Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

With my running shoes in one hand, I cross the hardwood floor in stocking feet and quietly turn the dead bolt, opening the door. Herman is outside in the hall, his back against the wall, leaning over tying the laces on his shoes.

I silently close the door behind me and join him against the wall, slipping the shoes on my feet.

Neither of us utters a word until we pass through the bar, go down the stairs toward the service area, and are out the door onto the street that borders the zoo.

Herman uses a small piece of duct tape to hold back the spring-loaded bolt on the lock, and then tapes a few thicker pieces onto the edge of the door to wedge it closed. He will have to use a knife to pry it open on the way back. The thick green wooden door has no handle on the outside.

We start to hoof it down the street.

“I hope you know where you’re going,” said Herman.

“I think I can find it.”

The written description given to me by Katia used the name of a local hospital three blocks away, Hospital Calderon Guardia, as the principal point of reference for finding houses or businesses in the area. The directions would lead you to the street where the house was located. Then it would describe the residence with particularity, such as “ casa blanca, segundo a la derecha, ” the white house, second on the right. It made perfectly good sense once you understood the system, though FedEx was out of luck on home delivery unless they could follow the trail of bread crumbs to your front door.

Half a block down, along the fence bordering the zoo, the thick overhead canopy of trees turned the lane into a dark tomb. By now the last streetlight is well behind us, above the green wooden door to the lodge. Ahead is nothing but blackness and the exotic sounds of the bush beyond the fence off to our left. Suddenly there is a guttural, low growl that is unmistakable, and not far off.

“When the woman at the counter said it wasn’t safe to walk at night, I thought she was talkin’ about the locals.” Herman is laughing. “Not some lion who’s gonna be pickin’ his teeth with my tibia because we took a wrong turn at the zoo.”

“Let’s hope he’s on the other side of the fence.”

Herman pulls a Mini Maglite from his pocket, twists the lens, and gives us a narrow beam of light on the pavement so we don’t break our necks.

“You think the light’s gonna scare him?”

“I hear they’re afraid of fire,” he says.

“Fire is a match. He’d swallow that like a Twinkie.”

“I’m not scared,” says Herman. “All I have to do is outrun you.”

“You can’t fool me. I saw your dinner-two steaks and four eggs. If that poor thing is out on the road, we both know who’s gonna get eaten and it won’t be me. All I want is the fur for the floor in front of my fireplace,” I tell him.

“Here we are arguing and it’s the FBI who’s in trouble,” he says. “How are they gonna explain how the two Americans they were tailing got eaten by a lion behind their hotel, one of them a lawyer, and they didn’t even get pictures?”

“You’re right. Maybe we should have just stepped out the front and asked them for a lift.”

“How do we know they won’t be waiting for us when we get to the house?”

“We don’t.” Herman has a point. Rhytag knows that Katia’s mother took the pictures. By now he would have had time to have one of his people, the agent assigned to the U.S. embassy, locate her residence and either place it under surveillance or try to contact her.

“If Harry’s information about her cell phone is accurate, Katia’s mother is still gone,” I tell him.

“Yeah, but they could be watching her house, especially now that they know we’re in town. And only two blocks away from where the woman lives,” says Herman.

“We’ll just have to play it by ear. I don’t know what else to do.”

In the dark, with only a narrow shaft of light to guide us, it takes almost ten minutes before we figure out our mistake, and then only after passing it three times.

Seen from above through the satellite photos on Google Earth, what appeared to be a normal conjunction of two streets was not an intersection at all.

The street that Katia lived on appears to dead-end at a railing about thirty feet above the level of the road Herman and I are walking on. It can only be reached by a set of uneven concrete steps, cracked in places, quite steep and difficult to navigate, particularly in the dark with only a flashlight to guide us.

As we reach the top of the steps, Herman turns off the Mini Maglite. We stand for a few seconds in the shadows and reconnoiter the houses and cars along the block. They are backlit by overhead lights in the distance, at the far end of the street.

Katia’s elaborate address, the written directions for finding the house, were crafted for approach by vehicle from the other end of the block; the white house, second on the right, now on our left. I can see it clearly from where we stand. The entire front of the structure is lit up by a streetlight mounted on a telephone pole directly in front of the house.

All the houses on the block front directly onto a narrow sidewalk on each side of the street, several of them with bushes and vines invading the sidewalk. The roadway itself is wide enough for only a single car, so that several of them are parked partway on the sidewalk.

I point out Katia’s house to Herman.

“I see it.” At the moment he is more interested in several cars parked on each side, from here to the end of the block. We start to walk.

As we reach the house at the other end of the block, I tell him, “It’s the first arched gate.”

Herman turns his head and takes a look. By the time we get to the end of the block, Herman seems satisfied that all of the cars are empty. Still, he keeps walking around the corner to the right as if we are leaving the area. I follow him.

Ten feet around the corner he stops. “I don’t like it. Too much light from that pole,” he says.

I step back to the corner again so I can see. Herman is right. The entrance is lit up like a spotlight on a stage, with the streetlight directly above the locked gate leading to the front door. A car turning the corner or somebody walking down the street is going to see us in a heartbeat, standing out in front working on the lock.

I step back to where he is standing. “I don’t know of any other way in,” I tell him.

“I’m just gonna have to work fast,” he says. “Can you whistle?”

“What?”

“Can you whistle? You know, like the lady said, put your lips together and blow?”

I try it. My lips are dry and nothing comes out. I lick them and try again. This time I get a weak whistle.

“It’ll have to do,” says Herman. “I want you to stay here. You see a car comin’ or anybody walking this direction you whistle. And make it loud enough so I can hear it.” He pulls a small black plastic case from his pocket, opens it, and selects a lock pick and another tiny curved tool of some kind.

“What if somebody comes from the other end of the street, up the steps?” I say.

“You’d have to be crazy to walk there in the dark,” says Herman.

“We just did.”

“Yeah, but the locals aren’t stupid.” Herman smiles at me. “Just remember to whistle, and make it loud so I can hear it.”

Before I can wet my lips again, Herman is back around the corner and down the sidewalk. I watch as he crosses the street on a diagonal and walks to the far end of the house and directly up to the arched gate. Hunched over, with his back to me, he starts working with the pick on the lock.

It was the problem with a lot of the countries in Latin America; even if they had access to natural gas they never developed the infrastructure, the pumping stations, and the underground pipes to deliver it, at least not for domestic use.