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

by J. M. Porup

  “Wish I knew.” The words escaped from her like air from a deflating balloon.

  I caressed her cheek. Her face was wet. “What did he say?”

  She stifled a sob. “He quoted Camus.”

  I lifted my head. “Who?”

  “Camus. The French philosopher.”

  “Who said what?”

  She was suddenly cross. “What is this, lecture time?”

  “It could be important. What did he say?”

  She unbuckled my belt but I stopped her.

  “‘The only true philosophical question is suicide.’”

  “Meaning what?”

  “To live or to die. It’s a choice. You have to choose.”

  “And what was Pitt’s choice?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  I nibbled her neck just under her ear. “Then how do you know he has guilt?”

  “I know what guilt looks like. I look in the mirror every day.” She shoved me up onto my knees and grabbed for my pants. “Now shut up and fuck me.” She had my belt undone and my cock in her hand before I could stop her.

  Her feather touch clouded my brain, thickened my tongue. “Where would he go?” I asked.

  “God, it’s huge,” she said. “You live up to your nickname, I’ll say that.”

  “We were talking about Pitt.”

  She tickled me in the wrong place. I gasped.

  “It matter to you, baby, where he is?”

  “It does. Yes.”

  She bent to take me in her mouth, but I covered myself with my hand.

  “Hard to get.” She laughed, husky, deep in her throat. “I like that.”

  I wasn’t, actually. Hard to get. Just not worth getting. But that wasn’t the point. Even though Pitt had screwed me over, and big time, I couldn’t bring myself to return the favor. I’d already fucked his mom plenty. I stuffed myself into my pants, zipped up.

  She sat up on her knees and cocked her head to one side. “You’re serious.”

  “I said I was, didn’t I?” It came out more tartly than I had planned.

  She trailed a finger along my shoulder, came up behind me and pressed herself against my back. She took hold of my sweater and pulled. I put my arms in the air and let her yank it off me. She reached under my armpits, began unbuttoning my shirt. Her lips brushed my neck.

  “Said something about volunteering,” she murmured.

  “Volunteering?”

  “Save the planet, all that crap.”

  I took hold of her wrists. “You know where?”

  She struggled. I didn’t let go. I leaned my head back, kissed her.

  She said, “Pitt always comes home. Eventually.”

  “Not this time,” I said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Call it a feeling.”

  “Is it your fault?”

  I nodded. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “But you have to know for sure.”

  I have to know how he deals with his guilt. But I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  I nodded and let go of her wrists. She got up, went to the rolltop desk. She bent forward, her bottom aimed at me in silent invitation. I looked away, closed my eyes, peeked.

  “He keeps the things he wants to hide in here.” She lifted the pigeonholes to reveal a secret compartment, and removed several business cards. I was out of the bed and snatched the cards from her hand before she could turn.

  “Finally,” she said. “A man who knows what he wants.”

  I stuffed the business cards into my jeans pocket, draped my sweater over my shoulder. I pinned her arms to her sides and inched around her to the door.

  Her mouth opened wide. “Amazing. But how?”

  “What’s that?” I said, one hand on the doorknob.

  “You’re so strong.”

  In her Boston twang I heard my ex-wife gloating to my face outside the courthouse door. The rage made me horny. I could have fucked an entire harem and had energy left over. But not for this woman, and not for anyone like her.

  I opened the door and the singed cat twisted its way into the room, meowing. A little hand snaked through the open door, clamped down on the animal’s tail, pulled it back outside. I kicked at the hand with my shoe. The cat hid under the bed.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  FIVE

  Volcanic Volunteers.

  Two of the business cards were in Spanish. One was a high-class brothel downtown. Another belonged to Hak Po. The third announced itself as Volcanic Volunteers. A picture of a happy smiley sun setting over a lake in the mountains adorned the card. The address was in Miraflores, right on Avenida Larco, the heart of the tourist district.

  It was an hour walk from San Isidro to Miraflores, and I didn’t like exercise. I was committing suicide by cowardice, dammit, and I saw no point in slowing the process. Today, though, I needed to clear my head, so I consoled myself by breathing the city’s toxic fumes and holding them deep in my lungs.

  What did it mean? Pitt? Volunteering? What was he doing with a bunch of no-good do-gooders with a self-righteous attitude? Look at me, look how good I am. I spent a week playing basketball with street kids in Lima, now let me into Harvard or Princeton, please, pretty please with sugar on top?

  That wasn’t like Pitt. That wasn’t like Pitt at all. Pitt was more like me. Scum of the earth, didn’t care who knew it. Take what you need and fuck the rules, ’cause if you don’t, somebody else will.

  Why did I give him Kate’s postcard? I’ll bet he still had it. Her cell phone number. Everything. She had said she’d found peace volunteering. No way that was a coincidence. I pulled back my sleeve and put out my cigarette. You asshole. You could at least have kept her number. Then you wouldn’t have to traipse halfway across fucking Lima to talk to some holier-than-thou morons.

  I found the volunteering office sandwiched between an internet café full of perky blondes yabbling in Swedish and a chifa joint that sold Peruvian chow mein, guaranteed diarrhea. To get there I had to run the gauntlet, the Shiny Happy People Zone, tourism central: overpaid stockbrokers from New York and London drinking resealed bottles of tap water, eating “guaranteed clean” imported salads slathered in human fecal material, congratulating themselves on how clever they were. They’d seen Machu Picchu. Deepest, darkest Lima, Peru, had changed since Paddington Bear made his getaway.

  I cupped my hand to the glass door. Stairs led to the second floor. I depressed the dirty yellow button on the intercom.

  “Sí?”

  “This Volcanic Volunteers?”

  “No hablo inglés.”

  “Cut the crap, bitch, I know you speak English. I want to volunteer. You going to let me up or aren’t you?”

  A long pause. I was about to punch the button again when the buzzer sounded. I opened the door with a click, let it swing shut. The stairs were dirty and covered in speckled linoleum, the kind that’s supposed to look like marble but winds up looking more like bird shit.

  I reached into my pocket for my soap dish. A glint of glass above. I kept my hand in my pocket. Security camera. Interesting. It’s true you can’t be too careful in Lima. But a volunteering organization with a security camera in the stairwell? This was the tourist district, after all. The hotels bribed the police to keep a watch on this part of town.

  On the landing, only one door. Locked. So I knocked: shave and a haircut, fuck you. A distant shuffling approached, like an ancient, dying animal. A key rotated in the lock, the door opened a few inches. A freckled face surrounded by a dandelion head of frizzy orange hair peered at me through a pair of brown plastic glasses.

  “I help you?” The accent was German, Bavarian perhaps, thick and guttural.

  “You always so rude to people who come here?” I asked.

  “You call every woman you meet a bitch?”

  “What do you think?”

  She laughed. “You are not volunteer we want. Sorry.”

  She closed the door but it bounced back in
her face, knocking her glasses crooked. My foot blocked the doorway.

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  I put my weight against the door. She let go. It swung open and I stepped inside. A short corridor. Mounted on the wall, a small black-and-white monitor. I could see the stairs, the street outside. To my right, at the end, a bathroom. The door was open. It looked clean. At the other end, to my left, windows. Sunlight shone in so bright I squinted.

  The ever-present garua, the fog, was worse than San Francisco. When had I last seen the sun?

  “The hell?” I said. “You got a red phone link to God?”

  A big man blocked the light, hands on his hips. He was taller than me by a head. His long black hair, pulled tight in a ponytail, shimmered blue and violet in the light, announcing his Indian ancestry. The bulbous cheeks suggested a German parent.

  “Echo baby, what’s going on?” he asked in Spanish.

  I said, “Your parents called you Echo?”

  She sighed, crossed her arms, heaved skyward her enormous, sagging tits. “Don’t start.”

  I closed the door, stuck my hand out at the big man. “Name’s Horace. But people call me Horse. As in hung like a. Heard about your volunteering program.”

  He flicked a switch on the wall. The sunlight died. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. His head was too small for his body, the shrunken trophy of Polynesian cannibals. His jaw was even smaller, drawn up into his head, giving him a pronounced overbite. His gut fought with the waistband of his brown corduroy trousers and won. On his feet, open-toed action-man sandals. A blue button-down dress shirt was his halfhearted kowtow to The Man.

  “Sun lamps,” I said.

  He shrugged, took my hand. It was big but soft, a limp bit of juicy steak. “The only way to stay sane in this horrible city,” he said in Spanish.

  I smiled. It felt weird. I couldn’t remember the last time my cheek muscles managed that distinctive upward pull. “We agree on something, then,” I said. “That’s a start.”

  He waved a hand at a metal chair covered in rotting green leather. I sat. The springs ground into the base of my spine. I crossed my legs, pressed down on one side, enjoying the pain.

  I thought of Sergio. That was fucked up. What he does? To see him in the nightclub. And now again this morning, up close, firsthand.

  Until today my punishment made sense. The cigarettes. The burns. Everything. A sudden darkness squeezed my chest. Was all of this a big mistake? Goddamn you, Pitt, I thought. For everything.

  The man said, “You want to volunteer?”

  “Either this or the Foreign Legion.” I shrugged. “Never did like sand.”

  I looked around the room. Aside from their laptops and sun lamps, the place was bare. No posters, no pictures, not even a jar full of paper clips or a box of pencils. In the corner lay a bunch of picket signs, upside down. Stake handles resting against the wall, the poster board clean, unbent. Unused. I bent my neck sideways to read them. Echo moved to stand in front of them, but not before I got a good look at a few.

  No War For Ore.

  Stop Bat Guano II.

  Fuck the US.

  “Subtle,” I said.

  “How did you find out about us, Horace?” The shrunken head smiled, his eyes narrow.

  “Friend of mine,” I said. “Met him in a bar. The Rat’s Nest, in Barranco. You know it?”

  They nodded in unison, arms folded across their chests, but said nothing.

  “Tell me about the bat guano,” I said. “What does that mean? Second helpings of bat shit?”

  The Bavarian’s frizzy orange hair exploded, as though struck by lightning. “It’s about imperialist fascist pigs raping Bolivia, stealing their land. It’s about—”

  A thick hand cut her off in mid-sentence. The man said, “The name of your friend, Horace.”

  I pulled out the business card, extended it between two fingers. “Sho’ ’nuff,” I said. “Name was Pitt.”

  They looked at the card. They looked at each other. The Bavarian fiddled with her bra strap. “Pitt?”

  “Have a last name?”

  I let my arm fall. “Watters,” I said. “Pitt Watters.”

  Shrunken head flicked his ponytail in one hand, eyed the gaping hole in my sweater. “Are you sure it was us he mentioned?”

  “Positive. Ambassador’s son is a stickler for details. Like father, like son.”

  The man stood. He held out his hand. “I would remember the American ambassador’s son.”

  “Or maybe you know my ex-fiancée,” I said, ignoring the hand. “Katherine? Goes by Kate? Would have volunteered about nine months ago.”

  They both shuffled their feet. Echo let out a fart, blushed. “There are many people with that name,” she said. “It is a common name. Now if you please?”

  I made a show of looking past her at the picket signs. “No War For Ore,” I said. “This got something to do with Ovejo? The lithium, perhaps?”

  Ovejo was the socialist president of Bolivia. Pitt had mentioned him once over beers and whores. The Bolivian government was demanding more money for the mining concession, threatening to nationalize the mine if their demands were not met.

  “We are busy right now,” Echo said. She massaged her belly, and I realized she wasn’t fat, or at any rate not just fat: she was pregnant. “Call next time. Before you come. Maybe then we talk some more. Yes?”

  I climbed out of the chair, my face wrinkling with kindness, tears coming to my eyes as the spring left contact with my spine. “We must think of the unborn,” I said. “What future are we leaving for our children?”

  “Of course.” Still the man’s hand hovered in midair, an insistent dismissal.

  “You got a brochure or something?” I said. “The Legion doesn’t want me I’ll try again with you.”

  A glossy trifold brochure attacked my chest. I folded it and stuffed it down the front of my pants.

  “I never caught your name,” I said, and took his hand.

  “No,” he said. “You didn’t.”

  He released me, but I held his hand tight.

  “I never said he was American.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The ambassador’s son.”

  I sashayed out on the landing. The door closed behind me. I went down the stairs, letting my feet fall heavy on the steps, noting the noise each made. At the bottom, I opened the door and lit a cigarette. I took a puff, threw the cigarette into the gutter. I slipped back inside as the door clicked shut.

  I didn’t move. I listened. Silence. I slid out of my flip-flops. Still nothing. I picked them up in one hand, and tiptoed up the stairs, skipping the creaky ones.

  Voices raised inside the office. I pressed my ear to the door, careful to stand below the peephole. They argued in Spanish.

  “I tell you, he knows!” The man’s voice was hysterical.

  “He knows nothing.”

  “He tries to stop us, what we’re doing—”

  “Gaia will never allow it—”

  “—helps those who help themselves.”

  My eavesdropping was interrupted by a tap on the glass below. I looked down the stairs. Some kid. Wait—Paco? Of all people. He waved. I put my finger to my lips, shook my head.

  “What if we’re wrong? What if—”

  “What if, what if, what if.” The woman’s voice was condescending, scornful. “We do her will. Have faith. We shall join her soon. All of us.”

  Paco tried the locked door, rattled the handle. I slashed my arms sideways, an umpire denying the winning touchdown.

  “Check the video.”

  Footsteps came closer to the door. “Waving at the camera. Some homeless.”

  The woman snorted. “Doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

  I jammed my feet back into my flip-flops. Jumped, grabbed the video camera and ripped it from the wall. Couldn’t have them knowing I had eavesdropped. Plaster showered on the landing. I spiked the camera, claimed my six points and threw myself
down the stairs three at a time. I was in the street before I heard the upstairs door open.

  I sprinted along the crowded sidewalk, crashing through groups of Brits in zip travel pants, the kind of tourists who thought slumming in Lima made them worldly adventurers. Behind me, a frenzy of pocket patting and slapping, and I knew Paco’s magic hands were at work, even as he ran.

  We didn’t stop until we got to the sea. We ran the length of Avenida Larco, dashed down the stairs into Larco Mar, the cliff-side shopping mall for tourists and Lima’s pathetically petite bourgeoisie. I slowed to a walk, hopped the escalator downstairs to the cinema. I bought two tickets to a Hollywood blockbuster whose poster of an overpaid movie actor holding a gun promised boredom. I handed a ticket to Paco. Together we entered the darkened theater.

  The movie was already halfway along. A faked explosion filled the screen. Cars squealed. I yawned. Paco pulled wallets from his various pockets, siphoned the cash and dropped the remainder on the sticky floor.

  “What’s going on, Paco?”

  He grinned. “I could also ask you that.” His teeth gleamed white in the dark theater.

  “Why were you following me?”

  “Shh!” A gringo tourist in a blue denim shirt turned around, finger to his lips.

  Paco lowered his voice. “They pay me. That is why I want talk to you, amigo.”

  “They are paying you. You want to talk to me. Fine. Who? Why?”

  “Tell them where you go. What you do. They pay in dollars. Much money.”

  “A lot of money.”

  He nodded, peering skyward at a pair of twenty-foot-tall, surgically crafted Hollywood breasts. “A lot.”

  A piece of popcorn missed my face by inches. “Hey asshole, shut up already.”

  “What do they look like?” I asked.

  “A gringo.” Paco shifted in his seat. “You know. Rubio.”

  “We all look alike.” I sighed. Rubio literally meant “blond.” But in practice it meant anyone with hair that wasn’t Latino black. My dark brown hair was, to Paco, rubio.

  “Since when?” I asked him.

  “Last week.”

  “When you meeting next?”

  Paco grinned. “You mean, ‘when are you meeting next,’ right, profesor?”

  A fat blob of an American stood, blocking the screen. He slobbered down at me, his words slurred by the quantity of fat dangling from his chin. “Some of us are on vacation.”