Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates (7 page)

Switters’s broad, tanned, big-boned face
was at all times abuzz with an activity, a radiance, of randomly spaced scars,
which, though delicate as sand shrimp and variable as snowflakes, created an
impression of hard history; and which, when combined with the intensity in and
around his emerald orbs, caused him to look potentially dangerous. That
impression was offset, however, by the irrefutable sweetness of his smile, a
smile that possessed the capacity to dazzle even when held in check to hide
chipped teeth, which it usually was. (Since every time he had them fixed, it
seemed his teeth just got abused again, he had made a vow to abstain from
further dental work until his forty-fifth birthday.) So, perhaps
dangerous
is not quite the right word for his countenance. Maybe
disconcerting
or
conflicted
or
unpredictable
would be more accurate—although for some drab souls,
unpredictable
and
dangerous
are synonymous. At any rate, women did not find his
appearance unintriguing, and when the muscular gringo stepped—jaunty, yet
somehow dignified—through the door in his white suit and guarded smile, two or
three bamboo-colored curls snailing out from under his Panama hat, there was a
sudden quickening of more than one female pulse.

Over the next ninety minutes,
Switters danced with an assortment of women, local and foreign, but by
midnight
—the hour when myth’s black cat pounces on time’s
mechanical mouse—one in particular was in orbit around him. Her name was
Gloria, she was Peruvian, and she was drinking too much too fast. Saucy and
petite, Gloria wore her short hair in bangs, similar, in fact, to Hector; and
her eyes were like chocolate-dipped cherry bombs with their fuses lit. In her
mid-twenties, she was a tad old for his specialized taste, but when she pressed
her pelvis against his during the slow dances, when she poked holes in his
breath with a vodka-heated tongue, his body forgot about Suzy, and beer by
beer, his mind followed suit.

He was experiencing a growing
appetite for Gloriapussy, and he figured that her alcohol consumption was not
dimming his prospects. Indeed, she had become so disheveled, wild-eyed, and
flushed that she would have looked more at home in a tangle of sweat-soaked
bedsheets than there on the crowded dance floor. Nevertheless, he was surprised
when she whispered wetly in his ear, “I desire you to chew my nipples.”

Dancing away from her, he executed a
twirl. When they came face-to-face again she said rather loudly and with a
giggle, “I desire you to eat my breasts.”

Chew? Eat?
Perhaps it was a
language problem. Perhaps Gloria meant
lick
or
suck
or
nibble
—oral
activities in which he might have been a willing participant—but lacked the
English for it. “You have a festive manner of speaking,” he said, borrowing a
line from Hector, and led her back to their table.

Hector sat across from them, an
urbanized, dyed-blond Indian girl on his lap. He seemed alert and under
control.
Langley
would approve. Switters felt the urge to talk shop
with him, to impart, perhaps, Switters’s somewhat novel notion that the CIA was
on the verge of evolving into a kind of autonomous secret society (a larger,
better funded, better organized version of the C.R.A.F.T. Club), a reverse
hierarchy whose fundamental function was to work behind the scenes to distract
the powerful and covertly thwart their ambitions so that intelligence (true
intelligence, which is always in the service of serenity, beauty, novelty, and
mirth) might actually flourish in the world, and some shard of humanity’s
primal innocence be preserved. Alas, the music was too loud, and Gloria was
tugging at his sleeve.

“Yes, dear?”

“I desire you to fuck me in the
culo
.”

At first he thought she said
“cooler,” and he had a vision of them entwined on the frosty, bloodstained
cement of one of those refrigerated lockers, with waxy yellow and red sides of
beef swinging from iron hooks all around them, their exhalations condensing the
instant they panted or sighed so that they kissed through a mutually generated
cloud and could not see each other’s faces.

“I desire you to fill up my ass,” she
elaborated.

Well,
he thought,
that’s
South America
for you.

“With premium or regular?” he asked.

As Gloria giggled uncomprehendingly,
he rose on an impulse, retrieved his hat, and gave Hector an affectionate
squeeze of the shoulder.

“No! Please! You are not leaving?”

“Afraid so. It’s getting vivid in
here, if you catch my drift. Good luck, pal.
Ha sido estupenda.
I’ll be
in touch.”

As he headed for the exit, he called,
“Order Gloria there a pot of coffee. And don’t forget to put it on your expense
account. The company’s a mile-high Santa Claus with an elastic sack.”

On the taxi ride back to the Centro,
he passed one of the cathedrals he had visited earlier that day. It was the one
with the statue of the angel on its porch. Once while playing Ping-Pong with
Suzy—one of the rare times he was left alone with her—he had asked her what
language she thought the angels spoke. “Oh,” she answered, without missing a
stroke, “probably the same one Jesus speaks.”

“The historical Jesus is believed to
have spoken Aramaic. Of all the possible languages, why would the heavenly
hosts choose to converse in a long-dead Semitic dialect from southwest
Asia
?
Do you suppose.”

She looked so puzzled that he
regretted at once having broached the subject. Suzy was a “babe in Christ,” as
the Bible refers to them, and “babes in Christ” become quite unhappy when asked
to actually
think
about their faith. “Whatever,” she said cryptically,
and smashed a shot past his outstretched paddle.

“I guess it wouldn’t matter whether
we could comprehend angel talk or not,” he conceded. “They’ve got those
trumpets and flaming swords, and glow-in-the-dark accessories, they’d find a
way to get their point across. I’m multilingual, so I’ve been told, but I spend
a lot of time in countries where I can’t understand the language at all. And
you know, Suzy, I’m coming to prefer it that way. It’s uplifting. When you go
for a while without being able to understand a word of what anybody around you
is saying, you start to forget what banal bores our blathering brethren be.”

Suzy found that highly amusing, and
when they traded ends of the table for the next game, she allowed him a
fleeting fondle—which, of course, assured her of victory in the match.

Incidentally, Switters and his
friends lumped all CIA agents into one of two categories: cowboys or angels.
They spoke the same language, the cowboys and the angels, but with different
emphasis and to far different ends.

It was approaching
2
A.M.
when he reached the Gran Hotel Bolívar, and the lobby
was not surprisingly shadowy and quiet. No sooner had he walked in, however,
than a figure shot from one of the overstuffed chairs and began walking toward
him. His hand slid to the pistol in his belt.

The figure was stoop shouldered and a
little gimpy.

“Señor Switter. Who do you find to
buy your tractors at this late hour?”

“Why, Juan Carlos, I’ve been to
midnight
mass.” He shook hands with the guide. “Didn’t see
you
there. The priest was asking about you. He’s worried you aren’t getting enough
rest.”

“Do not joke, señor. I could not rest
for the thinking of your situation. You have changed your mind about breaking
the heart of your dear grandmama?”

“No, my plans are firm. But don’t
worry, pal. My grandmother’s tough as a plastic steak. And she’s adamant about
giving that cracker-snapper its freedom.”

Juan Carlos looked as downcast as a
busted flowerpot. “If you take it to
Iquitos
,” he said, “it will not be free for long.” The guide
explained that despite its romantic reputation as an exotic jungle town and the
capital of
Amazonia
,
Iquitos
had
grown into a city of nearly four hundred thousand residents, and logging and
farming were pushing the rain forest farther and farther from its streets. “You
must go fifty kilometers from
Iquitos
in any direction to find the primary jungle, and even
there your bird may not be safe. The parrot market in
Iquitos
is very big, señor, very extensive. Your grandmama’s
friend will only be captured and put in another cage. Eventually, some stranger
will buy it and take it away—perhaps to the
U.S.
again.”

Well, that would never do. And Juan
Carlos went on to warn of cholera germs that were currently careening through
Iquitos
like a soccer mob. “Your inoculation, I fear, will
offer only minimal—”

“Okay. I get the picture.
Iquitos
is gonna wrinkle my rompers, gonna squeak my cheese.
So, what’s the alternative? I have the distinct feeling that there’s an option
up your sleeve.”

“For your own safety, señor, and for
the peace of mind of your grandmama.”

“I understand, Juan Carlos. You’re a
good man.”

“I have taken the liberty to cancel
Iquitos
and arrange for you the
noon
flight to
Pucallpa
.”

“
Pucallpa
?!”

“Sí. Yes. It is the much more small
city, and, guess what, do you know?—it is the more shorter flight from
Lima
.”

“That may be true, but from what I’ve
heard,
Pucallpa
’s not exactly Judy Garlandville. And it hasn’t been
kind to the forest, either.”

A couple of Policía de Turismo had
stirred from their doze and were giving them the old law-enforcement stink-eye.
Switters was hardly intimidated, but Juan Carlos nodded toward a space by the
elevator, and the two men strolled over there to continue their talk more
privately.

“
Pucallpa
is more rough but is also more gentle. Is that sounding
crazy?”

“Not at all. Only the obtuse are
unappreciative of paradox.”

“Yes, but you will not wish to remain
in
Pucallpa
, for, you see, it is a city also and is also having a
parrot market.”