Blood Lake (23 page)

Cabal, combine, gang, clique, offshoot, wing, splinter group.

Maybe I should make him write it one hundred times on the blackboard.

I tell him about the fragmentation among the far-left guerrillas, groups that do not support destructive action— like bombing newspaper offices—who prefer to develop support among the peasants by helping them with such mundane duties as enforcing ineffective land reform laws.

“Yeah, sure. Like kidnapping.”

“Bagging an oil company executive may seem like a body slam to the corporate system, but it's a poor substitute for collective action. Anything less is just pissing on the monolith.”

“That was Roberto El Rey's specialty, wasn't it?” he says. “Kidnapping and ransoming oil workers?”

We're passing the cathedral.

“Maybe I could interview
him
,” he says.

“You better update your material. Robby Rey was ambushed and killed four years ago.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was in all the papers. With photos of army officers standing over his body.”

“And you believe that?”

“It was him all right.”

“How do you know?”

What is this, the dialogues of Plato?

“Look, you're showing a healthy distrust of the official version of events, but the police and dozens of witnesses identified him, and the movement never denied it.”

“What do you mean?”

“By their silence, the rebels were acknowledging that the official report was probably true.”

“Okay, if you say so. Bad example. But aren't there other cases where that never happened? No one ever claimed to have found the bodies of Tiradientes, or like that other guy, Juanito Tres Ojos.”

“He's dead.”

“How do you know?”

I know.

“Because they'd be proudly declaring it if he were still alive.”

“Not if they wanted people to think he was dead.”

“What would that accomplish?”

“Make his myth grow.”

“He believed in action, not myth.”

We're coming up on the Avenida 9 de Octubre, which is crammed to the gutters with
guayacos
trying to steal a glimpse of the rally. The air is full of blinding white banners, hard to read in the midday sun, and the echoes of loudspeaker-chewed words bouncing off balconies and cornices before they reach our confused ears. Segundo-the-Chosen-One speaks:

“You see these other candidates!
-ates! -ates!
When they come here they are surrounded by bodyguards!
-ards! -ards!
What's the matter?
-er? -er?
Are they afraid of the people of Guayaquil?
-quil? -quil?
I have no bodyguards!
-ards! -ards!
Because God protects the just!
-ust! -ust!
”

Oh, let's not drag God into this.

“When they killed our
compañero el arzobispo
Oscar Romero!
-ero! -ero!
I saw that he was not afraid!
-aid! -aid!
Because we all know that the best security is Jesus!
-us! -us!
”

Poor Jesus. First the Inquistion, now this.

There's a hooting that heralds the passing of a nine-foot wooden cross through the rank-smelling streets, and a cheer rises from the rowdy
segundistas
. Peter keeps craning his neck and brushing the hair out of his eyes, but he still can't see anything. I make him give me a leg up, grabbing a window shutter for support, and I see Segundo, his arms wrapped around the crucifix, helped by two or three men, stepping down from the stage and carrying the daisy chain and ribbon-draped cross through the swarm of closely pressed bodies.

I've got to hand it to him. You'd never see Old Man Pajizo hauling a nine-foot wooden cross in ninety-five-degree heat under the direct sun, or see Ricardo-of-the-Patrician-Profile Faltorra sweating through his
guayabera
like this.

Of course, if he really wants to emulate the Savior so much, I'd be happy to oblige with some ten-penny nails and a claw hammer.

Peter lets me down, and says, “You wanna go over to Ruben's place?”

I tell him I'll join him later.

I've got a funeral to arrange.

“We can't have a traditional funeral ceremony without his death certificate,” says Padre Aguirre, the sibilant sounds sliding from his lips. “It's very strange to hold such services without his body.”

“These are strange times. Look, I'm not asking for a traditional burial service, just
some
kind of memorial. He never got his Last Rites.”

I look up at the high, blue vaulted ceiling, expansive and full of light, unlike so many of the dark adobe earthworks in the Andes they have hallowed in the name of
el Cristo pobre
, the Poor Jesus. There's something special about a place like this. No matter how hot it gets outside, it's always cool inside the church. Must be the convection from all those souls on ice.

Salvation in cool blue.

“He never received the final sacrament,” says Padre Aguirre, rubbing his smooth, heavy chin.

“He deserves a service.”

Our Lady of Mercy looks silently down on us, praying for our salvation, I hope. Scattered voices murmur penitential prayers among the dark wooden benches, the susurrant syllables slipping by our ears.

“Tomorrow, noon,” he says. “Just the family.”

“Just the family.”

Two blocks west of the church, five guys wearing pro-Canino T-shirts are kicking the crap out of three guys wearing pro-Gatillo T-shirts. They really take politics to the next level here, unlike our comfortably bloated, money-taking, deal-making middle-of-the-roaders up North.

Word is that Congressman Newton Camargo of Canino's
Centrist Coalition attacked fellow congressman Felipe Delgado of Gatillo's Socialist Unity Party over a matter of honor on the steps of the Chamber of Deputies in Quito. Camargo's bodyguard drew a gun, and Delgado shot and killed the guy.

They were
both
carrying guns? Who needs terrorists when
congressmen
shoot at each other!

So apparently the police decided that this was the moment to tear gas the Houses of Congress. Naturally, the cops later denied acting out this dearest fantasy of every voter in the country until Ecuavisa TV showed a clip of three white-helmeted policemen lobbing smoking canisters into the Senate chamber through a side window. Being a cop just isn't the same anymore in the age of video cameras.

Which reminds me of the old South American joke: Why do the police always travel in threes? One can read, one can write, and the other's there to make sure the two intellectuals don't go communist.

Anyway.

The street fight didn't distract me from the fact that I marked three familiar faces when I left the church: a shoeshine boy, a brown-skinned Rubenesque woman shading herself under a blooming red bougainvillea, and a shifty-eyed runt with a Cantínflas mustache, wearing a gray zippered jacket and pretending to read a rolled-up newspaper.

I lose him in the late lunch-hour crowd of a busy department store and head east to the riverfront.

Ruben's on the fourth floor of the Hotel Cordero, overlooking the Malecón Simon Bolívar and the river. Pretty nice address for an investigative reporter-in-exile.

When I walk in, the place is jumping like a TV station on election night. Ruben, Peter, and Claudio Moscoso are watching a live broadcast from the Amazonian oil fields, where assault troops are surrounding the Shuar protesters, and simultaneously listening to President Pajizo on the radio declaring that
el narcotráfico
is now considered “a crime against humanity,” with a five-year minimum jail term for being caught with so much as a marijuana seed and a
ten-year minimum for the slightest trace of cocaine. They are also printing out Web pages and fanning through today's editions of eight newspapers. The clipped and sorted results of Ruben's weeks of research form a desktop collage twenty layers thick. It's so noisy nobody hears me come in. I'm standing over Ruben at his desk before he looks up, startled by my appearance.

“You're late,” he says, checking his watch.

“Late for what?”

Moscoso takes the cigarette out of his mouth and waves it at the TV screen. “A reporter from Channel Three News just accused our friend Zimmy here of being a communist
and
a CIA spy, a liar and a charlatan who has sold state secrets to the Peruvian military at a hundred thousand sucres a pop—”

“Which entitles me to buy about five candy bars, I believe, at today's exchange rate,” says Ruben. “It's a bad time to be an old
cagatintas
like me, digging up twenty-year-old conspiracies no one wants to hear about. The real money is in gossip columns, celebrity interviews, and the in-your-face garbage on the Internet.”

“They don't know that you're going though these old morgue files, do they?” I say, riffling through a yellowing pile of clippings on the death of President Aguilera.

“It's a small country. Nothing like that ever stays secret for long.”

“He's right,” Peter chimes in. “Twenty-six journalists were killed last year worldwide, ten of them in Latin America,” he says, sounding as if he were quoting directly from
Facts on File
.

“None of them here,” I say, coming to Ecuador's defense. Although we do lose a lot of planes in the foggy mountains.

And it's time to use the bathroom.

A minute later I exclaim: “You've got hot water!”

“Man, what part of town do
you
live in?” says Peter.

Oh, fuck off.

I mean: “You are going to have to let me use your shower sometime,
señor
Zimmerman.”

That sparks a round of whistling and off-color remarks, the least profane of which is, “Nice to know you've still got some
cojones
, Zimmy.”

“There's hot water in my hotel room, too,” says Peter.

Then: “Quiet! Turn up the TV!” shouts Moscoso.

“Oh my God—”

The sound: “—pipeline blast killed at least forty-three people instantly, fire injuring hundreds more—”

The sight: grainy black humans run at me, jungle green faded under gray skies behind them, fireballs inside thick rolls of smoke rising from the flat, blackened earth, pots, pans, scorched shapes on the ground, can't tell if they're human or not.

“—leftist rebels are suspected—”

“Man, it looks just like Vietnam,” says Peter, slowly.

O jungle, my jungle.

Something has died.

The censer swings.

The smoke rises.

Voices rise, chanting the requiem in Latin, the words drifting upwards like sparks from a funeral pyre.

I sit in the shadow of St. Anthony, praying for help finding my
padre
's killers.

The perfumed vapor rises towards heaven, the reminder of a life turned to smoke.

In Ecuador, “to turn to smoke” means to disappear, to vanish without a trace.

They say that when my grandmother lay dying on her musty sickbed, consumed by a mysterious disease the simple country herbalists couldn't cure, when she finally let out her last breath, the room filled with a strange sweet perfume that hung heavily over the wake for three days, and lingered in the folds of their clothes, then followed the procession to the graveyard, and finally faded with the dissipating mist as they tamped down the earth over the plain pine box. The
hardbound people of Solano say that no one has ever smelled that exact perfume before or since.