The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (2 page)

“End the guilt.”

Those three little words ripped open a wound no balm could heal. They weren’t Pitt’s words, either. And that meant—
No. Don’t go there. Don’t even think about it.
I put the paper on the table and a cockroach scuttled down the table leg and across the floor.

Lynn impaled the insect on the heel of her shoe. “You got a real cockroach problem, you know that?”

She lifted her foot. A pile of twitching goo stuck to the tip of her heel. I snagged a tissue and bent down, running my fingertips along her calf, the sheer black stocking an electric separation between us. I held her foot steady and wiped the goo from her shoe.

“I’d say it’s the cockroaches who have a real human problem.”

I went to the window and opened it just enough to flick the tissue-wrapped bug outside. It landed in a passing wheelbarrow of red-black flesh. A butcher with a shovel scooped it into the meat grinder.

The thick gravy of Lima’s filthy air spilled into the room and I choked. Cold and disgusting. I took a deep breath, held it in my lungs. Perfect. I picked up the pack of Hamiltons on my desk. Nasty local cigarette. No filter. Stuck three in my mouth and set them all on fire, the match trembling in front of my face. I sucked in the hot smoke. The flavor of cheap tobacco mingled with the taste of exhaust.

The
pisco
and coke were no longer enough. What was Pitt trying to tell me? I ripped open my shirt and hunted for a patch of skin not covered in scar tissue. A futile quest. Over the course of the last year I had pockmarked my entire body from the neck down with multiple layers of cigarette burns.

Lynn came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my chest, pinning my elbows at my side. Her breasts made divots in my shoulder blades. I could smell her perfume.
Musk of Horny Woman.
By Calvin Klein.

“It’s not your fault,” she said.

I struggled to break free but she held me tight. “The
fuck
you know.”

“Could happen to anyone.”

“Well it didn’t, did it? It happened to me.”

“It’s OK to cry.”

“Fuck you,” I said. I elbowed her in the stomach and she let go.

There. Found a spot.
I extinguished all three burning cigarettes under my armpit. The smell of burning flesh wafted up between us. I put the cigarettes back in my mouth and lit them again, puffing to get them nice and hot.

She clutched her navel. She said, “I need to know.”

“Where the door is? Right behind you.”

“What it means. ‘End the guilt’? What guilt? What has he done?”

She had no idea. I wasn’t about to enlighten her. “Maybe he killed a cockroach.”

A sharp blow knocked the cigarettes from my hand.

“Damn you, Horse. I need your help!” Her face grew red. Brine leaked from the corners of her eyes. She reached for my crotch.

“Let him go,” I said. I held her breast firm in my hand. “He’s an asshole, same as me.”

“My son is not an asshole,” she said, shimmying out of her tube top.

“But you’ll admit that I am?”

She grinned through her tears. “You’re my kind of asshole.” She unbuckled my belt. The kettle began to scream.

Two

“Bros forever, dude?”

We were sitting on our longboards in the waves off Huanchaco, a short hour flight north of Lima. Pitt’s fist hovered in midair, waiting. His smile was full of teeth, his green eyes the color of the sea. A halo of early morning sun surrounded his head.

A blond god with a deep tan wanted to fist bump.

I pushed his fist with mine. “Bros forever.”

A wave was coming fast. A big one. It threw us apart and we scrambled to cling to our boards.

“Longest left hand point break in the world,” Pitt shouted over the noise of the sea and the caw of the gulls. A shark-tooth necklace danced on his chest, triangles of white on his black wetsuit.

We paddled out into the deep, our arms sweeping the lengths of our longboards, pushing through the ocean waves. A kilometer out, we pressed our chests against the waxed boards.

In the distance the gray, dead Peruvian coast watched us, a cemetery waiting patiently to be filled. We aimed our boards at the white church on the hill. Reed boats lined the foreshore, tiny handmade kayaks with curved prows like a jester’s slippers. The hour of fishing was over. Now was the hour of surf.

“Just get me back to shore,” I gulped, spitting salt water. Another wave lifted us in a heavy swell, dropped us again. The sun peeked over the eastern horizon, but in the west dark clouds hovered.

“Surfing’s better than sex,” he shouted.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Better than drugs! Better than anything!”

“Oh yeah?” I retorted. “What happens when you’re back on land?”

He laughed. “That assumes you make it back!”

He slipped off his board into the water. He grabbed the end of my surfboard and paddled toward shore.

“The fuck you doing?”

“When I say go, get up, OK?”

Another wave swelled. Without warning, a sudden shove launched me into the air
—what happened to “When I say go”? But no time to dispute the point now—
and I leaped onto the board, and for what seemed like eternity the only thing that mattered was staying upright.

I had gone surfing once or twice on a high school trip to Tijuana. My memory of the lessons was rather hazy, no doubt due to the quantities of liquor, pot and mescaline I had consumed that weekend, but somehow my feet remembered, my body understood, and the wave picked me up into the air, my arms out, body tense, and bore me toward the shore faster than I had ever gone before.

The sand got closer, the wave got higher, I began to panic.
Now what? How do I make it stop? How do I get off this thing?

The wave collapsed. My feet left the board and I fell into the surf, crashing sideways into the surfboard, my chest flattened against the hard surface. Pain blossomed in my ribs.
Gather ye rosebuds,
I thought. I stood in waist-high water, but the following wave knocked me over.

I swallowed sea water. Coughed, spat brine. I grabbed hold of the board again, ignoring the pain in my side, and floated into shore on the next wave. When I felt my knees hit sand, I picked up the board and walked out of the surf.

Pitt rode the crest of a monster wave. Must have been three meters, easy. He slid down into the curve beneath the wave, darting sideways through the tube as it collapsed behind him. It looked as though he’d make it all the way to shore, cruising along on the final efforts of the wave, when the sea decided it had seen enough insolence for one day, and crashed down around him.

He tumbled out of the water, staggering with his board under his arm, feet struggling through the outgoing tide. He pumped his fist in the air. “Wipe out!”

I waited until he got within non-shouting range. “I think I prefer cocaine.”

“That’s why we brought a kilo, didn’t we?”

He grinned, the sand and the sea streaming from his hair, the sun peeking through the gathering clouds to bathe us in its flickering warmth. That grin that said all was right with the world, there could be no wrong, happiness was as simple as a dip in the ocean or a trip to the brothel, and misery too complex to understand. I envied him.

I stuck my fist out. “Bros forever?”

“Dude,” he said, and punched my fist so hard it hurt. “Bros forever.”

Welcome to Happy Frying Pan Store.

So proclaimed the sign in Spanish, English and Chinese. Although I don’t know Chinese. Maybe it said Buy Cocaine Cheap Shop in that oriental chicken scratch.

Pitt had wanted coke for our trip up the coast. Insisted on meeting my dealer in person.

“Never know what they cut it with,” he complained.

“The stuff you’re snorting now is finest high-mountain nose candy,” I said. “Besides, I’m one of Hak Po’s best customers.”

But he insisted, so I let him tag along. He waited for me after class, and we took a bus deep into the warehouse and factory district adjoining Lima’s million-strong Chinatown.

I pushed open the front door. The bell tinkled. A Chinese boy of about twenty lounged behind the counter, picking his fingernails with a knife. He was missing an eye. The remaining orb appraised us quickly: gringos in the wrong part of town.

“You like fry pan?” he asked in pidgin English. “Very good fry pan.” Piles of cast-iron skillets lay stacked around the shop.

I chuckled and leaned on the counter. “You must be new. We’re here to see the boss.”

He held my gaze, his one eye unblinking. “Name?”

“Horace. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a.”

The boy closed the hasp of his knife and retreated through a hanging bead doorway.

Pitt hefted a frying pan. He ran a finger through a thick layer of dust. “Your drug dealer runs a frying pan factory?”

I shrugged. “Good a cover as any, I suppose.”

A wizened yellow gnome of a man shuffled through the bead door. The ever-present Cubs cap perched high on his head, exposing his wispy baldness. His sallow face puckered in a grin when he saw me.

“Hak Po!” I said. I hacked up some phlegm and spat on the floor.

“How’s my leetle Horsie?” he asked, dangling a finger at crotch level.

We shook hands and laughed.

“Friend I want you to meet,” I said.

He glided around the counter, his black slippers skating across the dust-covered floor. He looked Pitt up and down.

Pitt grinned and held out his hand. “Horse says you’re the best.”

Hak Po looked at the hand but did not take it. “Where I see your face before?”

Pitt’s eyes flickered my way. “I don’t know. My first time here.”

“You stay.” He pointed at me. “You come.”

Hak Po shuffle-glided back behind the counter and the little-used cash register.

Pitt went to follow, but I put a hand on his chest. “Sorry, dude,” I said. “I love you like a brother, but if Hak Po says stay, you stay. Besides,” I said. “Maybe you can find a nice frying pan for your mother or something.”

“Fat chance I’d ever see
her
cooking,” he laughed. “But you go on. Don’t worry about it.”

I stepped around the counter and through the bead door. Hak led me along a dark corridor into the factory. Great cauldrons of liquid iron belched and hissed steam. Workers poured the molten lava into frying pan molds, then plunged the newly created cookware into cold water to temper them. Steam rose in clouds. The din was terrible.

I’d asked him once, my nose full of coke, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to import cast-iron cookware from China?”

He had grinned up at me, a spoonful of cocaine ringing the edge of his nose. “I like make fry pan. What wrong with that? You insult my profession, something?”

“No,” I’d said. “Fry pan good. You good fry pan man.”

“Yes,” he’d said, snorting his uncut powdered joy. “I very good fry pan man.”

Hak Po’s office was a small room just off the factory floor. He let me go first. I squeezed through a gauntlet of four filing cabinets and climbed over his desk to take a chair. You didn’t want to slip; Hak Po, as his name suggested, was a spitter, and the floor was covered in a slick coating of slime.

Hak took a seat and unlocked a filing cabinet. He took out a kilo bag of cocaine and placed it on the desk. I tossed an envelope full of used fifties into his “in” tray and reached for the coke. He stopped me with an open hand.

“Tell me something, Horse, please.”

I was itching to get some of that powder in my nose. “Sure, Hak. Anything.”

“How long you know friend?”

I shrugged. “Couple months. Long enough. Why?”

“I know I see him somewhere. No remember where.” He waggled a finger in the air. “He bad man.”

I laughed. “As am I. As are you.”

A grunt. “True. But some are more bad than others. You stay away him, hear?”

“Sure, Hak,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

He let me taste the coke. It was good. The closest to forgetting I was ever likely to find. I stood and climbed past him over the desk.

A yellow hand pinched my calf. “You watch yourself now, Horse. You hear? I no like lose good customer.”

I’d been warned. I should have known better. Alarm bells had gone off the day I met Pitt, but I ignored them.

I was in the Rat’s Nest trying to pick a fight with a pacifist fucking general in the Marine Corps. I’d heard an aircraft carrier was in harbor down at Callao, and I went looking for the biggest, meanest-looking grunt I could find.

I believed in America. Its ideals. But those ideals had become so warped and mangled that nothing was left of them but hypocrisy and lies. The mere thought of living in America again made me sick to my stomach. Better an honest hellhole like Lima than the plastic smile and the knife in the back you’ll get at home.
Don’t you tread on me, motherfucker.

“You oughtta be ashamed of yourself,” I told him. “Killing innocent women and children for a living.” I spat on his uniform.

He wiped the loogie from his jacket and stood up. “I’ve met your kind before,” he sneered. “Traitors like you in every port in the world. Not good enough for your own country.” He turned to go. “You’re not worth the time it takes to piss on.”

“Well God bless America and pass the apple pie,” I said, and took a swing at him.

He blocked the blow easily, and sent a devastating punch my way. I closed my eyes and waited for impact, savoring in advance the coming stars. They never came. I peeked. His fist hovered in midair inches from my nose.

A crunching sound of broken bone. The man howled in pain. His forearm bent over the bar at an unnatural angle.

“Bye-bye,” a new voice said, and a man took the general’s barstool. He looked far too young and blond and happy to be sitting there in that filthy bar, chuckling to himself as the marine limped from the room, clutching his broken arm to his chest.

“The fuck are you doing?” I shouted over the noise of the bar.

“Saving your ass by the looks of things,” he said. “Name’s Pitt. Buy you a drink?” To the barman:
“Dos cervezas, por favor.”

“Make mine a bottle of
pisco,”
I hollered. “And who are you to get involved?”