The Silver Llama

By L. H. May

The Silver Llama is the final novel of the Tihuantinsuyo Quartet, and though it stands alone like each of the previous three, it has many of the same characters and winds up plot threads from the previous three books. The title refers to a llama statuette that the narrator and his friend discovered near Ocros, Peru, in 1969 before it was stolen from them in the first novel, Riders on the Nio Storms. It reappears two decades later as an object of obsession like the Maltese Falcon, a central symbol and flywheel of the plot. A plot is nothing without interesting characters, and specifically, Proust is a model for the analyses of their sexual relations and jealousies. Combining Hammett and Proust may seem an odd recipe, but the characters dont have inherited wealth like those of Proust, and though quite cultured, they live in a different world that sometimes requires them to get their hands dirty. The third novel, The Coca Bums, shows the dirt well and also plays on the gradations of morality the characters experience living in a developing nation, a continually readjusting slide rule of situational ethics. Most of the principal characters are Americans, so this novel says as much about America as it does about Peru, from a new and distant, hopefully engaging and entertaining point of view.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504958172

L. H. May

L. H. May was born in Cincinnati, Ohio; was educated in public schools there; received his BA, cum laude, from Yale College, where he majored in English and minored in philosophy; and was strongly influenced by the synthesis of those two disciplines suggested by the groundbreaking lecture of Jacques Derrida at Johns Hopkins in 1966, introducing deconstructionism to the United States and expanding the scope of literary criticism beyond its previously narrow scholastic bounds. After graduating from college, May worked as a newspaper reporter before attending law school, receiving his JD from Indiana University. He then lived and worked in Peru, Lima, Arequipa, and Ayacucho, learning Spanish and researching international law, before returning to the United States to practice law in the Midwest while continuing to write fiction.

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© 2016 L. H. May. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/14/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5818-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-5817-2 (e)

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Author's Preface & Disclaimer

This novel, The Silver Llama, is the fourth and last of The Tihuantinsuyo Quartet, the first being Riders On The Niño Storms, EBook ISBN9781456764968, AuthorHouse, 2011, $5.99, the second The Gate Of Two Snakes by L.H. May, EBook ISBN9781491823392, AuthorHouse 2013, $3.99, the third novel is The Coca Bums, ISBN97815049118181, paperback, AuthorHouse 2015, to order call 1-888-280-7715 or 1-888-728-8467. Portions of The Silver Llama were originally published in Return To The Corner Of The Dead, since withdrawn, out of print and chopped for the present production. Corner of the Dead is the translation of the Quechua 'Ayacucho', the Peruvian province where the bloody Maoist Sendero rebellion arose in the Seventies and Eighties. The title was changed because people confused the book with The Walking Dead and zombie fiction. The only problem with 'Llama' in a title is that most Americans pronounce it 'lama', but trust me, the correct pronunciation is 'yama'. None of the persons or events depicted in this or any of the previous novels of The Quartet are real.

The heart has its own reasons. Pascal, Pensées

1

Line 71 In The Wasteland

That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Eliot, The Wasteland

Lima, Peru

December 15, 1996

It was a nice day to be digging in his garden until Jim's three-prong fork hit a root of the fig tree that had invaded his compost heap, or at least he thought that was the snag until he saw the shoe. The dead man was dressed in a brown gabardine suit and a card in his wallet said that he was Nestor Aurelio Lenguado. Jim contacted Police Captain Leoncio Fregosco, whom he'd known for over ten years and who reported after a week of investigation that the man was a minor civil servant whose wife was involved with a politician. He said the murder was undoubtedly a crime of passion and had nothing to do with Jim, whose house on a cul de sac happened to be convenient to the main drag of Avenida Arequipa, with many trees around and his garden wall easy to scale with the planting wells on the outside, so a perfect dumping ground.

How did they get the body in? Jim said. That guy was pretty hefty.

Jumped the wall and sprung the gate---have you been away lately? Do you have a security system? Fregosco asked.

Yeh, Senora Sanchez up the street, Jim said. I asked her to watch the place when I went to Philadelphia. She's got an eagle eye and she didn't see anything.

A lot of walls in these old places have broken glass on top set in cement, Fregosco noted, looking at the substantial garden wall and the limestone flags at the base. Nobody made any threats to you lately? No irate investors?

I don't have any irate investors, Jim said. And there are only the general threats that Sendero would have for a Wall Street lackey.

Nah, the senderistas are on their heels, Fregosco said.

Jim did believe the captain on that point. Ever since Abimael Guzman, the charismatic leader of the Maoist Sendero Luminoso rebels, had been caught in 1992, the movement had been dramatically weakened. President Fujimori's popularity inversely rose spectacularly, even after he suspended Congress and gave free rein to the military to mop up the rebels. Now the tourists were back flocking to Machu Picchu, bringing the foreign exchange so vital to the Peruvian economy, as the rebels had known when they were crippling the country with terror added to the everyday misery and poverty there, conscripting children to kill as soldiers or be sacrificed as suicide bombers to pay what they called 'the quota of blood', the price of revolution. It was no longer like the days when Sendero controlled half the country; they were now down to maybe seven hundred armed rebels, making money doing protection for the campesinos in the Upper Hualaga valley, a rich coca growing region. Peru had finally discovered a commodity more dear than the gold, silver, guano, fishmeal or Amazonian rubber of previous booms, namely the coca leaf from which was derived cocaine, so successfully employed by Sigmund Freud, Kentucky horse breeders and big deal American salesmen. Zounds, Cambridge archaeologists had even found Peruvian coca residue in pipes recently excavated in Shakespeare's garden, (along with Danish hemp), raising the spectre that the Bard was coke high when he cooked up MacBeth.

The DEA was pouring chemicals on the coca bushes, it just reminded him of Agent Orange, and it wasn't going to stop it, just acted as a price support. And now they wanted Jim to check up on his clients. What the hell? He should add a question to his intake form: 'Where'd you get your money? Was it dirty drug dollars? Or did it go back to a royal grant from the time of The Conquest?' They want me to get them to fill out a form, but nobody at the ticket gate at Disney Land asks you where you got your shekels.

Like a beer and a sandwich? I've got pastrami and provolone, some good French bread from Panificadores? Jim said. Hot mustard and pepperoncini. I also have some eggnog with bourbon for Christmas cheer.

The portly Fregosco enjoyed the pleasures of the board, answered 'all of the above' and reassured Jim this was a random incident probably due to his absence in the U.S., and wanted him to know it had nothing to do with him personally or his being an American citizen. Though Jim expressed no doubt about the captain's judgment, some questions lingered in his mind---just because Sendero wasn't targeting him, it didn't mean somebody else wasn't. After he got the mollifying police report, which found no matches for the drips of blood at the base of the wall, nor the fingerprints on his umbrella stand and basement door, Jim decided to put in a call to his old friend, Harry Stein, a retired foreign correspondent who knew Peru and kept his ear so close to the ground that grass grew in it, and asked him to check up on this Nestor Lenguado who'd ended up in his garden.

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They arranged for Jim to come over to Harry's place the next Thursday for holiday lunch.

How has the old reprobate been? Jim asked Rosa, his housekeeper, who greeted him at the door.

Intolerable, though he's been drinking much less, Rosa said. Sometimes I wish he'd drink more if it made him less sour.

I'll take that as an order, Harry said, shuffling out to greet him. Jim and I will tipple and discuss hard tacks.

Rosa brought them a chilled quart of Cerveza Cristal and two plates of her exquisite picante de camarones, and they went out and sat on the patio. It was evidently true that Sr. Lenguado, a mid-level official in the Fisheries Ministry, had a wife who'd been involved romantically with a naval liaison officer to that ministry. This confirmed most of Fregosco's story, though he'd said the paramour was a politician. Harry pointed out that Fisheries had been nationalized under the leftist Velasco military government, before being privatized again, and said the officer was doing lobbying on the side and possibly eyeing a political career. Many theories were suggested besides a crime of passion, including an effort to smear the reputation of a promising candidate, and then the deceased Lenguado had evidently been taking bribes to gain favors and perhaps these hadn't been forthcoming as expected. Fujimori needed men and the officer had been on the ship that blasted open the walls of the island prison that Sendero prisoners took over in '86, so marine commandos could storm in, freeing all the hostages except one who was killed. Harry had gotten the sense from Fregosco that the officer was well connected, the navy was traditionally the most conservative of the services, and there were really not many answers to be had in the case. Oh, one other thing, after the operation to quell the prison riot in '86, this naval officer had served in Ayacucho Department in the sierra, where there was no ocean, but there was a detention camp where suspected Sendero rebels or their sympathizers were interrogated.

You haven't been up to Ayacucho recently, have you? Harry said.

Not since '69, Jim said. I did meet several communists at the time, but like ninety per cent of the faculty at the University of Huamanga was leftist.

But no recent contact? Harry said.

I do go down to the soup kitchen in the ayacuchano barrio here, but all those people are loyal, hell, they got displaced to Lima by Sendero, Jim said.

Or by the government, depending on how you look at it, Harry said. Did you know the name, Ayacucho, means 'corner of the dead' in Quechua? I don't know if that comes from the Incas' bloody defeat of the Chancas there in the 15th century. Or maybe it's because of the starvations when the rains don't come to the sierra. It's been a hard land from time immemorial, and a fertile ground for rebels.

When I talk to Sra. Paucharimac, I always ask about the latest news from home and some of it ain't so good, Jim said. Not from the barrio neither if the army comes kicking down doors. I can find out if somebody's been around asking about this gringo, Jim Hiram.

I don't think you need to be afraid, but I did get the sense from Captain Fregosco that there weren't many answers down this road, Harry said.

Um, say, doesn't lenguado mean 'sole' in Spanish, as in 'filet of sole'? Jim said.

So a good name for a fishery official, right? Harry said. You shouldn't worry. Fregosco likes you. He said you've done all right for his pension account.

I'd have done even better if Garcia hadn't screwed things up with the IMF in '86, Jim said. Now Fuji's the man of the day. Didn't he win over sixty per cent of the vote?

Things can change quickly, Harry said. You've heard his new nickname, Chinochet?

Chinochet was a combination of 'chino', Peruvian slang for anyone of Oriental descent, and of General Pinochet, the rightwing Chilean dictator who'd deposed Allende. As far as 'chino', Fujimori was Japanese-Peruvian, so like Jim's buddy Milt Takita said, it showed even with stereotypes, Peru couldn't get it frigging right. As far as the fascism, Fuji had dissolved Congress in '92, and though the Clinton administration's threatened sanctions had made him hold elections in '95, which he won big anyway, now there were questions about how he did it. His chief of the secret police, the SIN, the National Intelligence Service, Vladimiro Montesinos, had been accused of wire-tapping his congressional opponents with the aim of recording them taking bribes to assure their cooperation and silence.

The third member of their triumvirate was the Chief of Staff, General Hermosa, who'd allegedly tried to put together a coup when he invited all the other generals to his birthday party in Lima, but Fuji got wind of it and sent all the generals back to their posts. No happy birthday, no ice cream, no cake, maybe the triumvirate was more like a 2.5-umvirate, but now the focus was on the dirty tricks of Montesinos.

Is the triumvirate a Latin thing? Jim said. It didn't work out so great for Mark Anthony.

If things don't work out with one of your allies, you've always got another to turn to, Harry said. Unless, of course, you're odd man out.

My dead guy in the garden didn't even make the papers, Jim said. I'm not complaining, since that couldn't be good for business. I'm guessing the grieving widow's been quiet too, considering her position in this.

That evening Jim was having a nitecap and thinking about Montesinos and the SIN, their national intelligence service, humming 'who put the SIN in MonteSINos' to the tune of who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong. It wasn't real funny because he knew some of its connection to a death squad the Colina Group, but then kittens pounced, pawed, clawed and bit as they played in preparation for the time when they would grow up and hunt. The feline was a feature of mythic fear in Andean iconography, they still had masques with jaguar dances in Ayacucho in the sierra where some of the worst massacres had occurred during the recent civil war. Jim snoozed off recalling high school American History and the description of the Alphabet Agencies of FDR along with his packing the Supreme Court, an insult to American constitutional institutions, rank treason and apostasy, and his dream involved The Master of Acronyms in a game where you could be out if you missed just one question. This interlocutor looked sort of like The Penguin in Batman, in his tails and spats and grinning with his cigarette holder in his teeth. Question: 'And now for our next question, Jim, who is buried in your garden? Is it Chester or is it Nestor? Nestor is of course: (a) the sage Greek counselor who advised against hooking up with Hester; or (b) a venerable and wise old man. Jim's Answer: Both of the above. Ah, a wise guy, Master Pengy said, with that game show host grin. 'Fool, think you're so smart, who built the step pyramid of Zoser, who did William tell, who's buried in Grant's tomb, and who came not to praise Caesar? Get all those right and move on to the next level, Sonny Boy Jim. How about Acronyms for a category, the ABC countries and you are presently in P. On our radar. Bewilderment---Jim: 'Wait, what was the question again?' Master Pengy: 'Sorry, kid, if you don't know the question, you can't get the answer, can you?' 'Oh give him a clue, Pengy,' Miss Dolores in her satin bustier pleaded for him. 'Keep this under your hat,' Master Pengey said. 'Try looking up TS, old man.'

TS, Jim said, waking up and jotting down the details in his dreambook, the notepad he kept on his bed table for that purpose, all the while thinking 'what is this TS, the standard US FBI acronym for Technical Surveillance?', which he'd learned back in his antiwar days when Jedgar was listening to him tinkle. Not that he thought the IRS or the DEA would be lobbing bodies over his wall, but if they'd been bugging him to access client information, that was a horse of a different color, they might have an informal sharing agreement or an agent making money on the side. What an irony: he'd filed all his 1040s for years, didn't keep two sets of books, wasn't protesting Vietnam, was feeling good about a centrist Democrat in the White House.

TS, the IRS, it didn't make any sense, he was off on a false trail. Now, exactly what was it Emcee Pengy said in the dream, 'Try looking up TS, old man.'

'Old man', is that from Gatsby, or English usage like 'old chap'?

Nestor is the wise old man, and also the name of the very old man in his garden, as in one cannot get any older than when one is in Eternity, then he remembered the place in The Wasteland where the poet recalls Stetson being at Mylae, a battle in the Punic Wars, 'a war of commerce', and asks whether the body in his garden has sprouted yet. The reference was to Romans and the community of the faithful.

Oh, God, the TS is for T.S. Eliot, Jim exclaimed, getting up out of bed and finding a modern poetry classics anthology with The Wasteland and quickly locating the line about the body in the garden. It was in Line 71.

Soon after, with his mind on acronyms, Jim remembered NAL were not only the initials of Nestor Aurelio Lenguado, deceased recently in his garden, but also of Norman A. Larsen, chief counsel for Seymour Industries, also deceased in Jim's garden 1986, Lima, Peru, but fortunately not buried there. NIMBY (not in my back yard) was a good rule when disposing of bodies, not dead by his agency but at a time it would have been terrible for the Seymours, especially Helen's mother, who'd gone off her rocker right after her husband died up in the sierra. Well, after managing to kill Harry Seymour in the sierra, Larsen had arranged for his body to be lost at sea, not to make it home to Philadelphia and possibly prompt an inquest that could void a multi-million dollar insurance policy on the CEO. And Larsen hadn't readied a coffin for Harry alone. He'd also made provisions for Jim and Pedro, a med student who'd done toxicology tests on Harry to confirm Jim's suspicions of foul play. It wasn't Jim who'd shot Larsen in his garden; it was either Jim's brother-in-law to be, Peter Seymour, or Pete's lover and future wife, Holly Abbott, Jim hadn't seen which. The S.O.B. was blackmailing Holly, threatening to tell all about her old days in the life, and ruin her marriage plans with Pete.

That episode with Larsen had been ten years ago, and virtually nobody knew about it back then, well, at least nobody who'd want to talk about it. Norm Larsen had been muscling Jim when Holly Abbott showed up and Norm shot at her first before getting shot. She and Pete didn't even know Larsen was already dead when they left his place, because Jim told them he was going back inside to call an ambulance. But Norm was already gone when Jim got to him, lying down in the cellar stairwell. After he'd horsed Larsen's body into the SUV and the coffin, which he locked and drove to the docks of Callao, Jim saw the coffin loaded on the boat that later sank offshore. The old InterCon hulk called the General Ochoa had exited Callao harbor pumping bilge and exuding a heavy oil smoke, needed an engine overhaul bad, went down in about 10,000 feet in the Humboldt Current, so even with a Jacques Cousteau in a diving bell, it'd be long odds ever finding that wreck.

Jim had thought at the time there might be some back-flack from the case, but there was nothing substantial. Two insurance agents did come to Lima about Harry, the first guy Hansen arriving the Monday after the Sunday Jim had shipped Harry Seymour's body home on a private flight. That Monday Jim was in Valparaiso pretending to be Larsen absconding, and when he got back to his office Tuesday, Hansen was waiting. He'd heard this bogus press release Norm had prearranged, that Harry's body had been lost at sea in an explosion, was unaware that Harry was already interred back in Haverford Mills. Hansen was pretty hot and thought Jim had snookered him, so they sent another guy to follow up, Pirasini, a young Italian-American attorney who recalled a big city, clean-up prosecutor. After inquiring about Larsen, he'd noticed the recent excavations in the garden, and Jim had made some crack about the backhoe and the massive root ball of the fig. Oh God, did the insurance Johnny think Jim was just in his face, like 'yeh, Norm's takin' the long nap in my garden, whatchu gonna do about it?' Ach, that was crazy too: insurance men didn't throw bodies into the gardens of those suspected of insurance fraud. They might know T.S. Eliot, but they didn't as a rule lob bodies over your garden wall. It had to be somebody else besides Pirasini, or Piranesi or Pirandello as he and Helen occasionally referred to him when talking about the case and the days after Daddy died, as those days receded in the taillights of time. It wouldn't likely be Pete or Holly bringing up the subject of old Norm now, because there was no statute of limitations on murder, in the U.S. or in Peru.

It was like when he'd lost his keys or cell phone or wallet, before he called to cancel all his credit cards, he felt he had to go back and trace things and haply for him, the muse of memory was like a forgiving mother, and let him recall every detail.

Oh, there was that Juan Stelzer. That was the name on the accounts in Lima and Valparaiso, Chile as a co-signer with Larsen. Jim had always assumed that Stelzer was his straw man, if he were a real person at all. The Chilean police had identified Stelzer as a suspect in Larsen's disappearance, in part due to Jim's work in extending Norm's life by the miracle of impersonation. Maybe Stelzer was not an alias, was Norm's partner and a friend, we all need friends, even the bad boys. Maybe the cops gave Stelzer trouble after Larsen's disappearance, and now he was coming after Jim on the tenth anniversary of Norm's being gone. Still, most con men don't know a lot of T.S. Eliot. So many maybes, and a frustrating lot of theories.

When at a total loss for a reasonable explanation, go back to the last thread of it, or talk to somebody smart with a detached view, so he called his old friend, Frank Mathiessen, in La Paz. After they had discussed empty nest, which Frank and Luz were suffering with their two eldest off to college in the States, he got down to business.

"Hey, Frank, you remember back about ten years ago you put me in touch with a man named Benavides to act as an agent