Blood Lake (45 page)

“I don't see—”

“Guayaquil. Latacunga. Cuenca. Macas. This town could be next, Jaimito.”

Jaime completes the circuit in his head.

“Archbishop Lorca?” he says.

“His name's on the last page of the human rights report.”

“My God, you don't think—”

“What the hell does Canino know about the
padre
's murder?”

“I'll try to find out for you.”

“Thanks.”

When no one's looking, I stuff my bag with bread for the family.

Jaime comes back and says they're still assembling the
report, in Quito. It's going to be released on Saturday, the day before election day.

Jesus. They're planning to drop a bomb of some kind.

But what?

Maybe I'll just ask the candidate himself.

The weather is being much kinder to Governor Canino, but that's about all. The streets are filled with Faltorra supporters who intimidate and drown out Canino's smaller turnout as the motorcade rolls through town.

Stan and I walk hand-in-hand to the Plaza Cívica, and right away I know something's wrong. The square is jammed to twice its capacity with more people than have ever shown up for a rally in Cuenca, except for the time the pope came and gave an open-air Mass in a field on the western slopes of the city and told us all to stop using birth control. It only takes a moment's observation to find the cause. Half of the people here are snake-eyed hirelings bused up from the coast, unfriendly looking louts who think of the
sierra
as enemy territory. The rest are devout Faltorra supporters who have come to boo Canino. There's a third-act loaded gun for you if there ever was one. I tell Stan to be on his toes.

The crowd swells to fill the square from gutter to gutter. There's a huge gathering at the rear, and a clamoring from the windows facing the plaza, and thunderous shouts of “
Faltorra! Faltorra! Faltorra!
” while the opposing Centrist Coalition pols take the stage. I'm looking up at the—
sacred shit!

“Filomena? Honey?”

That's him! Putamayo's at the third-floor window of the Hotel 9 de Octubre, overlooking the plaza.

“Just wait here! I'll be right back!” I say.

“No freaking way—”

Stan plunges after me as I practically climb on top of people to get over to the edge of the square, my feet enmeshed in an irregular kaleidoscope of arms and noses and elbows and ears until I barge into the hotel lobby and try to push my
way through the bodies blocking the stairs. But three men in black shirts with the combined muscle mass of immortal Atlas loop their arms around me and carry me down the steps to the ground level as effortlessly as if I were a piñata stuffed with tissue paper.

Stan yells out, “It's all right! I'm a doctor!” and yanks me away from there before they can react to what he said.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asks, after drawing me back into the safety of the masses.

“It was him! I know it was!”

“Him
who
?”

And those body types. The matching shirts. The mercenaries are here, and Putamayo's writing crazy conspiracy theories to stir up trouble. That can only mean—

A screech of feedback jolts my ears.

Someone is sowing mayhem—in Guayaquil, in Latacunga, and now Cuenca. And everywhere there's been trouble, Putamayo's been there to report on it. But which came first? The story or the teller?

Up onstage, Governor Canino's vice-presidential candidate, Benito Degollar, raises his arms to the cloudy-dull but rainless sky and says, “Three days ago, the very heavens protested the presence of that son of the devil, Ricardo Faltorra, in this piously observant little city of Cuenca!”

Yeah. You should have seen it when the earth swallowed him up in a shower of fire and brimstone. That was impressive, too.

“Filomena? Hellooo?”

I'm standing on my tippy-toes, trying to get another look at the third-floor windows, but there's no sign of the bastard.

Degollar continues, “But don't worry, when the Neoliberals get wet, we will dry their skins in the sun!”

Cheers and laughter as some professional vigilantes elbow their way past me, snarling about all these sheepish
cuencanos
.

“And that upstart, Hector Gatillo, who says he's the people's answer. Yes, but what is the question?”

I hear a sound like vultures cackling in the dry desert breeze.

Staged disruptions. Forged pamphlets. Expertly placed disinformation. Padre Samuel was right: semiliterate thugs don't plan this big.

Degollar finishes with these bombastic warm-ups, then a stern, I-mean-business-faced Segundo Canino slithers onstage and signals to his imported crewmen to move forward in a strange, sudden crush that's
not
a normal movement of people waiting to hear a speech.

I tell Stan I don't like what's going on, let's move back to the sidelines.

“Finally, some sense out of you,” he says. “Now will you please tell me what's going on?”

“Later. Just keep an eye out for trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Stan. Will you please shut up and let me concentrate?”

The introductions finished, Governor Canino finally steps up to the mike. Does he say, “Hello, Cuenca” or “Gee, it's great to be here”? No. He starts right in: “Ten—minutes— ago!” he rages. “Two
cuencanas
were attacked by pro-Faltorra militants! And
this
shows how the Neoliberals are! A violent mob of the devil! Who
know
nothing but violence and
understand
nothing but violence!”

Syllables explode out of Canino's mouth like bullets through plywood. I can't even understand some of it, since it's being distorted by cheap microphones. Then, like a conductor cueing his musicians, he reaches for his belt and undoes it, sputtering, “Well, if they're going to give us violence, I'll give it right back to them, like this—
this
is what I'm going to do to them—!”

And with that, he yanks off his belt and starts whipping it around in circles over his head. Two seconds later, a clash finally erupts between the loud minorities at the back of the plaza. I honestly can't tell who starts it from where I'm standing, but they're throwing big, round rocks high into the air, arcing towards us. I try to recoil, but my back presses against
unyielding bodies. I follow the trajectories closely, and when the dark objects hit the stone pavement with a dull thud I realize that they are not rocks, but potatoes. But they sure as hell
look
like rocks, and people are scattering in panic and knocking each other to the ground.

The police start firing tear gas indiscriminately into the great mass of people, although my biggest fear right now is being trampled as the leering face of pandemonium is unveiled and the terrified crowd swarms towards the four corners of the plaza. So I push Stan
closer
to the spreading gas, where the bodies are fewer. Some hired agitators run screaming for their lives, jumping over fallen friends and knocking over an Indian woman's popcorn stand that she was operating with her five-year-old daughter on the assumption that a rally would be a good place to make a few honest sucres.

That'll teach her.

Gas grenades are launched with a muffled
puh!
sound, but now I hear the clear crack of gunfire. I look over the heads of the diminuitive
serranos
and see maybe ten bodyguards surrounding Canino and emptying their handguns into the air before whisking him offstage and into a van as if his life were in danger. Where have I seen that move before?

With Canino gone, the crowd starts to filter back to the plaza. So the police launch
more
tear gas grenades, I suppose to “protect” the Centrist Coalition party workers who are hurriedly taking down the stage. And that's just what it is, a stage.

Half of the scattering crowd is shouting “
Faltorra! Faltorra! Faltorra!
” We're heading for a neutral corner, past two strangers who are trying to convince people, “The leftists did this.”

The Ecuavisa television crew is walking rapidly away from the scene, heading for safer ground.

By now the youngest militant Faltorra supporters are back in the square ripping down all of Canino's banners and burning them in a pile. The police move in again, saturating the area so excessively that a couple of canisters land less than ten feet away from me, although I am now two blocks away from the plaza down a side street.

For a moment I lose sight of Stan, until he comes diving through the clouds, stumbling away from the battleground with whitish wisps of gas trailing behind him like streamers. I don't think Stan has ever been teargassed. His eyes are inflamed, puffed up to near blindness. I give him a handkerchief to blow his nose and clear his eyes a bit, and guide him away from the noise.

Like I said, things are always a bit more intense here.

“‘It's all right, I'm a doctor'?”

“It was the best I could come up with under the pressure of the moment.”

I'm applying cold compresses to his eyes. At least the cold water is back on.

“Well, I must say, it worked. They didn't come after us.”

“No, they just gassed the whole crowd instead,” he says. “How do you say ‘tear gas' in Spanish?”

“
Gaz lacrimógeno
.”

“Lacri—what?”

“
La-cri-mó-ge-no
.”

“Five syllables just to say ‘tear'?”

“That's Latin for you.” I'm caressing his sweet and salty skin. “From
lacrima
. Like in the requiem Mass?
‘Lacrimosa dies illa, qua resurget ex favilla judicandus homo reus. Huic ergo parce, Deus. Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.'
”

“Well,
Baruch atoh adonai elohenu melech ha'olam
to you too, baby,” he says. “Man, you mixed-up Catholic women: You give out hand jobs and recite the Latin Mass at the same time.”

“I see it as part of the same joyful expression of life.”

“I don't know, it sounds pretty kinky to me.”

“I suppose
you
never got together with a group of radical feminists and smeared your bodies with each other's menstrual blood as you danced around naked on a beach under the moonlight, but you must have done something equally primal.”

“Well, I …”

“Come on, I told
you
one.”

“Well, I once jerked off onto a microscope slide and then slipped it under the lens in time to see about two thousand of my own sperm swimming around for a while before they all croaked.”

Five minutes later, Stan has to pick me up off the floor, I'm laughing so hard.

By nightfall the power comes back on in time for us to watch the news on the hotel's nine-inch TV. Senator Faltorra is telling the cameras that Governor Canino is unfit to represent Ecuador in the international arena: “Can you see a boor like Segundo Canino sitting down to negotiate with a leader of the caliber of Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, or Andres Pastrana of Colombia, or President Bush of the United States?”