“Where can I drop you?” Hoyle asked.
“I live on the other side of the plaza. I’m not sure we can get there.”
“We can go around.”
“Optimism is a charming American trait,” Maria said.
“Well, I’m doing my best to be charming.”
They drove for a while, and Hoyle said, “I know you don’t eat. Do you drink?”
“May I call you Paul?”
“That’s still my name,” he said, smiling.
“I’m not sure you understand my situation, Paul.”
“I think I do,” Hoyle said, and he looked at her squarely. Her beauty so unsettled him that he said again: “I think I do.”
Maria looked out the window and watched the city pass. “I hope that doesn’t make you judge me.”
“Of course not.”
They surveyed the space between them, a place measured in moral and sexual dimensions; they both knew where this could go, Maria aware of only some of the danger this liaison could pose to her. She did not know Hoyle in any more than the most superficial way. The fact that she was attracted to him did not make her any more judicious.
“I don’t mean to pressure you,” Hoyle said.
“You’re not. It’s just been a while since someone asked me to have a drink.”
“I think we could find someplace quiet,” Hoyle said. Quiet meant anonymous, someplace Maria would not be known. “That is, if you’d like…”
Maria considered the invitation. During her silence, a dozen things passed through Hoyle’s mind, a host of issues beyond the normal circumstances of a man asking a woman out for a drink, factors beyond the complications of flirtation with the mistress of a powerful man. Like Maria, Hoyle had secrets to protect.
“What do you do at the embassy?” Maria asked.
“I don’t work at the embassy,” Hoyle said. “I’m a contractor.”
“What sort of work do you do?”
“I work for a petroleum survey company.” A steady enough cover, eminently plausible and much less interesting than the truth.
“And your friend Mr. Smith?”
“He’s a cultural attaché.”
Even Maria knew that this bland title usually denoted a spy. Again she became guarded. Spies and the friends of spies. It was a small, wild voice in her heart that said, Go ahead, no one will know. No one will ever know. Her life was now all given over to the demands of someone else, and for the first time in almost three years, she was alone, her time completely her own. The voice said, This man is attractive, he is an American, and he might be of some help to you.
“I’d love to have a drink,” she said.
19
HOYLE HAD NOT slept well, drink and excitement and the pain from his ribs keeping him awake most of the night. But he knew what had kept him awake mostly was the woman. Hoyle felt sometimes that his heart was like a burned-down house, but he had been struck by her, affected the first moment he saw her, and the second, and the third. And now he sat crossing and uncrossing his legs at the small café table, remembering the moment late last night when he went to bed at the safe house on the Plaza España and caught the faintest smell of Maria’s perfume on his skin. The most fleeting trace, for when he dropped her off, she had held him briefly and touched her lips to his cheek, and then she said to him that she would see him tomorrow, and they might go away together for the weekend. She had said she would like this more than anything, and now he waited in the café where Maria had said she would meet him, and he was as nervous as a man in an overturning boat. Hoyle could not know if she would really come, and he could scarcely tell if last night was real, the drinks and laughter, and now he sat trying to separate the time he had spent with her and the time that he had dreamed of her, this strangely beguiling woman.
He had been kept from sleep by the line between what he should do and what he should not. Going away with Maria, slipping off with her to the place he knew outside the city, spending the night with her—this was a thing he should not do. If she was to be a lover, and only a lover, that would be enough. But if Maria was to be an informant (the cold, brutal word in the trade was “asset”), if she was to be a source, then he should not go away with her. He must not sleep with her. He must not be attracted, charmed, or ensnared. He must not grow beguiled.
Hoyle ordered a Paceña as cold as could be had. He needed time to wind down his thoughts. He stared out into the street. It was ten minutes to two, ten minutes until the time she had said she would meet him, and Hoyle mulled over the standards of his profession; chief among the rules was not to sleep with the help. Sex was often the handmaiden of espionage, frequently the “handle” by which intelligence assets were levered, but case officers—controllers—were not supposed to take lovers from among the ranks of their spies. Hoyle had the examples of many, many failures to guide him to this immutable law. His friend Pyle had been murdered in Saigon, and it had been over a woman. Pyle, gung ho, dumbass Pyle, chivvied and tossed off the Dakow Bridge and into a river of shit.
Hoyle’s attention drifted to a table behind him. A pair of elderly men had taken to arguing over their coffee in perfect High German. They were obviously, and proudly, ex-Nazis, but Hoyle chose not to turn in his seat. He listened absently for a moment, and his mind slowly drifted back to Maria.
Hoyle had thought of nothing, exactly nothing, when he’d said, “Let’s go away tomorrow—let’s get out of La Paz.” He’d said it as though he were a normal man who did normal things for a living. He’d said it as though Maria were a normal woman and not the possession of a minister of government.
Hoyle could not know what went on behind the cascade of dark hair and the bright, perceiving eyes. There might be danger, hazard beyond the sudden reckless moment when he’d put his arms around her and her lips had pressed against his neck and she’d whispered to him, “I’d like to see you again.”
Maria might be very much more than a willing sexual partner.
And she might be nothing more.
At three minutes past two, Maria appeared around the corner of Mariscal de Santa Cruz and Avenida Camacho. She was dressed in a short aqua-colored dress and jacket; over her shoulder she carried a dark satchel, larger than a purse, and under her right arm, she clutched a small handbag. Hoyle stood and walked toward the curb, and she came on without seeing him. As she came closer, she seemed first to notice the Land Cruiser, and then her eyes fell on Hoyle. He knew that the crowd made her uneasy, and was careful not to smile so brightly. He met her at the curb and opened the door of the Land Cruiser.
“Shall we go?” he asked.
Maria glanced across the tables of La Confitería, hearing the German men still arguing, and she nodded. She stepped nimbly into the passenger seat, and Hoyle closed the door. Behind the tinted windows, Maria seemed immediately to relax; in her mind, this departure had been something of a jailbreak, and as Hoyle pulled into the stream of traffic and then sharply left onto Mercado, she let herself smile and exhale. She was free.
“How are you?”
“I am all right.”
Hoyle looked over at her. To his surprise, she came close and kissed his cheek. “Hello,” she said in English.
“Hi.”
She said, “I’m nervous. A little nervous.”
He said, “I am, too.”
The city was a wonderful thing to leave behind, and they drove through the last of the roadblocks as they turned onto the autopista and toward the hulking mass of Huayana Pitosí, lit brilliantly by the slanting sun. Four miles up into the sky, the summit was a rolled knuckle; a white, sputtering veil of snow was torn by the wind and whirled off to the north and east. Soon the city grew thin behind them, and the highway turned toward Lake Titicaca. They talked the entire way, from exactly the place they had stopped last night, before their small kiss. Maria and Hoyle talked about themselves, and after the first lies they had told each other, everything they said was true.
She told him about boarding school i
n Germany and how she had hated it. About her roommate, Nusheen, an Iranian, a Baha’i, whose father was a general in the shah’s army. She told him about nursing school in France. She told him it was her mother, also Maria, who had made her choose nursing as a profession. “Nurses never go hungry,” her mother had told her.
Hoyle paid attention, as he had the night before, and he was entertained, engrossed, even, but he compared the things she said, sifted through them, the small facts taken together, looking for inconsistencies and contradictions. There were none. The story of Maria’s life fit together and made sense. Hoyle knew it was a difficult, almost impossible thing to counterfeit. But he listened also to the things Maria did not say. She did not once mention Nicaragua. She did not once say what her father did to pay for boarding school at a German convent and nursing school in Lyon.
“I’m boring you,” Maria said.
“I don’t think you could do that.”
“You look distracted.”
“You distract me,” Hoyle answered. He meant it.
“Generally, I ignore flattery,” Maria said. “But I could get used to it.”
They had driven for nearly an hour before she even thought to ask where they were going.
“To a place I know, the Hotel Casino de la Selva.” He added, “On the Lago de Huyñaymarka. We’ll be there before five o’clock.”
That was far enough away, Maria thought, three hours from the city and at the southern end of the lake. Far enough away for her to be herself and no one else. She asked him to tell her about Colorado.
“I lived in Colorado Springs when I was a little boy. We moved to Chicago when my father died. I was ten.”
“You miss your father.”
“I guess. I didn’t know him well. He didn’t get along well with my mother. I don’t think she really got along with anyone.” Hoyle drove for a moment and then said, “Mother drank.”
Maria was silent, listening.
“Anyway, I was sent to military school. And to summer camps during vacations. After I graduated from high school, I went to Colorado College. That first Christmas I went back to Chicago. Mother had remarried, a man named Mansullen. He’d been a tennis pro at the Winnetka country club.” Hoyle smiled. “We didn’t get along too well, either. I haven’t been back to Chicago since.”
“What was your mother’s name?” Maria asked.
Hoyle had not said it, and he stared at Maria blankly. For an instant he could not remember, and it was as though he were an imposter, a thing masquerading as human, a creature that had been hatched from some cuckoo’s egg. Hoyle narrowed his eyes, remembering his mother’s tall elegance—even drunk, she was regal—and a hundred other things came to his mind, the smell of her perfume, the clink of her jewelry, the gloves she wore to luncheon. Hoyle’s mind threatened to collapse into a howling blank, and then he said finally, “Viveca.”
All of this was more than Hoyle had ever told one person. It was more than he ought to have said, and it was more candid, more true, than he should have revealed. Why didn’t he care? Why hadn’t he told Maria one of the dozen covers he had memorized? Why had he told her anything at all?
“Now I’ve bored you,” Hoyle said.
“Of course not.”
Maria had listened carefully.
The long, dusty road from Pucarani jogged west, and just as unexpectedly, the rutted track became an asphalt road and rounded the base of a hill. Hoyle turned his eyes to the road and said quietly, “We’re almost there.”
THE HOTEL CASINO de la Selva perched on a thumb of land jutting into Lago de Huyñaymarka, a vast C-shaped embayment at the extreme southern end of Lake Titicaca. The hotel pointed exactly northwest toward the Estrecho de Tiquina, the narrow gap separating Huyñaymarka from Lake Titicaca proper.
The road switched back and climbed the rolling scrub-covered hills. Clinging to an almost precipitous slope, the hotel came into sight, the main building and dozen yellow bungalows scattered along terraced walks and these surrounded by several stands of pine. The trees were peculiar because the hills beyond were mostly bare, and their dusky green color was extraordinary. The hotel had been built by an eccentric British gentleman, Lowry, once a consul and now a quiet and dignified alcoholic. The place never really caught on, perhaps because of its name; there was no casino, nor was there a forest, just the few pines, scrub, juniper, and cactus. But these were the only things that might disappoint. The Hotel Casino de la Selva commanded what might well be the most beautiful view in the world.
Immediately below the terraces were the Islas de Huyñaymarka, Kalahuta, Incas, Suriqui, and Pariti. To the north, visible beyond the narrow Tiquina Straits, were the Island of the Sun and the Island of the Moon. The Inca called these Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, husband and wife, brother and sister, and Titicaca itself was the cradle of the entire universe. That was not hard to believe. In the dusk, the entire place seemed perched on the pinnacle of the world, and the islands jewels in the crown of the setting sun.
Hoyle parked just away from the portico under a stand of pine, and Maria watched the sun edge into the silver vastness beyond the islands. In the three years she had been in Bolivia, Maria had never left the city. She never could have imagined a place like this existed just hours from the crowded, dusty place called La Paz. Maria thought, Enrique would not come here, and then she thought, rather sadly, that perhaps he had always come here.
“I’ll check us in,” Hoyle said.
Maria took her eyes from the sunset and smiled at him.
“Would you like to come in with me? It’s okay.” “Okay” meant that this was a place without judgment, and it was. Lowry cohabitated here famously with an Argentinean opera singer while his wife lived wrathfully in London. The clientele was almost entirely European; more specifically, the guests were almost always members of the diplomatic community. The couples who stayed at the hotel were not always spouses.
“I’ll wait here,” Maria said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Hoyle said.
She found his hand and said, “Thank you for bringing me here.” Her eyes stayed on his, and he bent forward. Her lips touched his lightly, then again, more firmly, and her heart seemed to be beating like a drum in a parade.
THE WALK TO the bungalow was an eternity, and then purgatory on top of that. Maria paced the terrace for the few minutes it took the bellman to set the luggage into the bedrooms, fluff open the curtains, and mumble, “Gracias, Señor,” for the dollars Hoyle pressed into his hand. As the latch clicked behind him, Maria stood rooted by the open doors to the terrace, a cold wind already rising from the lake and the bright red sky of sundown. Hoyle took a step toward her, and he meant to say that there was a bottle in his suitcase, he meant to offer her a drink, her choice of bedrooms, he meant to say anything, but instead the words choked off in his throat and they moved toward each other and his arms went around her waist. Her perfume befuddled him, made him dizzy, and then he felt her lips open on his, he tasted her tongue, and his breathing almost stopped.
Three days ago he had been struck down by bullets, and now he was here. Hoyle could not have been more surprised if he had been dragged into heaven by angels with trumpets.
Maria tilted her head back and turned around in his arms. Hoyle embraced her, his chest against her back and his lips against the back of her neck. He kissed her ears and her cheeks, holding her from behind.
Maria said aloud, not whispering, “This is the most perfect place I have ever been.”
She could feel his arms moving around her waist, and again he kissed her neck. As she turned her head, his lips found hers. He slipped his tongue into her mouth and tasted her kiss, hot and pleasant, and Maria dropped her jacket off her shoulders.
He ran his hands down her sides, down to her narrow little waist, and onto her lovely back. She pressed herself up against him, and they fumbled with each other’s clothing. Zippers and buttons, then straps and elastics and the heady smell of flesh, and Hoy
le felt the heat of her naked breasts against his skin. He touched them first with his fingertips. Touched them where the skin was white and most tender. And then lightly, lightly, his fingertips passed over her nipples, gently over each one. He again kissed her neck, and his tongue ran across her mouth. She felt his hands close over her breasts, cupping them, gently squeezing. And then his hands went down, down her chest, down across her stomach. One hand stopped on her hip, and one hand slid slowly, slowly, onto the mound between her legs.
They tumbled then into one of the beds, a sighing, grunting tangle of limbs. He ran his hands through her dark hair, and kisses were without number. She rolled on top of him; he felt her beautiful thighs opening, and she guided him into her. She gasped and he heard her say his name, once, twice, and he pushed into her. Hoyle pressed against her with his entire weight. A warmth started to spread from her abdomen, and tingling, hot jolts expanded across her body. She clutched her nails into his back and shivered. Maria felt like a million feathers had avalanched over them. Hoyle again kissed her neck, and this time he tasted sweat. He rejoiced in the taste of her. It gave him a primal, wild joy to hear her cry out. And as she climaxed, he pressed her down on the bed and held her tightly.
Now he was beyond anything but desire for her, and he felt her legs shift and the soft caress of thigh around his waist. They had both abandoned reason, thought, tossed away everything but the want of pleasure. She whispered almost in a hiss, “Take me. Take me. Take me.” The words amazed him, electrified him. With this she conquered, lured him to that place where his soul touched hers, and it was chaos and lightning, and he heard her again calling out, and his skin was on fire, and then ten thousand colors of light exploded in his head, and for a split second he was stunned, as baffled as though he had been pulled into a whirlpool. His breath escaped in a long groan, and Maria held on for both of their lives, clutching him, pulling him back from the yawning brink of emptiness.
Killing Che Page 17