Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Also incidentally, Switters had once been under the impression that the term angel, as applied to certain evolved mavericks within the CIA, was an entirely ironic reference to a dopey book by the evangelist Billy Graham, entitled Angels: God’s Secret Agents. Not so, said Bad Bobby Case. Bobby claimed that the term referred to a little known scriptural passage recounting the existence of “neutral angels,” angels who refused to take sides in the Heaven-splitting quarrel between Yahweh and Lucifer, and who chided them both for their intransigence, arrogance, and addiction to power. How a hotshot from Hondo knew such things (Case was graduated second in his class at Texas Tech, but that was aeronautical engineering), Switters couldn’t guess, nor could he guess where the spy pilot might be that morning or what he was doing, but he would have given a vat of red-eye gravy to have Bobby with him there, sharing an early-bird beer in the somber little marketplace of far Boquichicos.

The market was right next to the plaza. It consisted of a dozen or so irregularly spaced stalls with thatched awnings, as well as several rows of unshaded tables covered with ragged, faded, roach-eaten oilcloth. On display were a skimpy assortment of fruits and vegetables, dominated by plantains, chili peppers, and pale piles of yucca or cassava root; eggs, live poultry, smoked fish, animal and reptile hides; woven mats and baskets; dry goods and clothing (including shoddy cotton T-shirts adorned with unauthorized portraits of the most familiar face on the planet, more familiar, and perhaps better loved, than Jesus, Buddha, or Michael Jordan—the face of a bland, candy-assed cartoon rodent with a hypocoristic Irish moniker); and, at the stall where Switters currently stood, pisco, homemade rum, and warm beer.

Switters sipped slowly—the wise do not gulp warm beer—and looked around for Inti. The Indian was late. Maybe he’d had difficulty hiring a guide to escort Switters to the colpa, the clay lick where the parrots and macaws were said to gather every day to coat their tiny tastebuds with a nutritious mineral slick. Maybe he’d gotten into trouble over the noisy nocturnal fellowship he enjoyed with his lads. It wasn’t feasible that Inti could have headed back to Pucallpa for the very practical reason that so far he’d only been paid a 40 percent deposit on his services. As unlikely as it was, however, the faintest fleck of suspicion that Inti might have abandoned him in this moldy, weedy, hell-for-lonesome outpost was enough to freeze the sweat on Switters’s brow. He began to drink faster and faster, until the beer erupted in froth and its spume filled his sinus passages. Foam was still trickling out of his nostrils when, a minute later, he thought he spotted Inti at the opposite end of the market.

Some sort of commotion was in progress, and the captain of the Virgin seemed to be at the center of it. “Watch my beverage,” Switters said to the parrot. “I’ll be right back.”

The argument proved to be between Inti and a sinewy, gold-toothed, young mestizo man in Nike basketball sneakers and a spooky anaconda-skin cape. Several of the mestizo’s friends were supporting him, mainly with their physical presence, although they became vocally exhortative from time to time. Inti looked quite relieved to see Switters. Impressed by the latter’s fine suit and hat, the mestizo jumped to the conclusion that he was an important senor, a lawyer(!), perhaps, and he, too, welcomed the intervention of a reasonable authority. Hope of an objective opinion in the mestizo’s favor quickly drained, however, when Inti pointed to the Yankee, made a symbolic pistol of his fist and forefinger, and, jabbering aggressively all the while, fired a volley of imaginary shots into his adversary’s sternum. Inti was urging Switters to obliterate the Boquichicosian exactly as he had the banana-hogging spider, and from the way the man stepped back, his face turning as gray as his wild snaky cloak, he obviously had some fear that Switters might comply.

“No, no, no,” said Switters, shaking his head, forcing a big smile and trying to appear as genial as the toastmaster at a booster club prayer breakfast. He raised his arms in the universal peacemaker gesture and inquired conciliatorily, though in bad Spanish, what the trouble might be. This precipitated a dueling barrage of rapid-fire Campa-Spanish that sounded like stormy-night static on Radio Babel. It took a while, but eventually details of the dispute emerged, aided considerably by the fact that when cornered, the mestizo turned out to speak a surprisingly excellent brand of English.

Evidently, two weeks earlier, Inti had given Fer-de-lance (in order to enhance his reputation in one way or another, the mestizo had assumed the name of a deadly Amazon pit viper) a case of Lima’s finest pisco in exchange for a baby ocelot. The animal could be expected to fetch a high price in Pucallpa. Later upon the very evening that Switters had hired Inti, the Indian had been caught trying to peddle the ocelot on the fringe of Pucallpa’s semilegal parrot market. A game warden cited him for violating one of Peru’s new wildlife protection laws and confiscated the cub, but Inti informed him that he was heading again into the upstream bush the following dawn and promised to release the cat in the forest near where it had been captured, if he could have it back. After much discussion, the warden agreed. A bottle of pisco sealed the bargain.

That would explain, Switters thought, the potbellied guy in the shabby brown uniform who stood on the dock with folded arms and saw us off that morning. I wondered about that gentleman.

What Inti had done instead, however, was to return the little ocelot to Fer-de-lance (for the first time Switters now noticed a lidded, jiggling basket off to one side) and demand his pisco back. Fer-de-lance was having none of that, if for no other reason than that the bulk of the brandy had already met its brandy fate, which was to say, it had been sucked into that black hole that yawns at the gates of human yearning.

Switters finally settled the matter by convincing the strange mestizo to return a single bottle of pisco to reward Inti for his trouble and save his face, while he, Switters, would assume custody of the ocelot. The idea wasn’t to smuggle the cub home for Suzy, although that thought crossed his mind, but to release it on his way to the colpa to free the parrot. Ah yes. The Switters Pet Liberation Service.

That concluded, he stepped over to the gently rocking basket and stooped to lift its lid, intending to ascertain that the cub was not overheating in there, wondering, at the same time, if it might grow up with some animal memory of Suzy’s amateur brassiere. The instant he touched the woven top, however, there was a rude cry, and Fer-de-lance seized his arm, gripping it in fingers as strong as steel pincers.

“Shit,” Switters muttered. “I should’ve known it wasn’t going to be that easy.” He tried to relax his muscles and clear his mind, as he’d been trained to do in martial arts. “Here goes my glad morning. Here goes my nice fresh suit.” Then, in one liquid motion, he sprang to his feet, whirled, pak saoed Fer-de-lance’s hand away from his arm, and unleashed a punch.

The punch was not as fast as it might have been (he was as far out of practice as he was out of shape), and before it could land, an amazingly agile Inti blocked it. Inti then grabbed Switters’s right arm, and Fer-de-lance reestablished his steely claim on the left one. Solicitously, they turned Switters around. The basket, upended in the action, lay on its side—and from it there slowly slithered, flexing and reflexing, an anvil-headed snake as black and glistening as evil itself, death rays fairly shooting from its slitty chartreuse eyes.

The crowd cleared. Inti pulled Switters away. He pointed toward a second basket that sat in the shadow of a thatched overhang a few yards distant. He commenced to snort, hiss, and stomp, much as he had when Switters had been startled by the spider. “Yeah, I get the picture,” Switters grumbled. “And I suppose a pathological sense of humor is better than no sense of humor.” By the time he looked around, Fer-de-lance had somehow steered the viper back into its container.

“Okay, pal, your sleazy business deals have wasted a good half hour and nearly got me snake-bit. Let’s get this circus on the road. Where the hell’s our tour guide to the parrot spa?” Naturally, he had to rephrase the question. When he made his query intelligible to Inti, the skipper—ocelot basket (the correct basket) in his arms, pisco bottle stuck in his waistband like a pistola—assured him that his juvenile playmates had been sent to procure the finest guide available and would be showing up with that esteemed colpa connoisseur at any moment.

“Good. It’s getting late. And it’s getting hot.”

Indeed, though it was not yet midmorning, the sun was looking down on them like the bad eye of a billy goat, jaundiced and shot with blood; and beneath its baleful glare, every living cell in every living thing seemed to slump like a Dali watch. Switters felt his protoplasm turning into dry-cleaning fluid, and his suit, which soon enough would need a good cleaning, was glued to his body like a poster to a wall. The load of perspiration seemed to double his weight.

Breathing slowly, shallowly, as if the steamy air might choke him, he lagged several feet behind Inti while they traversed the marketplace. They hadn’t gotten far before he became aware of another commotion of sorts. This one was occurring around Sailor’s cage.

The pyramid cage was surrounded by a group of male Indians, five or six in number. Switters identified them as Indians not so much by their painted faces (geometrically arranged dabs of berry pulp), their features (long, flaring noses, chiseled cheekbones, sorrowful dark eyes), or their clothing (thorn-ripped cotton shorts and not much