Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“About the Law of Interconnected Monkey Business?”

“Uh-huh. There’s just too much going on. All that craziness last night on the boat, and now the warehouse burning down and somebody getting killed… What do you think, Phil?”

The question caught Phil in the middle of a vast yawn. “What do I think?” he said before it had quite finished. “I think I need a nap. I’m going back to the ship. See you guys later.”

“Why don’t you have a talk with Vargas, Doc?” John suggested. “Maybe you can get something out of him about what’s going on.”

“Me?” cried Gideon, who had no taste, and not much talent, for the guileful subtleties of interrogation. “Why me – why not you? You’re the cop.”

“That’s why; I’m a cop. I’ll scare him. And this isn’t my jurisdiction, you’re right about that. But you, you’re just a private citizen being friendly. Besides, he likes you.”

“He likes you too,” Gideon said lamely.

“No, he doesn’t. I make him nervous. Come on, look at the poor guy.” He tilted his chin toward the house, where Vargas was sitting forlornly on the steps, his elbows on his knees. “Aside from everything else, he looks like he can use a friendly ear to talk into. I mean, I’m not saying he’s guilty of anything, but something’s going on, and he knows more about it than he’s been telling us.”

“Okay,” Gideon said with a sigh, “I’ll give it a try. Um, how do I start?”

John shrugged. “Any way you want. Ask him when he expects us to leave. After that, just play it by ear.”

“Oh, thanks, that’s a huge help. They must teach you that stuff at the academy.”

“See you back on the boat, Doc.”

“Captain Vargas,” Gideon said, approaching the house, “I was wondering when you think we might be getting the Adelita going again.”

Vargas raised his head and made an attempt to smile. “Very soon, professor. I was hoping that the workmen who live here would come back. Surely they will, soon? Perhaps I give them one more half hour, no more.” He brightened at a rustling at the edge of the jungle a few yards away. “Ah, you see? Here they…” He leaped to his feet, eyes practically popping from his head as the newcomers emerged from the bush. “ Madre de Dios!”

There were three of them, the kind of beings for whom there is no longer a polite term: savages, primitives. Wild men. You could sense that, instinctively and at once, from their veiled eyes, from the way those dark, impassive eyes looked at you but didn’t look at you, focusing on nothing, as if the consciousness that lay behind them was in some other place and time. The men seemed to hold their bodies apart as well, standing tall (or as tall as they could; the biggest was perhaps five-foot-four) and poised and aloof. Their foreheads and cheeks were tattooed with complex designs of undulating lines and dots in orange, blue, and black. Their lips were dyed blue and their eyebrows plucked and replaced with thin, painted, blue crescents. Their thick black hair hung loose in back and was chopped into bangs in front. Quills or small, thin bones ran horizontally through their nasal septa. Although they wore no earrings, the holes in their ears showed they often did. Their earlobes had been dragged and stretched by heavy ornaments into two-inch long flaps. Their smooth chests were daubed with more dots and waving lines, this time in white. Their clothing consisted of short bark kilts – aprons, really. All were barefoot, all had yellow-gray teeth in terrible condition.

Vargas couldn’t stop staring at them. “Chayacuro?” Gideon whispered, about equally scared and enchanted.

“No, Arimaguas!” Vargas whispered agitatedly. “God help us, real tree climbers! Be careful.” He grinned at them, bobbing his head. “ Hola, amigos!” Slipping off his watch, he held it out invitingly. “ Le gusta? Un regalo! OK?” Do you like it? It’s a gift!

The nearest one took it from him, a casual flick of the hand without any change in his stone-faced expression, more or less without looking either at Vargas or the watch, then gestured at Gideon’s wrist.

“Give him your watch,” Vargas said.

“Wait a minute, why-”

“ Give it to him!” Vargas urged. “They’re as bad as the Chayacuro. Worse! Give them what they want, don’t upset them. Trust me, give them the watches and they’ll go away.”

Gideon unclasped the watch and handed it to the Indian. “ Un regalo,” he said, with markedly less enthusiasm than Vargas had shown. And a gift it had been, from an appreciative fellow professor for whom he’d filled in for a couple of weeks. Well, at least it would make a good story when he told her about it. Oh, the watch? Sorry, Marilyn, it was taken from me in the Amazon by a bunch of Indians with bones in their noses.

The second watch was handed to another man, and both objects disappeared under their aprons. That they had some contact with modern life was shown by the shotguns that all three carried on their shoulders with the grace and ease of long custom. Also by the fact that at least one of them, the one who’d taken the watches, spoke a primitive Spanish.

“You come,” he said, not particularly threateningly. Not particularly friendly, either. Not anything. Just an announcement. You come. He was the oldest of the three, a man probably in his late thirties or early forties, with a nose that had long ago been diagonally split across the bridge with a knife or, more likely, a machete. (In addition to the shotguns, each had a machete slung over his back in a sheath of woven palm fronds.) Gideon could see that the vicious, ropy, white furrow of a scar extended upward from his nose, over his right brow all the way up to and under his clipped bangs. Below, it ran down his left cheek to the corner of his jaw. It was deep enough to have done some serious bone damage, and indeed, his left malar – the cheekbone – was conspicuously caved in, making one eye appear weirdly lower and bigger than the other, like a head in a Picasso painting. Clearly, someone had once tried to cleave his head in two and very nearly succeeded, but here he was, spectacularly disfigured but otherwise apparently hale. I’d hate to see what the other guy looks like, Gideon thought.

“Come? Come where?” Vargas demanded, gathering up a few shreds of his dignity. “I am the captain of a ship, I have a ship to-”

“You come,” he repeated in exactly the same toneless tone, and at his nod the other two unshouldered their shotguns. Gideon noted that a firearms safety course had not come with the weapons. Each carried his gun with the action closed, and with his finger curled on the trigger, not alongside it or on the trigger guard. He had no doubt at all that there were live shells in the chambers. A jag of one of the double muzzles in Gideon’s direction made it clear that he was included in the invitation as well. He thought briefly of yelling for help, but everybody else was back on the Adelita, and the Adelita was at the base of a forty-foot bank that was sixty or seventy feet away. It was unlikely that they’d hear him, and even if they did, what would ensue in the thirty or forty seconds it took anyone to reach them? Besides, what could they do against three men, whatever their size, who were armed with shotguns and machetes?

“We’d better go with them, Captain,” he said.

“You come, yes?” He was grinning now, and his voice had taken on a wheedling, nasty tinge, like a Japanese soldier’s in a World War II movie. “Now.”

With one of the Arimaguas in front leading the way, and the other two behind them, Vargas and Gideon were marched into the bush.

“Captain Vargas, what’s this about? I think you know more-”

“No talk,” said Split-nose. An unexpected and painful jab of the gun into Gideon’s lower back emphasized his point. Both of the following Indians chuckled merrily at Gideon’s “Hey!”