George R. R. Martin Presents Wild Cards: Pairing Up: An Anthology
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Synopsis
An alien virus ravages the world, its results as random as a hand of cards. Those infected either draw the black queen and die, draw an ace and receive superpowers, or draw the joker and are bizarrely mutated.
Nevertheless, human nature reigns supreme. And one of the most enduring human drives is the search for love. Aces and jokers alike both want to find it, or have lost it . . . or perhaps just want to use it for personal gain. Crazy, unconventional, touching, strange, and oh-so-familiar, this is love, Wild Cards-style.
Within these stories:
• A jewel thief seduces a popular actor just so she can track down a long-lost treasure.
• A teenager trapped in the body of a giant snail attempts to win his love à la Cyrano de Bergerac.
• A man discovers his purpose in life after meeting a beautiful butterfly woman.
• A young hero who has been awarded the hideous name of Hero McHeroface finds some solace in the arms of an astrologer hiding her own unique powers.
Pairing Up is the Wild Cards take on love—finding it, seeking it, losing it, or achieving it—as aces and jokers enter into the highest stake game of all: gambling on their heart's desire.
Featuring stories from:
Kevin Andrew Murphy • Christopher Rowe • Marko Kloos • Melinda M. Snodgrass • Bradley Denton • Walton Simons • Peter Newman • Gwenda Bond • David Anthony Durham • Edited by George R. R. Martin
Release date: July 11, 2023
Publisher: Bantam
Print pages: 433
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George R. R. Martin Presents Wild Cards: Pairing Up: An Anthology
George R.R. Martin
1957
Trudy of the Apesby Kevin Andrew Murphy
The Garden of Allah was found, not in the Prophet’s Paradise, but in Hollywood, at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Havenhurst Drive. But instead of flying there on the back of the Buraq like Muhammad, Trudy Pirandello had taken Pan Am.
She checked her bags at the front desk, checked her makeup with her compact, and in the reflection, checked out the jewels and jewelry on display on the other guests—a nice watch here, a pretty ring there, but nothing that wouldn’t be missed and nothing worth risking, especially with her eyes on a greater prize. Trudy slipped her compact back in her handbag, slipped the bellman a generous but not lavish tip, and slipped off into the interior of the Garden of Allah.
She had expected paradise to look a bit more Arabian, with fanciful fountains and arabesques, not a couple dozen Spanish Mission–style bungalows, all terra-cotta tiles and stucco. At least the landscaping was pretty and tropical enough, with bougainvillea vines and night-blooming jasmine, the dark shiny leaves glittering in the sun. The houris were there, too, or at least starlets, many of them taking advantage of a swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea, the legacy of Alla Nazimova, silent-screen Salomé turned hotelier.
Rumor also had it that Nazimova coined the term sewing circlefor ladies who liked ladies, though as Trudy understood, Alla liked everyone. Her tradition had continued—the Garden of Allah, as the hotel had been renamed with an added h, was the swinging place to go if you were a Hollywood creative. F. Scott Fitzgerald had stayed there, as had Errol Flynn. It-girl Clara Bow, Ernest Hemingway, Ginger Rogers, D. W. Griffith, Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra, and Dorothy Parker. Even Marlene Dietrich, who’d starred in the movie The Garden of Allah.
Of course, the hotel had seen better days. Alla Nazimova had died in ’44—two years before the wild card—and it was now 1957. Errol Flynn had swashbuckled away. Trudy thought she glimpsed the dark-haired head of Ronald Reagan in the pool, surrounded by a bevy of bathing beauties—a definite trade-up from Bonzo the chimp—but a B-movie star wasn’t what Trudy needed. What she needed was an ace: a blonde, to be specific.
She spied a very small one: A little blond girl, no more than six, sat poolside sipping a pink lemonade. She wore a white blouse, a black skirt with suspenders, matching white socks and black Mary Janes, with a shocking-pink bow in her hair, and a supercilious expression as she watched the adults.
“Hello, Eloise.” Trudy sat down next to her. “I was hoping to see Kay.”
“She’s taking a nap…” Eloise told her.
“I expected she might,” Trudy said, keeping the secret unspoken. Kay was taking a nap because Eloise was her alter ego. Kay was Kay Thompson, star of stage and screen—singer, dancer, multitalented everywoman—who three years ago had gone to New York for a singing gig and taken ill. There were rumors that it might have been the wild card, but Thompson brushed them off, saying it was nothing more remarkable than menopause, then went on with her show.
No one else had noticed a little girl from time to time slipping out of Thompson’s suite at the Plaza Hotel, going off to make mischief or spy on guests. No one else except Trudy.
Trudy was an ace herself, but she was also smart enough to keep her wild card up her sleeve…and not just because she was also a thief who specialized in teleporting small objects—particularly jewelry—into her hands. Aces who got caught ended up in government service, doing far more dangerous and less rewarding jobs than going to nightclubs and musical revues and, in the dimness, teleporting this diamond earring or that gold watch to the inside of an evening bag.
Hotel lobbies were also good places to spy valuable jewels, particularly hotels as swanky as the Plaza—although Trudy hadn’t expected that the sharp-eyed little girl would be the same person as the popular songstress whose shows Trudy had pick-teleported one too many times. But Eloise was a touch too fashion-conscious for the average little girl, sharing a few too many tastes in common with Kay Thompson, which Trudy had remarked upon. Soon an uneasy truce sparked an unlikely friendship.
The fact was, Trudy liked Kay, and Kay liked Trudy, and two lady aces up the sleeve could cover for each other better than either could alone. Plus, Kay owed Trudy. Kay’s ace wasn’t fully under her control, tied, Trudy suspected, to menopause and hot flashes, and last year there’d been an overly suspicious hotel detective at the Plaza, asking a few too many questions about Kay’s occasional young guest, Eloise. After Trudy had arranged for the police to find him with a stolen string of pearls in his pocket, he’d gone away, and Trudy had let his successor think that Eloise was her own daughter, going off and getting into mischief while Trudy visited with Kay.
“So, what brings you to Hollywood, Trudy?” Eloise glanced up over her lemonade, holding it the way an older sophisticated woman would handle a cocktail. “Something I could help with? Or do you need Kay?”
“Well,” Trudy admitted, “Kay mentioned in her last postcard that Jack Braun had a bungalow here. I was hoping for an introduction…”
“What sort of introduction?”
Trudy cocked her head, gazing at the pool with Ronnie and his bevy of beauties, then gave Eloise a sidelong glance. “Not the sort of introduction it would be proper for a little girl to give…”
“Wait here.” Eloise gave her a knowing look and a wink. “I’ll manage it.” With that she downed the last of her lemonade like a hard-drinking woman would a cocktail, then skipped off down the tiles beside the pool with all the skill of a dancer with forty-plus years of training.
Trudy was a bit bemused. The parties at the Garden of Allah were legendary; she’d planned to find her way to them at night, try to work her charms on Jack, and see where that led. Instead, she looked at the poolside menu and ordered a limeade and an avocado-and-bacon sandwich, feeling very Californian in her choice. She wondered how many stories about the Garden were true.
The best she’d heard was the one about the naked actress, her pet monkey, and the telegram boy, which sounded like a bawdy tale from The Arabian Nights lightly retold for the Silent Era. But then Trudy heard the actual screeching of the remembered monkey, or at least a little girl screeching like a monkey: Eloise careening back into the pool area in her Mary Janes. Somewhere she’d acquired a fruit basket the size of one of Carmen Miranda’s headdresses. “Ook! Ook!” Eloise shrieked, hurling an orange with startling accuracy at a blond man chasing her. He was tall, handsome, and barefoot, wearing only shorts, and the orange hit him right in the middle of his broad bare chest. Or almost did, because there was a golden flash of light as it splatted on the air half an inch from his skin. “Eloise!” he roared.
“Ook!” cried Eloise. “You Tarzan, me monkey!” She danced around the pool to the amusement of minor stars and starlets, lobbing tangerines and apples at Jack Braun, Golden Boy of the Four Aces, the strongest man in the world…and also, incidentally, the actor playing Tarzan on television for NBC, coming off his first season in the role and almost ready to start his second. Eloise’s game would have been dangerous for anyone else to play, but the strongest man in the world didn’t mean the most agile, Jack Braun looked hungover, and Eloise had all the training of a dancer in her forties packed into the body of a six-year-old girl.
She also had a fruit basket with a bunch of bananas inserted randomly for color, so Trudy made a decision. One of the bananas disappeared from the basket and reappeared in Trudy’s hand underneath the napkin in her lap. Trudy produced the banana, as if she’d had it all along, and idly began to eat it as Eloise continued to pelt Golden Boy with fruit, dancing and laughing and crying, “Ook!” until she got him to chase her at just the right angle, headed straight toward Trudy.
The old slapstick trick had worked for Harold Lloyd in The Flirt, but rather than toss her banana peel under Golden Boy’s foot, Trudy teleported it there, with the desired effect—he skidded out. Rather than run past her after Eloise, he slid straight into her, knocking her, her chair, and himself into the pool. Trudy yelped, feigning surprise as best she could, and then they were tumbling into the water with a flailing of arms and a flashing of golden light.
Ladies falling clothed into the pool was something of a tradition at the Garden of Allah, and while it wasn’t quite the Hollywood meet-cute she’d planned—she’d learned the screenwriters’ term when she saw Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? last year on Broadway—it more than worked, allowing Trudy to put her arms around Jack’s neck and play the frightened soggy young thing while Jack played the gentleman. “Are you okay?” he asked, sweeping her up in his arms and dumping her on the side of the pool, then clambering out himself. “That kid is a menace!”
“I’m okay,” Trudy said, “just wet. Oh, I must look a fright…” Trudy considered feigning tears, but the waterworks weren’t really warranted, just a bit of vanity, because she knew she looked like a very attractive brunette with a wet blouse and nice tits.
“You just need to get dried off,” Jack Braun told her. “Are you staying here? Do you have dry clothes?”
“In my bags at the front desk,” Trudy told him. “I’m visiting a friend, but she’s not home yet.”
“Well, you’re welcome to change at my place…”
Trudy smiled. “Thank you,” she said, half to Jack, half to Eloise, who’d made her escape.
Kay Thompson had more than repaid her debt.
Getting Jack into bed wasn’t that hard. He was reasonably good in it, and so was Trudy, plus Jack was easy on the eyes, which helped. Besides, they were around the same age, so they had that in common—although, unfairly, he looked younger than her, even though Trudy was pretty certain he was actually older. She had thought that blonds wrinkled early, but somehow Jack’s body hadn’t gotten the memo. But he was also coming off a painful and expensive divorce and made it clear that he wasn’t looking for a new Mrs. Braun. “I may be Golden Boy,” he told her, “but the only gold I’ve got left is my hair—and this.” He clenched his fist, making it glow with golden light, the power of his force field.
Trudy considered. While she wasn’t without her charms, they were also in Hollywood, and hotties were nothing special, especially for a handsome famous ace. She needed to up her ante if she wanted to stay in the game. “Well, I won’t say I’m no gold digger, but I dug my gold years ago and I’ve got more than enough to last me.” Trudy laughed what she hoped was the right amount. “Now I’m just out for a good time. Don’t believe me? Here, let me show you my rocks.”
Trudy got up from bed, naked, and went to her luggage, leaning over it long enough for Jack to get a nice view of her ass while she got into her jewel case. The rocks were a couple of diamonds and an emerald, and rocks indeed—a thirty-three-carat diamond pendant, a twenty-one-carat emerald flanked by baguette diamonds, and an almost forty-two-carat diamond ring. The diamond pendant was greenish yellow, but pretty, in a Second Empire setting with three tulips and three teardrops; the diamond ring was a bluish-white stunner, in a newer setting by Cartier; and the emerald had a Cartier setting, too. Trudy put on all three. “Ta-da!” She turned around, wearing nothing but them and her birthday suit. “Like I said—rocks.”
Jack Braun stared at her slack-jawed, but mostly at the rings on her fingers and the pendant between her tits. “Where did you get those?”
Trudy sat down next to him on the bed so he could admire them closer. “Well, like I said, I was in New York on Wild Card Day, too.” The rings winked art deco seduction while the pendant glittered, old-fashioned but classy. “There was this old guy I was involved with.” She’d stolen the diamond ring from Harry Winston and gotten the pendant from a less reputable jeweler when she’d fenced a bunch of random baubles she didn’t want to hang on to. “He was good to me, but he wasn’t a nice man.” The emerald had necessitated a vacation to Palm Beach, Florida, to Mar-a-Lago, the estate of breakfast cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, who’d swanned around with a full emerald parure at a ball, declaring herself Juliet, until Trudy plucked the ring from her finger in the middle of “Begin the Beguine.” “He died. I didn’t.” A fourth heist, before all the others, netted her a dozen Georgian diamond buttons that had once belonged to Hetty Green, the Witch of Wall Street, along with some documentation that tied all the jewels Trudy was wearing together and set her on her ongoing scavenger hunt for the remainder of the prize. “But hey, he still left me something for my trouble.”
She gestured to the pendant with the hand with the diamond ring and let Jack stare at both diamonds along with her tits, not explaining that what she’d gotten from the old man wasn’t the rocks, but an ace power. Trudy also skipped the fact that the unnamed old guy wasn’t her sugar daddy, but the infamous Dr. Tod, who had released the wild card over Manhattan and died with Jetboy on that fateful September day over ten years ago.
“You said you shot Tarzan last year in Brazil?” Trudy asked, making conversation. “Well, these are Brazilian, too.” She waved the rings and dandled the pendant, letting them glitter. “Guess who found them there?”
Jack shook his head. “I couldn’t even begin…”
“Emperor Maximilian,” Trudy told him. “Well, he wasn’t emperor yet, he was on a botany trip, but he bought the diamonds. He had the pendant made for his wife, Carlota, and kept the diamond ring for himself. When he became emperor of Mexico, he picked up the emerald. Supposedly it once belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last king of the Aztecs, who ended up getting tortured to death by Cortés.” She grimaced. “Then Maximilian got shot by a firing squad and Carlota ended up in a nuthouse, and she hocked the rings to pay for doctors. But hey, everything comes with a history.”
Jack looked glum then, like something she’d said brought up a memory more painful than just watching Bette Davis chew the scenery as Empress Carlota in Juarez, so Trudy suggested, “Wanna make a little more history of our own?”
Jack did and Trudy fell back in bed, wearing nothing more than her diamonds and one emerald.
As Trudy had read in Variety, NBC had moved production of Tarzan from Brazil to Mexico, specifically to the state of Durango. They were shooting out of John Wayne’s ranch in the little town of Chupaderos, just seven miles north of the city of Durango itself, while the Duke was off in actual Africa with Sophia Loren, filming Legend of the Lost—except there, Libya was being shot as Timbuktu. And that wasn’t the only change. Tarzan still hadn’t gotten a Jane, but they did have a new Cheetah, Tarzan’s chimpanzee buddy—and one who could act.
Trudy smiled at the joker, hoping he wouldn’t recognize her, but no such luck. “Hey, wait a minute, I know you.” He pointed a chimpanzee finger at her. “You’re that hotsy-totsy nat broad who likes slumming it at Biff’s.”
Ace broad, Trudy thought, but she didn’t say it. She usually went masked to Jokertown, both for anonymity and to better blend in with the jokers, but you couldn’t eat with a full mask. “So sue me,” she told him. “Biff makes the best patty melt in Manhattan.” Biff was a joker who was a man-sized chipmunk from the waist up. Cheetah was the same, except the wild card had given him the upper body of a chimp. “You hung out with that tall kid, Troll, right?”
“Tall kid.” Cheetah laughed. “Yeah, like nine feet! Strong, too. Stronger than Golden Boy here.”
Jack’s expression was somewhere between incredulous and annoyed, but he just ignored Cheetah and went over to the grill on the rancheria’s back patio where they’d set up craft services, apparently trying to find something that fit with midwestern tastes.
Trudy took a seat opposite Cheetah at his picnic table. It was hot in Durango, the nat guest actors were all crowded at the other tables, and Cheetah’s umbrella offered the one free bit of shade. Besides, it’s not like she had to worry about catching anything from jokers, even if the wild card was contagious, which it wasn’t. You only got it from Takisian spores, like the ones in the canister Dr. Tod found then later took up in a blimp as a bomb; Trudy had learned that the hard way, and before any other earthling, too. “So,” she asked, “what’s your story? Long way to go for a kid from Jokertown.” Left unsaid was Trudy’s knowledge that Cheetah had run on the wrong side of the law like she did, if far less successfully.
“Hey, I only went to Jokertown for high school. I’m from Flatbush. But you’re asking how my card turned? Guess.”
“You made the mistake of seeing a Ronald Reagan movie?”
“Close!” Cheetah laughed, showing far more of his gums than any nat could. “You know we’ve got Bonzo here as one of the other Cheetahs, for when we need to do leg shots? But my dad works for the Brooklyn Zoo. Primatologist, really loves working with chimps. I wanted him to pay more attention to me…then hey, look what the damn virus did.” Cheetah shrugged his chimp shoulders beneath an ordinary human polo shirt. “But it let me get closer to my old man and gave me my first acting experience. Before this, I mean.”
“Oh?” Trudy asked.
“Yeah,” Cheetah told her. “Like I said, my old man works for the zoo. After I got like this, he took me to work, and one day the chimp—the real one—got sick. Big favorite with the kids. So I thought, what the hell—took my shirt off, left my pants and shoes on, crouched down, and went out into the chimp house and started doing monkeyshines for the kids. They loved it. So I got up on the ropes and started swinging back and forth, and the kid were cheering, and it was great. So then I start really getting into it, doing acrobatic flips, the whole flying trapeze number, then the next thing I know, I flip out of the chimp enclosure and land in the lion’s den, right next to the big lion. I start screaming, ‘Help! Help! Get me out of here!’ Then the lion opens his huge jaws and snarls, ‘Shut up, you fool, before you give us all away!’ ”
Trudy laughed lightly but Jack laughed more. “That’s what he told for his audition.” He came over to the table with a couple of plates of grilled skirt steak and tortillas. “Carne asada?”
Trudy took a plate. “Thanks, Jack.” She glanced to the chimp joker. “So you go by Cheetah?”
“Yeah,” he said, “never liked my nat name, so I ain’t telling no one.”
“Except payroll,” said Jack, taking a bite of the carne asada sandwich he’d made with a tortilla.
Cheetah laughed, asking Trudy, “So who are you? Do we finally get a Jane?”
“If I play my cards right,” Trudy told him. “Right now, I’m just script girl.”
Cheetah glanced from her to Jack and grinned like a mad chimp. “What’s the script? I haven’t seen any pages yet.”
“Does it matter?” Jack asked. “Your lines are just saying, ‘Ook’ a lot.”
“Hey, I wanna find my motivation…”
Trudy took pity on him. “We’re going to be shooting out of order anyway. The first couple of episodes need tigers and elephants, and they’re not here yet, so we’re skipping to episodes four and five. It’s a two-parter titled ‘The Blue Stone of Heaven,’ loosely based on Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar—” Trudy got out the script, laying it on the table. “—and yes, the John Wayne pic’s ripping Burroughs off, so we’re ripping them right back. But instead of looking for rubies and emeralds in the Lost City of Ophir like Wayne and Loren, Tarzan’s going to the City of Death and the jewel’s a sapphire.”
“Like Queen Azura’s from Flash Gordon?”
“Pretty much the same prop,” Trudy admitted, taking it out of her blouse. It was as big as the Daria-i-Noor, the “sea of light,” once part of the Great Table diamond—a jewel Trudy would have loved to get her hands on—but instead of the priceless pink diamond, it was flashy but cheap blue quartz. “I don’t know where wardrobe found this, but it’s very nice.” It also nicely hid Carlota and Maximilian’s diamonds and Max’s emerald, which Trudy was wearing underneath, inside her blouse, trusting the maids here less than back at the Garden of Allah. As for the dozen diamond buttons and Hetty Green’s other treasures, she’d teleported them behind the lining of her purse.
Cheetah reached out with his long chimp arms and touched the script covetously. “Is this for me?”
“That’s Jack’s copy,” Trudy told him, and he flinched back with an apologetic chimp grin for the big ace. “I’ve got your pages here.” She reached into the leather map case she’d grabbed from wardrobe and took out a thinner sheaf.
“Thanks,” said Cheetah, taking them.
Trudy let the other actors get over their fear of joker cooties long enough to come over and snatch their pages. She found it frankly ridiculous. She’d seen the horror of what the virus could do before Wild Card Day, and on it, too, and while there was always a chance of a new cache of spores surfacing somewhere, there wasn’t much possibility outside of Manhattan.
But these were actors, not botanists, archaeologists, or African colonels, no matter what they looked like or were costumed as. Dr. Tod’s gang, despite their many other failings, had been made of sterner stuff.
They finished their late lunch, then Jack smiled down at her. “Care to go see the town?”
“I’d thought you’d never ask.”
They took a jeep, rumbling over the tracks of the private railway spur John Wayne had installed directly to his ranch. Trudy noted with interest the new railway switch and the spot where it joined up with the older tracks, which looked a century old. She wondered if the elephants and tigers would be brought in by train, like the circus coming to town, and wondered which direction they’d be coming from.
Jack drove the jeep with all the skill of a man who’d done army service, and Trudy took in the rest of the sights. The sky was a pure sort of blue she’d never seen in New York and a match for the Blue Stone of Heaven prop she wore around her neck. The vistas were both spare and majestic, the Mexican brushland being a reasonable replacement for the African veldt, or for that matter the Wild West, as Jack drove them through an Old West town that looked like the set from half a dozen westerns and probably was. Then he rounded a corner and the Old West became an African village, the set designers having done a remarkable job of reproducing the look of Africa, or at least the look of Brazil shot for Africa from last season’s Tarzan.
Then they rounded the next corner and Trudy spied what could only be the City of Death, or at least a façade of grand African gates, like the entrance to King Solomon’s Mines. “Well, that’s impressive,” she remarked.
“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “Doesn’t get old.” He stopped the jeep and stood up, shining in the light of sunset and just a little bit of his own, looking like a young god—a young god with a particularly nice ass. Trudy reached up and pinched it, watching the golden light sparkle around her fingers, then while Jack was distracted, teleported the key from the ignition to her other hand, slipping it into her pocket. “Sorry,” she said, “I just couldn’t resist.” She smiled at her secret double entendre, since it applied to both pinching his ass and the key, and having him search for the latter would provide cover for any small props she might want to appropriate from the faux City of Death. Dr. Tod had taught her to think ahead. “Can we look around?”
“Of course.” Jack hopped out of the jeep, then, as she expected, glanced at the empty ignition, then to her. Trudy responded with a blank expression and did the math herself. A forward woman always just slightly unnerved even the most cocksure man, so since Jack didn’t know about her ace, the simple math was that he must have slipped the keys in his own pocket after turning the jeep off, then forgot about it when she’d pinched his ass.
He was enough of a gentleman to come around to her side of the jeep, and enough of a cad that, rather than opening the door, he lifted her out of it, his aura glowing as he did while he smiled. It didn’t seem a threat so much as being forward himself, since as he set her down, his hands gently brushed her breasts. “You can’t resist either, Mr. Braun.”
“I could,” he confessed. “I just decided not to.”
It was a romantic moment, made less romantic by a voice calling, “Señor Braun!”
Trudy turned. A middle-aged Mexican man with an unusually lush mustache and an immaculate but sensible light linen suit walked up the street toward them, looking especially out of place against the gates of the City of Death.
Jack looked as mystified as Trudy was. “Hello?” he asked. “I’m sorry, I’m not certain we’ve met.”
“My apologies.” The man laughed. “You are unmistakable, but we have been in contact, after a fashion.” The man’s English was good, which Trudy was grateful for. “I am Tiburcio Aguilar, the landowner here. Your NBC leased these lots to build your African village and your…Xibalba?” He lapsed into Spanish or some other language at the end, looking at the grand gates ornamented with African-style skulls and devil masks.
“The City of Death,” Trudy supplied. “La Ciudad de los Muertos.”
“Ah, you speak Spanish!”
“Un poquito,” Trudy said. “Mostly what I picked up at Puerto Rican bodegas.” While shoplifting and practicing with her ace ten years ago, though Trudy didn’t add that. She saw a telltale bulge under the linen of the landowner’s coat and knew he was packing heat, and a certain woman’s intuition that came from experience rather than the wild card made her suspect that Señor Aguilar, Mr. Eagle, likely made his dinero from less legal operations on the days when Hollywood wasn’t dumping a dump truck of money on his doorstep for property leases.
“Well then, we shall speak English,” he said. “Welcome to Chupaderos!” He smiled at her especially.
Trudy knew she was pretty enough to be an actress, so defused the obvious question. “Trudy,” she told him, “not Jane—yet—just script girl and Tarzan’s personal secretary.” She winked at Jack.
Aguilar looked askance toward the City of Death, so Jack told him, “The gates to the Lost City. Tarzan’s going to find the Blue Stone of Heaven.” He gestured to Trudy and she held up the prop pendant.
“Ah, a treasure hunt! There are many treasures in Durango, both found and lost. Durango is known for its silver mines, and gold as well.”
“Any with a waterfall?” Trudy inquired.
“Ah, then you know the legend?”
“Legend?” Jack looked puzzled. “No, it’s just one of the locations in the script. Trudy helped doctor it. She had some really great ideas the writers were able to incorporate.”
“The legend of Maximilian’s treasure,” Aguilar explained, prompting Jack to give Trudy a quizzical look. “Before Benito Juárez executed Emperor Maximilian, the European interloper packed forty-five barrels with gold and jewels plundered from Mexico, which he sent with Austrian soldiers up past the Rio Grande. But after they hired some former Confederate soldiers and were double-crossed, then suffered a Comanche attack, all that loot ended up lost, buried somewhere in Texas. Supposedly one survivor left a treasure map before he died, but it is yet to be found.” He stroked his lavish mustache sagaciously. “Señor Wayne is thinking about making a movie about it.”
“That does sound like Wayne’s sort of story,” Jack agreed, still eyeing Trudy.
“But that is only half the story!” Aguilar exclaimed. “Durango is far richer in silver than it is in gold, so Maximilian’s loyalists left all the silver behind, four hundred barrels, secreted, they say, in a cave or an old mine shaft, sealed by dynamite, along with Carlota’s choicest jewels, including her crown. Treasure hunters have been searching these hills for years. But the location was buried along with Maximilian’s loyalists, who took the secret to their grave.”
Trudy readjusted her purse, the dozen diamond buttons lumpy in the lining, along with the sheaf of notes from Hetty Green, who in 1900 had paid a couple of Maximilian’s old loyalists for them, as well as the ciphered map to the location of the treasure. However, unlocking the cipher required not just the diamond buttons from Maximilian’s coat, but also Carlota’s pendant and Maximilian’s rings.
Unfortunately, both the diamond and the emerald had been reset by Cartier and the old settings melted down before Trudy acquired the gems, making the key incomplete. “Do you have any idea where it is?” Trudy asked.
Aguilar gestured expansively. “Ah, señorita, if I knew that, I would be a far richer man than I already am. The state is riddled with old mine shafts, the countryside is overflowing with waterfalls, and treasure legends go back to the days of the Aztecs; Maximilian’s is only the most recent. Besides which, Maximilian’s loyalists only planned to retrieve his treasure after the French had retaken Mexico and reinstalled Carlota as empress, which they never did. Even if one knew where it was, one would need mining equipment to excavate the tunnel.”
Mining equipment, or the right ace power. Trudy could teleport things, including rocks, but she liked to stick to small ones, like gemstones. Big items tended to make her feel sick. But Jack Braun could lift a tank, so she was certain he could toss around a few pesky boulders.
“Not that folk haven’t looked,” Aguilar continued. “There are countless mine shafts, as I said, going back to the days of the Aztecs, and many that were played out or collapsed on their own. The only difference is, the one with Maximilian’s treasure, if it exists, was collapsed almost a hundred years ago.”
Ninety years, to be precise. Trudy had made careful study of Hetty Green’s notes, which were meticulous, as was to be expected of the famous miser and female finance wizard. Maximilian of Mexico had died on June 19, 1867, and his loyalists had tried to smuggle some of his loot and hide the rest shortly thereafter. “What a pity,” Trudy said with a sigh, “I am so fond of gems.” She held the faux Blue Stone of Heaven fondly while touching Maximilian’s rings and Carlota’s pendant behind it. “I’d love to have Carlota’s crown.” She smiled coquettishly at Jack. “Four hundred barrels of silver would be nice, too.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t they,” Jack agreed. Given the terms of his divorce, Trudy knew exactly what he’d be using them for, or at least a large chunk of them…assuming the treasure fell into his hands.
“But lost treasures aside,” Trudy said lightly, “do you know of any good caves or mine shafts where we could film, especially near a waterfall? As Jack said, we’re looking for sites for the script. Production found a few already, but it’s always nice to have other options.”
“That it is,” Aguilar agreed, “but I would advise you not to go poking around in most of the mine shafts here. They are very old and the true City of Death.” He paused while she smiled, then he conceded, “But I can give you a list of the safer ones that are already closed off. The waterfalls as well.”
“Editing can put the best waterfall together with the best cave,” Jack pointed out.
“Of course,” Trudy agreed.
“Would you like to come to my hacienda?” Aguilar pointed far up the road to an old Spanish Colonial–style dwelling, surrounded by the weeping branches of pepper trees—an original, of which the bungalows at the Garden of Allah were but a pale imitation.
“Sure,” Jack said. “Can we offer you a ride?” He reached for his back pocket, ...
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