Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon

“Not at all,” I assured him.

But I would never forgive him for talking to me that way.

“You’re very kind,” he said. “And I’m very nervous.”

“Whatever it is, can it really be all that bad?”

“I don’t see how it could be worse,” he said.

“Why? What on earth did you do?”

“Somewhat in the nature of — I’d say it was a mix between — I passed along the secrets of a company to the secret-gatherers of a government. That’s mixing industrial and international espionage, I’d say.”

“And you’re caught.”

He grappled in his shirt pocket for his Derbys — not just the fingers, but the whole arm trembled so you worried, would he behave all right — really, it was terrible to watch. “We've already agreed my ass is in a sling.”

“Can I have one of those Derbys, please?” I said.

He had a nice lighter.

I used this lighter and held it in my hand and said, "So why didn’t the Oh-Ee-Hota roll you up just now?”

“He is not — the OIJ have nothing to do with this. It's complicated. The question of jurisdiction is a little involved.”

“Well, yes, really. Maybe he doesn’t know he’s a long way from Costa Rica. Why don’t we find a soldier and get him arrested?”

“Because I’m so very out of my depth,” he said, “so out of it, I admit it. . I have no idea yet whose side the OIJ are on. Or even whose side I’m on. That man may be the only friend I’ve got.”

“Does he say he's your friend?”

“Yes, he does.”

“Then never talk to him again. Did he say his name?”

“He showed me his identity cards and a badge.”

“Don’t talk to him anymore. Forget him. Do you have a gun? Shoot him.”

“I don’t have a gun.” He was panicking again. “I’m honestly just a —stupid Senior Analyst, research and development, Watts Petroleum Corporation, and that is all. That is all.”

“Let’s lose this man.”

“I’ve only been Senior for one month.”

“Heartrending. Let’s ditch him down at the Mercado Central. I’ll pick you up in a cab, see, in a spot where he can’t get one. We’ll leave him standing there.”

“He happens to drive a car. What about his car?”

“He parks his car, follows you to the other end of the Mercado, and there I am, waiting for you in a cab — are you following this idea? By the time he gets back to his car, we’re long gone.”

“Then what?”

“I can’t line all that up for you. The Mercado idea sounds like a hit, is all.”

“I believe you’re drunk.”

All too true. “Would I be sitting here if I was the littlest bit sober? No,” I said. “No.”

“I don’t have any objection to leaving,” he said. “But the business of getting away from this man is just silly.”

“You can’t trust anybody down here. I was going to steal this,” I confessed. I handed him back his cigaret lighter.

“Were you really,” he said as if he hadn’t heard me at all.

ON THE way out we passed right by the OIJ man. He'd rolled up his copy of La Prensa, and he tapped it against his knee as he sat in his chair on the promenade, his sunglasses cocked on his head, watching us approach and watching us recede.

The Britisher seemed compelled to offer him something beyond dumb acknowledgment. “I, oh, uh,” he began.

I pulled him along. “You don’t have to explain anything to that person,” I said.

By the time we were off and running in a taxi, an old wrinkled Ford driven very slowly by an old wrinkled man, the Costa Rican was pulling out behind us in a four-wheel-drive Daihatsu, one of those Asian makes you never hear of outside the Third World . .

“That’s him back there,” I told the Englishman.

“I wouldn’t know. Don't look. My God, it's a tank. He told me he had a car.”

“That’s him. He’s got Costa Rican plates, too. They look like the new California plates, you know?”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t know that.”

“Will you go very much faster, please?” I asked the driver.

“No.”

“One of the few on Earth,” I noted.

“We can’t expect to lose him driving as slow as this,” the Englishman said.

“We're going to get rid of him down at the Mercado,” I reminded him.

“What’s the point? He’ll only wait back at my hotel.”

The rain started: they might have been letting down a truckload of marbles on the roof. .

We rolled up the windows and commenced suffocating. “This is impressive,” my friend said. “The wipers are useless. Can he see?”

“Can you see?” I asked the driver.

“No.”

“Is he still back there?”

“I can’t see a thing,” I said.

We were crawling. Soon the rain lessened by half, and things were visible again, but now our driver was held up by one muddy pond after another that had laid itself down across the road.

We were driving past the FSLN campaign headquarters. For the benefit of the new arrival I pointed it out, a circular building set by itself at the border of the huge wiped-out central area, rippling behind sheets of rain.

“It’s big, isn’t it,” he said.

“Well, I guess the Frente has all the money.”

“The campaign offices for the other parties aren’t quite as impressive, you’re saying.”

“No way. I don’t even know where the others are — no, wait, I’ve seen the MPL or whatever, the Communists. They’ve got a big chain-link fence, and a lot of rifles waving around out front. But that’s their whole general center of operations — not just a campaign outfit.”

"‘So the Sandinistas are going to win.”

“Win what?

“Well. .” He was confused. “The election.”

“If there’s an election in this country, babe, don’t blink — or you’ll miss the whole show.”

“But the elections are scheduled,” he said. “The elections are going to take place.”

“They’re not going to let anybody vote. They’ll postpone it again. And they’ll blame the U.S.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why would they risk losing? Why would they let go of all the power once they had it?”

“Because they believe in principles. Because those principles would grow stronger if they chanced losing that power in the name — if they played fair in the name,” he said, “of certain principles.”

“Like what principles? Let’s hear these names.”

“Equality, democracy.”

“Liberty, fraternity, right, yeah, right.”

“Why am I talking to you?” he said bitterly.

“Yerbabuena,” I told the cabdriver.

“El Mercado,” the driver corrected me.

“No, let’s go to the Yerbabuena now instead,” I said. “I'll show you some liberty and some of that other bullshit,” I told the British customer.

THE CAB driver wanted fifty. I gave him a hundred. “Wait for us,” I said. He nodded, turned off the engine, and sank into his seat to outlast the rain in a stupor, as we intended to do in the Yerbabuena, Managua’s rip-off socialist bookstore.

However slimy its impostures, the Yerbabuena had the most air-conditioned air in town and was more like home than any other place I’d seen since stepping off the plane a year ago in the capital of Costa Rica. The Yerbabuena had the sweetened rusticity — shelves of clean yellow wood with a satin finish, lots of light, coffee and cakes for sale, and solid manly wooden tables to sit at — of Big Sur, California. But unlike Big Sur this place had pretentious waiters in cheap wine-red jackets. Only disenfranchised intellectuals and left-tourists came here. With that tentativeness of foreigners, people stood in front of the shelves reading the spines of the books.