Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (5 page)

Carrying the shrouded parrot cage in
his right hand, he used the left to steer a luggage cart through clusters of
surly men who wore brown uniforms and shouldered automatic rifles. These were
the Policía de Turismo. Their duty was to protect foreign tourists from the
pickpockets, purse-snatchers, bag-slashers, muggers, con artists, bandits, and
revolutionary thugs who were as thick in
Lima
as seeds in any pumpkin. On occasion, the police
themselves were the problem. (During his last trip to
South America
, he’d been forced to shoot a policeman in
Cartagena
,
Colombia
, who tried to rob him at gunpoint. The man lived, but
Switters still had nightmares about it, hearing in his dreams the unbelievably
loud echo of his Beretta as he shot the man in the wrist to disarm him, and the
screaming as Switters pulverized both of the scumbag’s kneecaps to insure that
he would never again leap out at a victim from behind a badge. Switters believed
that law enforcement officers who themselves broke laws should receive
sentences twice as severe as civilians who committed the same crimes, for the
criminal officer had not only betrayed a sacred public trust, he or she had
also undermined the very concept of justice and fairness in the world. A
crooked cop was every bit as much of a traitor as was a seller of national
secrets, and should be punished accordingly.)

At the Gran Hotel Bolívar, there were
even Policía de Turismo in the worn though still opulent lobby. Most were
napping in faded overstuffed armchairs. One who was standing scowled
suspiciously at Sailor’s cloth-covered pyramid, but he chose not to investigate
and Switters registered with no more than the typical delay.

Without bothering to unpack, he
popped an Ergomar pill for his headache and went straight to bed. It was four
in the morning. The hour when Madame Angst knits large black sweaters, and
blood sugar goes downstairs to putter around in the basement.

He awoke, groggy, at ten-thirty and
opened the blinds just enough to illuminate the telephone. First, he called
Hector Sumac, the reluctant recruit, and arranged to meet him for a late
dinner. He’d keep his fingers crossed that Hector would actually show up. Then,
he phoned Juan Carlos de Fausto, a guide recommended by the hotel desk clerk,
and scheduled for midafternoon a tour of
Lima
’s more important cathedrals and churches. Switters was
considering converting to Catholicism in order to please Suzy, who was devoutly
religious. He’d make a terrible Catholic—he found organized religion in general
to be little more than a collective whistling past the graveyard, with
dangerous political undertones—but he enjoyed ritual, if it was pure enough,
and certainly infiltration was a tactic not entirely unfamiliar to him.

Ritual he liked, but compulsory
routine he hated. Thus, he resented every minute that he now had to surrender
to showering, shampooing, shaving, and flossing and brushing his teeth. If mere
men could devise self-defrosting refrigerators and self-cleaning ovens, why
couldn’t nature, in all of its complex, inventive magnificence, have managed to
come up with self-cleaning teeth? “There’s birth,” he grumbled, “there’s death,
and in between there’s maintenance.”

Having said that, he went back to bed
and slept for three more hours.

Before leaving on his tour, Switters
contacted the housekeeping staff to warn them that there was a parrot in his
room. Sailor was quite jet-lagged, so disoriented he wouldn’t eat, and it was
unlikely he would cause any commotion, yet all it would take would be a
screeching “Peeple of zee wurl, relax!” as an unsuspecting maid came through
the door, and Switters could find himself in a situation similar to that
experienced by his grandmother a dozen years ago.

At the time Maestra had had in her
employ a normally competent servant named Hattie. One day, while Maestra was
away at an all-day computer workshop sponsored by
North
Seattle
Community
College
,
Hattie added to her list of chores the cleaning of the pyramid birdcage. In the
process, she scrubbed Sailor’s water dish, which, admittedly, was rather funky,
with a popular household cleaning product that went by the brand name of
Formula 409. Parrots, alas, are unusually sensitive to chemical odors. Perhaps
it was the solvents in Formula 409, perhaps the 2-butoxyethanol, but when
Sailor went to drink from his now immaculate dish, the lingering fumes, subtle
though they were, overcame him, and he passed out cold.

Hattie thought he was dead. Desiring
to spare her employer the trauma of dealing with a freshly deceased pet, she
wrapped the comatose bird in newspaper and placed it in the trunk of her car.
Leaving Maestra a sympathetic note, she then drove home to prepare an early
supper for her semi-invalid father, after which she planned to dispose of the
corpse. While Hattie was busy in the kitchen, her father hobbled out to the
car, looking for something or other. When he opened the trunk, the parrot, now
fully revived, flew out in his face, wings flapping furiously, and squawking
like the mad conductor on the night train to Hell. The poor man had a heart
attack from which he never fully recovered.

It took Maestra a day and a half to
coax Sailor down from the fir tree in which he’d taken refuge, and as for
Hattie, her reaction was that of the typical contemporary American: “I’m
suffering. Therefore, somebody must owe me money. I’m hiring a lawyer.”

Eventually the judge dismissed
Hattie’s suit as frivolous, but not before it had cost Maestra more than thirty
grand in legal fees. She hadn’t had a servant since.

Because Switters lacked confidence in
his Spanish—he was considerably more fluent in Arabic and Vietnamese—and
because he wished to make certain that the hotel staff understood that the
object of his concern was a parrot, he pulled from his jacket pocket a Polaroid
snapshot that Maestra had taken, using the automatic timer, moments before he
departed the house on Magnolia Bluff. To the maids struggling to comprehend, he
pointed out the cage and its gaudy occupant. It was there in the snapshot.
Switters on the left, Maestra in the middle, Sailor on the right.

Or, as Maestra had written in a
wavering hand on the lower border of the photo: the Slacker, the Hacker, and
the Polly-Wanna-Cracker.

Inspecting his reflection in a
full-length, gold-framed mirror, one of several baroque ornaments whose
bombastic tendencies were rendered meek by the dramatic stained-glass dome atop
the lobby, Switters commented, “Don’t
look
like no slacker,” and if the
truth be told, he probably didn’t. The saving grace of places such as
Lima
was that they afforded him an opportunity to wear
white linen suits and
Panama
hats, which is precisely how he was attired at the
moment. The suit bore the label of a famous designer, but for all of the pussy
in
Sacramento
, he couldn’t have identified which one. It had a
yellowish tinge, due to lack of proper maintenance.

Completing the ensemble was a
T-shirt, solid black except for what at first glance appeared to be a tiny
green shamrock above the left breast, but which on scrutiny proved to be the
spiderlike emblem of the C.R.A.F.T. Club, a secretive society with branches in
Hong Kong and Bangkok, whose members met periodically to imbibe strange beverages
and discuss
Finnegans Wake
. When asked about it later, members would
answer, “C.R.A.F.T.”—Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing—and for the most part, they
wouldn’t be lying. Switters also wore black sneakers and chomped on a skinny
black cigar that somewhat resembled an iguana turd. He liked the way he looked
but knew better than to pretend it mattered.

With respect for fellow guests, if
not the Policía de Turismo, he waited until he was outside before torching the
cigar. No sooner had he expelled the first perfect smoke ring than he was
approached by a stoop-shouldered, balding, middle-aged gentleman with kind eyes
and a light dusting of mustache hairs above a sincere smile. The man introduced
himself as “Juan Carlos de Fausto, English-speaking guide to all attractions
and points of interest in this, the City of
Kings
.” Señor de Fausto was the person who, for thirty-five
U.S. dollars, would give Switters a tour of
Lima
’s holy sites and who, free of charge, would give him
advice that would indirectly, but severely and irrevocably, alter the course of
his life.

From the Gran Hotel Bolívar, it was
but a short walk along the Jirón de la Unión mall to the Plaza de Armas and
Lima
’s main cathedral. The notorious coastal fog had burned
off, and the afternoon had turned unseasonably hot. The mall was sizzling. It
was also teeming. A pickpocket stir-fry.

Juan Carlos, parting a surf of
aggressive vendors, led Switters across the plaza and into the rather stark,
dimly lit cathedral. He showed his client the coffin that held the remains of
Francisco Pizarro, made sure he admired the intricately carved choir stalls,
and described for him the earthquake that had flattened most of the building
and disassembled Pizarro’s skeleton (knee bone no longer connected to the thigh
bone) in 1746. One thing he neglected to explain was why
Lima
’s most important cathedral had no name. Silently,
Switters christened it Santa Suzy de Sacramento.

On foot, they visited the other
churches in the Centro: Iglesia de la Merced, Iglesia de Jesús Maria, Santuario
de Santa Rosa de Lima, San Pedro, San Francisco, Santo Domingo, and Iglesia de
las Nazarenas, edifices in which myriad generations had schemed to catch the
eye of God with gold leaf, carved wood, and garish tiles. Vaulted ceilings
strained to scuff their lofty beams on the doormat of Heaven, only to be yanked
back to earth by the leaden weight of statuary and a sad geology of catacomb
bones.

Later, Switters and Juan Carlos
pushed through the swarming vendors—Indians in rainbow ponchos peddling
pottery,
mestizos
in Chicago Bulls T-shirts hawking pirated cassette
tapes—to the guide’s 1985 Oldsmobile, lovingly buffed but hopelessly battered,
and drove to the Convento de los Descalzos, a sixteenth-century monastery with
two lavish chapels; and to several outlying churches.

If cities were cheese,
Lima
would be Swiss on a waffle. Its avenues were
moonscapes of potholes. After banging and bouncing over ubiquitous craters, as
well as dodging traffic even more anarchistic than
Bangkok
’s, the two men found
Lima
’s religious buildings islands of peace. Glum, maybe,
morbid, perhaps, but in contrast to the busted infrastructure, rackety
commerce, and thievery-on-parade, nothing short of serene.

At one point during the tour, having
observed that Switters never knelt nor genuflected and that he had to be
frequently reminded to remove his hat and stub out his cigar, Juan Carlos could
no longer restrain himself. “Señor Switter, I am suspecting that you are not
being the Catholic fellow.”

“No. No, I’m not. Not yet. But I’m
thinking about joining up.”

“Why? If you do not mind me asking.”

Switters pondered the question. “You
might say,” he eventually replied, “that I have a special feeling for the
virgin.”

Juan Carlos nodded. He seemed
satisfied with the response. Naturally, there was no way he could have guessed
that Switters was referring to his sixteen-year-old stepsister.

The sun dropped into the horizon
line like a coin dropping into a slot. The ocean bit it to make sure it wasn’t
counterfeit. Twilight softened the city visually but did not hush it. If
anything,
Lima
became more raucous, more crowded, more menacing with
the coming dark. Switters kept his wallet in his front pants pocket, kept his
Beretta in his belt. He belonged to that minority who had yet to accept the
rip-off as an inescapable fact of modern life.

Their tour completed, the guide and
his client stopped at a working-class bar for a glass of pisco. Who would have
thought that the juice of the grape could be transformed into a substance so near
to napalm?

“Heady, no?” exulted Juan Carlos.

“Quintessentially South American,”
grumbled Switters.

In the course of conversation,
Switters revealed to Juan Carlos his plan to repatriate Sailor Boy. For some
reason, it struck the guide as a horrid idea. He warned his client that there
was an unpublicized but widespread outbreak of cholera in the countryside and
that the Marxist marauders known as
Sendero Luminoso
or “Shining Path,”
thought to have been eradicated in 1992, had come back to life and revived
their campaign to murder innocent tourists as a means of improving the lot of
the Peruvian poor. The American explained that he’d been inoculated against
cholera and that he’d had run-ins in other countries with self-styled
“liberators of the people” and they didn’t scare him a bit. He said the latter
in a whisper, however, well aware of the prevailing political climate in bars
such as this one.