The Marchand Woman

Emil looked about him with disdain. “Kill me and my grandfather will avenge it. Your women, Cielo, your children. My grandfather will have them killed, and you and your brother and all your men—no matter how far you go, no matter where you try to hide.”

Julio said, “Not if you die in an accident witnessed only by me and my brother. And Vargas here.”

“And Crobey,” said Crobey. “Don’t forget old Harry.”

“Christ, Harry,” Cielo said, “your presence gives me a ripe pain in the ass right now. What are we going to do with you?”

“I don’t know, old sport. But I don’t see as you’ve got anything to gain by killing me.”

“For the love of God,” Cielo murmured haplessly, “I don’t want to kill anybody.”

The man who’d gone to search upstream came ru

By ones and twos the others appeared below the waterfall and the first two men waited impatiently while they climbed up to him. Then he led them upstream, excited, to show them what he’d found—freshly overturned stones in the stream. Someone had gone up through the chasm to the rimrock above.

“It must be the woman. Come on—we will look on top for her tracks.”

Confused as to his bearings, Anders fought to stay awake. Fever drenched him in sweat and something was going wonky with the one good eye he had left. He slammed down into a lower gear and fought the wheel. The primitive roadway had all but petered out by now. He’d have to get out and walk soon.

He clenched his stomach muscles to fight back dizziness and shoved the Bronco forward in an effort to pick up speed while he could still drive at all. Rosalia was gone but he had the illusory vague sense he could redeem himself by accomplishing this mission; at least he had to give it his best shot. But then his eye clouded over and he dragged his sleeve across it. He was having trouble co-ordinating his body and hit the accelerator by mistake. He was going about fifteen miles an hour up the gravel when he went off into a culvert. The Bronco slowly tipped over and fell on its side. Gle

Listless stupidity was wearing off; she was thinking more clearly now and her nerves started to jangle—the terror that had muted itself expanded inside her now and she trembled uncontrollably. All the aches and stings of her injuries grew acute; she noticed new agonies she hadn’t felt before.

This was madness. There was nothing she could do—nothing but make a fool of herself and get killed. Christ, the best combat soldier in the world would know enough to get the hell out of here. She was begi

All the same she was working, moving, preparing for the attack. The soda pop bottles, mud and gravel from the ground, gasoline from the tank of the donkey engine, her shirttails for fuses. She had three of them in one hand, the bottlenecks clutched in her fingers like a busboy carrying Cokes, and she was making her way down the switchbacking footpath—terrified because if anybody stepped outside the hut they’d see her on the face of the cliff above them. There was no place to hide. They could pin her to this wall like an insect On a display board.

Chilly dispassion had deserted her; it must have been the effects of the shock. She felt debilitated with terror now and she kept thinking of all the things that could go wrong. She made her way down the steep path one step at a time, testing the footing with a shaking foot, sliding one shoulder along the wall, terrified of toppling over the narrow shelf—it was a sheer drop. The arms cave that Anders had described must be over to her left somewhere but there were outcroppings of rock and she couldn’t see it. Still, she needed to keep that in mind. If the arms were unguarded.… But they wouldn’t be that silly, would they? No. It meant there’d be someone in the cave, and she had to remember that because it meant she’d have someone behind her when she approached the camp.

Come on now. One step at a time and don’t think about anything else until you get to the bottom.

The man in the cave sat with a bottle of beer and his memories of a Norwegian girl in a fly-specked room in Guatemala. He was half asleep and didn’t want anybody to catch him dozing so he got up and walked around the cave. The rain had let up but a kind of mist hung in the air, cloud tendrils prying into the cave and he felt clammy.

He stopped beside a bipod-mounted mortar and rested his hand on its uptilted muzzle. Such a primitive device, the mortar, yet devastatingly effective: An open steel pipe with a firing pin at the bottom of it, that was all it amounted to. He liked that sort of simplicity. Complicated mechanisms disturbed him; he distrusted them.

He walked across the mouth of the cave and stopped suddenly. Was that a movement over to the right at the base of the cliff—someone slipping into the trees?

He looked away, looked again: But the movement didn’t recur. After a moment he lifted his rifle and sat down to watch that quadrant, alert now, ready to kill.

Coming over the rimrock the half-dozen men deployed through the trees seeking tracks; there was a shout from up ahead and it drew them all onto the rim by the donkey engine. Here they studied and discussed the evidence they saw in the earth. There were fresh tracks, made since the downpour. The tracks were hard to make out, since everything was imprecise in the squishy clay, but it was evident someone had spent a bit of time here, rummaging about.

The area beyond the donkey engine was slab rock; it didn’t hold tracks. The men fa

She could see him coming down the cliff and she could see the angular one who squatted just inside the mouth of the big cave with a rifle in both hands; she saw them from her hiding place back in the sodden trees and she wondered if she had left tracks that the one on the path would find when he got to the bottom.

She saw two more men up top, fitful glimpses of them as they made their way along the rim above the cave. And there’d been voices—even more of them above her somewhere.

Madness, she thought. Sheer utter madness: I belong in a rubber room. Stupid lunacy. But then if you figure to get killed anyway what’s the point of beating around the bush?

She felt momentarily proud of herself for that thought because it sounded like something of Harry’s.

She went dizzy for a moment but she didn’t faint; she only stumbled a bit and reached for a tree trunk for support. Its surface was slimy and repulsive to her touch. She took the disposable plastic cigarette lighter out of her pocket. Harry: I don’t care if you don’t smoke. It’s a survival weapon: Always carry fire with you.

The rags she’d torn from her blouse and stuffed into the necks of the bottles were soaked with rain and she didn’t know whether that would destroy their capillary ability to soak up gasoline from the bottles. She’d wrung them out as dry as she could but what if they refused to catch fire? In this weather it was possible to imagine that nothing would burn.

She put the lighter back in her pocket. It wasn’t time for it yet. Then she gingerly shifted two of the bottles to her left hand, winced when she scraped a raw wound, and crept to the next tree. Her boots sank ankle-deep into the mud. She was in the jungle now and she couldn’t see out past the dark thickness of trees and bamboo and lush creeping things; that man on the cliff must be halfway to the bottom by now and she didn’t have much time at all.