The Travel Writer (2 page)

He turned to me. “We do not normally grant private interviews.” His accent, surprisingly, was just a spice to his words. “Who is this?”

“Mr. Gonzales, this is Jacob Smalls,” Pilar said. “A travel writer. Mr. Gonzales is our head of U.S. marketing.”

She was either lying or flattering Mr. Gonzales. Or perhaps the job title described just one of the man’s duties.

“Is there anything else that you need to tell me, Pilar?” I asked. “To make my article express the Matamoros’s opinion even more effectively, I mean.”

“There is nothing more to be said,” said Gonzales. “If there is anything more, we will inform you immediately.”

“We appreciate your sympathy and your assistance, Mr. Smalls,” said Pilar. “I told you and all the others everything I know.”

“But surely Mr. Smalls wants more information,” said the man. “After all, you are a journalist, not a slave to commercial interests like ourselves. I know you serve nothing but the truth.”

“Not this journalist,” I said. “This journalist writes his hotel and restaurant reviews with great sympathy for a proud industry.”

“You don’t have to lie to me,” said the man. “You won’t change my opinion. I think all reporters are shit.”

“You can’t say that,” said Pilar.

“Why not? Mr. Smalls would never betray us. Would he?”

“You always tell me not to trust writers,” she said.

“He’s a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“You won’t see him again?”

“No. I’m going home tomorrow morning.”

“Good. Tell him to take care what he writes. And then hope he obeys. For both of your sakes. I have unpleasant friends both here and in Bolivia.”

“Do you work for the Matamoros?” I asked. “Maybe you should try a different profession. Instead of hospitality.”

Pilar turned and raised a single eyebrow to me, an old signal, which I could never manage in return—she used to say that’s why she liked it. “Jacob,” she said. “Please.”

This man was threatening more than her job. And still she wanted me to defy his warnings and come to Bolivia.

* * *

It was still early in the evening when I got home. My key rattled and squirmed as I tried to fit it in the lock. I was both perplexed and exultant. I’m a travel writer, and corrupt as they come. I’d sell my journalistic principles for two nights at the Four Seasons with a free meal and a massage. I’ve been wheedled and bribed and plied with bottles of wine worth more than my laptop, and I’ve rarely failed to succumb to the temptation of providing a puff review. But I was not entirely without ambition. That afternoon I had for the first time inspired hate, not just disdain, from a hotel employee—if that’s what Gonzales was. I had stumbled onto something, perhaps a crime worth uncovering, or at least a story worth writing about. Was Hilary Pearson really alive and in danger? Was Pilar in danger too? The possibility both terrified me and stiffened my resolve. Perhaps I could save them both. In any case I now had for once a real story to investigate. And Pilar was back in my life.

I crossed my tiny apartment to check the calendar. I didn’t have much time before the flight. If I was to learn anything in Bolivia about Hilary Pearson’s disappearance, I needed first to gather as much information as I could in New York, from those who knew Hilary best. I gave an extra shake of food to my pet turtle for good luck, and then flicked my computer to life and began my research in the modern style: in my underwear, online.

I had never met Hilary in person, and yet I felt for her what might be the most durable of affections—the kind we feel for those who appreciate us. On the strength of a single sample review of La Paz’s futuristic Bella Vista Hotel (“The aliens have landed! And they apparently parked their spaceship in La Paz, where it’s been converted into a Mecca of moderately priced Bolivian gastronomy …”), written and emailed from a youth hostel, Hilary had given me my first paid assignment as a travel writer, an eight-page overview of La Paz. She subsequently queried and amended my final copy responsibly but not too vigorously, and was careful to include alleviating praise. In the end of her last email she wrote, “If only all my writers showed such opinionated enthusiasm! And the prose is sometimes lovely.” The afterthought, however qualified, kept my mind pleasurably occupied throughout much of the plane trip back to the States. I earned only three hundred dollars for the gig, but the chapter-level byline in a reasonably prestigious book was enough to convince less prestigious publishers to give me
bigger assignments and thus launch my career. And now my professional acquaintance with Hilary was enough to convince her mother to host me for an interview.

I took an afternoon train to Morris County the day after the Matamoros press conference. The phrase “suburban New Jersey” evokes two images: a B-movie dystopia of elevated highways and poisoning smokestacks or a contemptible suburban archipelago of strip malls and office parks. But the town Hilary’s parents lived in was too far from the city to have succumbed to either strain of New Jersey disease. It was important enough to warrant a roofed concrete platform by the rails but not enough for a station that sold tickets. The road beyond the platform had only two lanes, and the line between them was a faint sepia shadow. Across the road was a chain convenience store, standing alone beside a patch of parking lot. In principle I approve of such charming locales, but in practice, like any good New Yorker, I despise them as pitiable runt towns. Their lack of pedestrians, all-night delis, public transportation, and suspicious glares disorients and disturbs me. When I asked in the convenience store about a taxi, the counterman’s head jerked back like a shooting victim’s.

“Taxi?” His eyes darted about the counter in front of him, as if he hoped to find the concept’s definition taped somewhere beside the cigarette prices.

My only recourse was to call the Pearsons from the train platform, like a freshman home from college. I had arranged the interview with Mrs. Pearson, but her husband was also evidently expecting my arrival, and not with pleasure. He informed me that the house was about a mile and a half up the road from the train station, and then asked if I were sick or crippled.

Reporters love eccentric assholes, I reminded myself. The black strip of asphalt, a scar climbing up the back of the wooded hill ahead, rose with a daunting steepness, and my view of the hill’s peak was smeared with heat, but at least I would have the road to myself. Wind made the leaves beside me shiver and whisper.

As I hauled myself up the hill, I drafted a mental sketch of my upcoming raid on Mr. Pearson’s information. He would start off gruff and dismissive, until my piercing questions prodded his brain into hitherto undiscovered territory. At last his brow would wrinkle in bewilderment as he suddenly remembered, and slowly, as if hypnotized, he would confide in me the one little tip he had neglected to mention to all the other investigators and reporters. “Now that I think of it, that postcard she sent us was a little odd in one small way.… ” Afterward I would help him realize the implication of this discovery, and he would collapse to his knees, his mind stunned and inoperative. On the flight to South America, my mind would burn with a lead no one else had. Pilar’s eyes would glow when I told her.

I couldn’t imagine what questions I could ask to produce such a result. I had never interviewed anyone but tourists, PR agents, and hotel and restaurant managers before.

* * *

Hilary’s father was stooped and hulking; he swayed when he stepped, like a circus bear walking upright, and his breaths were growls. His neck, ears, and cheeks were red as raw steak; the rest of his face was only slightly better done. He narrowed his eyes when he looked at me, as if I were too tiny to see clearly.

I followed him into his cavernous living room, where pictures of the same female in various stages of youth jostled each other for position on the mantel. Mr. Pearson flung his swollen hands at a leather sofa in sullen invitation, and with a slow cranking of winches, lowered himself into a matching leather La-Z-Boy. He stared straight ahead at the blank screen of what must have been a fifty-inch television, clearly out of old habit.

“I’m going to the Matamoros,” I began.

“Burn it down for me,” the man said. “And shoot every one of those liars that run it!” Blood seemed about to burst from his pores.

His wife entered the room. I expected a skinny Edith to his Archie Bunker, and indeed she was slender and her skirt was brown and grim, but as she leveled her stare at her husband, he shut his mouth and seemed to nestle deeper in the Lay-Z-Boy’s leather cushions. Her hair shot back from her brow like a frozen jet of water, and the hair spray made it glitter in the lamplight.

“I know Hilary professionally,” I said. “As an editor, she’s one of the best.” I had practiced my opening on the train, and had made a mental note, with many mental stars beside it, to keep to the present tense. “But tell me what she’s really like.” I flicked my gaze between the two and stroked the underside of my chin, in the thoughtful manner of doctors, private eyes, wilderness trackers, and other prime-time truth seekers.

Mr. Pearson tossed out the response immediately. “She’s like a breath of sunshine,” he said, “in the early morning mist.” Surely he had heard himself say that before, and liked it.

“She’s beautiful,” said his wife, and I nodded. Freelance writers who had actually met her had told me as much.

“But she’s no tart,” Mr. Pearson insisted. “She dresses right.”

“Well,” said his wife. “Sometimes a little elasticky.”

“Sure! She’s young. She bought this dress once, tight, tight all over like plastic wrap, every part, and I told her she looked like a hooker. And she took it off and never wore it again! That’s the kind of girl she was.” He ground his fist into his other palm, enraged at his mistake.

“Is!” cried his wife, completely unnecessarily, and her husband ground his fist harder.

“What do you think happened to her?” I asked.

Mr. Pearson separated his hands like two fighting dogs and settled them on his knees.

“The CIA’s behind it,” he said, his voice drained of all emotion but conviction. “Heard of the Cocaine Wars? They got cocaine down there. And the U.S. Army.”

Hilary’s mother sighed and perched herself on the arm of the sofa next to me. I could see the bristles on the backs of her calves.

“I thought the wars were in Colombia,” I said.

“Sure! You base your operations in another country and you launch attacks across the border! I ought to know. Cambodia. Vietnam.”

His wife sighed and bent toward me. “He was never in Vietnam,” she explained.

“But I paid attention. I read books! I ought to know. We went to that hotel. They’re all liars there, every one of them, from the monkeys humping suitcases to the owner. He had a suit on, but you know what? He smelled dirty, like a mutt, like all the rest of them! His cousin in the government kidnapped her, and they’re all covering it up!”

“Don’t say that!” said Mrs. Pearson. “She ran away. It’s just another adventure.”

“She wouldn’t run! In Bolivia? Not in a billion billion years. Not without at least giving us a call on her cell.”

“She’s our Adventure Girl,” the mother said, before firing back at her husband. “Of course she’d run.”

Could she have run? I imagined myself creeping up to a lonely hut nestled on a hillside high above the Bolivian cloud forest, and throwing open the door to discover the surprised and admiring face of a beautiful American girl who never dreamed that anyone would be able to find her. My old editor wouldn’t know my face, but when I gave her my name, she’d shake her head in stunned recognition. “I should have known it would be you,” she’d say.

The parents glared at each other, continuing the argument in their heads.

“How did you first hear about her disappearance?” I asked. I had already seen two versions of the story from the online archives of the
New York Post
and the Morristown
Herald News
, but I wanted one for just myself.

“Two days after she was supposed to be back from this press trip, we started calling around,” said the father. “Her place. Her friends. Folgers Travel Guides, where she worked. Nobody’d seen her. So we called the hotel. They said they’re looking for her. Looking for her! So I said we’re coming to look too. They told us we better not. No! Didn’t just tell us. Wrote us a
letter
! FedExed it, I’ll give ’em that. Got here the next day. Told us we’d be
interfering with the private investigation
. Signed by the manager, Jorge”—he pronounced it
George
—“Barrientos. Can’t call off this dog so easy. I told Hilary’s boss at Folgers to get tough, and when that didn’t work, I called our senator.”

“The new one,” Mrs. Pearson said.

“That man knows how to get the job done. Or maybe it’s all his assistants. His minions! I don’t care. But we called him all right. A few days later some woman, Pealer something, gets on the horn and gives us the old Spanish sweet talk.” He twisted his voice into a preposterous imitation of Pilar’s voice, adding for good measure a Mexican accent she didn’t have. “
We o-pol-o-gize for de misunderstanding
. I tell her, we want answers. We want to do some of our own investigating! So she sends us plane tickets. Didn’t even meet us at the airport. Sent a shit-box car—a subcompact. The windows don’t shut. Dashboard held together by twist ties. Put us up for a night in La Paz and the next morning shoved us in a minivan with four Germans to go to the hotel. They showed us her room. They showed us her suitcase. They even showed us her goddamn tampons! What were we supposed to do with her tampons?”

He aimed this question at his wife, but she only sighed and kicked her pumps.

“Did you meet anyone from the hotel before you went down there? Anyone named Gonzales?”

“Before? Not a chance,” he said. “It’s all lies down there. The hotel. The newspapers. Even the papers up here. You talk to a reporter and he turns around and screws it all up. Well,
you
better not! Listen to me.” And then Mr. Pearson, with help from his wife, recounted, in tedious lurches, like a truck in the mud, the whole story of their Bolivian sojourn. (Fortunately he dispensed with the accent when quoting the locals.) Apparently their one day in La Paz, where they and a young Bolivian cop tacked up missing-person flyers, impressed them far more than anything in the Hotel Matamoros. They described for me, in blunt, deploring phrases, the city streets of unpainted cement, the unclean odor of street food, the minibuses crowded like circus cars, where the conductor was a boy who leaned out the window and shouted for passengers. As for the Matamoros itself, they emphasized the discomfort of the journey there—it was three hours from La Paz—the indigestibility of its cooking, and the mendacity of the hotel’s employees and the barbarity of their English. The woolen blankets (handwoven, I had heard) were scratchy, the alpacas and vicuñas that roamed the back gardens were smelly and ill-tempered, the television got only a half dozen English-language stations, there was no
USA Today
. This world-renowned First Wonder of the Third World was to them not just a den of iniquity but a shabby circus of curiosities and discomforts. Had they visited under the best of circumstances, with their daughter as chaperone, they still would have hated it. I wondered why Hilary hadn’t run as a child. Perhaps she had, and later returned, defeated but defiant, to sulk away her time until high school graduation. That Hilary had survived the emotional oppression of this house with the worldly good cheer she had always shown me, if only through email, was astonishing. Such a triumph shouldn’t be wasted. I was more determined than ever to find her.