by J. M. Porup
I cleared my throat. “Ought to know what?”
“Only way to the top’s over a pile of corpses.” He turned, looked at his father. “You really feel no guilt?”
“Helps to be a Christian, son.”
“I forgot. Jesus will forgive me.”
“He will. Don’t you ever doubt it.”
Pitt made a rude noise with his mouth.
Ambo stood. Held out a hand. “Horace. A word with my son. You don’t mind?”
I put my cigarette between my lips. I stood too, took his hand. “Don’t rough him up too much, sir.”
He slapped me on the shoulder, walked me to the door. “You’re a bad influence on my son, you know that?”
I laughed. “You think so?”
He grinned, opened the carved wooden door. The noise of the party spilled into the room. A marine guard in full dress chokers stood to attention outside.
“You’re too good for this world, Horace. Go do something bad.”
That was the day I found out who Lynn really was.
I elbowed my way through the crowd, the men a swarm of ghosts, my single speck of black the only blemish. Waiters slid sideways through the throng, trays of champagne balanced one-handed over their heads, their free palms brushing the buttocks of Peru’s leading diplomatic ladies, dresses of colorful silk, taffeta.
Men stalked the four corners of the room like boxers waiting for the bell, white cords curling from their ears. They wore blue blazers, held their hands tight over their nuts, as though warding off a low blow. Brass cuff buttons winked at the crowd from crotch level. They watched us through sunglasses. They watched me. I was easy to spot. A stain of sin in a sea of purity.
I stumbled through the crowd, wishing I had brought my soap dish. Two days without a hit. I took a drag on my cigarette, but it didn’t do me any good. I was afraid I might fall asleep standing up. Where was I going to find a dealer on a dance floor full of diplomats?
Everywhere I looked I saw tits. Tits and ass. A dozen languages cooed sweet words into the ears of a hundred married women, their plunging necklines sweeping to their navels. Maybe I could find something old and skanky.
I spotted the bar across the room. A waiter passed nearby, champagne glasses aloft, distributing his worldly delight to the surrounding throng. I shouldered my way toward him but managed only to follow in his wake, collecting conversations as I went. A German whispered to an Englishwoman his preference for hot English mustard, and its application to a variety of sausage types. A Japanese man wearing a sash grinned, spoke Spanish to a Chinese woman, deploring the rape of Nanking. An American woman propositioned a timid Dutchman in glasses, her brassy tones crashing like cymbals on those around her.
I made it to the bar. I grabbed an empty water glass, pointed to a bottle of the cheapest pisco on the shelf. “Don’t stop till I say when.”
“Hey, that’s my line!”
She leaned against the bar, breasts suspended in midair by a strapless blue gown. I could tell they were fake. They also looked delicious. It was time to leave. Run away. Any woman who’d want you is a woman you don’t want to know. My hand felt wet. I turned back to the barman.
“But, sir, you did not say ‘when.’”
“Funny man. Ought to come around that bar and knock you senseless.”
The barman, I realized too late, was a lesser species of goon, like those in the corners. He put the bottle down. He cracked his knuckles and smiled.
“Sir, I should like to see you try.”
“Asshole.”
I gulped my drink, shook the pisco off my hand. I turned to go.
“Wait.” She touched my forearm. “He doesn’t just serve booze. Be nice.”
“You mean—”
“Shh.” She fingered her cleavage. The corner of a small plastic bag peeked out from one side of her boob.
I looked more closely at her face. Her eyes were still pretty, a striking green. She was wrinkled, but not wrinkled enough for me. My need for a hit overwhelmed my revulsion, though, and I put my hand on her bare elbow. “You want to go somewhere we can share that?”
She chuckled. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Should I?”
She leaned into me, her whiskey breath panting on my neck. “The Rat’s Nest? That booth?”
It came back to me, a sledgehammer driving a spike into my brain. The frenzied dance floor, the shots, the coke, a furious attempt to make the time pass, keep the thoughts at bay, repulse the creeping darkness that threatened to engulf my soul, then the final hurried fumblings in the dark, ending only in sadness and an abrupt return to reality, the futility of it all.
“Oh,” I said. “Hi. How’s it going?”
Her hand clutched my back, drowning my senses in whiskey and perfume. “I’m old enough to be your mother,” she breathed in my ear, pride in her voice, the pride of a lioness in another mother’s cub.
“I’m young enough to be your lover,” I said. I grabbed her drink from the bar, poured it down my throat.
“Meet me at the top of the stairs in ten minutes,” she whispered again, then pulled away. She held out her hand in incongruous formality. “Name’s Lynn, by the way. Pleased to meet you.”
Before I could think of an appropriate comeback, like, for instance, my name, she engaged in conversation in Spanish with a Peruvian naval officer in full dress choker whites.
“Amigo.”
A voice at my elbow. The bartender with an attitude.
“Whaddaya want, cabrón.”
“You should be more careful.”
“Of what?” I spat on the floor. “You?”
“No, amigo,” he said gently, poured me a drink. “That woman.”
“What about her?”
At that moment a delegation of Japanese crowded around me, jabbering in accented Spanish, demanding more liquor. The bartender said something to me. I held my hand to my ear. He shrugged, and turned to make the drinks.
Careful of what? I studied the crowded ballroom, felt the pisco melting my brain. Lynn was nowhere to be seen.
It was time. I pushed through the crowd, letting silken slippery buttocks caress my knuckles as I made my way toward the stairs. I climbed halfway up, to the second landing of the curving marble staircase. The bartender below was pouring drinks. He didn’t look up. I scanned the room for Lynn. I didn’t see her. I turned to climb again, felt a finger on my shoulder.
“You lost, sir?”
The hand dropped again, clutched its crotch. The lips plastered to the hard jaw neither smiled nor frowned. An American flag pin soiled his left lapel. Were it not for the crisp crease in his gray slacks, you could mistake him for a garden-variety rent-a-cop.
“Just going to the bathroom.”
“Bathroom’s downstairs, sir.”
“But I was up here just a minute ago!” I protested.
The man’s face was granite.
A rustling of silk charged up the stairs.
“A friend of the ambassador’s,” Lynn cooed. “Do let him up.”
He nodded, turned aside. We climbed together, and she slithered her hand under my arm, her elbow-length blue glove stroking the back of my hand. On the top landing she led me down a familiar corridor. We passed a marine guard at attention beside a carved wooden door. I heard voices raised in argument, Pitt’s voice, Ambo’s voice, shouting, a crash as something broke.
“Quickly,” she said, her finger to her lips.
I followed her around a corner, to the end of the hallway. She opened a door. An enormous bathroom gaped white and spotless. She pushed me inside. She looked back over her shoulder, then darted in, closing and locking the door. She fumbled for the light switch, found it. I blinked. The incandescent bulb’s harsh rays shattered against the sharp reflecting surfaces.
“Well,” she said. Her cleavage rose and fell.
I nodded. “Let’s see it.”
She reached behind her back. A zipper hummed.
“No, no,” I sai
d. “This.”
I plucked the bag of cocaine from her cleavage without bothering to touch her breast.
She smiled. “First things first.” She retrieved a small mirror and a razor blade from the top of the medicine cabinet. I held the bag to the light, flicked it with my fingertip. Looked to be about a gram. I opened the bag, poured the entire pouch onto the mirror.
“Wow,” she said. “You’re hard core.”
I ignored her. I snorted more than half of the white powder, a stream of cocaine bliss. I sat on the toilet.
She said, “You needed that.”
I nodded. My eyes rolled up inside my head. Numb. So numb. The pain ebbs. There is nothing. No past. No future. Only now.
Lynn daintily cut the rest into a fine powder. She unfurled a crisp Benjamin from her other breast, snorted a thin line. She leaned back against the sink, her hands on the lip of the basin.
“Now,” she said. “Where were we.”
A door slammed outside. I leaned in to kiss her neck. My fingers groped for her zipper. Footsteps came our way. A heavy hand grabbed the bathroom doorknob, yanked it, rattled it, fought with it.
Lynn pitched her voice high, spoke over my shoulder. “That you, Jeremiah?”
“Oh.” Pitt’s voice, muffled. “Sorry, Mom. Use the one downstairs.”
We held our breath, waited for the footsteps to retreat. I pulled her zipper all the way down, stepped back. A hand fumbled below my waist. Her deft fingers released my fly. She knelt on the shimmering white tiles.
“Mom?” I said.
She giggled, her mouth full.
SEVEN
Ambo said, “Pitt is not your friend.”
He shuffled the cards. Bridged the deck, fluttered the two halves together. He dealt a new game of solitaire.
Watch out for Dad when the cards come out, dude. It means he’s pissed. Real pissed. One of those self-control tricks? When he’s torturing dissidents, sometimes it’s the only thing between them and a bullet in the brain.
I said, “I realize that.”
We were in the warden’s office. Ambo sat at the man’s creaking metal desk. A Peruvian flag, red and white, drooped in one corner. Behind him, on either side of the far door—a separate entrance?—two American marines in crisp khaki shirtsleeves and blue trousers stood to attention. They wore pistols in white holsters on their hips, carried black riot sticks in their hands.
“You think he cares for you? He gives a shit?” Ambo hawked up a loogie and spat on the floor. “He used you. For a job. I told him to. And now he’s using you again.”
“What for this time?” I asked.
Ambo’s rumpled tuxedo hung limp from his shoulders, the starch overwhelmed by his body heat. A bow tie dangled loose at his neck. Emeralds glittered at his cuffs. I thought of snakes. Where had I seen that shade before?
He looked at me over the rim of his reading glasses. “Don’t pretend that you don’t know,” he said. “Why are you protecting him?”
I rested my elbows on my knees. The Peruvian cops breathed loudly behind me. I wiped a trickle of shit-smelling snot from my upper lip.
“Look,” I said. “I was enjoying my facial scrub. Salon next door? Bucket à la merde? Why don’t you just tell me what you want. So I can get back to it.”
Ambo licked a finger, lifted a card from his draw pile. He held it out, looked down his long beak of a nose at it, discarded it. He flipped over a new card, a king. His hand trembled.
I snapped my fingers in his face. “You hear what I just said?”
Without looking up, he said softly, voice barely audible, “How old am I?”
He planted the king. A new foundation. A flick of his wrist, and an emerald winked at me. I gasped. It was Lynn, her million-carat eyes an inch from mine, the glassy sadness of an aging whore.
“How old are you,” I said. “The fuck is going on here?”
Ambo drew another card. Discarded it. His tuxedo soaked up the light from the overhead lamp, a bespoke black hole, and disappeared. His black head floated above the stabbing isosceles triangle of his white shirtfront.
He said, “Answer the question.” His voice was quiet, controlled. As though suppressing bottled hysteria.
“This is about Lynn, isn’t it,” I said. “Some sort of weird fucked-up revenge. You’re pissed that I was sleeping with her. Is that it?”
He froze for an instant, before slowly playing another card. His fist clutched the deck tight, his knuckles white.
I scooted my chair closer to the desk. Stood. Rested my knuckles on the flaking leather blotter. The mouth breathers behind me took a step forward, but did not interfere. I put my palm flat on top of his card game.
I said, “Ambo? Lynn is dead. And I am sorry.” I leaned over the desk as far as I could go, trying to catch his eye, but he avoided my gaze. “But it wasn’t me.”
Ambo looked at my hand, as though unsure what to do with an unexpected joker. “Randy?” he said.
Before I could say, No, not really, one of the marines came to attention.
“Sir!”
He strode to Ambo’s side. Peered down at the cards. His peaked cap brushed my forehead. I didn’t move my hand. He pointed with an outstretched index finger, clad in white. “Black knave on red queen, sir.”
Ambo nodded. He pried the jack from under my middle finger, moved it to the right. “Knave on queen. Thank you, Randy.”
“Sir.”
The room was cold but sweat beaded on Ambo’s forehead. A drop grew in the furrow above his eyebrows, ran along his nose until it hung from the tip, a future stalactite. He looked up at me. Again, he asked, “How old am I?”
I slashed sideways at the cards, wiped them from the surface of the desk with my forearm. “Didn’t you hear me?” I said. “I told you it wasn’t me.”
“I know it wasn’t. It was Pitt.” His brown eyes jumped up at me from deep inside his motionless skull. His gaze whipped my head back. I crumpled, caught myself against the back of the chair. I coughed, tasted bile.
“Pitt killed his own mother?”
“Answer the question.”
“Why he would do such a thing? I have no idea, Ambo,” I said. “I really don’t.”
His voice rose in crescendo, rage and panic blending together. “My age, Horace.”
“The fuck it matter?” I stood, knocked over my chair with the backs of my calves. Brown hands gripped my shoulders, picked up the chair and slammed me down.
Ambo folded his large hands, as though in prayer. Linked together they were the size of a small melon. “How old am I?” he asked.
“Old enough to know better, but not old enough to care.”
He did not so much as grin. “How old is that?”
I sat silent.
“Horace.” His voice was a growl, a bear prepared to rip your throat out.
“Seventy-five.”
He dropped his feet to the floor. Took off his glasses, laid them aside. Rubbed the bridge of his nose between a giant thumb and forefinger.
“Seventy-five years old.” He drummed his hand on the metal desk, a sound like rain pattering on rooftops. “And this is not,” —and here his fist smacked the hollow metal surface, the remaining cards twitching, the warden’s name plaque bouncing— “not how I am going to die.”
I looked at my own puny white hands, then at Ambo’s muscular pile driver of a fist. His fingers were thick as carrots, the tips calloused and hard.
“What makes you think you’re going to die?” I asked.
His fist rose up, the warhammer of the gods. Crashed down on the desk, denting it this time. He flung the remaining cards into the air, Lynn’s emerald eye twinkling amidst the blue paisley rain of dots and cartoon heads. With a primeval roar he overturned the desk.
I leaped backward. Footfalls shuffled behind me, as though drawn by the disorder, some atavistic urge to corral the chaos. Stopped. The marines on either side of Ambo had not flinched.
“What makes you think you’re not?”
he demanded.
He glowered at me from under those monstrous eyebrows. I had the sudden vision of horns curving from his temples, a red tail twitching back and forth as he offered Faust a bargain.
I said, “So go ahead and kill me. What’s the problem?”
Ambo took out a pack of Camels. Put the pack to his mouth, kissed it, came away with a cigarette between his lips. From a side pocket, a box of wooden matches. He rattled it, removed a match. Scratched the red tip against the box, the smell of sulfur floating across at me. He held the flame to the tip of the white paper.
“Let me ask you something, Horace,” he said, exhaling smoke. “Do you just say that? Or do you really mean it? Are you prepared to die?”
“Prepared to—” My tongue refused to finish the thought.
I had almost died in that bucket of shit. And I realized I was not prepared. That I didn’t want to die.
“Because I’m not,” he continued. “At least not yet.”
He puffed deep, holding the smoke in his lungs. Settled into the swivel chair. The frame creaked under his weight. The tip of the cigarette glowed orange in the dim light. He held it at arm’s length.
“No,” he said. “This is not how I want to die.” He looked at me again, and I struggled to endure his battering gaze. “But I can see why it appeals to you.”
God. I began to wish I hadn’t told him. I looked at the floor. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Ambo sat forward, his great bulk now resting on his elbows. He blew smoke through his nose. His broad shoulders hunched over, head dangling loose, a buzzard drawn to carrion.
“You know,” he said, “I understand you better than you think.”
“You understand,” I said, and sneered. “What do you think you understand? You sound like Lynn now.”
He ignored the reference to my affair with his wife. “It wasn’t the money,” he went on. “You aren’t the type who can be bought.”
“Yeah, OK, we know that.”
“And you’re not a patriot.”
I shrugged. “Land of the slaves and the home of the fearful.”
“So I’m guessing,” he said, and he cocked his head, fist at his ear, the cigarette smoldering orange at his temple, my vision of devil’s horns returning in a rush that made me gasp, “I’m guessing it’s for love.”