mass of blue-gray dough.
The security officer clutched his arm. “Come on!” he shouted. “Get out of here!” The security officer was a plump young black man with heavy jowls. The screams were distracting him. “Look,” Chee said, turning the open end of the mask toward him. “It’s a bomb.” While he was saying it, Chee was tearing at the wires. He dropped them to the floor, and sat on the back of the fallen manikin, and began carefully peeling the Yeibichai mask from the mass of blue-gray plastic which had been pressed into it.
“A bomb,” the guard said. He looked at Chee, at the mask, and at the struggle at the adjoining Incan exhibit. “A bomb?” he said again, and climbed the railing and charged into the Incan melee. “Break it up,” he shouted. “We have a bomb in here.”
And just then General Huerta Cardona’s bodyguard shot Leroy Fleck.
Joe Leaphorn’s hand knocked the control box out of Santero’s grip. It clattered to the marble floor between them. Santero reached for it.
Leaphorn kicked it. It went skittering down the corridor, spinning past the feet of running people. Santero pursued it, running into the crowd stampeding out of the exhibition hall. Leaphorn followed.
A man with a camera collided with him. “He killed the general,” the photographer shouted to someone ahead of him. “He killed the general.” On the floor near the wall Leaphorn saw fragments of black plastic and an AA-size battery. Someone had trampled the detonator. He stopped, backed out of the stampede. Santero had disappeared. Leaphorn leaned against the wall, gasping. His chest hurt. His hip hurt where the heavy camera had slammed into it. He would go and see about Jim Chee. But first he would collect himself. He was getting too damned old for this business.
Chapter Twenty-Two
« ^
Jim Chee sat on his bed, leaned back on his suitcase, and tried to cope with his headache by not thinking about it. He was wearing the best shirt and the well-pressed trousers he had hung carefully in the closet when he unpacked to save in the event he needed to look good. No need now to save them. He would wear them on the plane. It was a bitch of a headache. He had slept poorly—partly because of the strange and lumpy hotel mattress (Chee being accustomed to the hard, thin padding on the built-in bed of his trailer home), and partly because he had been too tense to sleep. His mind had been too full of horrors and terrors. He would doze, then jerk awake to sit on the edge of the mattress, shaking with the aftereffects of shallow, grotesque dreams in which Talking God danced before him. Finally, about a half-hour before the alarm was scheduled to rescue him from the night, he had given up. He had taken a shower, packed his stuff, and checked again with the front desk to see if he had any messages. There was one from Leaphorn, which simply informed him that Leaphorn had returned to Window Rock. That surprised Chee. It was a sort of courtly thing for the tough old bastard to have done. There was a message from Janet Pete, asking for a call back. He tried and got no answer. By then the headache was flowering and he had time to kill. Downstairs he drank two cups of coffee—which usually helped but didn’t this morning. He left the toast he’d ordered on the plate and went for a walk.
The mild early-winter storm which had been bringing Washington rain mixed with snow yesterday had drifted out over the Atlantic and left behind a grim gray overcast with a forecast for high broken clouds and clearing by late afternoon. Now it was cold and still. Chee found that even in this strange place, even under these circumstances, he could catch himself up in the rhythm of the fast, hard motion, of heart and lungs hard at work. The nightmares faded a little, coming to seem like abstract memories of something he might have merely dreamed. Highhawk had never really existed. There were not really eighteen thousand ancestors in boxes lining hallways in an old museum. No one had actually tried to commit mass murder with the mask of Talking God. He walked briskly down Pennsylvania Avenue, and veered northward on Twelfth Street, and strode briskly westward again on H Street, and collapsed finally on a bench in what he thought, judging from a sign he'd noticed without really attending, might be Lafayette Square. Through the trees he could see the White House and, on the other side, an impressive hotel. Chee caught his breath, considered the note from Leaphorn, and decided it was a sort of subtle gesture. (You and I, kid. Two Dineh among the Strangers.) But maybe not. And it wasn't the sort of thing he would ever ask the lieutenant about.
A dove-gray limousine pulled up under the hotel’s entryway roof, and after it a red sports car which Chee couldn’t identify. Maybe a Ferrari, he thought. Next was a long black Mercedes which looked like it might have been custom built. Chee was no longer breathing hard. The damp low-country cold seeped up his sleeves and around his socks and under his collar. He got up, inspired half by cold and half by curiosity, and headed for the hotel.
It was warm inside, and luxurious. Chee sank into a sofa, removed his hat, warmed his ears with his hands, and observed what his sociology teacher had called “the privileged class.” The professor admitted a prejudice against this class but Chee found them interesting to observe. He spent almost forty-five minutes watching women in fur coats and men in suits which, while they tended to look almost identical to Chee’s untrained eye, were obviously custom made. He saw someone who looked exactly like Senator Teddy Kennedy, and someone who looked like Sam Donaldson, and a man who was probably Ralph Nader, and three others who must have been celebrities of some sort, but whose names eluded him.
He left the hotel warm but still with the headache. The material splendors, the fur and polished leather of the hotel’s guests, had replaced his nightmares with a depression. He hurried through the damp cold back to his own hotel room.
The telephone was ringing. It was Janet Pete.
“I tried to call you last night,” she said. “How are you? Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Chee said. “We had trouble down at the museum. The FBI got involved and—”
“I know. I know,” Janet said. “I saw it on television. The paper is full of it. There’s a picture of you, with the statue.”
“Oh,” Chee said. The final humiliation. He could see it in the Farmington
“On television, too. On the ABC morning news. They had some footage of you with the mask. But I’m not sure people who didn’t know how you were dressed would know it was you.”
Chee could think of nothing to say. His head still ached. He wished with a fervent longing to be back in New Mexico. In his trailer under the cottonwood on the bank above the San Juan River. He would take two aspirin and sprawl out on his comfortable, narrow bed and finish reading
“They said Henry Highhawk was dead,” Janet Pete said in a small voice.
