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

by J. M. Porup

  I guess I was his audience. He liked to get high before going on a killing spree, murdering dissidents and protestors, whatever he did for a living. Then he’d fly into town and we’d go out drinking and whoring. He’d tell me about his latest atrocities.

  His stories always made me feel better.

  Pitt was one sick, twisted fuck. If his conscience had suddenly clicked on, then he was staggering around with a helluva load.

  I burned another cigarette into the multilayered scar that covered my body. Winced in joy at the pain. I could still smell Lynn’s aging pussy in the sheets. The crusty spot where we’d ground together scratched against my thigh. I touched the divot in the lumpy pillow at my side.

  No. I had to find Pitt. Had to find out what he meant by “end the guilt.” But not for her. For me. I wanted to know what he meant.

  Had to know.

  The glass security door clicked open. A bulldozer of a Latino plowed into the waiting room. He wore a sky-blue bulletproof vest over flowing robes of yellow and scarlet, like Buddhist monks wear in Tibet. One arm rested on the shotgun draped across his chest. His head gleamed from a recent encounter with a razor, and he stank of cheap aftershave.

  He put his palms together, bowed to me. “Shanti,” he said. “Peace.” He straightened up and his voice coarsened. “You got something to say?”

  “To Sergio, yes.”

  “Shanti,” he said again. “We are one. Mr. Salazar and me.”

  “And I. One what?”

  “He see what I see. Hear what I hear.”

  “Sees what you see. Hears what you hear.” I ground out my cigarette on the marble countertop. “And if that’s the case, he must be blind, deaf and stupid. C’mon.”

  I held out my arms and spread my legs. The guard’s lips puckered. He swung a fist at my face. I flinched. He patted my cheek. Laughed.

  “It is lucky for you that I am a pacifist.” His hands fondled me in all the wrong places. “What is this?”

  He held up a rusty hammer with a rubber grip. I’d filched it from the butcher’s shop downstairs and washed the blood off. I’d seen them using it the day before to make their cat’n’dog patties.

  “A gift for Sergio,” I said. “Something I thought he might like.”

  The man grinned, but did not return the hammer. He gripped it low at his side, tense, as though expecting me to make a move. The receptionist buzzed the security door. The bulldozer del día charged through, held the door open for me.

  “Nice meeting you,” the receptionist said. She undid her hair, let it fall to her chest. Her nipples peeked through the cascade of white.

  “Nice tits,” I said.

  She laughed. “Let me know, I’ll get the popcorn ready.” She slid a business card across the counter.

  I picked up the card. Her horny pink rat’s eyes devoured my disgusting exterior. When did I last take a shower? Much less wash my clothes. Why would any woman want to be with me, unless I paid her? For that matter, why did Lynn? Beat the hell out of me. I tore the card in half, then half again, and let the pieces flutter to the floor.

  “You do that,” I said.

  The glass door clicked shut. The air quality inside the office was good. Too good. My lungs didn’t know what to do. I coughed, tasted Lima traffic on my tongue. I spat on a plastic plant.

  “Wait here.” My escort pointed to an unoccupied cubicle. He fiddled with a security panel and disappeared through a door.

  I sat down. How long had it been since I’d last seen Sergio? Couple of months? No. Longer. More recent than my last shower, anyway. Our paths had crossed a couple of times, but he was more Pitt’s friend than mine. That, and Pitt’s boss. At least the one Pitt told people about.

  Sergio’s a nothing. A nobody. My dad and I run this country. And we run Anglo-Dutch Mining, too.

  Blue canvas fuzz lined the wall. In nearby cubicles phones rang. Bodiless voices answered. Unseen fingers typed on unseen keyboards. Ambitious tongues, sharpened for the kill, slurped on half-empty mugs of coffee. I clutched my stomach, suddenly nauseous.

  Cubicle slavery, American-style. You couldn’t escape it, no matter how far you flew. My first wife had tried to keep me in my job. When I refused to pay child support, she garnished my paycheck. I quit my job. Withdrew all my cash. Strapped it to my thighs, bought a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires. They stopped me at the airport and took my passport. Confiscated the money, gave it to her and her brat.

  I would be a slave to no man. And no fucking woman, either. So I did what anyone would have done in my situation. I fled across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Passed wetbacks going north. “Are you crazy?” I shouted. “Go home! Freedom lies the other way!” But they ignored me, and plodded onward to their new careers as America’s de facto slaves.

  I hitchhiked my way south, teaching English along the way. Picked up a fake passport, good enough to get me through Central America. Somehow wound up in Peru.

  I met Kate. Things were looking up. Life was getting good again. We had a dream and we were building it, piece by piece. Until the evil God who runs the universe intervened, and decided I’d had my fill of happiness.

  A man in polyester pants walked by, humming to himself. He propped a cardboard box on one hip, tapped a security code into a nearby panel and walked through the same door as the bulldozer. I could stand no more of this office bondage. Minions, be damned! I caught the door before it shut, pushed my way into the room.

  Fifteen men in tailored suits looked up from their laptops. Their pasty faces drooped, puffy with excess. I recognized three of them from the brothel circuit. Glasses and watches and tie pins glittered under the fluorescent lights, battle regalia of the modern warrior.

  The man with the cardboard box turned, opened his mouth and put the box down in midair. The box fell, exploding in a shower of manila folders. He scrambled to pick them up. Bulldozer grabbed me by the collar of my dirty brown sweater. I spotted Sergio at the end of the conference table. His dark Andean complexion and gray ponytail were hard to miss.

  “Sergio!” I waved. “So good to see you again!”

  “You know this man?” asked a portly gent in a three-piece suit, caressing his pinstripes.

  Sergio removed a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his gray alpaca suit. He patted his forehead. “I can’t be expected to know every homeless in Lima, now can I?”

  Dipstick here’s a useful puppet. Looks Indian enough to keep the locals happy. In private he takes orders like everyone else. Hello, I’m Sergio! I’m a sock puppet! Will you be my friend?

  The bulldozer tightened his grip and yanked me toward the door. “Shanti,” he grunted. “This hurts me more than it does you.”

  “The bathhouse,” I said, ignoring the guard’s feverish cultic pantings. “You don’t remember, Sergio? You and me, the three Brazilians? That amazing daisy chain?”

  “My dear boy, this city is not the place to be telling lies.” Sergio nodded to my escort, who reached for the door handle. “Libel law in Peru may not be very strong, it is true, but then neither is the criminal code.” He put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. “You don’t want to know how much Shanti here bench-presses.”

  “You mean that’s his name?” I said, and regretted it. Shanti gripped me around the waist, lifted me off the ground and heaved me from the room. I clung to the door frame. “Alright,” I said, “stop pretending you don’t know me, and I’ll stop pretending we’re lovers.”

  “What is this about?” The portly gent stroked his waddle.

  “The disappearance of Pitt Watters,” I said. “And will you get this goon off me?” Shanti was even now prying my fingers one by one from the door frame, mumbling prayers of penance as he did so.

  Sergio lifted his chin and the brutal bending stopped.

  The man at his side said, “Pitt what? What who?” Fingers pinched loose neck fat now, measuring and testing its elasticity. The other men sat silently, watching me.

  “Pitt Watters,”
I said again. “Your employee? The American ambassador’s son?”

  I remember the first time I met Sergio. Pitt and I had arranged to go to a new strip club. Something New, Pitt called it, in his never-ending quest for novel and peculiar pleasures.

  Life is pleasure, he’d hoot after his third hooker for the night. So what if it kills you? Quality, not quantity! Who wants to get old and wrinkly, anyway?

  I got to the club first. A leather-clad dominatrix led me to a table, cracked a whip in the air to attract the waitress’s attention.

  The waitress came over, swinging her hips from side to side, her body encased from nipples to knees in latex. They didn’t have any pisco, so I ordered a bottle of cheap Scotch and some ice. I shoved a wad of play money down her cleavage, told her to show my friends the table when they arrived. When she’d gone, I slipped into the bathroom and snorted coke off a urine-stained toilet seat.

  I emerged to find Pitt in a manly embrace with a guy in a Phantom of the Opera mask. They assailed each other with mutual toasts of brotherly love: elbows wide, chins high, white teeth glistening, glasses sloshing with drink. The look of pure friendship Pitt beamed at his new companion made my stomach twist in acid convulsions. And what was with the mask?

  “Horse!” Pitt yelled across the room, motioned me over. Half the assembled perverts turned to look. “Friend of mine!” he shouted in the man’s ear, despite a lull in the music. His voice rang hollow in the cavernous space.

  “You say so. You Sergio?” I filled my glass, nibbled at my Scotch.

  “Guilty as charged.” He stabbed an open hand at my abdomen, tilted his head so that his voice drooled from his nostrils. “They call me The Silver Fox.”

  I took his hand. It was moist, like a tepid vanilla pudding. “Most people just call me an asshole.”

  A brown finger flecked with long black hairs pointed at my head. Sergio’s mouth opened in a soundless laugh.

  “What’s with the mask?” I asked.

  He winked at me. “Let’s just say, a man in my position does not wish to be identified.”

  I regarded him calmly. “Did your momma drop you on your head, or were you born that way?”

  “What way?”

  I dangled my Scotch from a limp wrist. “The mask only covers half your face?”

  He laid a hand on my arm. “My friend, you would be surprised what this mask hides.”

  He was short and dark. Bolivian dark. Fifty-something, gray ponytail that lingered halfway down his back. A scar snaked across one hand, disappeared under the cuff of his white silk shirt. He was tie-less, and wore a wool suit, the same shade as his hair, buttoned tight against his paunch. He stooped as he sat, shoulders hunched, like a gnarled tree, warped by wind and rain, unable to stand straight.

  Pitt caressed my shoulder, gave a squeeze. “Daddy bought him a pretty accent, don’t you think?”

  Sergio’s nasal passages echoed with the studied irreverence of Eton and Oxford. In his face you could barely note his father’s blood, the millionaire Russian Jew who’d sired him off an itinerant Bolivian maid. The Russian took care of his flock of bastard children, Pitt had said, and Sergio had done well. As South American executive of Anglo-Dutch Mining, Sergio was considered by many the next logical choice for CEO of the South Africa-based mining conglomerate.

  And Pitt, as chief engineer at Anglo-Dutch’s lithium mine in Bolivia, was acknowledged as Sergio’s heir apparent.

  I looked around the club for faces I might know. When gringos meet in Latin dens of vice, there is instant camaraderie. Men whose names I didn’t know, histories I didn’t share, with whom I’d never exchanged a word, would look up from haggling with the girl at their side and lift a chin, an eyebrow, a salute of mutual appreciation that said: I found freedom too. Aren’t we both glad we left?

  But there were no other gringos here today, except for the three of us, so I communed with my liquid friend from Scotland. Pitt elbowed me in the ribs. Sergio was saying something.

  “What do you do?”

  “English teacher,” I grunted.

  Sergio stroked his upper lip. “I see.”

  “Do you?” I drained my glass, felt the liquor burn its way into my body.

  “It’s honest work.”

  “Honest?” I said. “I teach English to criminals so they can cheat tourists. You call that honest?”

  Sergio’s pudding hand wobbled, threatening to spill his drink. “Not for you to judge your clients, if what you offer them is honest.”

  BDSM was not my thing, and people who lie to themselves pissed me off. What I do is wrong. Don’t lie to me about my crimes. Don’t lie to yourself. I tapped Pitt on the elbow, opened my mouth to suggest we move on, but just then the lights dimmed and a woman strode onto the stage.

  Peruvian strip clubs aren’t the same as American ones, with their no-touching bullshit. Here that was the point. The stripping was merely advertising for the services offered out back, in the row of small rooms that invariably smelled of disinfectant, maintained by an army of maids. I often wondered about the maids. No matter how many brothels Pitt and I visited, banging away in adjacent rooms, the walls thin enough to hear each other come, I never saw the ones who cleaned up the mess.

  “Who deserves some pain?” asked the MC, a thin, dark-skinned woman with bleach-blonde hair. She wore a tangerine bra, panty and garter set, and every pair of eyes gobbled up the sliver of fabric between her thighs. Her pear-shaped breasts hung pendulous, ripe fruit ready to be plucked. I settled into my chair. Perhaps I’d stick around, after all.

  Two women dressed in leather unitards and black spike-heeled boots carried an apparatus onto the stage. It looked like a bizarre exercise machine. Wrist restraints hung from above, ankle restraints protruded from below. Another woman stepped from the shadows, her eyes masked. The whip she trailed in one hand curled around the points of her six-inch stiletto heels. She lifted her arm, cracked the whip against the stage floor. The sound of leather on wood echoed in the lofty space. The audience shifted in their seats.

  “No one here’s been naughty?” purred the tangerine-pantied MC. “No one here’s a—” and she breathed the words, almost a sigh, “—a bad boy?”

  Sergio thrust his arm in the air, fingers spread wide, hand twitching, a first grader eager to please. Pick me! Pick me! A spotlight swung around from the ceiling, engulfed our table. I shielded my eyes with my palm.

  Sergio stepped across Pitt’s lap, walked down the aisle and hopped onto the stage. The light followed him. The MC smiled her kindergartner grin, helped him shrug the jacket from his shoulders. Two women in leather unitards laid light fingertips on his biceps, directed him where to stand. He faced the audience. They smiled and spun him back the other way. The audience tittered.

  The woman on his right lowered the restraints from above, attached them to his wrists. The other nudged his feet apart and strapped in his ankles. They cranked the restraints tight, so that his arms and legs were fully extended, a man frozen in the middle of a jumping jack.

  A crack of the whip made me flinch in my chair. The dominatrix stepped forward. She curled her fingers around the back of his shirt collar, looked over her shoulder at the audience, and grinned. With one fierce movement she ripped the garment from his body. The sleeves hung loose from his arms. The crowd murmured when they saw his back. White scar tissue formed deep rivulets from neck to waist. I stifled a gasp. It reminded me of looking in the bathroom mirror. At thousands of small white circles cratering my own flesh.

  I leaned sideways toward Pitt. “This place wasn’t your idea then.”

  “I thought you might enjoy it,” he whispered.

  “You thought what?”

  Pitt gestured around at the club. “All your guilty conscience crap. Isn’t this what you’re after?”

  I sighed. I had tried to explain the concept of a conscience to him hundreds of times in the few months we had known each other, but had long since given up. “I don’t want pleasure through pain,�
� I said. “I want pain through pain. There’s a difference?”

  “I dunno,” he said, sipping his Scotch. He nodded at Sergio on stage. “Those scars don’t look like much fun to me.”

  A crack of the whip demanded silence. The audience held its breath. The dominatrix began to work. Quick nips elicited gasps from Sergio. Red welts formed—low down on his love handles, high up on his shoulders. Her aim was flawless: she never hit the same place twice. She paused, posed for the audience: demure.

  Sergio twitched. “What are you doing? Why are you stopping?”

  Beneath the mask, a smile flickered on her lips. She cast her eyes at the floor.

  Sergio heaved at the restraints, arched his back. “Do it!” he screamed at the ceiling. “Don’t stop! Please!”

  The next blow hit him square in the middle of his back, all her strength aiming the whip at his spine. The skin broke. Sergio groaned.

  I fidgeted in my seat. The dominatrix slashed at his back with her whip, taking ten-second breaks between each blow. Sergio’s noises of satisfaction became whimpers. Blood smeared, splattered with each stroke, trickled along the scarred waterways of his back into the seat of his pants. The remnants of his shirt turned scarlet.

  “Oh God,” he panted, his head on his chest, “give it to me. All of it. All that I deserve.”

  I swallowed my glass of Scotch. It tasted bad. I had never felt less aroused. Maybe Pitt was right. Was this what I was like? But I didn’t enjoy the pain. Pain hurt. I’m not some kind of pervert. Pain was what I deserved.

  All that I deserve.

  But that’s what he’d just said. It wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be. I fingered the two bits of paper in my pocket. I carried them with me everywhere. A picture and a postcard. I took out the postcard, bent it to catch the light. The front showed a photo of Lake Titicaca. I flipped it over to the handwritten scrawl on the back, even though I had long since memorized it. Pitt snatched the card from my hands.