and owed four hundred pesos. If Lee was half-owner of the joint, Allerton would not be in a position to ignore him. Lee did not actually want retaliation. He felt a desperate need to maintain some special contact with Allerton.
Lee managed to re-establish contact. One afternoon Lee and Allerton went to visit Al Hyman, who was in the hospital with jaundice. On the way home they stopped in the Bottoms Up for a cocktail.
'What about this trip to South America?' Lee said abruptly.
'Well, it's always nice to see places you haven't seen before,' said Allerton.
'Can you leave anytime?'
'Anytime.'
Next day Lee started collecting the necessary visas and tickets. 'Better buy some camping equipment here,' he said. 'We may have to trek back into the jungle to find the Yage. When we get where the Yage is, we'll dig a hip cat and ask him, 'Where can we score for Yage?''
'How will you know where to look for the Yage?' 'I aim to find that out in Bogota. A Colombian scientist who lives in Bogota isolated Telepathine from Yage. We must find that scientist.'
'Suppose he won't talk?'
'They all talk when Boris goes to work on them.'
'You Boris?'
'Certainly not. We pick up Boris in Panama. He did excellent work with the Reds in Barcelona and with the Gestapo in Poland. A talented man. All his work has the Boris touch. Light, but persuasive. A mild little fellow with spectacles. Looks like a bookkeeper. I met him in a Turkish bath in Budapest.'
A blond Mexican boy went by pushing a cart. 'Jesus Christ!' Lee said, his mouth dropping open.
'One of them blond-headed Mexicans! 'Tain't as if it was being queer, Allerton. After all, they's only Mexicans. Let's have a drink.'
They left by bus a few days later, and by the time they reached Panama City, Allerton was already complaining that Lee was too demanding in his desires. Otherwise, they got on very well.
Now that Lee could spend days and nights with the object of his attentions, he felt relieved of the gnawing emptiness and fear. And Allerton was a good travelling companion, sensible and calm.
Chapter 7
They flew from Panama to Quito, in a tiny plane which had to struggle to climb above an overcast. The steward plugged in the oxygen. Lee sniffed the oxygen hose. 'It's cut!' he said in disgust.
They drove into Quito in a windy, cold twilight. The hotel looked a hundred years old. The room had a high ceiling with black beams and white piaster walls. They sat on the beds, shivering. Lee was a little junk sick.
They walked around the main square. Lee hit a drugstore—no paregoric without a script. A cold wind from the high mountains blew rubbish through the dirty streets. The people walked by in gloomy silence. Many had blankets wrapped around their faces. A row of hideous old hags, huddled in dirty blankets that looked like old burlap sacks, were ranged along the walls of a church.
'Now, son, I want you to know I am different from other citizens you might run into. Some people will give you the women-are-no-good routine. I'm not like that. You just pick yourself one of these senoritas and take her right hack to the hotel with you.'
Allerton looked at him. 'I think I will get laid tonight,' he said.
'Sure,' Lee said. 'Go right ahead. They don't have much pulchritude in this dump, but that hadn't oughta deter you young fellers. Was it Frank Harris said he never saw an ugly woman till he was thirty? It was, as a matter of fact. . . . Let's go back to the hotel and have a drink.'
The bar was drafty. Oak chairs with black leather seats. They ordered martinis. At the next table a red-faced American in an expensive brown gabardine suit was talking about some deal involving twenty thousand acres. Across from Lee was an Ecuadoran man, with a long nose and a spot of red on each cheekbone, dressed in a black suit of European cut. He was drinking coffee and eating sweet cakes.
Lee drank several cocktails. He was getting sicker by the minute. 'Why don't you smoke some weed?' Allerton suggested. 'That might help.'
'Good idea. Let's go up to the room.'
Lee smoked a stick of tea on the balcony. 'My god, is it cold out on that balcony,' he said, coming back into the room.
''. . . And when twilight falls on the beautiful old colonial city of Quito and those cool breezes steal down from the Andes, walk out in the fresh of the evening and look over the beautiful senoritas who seat themselves, in colorful native costume, along the wall of the sixteenth-century church that overlooks the main square. . . .' They fired the guy wrote that. There are limits, even in a travel folder. . . .
'Tibet must be about like this. High and cold and full of ugly-looking people and llamas and yaks.
Yak milk for breakfast, yak curds for lunch, and for dinner a yak boiled in his own butter, and a fitting punishment for a yak, too, if you ask me.
'You can smell one of those holy men ten miles downwind on a clear day. Sitting there pulling on his old prayer wheel so nasty. Wrapped in dirty old burlap sacks, with bedbugs crawling around where his neck sticks out of the sack. His nose is all rotted away and he spits betel nut out through the nose holes like a spitting cobra. . . . Give me that Wisdom-of-the-East routine.
'So we got like a holy man and some bitch reporter comes to interview him. He sits there chewing on his betel nut. After a while, he says to one of his acolytes, 'Go down to the Sacred Well and bring me a dipper of paregoric. I'm going to make with the Wisdom of the East. And shake the lead out of your loin cloth!' So he drinks the P.G. and goes into a light trance, and makes cosmic contact—we call it going on the nod in the trade. The reporter says, 'Will there be war with Russia, Mahatma? Will Communism destroy the civilized world? Is the soul immortal? Does God exist?'
