Book 1: Revelation at Tikal — Ch 30: Question Mark

Chapter 32: "Question Mark" One day to the hearing. The passport in Cutty's shirt pocket says he owns a motorcycle. He sold the BMW two days ago to a Panama cop to buy three seats home, but the customs men at the border wrote the bike into his passport in ink, and nobody has cleared it. The only flight north that week leaves Tocumen at ten o'clock. Floey's competency hearing in Los Angeles is at nine the next morning. There is no second plane. All Sergeant Herrera will promise is that his cousin will come "before your plane departs," and in Panama, that counts as a time. The boarding line moves. An American kid with a guitar gets sent to the bench and doesn't come back. Cutty sends Paula and Floey on ahead, and counts the people between himself and the man with the stamp. Once they're in the air, Paula finally opens the Time magazine she bought at the airport newsstand. On page twenty-two, Reverend Zeek Kestrel is shaking President Carter's hand in the Oval Office, having told him what American money was doing in the Guatemalan highlands. On the next page is Floey, barefoot on a scaffold, painting the Popol Vuh. Then comes Los Angeles at dawn, a newspaper ad for a mimosa-morning sale of "the final works" of a woman everyone believes is dead, and a gallery on La Cienega full of collectors bidding on her paintings. Floey walks in the front door with a tube of alizarin crimson. In this episode: - A passport that could keep Cutty in Panama, a cousin who may not come, and a boarding line that keeps getting shorter. - Seat-to-seat on a midnight milk run through Mexico City: the preacher, the President, and the translation of "tacit support." - "That's your good side." Floey sees her Quiché mural in Time. - "Tahoe's a lake, Cutty." - A crowded gallery, one red brushstroke through a fake death date, and a question mark painted in front of everyone. - The Kuna molas, a phone call to Carl, and a cab race downtown to the courthouse on Hill Street. A line to carry out: "Carl," she said. "It's Florence." This is the final chapter of "Revelation at Tikal," Book One of the Further Adventures of Cutty Braughn. Cutty's story continues in "The Last of the Goletas," the second novel in the trilogy.