He turned the pen light on the Greek’s face, then put the barrel of the gun on the Greek’s forehead.

“Wake up,” Russell said. He moved the pen light so the Greek could see that it was a pistol he had resting on his forehead.

The Greek had blue eyes. Russell hadn’t noticed that before. “I’m going to kill you unless you stop bothering those boys. Do you understand?” He pulled the hammer back for effect. It made a big sound. It was a sound the Greek would never forget. He would never learn empathy, but he had finally learned fear.

Russell glanced over at the Greek’s roommate. He was awake, and was staring at Russell. He was no friend of the Greek’s either, though, because he was smiling.

SIX

Ayoung Indian woman, dressed in a formal blue and white maid’s uniform, opened the heavy antique door to Carl Van Diemen’s colonial mansion. Van Diemen, Mahler had told Russell, had spent a fortune remodeling the place. It showed. The maid led Russell and Katherine out to the traditional courtyard, which was full of mostly young partygoers. Van Diemen, in his late twenties, had become one of the biggest dealers of Pre-Columbian antiquities in Europe, and was obviously making a killing, judging from the magnificent seventeenth century digs.

Russell and Katherine followed a hallway along a twenty-foot-high stone wall. Painted plaster saints, their white faces hit by spotlights, hung next to Mayan stone fertility figures. The juxtaposition of the two clashing cultures was dramatic and poignant. At the end of the hallway was a towering, Titianesque painting of the Last Supper—it had been pulled from the ruins of the city after an earthquake. Under the colonial-era painting, young women in tight jeans and exposed midriffs swayed to Dirty Vegas’s famous trance tune.

“You come. I’m so glad,” Carl said, pushing through the crowd to get to them. He was a big man, a little overweight, a little ripe and unctuous-looking, in the way of Europeans of a certain class. Van Diemen wore a black turtleneck shirt— the shirt untucked—and faded but ironed blue jeans. The young man’s face was round. He was very blond and very rich, and the two things seemed to come together perfectly in him. At least, that’s what Katherine had said on the walk to the house. She’d been to lots of Carl’s parties, she confessed.

Carl gave Russell a bear hug, then roughed up his hair. They had spent a week at the same hotel in Costa Rica once, and had gotten to be friends there. Carl was with his Costa Rican lover then, a well sun-blocked kid of maybe eighteen who wore an orange Speedo, even out to the clubs. Carl’s lover looked a lot like a girl, except for the package in the Speedo. In the streets people would yell maricon at them, real hateful. Carl and the kid were oblivious. Intrepidly queer, they didn’t seem to care.

Back then, Carl was always buying everyone around the hotel pool drinks, so Russell had decided Van Diemen had to be a rich kid, a gangster, or a fool. He liked Carl well enough. Most people did. He was the new kind of German, silly, pretentious, pacifist. He was the kind of German who wouldn’t go to war unless it was over a fashion statement, Carl had told Russell one night by the pool. His boyfriend stood in the shallow end, holding a fancy blue colored drink and looking at Carl like a girl. Russell had thought that was pretty funny. “Attack when you see Tommy Hilfiger,” he had said.

“I’ll only use laughing gas, and those little drink swords!” Carl had said.

Katherine said that Carl gave the best parties in Guatemala because he didn’t let in the squares. From the look of it, it was only hip people tonight, which in this country meant you could talk politics and art instead of soccer, and drink wine instead of whiskey.

“I didn’t know you knew Carl so well,” Katherine said, turning to him surprised. Russell hadn’t mentioned Costa Rica to her.

“We spent a week in the same hotel,” Russell said. “I was working on an article. I think it was called, ‘Costa Rica: Switzerland of Central America.’ ” It was a joke, but neither Katherine nor Carl got it. “That’s the standard line,” Russell said, trying to explain. “You see four or five of those articles a year. The Costa Rican Tourist Agency pays for a lot of them. It’s a lie, though,” he added. “It ain’t no Switzerland. They have the biggest cockroaches in the world. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen one cockroach in Switzerland.”

“What’s a lie?” Carl said. He’d missed what Russell had said because he was checking out some kid’s ass. Carl turned to Katherine. “Russell, yeah, he work in Costa Rica, he no fun. But he has fun here in Antigua. I see him at the Oprah Café with girls all the time.” Katherine looked at Carl, then at Russell a little disappointedly.

Russell was embarrassed because he didn’t want to appear a playboy, although—if truth be told—he was, to a degree. Women liked him and he liked women. It was that simple.

Katherine hit him with her hip, just like in high school, but he noticed that she kept holding his arm. Carl got them a drink by whistling with his fingers in his mouth and a waiter, a short guy, hustled over like he was playing for Manchester United. They picked champagne glasses off a silver platter and Carl took them to meet a painter friend that Russell suspected Carl was trying to put the make on. The bottle of champagne cost more than the waiter would make in a year, maybe two, Katherine told him later.

“Did you know that Gore Vidal used to live here?” the painter said. “In this very house.” The painter was a handsome American, and Russell pegged him as an upper cruster. The painter seemed very preoccupied with his watch, spinning it around his thin wrist. Russell asked him if he’d come to Guatemala to paint. The young man looked at him shocked, as if he’d been asked if he picked his nose, or ate bugs that landed on him.

“No, of course not. I’ve stopped for the time being. I’m not doing anything. Really. I’m trying to figure out the next thing.

Then I’ll paint it. I mean, you have to get a good picture of where we’re going and then get that down, man. You know, get it down. Guatemala is next. I think its going to be hot. I’m going to Coban and see what’s there. Caves, I’ve heard.” The painter acted as if he’d taken crystal meth. He had that wired anticipatory look. He was thin and had a stud in his tongue. When he spoke, it looked as if the end of his tongue wasn’t on quite right.

The music stopped, then started again. Someone put on the sound track from the movie Stealing Beauty. With the small yellow lights strung up everywhere, the mansion’s wide Mediterranean-style corridors, and the sound of the water from the big fountain in the courtyard, they could have been in Ibiza or the Costa Azul in Spain, Russell thought.

If the mountain fell in the sea let it be. I got my old world to live through. The Hendrix cover got turned up loud. Some people nearby got in the groove and started to sway. Two very blonde girls speaking in Dutch were sliding their hips to the music.

“Girls from Holland like to fuck, smoke dope, and read books. And tell you how it’s going to be when the Greens take over the world,” an English guy told him, staring at the girls. “I been here a month. I want to fuck them all.” He smiled happily.

“You want to go to the coast with me? Tomorrow?” Katherine asked him over the music. “We’re building some houses on a coffee plantation.”

“Sure,” Russell said. He mostly wanted to sleep with her. Unlike a lot of the people here, he wasn’t a do-gooder; he’d gotten a master’s degree in economics at the University of Chicago when he was only twenty three and looked askance on all the do-gooding, only because he felt charity—no matter how well intended—was just that, charity, not a solution for the country’s chronic underdevelopment.