The Travel Writer (26 page)

“How? She was like a dog lying down in the middle of the highway. She refused to listen to me, and she defied Dionisius.”

“Don’t you feel anything?” I asked. “A tiny bit of guilt? Are you even human? Like I told you: you’re no better than Dionisius.”

“Even Dionisius is human. And Pilar is guilty too. Was guilty. I advise you to leave immediately. Do not wait for the morning.”

“If another American dies in this hotel, that will be the end of it.”

“That is why it is in both our interests that you leave immediately.”

I wanted to say something to impress upon him the depth of his iniquity, but nothing pithy came to mind. If only he could understand English, I thought. I had to resort to the first dramatic phrase I could concoct.

“If I believed in God, I would say that you would not escape his vengeance,” I said.

“Those who pray for misery are bad Christians,” he said. “I too am a bad Christian. In my heart, I hope that all American neoliberals go to hell for keeping the southern countries poor, hungry, and without hope. Nevertheless, I am very sorry, Mr. Esmalls. But the interests of the party are paramount. Remember also that my father depends on me for his own survival. I cannot behave recklessly.”

Behaving recklessly didn’t seem foolish to me as much as pointless. Arturo said she was found with American food and a change of clothes. I wondered what her last lonely meal had been.

“What kind of American food was she carrying? A hamburger?” Perhaps our last meals had been the same.

“What? No. She had a shopping bag from some gringo store. Some kind of juice, peanut butter, some bread.”

Peanut butter? And then I understood.

“If the hotel dies, the party will suffer,” I said.

“The hotel will not die.”

“It is dying right now. You know that. Its reputation has been destroyed.”

He said nothing.

“I know how to save the hotel,” I said.

He rubbed his finger around the mouth of the bottle.

“If I could prove that Hilary Pearson is alive,” I continued. “If I could show the world she was never harmed, the hotel will be forgiven completely.”

“How do you know she’s alive? Did Pilar tell you?”

“Yes.”

“What else did she tell you?”

“Nothing. Kenny knows more. Let me talk to him tonight. I’ll tell you all I found out tomorrow morning. Give me this one chance.”

“I make no promises. If I did, Dionisius would not keep them.”

I trolled for cops in the lobby and on the patios. There weren’t any. They had probably knocked off at five and were watching the soccer highlights in their rooms, assuming the hotel was putting them up. On my way back to the room, I passed a young cop in camouflage examining the llama prints on the walls of Tupac Amaru Way. Maybe this was our guard. As I opened the door, I glanced back to find him gazing over my shoulder into the room, looking as if, like Kenny, he wouldn’t mind running about the place turning on the gadgets.

In the room, Kenny looked up hopefully from the television; he was ready to spring into action or at least talk.

“Let’s go to bed, Kenny,” I said. It was almost nine.

He squished his brows together, reluctant to challenge me but unable to stop himself.

“What about Hilary?” he said. “What are we going to do?”

“We’ll get a few hours of sleep,” I said. “You can’t think if you haven’t slept. Then at around two we’ll do some investigating. I have a plan.”

Kenny pumped his fist. No one had ever believed in me as Kenny had, and it was all I could do to suppress my contempt for him. But at least I hadn’t abandoned him yet.

I must have been worn out with brooding, because I fell asleep instantly, and when I opened my eyes again, Kenny was snoring calmly. I lay motionless as my nerves fidgeted. Perhaps the sun was already up behind the mechanical shutters and blinding the world; perhaps the night, and my chance, was already gone. I peered at the digital clock beside me: 1:15
A.M
. I lay back, slapping my hand against my heart in frustration. I had set the alarm for two in the morning, but this would have to do. I slipped out of bed.

“I’m ready,” mumbled Kenny.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not time yet. Go back to sleep.”

But he sat up on the bed and stared blankly as I dressed in the dark. Maybe he was trying to reassemble a dream, which he knew had been glorious, colorful, and eventful, but which was now just a jumble of murky fragments, among them Hilary’s dimly remembered face. He had slept in his clothes.

“Wherever you’re going, I’m going,” he said. “No buts.”

Outside in the dim hallway, the guard was gone, probably for the night. I started down the hall, and Kenny lumbered after me, his heavy breaths storming in my ears. He was no good at this. As we hesitated at a corner, I thought I heard the beeping door alarm again in the distance, but it was just my pulsing heartbeat. Some people seek fear, on roller coasters and in movie theaters; some people collapse and commit themselves to bed at the merest whiff of it. To me, this fear was merely unpleasant, neither exhilarating nor enervating, perhaps because my actions had been bled of consequence. I could be avenged or I could humiliate myself or I could die, but I could hardly imagine enjoying victory or minding failure.

We came to the frontier of the Alpaca Wing and stopped before the door. I inserted Pilar’s passkey. The winking light by the handle flashed green, and something within the body of the door clicked. It was open. No one had yet undertaken the administrative unpleasantry of deactivating the passkey.

“Where’d you get that?” whispered Kenny.

“I stole it.”

I continued onto the walkway, trying to ignore the beaded sky and the foggy swath of Milky Way. It seemed warmer than it had been the night before, or maybe I was just better prepared for the cold. The truth is here, just ahead of you, I told myself, but I felt the urge to return to my room and sleep. Maybe my grief was already fading. Maybe I had never really loved her, and the pain was drifting away as the shock wore off. All evening, all afternoon, I had been thinking not of her, not really, but just of my own self-centered despair and how I might soothe it. Selfish! I was as selfish as a baby.

I padded through the corridor, peering under every door for a dim giveaway light. I finally perceived one, or convinced myself I perceived one, about as far down the hall as Pilar had been the previous night. I stooped and pressed my ear to the door and thought I heard people talking inside. Kenny stared wide-eyed at my mysterious but assured actions. Should I knock? Frightened people, like animals, sometimes lash out when they’re surprised. I slipped the passkey in, then entered.

The room was lit with candles. Two figures, both covered in blankets, were sitting facing each other on leather recliners. Between them was an empty sofa. One figure leaped up, the
blankets slipping to the floor.

“Who are you?” he asked in Spanish. He was Ray Quinones.

“I’m Pilar’s friend. Jacob.” I shut the door.

The other figure rose too, but more slowly, and kept the blankets on. By her feet was a plate, empty but for a butter knife.

“You’re Jacob?” It was the voice of an American woman, thin and hoarse. She spoke English. “How did you find us?”

“Hilary,” whispered Kenny, as if afraid his voice would frighten off the longed-for apparition.

“Pilar told me you were here,” I lied to her. “Is this all the light there is?”

“We can light more candles if you want,” said Hilary. “But the dark is safer.” She turned in to the candlelight, and I could see her face. Her long brown hair was tied in a teenage ponytail. My old editor, in person, at last.

“It’s all right, Ray,” she said in Spanish. Her accent was horrible.

“Pilar’s dead,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Ray told me. I say something to her whenever I light a candle. What are we supposed to do now?”

The man swayed uncomfortably on his feet. She motioned to the recliner, and he slunk back into it, almost guiltily, like a cat that’s not allowed on the furniture, and drew the blanket up around himself. The cold air in the unheated room flitted confidently through my clothes.

I sat on the sofa and pinched my thighs to keep my concentration from drifting. Focus, focus, I reminded myself. It never helps. “Tell everyone what you did, and why Pilar died.”

“Why she died? Because she missed a turn in a jungle road in the middle of the night? That wasn’t in the plan. How much did she tell you?”

“Everything.” I could almost believe it. Pilar might have told me, had I given her more time and more persuasive arguments.

“Everything! She’s such a liar. She told me all about you. Poor Jacob. You know, you really are a decent writer, for a travel writer.”

In the shadows, and in my ignorance, I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me or truly sympathetic. Like most of us, in person she was not at all like her emails. The candle flame on the coffee table was flickering violently in Ray’s breaths.

“Hilary!” Kenny stepped forward into the candlelight. “It’s me.”

She squinted. “Who are you?”

“Me, Hilary.” He framed his face with his hands, in case she was looking in the wrong place. “Kenny.”

“Kenny?” She stared through the dark at him.

“Kenny,” he repeated. “
You
know.”

“Kenny from work?”

“That’s it!” he said. “Me!”

She looked at Ray and shook her head, her thin hair pinwheeling.

“He has Kenny,” she told Ray in Spanish.

“Cainny,” said Ray, mournfully, staring at his big hands, scuttling helplessly on his knees like giant crabs.

“What the hell is Kenny doing here?” she asked me.

“We were really worried about you,” said Kenny. “Did they hurt you?”

“Who?”

“The kidnappers.”

“There were never any kidnappers,” I said.

“Sure there were,” Hilary said. “This is the great escape. I cut my way out of the holding pen with dental floss and strangled the guards. Also with dental floss.”

She paused, as if hoping I’d contribute to her joke. I clawed my thighs again.

Kenny sat down on the arm of the couch, his butt almost touching my cheek.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“She was just hiding here in the closed-off wing,” I said. “Pilar was going to have me bring a ransom note secretly back to her parents. Then they’d all try to collect, and nobody would know. Isn’t that it? I should have called the cops.”

“Pilar knew you wouldn’t. Do you have any idea how much she hated you? She told me what you did to her. Lying to you was her favorite part of the plan.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. Hilary wouldn’t be lying, not now, so she must simply be mistaken. I couldn’t believe Pilar had hated me that night in the Aparthotel Real Camino. But I knew she had hated me before that; maybe the hate had held over, had festered inside her even while she was loving me. She had been two people, lover and score settler, at the same time. No, she’d been many people. (The best girlfriends are, I could tell Kenny.) She lied to me, but she also lied to Hilary. She lied to herself. Maybe she told the truth only to her parents, via their photo, and after she’d torn it up there was no one left to be herself to.

“I always wanted to meet you in person,” said Hilary. “You’re a bigger liar than Pilar. Do you make up any facts in your travel books? You better not have in mine. You’re a legend to everyone who’s ever known Pilar.”

It was absurd. Pilar wouldn’t have told just this about me. Hilary herself was absurd and devious; perhaps stories of other people’s deviousness and absurdity were the only ones she
understood. But I did believe that I had become a sort of legend in Pilar’s retelling, a trickster villain. What Hilary didn’t understand was that it wasn’t me or my personality that had had power over Pilar, just something I said once, which had acted upon Pilar like an infection. I had distorted her. “You didn’t hear how she spoke to me. Just yesterday.”

“Oh, I heard all about it,” said Hilary. “You’re lucky you didn’t hear it too. She was a real bitch. I loved it. I always say, when it comes to love, you’ve got to be an atheist. Once it’s dead, it’s dead.” She laughed at me. Had she been laughing at her parents, her co-workers, her friends as well? More likely she had never thought of them. She had left not only her country but her world, expecting to shed her past completely and start fresh. With a lot of money.

“I spoke to your mother.” I figured that mentioning her father would just make her angry. “You should have seen her.”

“You should have grown up with her.”

“She called you her Adventure Girl. She thinks you’re alive.”

“Sure she does. She believes in me. She would have paid, if you’d done your job with the ransom note. My dad’s cheap, but he has a sense of shame, and my mom knows how to dig it out of him. People do this all the time in Colombia, you know. Venezuela. Mexico City.” She leaned back. “I’m just a modern-day businesswoman, ripping off my ideas from the international pages of the
Times
. If it had worked, I could have incorporated myself, farmed out the plan to other disaffected daughters. They would have done a case study of me at Wharton.”

“You should have told me,” said Kenny. “I might have helped. I still could.”

“Thanks. How about getting me another blanket?” Hilary couldn’t quite look at him. “Ray’s afraid to steal from the other rooms. But you could. Just get one from your room. You have heat. I can’t even fucking watch TV. The only food I get is what Ray brings me. I asked Pilar to bring me something, and she said she’d get it from the kitchen, but she never did.”

“She tried,” I said. “She had it with her when she was caught moving her car.”

“When the FBI came with the dogs,” Hilary continued, “Ray smuggled me out for a few days, but they didn’t stay long. He took a few days off and we went camping on the Choro Trail. That was the only break I got from this place. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being dead.”

“Is he really your boyfriend?” said Kenny.

She narrowed not just her eyes but her whole face, squeezing eyes, nose, and mouth into one organ of inspection.