Red Jungle (8 page)

He hadn’t needed light. He’d lived here for over eight years, and knew the school so well he could have gotten around it if he’d gone blind. He went down to the indoor shooting range in the basement of the gym, to the gun cabinet on the wall. The climbing ropes dangled in the dark behind him.

Paterson was in charge of locking the gun case after practice and keeping the key. He had left the metal locker door open, unlocking it after he played taps. Russell felt for the first pistol on the specially designed cabinet. There were twenty-five .45 automatics, their barrels buried in wooden slots. He took one and dropped the clip out, making sure it was empty. He racked the action twice to make certain, then he left the gym and went across the grass towards his dormitory. He collected leaves on his slippers as he made his way back to speak to the Greek.

He opened the Greek’s door. The Greek slept by the window; both he and his roommate were asleep. Russell turned on the small flashlight, walked between the beds, and climbed up on The Greek’s bed, putting his knees on either side of the sleeping boy’s body. The Greek was big, six feet and two hundred pounds. There was no way Russell could beat him in a fight, he’d known that. He had simply decided to use the lesson he’d been taught in school: Superior tactics, combined with overwhelming force, win battles.

He turned the pen light on the Greek’s face, then put the barrel of the gun on the Greek’s forehead.

“Wake up,” Russell said. He moved the pen light so the Greek could see that it was a pistol he had resting on his forehead.

The Greek had blue eyes. Russell hadn’t noticed that before. “I’m going to kill you unless you stop bothering those boys. Do you understand?” He pulled the hammer back for effect. It made a big sound. It was a sound the Greek would never forget. He would never learn empathy, but he had finally learned fear.

Russell glanced over at the Greek’s roommate. He was awake, and was staring at Russell. He was no friend of the Greek’s either, though, because he was smiling.

SIX

Ayoung Indian woman, dressed in a formal blue and white maid’s uniform, opened the heavy antique door to Carl Van Diemen’s colonial mansion. Van Diemen, Mahler had told Russell, had spent a fortune remodeling the place. It showed. The maid led Russell and Katherine out to the traditional courtyard, which was full of mostly young partygoers. Van Diemen, in his late twenties, had become one of the biggest dealers of Pre-Columbian antiquities in Europe, and was obviously making a killing, judging from the magnificent seventeenth century digs.

Russell and Katherine followed a hallway along a twenty-foot-high stone wall. Painted plaster saints, their white faces hit by spotlights, hung next to Mayan stone fertility figures. The juxtaposition of the two clashing cultures was dramatic and poignant. At the end of the hallway was a towering, Titianesque painting of the Last Supper—it had been pulled from the ruins of the city after an earthquake. Under the colonial-era painting, young women in tight jeans and exposed midriffs swayed to Dirty Vegas’s famous trance tune.

“You
come. I’m
so
glad,” Carl said, pushing through the crowd to get to them. He was a big man, a little overweight, a little ripe and unctuous-looking, in the way of Europeans of a certain class. Van Diemen wore a black turtleneck shirt— the shirt untucked—and faded but ironed blue jeans. The young man’s face was round. He was very blond and very rich, and the two things seemed to come together perfectly in him. At least, that’s what Katherine had said on the walk to the house. She’d been to lots of Carl’s parties, she confessed.

Carl gave Russell a bear hug, then roughed up his hair. They had spent a week at the same hotel in Costa Rica once, and had gotten to be friends there. Carl was with his Costa Rican lover then, a well sun-blocked kid of maybe eighteen who wore an orange Speedo, even out to the clubs. Carl’s lover looked a lot like a girl, except for the package in the Speedo. In the streets people would yell
maricon
at them, real hateful. Carl and the kid were oblivious. Intrepidly queer, they didn’t seem to care.

Back then, Carl was always buying everyone around the hotel pool drinks, so Russell had decided Van Diemen had to be a rich kid, a gangster, or a fool. He liked Carl well enough. Most people did. He was the new kind of German, silly, pretentious, pacifist. He was the kind of German who wouldn’t go to war unless it was over a fashion statement, Carl had told Russell one night by the pool. His boyfriend stood in the shallow end, holding a fancy blue colored drink and looking at Carl like a girl. Russell had thought that was pretty funny. “Attack when you see Tommy Hilfiger,” he had said.

“I’ll only use laughing gas, and those little drink swords!” Carl had said.

Katherine said that Carl gave the best parties in Guatemala because he didn’t let in the squares. From the look of it, it was only hip people tonight, which in this country meant you could talk politics and art instead of soccer, and drink wine instead of whiskey.

“I didn’t know you knew Carl so well,” Katherine said, turning to him surprised. Russell hadn’t mentioned Costa Rica to her.

“We spent a week in the same hotel,” Russell said. “I was working on an article. I think it was called, ‘Costa Rica: Switzerland of Central America.’ ” It was a joke, but neither Katherine nor Carl got it. “That’s the standard line,” Russell said, trying to explain. “You see four or five of those articles a year. The Costa Rican Tourist Agency pays for a lot of them. It’s a lie, though,” he added. “It ain’t no Switzerland. They have the biggest cockroaches in the world. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen one cockroach in Switzerland.”

“What’s a lie?” Carl said. He’d missed what Russell had said because he was checking out some kid’s ass. Carl turned to Katherine. “Russell, yeah, he work in Costa Rica, he no fun. But he has fun here in Antigua. I see him at the Oprah Café with girls all the time.” Katherine looked at Carl, then at Russell a little disappointedly.

Russell was embarrassed because he didn’t want to appear a playboy, although—if truth be told—he was, to a degree. Women liked him and he liked women. It was that simple.

Katherine hit him with her hip, just like in high school, but he noticed that she kept holding his arm. Carl got them a drink by whistling with his fingers in his mouth and a waiter, a short guy, hustled over like he was playing for Manchester United. They picked champagne glasses off a silver platter and Carl took them to meet a painter friend that Russell suspected Carl was trying to put the make on. The bottle of champagne cost more than the waiter would make in a year, maybe two, Katherine told him later.

“Did you know that Gore Vidal used to live here?” the painter said. “In this very house.” The painter was a handsome American, and Russell pegged him as an upper cruster. The painter seemed very preoccupied with his watch, spinning it around his thin wrist. Russell asked him if he’d come to Guatemala to paint. The young man looked at him shocked, as if he’d been asked if he picked his nose, or ate bugs that landed on him.

“No, of course not. I’ve stopped for the time being. I’m not doing
anything
. Really. I’m trying to figure out the next thing.

Then I’ll paint it. I mean, you have to get a good picture of where we’re going and then get that down, man. You know, get it down. Guatemala is next. I think its going to be hot. I’m going to Coban and see what’s there. Caves, I’ve heard.” The painter acted as if he’d taken crystal meth. He had that wired anticipatory look. He was thin and had a stud in his tongue. When he spoke, it looked as if the end of his tongue wasn’t on quite right.

The music stopped, then started again. Someone put on the sound track from the movie
Stealing Beauty
. With the small yellow lights strung up everywhere, the mansion’s wide Mediterranean-style corridors, and the sound of the water from the big fountain in the courtyard, they could have been in Ibiza or the
Costa Azul
in Spain, Russell thought.

If the mountain fell in the sea let it be. I got my old world to live through
. The Hendrix cover got turned up loud. Some people nearby got in the groove and started to sway. Two very blonde girls speaking in Dutch were sliding their hips to the music.

“Girls from Holland like to fuck, smoke dope, and read books. And tell you how it’s going to be when the Greens take over the world,” an English guy told him, staring at the girls. “I been here a month. I want to fuck them all.” He smiled happily.

“You want to go to the coast with me? Tomorrow?” Katherine asked him over the music. “We’re building some houses on a coffee plantation.”

“Sure,” Russell said. He mostly wanted to sleep with her. Unlike a lot of the people here, he wasn’t a do-gooder; he’d gotten a master’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago when he was only twenty three and looked askance on all the do-gooding, only because he felt charity—no matter how well intended—was just that, charity, not a solution for the country’s chronic underdevelopment.

“We’d have to leave early tomorrow,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” he said, but he was lying; he would have just as soon stayed in bed and screwed all morning.

“You can stay at my place,” she said. “Tonight. That way you don’t have to get up so early . . . it will be a lot easier.” It was the invitation he’d been hoping for.

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.”

Mahler appeared with a drink in his hand. When he saw Russell, he took him further out into the garden, and they sat on the edge of the fountain. Mahler gave him a report on
Tres Rios,
and Russell listened carefully. They’d only been able to survey the river on horseback before Russell had to go back to work.

They smoked a joint together. As he spoke about the work, Mahler’s blue eyes were intense, the fountain’s light catching them. Russell listened to Mahler talk about east of the river,
Amargo.
It was exciting and it was dangerous because he was working alone, he said. They had to keep the search a secret or they would run the risk of losing out to others, Mahler told him.

Russell agreed. He tossed the roach into the fountain and looked around the garden. The whole place seemed straight out of some MTV video.

“If something happens out there in the bush when you’re alone, you’re fucked,” Russell said.

“I’m blessed. Nothing ever happens to me. Let’s go talk to Carl before he gets too busy buggering some choir boy,” Mahler said. They went, and found Van Diemen talking to some girls. Carl took them into the house, to a library full of Mayan antiquities. The room had green leather club couches and dark red walls. Mayan statues and Olmec heads rested on a huge mahogany coffee table, along with a few tiny solid gold figurines. Mahler whistled out loud as they walked in.

“I’m so glad we can do business,” Carl said. “I mean, I buy the Jaguar. If you guys find it. I buy it. We get rich.” Carl smiled and looked at them happily. He was a little drunk.

“You’re already rich,” Mahler said, looking at the stuff on the coffee table.

“Great,” Russell said, impressed.

Mahler crossed the room, picked up a huge black obsidian knife from the bookcase, ran it across his throat, and smiled. “Fucking Mayans,” he said.

“You’ll buy all that stuff in the garden at
Tres Rios?
I need the money,” Russell said.

“Yes, of course. I buy all of it. Don’t worry . . . just find the Jaguar,” Carl said, watching Mahler.

Mahler tossed the knife on the couch. It was a heavy knife, and bounced. Carl picked it up and put it back on the shelf. Mahler was jealous of Carl, it was obvious, and it suddenly made Russell uncomfortable.

He went back outside to Katherine. She’d been looking for him, standing on the edge of the garden in one of the corridors, young men and women dancing behind her in the yellow light, swaying to the trance music that someone had turned back on.

Katherine had a Snoopy doll on her bed. He threw it off, and she got them something to drink. Some men had tried to stop their car on the way out of Antigua. She’d driven through them, not willing to stop and find out what they wanted. Shots had been fired. She was still upset, but was pretending not to be, he thought. They’d barely spoken on the way back into the city.

She lay down next to him, and he felt her shake. It was like a cat shakes when it’s scared. Later, they made love between the fresh cold sheets of her bed.

SEVEN

The general’s wife is very,
very
beautiful. I’ll warn you,” Katherine said suddenly. “And everyone thinks she’s crazy. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. All the guys I’ve brought up to work on the project can’t stop talking about her. I suppose you won’t be any different . . . guys are
so
predictable.”

On the drive towards the coast they’d passed some of the country’s biggest and oldest coffee plantations:
La Bella, La Sultana, La Gloria,
some obviously still grand and managing to keep going, others forlorn and abandoned because of the coffee crisis. The temperature cooled as they went higher into the mountains near Mexico. At times the dirt road was lonely and terribly rutted; at others it was well graded and busy with workers from a nearby plantation. Some plantations were so massive they’d spawned small towns outside their gates.