Authors: David Dodge
Too obviously a con? It’s been worked successfully for over a century, and it will go on working successfully as long as there are people around who are venal, greedy and dumb. Smitty’s letter had flaws, several of them. But they could be corrected easily enough, and I had the money he lacked to send copies of the letter out in quantity. There was a score to be made out of it. Several scores, if it was done right.
When I had read the letter, I said, “What’s in it for me, if I tell you what’s wrong with it?”
“Aw, come on. Look, I’m not even making for cakes. Don’t be like that.”
“Suppose I tell you what’s wrong and guarantee you’ll get one in five nibbles if you make the right changes?”
“For that, pally, I’ll cut you in on the gravy. When it starts to flow, of course.”
“It will flow. Fifty-fifty?”
“Hell, no. I’ll give you a quarter.”
“Half. I can sit down and write my own letters as easy as not.”
“Not without a sucker-list you can’t, pally. I’m sitting on that. I’ll give you a third.”
We settled for a sixty-forty split of all proceeds.
I said, “All right. You write pretty good English for a Peruvian convict, don’t you? Not even a split infinitive in the whole thing.”
“What’s a split infinitive?”
“Never mind what it is. It’s a mistake more Americans make than don’t make, including the educated ones. Where did you learn your English, señor A?”
“I’m an educated man. That’s why I’m in charge of the prison school.”
“With unlimited access to a typewriter.”
“That’s right.”
“Same having an American keyboard. I wonder how an American typewriter found its way into a Peruvian prison school?”
“Hey, wait a minute! You can’t tell—”
“The hell I can’t tell. Spanish-speaking typewriters have an ñ and an accent key. You’ve had to do ‘López’ and ‘Marañon’ by hand. Any banana-head can smell the glue on this piece of flypaper.”
“Most suckers wouldn’t notice that about the typewriter.” He didn’t like what I was telling him. It hurt his professional pride.
“A sucker worth conning is a sucker worth conning well. This whole thing ought to be written in pencil on cheap copy-paper, the kind you find in a prison school. It ought to contain a few, not many, grammatical errors, too. The way it is now, it’s too slick, too smooth. You didn’t write it. Where did you get it?”
“Never mind where I got it, pally.” (I figured he had pinched it and the sucker list from someone else, although I may be doing him an injustice.) “You think you can do better?”
“Certainly I can do better. But the letter I write you will have to be copied by hand in pencil. No more typewriting.”
“My God, how many handwritten letters do you think I can put out in a day?”
“Twenty-five, maybe. If you don’t have to waste time panhandling. I’ll put up for groceries, and I’ll work with you. That’s fifty letters in all. Wait until we’ve worked two or three weeks on that schedule, and you’ll begin to see results. You’re just wasting stamps, sending this thing out.”
He grumbled some, dragging his feet. Twenty-five handwritten letters a day was too much like work for his taste. He wasn’t a true artist, just a journeyman pigeon-plucker. But he was smart enough to look facts in the eye when they were shoved down his throat, and he came around. I drafted a new letter, adding a few syntactical errors of the kind that might be made by an educated Latin with $285,000 U.S. Cy. in a trunk and a ravishingly beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter. Then I moved in with Smitty—he had plenty of room, although I had to buy my own bed—after stocking his place with food and drink so we wouldn’t have to take too much time off for meals. Together we went on the nine-to-five, just as if we were office workers. Yet, somehow, that kind of nine-to-five didn’t bore me silly, as an office job would have done. What we were working at was more—constructive, I guess you’d say.
I made one bad mistake. More correctly, I perpetuated in my letter a mistake in Smitty’s letter that cooked us. We were probably already cooked before I moved in on the operation. Smitty was Juan Lopez, of course, and the Calle Marañon address was his own. He should have rented a post-office box or used some other address for a mail-drop. I ought to have seen the need for this immediately, and the danger it exposed us to every time we sent out a letter. I didn’t even give it a thought. We were sitting ducks when the law moved in on us.
Actually, Smitty was the sitting duck. I got away by luck and because he gave me the chance to do it at some cost to himself. We had been working for ten days or so, grinding away to make our quota of fifty letters a day. Because we had no refrigerator, I usually took time off before lunch to go out and buy the perishables we couldn’t keep in the room; eggs, butter, meat, cold beer, that kind of thing. This particular day I was out when the
chontes
hit us. Coming back to the room from the market with my loaded shopping basket I turned a corner and found myself walking squarely into the open arms of La Julia, as a police paddy wagon is affectionately referred to by the crooks of Peru. The doors of the barred cage where La Julia’s passengers ride stood wide for me. She didn’t have a Welcome mat out, but her message was unmistakable.
On second view, a couple of delayed heartbeats later, I saw that the paddy-wagon was not reaching to embrace me but had been parked in just the right place to receive a guest or guests flung down the two flights of stairs from Smitty’s room. I couldn’t see if anyone was behind the wheel, but a uniformed cop was resting his pants against a fender while he cleaned his nails. He looked bored and sleepy. He paid no attention to me.
I kept moving in the direction I was pointed. It took a lot of will-power, but one sure way to interest the cop would have been to drop the shopping basket, turn around and run like hell in the other direction, screaming. The urge was strong to do it. I came on, figuring to pass the paddy-wagon with a cheerful nod to the cop, perhaps a gay little whistle if I could get my lips puckered; go on around the corner, dump the groceries and shift into getaway gear as soon as I was out of sight.
Before I got as far as the paddy wagon Smitty came stumbling out on the sidewalk. Wearing
las esposas,
a native Peruvian term for handcuffs, and with the arm on him. A tough-looking Latin character in plain clothes supplied the arm. Another similar tough character followed along behind them.
Smitty’s lips were split and bleeding. One eye showed the beginning of a respectable mouse where he had been hit, and his clothes looked as if he had been going around with the cops on the floor. I stopped short. I either had to push my way by him and the two tough characters on the sidewalk, circle out in the street to get by the roadblock or stand there and gawp. I gawped.
It wasn’t easy. Smitty hadn’t looked my way yet. When he did—but I didn’t want to think about that. Or anything else. Like the passport with my picture in it that I had hidden in my mattress upstairs.
About then, Smitty looked my way. He had to look my way because the two hard guys in plain clothes were shoving him toward the door of the cage. When he saw me, he didn’t change expression by so much as the flicker of an eye. But he began to balk and hold back, struggling against the superior weight and strength of the two plainclothesmen.
“You can’t do this to me!” he yelled. “Lousy spics! I want to see a lawyer! I demand that my embassy be notified! I demand—”
That was as far as he got with his demands. The guy who had the arm on him smashed him hard across the mouth with the back of his free hand. He must have been wearing a ring or rings, because Smitty’s lips began to spurt blood like a cut artery.
“Shut up,” the guy said, in good American. Top sergeant American. “You’ll get a lawyer and hear from your embassy as soon as you give us the name of your buddy. Not before. Get in there.”
“I told you, I haven’t got a buddy,” Smitty said thickly. I think his mouth was bleeding on the inside, too. “I’m on my own.”
“Pendejo. Cojudo.
Liar,” the cop said, and smacked him again. Blood sprayed the air between them in a fine mist. “Get in there before I lose my temper.”
He gave Smitty a hard shove that slammed him forward into the cage. The cop who had been leaning against the fender cleaning his nails all this time came around to close the door of the cage and lock it. I gawped.
The plainclothesman who had done the smacking said something to his partner in Spanish. I couldn’t hear what it was. His partner nodded and went back into the building where Smitty’s room was. The tough guy looked at me.
“What do you want?” he said, hard.
I said, “Gee, I don’t want anything. I was just looking. What did he do?”
“None of your business. Friend of yours?”
“I’ve seen him around, in the street. I live over that way.” I pointed over that way, swinging my basket of groceries into view so he could see I was a respectable housewife coming home from the market. “What did he do?”
“None of your business. Beat it. Move along.”
“Yes,
sir,”
I said. “I’m moving.”
The paddy-wagon passed me before I reached the corner. Smitty’s blood-smeared face looked at me from the barred opening in the top of the cage door. I said, “Thanks, pally. Good luck,” as he went by; not saying the words aloud, just mouthing them. If he caught it, I couldn’t tell. He was already too far away.
I blew town fast. The evidence in Smitty’s room that two people had been living and working there was undeniable, and they had a stakeout on it. Sooner or later they’d find my passport, if they hadn’t found it already, and begin stretching nets. I meant to be long gone before that happened. I still had a fair amount of cash in the money-belt, which I never took off except to bathe. That and the clothes I was wearing were my travel outfit.
It was getting to be a normal thing for me not to have a passport. I reasoned that if I could get off a ship without producing identity papers in a Peruvian seaport, I ought to be able to get aboard a ship the same way. The trouble was, the cops were going to find my Thomas Polack seaman’s book along with my other papers when they mined the mattress, and that could lead to a stakeout of every port where I might possibly ship out.
Looking back, I realize I was attributing entirely too much importance to myself as a wanted criminal. I must have been pretty small peanuts in the eyes of the Peruvian law; probably too small to bother with for more than a day or two. At the time, I could hear the bloodhounds baying at my heels across the width and breadth of the country. I played it tight and cute. There was one seaport where I was pretty sure they wouldn’t look for me. Iquitos.
Iquitos is more of a river-port than a seaport, strictly speaking; twenty-three hundred miles up the Amazon from its mouth, on the jungly eastern side of the Andes. But the river is so big and so deep even that far upstream that ocean-going vessels can and sometimes do go there. Used to, anyway. Iquitos began to die when the Amazon rubber boom collapsed around the beginning of the century, and the town hadn’t much commercial or mercantile importance left when I got there. But there was some river traffic between it and Belém on the Atlantic, because there were—and still are—no roads or trains in the part of the world. Even today, you either get to Iquitos by river, or you take a plane. Although why anyone would want to get to Iquitos unless he was on the lam is something I’ve never been able to figure out.
I took the first plane I could get aboard, first sending up special delivery prayers that the cops hadn’t yet explored the mattress. I wasn’t picked up at the airport. In Iquitos I asked around; about ships, and about the formalities of getting across the border into Brazil. It appeared that there was none of either on the river, at the moment. You simply made yourself a raft or a dugout, got aboard and floated downstream until you were where you wanted to be; Peru, Colombia or Brazil, it made no difference. No sweat. Well, sweat, yes. The Amazon River valley is pretty much of a steambath all the time, lying as it does within three or four degrees of the equator over most of its length. But no problems with the authorities. I was home free. I thought. Little did I dream of what was to betide, as the betrayed virgin says in the true-confession magazines.
I didn’t have to whittle my own dugout. Although there were no ships on the river and none scheduled, there were a few riverboats.
Jaulas,
they were called collectively; birdcages. So named because they were built with an open-work superstructure to allow the river-breeze to flow freely through them while they were in motion. They carried freight and a few passengers. Most of the passengers slept in hammocks slung inside the birdcage so they would get the breeze but were protected from sudden rainsqualls.
The
jaula
I took passage on, a seventy-year-old woodburner with Parkinson’s disease, had a few cabins as well; four in all, each just big enough to hold two cramped bunks, a chair and a small table. I paid extra to have a cabin to myself because its single porthole was screened against mosquitoes, also because the captain said I could put a padlock on the door to protect the supplies I shipped for my own consumption. I had been tipped off that the only drinkable on the boat was filtered river-water, and that meals consisted exclusively of beans, dried fish, fried bananas and manioc-flour tortillas. I took steps to cure the situation on my own behalf, including the installation of the padlock, before the
jaula
pushed off. The padlock is important in view of what came later, or I wouldn’t make a point of it.
The trip wasn’t at all as bad as I expected it to be. Most of the
jaulas
passengers seemed to be Peruvians or Brazilians on legitimate business. All in all, captain, crew and passengers, we numbered about twenty. That’s not counting monkeys, marmosets and parrots, passengers’ pets in cages or tied to a stanchion or roaming free, and a four-foot pet alligator belonging to the
sobrecargo;
purser, I guess you’d call him. His name, or nickname, was Buchisapo, meaning a fat river frog. That’s what he looked like in a genial way. The captain was a quiet, pleasant man who didn’t talk much. The
práctico
or mate was a young fellow who handled the helm most of the way and had little time for anything else but sleeping and eating.