Blood Lake (17 page)

I do an about-face and cover half a mile of gravel roads before I spot a taxi with no meter.

“How much to the
barrio
Centro Cívico?”

“Five dollars.”

“Five
dollars
? Don't you take sucres?”

“The sucre ain't worth shit, honey. Take it or leave it.”

He knows anyone on foot this far out is not in a position to negotiate. I take it.

It's all quiet at the Correa's store, so I manage to talk César into going to the Municipal Department of Urbanization and Land Management for me, to find out who has an interest in the former site of Padre Samuel's parish house. He knows his way around those twisted corridors, and I'd offer him my firstborn male child in return, but the kid's already promised to someone else, and besides, I believe there's some kind of commandment against it, too.

While César's swinging the shiny steel hammer against that particular hard place, I take Antonia downtown for a special lunch of traditional Ecuadorian favorites, like
bola de verde
—yummm—that I almost never make at home because they all take forever to prepare properly, since the recipes were invented back when the women were expected to stay in the kitchen all day long cooking for the men—and that's not just a load of feminist bullshit, mister. I grew up watching barefoot women gutting chickens and grinding corn and milking goats while the men went out drinking and whoring. But the price for this extravagance is that Antonia has to sit
on a bench with me eating ice cream and providing my cover for an hour while I check out who goes in and out of the offices of the Agencia de Seguridad Nacional.

I watch the faces and bodies as they come and go. There are certainly a lot of big guys with broad shoulders and Coleman lanterns where their jaws should be, but you'd expect that on a federal police force. Not a lot of scrawny intellectual types on the job. No women either, except for the secretaries in their matching eggplant-colored uniforms. Time to modernize, guys. Someone should go in there and tell them that there is no coffee-making gene on the X chromosome. Although to be frank, I'm not really sure what I expect to see here. Maybe just a familiar-looking body type, like a couple of the bruisers who broke up the demonstration two days ago with iron bars. They couldn't have looked more like a unit if they had been marching in formation. I could get lucky and spot one. It's a city of three million people, but there are only so many pigs to go around.

“Yo, Mom. Refill on the ice cream?”

“Sure, honey.” I give her some money. “But come right back.”

“No, I'm going to wander around aimlessly for a few hours,” she says.

“It's just a parental reflex,” I'm explaining, when a spot of color catches the corner of my eye and I turn to see guy in a dark green muscle shirt wearing a Chicago Bulls cap exit the building and head north with no particular urgency. It probably doesn't mean a thing. Chicago's a popular destination around here, and people send stuff home, especially American stuff. But I'm still committing his physique to memory: black hair (of course), reddish brown face with a wispy excuse for a mustache and two days of beard growth, stocky legs, and an upper body like a well-oiled jelly donut. I know those terms don't always go together, but I'm trying to freeze an image here, and the guy looks like a well-oiled jelly donut, okay?

The guy's still in sight when Antonia comes back with a scoop of papaya ice cream in a paper cup.

“Come on,” I say, grabbing my bag. “We're following that guy up there.”

“Oh.” She eyes our target skeptically. “Why him?”

“Just curiosity.”

Donut Boy is ambling along so leisurely we have no trouble quickly closing the gap to twenty yards, where we hang back.

“What if he's just going to buy a lottery ticket or something?”

“Then we haven't lost anything by trying.”

“Hmm.” She licks some orange ice off the plastic spoon. “So when are you going to teach me something really cool like how to pick locks?”

“As soon as the law allows it.”

“You mean, like, never,” she says, bitterly. “You know, all the other kids get to spend their winter vacations playing hockey, building snowmen, going to Disney World, fun stuff like that. I'm learning how to shadow fat losers in Ecuador.”

“Okay, but let's do a little profiling here. A guy with that kind of body shape isn't going to be walking very far.”

“Somewhere with air conditioning, I hope.”

She has a point there. It is midday at the earth's midpoint, when the unforgiving ultraviolet burns right through the atmosphere and punishes everything in its path.

“Tell you what, if you can bring your grades up to a B-plus in algebra, I'll show you how to pop the lock and hot-wire a car.”

“
Yes
.”

Great. I should write a parenting book. But under a new law, convicted felons can't profit from the sale of books detailing their crimes.

“Well, what do you know?” I say, more to myself than to her. “Looks like Donut Boy's the civic-minded type.”

“Donut Boy—?”

“Never mind. But I guess you got your wish. He just went into the local office of the Board of Elections.”

“So what do we do now?”

“We go in after him.”

“But he'll see us.”

“Toni, I know what I'm doing. The trail ends here for now.”

“Thank God,” she mutters.

We go inside. My daughter groans like a surly bear. The air-conditioning is out, so they've got the lights off, which only adds to the cryptlike stillness of the place. All it needs is a few torchères and a stray skull or two kicking around under the cobwebs off in the corner to complete the effect. Donut Boy is nowhere to be seen. He must be in the back office somewhere. So either he works here or he's on familiar terms with someone who does. Okay, file this away for future reference.

“So what do we do now?” Antonia asks.

I go up to the burnished slab-of-cement counter and demand the clerk's attention.

“Yes, what do you want?” he says, clearly vexed at having to deal with a live human.

“I'm volunteering for Hector Gatillo's campaign. Could I have one of those petitions to collect signatures for him?”

“Gatillo doesn't need any more signatures. He's already on the ballot.”

“What about the other people on his slate?”

The clerk grunts some kind of admission, reaches below the counter and slaps a petition down in front of me. I couldn't swear to it, but it looks very much like the ones in the bundle of documents I saw in the darkened shed in Baños.

“I'll need two forms of identification,” he says.

“Wouldn't you know? I left them at the bank. Come on, honey, we'll come back later.”

“That's it?” she whispers as we hit the sidewalk.

“That's it for now. Unless you want to hang around across the street until the guy comes back out.”

“No freaking way.”

“Fine, but just so you know, that's how it's supposed to be done.”

“Sounds boring.”

“It is. Now we've got one more job to do.”

“I hate you. Go die.”

Ah, uncensored adolescence.

We take a cab to Our Lady of La Merced.

They're trimming the candles and purifying the fonts, and a man sweeping the aisles tells us that Father Aguirre is in the rectory. We traverse the sepulchral coolness of the cobalt-and-ivory tiles to a small reception area overseen by a Sister of Mercy who instructs us to take a seat and wait our turn. A couple of urgent male voices are filtering through the worm-eaten door, but I only recognize the Padre's.

“—and most of them were arrested illegally,” says the other voice.

“There's nothing I can do about that,” says Padre Aguirre, openly professing his impotence.

“And the clinic is a joke. The shelves have been emptied by thieves on both sides. Some of the inmates even knocked down the wall between their cells so they could sell the bricks and buy medicine for a sick comrade,” says the other man, each word leaving a smoking trail of passion and outrage. “Surely you can help us start a campaign to resupply the clinic?”

“That's possible, yes.”

“One young man has spent four years in jail without coming to trial for smoking a single joint.”

“Well, there's not a lot of sympathy for drug offenders in this parish—”

“Thanks to pressure from the Americans.”

“We have to work within the system, Jorge—”

“Wait a minute, you can't go in there—” the sister protests.

“Father Samuel Campos is dead and you're talking about the prison system?” I accuse Father Aguirre.

“At least five inmates die there every week,” says the tall black man, his eyes crackling with static electricity.

“I'm sorry, Father, she just forced her way in—”

“It's all right, Sister,” says the Padre. “We're all a little upset by what has happened.”

Padre Aguirre is leaning calmly against his desk. Standing across from him, all six-feet-two-inches of Congressman Jorge Hernández is now focusing his intense gaze on me.

“I'm sorry about Padre Campos,” says Hernández, “but he is only one man. I'm talking about hundreds.”

“So am I. A lot of lives are going to be ruined if we don't expose whoever's responsible for this.”

“And you are—?” the congressman challenges me.

Father Moe steps in to referee this fracas. “This is
señorita
Filomena Buscarsela and her daughter, Antonia. She's a long-time friend of our dear departed
compañero
Father Samuel. They're visiting from the United States.”

“The United States?” says Hernández, eyeing me suspiciously.

“You've heard of it?”

Sometimes humor is my best weapon. His grave expression cracks for an instant and he grins in spite of himself, then he puts his game face back on and the grin is history.

“Sure. Isn't that the place where poor kids kill each other over designer sneakers and sweatshirts?” he says, accusingly.

“Yeah, that's the place,” I admit.

“Tell me something. The poverty in Ecuador is much worse than in the U.S., yet we hardly ever see equivalent acts of depravity here. Can you explain that to me?”

I feel like a first-year law student being put on the spot by a hard-nosed professor. I muster the best answer I can under the circumstances.

“Well, the thing is, most of the poor kids around here don't really know what they're missing out on. They never see the world outside their miserable slums. But in the U.S., they see it every day—on TV, in magazines, movies—it's the
proximity
to the incredible wealth at the top of our society that makes their poverty seem so unbearable. And it's not just kids. I know people who make a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year who think
they're
poor because they spend their lives looking up the ladder at the people above them who make even
more
.”

The sharp-eyed political economist leans against the bookcase and ponders this. “So what you're saying is that even some of the wealthiest Americans by our standards are actually working class, because they must still sell their labor, however high-priced, to those above them. And so they end up being no different from pork bellies or any other product that is hoarded when the market is up and dumped when the market collapses, if it serves the needs of greater capital. This is truly fascinating.”

I'll say. My congressman can barely put two sentences together. But we're talking Queens, here.

“I do have a long list of obligations this afternoon,” says Padre Aguirre. “So please tell us why you have come.”

I hesitate.

“You may speak freely,” he says reassuringly.

Antonia's oddly quiet. I stand there clutching her hand and tell the two respected public figures how worried I am that the North Guayas Militia may have entered a new phase of operations, launching a campaign to root out and destroy the opposition once and for all. And by opposition I mean everybody they don't like. And that's half of my friends. They listen with half an ear until I tell them about last night, and how I witnessed the seizure of three suspected rebel sympathizers.

“Rebels? There hasn't been any rebel activity in the province in years,” says Hernández.

“That's what I figured,” I reply.

“Can you substantiate these allegations of the militia's intent to commit mass murder?” asks Padre Aguirre.

“No, I don't have any solid physical evidence yet, but I still wanted to warn Padre León to be careful.”

“Father León has lived safely among the wolves for years and they haven't bitten him yet,” says Padre Aguirre.

“Yes, but I'm saying there seems to be a new breed of wolf out there.”

“They are creatures of habit,” he says, dismissively.

“Maybe they have a new leader or something.”

“I haven't heard of any major shifts in their organizational structure,” says Hernández. “But it's worth looking into.”

“Well, someone needs to go further up the pecking order than I did, because I can't show my face around there anymore.”

I leave there feeling less than satisfied about having accomplished anything, and head for home base.

César comes back from the city offices looking like he's been to an old-fashioned exorcism, and has gained nothing from the experience.

But I've still got one more play up my sleeve, and it's time to roll those dice.