The Moche Warrior by Lyn Hamilton Page A

had been chosen for the stucco, the color peeling under the hot sun. This building was pale aqua. I gave her the coin, as instructed, and after looking at both it and me very carefully, she led me up three flights of stairs, pulling her bent figure up each step, leaning heavily on the railing.
    The room was small but adequate: a small bed, a desk and chair with one tiny lamp, a ceiling fan. The shutters were pulled against the heat of the day. There was a shower, for which I was grateful. The old lady did not speak to me, whether because she could not or would not, I do not know. But she saw to my comfort. A tray of food arrived regularly: fresh warm tortillas, always, and eggs or
sopa,
and cheese, sometimes a little wine or beer.
    At night, before the little lamp was turned on, she pulled heavy dark curtains across in front of the shutters. No one was to know I was there. After I turned out the light, I opened the curtains and lay on the bed, watching through the cracks in the shutter, a soft pink glow which I think must have come from the neon sign of a cantina, because I heard music and voices and the clatter of dishes until very late at night.
    The days and nights blurred together, the days known by the sunlight against the shutter, the night by the pink neon. Mainly I slept, exhausted, feeling safe for the first time in days, confident that neither the police nor the Spider would find me there. Sometimes I dreamt, though, and the horrible pictures of Edmund Edwards and Lizard hovered on the edges of my sleep.
    Sometimes my dreams were of an arid desert, where bleached skeletons and blackened brush dotted the landscape, where no living thing could be seen.
    On the second day a man came to see me. He told me to sit on the edge of the bed, and pulled the desk and the chair up to me, so that he could sit across from me. He turned the little lamp on my face and looked at me very carefully, turning my head one way and the other. He asked me to stand up and walk around. Then he got up and left, as suddenly and silently as he’d arrived.
    He was back again the next night with another, a hunched over old man, a serape and hat making him indistinguishable, who stood out of the light in a corner. The first man pulled up the desk and chair as usual, but then took my handbag and emptied it onto the desk in front of us.
    He went through everything in my purse, everything. He took my wallet and emptied it. He took the U.S. money and carefully divided it into two piles, putting half back on my side of the table and half in his pocket. “Credit cards,” he said, and cut them up one at a time. “Passport,” he said, then, “driver’s license.” These he didn’t cut up, but tucked them away carefully in his pocket.
    On the fourth night, the man arrived with his companion once again, but this time I knew who it was and smiled into the darkness in the corner. The first man handed me a package of hair color, and gestured for me to go into the bathroom and use it. In a few minutes my strawberry blond hair was brown. I stared at a stranger in the mirror.
    He handed me a U.S. passport, and the picture in it looked more or less like the stranger in the mirror.
    I had a driver’s license, Kansas, and the exit part of a Mexican tourist card already filled in. I also had a wallet bulging with money I didn’t recognize, Peruvian soles. And no credit cards.
    Suddenly the man in the corner threw off his poncho. It was Lucas. “I have a message for you from a friend of yours, the policeman. Not a bad fellow really, for a policeman.” He looked at me.
    “He says that should I be speaking to you—I said I would be surprised if I did—I should tell you that you should come home. That he will do his best to straighten everything out. He also says to tell you Alex will be all right.
    “We could get you home too, you know. Send you north rather than south.”
    “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve come this far, and I think I’ll see it