Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

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 Bolivar, 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.

“Senor 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, senor. 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, senor, 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, senor, 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?!”

“Si. 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 Policia 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.”

Switters’s intention was to fly into a jungle town—Iquitos had been his original choice, but Pucallpa would do—and hire a vehicle to take Sailor and him to the edge of the forest for the release ceremony. He thought of it as a ceremony because Maestra had stuffed her camcorder into his crocodile-skin valise and insisted upon his