“So . . . what’s this got to do with us?” Tim asked. “Why would they ...I mean, what reason would they ...?”
“Ask him what tribe,” Scofield said hoarsely. He had emerged from the dining room while Vargas was translating.
Vargas put the question to Chato.
“The Chayacuro,” Scofield said in a dead voice and then, as he sagged back against the dining room wall, laughter started gurgling out of him, limp, helpless laughter that built until it convulsed his whole body, so that he slid slowly down the wall into a sitting position on the deck.
The others stared at him, appalled. Vargas hurried toward him with his arms out, but Scofield, still shaking with deep but silent
laughter, waved him off. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said when he finally stopped and sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “Oo, ow, that hurt.”
But he wasn’t all right. There were oily tears running down his cheeks and he was still giggling. “They want to kill me...they remember, don’t you see? They’ve waited for me all these years ...can you believe it? All these years...They want to finish the job, they—”
Mel Pulaski stepped forward and reached down to grasp his hand. “Come on, Arden, get up,” he said disgustedly. “This isn’t doing anybody any good. Okay, you’ve had a hell of a scare, but it missed you. You’re okay, you’re fine. A couple of little nicks.”
“A hell of a scare,” Scofield echoed woodenly. “Yes, yes, it was certainly that.” Another little hiccup of laughter.
The big ex-linebacker pulled him unresisting to his feet. “Come on, let’s get you to your cabin.”
“I’ll do it,” Tim said, running up. “Come on, Professor, you want to lie down for a while. Easy does it now....” He took Scofield’s elbow and began to shuffle him tenderly forward the way a nurse would shuffle an aged patient down a hospital corridor to get a blood test.
That brought Scofield to sudden life. With a violent twist of his arm he shook the young man off. “Dammit, Loeffler, don’t treat me like a child! I’m a little shaky, yes—who wouldn’t be?—but I can damn well get to my cabin without your help!”
Tim’s face turned redder than Scofield’s. “But I wasn’t—I was only—”
“Oh, forget it, never mind,” Scofield muttered and strode off, steadily enough after the first tottery step or two, to the flight of stairs that led up to the cabins.
When he was gone, most of the others sank into the plastic chairs
at the various tables, sighing, or shaking their heads, or otherwise expressing shock and discomfort. Tim was flushed and sullen. Gideon and John remained standing, leaning against the deck railing.
“My Lord, I wonder what that was all about,” Duayne said. “Why should he think these people, these . . . Chayacuro, would be trying to kill him?”
“Oh, I know what it was about,” Maggie said. “Most of us do, actually. Or at least the ones that know Arden.”
“So how about enlightening the rest of us?” John suggested.
Maggie shrugged. “Why not? Well, you see, it goes back quite a way. When Arden—” She stopped and turned to Mel. “Mel, why don’t you tell it? You’re the man who just wrote his life story.”
Mel made a face. “I didn’t write his life story. I wrote what he
“Well, obviously,
“Yes,” Maggie agreed. “I’ve known Arden a long time, and I’ve never seen him like that. Not even close. Arden is usually—always, really—one of the most in-control people you’ll ever...” Shaking her head, she didn’t finish the sentence. “Just go ahead and tell it, Mel.”
“Okay, why not? Here’s the story.” Mel lounged back in his chair, his massive brown legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, his hands in the pockets of his shorts.
Thirty years earlier, he told them, Scofield, as a twentysomethingyear-old graduate student, had been on a rubber seed–hunting expedition in the Amazon with his two best friends, fellow students at Harvard.
“They were on assignment for a big Malaysian rubber plantation,” Maggie put in. “They made a lot of money from it. Arden did, at any rate. The other two never made it out.”
“You want to tell the story, be my guest,” Mel said grumpily. No less than Scofield, he didn’t care for having his narrative flow disrupted or his punch lines telegraphed. But with this Gideon could easily sympathize.
Maggie threw up her hands. “Well, please excuse me. I was just trying to fill in a few details. You go ahead, you’re the professional storyteller, after all.”
“Okay, then,” Mel said uncertainly, not sure whether or not he’d just been insulted. “So while they were coming back through the jungle to their boat, they were attacked by this band of Chayacuro Indians. First one of his pals gets it—a poison dart through the neck. So Arden and his other buddy drag him along, trying to stay ahead of the Indians, but in a few minutes they could see he was dead, and they have to leave him there. Then the second guy gets hit—”
