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

by J. M. Porup

  “Pieu, pieu, pieu! You’re dead!”

  The oldest child, a pretty black boy of six or seven, had discovered me, and was assassinating me with a Lego automatic.

  I nodded. “Sometimes I wish I was.”

  “Were.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Sometimes you wish you were. Mommy taught me that.” He glowed up at Janine. “Right, Mommy?”

  She patted his shoulder. “Good boy, Jerome. Go play with your brother and sister, OK?”

  Thus dispatched, the errant space fighter detached itself from the mothership, ran in circles about the great hall, firing imaginary projectiles at all manner of objects, stationary and otherwise, and pronounced them dead on sight.

  The infant renewed its complaint with mounting volume. Her cries were knives in my ears. Against my will, my feet carried me to the crib. I bent over the railing. Red-faced, screaming, the little one beat her tiny fists against the mattress. Six months old or so. Same age as Lili…

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  Janine stood at my side. “Esmeralda.”

  I sniffed. “I think she needs her diaper changed.”

  “I’m a bad mother and a lousy wife,” she said, and crossed her arms. “Anything else you want to know?”

  “Whoa,” I said, hands out. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Then how did you mean it?”

  “I just hate to see a baby cry is all.”

  “Fine.” Janine shrugged. “You wanna change her?”

  The little girl looked so much like my own. “Would you mind?”

  “Whatever turns you on.”

  I hadn’t touched a baby since La Paz. Something drew me to her. Because she was Pitt’s? Because she needed a fresh diaper? Or because she suffered, and there was something I could do to make it better? Her tears were for the whole world, even if she didn’t know it yet.

  Janine looked on with amusement. When I finished, her only comment was, “You’ve done that before.”

  I wiped my hands and dried the baby’s face. Her crying subsided. I chucked Esmeralda under the chin. She gurgled happily and squeezed my finger.

  “Some grip,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, she’ll need it to keep herself a husband.”

  Janine walked over to a black leather sofa, her silk bustling with the movement. She sat down. The leather creaked. She patted the seat next to her.

  I remained standing. “You mind I ask you something?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “I didn’t know Pitt was a Muslim,” I said.

  “He’s not.”

  “But you are?”

  “Catholic, actually.” She laughed, a bitter sound. “You mean the sheet.”

  I eased myself onto the sofa. She snuggled against me. Pitt had married Mrs. Mile-a-Minute. I put my arm around her. I could smell her, a brassy mixture of sex and sweat. An exercise bicycle stood near a shuttered window, a damp towel draped across the handlebars. From under her niqab, a buzzing noise whirred and throbbed, like a cell phone on vibrate.

  “Pitt is often away.”

  “Yes?” I said, jarred from my reverie.

  “I find I have a certain…effect on men.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I have a similar effect on women.”

  She tilted her chin up at me. “Do you?”

  I brought my lips close to hers. “You tell me.”

  An instant before our lips touched, she turned away. “I’m not being vain,” she said. “I’m just saying. I want to be faithful. You understand?”

  I sat back. So tiresome, these games. “I thought you said you were a lousy wife.”

  “Oh, I am.”

  An awkward silence fell between us, two satellites circling the planet Pitt, and abruptly sent crashing together. She ground her hips into the sofa. The buzzing noise continued.

  “You need to get that?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Just let me turn it off.”

  One arm disappeared under her robes. She lifted her butt. The buzzing got louder. Her arm emerged from a sleeve bearing a two-pronged violet vibrator. She plunked it on the coffee table. Flipped a switch. The buzzing ceased.

  “Sometimes it goes on all by itself,” she explained.

  The dildo stank with juices from both holes. “Does it,” I said.

  “So.” She clapped her hands together. “You’re yes-no-sort-of-with-the-company.” Her eyes twinkled. I could hear her mocking grin.

  I wrenched my gaze away from the soaking sex toy. “Which company would that be?”

  “Anglo-Dutch. Who else?” She propped her hidden chin on one hand. Her blank stare convinced me she knew nothing of Pitt’s clandestine calling.

  “No,” I said. “We used to work together, but not anymore. We’re just friends.”

  Janine laughed, long peals of ejaculating merriment.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Guess how long I’ve known Pitt.”

  “No idea.”

  “Senior year at Vassar.”

  “Which is?”

  “Eight years. I tell you where we met you’ll laugh.”

  “Try me.”

  “A strip club.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Stuffed a hundred-dollar bill inside my thong.”

  “And that was that.”

  “It was.”

  I put a hand on her knee. “I’d like to stuff more than that inside your thong.”

  She leaned into me, trailed a thumbnail along my thigh. A bolt of lightning stiffened my back, cracked my neck sideways. I pulled away.

  Down, boy. Down!

  “And in all that time,” she continued, delighting in my torment, “I have never known him to have a friend of any kind.”

  “No?” I struggled to keep my voice steady.

  “Drinking buddies, maybe. Work mates, sure. Fellow students. Roommates.” She observed me from behind her veil, her eyes the inscrutable blue of a Siberian husky. She withdrew her fingernail from my leg, and I sighed, a victim of the Inquisition released momentarily from torment. “But never a friend.”

  I snorted, coughed up a wad of traffic-tasting phlegm. I swallowed it. “We aren’t friends.”

  “But you are. I can tell.”

  “That is,” I said, and held out an open palm, “we aren’t anymore.”

  “I see,” she said. And looked at me.

  I felt compelled to complete the thought. “He used me.”

  “Of course.”

  “He does that, does he?”

  “But here you are, looking for him. Why is that?”

  “I—” The words caught in my throat.

  Why was I looking for him? End the guilt, of course. Find out what he meant. And then? Once I find him and we’re standing face to face? Tell him to go to hell. What else was there? This wasn’t about him. It was about me. I was a self-centered bastard and didn’t care who knew it, and this woman’s questions were getting on my nerves.

  She said, “You love him, don’t you.”

  “I what?”

  “You love him. You love Pitt.”

  “I’m not gay.”

  “I never said you were.”

  Love. Love was giving your girl the big beefy injection. Cooing over tiny humans caused by said beefy injection. Bald, half-naked cults that meditated on the Ganges. You might as well go catch a fucking cloud.

  “Fuck love,” I said. “You just met me. What do you know.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  I’d had enough of this game. She didn’t know anything. And even if she did—there had to be some easier way to find Pitt. I got up. “You don’t know where he is, just say so.” I walked toward the door.

  “You didn’t even think to ask?”

  My stride faltered. “So you know where I can find him?”

  She giggled and clasped her knees. “No idea.”

  “Well then.” I made a beeline to the exit.

 
She called after me, “No one else is going to care.”

  That struck home. I stopped. Beneath the table, the oldest child was demonstrating to the others how to pick up the cat by the tail. The cat made no complaint.

  “No one likes me,” I said. “I am not a nice man.”

  “I’m sure you’re not.”

  “I’m an asshole. Scum.”

  “If you say so.”

  I sighed. “But Pitt liked me. Or pretended to.”

  Get out of my head! I wanted to scream. Now who was toying with who?

  “Why would he pretend?” she asked.

  “I have been disappointed too many times by too many people.” I thought of La Paz. What happened to Lili. People I had trusted wrongly. Dozens of them in my past. But for reasons I could not fathom, Horse the Master Cynic got suckered in again and again, and every time the betrayal felt like the first time.

  I ran a hand across my face. “But with Pitt, it was like…” I shrugged, began again. “The one time, the only time I ever—”

  “Loved another human being.”

  “Used me. I was nothing to him. Nothing.” I paced the room. I raised a clenched fist, nearly crashed it into a mirror hanging from a nearby staircase. “A tool.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I wouldn’t be too sure.”

  “And you know what the worst thing is?” I rushed on before she could stop me. “I knew it was going to happen. I could see it coming a mile away. It was like watching a train wreck and being unable to stop it. I mean the man told me the day we met, for chrissakes.”

  “Told you what?”

  If she didn’t know, I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news. “The kind of man he is.”

  “And now you want to find him.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “Yes.”

  “Need to find him.”

  I hung my head. “Yes.”

  “I understand.”

  I studied her. Was this part of her seduction? Turn shrink and psych me out? She wanted to fuck my mind as well as my body. That is verboten in Horse Land.

  “Do you?”

  “I am his…” she paused, bit her lip. “That is, in my dark moments, when he is not around, I call myself his secret shadow.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I have done him wrong.” She laughed, and the sound seemed to conceal great sadness. “A lousy wife, remember?” She gestured at the children, none of whose various skin tones matched Pitt’s striking blond Nordic features. “I take what scraps of love I can, and for that I am grateful.”

  I sat down next to her again. “Has he called? An email? Letter, anything?”

  “Sergio called from Anglo-Dutch. ‘On special assignment’ was all he said.”

  I exhaled through my nose. Lit a cigarette. A cloud of smoke rose in the air. Maybe it would be enough to keep her at arm’s length. Doubtful.

  “Nothing else?”

  “His Highness came by.”

  “Ambo.”

  She laughed and sucked in a lungful of secondhand smoke. “Pitt taught you that too.”

  “And?”

  “Said the mining company wouldn’t talk to him. Wanted to know had I heard from Pitt.”

  “Had you?”

  “No. But then I don’t usually. Ambo asked me to call if I heard anything.”

  “So Pitt said nothing, where he might have gone?”

  The children under the table were inserting matches in the cat’s anus. The animal arched its tail to allow for greater access.

  Janine sat back against the sofa. She laid one forearm across her belly, tightening the thin silk across her breasts. “He had to go find himself,” she said softly. “I had to let him go.”

  “Go where?” My anger was seeping away, replaced by frustration.

  “Does it matter?”

  I took a long drag on the cigarette, let the cancerous smoke trickle from my lungs.

  One child, the oldest again, scraped a match against the box. It failed to light. He scraped it again. The third time it caught. The cat looked around, curious, nosed the boy’s hand. The child held the flame to the match heads. There was a flash of sulfur, and the cat’s tail caught fire. The animal yowled and ran across the room, the movement fanning the flames that spread across its body.

  Janine reached behind the sofa and came up with a fire extinguisher. She tracked the cat, like shooting skeet, and let go a blast of white powder that coated the animal in white sugar frosting. Snookums dove under a recliner, trying to escape its tiny tormentors. The fire extinguisher returned to its appointed post behind the sofa with a hollow clunk.

  “Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  She walked to a corner of the house, strode down a narrow corridor. She unlocked a side room. I followed after her, and she closed the door.

  An unmade king-size bed sprawled across the empty room. Bookshelves overflowed, their contents in disarray. Empty beer bottles stood on a nightstand. A rolltop desk sat open in a corner, its pigeonholes stuffed with papers. One corner of the room was coated in dry vomit. The stink of stomach acid and rotting, half-digested bits of food filled the room.

  “Tell me something, Horse,” she said.

  She unlatched the chain that held the veil across her face. She dangled the silk between two fingers. Let it slip to the floor. If her eyes were astonishing, her face doubled the effect. Angular features formed the platinum setting those burnings balls of sapphire deserved.

  I shuddered. I put the cigarette in the corner of my mouth and ran a thumb along the bookshelf. Plato. Nietzsche. Sartre. Augustine. Camus.

  I said, “Shoot.”

  “Am I beautiful?”

  I pulled out a well-thumbed copy of Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death. “Didn’t know Pitt was into philosophy.”

  She clucked her tongue. “He’s not.”

  “No?”

  “Or wasn’t. Until recently.”

  “What happened?”

  She sighed. “I was a philosophy major. About a month ago he asked to borrow all my books from college.”

  I laughed. “Pitt can barely read.”

  She shook her head, the blue fire keeping me in its sights. “Pitt always tells people that. He’s a speed reader. Could do it faster than anyone I’ve ever met. Went through all my books in a week.”

  “Any idea why?”

  She shrugged. “Afterward, he got drunk and puked in the corner.”

  “I can see that.”

  Her lips lifted in a half-smile. “The smell reminds me of him.”

  I put Søren back in his place, crouched to check out the bottom shelf.

  She said, “You going to answer my question?”

  A lump throbbed in my throat. I swallowed hard. “What was the question again?”

  “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

  “Pitt must have thought so. He married you, didn’t he?” A copy of Crime and Punishment lay sideways on top of the bottom shelf. I pulled it out.

  “Then can you tell me—why did he prefer to sleep in here, alone?”

  The sound of swishing silk, a judge’s robes as he enters the courtroom. I stood in time to catch the final ounce of niqab sliding to her feet. Janine stood naked in a pile of silk.

  She was beautiful. Too beautiful. Breasts to melt the resolve of the mightiest sinner, hips that twitched, waiting for hands to command them. A long full head of soft brown hair curved at her throat, tickled her collarbone. Four kids didn’t show.

  The cigarette burned my lips. I spat it out and crushed it with my shoe. “Thought you said you didn’t want to cheat.”

  “The spirit is willing, but the flesh…”

  I swallowed. “The flesh.”

  “The flesh,” she agreed, eyeing my crotch.

  I tried not to look at her body. “You could always pray for strength,” I suggested at last.

  She shook her head, a triumphant smile on her lips. “I pray. But no help ever comes. Why do you
think that is?”

  “Maybe you’ve stopped trying,” I offered.

  She nodded. “I’m just no good. I never will be. Maybe that means I’ll go to hell.” Her body tensed at the word, shivered. “So be it. I don’t know any other way to be.”

  She stepped out of the silk, her thighs sliding against each other. She took the book, put it on top of the shelf. “If you’re a friend of Pitt’s,” she said, and clasped my hand, cupped it to her breast, “if you know him as I do, you will understand that.”

  “I can’t,” I said, but didn’t pull away.

  “You know,” she said, her face close to mine, her eyes burning a path through my skull, “he hates it when I dress this way.”

  “You mean naked?”

  “No, silly. The niqab. Says that he’s got nothing to be jealous of.”

  “Then why do you?”

  Her mouth quivered. She looked like she was going to cry. “Because I love him.”

  She grabbed my head with both hands, pulled me down to her mouth. Her tongue slithered between my teeth. I wondered how she could stand it. When did I last brush? I couldn’t remember. Yes. I could. A year ago. The day we arrived in La Paz, Kate and I, the baby in tow. Pain stabbed at the back of my brain, and I stuffed the memory down as far as it would go. I stroked an open palm down her lower back, across her hip and up between her thighs.

  “Like that,” she hissed, and ran her fingers through my hair.

  To avoid her mouth I kissed her neck, trailed my way down to her left nipple. I sucked on her breast, tit flesh filling my mouth, rubbery against my teeth like moldy cheese, and choked on a mouthful of milk. She pulled away but I held her tight, swallowed. When she was dry, I took my mouth away. There was milk in my lungs. I stifled the cough.

  “No idea where he might have gone?” I asked.

  “Gone?” She ground herself down on my hand.

  “Pitt.”

  “Something heavy,” she sighed into my shoulder.

  “Heavy.”

  “On his soul.”

  “You mean like guilt?”

  “What else would I mean?” She pushed me away, as though trying to control herself, then clutched at my back, clawed my scalp and dropped backward onto the bed, pulling me down on top of her.

  “About what?” I asked. I drove the knee of my dirty jeans between her legs, bent to kiss her other breast, avoiding the nipple this time.