The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (7 page)

“Tell me something, Horse,” she said.

She unlatched the chain that held the veil across her face. She dangled the silk between two fingers. Let it slip to the floor. If her eyes were astonishing, her face doubled the effect. Angular features formed the platinum setting those burnings balls of sapphire deserved.

I shuddered. I put the cigarette in the corner of my mouth and ran a thumb along the bookshelf. Plato. Nietzsche. Sartre. Augustine. Camus.

I said, “Shoot.”

“Am I beautiful?”

I pulled out a well-thumbed copy of Kierkegaard’s
Sickness Unto Death.
“Didn’t know Pitt was into philosophy.”

She clucked her tongue. “He’s not.”

“No?”

“Or wasn’t. Until recently.”

“What happened?”

She sighed. “I was a philosophy major. About a month ago he asked to borrow all my books from college.”

I laughed. “Pitt can barely read.”

She shook her head, the blue fire keeping me in its sights. “Pitt always tells people that. He’s a speed reader. Could do it faster than anyone I’ve ever met. Went through all my books in a week.”

“Any idea why?”

She shrugged. “Afterward, he got drunk and puked in the corner.”

“I can see that.”

Her lips lifted in a half-smile. “The smell reminds me of him.”

I put Søren back in his place, crouched to check out the bottom shelf.

She said, “You going to answer my question?”

A lump throbbed in my throat. I swallowed hard. “What was the question again?”

“Do you think I’m beautiful?”

“Pitt must have thought so. He married you, didn’t he?” A copy of
Crime and Punishment
lay sideways on top of the bottom shelf. I pulled it out.

“Then can you tell me—why did he prefer to sleep in here, alone?”

The sound of swishing silk, a judge’s robes as he enters the courtroom. I stood in time to catch the final ounce of
niqab
sliding to her feet. Janine stood naked in a pile of silk.

She was beautiful. Too beautiful. Breasts to melt the resolve of the mightiest sinner, hips that twitched, waiting for hands to command them. A long full head of soft brown hair curved at her throat, tickled her collarbone. Four kids didn’t show.

The cigarette burned my lips. I spat it out and crushed it with my shoe. “Thought you said you didn’t want to cheat.”

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh…”

I swallowed. “The flesh.”

“The flesh,” she agreed, eyeing my crotch.

I tried not to look at her body. “You could always pray for strength,” I suggested at last.

She shook her head, a triumphant smile on her lips. “I pray. But no help ever comes. Why do you think that is?”

“Maybe you’ve stopped trying,” I offered.

She nodded. “I’m just no good. I never will be. Maybe that means I’ll go to hell.” Her body tensed at the word, shivered. “So be it. I don’t know any other way to be.”

She stepped out of the silk, her thighs sliding against each other. She took the book, put it on top of the shelf. “If you’re a friend of Pitt’s,” she said, and clasped my hand, cupped it to her breast, “if you know him as I do, you will understand that.”

“I can’t,” I said, but didn’t pull away.

“You know,” she said, her face close to mine, her eyes burning a path through my skull, “he hates it when I dress this way.”

“You mean naked?”

“No, silly. The
niqab.
Says that he’s got nothing to be jealous of.”

“Then why do you?”

Her mouth quivered. She looked like she was going to cry. “Because I love him.”

She grabbed my head with both hands, pulled me down to her mouth. Her tongue slithered between my teeth. I wondered how she could stand it. When did I last brush? I couldn’t remember. Yes. I could. A year ago. The day we arrived in La Paz, Kate and I, the baby in tow. Pain stabbed at the back of my brain, and I stuffed the memory down as far as it would go. I stroked an open palm down her lower back, across her hip and up between her thighs.

“Like that,” she hissed, and ran her fingers through my hair.

To avoid her mouth I kissed her neck, trailed my way down to her left nipple. I sucked on her breast, tit flesh filling my mouth, rubbery against my teeth like moldy cheese, and choked on a mouthful of milk. She pulled away but I held her tight, swallowed. When she was dry, I took my mouth away. There was milk in my lungs. I stifled the cough.

“No idea where he might have gone?” I asked.

“Gone?” She ground herself down on my hand.

“Pitt.”

“Something heavy,” she sighed into my shoulder.

“Heavy.”

“On his soul.”

“You mean like guilt?”

“What else would I mean?” She pushed me away, as though trying to control herself, then clutched at my back, clawed my scalp and dropped backward onto the bed, pulling me down on top of her.

“About what?” I asked. I drove the knee of my dirty jeans between her legs, bent to kiss her other breast, avoiding the nipple this time.

“Wish I knew.” The words escaped from her like air from a deflating balloon.

I caressed her cheek. Her face was wet. “What did he say?”

She stifled a sob. “He quoted Camus.”

I lifted my head. “Who?”

“Camus. The French philosopher.”

“Who said what?”

She was suddenly cross. “What is this, lecture time?”

“It could be important. What did he say?”

She unbuckled my belt but I stopped her.

“‘The only true philosophical question is suicide.’”

“Meaning what?”

“To live or to die. It’s a choice. You have to choose.”

“And what was Pitt’s choice?”

“He didn’t say.”

I nibbled her neck just under her ear. “Then how do you know he has guilt?”

“I know what guilt looks like. I look in the mirror every day.” She shoved me up onto my knees and grabbed for my pants. “Now shut up and fuck me.” She had my belt undone and my cock in her hand before I could stop her.

Her feather touch clouded my brain, thickened my tongue. “Where would he go?” I asked.

“God, it’s huge,” she said. “You live up to your nickname, I’ll say that.”

“We were talking about Pitt.”

She tickled me in the wrong place. I gasped.

“It matter to you, baby, where he is?”

“It does. Yes.”

She bent to take me in her mouth, but I covered myself with my hand.

“Hard to get.” She laughed, husky, deep in her throat. “I like that.”

I wasn’t, actually. Hard to get. Just not worth getting. But that wasn’t the point. Even though Pitt had screwed me over, and big time, I couldn’t bring myself to return the favor. I’d already fucked his mom plenty. I stuffed myself into my pants, zipped up.

She sat up on her knees and cocked her head to one side. “You’re serious.”

“I said I was, didn’t I?” It came out more tartly than I had planned.

She trailed a finger along my shoulder, came up behind me and pressed herself against my back. She took hold of my sweater and pulled. I put my arms in the air and let her yank it off me. She reached under my armpits, began unbuttoning my shirt. Her lips brushed my neck.

“Said something about volunteering,” she murmured.

“Volunteering?”

“Save the planet, all that crap.”

I took hold of her wrists. “You know where?”

She struggled. I didn’t let go. I leaned my head back, kissed her.

She said, “Pitt always comes home. Eventually.”

“Not this time,” I said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Call it a feeling.”

“Is it your fault?”

I nodded. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“But you have to know for sure.”

I have to know how he deals with his guilt.
But I wasn’t about to tell her that.

I nodded and let go of her wrists. She got up, went to the rolltop desk. She bent forward, her bottom aimed at me in silent invitation. I looked away, closed my eyes, peeked.

“He keeps the things he wants to hide in here.” She lifted the pigeonholes to reveal a secret compartment, and removed several business cards. I was out of the bed and snatched the cards from her hand before she could turn.

“Finally,” she said. “A man who knows what he wants.”

I stuffed the business cards into my jeans pocket, draped my sweater over my shoulder. I pinned her arms to her sides and inched around her to the door.

Her mouth opened wide. “Amazing. But how?”

“What’s that?” I said, one hand on the doorknob.

“You’re so strong.”

In her Boston twang I heard my ex-wife gloating to my face outside the courthouse door. The rage made me horny. I could have fucked an entire harem and had energy left over. But not for this woman, and not for anyone like her.

I opened the door and the singed cat twisted its way into the room, meowing. A little hand snaked through the open door, clamped down on the animal’s tail, pulled it back outside. I kicked at the hand with my shoe. The cat hid under the bed.

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

Five

Volcanic Volunteers.

Two of the business cards were in Spanish. One was a high-class brothel downtown. Another belonged to Hak Po. The third announced itself as Volcanic Volunteers. A picture of a happy smiley sun setting over a lake in the mountains adorned the card. The address was in Miraflores, right on Avenida Larco, the heart of the tourist district.

It was an hour walk from San Isidro to Miraflores, and I didn’t like exercise. I was committing suicide by cowardice, dammit, and I saw no point in slowing the process. Today, though, I needed to clear my head, so I consoled myself by breathing the city’s toxic fumes and holding them deep in my lungs.

What did it mean? Pitt? Volunteering? What was he doing with a bunch of no-good do-gooders with a self-righteous attitude?
Look at me, look how good I am. I spent a week playing basketball with street kids in Lima, now let me into Harvard or Princeton, please, pretty please with sugar on top?

That wasn’t like Pitt. That wasn’t like Pitt at all. Pitt was more like me. Scum of the earth, didn’t care who knew it. Take what you need and fuck the rules, ’cause if you don’t, somebody else will.

Why did I give him Kate’s postcard? I’ll bet he still had it. Her cell phone number. Everything. She had said she’d found peace volunteering. No way that was a coincidence. I pulled back my sleeve and put out my cigarette.
You asshole. You could at least have kept her number. Then you wouldn’t have to traipse halfway across fucking Lima to talk to some holier-than-thou morons.

I found the volunteering office sandwiched between an internet café full of perky blondes yabbling in Swedish and a
chifa
joint that sold Peruvian chow mein, guaranteed diarrhea. To get there I had to run the gauntlet, the Shiny Happy People Zone, tourism central: overpaid stockbrokers from New York and London drinking resealed bottles of tap water, eating “guaranteed clean” imported salads slathered in human fecal material, congratulating themselves on how clever they were. They’d seen Machu Picchu. Deepest, darkest Lima, Peru, had changed since Paddington Bear made his getaway.

I cupped my hand to the glass door. Stairs led to the second floor. I depressed the dirty yellow button on the intercom.

“Sí?”

“This Volcanic Volunteers?”

“No hablo inglés.”

“Cut the crap, bitch, I know you speak English. I want to volunteer. You going to let me up or aren’t you?”

A long pause. I was about to punch the button again when the buzzer sounded. I opened the door with a click, let it swing shut. The stairs were dirty and covered in speckled linoleum, the kind that’s supposed to look like marble but winds up looking more like bird shit.

I reached into my pocket for my soap dish. A glint of glass above. I kept my hand in my pocket. Security camera. Interesting. It’s true you can’t be too careful in Lima. But a volunteering organization with a security camera in the stairwell? This was the tourist district, after all. The hotels bribed the police to keep a watch on this part of town.

On the landing, only one door. Locked. So I knocked: shave and a haircut, fuck you. A distant shuffling approached, like an ancient, dying animal. A key rotated in the lock, the door opened a few inches. A freckled face surrounded by a dandelion head of frizzy orange hair peered at me through a pair of brown plastic glasses.

“I help you?” The accent was German, Bavarian perhaps, thick and guttural.

“You always so rude to people who come here?” I asked.

“You call every woman you meet a bitch?”

“What do you think?”

She laughed. “You are not volunteer we want. Sorry.”

She closed the door but it bounced back in her face, knocking her glasses crooked. My foot blocked the doorway.

“Let me be the judge of that.”

I put my weight against the door. She let go. It swung open and I stepped inside. A short corridor. Mounted on the wall, a small black-and-white monitor. I could see the stairs, the street outside. To my right, at the end, a bathroom. The door was open. It looked clean. At the other end, to my left, windows. Sunlight shone in so bright I squinted.

The ever-present
garua,
the fog, was worse than San Francisco. When had I last seen the sun?

“The hell?” I said. “You got a red phone link to God?”

A big man blocked the light, hands on his hips. He was taller than me by a head. His long black hair, pulled tight in a ponytail, shimmered blue and violet in the light, announcing his Indian ancestry. The bulbous cheeks suggested a German parent.

“Echo baby, what’s going on?” he asked in Spanish.

I said, “Your parents called you Echo?”

She sighed, crossed her arms, heaved skyward her enormous, sagging tits. “Don’t start.”

I closed the door, stuck my hand out at the big man. “Name’s Horace. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a. Heard about your volunteering program.”

He flicked a switch on the wall. The sunlight died. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. His head was too small for his body, the shrunken trophy of Polynesian cannibals. His jaw was even smaller, drawn up into his head, giving him a pronounced overbite. His gut fought with the waistband of his brown corduroy trousers and won. On his feet, open-toed action-man sandals. A blue button-down dress shirt was his halfhearted kowtow to The Man.