Kleat lifted the chain with his dinner knife. “Jewelry?”
“You could say that.”
It was a fistful of mud grabbed from the earth and dried in the sun. Molly saw his finger imprints. Then she saw an edge of flat metal at one corner. With that and the chain she could guess what it was. She took it from Kleat and scratched at the crust with her fingernail, but it was baked on hard.
“Here,” said Duncan. Without ceremony, he sank it in his water glass. He stirred with his spoon and the water clouded dark gray, then black.
While the clot dissolved, Molly spoke. “We left food for you. You never ate it.”
The man didn’t say a word to her. He just stood waiting, infinitely tolerant. Flying on junk, she thought. But his eyes were too bright, too present in the shadow face.
“We know what it is,” said Kleat, “if it’s even real.”
“Real as you or me,” the man answered. “Real as anything.”
“Three possibilities then.” Kleat issued a thick stream of smoke. “You bought it. It’s your own. Or you looted it. Is that what you did?”
Duncan scooped out what was left of the clot and crumbled it over his dish. What emerged was a small, flat metal plate, a dog tag, just as she’d suspected. Her heartbeat quickened.
If this really had been stolen from the well, then it was a possible proof of identity, perhaps their only one. She’d learned that the forensic labs wanted teeth, preferably an entire mandible, to match to dental charts. In addition, DNA testing could work, though only if a maternal relative had stepped forward over the past thirty years to offer blood. Without the benefit of primary, organic identifiers, the agencies had to rely on circumstantial evidence: a wedding band, a class ring, an engraved pocketknife. Or a dog tag.
“It’s a message,” the gypsy said. Deep gone, that face.
“Excellent,” said Kleat. “What’s it say?”
“Quit your pissing around.”
Kleat, the searcher, flushed. “That’s the message?”
“I’m still waiting,” the boy spoke.
“What it says,” said Duncan, washing the tag in his water and wiping the embossed letters, “is Samuels, Jefferson S. There’s a birth date. His blood type. Protestant. And a serial number.”
Molly knew everything about the pilot RE-1 had been searching for, from the date of his shoot down to the root canal in his left molar. And his name had not been Jefferson Samuels.
“Nothing,” Kleat said to the man. “You have nothing.”
The man dropped two more clots on the white tablecloth, two more tags.
Duncan cracked them open like eggs, black dirt all over the white tablecloth. He read the second tag, and the third. “Sanchez, Thomas A. Bellwether, Edward P.”
“Who the hell are you?” Kleat demanded.
Molly tried, more gently. She pointed at his arm, at the tattoo like a ghost beneath the dust. “Is that your name? Lucas Yale?”
“Luke,” he said.
Molly looked at Duncan and Kleat, and the name meant nothing to them. It defeated her, the uselessness of the name. She had nothing more to ask.
“Where did you find these?” Kleat said.
Luke looked at Molly for the first time. “I come to show you. Let’s go.”
“Just tell us,” said Kleat.
“It’s not so easy,” the boy said. The red sky bulged behind him, a great final burst of coloration. Night was falling.
“You’re playing a dangerous game,” Kleat said, “kidnapping the dead.”
In fact, the practice was as common as despair in this fertile green country. Peasants trafficked in human bones all the time, trying to prize money from the Americans even when the bones weren’t American.
“How much do you want?” said Molly.
The stranger smiled at her suddenly, and he was missing significant teeth on the right side, upper and lower. What teeth still remained lay green in there. Duncan was right, the boy must have been eating grass and weeds, rifling the land. But then Molly saw that it was moss, actual moss, growing between his teeth, like something out of a movie. The tropics had taken root in this young ancient. It showed in the leather of his face. It peeked from his mouth.
“No charge,” he said, “not for you-all.”
“Show us on a map,” said Duncan. He took a map from his briefcase. He suspected the stranger even more than Kleat did, and that put Molly on alert. His instincts were telling him something.
“Never mind that,” Luke said. “It’s off the map.”
“Come on, this is the twenty-first century. There’s no such thing as off the map. They have satellites.”
“Well, if it was on a map, they wouldn’t have ended where they are,” said Luke.
“How far away is this place?” Molly asked, trying to cut through the mystery. The key was to get your source talking.
“It’s a ride. We need to leave.”
“A ride. Does that mean an hour? A day? Two days?”
“One night’s ride. Tonight.”
It sank in.
“You’re joking,” Kleat said. “Leave tonight? We’ve been on the road all day. I have a flight to reschedule. We need to rest. Prepare.”
“There’s six more,” Luke told them.
That shut Kleat up.
“Six more dog tags?” Molly was incredulous.
“Bones, weapons, whatever it is you need.” Molly could see his tongue in the gap of missing teeth. “It’s all there. All yours.”
They were quiet for a minute. Nine soldiers? Molly felt something like rapture. She was saved. Here was her
“And all we have to do is follow you?” said Duncan.
“I can’t make you do a thing.”
“They don’t belong to you,” Kleat said. “These tags, the bones, the relics, whatever you found.”
“What more do you want? I’m saying come on. They’re all yours.”
“Sit down,” Molly said. He could walk out as easily as he had walked in, and then where would they be? “Eat with us. We’ve ordered our supper. We can talk things through.”
Luke stayed on his feet.
“There are proper channels for this kind of thing,” Duncan said. Molly could hear his turmoil. The boy confused him. Molly had never seen this side of him. Things were moving too fast for him. “You could have told the captain at camp. You could go to the embassy. Why here? Why tonight? Why us?”
Luke said, “Because you want it so bad.”
It was true. He had them cold. Week after week, he’d been watching them. He couldn’t know their individual appetites, but he’d seen their hunger.
The possibility grew on her. An American drifter circling through his own tropical dream world, stumbling upon relics from the war, why not? And it was perfectly conceivable that a drug addict, or schizophrenic, whatever he was, would trust three civilians over the captain and his soldiers. Uniformed or not, the military would represent an authority that might take him away. An authority that had rejected her and Duncan and Kleat.
Luke pointed at the new bridge. “I’ll wait on the far side there. You have two hours.”
“Two hours?” Kleat snapped.
Molly spoke to Luke. “It’s just so unexpected. There may be a serious storm coming. We can’t afford to be stranded in some godforsaken place. Is there a village nearby? How many days will we be gone?”
He was backing away from the table.
“You’ve waited this long, and there’s so much to be done,” she said. Slow him down. Keep him here. But he
