The Travel Writer

by Jeff Soloway

  “Taxi?” His eyes darted about the counter in front of him, as if he hoped to find the concept’s definition taped somewhere beside the cigarette prices.

  My only recourse was to call the Pearsons from the train platform, like a freshman home from college. I had arranged the interview with Mrs. Pearson, but her husband was also evidently expecting my arrival, and not with pleasure. He informed me that the house was about a mile and a half up the road from the train station, and then asked if I were sick or crippled.

  Reporters love eccentric assholes, I reminded myself. The black strip of asphalt, a scar climbing up the back of the wooded hill ahead, rose with a daunting steepness, and my view of the hill’s peak was smeared with heat, but at least I would have the road to myself. Wind made the leaves beside me shiver and whisper.

  As I hauled myself up the hill, I drafted a mental sketch of my upcoming raid on Mr. Pearson’s information. He would start off gruff and dismissive, until my piercing questions prodded his brain into hitherto undiscovered territory. At last his brow would wrinkle in bewilderment as he suddenly remembered, and slowly, as if hypnotized, he would confide in me the one little tip he had neglected to mention to all the other investigators and reporters. “Now that I think of it, that postcard she sent us was a little odd in one small way.… ” Afterward I would help him realize the implication of this discovery, and he would collapse to his knees, his mind stunned and inoperative. On the flight to South America, my mind would burn with a lead no one else had. Pilar’s eyes would glow when I told her.

  I couldn’t imagine what questions I could ask to produce such a result. I had never interviewed anyone but tourists, PR agents, and hotel and restaurant managers before.

  * * *

  Hilary’s father was stooped and hulking; he swayed when he stepped, like a circus bear walking upright, and his breaths were growls. His neck, ears, and cheeks were red as raw steak; the rest of his face was only slightly better done. He narrowed his eyes when he looked at me, as if I were too tiny to see clearly.

  I followed him into his cavernous living room, where pictures of the same female in various stages of youth jostled each other for position on the mantel. Mr. Pearson flung his swollen hands at a leather sofa in sullen invitation, and with a slow cranking of winches, lowered himself into a matching leather La-Z-Boy. He stared straight ahead at the blank screen of what must have been a fifty-inch television, clearly out of old habit.

  “I’m going to the Matamoros,” I began.

  “Burn it down for me,” the man said. “And shoot every one of those liars that run it!” Blood seemed about to burst from his pores.

  His wife entered the room. I expected a skinny Edith to his Archie Bunker, and indeed she was slender and her skirt was brown and grim, but as she leveled her stare at her husband, he shut his mouth and seemed to nestle deeper in the Lay-Z-Boy’s leather cushions. Her hair shot back from her brow like a frozen jet of water, and the hair spray made it glitter in the lamplight.

  “I know Hilary professionally,” I said. “As an editor, she’s one of the best.” I had practiced my opening on the train, and had made a mental note, with many mental stars beside it, to keep to the present tense. “But tell me what she’s really like.” I flicked my gaze between the two and stroked the underside of my chin, in the thoughtful manner of doctors, private eyes, wilderness trackers, and other prime-time truth seekers.

  Mr. Pearson tossed out the response immediately. “She’s like a breath of sunshine,” he said, “in the early morning mist.” Surely he had heard himself say that before, and liked it.

  “She’s beautiful,” said his wife, and I nodded. Freelance writers who had actually met her had told me as much.

  “But she’s no tart,” Mr. Pearson insisted. “She dresses right.”

  “Well,” said his wife. “Sometimes a little elasticky.”

  “Sure! She’s young. She bought this dress once, tight, tight all over like plastic wrap, every part, and I told her she looked like a hooker. And she took it off and never wore it again! That’s the kind of girl she was.” He ground his fist into his other palm, enraged at his mistake.

  “Is!” cried his wife, completely unnecessarily, and her husband ground his fist harder.

  “What do you think happened to her?” I asked.

  Mr. Pearson separated his hands like two fighting dogs and settled them on his knees.

  “The CIA’s behind it,” he said, his voice drained of all emotion but conviction. “Heard of the Cocaine Wars? They got cocaine down there. And the U.S. Army.”

  Hilary’s mother sighed and perched herself on the arm of the sofa next to me. I could see the bristles on the backs of her calves.

  “I thought the wars were in Colombia,” I said.

  “Sure! You base your operations in another country and you launch attacks across the border! I ought to know. Cambodia. Vietnam.”

  His wife sighed and bent toward me. “He was never in Vietnam,” she explained.

  “But I paid attention. I read books! I ought to know. We went to that hotel. They’re all liars there, every one of them, from the monkeys humping suitcases to the owner. He had a suit on, but you know what? He smelled dirty, like a mutt, like all the rest of them! His cousin in the government kidnapped her, and they’re all covering it up!”

  “Don’t say that!” said Mrs. Pearson. “She ran away. It’s just another adventure.”

  “She wouldn’t run! In Bolivia? Not in a billion billion years. Not without at least giving us a call on her cell.”

  “She’s our Adventure Girl,” the mother said, before firing back at her husband. “Of course she’d run.”

  Could she have run? I imagined myself creeping up to a lonely hut nestled on a hillside high above the Bolivian cloud forest, and throwing open the door to discover the surprised and admiring face of a beautiful American girl who never dreamed that anyone would be able to find her. My old editor wouldn’t know my face, but when I gave her my name, she’d shake her head in stunned recognition. “I should have known it would be you,” she’d say.

  The parents glared at each other, continuing the argument in their heads.

  “How did you first hear about her disappearance?” I asked. I had already seen two versions of the story from the online archives of the New York Post and the Morristown Herald News, but I wanted one for just myself.

  “Two days after she was supposed to be back from this press trip, we started calling around,” said the father. “Her place. Her friends. Folgers Travel Guides, where she worked. Nobody’d seen her. So we called the hotel. They said they’re looking for her. Looking for her! So I said we’re coming to look too. They told us we better not. No! Didn’t just tell us. Wrote us a letter! FedExed it, I’ll give ’em that. Got here the next day. Told us we’d be interfering with the private investigation. Signed by the manager, Jorge”—he pronounced it George—“Barrientos. Can’t call off this dog so easy. I told Hilary’s boss at Folgers to get tough, and when that didn’t work, I called our senator.”

  “The new one,” Mrs. Pearson said.

  “That man knows how to get the job done. Or maybe it’s all his assistants. His minions! I don’t care. But we called him all right. A few days later some woman, Pealer something, gets on the horn and gives us the old Spanish sweet talk.” He twisted his voice into a preposterous imitation of Pilar’s voice, adding for good measure a Mexican accent she didn’t have. “We o-pol-o-gize for de misunderstanding. I tell her, we want answers. We want to do some of our own investigating! So she sends us plane tickets. Didn’t even meet us at the airport. Sent a shit-box car—a subcompact. The windows don’t shut. Dashboard held together by twist ties. Put us up for a night in La Paz and the next morning shoved us in a minivan with four Germans to go to the hotel. They showed us her room. They showed us her suitcase. They even showed us her goddamn tampons! What were we supposed to do with her tampons?”

  He aimed this question at his wife, but she only sighed and kic
ked her pumps.

  “Did you meet anyone from the hotel before you went down there? Anyone named Gonzales?”

  “Before? Not a chance,” he said. “It’s all lies down there. The hotel. The newspapers. Even the papers up here. You talk to a reporter and he turns around and screws it all up. Well, you better not! Listen to me.” And then Mr. Pearson, with help from his wife, recounted, in tedious lurches, like a truck in the mud, the whole story of their Bolivian sojourn. (Fortunately he dispensed with the accent when quoting the locals.) Apparently their one day in La Paz, where they and a young Bolivian cop tacked up missing-person flyers, impressed them far more than anything in the Hotel Matamoros. They described for me, in blunt, deploring phrases, the city streets of unpainted cement, the unclean odor of street food, the minibuses crowded like circus cars, where the conductor was a boy who leaned out the window and shouted for passengers. As for the Matamoros itself, they emphasized the discomfort of the journey there—it was three hours from La Paz—the indigestibility of its cooking, and the mendacity of the hotel’s employees and the barbarity of their English. The woolen blankets (handwoven, I had heard) were scratchy, the alpacas and vicuñas that roamed the back gardens were smelly and ill-tempered, the television got only a half dozen English-language stations, there was no USA Today. This world-renowned First Wonder of the Third World was to them not just a den of iniquity but a shabby circus of curiosities and discomforts. Had they visited under the best of circumstances, with their daughter as chaperone, they still would have hated it. I wondered why Hilary hadn’t run as a child. Perhaps she had, and later returned, defeated but defiant, to sulk away her time until high school graduation. That Hilary had survived the emotional oppression of this house with the worldly good cheer she had always shown me, if only through email, was astonishing. Such a triumph shouldn’t be wasted. I was more determined than ever to find her.

  The worst part of the trip, the Pearsons agreed, was the press conference held in the Matamoros’s atrium. Every reporter, cop, government official, and hotel employee who spoke left the Pearsons more convinced that the entire country was conspiring to protect the secret behind their daughter’s disappearance.

  * * *

  After they finished deploring and I finished commiserating, I asked for a picture. Mrs. Pearson fetched a shoe box from another room and presented it to me. It was full of jumbled copies of a single photo. Hilary was perched on the guardrail of a hotel balcony at twilight, her head tossed to one side so that her straight dark hair flowed at a slight angle from her face, like a flag caught in a breath of wind. So that was my editor. Lovely in this photo, at least. Behind her lay the sunset and the bay and the lights of the city. I thought I recognized the view; it was from a high-rise lanai at the Hilton Hawaiian Village on Waikiki. Not the finest hotel in Honolulu but not bad.

  “Don’t take one,” Mr. Pearson said. “Here. Take twenty. Stick ’em up in restaurants. That’s what we did. Nail ’em to trees and telephone poles. Do they have telephone poles?” He took a manila folder from his wife. “And take these.” They were eight-and-a-half-by-eleven flyers that featured a photocopied version of the picture below text that read, in Spanish and English, “Have you seen this woman?”

  “Kids at the high school made these,” he said. “Senior project. They’re good but they’re not color. Color makes a difference. Brings a girl alive. Do they have telephone poles or not?”

  “You don’t even remember!” his wife accused.

  “How could I remember? They show you around, shake your hand, jabber some of their Spanish mumbo jumbo, and then it’s time to go home. You can’t think in a country like that. It’s as high as a mountain, everywhere you go. You can’t get enough air. You get sick if you stand up too quick.”

  “I’m sure the cops will find her soon,” I said, knowing that this was almost as silly as “God will make it all right.”

  “Cops! They take money from the hotel, which takes money from the government, which takes money from our government. And they don’t even speak English, most of them. You can’t trust anybody. What we need is a real investigation.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “That’s why I’m going. I knew her. She was the first editor who ever helped me out. I won’t let them lie to me.”

  “I believe you,” said Mrs. Pearson, but probably just because she knew her husband didn’t. He glowered at me and turned on the television.

  “Well, I don’t,” Mr. Pearson said. A local news program was closing its telecast with a close-up of a litter of puppies tumbling over each other. His eyes never wavered from the screen.

  “I have sources in Bolivia,” I said. “I’ve talked to an employee at the Matamoros. They’ve got a secret.”

  The appeal to his paranoia stirred his interest, and he turned from the puppies. “I know that!”

  Mrs. Pearson stepped closer, her hair standing stiffly at attention before me.

  “Can you find out the secret?” she said.

  “I can try,” I said. “They know me at the hotel. They trust me. The FBI didn’t find anything because nobody trusts them. Isn’t that right, Mr. Pearson?”

  “Of course it is,” he said.

  “You can’t understand what it is to lose someone,” said Mrs. Pearson. “What if she’s gone? Really gone. It’s terrible for this to happen to someone so young. I suppose it’s terrible for it to happen to anybody.”

  “Wrong!” said Mr. Pearson. “Most of them got it coming.”

  As the train took me back to civilization, I stared at my handful of Hilary photos and imagined a different rescue scenario, starting with me ripping apart the ropes around her wrists and ankles with my knife. I would have to throw her over my shoulder to prepare for my quick and noiseless rush out of the hut, past the unconscious sentry, and back into the jungle. Why not? Every great achievement begins with a bold and childish dream. Pilar and her bosses would stare as I carried Hilary into the lobby and laid her down on the sofa, safe, healthy, though dark with the sun and jungle dirt, sleeping away her fear and weariness. Hotel minions would scramble to call an ambulance, her parents, and the U.S. embassy. Pilar would take me in her arms. Sometime later, she would be seated at my table of honor, gorgeous in her uplifted hair and sparkling necklace, as I received the Pulitzer for the story. Hilary would be there too, our special guest.

  Outside, the sun was almost down and the forested New Jersey countryside blurred into one mass of deepening dark green. I gathered my senses and launched a new, more realistic fantasy, in which by bullying and browbeating some witnesses and feigning ignorance with others, I would lay bare the conspiracy and uncover Hilary’s fate. You’re lying, I’d say to the manager, who looked just like Gonzales, and I’d slap him down with the truth as gasps and then knowing sighs rose from the cops, Pilar, and onlooking hotel staff. It’s easier to envision yourself fleeing boldly with a girl over your shoulder than to hear yourself asking brilliant questions, but I marched on undaunted through the stickiest of possibilities.

  As I entered my apartment I almost slipped on an envelope just inside the door. It contained a note that read, “I have found you, Mr. Smalls.”

  There was no signature, just an exclamation point at the bottom of the page. I called the super, but he took his usual professional pride in having noticed nothing all day. Gonzales, or someone, must have got my address from the phone book and followed a neighbor into the building. Not so difficult. But it was a long haul out to my neighborhood just to write that note. Since double-locking was nothing more than the usual precaution, I fixed my desk chair under the doorknob as well. Yertle was safe in his turtle tank, basking on the two bricks I had stacked under the sixty-watt bulb of a desk lamp. His snout was lifted proudly to the light, as if daring someone to take a swing at his chin.

  Chapter 3

  The publishing industry had inverted the boom economy’s corporate tendencies: it provided its employees with low salaries and fabulous offices. The midtown office of Lisa Ravitz,
Hilary’s boss at Folgers Travel Guides, had a view of the Hudson River and New Jersey. The sun fell obliquely on the back of Lisa’s head, so her moonish face was in shadows. Visitors would always be gazing past her to the view as she spoke to them. But I was not that type of visitor. As I entered I noted the mural-size map of the world taped to the wall beside her. Red pushpins were scattered about it, as if Lisa were keeping track of her growing network of worldwide franchises. I glanced down at an open copy of The New York Observer on Lisa’s desk. She saw me and folded it up.

  “Have you been to all those places?” I asked, indicating the map with a world-encompassing stroke of my arm.

  “No. They’re still on my list.” She raised her eyebrows, implying that if she had put up pins for everywhere she’d been, there wouldn’t be much of a map left.

  “So this is the famous Jacob Smalls,” she said. “I had friends at the Matamoros press conference. I hear you had a friend at the conference too. Pilar Rojas.”

  The New York travel-publishing universe is like a Park Avenue dog: small and nasty.

  “She’s the Matamoros’s PR agent,” I said. “I needed her help to get down to the Matamoros. Now it’s all set.”

  “I bet it is. How much are they paying you? Are you flying first-class? Comped spa treatments and excursions? It’s nice to have an in. Hope you have a better time than Hilary did.”

  “They’re not giving me any money,” I explained, fixing a reasonable expression on my face. “In fact, they’re very suspicious of me. As they should be. I told them I’m planning to write a puff piece, but that’s just a front. Don’t tell me your authors never do the same thing; don’t tell me you’ve never done it either. The only two ways to get inside a luxury hotel is with money or with promises, and I don’t have money. Promises I can fake as well as the next writer.”

  “I’m sure you’re an excellent fraud.”

  “This time I’m going straight. I’m going to write up the real story. Nobody wants to read fluff about the Matamoros now. People want to find out what happened to Hilary. So do I. I wrote for her. She helped me out when no one else would.” This was true. Before Hilary had given me that first assignment, I had been electronically rejected or ignored by a number of obviously less intelligent editors.