Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (4 page)

Maestra was neither amused nor
dissuaded. “Your tone disappoints me,” she said. The pupils of his
aforementioned fierce, hypnotic green eyes were so dilated they looked like the
burners on a dollhouse stove. She stared into them without trepidation. “A
quick detour, that’s all I’m asking. It may widen the pinhole in your travel
map, but you’re going to have to do it for me.”

“Oh, no. No, no. It wouldn’t be
anywhere near quick enough for me. If I’m not out of
South America
within forty-eight hours, I will have forfeited all
claim to future happiness. Can’t do it, Maestra. It’s an ordeal in the making,
and it’s too much to ask.”

She clapped her age-spotted hands
together with such a sharp
pop
that it caused the parrot to start and
flutter. “Then I’m no longer asking. I’m insisting.”

Switters grinned. He loved the whole
world at that moment,
South
America
and a demanding old
matriarch included, but he wasn’t going to let himself be manipulated. “You
forget, I’m the only member of our family you’ve never been able to intimidate
or control. That’s why you adore me. So, you might as well—”

“Heh! The reason I tolerate you, to
the extent that I
do
tolerate you, is that you’re the only one of us
left with any tricks in his bag. In this case, I’m afraid, those very tricks of
yours are your undoing.” She paused briefly for the theater that was in it.
“You see, buddy boy, I happen to have on file every e-mail mash note you’ve
posted to Suzy in the past six months.”

“No, you don’t!” he blurted out
confidently, but somehow he knew she wasn’t bluffing.

“Want to bet?” She went directly to
the smaller and older of her two computers, the Mac Performa 6115, and within a
few minutes had pulled up a text. “All right, this one is dated thirty,
September. Ahem. It reads, and I quote, ‘I long to greet your delta like a
rooster greets the dawn.’ “

“Oh, dearie me.” Blushing, he slumped
in his chair and began to croon very softly, “Send in the Clowns.”

In the discussion that followed, the
word
blackmail
fell many times from Switters’s lips. He said it without
rancor, she responded without guilt.

“I can’t believe my own grandmother
would stoop to blackmail.” He shook his dark blond curls. He was bemused.

“Nobody else will believe it, either.
But they’ll have no choice but to believe the sordid evidence of Suzy’s e-mail.
I ask you again: Do you want your mother and stepfather to read those messages?
Want your superiors in
Virginia
to
read them? Mull it over.”

“Blackmail most foul. No pun
intended.”

“It’s for a good cause. Don’t take it
so hard. And you know, I’ve been contemplating updating my will. The Sierra
Club probably wouldn’t know what to do with the cabin at Snoqualmie, so I’m now
considering, only considering, leaving it to you.”

“I . . .”

“Hush. Just listen. My Matisse that
you’ve always been kind of gaga about? At present it’s destined for the
Seattle
Art Museum
, but I might be persuaded to keep it in the family. If
Sailor was sprung free and my heart was at peace.”

“Blackmail wasn’t sin enough. Now
you’ve added bribery.”

“Yes. The old B and B. It doesn’t get
any better than that.”

“You realized from the start that
bribery alone wouldn’t work.”

“Materialism is one of the few vices
you don’t subscribe to. Yet, deep down, even you have a pitty-pat sense of
self-survival.”

He made a final effort to escape his
fate. “Perhaps this hasn’t occurred to you, Maestra, not being a traveler, but
a person can’t just take live animals in and out of foreign countries. Most
countries have strict quarantine laws regarding pets. I’ll wager
Peru
—”

“Switters! You’re a CIA agent, for
Christ’s sake! Surely you have ways of getting any manner of restricted items
through the tightest of customs. You told me once it was like diplomatic
immunity, only better.”

Defeated, he slumped further in his
chair. In that position, he was at eye level with the pumpkin, and he imagined
he could detect its seeds spiraling inside of it like stars in a galaxy or bees
in a hive.

Conspicuously pleased with herself,
Maestra strutted over, bracelets clattering, and gently poked his neck with her
cane. “Sit up straight, boy. Do you want to be Quasimodo when you grow up?”
From somewhere in her richly brocaded kimono, she produced a thrice-folded
sheet of crumpled pink paper. “All this blackmail and bribery has given me an
appetite. Let’s do lunch.” She slapped the cheap brochure and a cordless phone
onto the table between him and the pumpkin. “There’s a new Thai restaurant
opened in the Magnolia shopping area. Why don’t you order for us? Five years in
Bangkok
should’ve given you a modicum of expertise.”

He ought to be hungry (except for a
pint of Redhook ale at Pike Place Market, he’d had no breakfast) just as he
ought
to be furious with Maestra, yet thanks to the XTC, he was neither. “Like
sedated spacemen conserving their energy for the unimaginable encounters ahead,
the pumpkin seeds lie suspended in their reticulum of slime.” Those were the
very words he whispered, but luckily she paid them no heed, having already
moved to the pyramid to speak to the parrot. Unlike those old women who coo
baby-talk to their birds, Maestra spoke to Sailor exactly as she spoke to
everyone else, which is to say, with language that was fairly formal and
occasionally flowery, a self-amused, ironic eloquence that to some degree,
though he might deny it, had influenced Switters’s own manner of speech. (As
for the parrot, on those rare occasions when it spoke at all, it would utter
but a single sentence, and it was always the same. “Peeple of zee wurl, relax,”
is what it would say, as if giving sage advice in a raspy Spanish accent.)

Seeing no route around it, and aiming
to please, he studied the menu and picked up the phone. As he requested such
dishes as
tom kah pug
and
pak tud tak
, names that routinely
sounded like a harelip pleading for a package of thumbtacks, the tricky
tonalities of Thai didn’t faze him. The waiter, in fact, mistook him for a
fellow countryman, until Switters explained that despite his immaculate accent,
he could not actually speak that tongue that in all probability had been
invented by the ancient Asian ancestors of Elmer Fudd.

In less than thirty minutes, cartons
of aromatic food were clustered, steaming, on the library table. Wafts of
lemongrass, chili paste, and coconut milk enlivened the technologized old room.

After about five torrid forkfuls of
pla
lard prik
, Maestra dozed off in her swivel chair and slept for hours.

Switters didn’t eat a bite, but
danced alone in front of the CD player until deep in the dark afternoon.

The next morning he flew to
Peru
. Alaska Airlines to
Los Angeles
, then the 1:00
P
.
M.
LAN-Chile flight to
Lima
, which stopped in
Mexico City
barely long enough for him to telephone a maverick
philology professor he knew there.

Once he had gotten the parrot secured
in the pressurized portion of the cargo hold that airlines set aside for
passengers’ pets, the departure passed smoothly. That was fortunate because the
effects of the XTC had left him moderately fatigued. Settled into a
business-class seat with a Bloody Mary on his tray, he began to feel consoled,
if not actually buoyant, about the demands of the immediate future. In all
honesty, he had to admit that the mission forced upon him by his crafty
grandmother was a good deal less boring, potentially, than the mickey mouse
assignment he’d been handed by
Langley
. Which was not to say it would be anything beyond an
inconvenience, but it had the virtue, at least, of being an
out-of-the-ordinary
inconvenience, a kind of dead-cat bounce. A couple of extra days in
South America
wasn’t exactly going to poison all the tadpoles in his
drainage ditch. He would endure.

Yes, unquestionably, he would get
through a sticky, buggy, rainy, much-too-vivid side trip to the Amazon jungle.
The in-flight movie, however, was another matter.

It was one of those so-called action
suspense pictures in which the primary suspense was the uncertainty as to
whether there would be ninety seconds or a full two minutes between one massive
explosion and the next. In those films the sky was seldom blue for long. Black
billows, orange flame, and polychromatic geysers of flying debris filled the
screen at irregular intervals, while on the soundtrack the crack, roar, and
shatter of battered matter was as common as music, although not quite so common
as gunfire and wailing. Both Maestra and Suzy sometimes watched such movies
because they imagined that this was what his life must be like in the Central
Intelligence Agency. Silly girls.

Switters endured a half hour of it
before ripping off his headset, quaffing his drink, and turning to the
passenger in the next seat, a tall, wiry, sharp-featured Latino in a
blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit. “Tell me, amigo,” said Switters in a
voice just loud enough to penetrate the fellow’s earphones, “do you know why
boom-boom movies are so popular? Do you know why young males, especially, love,
simply love, to see things blown apart?”

The man stared blankly at Switters.
He lifted his headset, but on one side only. “It’s freedom,” said Switters
brightly. “Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped
by our culture’s confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer
goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally
irreverent and devil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of release the
Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation.”

The Latino smiled, but it was not a
friendly smile; it was, in fact, the sort of quasi-smile one observes on small
dogs in the backseats of parked cars just before they begin to bark
hysterically and try to chew their way through the window glass.
Perhaps he
doesn’t understand,
thought Switters.

“Things.
Cosas.
Things attach
themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness
and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land.
Comprende?
People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space
and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and
they’re scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and
restricts their movements. That’s why they relish the boom-boom cinema. On a
symbolic level, it annihilates their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls
of their various traps.”

Feeling loquacious now, Switters
might have gone on to offer his theory on suicide bombers, to wit: Islamic
terrorist groups were successful in attracting volunteer martyrs because the
young men got to strap explosives on themselves and blast valuable public
property to smithereens. Exhilarating boom-boom power. If they were required to
martyr themselves by being dragged behind a bus or sticking a wet finger in a
light socket, volunteers would be few and far between. “Incidentally,” he might
have added, “are you aware that there’s no such thing as a smithereen? The word
exists only in the plural.” He said none of this, however, because the Latino
had begun to grind his teeth at him. Yes, it’s an odd concept, grinding one’s
teeth
at
another, but that’s unmistakably what the fellow was doing:
grinding them audibly, too, and so forcefully that his bushy black mustache
bucked and rolled as if it were a theme-park ride for thrill-seeking tamale
crumbs, leaving Switters with no choice but to pierce the grinder with what
some people have described as his “fierce, hypnotic green eyes.” He stared at
the grinder so fiercely, if not hypnotically, that he gradually ceased to
grind, swallowed hard, turned away, and avoided Switters’s gaze for the rest of
the journey.

Aside from that, the flight was
uneventful.

He arrived at Jorge Chávez
International at
two o’clock
Monday morning
with a dull, dry headache. He was subject to moderate migraines, for which air
travel was a definite trigger. Reading intelligence reports concerning Peruvian
guerrilla activity while drinking Bloody Marys hadn’t helped. The pain behind
his eyes escalated as he went through the rigmarole of getting Sailor Boy
cleared by customs. Had he not been carrying papers stating, falsely of course,
that he was temporarily attached to the
United States
embassy, he might have been there until Christmas.
Sometimes
Langley
was capable of marvelous efficiency.