Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

The woman shuffled over with a bottle of mineral water and two cloudy glasses. She was blind, Gideon realized from the way she touched the table before setting them down. Guapo himself poured for them with the expansive, benevolent air of a host providing for his guests – first moving the knife out of their immediate reach and keeping his hand on it – and Gideon and Vargas each gulped down a glass of the closest thing to nectar Gideon had ever tasted.

“More?” Guapo asked hospitably and was answered by two vigorous nods. The second glasses were emptied as fast as the first and once again eagerly held out. Strange. Minutes from probable death – an unimaginably unpleasant death – and yet one could take so much grateful pleasure from a glass of cold water.

When Gideon had put down his glass again without signaling for another, Guapo said something to him that he didn’t understand. Something about the river and the Adelita. Gideon asked him to repeat it.

He said it again and Gideon still couldn’t make it out. “I’m sorry, I don’t-”

Guapo was suddenly furious. He slammed the table with a heavy hand (Vargas actually jumped out of his chair; Gideon managed – just – to stay in his), grabbed the monstrous knife, and waved its point at Gideon’s eyes. “Don’t play dumb with me, you bastard! I know you speak Spanish.”

“I speak some Spanish, yes.”

“You speak perfect Spanish.”

No, I don’t, Gideon thought, his stomach moving up just a little toward its normal location. Vargas was right. It was some kind of misunderstanding. They had him confused with someone else. Talking their way out of this might still be a possibility.

“Look,” he said evenly, reasonably, “I don’t know who you think I am, but-”

Guapo got up, leaned on his hands – on the knuckles of the one holding the knife – and loomed aggressively over him. Gideon smelled whiskey, cheese, cigarettes, sweat. “You’re telling me you’re not the professor?”

“I’m a professor, but I’m obviously not the one you think I am.” And now a sudden burst of reckless but welcome righteous anger surged in him. He jumped up too, so he was nose to nose with Guapo. (Vargas, sitting between them, skidded back, out of the likely range of the knife.) “Why don’t you tell me who the hell you think I am? This is…” He sought the word for outrageous, but had to settle for terrible, the same in Spanish as it was in English. “You send your Indians to… to… you…” But his Spanish wasn’t good enough and he was reduced to waving his arms and sputtering: “Mud… thorns… mosquitoes… threats…”

His language difficulties had more effect than his protestations. For the first time, Guapo’s heavy, cruel face showed some doubt. He sat slowly down again, peering hard at Gideon.

“So who are you then?”

“Look…” Gideon zipped open the fanny pack he wore near his belt buckle, in which he kept his passport, airplane tickets, and money (and for the moment, a miscellaneous collection of fresh cranial fragments), then fumbled through a wad of damp nuevos soles and tenand twenty-dollar bills to pull out the passport, its familiar blue cover somehow reassuring, as if he were at an airport and simply showing it could get him out of whatever this mess was. He opened it to the identification pages and pushed it across the table to Guapo. “See? Gideon Oliver, that’s me.” He tapped his photograph.

Guapo peered sulkily at it. “And how do I know it’s not fake? Why should I think you’re not trying to fool me?”

“Fool you? How could I know I was going to see you? How could I possibly know your Indians would come and get us?”

“My Indians, my damn Indians!” Guapo exploded, jumping out of his chair. He flung the passport at Gideon’s face. “Luis!” he called, and the man with the revolver came to sit at the table in his place. A snake-necked, fox-faced, crazy-eyed man with an inch of burning cigarette dangling from his lower lip, he was missing the thumb and first finger of his right hand. But with his other thumb, he steadily clicked the revolver’s hammer back, eased it forward, clicked it back, eased it forward… all the while keeping it pointed at the center of Gideon’s chest. Gideon did his best not to think about it, but his eyes kept returning to the moving thumb.

“Would you mind not doing that?” he said. “Or at least pointing it someplace else?” A mistake, he thought immediately.

Oozing malignance – whether it was general or directed specifically at Gideon was impossible to tell – the man smiled meanly, revealing yet another mouthful of discolored, rotting teeth, and kept on doing what he was doing. Click… click…

Gideon shrugged one shoulder in what he hoped was a show of unconcern, and turned to watch Guapo, who had stomped to the three Arimaguas, where they still hunkered down at the base of the wall with their rifles and their Inca Kolas. He began shouting at them, waving the big knife for emphasis. None of them looked at him, but only stared straight ahead. Split-nose was the only one who replied, his answers surly and curt. Like the others, he stared straight in front of him, into the middle distance, his eyes on a level with Guapo’s hips, as still, and as impassive, as a stone idol, and just about as grim.

A long silence after his last answer, and then Guapo suddenly lashed out, kicking the bottle out of the Indian’s hand and sending it skittering over the worn plank floor, spewing yellow-green liquid. Split-nose didn’t move a muscle: no start, no blink, no change of expression or focus. Guapo yelled even louder, a mix of Spanish and something else. Gideon couldn’t pick up most of what he was shouting, but he managed to make out imbecile and estupido. Split-nose’s answers were more of the same: monotonic and obstinate. He seemed unreachable, immovable, but Gideon suspected there would come a time when Guapo would pay for this.

Now would be a good time, he did his best to convey to Split-nose. Now would be a perfect time. But the Indian sat immobile and oblivious.

“What are they talking about?” he asked Vargas in English. The man guarding them frowned and watched them intently, as if trying to understand the words, but he didn’t tell them to be quiet.

“Guapo, he thought you were Scofield.”

“Scofield? Why would he think I was Scofield?”

“He sent the Indians to get him… and me. He told them Scofield was called ‘professor,’ and the fellow with the chopped-up nose, he heard me call you ‘professor,’ so he thought…” He shrugged away the rest of the sentence. “At least, I think that’s what they’re saying.”

“This Guapo, have you heard of him?”

Vargas nodded. “He’s a very big man, the boss in North Loreto,” he whispered, then stopped himself. With a wary glance at the man with the revolver to assure himself that he didn’t understand English (the obtuse, open-mouthed expression satisfied him), he went on: “A tough customer, a killer. He’d as soon take your eye out with that knife as-”

Guapo’s heavy returning footsteps silenced him. “Stupid bastards,” he grumbled in Spanish as he fell into the remaining chair and poured himself three fingers of aguardiente. “Trained monkeys would do better.” With a grunt and a sudden jerk he jammed the point of the knife into the tabletop, which Gideon now noticed was covered with splintery pockmarks from a hundred previous such spearings. There the knife remained, upright and quivering, about three inches from Guapo’s hand and five long, impossible feet from Gideon’s. And both Vargas and the guy with the gun and the itchy thumb now sat between them. Plan A – going up and over the table and through that opening in the wall – wasn’t going to work any more, that was clear. Guapo drained half the tumbler and smoothed his mustache with thumb and forefinger, a surprisingly dainty motion. “So where is Scofield?” he asked in a low voice, staring at the table.