Blood Lake (18 page)

Rickety roadhouse walls bend around sweltering bodies crammed elbow-to-gut, and the air is filled with blood-warming music that makes my muscles tingle and hum. Polished guitars edged with blazing red-and-yellow neon lift up the bittersweet voices singing of the sad, sad life in the Andes, the rising notes holding me in their plaintive whorls, before uncoiling and leaving me breathless.
Pasillo
music.

A couple of waiters are dashing around, dripping with sweat, trying to deliver bottles of
aguardiente
and Coca-Cola to the tables before the customers lose their tempers and shoot them.

The overheated bodies, the smell of raw cane alcohol, the swaying pier, the smoke—for a moment the swirling waves of shapes and sounds mix in the sensory blender like the hot rushing of foul fluids spiraling down some kind of vertiginous toilet. I have to find a window and breathe some air, while Suzie starts making friends with one of the waiters. Ever since a hired killer left a mass of scar tissue in my lungs, dealing with the smoke in places like this is one of the hardest parts of any investigation.

Two stern-faced men wearing dark gray suits and ties from the original
Dragnet
are twanging away on a set of
road-weary acoustic guitars, while two prematurely hardened women sing of betrayal in love in harmonies that make my soul vibrate like a fluted wineglass that's about to shatter.

After a few minutes, Suzie's new friend body-surfs through invisible eddies in the crowd towards us, holding a chair and a tiny round table over his head. He makes some room for us amid the events in an area of space so densely occupied by other masses that Einsteinian physics may be playing an unseen part here. But Suzie and I are mathematically unprepared to solve the perplexing problem of successfully mapping two posterior volumes onto the same closed-plane surface, i.e., trying to fit our butts onto the same chair. I should have paid more attention during Freshman Calculus.

A half-liter bottle of
aguardiente
is plunked down with an energetic
thud
on the table in front of us.

“I'm not quenching my thirst with this stuff,” I tell Suzie. Part of my plan is to live through this evening.

The next act comes onstage, a trio consisting of a box-shaped woman with a veiny stone face and a lung capacity that would scatter her enemies before her like so many ants, a sallow accordionist who looks like they keep him in the beer cooler between sets, and a fat, ugly guitarist with two contrasting sets of knife scars on both sides of his face.

I was there when he got them.

They look like they've been touring lawless rubber plantations with sweaty burlesque shows since the days when the Oldsmobile Hydra-Matic transmission was a curious novelty, but their angelic voices fuse with tremendous majesty. I drink in the woeful
pasillo
, marveling at how a people so drained of blood and scarred by each passing conqueror can make such honey-sweet sounds out of our suffering.

“Man, this music is better than sex,” I say.

“How would you know?” Suzie kids me, then she downs a slug of
aguardiente
. “You're not having any?”

“I had enough last night—”

“So? That was last night.”

“And I need to stay sharp.” I snag a waiter and deposit a
ten-dollar bill in his sweaty shirt pocket, and tell him I want to meet the guitarist.

When their set is over, my stygian guide invites me down a narrow corridor past a seemingly solid wall of liquor and beer cases and a back room where the musicians stand around smoking and chatting. I follow him through the smoky darkness, and step through a door into another world, an unstable place, its edges slippery with moss and mold. The Río Guayas is sweeping south, the far coast lost in unelectrified darkness.

Alberto is adrift in a sea of mist and smoke, his face glowing red as he breathes in the hot gases from his burning cigarette. He turns with a satyric leer that vanishes in a puff of smoke when he recognizes me, leaving a pale afterimage hovering in the air as the mist closes in.

“Hello, Alberto.”

“He-e-ey, Jua—” He stops. I give him a hearty hug, and whisper my name in his ear. “Filomena!” he says. “I heard you were around.”

I don't like the sound of that, but I want to keep it friendly for now.

“How do you stay in such good shape?” I ask, patting his big, round belly.

“By exercising my arms every night,” he says, and illustrates by hefting a two-pound bottle of
aguardiente
to his lips for a long drink. “Ahh!”

He offers it to me.

“No, thanks. I'm staying away from the stuff.”

“
¿Cómo? Ah
.” He pinches me lightly under my chin. “
¿Siempre la sacerdotisa, eh? Más católica que el papa
.” Still the Priestess, eh? More Catholic than the pope.

“Prettier, too.”

“Depends which pope,” he says, his right hand waffling. But under the cover of laughter, Alberto looks a little green.

So I ask him what he knows about Padre Samuel's murder.

“No more than you do,” he admits.

“I haven't told you what I know.”

“You know what I mean. Don't mess with me,” he says.

“Okay, okay. My big question for you is, Why now? He's been a thorn in their paws for more than thirty years. The human rights report was only the latest tweak.”

“But it gave them the opportunity.”

“To do what?”

“To demonstrate their current policy. You know, threaten them all, kill one.”

“Well, I'm worried that there's been a change of policy. Do we still have any sympathizers among the provincial cops?”

“I'll let you know,” he says.

“You don't know?”

“I'll have to ask around.”

“What do you mean?”

He leans on the fragile driftwood railing, looks out at the shapeless foggy blackness.

Water flows by.

“Look, Filomena,” he says. “Some people think you betrayed the movement.”

“You mean, because I left it?”

“In other ways, too.”

Silence.

“Well, they would be wrong.”

The wet mist thickens around us.

“Some of us are still active, and some are trying to reinsert themselves into society. They even own private property,” he says, turning towards me. The rotting boards bend underfoot. “But some of your old friends have found that their mercenary skills are useful. Valuable. And that working for many sides has its advantages.”

There are twenty-two official political parties in Ecuador, at last count, and plenty of unofficial ones.

“So you better walk around like a fly with a hundred eyes,” he says. Then: “Sorry.”

A light drizzle of rain begins to wet my hair.

“In a way, Juanito betrayed us,” he says. “He broke out of jail to commit a messy, personal revenge murder instead of rejoining us.”

“You think of Johnny as a betrayor?”

“Not me, no. But others do.”

“So what's their problem with me? He's been dead for most of my adult lifetime.”

“
Has
he?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I don't know. I've heard rumors.”

“There's
always
rumors. Some people are still waiting for Che to come back.”

“Him, no. His spirit, yes.”

My heart is pounding.

“And what about Johnny's spirit?” I ask.

“His spirit is out there,” he says. “I have felt it.”

“Where?”

“Where else? In the mountains, of course.
El altiplano
.”

“In Cajas?”

Yes. Among the jagged rocks. I can get there, but I can't do it alone. Even a nutcase like me knows it's too dangerous to scale the western ridge of the Andes by yourself. The place is called Cajas, or Coffins, because so many travelers have died while trying to cross it. And I'm not about to spend a week chasing a dead fantasy around the misty crags of coffin-land, although somebody seems to want me to go looking in that direction, which is reason enough to avoid it. I've got plenty to deal with right here in Guayaquil. But I think about feeling his spirit again. If I ever wanted to conjure his ghost, I'd need someone to go with me. Someone I can trust.

Alberto nods. “We need his spirit recaptured for the movement.”

The wind picks up.

“You still carrying the harp for him?”

“It's been twenty fucking years, Alberto.”

“And you're being evasive.”

Drizzle wets my face.

A square burst of yellow light, clattering, a voice: “Oh,
there
you are!”

It's time to go back in. The heat envelopes me in its gummy flaps. People are dancing to a spicy-hot cumbia:

A veces, a veces, a veces me siento así.

A veces, a veces, a veces me siento así
.

That song. I turn to Alberto: “You know this song?”

“Sure, Pancho plays it all the time on his show.”

I give him a vacant look.

“Pancho La Pulga?” he says.

“Oh, him.”

“You mean you don't know? You're slipping, comrade. Panchito was the first guy in the province to report the Padre's murder.”

“He was? When was that?”

“Late Saturday night.”

“What time?”

“I said late Saturday—”

“What time
exactly
?”

“Oh.” His eyes close with concentration. The lines of his face tighten. You'd think he was passing a kidney stone. “Okay: It was right before our last set—so—about one-thirty.”

“What time is his show?”

“Ten
P.M.
to two
A.M.
every night except Sunday on Radio Lamar,” says Alberto.

“So he's on the air right now? Where is Radio Lamar?”

“Calle Ayacucho and Rumichaca, fifth floor.”

“Still memorizing phone books in your spare time?”

“We give live broadcasts from their studio all the time. He's a good
compañero
.”

“He's okay?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“You're
sure
?”

He's sure.

“The government keeps trying to shut him down,” he says.

“Okay. Let me know what you find out about our friends with the tan shirts, will you?”

“What exactly do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

It's raining. But it's a relief to be out of that club.

We catch a windowless cab that's got a rusty beach chair with frayed plastic straps for a front seat. Suzie negotiates the fare while I have a coughing fit that leaves my chest burning and raw.

“Jesus, you sound terrible,” she says.

I ask the driver if he can get Radio Lamar. The taxi's doors were borrowed from another car and bolted on, but it has a working radio. That's priorities. The driver changes the station for us, and a throbbing Afro-Caribbean beat rattles the tiny speakers.

The reception gets clearer and clearer as we pull up in front of the five-story poured-concrete testament to man's faith that an earthquake is not an imminent geological event but a capricious and unfathomable Act of God.

Suzie has to haggle some more with the driver. Somehow the meter got turned on and there's a discrepancy.

We duck through the rain, start up the stairs, and experience the curious effect of hearing the congas and claves
bip-bop-bam
ming from the taxi as it pulls away from the curb melding into the same stir-fried rhythm coming from the control room five flights above us. Elevator? What is this “elevator” thing you speak of,
señor
?

We're out of breath and starting to sweat by the time we reach the fifth floor. No one's there. I look around. Thousands of CDs and some old records are stacked in shelves wrapping around all four walls, leaving space only for the door we just came through, a bulletin board plastered with broadcast regulations and obscene political cartoons, a broom closet and a cinder-block window opening up near the soundproofed ceiling.

I hear a muffled flush that is not part of the music, and a mustachioed man with faded blue jeans and long graying hair tied into a ponytail under an LA Dodgers baseball cap
steps out of what I must revise my description of as being the broom closet, one hand zipping up his fly.

“Do I know you?” are the first words out of his mouth. No embarrassment about the other thing.

“No, but where I come from the Dodgers are considered a bunch of bums.”

“Excuse me a minute,” says the DJ, lunging for the control panel just as the music stops. He must have had that trip to the toilet timed to the millisecond, because he arches sideways over the mixing board, flips a switch and cuts in on the air, effortlessly says his piece, an ad for Cristal, “
el whiskey de los ecuatorianos
,” slips a CD into the laser-eyed machine, then turns back to his two midnight guests.