Epilogue:
Merida, Yucatan
A man's mind, stretched by new ideas, can
never go back to its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Palmer was hammering together a wooden crate on the porch of his hacienda when the mailman blew his whistle. "Tweet, Daddy! Tweet!" squealed Lethe, rounding the corner of the house as fast as her baggy diapers would allow. Her Babar the Elephant shirt was smeared with mud, and, judging from the dirty tablespoon she was waving, she'd been digging up the back patio again.
"Whoa, droopy drawers!" Palmer laughed, catching the toddler in his outstretched arms, flipping her upside down. Lethe giggled and wriggled in his grip like a puppy. Not bad for a nine-month-old. "You know you're not supposed to go near the road!"
Palmer deposited the child in the macrame hammock he kept strung on the porch and trotted down to the mailbox at the foot of the hill. He made a mental note to take the Land Rover into the city and buy some fencing material. Lethe was advanced for her age, but he still had problems with her wanting to run out onto the road every time the mailman made his rounds. Lethe loved getting mail.
A dark, ragged form emerged from the hacienda and joined Lethe in the hammock. The little girl's giggles were soon joined by peals of crystal chimes and the yammering of dolphins.
Palmer sorted through the letters as he walked back up the path to the house . Two were from boutiques in California and New York, ordering three more crates apiece of Day of the Dead tableaux, stuffed toad Mariachi bands and hand painted papier-mache carnival masks. There was also a package addressed to Lethe with a fistful of Asian stamps plastered across it and a postcard from Sonja.
"Look, honey! Aunt Boo sent you a present!" Palmer handed the package to Lethe, still curled in the seraph's lap. Within seconds, the porch was littered with tatters of brown paper and Lethe was playing with a rag doll dressed in a tiny blue cotton kimono, its dyed corn-silk hair pulled into an elaborate geisha's coiffure.
Palmer glanced at the front of the picture postcard - a panoramic view of downtown Tokyo at night - then flipped it over to read the message. There was no salutation or signature. There never were.
Still no sign of M. But I'm getting closer. The chimera is very excited. It smells its old master. The scar makes it harder for M to change identities. There are rumors of atrocities on the mainland - M? Hope to be home for Xmas. Miss you.
Palmer looked up from the card to find the seraph staring at him with its pupil-less golden eyes.
"No news, Fido. Same old things." The seraph nodded, although Palmer had his doubts as to how much the creature understood. "Lethe, sweetie, why don't you go play with Fido on the patio? I've got work to do."
Lethe nodded her tiny dark head, her golden eyes flashing in the afternoon light, and hopped out of the hammock, leading the grizzled seraph by the hand. Palmer smiled as the unlikely twosome, nut-brown nature-child and bedraggled street-person, disappeared around the corner of the house, Fido shambling after Lethe like a trained bear.
Even after all these months, Palmer still had a hard time accepting it all. A year ago he'd been looking a twenty-to-life sentence in the face. Now he was living the life of an expatriate yanqui, making a decent living selling Mexican and Central American folk art to painfully chic boutiques and galleries north of the border. He'd also discovered, to his surprise, he was a damn good father. Yeah, a lot of things can change in the space of a year, he mused, fingering his jade earring.
Lethe had reappeared a couple of weeks after he and Sonja had set up housekeeping in the Yucatan. One minute the patio had been empty, the next Lethe and the seraph were there. Although the baby was not yet a month old, she was already crawling and babbling.
When it became evident the seraph was not going to leave, Sonja decided it was time for her to continue on her hunt. Palmer knew the seraph made her nervous. It had taken him a few weeks to get used to the creature's presence himself. But after he started calling it Fido, he began to relax. Somehow "Fido" seemed an appropriate moniker.
Every so often Sonja would appear on the doorstep, unannounced but always welcome, loaded down with exotic toys for her "niece." Although she adored Lethe, Sonja could not tolerate being around Fido for more than a few days.
During her brief visits, she and Palmer lay curled together in the hammock and listened to the night birds call. In its own strange way, their relationship was idyllic.
The last time Sonja had come home she'd been amused to discover the ritual tattoo on Palmer's chest.
"What's this? Have you decided to go modern primitive on me?" She giggled, running her hands over the raised markings covering his pectorals.
"I - I decided to get a tattoo to hide the scar from my surgery."
"Really?"
"Kind of. Besides, it matches the scars you leave on my back."
She was silent for a few minutes. "Do you still have the dreams?"
"Sometimes. They've gotten stronger since the hand came back."
'The hand?"
"Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but a couple weeks ago something tapping at the window screen woke me up. At first I thought it might have been a bird. Then I saw it, squatting on the ledge outside the window. It was the hand Li Lijing gave you, scratching to be let in!"
"What'd you do?"
"I let it in."
"Weren't you scared?"
Palmer shrugged. "I've heard stories about dogs traveling cross-country to rejoin their families, so why not a six-fingered hand? Besides, it doesn't do anything except hide under the couch. My mom used to have a Chihuahua like that. And if I had to make a choice, I'd rather have an animated, amputated hand than a Chihuahua."
"Can't argue with you there. So what is this tattoo supposed to represent?"
"The old Mayan guy who did it says it used to be the seal of the Chan Balam, the Jaguar Lords."
However, he hadn't bothered to tell her that while his Spanish remained hopelessly retarded, he could now speak fluent Lancondoan, the tongue of the children of Quetzalcoatl, and that he'd stopped smoking his precious Shermans in favor of the burrito-sized hallucinogenic cigars favored by the Mayans. That had been three months ago. He wondered what she'd have to say about his earrings.
Palmer resumed his work on the packing crate, pausing every now and again to sip from a pitcher of lemonade. He noticed a campesino trudging his way along the unpaved road that ran past the house, headed in the direction of the paved highway three miles away where a rattle-trap bus carried locals into the city.
Palmer stiffened at the sight of the stooped, unwashed man dressed in the traditional loose-fitting white cotton pants and tunic, a machete hanging from his belt. He scanned the campesino, briefly sampling his thoughts and measuring his aura for traces of Pretender taint.
Luckily for the campesino, he was exactly what he looked like - a peasant on his way to town. He would live to ride the bus to Merida. Palmer allowed himself a sigh of relief. He disliked killing, even Pretenders. But he knew he could not allow his vigilance to slacken, even for a moment. For as every good parent knows, the jungle is full of jaguars hungry for the blood of children.