"Cut the crap." I pulled away, still in shock from seeing Sarah so addled. I wanted more than anything else in the world just to slug him. "Why did you bring her here? Think about your answer. Kidnapping is a serious crime in the States."
"I've been very concerned about her." He looked up at the groves of Cebia trees around the square, a quiet glance, as though to inhale the misty morning air. My legal threat had gone right past him-probably because here he was the only law. "But now she's receiving the treatment she needs. I expect she'll be fine before long."
"Treatment?" I was caught off guard. Okay, let's start getting things straight. "When she was here before, somebody tried to beat her to death. How-?"
"What happened then was beyond my control." He motioned me to join him as he settled onto the first step of the pyramid sadness in his eyes. We were alone in the square now, and I felt like I'd become his personal prisoner, trapped. "Sarah was… is very dear to me. I care for her deeply."
"You cared so much for her she ended up in a coma, over on the Mexican border." I didn't sit. Instead I just bored in, hoping to stare him down, but his eyes had grown distant, that little trick he had of alternating between intimacy and remoteness. Again it reminded me of that first morning we'd met, looking out over the bluffs of the Hudson.
"If you'll let me, I'd like to try and tell you something of the circumstances surrounding that tragedy." He was gazing off in the direction the women had gone. "You see, when Sarah first appeared at Quetzal Manor in New York, she was a very troubled young woman. She declared she was a person of pure spirit and she wanted to have a baby without so much as touching a man, some procedure that would produce a divine child created of cosmic energy."
Cosmic energy. I had a flashback, hearing the words, to the time when she'd just turned six and we'd been sent by my mother to the hayloft to track down nests secreted there by rogue chicken hens. When we came across a cache of eggs, she asked if baby chicks came out of them. I assured her they did, and then she asked if human babies came from eggs too. My biology was pretty thin, but I told her I supposed they did, sort of, but then the eggs were probably hatched, or something, before babies were born. She thought about that a moment, scrunching up her face, then declared "No!" and bitterly began smashing the eggs. Babies and all living things came from another world, she declared, a special place we could not see. They came directly from God…
That was why she would seek out someone like Alex Goddard. For her, he must have seemed a messenger of the Unseen. Who better to create a child for her? The ironic part was, I'd found him for almost the same reason, seeking a miracle when all else had failed. Were Sarah and I even more alike than I'd realized?
"So I began trying to work with her." He was turning back to me. "But then I discovered she'd been born with an abnormality of the uterus. It has a medical name, but suffice to say it's very rare, and afflicts only about one woman in twenty thousand. Even after my diagnosis, though, she refused to give up. She was a person of enormous tenacity."
God, I thought. Why didn't she come home to us, to Lou and me? We loved her. I felt my guilt go out to her all over again.
"She next declared she wanted to come here to Baalum, to the place of miracles. I told her that, yes, miracles can sometimes transpire here, but only at a great price. We would need to have an agreement and she would have to keep it no matter what."
"What do you mean, an agree-?"
"Truthfully, though," he went on, ignoring me, "I immediately regretted the offer, since I realized she was far too unstable for this… environment. Finally I forbade her to come, but just before my next scheduled trip she found out and booked herself on the same flight. There was literally nothing I could do to stop her."
"She put Ninos del Mundo on her landing card." I was growing sick to my stomach at the rehearsed way he was recounting her story. "That's this place, right? Baalum."
"My clinic here is known by that name. The village itself is called Baalum." He was easily meeting my eye, holding his own in our battle of wills. "Sarah was, I have to say, a very impressionable young person. Once here, she forgot all about her purpose for coming. She should have stayed up the hill there"-he was pointing off to the south-"where I could care for her, but instead she moved down here, into the compounds. Then she discovered a hallucinogenic substance they have here, began using it heavily, and I think it tipped her into a form of dementia."
So, she was doing drugs, something I'd always secretly feared. Well, maybe she was still having flashbacks of some kind; maybe that explained why she was off in another world when she came out of her coma.
"What… kind of 'hallucinogenic substance'?"
He sighed then shrugged and answered. "Here in the rain forest there's an ugly three-pound toad the Bufo marinus-you'll see them around, near sunset-that has glands down its back that excrete a milky white poison."
I knew about them. They were migrating north now, even into Florida. They were huge and looked like Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars. I hate toads of all varieties, but the thought of those monsters made me shudder.
"My God, isn't their toxin lethal?" Was Sarah trying to destroy herself? Was that why her mind was so blitzed? "I've heard-"
"Yes, it can kill you, but it can also-if processed correctly, with fermented honey-give you truly supernatural visions. The classical Maya used it for ceremonial purposes. I'd managed to reconstruct how they prepared it, and-something I now deeply regret-I showed the shamans here how to replicate the procedure. At the time it was just a minor part of my research into traditional pharmacology, but she heard about it and persuaded them to give her a vial. Then more and more."
That did sound like Sarah. Always out on the edge, testing new realities. But then I thought a moment about what he'd actually said. Some of the people here in his "place of miracles" were doing heavy drugs, and she'd got caught up in it.
"But why didn't you stop her?" You unfeeling bastard.
"I tried, believe me. But I'm afraid she was far past listening to me. By then she was learning the Kekchi Maya dialect, becoming totally immersed in their world. She began having episodes of complete non-rationality, and then one day she told the women in her compound she was going over to Palenque, the Maya ruins in Mexico. It's where the classical Maya held their last kingship ceremony. Before anyone realized she was serious, she stole one of their cayucos, their mahogany dugout canoes, and headed down the Rio Tigre." His eyes had turned completely dark, the way he used to blank them out. "She just went missing. Everyone here was devastated. We all loved her."
I stood there weighing his story. It didn't ring true. I supposed she was capable of something that crazy, but would she have actually done it? I didn't think so.
Then I remembered something else he'd said.
"You said you proposed an 'agreement.' What was that about?"
He stared at me. "It's nothing that need concern us. Suffice to say I kept my part. Anyway, it's over and past now."
Why wouldn't he tell me? Did she make some bargain with the Devil?
"But regarding Sarah," he went on, "I only just learned she'd been found and brought to New York in a coma. Wanting to do what I could, I immediately called the hospital and, out of professional courtesy, they told me she'd shown early stages of coming out of it, but she appeared to be hallucinating. It was exactly what I'd feared…" His voice trailed off. "I hope I did the right thing, but when I learned she'd been released, I arranged for her to be brought back here, where perhaps I can do something for her."
"What?"
"In rare cases, the hallucinogen she took permanently alters critical synapses in the brain. I'm fearful she may have abused it to the extent something like that could have occurred. No one in the U.S. would have the slightest idea what to do, but I think I may know of an herbal antidote they turned to in ancient times that can repair at least part of the damage. I also knew that getting her back here through normal channels would be impossible."
"So you had Colonel Ramos and a bunch of his Guatemalan thugs just break in and take her?" I didn't know which part of the story horrified, and angered, me the most.
"I have the misfortune to know him reasonably well, and I explained it was very important to me, and he agreed to assist. I honestly didn't know where else to turn. I understand there may have been some violence, for which I apologize, but these people have their own way of doing things." He rose and came over and put his hand on my shoulder. "I hope you'll understand."
The son of a bitch was coming on oily and contrite, when he'd just subcontracted an outright kidnapping. I wanted to kill him.
Finally I walked away, trying to get a grip on my anger.
"You know, that bastard also broke into my apartment and stole a reel of a picture I'm shooting." I turned back. "I've also got a strong feeling he's the one who just threatened one of the women I filmed."
"Well, if that happened, then let me say welcome to the paranoid harassment of the Guatemalan high command." He sighed against the morning sound of birds chirping all around us. "Unfortunately, I gather they've assumed you're documenting the operations of Children of Light in some way, doing a movie." His eyes drifted off into space, as though seeking a refuge. "You see, my project up here in the Peten is to carry out pharmaceutical research with as few distractions as possible. But in Guatemala City, I have what is, in effect, a hospice for girls in trouble-which is also called Niiios del Mundo, by the way-that's connected with my U.S. adoption service, Children of Light. However, any time Niiios del Mundo takes in an orphaned or abandoned infant and tries to provide it with a loving home through adoption in the States, the government here always threatens to hold up the paperwork if I don't give a bribe, what they call an 'expediting fee.' So if you were to probe too deeply… Let me just say it's not something they'd care to see lead off 60 Minutes."
It sounded like more BS, but I couldn't prove that. Yet.
"Well, why don't you just clear that up, and then I'll take Sarah and-"
"But I've only now initiated her treatment. Surely you want to give it a chance."
I looked out at the rain forest. This was the place she'd come to once, and-though I'd never admit it to Alex Goddard-it was the place she'd announced she wanted to return to. But something devastating had happened to her mind here. What should I do?
The fact was, I didn't trust Alex Goddard any farther than I could throw him. I had to get Sarah and get us both out of here as soon as possible, though that meant I'd have to neutralize him and the Army, and then use my limited American dollars to try to buy our way back to Guatemala City.
"But come." He turned his gaze toward the south. "Let me show you the thing I'm proudest of here. It's just up there." He was pointing toward a dense section of the rain forest, in the opposite direction from the river and up a steep incline.
I couldn't see anything but trees, but then I still had the feeling I'd stepped through the looking glass and found Sarah trapped there. The next thing I knew, we were on an uphill forest trail, headed due south.
"I think it's time you told me what's going on back there in the village," I said. What was it about this place that had seized such a claim on Sarah's mind?
"Baalum is difficult to explain to someone encountering it for the first time." He paused. "Much of it is so-"
"I think I can handle it."
"You have every right to know, but I don't really know where to start."
"How about the beginning?" Why was he being so ambiguous?
"Very well." He was taking out a pair of gray sunglasses, as though to gain time. "It actually goes back about ten years ago, when I was prospecting for rainforest plants up here in the Peten and accidentally stumbled across this isolated village, which clearly had been here since classical times. I immediately noticed a huge mound of dirt everybody said was haunted by 'the Old Ones,' and I knew right away it had to be a buried pyramid. They're more common down here than you'd think. So I struck a bargain with the village elders and acquired the site. But after I unearthed it and began the restoration, I became inspired with a vision. One day I found myself offering to restore anything else they could find-which eventually included, by the way, a magnificent old steam bath-in exchange for which they would help me by undertaking a grand experiment, a return to their traditional way of life."
"So you deliberately closed them off to the modern world?" It told me Alex Goddard could control a Mayan village just as he controlled everything else he touched. It also confirmed he had a weakness for the grandiose gesture. Would a time come when I could exploit that?
"I told them that together we would try to recreate the time of their glory, and perhaps in so doing we could also rediscover its long-lost spirit, and wisdom. On the practical side, they would help me by bringing me the rare plants I needed to try and rediscover the lost Native American pharmacologies, and in return I would build them a clinic where families can come for modern pediatric and public-health services. So Baalum became a project we share together. I call it a miracle."
That still didn't begin to explain why it felt so eerie. Something else was going on just under the surface. What was he really doing here?
Then the path uphill abruptly opened onto a clearing in which sat a large two-story building, its color a dazzling white, most likely plaster over cinder block, with a thatch roof and a wide, ornate mahogany door at the front. The building was nestled in a grove of trees whose vines and tendrils had embraced it so thoroughly, there was no telling how far it extended back into the forest. There also was a parking lot, paved and fed by a well-maintained gravel road leading south.
Seeing it, I felt an immediate wave of relief. Even better, the lot itself contained half-a-dozen well-worn pickup trucks, while sunburned Maya men were lounging in the shade of a nearby tree and smoking cigarettes. They were not from Baalum. They wore machine-made clothes and they were speaking Spanish, unlike the men in loincloths down in the village.
Yes! That's how I can get us out of here. A few dollars…
Parked there also was a tan Humvee, the ultimate all-road vehicle, which I assumed belonged to Alex Goddard. Maybe I should just try to steal it.
As we passed through the door and into the vestibule of the building, I glimpsed a cluster of Maya women and children crowded into a brilliantly lit reception area. Goddard smiled and waved at them, and several nodded back, timorously and with enormous reverence. They were being attended by a dark-eyed, attractive Maya woman in a blue uniform-the name lettered on her blouse was Marcelina- who was holding a tray of vials and hypodermic needles. She was pure indigena, all of five feet tall, with broad cheekbones and deep-set penetrating eyes. Unlike the other women in the room, however, there was no air of resignation about her. She was full of authority, a palpable inner fire.
"One of my most successful programs here"-he nodded a greeting to her-"is to provide free vaccinations and general health resources for the villages in this part of the Peten Department."
"I thought USAID already had public-health projects in Guatemala." The sight deeply depressed me. They all looked so poignant, the women with their shabby huipils and lined faces, the children even more disheartening, sad waifs with runny noses and watery eyes.
Which confirmed again that they'd come in the pickups parked outside, driven here by the men.
I had six hundred cash in dollars. I could just buy one of those worn-out junkers for that.
Alex Goddard glanced around, as though reluctant to respond in the presence of all the Maya.
"You saw those 'security guards' down there just now. They're nothing but boys with guns, 'recruits' kidnapped by the government on market day and pressed into the Army. They're all around here. The powers that be in Guatemala City are very threatened by what I'm achieving, so they've got these Army kids hanging around, keeping an eye on me. They also hate the fact I can provide health services better than they can. But to answer your question, most of the AID money gets soaked up by the bureaucracy in Guatemala City, so the people up here have learned to rely on me. The Army, however, despises me and everything I'm doing."
What a load of BS. You just admitted you had an inside track with Colonel Alvino Ramos. Anybody can see Children of Light or Ninos del Mundo, or whatever the hell other aliases you use, is thick as thieves with the Guatemalan Armed Forces. Don't insult my intelligence. It just makes me furious.
I turned to Marcelina. She'd begun passing out hard-sugar candies to the mesmerized children, showing them how to remove the cellophane before putting them into their mouths. Though she was pure Maya, she looked educated. I instinctively liked her. Maybe she could tell me what was really going on here.
"Do you speak English?"
"Yes." She was gazing at me with a blend of curiosity and concern. "If-"
"I've got a procedure scheduled shortly," Goddard interjected, urging me on down the tiled hallway. "But I need to take a moment and recharge. Come with me and we can talk some more."
Near the end of the hall, we entered a spacious, country-style kitchen. He walked over and opened the refrigerator.
"Care for a little something to eat?" He looked back, speckled white hair swinging across his shoulders as his ponytail came loose. "I had Marcelina whip up some gazpacho last night and I see there's some left. It's my own secret recipe, special herbs from around here. It's good and good for you."
"I'm not hungry." It wasn't true. I was growing ravenous. But I was repressing the feeling because of everything else that was going on. His "village" was holding back its secrets, and now his clinic of "miracles" also felt suspiciously wrong. I'd seen plenty of rural public-health operations in developing countries, and this setup was far too big and fancy. The whole thing didn't begin to compute.
"As you like." He gave an absent shrug.
I looked around and noticed that just off the kitchen was another space, which was, I realized, his private dining room. There was a rustic table in the center that looked like it had been carved from the trunk of a large Cebia tree. I walked in, and moments later he followed carrying a tray with two calabash bowls of gazpacho and some crusty bread.
"In case you change your mind and decide to join me." He placed a bowl opposite where he was planning to sit. "Like I said, there're unusual herbs around here with flavors you've never dreamed of."
He began eating, while behind him I glimpsed Marcelina moving down the hall, carrying more trays of vaccine and headed out toward the vestibule again. I had to find a way to talk to her.
As I settled into the rickety chair that faced my plate, I glanced down and saw a red lumpy mixture with a spray of indefinable green specks across the top like a scattering of jungle stars. No way.
When I looked up again, he was swabbing his lips with a white napkin, his penetrating eyes boring in.
"Now," he said, "it's time we started concentrating on you. Got you going with your program."