Warren Murphy: Unite and Conquer

That done, Remo took up one handle. He began to spin in place. Spinning and spinning, his arm lifted until it hung off his shoulder at a precise right angle, the can straining to tear loose from his grasp by centrifugal force.

With each revolution, the air holes whistled louder and more shrilly. Another unadvertised feature.

When Remo had achieved maximum velocity, he released his grip, aiming the can in the direction of the East River.

The can obliged him perfectly. It took off as if propelled by a mortar.

The splash it made when it hit the water was not loud. But Remo heard it anyway. It was a very satisfying splash.

"Good riddance, Mr. Chips," he said, then started down the stairway to the ground floor.

Before leaving the neighborhood, Remo took the time to drop the Dumpster lid into the down position.

No one noticed him as he boarded an express train at East 116th Street. Why should they? He was an ordinary-looking man of indeterminate age wearing a white T-shirt and gray chinos, and he hadn't any trash can balanced on his head or person.

He felt good. He was back on the team, doing good by doing the work he was good at.

Sometimes that was the only reward an assassin needed.

Chapter 3

Curator Rodrigo Lujan was in his office when the first soul-sickening rumble reverberated up through the foundations of the National Museum of Anthropology at the edge of Mexico City's sprawling Chapultepec Park.

He had lived through the 1985 earthquake, now a fading memory. He would never forget it, but the ruined buildings had long since been cleared and new edifices erected in their place to soothe the awful trauma. It had taken nearly a year to learn how to sleep peacefully once more. That was over ten years ago. Ten years of peaceful sleep despite the knowledge that the earth below was unstable and could crack open at any time.

Every night before he went home, Rodrigo Lujan, who had gone to some of the most prestigious universities in Mexico and wore a coat and tie to work, walked in machine-made leather shoes and ate prepackaged food with modem steel knives and forks, entreated his god to keep the unquiet earth still and quiescent.

"O Coatlicue, Mother of my people, I beseech you to appease the angry ground beneath us."

Coatlicue never responded to that plea. Sometimes she responded to other comments. But if her stone ears heard his prayers, her stone mouth did not reply.

Coatlicue was one of the most propitious gods in the Aztec pantheon. Lujan was Zapotec. On his mother's side. He was proud of his Zapotecness, and although successive generations had lightened the family's mahogany Zapotec skin to the heavily creamed coffee color of the modem Mexican mestizo, he carried his Zapotecness in his heart like a pure, undying flame.

As a Zapotec, he should have worshipped Huehueteod the fire god or Cocijo, Lord of the Rain.

But the more-obscure Zapotec gods had never conversed with him.

Coatlicue had.

The stone statue of Coatlicue, the Mother Goddess of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, had disappeared one night six years before. There were those who said she had bestirred her great stone legs and marched off.

It was true stone footprints had been found on the grass outside the museum. They formed a trail across the Reforma and through Chapultepec Park. This had been documented. This was proved. That much and no more.

But the tracks had ceased at the end of the park, and while some were discovered here and there, no definite trail was discernible.

They say Coatlicue was ultimately found at the ruined city of Teotihaucan, which had been been built by a race who came before the Aztecs who founded Mexico City, even before the lowland Maya and the highland Zapotecs, Mixtec and other indigenous peoples who roamed the epochs of old Mexico before the cruel Spaniards came.

Coatlicue had been broken in many pieces. It was heartbreaking, for she had survived the ages with only a few nicks and minor weathering from the mighty elements.

Returned to the museum, she was a heartbreak of shattered stone. Lujan had presided over her painstaking reassembly. Bolts had to be used. Holes were thus drilled into the porous shoulders and torso in order for the pins to be inserted.

When the stone masons and metal smiths and others were done, Coatlicue stood as she had for many years in an honored spot in the Aztec wing of the museum, near the precious Aztec Calendar Stone. Still fractured and as broken as Lujan's proud Zapotec heart.

She was imposing even so. Shaped from an eight-foot-tall block of basalt by a master artisan history failed to record by name, her broad, squat womanly figure appeared at first glance to be as wide as tall. Entwined serpents skirted her thick hips, which boasted a skull for a belt buckle. Her breast was decorated by a fan of severed hearts and hands. She stood on thick legs whose feet ended in stone claws. Her hands were blunted talons at her sides.

Coatlicue's head was a wonder. Formed of two serpent skulls at rest so their profiled snouts touched, the flat, sidemounted eyes and joined mouths created the illusion of a scaly, forward-facing countenance.

Lujan shivered just to look upon her brooding mass. Even defiled, she inspired dread, as should the mother of the war god Huitzilopochtli.

The miracle-there was no doubt it was a miracle-had occurred shortly after the restoration.

Coatlicue had miraculously healed herself.

It was no mistake, no hallucination. There existed an entire range of photographs showing her shattered hulk, every stage of the painstaking reassembly, as well her final restored form with the shiny bolts and pins peeping out at different points.

Thus, when Rodrigo Lujan opened the museum one morning to discover the cracks and fissures were no more and the bolts had mysteriously vanished, leaving perfect stone where there should be at least ugly drill holes, his first thought was that the original had been stolen and replaced by a papier-mache replica.

But Coatlicue was the Coatlicue of the ages. She stood as she had before the mysterious transformation. Her stone skin was as before. There was no mistaking her weight, her earthy solidity, her fierce womanly charms.

She was Coathcue whole again.

It was a miracle-more miracle than the remarkable walking away of so long ago, and so Rodrigo Lujan, his inner Zapotecness rising to the surface, fell down and worshiped her with hot tears in his luminous eyes and the ancient words spewing from his mouth.

O, She of the Serpent Shirts Mighty are you, Mother of Huitzilopochtli Crusher of bones.

Coatlicue had made no reply to that first obeisance.

Nor had she spoken on later occasions, after museum hours with the sun going down behind the mountains, when Lujan whispered questions to her.

"Why did you walk away, Coatlicue? What summoned you to Teotihaucan, seat of the nameless old ones? What terrible, shattering fate befell you there?"

Question after question, but no answer.

It happened one day two years after Lujan had given up questioning his Mother Goddess, and the terrible memories were dimming just as the memories of the great earthquake had faded somewhat. Rodrigo Lujan was explaining to a visiting Yale professor of ethnology the significance of Coatlicue.

"She is our Mother Goddess, our Mexican earth mother."

"She looks ferocious."

"Yes, she is terrible to behold, but all the gods of old Mexico were terrible. That was their beauty. There is beauty in terror and terror in beauty."

"Tell me," said the visiting professor, "I understood she had been shattered by a fall or something. But I see no signs of trauma."

"This was erroneously reported in the newspapers. As you can see, Our Mother is whole and undamaged."

There ensued some small talk, and the visiting professor moved on to feast his unworshipful eyes upon the other treasures of the museum.