She closed the door but it bounced back in her face, knocking her gla.s.ses crooked. My foot blocked the doorway.
"Let me be the judge of that."
I put my weight against the door. She let go. It swung open and I stepped inside. A short corridor. Mounted on the wall, a small black-and-white monitor. I could see the stairs, the street outside. To my right, at the end, a bathroom. The door was open. It looked clean. At the other end, to my left, windows. Sunlight shone in so bright I squinted.
The ever-present garua, the fog, was worse than San Francisco. When had I last seen the sun?
"The h.e.l.l?" I said. "You got a red phone link to G.o.d?"
A big man blocked the light, hands on his hips. He was taller than me by a head. His long black hair, pulled tight in a ponytail, shimmered blue and violet in the light, announcing his Indian ancestry. The bulbous cheeks suggested a German parent.
"Echo baby, what"s going on?" he asked in Spanish.
I said, "Your parents called you Echo?"
She sighed, crossed her arms, heaved skyward her enormous, sagging t.i.ts. "Don"t start."
I closed the door, stuck my hand out at the big man. "Name"s Horace. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a. Heard about your volunteering program."
He flicked a switch on the wall. The sunlight died. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. His head was too small for his body, the shrunken trophy of Polynesian cannibals. His jaw was even smaller, drawn up into his head, giving him a p.r.o.nounced overbite. His gut fought with the waistband of his brown corduroy trousers and won. On his feet, open-toed action-man sandals. A blue b.u.t.ton-down dress shirt was his halfhearted kowtow to The Man.
"Sun lamps," I said.
He shrugged, took my hand. It was big but soft, a limp bit of juicy steak. "The only way to stay sane in this horrible city," he said in Spanish.
I smiled. It felt weird. I couldn"t remember the last time my cheek muscles managed that distinctive upward pull. "We agree on something, then," I said. "That"s a start."
He waved a hand at a metal chair covered in rotting green leather. I sat. The springs ground into the base of my spine. I crossed my legs, pressed down on one side, enjoying the pain.
I thought of Sergio. That was f.u.c.ked up. What he does? To see him in the nightclub. And now again this morning, up close, firsthand.
Until today my punishment made sense. The cigarettes. The burns. Everything. A sudden darkness squeezed my chest. Was all of this a big mistake? G.o.dd.a.m.n you, Pitt, I thought. For everything.
The man said, "You want to volunteer?"
"Either this or the Foreign Legion." I shrugged. "Never did like sand."
I looked around the room. Aside from their laptops and sun lamps, the place was bare. No posters, no pictures, not even a jar full of paper clips or a box of pencils. In the corner lay a bunch of picket signs, upside down. Stake handles resting against the wall, the poster board clean, unbent. Unused. I bent my neck sideways to read them. Echo moved to stand in front of them, but not before I got a good look at a few.
No War For Ore.
Stop Bat Guano II.
f.u.c.k the US.
"Subtle," I said.
"How did you find out about us, Horace?" The shrunken head smiled, his eyes narrow.
"Friend of mine," I said. "Met him in a bar. The Rat"s Nest, in Barranco. You know it?"
They nodded in unison, arms folded across their chests, but said nothing.
"Tell me about the bat guano," I said. "What does that mean? Second helpings of bat s.h.i.t?"
The Bavarian"s frizzy orange hair exploded, as though struck by lightning. "It"s about imperialist fascist pigs raping Bolivia, stealing their land. It"s about-"
A thick hand cut her off in mid-sentence. The man said, "The name of your friend, Horace."
I pulled out the business card, extended it between two fingers. "Sho" "nuff," I said. "Name was Pitt."
They looked at the card. They looked at each other. The Bavarian fiddled with her bra strap. "Pitt?"
"Have a last name?"
I let my arm fall. "Watters," I said. "Pitt Watters."
Shrunken head flicked his ponytail in one hand, eyed the gaping hole in my sweater. "Are you sure it was us he mentioned?"
"Positive. Amba.s.sador"s son is a stickler for details. Like father, like son."
The man stood. He held out his hand. "I would remember the American amba.s.sador"s son."
"Or maybe you know my ex-fiancee," I said, ignoring the hand. "Katherine? Goes by Kate? Would have volunteered about nine months ago."
They both shuffled their feet. Echo let out a fart, blushed. "There are many people with that name," she said. "It is a common name. Now if you please?"
I made a show of looking past her at the picket signs. "No War For Ore," I said. "This got something to do with Ovejo? The lithium, perhaps?"
Ovejo was the socialist president of Bolivia. Pitt had mentioned him once over beers and wh.o.r.es. The Bolivian government was demanding more money for the mining concession, threatening to nationalize the mine if their demands were not met.
"We are busy right now," Echo said. She ma.s.saged her belly, and I realized she wasn"t fat, or at any rate not just fat: she was pregnant. "Call next time. Before you come. Maybe then we talk some more. Yes?"
I climbed out of the chair, my face wrinkling with kindness, tears coming to my eyes as the spring left contact with my spine. "We must think of the unborn," I said. "What future are we leaving for our children?"
"Of course." Still the man"s hand hovered in midair, an insistent dismissal.
"You got a brochure or something?" I said. "The Legion doesn"t want me I"ll try again with you."
A glossy trifold brochure attacked my chest. I folded it and stuffed it down the front of my pants.
"I never caught your name," I said, and took his hand.
"No," he said. "You didn"t."
He released me, but I held his hand tight.
"I never said he was American."
"Who"s that?"
"The amba.s.sador"s son."
I sashayed out on the landing. The door closed behind me. I went down the stairs, letting my feet fall heavy on the steps, noting the noise each made. At the bottom, I opened the door and lit a cigarette. I took a puff, threw the cigarette into the gutter. I slipped back inside as the door clicked shut.
I didn"t move. I listened. Silence. I slid out of my flip-flops. Still nothing. I picked them up in one hand, and tiptoed up the stairs, skipping the creaky ones.
Voices raised inside the office. I pressed my ear to the door, careful to stand below the peephole. They argued in Spanish.
"I tell you, he knows!" The man"s voice was hysterical.
"He knows nothing."
"He tries to stop us, what we"re doing-"
"Gaia will never allow it-"
"-helps those who help themselves."
My eavesdropping was interrupted by a tap on the gla.s.s below. I looked down the stairs. Some kid. Wait-Paco? Of all people. He waved. I put my finger to my lips, shook my head.
"What if we"re wrong? What if-"
"What if, what if, what if." The woman"s voice was condescending, scornful. "We do her will. Have faith. We shall join her soon. All of us."
Paco tried the locked door, rattled the handle. I slashed my arms sideways, an umpire denying the winning touchdown.
"Check the video."
Footsteps came closer to the door. "Waving at the camera. Some homeless."
The woman snorted. "Doesn"t know how lucky he is."
I jammed my feet back into my flip-flops. Jumped, grabbed the video camera and ripped it from the wall. Couldn"t have them knowing I had eavesdropped. Plaster showered on the landing. I spiked the camera, claimed my six points and threw myself down the stairs three at a time. I was in the street before I heard the upstairs door open.
I sprinted along the crowded sidewalk, crashing through groups of Brits in zip travel pants, the kind of tourists who thought slumming in Lima made them worldly adventurers. Behind me, a frenzy of pocket patting and slapping, and I knew Paco"s magic hands were at work, even as he ran.
We didn"t stop until we got to the sea. We ran the length of Avenida Larco, dashed down the stairs into Larco Mar, the cliff-side shopping mall for tourists and Lima"s pathetically pet.i.te bourgeoisie. I slowed to a walk, hopped the escalator downstairs to the cinema. I bought two tickets to a Hollywood blockbuster whose poster of an overpaid movie actor holding a gun promised boredom. I handed a ticket to Paco. Together we entered the darkened theater.
The movie was already halfway along. A faked explosion filled the screen. Cars squealed. I yawned. Paco pulled wallets from his various pockets, siphoned the cash and dropped the remainder on the sticky floor.
"What"s going on, Paco?"
He grinned. "I could also ask you that." His teeth gleamed white in the dark theater.
"Why were you following me?"
"Shh!" A gringo tourist in a blue denim shirt turned around, finger to his lips.
Paco lowered his voice. "They pay me. That is why I want talk to you, amigo."
"They are paying you. You want to talk to me. Fine. Who? Why?"
"Tell them where you go. What you do. They pay in dollars. Much money."
"A lot of money."
He nodded, peering skyward at a pair of twenty-foot-tall, surgically crafted Hollywood b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "A lot."
A piece of popcorn missed my face by inches. "Hey a.s.shole, shut up already."
"What do they look like?" I asked.
"A gringo." Paco shifted in his seat. "You know. Rubio."
"We all look alike." I sighed. Rubio literally meant "blond." But in practice it meant anyone with hair that wasn"t Latino black. My dark brown hair was, to Paco, rubio.
"Since when?" I asked him.
"Last week."
"When you meeting next?"
Paco grinned. "You mean, "when are you meeting next," right, profesor?"
A fat blob of an American stood, blocking the screen. He s...o...b..red down at me, his words slurred by the quant.i.ty of fat dangling from his chin. "Some of us are on vacation."
I pulled a switchblade from my pocket. I flicked open the knife one-handed, stabbed him in the nipple. "Well I"m not."
Out in the midday gloom of Lima, we hurled ourselves into a pa.s.sing bus.
"Where to next, boss?"
"Home. Tag along?"
"You do not mind?"
I ruffled his hair and sighed. "I"ll let you know when I do."
Volcanic Volunteers" trifold brochure contained no more information than I expected. Pictures of happy brown children frolicking next to high-alt.i.tude mud-brick houses, vistas of the Andes in the background. Promises of personal fulfillment for the foreign volunteer, all for the low, low price of just two thousand dollars per week.
A picture of a lake filled the middle inside third of the trifold. I stared at it. I knew that lake. Knew it too well. The island in the distance, too. I swatted the memory aside, but it bounced back, punched me in the jaw like an angry midget with a two-by-four.
I had to go there. Find the volunteers. Find them, find Kate. Find Kate, find Pitt. Find Pitt...and then? Then what? I had no idea. All I knew was I felt driven. After a year of wallowing in s.h.i.t I had something to hold on to, a life preserver, and I wasn"t going to let it go. Even if it meant having to dredge up the past and face Kate again.
I needed a drink. There are some things no man was ever meant to suffer. Was never meant to bear. I fingered the soap dish in my pocket, left it there. Not here on the bus. Getting caught would mean a hefty bribe I couldn"t pay, and a long flight back to the States. I shuddered just thinking about it. Better death than that.
I folded the brochure into a tight square, and shoved it deep into my pocket.