection tube, Ramon Flores gripped the
red emergency-stop handle, eyes locked on her. At the car’s end, she knew
Esteban Gamarra waited, clutching his crucifix, to block off entry from
third-class.

Two and a half eternal hours ago, the
International
e
had pulled out of Juliaca, to thread its way over the Altiplano, along
Lagunilles lake, past endless vistas where only a herd of llama or alpaca or a
one-room farmhouse broke the emptiness. Half an hour since, they had taken coal
and water at Crucero Alto. Now the locomotive was braking, easing the train
into the steepest section of the descent.