Blood Lake (28 page)

Clouds pass, swirling and gray and threatening, but the rain holds off while the whimsical sky delights in toying with us.

It's not making my unhappy task any easier, peeling back the gummy cloth to see my sweet Antonia's uncorrupted knees looking like someone took a cheese grater to them. And the passing night has revealed further blue-black badges of cruelty, which have emerged and spread like gruesome sunspots across her celestial skin. I wash off some of the phagocyte
residue with warm water, pat her dry, dab the wound with disinfectant and stick on some fresh gauze bandages.

“Does that feel any better?” I ask.

“It still hurts when I bend it.”

“So don't bend it,” I say, stroking the smooth skin near her boo-boo. “I got kind of banged up myself, but I rolled with it a little better. Your knee's going to hurt for a couple of days. Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she assures me.

“Good. That's good. Do you think you can make it to the hospital?”

“I have to go back to the hospital?”

“No, I mean, do you want to come to the hospital with me to visit Peter?”

“Not really.”

“Oh.” Serves me right for asking. “Tell you what, we'll go and spend twenty minutes there, then we'll do a museum and some shopping, if you're up to it.”

“Yay!” How sweet it is to hear that sound, just the way she used to say it when she was four years old. Of course I don't tell her that.

I'm also hoping that seeing Peter recover might help ease any remaining trauma she might have.

So this is our little family outing on a Saturday morning. A trip to the free hospital, a place where pregnant women are crammed two to a bed and you have to bring your own sheets.

But they have sprung for the handsome young
gringo
and have scrounged up a couple of mismatched sheets that are more gray than white. In fact, Peter looks very well taken care of. He's feeling better, and Antonia tells him about the three-foot-long iguanas she has seen lurking in the city parks.

I spend the rest of the morning sifting through a few precious grains of the dwindling sands of time with my daughter, visiting the spotlit galleries attended by gaunt, chain-smoking avant-gardists with dark circles under their eyes, then
passing between the vigilant, unsmiling ones who guard the austere chambers that house thousand-year-old earthenware pots and painted clay jaguar figurines and flat masks of beaten gold representing the sun god, and the modern Latin American soul-stirring paintings of Guayasamín and his sibling artisans reflecting our torturous condition. Then it's out for a special lunch at a typical eatery where nothing is canned, and someone else has to wash, peel, and chop up the fruit, then put it into a blender just to make a couple of glasses of juice for the two of us. And of course it's also special because it's just she and I being the mother and daughter we're supposed to be. Maybe we're like this all the time in a parallel universe somewhere out beyond the visible horizon of my life. A place like that would be heaven.

“There is a haze surrounding the people and events involved in this,” says Ruben, looking out his hotel window towards the white wave crests forming on the river. “It's almost like a halo of darkness. The deeper you look, the less you see, until seeing so much nothing starts to mean something.”

I nod with sincerest empathy.

“Listen to me,” he says, quickly dispelling his words and sentiments with a backhanded wave. “I don't know what I'm saying.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” I reassure him. “You know that somebody planted the phony details of Ismaél's arrest and confession in your paper on two separate occasions, and that this fairy tale is likely to become the official version of the events. And we both know that you've got to have some serious kind of power to pull off a scam like that. The Padre was a hard man to make disappear.”

“So, unfortunately, the circle widens,” he says.

“Only in terms of the invisible puppet masters,” I say. “The skunks who actually pulled the trigger are out there, and I'm going to sniff them out. Eventually the circle closes in. You just find me that reporter.”

“I'll have his name by this evening. Come by afterwards, no matter how late. My midnight lamp will definitely be burning.”

“I admire that in a man.”

“Admire what?”

“Endurance.”

He smiles.

There is a rough knock at the door and a bellhop comes in bearing today's stack of newspapers.

“I called down for these three hours ago,” Ruben complains.

“
Mañana
comes all the way from Quito,” says the bellhop.

“Always excuses! How do you expect the country to progress when all they ever do is make excuses?”

The bellhop fixes his eyes on a spot somewhere between Nairobi and Easter Island as his way of answering that one.

After he leaves, Ruben says, “I did find out one thing would interest you.”

“Yes?”

“My contacts were able to confirm that the North Guayas Militia has a new leader, a man named Colonel Alboroto. He came up through the ranks and seized the chance to take power as soon as he could.”

“So aside from being opportunistic, what's he like?”

“Murderous, apparently.”

The blue shadows are edging into the night, car traffic on the avenue picking up that eerie glow of a procession of sleek dragons with fiery nostrils, when a couple of particularly bright headlights stab my nighttime-adjusted eyes. It's a drab green jeep, driven by a harried-looking corporal in combat fatigues.

“Miss Filomena Buscarsela?”

“Yes.”

“I got a message from Captain Ponce.”

Alone, without even a pencil to take notes, I am led underground through the narrow, wet-walled corridors into a cold concrete room.

They sit me at one end of a long table under a low brick ceiling with instructions not to move, and give me plenty of time to soak up the icy indifference of this windowless room and the stale smell of embalming fluid.

Herrera is brought in, hands cuffed behind his back, dark hollows in his skin testifying to his lack of hot meals. Here and there purplish welts slither out from under his dusty prison clothes, tracing the endless trail of binding and beating he has been forced to walk. Some of the marks are months old. Some of them are quite fresh.

The guard sits Herrera down at the other end of the table, unlocks a cuff so Herrera can set his hands on the table in front of him, then ratchets it up again, tightly. Then he stations himself in the middle of the room between the two of us.

“Ten minutes,” says the guard.

I check my watch.

They're probably recording this, too. I look up. The grimy lightbulb above us carelessly squanders most of its energy illuminating the water-stained ceiling, where an intricate network of cracks and canals runs wild with the insane patterns of pain.

Flaws in the surface. Where do they lead?

“Why are you here?” asks Herrera.

“A friend of mine has been charged with a murder he didn't commit and I'm trying to clear him.”

“Too bad for him.”

“The murder of Padre Samuel Campos.”

He takes a moment, then the hard shell is back. “Yeah? So?”

“You knew the Padre, even before I did.”

“And?”

“So tell me about him.”

“Why?”

I check my watch again.

“Why should I tell you anything?” he says.

It's a legitimate question.

“Who else have you got to tell it to?”

Seconds tick away.

“I'm sorry, Freddy—”

He shushes me. Movement exposes skin.

A hideous network of scarlet and pus-filled electrode burns shrinks from the light beneath his collar and cuffs. I suppress the sudden evil urge to break the guard's head open against the concrete walls.

“How've you been?” he asks, out of the blue. “I hear you've got a daughter.”

Gulp.

“She as pretty as you?”

“Prettier.”

“Uh-huh. As smart?”

“Smarter. She's got the benefit of learning from all my screw-ups.”

“Then she must know how to be careful.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he says. We spend a few fleeting moments listening to the silence between us, then his words take on a subtle gravity. “One must watch what one says.”

“Yes. One must always watch what one says.”

“Campos did pastoral service in Loja for a while, remember?”

“Yeah.”

“Same year Aguilera's plane crashed.”

Right. Of course.

“There was a power blackout. It blocked radio transmissions in the whole province.”

I'm thinking back, trying to piece it together from memory. There was another blackout … ?

“Some
campesinos
came running, told us a plane had crashed in the valley. You know the place.”

“Yes.”

“All those mountains around and the plane crashed
in a valley
?”

It's coming together now.

“We had a lot of combat experience between us,” he says. “We knew the difference between a complete airplane wreck and a partial one. It sure looked like it had blown up in the air.”

The guard doesn't move.

“A couple of unmarked trucks drove up, and they cleared the debris away in a few hours, before most of the country had even heard the news. The official explanation was that it would ‘facilitate tourism.' Tourism!” He pounds the table. “At the site of a plane crash? Couldn't they even bother coming up with a decent lie?”

His voice reverberates off the slate gray stones.

A paint chip falls from the cracked ceiling.

The guard blinks.

“Farmers live way up in those hills. Tending sheep. Surefooted folks, they are. One of them climbed down the rock face and told a few of us he saw the plane going down
already in flames
. So maybe it didn't explode on contact like they said in all the news and TV reports. The Padre told him he had to go down the road and describe what he saw to the authorities. But the next morning, before he could tell his story, he was found at the bottom of a gorge. Slipped, they said.”

Why didn't Padre Samuel ever tell me this?

“Time's up,” says the guard.

As he leads me back upstairs, the guard says to me, “Don't worry about him. He's always babbling some commie nonsense.”