Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“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.

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