While checking in, Hood had met the owner, Felix, and his son Eduardo, the boy with the monkey and the half middle toe visible through the sandal on his right foot. The primate was a local squirrel monkey whose father had been killed by a car. Eduardo had found the baby clinging to its father's back, miraculously unhurt. It was now nearly eight inches tall, Hood estimated, and had a wide-eyed, can-do expression. It roamed a decorative wrought- iron birdcage in the lobby when it wasn't mounted on Eduardo's shoulder. Eduardo had named him Pepino.
Now through his screened window Hood watched the volcano for a few more minutes but he didn't unpack his bags. Instead he went back down and convinced Felix to let him see the registration forms for July. He showed his U.S. Marshal's badge but said he was on a mission of friendship. He sat in the fan-cooled lobby and drank a cold beer and easily spotted Father Joe Leftwich's signature. July eighteenth, seven nights, room twenty-four. He found Ozburn's Sean Gravas on July twentieth for four nights, room seven.
Hood handed the forms back to the owner and asked if he could move into room twenty-four. Pepino eyed him with a bright curiosity, cracked a seed in his teeth and dropped the shells to the cage bottom. His hands were tiny, perfect, black. The owner checked his computer and said he would be happy to make the room change for Hood.
'Thank you very much, senor,' said Hood.
'It is not a problem.'
'Do you know Father Leftwich?'
Felix worked the registration slips back into the rectangular cardboard box. He looked at Hood dubiously. 'Yes, of course. Why?'
'I'd like to meet him. We have mutual friends.'
'He left here in July.'
'Where did he go?'
'He said nothing to us. We were relieved that he finally left here.'
'Why?'
'He enjoyed provoking trouble. He inflamed our Germans with stories about Hitler. And the French with comments about Vichy. Once, he caused a fight between Spanish and Mexican businessmen, right in our dining room. There were two large beautiful Americans who bought him far too much alcohol and they shouted and argued and laughed very loudly for two straight nights. This hotel is for ecotourism, not fighting and drinking.'
'Was he belligerent?'
'No. Always polite. Always happy. Never having the appearance of the drunken man. It was always the people around him who suffered most.'
Eduardo ran into the lobby and swung open the cage, and Pepino crawled up his arm to his back. The monkey looked wide-eyed at Hood.
'Nobody understood Father Joe,' said Eduardo. 'He is a good man and interested in everything.'
'But you are eleven years old,' said his father. 'So you don't see how he makes people angry.'
The boy shrugged and the monkey picked at something on the back of its tiny paw. 'You and Itixa are superstitious about him because he's a man of God.'
'I am not superstitious, Eduardo,' Felix said with a smile. 'I am realistic about unhappy guests. This is our business. This is what pays us for your food and clothes and your TV.'
'And for yours.'
'Of course.' The owner looked at Hood. 'My father built this lodge. I am very proud of it. Because he is young, Eduardo thinks all things will come easy to him forever.'
'Have you seen the library that Father Joe was building?' asked Hood.
'No. It is between here and Tabacon.'
'I have!' said Eduardo. 'The Quakers are building it. Father Joe helped them. But that isn't why he came to Costa Rica.'
'Why did he come here?' asked Hood.
'To cause trouble in my dining room and bar,' said the father.
'No! To study wild things!'
He looked at his father, then at Hood, and ran out. Pepino spread his arms and clung to the boy's shoulders, turning back for a bug-eyed look at Hood. He looked like a tiny man on a big motorcycle.
'He's a good boy,' said Hood, smiling.
'He's a good boy,' said the owner.
'I wonder what wild things Father Joe was studying.'
'If you can catch Eduardo, I'm sure he will tell you.' Hood moved his bags into room twenty-four and unpacked. He still had the great volcano view. He ran a hand over the bedspread, then got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. There was dust and two dead flies and that was all. His cell phone had worked when he landed in San Jose but now there was no service. He turned it off and put it in a dresser drawer beside a Bible.
That evening he tried to eat alone in the dining room but the German birders asked him to sit with them. Hood spent the next hour eating his dinner and looking at the various cameras that were pressed upon him. The trogons and toucans were stunningly beautiful but no one had seen a quetzal as yet. The Germans were chipper and all of them spoke English precisely. They were off to try for quetzal again the next day.
After dinner Hood found Eduardo in the lobby, cleaning up Pepino's cage. The monkey clung to the boy's back and stared at Hood.
'Can you show me Father Joe's library tomorrow?'
'There is no school tomorrow, Detective. Yes. My studies will be done by four.'
'I'll pay you as a guide.'
'I guide for free but thank you.'
'Can we see his wild things, too?'
'We can see them after the library. We need the dark for those.'
Hood sat on his observation deck and drank bottled water mixed with bourbon from his duty-free bottle. He saw the great black hump of Arenal against the lighter black of the sky, watched the red crawl of the lava. Insects clung to the screen behind him and the frogs built a wall of sound in the jungle beyond. He turned and looked through the room at the bed where Sean Ozburn had snored and at the foot of that bed where Father Joe had sat and spoken quietly to Sean and then at the screened window through which Seliah had watched and mistaken this strange behavior for prayer. The moths and beetles fluttered on the screen, and the ceiling fan sectioned the room with moving shadows as Seliah had remembered. And I said, 'Well, that's all fine and dandy, Joe, and pardon my French, but what the fuck were you doing with his toes?' The late afternoon was cool and the volcano was shrouded in clouds and silent. Eduardo led the way down the road with Pepino on his back.
'Father Joe was a good man,' said Eduardo. 'He knew everything about nature. I've lived here my whole life and he was only visiting but he knew more. He could name all of the different types of scales on the head of any snake. He knew all the Latin names of the animals of Costa Rica. He was a true expert on birds. He said his favorite Costa Rican animal was the sloth, because it is one of the seven deadly sins and the one he enjoyed the most. This was a joke because he was a priest. He was always joking about things. It's true that he caused trouble in the dining room. He liked to stir up people and see what they did.'
'Your father didn't like him much. Was it only Father Joe's dining room behavior?'
'No, that's not the only reason. My father says it's the reason, but it has more to do with superstition than science.'
'Explain that, Eduardo.'
'Detective, superstition is belief without proof. Science is belief with proof. Older people like you and my father come from the age of superstition. But the young know better. We believe in science and technology. For example, my father hates his computer even though he learned to use it. Father Joe was very young in his heart. He showed me many shortcuts on the computer. He knew it very well. And other things. For example, he told me that the theory of evolution and natural selection is absolutely true. He said creation is also true. He said that what God created was the place where life could begin and evolve. It was a place with a few basic elements but that is enough. So, creation and evolution actually go together.'
'Okay, then what superstition does your father have about Father Leftwich?'
'He thinks he's evil.'
