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Overview
When New York City PI Filomena Buscarsela takes her teenaged daughter, Antonia, to see their extended family in Ecuador, it’s more than a homecoming. Filomena hasn’t been back in years, and the trip brings back memories of her previous life as a revolutionary.
Before she’s even had time to adjust to her new surroundings, a priest is murdered, a man who, years ago, saved her life and helped her escape to the United States. She owed him her life; now it’s time for the debt to be repaid, and she vows to find his killer. It’s an election year, and the dirty hands of politics seem to be everywhere, perhaps even in this senseless death. Filomena’s investigation promises to lead her back to the very people she escaped, all those years ago.
As the country is wracked by natural and man-made disasters—landslides, floods, food shortages, protests, crackdowns—Filomena becomes a fugitive from the law, racing across the country toward a climactic confrontation in the Amazon jungle. Wishnia provides a novel rich with the sights, sounds—and dangers—of Ecuador, and a compelling look at the provenance of one of mystery fiction’s most dynamic heroines.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781604864304 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PM Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2014 |
| Series: | Filomena Buscarsela Mystery , #5 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 1,123,712 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Liz Martínez’s stories have appeared in Manhattan Noir, Queens Noir, and Cop Tales 2000. She is the coeditor of Indian Country Noir, the author of the nonfiction book The Retail Manager’s Guide to Crime and Loss Prevention, and her articles about security and law enforcement have appeared in publications around the world. She is a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. She lives in New York.
Read an Excerpt
Blood Lake
By Kenneth Wishnia
PM Press
Copyright © 2014 Kenneth WishniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-430-4
CHAPTER 1
El que se dedica a redimir injusticias sociales tiene que pensarlo muy bien. Tiene que convencerse de que no va a morir de viejo en una cama. El General Torrijos sabe que va a morir violentamente, porque violenta es su vida, señores. Yo sé, y esto está previsto ...
He who dedicates himself to reforming social injustices must think it through. He must realize that he is not going to die of old age in bed. I know that I am going to die violently, because my life is violent, gentlemen. I know, and am expecting it ...
— Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera, Panamanian leader, who died in a suspicious plane crash, August 1, 1981
WE'RE MAKING the steepest banking curves I've ever felt, nearly vertical, tugging my gut in new directions, when the plane slices sideways and free-falls heavily through the ether until it smacks the bottom of the pocket, landing on a cushion of air that is actually willing to hold us up a little while longer and carry us in to Guayaquil airport.
I push away the tray table with the "continental breakfast" that I can't finish and wonder, which continent did they have in mind? Maybe Antarctica. I keep picturing all those baby penguins feeding on regurgitated krill.
We slip below the clouds, and I lean over to Antonia and point out the flat green islands floating in the great salt estuary, clogging the mouth of the Guayas River.
The heat hits us even before the doors open.
Then the doors open, and a sticky blanket of tropical heat embraces me as we step onto the old hand-positioned rolling stairway that passes for a gangway.
We climb down the narrow metal steps, our legs wobbly and unsure after so many hours in those narrow-assed seats, stumbling after the clumsy passengers in front of us who are as overburdened as pack animals with sacks and bags and carry-ons full of video cameras, waffle irons, and DVD players from the free-trade mecca up north. Then we trudge camel-like across the hot tarmac to the 1960s-era terminal, its Pacific blue doors and windows open to let in the jet fuel-scented breezes.
Going home to a poor country is like going back in time. A time when people still get yellow fever and typhoid and cholera, when one bad harvest means prices soar and two bad harvests means people die, and anyone who can steal something back from the government is a local hero.
I feel like a tropical turtle who has been wandering for years, over thousands of miles, but in the end I must return to my homeland, to that beach where I was spawned. Except that I was spawned in a cornfield, in a mud-walled shack high in the Andes.
There's no air conditioning inside the terminal.
We line up to go through immigration. By now my hands are cold and my fingers are tingling. If Antonia notices, she doesn't mention it. I distract myself with the complimentary copy of El Mundo that the airline handed out as we went into a tailspin over the Gulf.
I learn that the former Minister of Health and Welfare, Octavio Seboso, a repulsive blimp of a man (and you should know that I don't repulse easy), is being asked to explain why the 350 garbage trucks that he bought for the city of Guayaquil ended up costing 1.4 billion sucres more than projected. Watchdogs suspect that Seboso had his hand in the till. Hand in the till, hell! This guy looks like he ate the till.
"Why are you reading that paper?" Antonia asks me.
"I'm trying to find out what's been happening since the last time we visited. Why are you reading that comic book?"
"I've learned a lot of good stuff from comic books," she says, defensively.
"Like what?"
"Like, if you're trapped in a mausoleum with nothing to eat but a corpse, don't eat it, 'cause the embalming fluid will poison you. I learned that from Creepy Tales number thirty-six."
"I hope I never need to use that information," I tell her, peeling back a few pages of boldly inked action to view the glossy and plentiful gore. Yuck-o.
"Then I suppose you also know that if you're planning to conduct any experiments using molecular teleportation, you should make sure there are no flies in the lab first, right?"
"Everybody knows that."
"Oh."
Getting through immigration can be very difficult when you've had to start your life over a couple of times. Right now I'm concentrating on getting through the next fifteen minutes. I look up at the clock on the wall. Seven A.M.
The line moves up. I drag my carry-on bag two feet farther and go back to the paper, flipping past an article detailing the municipality's plans to pave the roads linking the new suburbs with the city center, and scanning today's exchange rates, when ripping red bullet holes stop me in mid-breath. The man in front turns around to look at me.
"Hot, isn't it?" I tell him, summoning my best smile.
He nods, smiles back at me, takes a look at Antonia and turns back to what he was doing.
There are so many ways to die, so much blood, in color.
The bodies of a man and a woman are indistinguishable under a couple of bloody sheets, while police stand around looking at the dirt. It's a lonely road in the back country near the town of La Trampa about sixty miles north-northwest of here. Both victims were members of the National Democratic Party, whose candidates are favored to be among the victors in the upcoming elections — that is, if they live that long. Sergeant Roca of the North Guayas Police believes that guerrillas are responsible, because the nature of the damage points to Soviet-style assault rifles.
Assassinations were never our specialty. And I've seen enough damage done with "Soviet-style assault rifles" to know that we're not the only ones who had them.
The hot sweat turns cold on the back of my neck. Welcome to the Third World. Check your rights at the door.
Yeah — the brain of the all-night traveler is not a safe place for kind thoughts.
An authoritative voice startles me up out of the open newspaper: "¡Pasaporte!"
I hand over the passports. The corporal stares at us, comparing Antonia with her name and photo, then he opens mine, and spends about three times as long staring at my name and photo.
"This girl is your sister? Your niece? Your cousin?" he asks.
"She's my daughter."
His eyebrows begin to flow together. Her American passport gives her name as Antonia Buscarsela Sánchez. That's my last name followed by her father's, because normally she only uses mine in the U.S. and we just lop his off. But in Ecuadorian culture, the father's name comes first, and my passport clearly indicates that my last name isn't Sánchez. So something's wrong. I don't fit the mold, as always.
"¡Capitán!"
The travelers behind me curse. I look at my watch. Seven-fifteen in the morning and already above ninety degrees.
The captain lifts one foot, then the other, drifting towards me with the poise of an ocean liner cruising gently along on a hot tropical breeze. He asks what the problem is.
A drop of sweat falls onto my customs declaration card. I blot it out with my sleeve.
The captain takes hold of my passport. "Señorita, what is your name?"
Only a half dozen people left alive know that Filomena Buscarsela was once a hotheaded revolutionary who went by the name of Juanita Calle. We were Juanito and Juanita. That was a very long time ago. But now my name is the same one I was born with, and somebody might remember that. This is a small country. And there are a lot of soldiers standing around holding automatic rifles.
"Mom? What's wrong?"
"Nothing," I assure her, then I explain to the immigration police that I'm not married and that Antonia carries my last name in the U.S., where they don't typically use the second family name.
"You are ecuatoriana?" asks the captain.
"Sí."
"So you changed your citizenship?"
"Sí, señor."
"Do you have your cédula?"
"Of course." I separate my old national identity card from a grimy pile of documents. They examine it closely.
"It's expired," says the corporal, making my chest muscles tighten the way they do when a stray dog is baring his teeth at me, but hasn't attacked yet.
The captain examines my cédula more closely, and eventually declares, "She is covered by the extension law." I rediscover the lost art of breathing. He turns to me to explain: "This class of cédula is now valid indefinitely. Corporal, update this cédula." The captain jams the card back into the corporal's hands, gives me a slightly rakish salute, turns on his heels and sails off to rescue yet another hapless traveler.
The corporal meticulously whites out the old expiration date on my cédula as if the task required the same precision as etching the Ten Commandments on the head of a pin with a diamond-head drill, cranks it into a U.S. Army-surplus manual typewriter, and the sound of belabored typing brings visible relief to the tormented souls behind me. Even a hysterical toddler becomes strangely pacified by the sound. The corporal finishes, yanks out my card, sticks it back inside the frayed plastic lamination, puts it on top of my growing mound of documents, and pushes the mound towards me. The next woman on line eagerly squeezes in and places her passport in the corporal's outstretched hand. He isn't even looking up.
I step away from the table and look at the back of my cédula. It doesn't say, "Valid Indefinitely." The corporal has typed in, "Valida Hasta la Muerte."
Good Until Death.
* * *
The clock on the wall still says 7:00, but I don't care. We finish with the Bureau of Alcohol, Perfume and Cigarettes, and are released into the expectant mob gathered here to meet their aunts and uncles, cousins, sisters, blood brothers, bird dogs, boosters, button men, mitt greasers, mules, ropers, and other connections, their eyes glistening in anticipation of the Boreal riches that they shall come a-bearing. A torrid stream within this hot-blooded human ocean disgorges a cluster of friendly faces, including a swarm of little ones I've never seen before getting caught around my legs. Hands grab my overweight suitcase and I'm caught between greeting a dozen relatives, tipping the porter, and making sure that those hands grabbing my bags belong to people I know.
My uncle Lucho lays his sun-dried hands on my shoulders, smiles, and gives me a powerful hug.
Antonia's been away so long it's all new to her. She soon realizes that riding in the metal cargo bed of my cousin Guillermo's pickup truck is a relative luxury, as she stares at all the other pickup trucks driving along with handmade wooden flatbeds, or no beds at all, just bare axles with bulbous gas tanks whose intake pipes are stuffed with rags, the drive-shafts exposed and spinning.
The road takes a dip and we lurch onto an unpaved section of the highway. A battered blue-and-white-striped bus drives by with the morning rush hour crowd and kicks up a faceful of dirt at us. It looks like about seventeen men are hanging off the sides and back of the bus, and the conductor is actually climbing over them, hanging off with one hand to collect their fares. He nearly loses it when the bus bounces back onto the paved road. The name of the bus cooperative is Unidos Venceremos. United We Will Win. Not the same as grabbing the M34 crosstown express.
We stop for gas at a crude cement apron, pulling up in front of a flat island supporting three oil-and-grit-covered American gas pumps from the Reagan years, and I have to look twice to realize that the extra zero on the end means that gas prices have hyperinflated by a factor of ten since the last time I visited. Shit. So a gallon costs the same fistful of dollars as in the U.S., but in Ecuador that fistful of dollars is a day's pay at minimum wage.
I chip in ten freaking bucks, feeling uncomfortably wealthy, a culpable accessory to their misery, with perhaps a dash of survivor's guilt thrown in, too.
"It's been really bad since the earthquake hit a few months ago," says my cousin Azucena, who is called Suzie. "It cracked the trans-Andean oil pipeline. Ninety thousand people were cut off from civilization."
"Lucky them," I say.
We pull back onto the road, cut in front of a few buses and survive long enough to swing onto the Avenida Quito, heading for the barrio Centro Cívico, the proud proletarian stronghold and indestructible pocket of resistance where so many of my family live and breed.
The drab pastel walls of the city are covered with so many faded layers of overlapping posters and paint it all moves like a living skin, melting orange-and-yellow campaign posters hawking candidates with Spanish and Lebanese names for every office in the land, from alderman's dog walker to the supreme office of el presidente himself, all tattooed with red-and-black verses expressing the radical opinions of the voiceless hotheads. Then a stretch of whitewash announces a truce between the warring factions to make way for a hand-painted mural of undisputed national martyrs and revolutionary heroes: Jesus, Rumiñahui, Espejo, Alfaro, Che, and a huge painting of Juanito Tres Ojos jumping through a glass window towards me, blood and all.
"Filomenita, what's the matter?" asks Suzie. Heads turns towards me.
"Oh, I'll be all right. It's just that flight must have really turned my stomach."
Antonia excitedly describes the air pocket in her unique hybrid of Anglo-Spanish as we stop at a light with the huge face glaring down at me.
All I can say is, "That's new."
Suzie agrees, then her daughter Charito asks, "Why is he called Juanito Tres Ojos?"
"I don't know," says Suzie. "That's your generation, Filomena."
So I explain that some say it's because he was so sensitive to peripheral movement it seemed as if he had a third eye in the back of his head that allowed him to see police and soldiers sneaking up on him, and others say that he had the symbolic third eye of the true visionary, who will return one day to lead us to a better future. I don't tell her that some say it's from his preferred method of killing his enemies, by blowing a hole in the back of the unfortunate bastard's head.
Our charted course takes us past an ice cream wagon and nine voices scream out conflicting commands to Guillermo, who pulls a maneuver that would get my driver's license burned in New York City, bringing the pickup to a halt in front of the rusty metal wagon. The kids effervesce over the rim of the pickup and converge on the vendor, euphoria personified, as he rings the rack of thick brass bells for them. Oh, to be that age again, where one hundred sucres buys the flavor of your choice and a brief taste of paradise.
"What flavor do you want?" asks my uncle Lucho, pointing Antonia at the long list of flavors advertised in cracked paint on rotting plywood. She says, "Chocolate."
But the vendor's out of chocolate. He's also out of mint, cherry, and yerba buena (now there's a flavor you can't get in the U.S.), so Antonia settles for babaco. The man opens the top of the cart and starts digging out some off-white icing.
Then a scream tears the moment in half.
I turn in time to see a filthy teenager running up the block towards us clutching what can only be a purse he's just snatched. Before my dull brain can fire up, Guillermo lunges for the kid's legs and brings him down onto the rough concrete sidewalk, where they roll around like a drunken octopus flailing its legs spasmodically. I step in to help, and he kicks me in the face with surprising strength for such a skinny boy, as Uncle Lucho pushes in and gets an iron grip on the kid's neck, and the solidly built woman arrives and starts hitting him with her shopping bag.
I remember when Uncle Lucho was strong enough to single-handedly lift a jeep out of the mud.
"You okay?" my female cousins say, helping me up.
I'm rubbing my face. The ice cream man gives me a chunk of ice to put on it. This street is a central artery, and the efficient Guayaquil cops show up in no time in their dark blue pants and clean white shirts, and want us all to make statements. Only I don't want to. My family explains that I just got here, and that the other woman is the real victim, and she's the one who's going to bring charges, so that's okay with the cops, though they do give me a closer look than I'd like. Everyone's happy, except the skinny kid, who, as my vision clears while they take him away, looks to me like he hasn't eaten in days.
* * *
My aunt Yolita hurries out of the Correa family store and wraps her strong arms around me, solid countrywoman's arms that have been lifting crates of vegetables and cases of beer since I was small enough to sleep in a cardboard box under the cash register.
"You look great," she says.
"Yeah, getting kicked in the face does such wonders for my appearance," I tell her. She stops my mouth with a broadside of kisses and hustles me under the iron bars and into the family business, which is an all-hours corner grocery and liquor store in an untamed slice of the barrio, with a full-sized floor-model commercial cooler that I would like to crawl inside of right now. You can keep your fax machines and wireless e-mails. Hot showers and cold beer are all I ask of civilization.
I return her compliment. She's still a great beauty, but she was an absolute knockout at sixteen, before she started popping out little Correas at the rate of one model per year like a Ford factory. Most of the fleet are at work already: Lucho Correa Jr. is a dentist at the free hospital, Carmita is a secretary in the offices the Ecuadorian Navy, Manolo and his wife Patricia make clothing in a third-floor workshop, Suzie has her own store selling plastic bags of all sizes, and César is watching the family store.
Then, living on the second floor, there's my other set of cousins, Ronaldo, Victor and Bolívar Mendez, who are off mixing cement at a construction site; Luis, who's clawing his way up to a law degree; and Fanny's in the U.S. working for Leona Helmsley.
"We're going to kill the fatted calf for you," says my uncle Lucho, winking at me. "Tonight. After work."
"Sounds great. But listen, I've been traveling for eighteen hours and I'd like to take a shower before I hug anybody else."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood Lake by Kenneth Wishnia. Copyright © 2014 Kenneth Wishnia. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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