"Sven and I were going to get married. Have babies. You understand? We"ve known each other since kindergarten. If I hadn"t picked a fight he"d still be alive. It"s my fault he"s dead."
"Isn"t that a bit harsh?" I asked. "I mean, how could you have known?"
"That"s not the point!" she screamed at me. Her face turned purple. "You are such an a.s.shole, you know that?"
I nodded. Vigorously. "Yes. I do."
She ducked her head, frowned at her boots. Her lips puckered. "I can"t stay here. I"ve got to get off this island. And if that means I get killed, I don"t care. But I"ve got to do something. And you"re the only something I see happening around here."
Every general needs cannon fodder, I thought. I didn"t much like the idea. I didn"t want her along. But if I said no she"d cause a major scene, and getting off the island was going to be a lot harder than getting onto it. Plus, if she stopped a bullet somewhere between here and my hands around Ambo"s throat, I wouldn"t complain. She could be my Swedish body armor. Then maybe I"d survive long enough to see Kate again.
I said, "You get killed, it"s not my fault. Got it?"
She tugged on her braids, spoke to the ground. Spat the words like bullets. "Let"s go kill the f.u.c.kers."
When we got back to the beach, the police did not want to let us off the island. No surprise there. Neither, for that matter, did the English girls. Two conscripts with AK-47s stood guarding the boat.
"Who"s the tart?" the Liverpudlian asked.
"My fiancee," I growled. "Wanna make something of it?"
The girl stroked Aurora"s cheek. "She"s cute. Wanna party?"
I had to pry Aurora"s fingers from the girl"s hair.
Darting away from the amused if sluggish police contingent, we humped back up the hill, in search of a boat. We descended to the Hotel Pelicano, on the water"s edge, and, I am ashamed to say, stole their boat. Given the ruckus on the island, I was amazed there was no one guarding it. Unlike my little aluminum dinghy, this was a proper speedboat, with twin 110-horsepower engines and a computerized navigational system, which seemed like complete overkill on a land-locked lake at four thousand meters. That is, until they started shooting at us.
Gunshots splashed the water off our bow. A puff of smoke hissed upward from a gun turret; a whistling sound; and a sh.e.l.l exploded in the water not ten meters away, soaking us with spray, nearly swamping us.
"Grab the gun!" I shouted.
"What gun?"
"s.h.i.t!" I"d left it in the other boat.
I crouched low, opened the throttle, and we shot across the lake, bouncing off the low waves. More sh.e.l.ls splashed around us, but the speedboat outpaced them, until the destroyer receded to a dot on the horizon.
But they wouldn"t be far behind us.
"You did this," Victor said. He pointed the gun at my head.
Fresh bruises littered his face. Wet strands of combover hung at his shoulder. His sweater was torn down the front. The gun twitched and bobbed in his hand. He looked like a homicidal racc.o.o.n with a bad case of the DTs.
This was the man Kate preferred to me? I was no great catch. I knew that. But this was the compet.i.tion? I put my hands in the air and considered my options.
Hmm. There weren"t any. I wondered what I"d say to Pitt if there really was an afterlife. What I"d say to Lili.
"I"m sorry," I said. "I should have flushed."
Aurora trudged through the sand, around Victor, up the gravel rise to the main street of the tiny village. Victor"s gun wavered between my nose and her b.u.t.tocks. "Come back here!" he shouted. "I"ll shoot!"
"Go ahead, for all I care," Aurora said.
"Hey," I said, "that"s my line."
She rounded the corner and stopped. She swayed on her feet. Fell to her knees. "Oh my G.o.d," she said. She covered her face with her hands. "This is real. This is happening."
"What is?" I asked.
But all she said was, "Who could do such a thing?"
"Do what?"
"As if you have to ask," Victor sneered. He put both hands on the gun, as though willing himself to shoot, but unable to do so.
"Before you kill me," I said, "let me find out what I did?"
He jerked the gun, motioning me toward Aurora. I climbed the gravel embankment and joined her in a front-row seat to an oozing pile of dead bodies.
A realtor would have said the houses were ready for new occupants, as long as you didn"t mind the bullet holes in the exterior wood paneling, or the shattered gla.s.s. And hey, blood comes out with just a little elbow grease, right? But really, sorry, hey, the corpses of the previous tenants have to go. Maggoty cadavers lower property values for everyone, not just you.
Whoever had done it had not been satisfied with merely ma.s.sacring everyone in sight. No. They had to stack the bodies in a pile taller than me. Blood and p.i.s.s formed puddles on the hard-packed earth. Orange-and-scarlet robes mixed with denim. A toothless mouth gaped at me upside down, and I knew the old fisherman"s net would never be fully mended. The little boy, the one who"d crashed into me, he was there too, eyes missing from their sockets, Bolivia"s hopes for the World Cup now dashed. Echo"s pregnant belly sagged amidst the carnage, one less angry volunteer for the Lima office. I picked up a red baseball cap, and half an eyeball plopped onto my shoe. I dropped the cap on the ground. I wondered if Kate was buried somewhere in the mess.
"It was you," Victor said. His breath came in snorts and gulps, his nostrils vibrating. "You. And him. Michael." He kicked a corpse on the ground, separating it from the main pile. He flipped it over with his toe. It was the talkative monk/volunteer/freakazoid from the night before. The auto-flagellating weirdo. The back of his head was missing.
"Why would he do such a thing?" I asked.
"Don"t pretend you don"t know."
"You know the dead guy?" Aurora asked me.
"I ate dinner with him last night. He said all of a dozen words before whipping himself with barbed wire."
"He was CIA!" Victor raged. "Had to be. Or why did he do all this?"
"So what happened?" Aurora asked. "All of a sudden he just started shooting?"
"Pretty much." He wiped the sweat from his palms against his sweater, one at a time, but kept the gun pointed at my chest. He said, "We were loading the boats. Preparing to flee. We expected American aggression." He spat. "Michael had a gun." He looked at the weapon in his hand. "This gun. Just started killing people. Clip after clip after clip. Men. Women. Children."
I swallowed. "Kate?"
"How convenient," he sneered. "I told you. Kate got away. A boatload left this morning, before you got up. Crossed the lake, took a jeep into the mountains."
"And you think I had something to do with this."
"I know you f.u.c.king did!" he shouted, his wet combover slapping against his right shoulder, his scalp pink in the late-morning sun.
"I know you did," he said again. His lips curled inward in a face-puckering howl. His shoulders shook. The gun rattled in his hands. "And now you"ll get your f.u.c.king war."
"Wait a second. What war?" Aurora held her palm in front of the gun barrel. "And how do you know it was this guy?" She jerked a thumb in my direction. "What was your name again?"
"Horace," I said. "But people call me Horse. As in hung like a."
She giggled. "Really? Like cloppity-clippity-clop, ride off into the sunset?"
"More like pulling heavy loads until you lie down at the side of the road and they shoot you. But close," I said.
Victor stepped between us, pointed the gun at her, then at me, back and forth, as though confused who to kill. "You murder dozens of innocent people, and you stand here talking about ponies?"
Aurora held up her hands again. "We had nothing to do with this. And Horse has been on the island all morning."
"Of course he was," Victor said. "All he did was lead them here so they could kill us all."
"But you just said the dead guy, Michael was it? Was CIA. How long has he been here for?" she asked.
Victor"s combover trembled. "Months. Three months. Three and a half."
"So they already knew you were here. Since ages ago. So what exactly is Horse guilty of?"
The gun trembled in his hand. "That doesn"t mean he didn"t do it. Both of you. You"re part of it too. I can tell." He pointed the gun at her, then at me. Aimed at my head. His eyes narrowed, like he was about to pull the trigger.
My body moved on autopilot. I smacked my fist down on the gun with one hand, slapped Victor across the face with the other. He let go of the gun. I picked it off the ground.
"I feel the same," I said. He continued to convulse. I slapped him again. "It will not do you any good. You understand?"
He cringed on the ground, covered his face with his forearms, hands flat on his scalp. "Do it quick and get it over with."
"For f.u.c.k"s sake," I said. "We"re not going to kill you. Will you snap out of it?"
"He"s in shock," Aurora said. "Give him some time."
"We haven"t got time," I said. I flicked the gun into the lake. It splashed in the water and disappeared.
"Happy now?" I asked.
He peeked between his wrists. "You"re not? Going to kill me, I mean?"
"Why would I want to kill you?" I asked him. I held out my hand. "Come on. Get up. Be a man."
He took my hand and I heaved him to his feet. He gaped at me. Glanced over his shoulders, as though expecting an a.s.sault.
"Are there others?" I asked him. "The ones who did this?"
"No," he said. "Just Michael."
I looked at Aurora. She shrugged. "Other survivors, maybe?" I asked.
Victor shook his head. "No one," he stuttered. "No one left. No one."
"How did you survive?"
He went limp. He flopped back on the ground, arms slapping against the sand. "I was taking a s.h.i.t," he wailed. He looked up. "Too much coffee," he added, pleading for understanding.
"I thought you drank tea," I said.
He held out his open palms. His face contorted in sorrow. "Fifty people just got murdered and you"re worried about what I drink with breakfast?"
"So you heard gunfire," Aurora suggested.
He twisted his limp arms in circles, a woebegone duck.
"Why didn"t the monks fight back?" I squatted next to him. "They all had guns. AK-47s, it looked like. Shotguns, too."
"They tried." He raked his combover back onto his scalp. It lay in thick clumps across his naked pate. "They are not warriors. They are not soldiers. Most don"t even know how to use a rifle. Never even pulled the trigger. The bullets we gave them were blanks."
"Then what"d you give them guns for, for heaven"s sake?" Aurora said.
"The lake pirates." He waved a limp wrist at the water. "Prey on the villagers. It was for show, don"t you see? Not to actually be used, not against..." He shrugged, left the thought unfinished.
I stood, kicked the bottom of Michael"s boot. "It was just him, then. No one else. He did all this."
A miserable nod. "Yes."
Aurora asked, "Any idea why he started shooting?"
Victor snorted a long strand of b.l.o.o.d.y mucus back up his nose. "The Americans destroy dissent. So much as a peep and the Dissent Suppression Unit will kill you. The things Pitt told me..." He lowered his chin. "Pitt"s dead, isn"t he."
I nodded. "Saw the body myself." The smell of his burnt flesh even now lingered deep in my sinuses.
"See?" Victor said. "The Americans will have their war." The hectoring professor slashed the air from his muddy lectern. "Cover up the inconvenient truth. What"s a few dead volunteers in exchange for some cheap lithium?" He laughed, a bitter bark. "h.e.l.l, if I hadn"t been taking a c.r.a.p, he"d have got away with it. Saunter out of here on a boat, report back to headquarters. Get a medal for it, I expect."
"What war is he talking about?" Aurora asked me.
I said, "The US is trying to steal the lithium fields in the altiplano from Bolivia."
"Is that why Sven died?"
"Yes."
Victor and I looked away. We stood in silence for a long moment. We watched the bodies, hoping for signs of movement, knowing there would be none. Buzzards circled overhead. Flies drifted in waves from the corpses, sampled our faces, rejected us for being insufficiently dead.
Aurora strode off toward the boat.
"Where you going?" I called after her.
"We got a war to stop, don"t we?"