by Janice Weber
The waitress brought watery black soup spiffed up with the rib cage of a fowl. I studied the room as I ate. Two corners wouldn’t work for surveillance: plastic flowers blocking view. Television blared in the third corner: I was probably sitting beneath Barnard’s equipment. An excellent vantage point … if the gear functioned, of course. Heat and humidity had fried everything else she had brought to Belize. I checked the wall behind me: posters, menus, crowded flypaper, dolls. On the top shelf, plates and Christmas ornaments. When I saw a plastic angel playing the violin, I stopped looking.
I was chomping on a rubber egg when a white male in fatigues came to the table. Crew cut, hoop earring, muscles, beer: if he couldn’t join a fight, he’d instigate one. “Name’s James. My mate and I have a little bet,” he said, taking the chair opposite me. “I hope you don’t mind settling it for us.”
East London accent: were the Brits still here? They had run a jungle training camp up the road when Belize was still British Honduras. “No problem.”
“My friend Simon thinks you’re a violinist named Leslie Frost.”
I laughed. “Never heard of her.”
“I’m very glad to hear that. You just won me a hundred dollars.” James waved to the waitress. “What’s your drink?”
“Château Margaux, 1990. I didn’t notice it on the wine list.”
He ordered beer. “Visiting? I can show you places tourists never see.”
“I’ve seen enough, thanks.”
“Here alone?”
“Why don’t you go back to your mates like a good boy.”
Maybe I was too grimy to fuss over: he didn’t press the point. “This country isn’t as safe as you think, luv. If you get into a jam, call me.” He dropped a card on the table.
I glanced at his job description, forced a yawn. “Soldier of fortune?”
“That’s right. Used to be a lot more action down here. We’re all thinking of returning to Africa now.”
“Even your friend Simon?”
“Yo. He’s bored silly.” James looked toward a tall, lethally athletic man across the room. “Owe me a hundred bucks, you ugly bastard,” he called.
The fellow barely smiled, but he had had an exhausting afternoon with a fer-de-lance and a high-retreat through the jungle. Hadn’t even bothered to change into a dry shirt before joining his buddies. Twenty feet away, I could read that twisted, burning lust to kill in his eyes: why the hell did these people always listen to classical music? “Tell him my name’s Cosima.”
Who walked into Koko’s but the fornicating Dutch. I watched them hit the bar, call for margaritas: either they had no inkling I was here or they were pros and I was dead. “Friends?” James interrupted.
“No.” I shook his hand. “Happy hunting.”
The ugly one’s eyes followed me as I headed for the door. How shocking that Simon had recognized me, covered with mud, thousands of miles from a concert stage. But a soldier of fortune would have a gimlet eye and few idols. Would he follow me out? Would James? How about the Dutch? Easy, Smith. Just leave. Without a gun, without even a knife, I had little choice.
Already dark outside. I was teeming sweat again: maybe the gash in my thigh was going septic. Ek stood in a corner of the porch. I continued down a steep alley to the Macal River. Huge moon, distant thunder: this was a night to wade into the water and just float away. I took Ek a bit downstream before wheeling on him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He held out a tiny jar. “I brought ointment for your leg.”
“Oh Christ! My leg is fine!”
A branch snapped behind us. Ek and I slid into the water. It was warm, gentle … rife with vermin. Couldn’t worry about that now. I took a deep breath and gave myself to the current. The instant I came up for air, I saw a streak. Pish: inches from my head, an arrow sliced into the water. Knapsack and I didn’t sink quite fast enough before the second arrow grazed my left shoulder. Damn! That was just the spot I rested my violin! Drifted with the fish until my lungs nearly burst. This time I put just my nose above water. Another pish a few inches from my head. I cursed the bright moon. Where was Ek? The river made a sharp bend, nudging me toward shore. No snakes, please: I grabbed an overhanging vine. Rolled behind a fat, slimy tree and ripped off my backpack. Willed my fingers to work in the seething, chittering moonlight. As I filled my last hypodermic I could hear someone pounding through the brush.
Rolled over and played dead. The footsteps stopped abruptly a few feet from my head. Either my assailant didn’t know how to proceed or he was loading his quiver for one final shot. Where would I get it next? In the liver? The eye?
“Don’t do that,” Ek cried.
I plunged steel into the nearest leg. It jerked away, snapping off my needle. Several steps, a grunt, staggering, then a body fell to the ground. Eleven seconds: Maxine had actually met spec this time.
I lit a match. Ek and I stared at the twisted face, the huge eyes. The corpse’s hand clutched a long machete. Beheading: why hadn’t I thought of that. “He’s dead,” I said. “Recognize him?”
“Yes. He was the man who tried to follow us back to camp.” Ek’s voice wobbled. “Why was he shooting at you?”
“Because I saw him kill Dr. Tatal this afternoon.” I plucked half a needle from the still leg. “I’m sorry. You weren’t meant to be involved in this. Not at all.”
“He killed Dr. Tatal?” Ek wailed.
“I found her at Xunantunich with a fer-de-lance in her lap. He dropped the snake on her from an overhead cage in the toilet. Go see for yourself. She’s probably still there.”
Ek’s eyes went white and blind as the moon. “Why’d he do that?”
“Don’t know.” I chuckled stupidly: Simon would have left me in two pieces. “Did this man ever see Polly with Louis?”
“Yes. At Koko’s café the day he tried to follow us back to camp.” Ek shuddered. “You killed him!”
“I killed him? See that machete? He was about to cut my head off. Yours would have been next.” Ek didn’t move. “Look, I didn’t start this.”
“Did Polly?”
“No, Louis did. Whatever he’s working on, it’s trouble.”
Besides the machete and the arrows, Simon had been carrying a stiletto and a bit of smooth cord. Nothing in his pockets but a few rumpled bills and a passport. A few feet away, I found the heat scopes. “Take a look,” I said, handing them to Ek. A gasp as he found some beast munching on the opposite bank. “What was Louis working on?”
Ek finally let the scopes fall to the mud. “He was trying to make a medicine.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he succeed?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did Polly know?” Shrug. The boy was traumatized. “Go back to camp, Ek. Forget you saw this.”
Without reply, he cut into the forest. I drooped to the riverbank. Soon the nearby trees shivered with insects. The frogs resumed their monotony. Strange: now that I had killed a predator, my fear of the jungle suddenly receded. I had passed a primeval initiation and entered the kingdom of the wild. Even the heat didn’t seem as crushing anymore. Took a few minutes to realize that only one animal in Belize now threatened my life, and I had just let him walk away.
The bugs had already found Simon. I memorized his passport number, rolled the body into the current: by morning there wouldn’t be much soft stuff left. As he floated away, I began to feel afraid again. Hacked my way back to San Ignacio. The town was dark, Koko’s empty. A bobby pin got me in. Now that all the fans were off, the place was hot and stinky, thick with the exhaust of the evening’s meals. I cut to the corner with the plastic angel on a shelf. Barnard had hidden her camera beneath its skirts, bored her lens cleverly in the wings. I stuffed it in my knapsack and ran to the street.
Drove east, toward the coast, scattering rodents and necrophages. Almost ran over a Mennonite couple and their horse-drawn cart. As the sun cracked the horizon, women in brilliant sk
irts and men in their grandfathers’ suits appeared, looking for the bus that might unload them in Belize City. I whizzed past a development bursting with rich, industrious, monolingual immigrants from Hong Kong. Good luck in Central America, guys. Twenty bucks got me a room with running water. I hit the shower. Scrubbed my blue thigh, pried a leech from my navel. The gash from Simon’s arrow could have been a streak of red ink on my shoulder. I had accumulated bites and scratches everywhere, as if I had been scourged by a horde of Lilliputians. Somehow I had managed to get a sunburn. Everything was beginning to hurt: Maxine’s booster was winding down and I had no more needles.
Bedlam at the airport. A plague of divers infested the terminal. They all looked tan, fit, mindlessly American: three out of four would have difficulty naming the day of the week. Overhead fans circulated vaguely distasteful biological aromas as eco-tourists tried to get triple air miles and Lebanese families checked in with fifty pieces of near dead luggage. Children shrieked, PA system blared. I saw with dismay that no major coffee chain had set up a dispensary here.
The customs agent collected my departure fee. “You have nothing to declare?”
Two bodies, but I was leaving them behind. “No.”
One last trek across a searing tarmac and I thudded into my seat. Neither Ek nor the Dutch had followed me aboard. The cabin was cold as a crypt. Something tore inside my chest as the airplane lost contact with the runway. A sharp pain, like that of leaving a lover. Perhaps I was nothing but an animal at heart. I had felt so acutely alive in the sweltering, green bosom of the earth, where death was close as the next cloudburst and creatures hunted without pity or conscience because their law was absolutely clear: Eat or be eaten. Now I had to return to scheming, dirty people? Totally unprepared for that. With a shudder, I drifted into knotted, colorful dreams.
Chapter Six
I HAD BEEN ASLEEP for twenty-four hours when the phone rang. “Don’t you have a rehearsal tonight with Fausto?” Maxine asked.
My head felt more distant than Pluto. I was drenched in sweat, but no longer in the forest: something wrong here. “What day is this?”
“Wednesday. You’re in New York. How’d it go?”
I arranged aching bones into a sitting position and tried to convert events of the last three days into words. After a silence, all I could say was, “Not sure.”
“Did you find Tatal?”
I saw a long, brown fer-de-lance. “She was dead.”
“Did you get Barnard’s gear?”
I smelled grime and fried banana. “Yes.”
“Did you see Louis’s camp?”
I felt a crushing darkness, heard waterfalls and the noise of a trillion cicadas. And I felt Ek. “Yes.” This room was so cold. What happened to all the bugs? Who was this woman who had interrupted my dreams? I wanted to go back to sleep.
“Smith!” Maxine called. “You’re expected in Washington tonight.”
I drew back the covers, stared at the swollen gash and the itty bites covering my legs. All this stigmata didn’t jibe with the ironed sheets. “I’m tired.”
“Eat. Go to the gym.”
More exercise? No way. “There was a casualty.”
“Witnesses?”
“One.” God, my head hurt. “He’ll keep his mouth shut.”
For the moment, Maxine let that delusion slide. “You’ve got a rehearsal with Fausto Kiss,” she repeated. “He’s playing piano. You’re violin.”
The very word flooded my system with strange chemicals. My fingers tingled. A little door in my brain, behind which Europe hid, cracked open. I inspected my swollen fingertips: just enough callus there to depress an E string. Beneath several fingernails lodged slivers of black earth. Mud … heat … I felt a rush of longing, a violent confusion. But the violin won. It had been there longer and I was in another jungle now, one thick with phones, lights, people: survival here required a different set of synapses. “Fausto,” I repeated. More images, more confusion.
“Can you get back to me tonight?” Maxine asked.
Ah, that little cave in the zoo: one place in America where I might feel at home. “Depends on the rehearsal.”
Maxine hung up.
In a trance, disoriented by the absence of shrieking birds and insects, I flew back to Washington. Its heat and humidity were pale cousins of conditions in Belize. White, not green, predominated here: all that sparkling stone grated on my eyes. Thousands of people, heavily overdressed, rushed everywhere. I made airport to hotel without breaking a sweat: machines, not Mother Nature, ruled this cosmos. In my room, messages from Justine Cortot, Fausto, Bendix, Curtis. I didn’t answer any of them because I wasn’t prepared for people yet. Duncan was a cross between the Energizer Bunny and a kangaroo, so I let him in.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “I’ve been calling for days!”
“I told you I was taking some time off. How’s your wrist?”
“Still broken.” Duncan tossed a newspaper onto the couch. “Did you read that review?”
Of course not. “Good or bad?”
“‘Leslie Frost appeared in Carnegie Hall last night, assisted by the unflappable Duncan Zadinsky,’” he read.
“That’s a decent start. Where does it go from there?”
“Nowhere! I didn’t get another word! Unflappable! What does he think I am, a shingle?”
After two days in the jungle, black ink on grotty paper had zero connection to reality. Nevertheless, I read the review. It was mostly about the composer who had just died: critics had nothing more to say about Brahms or Bach, who had been demoted from demigods to wallpaper. “Could have been worse.”
“Justine called the critic up and chewed his ass out.”
“Excellent. You won’t get called unflappable again.”
Duncan passed on to his next open wound. “I understand I’ve been replaced by Fausto Kiss.”
“For one hour. Hope you’re not too upset.”
“Of course I’m upset!” he screeched. “Why didn’t you just say no?”
“The hostess was paying the going rate. You know Curtis.”
Duncan couldn’t argue with commerce. “Is Fausto any good?”
“No idea. We’re rehearsing for the first time tonight.” I tried to look resigned. “He hasn’t touched a piano in thirty years. I bet his fingers are about as swift as cigars.”
The phone rang: concierge sending up a fresh bouquet of orchids. “Again?” Duncan cried, fishing out the card. “‘Welcome back.’ Who is this? A stalker?”
“Give them to Justine.”
“She likes roses.” Duncan peered at my face. “What happened to your eyebrow?”
“I walked into a door. Have you been keeping yourself out of trouble?”
“I’ve been working like a dog! Master class at Peabody tomorrow. NEA panel all next week. People know I’m here.”
True to his word, my manager was keeping Duncan off the target range. “How’s your girlfriend?”
“Fine. She’s arranged a private tour of the White House for us.”
“I just saw it last week. So did you.”
“This is the off-limits stuff! The kitchen and bedrooms!”
“Bobby Marvel’s boudoir doesn’t interest me. Thank your Aunt Justine just the same.”
Glancing at his watch, Duncan headed out. “She’s had enough of this place, you know. She’s thinking about coming to Berlin.”
Power was a drug, politicians were hopeless addicts. Justine was as likely to kick the habit as I was of throwing my Strad into the Potomac. “Isn’t this the pinnacle of her career?”
“She hates Bobby Marvel.”
“What was she high on when she told you that?”
The door slammed. My accompanist wouldn’t speak to me for days. On the other hand, our verbal exchange had been a nice little reintroduction to civilized conversation. I picked up the phone. “Still on for tonight, Fausto?”
“I’ve been practicing my weenie off.”
&
nbsp; “I can hear your metronome. What’s the program?”
“Let me surprise you. Sixty minutes, you said?”
“That’s what Aurilla ordered.”
“Perfect. See you at seven.”
This did not sound like the Fausto of yore. I ate a huge lunch then began to practice. Fingers were stiff and the gash on my shoulder wasn’t happy with a hunk of wood pressing on it, but the moment sounds began, another demon seized my brain, squeezing jungle out, artistry in. In a few hours I was half back to warp speed, ready for whatever Fausto might throw at me.
As I was dressing, Justine called. “You’ve been away.” When I didn’t explain, she continued, “You’re expected at the White House tomorrow at three.”
“Sorry, I’ve got a rehearsal. And I never screw married men in their own beds. It’s unethical. By the way, I hear you’re coming to Berlin. Duncan’s beside himself.”
“He told you that?”
“He tells me everything. Would you have any more of those pills you gave him backstage at Carnegie Hall? I might need a few for Fausto. God knows if he can get it up for Aurilla’s concert.”
“Fausto can fend for himself.” Justine hung up.
The phone immediately rang again. “You’ve been away,” said Bendix, inflection half amity, half accusation. Somewhere in the back of my brain a branch snapped, a carnivore growled.
“I’ve been visiting friends.”
“I enjoyed our dinner the other night. And congratulations on your review. I’d like to drop something off for you at the hotel. Will you be in?”
“In and out. Just leave it at the desk. I’ll get it eventually.”
On to my next beast: I drove through clots of traffic to Fausto’s. He came to the door in bow tie and linen pants. There was an effervescence about him I had not seen. When he kissed me, I smelled talcum and stage fright. “Hi darling. I’m nervous as a bride.”