Blood Lake (30 page)

Fuck waiting for the cops. Fuck being watched. I'm out of here.

Down the back stairs, past the old steel cans overflowing with sulfurous heaps of rotting garbage and out through the alley into the loathsome and endless night.

I've got to go underground.

Tonight.

El pobres rispetao único cuando puede matar.

The poor man is respected only when he can kill.

—Ciro Alegría,
La serpiente de oro

IN A CROWDED MARKETPLACE
four men emerge from the shadows, their barrel chests bathed in light and their faces lost in darkness. They surround me and say, We have something for you, hold out your hand. I slowly turn my palms up, and they place a large black-and-yellow-striped beetle in the hollow of my left palm. I can feel the bug's chitinous legs twitching as it tries to crawl under my skin. Then my flesh becomes like melting wax, sucking the huge insect in and closing back over it, leaving a walnut-sized black-and-blue lump with a thick ridged seam down the middle sewn up with coarse black stitches. My eyes are coated with a veil of film that I can't wipe away. I wander around the blurry place holding out my hand to the wise-eyed Indian women asking, What is this? One woman recoils from it as if it were evil, but another woman says, No, it means you have a child somewhere who is far from your love, who does not feel its warmth. Oh my God. How do I find this child and offer her my warmth? What gray, lonely limbo does she inhabit?

But there is no way to find her in this hazy place, where the walls are always melding with the shadows, and suddenly the shapes melt away, leaving me in a strange, dark
place, filled with the smell of fresh earth and chalk dust. Dark skeletal outlines form above me and a hard cement floor materializes beneath my spine. Somehow I fell asleep.

I check my hand. It's smooth and flat. No violet-colored lumps.

Lord have mercy.

The child that never was. A work-related miscarriage. Brought on, they said, by my spending a fourteen-hour ride on rough roads hidden in a truck bed. In Spanish, a miscarriage is called
un aborto
. Yeah, it's the same word.

She would have been ours. Mine and Johnny's.

I'm stiff and sore. There's a knot between my neck and right shoulder blade that feels like a malignant goblin is stabbing me with a bayonet whenever I turn my head to the right. The bare cement floor of a building under construction is not the ideal place to get a good night's rest.

So I lie there and think.

Three people dead and one in the hospital, red-inked threats and some well-orchestrated police harassment. Somebody's in an awful hurry to get things done. Where's the fabled Ecuadorian inefficiency? Because I'm seeing precision at every turn, like an expert knife thrower, just missing me every time.

Maybe that explains the stabbing pain in my back. I lift my arm and massage the base of my neck with my hand and ponder the sensation of being impelled to move in a particular direction to avoid being pinned to the wall by their blades.

They're trying to drive me to act. To run. To betray, like Johnny did. Ah, Johnny … Do they really think you're still alive? And that I'll lead them to you? Do they expect me to go scampering blindly over the Andes like a bitch in heat to find you, without looking back at the hot and skanky trail I'm leaving? Or do they just want me to believe that you're alive, figuring I'll beat a path straight to one of your lairs like some avenging angel out of a Gothic folktale hacking her way through the hundred-year-old overgrowth of prickly vines to awaken you with a kiss? Okay, I'll admit that the impulse is
there, but I'll be damned if I'm going to disregard everything I've worked to cover up for the last twenty years.

And I'm not alone in that.

I pick up my bundle of notes and articles, which still have some flecks of blood on them, dried to a dark burgundy brown, and reread the article that was wrapped around Ruben's watch. He must have cut it from yesterday's
El Despacho
. It's about an active wing of the Black Condor Brigade that has blown up key petroleum facilities and organized community takeovers of oil wells and pumping stations, and sabotaged airstrips as far south as the Río Santiago near the Peruvian border and as far west as the Amazonian towns of Arapicos, Chiguaza, and Macas—Macas being mighty close to the Andean foothills and the long arm of the law.

And the byline: Javier Putamayo. Unusual spelling. Most Ecuadorians spell Xavier with an
X
.

X
is the unknown.
X
means nothing. But sometimes if you look at nothing long enough, you begin to see something.

I'm trying to reconstruct something I wasn't there to see. The only story that fits the grisly tableau I walked into is that Ruben didn't realize that he was in deep trouble until sometime
after
the killer showed up. So it was someone who did not alarm him at first. A friend—or someone he thought was a friend, like his contacts to Colonel Alboroto, the new paramilitary leader. Because if those mercenaries had shown up with their high-caliber side arms a-blazing, Ruben would have been puréed all over the room. No, this was a quiet killer's precision weapon. Very precise indeed. And the only way to leave a clue like this, if it is indeed a clue, would be if they chatted for several minutes while Ruben pretended to be working, unconcernedly shuffling through his papers, when in fact he was searching for this article and flagging it with his wristwatch, hoping I would recognize it for what it was. Resigned to his own death. One last struggle for the old warhorse.

But of course we'll never know his version of the story.

It was someone who entered without resistance. They
talked a bit, then—quick death from a small gun. It matches the MO for Padre Samuel's murder. I'm looking for the same person. And whoever wrote this article is part of the puzzle. I look at it again.

The Black Condor Brigade. The Río Santiago. Macas. I wonder.

Swat!
Damn mosquitoes! Breeding like hell in all this stagnant water. Hope they don't give me dengue. The last thing I need right now.

Insects. Buzzing around my briny flesh, perceiving me as nothing but a heap of inanimate smells, something with no mind, diffuse, dissipating, drifting among the sea of odors surrounding these murders, like the seaborne air currents wafting me towards the mountains where a special kind of clay is found, the clay from which I was made, to a place where the streams run as cold as death's touch, and the few remaining Cañaris who inhabit the jagged hills are so miserably poor that they swear it's a happy occasion when a child dies because that means she doesn't have to suffer through the agony of life in this world.

But there's no such convenient fatalistic option for me. Just the foot-tingling vertigo of forging ahead into the cold, clear emptiness, making it up as I go along, plotting deadly expeditions into the blank white spaces where the chart ends and there are no guidelines.

I'll just have to draw in my own.

Rusty nails snag my clothes. Rough-ridged tin scrapes my skin. I prop myself up on my elbows, take a breath and hold it—which I know I shouldn't do, I need to remember to keep breathing as I peer over the rooftop. There are cops in the street, on the sidewalk, on every floor, buzzing from room to room, throwing my stuff out the windows, running up and down the stairs, hassling my family. I lie there listening to my cousins answering and arguing and pleading, but their ignorance of my whereabouts is real and frankly that's better
for them. My aunt is in the store loudly accusing them, What have you done with her?

And they laugh.

But they are convinced.

I can't even risk a phone call. Not yet. I'll have to wait 'til the Mendez brothers go to the construction site tomorrow morning. I hope nobody's watching them too closely.

But as I watch my sweet Antonia struggle to keep her jaw set resolutely while her lips are quivering with doubt, a thousand crystalline shards slice through my once untamable heart.

Child rearing has really slowed down my killer instincts. I've been chaining my wild, unbroken spirit to the plow horse of parenthood every sunrise, an act that requires supreme effort and self-denial, and I can't just turn all that nurturing off.

I find a boy hanging out in front of a candy store who's willing to deliver a three-word message for me: Mom's fine, kid.

Now I need to sharpen my claws for the next step.

And I'm going to need some real weapons.

“
Señor
Putamayo has no office. He files from the field,” says the receptionist.

“Aha.”

I've made it to the fourth floor of
El Despacho
without being accosted, but it's starting to smell like another dead end. Does she have a contact number for him? No. A home address? No.

“Can you tell me what he looks like?”

“No, I've never seen him. Maybe one of the regular weekday girls.”

“Right, that makes sense. Just one more thing. Do you have this typeface on your computers?” I'm holding up the anti-Padre Campos pamphlet.

“Sure we do.” She calls it up on her screen for me.
Twelve-point Helvetica Light. A perfect match. “Everybody's got that one.”

Then I scramble out of there before the police dogs catch my scent.

The sun's piercing rays prick my eyes, which somehow tickles my nose, leading to an explosive incongruous sneeze on this oven-baked concrete pier. I cross my arms and look around, still feeling a dull twinge between my shoulder blades. I take a few steps windward and perch my knee on the empty packing crate for a micro-sized Japanese washing machine and stare out at the river's swelling fury, swirling and churning within inches of overflowing its banks and flooding the city. I watch and wonder at all the sailors and fishermen who keep destitution at bay by trawling the black and formless face of the deep from sun to sun, gleaning a fistful of its jealously guarded fertility and bringing it safely into port.

A shirtless man offers me a handful of pirate videos of the latest Hollywood action movies. I turn them down.

I watch two dockhands have way too much fun tossing pregnant sacks of corn flour onto a pallet, then settling onto the forklift for a leisurely ride back to the loading dock, one kidding the other the whole time about his paunch, lightly patting his big stomach.

Bells jingle as the ice cream man scrapes the bottom of a five-gallon carton to slap together a vanilla cone for a brown-skinned six-year-old boy.

Things seem quiet enough. Normal. I walk around, taking stock of the merchandise, the Swiss-Colombian watches, the Taiwanese wind-up toys, the Aiwas, Sonys, and Osterizers and their Peruvian counterfeits, keeping an eye on the glass eyes staring back at me in neat little rows, then I slip inside the old iron-and-glass-roofed warehouse, with its high-flying Palladian pillars and ornate painted metal fan tracery, and those nice dark windows that haven't been washed since 1928.

Inside, enterprising merchants are selling over-the-counter thorazine, “contraband” Colombian coffee and, spread out on a low table, black market pacemakers cut from the chests of recently departed donors.