The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (8 page)

“Sun lamps,” I said.

He shrugged, took my hand. It was big but soft, a limp bit of juicy steak. “The only way to stay sane in this horrible city,” he said in Spanish.

I smiled. It felt weird. I couldn’t remember the last time my cheek muscles managed that distinctive upward pull. “We agree on something, then,” I said. “That’s a start.”

He waved a hand at a metal chair covered in rotting green leather. I sat. The springs ground into the base of my spine. I crossed my legs, pressed down on one side, enjoying the pain.

I thought of Sergio. That was fucked up. What he does? To see him in the nightclub. And now again this morning, up close, firsthand.

Until today my punishment made sense. The cigarettes. The burns. Everything. A sudden darkness squeezed my chest. Was all of this a big mistake?
Goddamn you, Pitt,
I thought.
For everything.

The man said, “You want to volunteer?”

“Either this or the Foreign Legion.” I shrugged. “Never did like sand.”

I looked around the room. Aside from their laptops and sun lamps, the place was bare. No posters, no pictures, not even a jar full of paper clips or a box of pencils. In the corner lay a bunch of picket signs, upside down. Stake handles resting against the wall, the poster board clean, unbent. Unused. I bent my neck sideways to read them. Echo moved to stand in front of them, but not before I got a good look at a few.

No War For Ore.

Stop Bat Guano II.

Fuck the US.

“Subtle,” I said.

“How did you find out about us, Horace?” The shrunken head smiled, his eyes narrow.

“Friend of mine,” I said. “Met him in a bar. The Rat’s Nest, in Barranco. You know it?”

They nodded in unison, arms folded across their chests, but said nothing.

“Tell me about the bat guano,” I said. “What does that mean? Second helpings of bat shit?”

The Bavarian’s frizzy orange hair exploded, as though struck by lightning. “It’s about imperialist fascist pigs raping Bolivia, stealing their land. It’s about—”

A thick hand cut her off in mid-sentence. The man said, “The name of your friend, Horace.”

I pulled out the business card, extended it between two fingers. “Sho’ ’nuff,” I said. “Name was Pitt.”

They looked at the card. They looked at each other. The Bavarian fiddled with her bra strap. “Pitt?”

“Have a last name?”

I let my arm fall. “Watters,” I said. “Pitt Watters.”

Shrunken head flicked his ponytail in one hand, eyed the gaping hole in my sweater. “Are you sure it was us he mentioned?”

“Positive. Ambassador’s son is a stickler for details. Like father, like son.”

The man stood. He held out his hand. “I would remember the American ambassador’s son.”

“Or maybe you know my ex-fiancée,” I said, ignoring the hand. “Katherine? Goes by Kate? Would have volunteered about nine months ago.”

They both shuffled their feet. Echo let out a fart, blushed. “There are many people with that name,” she said. “It is a common name. Now if you please?”

I made a show of looking past her at the picket signs. “No War For Ore,” I said. “This got something to do with Ovejo? The lithium, perhaps?”

Ovejo was the socialist president of Bolivia. Pitt had mentioned him once over beers and whores. The Bolivian government was demanding more money for the mining concession, threatening to nationalize the mine if their demands were not met.

“We are busy right now,” Echo said. She massaged her belly, and I realized she wasn’t fat, or at any rate not just fat: she was pregnant. “Call next time. Before you come. Maybe then we talk some more. Yes?”

I climbed out of the chair, my face wrinkling with kindness, tears coming to my eyes as the spring left contact with my spine. “We must think of the unborn,” I said. “What future are we leaving for our children?”

“Of course.” Still the man’s hand hovered in midair, an insistent dismissal.

“You got a brochure or something?” I said. “The Legion doesn’t want me I’ll try again with you.”

A glossy trifold brochure attacked my chest. I folded it and stuffed it down the front of my pants.

“I never caught your name,” I said, and took his hand.

“No,” he said. “You didn’t.”

He released me, but I held his hand tight.

“I never said he was American.”

“Who’s that?”

“The ambassador’s son.”

I sashayed out on the landing. The door closed behind me. I went down the stairs, letting my feet fall heavy on the steps, noting the noise each made. At the bottom, I opened the door and lit a cigarette. I took a puff, threw the cigarette into the gutter. I slipped back inside as the door clicked shut.

I didn’t move. I listened. Silence. I slid out of my flip-flops. Still nothing. I picked them up in one hand, and tiptoed up the stairs, skipping the creaky ones.

Voices raised inside the office. I pressed my ear to the door, careful to stand below the peephole. They argued in Spanish.

“I tell you, he knows!” The man’s voice was hysterical.

“He knows nothing.”

“He tries to stop us, what we’re doing—”

“Gaia will never allow it—”

“—helps those who help themselves.”

My eavesdropping was interrupted by a tap on the glass below. I looked down the stairs. Some kid. Wait
—Paco?
Of all people. He waved. I put my finger to my lips, shook my head.

“What if we’re wrong? What if—”

“What if, what if, what if.” The woman’s voice was condescending, scornful. “We do her will. Have faith. We shall join her soon. All of us.”

Paco tried the locked door, rattled the handle. I slashed my arms sideways, an umpire denying the winning touchdown.

“Check the video.”

Footsteps came closer to the door. “Waving at the camera. Some homeless.”

The woman snorted. “Doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

I jammed my feet back into my flip-flops. Jumped, grabbed the video camera and ripped it from the wall. Couldn’t have them knowing I had eavesdropped. Plaster showered on the landing. I spiked the camera, claimed my six points and threw myself down the stairs three at a time. I was in the street before I heard the upstairs door open.

I sprinted along the crowded sidewalk, crashing through groups of Brits in zip travel pants, the kind of tourists who thought slumming in Lima made them worldly adventurers. Behind me, a frenzy of pocket patting and slapping, and I knew Paco’s magic hands were at work, even as he ran.

We didn’t stop until we got to the sea. We ran the length of Avenida Larco, dashed down the stairs into Larco Mar, the cliff-side shopping mall for tourists and Lima’s pathetically
petite bourgeoisie.
I slowed to a walk, hopped the escalator downstairs to the cinema. I bought two tickets to a Hollywood blockbuster whose poster of an overpaid movie actor holding a gun promised boredom. I handed a ticket to Paco. Together we entered the darkened theater.

The movie was already halfway along. A faked explosion filled the screen. Cars squealed. I yawned. Paco pulled wallets from his various pockets, siphoned the cash and dropped the remainder on the sticky floor.

“What’s going on, Paco?”

He grinned. “I could also ask you that.” His teeth gleamed white in the dark theater.

“Why were you following me?”

“Shh!” A gringo tourist in a blue denim shirt turned around, finger to his lips.

Paco lowered his voice. “They pay me. That is why I want talk to you,
amigo.”

“They
are
paying you. You want
to
talk to me. Fine. Who? Why?”

“Tell them where you go. What you do. They pay in dollars. Much money.”

“A
lot
of money.”

He nodded, peering skyward at a pair of twenty-foot-tall, surgically crafted Hollywood breasts. “A lot.”

A piece of popcorn missed my face by inches. “Hey asshole, shut up already.”

“What do they look like?” I asked.

“A gringo.” Paco shifted in his seat. “You know.
Rubio.”

“We all look alike.” I sighed.
Rubio
literally meant “blond.” But in practice it meant anyone with hair that wasn’t Latino black. My dark brown hair was, to Paco,
rubio.

“Since when?” I asked him.

“Last week.”

“When you meeting next?”

Paco grinned. “You mean, ‘when
are
you meeting next,’ right,
profesor?”

A fat blob of an American stood, blocking the screen. He slobbered down at me, his words slurred by the quantity of fat dangling from his chin. “Some of us are on vacation.”

I pulled a switchblade from my pocket. I flicked open the knife one-handed, stabbed him in the nipple. “Well I’m not.”

Out in the midday gloom of Lima, we hurled ourselves into a passing bus.

“Where to next, boss?”

“Home. Tag along?”

“You do not mind?”

I ruffled his hair and sighed. “I’ll let you know when I do.”

Volcanic Volunteers’ trifold brochure contained no more information than I expected. Pictures of happy brown children frolicking next to high-altitude mud-brick houses, vistas of the Andes in the background. Promises of personal fulfillment for the foreign volunteer, all for the low, low price of just two thousand dollars per week.

A picture of a lake filled the middle inside third of the trifold. I stared at it. I knew that lake. Knew it too well. The island in the distance, too. I swatted the memory aside, but it bounced back, punched me in the jaw like an angry midget with a two-by-four.

I had to go there. Find the volunteers. Find them, find Kate. Find Kate, find Pitt. Find Pitt…and then? Then what? I had no idea. All I knew was I felt driven. After a year of wallowing in shit I had something to hold on to, a life preserver, and I wasn’t going to let it go. Even if it meant having to dredge up the past and face Kate again.

I needed a drink. There are some things no man was ever meant to suffer. Was never meant to bear. I fingered the soap dish in my pocket, left it there. Not here on the bus. Getting caught would mean a hefty bribe I couldn’t pay, and a long flight back to the States. I shuddered just thinking about it. Better death than that.

I folded the brochure into a tight square, and shoved it deep into my pocket.

I left Paco on the steps of a crumbling
chifa
joint across the street from my apartment. He promised to watch me real good. I didn’t have the heart to explain that “good” was not an adverb.

I climbed the rotting planks to my apartment. The stairs bowed and creaked underfoot, threatening to send me plummeting ass first into the basement beneath the butcher shop, impale me on who knew what subterranean delights lay hidden below.

The door was ajar.

No sign of damage. No scratches. No splintered or broken wood. But still, ajar.

I smiled and rubbed my crotch. Momentary distractions were always welcome. I was still hard from thinking about Janine. I put my keys in my pocket. “I told you not to come here, Lynn,” I called out.

I opened the door. The room was dark. “Playing games, I see. You like it that way, don’t you?”

I tripped over something on the floor and fell. I landed on an arm.

“Sorry, babe, I—”

But the arm bounced, fell back, lay still. I jumped up and flicked on the light.

It was Lynn. She lay naked on the floor. I bent down, laid a finger to her lips. Nothing. I touched her throat. No heartbeat.

“Damn you,” I said. “Damn you to hell.”

I pulled out my cell phone. The occasion seemed to demand it. Who would I call? The police? The American embassy? Ambo direct? Ambo, I decided. He would want to know first. He would know what to do. With any luck he might even kill me.

My fingers shook as I punched in the numbers, slid on the keys, misdialed. I cleared the screen and tried again. A flash of movement in the cracked wall mirror caught my eye. A heavy weight crashed against my temple.

Pain and blackness. Far above me I heard sobbing. Drops of hot rain splattered my cheek. Then the sweet blanket of death covered me and took me from this life.

Six

A voice said, “Hope you like it up the ass.”

Pain filled my head and I groaned. A hand slapped my face. A ring dug into my cheekbone. I struggled to focus. Where were my glasses? I reached up to rub my eyes, but my hands were cuffed behind my back. I took a deep breath and gagged. It smelled like shit. Like a latrine. Flies buzzed on my eyelids. I blinked, and one settled on my nose.

“I died and gone to hell?” I asked.

“You’re going to wish you had.”

A fist crashed into my nose, and I saw red. I gasped, my body quivered, an orgasm of damaged nerve and broken bone. It made me feel clean, the trembling joy of a nun bathing in holy waters. For a long, glorious moment I convulsed in ecstasy, before it leaked away, taking my happiness from me. My vision slowly cleared. A black blob stuck to the tip of my nose.

“Hey,” I said. “The human flyswatter.”

A face loomed over me. Its ashen pallor announced a true
limeño.
My kind of guy. His nose was flat and speckled with acne scars, the kind you get from growing up in this sea of filth. He wore a gun under his armpit and a badge on his belt.

Personal favorite joke: What’s a cop?

Answer: A thug with a badge.

He held a photo close to my face. “Know this woman?”

I squinted. The official embassy portrait. “Lynn.” Then I remembered. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“I know she’s dead, asshole. You killed her.”

I shook my head. I was still half-awake.
“Me?
What are you talking about?”

He flicked a large matte photo onto the table in front of me. Lynn reclined naked on my cockroach-strewn floor. Masking tape outlined her body.

I spat blood. “How?”

“You need to ask?”

A throat cleared. “Strangled,” said a voice.

I nodded at the man in the shadows. “Who’s your bum buddy,
marica?”

The man stepped into the light. It was Major Villega. He crossed his arms and winked at me.

“Figures,” I said. “Scum always floats to the surface.”