"Fools rush in, right?"
"My point precisely. But if Steve here means what he says, well, maybe there's a little room to negotiate. Maybe I could take you on a quick sightseeing trip. And just for laughs I could kind of inadvertently stray over the area I think you might find productive. Assuming we can locate it. But here're my terms. I do it and Steverino and me are square. Consider it a twenty-thousand-dollar cruise."
"Fine with me." Steve didn't even blink, and I loved him all over again, right on the spot. Though the truth was, I knew he'd never planned on seeing a penny of the money again anyway.
"And you think this place is Ninos del Mundo?" I was trying not to get my hopes up too much, but still . . .
Dupre lit his new cigarette. "You didn't hear this from me, okay? You heard it from the embassy or some other damned place. But that's one name for it. Another is 'Jungle Disneyland.' Actually, I think the local name is Baalum, the old Maya word for jaguar. But everybody acts like it's a state secret, so all you get are rumors."
"Well, assuming we find it, then how could I get in? I mean actually in." I was squinting at him, feeling my body tense. What was it Lou had said about a word he'd heard when they were taking Sarah? It sounded like "Babylon"? I also thought that was what she'd whispered to me. Could it be the word was actually Baalum? The gloomy morning skies abruptly flooded with the brilliant white light of hope. I glanced back at Steve, and our eyes locked for a long moment.
"Morgy, for chrissake, what are you saying?" Steve took my hand. "Don't you realize this is Guatemala? Don't even think about it."
"We're just talking now, okay?" I squeezed his hand then looked back at Dupre. "I was just wondering. Once we've found it, could I get a sneak look-see? Assuming I wanted to?"
"Well, I'll tell you one thing, Miss Morgan James." Dupre was fingering his new cigarette, oblivious to my reaction. "Give no serious thought to just driving up. The Army'd be all over your butt in the time it takes to cock an AK-47." He glanced up at the sky again, though now a dense bank of dark clouds had swallowed what remained of the sun. A pre-rain gloom was enveloping the park, which was starting to empty out, the hawkers and loiterers headed home to wait out the weather. "But if we do find it, then as long as we're there, I might be able to drop you off for a quick glance somehow, say, if we did it around twilight time . . . that is, if that's what you want. But it's ten minutes tops, and that's my final offer. Frankly, I think you'd be ill-advised in the extreme to do it, but . . . in any case, it's got to be a low-profile enterprise all the way. We screw this up and we could easily swell the ranks of the 'disappeared.' "
"But you think you could actually locate it?"