In Flames Read online

  In Flames is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi eBook Original

  Copyright © 2015 by Richard Hilary Weber

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 9780553393781

  Cover design: Caroline Teagle

  Cover image: © Patrick Laverdant/Getty Images

  www.readalibi.com

  v4.0

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I

  San Iñigo

  Walter

  Buenas Tardes

  Elaine

  Club Life

  Skinny Vinny

  Sister Emma

  Drunk

  Police

  Headquarters

  Club Lunch

  Funeral

  The General

  The Widow

  Desires

  Reg Townsley

  Padre

  Police Major

  Señor y Señora Arbusto

  Bed

  Part II

  Part III

  Hospital

  Ambassador

  Psychiatrist

  Reg

  General Arbusto

  Club Saint Ignatius

  Court

  Exit

  About the Author

  You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out. That is a private fight. Everybody has to find his own way.

  V. S. Naipaul

  A Bend in the River

  Part I

  San Iñigo

  Let me tell you something about lining your pockets even when the effort—whether driven by greed or mere survival—will probably kill you.

  Because the truth is, had I been able to land a stateside job after graduating Princeton—no, let me amend that—if I could have landed a job anywhere else, I’d never have gone to San Iñigo and never have seen with such terrible clarity and closeness the many ways a person could die there. Which to some extent may explain why, though no one was threatening me when I arrived, I felt vaguely anxious from the moment I stepped off the plane into the hot wet air of what travel brochures called “the paradise island of the western Caribbean, a pristine passage to sublimity, discovered 1496…”

  In tourist bureau photos, island colors were dense and vivid under brilliant sun, impossible to tell at a glance whether you were looking at growth or decay, the island’s highlight a rainforest river glistening white over mountain rapids before turning caffe latte beige on its way down to the sea.

  My job, a day’s hard journey by road from those scenic mountains and river, was supposed to keep me in San Iñigo city, safe and occupied, which meant the formless worries I experienced on arrival were absurd, as I knew very well who was in charge, that our own people ran the place, we were the entrepreneurs, not the barbarians. Despite this, anyone in my shoes might have felt the way I did landing on that island republic for the first time. No matter how great the opportunity for me—Dan Shedrick, junior architect for the new harbor and Xy Corp. facilities, a year’s contract freshly signed and notarized—my first up-close view of San Iñigo was less than encouraging.

  Armored tanks ringed the airport, turret cannons aiming away from runways as though fearing attacks not by outside invaders but from forces within. Before leaving home, I’d checked the U.S. State Department’s Web site, and although the facts appeared less than enticing—northern virtue eyeing tropical depravity—I thought I detected wiggle room for hope.

  “The potential for violence by terrorists and other criminal elements continues to be notorious in certain areas of San Iñigo. Outside the protected zones, armed assaults and robberies continue to be a part of everyday life, and U.S. citizens have been victims of violent crimes, including kidnapping and homicide. Firearms are prevalent in San Iñigo, and altercations can often turn violent…”

  In other words, oppression didn’t create saints, only potential killers: all victims were dangerous, permanently aggrieved.

  My harbor job was in a protected zone, the entire capital city a heavily patrolled world unto itself, where I couldn’t even bring my dog in from the States, and with much parting sorrow had given Felix, a devoted golden retriever, to a neighbor on Garden Place in Brooklyn, my dog and I and my neighbor all of us blubbering. Apart from missing Felix, the abrupt discomfort I felt on entering San Iñigo wasn’t any specific anxiety I could actually pinpoint—the tanks around the airfield weren’t aiming at me. Nor could I nail down a precise instant when vague fears seized me, replacing curiosity and enthusiasm, a sensation of nausea rising from a dread of increasingly obvious discrepancies as I rode into the city from the airport, the symptoms a sourness in my throat, sharp taste on my tongue, growing knots in my stomach while passing lugubrious mile after mile of thatched roof, cinder block shanties lining the highway, the barrios populares where the poor lived. The shanties didn’t appear in any tourist brochures, and the tanks were facing the shanties. Their message: to endure, not enjoy.

  While my job in San Iñigo wasn’t exactly a Frank Lloyd Wright assignment, the salary beat anything I could barely land an interview for stateside, my Princeton degree and varsity tennis letter, Deke brother and Cottage Club years worth nearly nada in the endless recession back home. Up to that point my life had been sympathetic and ordered, a steady and protective progress of parochial and private schooling, made more placid by the hope, indeed the continued reassurance, that life would always continue this way. And then the bottom fell out and the long slump struck. San Iñigo was supposed to be different—regular paychecks, warm nights, tropical fancies fulfilled—several steps up a new ladder of revived progression.

  But the ride from the airport into Ciudad San Iñigo wasn’t promising all that much. The cab air-conditioning conked out, windows stuck shut, the driver muttering few words of English—hello, tip, hot—and in full view on the front seat, a shotgun beside an open box of cartridges. Wiping a misted window, I regarded an endless parade of shantytowns. Oil rigs were so far offshore, I couldn’t see a trace from the coast, but I knew platform towers lay somewhere out there beyond the horizon, and they were the only reason our people tolerated perpetual heat in San Iñigo. As the taxi approached the city, views improved, forested foothills and serrated mountain ridges framed a panorama of spectacular scenery, the island alive with colors. Anyone would fall in love with the landscape; indifference to the setting was impossible. The first time I saw the San Iñigo coastline at sundown, I lingered in the hotel garden with a welcome drink in my hand and watched the vista grow even more beautiful for about fifteen, twenty minutes. The distant hills and winding roads, the military base, all these acquired a yellow tint, turning pink to pale green, blue and red and gold, this unvarying transformation occurring whether you drank too much rum or sipped only iced tea. The offshore oil rigs remained invisible, shantytowns remote, nothing in San Iñigo marred the knockout views from hilltop hotels and restaurants. The island may have been full of frustrations and fears, real or imagined, but at sunset each day you felt a kind of happiness there, when for a few moments you indulged crepuscular insights, moved by some peculiar mix of fading lights and fragrances of new flowers and fruits that brought back childhood memories and revived old hopes, or at other times induced a feeling of something
precious once lost and now almost impossible to recall. You picked your spot to stand and watch, too mesmerized to judge whether the place was acquiring meaning for you or leaking it away, the island tottering at some halfway point between creating or destroying.

  West of the city, floodlights illuminated a shadowy black lava mass of the El Moro headland and a hundred-foot white stone statue of Cristo Redentor, the island’s tallest structure, the immense San Iñigo pride of Christ the Redeemer, His arms stretched forward in benediction over city and sea.

  Granted, San Iñigo wasn’t really ours, not legally, I knew that much, but it might as well have been. And I wasn’t there in military uniform, I was with the company—a harmless unarmed civilian, no bull’s-eye on my back—still I nearly slipped into cardiac arrest the first time a dark hand touched my arm, coming up from behind me without warning. “I take you bags, señor…”

  The Nacional hotel lobby was cool, polished lava floors spotless. Someone was always mopping the dark stone. I left my suitcases yawning open on the bed in my room, too depressing a sight, and called for a cab. Pocketing a letter of introduction from my stepfather—an often tightfisted man, though free with kindly words—I rode down the coast to the Saint Ignatius beach, golf, and tennis club. A reassuring sight, the club could have been in the Hamptons, the entire Maidstone airlifted directly down to Latin America, albino members and all. My relief was palpable, serendipity my guide: the familiar comforted, and the unfamiliar didn’t have to be sought as it would find you soon enough.

  Walter

  “Dan!” Right hand extended, an older man crossed the bar terrace in my direction.

  Walter Ferguson was the club owner-manager, a friend of my stepfather’s and an embassy confidant, a longtime expat on the island. His reputation placed him on excellent terms with the San Iñigo president, and he’d often boast of visits to el presidente’s vast sugarcane plantation on the western end of the country, flying out there in the maximum leader’s official plane, landing alongside flower beds and lawn in time for a splendid lunch. Walter Ferguson wasn’t noticeably different from the man whose photo hung behind the club bar, The Founder, of twenty-five years before. Ferguson’s blue eyes were large and lively, chin sharp, white hair trimmed close, giving him the appearance of a television talking head or a grandfather figure in an ad for mutual funds. Preserving the legacy you’ve earned…He was a character, willfully flamboyant, his style was his substance, assiduously cultivated, his manner his mansion, fastidiously designed: an experience common to expats on meeting a new culture, acting out a role felt to have been rightfully assigned in an earlier life, and now a hidden persona kicked into action.

  “You look exactly like your Facebook picture,” he said to me, “full of youth. Delighted you’re here, Dan, I’m Ferg.” He lowered his voice, hinting at confidentiality. “Wish I were your age again, swear to God. You’ll do wonders in this place. They’ll be all over a jock like you, swarming like mosquitoes. Live life to the hilt, it’s a big mistake not to. Only take precautions, you never know what’ll hit you here.” Ferg placed an avuncular hand on my shoulder. “Place reeks with disease. No matter what we do, nothing changes. Same old story…”

  You’ll do wonders in this place…Although a thought meant to encourage, even at that early point I didn’t kid myself. The island gave off a heavy air, like a pervasive pollutant, an inescapable warning telling anyone paying attention there were lots of reasons to worry, a disquiet insidious and chronic and I believed I knew why. Or that I should have known. It wasn’t merely malaria or whatever other contagions spread so easily in San Iñigo. Unavoidable discrepancies gnawed, endlessly. Detachment was impossible, a natural apprehension prevailed for as long as you were rational and confined to the island.

  The Club Saint Ignatius, however, delighted. A series of white buildings overlooking an eighteen-hole golf course, tennis courts, a long swimming pool beside a yacht marina and sugary sand beach. From sunset, electric lights illuminated the club paths like vesper candles lit for evening services, a time of day that was no longer quite daytime, a time when some people started feeling a call to drink especially if moonrise happened to be involved and life grew seemingly stale without alcohol. Inside the club the public rooms were high-ceilinged and air-conditioned. Outdoors, when the sun disappeared, insects grew ubiquitous. Furry spiders, mosquitoes, flying roaches, moths the size of your hand. No razor-wire fence or guards kept the bugs out. But you get used to them, club members assured me, just relax. Simply pick the pests out of your drink, and toss them away, they won’t kill you. With time, you’ll develop an immunity here, all of us do. While I had more than a little trouble believing that, I remained undeterred—San Iñigo was my new domicile—an act of hubris inviting inevitable retribution.

  Buenas Tardes

  After work the first day I stopped off at the club to play some tennis, shower, drink a few rum coolers before supper outside on the bar terrace.

  And I stuck around awhile longer for a few more drinks. Though everyone was friendly, my vague unease persisted even at the club, circling like a cloud of insects hungry and tenacious. The ride that night from the club back to the hotel didn’t help any, but confirmed the fears that had been building ever since my arrival on the island. I was a little loaded and didn’t drive my leased car but left it in the club parking lot. I took a cab, the driver unarmed. Passing an avocado orchard, pear-shaped fruits in moonlight the size and shape of cannonballs, we rounded a curve beside the carbonized ruins of an old villa and a crumbling swimming pool, the remains battling the woods for existence. The taxi braked abruptly for a wrecked car blocking the road, and at once a dozen men in torn shirts, tattered jeans, and camouflage hats swarmed from the bush, surrounding us, all of them aiming rifles at the cab windows. A thug rapped the barrel of his weapon on the driver’s side, motioning us to get out of the car. The cabbie said, “Don’t resist, señor, it’s dangerous.”

  Earlier that night I’d heard several accounts at the club bar about road robberies, enough to know how to act if I wanted to live.

  “This close to town, señor, they only want money. They don’t want noise.”

  “Sure, no noise.” Though half in the bag I was sobering up fast enough. “It’s okay,” I said, stepping from the cab. “Buenas tardes, hermanos, I’m a U.S. citizen. Here’s my ID. See, there’s the eagle seal.”

  “Señor, they can’t read. They don’t understand English. Show them your money.”

  The thieves peered into the cab and opened the trunk. Nothing to steal but the car itself and it wasn’t worth the effort. The thieves might encounter a military roadblock, vehicle checkpoints frequent everywhere around the city.

  I flipped open my wallet. “Here you go, take the cash. It’s all yours.” I had about three hundred dollars. They helped themselves and faded back into the woods, leaving behind two men who drove off the wreck. I was astounded. “Is it always this bad? So close to town?”

  “Bad and bad, señor. The rebels need money.”

  “You’ve been robbed before?”

  “Everyone has.”

  “No police?”

  “Señor, some of them might be police.”

  And I grew more worried. I’d heard even worse stories traded at the club bar. The cabbie could have spotted I was soused and not taken me directly to the Nacional, but driven me up into dark hills to some backcountry road, where his pals would roll me and leave my body in a sewage-filled ditch and I’d drown in the muck before I ever regained consciousness. It happened. I could spend my whole year on assignment in San Iñigo worrying about my life, before deciding this anxiety was only a distraction from finding a way to live with the place. Living abroad—almost anywhere, and especially in the tropics—can end up like that, it makes you or it unmakes you. Only those free to leave at any time can afford to be sentimental about these wild places, or nostalgic once they’ve left the jungles behind, content with self-serving pieties about nature at its rawest.

&nbs
p; The Club Saint Ignatius had a few rooms for bachelors, simple rooms, not as comfortable as the Nacional, but if I lived at the club I could drink what I wanted at night and simply roll into bed. Forget worrying about cab rides and robberies. The club hired Xy Corp. contractors, big beefy Special Forces types patrolling the grounds and the perimeter fence, trained guards armed with Uzi submachine guns and fierce-looking Rottweilers. No San Iñigo islander in his right mind would try a run past the guards and their killer dogs.

  And so at the end of my first week, I moved out to the club. After closing the bar late that Friday night and losing track of time, I intended to sleep in on Saturday. When I turned off the lamp in my room I could see Christ the Redeemer glowing in the dark on the distant headland and behind Him the lights of the new harbor, my workplace. Earlier that week we’d mounted steel towers on flat barges out in the bay, from which iron pilings pounded into seabed. Day and night—clang boom clang boom—the noise reverberated like ritual drums in the hills. The Saint Ignatius was a fair distance from the harbor and in my new quarters construction noises stayed muffled. I was settling in, life was looking up, no need to lose any sleep. I could kick back for the coming year and unwind in my adopted home, another exercise of hubris that would nearly kill me.

  I closed the window shutters to the room and heard the screech and thunder of a jet making a low pass overhead as if it had left the airfield only moments before. The noise wasn’t the jumbo-sized roar of a long-distance aircraft on the way to Miami or Mexico City and the hour was too late for a regional commercial flight. I lay in the dark thinking of all the things a jet plane might be doing at night flying so low over San Iñigo, where it was headed and who was at the controls, and as the engine sound faded heading east along the coast toward the mountains where the rebels hid, I fell asleep. It was cool as a sea cave in my air-conditioned shuttered room.