The Second Bat Guano War: a Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller

by J. M. Porup

  “Surfing’s better than sex,” he shouted.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Better than drugs! Better than anything!”

  “Oh yeah?” I retorted. “What happens when you’re back on land?”

  He laughed. “That assumes you make it back!”

  He slipped off his board into the water. He grabbed the end of my surfboard and paddled toward shore.

  “The fuck you doing?”

  “When I say go, get up, OK?”

  Another wave swelled. Without warning, a sudden shove launched me into the air—what happened to “When I say go”? But no time to dispute the point now—and I leaped onto the board, and for what seemed like eternity the only thing that mattered was staying upright.

  I had gone surfing once or twice on a high school trip to Tijuana. My memory of the lessons was rather hazy, no doubt due to the quantities of liquor, pot and mescaline I had consumed that weekend, but somehow my feet remembered, my body understood, and the wave picked me up into the air, my arms out, body tense, and bore me toward the shore faster than I had ever gone before.

  The sand got closer, the wave got higher, I began to panic. Now what? How do I make it stop? How do I get off this thing?

  The wave collapsed. My feet left the board and I fell into the surf, crashing sideways into the surfboard, my chest flattened against the hard surface. Pain blossomed in my ribs. Gather ye rosebuds, I thought. I stood in waist-high water, but the following wave knocked me over.

  I swallowed sea water. Coughed, spat brine. I grabbed hold of the board again, ignoring the pain in my side, and floated into shore on the next wave. When I felt my knees hit sand, I picked up the board and walked out of the surf.

  Pitt rode the crest of a monster wave. Must have been three meters, easy. He slid down into the curve beneath the wave, darting sideways through the tube as it collapsed behind him. It looked as though he’d make it all the way to shore, cruising along on the final efforts of the wave, when the sea decided it had seen enough insolence for one day, and crashed down around him.

  He tumbled out of the water, staggering with his board under his arm, feet struggling through the outgoing tide. He pumped his fist in the air. “Wipe out!”

  I waited until he got within non-shouting range. “I think I prefer cocaine.”

  “That’s why we brought a kilo, didn’t we?”

  He grinned, the sand and the sea streaming from his hair, the sun peeking through the gathering clouds to bathe us in its flickering warmth. That grin that said all was right with the world, there could be no wrong, happiness was as simple as a dip in the ocean or a trip to the brothel, and misery too complex to understand. I envied him.

  I stuck my fist out. “Bros forever?”

  “Dude,” he said, and punched my fist so hard it hurt. “Bros forever.”

  Welcome to Happy Frying Pan Store.

  So proclaimed the sign in Spanish, English and Chinese. Although I don’t know Chinese. Maybe it said Buy Cocaine Cheap Shop in that oriental chicken scratch.

  Pitt had wanted coke for our trip up the coast. Insisted on meeting my dealer in person.

  “Never know what they cut it with,” he complained.

  “The stuff you’re snorting now is finest high-mountain nose candy,” I said. “Besides, I’m one of Hak Po’s best customers.”

  But he insisted, so I let him tag along. He waited for me after class, and we took a bus deep into the warehouse and factory district adjoining Lima’s million-strong Chinatown.

  I pushed open the front door. The bell tinkled. A Chinese boy of about twenty lounged behind the counter, picking his fingernails with a knife. He was missing an eye. The remaining orb appraised us quickly: gringos in the wrong part of town.

  “You like fry pan?” he asked in pidgin English. “Very good fry pan.” Piles of cast-iron skillets lay stacked around the shop.

  I chuckled and leaned on the counter. “You must be new. We’re here to see the boss.”

  He held my gaze, his one eye unblinking. “Name?”

  “Horace. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a.”

  The boy closed the hasp of his knife and retreated through a hanging bead doorway.

  Pitt hefted a frying pan. He ran a finger through a thick layer of dust. “Your drug dealer runs a frying pan factory?”

  I shrugged. “Good a cover as any, I suppose.”

  A wizened yellow gnome of a man shuffled through the bead door. The ever-present Cubs cap perched high on his head, exposing his wispy baldness. His sallow face puckered in a grin when he saw me.

  “Hak Po!” I said. I hacked up some phlegm and spat on the floor.

  “How’s my leetle Horsie?” he asked, dangling a finger at crotch level.

  We shook hands and laughed.

  “Friend I want you to meet,” I said.

  He glided around the counter, his black slippers skating across the dust-covered floor. He looked Pitt up and down.

  Pitt grinned and held out his hand. “Horse says you’re the best.”

  Hak Po looked at the hand but did not take it. “Where I see your face before?”

  Pitt’s eyes flickered my way. “I don’t know. My first time here.”

  “You stay.” He pointed at me. “You come.”

  Hak Po shuffle-glided back behind the counter and the little-used cash register.

  Pitt went to follow, but I put a hand on his chest. “Sorry, dude,” I said. “I love you like a brother, but if Hak Po says stay, you stay. Besides,” I said. “Maybe you can find a nice frying pan for your mother or something.”

  “Fat chance I’d ever see her cooking,” he laughed. “But you go on. Don’t worry about it.”

  I stepped around the counter and through the bead door. Hak led me along a dark corridor into the factory. Great cauldrons of liquid iron belched and hissed steam. Workers poured the molten lava into frying pan molds, then plunged the newly created cookware into cold water to temper them. Steam rose in clouds. The din was terrible.

  I’d asked him once, my nose full of coke, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to import cast-iron cookware from China?”

  He had grinned up at me, a spoonful of cocaine ringing the edge of his nose. “I like make fry pan. What wrong with that? You insult my profession, something?”

  “No,” I’d said. “Fry pan good. You good fry pan man.”

  “Yes,” he’d said, snorting his uncut powdered joy. “I very good fry pan man.”

  Hak Po’s office was a small room just off the factory floor. He let me go first. I squeezed through a gauntlet of four filing cabinets and climbed over his desk to take a chair. You didn’t want to slip; Hak Po, as his name suggested, was a spitter, and the floor was covered in a slick coating of slime.

  Hak took a seat and unlocked a filing cabinet. He took out a kilo bag of cocaine and placed it on the desk. I tossed an envelope full of used fifties into his “in” tray and reached for the coke. He stopped me with an open hand.

  “Tell me something, Horse, please.”

  I was itching to get some of that powder in my nose. “Sure, Hak. Anything.”

  “How long you know friend?”

  I shrugged. “Couple months. Long enough. Why?”

  “I know I see him somewhere. No remember where.” He waggled a finger in the air. “He bad man.”

  I laughed. “As am I. As are you.”

  A grunt. “True. But some are more bad than others. You stay away him, hear?”

  “Sure, Hak,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

  He let me taste the coke. It was good. The closest to forgetting I was ever likely to find. I stood and climbed past him over the desk.

  A yellow hand pinched my calf. “You watch yourself now, Horse. You hear? I no like lose good customer.”

  I’d been warned. I should have known better. Alarm bells had gone off the day I met Pitt, but I ignored them.

  I was in the Rat’s Nest trying to pick a fight with a pacifist fucking
general in the Marine Corps. I’d heard an aircraft carrier was in harbor down at Callao, and I went looking for the biggest, meanest-looking grunt I could find.

  I believed in America. Its ideals. But those ideals had become so warped and mangled that nothing was left of them but hypocrisy and lies. The mere thought of living in America again made me sick to my stomach. Better an honest hellhole like Lima than the plastic smile and the knife in the back you’ll get at home. Don’t you tread on me, motherfucker.

  “You oughtta be ashamed of yourself,” I told him. “Killing innocent women and children for a living.” I spat on his uniform.

  He wiped the loogie from his jacket and stood up. “I’ve met your kind before,” he sneered. “Traitors like you in every port in the world. Not good enough for your own country.” He turned to go. “You’re not worth the time it takes to piss on.”

  “Well God bless America and pass the apple pie,” I said, and took a swing at him.

  He blocked the blow easily, and sent a devastating punch my way. I closed my eyes and waited for impact, savoring in advance the coming stars. They never came. I peeked. His fist hovered in midair inches from my nose.

  A crunching sound of broken bone. The man howled in pain. His forearm bent over the bar at an unnatural angle.

  “Bye-bye,” a new voice said, and a man took the general’s barstool. He looked far too young and blond and happy to be sitting there in that filthy bar, chuckling to himself as the marine limped from the room, clutching his broken arm to his chest.

  “The fuck are you doing?” I shouted over the noise of the bar.

  “Saving your ass by the looks of things,” he said. “Name’s Pitt. Buy you a drink?” To the barman: “Dos cervezas, por favor.”

  “Make mine a bottle of pisco,” I hollered. “And who are you to get involved?”

  Pitt cracked his knuckles. “That guy was going to beat you up.”

  “Yes. I know. That was the point?”

  The pisco came. Pitt poured me a shot. I took the bottle and drained it in one long swallow.

  “Thirsty,” he said, and rested his chin on his fist. “You want another or should I just tape a ‘Rob Me’ sign to your forehead?”

  “Fuck off, will you?” I said. “You’ve already ruined my evening.” I looked around the room. None of the other crew off the USS Asswipe seemed incline to brawl. Not with Pitt at my side. I slid off my barstool, feeling unsteady. “Now I’ll have to go somewhere else to get beaten up.”

  Pitt drank his beer and laughed. “You are weird, dude. Why on earth do you want to get beaten up?”

  My liquor tolerance was pretty high but even I was struggling to process an entire bottle of pisco. The stuff was raw local brandy, as nasty as it gets. I held on to the bar to steady myself. “Because I deserve it,” I said to a puddle of beer on the bar. I sat down and covered my face with my hands.

  He slapped me on the back. “What can you possibly have done to deserve that?”

  So I told him. I tell everyone. I love to watch their faces change. The horror when they hear what I have done.

  When I was finished, he just laughed. “Dude,” he said, “that’s nothing. Don’t be such a fucking wuss. How can you feel guilty about something as stupid as that?”

  The world was spinning now. “Wouldn’t you?” I managed to croak. I reached for my soap dish to righten the good ship Horsie.

  “I do that kind of shit before breakfast sometimes,” he said. “And I sleep like a baby. Um, sorry,” he said, catching my expression of pain. “You know what I mean.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, snorting cocaine up my nose until my septum bled. “Tell me all about your pre-breakfast guilt-free ways.”

  “I’m CIA,” he said breezily. “An enforcer. Part of the Dissent Suppression Unit.”

  “And I’m the King of Spain. I dub thee, Sir Stranger Who Must Now Fuck Off.” And I collapsed into giggles.

  He pinched my neck. A sharp pain shot down my spine. “I kill people for a living, dickwad,” he said. “You hear about the murders in Iquitos last week?”

  I squawked an affirmative, his hand still on my neck.

  “That was me. Strangled three dissidents with their own intestines. Roasted their nuts over an open fire. They were tasty.” His smacked his lips close to mine. “Fucking villagers didn’t want us drilling for oil. Thought it might ruin their precious fucking habitat. Guess what?” He laughed beer smell in my face. “We run this country. We don’t put up with that shit from nobody. You get in our way, you object to our policy, you protest our raping your country for money? Dead. Tortured. Disappeared.”

  He let go of my neck, and I sat back, rubbing my spine.

  “Decapitate dissent,” he said. “That’s what I do. Literally. Kill the leaders, and the sheep will follow.” He ticked off on his fingers. “Union organizers. Indigenous leaders. Hoity-toity academics who can’t be blackmailed or bullied. Artists. Writers. Opposition politicians. We make them go away.” He thumped his chest. “And I am a one-man disappearing team. I will kill, torture, maim, rape, sodomize, cannibalize and terrorize until you fucking obey, you stupid fucking Peruvians.” He leaned back in his chair with a smile. He drank his beer, then held it to his cheek and grinned broadly. “But after a hard day’s work, it’s time for an ice-cold Bud. Don’t you agree?”

  I stared at him. It was bizarre. This golden boy, this Greek god spewing such filth…he didn’t look like he was joking. “If that’s the case, how come you’re telling me all this? Isn’t that, you know, like, classified?”

  “You wearing a wire?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because if you were I’d have to kill you.” He swigged his beer and grinned again.

  From the depths of my soul came a reply: “You are either a liar or a psychopath.”

  He swallowed suds and wagged a finger. “Sociopath, actually. Company shrink said so.”

  Turned out he wasn’t a liar.

  THREE

  The sign said No Smoking. I lit a cigarette.

  Two blue leather sofas glistened at right angles in the waiting room. Paintings of mountains long since gouged flat regarded me mournfully from the wall. Above them blazoned the coat of arms of Anglo-Dutch Mining, Ltd.: two unicorns rampant over a field of poppies. Four clocks ticked in unison, alerting the visitor to the current hour in London, Johannesburg, Melbourne and Lima.

  Behind the yacht of a reception desk, its skipper, a twenty-something albino with her hair in a bun, tapped daintily at a computer. Her unfettered nipples ogled me through a tight red twinset. She glanced up from time to time, caught me staring at her. Those pink eyes made me think of rats. She’d greeted me with a polite “buenos días,” but switched to English when she heard my gringo accent. “Hey, you a Merkan?” she twanged. The South Florida accent made me want to hurl. “How’s it going? How do you like Peru?” She giggled. “Isn’t it just wonderful down here?”

  Santana’s “American Woman” played in my head on endless loop. I blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “You need to put that out.” She snapped her pale fingers at the sign.

  The imperial finger snap made me want to wrench her arm from its socket and beat her over the head with it. My first wife used to do the same. Fuck her. And fuck her whole half of the species, especially the American ones.

  At our son’s second birthday party Mrs. Bossy had snapped her fingers in my face and announced in front of all the company that she was divorcing me and suing for child support. Oh—and that the child wasn’t mine, but my best friend Larry’s.

  “Child support?” I’d asked my lawyer. “Is she joking?”

  “Nope,” he’d said with a chuckle. “According to the law, you got two years to order a paternity test. After that, doesn’t matter if it’s yours or not.” He aimed his pencil at my head. “You’re on the line for the next sixteen years, bucko.”

  I heaved myself from my seat with a squish of leather and approached the yacht, cigarette betwe
en my lips. Ash dribbled onto the spotless marble. I exhaled smoke through my nose.

  “I can suck myself off,” I said. “Wanna see?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  You better be, cunt, I thought. You and all your kind.

  “I need to see Sergio. You want to see me do it. Get your girlfriends, make some popcorn.”

  “What? I—no.” Her ghostly face flushed crimson. “Are you crazy? I told you, Mr. Salazar is in a—”

  “You’ll regret it if you don’t.” I unzipped my jeans, tooth by tooth. The noise echoed in the sterile waiting room.

  She closed her mouth. Glanced at my crotch. Picked up the phone.

  Fucking slut.

  That morning I sat in bed for a long while, smoking cigarettes. Lynn had spent the night. A first. Went to great lengths to change my mind. Didn’t even complain when the cockroaches crawled into bed with us. When I woke up screaming, rats clawing at a baby in my arms, she hushed me, stroked my face, held me against a silicon breast. I wondered what she’d tell her husband. I spent the night fucking your former agent’s brains out. Why? So he’d help me find my son. You remember him. Pitt?

  Pitt, I thought. Goddamn Pitt. Only friend I’d had down here in Lima. Or thought I had. Serves him right. After what he did? No. He can get fucked.

  I extinguished the cigarette against my left nipple. Lit another. “End the guilt.” That’s what the email had said. Pitt had found a way to end the guilt. Pitt! With a conscience! Just the idea made me want to laugh.

  He was everything I hated in the world. So why did I love him so much? Even now, after he betrayed me. How can you love someone you hate?

  Maybe because, compared to him, I felt like a good person. He was a reminder that there were worse people in the world than myself. Truth be told I was jealous of his lack of conscience. What freedom he must feel! Not to be weighed down by ten tons of baggage like me.

  Why had a murderous sociopath like Pitt wanted to hang around a sad sack of shit like me? God only knew. A source for his coke, I suppose. Although cocaine wasn’t exactly hard to come by in Peru. Hell, the country produced more of the stuff nowadays than Colombia did. Pitt had used me, of course. Of course. On my first, last and only mission for the CIA, thank God. But I could think of a dozen other people with the right access for that op. Why did he pick me?