Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Read online

  In less than thirty minutes, cartons of aromatic food were clustered, steaming, on the library table. Wafts of lemongrass, chili paste, and coconut milk enlivened the technologized old room.

  After about five torrid forkfuls of pla lard prik, Maestra dozed off in her swivel chair and slept for hours.

  Switters didn’t eat a bite, but danced alone in front of the CD player until deep in the dark afternoon.

  The next morning he flew to Peru. Alaska Airlines to Los Angeles, then the 1:00 P.M. LAN-Chile flight to Lima, which stopped in Mexico City barely long enough for him to telephone a maverick philology professor he knew there.

  Once he had gotten the parrot secured in the pressurized portion of the cargo hold that airlines set aside for passengers’ pets, the departure passed smoothly. That was fortunate because the effects of the XTC had left him moderately fatigued. Settled into a business-class seat with a Bloody Mary on his tray, he began to feel consoled, if not actually buoyant, about the demands of the immediate future. In all honesty, he had to admit that the mission forced upon him by his crafty grandmother was a good deal less boring, potentially, than the mickey mouse assignment he’d been handed by Langley. Which was not to say it would be anything beyond an inconvenience, but it had the virtue, at least, of being an out-of-the-ordinary inconvenience, a kind of dead-cat bounce. A couple of extra days in South America wasn’t exactly going to poison all the tadpoles in his drainage ditch. He would endure.

  Yes, unquestionably, he would get through a sticky, buggy, rainy, much-too-vivid side trip to the Amazon jungle. The in-flight movie, however, was another matter.

  It was one of those so-called action suspense pictures in which the primary suspense was the uncertainty as to whether there would be ninety seconds or a full two minutes between one massive explosion and the next. In those films the sky was seldom blue for long. Black billows, orange flame, and polychromatic geysers of flying debris filled the screen at irregular intervals, while on the soundtrack the crack, roar, and shatter of battered matter was as common as music, although not quite so common as gunfire and wailing. Both Maestra and Suzy sometimes watched such movies because they imagined that this was what his life must be like in the Central Intelligence Agency. Silly girls.

  Switters endured a half hour of it before ripping off his headset, quaffing his drink, and turning to the passenger in the next seat, a tall, wiry, sharp-featured Latino in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit. “Tell me, amigo,” said Switters in a voice just loud enough to penetrate the fellow’s earphones, “do you know why boom-boom movies are so popular? Do you know why young males, especially, love, simply love, to see things blown apart?”

  The man stared blankly at Switters. He lifted his headset, but on one side only. “It’s freedom,” said Switters brightly. “Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture’s confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally irreverent and devil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of release the Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation.”

  The Latino smiled, but it was not a friendly smile; it was, in fact, the sort of quasi-smile one observes on small dogs in the backseats of parked cars just before they begin to bark hysterically and try to chew their way through the window glass. Perhaps he doesn’t understand, thought Switters.

  “Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. Comprende? People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. That’s why they relish the boom-boom cinema. On a symbolic level, it annihilates their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls of their various traps.”

  Feeling loquacious now, Switters might have gone on to offer his theory on suicide bombers, to wit: Islamic terrorist groups were successful in attracting volunteer martyrs because the young men got to strap explosives on themselves and blast valuable public property to smithereens. Exhilarating boom-boom power. If they were required to martyr themselves by being dragged behind a bus or sticking a wet finger in a light socket, volunteers would be few and far between. “Incidentally,” he might have added, “are you aware that there’s no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.” He said none of this, however, because the Latino had begun to grind his teeth at him. Yes, it’s an odd concept, grinding one’s teeth at another, but that’s unmistakably what the fellow was doing: grinding them audibly, too, and so forcefully that his bushy black mustache bucked and rolled as if it were a theme-park ride for thrill-seeking tamale crumbs, leaving Switters with no choice but to pierce the grinder with what some people have described as his “fierce, hypnotic green eyes.” He stared at the grinder so fiercely, if not hypnotically, that he gradually ceased to grind, swallowed hard, turned away, and avoided Switters’s gaze for the rest of the journey.

  Aside from that, the flight was uneventful.

  He arrived at Jorge Chávez International at two o’clock Monday morning with a dull, dry headache. He was subject to moderate migraines, for which air travel was a definite trigger. Reading intelligence reports concerning Peruvian guerrilla activity while drinking Bloody Marys hadn’t helped. The pain behind his eyes escalated as he went through the rigmarole of getting Sailor Boy cleared by customs. Had he not been carrying papers stating, falsely of course, that he was temporarily attached to the United States embassy, he might have been there until Christmas. Sometimes Langley was capable of marvelous efficiency.

  Carrying the shrouded parrot cage in his right hand, he used the left to steer a luggage cart through clusters of surly men who wore brown uniforms and shouldered automatic rifles. These were the Policía de Turismo. Their duty was to protect foreign tourists from the pickpockets, purse-snatchers, bag-slashers, muggers, con artists, bandits, and revolutionary thugs who were as thick in Lima as seeds in any pumpkin. On occasion, the police themselves were the problem. (During his last trip to South America, he’d been forced to shoot a policeman in Cartagena, Colombia, who tried to rob him at gunpoint. The man lived, but Switters still had nightmares about it, hearing in his dreams the unbelievably loud echo of his Beretta as he shot the man in the wrist to disarm him, and the screaming as Switters pulverized both of the scumbag’s kneecaps to insure that he would never again leap out at a victim from behind a badge. Switters believed that law enforcement officers who themselves broke laws should receive sentences twice as severe as civilians who committed the same crimes, for the criminal officer had not only betrayed a sacred public trust, he or she had also undermined the very concept of justice and fairness in the world. A crooked cop was every bit as much of a traitor as was a seller of national secrets, and should be punished accordingly.)

  At the Gran Hotel Bolívar, there were even Policía de Turismo in the worn though still opulent lobby. Most were napping in faded overstuffed armchairs. One who was standing scowled suspiciously at Sailor’s cloth-covered pyramid, but he chose not to investigate and Switters registered with no more than the typical delay.

  Without bothering to unpack, he popped an Ergomar pill for his headache and went straight to bed. It was four in the morning. The hour when Madame Angst knits large black sweaters, and blood sugar goes downstairs to putter around in the basement.

  He awoke, groggy, at ten-thirty and opened the blinds just enough to illuminate the telephone. First, he called Hector Sumac, the reluctant recruit, and arranged to meet him for a late dinner. He’d keep his fingers crossed that Hector would actually show up. Then, he phoned Juan Carlos de Fausto, a guide recommended by the hotel desk clerk, and scheduled for midafternoon a tour of Lima’s more important cathedrals and churches. Switters was considering converti
ng to Catholicism in order to please Suzy, who was devoutly religious. He’d make a terrible Catholic—he found organized religion in general to be little more than a collective whistling past the graveyard, with dangerous political undertones—but he enjoyed ritual, if it was pure enough, and certainly infiltration was a tactic not entirely unfamiliar to him.

  Ritual he liked, but compulsory routine he hated. Thus, he resented every minute that he now had to surrender to showering, shampooing, shaving, and flossing and brushing his teeth. If mere men could devise self-defrosting refrigerators and self-cleaning ovens, why couldn’t nature, in all of its complex, inventive magnificence, have managed to come up with self-cleaning teeth? “There’s birth,” he grumbled, “there’s death, and in between there’s maintenance.”

  Having said that, he went back to bed and slept for three more hours.

  Before leaving on his tour, Switters contacted the housekeeping staff to warn them that there was a parrot in his room. Sailor was quite jet-lagged, so disoriented he wouldn’t eat, and it was unlikely he would cause any commotion, yet all it would take would be a screeching “Peeple of zee wurl, relax!” as an unsuspecting maid came through the door, and Switters could find himself in a situation similar to that experienced by his grandmother a dozen years ago.

  At the time Maestra had had in her employ a normally competent servant named Hattie. One day, while Maestra was away at an all-day computer workshop sponsored by North Seattle Community College, Hattie added to her list of chores the cleaning of the pyramid birdcage. In the process, she scrubbed Sailor’s water dish, which, admittedly, was rather funky, with a popular household cleaning product that went by the brand name of Formula 409. Parrots, alas, are unusually sensitive to chemical odors. Perhaps it was the solvents in Formula 409, perhaps the 2-butoxyethanol, but when Sailor went to drink from his now immaculate dish, the lingering fumes, subtle though they were, overcame him, and he passed out cold.

  Hattie thought he was dead. Desiring to spare her employer the trauma of dealing with a freshly deceased pet, she wrapped the comatose bird in newspaper and placed it in the trunk of her car. Leaving Maestra a sympathetic note, she then drove home to prepare an early supper for her semi-invalid father, after which she planned to dispose of the corpse. While Hattie was busy in the kitchen, her father hobbled out to the car, looking for something or other. When he opened the trunk, the parrot, now fully revived, flew out in his face, wings flapping furiously, and squawking like the mad conductor on the night train to Hell. The poor man had a heart attack from which he never fully recovered.

  It took Maestra a day and a half to coax Sailor down from the fir tree in which he’d taken refuge, and as for Hattie, her reaction was that of the typical contemporary American: “I’m suffering. Therefore, somebody must owe me money. I’m hiring a lawyer.”

  Eventually the judge dismissed Hattie’s suit as frivolous, but not before it had cost Maestra more than thirty grand in legal fees. She hadn’t had a servant since.

  Because Switters lacked confidence in his Spanish—he was considerably more fluent in Arabic and Vietnamese—and because he wished to make certain that the hotel staff understood that the object of his concern was a parrot, he pulled from his jacket pocket a Polaroid snapshot that Maestra had taken, using the automatic timer, moments before he departed the house on Magnolia Bluff. To the maids struggling to comprehend, he pointed out the cage and its gaudy occupant. It was there in the snapshot. Switters on the left, Maestra in the middle, Sailor on the right.

  Or, as Maestra had written in a wavering hand on the lower border of the photo: the Slacker, the Hacker, and the Polly-Wanna-Cracker.

  Inspecting his reflection in a full-length, gold-framed mirror, one of several baroque ornaments whose bombastic tendencies were rendered meek by the dramatic stained-glass dome atop the lobby, Switters commented, “Don’t look like no slacker,” and if the truth be told, he probably didn’t. The saving grace of places such as Lima was that they afforded him an opportunity to wear white linen suits and Panama hats, which is precisely how he was attired at the moment. The suit bore the label of a famous designer, but for all of the pussy in Sacramento, he couldn’t have identified which one. It had a yellowish tinge, due to lack of proper maintenance.

  Completing the ensemble was a T-shirt, solid black except for what at first glance appeared to be a tiny green shamrock above the left breast, but which on scrutiny proved to be the spiderlike emblem of the C.R.A.F.T. Club, a secretive society with branches in Hong Kong and Bangkok, whose members met periodically to imbibe strange beverages and discuss Finnegans Wake. When asked about it later, members would answer, “C.R.A.F.T.”—Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing—and for the most part, they wouldn’t be lying. Switters also wore black sneakers and chomped on a skinny black cigar that somewhat resembled an iguana turd. He liked the way he looked but knew better than to pretend it mattered.

  With respect for fellow guests, if not the Policía de Turismo, he waited until he was outside before torching the cigar. No sooner had he expelled the first perfect smoke ring than he was approached by a stoop-shouldered, balding, middle-aged gentleman with kind eyes and a light dusting of mustache hairs above a sincere smile. The man introduced himself as “Juan Carlos de Fausto, English-speaking guide to all attractions and points of interest in this, the City of Kings.” Señor de Fausto was the person who, for thirty-five U.S. dollars, would give Switters a tour of Lima’s holy sites and who, free of charge, would give him advice that would indirectly, but severely and irrevocably, alter the course of his life.

  From the Gran Hotel Bolívar, it was but a short walk along the Jirón de la Unión mall to the Plaza de Armas and Lima’s main cathedral. The notorious coastal fog had burned off, and the afternoon had turned unseasonably hot. The mall was sizzling. It was also teeming. A pickpocket stir-fry.

  Juan Carlos, parting a surf of aggressive vendors, led Switters across the plaza and into the rather stark, dimly lit cathedral. He showed his client the coffin that held the remains of Francisco Pizarro, made sure he admired the intricately carved choir stalls, and described for him the earthquake that had flattened most of the building and disassembled Pizarro’s skeleton (knee bone no longer connected to the thigh bone) in 1746. One thing he neglected to explain was why Lima’s most important cathedral had no name. Silently, Switters christened it Santa Suzy de Sacramento.

  On foot, they visited the other churches in the Centro: Iglesia de la Merced, Iglesia de Jesús Maria, Santuario de Santa Rosa de Lima, San Pedro, San Francisco, Santo Domingo, and Iglesia de las Nazarenas, edifices in which myriad generations had schemed to catch the eye of God with gold leaf, carved wood, and garish tiles. Vaulted ceilings strained to scuff their lofty beams on the doormat of Heaven, only to be yanked back to earth by the leaden weight of statuary and a sad geology of catacomb bones.

  Later, Switters and Juan Carlos pushed through the swarming vendors—Indians in rainbow ponchos peddling pottery, mestizos in Chicago Bulls T-shirts hawking pirated cassette tapes—to the guide’s 1985 Oldsmobile, lovingly buffed but hopelessly battered, and drove to the Convento de los Descalzos, a sixteenth-century monastery with two lavish chapels; and to several outlying churches.

  If cities were cheese, Lima would be Swiss on a waffle. Its avenues were moonscapes of potholes. After banging and bouncing over ubiquitous craters, as well as dodging traffic even more anarchistic than Bangkok’s, the two men found Lima’s religious buildings islands of peace. Glum, maybe, morbid, perhaps, but in contrast to the busted infrastructure, rackety commerce, and thievery-on-parade, nothing short of serene.

  At one point during the tour, having observed that Switters never knelt nor genuflected and that he had to be frequently reminded to remove his hat and stub out his cigar, Juan Carlos could no longer restrain himself. “Señor Switter, I am suspecting that you are not being the Catholic fellow.”

  “No. No, I’m not. Not yet. But I’m thinking about joining up.”

  “Why? If
you do not mind me asking.”

  Switters pondered the question. “You might say,” he eventually replied, “that I have a special feeling for the virgin.”

  Juan Carlos nodded. He seemed satisfied with the response. Naturally, there was no way he could have guessed that Switters was referring to his sixteen-year-old stepsister.

  The sun dropped into the horizon line like a coin dropping into a slot. The ocean bit it to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. Twilight softened the city visually but did not hush it. If anything, Lima became more raucous, more crowded, more menacing with the coming dark. Switters kept his wallet in his front pants pocket, kept his Beretta in his belt. He belonged to that minority who had yet to accept the rip-off as an inescapable fact of modern life.

  Their tour completed, the guide and his client stopped at a working-class bar for a glass of pisco. Who would have thought that the juice of the grape could be transformed into a substance so near to napalm?

  “Heady, no?” exulted Juan Carlos.

  “Quintessentially South American,” grumbled Switters.

  In the course of conversation, Switters revealed to Juan Carlos his plan to repatriate Sailor Boy. For some reason, it struck the guide as a horrid idea. He warned his client that there was an unpublicized but widespread outbreak of cholera in the countryside and that the Marxist marauders known as Sendero Luminoso or “Shining Path,” thought to have been eradicated in 1992, had come back to life and revived their campaign to murder innocent tourists as a means of improving the lot of the Peruvian poor. The American explained that he’d been inoculated against cholera and that he’d had run-ins in other countries with self-styled “liberators of the people” and they didn’t scare him a bit. He said the latter in a whisper, however, well aware of the prevailing political climate in bars such as this one.