panting in the heat like a wounded animal.
'What about you? What's your crime?' Tomlinson asked.
'My crime is that I am a physician. I could have opened a practice in Masagua City after internship, but I chose instead to spend a year practicing in the rural areas of my country—to pay a debt of respect to my own people. About a month ago this army attacked Pochote, a mountain village they suspected of helping another guerrilla group here, the Masaguan People's Army. Zacul's soldiers burned the village, but that is not the worst thing he did. He assembled the men of Pochote and offered them the chance to join his army. He asked for volunteers, which was Zacul's way of tricking them for, of course, none of the men volunteered. He had burned their village, you see.
'There were forty-three men in that village over the age of fourteen. Zacul and his lieutenants cut the testicles off all forty-three of those men. They stripped the men, tied them with ropes, and used no anesthetic. It took all night. When I arrived two days later, the floor of that place was like a charnel house. It was black with blood. I tell you, when Zacul goes to a village now and asks for volunteers,
The doctor continued, 'I learned of the atrocity and traveled two hundred miles to help those men. Several had bled to death, two had committed suicide. Those who survived were already badly infected when I arrived, but I had brought medicines and set about trying to treat them as best I could. Several days later I was arrested. Four times they have taken me to a room and beaten me. Each time I am asked to sign a paper which says that
I agree to serve as a medical officer in Zacul's army. I am not a strong man. In fact, my classmates considered me to be a coward. So I was surprised and rather proud that I did not sign that paper during the first torture session. Of course, they did not beat me badly. They are desperately in need of a physician, so I'm sure they treated me more gently than the others you see here, such as Creno. But I began to take strength from the courage of poor Creno and I survived the second beating. Now I have survived four, and it has been three or perhaps four days since either Creno or I have been beaten.' The young doctor leaned farther forward, anxious as a child as he said, 'You, obviously, are not considered criminals by General Zacul. I will not ask why you are here, but perhaps you have even spoken with the general. Perhaps you know him as a man in some way. Do you think it is possible that he has given up his efforts to force us by torture? Do you think it is possible that we might some day be released?'
Ford was reaching to reconstruct the foundation of the twig house for the seventh time when a small white hand reached out and stopped his. Jake Hollins was staring at the pile of twigs, but watching him peripherally. There was an expression on his face: impatience, Ford decided. As if to say Can't you adults do anything right?
Ford liked the expression on that small, grimy face with its cleft chin; recognized something in the light of those dark-brown, gold-flecked eyes that he had once admired in Rafe's. As Tomlinson and the young doctor continued to talk, he and Jake Hollins began to build the house together.
Ford did not answer the physician's question.
Three A.M., and Ford was whispering, 'A boy who lived in Tambor used to bring me sharks' teeth. Hundreds of them, some °f the biggest and best I've ever seen. I finally convinced him I'd still buy the teeth if he showed me where he was finding them. He brought me here.'
Both Tomlinson and Ford were lying on their stomachs, gripping the steel stake to which Jake Hollins was chained, trying to twist it free. The stake was driven through the chain, through a heavy grommet built into the fiberglass, then deep into the ground.
The boy was asleep, knees drawn up to his stomach, lying on his side.
Ford said, 'The question was obvious: Why so many sharks teeth a half mile from the lake and nearly a mile from the sea? They weren't fossilized; nothing to suggest a prehistoric drop in sealevel. It gave me something to think about, and, believe me, you live alone in a place this remote, you treasure little mysteries like that.
'At about the same time, I met Pilar. While her husband was on a tour of Europe, she had rented a little cabana about a quarter mile from my lab and lived alone. We met on the beach, and gradually—very gradually— became friends. I began to help her in her work, and she began to help me in mine.'
'And that's how you fell in love with the
Ford said, 'Balserio wasn't president then but, yeah . . . that's how it happened. Pilar and I had some great talks sitting outside that cabana at night, just the two of us. She was about as desperate for company as I was at first, but then it became more than that. We weren't lovers; not completely, but I guess I was in love with her—as close as I've ever come to being in love, anyway. Twice she said that she loved me, and a woman like that doesn't use the word loosely.'
They were twisting the steel rod back and forth, working it like a crossbuck saw, and it was beginning to move. Tomlinson said, 'A guy like you, he's got to be in prison before he opens up. I think you ought to consider this a kind of therapy; make it into a positive thing.'
'Uh-huh, right. Pilar s the one who told me the story about the Kache, the conquistadors, the calendar, the earthquakes; all of it. The problem she was working on was what happened to the calendar. If the legends were correct, the calendar should have been someplace in the lake. It's a hell of a big lake and it's deep, but it's only really deep toward the middle and, considering all the people who have looked for the calendar, someone should have found it. At that time, Pilar was plotting constellations for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, doing a lot of complicated math and trying to figure out exactly where the Tlaxclen priests would've had to mount the calendar to reflect the light of a certain major constellation. She had settled on Orion as the constellation because it had seven bright stars and, in Tlaxclen tradition, the last year of the calendar was called the Year of Seven Moons. This event only happened once every fifty-two years—'
'I know, I know,' Tomlinson said impatiently. He was sweating, working hard but trying not to look like he was working in case anyone was watching. 'Christ, I'm the one who told you.'
'Oh, yeah . . . Anyway, she kept coming up with the eastern shore, where we are now. But so had a lot t>f treasure hunters, and this was the only section of the lake that had really been thoroughly searched, even with all the sharks. That's when it came to me, sitting outside the cabana with Pilar one night. The earthquakes that came after Alavardo's conquest either drastically reduced the level of the lake or altered its position. Where we are now was once underwater, that's why all the sharks' teeth. If the Tlaxclen priests had really pushed the calendar into the lake, it would not be sitting beneath the jungle a half mile or more from the shore. '
'Not bad, man. I bet Pilar loved that idea.'
Ford had both hands on the stake and slowly worked it out of the ground. 'Pilar like the idea. She loved me.'
'So why did she leave you?'
Ford slid the stake back into the ground and patted earth around it. 'That's a mystery I never solved.'
EIGHTEEN
Late the next morning there were voices outside the stockade. The door was pushed open and an unfamiliar figure stood staring in, lean in the bright column of light which jarred through.
It was Julio Zacul.
He peered into the darkness for a few moments, trying to see, then turned away as if the effort was undignified. To the guard he said, 'Bring the Yankees,' and disappeared from the wedge of light.
Ford patted Jake Hollins's leg, telling him to stay put, to hang on. The boy seemed to understand as quickly as he had discovered upon waking that the stake which held his chain was loose.
Now, as then, he said nothing; just blinked brown eyes at Ford.
Zacul was waiting for them, standing with Colonel Suarez in the shade of a wide guanacaste tree. Both wore fatigues and Suarez had something in his hand, something Ford couldn't see, which he held to his nose before handing it back to Zacul. Now they were both lighting cigarettes: Zacul, tall and lean with stars on the epaulets of his shirt, leaning toward Suarez's lighter, his hand cupped around the flame. It was the face from the photograph, older, heavier, but still with that pointed expression: skeptical, judgmental. But there was something different in the eyes now—a glassy look without emotion, like illness. Ford guessed him to be twenty-eight or twenty-nine, six three, two hundred pounds, but with the softness of someone who had grown up inactive and indoors. All the little
