The Andean Correspondent

I’m on the lazy side, the first to admit it. If I don’t have to do a job, I’ll sit around, page through a magazine, maybe strum the guitar a little, and think about what I could accomplish if somehow I were forced to work. I’ve always known this about myself. So it was against my better judgment that I drove my old Beetle one autumn afternoon from Boston to a small town in New Hampshire, on the piney banks of Lake Winnipesaukee, and applied for a fellowship that would allow me to do nothing for two whole years, with the only proviso that I spend this idle time in the Andean Region.

“You mean I wouldn’t have a syllabus or anything?” I asked the foundation director.

His name, perfectly suited to the setting, was Woody. We sat on a little pinewood deck, just a few feet from the lapping waters of the lake. It was breezy, and he wrapped his loose frame in a gray cardigan sweater. Woody wore his hair long, in the style of the late seventies, over his ears and across his forehead, a ridge of it resting on the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. I guessed from a few gray strands that he was pushing 40, which seemed depressingly old at the time. He smiled at me, radiating wisdom. “Just to learn,” he said. “That’s the mandate.”

“And how will you know if I’m learning?”

“Do you like to write letters?”

I told him I did. It’s long been a favorite mode of procrastination.

“You just write us a letter once a month, and tell us what you’ve learned.”

“And what would you want me to learn?”

He laughed gently and explained that the Higgins Foundation simply wanted to seed the globe with young curious Americans, hoping that in a few years, these same Americans, older and more influential, would provide the country with expertise in strategically important regions. He said the foundation paid $15,000 a year — princely pay at the time — plus travel expenses.

At that point in my life, I hadn’t yet found real work. Foolishly, coming out of college I’d set my sights on only one job, as a Spanish teacher at a private school in Connecticut. I had near perfect grades at Michigan, and my Spanish was fluent. I didn’t see how I could miss. But I did. So I settled for work at Beacon Book Store. I think I was making $3.25 an hour. This is all to say that two years lazing in the Andes, sending off an occasional letter, would hardly disrupt my career.

“Would it be OK if I went down there with my girlfriend?” I asked.

He looked away from me and ran his fingers through his hair. “We don’t encourage it,” he said. “We’d rather you spent more time with the locals.”

This meant I could break with Helen, who’d had followed me from Ann Arbor to Boston in the vain hope that a change of locale would alter my personality. We fought all the time.

***

In my quiet way, I’ve always been a sap for patriotism. I get teary-eyed when I hear crackly recordings of Roosevelt’s first inaugural, or the I Have A Dream speech. I think people with screwed-up families lean on their country a little more. I know I did. The idea that some enlightened millionaire named Higgins had hatched a plan to sprinkle people like me around the world, and then wait 20 or 30 years for the investment to pay dividends for humanity, it seemed marvelous to me, and quintessentially American. I was naive at the time. I see that now. But I remember driving back from New Hampshire, through a driving rainstorm, thinking that if I landed this fellowship, I’d work hard in the Andes, even without a mandate. I’d meet people, all kinds of people, and I’d learn. Forgetting my laziness, I vowed to do whatever I could to make Mr. Higgins proud of his investment in me.

A month later, I was sitting in Jim Rock’s dark room in the Gran Casino Hotel in Quito, Ecuador, smoking a joint and learning an early lesson about the Andean Region: They grow some very powerful drugs there.

I met Jim Rock at the Quito airport. He was standing behind me in the immigration line, as big and broad-faced as his name, with sun-bleached hair trimmed over his ears. He asked if the Miami Herald I’d brought with me had a sports section. I handed it to him, and he was still studying it as they stamped our passports, mine American, shiny and new, his Canadian, looking as though it had gone a couple cycles in a washing machine.

I still remember him looking up from the newspaper when the officer asked for his visa.

“Huh?”

“Su visa, senor.”

“Oh, that,” Jim said. Then he said “pagina veintiocho” with a laughable accent, and pointed to the visa in his passport. I used to tutor Spanish to football players at Michigan, to get them past language pre-reqs. Most of them had bad accents. But Jim, it was as if he was trying to speak miserable Spanish.

His face was tanned and he wore preppy clothes: khakis, loafers, and a LaCoste shirt. This led me to wonder if he might be a traveling golfer.

As we waited for our luggage, Jim told me he was from Vancouver. He was teaching some English, on and off, and traveling around the Andes. It occurred to me as we talked that he looked like a heavy, short-haired version of myself. He said he’d just been down in Peru for a few days.

“Machu Picchu?” I asked.

“Not far from there.”

I wondered why someone would travel all the way into the Peruvian Andes and not visit Machu Picchu. “Is there some golf resort up there, or something?”

Jim glanced sharply at me with bright blue eyes. “What’s that?”

“Golf. I was wondering if you were playing golf down there.”

I mentioned his tan and the golf shirt. He was studying me as I said this, and I began to feel a little ridiculous.

Then he broke into laughter. “That’s a good one! What’s your name again?”

I hadn’t told him yet. “Mike,” I said. “Mike Bavard.”

“French, eh?”

“Somewhere way back,” I said.

“Oh, blueblood, eh?”

“Not exactly.”

“You know what, Mike?” he said, coming close to me as if he were going to tell me a secret. “You look like a Smedley to me.

OK with you if I call you Smedley?”

“Huh?”

Before he could explain, our luggage arrived, my enormous black trunk with chrome buckles, and his compact white-leather suitcase.

Jim seemed to know one of the customs officials, who whisked us right through. As we walked outside, I got my first look at Quito, its red-tile roofs climbing up the bases of steep green mountains. I took a deep breath of the Andean air, and tasted diesel exhaust. Jim asked where I was staying. I fumbled through my Bible-sized South American Handbook and pointed to a hotel I’d circled, the Falcon, or maybe the Halcon. Its appeal, I remember,was that each room had a balcony. I imagined sitting on my balcony, taking the brilliant mountain sun, and writing my monthly epistle to Higgins.

Jim laughed. “You don’t want to stay there.” He flagged down a taxi and told me to join him. “Come on, Smed!” he said.

A year or two after I got back from Quito, I saw the movie Midnight Express. It’s about an American who gets caught running drugs in Turkey, and winds up in an Istanbul jail. The prison in that movie, with its big sunny courtyard, and all the jaded hippies mingling about in their dusty, Third-World get-up, reminded me of the Gran Casino. The hotel Jim Rock took me to was full of young people from all over the world, and there was something a bit grim and weary about them. These were not vacationers popping down for a quick look at the Galapagos or the volcanos. Those types stayed in the modern side of town, in hotels with pools and nicer restaurants. No, the travelers at the Gran Casino were in for the long haul.

Most of the Americans and Canadians had made their way down through Mexico and Central America, and from there to Colombia. They traded stories about crimes and rip-offs, hellish bus rides down Panama, glimpses of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Most of the Australian and New Zealanders at the hotel were coming from the other direction. They had hopped the Pacific, from the Easter Islands to Chile, and then bussed north through the deserts of Peru. They could tell the southbound travelers where to avoid pickpockets and bedbugs, and undercover cops. Some of these people never stopped traveling. These were usually Europeans. They reminisced about the golden years in India, in the late 60s, about Thailand and Burma. A few had done Africa.

People at the Gran Casino were going about the business of travel. It was a place to get over dysentery, or to wait for friends coming in from Cuzco or the Amazon. To do laundry, or wait for a money order. As far as I could tell, Jim Rock and I were the only two who had arrived by air.

As we walked in, the clientele were lazing about in the courtyard, drinking coffee and beer, reading novels, most of them wearing sandals and native cotton pants with a rope around the waist. Hardly a golf crowd.

Jim showed me around. He introduced me to a couple of New Zealand women he knew, Jan and Eunice, who had a hammock strung up in their room. And he knocked on the door of two Italian astrologers, Giulio and Massimo, or Max, who both reached out with two hands to shake mine and nodded intently as Jim told them that I was a Bostonian named Smedley.

“Actually, the name’s Mike,” I hurried to say.

“But they just smiled and nodded, apparently accustomed to Jim Rock’s name games.

Later that night, as we smoked that first joint in his room, I asked him why he called me Smedley.

He smiled. “I think of things, and people, in terms of sports,” he explained. When he was on the high school basketball team, outside of Vancouver, they once played another team with a power forward named George Smedley. For some reason, Rock and his friend liked the name. It meant something to them, though he wouldn’t tell me what. This was probably to protect my feelings, since I was already a Smedley. I didn’t know whether to believe Jim Rock when he told me that he always tried to keep one Smedley in his life. “It’s the ying to my yang,” he said, his eyes dancing.

I hated the name Smedley. I felt I was being used, and ridiculed. So I stayed away from Rock for a couple of days, letting him know, for what it was worth, that he didn’t have his Smedley on call. In fact I didn’t need him at all. I didn’t like drugs all that much. And even if I had, Jim Rock had no monopoly on supply. A fog of marijuana hung in the hallways, pierced from time to time by the pharmaceutical scent of cocaine, which back then was still considered benign.

I set up a table in my room and studied the South American Handbook, trying to plan my next two years. I also toured colonial Quito. I climbed the steps behind the hotel, to the top of a green hill called El Panecillo, and took in the view of Quito, the poor, colonial neighborhood below me, and the tacky modern section in the distance. I visited the Jesuit cathedral, La Compañia. It dripped with gold and was surrounded by beggars.I walked up and down the cobblestone merchant streets, looking at the silverware and jewelry, the stands of fruits I hadn’t yet tasted, papayas and chirimoyas. I saw the caskets in the carpentry shops, some of them arranged in sidewalk displays. The infant-sized models, in white and baby blue, caught my eye. I noted that detail and planned to mention it in my first letter to the foundation.

I tried to make other friends at the Gran Casino. I remember walking to a restaurant with the New Zealanders, Eunice and Jan. Eunice, tall and thin, with frizzy hair, talked a lot, while the beautiful Jan stared out a window. Guinea pigs, or cuy, a national food in Ecuador, scurried under our table, eating crumbs. Eunice pestered Jan to order cuy, reasoning that it would be fresh. Jan agreed, if no other reason than to end the discussion. I opted for chicken. While we waited for the food, Eunice told me she’d heard that robbers in Colombia, armed with very sharp knives grabbed Gringos in the streets and slit their thumbs. While the injured foreigners gaped at their wounds, she said, the Colombians made off with their watches, wallets and jewelry. I laughed and said it seemed like a round-about way of doing business. “No,” Jan said, looking at me for the first time. “It’s the truth.”

The Italian astrologers were well into their second decade of Third-World wanderings, and they had their room hung with all sorts of Asian and African fabrics. Giulio, a balding gnome with a ponytail, was the guru. He didn’t speak English or Spanish, and sat smiling gently as Massimo, or Max, carried out business. Max had soft features and curly black hair, and looked to me like an Apollo, by Caravaggio. He said he’d learned most of his English from Bob Dylan songs. He rolled a joint and asked me what I was doing in Ecuador.

“I guess I’ll teach English,” I said, wondering whether to smoke when he passed the joint; it was barely breakfast time. As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. He smoked it all himself, speaking slower and slower as the drug settled in.

“But you arrived…” He was holding in the smoke, and speaking in bursts. “By an airplane, no?”

I nodded.

“With the big box.”

I supposed he was wondering why someone with no firm plans would fly to Quito with such an enormous trunk. At this point I wasn’t telling anyone about the foundation. I thought it would raise too many questions. I also worried that once people knew I had a steady income, they’d hit me up for loans. Money wasn’t something you bragged about at the Gran Casino.

Yes, I said. I had come in an airplane with a big box. Then it was quiet. We sat there, the three of us, Max stoned, Giulio apparently meditating, and me, determined not to break whatever peace they were working on with some trivial question or remark.

Then, in a soft, lyrical Italian, Giulio finally murmured something to Max.

“He says you should probably go,” Max said, his eyes half shut. “Something about the vibes he doesn’t… dig.” Giulio smiled at me and waved with his fingers as I got up and left.

I bought the local paper every day from a little Indian boy who stood at the street corner yelling, “El Comeeeeeeeercio!” It was an excruciating bore. But I needed to fill my monthly letter. I sat at the table in my room, clipping out wire stories about Peru and Bolivia, both run by military governments, and Colombia, which appeared to be a democracy, at least in name. Ecuador’s military leaders were planning some sort of referendum on democracy. I suspected it was a charade, but couldn’t tell from the pages and pages of gray coverage in El Comercio. At this point, Mr. Higgins would probably have instructed me to go out and talk to people.

I talked to Jim Rock. I guess I should mention here that ever since my days in Ann Arbor, and probably even before, I’ve always preferred to be among the most liberal in a group, and hated to be the most conservative. This wouldn’t be a problem if I were a Trotskiite or an Anarcho-syndicalist. But I’m just a liberal Democrat. Back in Ann Arbor in the mid-’70s, those of uswho didn’t object too much to the rule of law, who believed in marriage and put up with the free market, we were viewed as reactionaries. The politics were much the same at the Gran Casino, where Fidel Castro would have been considered a middle-of-the-roader.

The lone conservative was Jim Rock. He’d circulate among the travelers at the Gran Casino cafe, looking like a frat boy at Woodstock. He’d sit down with the French and Germans, sometimes using his ridiculous Spanish. Gently he would turn the conversation toward politics. Within a few minutes, he’d be asking, earnestly, if the old bridges over the Seine were wide enough for Soviet tanks. Then, before a serious argument could start, Jim would laugh and stand up, patting them on the back, shaking a hand or two, and move on to another table. When he was done, he’d sit down with me. “It’s you and me, Smed,” he’d say, shaking his head.

More than once I insisted that I supported Carter’s Panama policy, and lots of other liberal causes.

He shrugged. “OK. So we have some policy differences…”

Still, as far as he could see, it was Jim Rock and his friend Smedley against the world.

“Drink up,” he’d say, pointing to my coffee or my beer. “I want to talk to you about something, in my room.” But when we got up there, he’d just horse around. He had a leather-bound backgammon board we played, with Jim providing a comic play-by-play in the voice of Don Corleone. His imitations were as nearly as miserable as his Spanish. But I laughed all the same.

****

I’m trying to remember exactly when and how I figured out that Jim Rock ran drugs. Some people would have guessed at the very start, from the way he winked his way past the customs agent at the airport. I suppose their detective skills work at a higher level than mine.

But the truth, as it began to emerge in my mind, wasn’t so startling. We were operating in an supremely tolerant and welcoming culture when it came to drugs, along with the people who trafficked in them. There was hardly any difference, at the Gran Casino, between recreational drug users, which included almost everyone, and people who might sell a joint or two. That was just being friendly, or accommodating. And once people started selling, some of them turned it into a small business, which didn’t exactly mean they were traffickers. They just saw they could make more money that way than by teaching English, which only paid about two dollars an hour. As we spent more time together, I began to realize that Jim’s trips to Peru placed him in a different league altogether, closer to people who dealt drugs as a career and carried guns.

Still, this was before most of us had heard about the Medellin and Cali cartels, before they even existed. And from the Gran Casino perspective, the villains in South America were the dictators and death squads. We read about the various Dirty Wars in dog-eared copies of Time and L’Express, which circulated at the cafe. In Argentina, the rightwing killers threw student leftists out of helicopters. The narcos, to our eyes, seemed nothing like that. They provided a useful service. For all we knew, they probably listened to good music and had wild parties, way up there in the mountains. Most of us didn’t think about them much.

Jim Rock would slip away occasionally, disappearing for three or four days at a time. When he did, I felt at loose ends. I’d wander around the hotel with my notebook or a novel, talk to a couple of Australians, or join up with the Italians, Max and Giulio, if they’d have me, for a cup of coffee. Alone in my room, I drank Chilean wine and worked on crossword puzzles.

When Jim Rock reappeared with his white suitcase, and circulated in the cafe, shaking hands with newcomers, patting old acquaintances on the back, I felt — and even now I feel a little embarrassed to write it — rescued. I’d wait for him, nervously, to get to my table, and when he reached me, he’d smile, point with his thumb toward his room, and say, “Backgammon?”

More than once I headed up to his room determined to have a frank discussion. I’d tell him about my fellowship and ask about his business, point blank. It shouldn’t be such a big deal, I’d think. I had no reason to feel secretive about the Higgins money, not with Jim. And if he was dealing drugs, we could still be friends. It turns out that the longer you put off big questions, the harder it becomes.

When I got up to Jim’s room, he would have the backgammon board set up He effortlessly deflected my little hints and probes into his business, and launched into his Don Corleone act, or an even worse, Howard Cosell. “At game time today, the Smed appeared to be of an unusually inquisitive mind, a burning curiosity which was only dampened by the prompt application of a soporific substance, brought to his lodging, at great risk, by his imitable Canadian friend…” And as he talked, he’d pass me a joint.

I lay awake at nights worrying about my first letter to the Higgins Foundation. I had a notebook filled with random observations and pieces of color. But I couldn’t imagine synthesizing it all into a letter, certainly not one worth two thousand dollars — my monthly cost to the foundation, as I calculated it. For practice, I wrote letters to my mother, to a couple of friends in Ann Arbor, and most of all, to Helen. Early on, I used the letters to Helen as rough drafts for Mr. Higgins. I wrote about infant mortality and the Ecuadorian referendum, and added a sentence or two at the end about loving her, without actually using that word. But by the third or fourth letter, I’d abandoned my pride and was begging Helen to fly to Quito, the sooner the better, to join me for an exciting bus ride through Peru and Bolivia. The prospect of traveling through that bleak Altiplano all by myself seemed too lonely and depressing for words. But Helen, though I didn’t know it at the time, had moved on.

One Sunday when Jim Rock was gone, the New Zealanders, Eunice and Jan, returned from the Galapagos. They’d had plenty of sun there. Eunice’s long, plain face was blotched with freckles, her nose one big scab. Standing next to her at the cafe, Jan looked like a bronzed goddess.

I was writing a letter to Helen at the time. I put down my pen and asked them to join me for coffee. As usual, Eunice did most of the talking. They’d had a wonderful time, she said — “jest spectacula.”

Jan agreed. Her tan made her blue eyes shine, and when she opened her mouth, her teeth looked dazzlingly white. Eunice told me about their plans. As soon as a money order arrived, they would be heading up to the States. Eunice had a friend who worked in a Howard Johnson’s in Tampa, Florida, and they figured they could make some money there for a few months. How about me?

I looked at Jan, and was happy to see she was paying attention. I told them I was heading down to Peru and Bolivia in a few weeks, on a bus, and I said maybe they’d like to change their plans and join me. My hope was that Eunice would fly off to Tampa, leaving me alone with Jan.

“You poor thing,” Eunice laughed. “We just came from there.”

She rolled her eyes, which made her face look even longer. “I swear,” she said, “if I had to see one more Peruvian soldier or drink one more of those Inca colas…” I looked over at Jan and saw her nodding with her mouth shut. She a dimple, I noticed on her right cheek.

They were heading north through Colombia, Eunice said, and flying from Cartagena to Miami. I remembered that Colombia was an Andean country, fully part of my turf. There was no reason I couldn’t head north with them. “Colombia…” I said, as if intrigued by the idea. “That’s one place I’d love to see. Are you going to spend much time there?”

“Good heavens, no,” Eunice said. They could only travel through Colombia on transit visas, she explained, which meant they had to hurtle across the entire country in a week.

“Hmmm,” I said, begging for an invitation. “A short trip in Colombia. That should be quite something.”

“Very short,” said Eunice, clearly dreading 80 hours on a bus in the country of the thumb-slitters.

Then Jan piped up. “Would you like to join us?”

****

I hurried off my letter to the Higgins Foundation the very next day. Now that I had other business on my mind, it practically wrote itself. Then I went to the Colombian Consulate, in the modern side of Quito, and applied for a transit visa. To get one, I had to have an exit ticket. So I went over to the Avianca offices and spent a good deal of Mr. Higgins’ money on a one-way return fare from Cartagena to Quito.

Meantime, I was getting to know my new traveling companions. They were school teachers on sabbatical. Eunice taught third grade and Jan, who rarely spoke, was in special ed. She ate meat with her fork backwards, in the European fashion. Even when the conversations petered out, I loved to look at her, those jaw muscles working on the beef, and passing it down to those silky neck muscles. Down I would look, toward the two open buttons of her white cotton blouse. At about this point, Eunice usually came up with something to say.

We were having lunch, the three of us, at a cafe near the Colombian Consulate, when I come up with an idea for turning the Colombia trip into a more manageable foursome. Jan was nibbling quietly at a salad while Eunice and I, waiting for our chicken, gossiped about the cast of characters at the Gran Casino. She mentioned with a giggle that my friend Jim was “bloody cute.”

“Eunice…” Jan looked up from her salad sternly.

“Well he is, Janny. It’s a fact,” Eunice said, adding to me: “She doesn’t like him. Fancies he’s a mafioso.”

A day or two later, when Jim Rock returned to Quito, I told him casually, over a game of backgammon, that I was thinking of taking a little tour through Colombia. I thought I might travel, at least for part of the trip, with the New Zealanders. He seemed to perk up.

“You know,” I said, “I think Eunice has a crush on you.”

He puzzled for a moment. “Is that the horsey one?”

Eunice and Jan, it turned out, couldn’t leave for Colombia and then Tampa until they received a check in the mail. But they had enough money to take a trip to the jungle. One frosty dawn I walked with them down to the bus station, helping with the luggage. They bought tickets from the man screaming “Amazoooooonas”, and then we drank hot chocolate. There wasn’t much to say. I reminded them not to walk barefoot in the jungle streams. They nodded. I asked if they had books for thetrip. They both did. So I said goodbye. I reached toward Eunice and gave her a big hug. She seemed a little startled, but happy enough, and even clawed my back with her fingernails.

Then I reached for Jan. She stood there, shy, maybe a bit uncertain, like one of her special ed students. Then she stood on tip-toes and spread her arms wide and almost jumped into my arms, kissing the first thing she could reach, which happened to be my neck. Then almost as quickly as she pushed away and hurried after Eunice toward the bus. I was left with her fragrance, which reminded me of pine trees, and a moist spot just below my ear.

I’d hardly exchanged ten words with Jan, but as I walked back from the bus station to the Gran Casino that morning, as the sunlight started to warm the mountain air, I was thinking about marrying her. I imagined introducing her to my friends in Boston. They’d be awed by her beauty. I’d explain that she wasn’t a big talker.

Every day they were gone, I checked with the concierge at the hotel, to see if the letter they were waiting for had arrived. Every day, the answer was no.

It was during that week that Massimo started pressing me to have my astrological chart done. He hardly ever talked to me in the presence of Giulio, who continued to sense bad vibes coming from my direction. But Massimo searched me out. In all of his wanderings, he’d never made it to the United States — the home of his beloved Bob Dylan — and he was fascinated by the most mundane details of American life. I found myself telling him about my family, how my only brother, Charles, who used to take me camping, was now a lawyer in Minneapolis, and married. He sent me Christmas cards. I told Massimo about my parents’ divorce when I was in 10th grade, how my Dad married a much younger woman, Dorothy, whom I never met, and moved to Jamaica, somewhere near Ocho Rios.

Max nodded when I told him these things. “You’re still huntin’ for your father,” he said quietly. It sounded like a line lifted from Blonde on Blonde, even if it didn’t make much sense.

I confessed that I was busier pursuing Jan.

He snorted impatiently. “That’s just for focking, man! Jack up!”

“Jack up?”

He made a pumping gesture with his hands. “Do yourself, man. That’s just … biologia.”

I tried to explain the difference between bare necessity and fulfillment. But he interrupted me, reaching across the table and grabbing my hand. “Michael. Let’s do your chart. You need it, man.”

I told him I’d think about it.

A day or two later, Jim Rock came back from his trip and made his usual victory lap around the Gran Casino cafe. We later played backgammon and smoked the usual joint. Jim had been to Panama, he said, and he’d brought back a little cassette player and some tapes. We listened to the Grateful Dead’s Mars Hotel album, which filled me with nostalgia for Ann Arbor.

“You’re getting dreamy on me, Smed,” Jim Rock said, as I gazed out his window. I was remembering cramming for finals at the library, with Helen.

“What do you expect?” I said. “If you smoke pot and listen to music, you get dreamy.” I felt a little more assertive following my talks with Max. “What were you doing in Panama?” I asked him.

He sat back a little in his chair. “Oh. Just, uh, the usual, you know?”

I pressed on with it, but he didn’t tell me much. “You like this machine?” he asked, gesturing toward the cassette player. I nodded. “It’s yours,” he said. “I bought it for you.”

I started to shake my head and turn it down.

“You know I’m tone deaf,” Jim Rock said grimly.

It was a couple days later that Jan and Eunice returned. By

the time I saw them, they’d already learned that their check had not arrived. They were in no mood for welcoming kisses and hugs.

Eunice looked as though she hadn’t slept in a few days. Her curly hair lay plastered against her forehead. Jan was tired, too, but the dark circles under her eyes enhanced them, making her look more sensuous. They could have been mascara stains after a passionate night in bed. I gave each traveler a peck on the cheek and asked them about their plans.

“We’re bleeding broke,” Eunice said, struggling to get out from under her knapsack.

“We’ll go out to dinner tonight,” I said. “My treat.” Bathed and napped, they were in better spirits by dinnertime. We started off in Jim Rock’s room. I brought in the tape player, and we listened to the Stones, Sticky Fingers, I think, and drank Russian vodka Jim had brought from Panama.

Eunice got giggly right away, and by her second glass of vodka, she was shrieking at Jim’s Don Corleone imitation.

Eventually, we made it out to dinner. Since I was paying, we bypassed the usual guinea-pig joints and ate at an Italian place with checkered tablecloths in the new part of town. We sat in a booth and drank chianti. I remember pushing closer and closer to Jan, rubbing my leg against hers. As the dinner progressed, I reached under the table and laid my hand on her thigh. She gave my hand a squeeze, and then put her hand on my leg. I felt my whole body quiver.

Jim was telling jokes and we were all laughing, especially Eunice. We ate linguini al Alfredo; Jim declared it tasteless and piled on a few spoonfuls of the local hot sauce, aji. Meanwhile, I pawed Jan under the table. I remember thinking how Max, with his advice to “jack up,” didn’t have a clue.

We went back in a cab, Jim in the front seat, still telling jokes. “And you know what Smedley asked me the first time we met?” he said, turning around and looking at us wedged in the back. “He wanted to know if I played golf! In Peru! Golf!” Eunice laughed until she cried.

Looking back, I still don’t see what was so funny about it. Was I supposed to assume from the start that he was a drug trafficker? Apparently everyone else did.

By the time we reached the Gran Casino, I was aching to take Jan right to my bed. But Jim insisted on a nightcap. He took us into his room, turned on the music again, and began chopping cocaine on a mirror with a single-edged razor. I’d never tried cocaine before, and neither had Jan or Eunice. We watched him and then followed his lead with the rolled-up 20-sucre bill.

Within minutes we didn’t feel drunk anymore. Now we were marvelously witty and our insights, suddenly, were brilliant. Even Jan was venturing some opinions. I began to think I should get my notebook and jot down some of this rich material for my next Higgins letter.

“You like it, eh?” Jim said, placing another white chunk on the mirror.

“I don’t feel a thing,” Eunice said blankly. Jan agreed.

Jim started to chop again. But I reached for Jan’s hand. She took mine. We said goodnight to Jim and Eunice. After I shut the door to my room, we promptly stripped and fell onto the bed. We made love all night, untilthe dogs up the mountainside started barking and the boy on the corner yelled, “Comeeeercio!” Then, with her face glowing in the soft morning light, her eyes ringed by spent mascara — just as I’d imagined — Jan fell asleep. I looked at her and kissed her for a while, on the brow, above the lips, on her jaw and down to her shoulders, wishing I could save the kisses for later. Then I slept too.

****

We were awakened by a soft knocking on the door, and a voice whispering, “Janny, Janny…” I opened the door and saw Eunice, looking pallid. She was already dressed, in bluejeans and a plaid cotton blouse, and what looked like a brand new pair of sandals. She had her knapsack packed. “We’re flying out in an hour and a half,” she said.

Jim, she said, was lending them the money to fly directly to Miami, on the Braniff flight leaving around lunchtime. The bus trip to Colombia was off. I looked back and took in one last glimpse of Jan’s body as she reached down and pulled on her pants and then twisted her torso into her bra. “What time’s the flight,” she asked, her back still turned.

“An hour and a half, Janny. At two,” Eunice said, sounding stressed.

That was the last I saw of them. I said goodbye to Jan and we exchanged addresses, while Jim Rock and Eunice went through the same dreary ritual. Then we walked them outside, where a taxi was waiting. Jan gave me one last kiss, and put a hand on the side of my face for a moment. “Ciao,” she said as she ducked into the cab. I didn’t even get around to saying goodbye to Eunice.

“Well,” Jim Rock said, as we walked back into the Gran Casino. “It’s you and me, Smed.”

I could have punched him.

Jim left on another one of his trips the next day. I took an all-night bus to Esmeralda, on the coast. It must have been all downhill. By daybreak, I had a crick in my neck from sleeping against the window, and I was sweating heavily in my alpaca sweater. I was in banana country, the air thick with steam. The cool Andes seemed like a distant planet. The people were black instead of indian, and they spoke a lightning fast Spanish, like Cubans.

I was down, and all I did there was drink. I took a taxi to a little beach town called Atacames, and rented a hammock for a few sucres a night. For four days I just sat in a shack on the beach with a book in my hand, drinking beer and rum, and occasionally eating a fish. When I sobered up, I told myself, I’d write my next Higgins letter. That was the stated purpose of the trip. I dreamed about Jan, and I cursed Jim Rock for sending her away.

One night I found myself in a metaphysical discussion with some Ecuadorian students who had come up from Guayaquil. I asked them if they’d ever heard of black holes, the star-sized vacuums into which all matter is destined to disappear. (They were an unhealthy obsession of mine at the time.)

I remember on the students puzzling over the words for a while, repeating, “agujero negro, agujero negro…” Then he looked up and asked, in Spanish, “You wouldn’t be referring to the anus, would you?”

The next day I rode the bus back to Quito, dreading the prospect of lazing about the Gran Casino for another week. When I got there, the concierge seemed genuinely relieved to see me. “Senor Rock,” he said, “has been calling you for four hours straight.” As he said that, the phone rang, and I found myself talking to Jim Rock.

I had to do him a favor, he said. There was a package to pick up and drop off. He’d explain it all later. He gave me an address on the north side of Quito, the modern side, over past the American Embassy.

“Now?” I asked.

“Now. Take a cab.”

“This isn’t something…”

“Don’t worry about it, Smed.”

“But, I’m just wondering…”

“Goddamn it! Do it for me… Please.” His voice seemed to break when he said “please.”

As I rode in the cab to the first address he gave me, I pictured Jim Rock sitting in a garage someplace with a gun pointed at his head.

We wound through a middle-class neighborhood, near the language schools where lots of the Gringos taught English. We passed Libri Mundi, the bookstore where I’d spent loads of Higgins’ money on a shelf of Latin American literature I had yet to read.

I had the driver drop me off a block from my destination and I told him not to wait. Then I walked toward the address. As I passed each house, barking dogs lunged at me from behind the fences.

I was an idiot to be doing this. I knew it. But practically everything I did back then was dumb. Imagine having two years to travel around a dazzling region of the world, and staying holed up for the first two months in a run-down hotel like the Gran Casino — a place that could double as a Turkish jail.

I suppose I stayed there because I was lonely. And I guess I was picking up this package for Jim Rock because, no matter what business he was involved in, he was my only friend. I trusted him, to a degree, and felt sorry for him.

I rang the buzzer. A window opened in the black metal door

and a man peered out. “Si?”

I told him I was supposed to pick up something.

“Su nombre?”

“Mike. Mike Bavard.”

He shook his head and began to close the window. “Wait a minute,” I said in Spanish. “Smedley, George Smedley.”

“Ah.” He opened the little window and passed me a small package wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. Then he told me to hurry.

You’re probably expecting me now to say that I’m writing this from some Ecuadorian prison, one that looks and feels much like the Gran Casino. But that’s not the case. I caught a cab and made it to the second address, in a similar neighborhood. I rang.

Another small window opened up and a dark, Incan face simply asked: “Mister Esmedley?” I nodded, shoved the package through the window and caught another cab back to the hotel. The concierge smiled at me. I waved at a few familiar faces in the cafe, and then spotted Massimo. I sat down with him and ordered a beer.

He looked at me knowingly as I started to drink. “You are taking that beer like medicine,” he said.

****

Jim came back a day later with wild stories from Peru. As we played backgammon, he told me of guerrillas down there, Maoists, all of them devoted to this professor named Guzman. These Maoists, the Shining Path, planned to overthrow the government through a campaign of terror. They would shoot mayors, execute bourgeois sympathizers, hang dead dogs from lampposts. “They’re completely nuts, Smed,” he said.

They sounded that way to me. As it turned out, Jim Rock was laying out the tragedy that would nearly bury Peru in the ’80s. I was far more interested to learn about that package I’d delivered, and why Jim had been crying he gave me those marching orders. I asked him what was going on.

“Don’t ask.”

“What do you mean, don’t ask?” I closed the backgammon board, ending the game. “When I become part of it, I deserve to know what you’re doing.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He had his head down, and looked depressed. He turned on music, to drown out our talking. “Look at it this way,” he said. “I’m juggling, juggling like crazy. I have thousands and thousands of dollars that I’m juggling, and none of them belong to me.” He looked at me, and I think it was the first time I ever saw Jim Rock without even a trace of a smile. I saw a broad young face, probably not much different than it looked when he was twelve, or even eight.

I thought of a mother looking at that face and seeing her son, and calling him Jim Rock. It didn’t sound right. And I knew then that his name wasn’t Jim Rock any more than mine was George Smedley.

His jaw was trembling a little. “If I drop it, just once,” he whispered, “I’m fucked.”

I spent the next day in my room, writing my Higgins letter. I wrote more about the referendum. And to give them a sense that I was traveling, I included some observations from my drunken journey to the coast. I read over the letter and was not impressed. So I bolstered it with a couple of paragraphs about this new group of fanatics in Peru, the Shining Path.

The night I finished the letter, I walked down the hallway and found the maid cleaning Jim Rock’s room. It was empty. He had left without saying goodbye. The next day they rented out his room to a French couple. I asked the concierge what he knew, and he shrugged. “Nada, Senor.”

I decided to go to east, to the jungle. For two days, I traveled around Quito buying the necessary equipment, the mosquito netting, the snake-bite kit. I paid a nurse to give me a gamma globulin shot. I was just about to check out of the hotel and head for the bus station when the concierge told me that someone was on the phone for me. “Un americano.”

I expected Jim Rock. But it was Woody. “I have a bonus offer for you,” he said, explaining that the foundation would pay an extra $3,000 for another letter on the Shining Path.

“But I told you everything I knew,” I said.

“Yes,” said Woody. “But we were thinking you might be able to go down there and find out more. It’s splendid material. Just fascinating. To think of it, the Gang of Four…”

“It seems like you’re moving away from the Higgins mandate,” I said. “What, are you in the information-gathering business, too?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Certain types of information,” he said.

“And who’s paying for it?”

“Just do the reporting. Please.” No longer the serene man I remembered on the dock, he sounded like my master.

I told him I’d see what I could do. Then I caught the bus to jungle. I got a fever down there, and spent the best part of a week shivering in a hammock on the banks of the Napo River.

When I got back, there was a postcard for me from Cuzco, Peru. It said simply: Smed, best wishes, Sasha.

So he’d reemerged as Sasha. I sat down at the cafe and ordered a chamomile tea, and I thought about Jim Rock. I thought he was someone I knew, and he wasn’t. It was embarrassing, but not all that important.

Then I began to worry. He had fled Quito and changed his name. Wouldn’t that indicate that he had enemies nearby, or creditors? And wouldn’t that make me, his well-known friend and one-time accomplice, Smedley, vulnerable? I was thinking those dark thoughts when Massimo pulled up a chair beside me.

“Michael,” he said somberly, “you’re sailing a very long way without a chart.”

I smiled. “You’re right.”

He picked up the Cuzco postcard and read the back. “So he’s the Sasha-man of Cuzco,” he said, knowingly. “I expected so much.”

It turned out that a man named Sasha had directed a few northbound travelers to look up Massimo and Giulio in Quito. “We did their charts,” Max said, nodding slowly. “One’s a triple Scorpio. Someone you should meet, Michael.”

I was digesting this information when Max remembered a bit of gossip he’d picked up from Sasha’s friends. “You remember that Australian woman you were so hungry to fock, Michael?”

I told him I did, without bothering to correct the nationality.

“A very funny story about them. Very funny.” He went on to tell me that Jim Rock had sent Eunice and Jan to Miami wearing sandals packed with cocaine. They didn’t know it. The plan was simply for Jim’s contacts in Miami to meet them after they cleared customs, and to switch shoes with them. “As they see them coming through customs,” Massimo said, laughing, “the tall one, not so pretty, what’s her name?”

“Eunice,” I said.

“Vero. Eunice. She has her foot all white. It’s white as a… a fantasmo.” Max by this point was laughing so hard he had trouble talking. “And she was looking down at her foot, wondering what is happening with her new shoes!”

I wasn’t laughing.

“Don’t you understand?” Max cried. “She goes through customswith a white foot!”

****

I flew to Florida the next day, on the same Braniff flight that Jan and Eunice had taken. On board I wrote my last Higgins letter. I wrote about what I’d learned in Quito, about the Gran Casino and the man called Jim Rock, or the Sasha-man of Cuzco. I theorized about the nature of drug-trafficking in South America, and how the narcos were forging links with left-wing guerrillas in Peru. I wasn’t sure about that. But how else would Jim Rock have met the Maoists?

When I reached Miami, I mailed the letter, along with a note of resignation. I felt certain that my letter would land Jim Rock in jail, or kill him.

I vaguely remember renting a car and driving up to Tampa Bay, visiting every orange-roofed Howard Johnson between Sarasota and Dunedin. I found no sign of Jan and Eunice.

I gave up. I was lost, as Massimo had warned, and I fell. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that the recovery process landed me in Minnesota and brought about a reunion, of sorts, with my brother Charles. In fact, it was on a hot summer night there that Charles picked me up in his air-conditioned Buick and took me for an excursion. We saw Midnight Express.

The prison carried me right back to the Gran Casino. The prisoners reminded me of the bedraggled travelers I knew there. I was fine until the brutality commenced. At that point, I walked out to the parking lot and swatted dive-bombing mosquitos, until Charles emerged with the rest of the crowd and drove me back.

By the early ’80s, when the Shining Path surfaced in the news, hanging the dead dogs and blowing away mayors, I was back in Boston, helping to manage a bookstore. Naturally, I wondered about Jim Rock. And as I gained weight with the passing years, and wore my hair shorter, I began to imagine his broad face smiling at me from the mirror. Later in the decade, I read about an island prison off the coast of Lima, which the Shining Path prisoners had turned into a Maoist stronghold. Thousands of these fanatics ran the place, forcing everyone, even the wardens, to attend ideology classes and keep the place in ship shape.

How sad, I thought, if Jim Rock was missing North America’s rollicking ’80s, and wasting away in a lock-up with Maoists. He was losing out on a decade that seemed custom-made for lost and greedy scoundrels like him.

I still have the tape player he gave me. It’s battered now,with gray duct-tape holding in the batteries. Sometimes I think about his other Smedleys, and wonder what mementos they’re left with.