Ethan stopped walking and turned to face Cunningham, who had one hand on his arm and the other in the pocket of his linen jacket. It seemed that no one had a change of clothes in the tropics.
“No, don’t stop walking,” Cunningham said. “Never stop walking. We’re two fellows taking in the rotten sea. Gentlemen of leisure on an evening constitutional along the balmy boardwalks.”
How they looked, Ethan thought as he glanced at their reflections in the darkened windows of abandoned empanada shops, was perverted. Cunningham’s jacket had accrued some vast new webbing of wrinkles. His shirt collar was soiled and his blond hair lay, like something hit by a car, across his brow. Ethan had avoided his own reflection, but he knew it would not be good.
“You’re too late,” he said. “Soto’s got Yolanda. Don’t you all communicate?”
The streetlights on the boulevard flickered off, and the road was dark but for light cast from the windows of the empty hotels. It was well past midnight—Ethan had heard the cathedral toll the hour as he walked—but still some sun tinted the far-off water.
“That’s fine,” Cunningham said. “That’s well and good. We’ve all got the same interests, though I’m a bit more chivalrous than the boys with epaulets. They’ll give her a rough time.”
A mangy dog with a low, hanging snout skulked toward them along the dock. Cunningham dropped to his knees as if reaching for a rock and the dog yelped and scampered off.
“There’s not a pisshole in the world where that doesn’t work,” Cunningham said. “I think that might be the definitive difference between the First and Third Worlds. We don’t beat our dogs.”
They walked for a few moments in silence. Ethan watched the light hang on the far water. There were no stars and the clouds of purple ash drifted out over the city, toward the sea. An explosion sounded in a distant barrio. Ethan heard it echo off the mountains.
“They’ve been bombing the markets all week,” Cunningham said. “God knows why.”
“Do you have a sense,” Ethan asked, “that everyone is disturbed? That something is happening here?
“Forget it. Think not upon it. I just have a few questions I want to ask you.”
“Oh, good. A debriefing.”
Ethan could not hide his scorn, though since Soto drove away with Yolanda, his anger had begun to subside.
“Watch your tone. We could call it a debriefing or a cocktail. Whichever you’d prefer.”
Ethan wondered if Cunningham really had a gun in his pocket. He could have been holding a banana, there certainly was no shortage of them. It probably didn’t matter.
“Where are we going?” Ethan said.
“To your hotel. Your hotel bar, say. See the nightlife. The local color.”
It occurred to Ethan that Cunningham might not actually know which hotel he was staying in. He didn’t think he had been followed. Three hotels before his, at the Palmas de la Mar, he said, “Here we are,” and Cunningham made no move to stop him.
THE PALMAS WAS FANCIER than the Azul, but no less deserted. The bar was vintage Panama chic: wide green fans turned slowly from the low ceilings and the floors gleamed with black and white checkered marble. Tall potted palms stood along the walls. The tables were made of glass, the chairs woven from wicker. In the corner, a spotlight illuminated a bare stage. Ethan and Cunningham sat at the mahogany and brass bar and drank rum. Cunningham held his empty glass out to Ethan as if it illustrated a specific point.
“Can’t say I appreciated the lie there in Roycetown. I was in my cups and off my game. Bad form to take advantage of a fellow like that. Especially when he’s trying to do you a good turn.”
Ethan raised his hand for another rum.
“Why don’t you leave the bottle?” Cunningham said to the bartender. “And some more ice, yeah?”
“I don’t trust the ice here,” Ethan said.
Cunningham filled his glass with ice and poured rum to the brim.
“You just have to give up on solid stools. There’s no one to judge you here, and man is the most adaptable of creatures.”
In the back, a woman wearing a sequined black dress stepped onto the stage and began to sing “As Time Goes By.” There was no accompanying music and this time the song was in English. Her voice was low and throaty, a smoker’s voice, and from her intonation it was clear that she had no idea what the words meant. She could have been singing anything. Gibberish. It recalled that night in the bar in New York. The bellowing dwarf, the off-season storm, and Ethan’s phone ringing in a new future. He could still see the dwarf’s face: frantic, snarling, dripping tears. A portent of some nascent panic. That moment did not seem so long ago now. A moment he could reach back and touch. He poured another drink.
“I’m very tired,” he said to Cunningham. “I’ve done things today I never thought I’d do.”
Another explosion, this time a little closer. The lights flickered but came back on. Cunningham raised his glass.
“Cheers to that. Life in le tropiques.”
A kiss is just a kiss, the woman sang with listless Spanish intonation, a sigh is just a sigh.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Ethan said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Latin America isn’t what it used to be,” Cunningham said. “It’s all democracy and free trade. For the right people there’s plenty of coffee and plenty of cocoa. Everybody who wants a boat has a boat.”
“I want a boat,” Ethan said.
“But if Copal, our seething little Banana Republic—if Copal should have a revolution, well, there’d be a number of problems. There’d be refugees into Mexico, and Mexico does not want any more refugees. They’re jam-packed, it seems, with gang warfare, Copal’s primary export. You know how it is. Bombs in the markets, lepers on the road. Women disappearing in the night. There’ll be more death squads. There’ll be trade implications.”
“I never liked this song,” Ethan said. “Do you realize, Barry, that at this point I really don’t give a fuck?”
“Hey, now. No reason to take that tone. No reason at all. We’re just gentlemen on the verandah here. We’re having drinks.”
“This is flagellants at the carnival. Not a verandah.”
Cunningham poured another rum.
“Consider the situation from the humanitarian perspective. Where would these people be without the banana trade to the U.S.? Without a little imposed order? They’d be shitting in the street, that’s where.”
One of the thousand clocks in the city struck the hour.
“Do you realize,” Ethan said again, “that it’s one in the morning and the sun has not set?”
“What we need,” Cunningham said, “is that girl. Mirabelle Campo. For her own good. Her safety.”
Through the lobby glass Ethan saw that the mareros from the road were outside in the street, drinking guaro. So he had been followed.
“I thought that if I gave up Yolanda, you guys left Mirabelle alone. I mean, that’s what Soto promised.”
“Ah,” Cunningham crooned over the rising song, “that was your deal with Soto. Not with me. I gave you a chance to play pass the cookie and you told me to go fuck myself. You sent me to a rotten hotel. Besides, as I said, it’s for her own good. Her own safety.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Ethan said. “In fact, it’s unbelievable.”
“I suppose at a certain point, if you’re not a man of belief already, if you don’t have an ideology to fall back on, you believe what you have to. That’s what I like about this work. It forces certain choices into stark relief. In such a situation, I find it comforting that you must act with absolute honesty. So now, be honest. Take in the smell. You’re lost and dying slow. Right now you’re like the mariners of old. You’re in the doldrums and there are no winds that can save you. In such situations, in such climes, with the sea becalmed and water running out, they’d toss their horses overboard. Take stock. It’s time to abandon what you can live without.”
Here, though
t Ethan, in the clockless hours, in the shadow of the volcano where the sun will not set, another chance to renounce grace. Whatever Cunningham would do with Mirabelle would not be good. Mystic or mad girl, or frail, sick, cholerous child, whatever these people wanted could not fail to ruin her. The woman continued to sing; she did not realize, clearly, that the song must end. There was Mallory in his arms, staring up: is there no grace, is there no remedye, and Samantha, that first night back from the hospital, and all the nights disappearing beyond it. The mareros were in the lobby. The security guard had disappeared. There was some comfort, now, in clarity. He stood.
“Come on, then,” he said. “It’s late, Barry. Let’s go get her.”
THEY TOOK THE STEPS, not the elevator. “Wouldn’t trust those things,” Cunningham said. “Not here.” He stumbled and sweated and panted as they went. Once they came to the seventh floor, Ethan stopped and turned toward the hall.
“This way,” he said.
Halfway down the corridor he began to look for his key. He reached in his pockets, he untied his sweatshirt from his waist and shook it out over the floor. They reached the last door. Beside them, at the end of the hall, a Plexiglas picture window looked out at the moving, half-lit sea.
“I’ve lost the fucking key,” Ethan said. “Somewhere along the way.”
“Better knock, then. I’m not doing those stairs again.”
“Won’t work,” Ethan said. “I told her not to open the door. Not for anyone. I was protecting myself, see. Against the likes of you.”
They stood for a moment, the two of them, at the end of the hall by the window. Cunningham with his hands on his knees, still wheezing.
“Can’t you jimmy this thing?” Ethan said. “Don’t they teach that in spook academy?”
Cunningham straightened. His red face splayed a wide, rubbery smile.
“What they teach you is not to drink a gimlet in Mumbai. It’s not often that a fellow gets to apply his craft abroad.”
He produced, as if he’d had them at the ready, a set of lock picks. He knelt before the door.
“Could you step out of my light, please?”
Ethan moved away from the window and walked around Cunningham.
In his dreams of vengeance he finds the man who raped Samantha. He finds him in a bar or an alley, or sometimes in his apartment with Samantha there, looking on, and he beats him very slowly to death. He kicks him to the ground, he jams his foot between his teeth, he listens as his mouth, rent open, tears back through his cheeks. When he presses harder, he registers the last tension before the jaw cracks with a sound like twigs snapped over a knee and slaps, slack and askew, against the man’s shoulder. Then Ethan climbs down, astride him, and pounds his face into the ground. As he beats him he can smell the sudden copper of the man’s blood and the rank vegetable rot of his breath, which he tastes in his own mouth as he retches and punches until the man’s face gives way. He sees it the same way every time: the fine architecture of the man’s long nose twists and then pancakes into the concave hollow between his collapsing cheekbones as they soften into a ragged, bearded mush. When Ethan wakes, he wakes sweating, muscles flexed and adrenaline spiking through him. The feeling of the phantom skull under his fists is real and pleasurable, and now he thinks if nothing can avenge the way he abandoned Samantha to the world she always knew was waiting for her—the way he abandoned Samantha and then Yolanda—there is no turning away from this. Seven floors below, the song still came. There were footsteps on the stairs. It was Annie and the Wolves all over again, and he wouldn’t leave Mirabelle to them. He slid Soto’s stiletto from his belt. Outside, the volcano puffed smoke over the sea where the storm clouds gathered in layers of moving dark.
“Looks like something’s coming,” he said.
Cunningham stopped and turned and looked for a moment. He wiped his brow.
“That’s how it is down here, compadre. Always another storm.”
“No,” Ethan said. “That’s not what I meant.”
The knife flicked open with a sound meant to impress and terrify and Cunningham moved at the sound. In one motion, he turned and grabbed Ethan’s wrist and slammed his knee into his groin as he stood. Ethan fell forward and Cunningham wrenched his wrist behind his back and had him up against the wall with the muzzle of his pistol pressed below his ear. So the pistol, anyway, was real.
“Oh, come off it. What was that?” Cunningham said.
His labored and rummy breath moistened the back of Ethan’s neck like a wet blanket. The drink, clearly, had not slowed him much.
“Thought you had the drop on me?” asked Cunningham. “Thought I’d fall for some cheap assassin’s trick? Is that really what you thought?”
Not far below there were footsteps on the stairs. Doors being closed and opened. This was what the world had fractured into: sounds on the stairs, the cold metal of the pistol, the smell of mildew against Ethan’s face. Somewhere farther off, he heard what sounded like a boat horn signaling through the fog. The song had ended.
“Did you think you could stab me? There is probably no harder way to kill a fellow than that. The sheer guts it takes. The sickening sensation. Most Navy Seals can’t even do it.”
Cunningham stepped back and let Ethan off the wall. When Ethan turned to face him, Cunningham slouched against the window and wielded the pistol like a woman holding a cigarette: his elbow was bent, his arm was hardly extended, and his wrist hung limply.
“Now, if you don’t mind me asking again, where is the fucking girl?”
“I don’t think I’m going to tell you,” Ethan said.
Cunningham shrugged his shoulders in a huge display of exhaustion. Under the hanging sunlight his sweaty face glistened like something lacquered.
“Oh God, are you serious? Yes, you will. You absolutely will tell me.”
He pushed himself off the window, walked over to Ethan, and threw his left arm around him. The sound of boots echoing on the stairs drew closer. Cunningham seemed not to notice.
“Why expose yourself to this pain?” he asked. “Why try to stab a man in the back? One shouldn’t approach violence with such little discipline.”
He brought the butt of the pistol up and into Ethan’s solar plexus and then whipped the barrel across his face. Ethan fell against the wall beside the stairwell door.
“There are violences of human nature and violences of history. Make sure you know which you’re approaching. I myself am a man of history. An agent of it, if you will.”
When the mareros came through the door Ethan was still sitting against the wall. The door opened into his face, and when it closed they had already stepped onto the landing and into the hall. They stood facing Cunningham and Ethan was behind them, unnoticed, on the floor.
Cunningham gestured at the men with his pistol.
“This is exactly what I mean,” he said. “This is the sort of trash with which Copal wants to grace the shores of the future.”
He reached into his pocket and threw a wad of pesos at the shirtless marero.
“Now fuck off, Queequeg.”
The shirtless marero stepped forward and Cunningham shot him in the face. He turned toward the second one and took the brunt of the machete blow to his forehead. The first marero fell headless at Ethan’s feet and Cunningham slumped to his knees with the machete still centered in his half-cleaved skull. Ethan tried to stand and slipped on the new slick of brainy blood. He scrambled for a moment on the floor in cartoonish urgency and pulled himself up by the door handle. The second marero spun around, saw him for the first time, and shook his head. In the clear light of the hallway, Ethan saw that he was maybe twenty years old. He no longer looked amused, as he had in the street, but there was also no sign of rage. “Cállate,” he said, and brought his finger to his lips. Then he unbuttoned his sleeves, rolled them up, and turned back toward Cunningham, who was sitting now with the weight of the machete handle pulling his head toward the floor between his feet. The marero stepped up to him and wre
nched it free. Ethan opened the door to the stairwell and took the stairs two or three at a time. Falling and standing and falling again as he went. On the second floor landing he stopped for a moment and listened. There was a speck of brain, small and round like a grape nut, stuck to his pants. He flicked it off and listened some more. No one followed.
When he opened the door to their penthouse suite, Mirabelle rose from the window where she was watching the clouds gather over the water in the dark. He turned on the lights and the window became a black pane. A frail line of light moved over the water.
“Where have you been?” she said. “Where is my sister?”
Ethan saw that her hands were balled into fists. He crossed the room and put his palms, as slowly as he could, on her shoulders. He realized now as he touched her that he wanted to see her expression as he said this, he wanted to feel her shudder against his touch. As if, as he had thought in Boystown, to hold this damage up to his own. She was young and virtuous. There were fires of madness or faith or certainty smoldering in her and he knew that as he spoke he would watch those things fall away. He would like to see what they left in their wake.
“Yolanda’s dead,” he said.
She jerked, as he’d known she would, and tried to fly from him, but he reached out and pulled her close and held her as she wept. The sound of it, of her crying in his arms in a room by the sea, was not so awful as he had expected. A keen. A seabird. A lover waking from a dream. He held her. He felt some slow, settling comfort.
He knew how it was. We all must abandon our charmed lives. Everyone does it: Doyle fleeing not away, but into, his own tropical prison; Paolo sitting beneath the shadow of a crazy wife, sitting and waiting and writing travel pieces about places he’d never seen—a thousand imaginary worlds. And Samantha. Samantha waking in the morning. Samantha whose hair smelled of raspberries and sleep. Samantha nestling against him in the park and saying I could drink you like wine. Samantha at the table in the morning looking up from her cereal as the world prepared to unbuckle into ruptured sound, as windows readied to blow from their sills, car alarms sirening out into wind: what are you thinking?
Horse Latitudes Page 34
