Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (6 page)

Juan Carlos countered that the
cholera vaccine was only about 60 percent effective and that he hadn’t realized
that a dealer in farm equipment led such an adventurous life. (Switters had
passed himself off as an international sales representative for John Deere
tractors.) Furthermore, he would bet Switters another glass of pisco—”Not on
your life, pal”—that his grandmother was already in remorse over her decision
to return her longtime pet to the wild, and that if Switters went through with
such a rash exercise, he eventually would join his dear relation in profound
and protracted regret. Juan Carlos was adamant about his sense of impending
tragedy, and to convince his foolish client, he begged him to come along on a
brief drive. Switters agreed, if only to avoid a second pisco.

They motored to the posh neighborhood
of Miraflores, parked, slipped through a hedge, crossed an overgrown
garden—stirring up in the process a bloodthirsty billow of bugs—and tiptoed
onto a patio, from where they might peer through the windows of an elderly,
distant relative of Juan Carlos. This scene, naked parrot, merciless mosquitoes
and all, has already been described.

If the guide expected that a peepshow
of a feeble widow and her feeble bird, blinking and stumbling toward the grave
in each other’s company, expected that a stolen exhibition of enduring and
everlasting owner-pet fidelity would melt his client’s heart and move said
client to facilitate a joyous reunion between grandmother and ill-advisedly
emancipated parrot, then he was mistaken.

However, the first thing Switters did
when he got back to the hotel was to go on-line and check his box. An e-mail
message from a repentant Maestra canceling her instructions and insisting that
Sailor be returned to her care with all due haste? No, not surprisingly, there
was nothing of the sort. Maestra would never be counted among those millions
who permitted loneliness to compromise their principles, their judgment, their
taste.

The single message on the screen was
a coded one from the spookmeister at
Langley
, reminding Switters to “obey protocol” and inform the
Lima
station of his presence and intent in the city. Well,
he’d think about it. The word
obey
, from the archaic French
obéir
and the earlier Latin
obedire
, meaning “to give ear,” entered the
English language around 1250, the year in which the goose quill began to be
used for writing—and to this day, should one give ear, one can detect the stiff
scratch of the goose quill in its last syllable. For his part, Switters
associated
obey
with
oy vay
, the Yiddish cry of woe or dismay,
and while there was absolutely no etymological justification for it, it did
provide a hint that
obey
was not the kind of word to make him glad.

“Sorry, pal,” Switters said to
Sailor as the bird watched him apply calamine lotion to a galaxy of mosquito
bites. “I’d love to spend some quality time with you, but duty calls.” No
sooner did he exchange his C.R.A.F.T. Club T-shirt for a fresh one in solid
violet, splash on some Jungle Desire cologne, and dilute the pisco aftertaste
with a gargle of mouthwash than he was out the door.

A pothole-spelunking minicab carried
him to a modest steakhouse in the Barranco, a district popular with students
and bohemians. Hector Sumac was seated at table, sipping a North American beer.

“You dig the Yankee brewski?” asked
Switters.

“This Bud’s for you,” answered
Hector.

Thus was mutual identity established.

Hector Sumac proved to be a
nerdy-looking fellow, pale for a Peruvian, with a shaggy pageboy haircut
(Beatles, circa 1964) and those dinky little wire-rimmed spectacles commonly
referred to as “granny glasses.” (Switters’s granny, by contrast, wore an
outsized, owlishly round, horn-rimmed pair that made her look rather exactly
like the late theatrical agent, Swifty Lazar.) Even sitting down, however,
young Hector betrayed a fluid, athletic grace, and though he lacked bulk, he
might be quick and tough enough, Switters thought, to give a good account of
himself on the rugby field.

Switters ordered a Yankee beer as
well, and the two men whipped up small talk, first about the unusually warm day
and then about cybernetics. Hector was surprised—even impressed and amused—when
Switters confessed that he used a computer only when it became unavoidable for
efficiency’s sake.

“What interests me are the
post-Newtonian, extrabiologic implications of a human species able to think and
act using clusters of electrons:
light,
in other words. If the opening
act of the evolutionary drama involved a descent from light into matter and
language, then it only makes sense that in the closing act, so to speak, we
reunite with our photonic progenitor. The role that language—the word—will play
in our light-driven metamorphosis is the furry little question that cranks my
squirrel cage. Say, didn’t the guinea pig originate in the Peruvian Andes?”

“But personally you do not boot up?”

“Sure I do, pal. E-mail’s a wonderful
convenience—even when it’s goddamn hacked, but that’s another story. What I’m
saying is I’m not gonna sit around for hours every day having nonorgasmic sex
with a computer or a TV set. These machines will fuck the life right out of you
if you give ’em half a chance.”

“I log on five or six hours a day,”
admitted Hector somewhat sheepishly. “But I am always happy when I have the
chance to read a good book.”

“Yeah? What do you read?”

“I am looking for the novelists whose
writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their
neurosis.”

“Good luck to you, pal. That’s a
search these days.”

For the third time, an impatient
waiter cruised up to their table. “This place is good for meat,” Hector said.
“What is your favorite dish?”

Switters stared wistfully into space.
“Spring lamb Roman Polanski,” he said.

“It is not on the menu, I am afraid.”

“Just as well. It’s an acquired
taste.”

With gusto, Hector Sumac polished
off a mixed grill of beef heart and kidney, a dish he had missed during his
recent three years of scholarship in
Miami
. As for Switters, despite his professed hunger for
baby lamb cakes, he was primarily a consumer of fish and vegetables, so he swam
against the kitchen and ordered ceviche, picking warily at it, for,
predictably, it was not the dewiest ceviche in town.

It was over dessert—fruited cornmeal
pudding for each of them—that the two men got down to business. Having jumped
to the conclusion that Hector had reneged on the arrangement with Langley due
to late-blooming reservations about the CIA’s history of illegal interference
in Latin American affairs, particularly, perhaps, its heinous behavior in
Guatemala and El Salvador, not to mention Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, Switters
had come armed with a response, an argument that would neither defend nor
condemn Langley’s murderous hanky-panky but that would convince the recruit of
the validity and necessity of his service. Ah, but when Hector explained his
change of mind, his reason was of an entirely different tenor.

“Our federal administration is
thoroughly corrupt . . .”

Yours and everybody else’s,
thought Switters, but he didn’t wish to belabor the obvious.

“. . . and even though I now am
employed in its Ministry of Communication, I cannot support it. On the other
hand, the Sendero Luminoso is brutal and self-serving, so I cannot support
revolution. Your—what is your soft name for it?”

“Company.”

“Yes. Right. Your ‘company’ has
assured me that never would I be put in the position of betraying my people, my
native land. . . .”

Heh!
thought Switters,
imitating, in his cranial echo chamber, Maestra’s ejaculation of
incredulousness.

“. . . so I do not have the strong
political objection to the surreptitious work for your ‘company.’ But, Agent
Switter, I want very much to be completely honest in my dealing with you and
your superiors, and the honest truth is, I, personally, could never fit in with
your ‘company.’ I am of a different character.”

“What character’s that, pal?”

“Well,” said Hector, a tinge of
reddening in his cheeks, susurration in his tone, “the shameful but honest
truth is, what I am most interested in in life is sex, drugs, and rock ’n’
roll.”

Thanks to various misunderstandings,
rugby scrums, fender-benders, and occupational hazards, Switters was left with
only eleven whole and healthy teeth. The inside of his mouth, in his opinion,
so resembled a dental Stonehenge that he refrained from smiling broadly “for
fear,” as he put it, “of attracting Druids.” Now, however, Hector’s guilty
admission elicited a wide, open-mouthed grin that no amount of
self-consciousness could censor—although much of what might have been revealed
was obscured by pudding.

“Perfect,” he said. “That’s just
perfect, Hector.”

The Peruvian was perplexed. “Please,
what do you mean?”

“I mean that you’ll have a great deal
in common with your new colleagues. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll are
enormously popular in the CIA.”

“You are joking with me.”

“Not among the administrators, naturally,
and not with
all
the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the
brightest and the best. You see, unlike the U.S. Forest Service or the
Department of Energy, just to mention two of the worst, the CIA is not entirely
an organization of bureaucratic meatballs.”

“But the ‘company’—the CIA, if I’m
allowed to say that now—does not actually condone—”

“Officially, no. But there’s little
it can do about it. Experienced recruiters understand completely what type of
person makes the best operative or agent: a person who is very smart, educated,
young, self-reliant, healthy, unencumbered, and relatively fearless. Well, a
guy who’s smart, educated, young, self-reliant, healthy, unencumbered, and
fearless is a guy who, chances are, is going to reserve a big place in his
affections for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It goes with the territory. And
it’s tolerated. Sure, from time to time there’re cowboys who slip through the
net. . . .”

“Cowboys?”

“You know: flag-wavers and
Bible-thumpers. Trigger-happy patriots. They’re the ones who create the
international incidents, who’re always embarrassing the CIA and the
United States
and getting innocent people killed. Of course, they
tend to win promotions because basically they’re the same kind of dour-faced,
stiff-minded, suck-butt, kick-butt, buzz-cut, macho dickheads who oversee the
company as political appointees, but anyone who truly understands the art and
science of intelligence and counterintelligence will tell you that the cowboys
mostly just get in the way. The gods dropped ’em in our midst to generate
misery and gum up the works. You’re aware, are you not, Hector, that the gods
are tireless fans of slapstick?”

It was Hector’s turn to smile. “You
have a festive manner of speech, Agent Switter. If you are at all typical, and
if you are not pulling my legs, I think I am going to enjoy very much my
association with this CIA.”

“Atta boy.”

“And so, dinner is complete, yet the
night is still ahead. Tell me, Agent Switter, do you like to dance?”

“Why, yes, I do. Just a couple of
days ago, as a matter of fact, I danced for hours without a break.” He
neglected to mention that he was alone at the time.

Hector Sumac’s drug of choice, at
least for that October evening, was a clean, beige, relatively mild form of Andean
cocaine. Switters wanted no part of it. “Thanks, pal, but I tend to avoid any
substance that makes me feel smarter, stronger, or better looking than I know I
actually am.” There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs
that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs; and on
a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger. Should he ever aspire
to become voluntarily delusional, then good old-fashioned alcohol would do the
job effectively and inexpensively, thank you, and without the dubious bonus of
jaw-clenching jitters.

Nevertheless, Switters sat with
Hector while he snorted a few lines. They sat in Hector’s ‘97 Honda. The
vehicle was still immaculate, but if
Lima
didn’t hasten to allot a few billion
nuevos soles
to street repair—the tyranny of maintenance—it wouldn’t be long before Hector’s
proud chariot would be shaken and beaten into a spring-sprung tumbleweed of
automotive nerves. At present, however, it exuded that peachy, creamy, new-car
aroma, and inhaling it, Switters was led to wonder if part of the appeal of
young girls wasn’t the fact that they gave off the organic equivalent, the
biological equivalent—okay, the genital equivalent—of a new-car smell.

When Hector was sufficiently tootered
up, he ejected the Soundgarden cassette to which they’d been listening, and the
two men walked the block and a half to the Club Ambos Mundos, arriving shortly
before
eleven
o’clock
. Five nights a week,
the Ambos Mundos, like most clubs in
Lima
, featured live Creole music, but each Monday it was
taken over by a hipster deejay who played the latest rock hits from the
U.S.
and
Great Britain
. Blue lights apulse, the place was rocking to Pearl
Jam when they made their entrance.