The Second Bat Guano War Part 36

"Sven and I, we-" but she stopped, and sat back, and put a finger to her lips.

Ahead of us, a horse-drawn cart slowed traffic. Behind us, three taxis and a tour bus downshifted to a crawl. The motorcyclist had followed us into the alley, and now puttered along two taxis back. Halfway down the lane, Victor told the driver to stop.

He said to us, "Wait thirty seconds and follow me."

"But what are you-"

"Just do it."

The taxis behind us honked their horns. Victor got out, walked over to a vendor's stall. He held up his open palms to the blockaded taxis, begging forgiveness in advance. He entered the dark shop.

"Ready?" I asked.

"Not thirty seconds yet," she said.

"You always do what people tell you?"

I got out of the cab. She followed. The taxis' horns blared. The driver shouted abuse in Spanish, Quechua and bad English. I smiled and waved, nodded. Just another dumb gringo tourist who doesn't speak Spanish. Just got off the Inca Trail. Smile some more. I pointed at my watch, held up two fingers.

Victor was talking to a gargantuan hoop-skirted Indian. Her typical highland finery was regulation issue, except her clip-on braids, which were orange instead of black. The color looked real. I wondered what the Scottish la.s.s who'd sold her hair would think of its new owner.

He shouted at the woman in Spanish, turning sideways so the other customers could hear. "Pay me what you owe me, or I take back my merchandise!" He gestured at the meat hooks from which hung the llama fetuses.

The hoop skirt rustled in retreat, returned with a man from inside the shop. He was short and dark, his face splattered with flecks of blackened gore. He carried a meat cleaver in one hand. His blood-encrusted ap.r.o.n hung stiffly from his neck.

"I come for what I'm owed," Victor said.

The butcher planted the cleaver deep into a nearby beam. "Don't have it for you. Come back tomorrow."

Aurora's hands crept to her jacket pocket. Pulled out a digital camera. She was staring at the orange-braided woman. She seemed fascinated by the deep creases in the woman's face, the single tooth jutting from her lower lip, the black bowler hat perched precariously on the side of her head.

"Don't," I whispered out of the side of my mouth.

"Not her, numb nut," she whispered. "Motorcycle guy."

Victor continued to argue loudly with the butcher. I went and stood next to the butcher's wife. Raised my eyebrows, pointed at Aurora's camera.

"Photo?" I asked.

"Five dollah," she said.

My wildly gesticulating limbs pantomimed shock. "Too much," I said.

"Give it to her," Aurora growled.

I took the last of my money and put it in the woman's palm, trying to avoid touching her. She grinned broadly, confirming the lonely tooth was a solitaire, and threw an arm around my shoulder. She stank of s.h.i.t and p.i.s.s and s.e.x and rotting teeth.

Aurora looked at the camera's screen. She muttered something about "bad light." Gestured us sideways, farther, farther, until our backs faced the street. Our taxi driver honked his horn, yelled at us to hurry. The motorcycle rider was behind me now. I imagined him resting his feet on the ground, chin on one fist, wondering when and how to murder us all.

"Say 'whiskey!'"

"Wee-skee!" my newfound lover said, hugging me to her chest.

The camera flashed. Aurora checked the photo, gave me a thumbs up.

"What are you doing?" Victor asked. He eyed the commotion in the street. "Come inside."

The butcher wrenched the meat cleaver from the beam. We followed him into the shop. In the middle of the room stood a concave butcher's chopping block, worn smooth from years of scrubbing. A rotting llama carca.s.s hung from a hook in the corner, a wriggling ma.s.s of maggots. The butcher picked up the cleaver, slashed the animal from tail to neck. Maggots writhed, spilled to the ground. A heavy plastic bag thumped at the butcher's feet. He picked it up.

Victor took the bag and fished out a gun. He put it on the chopping block. It was an ancient six-shooter.

"Colt .45 Peacemaker," he said. "Weapon of cowboys everywhere."

He laid a box of ammunition beside the weapon and discarded the bag at his feet, where it slithered and hissed on the tide of maggots. He loaded the gun, one bullet at a time.

The butcher said something in Quechua. Victor's one-word answer did not please him, and he slashed the meat cleaver, filthy with maggot juice, down into the cutting block an inch from Victor's fingers.

Victor laughed. He threw his arms wide, chest forward, neck back, as if to say: only kidding. He pulled out a wad of US dollars, rolled together with a rubber band, and slapped the green cylinder onto the chopping block. The butcher picked it up, flicked away the rubber band. Thumbed through the bills. Nodded, hid the money in his ap.r.o.n pocket.

A voice at the door interrupted us. Our taxi driver swaggered his thin frame through the open door. "Hijo de puta!" he swore. "Pay me so I can go!"

His eyes fell to the gun in Victor's hand. Too late. Victor shut the revolver, pointed it at the taxi driver and pulled the trigger. My ears rang. A fountain of red exploded from the side of the man's neck. He clutched his throat. The blow spun him around. Victor shot him again, this time below the left shoulder blade. The man pitched against the wall, streaked a crimson path across the cinder blocks. He careened through the doorway and fell to the ground. Outside, someone screamed.

"The f.u.c.k was that?" I said.

The blood drained from Aurora's face. I patted her cheek. She didn't react.

"Don't faint on me now, girl," I said.

Victor jammed more bullets into the gun, tucked it into his pants at the small of his back. Dropped the box of bullets into his jacket pocket. He smiled. "Knight takes p.a.w.n." The butcher shouted, gestured toward a rear door with his meat cleaver.

"Come on!" Victor shouted.

He banged through the door. I pushed Aurora in front of me. Her legs began to move. We stumbled through the living quarters the butcher and his wife shared with a small army of rats, and out another door into an alleyway. We zigzagged to the left, ran toward the light. Emerged, panting for breath, on a major thoroughfare.

We dashed across the road, traffic honking at us. Victor threw up his hand at a pa.s.sing bus marked El Alto. The bus was full. Pa.s.sengers stood in the stairwells. We elbowed our way aboard. Victor pressed coins into the driver's hand, enough for the three of us, and the bus roared uphill, aimed at the lip of the crater.

It was only then I realized Aurora was crying. I touched her cheek.

"Why did you do that?" she said. "Why did you have to kill that guy?"

Victor took a deep breath. Exhaled slowly. "The driver was CIA."

"How do you know that?" she asked, pushing her face into my neck.

"Yeah," I said. "He have a tattoo on his forehead that said, 'I'm a spy, shoot me'?"

"Look." Victor lowered his voice. Our fellow pa.s.sengers jostled against us, a sea of sweaty armpits. "These people are trying to kill us. They almost killed me. They will kill you if you let them. Cut me some slack, OK?"

"So was it worth it, then?" I asked. "Have we lost them?"

"For now."

The bus ground its way up the mountain, panting in first gear. It slowed every hundred meters or so to pick up or drop off pa.s.sengers. My ears popped. Twice. Finally we crested the lip of the city's giant crater. The bus meandered its way through that giant high-alt.i.tude slum.

"Aqui, por favor!" Victor called out. We descended to the broken pavement, shivering and gasping for breath.

"Now what?" I asked.

"We find Fritz."

"Who is who?"

"A man with a jeep."

The shanties grew smaller and more rustic the higher we climbed, punctuated here and there by an eye-popping new medical clinic or brand-new school.

"This is where Ovejo buys his votes," Victor said.

"I thought you were on the Bolivian side."

"I am. I don't want to see the US bully anyone. That doesn't mean I have to like the local politics."

We turned down a side street. There was a conspicuous absence of motor vehicle traffic. We walked on the sunny side of the street, straining to soak up as much warmth as possible. Children played soccer in the street, but stopped when they saw us. One picked up the ball. Another hid behind his playmate's back, his finger in his nose. From an open widow, a wrinkled old woman spat a stream of tobacco juice in the dust at my feet, then slammed the shutters closed in our faces. A teenage boy took a b.u.t.terfly switchblade from his pocket. He flicked the knife open, threw it at the wooden door of his house. He stepped to the door, removed the blade, looked at us, then returned to his target practice.

"I don't think we're welcome here," Aurora said.

Victor waved a hand. "They won't bother us."

"They haven't seen too many gringos, I would think," I said. "We do not belong here."

"You don't."

The m.u.f.fled voice came from a man with a scarf wrapped around his face. Only his eyes and dark forehead were visible. A heavy green-and-purple poncho hung from his shoulders. He pointed a shotgun at my b.a.l.l.s. A second barrel pointed at my face.

TWENTY-TWO.

Five Bolivians. They all wore heavy ruanas, the woolen Andean poncho, and scarves hid their faces. Their weapons were antiques inlaid with silver, glimmering in the weak midday light. We put our hands in the air.

"Gringos far from home," one said.

"Nah," I said. "Home is where the heart is," and got a gun b.u.t.t in the kidney for my trouble.

A sharp word in German. The booted foot stepped away from where I lay on the ground.

"Sprechen zie Deutsch?" Victor asked.

"What is that to you?"

I looked up in time to catch Victor's smile. "You must be the grandsons. He's told me so much about you."

The man shifted his weight. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Fritz is a good friend of mine. He tells me everything." Victor's smile widened. "Everything."

I rubbed my lower back with my hand. "Some friends," I said.

Victor spoke to them in German, at first haltingly, then at greater length. He gestured to us, then turned around, hands in the air. Their leader removed the gun from Victor's belt, tucked it under his poncho.

A hand from the heavens descended to my level. I looked at it, still rubbing my kidney. "Come," a voice said from above. "Take my hand. We go inside now."

I accepted the hand and pulled myself to my feet. They led us down a nearby alleyway. It twisted to the right, then left, then out onto a parallel street and into a mechanic's garage. A battered hatchback with multicolored panels and no fender sat high in the air. Two men consulted its organs from below. We pa.s.sed through the clank and the stink of automotive repair, through a narrow door, and time-warped from the Bolivian Andes to the Swiss Alps.

A cuckoo clock hung from the wall. A walnut entry table drowned in white lace. Framed in gold and covered in gla.s.s, a pair of green lederhosen monitored our progress down the hall, the nostalgic reminder of some mountain farer's distant youth.

We entered a living room. In the middle of yet more walnut and lace, a crystal bowl overflowed with lulos, pitayas, cashew fruit and other tropical wonders I couldn't identify.

Light fixtures designed to resemble gas lamps lit the room. A bundle of green-and-yellow wool emitted a wheezing cough from a leather armchair. A thin arm pushed its way through the blanket. An old man struggled to his feet, gripping a gnarled wooden cane. Long white mustaches drooped from either side of his upper lip. Thick eyebrows hooded his sockets. He grasped a heavy pewter crucifix at his chest, a gruesome depiction of Christ's suffering.

A young woman stood at his side. She wore a blue kerchief in her hair, and a brown dress that might have been in fashion in Zurich fifty years ago. The blanket slipped to the floor, and she stooped to pick it up. She wrapped it around the old man's shoulders, but he shrugged it off.

He barked at her in German, and she retreated from the room. "My niece," he grunted in Spanish.

"You are Fritz?" I asked.

The man looked me up and down, as though judging me worthy of a reply. "I am," he said finally. He addressed Victor. "You have met my grandsons, I see."

The five men removed their scarves. They arranged themselves around the room, sitting on the edges of the furniture, leaning against the walls, shotguns draped across their thighs. The leader unwrapped a chunk of pink chewing gum, laid it gently on his tongue.

"Fine young men," Victor said.

"I had not expected to see you so soon," Fritz said.

Aurora plopped onto the empty sofa. "That's because everyone's dead."

Fritz's eyebrows rose, a squirrel's tail, ready to pounce. "Everyone?"

"Her boyfriend," I said. "And a friend of mine. Name of Pitt."

"He knows Pitt?" Fritz asked, with a sudden intake of breath.