Fallen Idols

by J. F. Freedman

  After a dozen more miles they rounded a corner and the road was paved again with a fresh coat of tar. “Why are some parts of the highway paved and others not?” Clancy asked Manuel.

  “Because someone who is in the government or is rich lives nearby,” their guide answered. “Like there.”

  He pointed to a low hill off to the side. A long, winding macadam driveway snaked up the hill to a high, cement wall. A gated entrance was cut into the wall, next to which stood a guardhouse that further protected access to the property.

  “That wall has broken glass embedded into the top of it,” Manuel informed them. “If you were foolish enough to try to scale it to get to the mansion it protects, the broken shards of glass would cut you to ribbons.”

  “Not very hospitable,” Tom commented dryly.

  “The owner has the concession for Coca-Cola for the entire country,” Manuel continued. “So the road in front of his house is paved. He has his own helicopter as well, behind the house.” He glanced back at the forbidding wall through his sideview mirror. “He is only here two or three weeks a year. The rest of the time he lives in Miami Beach.”

  They crested a low rise and dropped into a shallow valley. Ahead of them, two young boys on horseback were herding three dozen slow-moving animals—cows, bulls, horses—down the road. The livestock were spread out all across the road, from one edge to the other. The boys were bare to the waist, jeans and boots on their legs and feet, straw cowboy hats on their heads. They rode bareback, with rope halters to guide their horses, moving in and out of their herd with easy confidence.

  The minivan came up behind them. Manuel braked to a slow crawl. Slowly, carefully, he pushed the minivan through the herd. The boys helped, herding the animals to either side. As the minivan passed, the boys smiled gap-toothed grins and raised their hats in greeting.

  The road became bumpy and potholed again. “Check that out,” Tom called. He pointed out the window to the skeletal remains of a Ferris wheel in the middle of a weed-infested field. Nearby, there were rotting frames of buildings that had fallen apart.

  “That was an amusement park,” Manuel informed them. “Parents brought their children here. It was very pleasant.”

  “It's like out of a Fellini movie,” Tom said. “What happened to it?”

  “The owner was killed in an ambush, for his payroll. After that, the families stopped coining. So now, it is a wreck. In five years there will be no trace of it left.”

  “Unlike La Chimenea, which was built for the ages,” Clancy commented. “That's why sites like La Chimenea are so important.” He looked back at the hulk of the old carnival as it receded from view out the back window. “Why people like dad spend their lives trying to preserve them.”

  An hour passed. After driving through a town composed of a few houses and a store, they came upon an army barracks set back behind a high barbed wire fence. As they drove by the entrance, a convoy of guardia, riding tandem on black Kawasaki motorcycles, wearing black uniforms, knee-high polished boots, and Darth Vader helmets, was conning out of the gate. They were all armed, some with machine guns strapped across their backs. As the motorcycles cruised by the minivan, proceeding in the opposite direction, the troops, all of them young, glanced in the windows, checking them out. Some of the guardia were women.

  “This reminds me of Paris during their riots,” Tom remarked. “Cops doing whatever they wanted.”

  “To me, this is scarier,” Clancy said. “It feels like I there's no moral authority here at all.”

  Manuel was careful not to make eye contact with any of the soldiers. His vision was fixed on the road ahead, knuckles tightened on the steering wheel, not relaxing until they had passed the barracks and the motorcyclists were no longer in sight. Then he checked again in the rearview mirror, to make certain the guardia were gone and hadn't doubled back to follow them.

  “They are everywhere,” he said. “Except when they are needed,” he added in a flash of anger. “We're lucky they did not stop us and shake us down for money. If you were on your own, they would have, no question. They always hassle gringos.” He sighed heavily. “For them, this is the only way to have a better life. They are fed, clothed, they go to school. Being in the military, the guardia, is one of the few ways the poor people, especially the young ones, can ever get anywhere in this wretched, godforsaken country.”

  As they approached the district capital, the highway improved and there were more houses and small businesses. Clusters of people were on the streets, walking and driving motor scooters and old cars.

  “You are staying at the Excelsior for tonight?” Manuel asked, as he deftly maneuvered his vehicle onto the main highway that led into the center of the city.

  “Yes,” Tom confirmed. “How is it these days?”

  The Excelsior was an old hotel in the center of the city. They had stayed there with their parents on previous forays. It had been faded around the edges for years now, but it still had a funky colonial style and a good bar. Journalists in the country, regardless of where they were staying, could often be found at the Excelsior bar after dark, drinking and swapping war stories. CNN had done a brief profile on it a few years back, describing it as a throwback to a bygone era, a place where you, would expect to see Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall having drinks and trading bon mots with Errol Flynn and Ingrid Bergman.

  “It is comfortable enough,” Manuel said. “Most Americans stay at the newer hotels now, the ones that I have swimming pools and cable television. But the Excelsior is plenty fine,” he added quickly, not wanting the boys to think they weren't staying at a decent establishment.

  They would settle in here tonight, relax, recharge their batteries after their long, sleepless trip. Tomorrow they were scheduled to meet with the Minister of Archaeology and Culture, the official who had withdrawn his troops’ support for the ill-fated journey away from La Chimenea, and had then, after Jocelyn's killing, rubbed salt in the wound by denying Walt further access to it. The meeting had been confirmed, with reluctance, before they left the States—they weren't going to fly live thousand miles to chase a wild goose. Although the Smithsonian Museum no longer sponsored Walt, they had cooperated to the extent of putting pressure on the minister to meet with his sons.

  Manuel dropped them at their hotel, promising to pick them up early the following morning to drive them across town to the capital building.

  “Thanks for all your help, Manuel,” Tom said, leaning in the driver's-side window and shaking Manuel's hand. He reached into his wallet and pulled out some money. He knew that American money was good here, preferable to the native currency, which could fluctuate in value, overnight sometimes, from barely acceptable to close to worthless. He tried to press the money into Manuel's hand, but Manuel wouldn't take it.

  “No,” he said firmly. “You don't have to pay me, Señor Tom.”

  “Come on, Manuel, take it, please,” Tom cajoled their guide. “You're working for us. We want to pay you for that.”

  Again, Manuel politely but firmly refused to take the money,” Perhaps later, if you find out what you are looking for,” he told Tom. “But not now.”

  “Okay,” Tom said, backing off. “But we're settling accounts before we leave. Agreed?”

  “All right. Yes. Hasta mañana.” The minivan pulled

  away into the narrow street, a plume or dark smoke coming from the tailpipe. The brothers stood on the sidewalk and watched him disappear into traffic.

  “Let's get settled in and grab some beers,” Tom said, pushing the front door open. “I've got a thirst that needs attending to.”

  This place hasn't been renovated in forty or fifty years, Clancy thought, as they walked across the black-and-white-tiled floor to the registration desk. Ceiling fans spun listlessly in the afternoon heat. Battered wicker tables and chairs were haphazardly arranged in the lobby, and a low bookcase along one wall featured old novels and back issues of National Geographic. Through a large double door at the far end of th
e room they saw the bar, now empty, the lights off.

  The registration clerk, who leisurely emerged from a room in the back after Tom rang the front-desk bell, was a stout, middle-aged woman who looked part black, part Indian, part Spanish—a common mixture, particularly near the coast, which had been the center of the country's slave trade two centuries ago. Clancy dug into his bag and handed her the fax printout of their confirmation. She handed them their registration cards.

  “We have you a fine room,” she told them in thick Spanish-flavored English. “Dos camas.”

  “Air-conditioned?” Tom asked hopefully. “¿Air aconedicionado?” He had four years of college Spanish—he would do the talking when Spanish was required.

  “No,” she answered, favoring him with a sad smile that revealed more teeth missing than intact.

  “No problema,” he assured her. “¿Ventiladores?” He pointed to the ceiling fans.

  “Sí,” she answered, smiling more broadly.

  “Then we're in business,” he told her. “Muy bien.”

  They rode the creaking copper-paneled elevator to the third floor and walked halfway down the narrow hallway to their room. “I'll bet we're about the only guests they've got here,” Tom said. He ran his hand along one wall of faded wallpaper that featured flamingos, macaws, and other wild birds in a bright green forest.

  “Probably,” Clancy agreed. “These old places aren't popular anymore, without air-conditioning and video rooms and pools.”

  “That's too bad,” Tom said. “There's something to be said for genteel decay.”

  The mattresses on the two narrow beds were thin and swaybacked, but the sheets looked clean. Threadbare towels were laid out on the beds, along with sealed bottles of water for drinking, and cellophane-wrapped glasses. At the end of the hallway, the bathroom door was open. They could see a sink, a toilet, a bathtub. It looked clean.

  They tossed their bags on the beds and left, locking the door behind them. They kept their passports, wallets, and necessary documents with them—if their clothing and toilet articles were stolen they could be replaced, but not their identification, cash, and credit cards. Bypassing the elevator, they walked down the stairs, through the empty lobby, and out into the street.

  The streets in the center of the city were narrow. Some were cobblestoned, as they had been for over a century. Many of the side streets had never been paved at all; they were no more than dirt cart paths that had been worn smooth over the years.

  This part of the city was the original settlement. It had been established by the early Spanish invaders, who, after subjugating the native population by killing most of them off, had erected houses and other buildings in the style of their own country. These structures were built to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scale, so the streets and sidewalks, meant to accommodate people, horses, and carriages, were cramped, a tight squeeze for modern cars and trucks, which cruised up and down them without regard for stop signs or traffic lights, creating mini-traffic jams at every intersection.

  It was almost five in the afternoon. Siesta was over, the streets were full of life. The brothers edged their way along the main avenue's congested sidewalk, rubbing elbows with locals and a few other turistas, passing street vendors selling a mishmash of goods—knockoffs of Gucci and Prada handbags, Polo golf shirts, Rolex watches, Hermès scarves, as well as crude hand-carved wooden Maya artifacts, old music cassettes, sandals, blankets, shawls. Hundreds of items—anything a tourist, which to any native's eye they certainly were, might want to take back home.

  A group of American kids, clothes filthy, hair long, some of them in Rastafarian dreadlocks, sat on the sidewalk, panhandling.

  “Spare change?”

  They ignored the kids. One of the girls, her blond hair matted, her bare feet dirty from road dust, jumped up and lightly grabbed on to Tom's shirtsleeve.

  “Got any dope, man?” she asked in a breathless whisper.

  “No.” He looked her over. She couldn't be older than eighteen.

  “Wanna buy some? Good shit, Jamaican. Good price.”

  He shook his head. “No, thanks.”

  “Blow job for five dollars?”

  He shook his head. “Not today.” He pulled away from her.

  “Faggot,” she called after him, halfheartedly.

  They ate dinner at an Indian restaurant—tandoori chicken, vegetable curries, shrimp, riata, rice, washed down with decent local beer. Afterward, the Sri Lankan proprietor, who was also the chef, served them thick Turkish coffee and tiny snifters of Rémy Martin. The bill, including a generous tip, came to twenty-five dollars American, which Clancy put on his Visa card.

  “You could live like a king for almost nothing down here,” Tom observed as they walked along the busy sidewalk again.

  “Except you'd be living here,” Clancy said.

  “There's worse places,” Tom replied. “You could have a little motel or shop, live on the beach, what's wrong with that? Open up a branch of Finnegan's, I'll bet it would do well.”

  “When I retire,” Clancy said. “Let's head back. We'll have a couple of beers at the hotel and take it mellow.”

  The half-dozen drinkers gathered in the Excelsior bar, four men and two women, looked like refugees from a Graham Greene novel. Europeans, Clancy thought, as he and Tom walked in. Europeans don't look like Americans. He didn't know why that was, they came from the same root stock, but he'd seen enough Europeans in his bar and in his work to know that most of the time that was true. A couple of them, one man and one woman, were in their thirties; the rest looked a decade or more older. They all had the faces of seasoned drinkers. They sat in two groups at two adjoining tables. No one was sitting at the bar. The bartender was washing glasses.

  The other patrons looked up as the brothers sat down at an empty table. One of them, a pale-complexioned man with sparse reddish hair and rimless glasses, saluted them with his highball glass. “It's serve yourselves here, gents,” he informed them in an oatmeal-thick Irish brogue. “The barmaid left early.”

  “By about ten years,” laughed the younger of the two women in a husky, also Irish or English, voice. She, too, had red hair, a deep luxurious auburn pulled back from her face in a long, thick braid halfway down her back. She was pretty, with an Irish-English woman's fair, freckled complexion. She shook a Marlboro from a pack on the table, lit up.

  “What do you want?” Clancy asked Tom.

  “A shot of tequila and a beer.”

  Clancy walked to the bar and ordered their drinks—he knew bar Spanish, which was good enough for in here.

  The woman smiled at Tom. “Smoke?” she offered. She pushed her pack toward him.

  He smiled back. “No, thanks.” An attractive woman, he thought. I wonder if she's with any of these guys. A quick size-up was that she was a friend to all, a lover to none.

  He thought, yet again—it was like a song stuck in his head he couldn't shake—of Diane. This was an attractive woman sitting here, but not in Diane's league. Which was becoming a problem—he mentally compared every woman he met with Diane, and they all came up short. He had to get rid of that song and replace it with a better one.

  “Americans,” the Irishman said.

  “Yep,” Tom answered.

  “From whereabouts?”

  “The Midwest. Chicago.”

  “Good town, Chicago,” the man said approvingly. “Good drinking town.”

  “You know it?”

  “I've been through.”

  Tom grinned. “Ever been to a bar called Finnegan's?”

  The man scrunched up his face in thought. “Don't think so. Is it in the center of the city?”

  “North side.”

  The man shook his head. “I only know Michigan Avenue. You stay at a hotel, you do your job, eat and drink locally, go to the next assignment. Nice pub, Finnegan's?”

  Tom resisted the natural inclination to brag on his brother's place. “They pour an honest shot,” he said.

  “I
like that,” the man said. “Have to try it the next time I pass through.”

  “You won't be disappointed,” Tom promised him. “What sort of work do you do?” he asked. “You sound like you travel in your job.”

  The man nodded. “Journalist. Freelance video. Right now I'm with CNBC. Me and Anton here.” He nudged die man seated next to him. “The mad Hungarian. He's my soundman. We're a team. Anton and Patrick.”

  “All Hungarians are mad,” the man called Anton said gaily, in a middle-European accent. “Except not me, tonight.” He held up his glass. “I have my faithful companion to keep me in good company,” he added with a laugh.

  “You're all journalists?” Tom asked. “Broadcasters? Thanks,” he told Clancy, who had returned to the table with two shot glasses of tequila entwined in the fingers of one large hand, two bottles of beer with a local label in the other.

  The man called Patrick nodded. “Burt and Dickie”— he pointed to the other two men—”are stringers for Reuters and the BBC. Lorna's a reporter.”

  Lorna was the redhead with the pretty face and the long braid. Burt and Dickie raised their glasses in acknowledgment.

  “All except Vera,” Patrick went on, nodding to the other woman.

  Tom looked over at Vera, who was sitting at the table with the two Brit stringers. She was the oldest one here. Fifty, maybe a few years over that. If faces are a road map of life, Tom thought as he looked at her, she had been in many places and seen many things. She's as old as mom was when she was killed, he realized with a shudder of sadness.

  “And you?” he asked her. “What's your game?”

  She smiled politely. “I own an art gallery. In Amsterdam.” Another smile. “And your game, as you Americans put it? What's yours?”

  “I'm a physical therapist,” Clancy answered. “He's a mathematician,” he said, pointing his thumb at Tom.

  “On holiday?”

  “Yep. Always wanted to check this part of the world out.”