Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [9]
“Hey!” he yelped in English, “I’m American! Hey you guys, I’m an American!”
Only the woman seemed to hear, flashing a quick, startled look over her shoulder, then continuing inside. Blair started to follow but a guard blocked his way.
“Alto, Joan Blair. Only the big shots go in there.”
“Who are those people?” Blair asked, craning for a look through the door. Which abruptly shut.
“Well,” the guard said, assuming the manner of someone schooling a particularly dense child, “there is Señor Rocamora, the Peace Commissioner, and there is Señor Gonzalo, the Finance Minister—”
“But the Americans, who are they?”
“How the hell should I know? Peces gordos, I guess.”
Blair didn’t dare leave, not for a second, though he could feel the sun baking all the juices out of him. The crowd in the compound absently shuffled about, disappointed without really knowing why. Fritanguera ladies set up their grills and started frying dough; a King Vulture scraped lazy circles in the sky. After a while the American woman stepped outside and walked down the gallery to speak to the reporters. Blair brushed past the guard and was up in a second, intercepting the woman as she walked back to the door. Out of instinct she started to dodge him; he looked like a wild man with his castaway’s beard and grimy jungle fatigues, but his blue eyes beaming through the wreckage brought her up short.
“Oh! You must be John Blair!”
He could have wept with gratitude. “Yes, I’m John Blair! You know who I am!”
“Of course, State briefed us on your situation. I’m Kara Coleman, with the—” A scissoring blast of syllables shot off her lips. “Wow,” she continued, eyeing him up and down, “you look like”—hell, she barely avoided saying—“you’ve been here awhile.”
“Fifteen months and six days,” Blair instantly replied. “You’re with the State Department?”
“No, I’m with the—” She made that scissoring sound again. “I’m Thomas Spasso’s assistant, he’s leading our group. Thomas Spasso,” she repeated in a firm voice, and Blair realized that he was supposed to know the name. “Chairman of the Nisex,” she continued, almost irritated, but still Blair didn’t have a clue. “The Nisex,” she said as if speaking to a dunce, “the New York Stock Exchange.”
Blair was confused, but quite as capable as anyone of rationalizing his confusion—he knew that fifteen months in the Andes might have turned his American frame of reference to mush. So maybe it wasn’t so strange that the king of Wall Street would turn up here, in the jungly heart of MURC territory. Blair’s impression of the stock market, admittedly vague, was of a quasi-governmental institution anyway.
“Right,” he said, straining to put it all together. The unfamiliar English felt like paste on his tongue. “Sure, I understand. But who, I mean, what, uh—why exactly are you here?”
“We’re here to deliver a message from the financial community of its support for the current peace initiative. Foreign investment could do so much for this country, we felt the MURC might be more flexible if they knew the opportunities we could offer them. And Mr. Spasso has a special interest in Colombia. You know he’s close personal friends with Ambassador Moreno.”
Blair shut his eyes and wondered if he’d lost his mind. “You mean,” he said in a shattered whisper, “this doesn’t have anything to do with me?”
“Well, no, we came chiefly with the peace process