Blood Lake (21 page)

And my biggest problem is that I could cut off three fingers and
still
be able to count how many people I can really trust on one hand.

I simmer with the frustration of the modern warrior, whose battle lines are not clearly drawn, whose enemies do not stand and announce themselves in heroic couplets, and who wears her deepest battle scars on the inside, where they are unseen.

I may not be able to get the big guys who work behind the curtain, but I ought to be able to get the actual killers. I'm good at that sort of thing.

Because the forces of repression aren't as monolithic as you might think, or I wouldn't be here. I've lived through five military takeovers and a couple of overthrows. Too bad my brother wasn't so lucky. Yeah, I don't talk about him much. I
hardly remember the smiling teenager whose battered body rolled up to our doorstep covered with bloody morning dew. And I never got revenge on his killers.

It was such a long time ago, we actually had a left-wing president. Then the future right-wing president ordered the army to surround the chambers of Congress and hold them all hostage. And the Ecuadorian Air Force buzzed the capital and bombed their brothers on the ground. The loser was president for eighteen hours.

My brain is starting to hurt, since I stayed up way too late chasing musicians all over town and the caffeine is wearing thin. I need a second wind without an infusion of stimulants, 'cause I need to be awake, but I need to be sane, too.

However, unable to find a branch outlet of the Fountain of Youth in this target area, I just have to paint a smile on and act like I'm ten years younger and stop at a supermarket—yes, we have such things in Ecuador—and stock up on goodies. Candy and potato chips for the kids, cartons of cigarettes, bread and barbecued meat on a stick for the folks who love meat (these people can't get enough of it), lots of cheap
aguardiente
and even the extravagance of bottles of beer. It's all a matter of speaking their language better.

I spend the early afternoon hours sloshing around the muddy potholes of La Chala, making freely with the good cheer, dispensing belly warmers at three and four fingers a shot, and trying to find out if anyone heard anything unusual or can tell me
precisely
what time the blackout occurred. The general outpouring of words is no better than their previous silence. People heard every imaginable sound
except
gunshots, and there's very little agreement about the blackout, although there's a general clustering around 11:15 to 11:30
P.M.
, until I find one guy who swears his electric clock stopped at exactly 11:17, right in the middle of “
A veces me siento así
.” Others agree.

I reconfirm that Gilda was watching the street as soon as the power went out, and that Ismaél came running out a couple of minutes later. She adds that the police came soon
after that. How soon? She's pretty sure it was right before Pancho rang the midnight gong, halfway through his show.

According to the official version of events, the Padre was still alive then. I'd sure like to see the police report explain
that
one.

Which means the murderer must have been with Padre Samuel and struck the instant darkness fell. Then what? You either hide the body, or you get the hell out of there. (There was
nothing
to steal in that place—certainly nothing like two million sucres.) How did the killer escape? Under cover of darkness? During the confusion after Ismaél ran out? Or out the back window, down a rope to a waiting boat? Who'd go to
that
effort?

Or maybe I've been looking at the wrong side of this whole thing.

But first I go to the school to ask the nuns about Padre Samuel giving Canino's victory Mass.

“Yes,” Sister Cecilia says, “he did give that Mass, even though he felt that it was a shameful manipulation of the believers' faith for political purposes.”

“Then why did he do it?”

“Because they asked him to.”

“Who asked him?”

“Three men. They said he owed them a favor.”

“You recognize any of them?”

“No. I've never seen them before.”

“Could you describe them?”

Yes, but her minimal descriptions fit three-fourths of the men on the bus I took over here.

What did Canino's rude boys do? Threaten to take back the land, bulldoze the school? Why force a political enemy to bless you in public? Just to remind him who's boss? Or to set him up? Make the hard-line radicals think the Padre was a turncoat and put him on their shit list. It's been done.

Pancho went for it.

And so I have to consider the possibility that Padre Samuel may have been killed by a far-left splinter group. It's a little harder to fit the police cover-up into that explanation, but not much: Alberto warned me that a lot of my old friends weren't so friendly anymore.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

My daughter is downtown, safe from all this.

But I'm here.

I find someone who's willing to lend me a canoe for a few
sucres
so I can go snooping around the estuarial backwash and see what I can dredge up besides higher life insurance premiums. Man, my Allstate rep would have a heart attack if he could see me wobbling unsteadily on this putrescent backwater. But I get my legs soon enough, and paddle around Alicia's shack to the open grave where the church and parish house once stood. There's nothing left of it but some jagged bones, but rebuilding it in my mind, I figure it would have been about a sixteen-foot jump into the water from the
padre
's window. Not at all hard, but then what do you do? Swim through this muck? At night? A rope would have taken time to secure, assuming you could secure
anything
to that ratty old lumber, but I have to admit that someone
could
have snuck up on him this way. Of course, to do it swiftly and silently would require some serious paramilitary training, and maybe I don't like where this is going, but it could have happened that way.

I wonder if Alberto's getting the word out yet. I'm going to need friends.

I punt around among the miserable shacks that have isolated themselves from the rest of humanity, and which are only accessible by canoe, trying to find out if anyone saw or heard anything on this side of the water. Even with my arms full of peace offerings, they won't let down their guard and I still come up empty.

By the time I paddle back to the landing, I'm starting to smell like one of Porky Pig's less endearing relatives. There's a kid standing there, waiting. Seems like he's waiting for me.

Mishojos.

He jumps into the canoe, shoves off and steers us out into the middle of the wide, flat water. We float with the current for a bit, then he paddles towards a maze of closely knit shacks.

It's starting to cloud over.

“So where are we going?”

“Further down the river,” he says. Well, yeah.

We float between the thin splintering stilts, dwellings the Sumerians would have considered a bit primitive. Thick bamboo poles, clusters of reeds tied together with corn fiber, roofs thatched with wide green leaves. Some of them don't even have four complete walls.

Hovel, sweet hovel.

“Miss Filomena?”

“Yes?”

“One of the people you were talking to says he heard gunshots that night.
Bang-bang
, one right after the other.”

“Thanks for coming forward with that. What else did he say?”

But instead of answering, he juts his chin towards the bow. I turn.

We're pulling up alongside a long, dark boat, a sleek modern version of the aboriginal dugout canoes. The pilot is wearing a big straw hat that completely covers his face. He does not tip his hat to me. In fact, he keeps his face covered the whole trip. I look back at Mishojos as we pull away, staring back at me impassively from the shadows, the borrowed canoe rocked by darkening waves.

It starts to rain lightly.

We go downriver a couple of miles to a different slum on the edge of the warehouse district, a no-man's-land north of the new port.

Onshore, a second sentinel with an enormous straw hat leads me through an endless tangle of battered cane shacks to an alley behind a warehouse, a dead end of cinder block, brick, and cane. Uh-oh.

“Stand there,” he says, backing out of the alley.

Rats. End of the line, blocked three ways. I'm wondering if I'd rip my fingernails off trying to claw my way up the bricks when voices start talking to me through the cane wall:

“We have guns trained on you.”

“Okay,” I answer. “Just don't let any of them go off.”

“That depends on you.”

“Good. I trust myself not to try anything crazy.”

“You better not,” says one.

“Why are you looking for us?” says another.

I don't even know who I'm talking to, of course.

“If we were the other side, you'd be dead right now,” one of them says, as if reading my thoughts. “Talk, woman.”

“About—?”

“Don't fuck with us, girl. The Crow said you wanted five minutes of ear time. Well, you got three. Now talk.”

“I want to reconnect,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because the official story is that a delinquent teenager knifed Padre Samuel Campos for some quick cash. But it smells to me like the first shot in an all-out war on the progressive forces that have always kept the jackbooted militia types in check,” I say.

“Then maybe you should have figured out that Campos's death is being used to flush out people like you.”

“I'm not that important.”

“You think they care?”

I have to admit that they could be right.

“Look at you,” they say. “Standing all alone in an alley talking to a wall.”

Yeah, it feels like I'm talking to a wall, all right.

“Well, somebody's jerking me around, and I want to know who's pulling the strings. And I figured you might know something about it.”

“Those are two different things,” they reply.

“Okay. You have eyes and ears, and the little blackbird should have told you that I'm trying to find out if there's
anyone with the provincial police who's friendly enough to talk to me.”

“We're not telling you a damn thing about them.”

“No, of course you wouldn't. But I've done a lot of things I used to think I would never do.”

“You mean like betraying the movement,
Juanita
?”

Control it, girl.

I answer, “
Ante eso en mi tierra corre sangre
. Anyone who accuses me of betraying a single member of the movement owes me the favor of a duel
hasta la muerte
.”

To the death.

Nobody says anything. Then:

“Let's talk about Juanito.”

Throat. Tight.

“Well?”

“You know something about him?” I ask.

“There's nothing to know. Tell us about the last time you saw him.”

I don't answer.

“
Well?
”

Okay, asshole, if that's how you want it: “The last time I saw him, Johnny was so blinded by rage that he almost broke down my door. He didn't care if he led the cops right to me and they burned me alive.”

“Bet that really pissed you off,” says one.

“And no one saw you for a long time after that,” says another.

“I had to skip out.”

“You could have gone underground.”

“Sure, and lead the
federales
straight to my unit.”

“But you didn't. You left the country.”

“Out of sight is out of sight. What's the difference?”

“So you thought hiding out as a New York City cop was the perfect cover?”

“Okay, so you know about that.”

“Yeah, we know about that. He left you in a roomful of cops, Juanita. So how'd you get out?”

“
Fuck you
. I got out without taking anyone else with me, and I can still look at myself in the mirror.”

“How'd you get out?”

By spending a year and a half in a maximum security prison, you bastards.

“I got out,” I say.

They take a moment to discuss that among themselves.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I'm trying to find out who killed Samuel Campos. It wasn't you guys, was it?”

“And who will benefit from this knowledge?”

“Anybody else on their shit list,
amigo
. Even you.”

Pause.

I tell them, “I'm going to keep digging.”

Longer pause.

“We'll let you know.”