Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (42 page)

She did not ask me if I had heard of it. No one who spends more than a week in central Patagonia can be ignorant of Trapalanda. For three hundred years, explorers have searched for the “City of the Caesars,”
Trapalanda
, the Patagonian version of El Dorado. Rumor and speculation said that Trapalanda would be found at about 47 degrees South, at the same latitude as Paso Roballo. Its fabled treasure-houses of gold and gemstones had drawn hundreds of men to their death in the high Andes. People did not come back, and say, “I sought Trapalanda, and I failed to find it.” They did not come back at all. I was an exception.

“I am disappointed,” I said. “I had thought your husband to be a wiser man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone wants to find Trapalanda. Four years of my life went into the search for it, and I had the best equipment and the best knowledge. I told your husband that there were a dozen better guides, but I was lying. I know that country better than any man alive. He is certain to fail.”

“He believes that he has special knowledge. And you are going to do it. You are going to take him there. For Trapalanda.”

She knew better than I. Until she spoke, I did not know what I would do. But she was right. Forget the “agreement in principle.” I would go.

“You want me to do it, don’t you?” I said. “But I do not understand
your
reasons. You are married to a very wealthy man. He seems to have as much money as he can ever spend.”

“John is curious, always curious. He is like a little boy. He is not doing this for money. He does not care about money.”

She had not answered my implied question. I had never asked for John Kenyon Martindale’s motives, I had been looking for
her
reasons why he should go. Then it occurred to me that her presence, here in my bed, told me all I needed to know. He would go to the Kingdom of the Winds. If he found what he was looking for, it would bring enormous wealth. Should he fail to return, Shirley Martindale would be a free and very wealthy widow.

“Sex with your husband is not good?” I asked.

“What do you think? I am here, am I not?” Then she relented. “It is worse than not good, it is terrible. It is as bad with him as it is exciting with you. John is a gentle, thoughtful man, but I need someone who takes me and does not ask or explain. You are a strong man, and I suspect that you are a cold, selfish man. Since we have been together, you have not once spoken my name, or said a single word of affection. You do not feel it is necessary to pretend to commitments. And you are sexist. I noticed John’s reaction when you said, ‘I married Helga.’ He would always say it differently, perhaps ‘Shirley and I got married.’” Her hands moved from my arm, and were touching me more intimately. She sighed. “I do not mind your attitude. What John finds hard to stand, I
need
. You saw what you did to me here, without one word. You make me shiver.”

I turned to bring our bodies into full contact. “And John?” I said. “Why did he marry you?” There was no need to ask why she had married him.

“What do you think,” she said. “Was it my wit, my looks, my charm? Give me your hand.” She gently moved my fingers along her face and breasts. “It was five years ago. John was still blind. We met, and when we said good night he felt my cheek.” Her voice was bitter. “He married me for my pelt.”

The texture was astonishing. I could feel no roughness, no blemish, not even the most delicate of hairs. Shirley Martindale had the warm, flawless skin of a six-month-old baby. It was growing warm under my touch.

Before we began she raised herself high above me, propping herself on straight arms. “Helga. What is she like? I cannot imagine her.”

“You will see,” I said. “Tomorrow I will telephone Lausanne and tell her to come to New York. She will go with us to Trapalanda.”

Trapalanda.
Had I said that? I was very tired, I had meant to say Patagonia.

I reached up to touch her breasts. “No talk now,” I said. “No more talk.” Her eyes were as black as jet, as dark as mountain lakes. I dived into their depths.

* * *

Shirley Martindale did not meet Helga; not in New York, not anywhere, not ever. John Kenyon Martindale made his position clear to me the next morning as we walked together around the seventh floor library. “I won’t allow her to stay in this house,” he said. “It’s not for my sake or yours, and certainly not for Shirley’s. It is for her sake. I know how Shirley would treat her.”

He did not seem at all annoyed, but I stared at the blind black mask and revised my ideas about how much he could see with his CCDs and fiber optic bundles.

“Did she tell you last night why I am going to Patagonia?” he asked, as he picked out a book and placed it in the hopper of an iron potbellied stove with electronic aspirations.

I hesitated, and told the truth. “She said you were seeking Trapalanda.”

He laughed. “I wanted to go to Patagonia. The easiest way to do it without an argument from Shirley was to hold out a fifty billion dollar bait. The odd thing, though, is that she is quite right. I am seeking Trapalanda.” And he laughed again, more heartily than anything he had said would justify.

The black machine in front of us made a little purr of contentment, and a pleasant woman’s voice began to read aloud. It was a mathematics text on the foundations of geometry. I had noticed that although Martindale described himself as a meteorologist, four-fifths of the books in the library were mathematics and theoretical physics. There were too many things about John Martindale that were not what they seemed.

“Shirley’s voice,” he said, while we stood by the machine and listened to a mystifying definition of the intrinsic curvature of a surface. “And a very pleasant voice, don’t you think, to have whispering sweet epsilons in your ear? I borrowed it for use with this optical character recognition equipment, before I got my eyes.”

“I didn’t think there was a machine in the world that could do that.”

“Oh, yes.” He switched it off, and Shirley halted in midword. “This isn’t even state-of-the-art anymore. It was, when it was made, and it cost the earth. Next year it will be an antique, and they’ll give this much capability out in cereal packets. Come on, let’s go and join Shirley for a prelunch aperitif.”

If John Martindale were angry with me or with his wife, he concealed it well. I realized that the mask extended well beyond the black casing.

Five days later we flew to Argentina. When Martindale mentioned his idea of being in the Kingdom of the Winds in time for the winter solstice, season of the anomaly’s strongest showing, I dropped any thoughts of a trip back to Lausanne. I arranged for Helga to pack what I needed and meet us in Buenos Aires. She would wait at Ezeiza Airport without going into the city proper, and we would fly farther south at once. Even if our travels went well, we would need luck as well as efficiency to have a week near Paso Roballo before solstice.

It amused me to see Martindale searching for Helga in the airport arrival lounge as we walked off the plane. He had seen her photograph, and I had assured him that she would be there. He could not find her. Within seconds, long before it was possible to see her features, I had picked her out. She was staring down at a book on her lap. Every fifteen seconds her head lifted for a rapid radarlike scan of the passenger lounge, and returned to the page. Martindale did not notice her until we were at her side.

I introduced them. Helga nodded but did not speak. She stood up and led the way. She had rented a four-seater plane on open charter, and in her usual efficient way she had arranged for our luggage to be transferred to it.

Customs clearance, you ask? Let us be realistic. The Customs Office in Argentina is no more corrupt than that of, say, Bolivia or Ecuador; that is quite sufficient. Should John Martindale be successful in divining the legendary treasures of Trapalanda, plenty of hands would help to remove them illegally from the country.

Helga led the way through the airport. She was apparently not what he had expected of my wife, and I could see him studying her closely. Helga stood no more than five feet two, to my six-two, and her thin body was not quite straight. Her left shoulder dipped a bit, and she favored her left leg a trifle as she walked.

Since I was the only one with a pilot’s license I sat forward in the copilot’s chair, next to Owen Davies. I had used Owen before as a by-the-day hired pilot. He knew the Kingdom of the Winds, and he respected it. He would not take risks. In spite of his name he was Argentina born—one of the many Welshmen who found almost any job preferable to their parents’ Argentinean sheep-farming. Martindale and Helga sat behind us, side-by-side in the back, as we flew to Comodoro Rivadavia on the Atlantic coast. It was the last real airfield we would see for a while unless we dipped across the Chilean border to Cochrane. I preferred not to try that. In the old days, you risked a few machine-gun bullets from frontier posts. Today it is likely to be a surface-to-air missile.

We would complete our supplies in Comodoro Rivadavia, then use dry dirt airstrips the rest of the way. The provisions were supposed to be waiting for us. While Helga and Owen were checking to make sure that the delivery included everything we had ordered, Martindale came up to my side.

“Does she never talk?” he said. “Or is it just my lack of charm?” He did not sound annoyed, merely puzzled.

“Give her time.” I looked to see what Owen and Helga were doing. They were pointing at three open chests of supplies, and Owen was becoming rather loud.

“You noticed how Helga walks, and how she holds her left arm?”

The black shield dipped down and up, making me suddenly curious as to what lay behind it. “I even tried to hint at a question in that direction,” he said. “Quite properly she ignored it.”

“She was not born that way. When Helga walked into my office nine years ago, I assumed that I was looking at some congenital condition. She said nothing, nor did I. I was looking for an assistant, someone who was as interested in the high border country as I was, and Helga fitted. She was only twenty-one years old and still green, but I could tell she was intelligent and trainable.”

“Biddable,” said Martindale. “Sorry, go on.”

“You have to be fit to wander around in freezing temperatures at ten thousand feet,” I said. “As part of Helga s condition of employment, she had to take a full physical. She didn’t want to. She agreed only when she saw that the job depended on it. She was in excellent shape and passed easily; but the doctor—quite improperly—allowed me to look at her X rays.”

Were the eyebrows raised, behind that obsidian visor? Martindale cocked his head to the right, a small gesture of inquiry. Helga and Owen Davies were walking our way.

“She was put together like a jigsaw puzzle. Almost every bone in her arms and legs showed marks of fracture and healing. Her ribs, too. When she was small she had been what these enlightened times call ‘abused.’ Tortured. As a very small child, Helga learned to keep quiet. The best thing she could hope for was to be ignored. You saw already how invisible she can be.”

“I have never heard you angry before,” he said. “You sound like her father, not her husband.” His tone was calm, but something new hid behind that mask. “And is that,” he continued, “why in New York—”

He was interrupted. “Tomorrow,” said Owen from behind him. “He says he’ll have the rest then. I believe him. I told him he’s a fat idle bastard, and if we weren’t on our way by noon I’d personally kick the shit out of him.”

Martindale nodded at me. Conversation closed. We headed into town for Alberto McShane’s bar and the uncertain pleasures of nightlife in Comodoro Rivadavia. Martindale didn’t give up. All the way there he talked quietly to Helga. He may have received ten words in return.

It had been five years. Alberto McShane didn’t blink when we walked in. He took my order without comment, but when Helga walked past him he reached out his good arm and gave her a big hug. She smiled like the sun. She was home. She had hung around the
Guanaco
bar since she was twelve years old, an oil brat brought here in the boom years. When her parents left, she stayed. She hid among the beer barrels in McShane’s cellar until the plane took off. Then she could relax for the first time in her life. Poverty and hard work were luxuries after what she had been through.

The decor of the bar hadn’t changed since last time. The bottle of dirty black oil (the first one pumped at Comodoro Rivadavia, if you believe McShane) hung over the bar, and the same stuffed guanaco and rhea stood beside it. McShane’s pet armadillo, or its grandson, ambled among the tables looking for beer heeltaps.

I knew our search plans, but Helga and Owen Davies needed briefing. Martindale took Owen’s 1:1,000,000 scale ONCs, with their emendations and local detail in Owen’s careful hand, added to them the 1:250,000 color photomaps that had been made for him in the United States, and spread the collection out to cover the whole table.

“From here, to here,” he said. His fingers tapped the map near Laguna del Sello, then moved south and west until they reached Lago Belgrano.

Owen studied them for a few moments. “All on this side of the border,” he said. “That’s good. What do you want to do there?”

“I want to land. Here, and here, and here.” Martindale indicated seven points, on a roughly north-south line.

Owen Davies squinted down, assessing each location. “Lago Gio, Paso Roballo, Lago Posadas. Know ’em all. Tough landing at two, and that last point is in the middle of the Perito Moreno National Park; but we can find a place.” He looked up, not at Martindale but at me. “You’re not in the true high country, though. You’re twenty miles too far east. What do you want to do when you get there?”

“I want to get out, and look west,” said Martindale. “After that, I’ll tell you where we have to go.”

Owen Davies said nothing more, but when we were at the bar picking up more drinks he gave me a shrug.
Too far east
, it said.
You’re not in the high country. You won’t find Trapalanda there, where he’s proposing to land. What’s the story?

Owen was an honest man and a great pilot who had made his own failed attempt at Trapalanda (sometimes I thought that was true of everyone who lived below 46 degrees South). He found it hard to believe that anyone could succeed where he had not, but he couldn’t resist the lure.