The fire had occurred not long before, sometime during the previous day, in all likelihood; there were no longer any flames to be seen, but curling gray wisps still rose occasionally from the burnt wood, and a few embers could be seen glowing here and there in the shadows. The flooring had buckled in places, but the walls still stood, and the corrugated metal roof had held. Fifty feet from the building was a simple, open-walled, thatch-roofed house on waist-high stilts, much like the ones they’d seen at the Ocaona village, untouched by the fire and deserted.
As the
Gideon, standing not far from him, asked, in English, what was the matter.
“Is our warehouse. San Jose de Chiquitos. I be to unload the... the coffee beans here. Now how I do it? I don’t can!” In his extremity, his command of English had fled him again. He jerked his head to stare at Gideon. His eyes, protuberant to begin with, bulged a little more. “What I do with the coffee?”
He asked it—wailed it—as if he were really counting on Gideon to give him the answer, and Gideon didn’t know what to say. “Well, it isn’t as if it’s your fault,” he began soothingly. “Obviously, you can’t unload it here—”
“How this can happen?” Vargas muttered, barely hearing him. “Are guards, guards what live right here! How they can don’t see? And where they are now, why they don’t be here, can you tell me this?”
“Captain Vargas, however it happened, I guess you’ll just have to take it back to Iquitos. No one would expect you to—”
But Vargas, not listening at all now, was wandering dazedly away. “You don’t can understand...you don’t know...”
A few minutes later, the narrow gangplank was let down, and Vargas, some of the passengers, and most of the crew came down it and climbed the dozen or so rough steps dug out of the bank to get up to the building and look around. Although the still-smoldering structure was too hot to enter, it could be seen through gaps in the walls that the place was empty; nothing was stored there. John, who had some experience investigating arson, guessed that the fire was twelve or fifteen hours old.
While most of the others poked gingerly along the outside of the building, some with sticks they’d picked up, Gideon and John went
meandering, with no real purpose, around the clearing. There were stacks of fresh lumber, corrugated metal roofing, and other building materials nearby, and lumber scraps and power tools on the ground. Under a crude little waist-high lean-to of its own stood the tools’ power source, a new-looking, gasoline-powered 5.5-horsepower Hitachi air compressor. (Gideon, not much of a hand around power tools, knew this only because John, who did know about such things, had just told him what it was.)
“Looks like there was some construction going on,” said John.
“Yup. Enlarging the place, repairing it, something.”
On top of the small lean-to were a few more power tools. “These are pretty good tools, you know?” John picked one up. “Hutchins rotary sander,” he said enviously. “Top of the line. I wish I could afford one. And this . . .” He hefted another. “Whoa, a Makita nail gun, also top of the line. This little baby doesn’t come cheap.” He put it down, seemingly with regret. “Doc, does it strike you as a little strange that in a place like this”—he waved vaguely about them— “way,
“Not really, no,” Gideon said. “This is a warehouse, a pick-up point for other places, isn’t it? Not just some local storehouse. We don’t know how much money is behind it.” He leveled a finger at his friend. “Let me guess. You’re thinking there are drugs involved, right?”
“Yeah, I guess I got a one-track mind. But you know what the DEA people call this stretch of the Amazon Basin? The White Triangle. Sixty percent of the North American cocaine trade comes through here, either on the ground, down the river, or in the air. And here we have this falling-down little shack of a warehouse, way, way in the
tules, and there’s about ten thousand dollars worth of new tools laying around.” He shrugged. “So, yeah, I’m thinking there might be more than coffee beans that come through here. You don’t agree with me?”
“I agree you’ve got a one-track mind. It’s hard to picture Vargas as a drug trafficker. The guy’s a bundle of nerves. He’d never be able to stand it.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
They walked on a little. “And here’s something else,” John said. “You know that old prof of yours, Abe Goldstein, and that theory he was always talking about, when too many things happen—”
“The Law of Interconnected Monkey Business. When too many suspicious things—too much monkey business —start happening to the same set of people in the same context, you’re going to find a connection between them.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Well, don’t you think it maybe applies here? Yesterday Cisco goes bonkers and throws Scofield overboard, then throws Maggie overboard, then throws himself overboard...and then when we arrive at the warehouse to drop off the coffee, the warehouse has just been burnt down—”
“I see what you’re saying, John, but in this case I don’t think it applies. We know why Cisco hated Scofield, and it had nothing to do with the warehouse, or coffee, or drugs for that matter. That was between them, something personal. This is something completely different, a different context.”
“Is it? Tell me, what’s Vargas so shook up about? He looks like a balloon that somebody let all the air out of.”
“Well, he was supposed to make a delivery here. That coffee—”
