Blood Lake (49 page)

Damn good question.

“I'm trying to solve Padre Samuel's murder.”

Nobody's taking their guns off me.

Maybe I would feel tougher if I were wearing something besides a T-shirt and panties.

“I just heard you were looking for me,” he says. “And I want to know why.”

Me, too, Juanito. Me, too.

“There are ways of getting a message out,” I say. “You could have let me know you were alive.”

“I figured you'd come looking for me someday, and that you were sure to stir things up when you did. Took you long enough.”

Took
me
long enough—!

“There are phones, Johnny. Mailboxes. I hear you've even got e-mail. Where the fuck were you for the rest of my life?”

“Where are you now? Why did you send your boyfriend away and abandon your daughter? When was the last time you spoke to her?”

“Last night. What do you know about her?”

“Everyone knows about her …”

And tears are welling up in my eyes, damn it. I can't help it.

“Don't worry,” he says. “She's safe.”

Trembling lips. I tighten down on them. I try to control my emotions, and replace them with—with—

With ice.

He tells the men to watch the door and window, then sits down on the bed. A twenty-year-old ghost.

“You better be careful,” I say. “Someone's probably following me.”

“Someone
was
following you. We took care of him.”

“Oh. More killing, Juanito? Or are you using another code name, since no one seems to know you're alive.”

“Sometimes it's better to be a dead man,” he says. “We are trying to make a revolution,
Filomena
.”

“Like the time you executed María Gallegos?”

“She was involved in counterrevolutionary activities—”

“A soup kitchen. So you showed up at the big food fest and cut her apart with machine guns, from twelve feet away as I recall. But
you ate her food first
. That didn't get you any support from the peasants.”

“We may have been mistaken there. We debated it for days.”

“Look, Johnny, I went along on a thousand wild midnight rides with you, but I see a different Ecuador today, with radicals like Espolazo and Hernández working within the system fighting for a new country.”

“And look what they did to Hernández.” He's right, of course. “So what should we be doing?”

“I don't know. All I know is that for the first time in my life, I see people starving here.”

“Good! Let the corrupt politicians bleed the country to death!
Then
people will rise up and join us!”

“Oh, Juanito, Mao isn't scripture. We're not always right, Johnny. None of us. Nobody.”

“Not even Jesus then?”

“Whoever wrote down what he said could have screwed up. Even with a tape recorder people still get things wrong, you know. Reporters are always misquoting me.”

He nods his head and smiles: “Same old Juanita.”

“No, I'm not the same old Juanita.”

“That's just like you to say that.”

Must. Suppress. Rage.

“Go on,” I say.

“What's different about you?”

“Maybe I look the same to you.” Deep breath. Exhale. “I used to face my fear of death by ridiculing it, because I was young and crazy and full of the hot blood of life. Now I face my fear of death by accepting it, because I know that God's love does not end with our death, it begins there.”

“Well, why the hell does He wait so damn long? Why doesn't He improve things
right
here and
right
now?”

“That's for us to work on.”

Pause.

“Convenient answer.”

“Well, what are you doing about it?” I ask.

“We just helped a group of homeless farmers occupy and cultivate a piece of arable land for themselves. We defend the squatters and support their families. We distribute medicine in the jungle, to places nobody goes.”

“Stolen medicine?”

“Is it stealing to steal from thieves?”

“Sometimes it's hard to tell around here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Skip it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Stealing from a corrupt system doesn't change the system. Check your Lenin.”

“It's a way to survive.”

“Just like what María Gallegos was trying to do.”

“
We
prevented the expansion of Texaco in the
oriente
—”

“Yeah, by spilling half a million barrels of oil into the river and poisoning the fish the Shuars depend on for their survival.”

“Who is a bigger threat to their survival? Texaco or me?”

“Texaco, of course. But it doesn't
stop
them. It just slows them down.”

Johnny snaps his head around. Everyone goes rigid. After a moment, light glistens off the wooden blinds as a truck rumbles down the street two floors below. He sensed something coming before anyone else did, even though they were watching for it. I resist the urge to say, “Same old Johnny” out loud. That third eye in the back of his head saved our necks many times. He turns back to me.

I soften my voice. “A hundred families still run the country, Johnny, and the rest of us still have nothing. Or as close to nothing as you can get without dropping off the edge. And I've been skating awfully close to that edge.”

“So have we all,” he says, looking around the room. “And people can complain as loud as they want, but skulls don't have ears.”

Or eyes. Or tongues.

“Let me ask you something. Did you kill
profesora
Ramera?”

“That
huaricha
?” he snaps. “I should have.”

“Did you order it?”

He's evasive. “Look, Filomena, I don't remember every one of our actions.”

“Bullshit. You remember every brick, every blade of grass, every hair on your victim's head—”

His eyes sparkle in the dark hollows of the night.

“Tell me what you're feeling,” I say.

He dismisses his men outside the door.

He's still attractive in a way. He was such a big part of my young life. But that was so long ago, it's hard to believe it was really me. I won't let him touch me.

My eyes flit to the pistol in his belt. His gaze follows mine, and he understands. He sits back down.

“What do you want?” he says.

“I want to solve a murder. And possibly prevent others. I'm afraid there's going to be a lot of suffering.”

He thinks for a moment, slaps his knee, and nods. “We'll see,” he says, getting up and raising his left hand in an open-palmed salute. He's missing the top third of his two middle fingers, and I wonder if he realizes that his hand naturally forms the phrase in dactylogical sign language, “I love you.”

Mi pluma lo mató.

My pen killed him.

—Juan Montalvo

SLEEP?

What's
that
?

I stay up until the mist rises with the first light of dawn.

It's too early to get coffee, so I have to suffer through the hope that a cup of warm Coca-Cola will take some of the glaze off my eyes. Then I have to sandblast the sugary grit off my teeth.

That's when the bus pulls in. I guess the wildcat transit strike's over. Like a scene from the old frontier days, a tall stranger gets off the bus, and the barefoot children waste no time in gathering around and gaping while the women look him up, down and sideways, and the men mutter and spit.

My, my. Peter sure stands out in a crowd of dark-haired Amazons, especially with those big jungle boots on.

Yes, they sure are big.

The guy should learn some discretion if he's going to do any serious investigative reporting out here. Of course, with that long blond hair and pale face squinting into the rising sun, he could dump a bucket of tar over his head and he'd still stand out like a
gringo
from a hundred yards away.

Unless he wants it that way.

His scars look better.

Much better.

“Hey, Peter.” He doesn't act surprised. “Sorry I couldn't make it to the Teatro Sucre.”

“Right, I sat through the whole freakin' movie waiting for you to show up.”

“You did? You poor thing. Is Putamayo still in Macas?”

“As far as I know.”

“Let's go. I've got a hundred-year-old jeep and I could use the company, just in case.”

“Sure. I'll chip in for gas.”

“Hot damn! A tank full of gas doubles the value of the car.”

“Gee, aren't you funny this morning.”

Wait. It gets funnier.

“It doesn't lock,” I say, climbing in and opening his door from the inside.

Sure enough, twenty minutes out of Limón and the rattletrap gets caught in eighteen inches of mud. Peter tries pushing while I accelerate. All that does is get mud all over him.

He yanks on the door handle, and I have to open it for him.

“I thought you said the doors didn't lock.”

“No,
my
door doesn't lock. Your door doesn't open,” I say.

“So what do we do now?”

“Well, while we're waiting for someone to help us get the jeep out of the mud, we can confuse anyone who might be following us by taking the tires off and reversing them so that anyone who looks at our tracks will think we went the other way.”

“Very funny, Filomena. Meanwhile, we're stuck in a mud-slide two hundred miles from nowhere,” he says.

“Does that not fit in with your plans?”

“Our plan is to get to see Putamayo.”

Right.

I open the door of the jeep and leave it open. Half an hour past sunup and it's already steaming. Peter starts fiddling
with his shortwave radio. I reach over and turn the dial to Radio Sangay, which has the biggest market share in the valley below the volcano, and if that doesn't impress you, I don't know what will. The DJ is telling me to buy Havoline motor oil, from Texaco. I answer back that if he can get me to a gas station, I'll buy a whole goddamn case.

“So what do we do now?” asks Peter again.

“Sit and admire the scenery.” It
is
gorgeous. A sparkling waterfall rushes soothingly down a wet slice of bare rock face into a deep gorge and thunders away downstream to join the Río Yunganza on its way to meld with the vast glory of the Amazon. Thousands of orchids lean into the moist spray, a florist's paradise come to life.

The music changes to the current hit, “
A Veces Me Siento Así
.”

“Someone should be along pretty soon,” I say. “This is the only road up to Macas.”

“Oh, yeah. There must be a car through here every couple of weeks.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven-twenty-two.”

“Nice watch.”

“Yeah. I got it in Guayaquil.”

“The same day you got out of the hospital.”

“What? Oh yeah, the paper's paying for it. How cool is that?”

“Way cool, dude.”

We sit there watching the continental plates shift.

“So what did you think of
The Color Purple
the other night?” I ask him.

“Oh, it's a classic,” he says. “That Spielberg's a freakin' genius.”

“Yes.” I look at him. “Yes. He is. But he's no Roger Corman.
It Conquered the World
—now,
that's
filmmaking.”

So maybe Ruben's final missive wasn't the article at all. It was the watch.

“There's no Putamayo, is there?”

Peter says, “Huh?”

“No wonder you never saw Campos's corpse in the hospital. It was never there, just like there's no
señor
Putamayo and you know it because you've been choreographing the whole thing since the beginning.”

“Say what?”

“Aren't you going to say ‘dude'?” I mimic him. “Always steering me
away
from the story. Can't get much further from the action than this, can we? Well, your statute just ran out.” I get out of the jeep.

“Filomena, what are you talking about?”

“Did you arrange for me to be detained by the police in Guayaquil?”

“Detained? No way.”

“Did you set me up for the ambush in Mapasingue?”

“Filomena! That's cold.”

“Okay. You didn't do any of those nasty things. But you did engineer that car accident. You made it look real, all right, only you probably weren't supposed to get hurt
that
bad, were you? But that's what convinced me, of course. And I remember that your watch was smashed. Then you got out of the hospital, and you say you tried to find me right away, but somehow you still had time to get a fancy new watch first. A hospital's a great cover, isn't it? Especially when you can come and go as you please, looking like an invalid. Completely removes you from all suspicion. Just tell me one thing. Did you kill Ruben?”

Silence.

He's not saying no.

“And I handed you his notes, like a complete idiot. This is about stopping Ruben from spreading the word, isn't it? He found out something about President Aguilera's death, didn't he?”

“This isn't about stopping some piddly little propagandist.”

“Okay, then it's about killing priests.”

“No, it isn't.”

“Oh? Then what
is
it about?”

No answer.

“Let me guess,” I say. “The Centrist Coalition is going to accuse the Neoliberal Party of being connected to the murders of
padres
Campos and Aguirre, and Congressman Hernández.”

Of course he's not going to confirm or deny any of this.

I throw up my hands in disgust.

“Filomena, where are you going?”

“As far away from you as possible!”