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<title>The Second Bat Guano War: a Hardboiled Spy Thriller</title>
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<p class="blurb"><strong>From former <em>Lonely Planet</em> author J.M. Porup comes this gritty South American noir…</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p class="blurb_text">
<em>Rats ate his baby daughter while he partied in a disco. Now Horace “Horse” Mann is a drugged-out expat teaching English to criminals in Lima, Peru. Oh, and doing the odd favor for the CIA.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="blurb_text">
<em>When his Agency contact, Pitt Waters, goes missing, Horse’s desperate efforts to find his only friend lead him to a Buddhist ashram on the shores of Lake Titicaca. There Horse uncovers his friend’s involvement with a group of Gaia-worshipping terrorists who want to kill off the human “disease” infecting the earth.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="blurb_text">
<em>Can Horse find his friend in time? And when he does—will he want to stop him?</em>
</p>
<p class="title"><span class="centered">THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p class="author"><span class="centered">By</span></p>
<p class="author"><span class="centered">J.M. Porup</span></p>
<p class="dedication"><em>for Anna-Sofia</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p class="centered"><span class="centered"><em>a nightmare I dreamed up</em></span></p>
<p class="centered"><span class="centered"><em>before you were even a glimmer</em></span></p>
<p class="epigraph">Timon:</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="epigraph_text">What wouldst thou do with the world,</p>
<p class="epigraph_text">Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="epigraph_text">Apemantus:</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="epigraph_text">Give it to the beasts,</p>
<p class="epigraph_text">to be rid of the men.</p>
<p> </p>
<p class="epigraph_text">—Shakespeare, <em>Timon of Athens,</em> IV.iii</p>
<p class="chapter">One</p>
<p>Someone was calling my name. The sound was distorted, a foghorn of death and regret. Jackhammers pounded inside of my skull, a reminder of yesterday’s excess.</p>
<p>“Horse.”</p>
<p>There it was again. I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to dull the pain behind my eyes. Who was talking to me? I peered out at my class through grease-smeared lenses. My students avoided my gaze. Can’t say that I blamed them. They were criminals, all of them, the oozing pus of this chancre of a city. But who was I to judge? I’m no better than they are.</p>
<p>No. I’m worse.</p>
<p>“Horse, <em>please!”</em></p>
<p>The voice called me again. Whoever it was, why couldn’t they leave me alone? Couldn’t they see I was trying to teach English?</p>
<p>“Oh my God, what is that?” said Paco the pickpocket. “Is that a UFO?” He thrust a finger skyward at some plaster dripping from the ceiling.</p>
<p>“Excellent, Paco.” A noise was coming from my throat. Was that me talking?</p>
<p>“And then I steal them.”</p>
<p>“Steal <em>from</em> them. Yes. Very good.”</p>
<p>Six months ago I caught Paco with his hand in my pocket. My friend Pitt wanted to crack the boy’s skull open against a nearby dumpster, then leave him in it. I gave him my business card instead.</p>
<p>“English for Criminals.” Word got around. If you wanted to learn English in Lima, and from a teacher who wouldn’t rat you out (and who happily accepted, in lieu of cash, cocaine by the ounce, <em>pisco</em> by the case, or sexual favors in half-hour increments as payment), then I was your man.</p>
<p>The class was no longer looking at me. I followed their gaze. A blonde stood in the doorway of my grungy classroom, a long cherry fingernail up her nose. She cleared her throat. She was tall, a good six foot something, a Valkyrie towering over my Napoleonic shortness. She had a whiplash-inducing figure, but on closer inspection the sands were draining from her hourglass, as things began to sag and bulge in all the wrong places. She wore a black leather miniskirt and a turquoise tube top, which would have looked good on her twenty years ago; her breasts were in open revolt against gravity, a testament to the efforts of a talented plastic surgeon. If you didn’t look too closely at the crow’s-feet around her eyes, you might think she was still in her thirties. That is, if you dynamited your way through several geologic layers of makeup, first.</p>
<p>Every pair of eyes swiveled to examine the blonde’s crevices and curves, calculating their odds. Including, I was sorry to see, Juanita, the only female in the class, who carried a slim switchblade parked between her breasts and always paid me promptly, and in cash.</p>
<p>The fingernail slithered out of the blonde’s nostril, tried in vain to hide itself under a breast. She stepped forward. “Horse?”</p>
<p>I turned back to my class. Maybe if I imagined she wasn’t there, she’d go away.</p>
<p>“Now, Major.” I addressed the class’s sole member of Lima’s finest. He’d busted me with a kilo of coke, which, I might add, really was for personal consumption. I gave him free English lessons in exchange for keeping me out of jail. At first his presence had inhibited conversation. But the major was too drunk most days to remember his own name, much less those of the others, and tales of illegal exploits soon flowed freely once again.</p>
<p>Today was one of the cop’s more lucid days.</p>
<p>“Major Villega,” I continued, ignoring the blonde’s urgent stare, “when you catch the thief, what do you say to the gringo?”</p>
<p>He grinned, his rotting teeth glittering with saliva, grotesque belly spilling sideways over his belt. “I say, ‘Hello, pretty lady, you wan’ make fuck wit’ me?’”</p>
<p>The blonde’s pale complexion, covered as it was in the fine powder that settles on everything in this city, colored a violent shade of pink. Even her makeup wasn’t enough to hide her discomfort. The students pounded their desks and laughed, slapped each other on the back.</p>
<p>Besides Paco and Major Villega, there was Luis, an earring snatcher who paid me in blood-stained gold; Álvarita, a transgender whore who sucked cock in the park, then robbed her johns with a knife to their balls as they came; Lucho the <em>taxista,</em> who was always there to give a horny gringa the ride of her life; Andrès, a Hilton bellboy who was also the de facto concierge<em>—cocaine? chicas? concert tickets? I get for you, don’t worry;</em> Ricardo, a script kiddie who wanted to know the value of the secrets he stole; and half a dozen other creeps, lowlifes and riffraff, the scum who make up most of this foul city.</p>
<p>“Horse, please,” she said. “It’s about Pitt.”</p>
<p>I sighed. “You have to call me that? The name is Horace. And what about him?”</p>
<p>She tiptoed into the room, teetering on her high heels. “Can I talk to you?” She lowered her voice, glanced at the class. “Alone?”</p>
<p><em>“El profesor tiene cojones, amigo!”</em> The class whooped and high-fived. “Who’s your lady friend, man?”</p>
<p>“That’s enough.” I looked at the clock. Five to. “Same time Wednesday. Your homework,” —I held up my arms to stifle the groans— “excuses and apologies. I want to see some creativity this time!” I shouted as their chairs scraped against the rotting wooden floor. I had given them a long list of possible excuses, ways to convince a gringo victim not to turn them in: sob stories of nonexistent baby sisters in need of operations, kidnapped cousins forced into slavery and cannibalism in the high Andes, malnutrition in the slums. I wanted them to think for themselves, though; it wasn’t good enough to just memorize my list. They needed to be ready to improvise.</p>
<p>As Paco walked by I grabbed his arm. I held out my hand.</p>
<p>He grinned. He pulled my wallet from his pocket and laid it on my palm. “You alright, Horse. You cut me slack.”</p>
<p>Getting people to call me by my given name was a lost cause. Once they’d seen my camel toe, the nickname stuck.</p>
<p>I slapped him on the shoulder. “See you, Paco.”</p>
<p>The last of the men trooped down the stairs, leaving me alone with the blonde. I walked down the peeling linoleum hallway, past the overflowing toilet with no door to a small room with a bed, fridge and stove. My flip-flops threw up puffs of dust. Her spike heels echoed behind me as they punctured divots in the underlying floorboards.</p>
<p>I dropped my glasses on top of the television before turning around. She looked better out of focus. Less tempting, too. I avoided pretty girls as a rule. I threw myself ass first onto the bed and sank almost to the floor, the ancient metal springs creaking to support my modest weight.</p>
<p>“What do you want, Lynn?”</p>
<p>We had met in a bar in Barranco. The Rat’s Nest. Three levels of debauchery, each more wicked than the last. We’d ground against each other to the <em>reggaetón,</em> then paid for one of the stand-up booths in the corner. I’d penetrated her without a condom. She didn’t object. I don’t think she cared much either.</p>
<p>It became a regular afternoon liaison. I knew she was married. I knew she had kids. My age. I knew I could do better. I didn’t want to. Being with her was the same sadness I got from lying with whores, only more intense. I was a worthless piece of shit and deserved no better.</p>
<p>“Pitt’s missing,” she said.</p>
<p>She crunched her way over to the bedroom window, looked down at the courtyard. I lived over a butcher shop. Most days it served as an impromptu abattoir. If it moved and you could eat it, they’d kill it, skin it and pack it for you. From my bedroom window you could watch the meatpackers in their gore-flecked vestments making sausage, mixing flyblown offal with wheelbarrows of sawdust. The reek infiltrated my room through cracks in the glass.</p>
<p>“What else is new.”</p>
<p>I pulled a half-empty bottle of <em>pisco</em> from under the bed. I unscrewed the top and threw it across the room at the swarming mass of cockroaches that lived in the corner, scuttling their grandparents’ carcasses in its wake. I took a long swallow, grunted, held the bottle out to her. She took it and drank.</p>
<p>She said, “I haven’t seen him for a month.”</p>
<p>“So put the goon squad on the case. What’re you asking me for?”</p>
<p>“They can’t know about this, Horse.”</p>
<p>“You mean the embassy, or—”</p>
<p>“Neither.”</p>
<p>I shrugged. She took another swallow of <em>pisco</em> and offered me the bottle. I waved it away. I reached under my pillow and pulled out a travel soap dish. One of several I kept about the place. Pried off the lid, took a big pinch of cocaine between my thumb and forefinger, and snorted it. I held out the soap dish to her.</p>
<p>She looked at the coke and delicately scratched the inside of her nose again, as though considering today’s required dosage. Paced to the end of the small room, her heels sinking into decades of dirt. Her leather mini creaked with the movement. She clutched her forearms under her breasts, bit her lip.</p>
<p>“You don’t care, do you,” she said.</p>
<p>“Not really, no.”</p>
<p>“And if he’s lying in a gutter somewhere?”</p>
<p>“It was me,” I said, and snorted another pinch of coke, “I wouldn’t want to be disturbed.”</p>
<p>“The two of you are friends.”</p>
<p><em>“Were.</em> And he’d do the same for me.”</p>
<p>The coke hit me. My head went numb. Anesthetic for the memories. Instead of live-action replays of my crime on endless loop, it froze for an instant in gruesome caricature.</p>
<p>I put the soap dish on my pillow and stood up. Her breasts were at eye level. I put my hands on her hips and craned my neck. She didn’t move.</p>
<p>“I told you,” I said. “It’s over.”</p>
<p>Turned out she wasn’t just the mother of my best friend. Correction, <em>former</em> best friend. She was also the wife of my one-time employer, Pitt’s adoptive father. The two of them, father and son, had a license to kill—for their country; for sport; for any minor transgression, real or imagined; whenever they felt the urge. So hell yeah, I broke things off with Lynn. For our own good, I told her. And I meant it. But doing what was good for me was something alien to all my being, and again and again we came together in furtive intercourse, hating each other and loathing our own weakness.</p>
<p>She laid her hands on my chest. “I didn’t come here for that.”</p>
<p>“Then what did you come for?”</p>
<p>She unbuttoned the top of my shirt. “Maybe I could have a glass of water?”</p>
<p>I slid my hands down past her muffin top and clutched her cottage cheese buttocks, pulled her pelvis against me. “You came here for a glass of water?”</p>
<p>Her voice was soft, wounded. “Please.”</p>
<p>I went to the sink and filled the kettle with water, trying not to inhale the stench from the tap. Even I couldn’t handle that. Drinking water in this town was a shortcut to unhappy bowels. The best you could do was boil it. It still tasted like sulfur. No doubt I would drink my fill from hell’s reeking pits soon enough.</p>
<p>“Since when do you drink water?” I asked.</p>
<p>I carried the kettle to the stove and lit the gas burner with a match. I put the kettle on to boil.</p>
<p>“Since this.” She held out a piece of paper.</p>
<p>“Which is?”</p>
<p>“Read it.”</p>
<p>I took the paper. “You know I can’t read without my glasses.”</p>
<p>“Dammit, Horse. It’s an email from Pitt.”</p>
<p>“What does it say?”</p>
<p>“‘I’ve found a way to end the guilt.’”</p>
<p>Muhammad Ali connected with a solid right hook. My world spun. I held on to the table for support. Since when did Pitt feel guilt?</p>
<p><em>Conscience is overrated, bro. All it’ll do is get you killed by people like me.</em></p>
<p>“The words,” I said. “The exact words.”</p>
<p>She spotted my glasses on top of the broken television. There was a hole in the screen where I had kicked it in some months ago. On the whole I found I preferred watching dust gather on the gaping shards to the usual cable fare. She grabbed my glasses and forced them onto my face.</p>
<p>“Not so rough,” I said, adjusting the frames. I straightened the printout and squinted to focus. I recognized Pitt’s email address. The message was dated a week ago.</p>
<p>“End the guilt.”</p>
<p>Those three little words ripped open a wound no balm could heal. They weren’t Pitt’s words, either. And that meant—<em>No. Don’t go there. Don’t even think about it.</em> I put the paper on the table and a cockroach scuttled down the table leg and across the floor.</p>
<p>Lynn impaled the insect on the heel of her shoe. “You got a real cockroach problem, you know that?”</p>
<p>She lifted her foot. A pile of twitching goo stuck to the tip of her heel. I snagged a tissue and bent down, running my fingertips along her calf, the sheer black stocking an electric separation between us. I held her foot steady and wiped the goo from her shoe.</p>
<p>“I’d say it’s the cockroaches who have a real human problem.”</p>
<p>I went to the window and opened it just enough to flick the tissue-wrapped bug outside. It landed in a passing wheelbarrow of red-black flesh. A butcher with a shovel scooped it into the meat grinder.</p>
<p>The thick gravy of Lima’s filthy air spilled into the room and I choked. Cold and disgusting. I took a deep breath, held it in my lungs. Perfect. I picked up the pack of Hamiltons on my desk. Nasty local cigarette. No filter. Stuck three in my mouth and set them all on fire, the match trembling in front of my face. I sucked in the hot smoke. The flavor of cheap tobacco mingled with the taste of exhaust.</p>
<p>The <em>pisco</em> and coke were no longer enough. What was Pitt trying to tell me? I ripped open my shirt and hunted for a patch of skin not covered in scar tissue. A futile quest. Over the course of the last year I had pockmarked my entire body from the neck down with multiple layers of cigarette burns.</p>
<p>Lynn came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my chest, pinning my elbows at my side. Her breasts made divots in my shoulder blades. I could smell her perfume. <em>Musk of Horny Woman.</em> By Calvin Klein.</p>
<p>“It’s not your fault,” she said.</p>
<p>I struggled to break free but she held me tight. “The <em>fuck</em> you know.”</p>
<p>“Could happen to anyone.”</p>
<p>“Well it didn’t, did it? It happened to me.”</p>
<p>“It’s OK to cry.”</p>
<p>“Fuck you,” I said. I elbowed her in the stomach and she let go.</p>
<p><em>There. Found a spot.</em> I extinguished all three burning cigarettes under my armpit. The smell of burning flesh wafted up between us. I put the cigarettes back in my mouth and lit them again, puffing to get them nice and hot.</p>
<p>She clutched her navel. She said, “I need to know.”</p>
<p>“Where the door is? Right behind you.”</p>
<p>“What it means. ‘End the guilt’? What guilt? What has he done?”</p>
<p>She had no idea. I wasn’t about to enlighten her. “Maybe he killed a cockroach.”</p>
<p>A sharp blow knocked the cigarettes from my hand.</p>
<p>“Damn you, Horse. I need your help!” Her face grew red. Brine leaked from the corners of her eyes. She reached for my crotch.</p>
<p>“Let him go,” I said. I held her breast firm in my hand. “He’s an asshole, same as me.”</p>
<p>“My son is not an asshole,” she said, shimmying out of her tube top.</p>
<p>“But you’ll admit that I am?”</p>
<p>She grinned through her tears. “You’re my kind of asshole.” She unbuckled my belt. The kettle began to scream.</p>
<p class="chapter">Two</p>
<p>“Bros forever, dude?”</p>
<p>We were sitting on our longboards in the waves off Huanchaco, a short hour flight north of Lima. Pitt’s fist hovered in midair, waiting. His smile was full of teeth, his green eyes the color of the sea. A halo of early morning sun surrounded his head.</p>
<p>A blond god with a deep tan wanted to fist bump.</p>
<p>I pushed his fist with mine. “Bros forever.”</p>
<p>A wave was coming fast. A big one. It threw us apart and we scrambled to cling to our boards.</p>
<p>“Longest left hand point break in the world,” Pitt shouted over the noise of the sea and the caw of the gulls. A shark-tooth necklace danced on his chest, triangles of white on his black wetsuit.</p>
<p>We paddled out into the deep, our arms sweeping the lengths of our longboards, pushing through the ocean waves. A kilometer out, we pressed our chests against the waxed boards.</p>
<p>In the distance the gray, dead Peruvian coast watched us, a cemetery waiting patiently to be filled. We aimed our boards at the white church on the hill. Reed boats lined the foreshore, tiny handmade kayaks with curved prows like a jester’s slippers. The hour of fishing was over. Now was the hour of surf.</p>
<p>“Just get me back to shore,” I gulped, spitting salt water. Another wave lifted us in a heavy swell, dropped us again. The sun peeked over the eastern horizon, but in the west dark clouds hovered.</p>
<p>“Surfing’s better than sex,” he shouted.</p>
<p>“How’s that?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Better than drugs! Better than anything!”</p>
<p>“Oh yeah?” I retorted. “What happens when you’re back on land?”</p>
<p>He laughed. “That assumes you make it back!”</p>
<p>He slipped off his board into the water. He grabbed the end of my surfboard and paddled toward shore.</p>
<p>“The fuck you doing?”</p>
<p>“When I say go, get up, OK?”</p>
<p>Another wave swelled. Without warning, a sudden shove launched me into the air<em>—what happened to “When I say go”? But no time to dispute the point now—</em>and I leaped onto the board, and for what seemed like eternity the only thing that mattered was staying upright.</p>
<p>I had gone surfing once or twice on a high school trip to Tijuana. My memory of the lessons was rather hazy, no doubt due to the quantities of liquor, pot and mescaline I had consumed that weekend, but somehow my feet remembered, my body understood, and the wave picked me up into the air, my arms out, body tense, and bore me toward the shore faster than I had ever gone before.</p>
<p>The sand got closer, the wave got higher, I began to panic. <em>Now what? How do I make it stop? How do I get off this thing?</em></p>
<p>The wave collapsed. My feet left the board and I fell into the surf, crashing sideways into the surfboard, my chest flattened against the hard surface. Pain blossomed in my ribs. <em>Gather ye rosebuds,</em> I thought. I stood in waist-high water, but the following wave knocked me over.</p>
<p>I swallowed sea water. Coughed, spat brine. I grabbed hold of the board again, ignoring the pain in my side, and floated into shore on the next wave. When I felt my knees hit sand, I picked up the board and walked out of the surf.</p>
<p>Pitt rode the crest of a monster wave. Must have been three meters, easy. He slid down into the curve beneath the wave, darting sideways through the tube as it collapsed behind him. It looked as though he’d make it all the way to shore, cruising along on the final efforts of the wave, when the sea decided it had seen enough insolence for one day, and crashed down around him.</p>
<p>He tumbled out of the water, staggering with his board under his arm, feet struggling through the outgoing tide. He pumped his fist in the air. “Wipe out!”</p>
<p>I waited until he got within non-shouting range. “I think I prefer cocaine.”</p>
<p>“That’s why we brought a kilo, didn’t we?”</p>
<p>He grinned, the sand and the sea streaming from his hair, the sun peeking through the gathering clouds to bathe us in its flickering warmth. That grin that said all was right with the world, there could be no wrong, happiness was as simple as a dip in the ocean or a trip to the brothel, and misery too complex to understand. I envied him.</p>
<p>I stuck my fist out. “Bros forever?”</p>
<p>“Dude,” he said, and punched my fist so hard it hurt. “Bros forever.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Welcome to Happy Frying Pan Store.</p>
<p>So proclaimed the sign in Spanish, English and Chinese. Although I don’t know Chinese. Maybe it said Buy Cocaine Cheap Shop in that oriental chicken scratch.</p>
<p>Pitt had wanted coke for our trip up the coast. Insisted on meeting my dealer in person.</p>
<p>“Never know what they cut it with,” he complained.</p>
<p>“The stuff you’re snorting now is finest high-mountain nose candy,” I said. “Besides, I’m one of Hak Po’s best customers.”</p>
<p>But he insisted, so I let him tag along. He waited for me after class, and we took a bus deep into the warehouse and factory district adjoining Lima’s million-strong Chinatown.</p>
<p>I pushed open the front door. The bell tinkled. A Chinese boy of about twenty lounged behind the counter, picking his fingernails with a knife. He was missing an eye. The remaining orb appraised us quickly: gringos in the wrong part of town.</p>
<p>“You like fry pan?” he asked in pidgin English. “Very good fry pan.” Piles of cast-iron skillets lay stacked around the shop.</p>
<p>I chuckled and leaned on the counter. “You must be new. We’re here to see the boss.”</p>
<p>He held my gaze, his one eye unblinking. “Name?”</p>
<p>“Horace. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a.”</p>
<p>The boy closed the hasp of his knife and retreated through a hanging bead doorway.</p>
<p>Pitt hefted a frying pan. He ran a finger through a thick layer of dust. “Your drug dealer runs a frying pan factory?”</p>
<p>I shrugged. “Good a cover as any, I suppose.”</p>
<p>A wizened yellow gnome of a man shuffled through the bead door. The ever-present Cubs cap perched high on his head, exposing his wispy baldness. His sallow face puckered in a grin when he saw me.</p>
<p>“Hak Po!” I said. I hacked up some phlegm and spat on the floor.</p>
<p>“How’s my leetle Horsie?” he asked, dangling a finger at crotch level.</p>
<p>We shook hands and laughed.</p>
<p>“Friend I want you to meet,” I said.</p>
<p>He glided around the counter, his black slippers skating across the dust-covered floor. He looked Pitt up and down.</p>
<p>Pitt grinned and held out his hand. “Horse says you’re the best.”</p>
<p>Hak Po looked at the hand but did not take it. “Where I see your face before?”</p>
<p>Pitt’s eyes flickered my way. “I don’t know. My first time here.”</p>
<p>“You stay.” He pointed at me. “You come.”</p>
<p>Hak Po shuffle-glided back behind the counter and the little-used cash register.</p>
<p>Pitt went to follow, but I put a hand on his chest. “Sorry, dude,” I said. “I love you like a brother, but if Hak Po says stay, you stay. Besides,” I said. “Maybe you can find a nice frying pan for your mother or something.”</p>
<p>“Fat chance I’d ever see <em>her</em> cooking,” he laughed. “But you go on. Don’t worry about it.”</p>
<p>I stepped around the counter and through the bead door. Hak led me along a dark corridor into the factory. Great cauldrons of liquid iron belched and hissed steam. Workers poured the molten lava into frying pan molds, then plunged the newly created cookware into cold water to temper them. Steam rose in clouds. The din was terrible.</p>
<p>I’d asked him once, my nose full of coke, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to import cast-iron cookware from China?”</p>
<p>He had grinned up at me, a spoonful of cocaine ringing the edge of his nose. “I like make fry pan. What wrong with that? You insult my profession, something?”</p>
<p>“No,” I’d said. “Fry pan good. You good fry pan man.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” he’d said, snorting his uncut powdered joy. “I very good fry pan man.”</p>
<p>Hak Po’s office was a small room just off the factory floor. He let me go first. I squeezed through a gauntlet of four filing cabinets and climbed over his desk to take a chair. You didn’t want to slip; Hak Po, as his name suggested, was a spitter, and the floor was covered in a slick coating of slime.</p>
<p>Hak took a seat and unlocked a filing cabinet. He took out a kilo bag of cocaine and placed it on the desk. I tossed an envelope full of used fifties into his “in” tray and reached for the coke. He stopped me with an open hand.</p>
<p>“Tell me something, Horse, please.”</p>
<p>I was itching to get some of that powder in my nose. “Sure, Hak. Anything.”</p>
<p>“How long you know friend?”</p>
<p>I shrugged. “Couple months. Long enough. Why?”</p>
<p>“I know I see him somewhere. No remember where.” He waggled a finger in the air. “He bad man.”</p>
<p>I laughed. “As am I. As are you.”</p>
<p>A grunt. “True. But some are more bad than others. You stay away him, hear?”</p>
<p>“Sure, Hak,” I said. “Whatever you say.”</p>
<p>He let me taste the coke. It was good. The closest to forgetting I was ever likely to find. I stood and climbed past him over the desk.</p>
<p>A yellow hand pinched my calf. “You watch yourself now, Horse. You hear? I no like lose good customer.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I’d been warned. I should have known better. Alarm bells had gone off the day I met Pitt, but I ignored them.</p>
<p>I was in the Rat’s Nest trying to pick a fight with a pacifist fucking general in the Marine Corps. I’d heard an aircraft carrier was in harbor down at Callao, and I went looking for the biggest, meanest-looking grunt I could find.</p>
<p>I believed in America. Its ideals. But those ideals had become so warped and mangled that nothing was left of them but hypocrisy and lies. The mere thought of living in America again made me sick to my stomach. Better an honest hellhole like Lima than the plastic smile and the knife in the back you’ll get at home. <em>Don’t you tread on me, motherfucker.</em></p>
<p>“You oughtta be ashamed of yourself,” I told him. “Killing innocent women and children for a living.” I spat on his uniform.</p>
<p>He wiped the loogie from his jacket and stood up. “I’ve met your kind before,” he sneered. “Traitors like you in every port in the world. Not good enough for your own country.” He turned to go. “You’re not worth the time it takes to piss on.”</p>
<p>“Well God bless America and pass the apple pie,” I said, and took a swing at him.</p>
<p>He blocked the blow easily, and sent a devastating punch my way. I closed my eyes and waited for impact, savoring in advance the coming stars. They never came. I peeked. His fist hovered in midair inches from my nose.</p>
<p>A crunching sound of broken bone. The man howled in pain. His forearm bent over the bar at an unnatural angle.</p>
<p>“Bye-bye,” a new voice said, and a man took the general’s barstool. He looked far too young and blond and happy to be sitting there in that filthy bar, chuckling to himself as the marine limped from the room, clutching his broken arm to his chest.</p>
<p>“The fuck are you doing?” I shouted over the noise of the bar.</p>
<p>“Saving your ass by the looks of things,” he said. “Name’s Pitt. Buy you a drink?” To the barman: <em>“Dos cervezas, por favor.”</em></p>
<p>“Make mine a bottle of <em>pisco,”</em> I hollered. “And who are you to get involved?”</p>
<p>Pitt cracked his knuckles. “That guy was going to beat you up.”</p>
<p>“Yes. I know. That was the point?”</p>
<p>The <em>pisco</em> came. Pitt poured me a shot. I took the bottle and drained it in one long swallow.</p>
<p>“Thirsty,” he said, and rested his chin on his fist. “You want another or should I just tape a ‘Rob Me’ sign to your forehead?”</p>
<p>“Fuck off, will you?” I said. “You’ve already ruined my evening.” I looked around the room. None of the other crew off the <em>USS Asswipe</em> seemed inclined to brawl. Not with Pitt at my side. I slid off my barstool, feeling unsteady. “Now I’ll have to go somewhere else to get beaten up.”</p>
<p>Pitt drank his beer and laughed. “You are weird, dude. Why on earth do you want to get beaten up?”</p>
<p>My liquor tolerance was pretty high but even I was struggling to process an entire bottle of <em>pisco.</em> The stuff was raw local brandy, as nasty as it gets. I held on to the bar to steady myself. “Because I deserve it,” I said to a puddle of beer on the bar. I sat down and covered my face with my hands.</p>
<p>He slapped me on the back. “What can you possibly have done to deserve that?”</p>
<p>So I told him. I tell everyone. I love to watch their faces change. The horror when they hear what I have done.</p>
<p>When I was finished, he just laughed. “Dude,” he said, “that’s nothing. Don’t be such a fucking wuss. How can you feel guilty about something as stupid as that?”</p>
<p>The world was spinning now. “Wouldn’t you?” I managed to croak. I reached for my soap dish to righten the good ship Horsie.</p>
<p>“I do that kind of shit before breakfast sometimes,” he said. “And I sleep like a baby. Um, sorry,” he said, catching my expression of pain. “You know what I mean.”</p>
<p>“Tell me about it,” I said, snorting cocaine up my nose until my septum bled. “Tell me all about your pre-breakfast guilt-free ways.”</p>
<p>“I’m CIA,” he said breezily. “An enforcer. Part of the Dissent Suppression Unit.”</p>
<p>“And I’m the King of Spain. I dub thee, Sir Stranger Who Must Now Fuck Off.” And I collapsed into giggles.</p>
<p>He pinched my neck. A sharp pain shot down my spine. “I kill people for a living, dickwad,” he said. “You hear about the murders in Iquitos last week?”</p>
<p>I squawked an affirmative, his hand still on my neck.</p>
<p>“That was me. Strangled three dissidents with their own intestines. Roasted their nuts over an open fire. They were tasty.” He smacked his lips close to mine. “Fucking villagers didn’t want us drilling for oil. Thought it might ruin their precious fucking habitat. Guess what?” He laughed beer smell in my face. “We run this country. We don’t put up with that shit from nobody. You get in our way, you object to our policy, you protest our raping your country for money? Dead. Tortured. Disappeared.”</p>
<p>He let go of my neck, and I sat back, rubbing my spine.</p>
<p>“Decapitate dissent,” he said. “That’s what I do. Literally. Kill the leaders, and the sheep will follow.” He ticked off on his fingers. “Union organizers. Indigenous leaders. Hoity-toity academics who can’t be blackmailed or bullied. Artists. Writers. Opposition politicians. We make them go away.” He thumped his chest. “And I am a one-man disappearing team. I will kill, torture, maim, rape, sodomize, cannibalize and terrorize until you fucking obey, you stupid fucking Peruvians.” He leaned back in his chair with a smile. He drank his beer, then held it to his cheek and grinned broadly. “But after a hard day’s work, it’s time for an ice-cold Bud. Don’t you agree?”</p>
<p>I stared at him. It was bizarre. This golden boy, this Greek god spewing such filth…he didn’t look like he was joking. “If that’s the case, how come you’re telling me all this? Isn’t that, you know, like, classified?”</p>
<p>“You wearing a wire?”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>“Good. Because if you were I’d have to kill you.” He swigged his beer and grinned again.</p>
<p>From the depths of my soul came a reply: “You are either a liar or a psychopath.”</p>
<p>He swallowed suds and wagged a finger. “Sociopath, actually. Company shrink said so.”</p>
<p>Turned out he wasn’t a liar.</p>
<p class="chapter">Three</p>
<p>The sign said No Smoking. I lit a cigarette.</p>
<p>Two blue leather sofas glistened at right angles in the waiting room. Paintings of mountains long since gouged flat regarded me mournfully from the wall. Above them blazoned the coat of arms of Anglo-Dutch Mining, Ltd.: two unicorns rampant over a field of poppies. Four clocks ticked in unison, alerting the visitor to the current hour in London, Johannesburg, Melbourne and Lima.</p>
<p>Behind the yacht of a reception desk, its skipper, a twenty-something albino with her hair in a bun, tapped daintily at a computer. Her unfettered nipples ogled me through a tight red twinset. She glanced up from time to time, caught me staring at her. Those pink eyes made me think of rats. She’d greeted me with a polite <em>“buenos días,”</em> but switched to English when she heard my gringo accent. “Hey, you a Merkan?” she twanged. The South Florida accent made me want to hurl. “How’s it going? How do you like Peru?” She giggled. “Isn’t it just wonderful down here?”</p>
<p>Santana’s “American Woman” played in my head on endless loop. I blew smoke at the ceiling.</p>
<p>“You need to put that out.” She snapped her pale fingers at the sign.</p>
<p>The imperial finger snap made me want to wrench her arm from its socket and beat her over the head with it. My first wife used to do the same. Fuck her. And fuck her whole half of the species, especially the American ones.</p>
<p>At our son’s second birthday party Mrs. Bossy had snapped her fingers in my face and announced in front of all the company that she was divorcing me and suing for child support. Oh—and that the child wasn’t mine, but my best friend Larry’s.</p>
<p>“Child support?” I’d asked my lawyer. “Is she joking?”</p>
<p>“Nope,” he’d said with a chuckle. “According to the law, you got two years to order a paternity test. After that, doesn’t matter if it’s yours or not.” He aimed his pencil at my head. “You’re on the line for the next sixteen years, bucko.”</p>
<p>I heaved myself from my seat with a squish of leather and approached the yacht, cigarette between my lips. Ash dribbled onto the spotless marble. I exhaled smoke through my nose.</p>
<p>“I can suck myself off,” I said. “Wanna see?”</p>
<p>“I’m <em>sorry?”</em></p>
<p><em>You better be, cunt,</em> I thought. <em>You and all your kind.</em></p>
<p>“I need to see Sergio. You want to see me do it. Get your girlfriends, make some popcorn.”</p>
<p><em>“What?</em> I—<em>no.”</em> Her ghostly face flushed crimson. “Are you crazy? I <em>told</em> you, Mr. Salazar is in a—”</p>
<p>“You’ll regret it if you don’t.” I unzipped my jeans, tooth by tooth. The noise echoed in the sterile waiting room.</p>
<p>She closed her mouth. Glanced at my crotch. Picked up the phone.</p>
<p><em>Fucking slut.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>That morning I sat in bed for a long while, smoking cigarettes. Lynn had spent the night. A first. Went to great lengths to change my mind. Didn’t even complain when the cockroaches crawled into bed with us. When I woke up screaming, rats clawing at a baby in my arms, she hushed me, stroked my face, held me against a silicon breast. I wondered what she’d tell her husband. I spent the night fucking your former agent’s brains out. Why? So he’d help me find my son. You remember him. Pitt?</p>
<p><em>Pitt,</em> I thought. <em>Goddamn Pitt.</em> Only friend I’d had down here in Lima. Or thought I had. <em>Serves him right. After what he did? No. He can get fucked.</em></p>
<p>I extinguished the cigarette against my left nipple. Lit another. “End the guilt.” That’s what the email had said. Pitt had found a way to end the guilt. Pitt! With a conscience! Just the idea made me want to laugh.</p>
<p>He was everything I hated in the world. So why did I love him so much? Even now, after he betrayed me. How can you love someone you hate?</p>
<p>Maybe because, compared to him, I felt like a good person. He was a reminder that there were worse people in the world than myself. Truth be told I was jealous of his lack of conscience. What freedom he must feel! Not to be weighed down by ten tons of baggage like me.</p>
<p>Why had a murderous sociopath like Pitt wanted to hang around a sad sack of shit like me? God only knows. A source for his coke, I suppose. Although cocaine wasn’t exactly hard to come by in Peru. Hell, the country produced more of the stuff nowadays than Colombia did. Pitt had used me, of course. <em>Of course.</em> On my first, last and only mission for the CIA, thank God. But I could think of a dozen other people with the right access for that op. Why did he pick me?</p>
<p>I guess I was his audience. He liked to get high before going on a killing spree, murdering dissidents and protestors, whatever he did for a living. Then he’d fly into town and we’d go out drinking and whoring. He’d tell me about his latest atrocities.</p>
<p>His stories always made me feel better.</p>
<p>Pitt was one sick, twisted fuck. If his conscience had suddenly clicked on, then he was staggering around with a helluva load.</p>
<p>I burned another cigarette into the multilayered scar that covered my body. Winced in joy at the pain. I could still smell Lynn’s aging pussy in the sheets. The crusty spot where we’d ground together scratched against my thigh. I touched the divot in the lumpy pillow at my side.</p>
<p>No. I had to find Pitt. Had to find out what he meant by “end the guilt.” But not for her. For me. I wanted to know what he meant.</p>
<p>Had to know.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The glass security door clicked open. A bulldozer of a Latino plowed into the waiting room. He wore a sky-blue bulletproof vest over flowing robes of yellow and scarlet, like Buddhist monks wear in Tibet. One arm rested on the shotgun draped across his chest. His head gleamed from a recent encounter with a razor, and he stank of cheap aftershave.</p>
<p>He put his palms together, bowed to me. <em>“Shanti,”</em> he said. “Peace.” He straightened up and his voice coarsened. “You got something to say?”</p>
<p>“To Sergio, yes.”</p>
<p><em>“Shanti,”</em> he said again. “We are one. Mr. Salazar and me.”</p>
<p>“And <em>I.</em> One what?”</p>
<p>“He see what I see. Hear what I hear.”</p>
<p><em>“Sees</em> what you see. <em>Hears</em> what you hear.” I ground out my cigarette on the marble countertop. “And if that’s the case, he must be blind, deaf and stupid. C’mon.”</p>
<p>I held out my arms and spread my legs. The guard’s lips puckered. He swung a fist at my face. I flinched. He patted my cheek. Laughed.</p>
<p>“It is lucky for you that I am a pacifist.” His hands fondled me in all the wrong places. “What is this?”</p>
<p>He held up a rusty hammer with a rubber grip. I’d filched it from the butcher’s shop downstairs and washed the blood off. I’d seen them using it the day before to make their cat’n’dog patties.</p>
<p>“A gift for Sergio,” I said. “Something I thought he might like.”</p>
<p>The man grinned, but did not return the hammer. He gripped it low at his side, tense, as though expecting me to make a move. The receptionist buzzed the security door. The bulldozer <em>del día</em> charged through, held the door open for me.</p>
<p>“Nice meeting you,” the receptionist said. She undid her hair, let it fall to her chest. Her nipples peeked through the cascade of white.</p>
<p>“Nice tits,” I said.</p>
<p>She laughed. “Let me know, I’ll get the popcorn ready.” She slid a business card across the counter.</p>
<p>I picked up the card. Her horny pink rat’s eyes devoured my disgusting exterior. When did I last take a shower? Much less wash my clothes. Why would any woman want to be with me, unless I paid her? For that matter, why did Lynn? Beat the hell out of me. I tore the card in half, then half again, and let the pieces flutter to the floor.</p>
<p>“You do that,” I said.</p>
<p>The glass door clicked shut. The air quality inside the office was good. Too good. My lungs didn’t know what to do. I coughed, tasted Lima traffic on my tongue. I spat on a plastic plant.</p>
<p>“Wait here.” My escort pointed to an unoccupied cubicle. He fiddled with a security panel and disappeared through a door.</p>
<p>I sat down. How long had it been since I’d last seen Sergio? Couple of months? No. Longer. More recent than my last shower, anyway. Our paths had crossed a couple of times, but he was more Pitt’s friend than mine. That, and Pitt’s boss. At least the one Pitt told people about.</p>
<p><em>Sergio’s a nothing. A nobody. My dad and I run this country. And we run Anglo-Dutch Mining, too.</em></p>
<p>Blue canvas fuzz lined the wall. In nearby cubicles phones rang. Bodiless voices answered. Unseen fingers typed on unseen keyboards. Ambitious tongues, sharpened for the kill, slurped on half-empty mugs of coffee. I clutched my stomach, suddenly nauseous.</p>
<p>Cubicle slavery, American-style. You couldn’t escape it, no matter how far you flew. My first wife had tried to keep me in my job. When I refused to pay child support, she garnished my paycheck. I quit my job. Withdrew all my cash. Strapped it to my thighs, bought a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires. They stopped me at the airport and took my passport. Confiscated the money, gave it to her and her brat.</p>
<p>I would be a slave to no man. And no fucking woman, either. So I did what anyone would have done in my situation. I fled across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Passed wetbacks going north. “Are you crazy?” I shouted. “Go home! Freedom lies the other way!” But they ignored me, and plodded onward to their new careers as America’s de facto slaves.</p>
<p>I hitchhiked my way south, teaching English along the way. Picked up a fake passport, good enough to get me through Central America. Somehow wound up in Peru.</p>
<p>I met Kate. Things were looking up. Life was getting good again. We had a dream and we were building it, piece by piece. Until the evil God who runs the universe intervened, and decided I’d had my fill of happiness.</p>
<p>A man in polyester pants walked by, humming to himself. He propped a cardboard box on one hip, tapped a security code into a nearby panel and walked through the same door as the bulldozer. I could stand no more of this office bondage. Minions, be damned! I caught the door before it shut, pushed my way into the room.</p>
<p>Fifteen men in tailored suits looked up from their laptops. Their pasty faces drooped, puffy with excess. I recognized three of them from the brothel circuit. Glasses and watches and tie pins glittered under the fluorescent lights, battle regalia of the modern warrior.</p>
<p>The man with the cardboard box turned, opened his mouth and put the box down in midair. The box fell, exploding in a shower of manila folders. He scrambled to pick them up. Bulldozer grabbed me by the collar of my dirty brown sweater. I spotted Sergio at the end of the conference table. His dark Andean complexion and gray ponytail were hard to miss.</p>
<p>“Sergio!” I waved. “So good to see you again!”</p>
<p>“You know this man?” asked a portly gent in a three-piece suit, caressing his pinstripes.</p>
<p>Sergio removed a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his gray alpaca suit. He patted his forehead. “I can’t be expected to know every homeless in Lima, now can I?”</p>
<p><em>Dipstick here’s a useful puppet. Looks Indian enough to keep the locals happy. In private he takes orders like everyone else. Hello, I’m Sergio! I’m a sock puppet! Will you be my friend?</em></p>
<p>The bulldozer tightened his grip and yanked me toward the door. <em>“Shanti,”</em> he grunted. “This hurts me more than it does you.”</p>
<p>“The bathhouse,” I said, ignoring the guard’s feverish cultic pantings. “You don’t remember, Sergio? You and me, the three Brazilians? That amazing daisy chain?”</p>
<p>“My dear boy, this city is not the place to be telling lies.” Sergio nodded to my escort, who reached for the door handle. “Libel law in Peru may not be very strong, it is true, but then neither is the criminal code.” He put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. “You don’t want to know how much Shanti here bench-presses.”</p>
<p>“You mean that’s his <em>name?”</em> I said, and regretted it. Shanti gripped me around the waist, lifted me off the ground and heaved me from the room. I clung to the door frame. “Alright,” I said, “stop pretending you don’t know me, and I’ll stop pretending we’re lovers.”</p>
<p>“What is this about?” The portly gent stroked his waddle.</p>
<p>“The disappearance of Pitt Watters,” I said. “And will you get this goon off me?” Shanti was even now prying my fingers one by one from the door frame, mumbling prayers of penance as he did so.</p>
<p>Sergio lifted his chin and the brutal bending stopped.</p>
<p>The man at his side said, “Pitt what? What who?” Fingers pinched loose neck fat now, measuring and testing its elasticity. The other men sat silently, watching me.</p>
<p>“Pitt Watters,” I said again. “Your employee? The American ambassador’s son?”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I remember the first time I met Sergio. Pitt and I had arranged to go to a new strip club. Something New, Pitt called it, in his never-ending quest for novel and peculiar pleasures.</p>
<p><em>Life is pleasure,</em> he’d hoot after his third hooker for the night. <em>So what if it kills you? Quality, not quantity! Who wants to get old and wrinkly, anyway?</em></p>
<p>I got to the club first. A leather-clad dominatrix led me to a table, cracked a whip in the air to attract the waitress’s attention.</p>
<p>The waitress came over, swinging her hips from side to side, her body encased from nipples to knees in latex. They didn’t have any <em>pisco,</em> so I ordered a bottle of cheap Scotch and some ice. I shoved a wad of play money down her cleavage, told her to show my friends the table when they arrived. When she’d gone, I slipped into the bathroom and snorted coke off a urine-stained toilet seat.</p>
<p>I emerged to find Pitt in a manly embrace with a guy in a Phantom of the Opera mask. They assailed each other with mutual toasts of brotherly love: elbows wide, chins high, white teeth glistening, glasses sloshing with drink. The look of pure friendship Pitt beamed at his new companion made my stomach twist in acid convulsions. And what was with the mask?</p>
<p>“Horse!” Pitt yelled across the room, motioned me over. Half the assembled perverts turned to look. “Friend of mine!” he shouted in the man’s ear, despite a lull in the music. His voice rang hollow in the cavernous space.</p>
<p>“You say so. You Sergio?” I filled my glass, nibbled at my Scotch.</p>
<p>“Guilty as charged.” He stabbed an open hand at my abdomen, tilted his head so that his voice drooled from his nostrils. “They call me The Silver Fox.”</p>
<p>I took his hand. It was moist, like a tepid vanilla pudding. “Most people just call me an asshole.”</p>
<p>A brown finger flecked with long black hairs pointed at my head. Sergio’s mouth opened in a soundless laugh.</p>
<p>“What’s with the mask?” I asked.</p>
<p>He winked at me. “Let’s just say, a man in my position does not wish to be identified.”</p>
<p>I regarded him calmly. “Did your momma drop you on your head, or were you born that way?”</p>
<p>“What way?”</p>
<p>I dangled my Scotch from a limp wrist. “The mask only covers half your face?”</p>
<p>He laid a hand on my arm. “My friend, you would be surprised what this mask hides.”</p>
<p>He was short and dark. Bolivian dark. Fifty-something, gray ponytail that lingered halfway down his back. A scar snaked across one hand, disappeared under the cuff of his white silk shirt. He was tie-less, and wore a wool suit, the same shade as his hair, buttoned tight against his paunch. He stooped as he sat, shoulders hunched, like a gnarled tree, warped by wind and rain, unable to stand straight.</p>
<p>Pitt caressed my shoulder, gave a squeeze. “Daddy bought him a pretty accent, don’t you think?”</p>
<p>Sergio’s nasal passages echoed with the studied irreverence of Eton and Oxford. In his face you could barely note his father’s blood, the millionaire Russian Jew who’d sired him off an itinerant Bolivian maid. The Russian took care of his flock of bastard children, Pitt had said, and Sergio had done well. As South American executive of Anglo-Dutch Mining, Sergio was considered by many the next logical choice for CEO of the South Africa-based mining conglomerate.</p>
<p>And Pitt, as chief engineer at Anglo-Dutch’s lithium mine in Bolivia, was acknowledged as Sergio’s heir apparent.</p>
<p>I looked around the club for faces I might know. When gringos meet in Latin dens of vice, there is instant camaraderie. Men whose names I didn’t know, histories I didn’t share, with whom I’d never exchanged a word, would look up from haggling with the girl at their side and lift a chin, an eyebrow, a salute of mutual appreciation that said: I found freedom too. Aren’t we both glad we left?</p>
<p>But there were no other gringos here today, except for the three of us, so I communed with my liquid friend from Scotland. Pitt elbowed me in the ribs. Sergio was saying something.</p>
<p>“What do you do?”</p>
<p>“English teacher,” I grunted.</p>
<p>Sergio stroked his upper lip. “I see.”</p>
<p>“Do you?” I drained my glass, felt the liquor burn its way into my body.</p>
<p>“It’s honest work.”</p>
<p>“Honest?” I said. “I teach English to criminals so they can cheat tourists. You call that honest?”</p>
<p>Sergio’s pudding hand wobbled, threatening to spill his drink. “Not for you to judge your clients, if what you offer them is honest.”</p>
<p>BDSM was not my thing, and people who lie to themselves pissed me off. <em>What I do is wrong. Don’t lie to me about my crimes. Don’t lie to yourself.</em> I tapped Pitt on the elbow, opened my mouth to suggest we move on, but just then the lights dimmed and a woman strode onto the stage.</p>
<p>Peruvian strip clubs aren’t the same as American ones, with their no-touching bullshit. Here that was the point. The stripping was merely advertising for the services offered out back, in the row of small rooms that invariably smelled of disinfectant, maintained by an army of maids. I often wondered about the maids. No matter how many brothels Pitt and I visited, banging away in adjacent rooms, the walls thin enough to hear each other come, I never saw the ones who cleaned up the mess.</p>
<p>“Who deserves some pain?” asked the MC, a thin, dark-skinned woman with bleach-blonde hair. She wore a tangerine bra, panty and garter set, and every pair of eyes gobbled up the sliver of fabric between her thighs. Her pear-shaped breasts hung pendulous, ripe fruit ready to be plucked. I settled into my chair. Perhaps I’d stick around, after all.</p>
<p>Two women dressed in leather unitards and black spike-heeled boots carried an apparatus onto the stage. It looked like a bizarre exercise machine. Wrist restraints hung from above, ankle restraints protruded from below. Another woman stepped from the shadows, her eyes masked. The whip she trailed in one hand curled around the points of her six-inch stiletto heels. She lifted her arm, cracked the whip against the stage floor. The sound of leather on wood echoed in the lofty space. The audience shifted in their seats.</p>
<p>“No one here’s been naughty?” purred the tangerine-pantied MC. “No one here’s a—” and she breathed the words, almost a sigh, <em>“</em>—<em>a bad boy?”</em></p>
<p>Sergio thrust his arm in the air, fingers spread wide, hand twitching, a first grader eager to please. <em>Pick me! Pick me!</em> A spotlight swung around from the ceiling, engulfed our table. I shielded my eyes with my palm.</p>
<p>Sergio stepped across Pitt’s lap, walked down the aisle and hopped onto the stage. The light followed him. The MC smiled her kindergartner grin, helped him shrug the jacket from his shoulders. Two women in leather unitards laid light fingertips on his biceps, directed him where to stand. He faced the audience. They smiled and spun him back the other way. The audience tittered.</p>
<p>The woman on his right lowered the restraints from above, attached them to his wrists. The other nudged his feet apart and strapped in his ankles. They cranked the restraints tight, so that his arms and legs were fully extended, a man frozen in the middle of a jumping jack.</p>
<p>A crack of the whip made me flinch in my chair. The dominatrix stepped forward. She curled her fingers around the back of his shirt collar, looked over her shoulder at the audience, and grinned. With one fierce movement she ripped the garment from his body. The sleeves hung loose from his arms. The crowd murmured when they saw his back. White scar tissue formed deep rivulets from neck to waist. I stifled a gasp. It reminded me of looking in the bathroom mirror. At thousands of small white circles cratering my own flesh.</p>
<p>I leaned sideways toward Pitt. “This place wasn’t your idea then.”</p>
<p>“I thought you might enjoy it,” he whispered.</p>
<p>“You thought <em>what?”</em></p>
<p>Pitt gestured around at the club. “All your guilty conscience crap. Isn’t this what you’re after?”</p>
<p>I sighed. I had tried to explain the concept of a conscience to him hundreds of times in the few months we had known each other, but had long since given up. “I don’t want pleasure through pain,” I said. “I want <em>pain</em> through pain. There’s a difference?”</p>
<p>“I dunno,” he said, sipping his Scotch. He nodded at Sergio on stage. “Those scars don’t look like much fun to me.”</p>
<p>A crack of the whip demanded silence. The audience held its breath. The dominatrix began to work. Quick nips elicited gasps from Sergio. Red welts formed—low down on his love handles, high up on his shoulders. Her aim was flawless: she never hit the same place twice. She paused, posed for the audience: demure.</p>
<p>Sergio twitched. “What are you doing? Why are you stopping?”</p>
<p>Beneath the mask, a smile flickered on her lips. She cast her eyes at the floor.</p>
<p>Sergio heaved at the restraints, arched his back. “Do it!” he screamed at the ceiling. “Don’t stop! Please!”</p>
<p>The next blow hit him square in the middle of his back, all her strength aiming the whip at his spine. The skin broke. Sergio groaned.</p>
<p>I fidgeted in my seat. The dominatrix slashed at his back with her whip, taking ten-second breaks between each blow. Sergio’s noises of satisfaction became whimpers. Blood smeared, splattered with each stroke, trickled along the scarred waterways of his back into the seat of his pants. The remnants of his shirt turned scarlet.</p>
<p>“Oh God,” he panted, his head on his chest, “give it to me. All of it. All that I deserve.”</p>
<p>I swallowed my glass of Scotch. It tasted bad. I had never felt less aroused. Maybe Pitt was right. Was this what I was like? But I didn’t enjoy the pain. Pain hurt. I’m not some kind of pervert. Pain was what I deserved.</p>
<p><em>All that I deserve.</em></p>
<p>But that’s what he’d just said. It wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be. I fingered the two bits of paper in my pocket. I carried them with me everywhere. A picture and a postcard. I took out the postcard, bent it to catch the light. The front showed a photo of Lake Titicaca. I flipped it over to the handwritten scrawl on the back, even though I had long since memorized it. Pitt snatched the card from my hands.</p>
<p>“Hey!” I shouted, and reached for it.</p>
<p>He held it overhead. “Who’s this from?”</p>
<p>“From Kate. Give that back!”</p>
<p>“Who’s Kate?” His eyes scanned the note.</p>
<p>“My wife.”</p>
<p>“Your <em>what?”</em></p>
<p>I grabbed for the postcard again, but he held it out of reach. “My almost-wife. Or never-wife, as she called herself. We were engaged.”</p>
<p>“And what’s this—‘End the guilt’? What is that all about, man?”</p>
<p>I slugged him as hard as I could. He bent over, and I retrieved the note.</p>
<p>He chuckled through his pain. “How can you even think about getting married, bro?” He flung an arm at the stage. “There’s so many <em>chicas</em> here in need of good gringo loving. How can you pick just one?”</p>
<p>A security guard with a hand cannon on his hip appeared at the table. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Is everything alright?”</p>
<p>“Fine.” I put on my innocent gringo grin. The guard reluctantly strolled away. I said to Pitt, “You’re an asshole, you know that?”</p>
<p>His laughter faded quickly. “Of course I’m an asshole. How many times I got to tell you?”</p>
<p>“Yeah, well. You don’t have to be that way with me.” I took out my lighter and flicked it on and off. On and off. On and off.</p>
<p>“My shrink says I’m numb to the world. A real insensitive blockhead.”</p>
<p>I nodded. “It’s alright, man. I’ve been hanging on to this goddamn thing for too long anyway. Maybe I can learn a thing or two from an insensitive blockhead like you.” <em>Lighten the ten-ton load on my shoulders by half an ounce.</em> I held the lighter to a corner of the postcard. It caught fire.</p>
<p>“What are you doing?” He snatched it from me and smushed it out in the wet circles that coated our table. “Why don’t you go to her? It sounds like she’s found a better way to cope than you.”</p>
<p>I shook my head. “She’s a reminder of my crime. I could never find peace with her.” I stood. “Come on.”</p>
<p>Sergio moaned his pleasure. While the dominatrix continued to whip him, a whore knelt before him and loosened the zipper constraining the bulge in his pants.</p>
<p>Pitt followed me to the exit. He still held the postcard in his hand. “Sure you don’t want this?”</p>
<p>“You keep it,” I said. “Burn it. Wipe your ass with it. Just so I never see it again.” I burst out into the foul air, the streets swarming with human vermin. “Now let’s get a move on. The night is young, and so are we, and we have our bodies to destroy.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Sergio said, “We’ll finish after lunch.”</p>
<p>He unbridged his fingertips, bent a smile from his crowbar of a frown. He flicked his ponytail off his shoulder and stood, buttoning his suit jacket. He led the way out of the conference room. I followed, Shanti right behind me, three ugly ducklings in a row.</p>
<p>No sooner had he closed the glass door to his office than he grabbed a hairbrush and faced me, brandishing it like a rapier. “What would Ambo say?”</p>
<p>Ambo was Pitt’s father, the American ambassador to Peru. One drunk luncheon by the beach Pitt had dubbed him “Ambo,” and despite the frequent paternal threats of physical violence, the nickname stuck.</p>
<p>I shrugged. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, Shanti’s broad shoulders rolled and flexed, as though preparing for round two. I said, “Ambo doesn’t know.”</p>
<p>“Yes, well. You say that now. He has ways of finding out.”</p>
<p>The room was simple. Spartan. No. Not even. It was actively uncomfortable. There were no chairs for guests. Papers lay scattered across a beat-up metal desk, the kind I had in my own classroom. A broken fold-out chair served as Sergio’s throne. In the corner stood a cheap plywood cabinet. A heavy lock dangled from its latches.</p>
<p>Sergio ripped a black hair tie from his ponytail and flicked his hair over his head, a sixteen-year-old girl in the throes of pre-prom grooming.</p>
<p>I said, “You must have some idea where he is.”</p>
<p>“I assure you, it is a mystery to us both.” He attacked his hair, scraped the brush from neck to forehead.</p>
<p>I sat on the edge of his desk. “But you have an idea.”</p>
<p>Sergio tossed his hair back. It surrounded his head in a cloud of gray. He pointed the brush at me. “Pitt resigned effective immediately.”</p>
<p>“What do you mean, ‘resigned’?” I asked. “Why would he resign? This place was perfect cover.”</p>
<p>“Never showed for work. That’s all I know.”</p>
<p>Pitt worked a fly-in, fly-out schedule. Two weeks in the <em>altiplano</em> at the mine. Then a week in Lima raising hell. Among other things.</p>
<p>“That’s <em>all</em> you know,” I said. I crossed my arms and stared down my nose.</p>
<p>“My dear boy, I assure you it is.”</p>
<p>I went to the door and opened it. “Thug dude. Hammer back?”</p>
<p>Shanti bent his yellow-and-scarlet frame into the room. Sergio looked up at the man through a haze of hair. “What’s it for?”</p>
<p>“New trick you, uh, might enjoy,” I said.</p>
<p>“Oh, darling.” He nodded to the bulldozer. “Let him have it.”</p>
<p>I took the hammer, closed the door and walked over to the cabinet. With both hands I smashed the hammer down on the padlock. The latches ripped from their flimsy moorings and crashed at my feet.</p>
<p>The office door opened. I dropped the hammer to the floor and flung open the cabinet’s plywood doors. Strong hands encircled my wrists and drew my elbows back at a painful angle.</p>
<p>Inside the cabinet, five shirts dangled from paper-shrouded hangers, draped in dry cleaner’s plastic. Five suits of various shades of gray jostled for space. At the bottom, a pair of black shoes, a tin of shoe polish, a dirty rag. A tie rack spat fistfuls of colorful silk.</p>
<p>Sergio poked at a hole in my filthy brown sweater. “Looking to improve our wardrobe?”</p>
<p>“What are you afraid of?” I asked. “Since when do you use bodyguards?”</p>
<p>“I’ve told you what I know,” he said. “Now get out.”</p>
<p>Shanti frogmarched me to the door. </p>
<p>“Be sure to check behind the suits,” I said. “You’ll find it worth your while.”</p>
<p>A vase beside me shattered, spilling a dozen plastic birds of paradise at my feet. A hairbrush bounced off my shoe. “Bloody hell. I’m going to have to move them now.”</p>
<p>“Move what?” I asked. “Good help hard to find?”</p>
<p>A sharp hiss of breath. Sergio said, “Let him go.”</p>
<p>Shanti released my arms. He put his palms together, bowed. “Forgive me,” he said. “Peace be unto you. I’ll be outside if you need me.”</p>
<p>Sergio massaged the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He sighed. “I’m sure you will.”</p>
<p>I returned to the cabinet, pushed the shirts and suits out of the way. Venetian blinds fluttered and whirred, as Sergio sought escape from the prying eyes of his employees. The back of the cabinet had no obvious cracks.</p>
<p>“Must you do this?” he asked.</p>
<p>“I can break it if you want.”</p>
<p>He felt under the pile of silk. A button clicked. The back of the cabinet slid down.</p>
<p>To one side, a variety of dildos and butt plugs. A Fleshlight. Hanging from one hook, a small whip; on another, a cat-o’-nine-tails. A third hook sat empty. I lifted the cat. From each of the nine ends hung a twisted spike of barbed wire. Dried blood and chunks of gore caked the spikes.</p>
<p>“Something missing on that hook,” I said.</p>
<p>“On back order. Are we satisfied?”</p>
<p>I studied the empty space. Blood stains marred the plywood where another implement had hung. “Tell you what,” I said. “Be bad enough, I might just use this on you.”</p>
<p>Sergio shuddered. “Don’t say that.”</p>
<p>I lifted the cat, slashed it down on his desk with a loud crack. Sergio jumped across the room. Slammed the door shut as Shanti began to enter.</p>
<p>“Not now,” he wailed. “Don’t come in unless I call you, understand?” He locked the door, rested his weight against the frame. The blinds crackled.</p>
<p>I held the cat to my nose. It smelled of blood and sweat and sex. I stifled the urge to vomit. “You were telling me why Pitt resigned.”</p>
<p>Sergio lifted a trembling hand to his lips, wiped a strand of saliva from his chin. “He sent me a note, you see,” he said, not looking at me. “Pitt did.”</p>
<p>“Still got it?”</p>
<p>His open palms trembled in front of him, a saint beseeching the empty heavens for salvation. “I don’t understand what it means.”</p>
<p>I lifted the cat in the air. “You got it or don’t you?”</p>
<p>His head twitched sideways, unable to look away from the cat. “No,” he mumbled. “I threw it away.”</p>
<p>“What’d it say?”</p>
<p>His entire body spasmed now, his eyes fixed on those barbed spikes. “My dear boy, I don’t understand what it means. Or didn’t. Not at the time. I swear. Some rubbish about ending his guilt.”</p>
<p><em>Ending his guilt</em><em>…</em> Was BDSM Pitt’s solution? Had he changed his mind? Hard to believe. If that was his answer, he was barking up the wrong tree. Still<em>…</em></p>
<p>I pointed to the cabinet, the empty hook.</p>
<p>Sergio pressed his knees together, like he had to go to the bathroom. Confessed with a jerk of his head. “He stole my favorite cat.”</p>
<p>“Stole it? Why would he bother?”</p>
<p>“These cats are handmade in a factory in Tibet by Buddhist monks. They are rare, and exceedingly valuable.”</p>
<p>“So?” I said. “Pitt’s got money. You know he does.”</p>
<p>“Online purchases can be traced. You know this as well as I do.” He glared at me. “So much more subtle than you. At least <em>he</em> picked the lock. Broke in when I was gone.”</p>
<p>“But pain is not his scene. You know it’s not. How can you be sure it was him?”</p>
<p>Sergio said nothing, swung his head from side to side. I cracked the cat on his desk again.</p>
<p>The little man hopped like a puppet on a string. “How could I possibly? It was only when he disappeared that I knew.”</p>
<p>“Knew what?”</p>
<p>He bit his lip. His eyes darted around the room, looking for some escape from his perversion, finding none.</p>
<p>I lifted the cat again. “Knew what?”</p>
<p>He tiptoed across the room, leaned into me. God, what a smell. He’d shat himself. The stink made me choke. He whispered into my ear, “Bat guano.”</p>
<p>“Bat—”</p>
<p>“Shh!” He clamped a hand over my mouth.</p>
<p>I held up an open palm, nodded. He withdrew his hand. I mouthed the words: <em>Bat guano?</em></p>
<p>“Yes,” he whispered.</p>
<p>“What about it?”</p>
<p>“Go ask Ambo.”</p>
<p>I slashed the cat down on the desk, the metal frame booming with the impact. “I’m asking you, slave.”</p>
<p>“Oh God, oh please.” A turd slid from his pant leg onto his shoe. He pressed his palms together between his thighs. “I’d tell you if I knew. I swear I would.”</p>
<p>“What else?”</p>
<p>“Pitt was involved. He was key.”</p>
<p>“Then it wasn’t you who made him vanish.”</p>
<p>“Me?” His face exploded in outrage. “I’m a businessman who dabbles, not the other way around.”</p>
<p><em>“The dabblers are the best,”</em> Pitt had said that day on the beach, the ocean waves rolling into shore, as though to punctuate his point. <em>“You pay them with the thrill. They’re desperate for action. You give them less than what they want. Keep them hungry. Wanting more.”</em></p>
<p>“I see.” I put the cat on his desk. He eyed the blood-encrusted barbed wire.</p>
<p>He said, “One thing more.”</p>
<p>I raised my eyebrows.</p>
<p>“The whole plan fails without him.”</p>
<p>“What makes you say that?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Ambo’s looking for him.”</p>
<p>“Is he now.”</p>
<p>“Since a month ago.”</p>
<p>A month ago. A month head start. Hadn’t even mentioned it to Lynn. And if he didn’t want his mother to know… The thought erupted in my brain. Pitt had gone rogue. I walked to the door, unlocked it.</p>
<p>“Wait!” he screamed, dialed down the volume mid-word. He picked up the cat and held it out.</p>
<p>I said, “Any idea where to find him?”</p>
<p>“Ask his wife. She might know.”</p>
<p>For the second time that day I did a double take. “His <em>what?”</em></p>
<p>“Five years, four kids. House in San Isidro. Didn’t you know?”</p>
<p>“You’re shitting me.”</p>
<p>Sergio shrugged, bounced on his toes, the cat held out in one hand. A second turd stained his other shoe. “Maybe you don’t know your friend as well as you thought.”</p>
<p>My mouth hung open. I stared at the wall. His <em>wife.</em></p>
<p>Unbidden, Sergio set the cat down and scribbled on a sticky note. The pen clattered on the desk. He slapped the yellow square to my chest.</p>
<p>“The address.”</p>
<p>I read it. Closed my mouth. Peeled the note off my sweater and shoved it in my pocket. I opened the door.</p>
<p>“Wait!” Sergio pawed at my elbow and pointed at the cat on his desk. “You promised,” he whispered.</p>
<p>I thought about it. Give him a whipping. What he deserved. But what about me? What do I deserve? I can’t even save myself. How was I supposed to save him? I’d punished myself for a year now. Three times over I’d burned my body from neck to toes. How much was enough? When will I have paid the penalty? The rest of my life? Tomorrow? Next week, next year? Will I ever be free to live again?</p>
<p>“No,” I said, loud enough for the cubicle-dwellers nearby to hear, “I won’t give you a blowjob. That’s disgusting.”</p>
<p>The door clicked shut. The bodyguard and I ignored each other. I walked toward the exit. Through the glass wall I heard the slashing sound of leather and metal on flesh, followed by a soft, high-pitched groan. Two overweight expatriate engineers discussing basketball scores sat up straight, frowned. It was the sound of pain. Of well-deserved punishment.</p>
<p>Or was it merely masochistic pleasure?</p>
<p class="chapter">Four</p>
<p>I stared at the address Sergio gave me. Three stories of moldy stone cast menacing shadows on the sidewalk below. A pair of gargoyles hissed their disapproval from above. Black mildew crept down from the gutters. I rang the doorbell.</p>
<p>I’d stopped off at an internet café to look up bat guano. There’d been a war over the stuff. In the 1880s. Apparently it made great fertilizer. Farmers paid big money for it, before they invented the synthetic variety. Peru and Bolivia fought Chile, some dispute over tariffs. That was back when Bolivia still had a coastline. Although what a war over bat guano had to do with Pitt, much less his wife, was beyond me.</p>
<p>A woman in a <em>niqab</em> answered the door. Black silk covered her from head to toe. Only her eyes were visible. I looked at my yellow sticky note, then at the address. They were the same. I crumpled the note. Sergio had been a real bad boy this time.</p>
<p>“Sorry,” I said in Spanish. “My mistake.” I turned to go.</p>
<p>The woman rested her head against the door frame, a buzzard eyeing the final moments of dying roadkill. She said, “You’re at the right address.” She spoke in English, the accent a clear, unmistakable Boston twang.</p>
<p>Her face was a mere strip of white behind the silken armor, her eyes blue balls of fire. Another cock-hungry American whore. I knew her type. But what was the deal with the sheet?</p>
<p>“Your name Pitt?”</p>
<p>She laughed. “No, silly.”</p>
<p>“Well then.” I stepped backward down the stairs.</p>
<p>“My husband’s name is, though.”</p>
<p>I lost my footing, banged my knee. <em>“You’re</em> Pitt’s wife?”</p>
<p>She shifted in the doorway. The silk stretched tight across her body. Was she wearing any clothing underneath? </p>
<p>“You with the company?” she asked. Her eyes darting below my belt.</p>
<p>“Yes,” I said. “I mean no. That is, I’m a friend of Pitt’s. I need to find him.” <em>Damn. That came out kinda lame. You got a horsie, act like it for chrissakes.</em></p>
<p>She cocked those balls of fire sideways, as though taking aim with a shotgun. “Since when did Pitt have friends?”</p>
<p>I lifted my eyebrows in self-defense. “Since when did Pitt have a wife?”</p>
<p>A child’s voice broke the spell. “Who is it, Mommy?”</p>
<p>She shouted over her shoulder, “Friend of Daddy’s!”</p>
<p>“But Daddy doesn’t have any friends!”</p>
<p>She held out a hand, exposing a slender wrist. I snorted at the sight, a bull aroused by a moving cape. The hand was soft, and the touch of her skin sent a jolt of fire to my groin. Resisting this woman was going to be tough.</p>
<p>She squeezed my fingers. “Janine. Janine Watters.”</p>
<p>“Horse.”</p>
<p>“What, like the animal?”</p>
<p>“It’s Horace, actually. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a.”</p>
<p>“Are you really?” she asked, her voice a throaty purr.</p>
<p>“You’re nice to me, you might find out.”</p>
<p>She laughed. “You better come in.”</p>
<p>As I walked past, she pressed her breasts against my arm. They quivered, nipples like pebbles under the thin silk.</p>
<p><em>Toy with her,</em> I told myself, ignoring the bulge in my pants. <em>That’s all. You don’t need to add “cheating on your best friend’s wife” to your list of sins.</em> Of course, he wasn’t my best friend anymore. And fucking his mother wasn’t exactly high on the list of noble activities. <em>Crap.</em> I adjusted myself as subtly as I could. Which for me was difficult.</p>
<p>I stepped into the main room of the house, a large atrium. Unlike the mortuary facade, the interior overflowed with life: primeval ferns hung from hooks along the walls, dripping their damp and steamy essence on the tile floor. The walls of the house were clad in teak. A pyramid skylight caught the weak sun. Mirrors of varying shapes and sizes hung from impossible angles, scattering light into the far corners of the building. The second and third floors loomed above me, balconies encircling the space below.</p>
<p>“Your fly is open, by the way.”</p>
<p>“Is it?” She caught me off guard. I yanked at my zipper. I must have forgotten to close it after talking to the albino receptionist.</p>
<p>She padded barefoot ahead of me. “Don’t want your horsie popping out now, do we?”</p>
<p>A long table stretched down the center of the atrium. Beneath it, three young children played with an orange tabby. An infant cried in a nearby crib. The newfound agony of its existence shattered in mournful echoes against the wood-paneled walls.</p>
<p>“Pieu, pieu, pieu! You’re dead!”</p>
<p>The oldest child, a pretty black boy of six or seven, had discovered me, and was assassinating me with a Lego automatic.</p>
<p>I nodded. “Sometimes I wish I was.”</p>
<p>“Were.”</p>
<p>“I’m sorry?”</p>
<p>“Sometimes you wish you were. Mommy taught me that.” He glowed up at Janine. “Right, Mommy?”</p>
<p>She patted his shoulder. “Good boy, Jerome. Go play with your brother and sister, OK?”</p>
<p>Thus dispatched, the errant space fighter detached itself from the mothership, ran in circles about the great hall, firing imaginary projectiles at all manner of objects, stationary and otherwise, and pronounced them dead on sight.</p>
<p>The infant renewed its complaint with mounting volume. Her cries were knives in my ears. Against my will, my feet carried me to the crib. I bent over the railing. Red-faced, screaming, the little one beat her tiny fists against the mattress. Six months old or so. Same age as Lili…</p>
<p>“What’s her name?” I asked.</p>
<p>Janine stood at my side. “Esmeralda.”</p>
<p>I sniffed. “I think she needs her diaper changed.”</p>
<p>“I’m a bad mother and a lousy wife,” she said, and crossed her arms. “Anything else you want to know?”</p>
<p>“Whoa,” I said, hands out. “I didn’t mean it like that.”</p>
<p>“Then how did you mean it?”</p>
<p>“I just hate to see a baby cry is all.”</p>
<p>“Fine.” Janine shrugged. “You wanna change her?”</p>
<p>The little girl looked so much like my own. “Would you mind?”</p>
<p>“Whatever turns you on.”</p>
<p>I hadn’t touched a baby since La Paz. Something drew me to her. Because she was Pitt’s? Because she needed a fresh diaper? Or because she suffered, and there was something I could do to make it better? Her tears were for the whole world, even if she didn’t know it yet.</p>
<p>Janine looked on with amusement. When I finished, her only comment was, “You’ve done that before.”</p>
<p>I wiped my hands and dried the baby’s face. Her crying subsided. I chucked Esmeralda under the chin. She gurgled happily and squeezed my finger.</p>
<p>“Some grip,” I said.</p>
<p>“Yeah, well, she’ll need it to keep herself a husband.”</p>
<p>Janine walked over to a black leather sofa, her silk bustling with the movement. She sat down. The leather creaked. She patted the seat next to her.</p>
<p>I remained standing. “You mind I ask you something?”</p>
<p>“Go right ahead.”</p>
<p>“I didn’t know Pitt was a Muslim,” I said.</p>
<p>“He’s not.”</p>
<p>“But you are?”</p>
<p>“Catholic, actually.” She laughed, a bitter sound. “You mean the sheet.”</p>
<p>I eased myself onto the sofa. She snuggled against me. Pitt had married Mrs. Mile-a-Minute. I put my arm around her. I could smell her, a brassy mixture of sex and sweat. An exercise bicycle stood near a shuttered window, a damp towel draped across the handlebars. From under her <em>niqab,</em> a buzzing noise whirred and throbbed, like a cell phone on vibrate.</p>
<p>“Pitt is often away.”</p>
<p>“Yes?” I said, jarred from my reverie.</p>
<p>“I find I have a certain…effect on men.”</p>
<p>“I know what you mean,” I said. “I have a similar effect on women.”</p>
<p>She tilted her chin up at me. “Do you?”</p>
<p>I brought my lips close to hers. “You tell me.”</p>
<p>An instant before our lips touched, she turned away. “I’m not being vain,” she said. “I’m just saying. I want to be faithful. You understand?”</p>
<p>I sat back. So tiresome, these games. “I thought you said you were a lousy wife.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I am.”</p>
<p>An awkward silence fell between us, two satellites circling the planet Pitt, and abruptly sent crashing together. She ground her hips into the sofa. The buzzing noise continued.</p>
<p>“You need to get that?” I asked.</p>
<p>She nodded. “Just let me turn it off.”</p>
<p>One arm disappeared under her robes. She lifted her butt. The buzzing got louder. Her arm emerged from a sleeve bearing a two-pronged violet vibrator. She plunked it on the coffee table. Flipped a switch. The buzzing ceased.</p>
<p>“Sometimes it goes on all by itself,” she explained.</p>
<p>The dildo stank with juices from both holes. “Does it,” I said.</p>
<p>“So.” She clapped her hands together. “You’re yes-no-sort-of-with-the-company.” Her eyes twinkled. I could hear her mocking grin.</p>
<p>I wrenched my gaze away from the soaking sex toy. “Which company would that be?”</p>
<p>“Anglo-Dutch. Who else?” She propped her hidden chin on one hand. Her blank stare convinced me she knew nothing of Pitt’s clandestine calling.</p>
<p>“No,” I said. “We used to work together, but not anymore. We’re just friends.”</p>
<p>Janine laughed, long peals of ejaculating merriment.</p>
<p>“What’s so funny?”</p>
<p>“Guess how long I’ve known Pitt.”</p>
<p>“No idea.”</p>
<p>“Senior year at Vassar.”</p>
<p>“Which is?”</p>
<p>“Eight years. I tell you where we met you’ll laugh.”</p>
<p>“Try me.”</p>
<p>“A strip club.”</p>
<p>“Really,” I said.</p>
<p>“Stuffed a hundred-dollar bill inside my thong.”</p>
<p>“And that was that.”</p>
<p>“It was.”</p>
<p>I put a hand on her knee. “I’d like to stuff more than that inside your thong.”</p>
<p>She leaned into me, trailed a thumbnail along my thigh. A bolt of lightning stiffened my back, cracked my neck sideways. I pulled away.</p>
<p><em>Down, boy. Down!</em></p>
<p>“And in all that time,” she continued, delighting in my torment, “I have never known him to have a friend of any kind.”</p>
<p>“No?” I struggled to keep my voice steady.</p>
<p>“Drinking buddies, maybe. Work mates, sure. Fellow students. Roommates.” She observed me from behind her veil, her eyes the inscrutable blue of a Siberian husky. She withdrew her fingernail from my leg, and I sighed, a victim of the Inquisition released momentarily from torment. “But never a friend.”</p>
<p>I snorted, coughed up a wad of traffic-tasting phlegm. I swallowed it. “We aren’t friends.”</p>
<p>“But you are. I can tell.”</p>
<p>“That is,” I said, and held out an open palm, “we aren’t anymore.”</p>
<p>“I see,” she said. And looked at me.</p>
<p>I felt compelled to complete the thought. “He used me.”</p>
<p>“Of course.”</p>
<p>“He does that, does he?”</p>
<p>“But here you are, looking for him. Why is that?”</p>
<p>“I—” The words caught in my throat.</p>
<p>Why <em>was</em> I looking for him? End the guilt, of course. Find out what he meant. And then? Once I find him and we’re standing face to face? Tell him to go to hell. What else was there? This wasn’t about him. It was about me. I was a self-centered bastard and didn’t care who knew it, and this woman’s questions were getting on my nerves.</p>
<p>She said, “You love him, don’t you.”</p>
<p>“I <em>what?”</em></p>
<p>“You love him. You love Pitt.”</p>
<p>“I’m not gay.”</p>
<p>“I never said you were.”</p>
<p><em>Love.</em> Love was giving your girl the big beefy injection. Cooing over tiny humans caused by said beefy injection. Bald, half-naked cults that meditated on the Ganges. You might as well go catch a fucking cloud.</p>
<p>“Fuck love,” I said. “You just met me. What do you know.”</p>
<p>“Where did you meet him?”</p>
<p>I’d had enough of this game. She didn’t know anything. And even if she did—there had to be some easier way to find Pitt. I got up. “You don’t know where he is, just say so.” I walked toward the door.</p>
<p>“You didn’t even think to ask?”</p>
<p>My stride faltered. “So you know where I can find him?”</p>
<p>She giggled and clasped her knees. “No idea.”</p>
<p>“Well then.” I made a beeline to the exit.</p>
<p>She called after me, “No one else is going to care.”</p>
<p>That struck home. I stopped. Beneath the table, the oldest child was demonstrating to the others how to pick up the cat by the tail. The cat made no complaint.</p>
<p>“No one likes me,” I said. “I am not a nice man.”</p>
<p>“I’m sure you’re not.”</p>
<p>“I’m an asshole. Scum.”</p>
<p>“If you say so.”</p>
<p>I sighed. “But Pitt liked me. Or pretended to.”</p>
<p><em>Get out of my head!</em> I wanted to scream. Now who was toying with who?</p>
<p>“Why would he pretend?” she asked.</p>
<p>“I have been disappointed too many times by too many people.” I thought of La Paz. What happened to Lili. People I had trusted wrongly. Dozens of them in my past. But for reasons I could not fathom, Horse the Master Cynic got suckered in again and again, and every time the betrayal felt like the first time.</p>
<p>I ran a hand across my face. “But with Pitt, it was like…” I shrugged, began again. “The one time, the only time I ever—”</p>
<p>“Loved another human being.”</p>
<p><em>“Used</em> me. I was nothing to him. Nothing.” I paced the room. I raised a clenched fist, nearly crashed it into a mirror hanging from a nearby staircase. “A tool.”</p>
<p>“Maybe,” she said. “I wouldn’t be too sure.”</p>
<p>“And you know what the worst thing is?” I rushed on before she could stop me. “I knew it was going to happen. I could see it coming a mile away. It was like watching a train wreck and being unable to stop it. I mean the man told me the day we met, for chrissakes.”</p>
<p>“Told you what?”</p>
<p>If she didn’t know, I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news. “The kind of man he is.”</p>
<p>“And now you want to find him.”</p>
<p>I ran my fingers through my hair. “Yes.”</p>
<p><em>“Need</em> to find him.”</p>
<p>I hung my head. “Yes.”</p>
<p>“I understand.”</p>
<p>I studied her. Was this part of her seduction? Turn shrink and psych me out? She wanted to fuck my mind as well as my body. That is <em>verboten</em> in Horse Land.</p>
<p>“Do you?”</p>
<p>“I am his…” she paused, bit her lip. “That is, in my dark moments, when he is not around, I call myself his secret shadow.”</p>
<p>“Meaning what?”</p>
<p>“I have done him wrong.” She laughed, and the sound seemed to conceal great sadness. “A lousy wife, remember?” She gestured at the children, none of whose various skin tones matched Pitt’s striking blond Nordic features. “I take what scraps of love I can, and for that I am grateful.”</p>
<p>I sat down next to her again. “Has he called? An email? Letter, anything?”</p>
<p>“Sergio called from Anglo-Dutch. ‘On special assignment’ was all he said.”</p>
<p>I exhaled through my nose. Lit a cigarette. A cloud of smoke rose in the air. Maybe it would be enough to keep her at arm’s length. Doubtful.</p>
<p>“Nothing else?”</p>
<p>“His Highness came by.”</p>
<p>“Ambo.”</p>
<p>She laughed and sucked in a lungful of secondhand smoke. “Pitt taught you that too.”</p>
<p>“And?”</p>
<p>“Said the mining company wouldn’t talk to him. Wanted to know had I heard from Pitt.”</p>
<p>“Had you?”</p>
<p>“No. But then I don’t usually. Ambo asked me to call if I heard anything.”</p>
<p>“So Pitt said nothing, where he might have gone?”</p>
<p>The children under the table were inserting matches in the cat’s anus. The animal arched its tail to allow for greater access.</p>
<p>Janine sat back against the sofa. She laid one forearm across her belly, tightening the thin silk across her breasts. “He had to go find himself,” she said softly. “I had to let him go.”</p>
<p>“Go where?” My anger was seeping away, replaced by frustration.</p>
<p>“Does it matter?”</p>
<p>I took a long drag on the cigarette, let the cancerous smoke trickle from my lungs.</p>
<p>One child, the oldest again, scraped a match against the box. It failed to light. He scraped it again. The third time it caught. The cat looked around, curious, nosed the boy’s hand. The child held the flame to the match heads. There was a flash of sulfur, and the cat’s tail caught fire. The animal yowled and ran across the room, the movement fanning the flames that spread across its body.</p>
<p>Janine reached behind the sofa and came up with a fire extinguisher. She tracked the cat, like shooting skeet, and let go a blast of white powder that coated the animal in white sugar frosting. Snookums dove under a recliner, trying to escape its tiny tormentors. The fire extinguisher returned to its appointed post behind the sofa with a hollow clunk.</p>
<p>“Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”</p>
<p>She walked to a corner of the house, strode down a narrow corridor. She unlocked a side room. I followed after her, and she closed the door.</p>
<p>An unmade king-size bed sprawled across the empty room. Bookshelves overflowed, their contents in disarray. Empty beer bottles stood on a nightstand. A rolltop desk sat open in a corner, its pigeonholes stuffed with papers. One corner of the room was coated in dry vomit. The stink of stomach acid and rotting, half-digested bits of food filled the room.</p>
<p>“Tell me something, Horse,” she said.</p>
<p>She unlatched the chain that held the veil across her face. She dangled the silk between two fingers. Let it slip to the floor. If her eyes were astonishing, her face doubled the effect. Angular features formed the platinum setting those burnings balls of sapphire deserved.</p>
<p>I shuddered. I put the cigarette in the corner of my mouth and ran a thumb along the bookshelf. Plato. Nietzsche. Sartre. Augustine. Camus.</p>
<p>I said, “Shoot.”</p>
<p>“Am I beautiful?”</p>
<p>I pulled out a well-thumbed copy of Kierkegaard’s <em>Sickness Unto Death.</em> “Didn’t know Pitt was into philosophy.”</p>
<p>She clucked her tongue. “He’s not.”</p>
<p>“No?”</p>
<p>“Or wasn’t. Until recently.”</p>
<p>“What happened?”</p>
<p>She sighed. “I was a philosophy major. About a month ago he asked to borrow all my books from college.”</p>
<p>I laughed. “Pitt can barely read.”</p>
<p>She shook her head, the blue fire keeping me in its sights. “Pitt always tells people that. He’s a speed reader. Could do it faster than anyone I’ve ever met. Went through all my books in a week.”</p>
<p>“Any idea why?”</p>
<p>She shrugged. “Afterward, he got drunk and puked in the corner.”</p>
<p>“I can see that.”</p>
<p>Her lips lifted in a half-smile. “The smell reminds me of him.”</p>
<p>I put Søren back in his place, crouched to check out the bottom shelf.</p>
<p>She said, “You going to answer my question?”</p>
<p>A lump throbbed in my throat. I swallowed hard. “What was the question again?”</p>
<p>“Do you think I’m beautiful?”</p>
<p>“Pitt must have thought so. He married you, didn’t he?” A copy of <em>Crime and Punishment</em> lay sideways on top of the bottom shelf. I pulled it out.</p>
<p>“Then can you tell me—why did he prefer to sleep in here, alone?”</p>
<p>The sound of swishing silk, a judge’s robes as he enters the courtroom. I stood in time to catch the final ounce of <em>niqab</em> sliding to her feet. Janine stood naked in a pile of silk.</p>
<p>She was beautiful. Too beautiful. Breasts to melt the resolve of the mightiest sinner, hips that twitched, waiting for hands to command them. A long full head of soft brown hair curved at her throat, tickled her collarbone. Four kids didn’t show.</p>
<p>The cigarette burned my lips. I spat it out and crushed it with my shoe. “Thought you said you didn’t want to cheat.”</p>
<p>“The spirit is willing, but the flesh…”</p>
<p>I swallowed. “The flesh.”</p>
<p>“The flesh,” she agreed, eyeing my crotch.</p>
<p>I tried not to look at her body. “You could always pray for strength,” I suggested at last.</p>
<p>She shook her head, a triumphant smile on her lips. “I pray. But no help ever comes. Why do you think that is?”</p>
<p>“Maybe you’ve stopped trying,” I offered.</p>
<p>She nodded. “I’m just no good. I never will be. Maybe that means I’ll go to hell.” Her body tensed at the word, shivered. “So be it. I don’t know any other way to be.”</p>
<p>She stepped out of the silk, her thighs sliding against each other. She took the book, put it on top of the shelf. “If you’re a friend of Pitt’s,” she said, and clasped my hand, cupped it to her breast, “if you know him as I do, you will understand that.”</p>
<p>“I can’t,” I said, but didn’t pull away.</p>
<p>“You know,” she said, her face close to mine, her eyes burning a path through my skull, “he hates it when I dress this way.”</p>
<p>“You mean naked?”</p>
<p>“No, silly. The <em>niqab.</em> Says that he’s got nothing to be jealous of.”</p>
<p>“Then why do you?”</p>
<p>Her mouth quivered. She looked like she was going to cry. “Because I love him.”</p>
<p>She grabbed my head with both hands, pulled me down to her mouth. Her tongue slithered between my teeth. I wondered how she could stand it. When did I last brush? I couldn’t remember. Yes. I could. A year ago. The day we arrived in La Paz, Kate and I, the baby in tow. Pain stabbed at the back of my brain, and I stuffed the memory down as far as it would go. I stroked an open palm down her lower back, across her hip and up between her thighs.</p>
<p>“Like that,” she hissed, and ran her fingers through my hair.</p>
<p>To avoid her mouth I kissed her neck, trailed my way down to her left nipple. I sucked on her breast, tit flesh filling my mouth, rubbery against my teeth like moldy cheese, and choked on a mouthful of milk. She pulled away but I held her tight, swallowed. When she was dry, I took my mouth away. There was milk in my lungs. I stifled the cough.</p>
<p>“No idea where he might have gone?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Gone?” She ground herself down on my hand.</p>
<p>“Pitt.”</p>
<p>“Something heavy,” she sighed into my shoulder.</p>
<p>“Heavy.”</p>
<p>“On his soul.”</p>
<p>“You mean like guilt?”</p>
<p>“What else would I mean?” She pushed me away, as though trying to control herself, then clutched at my back, clawed my scalp and dropped backward onto the bed, pulling me down on top of her.</p>
<p> “About what?” I asked. I drove the knee of my dirty jeans between her legs, bent to kiss her other breast, avoiding the nipple this time.</p>
<p>“Wish I knew.” The words escaped from her like air from a deflating balloon.</p>
<p>I caressed her cheek. Her face was wet. “What did he say?”</p>
<p>She stifled a sob. “He quoted Camus.”</p>
<p>I lifted my head. “Who?”</p>
<p>“Camus. The French philosopher.”</p>
<p>“Who said what?”</p>
<p>She was suddenly cross. “What is this, lecture time?”</p>
<p>“It could be important. What did he say?”</p>
<p>She unbuckled my belt but I stopped her.</p>
<p>“‘The only true philosophical question is suicide.’”</p>
<p>“Meaning what?”</p>
<p>“To live or to die. It’s a choice. You have to choose.”</p>
<p>“And what was Pitt’s choice?”</p>
<p>“He didn’t say.”</p>
<p>I nibbled her neck just under her ear. “Then how do you know he has guilt?”</p>
<p>“I know what guilt looks like. I look in the mirror every day.” She shoved me up onto my knees and grabbed for my pants. “Now shut up and fuck me.” She had my belt undone and my cock in her hand before I could stop her.</p>
<p>Her feather touch clouded my brain, thickened my tongue. “Where would he go?” I asked.</p>
<p>“God, it’s huge,” she said. “You live up to your nickname, I’ll say that.”</p>
<p>“We were talking about Pitt.”</p>
<p>She tickled me in the wrong place. I gasped.</p>
<p>“It matter to you, baby, where he is?”</p>
<p>“It does. Yes.”</p>
<p>She bent to take me in her mouth, but I covered myself with my hand.</p>
<p>“Hard to get.” She laughed, husky, deep in her throat. “I like that.”</p>
<p>I wasn’t, actually. Hard to get. Just not worth getting. But that wasn’t the point. Even though Pitt had screwed me over, and big time, I couldn’t bring myself to return the favor. I’d already fucked his mom plenty. I stuffed myself into my pants, zipped up.</p>
<p>She sat up on her knees and cocked her head to one side. “You’re serious.”</p>
<p>“I said I was, didn’t I?” It came out more tartly than I had planned.</p>
<p>She trailed a finger along my shoulder, came up behind me and pressed herself against my back. She took hold of my sweater and pulled. I put my arms in the air and let her yank it off me. She reached under my armpits, began unbuttoning my shirt. Her lips brushed my neck.</p>
<p>“Said something about volunteering,” she murmured.</p>
<p>“Volunteering?”</p>
<p>“Save the planet, all that crap.”</p>
<p>I took hold of her wrists. “You know where?”</p>
<p>She struggled. I didn’t let go. I leaned my head back, kissed her.</p>
<p>She said, “Pitt always comes home. Eventually.”</p>
<p>“Not this time,” I said.</p>
<p>“What makes you say that?”</p>
<p>“Call it a feeling.”</p>
<p>“Is it your fault?”</p>
<p>I nodded. “Maybe. Maybe not.”</p>
<p>“But you have to know for sure.”</p>
<p><em>I have to know how he deals with his guilt.</em> But I wasn’t about to tell her that.</p>
<p>I nodded and let go of her wrists. She got up, went to the rolltop desk. She bent forward, her bottom aimed at me in silent invitation. I looked away, closed my eyes, peeked.</p>
<p>“He keeps the things he wants to hide in here.” She lifted the pigeonholes to reveal a secret compartment, and removed several business cards. I was out of the bed and snatched the cards from her hand before she could turn.</p>
<p>“Finally,” she said. “A man who knows what he wants.”</p>
<p>I stuffed the business cards into my jeans pocket, draped my sweater over my shoulder. I pinned her arms to her sides and inched around her to the door.</p>
<p>Her mouth opened wide. “Amazing. But how?”</p>
<p>“What’s that?” I said, one hand on the doorknob.</p>
<p>“You’re so strong.”</p>
<p>In her Boston twang I heard my ex-wife gloating to my face outside the courthouse door. The rage made me horny. I could have fucked an entire harem and had energy left over. But not for this woman, and not for anyone like her.</p>
<p>I opened the door and the singed cat twisted its way into the room, meowing. A little hand snaked through the open door, clamped down on the animal’s tail, pulled it back outside. I kicked at the hand with my shoe. The cat hid under the bed.</p>
<p>“No,” I said. “I’m not.”</p>
<p class="chapter">Five</p>
<p>Volcanic Volunteers.</p>
<p>Two of the business cards were in Spanish. One was a high-class brothel downtown. Another belonged to Hak Po. The third announced itself as Volcanic Volunteers. A picture of a happy smiley sun setting over a lake in the mountains adorned the card. The address was in Miraflores, right on Avenida Larco, the heart of the tourist district.</p>
<p>It was an hour walk from San Isidro to Miraflores, and I didn’t like exercise. I was committing suicide by cowardice, dammit, and I saw no point in slowing the process. Today, though, I needed to clear my head, so I consoled myself by breathing the city’s toxic fumes and holding them deep in my lungs.</p>
<p>What did it mean? Pitt? Volunteering? What was he doing with a bunch of no-good do-gooders with a self-righteous attitude? <em>Look at me, look how good I am. I spent a week playing basketball with street kids in Lima, now let me into Harvard or Princeton, please, pretty please with sugar on top?</em></p>
<p>That wasn’t like Pitt. That wasn’t like Pitt at all. Pitt was more like me. Scum of the earth, didn’t care who knew it. Take what you need and fuck the rules, ’cause if you don’t, somebody else will.</p>
<p>Why did I give him Kate’s postcard? I’ll bet he still had it. Her cell phone number. Everything. She had said she’d found peace volunteering. No way that was a coincidence. I pulled back my sleeve and put out my cigarette. <em>You asshole. You could at least have kept her number. Then you wouldn’t have to traipse halfway across fucking Lima to talk to some holier-than-thou morons.</em></p>
<p>I found the volunteering office sandwiched between an internet café full of perky blondes yabbling in Swedish and a <em>chifa</em> joint that sold Peruvian chow mein, guaranteed diarrhea. To get there I had to run the gauntlet, the Shiny Happy People Zone, tourism central: overpaid stockbrokers from New York and London drinking resealed bottles of tap water, eating “guaranteed clean” imported salads slathered in human fecal material, congratulating themselves on how clever they were. They’d seen Machu Picchu. Deepest, darkest Lima, Peru, had changed since Paddington Bear made his getaway.</p>
<p>I cupped my hand to the glass door. Stairs led to the second floor. I depressed the dirty yellow button on the intercom.</p>
<p><em>“Sí?”</em></p>
<p>“This Volcanic Volunteers?”</p>
<p><em>“No hablo inglés.”</em></p>
<p>“Cut the crap, bitch, I know you speak English. I want to volunteer. You going to let me up or aren’t you?”</p>
<p>A long pause. I was about to punch the button again when the buzzer sounded. I opened the door with a click, let it swing shut. The stairs were dirty and covered in speckled linoleum, the kind that’s supposed to look like marble but winds up looking more like bird shit.</p>
<p>I reached into my pocket for my soap dish. A glint of glass above. I kept my hand in my pocket. Security camera. Interesting. It’s true you can’t be too careful in Lima. But a volunteering organization with a security camera in the stairwell? This was the tourist district, after all. The hotels bribed the police to keep a watch on this part of town.</p>
<p>On the landing, only one door. Locked. So I knocked: shave and a haircut, fuck you. A distant shuffling approached, like an ancient, dying animal. A key rotated in the lock, the door opened a few inches. A freckled face surrounded by a dandelion head of frizzy orange hair peered at me through a pair of brown plastic glasses.</p>
<p>“I help you?” The accent was German, Bavarian perhaps, thick and guttural.</p>
<p>“You always so rude to people who come here?” I asked.</p>
<p>“You call every woman you meet a bitch?”</p>
<p>“What do you think?”</p>
<p>She laughed. “You are not volunteer we want. Sorry.”</p>
<p>She closed the door but it bounced back in her face, knocking her glasses crooked. My foot blocked the doorway.</p>
<p>“Let me be the judge of that.”</p>
<p>I put my weight against the door. She let go. It swung open and I stepped inside. A short corridor. Mounted on the wall, a small black-and-white monitor. I could see the stairs, the street outside. To my right, at the end, a bathroom. The door was open. It looked clean. At the other end, to my left, windows. Sunlight shone in so bright I squinted.</p>
<p>The ever-present <em>garua,</em> the fog, was worse than San Francisco. When had I last seen the sun?</p>
<p>“The hell?” I said. “You got a red phone link to God?”</p>
<p>A big man blocked the light, hands on his hips. He was taller than me by a head. His long black hair, pulled tight in a ponytail, shimmered blue and violet in the light, announcing his Indian ancestry. The bulbous cheeks suggested a German parent.</p>
<p>“Echo baby, what’s going on?” he asked in Spanish.</p>
<p>I said, “Your parents called you Echo?”</p>
<p>She sighed, crossed her arms, heaved skyward her enormous, sagging tits. “Don’t start.”</p>
<p>I closed the door, stuck my hand out at the big man. “Name’s Horace. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a. Heard about your volunteering program.”</p>
<p>He flicked a switch on the wall. The sunlight died. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. His head was too small for his body, the shrunken trophy of Polynesian cannibals. His jaw was even smaller, drawn up into his head, giving him a pronounced overbite. His gut fought with the waistband of his brown corduroy trousers and won. On his feet, open-toed action-man sandals. A blue button-down dress shirt was his halfhearted kowtow to The Man.</p>
<p>“Sun lamps,” I said.</p>
<p>He shrugged, took my hand. It was big but soft, a limp bit of juicy steak. “The only way to stay sane in this horrible city,” he said in Spanish.</p>
<p>I smiled. It felt weird. I couldn’t remember the last time my cheek muscles managed that distinctive upward pull. “We agree on something, then,” I said. “That’s a start.”</p>
<p>He waved a hand at a metal chair covered in rotting green leather. I sat. The springs ground into the base of my spine. I crossed my legs, pressed down on one side, enjoying the pain.</p>
<p>I thought of Sergio. That was fucked up. What he does? To see him in the nightclub. And now again this morning, up close, firsthand.</p>
<p>Until today my punishment made sense. The cigarettes. The burns. Everything. A sudden darkness squeezed my chest. Was all of this a big mistake? <em>Goddamn you, Pitt,</em> I thought. <em>For everything.</em></p>
<p>The man said, “You want to volunteer?”</p>
<p>“Either this or the Foreign Legion.” I shrugged. “Never did like sand.”</p>
<p>I looked around the room. Aside from their laptops and sun lamps, the place was bare. No posters, no pictures, not even a jar full of paper clips or a box of pencils. In the corner lay a bunch of picket signs, upside down. Stake handles resting against the wall, the poster board clean, unbent. Unused. I bent my neck sideways to read them. Echo moved to stand in front of them, but not before I got a good look at a few.</p>
<p><em>No War For Ore.</em></p>
<p><em>Stop Bat Guano II.</em></p>
<p><em>Fuck the US.</em></p>
<p>“Subtle,” I said. </p>
<p>“How did you find out about us, Horace?” The shrunken head smiled, his eyes narrow.</p>
<p>“Friend of mine,” I said. “Met him in a bar. The Rat’s Nest, in Barranco. You know it?”</p>
<p>They nodded in unison, arms folded across their chests, but said nothing.</p>
<p>“Tell me about the bat guano,” I said. “What does that mean? Second helpings of bat shit?”</p>
<p>The Bavarian’s frizzy orange hair exploded, as though struck by lightning. “It’s about imperialist fascist pigs raping Bolivia, stealing their land. It’s about—”</p>
<p>A thick hand cut her off in mid-sentence. The man said, “The name of your friend, Horace.”</p>
<p>I pulled out the business card, extended it between two fingers. “Sho’ ’nuff,” I said. “Name was Pitt.”</p>