The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (32 page)

She squeezed my shoulder. “It’s not your fault you were born American.”

The niece bustled in with an ornate silver tray. On it she carried a full bottle of Ribena, empty glasses, a pitcher of water and a plate of cookies. She poured a finger of Ribena into each glass, and topped the glasses with water. We stopped talking, and there was a prolonged silence.

She looked up, realized we were all watching her. Her face went red. She clutched her skirt and ran from the room. Fritz grunted, shook a liver-spotted fist at the table.

“Goddamn diabetes,” he grumbled to no one in particular.

The cookies were ginger snaps, crunchy and buttery, pungent with spice. When was the last time I’d eaten? A couple days without coke and my appetite returned. I stuffed another in my mouth.

“You know about the war then, do you?” Fritz boomed, driving the tip of his cane into the paisley swirls of the Turkish carpet.

Victor bowed his head. “They know all about Pitt’s CIA connection. The American plot.”

“Well I’m sorry they had to know the truth.”

Aurora was crying. She held a half-empty glass of Ribena in her hand.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, squeezed her bicep.

“It tastes like home,” she whispered. She looked at me, lips parted, stained red. “It tastes like Sven.”

I took her glass and put it on the table. I drew her head to my shoulder.

Fritz returned to his chair with the air of King Solomon deciding the fate of the world. “You must leave,” he said. “At once. Go to Paraguay, my advice. We can smuggle you there if you like.”

“What?” Aurora’s head jerked up.

“Paraguay?” I said. “What the hell’s in Paraguay?”

Fritz stroked his long white whiskers. “The war cannot be stopped. The CIA wants you dead. What would you have me do? Send you to your deaths?”

“Well,” I said. “If the CIA wants us dead, they can kill us just as easy in Paraguay as they can here in Bolivia.”

Fritz rested his chin on the handle of his cane. “Young man, do you have the faintest idea what you’re up against?”

“What’s the worst they can do?” I said. I put down my empty glass and stuffed another handful of ginger snaps in my mouth. “Kill me? Go ahead. Let them. But not,” —and here I slashed the air with a half-eaten ginger cookie— “not before I take some of the bastards with me first.”

The old man cackled, the delight of a witch discovering a particularly rare form of newt. The cackle disintegrated into another long, wheezing cough. “You’ve got an immovable object here, Victor.”

Aurora nuzzled my throat, her hot breath panting against my skin. “Can’t we just stop the war?” she mumbled into my shirt collar. “I really don’t want to kill anybody.”

“Maybe I don’t want to either,” I whispered. And realized that I meant it.

Victor sat next to Fritz. “It could work.”

Fritz grunted. “Suicide mission.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Are they the ones to do it, though?”

“Who else is there?”

“Enough talk,” I said. “We want a jeep. Victor says you’ve got one.
Vamonos ya.”

Fritz coughed again, a long, hacking bark that went on and on, as though he were struggling to expel something lodged deep within his lungs. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his lips. Blood stained the fabric. When the fit subsided he sat back in his chair, his face whiter than before. He lifted a bony hand and pointed at the wall.

“Where are my sons now?” he challenged me, a teacher interrogating a precocious student.

The wall was covered in black-and-white photographs. Bearded men wearing lederhosen held skis, posed in front of a simple wooden chalet. Jagged mountains punctured the sky between them. A ski lift rose high above the mountain mist. A more recent color photo showed Fritz with his arm around two younger men. Both had European features, but the brown skin of Bolivia.

I looked around the room. The five members of our welcoming committee looked away. The resemblance was unmistakable.

“Well, Fritz,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to your sons. I gather something bad.”

“Something bad, bullshit,” he said. “They died, that’s what.”

He put an inhaler to his lips, took a sharp breath, pumped the medicine into his lungs.

Victor lifted his eyes meaningfully at the ceiling. “World’s highest ski lift.”

“Highest ski
resort,”
Fritz retorted. He thumped his cane on the floor. “And a bloody good resort it was, too.”

“OK,” I said, stuffing more cookies in my mouth. “I’ll bite. What happened?”

“Global warming happened.” The leader of the grandsons spoke. He blew a gum bubble, popped it with a crack of his teeth.

“How’s that?”

“Why you think we’re here and not there?”

I shrugged. “Not the season for snow?”

“It is always the season for snow at five thousand meters, young man.” Fritz was agitated now, grinding and pounding his cane into the rug. “Unless the fucking glacier melts, that is.”

“Which it did,” I offered.

“Little by little.” His great eyebrows bowed low. “Then one day,
woompf!”

“Avalanche,” said the bubble-gum-popping grandson.

“What do you expect?” Fritz continued. “We must all suffer so fat Americans can drive SUVs.”

I swallowed my ginger snaps. I felt vaguely ill. “Speaking of SUVs,” I said.

Fritz nodded. Snot dribbled down his long mustache onto the handle of his cane. He said to Victor, “What say you, old friend?”

Victor crossed his arms, tucked his chin to his chest. “Likely to be a useless errand. But under the circumstances, I don’t see how it can hurt.”

“We can pay you,” I said. “Victor has money. Right, Vic?” I clapped him on the back. Victor looked at me sideways, horrified at the familiarity.

“No, no money.” Fritz squinted at his offspring. “Manuel?”

“Abuelo?”
The leader of the grandsons stood. He cracked his gum. It formed a bulge in his right cheek.

“Show them where the jeep is. Make sure the water and gas containers are full.”

Manuel held his shotgun loosely in his hand.
“Abuelo.
Please.” His voice held in check the frustration of the parents of a two-year-old.

“Not in front of the guests,” Fritz said.

“Is that what they are?” Manuel looked at us, our dirty clothes, our unwashed faces, Victor’s swollen eyes. My broken nose. “We give away the jeep, what are we going to use?”

“To what, hump your girlfriends in the back?” Fritz said. “Get a fucking room, kid.”

“For these religious crazies?” Manuel stood over Victor, towering above the much shorter man. “This is the second jeep in two days.”

“Who took the first jeep?” I asked.

“Kate and the monks who escaped,” Victor said.

“Kate was
here?”
I asked. I looked around me. “In this very room?”

Manuel looked about to explode. “Who is this man, anyway?”

“I told you,” Fritz said, and there was a pause while he coughed again. “Met him at the ashram.”

“The ashram.” Manuel nodded. He went to his grandfather, put a hand on his shoulder.
“Abuelo,
you are a Catholic. We are all Catholics here. Not Buddhists.”

Fritz straightened, or tried to. He glared at Manuel. “You are young. Prepare for life. Let me prepare for death.”

“And what is all this talk of wars?” Manuel insisted. “The CIA,” he sneered. He gestured at us. “Crazy people. Crazy talk.”

“Enough!” Fritz lifted the cane and struck his grandson on the upper arm. “I am not asking you. I am telling you. Give them the jeep.”

Manuel sighed. He bowed his head. “Alright,
abuelo.
It will be as you say.” He tucked the shotgun under his poncho, went out into the chill afternoon.

Fritz said to us, “I apologize for my grandson’s rudeness. You will need supplies as well, no?”

I drained my third glass of Ribena. I blinked, alarmed at the heights of my sugar rush. I was going to crash, and soon. My addictions were forgotten. My body craved nutrition. “Could use some real food,” I said. “Haven’t eaten since dinner, day before yesterday.”

“Well why didn’t you say so?” Fritz said. “Helena!”

The cute half-breed niece poked a nose around the door, one eye visible.
“Sí, tío?”

“Dinner for our friends. Empty the larder.”

I checked my watch. “Can you chuck it in a basket for us? We can eat in the jeep.”

Victor pinched his lower lip. “Why don’t we eat here, with friends? An hour rest will do us good. We can still get there in plenty of time.”

“You’re assuming the CIA haven’t changed their schedule,” I said.

“In which case they’ve already blown it up,” Victor said. “Besides, we don’t want to get there too early. Otherwise they might catch us before we can record the event.”

The door banged shut behind the niece, the hem of her skirt swirling against the door frame.

Fritz held a finger high. “Let no one say I don’t know how to welcome guests.”

Fritz’s hospitality was duly confirmed. The table was piled high. We ate like the hungry revolutionaries we were. Soup, roast beef, fried plantain, rice, German bread, a heroic attempt at a green salad, homemade pickled cucumbers, ice cream and a three-layer Bavarian raspberry-chocolate torte that just happened to be in the refrigerator.

It was late in the afternoon when we finished. The sun crept in sideways through the windows. Manuel returned with the jeep. He laid the keys next to my empty plate. I checked my watch. It was later than I thought. I pushed myself from the table, finally sated. Picked up the keys, twirled them on my finger.

“Shall we?”

“Nonsense,” Fritz said, still meditating over the same lettuce leaf he’d shredded on his plate when he first sat down. “Dusk is come. We have beds here you may use.”

“Yes,” Manuel said, stooping in a mock bow. “Do stay the night.”

“Hello,” I said. “How much time we got left? Less than twenty-four hours. So let’s hit the road. Ready, toots?” I wiggled my eyebrows at Aurora, and for the first time I heard her laugh, a satisfied, contented giggle that ended abruptly.

“It’s a fourteen-hour journey,” Victor said. “And there are dangers traveling the salt flats at night. We could nap for an hour or two. Better to be well-rested, don’t you think?”

“Be my guest,” I said. “Or rather, be Fritz’s guest.” I stood. “Remind me, when does the bomb go off?”

Victor looked at his watch. “11:37 tomorrow morning.”

At that moment, all the clocks in the room struck six. I held out my hands, let them drop. “That’s cutting things way too close. I say we go now.”

“Let me take a shower first, if I may,” Victor said, and looked at Fritz, who lowered his regal head with the finality of judgment.

“Sho’ ’nuff,” I said. “But save your wanking till later, get me?”

Despite their open hostility, the grandsons grinned at each other. Helena blushed and looked down at her half-eaten cake.

“Can I, too?” Aurora asked.

“What, wank?”

“No, shower. Nong.”

“For crying out loud.”

“I’ll be quick,” Victor said, and went off in search of a clean towel.

“We’re on a deadline to stop a war and you want to take a shower?” I said. “This is important.”

Aurora sniffed my neck loudly. “So is being clean.” She turned to go.

“Yeah, well.” I slapped her on the ass. She delayed her public outrage long enough to show me she didn’t mind.

“I stink,” I said. “No amount of soap can change that fact.”

We were loading the jeep when Manuel caught me by the elbow, drew me aside. “You know what you’re getting yourself into?”

“Not a fucking clue,” I said.

He jabbed a gun into my ribs. The thin equatorial twilight cut his face into dark shards. His whisper was hot on my cheek.

“Grandfather has Alzheimer’s,” he said.

I shook my arm free. “Is that all?”

He grabbed my ear and lifted. “No,” he said. “You bring me back this jeep. Not a scratch. Or I come looking for you. Hear?”

He pressed the gun into my hands. The barrel was enormous. It was a flare gun. He pulled harder on my ear, and I lifted myself on tiptoe.

“I said, ‘hear?’”

“I hear you,” I said. “Message clear. Understood. Absolutely crystal. Fuck! Goddammit. Thank you.”

Twenty-Three

The jeep crunched across the salt flats. We drove without headlights. The full moon reflected off the crystallized former lake bed. Isla de los Pescadores rose on the horizon, a deformity on the otherwise flat surface.

It had been a long night of driving. We’d left La Paz after dinner and made it to Oruro before midnight. Around four in the morning we sped through the outpost of Uyuni, heading our way southwest into the heart of the Salar. We were ahead of schedule. At this rate, we could expect to reach the mine just after dawn. Plenty of time to poke around, see what there was to see. Record the bombing when it happened.

We stopped every few hours to take a leak, our urine rising hot on the night-frozen salt. It was cold in the jeep, and I had no gloves. Victor and I took turns driving, and each time we stopped to swap seats, I had to pry my fingers from the steering wheel.

Staring at the night sky, at the dome of the heavens ancient and haunting, I was reminded of my smallness, the pointlessness of all existence. And as the urine dribbled from my body, my dick in my cold fingers, I thought of Pitt. Those empty eye sockets, the skin crumpling and flaking under my fingers, his flesh cooked to a soggy medium rare.

Pitt is dead. It sinks in now. He’s gone. He isn’t coming back.
Aurora understood that, I realized.
Nothing I can do, no revenge, will bring him back to life.

“No woman will ever understand you the way another man will,” Pitt said.

We were sitting on the beach, watching the sun set, beers in hand, a chaste distance between us. In Huanchaco, the night before the blackmail. Before the rope. Before everything between us changed.

“To friendship,” I said, holding out my can of
Cusqueña.

We clinked our beers and drained them. Sighed at the same time, and exchanged glances of shared happiness. Together we leaned back in the sand. Across the waters of the Pacific Ocean, a ball of fire ninety-three million miles away said goodnight. Or was it goodbye?