Free The Laughing Falcon by William Deverell Page B

red four-wheel taxi pulled up. The driver, stout and short and seeming still half-asleep, asked, “You the lady for the Eco-Rico Lodge?”
    Maggie agreed that she was, hoisted her pack in, then climbed aboard. The driver introduced himself as Guillermo Brenes and asked, “You know where is this place?”
    “You’ve never been there?”
    “No problem. We find it.”
    As they pulled out of town, a rosy light began to permeate the eastern sky, enough to illuminate Maggie’s map: the route to the fabled Savegre, then up into the mountains. She would be navigator. They drove between seemingly endless plantations of African palms, the road unerringly straight but poorly gravelled and scarred with bumps and ruts. Maggie made her first sighting of a king vulture, striking in white and black, which barely raised its harlequin head from its roadkill feast as the taxi lumbered past. Small villages drifted by, neatly laid out: company towns, said Brenes, whom she was trying to keep alert with questions.
    But at one point, after a lull in conversation, he almost swerved off the road, and Maggie had to grab the steering wheel and shake him awake.
    He apologized. “You got five kids at home you no sleep too good.”
    To keep Brenes awake, she prodded him into talking about his home life. It was a litany of grief: he was supporting not only his five children with his current partner, but four from a failed marriage and two from other relationships. He hammered nails all day and drove cab all night to make ends meet. She supposed he was trying to fatten the tip.
    Maggie feared that the four days ahead promised to be more nerve-racking than entertaining unless she quickly confessed her deceit. But what could she say to Senator Walker, who wanted his picture in the
Geographic?
“I told Mr. Jericho I would
try
to sell an article. Between you and me, I think he was on drugs.” No, she would be honest; they would not have the heart to send her back.
    They came to a long, narrow concrete bridge spanning a river. This was the Savegre: swollen from the rains and rushing turbulently to the sea, a much smaller river than the wide meandering South Saskatchewan. How far into the mountains would Spanish missionaries have built their settlement? The padres would have wished to distance themselves from marauding pirates.
The Treasure of Rio Savegre
would be her title, it had more punch than
The Torrid Zone
.
    Where a smaller road turned off beside the river, Maggie saw an Eco-Rico sign. “Why they have hotel up here? “Brenes said. “No beach. Is crazy.” They ascended past plantations of papayas and bananas and spindly yucca to an almost deserted village with the apt name of Silencio. The narrow, humped road seemed to disappear at the eastern bank of the river, but it was wide and shallow here, and Brenes gunned his car across, sending spumes of waves. Then they toiled up into the hills high above the churning river, the road now just two dirt tracks.
    For the next hour, Maggie frequently held her breath as their route took them up a red-clay track that clung to the side of a mountain, the views both dazzling and terrifying. At onepoint she could see directly down the rubble of an old landslide above the Savegre River. She cast a look at Brenes to ensure her exhausted driver was still fully awake. “
Temblor,”
he said. “Earthquake.”
    The country grew wilder – there were no farms up here, or even signs of habitation, just forest, an undulating canopy below them, trees and lianas flowering yellow and violet, the valley a vast bouquet. Maggie felt disoriented; she was used to flat lines, uninterrupted horizons, a monochrome palette.
    The track grew steadily worse and finally became just a foot path where a fence of living tree posts and barbed wire met a gate bearing another Eco-Rico sign. Standing by this outpost of civilization, incongruously, were two men in crisply pressed shorts, a third man who was older and unshaven, and a young