Life Blood ---XVII---Page No--56

"Jesus, you're serious about this, aren't you?" Dupre

nervously crushed out his cigarette, staring at me glassy-eyed.
        "Never been more."

He extracted another Gauloise.
"Okay, a counteroffer, Miss . . ."
"James. Morgan James."

"Right, Miss James. I'm beginning to think you've got no

realistic sense of proportion about this part of the world. You—"
        "Fools rush in, right?"

"My point precisely. But if Steve here means what he says,
well, maybe there's a little room to negotiate. Maybe I could take
you on a quick sightseeing trip. And just for laughs I could kind of
inadvertently stray over the area I think you might find productive.
Assuming we can locate it. But here're my terms. I do it and
Steverino and me are square. Consider it a twenty-thousand-
dollar cruise."

"Fine with me." Steve didn't even blink, and I loved him all
over again, right on the spot. Though the truth was, I knew he'd
never planned on seeing a penny of the money again anyway.

"And you think this place is Ninos del Mundo?" I was trying
not to get my hopes up too much, but still . . .
        Dupre lit his new cigarette. "You didn't hear this from me,
okay? You heard it from the embassy or some other damned
place. But that's one name for it. Another is 'Jungle Disneyland.'
Actually, I think the local name is Baalum, the old Maya word for
jaguar. But everybody acts like it's a state secret, so all you get
are rumors."

"Well, assuming we find it, then how could I get in? I mean
actually in." I was squinting at him, feeling my body tense. What
was it Lou had said about a word he'd heard when they were
taking Sarah? It sounded like "Babylon"? I also thought that was
what she'd whispered to me. Could it be the word was actually
Baalum? The gloomy morning skies abruptly flooded with the
brilliant white light of hope. I glanced back at Steve, and our eyes
locked for a long moment.

"Morgy, for chrissake, what are you saying?" Steve took my
hand. "Don't you realize this is Guatemala? Don't even think
about it."

"We're just talking now, okay?" I squeezed his hand then

looked back at Dupre. "I was just wondering. Once we've found it, could I get a sneak look-see? Assuming I wanted to?"

"Well, I'll tell you one thing, Miss Morgan James." Dupre was
fingering his new cigarette, oblivious to my reaction. "Give no
serious thought to just driving up. The Army'd be all over your butt
in the time it takes to cock an AK-47." He glanced up at the sky
again, though now a dense bank of dark clouds had swallowed
what remained of the sun. A pre-rain gloom was enveloping the
park, which was starting to empty out, the hawkers and loiterers
headed home to wait out the weather. "But if we do find it, then as
long as we're there, I might be able to drop you off for a quick
glance somehow, say, if we did it around twilight time . . . that is, if
that's what you want. But it's ten minutes tops, and that's my final
offer. Frankly, I think you'd be ill-advised in the extreme to do it,
but . . . in any case, it's got to be a low-profile enterprise all the
way. We screw this up and we could easily swell the ranks of the
'disappeared.' "

"But you think you could actually locate it?"

"What I hear, the place is on a tributary of the Usumacinta
River, a latrine they call the Rio Tigre. Way up in the northwest.
Low-level Army types, you meet them in bars from time to time,
like to BS about it. I've got a rough idea where it might be, though
you don't know whether to believe a bunch of kid recruits after
half-a-dozen beers."

Then my mind clicked. The Rio Tigre? Didn't that have

something to do with where Lou said Sarah was found? That was definitely where I wanted to go.

"Morgy, have you lost your senses?" Steve had placed his
hand on my shoulder. "If the Army's involved in something down
here, you don't want to know about it. Don't lose sight of the fact
those goons knocked off two hundred thousand villagers since the
freedom-loving days of the Gipper, for fear they might be
Commies, with the CIA practically flying in the ammo. This whole
damned country's just one big mass grave. Yet another unclaimed
corpse or two won't make a hell of a lot of difference."
        "Steve, I'll bet you anything that's where she is." Saying it, I
had a vision of all the things that had happened to me, and to
Sarah, because of Alex Goddard. I couldn't wait to confront the
bastard. "He's brought her back."

Steve just glared at me for a long moment, despairing.

"Christ, you make me nuts. Okay, look, how about this? At
least let me come with you. That way we'll face the unknown
together."