Ghost Lights (19 page)

“Jesus,” said the lawyer, and shook his head. He turned to Hal. “She was an entertainer I guess? Something to do with the music? But she had this extra nipple. It was, like, right under her clavicle.” He tugged his shirt collar down to display the area in question.

“It was weird, though,” said Brady. “It was little.”

“Almost like a big wart.”

“But with an areola.”

“So this won’t, this won’t make the cops think we’re adversarial?” asked Hal. “Marching back in there with an attorney?”

“It’s just a formality. Don’t worry. After you, gentlemen.”

Brady opened the door for him.

“She kept going, ‘my supernumerary nipple,’” said the lawyer. “That’s what she called it. I never forgot. ‘Supernumerary.’”

“Made it sound official,” said Brady.

“Bureaucratic,” said Cleve.

After a few minutes’ wait, with Brady and the lawyer still talking about the pool party—apparently a man had walked through a plate-glass door and been airlifted to a hospital in Mexico City—the stocky, sweat-stained man from before came out and ushered them in. It seemed to Hal that the security guard looked askance at him as they passed, as though Hal posed a security risk.

Inside they went down a brightly lit corridor and the stocky man opened the door to an interrogation room.

There was T., seated at a Formica table. At his elbow was a bottle of water.

Hal bent down and held his shoulders, then stepped back. He did not look upset.

“Are you OK? How are you holding up?”

“Fine, thank you,” said T., and smiled.

“Where were you sleeping last night?”

“We were driving for some of it. There was a rest stop. I didn’t get that much sleep.”

“Man. I’m so sorry. This is wrong, T.”

T. patted him on the arm and then looked past him, polite. “Tom Stern. Please call me T. And you are?”

Hal introduced Brady and the lawyer. On the other side of the table the stocky man arranged chairs.

“One moment,” said Jorge the stocky, and left them.

“Have they accused you of anything?” asked Hal impatiently.

“No, nothing,” said T. pleasantly.

“But so—on what grounds are they keeping you?”

“They have some questions, is what I’ve been told. They want to know what happened. Get it into the record.”

“You haven’t been interviewed officially, I assume,” said the lawyer.

“No one’s really asked me anything,” said T. “We were in a car, then a transport van with a couple of prisoners, then we stopped at a rest stop . . . I’m tired. But nothing’s happened.”

“They’ll be taping this now, then,” said the lawyer. “Wish we had more time to prepare. Key is, you don’t want to disclose more than the basic facts. You ever been deposed?”

T. shook his head.

“You have nothing to hide here, I’m sure. But keep it brief. We want to avoid even the suggestion there’s anything you could have done to stop this man from dying.”

“If I had EMT training, maybe . . . ,” said T. pensively.

“That kind of speculation is exactly what we don’t want. Just the basic facts. No emotional statements, for instance. You think you can do that?”

Then Jorge was back, and a woman with glossy lipstick and a tape recorder.

“Excuse me,” said Jorge. “This is our stenographer. Could she—?”

There was little room. Hal saw he was motioning to the chair beside Hal, in which he had not yet sat down.

“Sure, sure,” said Hal, but then, in the ensuing arrangement of persons as they settled, was left with nowhere to sit. He leaned against the wall, arms folded.

“You can just tell us what happened, your version of the events,” said Jorge, and T. nodded. Jorge narrated some protocol in the direction of the tape recorder—who was present, the date, the date of the guide’s demise. T. began to tell his story, which Hal had heard before, in an even, pleasant tone. It was as though he was unaffected by stress.

Hal himself was sweating. There was no air in the room, no windows and no air. Not even a ventilation grid, he saw, looking around. Maybe if he could crack the door open? Even a few inches would offer relief. But then there would be background noise, he guessed. Ambient sound on the tape recorder, compromising its integrity.

He was wet beneath the arms. Disgusting. And the ceiling, it seemed, was perilously low, pocked with little pinpricks in what looked like white cardboard.

Yet none of the others seemed to be noticing. They were not bothered by any of it. Except for Jorge they were not even perspiring, as far as he could see. He felt a tenuous bond with Jorge. They were the only ones with armpit stains.

Possibly he was slightly claustrophobic. Before his venture into this small, subtropical and foreign country, he had never thought of himself as a wimp. Yet it seemed he was often in discomfort since he got here, uncomfortable, exhausted, or alarmed. He had turned out to be a hothouse flower—a hothouse flower from the first world that wilted in the third. An American hothouse flower, adapted only to the United States. And within the U.S. only to Southern California, or more restricted still—adapted to the unchanging mildness of West L.A., where the worst weather you encountered was gray.

“By the time I dragged myself back down to the coast,” T. was saying, in his low, well-modulated voice, “I was in a state of exhaustion. My body weight had dropped. I went to my foreman, Marlo. Later he said I was starving. But my own worry had been thirst, you know, potable water. The river water I’d been avoiding as much as I could. I was afraid of illness. Possibly giardia. Delonn had told me there were cattle upstream. So I used the filter, but I didn’t trust myself. I was afraid I was using it wrong. By the time I saw the tourists—it was a family taking pictures of a toucan—I wasn’t thinking clearly. And the recovery was slow. This is what accounts for my delay in contacting Delonn’s family. I regret . . .”

The lawyer shook his head in a small, tight movement, but T. ignored him. Neither Jorge nor the stenographer, who seemed to be doing nothing other than keeping one hand on the tape recorder, noticed either.

“I regret that my recovery prevented me from contacting them earlier,” he went on. “I do think Delonn’s problem on the boat, the possible arm pain and mild distress he appeared to be having as we came up the river, were an early warning signal.”

The lawyer shook his head again, but T. was not looking at him.

“But he chose not to turn back. At that time, as I said, I asked him if he was OK. He was an older man, but he seemed to be in good physical shape. He was active. My recollection is, he said it was probably heartburn. He had no interest in turning back, so he dismissed my concern.”

The lawyer nodded, as though to affirm: good. Good. Blame the victim.

“Mr. Stern. What is your opinion,” asked Jorge, tipping his chair back onto two legs, “about what happened to the body? Go over that one more time, please.”

T. was drinking water from his bottle. He recapped it and set it down carefully.

“A couple of days after I abandoned the boat,” he went on, “I was at my campsite at night. I saw the boat drifting downriver. I ran into the river and tried to climb over the side, but I was too slow. I slipped off and the boat kept going. But while I was still hanging on I saw the inside of the boat, and the body wasn’t there. The tent, you know, that it was wrapped in?—was that bright yellow of raincoats. Even at night I would have been able to make it out. But there was nothing.”

“You’re sure?”

“He already said so,” said the lawyer.

“My guess was—”

“You don’t have to guess,” said the lawyer. “That’s all you saw.”

Hal felt heat rush to his face, and a suffocation. He closed his eyes and lights pricked at the darkness.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The hallway was slightly less stifling but not enough, and he kept going past the security guard and the reception desk, out the front door. The sky had clouded over and a cool breeze was up, and he relaxed instantly.

The guard would probably not let him back in by himself, but he was indifferent. The lawyer was his watchdog. The lawyer was being a lawyer. There was nothing Hal could do to help, past the fact of having brought him in, Brady and him. He was unsure of their competence, but what could he do? Nothing. These were guys who spent their spare time discussing women with extra nipples.

He sat down on a deep window ledge, feet planted far apart on the sidewalk, and raised his face to the sky. He took a deep breath and then looked level again, gazed in front of him. A car or two passed. Across the street there was a store that seemed to sell things made of ugly plastic. The objects festooned the windows brightly but their nature was unclear . . . he had always thought of himself as competent, but then he came down here and had to do everything through proxies—all he did was delegate tasks to those who were more qualified. His own qualifications, it turned out, were limited to Service business. He had no qualifications outside those narrow parameters.

And yet back home, day in, day out, he walked around like a competent man.

That was what his country did for people like him. It specialized them. They knew how to live, day in, day out, in one highly specific undertaking. They thrived in their tunnels, however narrow. Manual laborers knew more. Manual laborers, many of them, could perform myriad tasks if called upon to do so, but white collars like himself knew only one thing.

He was a surplus human, a product of a swollen civilization. He was a widget among men.

When civilization fell and government went with it, his people would die off, replaced by bricklayers, plumbers and mechanics—replaced by farmers, weavers, and electricians who could forage through the ruins for generators and fuse boxes and wire. There would be no more use for his kind.

Could he adapt, given time? Possibly. Although with some difficulty. His former mantle of confidence would fall away; losing authority, he would become a kind of beggar. He and the bohemians. Clearly they were even more useless than he was. This was why, no doubt, he partly identified with them. The presence of other broadly useless humans offered a certain comfort . . . more comfort even than Gretel, in fact, who had been so kind to him, because the young and beautiful were in their own privileged category. They would always be needed, or wanted, at least. The young and beautiful were an end in themselves. Even in the postscript to civilization, the young and beautiful would seldom be forced to beg. Plus they were good breeding stock.

In any case civilization was not quite falling at the moment. It was on its way down, collapsing in slow motion, but it had some good years left in it yet. Chances were he would continue to be what he was, live out his life as a widget, and never be called upon to learn to, say, butcher a calf.

There was Brady, coming out the front door. He nodded briskly at Hal, shook a cigarette out of a packet and lit it.

Brady, too, was a human widget.

“My prediction,” said Brady, after a first inhale, “is they keep him in overnight. Maybe one more night for good measure. I don’t think we’re looking at a serious situation.”

“Jesus,” said Hal. “That’s great to hear.”

He didn’t quite trust Brady. Brady was not smart enough, he suspected. But still it offered some relief.

“Can I talk to him by myself? Or do the cops always have to be there?”

“Give ’em another five minutes,” said Brady. “You should be able to get some face time then.”

•

B
ail was not an option, apparently. T. had not been arrested, he told Hal, sitting in the interview room again with the door wide open. He was being detained, but no charges had been brought. He was staying on a voluntary basis, until they were satisfied he was not a flight risk.

“As a courtesy,” he explained.

“You’re staying in prison as a courtesy? Why be courteous? I don’t get it. They have no right to keep you.”

“It’s all right, Hal,” said T. calmly. “Really. They’re doing a search for the body, just in case. Mostly the riverbanks, is all they can manage. Manpower issue I guess. But if they don’t find anything in the next twenty-four hours, the lawyer said, I’ll be free to leave. And if they do find it, they’ll conduct an autopsy. Verify my story.”

“That’s bullshit,” said Hal.

“It’s OK. Really. It’s not a problem for me.”

“Do you even know the, you know, the conditions? Have you gone to where they’re going to keep you?”

“Not yet. It’s just down the street.”

“And the lawyer advised you to go along with this? I mean we have money. You know. There’s plenty of it. We should be able to post a bond. You could stay at my hotel while they do their search. Their autopsy.”

“I don’t think they’ll find the body,” said T. “I think the animals got to it.”

He seemed matter-of-fact about the prospect.

“Listen. T. Why not stay in my hotel? You want to—I don’t know—have to use the toilet in front of perfect strangers? Eat gruel?”

“My own cell, they said. It’s not a high-security thing. There are private showers. And it’s just for one night.”

“I don’t know,” said Hal, shaking his head. He felt fretful. T. was not practical; in his new form he had become irresponsible, flaky. Could he be trusted even with self-preservation? “Maybe we should call a lawyer in the U.S. Someone famous. Get a referral, at least. I don’t know about this.”

“You know how you could help?”

“Just tell me.”

“If you could arrange for the flight out, a couple days down the road, that’d be great. I was thinking of walking, but now I have other plans.”

“Ha ha.”

“No, really. I was going to try to walk home, at one point.”

“In delirium, I assume.”

“I just wanted to do it. But now I think we should maybe go ahead and get back, if that works for you.”

“Good thinking.”

“Mr. Stern?”

Jorge was at the door.

“We can move you on now, sir.”

Hal stood, scraping his chair back.

“I’ll keep close tabs on you,” he told T. “That’s for sure.”

“I appreciate your concern, Hal. I do.”

“Tomorrow,” he said.