who for a monk is quite the worrywart, was by definition trapped and helpless to go check things out on his own. He had put a call through to the diocese in southern Mexico where Stefan was stationed, only to discover that no one had anything to say about my brother’s whereabouts. Stefan was not there, but as far as they were concerned, he was not missing either. When I made my own call, I ran into the same stone wall. This, I found irritating. Though as I say, I wasn’t yet particularly worried about Stefan, I didn’t like their attitude, and told Jonah I’d make the trip if I could set it up.
Now I was here, or at least in the country next door, and it came to mind that there was a fairly major difference between my brother and me that might be important to consider. This was Stefan’s rather weak attachment to earthly life. He liked it well enough, but didn’t cling, not enough to make him a fighter, anyway. He was much more passive in that way than I was, which used to drive me crazy when we were kids and probably explains why, for his own good, I was always trying to boss him around even though he was four years older than me.
For passive, I am not. Soon after the Thai temple project, when Robert and I still liked each other well enough to sign on for another joint adventure, he convinced me to go to Cambodia to help him snoop around the former killing fields. Something he needed for a new book project, he said, and I, with all my vaccinations up to date and realizing I’d grown a lot fonder of him than I’d been of anybody in a long time, said sure. We had the teamwork thing down cold. We understood each other’s vision, which meant we could help each other take better pictures. And he was bright and sexy and made me laugh. So Cambodia felt like an investment, the kind I’d never been willing to make before.
Not for long, though. We spent a couple of nights in town prior to heading for the refugee camps, just to plan things out, and somewhere in the middle of that, Robert showed his cards. Our hotel was your typical tiny equatorial affair, heavily reliant on bamboo. I remember there was an enormous spider plastered to the outside of the window screen. Robert, wearing nothing but his boxers and his handsome skin, was propped up in bed on one elbow observing me with his connoisseur’s eye, which had put me into full basking mode. And then he said, apropos of nothing, “If you had a knife and you woke up and some guy was in your sleeping bag with you, would you stick him?”
“This person isn’t you?” I asked, still clueless.
He shook his head. “Some guy. You don’t know him.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “Of course.”
He shook his head and gave me his famous wry smile. “Wow.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No guy’s going to crawl in with me, baby. How about this? You’ve got a gun and you’re out in the boonies and some guy is stealing your pack with all your food and chances are good you won’t get out alive without it. But you know he’s hungry and he’s got a family to feed.”
“But I’ll die if he takes my food?”
“Right.”
“I’d shoot him.”
He stared at me admiringly and shook his head again. “If he’s begging for mercy?”
“If he gives the food back, okay. Otherwise, it’s him or me.”
“This is so wild. This is exactly what I thought you’d say.”
“Really.” I was beginning to pick up the tone here, one I recognized through hard experience, though this was the first time I’d ever heard it coming out of Robert.
“How about if the guy who’s taking your food is me? We’ve been lost for three weeks and we’re out of everything except toothpaste and four crackers and suddenly I snap and grab for the pack and you’ve got a gun . . .”
“What’s going on here?”
“Just wondering, is all.”
“What do you think I’d do?”
“I hate to say, really.” He peered into my face. He was still grinning, but I was not. “Oh, come on now, Eva, lighten up. This is just a . . . what do you call it? Party game? Something to pass the time.”
I stared back at him. “I wasn’t bored. Were you? Is this relationship starting to bore you?”
His eyes shifted then, and he reeled in the little cruel streak I hadn’t known was there. Until, of course, we got safely out of the country and then it was, as I already figured it would be, goodbye dear Eva and best of luck and it’s been truly grand and I’ll never forget you, which naturally he did the second the next decent-looking female dove into view. But I’d told him the truth. I’d shoot. Because obviously—he’d just proved it—if I didn’t take care of myself, who would?
I could not, however, say what Stefan would do if his life were similarly threatened, and that made everything more uncertain. If he were being held captive, for example, would he even try to make a break for it? Or, good Catholic boy that he was, would he be unable to resist the call to martyrdom?
Chapter Two
Jan and Rikki and I had come upon something that looked like a small hill covered in shrubs and tree roots but that turned out to be a temple in disguise and the apparent object of our soggy hike. Rikki and I set up camp while our leader went somewhere with his high-powered battery lantern and didn’t come back for nearly an hour. “What’s he doing?” I asked Rikki, who said, “He’s checking things out inside the temple.”
“So we’ll be at it tonight already?”
He nodded. “My dad has been planning this for a long time.”
“What’s he up to? Do you know?”
He started to say something, then stopped. He didn’t shake his head, didn’t lie, just stopped.
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot it was a big secret.”
“Not really a big secret,” he said. “But he can’t take a chance of it getting out there. He’s got his reputation to protect.”
That sounded like a direct quote. In fact, Jan had been quite adamant about the conditions of my employment. I was hired for three months, no more, and this was a private project, paid for out of his own pocket. I must agree not to discuss our work with anyone, nor could I sell any of my photographs or drawings afterward. My glum boss was up to something potentially ludicrous, it sounded like, or maybe even illegal. And I was making almost nothing in the way of quetzales for the privilege of sharing this adventure. “Are there snakes in that temple?”
“Víboras. Si. Maybe.”
I saw a porter get bitten once, by some kind of viper. We had been in a place where there were no doctors for two hundred miles and only one functioning jeep. I don’t like snakes.
Pretty soon Jan came back, silent as ever but with a hot little glow behind his glasses, and I could tell that whatever he was hoping to get on film was still there exactly as he remembered it, and tonight I would find out what it was. But first there was dinner to cook—a pot of beans and rice—and some fluffing up of the nest (I like a cozy tent) and then sitting by the cook fire for a bit while the sun started its long slide into the trees.
An
