The woman shuffled over with a bottle of mineral water and two cloudy glasses. She was blind, Gideon realized from the way she touched the table before setting them down. Guapo himself poured for them with the expansive, benevolent air of a host providing for his guests – first moving the knife out of their immediate reach and keeping his hand on it – and Gideon and Vargas each gulped down a glass of the closest thing to nectar Gideon had ever tasted.
“More?” Guapo asked hospitably and was answered by two vigorous nods. The second glasses were emptied as fast as the first and once again eagerly held out. Strange. Minutes from probable death – an unimaginably unpleasant death – and yet one could take so much grateful pleasure from a glass of cold water.
When Gideon had put down his glass again without signaling for another, Guapo said something to him that he didn’t understand. Something about the river and the Adelita. Gideon asked him to repeat it.
He said it again and Gideon still couldn’t make it out. “I’m sorry, I don’t-”
Guapo was suddenly furious. He slammed the table with a heavy hand (Vargas actually jumped out of his chair; Gideon managed – just – to stay in his), grabbed the monstrous knife, and waved its point at Gideon’s eyes. “Don’t play dumb with me, you bastard! I know you speak Spanish.”
“I speak some Spanish, yes.”
“You speak perfect Spanish.”
No, I don’t, Gideon thought, his stomach moving up just a little toward its normal location. Vargas was right. It was some kind of misunderstanding. They had him confused with someone else. Talking their way out of this might still be a possibility.
“Look,” he said evenly, reasonably, “I don’t know who you think I am, but-”
Guapo got up, leaned on his hands – on the knuckles of the one holding the knife – and loomed aggressively over him. Gideon smelled whiskey, cheese, cigarettes, sweat. “You’re telling me you’re not the professor?”
“I’m a professor, but I’m obviously not the one you think I am.” And now a sudden burst of reckless but welcome righteous anger surged in him. He jumped up too, so he was nose to nose with Guapo. (Vargas, sitting between them, skidded back, out of the likely range of the knife.) “Why don’t you tell me who the hell you think I am? This is…” He sought the word for outrageous, but had to settle for terrible, the same in Spanish as it was in English. “You send your Indians to… to… you…” But his Spanish wasn’t good enough and he was reduced to waving his arms and sputtering: “Mud… thorns… mosquitoes… threats…”
His language difficulties had more effect than his protestations. For the first time, Guapo’s heavy, cruel face showed some doubt. He sat slowly down again, peering hard at Gideon.
“So who are you then?”
“Look…” Gideon zipped open the fanny pack he wore near his belt buckle, in which he kept his passport, airplane tickets, and money (and for the moment, a miscellaneous collection of fresh cranial fragments), then fumbled through a wad of damp nuevos soles and tenand twenty-dollar bills to pull out the passport, its familiar blue cover somehow reassuring, as if he were at an airport and simply showing it could get him out of whatever this mess was. He opened it to the identification pages and pushed it across the table to Guapo. “See? Gideon Oliver, that’s me.” He tapped his photograph.
Guapo peered sulkily at it. “And how do I know it’s not fake? Why should I think you’re not trying to fool me?”
“Fool you? How could I know I was going to see you? How could I possibly know your Indians would come and get us?”
“My Indians, my damn Indians!” Guapo exploded, jumping out of his chair. He flung the passport at Gideon’s face. “Luis!” he called, and the man with the revolver came to sit at the table in his place. A snake-necked, fox-faced, crazy-eyed man with an inch of burning cigarette dangling from his lower lip, he was missing the thumb and first finger of his right hand. But with his other thumb, he steadily clicked the revolver’s hammer back, eased it forward, clicked it back, eased it forward… all the while keeping it pointed at the center of Gideon’s chest. Gideon did his best not to think about it, but his eyes kept returning to the moving thumb.
“Would you mind not doing that?” he said. “Or at least pointing it someplace else?” A mistake, he thought immediately.
Oozing malignance – whether it was general or directed specifically at Gideon was impossible to tell – the man smiled meanly, revealing yet another mouthful of discolored, rotting teeth, and kept on doing what he was doing. Click… click…
Gideon shrugged one shoulder in what he hoped was a show of unconcern, and turned to watch Guapo, who had stomped to the three Arimaguas, where they still hunkered down at the base of the wall with their rifles and their Inca Kolas. He began shouting at them, waving the big knife for emphasis. None of them looked at him, but only stared straight ahead. Split-nose was the only one who replied, his answers surly and curt. Like the others, he stared straight in front of him, into the middle distance, his eyes on a level with Guapo’s hips, as still, and as impassive, as a stone idol, and just about as grim.
A long silence after his last answer, and then Guapo suddenly lashed out, kicking the bottle out of the Indian’s hand and sending it skittering over the worn plank floor, spewing yellow-green liquid. Split-nose didn’t move a muscle: no start, no blink, no change of expression or focus. Guapo yelled even louder, a mix of Spanish and something else. Gideon couldn’t pick up most of what he was shouting, but he managed to make out imbecile and estupido. Split-nose’s answers were more of the same: monotonic and obstinate. He seemed unreachable, immovable, but Gideon suspected there would come a time when Guapo would pay for this.
Now would be a good time, he did his best to convey to Split-nose. Now would be a perfect time. But the Indian sat immobile and oblivious.
“What are they talking about?” he asked Vargas in English. The man guarding them frowned and watched them intently, as if trying to understand the words, but he didn’t tell them to be quiet.
“Guapo, he thought you were Scofield.”
“Scofield? Why would he think I was Scofield?”
“He sent the Indians to get him… and me. He told them Scofield was called ‘professor,’ and the fellow with the chopped-up nose, he heard me call you ‘professor,’ so he thought…” He shrugged away the rest of the sentence. “At least, I think that’s what they’re saying.”
“This Guapo, have you heard of him?”
Vargas nodded. “He’s a very big man, the boss in North Loreto,” he whispered, then stopped himself. With a wary glance at the man with the revolver to assure himself that he didn’t understand English (the obtuse, open-mouthed expression satisfied him), he went on: “A tough customer, a killer. He’d as soon take your eye out with that knife as-”
Guapo’s heavy returning footsteps silenced him. “Stupid bastards,” he grumbled in Spanish as he fell into the remaining chair and poured himself three fingers of aguardiente. “Trained monkeys would do better.” With a grunt and a sudden jerk he jammed the point of the knife into the tabletop, which Gideon now noticed was covered with splintery pockmarks from a hundred previous such spearings. There the knife remained, upright and quivering, about three inches from Guapo’s hand and five long, impossible feet from Gideon’s. And both Vargas and the guy with the gun and the itchy thumb now sat between them. Plan A – going up and over the table and through that opening in the wall – wasn’t going to work any more, that was clear. Guapo drained half the tumbler and smoothed his mustache with thumb and forefinger, a surprisingly dainty motion. “So where is Scofield?” he asked in a low voice, staring at the table.
A promising sign? Gideon wondered. He believes me?
“Professor Scofield has… has died, I regret to say,” Vargas stammered, clearly realizing how extremely unlikely it sounded. “Only last night.”
Guapo eyed him suspiciously.
“I swear it on the grave of my mother,” said Vargas. “A crazy person, a drug-crazed lunatic, threw him from the ship. He also threw another passenger, a-”
“And what do you say?” Guapo asked Gideon.
“It’s true. Scofield’s dead.” Well, that had hardly been established beyond doubt, but it was highly probable, and this was not the time for complicated answers.
“They’re lying,” said the fox-faced one. “Why are we wasting all this time?”
Thoughtfully, Guapo drained the tumbler and poured a little more, finishing the bottle. Another sip, another delicate smoothing of the silky mustache, and he turned to Vargas to address him directly for the first time, other than having told him to shut up. “And you, I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not Vargas.”
“No, senor, I’m Vargas, all right, that’s completely correct. Alfredo Vargas, Captain Alfredo Vargas, at your service.” His hand reached up to his braided captain’s hat, but it was no longer there, having been lost when he fell into the river.
“That’s good. I’m very glad you didn’t lie, my friend. You should be even more glad you didn’t lie. Now I want you to tell me exactly what happened to Scofield.”
“Of course, with pleasure-”
“And I want you to tell me exactly – exactly – what your boat is doing on the Javaro River.”
“Certainly, I have nothing to hide from you-”
Guapo held up his hand. “ You know who I am, don’t you? You’ve heard of El Guapo?” With a jerk, the knife was pulled from the table.
Vargas’s eyes followed it as if magnetized. “Of course, senor. Everyone has heard of El Guapo.”
“And have you heard of what happens to people who tell falsehoods to El Guapo?” With the point of the huge knife he gently, almost tenderly, touched Vargas’s left earlobe, then ran it around the entire ear. Gideon saw a single spot of blood where it nicked the top rim. Vargas sat through it as rigidly and motionlessly as was possible for a human to sit, although his Adam’s apple, beyond his control, glugged up and down a couple of times.
“Yes, senor,” he croaked through barely moving lips.
Guapo withdrew the knife, but his fingers remained around the handle. “Then go ahead. And don’t be nervous.”
Fox-face laughed nastily. “No, no, don’t be nervous, what is there to be nervous about?”
And so the story came out. The first part, about how Scofield and Maggie had been thrown overboard, and Maggie, but not Scofield, had been rescued, was told pretty much as it had happened. Gideon was asked to verify the details once or twice and complied. Guapo didn’t ask why Cisco would have wanted to kill Scofield. He seemed to accept Vargas’s description of a “drug-crazed lunatic” on the loose (which was accurate enough), and neither Vargas nor Gideon volunteered anything more about it. The simpler, the better. “You are very lucky you are not Scofield,” Fox-face said to Gideon with undisguised regret.
Gideon nodded his agreement. Any way you looked at it, it was the truth.
The rest of Vargas’s story, which he told with an occasional shamefaced glance at Gideon, and with many self-serving asides (“He talked me into it against my better judgment,” “Never have I done this before,” “It was my intention to do it only this one time, for enough money to upgrade my poor ship,” “I didn’t realize, I never thought, that we would be in a region of interest to El Guapo; had I known, I would never have agreed, never!”) was pretty much what Gideon was expecting by now. He had realized from the moment he had walked into the cantina and set eyes on Guapo and his men that John had been right: he, John, and Phil had gotten themselves into the middle of a drug-trafficking imbroglio. And Guapo’s original certainty that the Indians had brought him Arden Scofield, and his incensed disappointment that they had not, had made it clear that Scofield was the major figure in it.
The substance involved was coca paste, Vargas said. He understood that there were sacks of it hidden within the coffee bags (he himself, of course, had never seen any of it, but had only taken Scofield’s word for it; he himself had no part in the arrangements, but only provided the space and transportation) that were to be deposited at the warehouse “Was it you who had the warehouse burnt down?” Gideon asked Guapo.
“Hey – who told you to speak?” Fox-face said, but Guapo waved him down.
“Yes, sure, that was my man,” Guapo said. “Do you think I didn’t know what was happening? Do you think I would permit such a thing? Do you think anything happens in North Loreto Province about which I don’t know?”
“I guess not,” Gideon said, which seemed to please Guapo.
“How many coffee bags?” he asked Vargas.
“Forty or fifty, I believe.”
“Forty-eight,” said Guapo. “And how much paste?”
“About… about a hundred kilos, I think.”
“A hundred and fifty,” Guapo said, his voice hardening. “Be careful, my friend.” He sat back, slowly rotating the knife in his left hand, its point gently rotating against his right forefinger. “And for whom was it destined?”
“Destined? I-”
“Think before you answer. Tell the truth when I ask you a question, and you may yet get out of this with your life, and maybe even with all your appendages.”
Vargas fished in his pocket for his glasses and put them on, as if they might help him think more clearly. “Guapo… senor… I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, I didn’t want to know, I had no wish to be-”
“It was destined for Eduardo Veloso of the Cali cartel, whose carriers were to pick it up tomorrow night,” Guapo said, and Gideon began to think that there really wasn’t much going on, at least in this particular aspect of the regional commerce, that got by El Guapo. “And how is it hidden? Is there some in all the coffee sacks?”
“It’s in plastic bags – so I was told by the professor – not him” – a gesture at Gideon – “the other professor – in several of the sacks, fifteen or twenty of them, I think-”
“Thirty,” said Guapo warningly.
“Yes, thirty, that was it, that was it!” Vargas gibbered, the perspiration actually dripping off him onto the floor so that there was a little puddle on each side of his chair. Was he lying because he yet hoped to siphon off some of the paste for his own profit? Or was lying simply his instinctive reaction to stress? “Yes, thirty, that’s right, now I remember, of course. It’s thirty, all right. Now, senor, the honest truth is I do not know which bags it’s in, I was never told-”