Adrian McKinty: The Bloomsday Dead

The third book in the Michael Forsythe series, 2007

State LY Plum P. Buck Mulligan.” Hector handed me this message on the cliffs at Miraflores.

I set the binoculars on the wall, took the note, and put it in my pocket. Hector was watching my face to see if there was annoyance or even dread in my eyes, but I was giving nothing away.

The sun was rising over the Andes, turning the Pacific a pinkish blue. The sky to the east was a long golden gray and in the west the Southern Cross and the moon had set into the sea.

I thanked Hector with a nod and put my sunglasses on.

Wild lilacs were growing among the cacti and a warm breeze was blowing through the poplars. There was, as yet, no traffic and normally it would be peaceful up here. Just the cliffs and the beach and the whole of the sleeping city behind me. Fog burning off the head-land and a few early-morning dog walkers demonstrating that Latin love for miniature poodles and Lhasas.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” I said in English.

Hector shook his head uncomprehendingly.

I smiled, watched the usual dazzling collection of seabirds rising on the thermals off the cliffs. Occasionally you’d see an albatross or a peregrine falcon and rarer still sometimes a lost condor or two.

The smell of orange blossom and oleander.

“Lima has a bad rap, but I like it,” I said in Spanish.

Especially this time of day before the two-stroke motors and the diesel engines and the coal fires really got going. Hector nodded, pleased with the remark and happy that he’d found me before I retired to bed. He knew that after the night shift I liked to come here with a cup of coffee. Last week I came to watch the first transit of Venus in living memory but mostly it was either to do some amateur ornithology or, he suspected, to stare through the binocs at the pretty surfer girls catching the big rolling breakers at the meeting of the continent and the ocean.

Today about a dozen early surfers, all of them in their teens, wearing full wet suits, booties, and gloves. Half of them female, a new feature of the scene in the city. None of them looked like Kit, the surfer girl I’d been forced to kill in Maine a long time ago, but they all reminded me of her-I mean, that’s the sort of thing you never get over.

I sipped the coffee, frowned at the sound of a power drill. This particular morning, much to my annoyance, it was not quiet up here. There were a score of grips and roadies building the set for a free concert by the Indian Chiefs. They were working with un-Peruvian noise and diligence and it didn’t surprise me at all to see that their supervisor was an Australian.

Hector blinked at me in that obvious way of his, to prod me into action.

“Thanks for the note, Hector, you go on home,” I said.

“Is everything ok, boss?” he asked.

“No, but I’ll take care of it,” I responded.

Hector nodded. He was still only a kid. I’d been training him for about three months and he didn’t look at all uncomfortable in the suit and tie that I’d bought for him. I’d taught Hector to be polite, calm, well mannered and now he could be employed as a bouncer anywhere in the world. I’m sure the customers at the Lima Miraflores Hilton had no idea that Hector lived in a house he had built himself in the pueblos jóvenes slums to the east of here, where the walls were corrugated metal sheets, where water came from a stand pipe and sewage ran in the street. Displaced from his shanty, Hector appeared elegant, poised, and aristocratic. The marriage of a conquistador bloodline with Inca royalty. And he was smart and he had compassion. He was an ideal lieutenant. He couldn’t be more than twenty-one or twenty-two; he’d go far, probably have my job in five or six years.

“It seems a bit early for this kind of nonsense,” he said with a resigned shake of the head. He was talking about the contents of the note.

“It’s either very early or very late,” I agreed.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to deal with it, I don’t mind,” Hector said with another look of sympathy.

He knew I’d had a rough night of it. A kid from Sweden had taken an overdose and I’d had to see him to the hospital, then I kicked some whores out of the lobby, and then we’d dealt with an elderly American couple who claimed they couldn’t breathe in the polluted air and wanted an oxygen machine. Later today the Japanese ambassador to Peru was coming for an informal breakfast talk on the possibility of extraditing disgraced Peruvian ex-president Fujimori from his bolt hole in Tokyo. The talks wouldn’t go anywhere but it was good for all parties to be seen looking for a solution. Good for the hotel especially. The ambassador had his own security people, but we didn’t need a disturbance wrecking the tranquility of the visit.

“No, I’ll fix it, Hector, you can go on home,” I said.

Hector nodded, walked back across the street to change into his jeans and T-shirt for the scooter ride to the slums. He’d been on the night shift, too, and was bound to be tired.

The surfers were doing lazy cutbacks and the sun was inching over those high, dry mountains that someday I’d go and visit. A blind man had recently climbed Everest, so surely I, a man challenged merely with an artificial foot, could hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu.

I took a big swig of the coffee and set down the cup.

A few schoolgirls had come by to see if the roadies could give them backstage passes to the Chiefs; the roadies had none to give away but they chatted up the girls anyway.

“Get your backs into it, you dago bastards,” the Australian foreman barked. Without the note drawing me away to business I might have gone over and smacked that bugger for spoiling my meditations.

I looked at the message. It was easy enough to decipher.

In stateroom LY (that is, the fiftieth floor, suite Y), a Plum (in other words, a drunk American) named Mr. P. Buck was creating a Mulligan (i.e., a disturbance). The codes had been established by the previous head of security at the Miraflores Hilton, an avid golfer. At some point I was going to drop the references to Mulligans, Eagles, Birdies, and the like. But I’d only been here for a few months and there were other, more pressing priorities.

I sighed, crumpled the note in disgust, and threw it in the nearest garbage can.

A drunk American, probably fighting with a prostitute.

P. Buck-I wondered if R.E.M. were in town, the guitarist was called Peter Buck and had once been arrested and acquitted of being drunk and disorderly on a British Airways flight. I shook my head. If an American rock star had been staying at my hotel, I would have known about it before now. Still, Peter Buck was one of my heroes and I crossed the street with a heightened level of expectation.

The hotel was new, tall, gleaming with glass and curved stainless steel-like something Frank Gehry might have come up with on a bad day.

Tinco, the nervous Ecuadorean night manager, grabbed me at the double doors.

“I heard,” I said before he could open his mouth.

“Stateroom LY, hurry, please, we have the Japanese ambassador arriving this morning,” he said, grasping his hands in front of him in a pleading gesture.

“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, relax, I’ll take care of it.”

“One of the girls has complained,” he said, looking sadly at the floor.