The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller (9 page)

Villega looked at the other man’s back, held a finger to his puffy lips. “Well,
profesor,”
he said in Spanish. “I see you’ve been involved in some extracurricular activities.”

“Nothing worse than what you do every day for a living,” I said. I spat on the floor.

My interrogator clutched my balls through my jeans. “You didn’t even fuck her first. That’s what I don’t get.”

“I didn’t—”

He squeezed. Hard. “What kind of man
are
you?”

I kicked him in the shin with my bare toes. Savored the crunch of bone on bone. My flip-flops bent but did not break. He swore and let go of my sack. Stood, rubbed his leg.

“The ambassador has enemies,” I said. “It could have been anyone.”

The man limped around behind me, tipped my chair forward. I dug in with my feet, but he twisted my handcuffed wrists sideways. I fell. He pressed his knee into my lower vertebrae.

“They found her in your apartment.”

“Where they found me too,” I said. “Someone knocked me out when I got home. Or what, you think I killed the woman, then whacked myself on the side of the head?”

“Then how do you explain this?”

A length of heavy rope fell to the ground at my cheek. He held up the end: a hangman’s noose dangled from his hand.

“Found this in your bathroom.”

A metal bucket scraped along the floor until it stood next to my head. A swarm of flies buzzed. The stench was overpowering. The man pulled me to my knees. The bucket was full of shit. The kind of bucket they use in prisons without indoor plumbing. Looked like human shit. Brown and lumpy, a fecal pudding.

I said, “I can explain.”

A snap of latex as he gloved his hands.

“Well?”

I opened my mouth. Was there anything I could say that would change his mind? I doubted it. Why bother trying? I was ready to take my punishment. I shook my head. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. He grabbed me by the hair, shoved my head into that chocolate broth.

Amazing the sorts of things that go through your head when it’s submerged in a bucket of feces. I didn’t think about the multiple varieties of hepatitis to which I was being exposed, the numerous kinds of dysentery and other noxious diseases I might get. I didn’t feel anger at the detective. It wasn’t anything personal. I knew that. He was just doing his job.

As I inhaled a turd through my nose, and the oxygen-depleted air in my lungs leaked through my lips, and the taste made me vomit into the vile fluid, inhaling my own bile, all I could think of was Lynn. Sure, she was a bitch. But she was my bitch, and I had loved her. I realized that now. And someone had killed her.

Who would do such a thing, and why?

I would never know the answer to that question. I was ready to die. I deserved it. I would leave this world with my questions unanswered, drowned in a bucket of poo.

Hands unbuttoned my shirt, pulled it back from my chest and down to my wrists. They pinned my forearms behind me and removed the handcuffs. Lifted my head from the bucket.

I coughed and vomited in long, heaving gasps, trying to empty my stomach and lungs at the same time. Hands pulled me to my feet, wrapped a towel around my face. They tugged the shirt free of my wrists. Where was my sweater? The things you think at times like this. The handcuffs clicked tight around my wrists again. Fingers groped at my jeans, unbuckled my belt, pulled my pants around my ankles. They were going to sodomize me before I died. I was too weak to resist.

There were two of them, perhaps three. They got my trousers off me, and I was naked. I wondered what they thought of my scars. One held the towel around my face. The other shoved me forward. My hip grazed a doorknob. The shit drained from one ear. Our footsteps echoed along a corridor. A toilet flushed. A faucet squeaked. Water pattered on a tile floor. Pooled under my toes.

With the last of my strength I struck up and back with my elbow. It landed on something hard. A jaw, maybe. An unfamiliar voice swore in Spanish. A fist slammed into my left kidney, and I buckled, groaning. A hand grabbed the handcuffs, held my arms still. The towel disappeared. Someone shoved me under a shower head.

“Close your eyes.”

I kept them open. Whatever they were going to do, I wanted to see.

Strong hands massaged my scalp. Clumps of shit dripped from the sides of my face. The lump on my head throbbed. My eyes began to sting. I smelled shampoo mixed in with the shit.

“The
fuck?”

A voice chuckled. “I told you, close your eyes.”

This time I obeyed.

A sponge attacked the side of my face. “Inhale deep.”

Again I obeyed. The sponge sparred with my face, my broken nose, my forehead, my eyelids, the rough stubble on my chin. It jabbed against my temple and I whimpered in pain, exhaling bubbles of shit-flavored soap.

When he finished, he pushed me under the shower and let the water run over my chest and back. I cleared my throat and hawked up a turd. The shower squeaked off. I stood up straight.

“Open your eyes.”

My clothing lay folded on a nearby table. My raggedy old sweater, too. Even my glasses.

“Turn around.”

I turned. They removed the handcuffs.

“Get dressed.”

I got dressed.

My bather wore a nurse’s white uniform. Two young policemen, probably conscripts, stood with their batons in hand and watched. One held his nose pinched between two fingers, his head tilted back.

“Follow me.”

The nurse led me down a long corridor, the conscripts following close behind. He opened a door and held it for me. Unlike the last room, this one was clean, well-scrubbed, well-lit. A metal desk stood in the middle, two chairs on either side. The room smelled of disinfectant.

A pair of snakeskin boots rested on the desk. Attached to them reclined a large black man, playing cards. Solitaire. His broad shoulders cast a monstrous shadow on the floor. A white cowboy hat rested on its crown at his elbow. His shaved head glistened in the harsh yellow glare of the naked bulb. The gray in his eyebrows was the only hint of his age. He looked up as I came in.

It was Ambo.

I leaned across the desk, held out my hand.

Ambo asked me, “What are you punishing yourself for?”

Nine months earlier. I’d just met Pitt. We were in the embassy’s inner sanctum, applying ourselves to a crystal decanter of Scotch. White ties fluttered under our chins, the ambassador and Pitt in tailor-made white tailcoats, me in my black rent-a-tux that reeked of diesel fumes. Ambo scratched his nose with a thumbnail, an unfiltered Camel clamped between two knuckles. Pitt was in the bathroom doing a line, and we both knew it. I coughed on my single malt. Wiped my lips and put my glass down. I was unaccustomed to such quality liquor. It was my first drink in two days.

“My conscience would look good on a stripper, sir,” I said.

Pitt was mad at me. No, at Ambo. Mad in general. He only brought me along to piss off his father.
Look, Dad! Street riffraff!
I was the awkward fuck-up of an expat guaranteed to say something offensive. I came along anyway. Free booze was free booze. An excuse to break my two-day Lent, a futile attempt to free myself from my many addictions. The grating throb of a hangover tomorrow would be a welcome distraction.

“Meet my drug dealer,” was how he introduced me at the gates of the fortress.

Was it a cry for attention? He was adopted. I knew that. Everyone knew that. It was pretty obvious. Who ever heard of a black man siring a Swedish god? But even in the half an hour I had seen them together, I could tell that Ambo cared. About Pitt. More than my old man cared about me, and that scumbag was flesh and blood. There was something vicious, almost ungrateful, about the way Pitt treated his father.

“You don’t sell Viagra, do you?” Ambo asked, greeting me in the garden when I arrived. Held my hand in his, then winked.

I said, “In fact, I do.” And rattled an orange prescription container at the side of my head. The way I treated my body, I needed it, too.

He laughed, his six-foot-something frame booming the sound into the smoggy night. On his head, a pale Stetson, curved up at the sides. He had been a pro basketball player in his youth, back before the days of the twenty-million-dollar contract, and on his right fist a diamond-encrusted championship ring sparkled dusky and hard under the fairy lights. No wonder the unpolished wedding band on his left hand got so little attention.

Now he was intent on dissecting me.

“Guilt will kill you sooner than a gun.”

He dropped the Stetson onto his desk, aimed his cigarette at me. “Pieu,” he said, and laughed, the smoke tickling my nostrils with promises of temporary happiness, or at least reduced anxiety. I had been cold turkey for two days. No nicotine. No booze. No cocaine. I felt like shit. I bummed a cigarette and lit it.
Two out of three ain’t bad.

“What makes you think that I have guilt?” I asked.

“Every man is guilty of something.” He looked at his cigarette and ground it out, half-finished. He propped his snakeskin boots onto the wide expanse of desk. They glimmered in the dim light. “Every man sins.”

I closed my eyes and felt the nicotine wash over my brain. “And you?” I asked. “Do you sin?” Wondering if he’d admit to the DSU’s crimes.

“I do what must be done, Horace.” He reached behind him, fingered a gold-fringed American flag.

“I mean, what’s the big deal?” I insisted, pushing the bounds of good taste, and not giving a shit. “So people disagree with you. Dissidents. Whatever the fuck you want to call them. So what?”

Ambo looked at me sadly. “One man, Horace,” he said. He dropped his boots to the floor. “It only takes one man. To ‘save the world.’” He made exaggerated finger quotes. “Or should I say, destroy it.”

I sucked on my cigarette. “And what’s so bad about saving the world?”

“It can’t be saved.” He threw his arms out wide and knocked over a potted fern. Ignored the wreckage. “We are imperfect creatures on an imperfect planet. America is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. These people would tear down everything we have built—and put what in its place?” He shrugged. “Socialism? Dead and buried. Didn’t work. Now what? They have no idea.”

“So at worst they’re deluded fools. Why can’t you live and let live? How are they even a threat?”

“Because it only takes one man,” he said again, jamming his finger down into his desk. “One voice of dissent can send ripples around the world. People don’t know what’s good for them. For their own sake we must prevent them from speaking against us—even
thinking
against us. Against America.”

What a bunch of bullshit.
“And how do you stop people thinking?” I asked.

“Fear,” he said simply. “We are the agents of fear.”

“And so you sin,” I concluded. “Taking a bullet for humanity, so to speak.”

He either didn’t catch my sarcasm or chose to ignore it. He lowered his head. “And so I sin.”

The vice-regal toilet flushed. Pitt stumbled from the bathroom, stuffing his shirt into his white pants. A trickle of blood shone on his upper lip. He snorted it back into place. “Dad’s got lots of sins, don’t you, Dad?”

Ambo nodded. “I do.”

Pitt buckled his belt, flipped up his white penguin tails and sat on Ambo’s desk. On the wall hung photos of the President and Secretary of State. He picked up two jars. “See this?”

He lifted one above his head. A regular jam jar, full of what looked like molasses.

“Blackstrap?”

“Oil.”

Ambo chuckled. “First wildcat strike I ever done. Nigeria, nineteen—”

“—sixty-five. Number dead? One hundred and twenty-seven.”

Ambo frowned, looked at the floor. He nodded again, twitched his head from side to side. “We be patriots, son. We do what must be done.”

Pitt put the jar of oil back on the desk. He held aloft another jar, this one filled with white pellets.

“Vitamin C?” I guessed.

“Lithium.” He rattled the jar. “My inheritance.”

“That’s enough,” Ambo said.

“Don’t you think he ought to know? I mean, if—”

“I said, enough!”

It was the first and only time I ever saw Ambo raise his voice. Pitt got off the desk, slouched down into his chair, lit a cigarette. He smoked in silence for a long moment.

I cleared my throat. “Ought to know what?”

“Only way to the top’s over a pile of corpses.” He turned, looked at his father. “You really feel no guilt?”

“Helps to be a Christian, son.”

“I forgot. Jesus will forgive me.”

“He will. Don’t you ever doubt it.”

Pitt made a rude noise with his mouth.

Ambo stood. Held out a hand. “Horace. A word with my son. You don’t mind?”

I put my cigarette between my lips. I stood too, took his hand. “Don’t rough him up too much, sir.”

He slapped me on the shoulder, walked me to the door. “You’re a bad influence on my son, you know that?”

I laughed. “You think so?”

He grinned, opened the carved wooden door. The noise of the party spilled into the room. A marine guard in full dress chokers stood to attention outside.

“You’re too good for this world, Horace. Go do something bad.”

That was the day I found out who Lynn really was.

I elbowed my way through the crowd, the men a swarm of ghosts, my single speck of black the only blemish. Waiters slid sideways through the throng, trays of champagne balanced one-handed over their heads, their free palms brushing the buttocks of Peru’s leading diplomatic ladies, dresses of colorful silk, taffeta.

Men stalked the four corners of the room like boxers waiting for the bell, white cords curling from their ears. They wore blue blazers, held their hands tight over their nuts, as though warding off a low blow. Brass cuff buttons winked at the crowd from crotch level. They watched us through sunglasses. They watched me. I was easy to spot. A stain of sin in a sea of purity.

I stumbled through the crowd, wishing I had brought my soap dish. Two days without a hit. I took a drag on my cigarette, but it didn’t do me any good. I was afraid I might fall asleep standing up. Where was I going to find a dealer on a dance floor full of diplomats?