The Navidad Incident (15 page)

Predictably, his hours at Angelina's increased considerably during this career slump. Matías would have happily taken up full-time residence, but Angelina wouldn't hear of it. He was the mainspring of the business, and with him out of government, official guests had already dwindled; if he continued to sit there on his ass, she'd lose all her customers. He could still come around at night via the green door, but if he insisted on spending his days there, holding court in the salon, meeting with his not-so-secret informants, then others couldn't help but see. This was her brothel too. And if the great man didn't get up on his own two feet, Angelina scolded, how was she expected to stand behind him?

One night, having crept in the back way to Angelina's bed, Matías picked up on something in her daily recap. A couple of new customers had come in. Europeans, different color hair and eyes, but otherwise they could have been twins. Thirtyish—no telling white people's ages—they just stood there, hesitating, in the doorway “Welcome, step inside,” encouraged Angelina, who happened to be close by. Actually, the men told her, they weren't looking for women. They were gay and, frankly, quite content with each other. No, what they wanted was a drink. The hotel and guesthouse bars had the odd bottle, but not the label they were after. Someone had suggested, however, that Angelina's might have the very thing.

“So what's your poison?” asked Angelina.

“Twelve-year-old I.W. Harper,” said the fairer and slightly taller of the two. “Got any?”

“Sure do. Come on in. Is that really all you want?”

“That'll do just fine,” he said, smiling at his friend. (“A real beautiful light-up-the-sky kind of smile,” Angelina told Matías.)

The two of them came in and sat down. Each ordered a shot glass and a big chaser. They stayed on for what must have been six hours, sipping their bourbon nice and slow. Savoring the taste, smiling at each other, exchanging quiet jokes, they practically polished off the whole bottle while remaining, to all appearances, sober. At first the girls eyed this odd couple with curiosity, but when neither man showed the least interest in them sashaying past en déshabillé, they finally gave up, disheartened.

“They probably still down there drinking right now.”

Just then the intercom buzzed from the ground floor salon. The two men were saying they wanted a room for the night, was it all right? Angelina thought it over for a second, then said, “Well, if they wanna make this their hotel, why stop them? Only give them the smallest room, number four. Can't really charge them same as for a trick.”

The following evening, hearing that they were back, Matías decided to take a look for himself. With Angelina's permission, he made a rare foray downstairs into the salon and found the two sitting happily at a corner table with a bottle planted between them.

“Mind if I join you for a while?” asked Matías.

“Not at all. Please do,” said one of the men, the other nodding in unison.

“I'm Matías Guili. Up until a few days ago … I was president here.”

“I'm Yin.”

“And I'm Yang.”

Funny
, thought Matías,
they don't look Chinese
.

“Or no, I'm Port.”

“And I'm Starboard.”

Seamen were they now?

“Er, Laurel?”

“Hardy.”

“Castor.”

“Pollux.”

“We're a mixed-up couple, the two of us. Call us what you like, we're inseparable.”

“Each just a part of a pair.”

“Care for some bourbon?”

“Uh—no,” said Matías, lifting his champagne glass in disconcerted response to the jabbering duo. “I'm okay with this.”

“Ah, you got us there.”

“An equally fine tipple. The French sometimes do get things right.”

“Excuse us. We still hadn't settled the name question. Seriously, my name is Paul Joel.”

“And I'm Peter Ketch.”

Finally
, thought Matías,
some real-sounding names!

“Totally unrelated, yet people say we look alike.”

“Unrelated? Well I like that! We're lovers. I hope you don't mind that sort of thing.”

“All the same to me. East and West, everyone's got superstitions about twins and the like, but there's room for all sorts in this world.”

Joel was blond and blue-eyed, and Ketch had chestnut hair and dark brown eyes, yet in actual fact the two did look very much like twins.

“We're
so
glad to find this bourbon here.”

“Give us this and we're fine anywhere.”

“Weren't we just saying, if we had this every day, we'd be happy doing almost anything?”

“Which makes me curious,” said Matías, “I hope you don't mind my asking, but what
is
it you two do?”

“Whatever. We do magic tricks, done our share of boxing too.”

“First off, we worked as coal miners in Sweden, then we were doctors in Madagascar.”

“No no no, you got it backwards. The longest was that stint in the circus. After that we sold gibbons, worked as dance instructors, that sort of thing.”

“More recently, we headed up an advertising firm.”

“In Manhattan.”

“Truth is, we've even killed people.”

“Yes, we
have
killed people. Can't go into details, naturally, save to say it was a CIA job.”

“What are you talking about? It was Mossad.”

“Stasi.”

“Okay, anything but KGB. That really would be too much.”

“So you see, we're fickle. Can't stick to any one job for more than three years.”

“Eventually, we got tired of doing different jobs altogether. Thought we'd take a break, lie low for a while. So we started island-hopping across the Pacific … and here we are.”

“Pretty soon, though, the money's going to run out. We'll stay while the drinking's good, but when our last bottle's gone, we'll just have to look for gainful employment, now, won't we?”

“Go work for Mr. Harper.”

“Goes down easy. Tickles your throat from the inside.”

“Er, you two,” Matías finally managed to get in an awkward word, “being homos and all …”

“That's right. That's how we can be happy, just the two of us. Granted, having beautiful women around is nice too, though perhaps we're a tad disappointing for the ladies. Especially considering the line of work here,” said Ketch (or was it Joel?), gesturing with a shot glass toward the girls entertaining the other customers.

“With Joel beside me and this to drink, what else could I need?”

“With Ketch beside me and this to drink, what more could I want?”

In the end, Matías never did learn anything reliable about them—except their names. Back at his own house later that night, however, he checked the dictionary just out of curiosity. Sure enough, he found that a
ketch
was a two-masted Bermuda-rigged sailboat, differing slightly in the position of its mizzenmast from a yawl or jolly boat, derived from the German
Jolle
. Not “Joel,” but suspiciously close. And wait, Peter and Paul, weren't they the two principal Biblical apostles? Aliases again?

A few days later, when Matías was feeling even lower and more insecure, he struck a deal with the two to retain them as handymen at Angelina's and—if and when the occasion should arise—as his personal bodyguards. In return, they'd be granted room and board and all the I.W. Harper they could drink, for as long as they stayed on the islands.

Every day they did their allotted duties around the premises, and every evening they happily downed a bottle of Mr. Harper's finest, then retired to their tiny room number four and fell asleep in each other's embrace. Not the least bit secretive about their gay proclivities, they were, however, reluctant to have their morning slumbers disturbed by Angelina sending one of the girls to wake them up. This arm wrapped around that shoulder, they'd grumble about the knock on the door, but a contract was a contract.

The warm coral-reefed seas around Baltasár and Gaspar islands are home to a number of rare species of plankton not to be found in any other waters. Similarly numerous are the foreign scientists who come to the islands with proposals to set up permanent research facilities. Attractive though it might be to see a generation of local boys and girls grow up to be world-renowned plankton experts, the President has no intention of agreeing to this—at least for the moment—and douses all such offers from abroad in a cold shower policy. Nonetheless, among the undeterred visiting researchers, one young scholar from the Wood's Hole Oceanic Institute set up a laboratory in the basement of the third cheapest guesthouse in Baltasár City. During the daytime, he boated about the lagoon casting his plankton nets, then spent the late afternoon classifying the specimens collected, and typed up his findings by night. A reclusive fellow, only rarely did he ever go out on the town.

One afternoon, this David Crosby spied something extraordinary swimming across the eyepiece of his microscope. Could that have been a yellow and green bus? He distinctly saw some little old men cheerfully waving from the windows. For the next hour or so, he toyed with the knobs, frantically adjusting the magnification and focal plane, but the bus never reappeared.

Understandably, the very next day, he packed up his research and headed back to America. When life-changing good fortune comes along, one mustn't let it slip by. We can only hope that when he told his colleagues about his amazing experience, they were equally appreciative of the significance of his rare discovery.

One slow evening, Ketch and Joel are ensconced at their usual table in a corner of the near-empty salon, while Angelina stands by the door on the lookout for customers. The younger girls are all chatting in threes and fives, underscored softly by Miles Davis—a 1953 New York recording with Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker on sax, “Round Midnight” medleying into “Compulsion.” Angelina's extensive collection of jazz rarities is lost on the islanders, but it's been known to draw the occasional gasp from foreign visitors. For jazz aficionados Ketch and Joel, this cache of several hundred records is a source of immense enjoyment.

In the far corner sits the young woman from Melchor. The same age or younger than the rest, she most decidedly is not one of the girls. She has never been “kept” by parents nor madame nor patron. She rarely talks to the others; she either does her chores or sits in her corner. She aspires to invisibility: never enters into gossip, never the butt of any jokes, yet everyone notices if she's there or not. Imagine someone leaving a big package in the salon; people might learn to overlook it in time, but they'd still wonder what was inside—that's her. Normal-looking as can be, though since she hardly ever talks to anyone, there's little opportunity to see her face straight on. She always averts her eyes and rarely glances around the room. But tonight it's so quiet, she seems transfixed. Maybe it's Miles Davis who's cast a spell on her. Just now, two Indian traders come in, hurriedly choose partners, and disappear into the back rooms, but the maid from Melchor just sits listening to Miles's trumpet, oblivious to their exit. Even when Joel calls Angelina over, nothing can make the maid look up.

“Slow night,” says Joel, as Angelina takes to a plush sofa.

“Uh-huh, that's how it goes. Men all got better things to do. Business or family or sick parents or somebody's wake, it all put this good-time establishment off-limits. And no one in from overseas either, unfortunately. Everybody got off-nights.”

“Gives everyone a breather,” says Ketch.

“Nice change for one night maybe. But if it go on like this for a month, heaven help us.”

“Not much chance of that. You've got a solid reputation. The President's a regular here, VIPs always pass through,” Ketch says reassuringly.

“You don't like drunks, do you?” Joel asks her, apropos of nothing, his impossibly blue eyes glinting in the chandelier light.

“No, I happen to like drunk men
and
women.
I
even been known to get drunk myself.”

“But skin-to-skin in the sack's better than just drinking, right?”

“Who says you gotta choose one or the other?” she counters logically. “We make our business here offering both. Most johns knock back a few drinks before they take a girl.”

“But not us. We just drink and go to our room. On busy nights when you'd kill for an extra room, nonpaying guests like us must put a crimp in your profits.”

“Never cross my calculating mind. Paying customers or not, you're guests of this house. I happen to like you two.”

“We're so happy to hear you say that,” says Ketch.

Joel looks skeptical. “Do you really mean it? Are you really happy to have us here?”

“Sure. And not just me, the girls all enjoy having you here. And there's your contract with the President,” she adds in a lowered voice. “We all welcome you.”

“Nah, c'mon,” says Joel.

“Plus, you two have your uses. Wanna know why?”

The two men nod, clearly drawn in.

“Too many women staying together is a mess. Before your time, we have the girls selling, we have the johns buying, and we have me taking care of business, that's it. Often the girls fight, a little too often, steal customers back and forth, bitch bitch bitch … stupid stuff. Then you come along, and all that stop. The difference is, somebody looking on. Not a customer, not another girl, somebody they can trust, somebody they respect, somebody from a whole different world, but near enough to understand. The girls all feel your eyes on them, so they act nice, on their best behavior. You're not women, so no competition, nothing to get catty about. And you're not men—well, you know what I mean—so no need to flirt. Ideal housemates, no? Or you already know this, and just playing along?”

“We knew it. But then we're always drunk.”

“Which is fine. You gay and you boozers, so that make you double distant.”

“So it's all right for us to stay drunk? All right for everyone here, I mean, not ourselves.”

“Why not? You both fun, you good with words and charming, and most of all,” she searches for the proper phrase, “you satisfied with life. Drinking helps. It really does.”

“Now
that
, I must say, is something I've given considerable thought to,” says Joel.

“Joel here's lectured on ‘Drinking as Social Consciousness,' ” says Ketch, gazing off.

“That's right, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.”

“No! Really?”

“To harden their resolve, they decided to expose themselves to opposing opinions, or some such crazy notion. So I went and talked about the contribution of alcohol toward pacifism.”

“Joel's a good speaker, very persuasive,” adds Ketch.

“All in good fun, a bit of a lark. But you know I don't remember a thing. I was drunk at the time. Anyway, it was Ketch who wrote the text.”

“Just notes, really.”

“And what exactly did I make of those notes, Mr. Ketch? You were there.”

“Well, Mr. Joel, you talked about the drunkard as the most evolved genus of peaceable creatures,” says Ketch. “I remember it all very well. The gist of it was, for starters, that we humans have too many desires. We want to conquer other countries, or we want the most beautiful woman in the world for a bed warmer, or we want that rare one-of-a-kind ancient vase for our mantelpiece, we want it all. But the effort to acquire these things costs so very much, both for oneself and for others. Especially others, too many sacrifices.”

“Did I really say that? Are you sure you're not just making this up?”

“Not at all. Based on my simple notes, you extemporized most convincingly, Mr. Joel. To wit, that alcohol serves to cut those outlandish desires down to size and conveniently evaporates any lingering dissatisfactions. Or more to the point, getting drunk makes you feel as if you'd already realized your desires. And alcohol's a lot cheaper. Not this high-class stuff, of course,” says Ketch, holding up his glass of I.W. Harper. “But still, compared to a battleship or diamonds to entice a beautiful woman or a rare antique vase, it's a whole lot less expensive. Thanks to alcohol, people can just skip all those over-the-top desires.”

“That's right. Alcohol's an imagination amplifier,” adds Joel.

“Very well put. It amplifies us drunkards into the most highly evolved peace-loving dreamers in all creation.”

“But horses and cows and whales don't drink, and they very peaceful,” says Angelina.

“Most certainly. That's because horses and cows and whales are innately good. No such thing as a bad horse. No evil whales. We must ingest alcohol to return to that happy horse and whale state. And compared to drugs and bondage and sexual disorders, alcohol's pure. Don't know about plankton, but it's the nearest thing to grain.”

“Talk of sexual disorders, where does that put you two?” asks Angelina, speaking with a knowing confidence that she's not offending.

“We're both one hundred percent normal. We're friendly with our own kind. We never sleep with women, nothing so perverted.”

“Tsk tsk, he's just teasing. We're normal, the customers who come here are normal, the girls are normal. It's people who can't get it on without slashing their partner to ribbons who've got a problem. Now
that's
a disorder.”

“So there you have it. Taking the argument to its logical conclusion, we showed that a highly evolved drunkard species is just about as peaceable as horses, cows, and whales.”

“Within one week, a full third of the AA members quit the organization.”

“Really floored us, it did. Made me feel as if I'd done something wrong.”

“Oh, come now. It was all in the power of words. And none of them even knew just how ‘amplified' you were at the time.”

“No, they knew,” says Angelina. “Same as I know drunks are basically good. Mind you, there's better or worse at everything. We get some lousy customers in here, make a nuisance of themselves, but given time even they get the hang of it.”

“See? They evolve,” quips Ketch.

“Well, don't you evolve too much. We all love you as you are. We wish you could stay drunk forever. And if you can, we just want you to see us as lovely ladies.”

“Don't we always?”

“Yes, always,” echoes Joel, pouring himself another glass of bourbon.

Angelina wonders whether to have one herself, but then looks up and notices the maid from Melchor is gone. No, she'll pass on the drink; it's too much trouble to go get a glass.

“This bottle, though, wish they'd done a little better by the shape,” chides Ketch. “What's inside is so good. Why'd they have to make such a god-awful bottle?”

“Square bottles are unnatural, the fake cut-glass work is uncalled for. The cap's too big, it looks cheap. They wanted something to set this twelve-year-old apart from the run-of-the-mill bottle, but they overdid it.”

“Round, slender bottles are the thing. Better to fit right in the palm of your hand.”

“Don't you two ever disagree on things?” asks Angelina.

“Certainly. All the time.”

“Actually, we don't get along at all.”

“Funny, I never heard you arguing.”

“Only when we're alone. And without screaming or shouting.”

“Oh, then you really
do
get along. Shut out the world and you have your own little world to yourselves.”

“You think?” says Joel.

“Listening to records every night, laughing, whispering. What on earth you two talk about? Everybody want to know. What you got so much to discuss?”

“Call us creative.”

“Alcohol heightens creativity. Some say the best part of human culture is distilled from it.”

“Like a toy choo-choo train, running on alcohol. That's humanity.”

“That's why, while we do reminisce from time to time, most of the time we make up new things.”

“New things? Plans, things to do?”

“No, worlds,” says Joel matter-of-factly. “Inhabited by people doing all sorts of things, with unexpected events in the offing so there's an element of change. We make it all up. Natural backdrop and human actors, settings that've been there forever but the scenes keep changing. You know the sort of thing—a world.”

“Or two.”

“And
that's
what you make up?”

“Well, in words,” says Ketch.

“We toss out different ideas, sketch in the details, then put it all together.”

“Care to let me listen in sometime? At the creation,” teases Angelina, a rare note of coquetry in her voice.

“One day,” says Ketch.

“All in good time,” adds Joel, noticing something out of the corner of his eye. The maid from Melchor is now standing in the corner of the salon staring this way. Intrigued by their conversation possibly? Or no, thinks Joel, was that a spark of defiant challenge in her eyes? As if to say, we'll see who's better at making up worlds! One brief flash of eye contact, then she retreats to her room.

Sunday morning, Santa María Cathedral in Baltasár City, the bus attended First Mass at seven o'clock. As parishioners took their seats and the priest approached the altar, the bus was already there, at the end of a pew far to the back. Throughout the service it sat quietly with its engine off, so despite its size, only those sitting in the same row and the priest and acolyte who faced the congregation even noticed it. According to testimony from those seated nearby, during the hymns and litany two voices came from inside, probably the driver and young Foreign Office staffer assigned to accompany the veterans group. A former choirmaster went on record as saying that one sang at a high tenor pitch, the other bass.

When the collection basket was passed around, witnesses saw an arm reach out from the driver's seat and contribute a substantial amount of banknotes. However, when the time came to take Communion the bus did not rise. Most probably it—or they—felt unworthy to partake of the sacrament. Later, this puzzled people: on the one hand, if there were any sinful people on board it had to be the Japanese ex-soldiers, not the two locals duty-bound to drive and assist them, though they too presumably felt guilty consorting with wrongdoers. The subject of these most uncatholic venalities was much debated among the faithful of the capital.

Once Mass was over, as if to avoid any questions, the bus slipped outside as unobtrusively as it came. The backing maneuver was a feat of consummate skill. People ran after it, but all they saw were the taillights rounding a bend in the road. Others ambling about the cathedral lawn infused with righteous grace after Mass saw the bus leave but for some reason didn't think of giving chase by car.

Another rather more secular question people later asked themselves: what exactly were those Japanese doing all through Mass? And the answer was, quite obviously, they must have been sleeping. So the only two good Catholics on board, the driver and the Foreign Office aide, probably had conspired to take the bus to church, even though the sinful forty-seven inside slept right through the angelic hymns of praise.

President Matías Guili, habitual early-riser, is pondering a question in his dojo: whether or not to call that young woman from Angelina's over to the Presidential Villa. By all measure of daytime logic, which is to say in the language of politicking—bureaucratic institutions or persuasive rhetoric or sharing out monies—the act carries no obvious merit at all. He already told Lee Bo, he can't even explain why he wants her nearby, so probably he shouldn't give it another thought. Still, he has the feeling this is an important decision for him. Shifting and shapeless, a nocturnal vision born of the shadows between late night and dawn, the implications are unclear, yet compelling nonetheless. For in some spiritual sphere, far from workaday events, other powers hold sway. Somewhere, he knows, she's connected with him. With so many strategic judgments to make in the weeks ahead, keeping her around will have its advantages. For psychic support, for guidance. She probably won't know herself if something she says is prophetic or not. Even if nothing happens, some of her powers might just rub off on him. All very iffy, he knows, but that's a risk he'll have to take.