Blood Lake (44 page)

I don't know either of them.

After a pause, Stan turns to me and says, “I think this is
your
specialty.”

Too late. He shouldn't have spoken English.

But at least he doesn't understand the gunman, who says, “So, this is how we find you, talking to a fucking
gringo
.”

“That's been upgraded to a capital offense now, has it?”

“Just what we expected,” says the knifeman. “You were never anything more than a cheap
bandolera
.”

Sancho winces, but stays out of it.

“Three of our people are dead because of you,” says the gunman.

Which side are they on?

“What three people?” I ask.

“Don't act stupid.”

Stan has figured out that they're not muggers.

It could be worse.

“She's pretty cool,” says the knifeman.

“Cool as a coffin,” says the gunman, taking two steps closer and pressing the gun to my cheek.

Not much worse.

It's a cheap semiautomatic. They jam on you twenty percent of the time. Still no odds there.

“
Calle Cuatro y Zapatero
,” he says. “What happened?”

Aha. I still don't know who these guys are, but at least I know what they're talking about.

“
What happened?
” he repeats.

“I got a note. I chose to believe it. And they admitted sending it.”

“That's stiff, girl, real stiff,” says the knifeman.

“You led the cops right to them,” says the gunman, chipping each word out of the air with an ice ax.

Choose your words carefully, Fil.

“I'd say it was the other way round. Someone led the cops right to me.”

“That's a lie and you know it, you fucking whore—!

“Yeah, you
bandolera chupacolas
—!”

“The note was authenticated with an object that was taken from me by the police, so I kept a close eye out, and I would have noticed two dozen cops following me with riot gear and a pair of five-thousand-watt searchlights.”

“Ah, save your spit—”

“Yeah, try that bone on another dog, you
bandolera de mierda
—”

“What's that word they keep calling you?” Stan asks in English.

“Nothing,” I tell him.

“And now we hear you're trying to find Juanito,” says the gunman.

“That information is in public domain,” I tell them.

The gunman actually hears my words, and says, “What do you mean?”

I tell him, “Okay: you people seem to have no trouble finding me—on the coast, in the
sierra
—you've got my movements so well mapped out I bet if I swam to the Galápagos Islands you'd be waiting on the beach for me with a rum coco in your hands. So it seems to me that if I were working for the cops, you'd damn well know about it.”

There's actually a moment when they seem to consider this.

“You'd have seen me with somebody,” I add.

A fly lands on the doorframe, crawls up it a few inches, then a few inches more, almost a whole foot.

I say, “Someone is talking out of both sides of their mouth.”

They think about it. Sancho looks like he's pissed himself. Twice. I'm waiting for my guardian angel to get back from heaven already.

The gun pulls away from my head.

“We'll look into it,” says the gunman.

“We know where to find you,” says the knifeman.

No apologies.

The gunman warns me, “We're gonna dig deep.”

“It was just a misunderstanding,” says Sancho. “What do you expect? If any of us had any sense we wouldn't be in this business.”

And they're gone.

“Sorry I got you into all this.”

Stan says, “Ah, my life was in a rut anyway.”

That's why I like him. He makes great blintzes, too.

The power goes out in the hotel.

As if I care.

Our Sunday morning placidity is shattered by the frightful news. Congressman Jorge Hernández was coming down the steps of the church of Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Guayaquil after hearing Saturday evening Mass with his nephew and the priest when a man stepped away from a white Toyota Celica, raised two powerful handguns and shot Hernández four times in the head and chest, killing him instantly, then turned and shot the other two men, leaving them to die on the steps in puddles of blood.

The priest was Father Moisés Aguirre.

I go to Mass to pray for their souls.

And for my country's soul.

In Ecuador, when you want to say “Once in a blue moon,” you say “
Cada muerte de obispo
.” Every time a bishop dies.

Bishops don't die that often.

But apparently priests do.

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god.

—Denis Diderot

SUNDAY
passes in stunned silence.

Monday the shit hits. And it keeps hitting.

Accusations fill the streets.

Glass breaks.

Nightsticks whack bone.

Knuckles bloody.

People are raging against the government's response to the assassinations of Jorge Hernández and Padre Aguirre after an official announcement that Congressman Hernández was
probably
killed by a Colombian paramilitary hit squad as payback for his clandestine support of the left-wing narco-terrorist insurgency across the border in southeast Colombia, which is at about the level of “the dog ate my homework” in terms of credibility.

I'm sipping coffee in Marianita's kitchen when Lucho comes back from trying to fill his gas tank and says that prices at the pumps have doubled.

The dollar shoots to eighteen thousand sucres. Food prices follow.

Panic ensues.

Banks shut their doors, and the government commits
every
centavo
in the treasury to shoring them up by freezing the money in every sucre account and half the dollar bank accounts in the country for a full year.

The rules of the game go like this: They roll the dice, and everyone else loses a turn. It's the genius of capitalism.

Pancho la Pulga's on the air stirring things up, his late-night radio show carried in Cuenca, calling for people to rip up the streets and build barricades: “Now, a lot of people have been going on about some kind of a conspiracy to kill the priests who wrote that human rights report. But let me ask you,
who
would want to punish the people who wrote a report criticizing
this government
? Hmm,
amigos
?”

President Pajizo urges the people to remain calm, and swears that he will respect the outcome of the next elections, no matter who wins, which is awfully thoughtful of him. And I swear I that will allow the sun to rise tomorrow morning. I may even let it rain.

Today's
El Despacho
carries the first front-page story I've seen with Putamayo's name on it. The central feature is Governor Segundo Canino's alleged revelation that the Neoliberals are partly responsible for Padre Samuel's murder, although in print it lacks Governor Canino's inimitable somebody-commit-me-before-I-hurt-myself oratorical style: “We have turned up evidence that the janitor was
on Senator Faltorra's payroll
, so that in addition to supporting terrorists, one of Ecuador's legal political parties may be connected to the murders of Padre Campos of La Chala and Padre Aguirre of La Merced!”

Right. But which party? This is getting weird, even for Ecuador. And tonight Canino's coming to Cuenca.

Maybe I'm still recovering from my near-death experience, but Stan's showing up has really made me lose focus. Everything seems to be happening in Guayaquil, while I'm miles away, looking down, helpless. I wish I could find out how Peter's doing at his end of the trail. Other sleuths get to have boyfriends they can send on information-gathering errands, but if I tried to send Stan to the wilds of North
Guayas, they'd cut him up like a lab rat and dump his gutted body in a ditch.

And I'm sorry I made that joke about nobody needing terrorists when congressmen shoot at each other. They weren't laughing at Jorge Hernández's funeral.

I've got to find out what Canino's party thinks it's doing, blaming the center left for a pattern of attacks on the other prominent leftists.

The Centrist Coalition's provincial headquarters are on the second floor of a nineteenth-century colonial-style building with flimsy wooden balconies and balustrades and a few worm-eaten planks that are shaking under the heavy foot traffic of an army of devotees running around scattering leaflets and making such a fuss you'd think it was the floor of the Moscow stock exchange the day after the Bolsheviks shelled the Winter Palace.

Leather-jacketed militants are rushing up and down the stairs carrying red-and-white flags, banners, and bunting for the big rally. A party committee member leans against a doorframe, smiling but curtly dismissing an American freelance journalist's request for an interview with Governor Canino, telling the curly-haired young innocent that the presidential candidate is only coming to Cuenca for the afternoon and that he certainly won't have the time to talk to any lousy foreign journalists, especially since a lousy foreign journalist recently published “nothing but lies” about Segundo Canino in a Spanish newspaper, and that if the guy ever returns to Ecuador, “they will kill him.”

Democracy in action.

In another room that's small enough for everyone to hear a low whisper from a wheezy asthmatic, a thick-necked
caninocista
in a suit and tie is sputtering with red-faced passion, punching the air with surprising ferocity, and loudly exhorting all the party supporters sitting there in the mock schoolroom rows of wobbly metal chairs to go to the polling places this Sunday and verify that the Neoliberal Party doesn't commit widespread fraud.

Two hunched men nearly ram me with a rolled-up banner as they rush down the creaky wooden staircase.

A voice cries out in the middle of the mayhem. It's my cousin Jaime Mejia. He's wearing a full complement of redand-white pro-Canino buttons, with matching cap and armband.

“What's happening with your wonderful life?” he asks me.

We exchange the customary hugs and greetings, and he invites me have some coffee and
quesadilla
bread.

“You're a militant for the Centrist Coalition?” I ask.

“Just a supporter.”

“I don't see much of a difference.”

“Don't let them hear you say that.”

I shake my head and smile. “I gotta tell you, it's hard for me to remember ever feeling that strongly about a candidate.”

“That's because they're all the same in the U.S. Two identical parties with no balls between them. Here we have to fight to be heard.”

“What are you worried about? I thought Canino had a lock.”

“
Verás
,” he says, stroking his salt-and-pepper mustache. “The polls show that Governor Canino is losing ground to Ricardo Faltorra and Hector Gatillo, even in the
sierra
.”

“I'm not sure I trust those polls.”

“Look, Filomena, you've been out of the country a long time, so let me explain how it works. Supporting that school-teacher Gatillo is just another way of bringing Canino to power.”

“You mean by pulling votes off Faltorra and splitting the left?”

He chuckles. “Boy, you
have
been away a long time. Everybody knows
los militares
would never allow a socialist like Gatillo to take power. So when Canino slipped to second place, a lot of
caninocistas
joined with Gatillo's people, hoping that with their support
he
would win, the military would then force Gatillo out, nullify the election, and replace him with Governor Canino.”

What?

And you wonder why magical realism is an indigenous Latin American literary form.

“What if the military only do the first two things, and don't bother about that last part?”

“They don't want to run this place!” Jaime explains. “It's too much of a pain.”

“Sure it is, Jaime. But there's a lot of money in it, and it's always been easy to sell people on the idea of a ‘strong' leader, especially when you can manufacture a crisis to go with it.”

“Nobody needs to manufacture a crisis around here, Fil, we've got enough to go around. But those people are forgetting about all the restrictions we had to put up with under the military, the curfews, the censorship, the arrests, the torture, the assassinations—”

“Yes, Jaimito.” I lean closer. “And what about Padre Campos's murder?”

“Padre Campos?”

“Your candidate says he has evidence about who did it.”

“Yes, it's a vast conspiracy.”

“A pattern.”

“Pattern?”

“Campos, Aguirre, Malta, Lorca, Carnero.”