Dancing Aztecs Page 3

  José Caracha said, “Pedro, this isn’t somebody’s cousin misbehaving with a donkey. This is a serious business proposition, with important people involved. Like Edwardo here.”

  “That’s right,” said Brazzo, and he patted the sweat-damp necktie that was his badge of rank. “Think about it, Pedro,” he said. “Would I risk my position in the government if I wasn’t sure of all this? I have a lot more to lose than you do.”

  “All I have to lose,” Pedro said, “is my tongue. And the head I keep it in.”

  “But nothing can go wrong,” José insisted. “The plan is foolproof.”

  “It is?” Pedro shrugged, and behind him his shadows jumped around on the walls. “I don’t even understand the plan,” he said. “I don’t think there even is a plan. We steal the statue, we don’t steal the statue, we chase away people that aren’t even there, it all makes no sense to me. None.”

  The other two men sighed, and exchanged glances. Early m the preparation of this scheme they had considered the possibility of shooting Pedro in the head with his own gun, for verisimilitude, but their innate kindliness had made them decide against it. Now they were both having second thoughts.

  But no; the plan was set, it was too late to change it. José shook his head, turned back to Pedro, and said, “I’ll go over it with you one more time, step by step.”

  “I’m all ears,” Pedro announced.

  Edwardo muttered something inaudible, and Pedro gave him a suspicious glare. “What was that?”

  “Thinking out loud,” Edwardo said. “Go ahead, José.”

  “Now, listen, Pedro,” José said, “with all those ears of yours. Up in the United States there are museums, very very rich museums, and one of those museums in New York City wants our Dancing Aztec Priest.”

  “Why,” said Pedro.

  “To put in their museum,” said José.

  “Why,” said Pedro.

  In exasperation, Edwardo thumped the table and cried, “What does it matter why? They have money, that’s all, and they’ll give some of it to us.”

  “All rights,” Pedro said. “Already there are things I don’t understand and you can’t explain them, but that’s all right. Tell me more.”

  José told him more: “The museum people,” he said, “got in touch with some other people, who got in touch with the people who export the marijuana, who got in touch with Edwardo, who got in touch with me, who got in touch with you.”

  “And I didn’t get in touch with anybody,” Pedro said.

  “You’re not listening,” José told him. “You’re talking, and you’re not listening.”

  “Okay. I’ll listen, and no talk.”

  “Good.” José took a deep breath, and went on with his explanation: “I have the original statue of the Dancing Aztec Priest here in my house, on loan from the National Museum, so that I can make a mold from it to make reproductions.”

  Pedro gestured at the little army of Dancing Aztec Priests on the dirt floor in one corner of the room. “Yes, I see them,” he said.

  “One of the reproductions,” José said, “I did some extra work on, so that it looks exactly like the original.” Reaching down beside his chair, he picked up the small statue and placed it on the table, saying, “Here it is.”

  Pedro frowned at the Dancing Aztec Priest, glittering muted saffron in the candlelight. About eighteen inches high, it was a complicated figure of a man in an unusual pose. Both knees were slightly bent, the left hand was on the left knee, the right foot was raised off the base on which the figure stood, and the right arm was bent up across the chest. The figure was nude, except for rings of feathers around his ankles and a glaring devil mask covering his head. The beady gleaming eyes in the mask were green. “That’s very ugly,” Pedro said.

  “Ugly doesn’t matter with antiques,” José explained.

  Pedro picked up the statue and looked at it more closely in the shifting candlelight. “So this is worth a lot of money,” he said.

  “Not that one,” José said, and picked up another identical statue from the floor. “This one is the original.”

  “Look out!” Edwardo warned. “He’ll mix them up!”

  Pedro looked offended, while José said, “No, he won’t. I put a red X with a Flair pen on the bottom of the original. See?”

  They all looked at the red X. Pedro, putting down the copy, said, “I didn’t want to look at that one, anyway. I just want to know what we think we’re doing with all of these ugly statues.”

  “Ah,” said José Putting both statues away, he said, “We’ve waited for just the right moment, and now at last it’s come. Those American archaeologists left this morning in their ATV, and they’re certainly across the—”

  Pedro said, “ATV?”

  “All-Terrain Vehicle,” José explained. “Four-wheel drive.”

  “I don’t understand any of that,” Pedro said.

  Edwardo, speaking through clenched teeth, said, “Pedro, you don’t have to understand anything except that they traveled through the jungles and across the border and out of Descalzo, and that they left tracks.”

  Pedro nodded. “Yes. Everybody leaves tracks.”

  “Good,” said Edwardo, and gestured to José. “Back to you,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said José, and he leaned once more toward Pedro. “Tonight, after midnight, the three of us will raise a sudden alarm. We will yell and cry out. You will shoot that pistol of yours.”

  Pedro said, “At what?”

  “Into the air,” José said. Being a sculptor, he was a very patient man.

  Pedro said, “Why.”

  “Because we are scaring off thieves,” José said.

  “But there aren’t any thieves,” Pedro said. “Except us.”

  “We will pretend,” José told him. “We will pretend that foreign thieves came here to steal the famous Dancing Aztec Priest, and we will pretend that we scared them away.”

  Pedro said, “Why.”

  “Because,” José said, “everybody will be very happy when the Dancing Aztec Priest is put back in its closet in the National Museum tomorrow, and nobody will notice that it’s my copy instead of the real one. And then the real one will be shipped out to New York with all those other copies, and the museum will pay the money, and we will all become rich.”

  “How rich?”

  “Millions of peserinas.”

  “How much in U.S. dollars?”

  “Hundreds,” José said. “Maybe even thousands.”

  Pedro nodded; at last they’d said something he could understand. Then he said, “But why do all this pretending and chasing thieves that don’t exist? Why not just put the copy in the museum and send the real one to New York without all this play-acting?”

  “It’s psychological,” José said, and frowned doubtfully at Pedro.

  Edwardo said, “Maybe I can explain it.”

  José looked at him in surprise. “Do you really think so?”

  “I can but try.” Edwardo placed both forearms on the table and looked severely at Pedro. “Pedro,” he said.

  Pedro sat at attention.

  “Next year, or two years from now,” Edwardo said, “the museum in New York will announce that they have the Dancing Aztec Priest. If we did not do this pretense tonight, the government would study the imitation in our own museum, would see that it was a fake, and they would ask the question, ‘Who has had his hands on the Dancing Aztec Priest?’ And they would remember José, and you, and me.”

  Pedro nodded. “And they would come hang us by our tongues,” he said.

  “That’s one of the possibilities.” Edwardo held up his hand like a traffic cop. “But hold,” he said. “Tonight, we establish that there are other thieves, that we are honest men who have saved the Dancing Aztec Priest. Tonight, we prove that someone else is stealing the Dancing Aztec Priest.”

  Pedro’s brows lowered so heavily over his eyes that he could barely see. “I don’t understand that part,” he said. “
I never understand that part.”

  Edwardo said, “Pedro, you must trust us. We are both educated men, José and I, and we do understand that part.”

  José said, “Pedro, all you have to do is tell everybody that a big car like a jeep came here with foreign men in it who shouted that they wanted the Dancing Aztec Priest, and you shot your pistol at them, and they ran away.”

  “I have never shot my pistol,” Pedro said.

  “Wouldn’t you like to?” José asked him.

  For years Pedro had wanted nothing more than to shoot his pistol, but he wasn’t about to make such an admission. “They’ll make me pay for the bullets,” he said.

  José and Edwardo both laughed, and Edwardo said, “For saving our famous national statue? Pedro, they’ll give you a medal!”

  “A medal,” Pedro said, grinning scornfully. “Now I know you’re joking.”

  Edwardo reached out to pat Pedro’s arm. “You listen to me, Pedro,” he said. “You’re going to be a Hero. You’re going to get a medal.”

  José said, “And the time for us to start is right now.”

  Becoming immediately businesslike, Edwardo got up from the table, saying, “Yes, you’re right. No point waiting any longer.”

  Pedro blinked at the both of them. “Now? So soon?”

  “We’ll do it and get it over with,” José told him.

  Pedro said, “Why don’t we have a drink first?” He gestured at José’s jug of gluppe, the national drink of Descalzo, fermented from rotting yam skins and lima-bean stalks.

  But Edwardo said, “No drinking, not till it’s all over. Come on, let’s get started.”

  “I don’t think I’m quite ready,” Pedro said, trying to sound calm, but Edwardo had already turned toward the window and had suddenly started shouting:

  “Hi! Help! Yay, help, thieves! Murderers and assassins!”

  “Oh, no,” said Pedro.

  José was also standing now, also yelling about thieves and murderers while at the same time tugging at Pedro’s arm, whispering harshly to him, “Get out there! Get out there and yell! Shoot your pistol!”

  “Mother of Mercy,” moaned Pedro, and the yelling Edwardo and José together shoved him out the door. “Help help help!” yelled Pedro, meaning every syllable of it, and grabbed his pistol and pulled the trigger. However, in his excitement he forgot to pull the pistol from the holster before shooting it, so that was when he shot his toe off.

  THE NEXT MORNING …

  Jerry Manelli carried his laundry down the private outside staircase and went into his parents’ part of the house through the kitchen door. “Whadaya say, Mom,” he said, and dumped the laundry on top of the washing machine.

  Mrs. Manelli stood at the stove, left hand on her hip, stirring the spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon. It was her belief that somewhere there existed a perfect spaghetti sauce, somewhere within the reach of the human mind, and she was determined to find it. She experimented with ingredients, brand names, alternatives. She experimented with pots, with spoons, with higher and lower flame. She tried the same recipe on sunny days and on rainy days and on days with different barometric pressures. She was in her thirty-second year of research, and prepared to go on till the end of time, if necessary.

  “You’re up early, that’s what I say,” she told her son, and stirred with the wooden spoon.

  “Gotta hustle,” Jerry told her amiably, picked up the coffeepot from the back burner, and sniffed at the latest sauce. “Smells good.”

  “I think it’s congealing,” she said. “I mean, you’re early, considering how late you were out last night.”

  Myrna and her rosé had helped somewhat to ease his annoyance over the mixup with the box marked A. Jerry grinned and repeated, “Gotta hustle,” with slightly different emphasis. He put sugar and milk in his coffee, and said, “Where’s Pop?”

  “Flying a kite,” said his mother.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s the latest. He’s over by Alley Pond Park with a kite. He made it himself, it looks like a ravioli.”

  Jerry’s father had retired two years ago from his job in a department store’s warehouse out on Long Island, and as soon as he became a senior citizen his name got onto more rotten mailing lists than you could shake your fist at. Everybody wants to hustle the old folks. A running theme in all this junk mail was that retired people ought to have a hobby, take up the slack from no longer having a job. The old man had never worked a day in his life—he’d spent most of his laboring years trying to figure a way to slip unnoticed out of the warehouse with a sofa—but he believed this hobby thing as though the Virgin herself had come down on a cloud to give him his instructions. “Man without a hobby shrivels up and dies,” he’d say. “A hobby keeps your mind active, your blood circulating, keeps you young. They’ve done studies, they got statistics, it’s a proven thing.”

  Unfortunately, though, the old man had never had a hobby in his life, didn’t really know what the hell a hobby was, and couldn’t keep up his interest in any hobby he tried. He’d been through stamp collecting, coin collecting, match-book collecting. He’d paid good money for a ham radio but he never used it, because, “I don’t have anything to say. I don’t even know those people.” He’d tried making a ship in a bottle, and within half an hour he’d busted the bottle on the radiator and stalked out of the house. He was going to build a St. Patrick’s Cathedral out of toothpicks, and got as far as the first step. He figured he’d become an expert on baseball statistics, but the last time he’d looked at baseball there were sixteen teams in the two major leagues and now there were hundreds. He started clipping things out of the newspapers—disaster stories or funny headlines (“Action on Building Bribes Delayed by Lack of Funds,” for instance, from The New York Times)—and all he managed to do was cut the dining room tablecloth with the scissors, and glue his fingers together.

  The old man didn’t know it, and nobody would tell him, but it turned out his hobby was looking for hobbies. It was certainly keeping his mind active and his blood circulating, and if he was actually out in the park now with a homemade kite then maybe it was also keeping him young. “Yeah,” Jerry said. “Maybe I’ll stop over there before lunch.” He finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink.

  His mother looked at him. “No breakfast?”

  “I got a special pickup this morning.” He kissed her on the cheek. “See you later.”

  “If you see your father,” she called after him, “tell him dinner at six. Not six-thirty, quarter to seven. Six.”

  LATER THAT MORNING …

  “They look like they’re taking a crap,” Frank McCann said.

  “It’s a fart contest,” said his brother Floyd. “They’re standing around trying to give out with the biggest fart.”

  Frank and Floyd were in Frank’s sunny kitchen, sitting at the white Formica table on which stood four gold-painted green-eyed Dancing Aztec Priests, hopping on their left legs amid a rural scattering of excelsior. The wooden box marked A was on the floor beside the table, with its top ripped off.

  Frank’s wife Teresa, who was also Jerry’s sister, looked over at the table from where she was chopping carrots on the drainboard and said, “Maybe they’re dancing.”

  “Yeah, they’re dancing,” Frank said. “The green apple two-step.”

  Floyd said, “So what do we do? Throw them out?”

  “We’ll put ’em in the closet,” Frank said. There was a closet in the basement, behind the bar, where they kept things that might be valuable but for which they had not as yet found the right customer. Skis, for instance; there were a lot of skis down there.

  Floyd said, “Let’s see what else we got today.”

  So they put the four Dancing Aztec Priests and most of the excelsior back in the wooden box, and then turned to the mail sacks and packages and boxes that were Jerry’s regular harvest from the airport. They slit open the canvas mail-bags, punched open the cardboard cartons; crowbarred open the wooden b
oxes, and quickly separated the wheat from the chaff. All registered letters were opened, and cash was put in one pile, stocks and bonds in another. Small registered packages were likely to carry jewelry, which went onto a third pile. While Teresa went on preparing today’s minestrone the loot heaped up on the kitchen table, with the discarded boxes and bags and envelopes and letters scattered around the floor.

  The reason Frank was home during the day was that he was a member of a backstage theatrical union. The union required so-and-so many members be hired for every Broadway and Off-Broadway production, whether that large a crew was needed for that particular show or not. Frank, a pale-skinned, pot-bellied man of thirty-four, with thinning red hair and a thickening red face, had been with the union twelve years and had pretty good seniority by now, so he generally got himself hired by shows where he was redundant and didn’t have to put in an appearance hardly at all.

  Floyd McCann, a younger and somewhat thinner version of his brother, was in a construction union and so also had a lot of time off. If they weren’t on strike—and they were usually on strike—then something else would happen, like the city running out of money or the contractor failing to get all the right permits. At the moment, blacks were sitting-in at the project where Floyd was supposed to be working, wanting some damn thing, so Floyd was at home again, on full pay, and he’d drifted over to Frank’s house for today’s opening.

  Frank was counting the day’s cash and Floyd was separating the “pay to bearer” stocks and bonds from those with names on them, when the kitchen door opened and Jerry came in, wearing his on-duty white coveralls and blue base-ball cap and looking annoyed.

  Something had to be wrong. Jerry was always at work this time of day, and he never wore his coveralls away from the job. Floyd said, “Hey, Jerry,” and Frank said, “What’s up?”

  “We got a problem,” Jerry said. “With that goddam box.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I went to get the right box this morning,” Jerry said, “and it was already delivered. Gone from the airport.”

  Floyd said, “Then that’s that.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Jerry took off his cap, wiped his forehead with it and put it back on. “I called that number,” he said. “The one the contact gave me last night. The answer was, they still want the box.”