Nobody used banks in his neighborhood – they asked too many questions, were suspicious of cash and paid laughably low interest. In virtually every barrio in Central America the neighborhood convenience store ran a profitable side business lending money; and they tended to be trustworthy custodians for savings. He methodically gave the local market owner $200 each month, as he had for three years, and earned fifteen percent annual interest. Sure, the owner lent the money out at sixty percent, but Ernesto was satisfied with a quarter of that as his cut because the owner took all the risk. And Ernesto was building a nest egg. Perhaps one day he could return to Bogota and meet a nice girl – someone with an education who worked in a shop or an office – his savings could easily provide the beginning of a life together. But for now, a little paid romance twice a week did the trick.
Such were Ernesto’s thoughts as he strolled towards the familiar high-walled compound. He punched the red intercom button by the ornate iron gate and the overhead camera mounted at the top of the support beam swiveled towards him. Just as it did every day. The lock buzzed and he entered the grounds. It was a large piece of land, no doubt had belonged to a wealthy colonial landowner back in the day. There were a number of buildings scattered around the two story main house – several garages, servants’ quarters, a kennel and stables, and a large corrugated steel storage shed he knew was used as an office. He believed the place was owned by a powerful Gringo because there was always an armed retinue of at least four Gringo guards patrolling the interior, day and night, often accompanied by several large German Shepherds.
Armed compounds weren’t particularly unusual in Central America, given the often bloody manner in which the narco-trafficantes settled their disputes, along with the ever-present danger of kidnapping for the wealthy and their families. Ernesto had grown so accustomed to the presence of the gunmen he barely registered them beyond giving them a salute or a wave, which they always reciprocated. The entire time he’d worked there he’d never heard of any altercation or problems, so the sentries and high walls topped with razor wire had obviously served their purpose. This was one the of the last places on the planet anyone would want to rob. There were far easier targets.
He’d never met the owner he’d been cooking for – not once in his eight years at the villa. Clearly the man or woman had reclusive tendencies. Fine by him. His weekly salary was always paid in American dollars, and never late, so as far as he was concerned things couldn’t have been better. He simply had to follow the written menu that invariably awaited his morning arrival but was largely left to his own devices beyond that. The shopping was done by parties unknown and the pantry and large double-width refrigerator were always brimming with fresh supplies. It was like working in a small hotel – he kept to himself, stayed out of the way, did his job, and everyone left him alone. His contact person was a bi-lingual Gringo named Stanley, who checked in with him several times a week in addition to handing him his pay envelope.
This morning was Friday. Payday. Ernesto knew that at 10 a.m. on the dot, Stanley would enter the expansive kitchen, chat for a few minutes and then give him his wages – always in twenties. The routine never changed.
But today the activity around the villa was unusual. Four new vehicles sat by the garages – big SUVs, late model, with their rear deck lids open. The sentries no longer carried their weapons and were ferrying crates and boxes from the house. There were at least fifteen unfamiliar people helping move the items, some of which were large trunks.
Ernesto was troubled. This was a first.
He entered the kitchen and placed his backpack onto the counter by the TV as he did every day before approaching the large island to see what the day’s menu consisted of. But today there was no menu. Instead, there was a handwritten note in Spanish, signed by Stanley, along with a brown envelope. He picked up the note and read the terse missive.
“Ernesto, your services won’t be required any longer. Sorry for the lack of notice but I just found out last evening. We’re moving on Friday. The envelope has two week’s pay in it. Good luck finding another position. You’re a good cook.”
Ernesto opened the flap and peered inside at the paltry wad of twenties. Unbelievable. He was now unemployed, even though he’d never missed a day’s work – except when his mother had died – and all he got by way of thanks was one lousy extra week’s pay? Ernesto sat heavily beside the island and read the note again. Stanley hadn’t even bothered to show and personally deliver the news – Ernesto just got a short letter. Why not just text message him on the bus on the way in? What a thoughtless way to reward almost a decade of loyal service. Gringos were all the same. You couldn’t trust them; they viewed anyone foreign as beneath contempt – just cheap little robots for their own convenience, unworthy of the most cursory consideration.
He deserved better than this. Whether Stanley wanted to talk or not, Ernesto intended to have a conversation with him. This wasn’t over – not like this. For the first time after his eight years in the compound he shouldered his backpack and moved through the connecting double doors into the hall that led to the main house. It was buzzing with activity; men hastily carting boxes from the house to the vehicles. Ernesto was invisible to them; just another of the locals hired to move their belongings and clean up after them. He realized he had no idea where to find Stanley – even if he was still in the villa. His indignation rapidly fading, he stopped outside one of the open doorways halfway to the main wing. Glancing inside, he saw several monitors, some audio-visual gear and a case filled with about a dozen late model video cameras.
Ernesto looked up and down the hall. It was temporarily deserted. Overcome by an impulse he didn’t completely understand, he leaned into the room and grabbed the nearest camera, hurriedly stuffing it into his bag before closing the lid on the camera container. He scanned the hall again. Nobody had seen anything.
He stood for a moment in the hall, internally debating his next move, when a man in one of the house ‘uniform’ windbreakers rounded the corner. The Gringo stopped when he saw Ernesto and spoke to him in rapid, clipped Spanish without any hint of an accent.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.
Ernesto’s righteous indignation buckled, replaced by fear of being caught. “Er, nothing, sir...I was actually looking for Mister Stanley...”
“Stanley? He’s gone. Who are you?”
“Ernesto. The cook. I really need to speak with Mister Stanley...”
“He’s gone, and he’s not coming back…just like you.” He narrowed his eyes. “You shouldn’t be here. You need to leave the area right now.”
“But I–”
“I’m not going to repeat myself. Get out of here – now – or I’ll have you removed by the guards.”
Ernesto weighed his anger at his abrupt termination against the likelihood of being prosecuted for stealing an expensive piece of electronics.
Discretion won the day.
“All right,” Ernesto protested. “But you tell Mister Stanley the way he treated me isn’t right. It isn’t right.”
The man regarded him with a stony stare and pointed to the kitchen door.
Ernesto got the message. He turned and slunk back down the passageway, through the kitchen and out of the compound.
Eight years, and the fuckers boot him out just like that.
Chinga tu Madres, Putas.
Excerpt from Fatal Exchange
Russell Blake
Copyright © 2011 by Russell Blake
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact [email protected].
Fatal Exchange <1>
A shriek ripped through the bunker, then slowly
tapered off to a moan punctuated by congested gasps and feeble gurgling. At first it was hard to tell the gender of the screamer by the timbre of the emanation, but then the moan gave it away.
It was a man.
The noise was coming from a room at the end of a dimly lit hallway, concrete construction, everything painted a sickly olive-green and reeking of disrepair. Behind the chamber’s steel door stood two men in brown uniforms of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. A third man wearing a short-sleeved pleated dress shirt sat at a metal table upon which rested an old wooden box with a hand crank, and what looked like a weathered carpentry kit, with all the usual tools present. There were other, more arcane instruments strewn over a small rolling stand, and a tray containing rubber gloves, an apron, and a Dremel.
The floor sloped gradually to meet the drainage grid in the far corner, where an old faucet intermittently dripped water. Illumination was dim on the periphery but brighter in the middle of the space, where a large lamp hung from the ceiling, housing a bank of hundred-watt incandescent bulbs.
The air was putrid and smelled of urine and feces, and ventilation was poor – they’d needed to improvise a facility on relatively short notice. As the building had originally been a holding cell for prisoners offloaded from returning naval ships, powerful climate-control and air-moving machinery had never been deemed necessary.
All three men had their attention focused on a naked Asian man in his late thirties, strapped to a metal chair directly below the lights. His head rested on his chest, where a thin thread of saliva and blood slowly trickled down his concave ribcage. The screaming had stopped, replaced by sobbing and whimpering, high pitched and eerily reminiscent of a cat in heat.
The smaller of the uniformed men approached the seated figure, carefully avoiding the pool of filth around the chair—the victim had voided his bowels and bladder at some point during the interrogation, contributing to the stench in the room. He leaned in close and spoke softly in Burmese.
“Where is it?”
The man in the chair moaned. The uniformed man tried again, reasonably.
“Where is it? We know you took it.”
The subject didn’t register the words. Annoying. The officer had so many more pleasurable things he could be doing. Right now he was running late for a rendezvous with one of the young ladies he favored with his charms, as well as the odd food voucher or handful of coins.
He pressed onward. “We don’t wish to make this last any longer than it has to. It would be a shame to have to bring your family into it, but you’re leaving me no choice. How old are your two daughters? Eight and ten, I believe? Think of them. Answer the question. For them.”
The man slowly raised his head and regarded the officer. One of his eyes was missing, or rather had been punctured earlier in the discussion, and was leaking its ocular fluid down his battered cheek. The pain had to be excruciating.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I swear.” The words ran together in a hoarse mumble, due to the obliteration earlier levied upon his face.
The officer shook his head imperceptibly and sighed. His tryst would have to be delayed; this was going nowhere. Shrugging his shoulders, he reached into his pocket and retrieved a pair of white foam earplugs, then turned to the man in the short shirtsleeves and nodded.
Without hesitation, the man cranked the handle on the old wooden box. The victim shrieked again, an otherworldly sound that bespoke unimaginable horrors. A pair of worn blackened wires ran from the old hand generator to the seated man’s genitals, where the bare ends had been affixed with black electrical tape. The smell of burning hair and flesh mingled with the other noxious odors.
“Where is it? What did you do with it?”
More gurgling.
The taller officer removed his round wire-rimmed glasses, cleaned the lenses carefully with a handkerchief, and addressed the man in the shirtsleeves.
“Use the drill.”
The shirt-sleeved man nodded, and removed from his bag a device resembling a dog muzzle, with straps on the back terminating in metal hooks. He clawed his hands into the man’s head, forcing his face into the contraption. The front section had a hinged mechanism controlling two short metal rods now plunged inside the man’s mouth. The rods were grooved, worn by the many previous sets of teeth which had ground them.
He secured the metal hooks to the chair back, and tightened the straps so the man couldn’t move his head. Then, with a practiced twist, he turned the lever on the side of the mechanism, forcing the man’s mouth open, allowing access to his dental plate.
Pausing for a moment, the shirt-sleeved man considered his shoes, now soiled with the accumulated expulsions. Aggravating, but there was nothing to be done about it. He hoped they’d wash clean.
Turning, he donned a plastic apron with an incongruous faded image of a dancing crab, and selected the Dremel, a tiny high-speed jeweler’s drill used for polishing and grinding work. He inserted the bit—a small tapered cone with serrated edges running from the tip to the base, useful for boring holes in stone or metal—and tightened the shaft.
The victim’s eye went wide as the screech of the high-pitched motor filled the space.
“So, my friend, is there anything you want to tell me before we start?”
*****
Overhead loudspeakers blared flight arrival and departure information in Korean as well as in Japanese, Chinese, and English. The terminal was congested, even though its ultra-modern interior was designed specifically to accommodate heavy traffic, and the din of conversations battling with the ceaseless announcements created a kind of low-grade pandemonium. Seoul was a major hub for travel into China and the Far East, and on any business day there were a lot of busy people with important places to go, most of whom apparently had to do so while having animated discussions on their cell phones.
Seung waited restlessly in the ticketing area, half an hour early for his meeting. Thin, fashionably mod haircut, and a studied air of disinterest affecting every mannerism, he was dressed in jeans and leather jacket, in defiance of the brooding heat outside the airport’s doors.
Fuck, he hated crowds. Airports were the worst. The noise and bustle were grating on his already raw nerves.
Fidgeting with his black briefcase, he scouted his surroundings and spotted a men’s restroom icon. He studied the crowd, quickly glanced at his watch, then moved towards the facilities. Of course there was a line. Forced to wait a few minutes for a toilet to free up, he passed the time imagining he was boarding one of the big 747s on the tarmac and flying to Fiji or Bora Bora. Maybe one day. One day soon.
The end stall vacated and he entered and locked the little compartment door, exhaling a sigh of relief to be out of the throng. After confirming the latch was secure and there was no visibility through the door joints, he pulled a small zippered wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and carefully opened it, using his briefcase as an ad hoc table.
He painstakingly emptied half the contents of a tiny plastic bag into an old metal spoon, and with a trembling hand clutching his cigarette lighter he melted the powder in the spoon bowl. Very slowly, he returned the lighter to his jacket pocket and removed a disposable syringe from the wallet. Gripping the orange plastic cap with his teeth, he freed the little needle and sucked the liquid into the syringe.
The tricky part concluded, he replaced the cap and held the syringe in his mouth while he repacked the kit, taking care to reseal the bag’s tiny zip-lock top.
Seung rolled up his left jean leg, exposing a network of bruised discolorations which marred the larger veins in his ankle. He removed a length of surgical tubing, tied off just below his calf and slapped at the vein. That one looked good for another week, then it would collapse like the ones in his right leg.
Oh well. He’d have to still be alive next week to care. There were no guarantees.
He popped the cap off the needle again and slid the metal into his ruined vessel, drawing blood into the syringe and
mixing the amber fluid with the viscous crimson from his vein. Satisfied, he depressed the plunger, emptying the contents into his bloodstream. This was only half a hit, really just a maintenance dose—he didn’t want to nod off on the job. He released the tubing and felt a warm rush through his entire system, running up his leg to his heart, then into his throat and up to his head.
It was heaven.
Even half a hit made life bearable, at least for now, and he could focus better if he wasn’t jittery and jonesing. His eyes began to close and it was only with tremendous effort he kept them open. He drifted, his lids getting heavier, heavier.
The neighboring stall door slammed and abruptly jolted him back to full consciousness.
Think. Put your shit away, stand up, and get busy.
He looked at his oversized steel watch; his meeting was in five minutes. Fuck. He fumbled, stuffing the kit and syringe into his breast pocket, then blotted the blood on his ankle with some toilet paper and slapped himself in the face several times.
He flushed the toilet, grabbed his briefcase and exited the stall, flipping on a pair of sunglasses to lessen the impact of the lights on his dilated pupils as he approached the ticketing area.
Ah. There was his target, a fifty-something man with a suit bag draped over his shoulder, carrying an identical briefcase.
Seung caught his eye, set the briefcase down on the floor next to his right foot, and pretended to play with his cell phone. The older man walked over and asked if he had the correct time, which Seung made a display of providing. He admired the younger man’s phone, and put his bag and briefcase down next to the other briefcase, asking to see it. Seung showed him the most compelling features—it really was unbelievable what they could do these days with technology.
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