Blood Lake (13 page)

The gang's home base is sinking into the water so badly, one corner is flooded. One of them is pissing out the door right into the estuary.

Hemingway once said that hunger sharpens the senses. But a lifetime of hunger has dulled the swamp boys' senses and drained their sunken eyes of the ability to see anything beyond how to scam their next meal.

But they have the strength to laugh and whistle. The piss-warm rain has picked up, causing my clothes to cling to me most revealingly at this inopportune moment.

“
Ya viene la buena moza
.”

A fifteen-year-old is calling me a hot babe. He must be the leader.

“And what's your name?” I ask, stepping forward. Water comes gushing up through the floor where I put my feet.

“Venenito, sweetie, you want a taste?” he says. More clucks. Time to cut through this.

I pull out the dull kitchen knife.

They laugh at it.

I announce: “I come from Padre Samuel's past.”

Their bodies freeze, as if I were a green ghost risen up out of the scummy swamp seeking vengeance on their flesh. They have a lot to learn about hiding their emotions.

Venenito pulls a knife on me. A cheap stiletto, but dangerous enough at this range. He hesitates, then takes a step towards me. Right. I lunge forward, grab his knife hand, sweep my knife up and whack him across the face with the flat edge as hard as I can. Then I chop at his hand with the dull edge one-two-three times until he loses his knife, and I push him through the cane wall into the water.

One advantage of this tribal subculture: When you beat their leader, the whole army surrenders.

I push the blade back into his stiletto while the other boys give him a hand up out of the water.

“Not bad,” I say, handing him back his knife. “Most men would have dropped this on the first whack.”

He takes it as a compliment.

“Where'd you learn to fight like that?” he says, looking me up and down as if to verify his initial impression, that I am indeed a woman.

“A long way from here.”

They nod as if I have given them a meaningful answer.

“You kids threatened the Padre,” I say.

I let that sink in.

Then: “And I want you to tell me who paid you to do it.”

Venenito starts to say “Eat shit” but thinks better of it and changes it to, “Eat cement. We're men of honor.”

Glad to see he's got his self-esteem back.

“You were paid to threaten a man's life.”

Venenito dismisses that: “If we cared about people's feelings, what would we eat?”

“And what do you think the guys you're protecting would do? Same thing, right? They'd sell you out in a minute. But not Padre Samuel. Because he was a tough guy. He wasn't scared of anybody.
They
were scared of
him
.”

They're thinking about it. Wondering what my payoff's going to be. Okay, here it is. I lean forward.

“And you know something? They're scared of me, too.” My eyes burn with the flaming sword of hatred. “So what's it going to be?”

They confer. They want to know what's in it for them. I look around at their shack, currently missing part of a wall.

“Name it,” I say.

Their price: A case of beer.

Just add “contributing to the delinquency of minors” to my growing list of crimes.

They think it was city cops. But they're just a bunch of booger-eating street kids living off the refuse excreted by this foul-smelling slum. They know a lot about surviving in
this marshy wasteland, but not much about who pulls the strings in the endless and twisted corridors of the forbidding labyrinths of power in this country.

“What did these guys look like?”

They all talk at once:

“Just two guys.”

“Plain.”

“Ordinary.”

“T-shirts.”

“One of them had a Chicago Bulls hat.”

“They had money.”

“How much money?” I ask.

“Ten thousand sucres,” says Venenito.

“Ten thousand sucres for eight of you?” That's twenty-five cents apiece. The little bastards.

“Each time.”

“How many times were there?”

“Just two.”

“Three.”

“Well, which is it?” I ask.

“Three,” a kid says. “You weren't there for that—”

Venenito jumps on him. “Why you little pussy, I'll fucking kill you—!”

“
Knock it off
,” I say, pulling them off each other. “You saw these guys
three times
and you can't tell me what they looked like?”

They describe two guys who could be half the men in Ecuador. They could be working for
anybody
.

I warn them not to cross me.

And I go.

Sure, I can still outmaneuver a bunch of weak, underfed street kids, but I can't go up against the cops and the city and the province, and everybody else in the whole
santo país
who commands a small army of hardened killers, all by myself. I'm going to need help.

Serious help.

¿En qué otro país del mundo hay una provincia llamada Matanzas?

What other country on earth has a province called Massacres?

—Guillermo Cabrera Infante (on Cuba)

“
SO YOU
used to be a cop, huh?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“How else would you be able to talk your way past that pit bull of a head nurse, on a Sunday?”

“It's a decent hospital,” I say. “It's clean, adequately supplied and staffed. But the military's are better.”

“Fuck you, Miss Filomena,” says Carlos, smiling.

“Hey, you're the one getting three days of bed rest for a superficial shoulder wound, what the hell are you complaining about?”

“Because if you'd've let me bleed a little longer, they'd be letting me stay here another week,” he bitches.

“You want me to let them shoot you somewhere else next time?”

“I'd appreciate that,” he says, closing out this round of cynical cop humor.

“Anyway, thanks again for helping me out of that jam,” I say, trying not to notice the shifting contours beneath his thin sheets. “That psycho captain was about to put me away for stealing the federal gold reserves.”

“Too bad somebody already beat you to it. Maybe we
should put out an APB on that Francisco Pizarro guy. Bastard ripped the whole country off.”

“You're a funny guy, Carlos. Not like the other day.”

“Wait 'til I recover, then I'll show you a trick or two, once my blood starts flowing again.”

“It looks like your blood is flowing just fine to me.”

His eyes brighten, and he strokes his mustache so the bristles stick up.

“Speaking of blood—” he starts to say.

“Not to kill the mood or anything, but a man I know was murdered last night, and I'd like to find out who's handling the autopsy, and where it's being done.”

His face darkens. “That's too bad. Where'd it happen?”

“La Chala.”

“La Chala? And who took custody of the body?”

“I don't know. The provincial police were mopping up by the time I got there.”

“
¿Los provinciales?
Not the city cops?”

“Is that so unusual?”

His lower lip juts out in the bandaged man's equivalent of a shrug. “I could see it if a floater washed up from their side of the estuary, but they've got enough customers of their own to deal with without having to come trawling for business on our shores, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, it seemed like a special arrangement of some kind.”

“Who's the victim?”

“Father Samuel Campos.”

The title clarifies the corpse's significance. Carlos registers that it's not just another nameless loser.

“Doesn't mean anything to me, but I'll try to find out for you.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate it.”

“Who was he?”

“I heard the city may have wanted the land he developed. Would city cops get involved in that?”

“Sure, and a million other people, too.”

“How would I go about confirming that? Who would I ask?”

“I guess you could go to the Department of Urbanization and Land Management. But I've got to warn you—”

“What?”

“You better bring a book.”

With glazed eyes and a spiny beard smelling of something plucked from the sea, the street vendor shoves an oily cardboard box in front of me.

“Look, lady. Carriage bolts. A whole box of them. Aren't they beautiful?”

“Thanks, but I'm not interested,” I say, making my way towards the tilting spires of Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza, Our Lady of Hope of Balzar. I'm a shorts-and-tank-top-clad-tourist with a wide straw hat and sunglasses, although the sun has already set and the sky is glowing with purple magic.

The six o'clock knee drills are just letting out, and Padre León has a few minutes for me. With his robes on, the priest's thin body looks like a withered sackful of years with white hair and marbled skin.

“What can I do for you?” he asks, eyeing this far-flung tourist curiously.

I take off the sunglasses and tell him who I am.

“Ah, yes. Father Samuel spoke of you many times. We are all very sad to hear about his passing.”

“He was murdered, Father. And I think the North Guayas Militia is involved in it.”

“You're not going to try to confront them, are you? That's insane.”

“No, I'm not going to interrogate them. I just want to look at their faces. And that's one thing I can do that no other investigator can do, especially looking like this.”

“Father Samuel said you were always the one looking for trouble.”

“I need to see a copy of the report you guys wrote.”

Padre León dwells on the wording of my request, then opens the lower desk drawer and fishes out a six-by-eight-inch
booklet with a red cardboard cover crudely stapled to it. This is the earthshaking document that everyone's so afraid of?

The text is more or less what I expected it to be, a measured but spirited condemnation of the misplaced priorities and insults to human dignity inflicted by the Pajizo government, often in rhythmic sequences and word arrangements that I recall from Padre Samuel's own sermons. I can almost hear his voice echoing through some of the passages, bringing a smile to my lips and a salty wetness to my eyes, which I wipe away before it falls. The last page is the most interesting, with its concluding paragraph, and below that an alphabetical list of the twelve authors. Padre Campos is near the top, along with Padre Aguirre of La Merced, Archbishop Carnero of Macas, Archbishop Duarte of Riobamba, Archbishop Lorca of Cuenca, Padre Malta of Latacunga—it goes on.

“You've practically given them an enemies list,” I say.

“Killing off individual enemies is just a distraction from their real goal—taking back the political power they lost many years ago.”

“But anybody on this list could be next.”

“Their list of so-called enemies includes many targets besides us. Is there anything else you wish to know?”

“Sure. When's the next bus to La Trampa?”