Chapter Seven
Dancy braced for the impact of the jet blasting into the jungly rocks, but kept her eyes opened and glued to the window. It’s not often you get a front row seat for a fatal crash, she thought. And me without my camera. Then it hit her: they were going to touch down on the highway.
The landing was smooth enough, but there were several major jolts while the engines and brakes fought the plane to a taxi. Dancy had been too enthralled with watching trees and fences flash by to notice that Santiamen had tightly closed his eyes and grabbed the crucifix under his shirt as he fervently mouthed silent prayers. The plane taxied slower, then turned sharply and rolled into the dark interior of a warehouse.
Santiamen snatched up the bags and motioned Dancy through the door into the main cabin of the aircraft. She walked through very slowly, taking in the details of what looked like a business study designed by Porsche Carrerra. The six chairs looked like black leather sports car seats mounted on pedestals. The chrome tables, side bar, and file cabinets featured arrays of computers, telephones, and other electronic marvels, cluttered with silver decanters, cigarette boxes, and urns with orchids and bromeliads. The paneling seemed to be ebony, and so did the Bang and Olafson stereo mounted on the wall. The curtains actually seemed to be black leather. Ebony frames on the bulkheads displayed chrome half-models of twelve meter yachts, Formula One cars, and jet fighters. The door to the bed chamber had a model of the Stealth Bomber, cast in what looked like titanium. Dancy glanced at Santiamen, wanting to share her little laugh with somebody, but the big guy was glowing with the pride of a cubscout showing off the world’s keenest clubhouse. She stepped by the exit hatch into the passageway to the cockpit, noticing it was flanked by a tiny microwave galley and a wet bar seemingly designed to military specifications. There were no bottles in sight, just chrome canisters engraved with words in Spanish.
Dancy stepped out onto a wide carpeted stair ramp, and looked around the interior of the huge warehouse. In addition to holding the plane, it had tool shops and several tons of what looked like cut cane or bamboo. Behind the sleek fuselage of the Gulfstream the open end of the hangar blazed with the yellowish light and heat of tropical afternoons. Just inside was a black Hummer covered with chrome decor including a bas relief of a spread eagle covering the entire hood. It had no side curtains and the convertible top seemed to be made of silver lame, or perhaps space blanket material. Armando stood beside it in white slacks and shirtsleeves talking to a group of henchmen and spearcarriers, most of them holding automatic weapons. Dancy stepped down the ramp, Santiamen following her like a dog.
It suddenly hit her that Armando had been pretty distant, considering he had gone to such trouble to have her around. She glanced at Santiamen, obviously her appointed companion and guard pet, and realized Armando’s strategy. Keep her around shy maids and teddy bears like this Santo lug to make her feel comfortable; stay aloof and let her start seeking him out. No dummy, that Armando, she thought, bet he pulls this dodge all the time. The slut.
Armando turned to meet her, dismissing his men with a sweep of his arm. The men went off with only the briefest of glances back at the gringa goddess; all except the fey Ramos, who Dancy recognized even with the bandages on his nose. He gave her a courtly bow, she replied with a caricature of an embarrassed little wave. Oops, she mimed with a wide-eyed look at the nose job, did I do that? Ramos and Santiamen got in the back of the Hummer with a few handbags, Armando touched her elbow lightly, leading her to the front passenger seat. “Welcome to Nayarit,” he said. “Let’s drive up to the house now so you can get a real bath, a real meal and the deluxe tour.”
“I’m in your hands, Mi Capitan. I hope you’re a safe driver?”
When the low-slung four-by rolled out of the warehouse into the sun, Dancy immediately felt her chest dewing with sweat in the humid heat, even shaded by the reflective ragtop. “I should pick up a big straw hat,” she told Armando, “Blondes are prone to sunstroke.”
“I think we can find one somewhere,” Armando said, gesturing at dozens of field workers, all wearing hard white panamas or floppy straw sombreros. He drove towards a group of workers that had gathered in a row of poplars that lined the river Dancy had seen from the plane. A dozen picnic tables were arranged in the shade and as they passed through them, the men waved and cheered, waving tortillas and bottles of beer. “Welcome for their patron,” Armando said. Dancy swept out a gesture like a parade float queen and the cheering got a lot rowdier. Armando cut his eyes to hers, smiling and shaking his head.
Once through the dining area, the Hummer ducked into the trees along the riverbed, Dancy realizing there were two rows flanking a paved lane. The shade was welcome and the flicker of tree trunks diced the view of the fields and river stones like a jerky old movie. It occurred to Dancy that the sixty foot trees, each with the bottom six feet neatly whitewashed, also concealed the road from the air. But after meandering along the stream for ten minutes, the road climbed a few switchbacks and broke out into a higher valley. Here the road ran straight out into a wide, open field of red flowers. It was not stealth that hid this upper valley, but corruption. The trees had been planted forty years earlier to make it more bearable to walk along the road in the heat, but that would never have occurred to her.
In the trees at the edge of the plain a charming stone bridge crossed the river. Three small boys in ragged shorts were fishing. They waved enthusiastically to Armando, who pulled coins from a cup on the transmission hump and tossed them into the river as they crossed. The boys cheered and dived into the stream. Passing the bridge, the lane turned through a copse of palms and out on a meadow surrounded by the steep jungly slopes. Armando stopped the car at a point where two curving palms framed the view up the meadow.
The valley was a confluence of two streams, forking into twin valleys with a high, prowlike ridge between them. The peak of the ridge was capped by a castle constructed of black volcanic rock and giving the appearance of having been carved out of the landscape. Dancy stared at the castle in surprise, then admiration, then a kid of awed excitement. The foundation was a wedge as acute as the ridge it sat on, two tiers of arches leading forward to sharp points, each tier topped with battlements. Set further back, the walls of the main building rose to peaked roofs like a pagoda, each story at least fifteen feet high and receding back to maintain the slanted profile of the ridge. The effect was like a Shogunate battleship aground on the hill.
The top floors broke up the severe wedge shape somewhat, a mass of gables crowned with jutting slate roofs that curved to points like falcon beaks. Beneath those spiky brows the windows looked like the eyes of raptors. The entire building had a fortified medieval look and on top of it all a sturdy tower was topped with crenellated gunslots and a mast flying a black flag with a device in silver boullion–a stylized plunging eagle after Hiroshige.
Aside from the black basalt and slate, the only accents were silvered glass and red stone window trim. At the base of the tower was an arched recess over two round, red-rimmed windows. Below them the uppermost curved gable peaked out over a domed door. The impression of a giant bird of prey brooding over the valley was unavoidable, but too much in keeping with the massive, spiky architecture to look contrived.
Dancy sat still, letting the castle sink in. She gave a low whistle and a flurry of applause. Turning to Armando, who leaned back from the wheel watching for her reaction, she said, “Too much. Castle Greyskull in Shangri La.”
“Does that mean you approve?”
“It’s fabulous, Armando. Let me guess, you designed it yourself?”
“Well, with the aid of some Swiss architects.”
“And maybe a little inspiration from pictorials in ‘Air Pirate’s Home Companion’?”.
“Wait till you see the view from the tower.”
“Absolutely. Let’s skip the refreshments and cut straight to the Universal Studios tour.”
Armando headed out onto the meadow, onto blacktop looping through the fields of red flowers that stretched back to the castle ridge and out on each side to the hillsides, where rich green bushes grew up the slopes. Looking up the twin valleys flanking the castle, Dancy could see terraces with orchards, garden plots, and small clusters of white houses. Bowling through the flowers, Dancy said, “The black stone looks great on the castle, like it was designed by The Empire. But you really should have done the road in yellow brick.”
There was a roadway looping up the base of the ridge, and an actual drawbridge and with portcullis gate to allow only invited vehicles to drive up the dramatic ramp to the porte cochere behind. Those were not at all medieval, but looked modern and efficient; the drawbridge didn’t span a moat, but a sort of tank trap. Still, Dancy thought, how many private drawbridges do you see any more? They parked under the arched porte-cochere, but while Santiamen scrambled inside with their luggage, Armando led Dancy along a tiled gallery of red-rimmed arches that led around to the front of the building. The gallery terminated in broad steps down to a triangular patio like a ship’s prow, paved in marble squares and surrounded on the two long sides by parapets relieved by gunports, each port with its cannon. Most of the guns were culverins of cast bronze on heavy wood carriages, but others were German mountain howitzers and American recoilless rifles, apparently in working repair.
“Great place for a Fourth of July party,” Dancy said, “But I don’t suppose you celebrate it.”
“We will this year,” Armando said, “In your honor.” He lightly touched her elbow, turning her towards the front doors. They were gigantic cathedral doors, over fifteen feet high and constructed of massive timbers overlaid with a complex armor of wrought iron hardware and cast bronze ornamentation. Two dozen panels were richly carved with figures in relief three inches deep. Dancy moved to the doors and ran her fingers over the old carvings. “Very nice,” she said, “Pre-Lutheran cartoon strips. Did you swap aluminum sliders to some cathedral somewhere?”
“It was a Spanish church, ruined in the wars against Franco. The doors have had two other owners, in Madrid, in Mexico, and now here.”
“Well. they’re sure big enough for the paperboy to hit. Do they open?”
“Oh, yes. They are balanced very nicely.” Armando grasped a bronze ring as big as his head and pulled the right door open. It swung slowly, but silently. Without waiting to see if he’d carry her over the threshold, Dancy stepped inside the main hall and into another world. Neither the airplane’s interior nor the castle’s exterior had prepared Dancy for the inside of the magnificent pile of rock. It was big, grotesque and antique; but more than just stone, dark wood, tapestries and armor. Although there was enough of all of that. It was also somehow modern, like the props for the film “Dune”, or the futuristic palaces of sic-fi serials. Somebody had thought nothing of having ancient marble caryatids support a ship-to-shore radio, or carving a labyrinth of grapevines around a glass case full of assault rifles, or stacking a compact disc collection in a fourteenth century armoire.
Dancy liked the fact that Armando hadn’t gone for any regency furniture. Everything ran to massive wood with iron accoutrements; colonial and monastery stuff with chain suspension and studded metal bosses. Your basic Don Quixote decor group. You sat on black leather here, or better yet, on fur. Not just fur, pelts–skins of animals tossed on Italian couches or heaped up in corners. There was wainscot and molding, ceiling painting and massive steel chandeliers, even torches thrust in wrought brass sconces. Art was of several themes: the stallion, the cock, the falcon, the bull, the naked human female. Dancy particularly admired one piece, of black welded metal plate and as big as an entire wall, which depicted four larger-than-life horses exploding from out of the stone in a flurry of hooves, flown manes, and flared nostrils. Guernica modern, but somehow timeless. Apocalypse whenever, she reflected. A lighted niche in another wall held a very old Doric pedestal, almost certainly Hellenic, supporting a seahorse in ceramic covered with hammered brass–but a seahorse with the head of a regular horse, it’s mane curling away behind it like a series of waves. A solid black marble bull in one of the confusing series of halls must have weighed ten or twelve tons and every ounce of it refined the power of the bull into sleek abstract lines without diluting its brutal male thrust. And everywhere were weapons or places for weapons, electronic gadgets or accessories for them: giant televisions with dual tape decks, Barnett crossbows hung on walnut pegs, a giant wall safe filling the space under a travertine mantelpiece, swords and video games, liquor cabinets and karaoke machines, industrial computer set-ups and tennis ball serving catapults, Nautilus machines in front of silvered mirrors whose inch deep bevels sizzled rainbows around their edges. It’s more than a clubhouse, Dancy admitted, its a swashbuckling work station, half freebooter’s lair, half lordly manor.
Finally they had toured the main rooms and taken the tiny brass elevator cage to the top of the tower. The crow’s nest was cramped and simple, but a steel plate covered some very businesslike switches and buttons. Dancy leaned over the edge of the tower, admitting that Armando had been right about the view. The rivers on each side ran out green and limpid from jungled valleys. the castle and ridge jutted like a dreadnaught cutting through the flame red sea of flowers. She could see nothing of the road, but gazed straight out over miles of empty, steaming jungle falling away in the convolutions of an extremely stressed terrain. The distant haze could have been the sea, it could have been the edge of the world.
“That isn’t the ocean, is it?” She pointed directly West.
“No, you can’t see it from here, even if there was ever a completely clear day.”
Staring down into the green and red meadow, she said, “Those aren’t tulips, are they?”
“No,” Armando said, “They are poppies.”
“For the local poppyseed cake industry, one assumes,” Dancy said, “So those tall green plants over there must be sinsemilla or something?”
“Exactly. From my own clones of Asian and Afghan stock. The poppies are more lucrative, but we still carry the full line.”
“I’m beginning to suspect this isn’t Kansas, Army baby.”
“Most people draw those conclusions as soon as they see the plane or the house. You’re the first woman to visit here that didn’t want to see the kitchen.
“Why on earth? Aren’t kitchen’s pretty much where the help work?”
“I told you we think alike, Dancy. We’re two of a kind, all right.”
“What, you can’t cook either?”
“It really is an exceptional kitchen.”
“Then let’s make an exception. What I want to see is the master bedroom. Or the mistress bedroom, if you’ve got one.”
“Actually, I’ve several that might suit you.”
“Hell, that first room suits me. Who needs a boudoir when you’ve got a big pile of bearskins by the fireplace? Yeah, this is pretty damn plush.”
“No, this is primitive,” Armando corrected her, “It’s a hideout, essentially a fortress. I’m as proud of my family’s tradition as outlaws as I am of our royal pedigrees. This is a man’s place, my business location. It’s military, essentially. For plush, you’d have to see my villa in Guadalajara or the condos in Cancun, Mexico, and San Diego. Those are places to please women.”
“I don’t know. I like this just fine. Every corporate pencildick has a villa or condo. How many people have their own castle and kingdom?”
“I’ve met a few.”
“At warlord conventions? No, I’ve got to hand it to you, Armando. You’re not the typical blind date.” She stared down at the castle and its grounds and mused, “It’s all pretty Gothic, really. The abduction, the helpless heroine, the shady hunk of mysterious means, the isolated mansion. But isn’t there supposed to be another guy, to put my heart in a confused flutter between good nobility and evil wealth? Or is it the other way around?”
Armando gave a dismayed shake of his head. “I spend years and millions building up this fortress of masculine power, then you show up to turn the whole thing into a paperback romance.”
“I thought I was being pretty tactful not mentioning ‘Falconcrest’, myself”.
“That’s a good name. But I like mine better.”
“Armando’s Hideaway?”
“El Gavilan.”
“Ooo, that does have a ring. What does it mean?”
“Well, it’s a bird of prey. A rapine bird as we say.”
“Armando, you’re going to have to get your story straight. This is either a rape or it isn’t. As guest of honor, I think I’ve got the right to know.”
“Rapine doesn’t mean that, our word for rape is ‘violation’.”
“Gee, we use that just for overtime parking.”
“It refers to carrying away prey with talons.
“I’ve gotta admit, you’ve got that down cold.”
Armando shrugged depreciatively, “It’s a long tradition of my family, the predatory thing. But I’m the first one to actually fly. I admire birds, the plane. I think it was Jorge Luis Borges who said that all winged things are sacred.”
Dancy gave him a long take and slowly said, “I can get behind that. Funny, you just recognize some sayings as being the truth.”
“And what is truth but beauty? Or beauty but truth?”
Dancy looked away from him, muttering, “What they both are is traps.”
She stretched, rotated to take the entire scene. “So you have your cash crops and your truck gardens right here on the grounds.”
Armando nodded. “And my command center. And my people.”
“So really, it’s like a plantation?”
“Yes, it is. We grow to sell, and we make what we need for our own use. Those trees over there are mangos, papayas, and bananas for the table. We grow oranges and olives, and grapes for my house wine. We also raise grain for bread, meat and fish. We make cheese and beer here. To tell you the truth, if we needed to just close the door to the rest of the world we could survive here for a very long time.”
“And those shacks down there by the Swanee Ribber? Would those be the slave quarters?”
Armando snorted and gave her a disgusted look. “Those are where my people live. My retainers, you could say. MY people. I’m like their…Duke or Lord. like my father was before me. They work for me, I protect them, And pay them, I might add. But it’s not like a normal ranch or anything. Without me they would starve.”
Dancy, being an American girl, assumed he was exaggerating about the starving. But she saw that the feudal analogy was no exaggeration, and that it worked. Wow, she thought, let’s do the time warp again. How do you get to be lady of the castle? Then she laughed at the thought, said to herself, “I mean besides that.”