The Travel Writer

by Jeff Soloway

  In the room, Kenny looked up hopefully from the television; he was ready to spring into action or at least talk.

  “Let’s go to bed, Kenny,” I said. It was almost nine.

  He squished his brows together, reluctant to challenge me but unable to stop himself.

  “What about Hilary?” he said. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ll get a few hours of sleep,” I said. “You can’t think if you haven’t slept. Then at around two we’ll do some investigating. I have a plan.”

  Kenny pumped his fist. No one had ever believed in me as Kenny had, and it was all I could do to suppress my contempt for him. But at least I hadn’t abandoned him yet.

  I must have been worn out with brooding, because I fell asleep instantly, and when I opened my eyes again, Kenny was snoring calmly. I lay motionless as my nerves fidgeted. Perhaps the sun was already up behind the mechanical shutters and blinding the world; perhaps the night, and my chance, was already gone. I peered at the digital clock beside me: 1:15 A.M. I lay back, slapping my hand against my heart in frustration. I had set the alarm for two in the morning, but this would have to do. I slipped out of bed.

  “I’m ready,” mumbled Kenny.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not time yet. Go back to sleep.”

  But he sat up on the bed and stared blankly as I dressed in the dark. Maybe he was trying to reassemble a dream, which he knew had been glorious, colorful, and eventful, but which was now just a jumble of murky fragments, among them Hilary’s dimly remembered face. He had slept in his clothes.

  “Wherever you’re going, I’m going,” he said. “No buts.”

  Outside in the dim hallway, the guard was gone, probably for the night. I started down the hall, and Kenny lumbered after me, his heavy breaths storming in my ears. He was no good at this. As we hesitated at a corner, I thought I heard the beeping door alarm again in the distance, but it was just my pulsing heartbeat. Some people seek fear, on roller coasters and in movie theaters; some people collapse and commit themselves to bed at the merest whiff of it. To me, this fear was merely unpleasant, neither exhilarating nor enervating, perhaps because my actions had been bled of consequence. I could be avenged or I could humiliate myself or I could die, but I could hardly imagine enjoying victory or minding failure.

  We came to the frontier of the Alpaca Wing and stopped before the door. I inserted Pilar’s passkey. The winking light by the handle flashed green, and something within the body of the door clicked. It was open. No one had yet undertaken the administrative unpleasantry of deactivating the passkey.

  “Where’d you get that?” whispered Kenny.

  “I stole it.”

  I continued onto the walkway, trying to ignore the beaded sky and the foggy swath of Milky Way. It seemed warmer than it had been the night before, or maybe I was just better prepared for the cold. The truth is here, just ahead of you, I told myself, but I felt the urge to return to my room and sleep. Maybe my grief was already fading. Maybe I had never really loved her, and the pain was drifting away as the shock wore off. All evening, all afternoon, I had been thinking not of her, not really, but just of my own self-centered despair and how I might soothe it. Selfish! I was as selfish as a baby.

  I padded through the corridor, peering under every door for a dim giveaway light. I finally perceived one, or convinced myself I perceived one, about as far down the hall as Pilar had been the previous night. I stooped and pressed my ear to the door and thought I heard people talking inside. Kenny stared wide-eyed at my mysterious but assured actions. Should I knock? Frightened people, like animals, sometimes lash out when they’re surprised. I slipped the passkey in, then entered.

  The room was lit with candles. Two figures, both covered in blankets, were sitting facing each other on leather recliners. Between them was an empty sofa. One figure leaped up, the blankets slipping to the floor.

  “Who are you?” he asked in Spanish. He was Ray Quinones.

  “I’m Pilar’s friend. Jacob.” I shut the door.

  The other figure rose too, but more slowly, and kept the blankets on. By her feet was a plate, empty but for a butter knife.

  “You’re Jacob?” It was the voice of an American woman, thin and hoarse. She spoke English. “How did you find us?”

  “Hilary,” whispered Kenny, as if afraid his voice would frighten off the longed-for apparition.

  “Pilar told me you were here,” I lied to her. “Is this all the light there is?”

  “We can light more candles if you want,” said Hilary. “But the dark is safer.” She turned in to the candlelight, and I could see her face. Her long brown hair was tied in a teenage ponytail. My old editor, in person, at last.

  “It’s all right, Ray,” she said in Spanish. Her accent was horrible.

  “Pilar’s dead,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “Ray told me. I say something to her whenever I light a candle. What are we supposed to do now?”

  The man swayed uncomfortably on his feet. She motioned to the recliner, and he slunk back into it, almost guiltily, like a cat that’s not allowed on the furniture, and drew the blanket up around himself. The cold air in the unheated room flitted confidently through my clothes.

  I sat on the sofa and pinched my thighs to keep my concentration from drifting. Focus, focus, I reminded myself. It never helps. “Tell everyone what you did, and why Pilar died.”

  “Why she died? Because she missed a turn in a jungle road in the middle of the night? That wasn’t in the plan. How much did she tell you?”

  “Everything.” I could almost believe it. Pilar might have told me, had I given her more time and more persuasive arguments.

  “Everything! She’s such a liar. She told me all about you. Poor Jacob. You know, you really are a decent writer, for a travel writer.”

  In the shadows, and in my ignorance, I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me or truly sympathetic. Like most of us, in person she was not at all like her emails. The candle flame on the coffee table was flickering violently in Ray’s breaths.

  “Hilary!” Kenny stepped forward into the candlelight. “It’s me.”

  She squinted. “Who are you?”

  “Me, Hilary.” He framed his face with his hands, in case she was looking in the wrong place. “Kenny.”

  “Kenny?” She stared through the dark at him.

  “Kenny,” he repeated. “You know.”

  “Kenny from work?”

  “That’s it!” he said. “Me!”

  She looked at Ray and shook her head, her thin hair pinwheeling.

  “He has Kenny,” she told Ray in Spanish.

  “Cainny,” said Ray, mournfully, staring at his big hands, scuttling helplessly on his knees like giant crabs.

  “What the hell is Kenny doing here?” she asked me.

  “We were really worried about you,” said Kenny. “Did they hurt you?”

  “Who?”

  “The kidnappers.”

  “There were never any kidnappers,” I said.

  “Sure there were,” Hilary said. “This is the great escape. I cut my way out of the holding pen with dental floss and strangled the guards. Also with dental floss.”

  She paused, as if hoping I’d contribute to her joke. I clawed my thighs again.

  Kenny sat down on the arm of the couch, his butt almost touching my cheek.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “She was just hiding here in the closed-off wing,” I said. “Pilar was going to have me bring a ransom note secretly back to her parents. Then they’d all try to collect, and nobody would know. Isn’t that it? I should have called the cops.”

  “Pilar knew you wouldn’t. Do you have any idea how much she hated you? She told me what you did to her. Lying to you was her favorite part of the plan.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. Hilary wouldn’t be lying, not now, so she must simply be mistaken. I couldn’t believe Pilar had hated me that night in the Aparthotel Real Camino.
But I knew she had hated me before that; maybe the hate had held over, had festered inside her even while she was loving me. She had been two people, lover and score settler, at the same time. No, she’d been many people. (The best girlfriends are, I could tell Kenny.) She lied to me, but she also lied to Hilary. She lied to herself. Maybe she told the truth only to her parents, via their photo, and after she’d torn it up there was no one left to be herself to.

  “I always wanted to meet you in person,” said Hilary. “You’re a bigger liar than Pilar. Do you make up any facts in your travel books? You better not have in mine. You’re a legend to everyone who’s ever known Pilar.”

  It was absurd. Pilar wouldn’t have told just this about me. Hilary herself was absurd and devious; perhaps stories of other people’s deviousness and absurdity were the only ones she understood. But I did believe that I had become a sort of legend in Pilar’s retelling, a trickster villain. What Hilary didn’t understand was that it wasn’t me or my personality that had had power over Pilar, just something I said once, which had acted upon Pilar like an infection. I had distorted her. “You didn’t hear how she spoke to me. Just yesterday.”

  “Oh, I heard all about it,” said Hilary. “You’re lucky you didn’t hear it too. She was a real bitch. I loved it. I always say, when it comes to love, you’ve got to be an atheist. Once it’s dead, it’s dead.” She laughed at me. Had she been laughing at her parents, her co-workers, her friends as well? More likely she had never thought of them. She had left not only her country but her world, expecting to shed her past completely and start fresh. With a lot of money.

  “I spoke to your mother.” I figured that mentioning her father would just make her angry. “You should have seen her.”

  “You should have grown up with her.”

  “She called you her Adventure Girl. She thinks you’re alive.”

  “Sure she does. She believes in me. She would have paid, if you’d done your job with the ransom note. My dad’s cheap, but he has a sense of shame, and my mom knows how to dig it out of him. People do this all the time in Colombia, you know. Venezuela. Mexico City.” She leaned back. “I’m just a modern-day businesswoman, ripping off my ideas from the international pages of the Times. If it had worked, I could have incorporated myself, farmed out the plan to other disaffected daughters. They would have done a case study of me at Wharton.”

  “You should have told me,” said Kenny. “I might have helped. I still could.”

  “Thanks. How about getting me another blanket?” Hilary couldn’t quite look at him. “Ray’s afraid to steal from the other rooms. But you could. Just get one from your room. You have heat. I can’t even fucking watch TV. The only food I get is what Ray brings me. I asked Pilar to bring me something, and she said she’d get it from the kitchen, but she never did.”

  “She tried,” I said. “She had it with her when she was caught moving her car.”

  “When the FBI came with the dogs,” Hilary continued, “Ray smuggled me out for a few days, but they didn’t stay long. He took a few days off and we went camping on the Choro Trail. That was the only break I got from this place. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being dead.”

  “Is he really your boyfriend?” said Kenny.

  She narrowed not just her eyes but her whole face, squeezing eyes, nose, and mouth into one organ of inspection.

  Kenny stepped forward into her attention. “What about … me?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you remember, that night? When we danced?”

  “I can’t deal with this right now, Kenny. I can’t fucking deal with this!”

  “Be quiet, please!” said Ray.

  “Shut up, Ray,” she said, but quietly. She looked at me. “You could have her share.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the money. Pilar’s idea was to get a lot. She was always complaining about being poor. She had her aunt to support, you know. Talk about a drain on the finances, but she did it. She always said her aunt was the only one who gave a shit about her. Every week, she’d give her a call no matter where she was. But it wasn’t just her aunt. They’d send her to the States and she could hardly afford a movie. She was always angling for a raise. But something changed a few months ago. She said she was ready to move on. She was free.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows? No reason we can’t still get the money. Pilar would have wanted it. Do one thing right for her, Jacob, you liar. Maybe you could send some of it back to Pilar’s aunt. Do that and Pilar will definitely talk to you in Heaven when you’re dead. You don’t want to get the cold shoulder in Heaven from the only woman you ever loved.”

  “They killed her. And it’s your fault.”

  “What do you mean? It was a car accident. Wasn’t it?”

  Ray looked at her, alarmed at her alarm. I enjoyed their confusion for only a moment.

  “No,” I said. “Condepa killed her. They’re the people who own the hotel. They found out that Ray was your boyfriend, and that Pilar hired him. They realized that she must have lied to them, so they killed her.”

  Hilary said nothing. My words seemed to act on me more than on her.

  “How did they find out about Ray?” asked Hilary.

  Still wandering in my thoughts, I looked at Kenny.

  Hilary took quick Lamaze breaths to calm herself. It didn’t seem to work. “You told them?”

  “No!” cried Kenny. “Not on purpose.”

  “You moron. You killed Pilar. You killed me too. You’re a murderer. Ray”—she spoke in Spanish—“Kenny tells them. About us. Then it kills Pilar. Condepa kills Pilar.” Her Spanish was just one rung above Kenny’s.

  I turned. Kenny just rubbed his eyes, looking about as little like a murderer as anyone possibly could.

  “Cainny,” said Ray, scornfully this time.

  “I just wanted to see if you were okay,” Kenny said.

  “I’m not okay,” she answered, “because you’re here. I tried to be decent to you, Kenny, and you turn around and ruin every hope I ever had. If you weren’t such a doofus, I’d say you planned it all out from the start. You arrogant son of a bitch. What gave you the right?”

  “The right?” he asked.

  “To follow me. Like bad luck!”

  “Be careful,” I said. “You’re making a lot of noise.”

  “I thought I could find you,” Kenny said. “Ever since that night—”

  “What night?”

  “That night you kissed me.”

  “You pathetic lech. I’m so sorry I ever felt bad for you.” She bent her head back to shout at the ceiling. “Next time, Lord, I’ll shit on the doofus like everybody else, I swear it! Now enough with the frogs and locusts!”

  “Keep quiet!” said Ray.

  Kenny turned from her wrath and kicked at the wall, bowing his head to obscure his shame. With his other hand he yanked violently on a handle embedded in the wall. An ironing board popped out, and Kenny’s head snapped back in surprise.

  “What passes?” demanded Ray in English. He tried again in Spanish: “What’s he saying?”

  Grunting at this new affront, Kenny plunged both hands into the recess and worried the iron out of its niche above the board.

  “You fucking doofus.”

  Kenny looked at her and set the iron upright on the board.

  “They’re looking for you,” I said.

  Kenny was now flicking the useless light switch by the door on and off again, furiously.

  “Stop it, Kenny,” I said, as kindly as I could. He stopped.

  “I hear something,” Kenny said. “Do you hear something?”

  Hilary rushed to the door and pressed her ear against it.

  “Someone’s coming!” she whispered. I heard it too.

  Hilary and Ray stared at each other from across the room. Had this happened before? Did they know how to deal with it? Ray twisted right and left, as if to look for some weapon or escape hatch, but his feet never moved.

 
“You better hide,” I said. “I’ll tell them a story.”

  “Right,” said Hilary, as if this was all part of the plan. I scanned the murky room, with its lit and unlit candles, the strewn-about blankets, the trash scattered like rubble on the floor. It would have to be quite a story.

  A tap on the door unfroze them, and they scrambled off to the bedroom. Kenny stayed with me, whether out of loyalty or confusion I couldn’t tell. If they wanted to hide, they should have blown out all the candles and huddled in the dark. Why hadn’t they thought of that? Because they were idiots. Or no one had come looking before. Someone barked a command through the door. I stepped back.

  “Enter,” I said.

  An electronic click, and the door flashed open an inch, then stopped, then exploded open with a shout that startled me so much I almost laughed. Arturo burst inside. He held a gun. Dionisius followed. I gave way to them, so they now stood between Kenny and me.

  Dionisius had no gun, or perhaps he just hadn’t pulled it. He had made the armed Arturo go first.

  “I found where Pilar was hiding,” I said, hoping hate would mask the shaking in my voice. Not to my ears.

  “What’s going on?” Dionisius demanded. Arturo said nothing. His gun was aimed not directly at me, but not far away either.

  I tried to think of a saving explanation, but though my thoughts were quick and precise, though my powers of concentration were so heightened that I could see every line on the skin of Dionisius’s hairless knuckles, even in the candlelight, no answer came to me. It was as if my brain was dashing just past the right response at every moment.

  I heard a clumsy bump in the bedroom. Were Hilary and Ray trying to hide under the bed? Maybe they were struggling to throw open a window, or cut their way through the wall with dental floss.

  Kenny heard it too. His eyeballs twitched in the direction of the bedroom.

  “That young man”—Dionisius pointed at Kenny—“he knows what happened to Hilary Pearson, right? We will speak to him.”