Richard Stevenson - Strachey's folly

"You put it ever so vividly."

"The lines of your dramatic narrative emerge boldly on your own."

"Since you feel so bad for me, will you go to bed with me? That would cheer me up, and I know you'd enjoy it hugely, too."

"No, of course I won't go to bed with you. Don't be absurd."

He put down his beer. "Let's go for a swim then and have a lovely dinner instead. You might as well get something satisfying out of your visit to this tropical paradise." Then Suter flung off his shorts and shirt and ran naked toward the surf. I figured there was no harm in that and did the same.

Do you know a D.C. cop named Ray Craig?" I asked Suter.

"No, who's he?"

"How about a Captain Milton Kingsley?"

"I don't recognize the name."

We were on the southern terrace of the house now, watching one of the sunsets that must have been an inspiration for those big Mexican oil paintings that are full of Spanish-conquest blood and gore-another inspiration being the Spanish-conquest blood and gore itself.

After our swim, Suter and I had put our shorts on and walked up the beach a mile and then back. The houses we passed, built by Jorge's father, were even bigger and more opulent than Jorge's. They were owned, Suter said, by wealthy North Americans, many of whom spent little time in their tile-and-stucco palaces. We walked by an occasional well-tanned bather or sunbather, many of them nude.

Most seemed to be foreigners. I heard mainly North American accents, as well as a few German and Italian speakers. The scattering of Mexicans on the beach tended to be families, in bathing suits or fully clothed. Suter said the Mexicans considered the nudism shameful but that they are an almost endlessly tolerant people. Also, Mexican men who otherwise were not necessarily nature lovers liked strolling on the beach and staring at the bare-breasted European women, quite the erotic spectacle in a society where only the men were allowed to be lewd.

We also passed a beautiful young Mexican woman in a white, one-piece bathing suit in the company of a man I recognized as a well-known U.S. congressman from a Midwestern state. Suter greeted them both, and then told me that the congressman, Lawrence Grandchamps, was a frequent visitor to a house owned by a Mexican cement tycoon whose exports to the south-central United States increased by roughly 1,000 percent after the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed and signed. Suter laughed and said he was sure the two men's deep friendship was based on a love of scuba diving out by the reef and not on a love of cement profits.

Back at Suter's house, he was stretched out on a chaise with another Dos Equis in his hand, and I shoved myself back and forth in the string hammock that hung between two coconut palms alongside the tile terrace. When he told me he didn't recognize the names Ray Craig or Milton Kingsley, I asked Suter again why he was so anxious that the D.C. Police Department not know where he was.

"Unpaid parking tickets."

"I don't think so."

"Well, then-here's the actual thing," Suter said, sucking in air. Then he didn't go on.

"Yes? And?"

He sighed again and said, "I'm being sued. There's a summons going around looking for me, I'm told."

"Oh? Sued for what?"

"I don't want to go into it. It's a professional thing that has no bearing on the Krumfutzes or Jorge or why I'm down here."

"Is the dispute with a publisher?"

"No."

"Anyway, what have the cops got to do with a civil suit? The plaintiffs lawyers will go after you, or maybe a process server will. But cops only deal with criminal matters."

"This situation is a little more complicated than that."

"Complicated. Uh-huh."

I waited, and when it was plain that Suter had nothing more to offer on the lawsuit against him, I said, "I'm sure the D.C. cops know where you are. If I found you, they could do it. I knew from your letter to Maynard that you were in the Yucatan, and my partner, Timothy Callahan, extracted from Betty Krumfutz the name of the town where you were most likely to turn up. Ray Craig is investigating Maynard's shooting and made his first Mexican connection when two eyewitnesses described the shooter. He knows, too, that Maynard was down here in September. Craig has been investigating me, so he undoubtedly knows by now that I'm investigating you."

"Thanks for nothing," Suter said sourly.

"Milton Kingsley is a D.C. police captain who, according to a source of mine in the department, was set to travel down here around the same time I came."

"Well," Suter said, "thanks to Jorge's father, this cop would have a very hard time finding a Mexican judge or any other Mexican official who would agree to have me extradited. Anyway, this awkward situation is not criminal, which means I can't be extradited. It's just that I'd prefer to avoid the hassle of having to deal with the suit right now. I need peace and quiet and the chance to concentrate.

The thing is, I'm working on a novel." His eyes shone brightly.

"Ah. Working on a novel." So was the weekend weatherman on Channel 8 in Albany. And Timmy's aunt Moira. And six or eight of Timmy's colleagues in the New York State legislature. And Kathie Lee Gifford probably. And Radovan Karadzic. I said, "But the novel is dead. Why aren't you writing a screenplay?"

"I am. I'm doing the novel and the screenplay simultaneously."

"You're quite efficient."

"Yeah, I am. Even though I don't have to be. I've got nothing but time on my hands down here."

Fools rush in. "What's the novel about?"

Suter smiled ruefully. "It's about an exceptionally charming and attractive man with intimacy issues. Sound familiar? I confess. The novel is autobiographical."

"Oh, well. 'Intimacy issues.' I'm glad to hear you're writer enough to tackle one of the great literary themes."

"You're ridiculing me."

"You bet."

"Why? Why should you make fun of me?"

"Because you talk about yourself in vague, psychobabbly euphemisms. You don't have 'issues,' Suter. You have a history of playing with gay men cruelly.

What it is, is acting like a total asshole. In fact, there's a title for you: The Autobiography of an Asshole."

Suter stared at the blackening sunset and said nothing.

"I feel sorry for you," I said, "because for whatever reason, you can't seem to help yourself. You do have some shallow understanding of your weaknesses and their cruel effect on others. But some critical part of what ought to be your moral ballast is missing, so you minimize what you do to people. You call it 'issues,' when it's actually psychological sadism. I'm sorry that you're deluded, and I'm sorry that you met a man who apparently is even more sadistic than you are. I think you deserve to be socked in the jaw, figuratively or actually. But I don't believe you deserve a lifetime of Jorge. He sounds grotesque."

Suter lay very still on his chaise through this. Then he said, without much emotion, "It won't be a long lifetime, however. My looks will soon fade, and Jorge will lose interest. He'll find another, younger, beautiful slave. His mother will die, I'll lose my protector, and then I'll be killed."

I thought of Timmy back in Washington and his conviction that Maynard's shooting was one of the events flowing from a vast and terrible conspiracy, and then I thought of my own belief that surely all these gruesome events flowed instead from more mundane examples of human weakness and folly, and I told myself with no satisfaction whatsoever that I was right and Timmy was wrong. A drug gang-even one that reached from Mexico into small-town new-car dealerships in Central Pennsylvania-was brutal, but it was also contained and, in the United States of the 1990s, such things bordered on the banal. And Jim Suter? Here was individual-human folly personified.