Read Online Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins - Free Book Online Page B

connect him in some way to Suzy, but he wasn’t adept at it,
being overly conscious of the language, perhaps; not wishing to bore whoever or
whatever was on the receiving end with hackneyed phrases, yet wondering whether
ornamentation and witticisms might be inappropriate or unwelcome. Before he
could get a rhetorically satisfactory prayer on track, his mind wandered to
Gloria—many of Lima’s women were cultured and sophisticated, as he suspected
Gloria might be when she wasn’t rendered crude by excessive alcohol—and he
experienced a pang of regret, in his heart and his groin, that he hadn’t
fetched her there beside him. It was his own fault, of course, for being so
finicky.
    The irony of Switters was that while
he loved life and tended to embrace it vigorously, he also could be not merely
finicky but squeamish. For example, what else but squeamishness could account
for his reluctance to accept the existence of his organs and entrails?
Obviously, he knew he had innards, he was not an imbecile, but so repulsive did
he find the idea that his handsome body might be stuffed like a holiday
stocking with slippery, snaky coils of steaming guts; undulating meat tubes choked
with vile green and yellow biles, vast colonies of bacteria, fetid gases, and
gobs of partially digested foodstuffs, that he blocked the fact from his
cognizance, preferring to pretend that his corporeal cavity—and that of any
woman to whom he was romantically attracted—was powered not by throbbing hunks
of slimy, blood-bathed tissue but by a sort of ball of mystic white light. At
times he imagined that area between his esophagus and his anus to be occupied
by a single shining jewel, a diamond the size of a coconut whose brightness
rang in all four quadrants of his torso.
    Really, Switters.
    He was up by eight and on-line by
nine. (In between, he packed, grudgingly committed acts of bodily maintenance,
and ordered room service breakfasts: poached eggs and beer for himself, a fruit
platter for Sailor.)
    At the computer he dispatched an
encoded report to the economic secretary at the U.S. embassy, who happened also to be Langley ’s station chief in Lima . Switters’s report was entirely professional, devoid
of literary japes or sarcastic references to the irony of an “economic
secretary” being ultimately devoted to undermining the host economy, the
Peruvian economy being a sickly system whose sole vitality, top to bottom, was
generated by the very coca drug trade the CIA was commanded to help eradicate.
To the chief, a cowboy through and through, Switters merely reported that the
lost sheep had returned to the fold, adding, for what it was worth, that in his
opinion Hector Sumac (he used his code name) probably could be relied upon to
engage in second-level espionage and assist in enforcement operations, but that
it might be wise to wait several years before permitting him to run any Joes of
his own.
    The line between cowboy and angel could
be no wider than an alfalfa sprout—Switters, himself, occasionally zigzagged
that line—and while Hector gave promise of impending angelhood, Switters was
wary of the Latin temperament, suspecting it to be unnecessarily volatile, and
thus was hesitant to trumpet too loudly on Hector’s behalf before the fellow
proved to him that he actually had wings.
    Duty accomplished, and still at his
deluxe, state-of-the-art, military quality laptop, Switters set about the task
of worming his way into Maestra’s home computer. A trifle rusty at such
maneuvering, it took him the better part of an hour, but eventually he crashed
her gates, jumped over the guard dogs, and landed in her files, where he
proceeded to delete each and every one of the e-mail notes that she had
hijacked from Suzy’s mailbox. Assuming that she hadn’t printed it or downloaded
it onto a disk, and he was pretty confident she had not, written evidence of
his heat for his young stepsister had now been swallowed by an uncaring,
nonjudgmental