The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (18 page)

Despite the cold I was sweating. Colored spots swam across my vision. My brain felt like it was melting. My limbs trembled under my sweater. I needed money, cocaine and
pisco,
in that order. And fast.

I looked around me. Things hadn’t changed much since Kate and I were here. That had been, what? A year ago? I sighed, plastered my don’t-fuck-with-me frown across my face. An essential accoutrement for the Cuzco experience. I hoped I wouldn’t meet her here. Those were happier times.

The other passengers were engaged in a scrum for their luggage, then a mad dash for a taxi. I didn’t have any money, so I decided to walk into town. A block or two along Avenida del Sol, Cuzco’s main thoroughfare, a voice called after me.

“Hey, wait up!”

Red Cap chugged up behind me, full backpack swaying from side to side. I walked faster. He panted, trying to catch up, the air thin at this altitude.

“Where you going?” he called out.

“Where you think?”

“I come with?”

I about-faced. He jumped on tiptoe to avoid crashing into me.

“No.”

He hooked his thumbs under the pack straps, struggling to get his breath. Before he could say anything, I crossed the street. A taxi blared its horn, just missing me. Red Cap shrugged, held out a hand in salute. Another taxi stopped, and he got in.

At the Plaza de Armas I turned left on Calle San Juan de Dios, ducked right on Calle Meloq, and walked up a steep hill. I panted to a halt in front of an ancient stone building. The sign over the door proclaimed it the Hostel Thor. A car door slammed shut behind me. Red Cap got out and puffed up the hill. He entered a cheap hotel farther down. I dove into the hostel. It was early afternoon. A dozen backpacks sat by the door, waiting for their outbound owners. The lobby was quiet.

“Buenas tardes. En que puedo servirle?”

A German girl talked Spanish at me. She had dimples in her cheeks and blue ribbons tied in bows around her braided hair, a prize pig at the county fair. Her breasts hung heavy, braless. I ignored her. I lifted the countertop, went behind the desk.

“What are you doing?” she asked in English.

I took the cash box from under the counter. I spun the key and opened it.

“Scheiss,
what the fuck?”

I lifted the false bottom of the box.

“Alex!” she shouted. “Al-
EX!”

“Yeah!” came the distant male reply.

“Call the police!” She stood in the far corner, clutching a pen like a dagger.

“Shut up, bitch,” I said. I flicked through the money, a mixture of US dollars and Peruvian play money. I rolled the money into a tight cylinder, shoved it deep in my jeans pocket. I put the tray back in the cash box, closed the countertop behind me.

“You can’t do that!” she screamed.

“I just did.”

Footsteps ran along the corridor, slapping against the stone floors. A red face and crew cut appeared.

“That is him!” the German girl yelled. “Right there!”

He was six foot tall. Six foot two and a half in socks, to be precise. He ran at me, his broad chest aimed at my face. I braced for impact. He grabbed me in a hug, squeezed me to his chest, thumped me on the back. I beat my fists against his ribs until he let go.

“The fuck, man?” he said. “It’s been how long?”

The German girl stared, her heavy Teutonic tits sagging. “You know this guy, Alex?”

Alex slapped me on the back. He put his arm around my shoulder. “Berta, baby, this guy owns a third part of the hostel.”

“Guess that makes me your boss,” I said.

“What’s up, man? You need a place to crash?”

“Crash is right.”

Alex went to the girl, caressed her bare arm. He kissed her cheek. “It’s cool, baby. Clear the honeymooners out of the presidential.”

“Please don’t do that,” I said.

“You deserve it, dude. You built this place from scratch, remember?” He jerked his head toward the hallway. “Come into my lair.” He laughed. “I mean, your lair.”

The hostel was a three-hundred-year-old stone mansion. It had seen its share of Latin-chanting monks and sword-wielding Spaniards, plus the usual assortment of Indian slaves, North American vagabonds and cocaine addicts. Kate and I had bought the place from a company that wanted to demolish it.

The building was structurally sound but otherwise a pigsty. Literally. We’d sold the swine and shoveled out their slop, laid new wooden floors in the rooms, built the kitchen, transformed it from nothing to something in a month flat. Alex was our first hire, and the only one who showed any real interest in the business. When things went bad between me and Kate, we sold him a third share in the business, let him manage the place.

Alex sat down behind my old desk, pulled open a drawer. He took out two water glasses and a bottle of
pisco,
filled the glasses half-full. He held out a glass. I took it.

He said, “Kate’s the same, you know.”

“How’s that?”

“Doesn’t want me to send her money.” He shook his head. “Your share is yours. I ain’t gonna touch it. Every month it goes into the bank.”

I drank the glass of
pisco
and coughed. “Keep it,” I said, and wiped my lips with the back of my hand.

Alex put his drink down untouched. “You mind I ask?”

“Of course I mind.”

“You’re in trouble.”

“You fucking think?”

Alex whistled. “You are wound up tight.”

I poured myself a second glass, full this time. “Year in Lima does that to you.”

He put his hand on top of my glass. “Easy, bro. It’s not your fault.”

“Why does everyone keep telling me that?” I drank from the bottle. “Of course it’s my fault. Everything’s my fault. The whole fucking world.”

“What happened to you could have happened to anyone.”

“But it didn’t, did it? It happened to me. And I am dealing with it. And right now,” I said, and took his hand by the wrist, removed it from my glass, “right now I need a favor.”

Alex rocked in his chair. It creaked. “Shoot.”

“Need a train ticket. Machu Picchu. For tomorrow.”

He blinked. “In high season?”

“Know where I can scalp one?”

Alex sipped his
pisco,
grimaced. “Machu Picchu’s not your thing. Never was.”

“It’s not a tourist visit.”

He nodded. “How much you willing to pay?”

“How much I got?”

“From petty cash?” He gnawed his lower lip. “Around five hundred US. Enough.”

I put my glass down empty. “You make it happen?”

“Sure, man. Whatever. I’m always here, you need me.”

Why had Alex and I never become friends? We had worked together. Liked each other. He was a good guy. He could have been the friend I needed. Maybe it was Kate. She was jealous of everyone, male and female. Oh well. Too late now.

I stood. “I got a little thing I got to do.”

“Sure,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” I avoided his gaze. “Just a thing. I got to do.” I stopped, bit my lip. “That is—”

“Of course.” His open hand: say no more. “Remember how to get there?”

I halted, my hand on the doorknob. “How could I forget?”

My flip-flops smack-smacked against the worn bottoms of the hallway’s ancient flagstones, deep bowls of sorrow and longing, puddles of lost youth: long-dead adventurers now dust. The dark corridor vomited me forth into the modern computerized lobby. I waved to the Saxon princess, shot out into the bright mountain air.

I humped my way down the hill, past the Plaza de Armas, past the touristy restaurants and the street vendors selling crap. I walked out of the center into the slums that surround Cuzco, corrugated tin hovels sheltering small brown faces embedded with impossibly bright eyes. The hovels got smaller and filthier the farther I got from the center.

Then I was there.

A rotting wooden fence like a corral served as the cemetery boundary. I found what I was looking for in the corner. Someone had dumped a pile of garbage on the grave: decomposing banana peels, eggshells, bits of broken glass, decayed chunks of llama offal.

I scraped it aside with my foot. The gravestone lay flush with the earth. I knelt. Cleaned the crude stone with the palm of my hand. Bits of glass cut my skin. I relished the pain. The stone read:

Liliana Mann

Daughter of

Horace Mann & Katherine Bittre

Forgive Us If You Can

I waited. Nothing happened. I had feared this moment for so long. Avoided it at all costs. I hadn’t been here since the funeral, and I don’t remember that day, I was so drunk, so high…

What did I expect? Her ghost to rise up in a translucent cloud of ectoplasm, and curse me in the incoherent babble of a six-month-old? Or do dead infants develop the capacity for speech in the underworld?

The smell of garbage rose thick in my nostrils. A light breeze ruffled my hair. Still nothing.
Was this all there was?
A rectangle of fake granite and tiny limbs decomposing six feet beneath me? Or maybe that was it. Nothing more.
A bit of sky and sunshine is all we have,
I thought,
and when we disappear underground it is forever.
I wished I was with her. I’d be joining her soon enough. I took the picture from my pocket, put it away again. I wanted to cry. I had tried to cry so many times these last twelve months. And now? Here I was and I couldn’t even shed a drop.
What kind of scumbag are you?
I wanted to shout.

I looked around. A pack of street dogs swarmed a yellow-backed bitch, yelping and nipping each other to see who would be next. A wrinkled Indian woman across the street swept her front porch. A flash of red caught my eye. Behind a tombstone? Or was it my imagination? I picked a final bit of dog shit from Lili’s gravestone, and stood up.

Pitt,
I thought.
Where are you? What do you know? What do you mean by end the guilt?
It hung heavy from my shoulders now, heavier than ever before. Maybe he’d found some secret key that lifted the burden, freed you to live again. I doubted it. Or maybe he had, but it was some religious bullshit. Like Ambo and his Bible-thumping hypocrisy. I had to take the chance.

I walked back to town, one hand in my pocket, clutching the cash, the other beating away the clamoring young thieves whose inexpert hands darted in and out of my empty pockets. I climbed the hill once more to the hostel. Berta was there. The flaxen-haired Visigoth.

“You known Alex long?” I said.

Her cheeks flushed pink. “Just a few weeks. Here’s your key.”

“Alex goes through women like I go through socks.” I shrugged and took the key. “Guess you know what you’re doing, though.”

The room was just how I designed it. Simple, durable furniture. Bed that didn’t squeak. Floor-to-ceiling windows that let in the evening lights of Cuzco. Big bathroom with a tub. A hideaway for lovers, a hotel room in a hostel. It had been our love nest, Kate and I.

I sat on the bed. She had given birth here. Liliana had taken her first lungful of air in this room. This was where it all began. What I had been avoiding for so long. Now I was here and I felt like a stranger in my own home. I closed my eyes, rubbed the bridge of my nose.

I stank. For the first time in a year I was aware of my own smell. Maybe it was the altitude. And after the time in jail, the bus ride… I was putrid. I took my clothes off and sniffed them. Not worth saving. I showered, resisting the temptation to soak in the bath. Too many memories lingered in that tub. I got out of the shower, put a towel around my waist and walked out into the hallway. Berta was arguing with Alex.

“So what am I, just another weeklong fling?”

I looked over the banister into the lobby. Alex put his hands on her hips. She pushed him away. The room next to mine was Alex’s. I tried the knob. Unlocked. I went in, rummaged around in the closet. I stole a couple of T-shirts, a clean white dress shirt, a pair of jeans, a sweater, a leather jacket. I closed the door behind me. From a broom closet I pinched a length of rope. Then I went back to my room, got dressed. The clothes were all three sizes too big. I had to roll the jeans halfway to my knees. The rope I chucked under the bed.

Alex had left a courtesy gram of cocaine for me on the pillow, plus an unopened bottle of
pisco
and a pack of Hamiltons.
What a guy,
I thought.
Damn. I should really be nicer to him.
I shoveled a pinch of cocaine up my nose and took a big swig from the bottle to wash it down. I began to feel human again. That is to say, another piece of shit floating in a sea of filth.

I jumped down the stairs three at a time, turned toward the lobby just in time to see Berta slap Alex across the face.

“Got those tickets, Alex?” I shouted.

“Working on it. Hey—” I kept walking. I was almost to the door. “I need to talk to you,” he said.

“Sorry, gotta run.”

The evening chill had fallen on Cuzco, a faint orange glow in the western sky. I pimp-rolled down the sidewalk stairs, looking into every open window, checking over my shoulder. On Calle San Blas I joined the promenading gringo throng. I pretended to read restaurant menus, studied the reflection of the crowd behind me.

There he was. A change of clothes, but the red cap remained. Did he want me to spot him? What an idiot. He lingered in front of a café on the other side of the street. I strolled along to the next restaurant, looked in the reflection again. He matched my pace.

A Peruvian tout clung to my arm, tried to drag me inside his establishment. I shook myself free, cursed his mother, threatened physical violence to his testicles, if he had any, the existence of which I declared in a loud voice I doubted, then went into the British-owned restaurant next door. I perched in the window on a high stool. Red Cap stood across the street, peering into the opposite eatery, his back toward me.

The waitress offered me a menu. I had no real appetite but I needed to eat something, keep my strength up. Digesting fatty foods at altitude was hard, especially if you’ve just come up from Lima. So I skipped the steak and fries and asked for a big bowl of rice and beans. Healthier than my normal fare, but junk food would probably have me puking all night long. I declined the offer of a beer. I had
pisco
enough back in my room. When I finished ordering, Red Cap had gone. The food tasted good, better than I expected, and for the first time since La Paz I treated myself to a cappuccino for dessert.