Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“That’s a pretty big leap, Tim,” Gideon said.

“No, it isn’t. Last night – I don’t mean tonight, I mean the one before – he told me, all mysterious and weird-like, that he wouldn’t be around the next day, that he had something to take care of, and that he’d be back the day after, or maybe not. Maybe we wouldn’t be seeing him anymore at all. He had other things on his plate. It all adds up now, but at the time, I never thought he meant to kill anybody, I just thought he was – Dr. Gray, you were there, remember?”

“I was?” Maggie said, startled. She had been vacantly pushing the remnants of her picarones around her plate with her fork. She put the fork down. “Yes, that’s right, I was. I do remember that, Tim. But I thought it was just more of his wild talk, I didn’t take it seriously.”

“Well, of course not,” Tim said eagerly, “I didn’t either, that’s my point. I mean, who knew what he was talking about half the time?”

“But Tim, I never heard him say anything about the lance, or the spider-”

“No, no, he wouldn’t say that in front of you. That was after you left, when we started on that mampekerishi shit he brought.” He winced. “Oh, hell, excuse me, I-”

“Tim,” Gideon interrupted, “why would Cisco hate Scofield? How did he even know him?”

Tim gathered himself together, visibly trying to collect his thoughts. When he sucked twice at an empty coffee cup, Gideon got up and got him some more, which he sipped equally absently. “I think everybody knows that old story about Dr. Scofield,” he said, addressing the whole of his rapt audience. “About how the Chayacuro attacked him and his friends, the two brothers?”

Nods all around.

“And how they had to leave the first brother after he got hit by a poison dart, and they heard the Indians chop his head off, and then the second brother got hit by a dart and died in Dr. Scofield’s arms?”

They nodded again, expectantly now.

“Well, it’s not true. He didn’t die in Dr. Scofield’s arms. Dr. Scofield just ran away and left him there to die. But he didn’t die. When the Chayacuro found him they knew him, see, because he’d done some fieldwork with them when he was working on his dissertation. They’ve got an antidote for the poison – they make it from sugarcane – and they gave it to him. He lived with them for three months, became what they call a shaman’s apprentice, got really deep into their drugs, and never went back to the States after that. He’s lived in South America ever since, in Bolivia and Colombia, I think, but mostly right around Iquitos.”

“This can’t be going where I think it’s going,” John said.

“Anybody remember his name – the second brother?” Tim asked.

“Frank,” Mel said. “Frank Molina.”

“That’s right. And Frank in Spanish is Francisco. And short for Francisco is-”

“‘Cisco,’” breathed Gideon.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Duayne after a moment’s stunned silence.

The fact that Cisco and Scofield had wound up on the same ship after thirty years, Tim continued, was just an unlucky fluke, not anything that Cisco had worked out ahead of time.

“Hold it right there,” John said. “It’s not that I don’t believe in coincidences, but that’s a little too much to swallow.”

“I’m just telling you what he told me,” Tim said, chewing vigorously. His appetite had caught up with him, and although the picarones were now cold and getting soggy, he was stuffing them in.

“It’s true, what he says,” Vargas said, having just returned from the river search for Scofield and Cisco, which had been fruitless. There was no sign of them. “I could think of no one else who could be a guide for such a group as this. I went to him and offered him the job, and he took it.”

“You’re saying he didn’t even know Scofield would be aboard?” John asked. “So we’re supposed to think he just carries around a giant spider and a shrunken head in case they come in handy? And a spear?”

Vargas offered a supplicatory shrug. “No, no, of course not. I’m sure I mentioned to him the name, so yes, he knew Professor Scofield would be here. Still, it was I who went to Cisco, not Cisco who came to me.”

“No, it’s too much of a coincidence,” John repeated, shaking his head.

“I don’t know, John,” Gideon said. “Coincidence, yes. Too much of a coincidence? Maybe not. Look at it this way. Cisco’s been hanging around Iquitos on and off for thirty years. He knows more about ethnobotany – he practically has a Harvard doctorate in it – than anybody else in the area, and he’s familiar with the local shamans and what they do – plenty of experience in that regard. Well, those things are just what Scofield was interested in, right? And, if I understand it correctly, this was Scofield’s first Amazon expedition-”

“Yes, that’s so,” Maggie said. “Until now, he’d held them down in the Huallaga Valley.”

“So he needed someone knowledgeable to guide them. He asked Captain Vargas to find someone-”

“Exactly right, exactly right,” Vargas said, nodding along.

“And Captain Vargas quite naturally came up with Cisco.”

“Exactly! Naturally!”

“Okay,” John said, “I’m not convinced, but okay.” He turned to Maggie. “Maggie, you said you heard scuffling-”

“I think I heard scuffling.”

“-coming from Scofield’s cabin.”

“I think it was from Arden’s cabin.”

“All right, fine,” John said, showing some impatience. “But I don’t remember you saying you heard a splash. Do you think you heard a splash?”

She looked blank. “A splash?”

“If he threw Arden in, there would have been a splash, wouldn’t there? Right outside his cabin. Pretty much right outside your cabin.”

Maggie frowned. “I’m not certain. Now that you’ve asked the question, it seems to me, maybe I did. But I can’t really say… no, I’m sorry, John, I can’t say for sure that I did.”

Duayne lifted his head, sensing something in the air. “What’s happening? Are we turning around again? Why are we going back?”

“No, we’re not going back,” Vargas said. “The river here, it’s making a big loop, a big bend. That’s what the Javaro is like.”

“Tim, you got anything else to tell us?” John asked.

Tim mutely shook his head.

“Captain Vargas,” John said, “I think we need to turn this over to the police.”

“The Colombian police?”

“Well, it happened in Colombia, so obviously, yes.”

“You want to go back to the checkpoint? You want to report a murder on my ship to Colonel Malagga?” Vargas was horrified.

“Not a murder, we don’t know that yet,” John said. “A missing person for sure, a homicide, maybe-”

“And an attempted homicide – on me,” Maggie said. “Let’s not forget that delightful little incident.”

“Absolutely,” John said. “But yeah, I see your point about Malagga, Captain. What do you suggest?”

“That we continue to Leticia. It’s not much farther ahead than the border is back. We’ll be there tomorrow night or Friday morning. There you will find a much more professional, more competent headquarters of police. Real policemen, not scoundrels like Malagga.”

John nodded his approval. “Sounds good.”

Captain Vargas was once again in a dither, and once again the cause was Arden Scofield, who was as much a source of trepidation and self-recrimination dead as he’d been alive. For the hundredth time, Vargas cursed himself for ever getting involved with the vile man. The problem was, what the hell was he supposed to do now? He knew next to nothing about the arrangements for the contraband coffee at the San Jose de Chiquitos warehouse. The plan had been for Vargas to unload the shipment of coffee as if it was no different than usual. Scofield would take it from there. But with Scofield no longer in the picture, how would it work? Were the sacks with the coca paste in them supposed to be treated differently in some way? He supposed so, but how? Would there be people there to receive them? If so, would they be in on what was in them? Acceding to Vargas’s own wishes, Scofield had kept him out of the loop on almost everything.