Angels in Heaven

all already,” Sara said.
    “Except if you’re with me,” I said.
There was a squawk from a spider-eating great tit in the nearby jungle.
    “We could have a word with
What’s-his-name, Alfredo, at the hotel, to see if he knows anything,” Sara
said.
    “We could,” I said. “If he’s not on
the high seas with Long Dan Silver. And if he knows anything. And if he’ll tell
us if he does know anything.” I looked gloomily downriver one more fruitless
time.
    A deep silence fell.
    “Edgar Allen Poe,” said Benjamin
after a while.
    Doris looked at me and tapped her forehead
significantly.
    “Swamp fever,” she said. “Drives men
mad.”
    “ ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ” he said.
    “Totally round the bend,” she said.
“Tragic, really.”
    “The problem Mr. Poe posed,” said
Benny, in a lecturing tone, “was how does one hide something of value in a
foolproof manner. His solution? Do not hide it at all.”
    “Taxi!” said Doris. “Take this man to
the funny farm.”
     
    It was a quarter after eight in the
evening of that same day. The Mérida bullring, which held just under eight
thousand spectators, was filling up fast. There were a surprising number of
children, the girls in party frocks, the boys in long pants and white shirts.
Vendors of all shapes, sizes, and ages sped up and down the aisles hawking ice
cream, beer, soft drinks, caramelos, peanuts. A mariachi band high up in
the stands played a lively ditty. The occasionally undecipherable announcement
blared over the loudspeaker system. Pretty señoritas flirted with passing gallants.
Matrons fanned themselves. Children hopped up and down in restless excitement.
    At eight-twenty precisely there came
over the loudspeakers the clarion call we were all awaiting—no, not the lonely
bugle solo that heralds the start of “La Macarena,” that chilling paso doble
that is the signal for toreros to cross themselves one more, final time,
and then set their satin-covered feet on the still-warm sands for the
traditional opening procession, but the stirring strains of “Sweet Georgia
Brown,” signature tune of the clown princes of basketball, the world-famed
Harlem Globetrotters.
    And from the large tunnel next to the
smaller one aptly named the gates of fear, out of which toros bravos hurtled during bullfights, out pranced the Globetrotters to a roar of applause,
tossing basketballs deftly to one another. Leading the team was a fetching
miss, the next-to-newest addition to the side: bringing up the rear was the
latest addition, V. (for Very Visible, Vulnerable, and Varicosed) Daniel.
    Thanks again, Benny, I thought as I
puffed my way to "our” bench and subsided onto it gratefully. There you
are— you’ll be leaving the Rocamar now after happy hour, wending your way down
the hill, carefree and gay—and here I am, got up like Othello in warm-ups,
being invisible in front of eight thousand Meridians.
    Out on the wooden court that had been
laid on the sand, the Globetrotters swung into their well-known warm-up antics,
to the delight of the crowd.
    Then a strange thing happened.
Despite the fact that I was wearing on my head a six-foot-wide sombrero, had
one arm in a sling down to and including the hand, attired as I was in
Globetrotter warm-ups, outsized sneakers, and wraparound sunglasses, with a
towel slung around my neck, I began, in a weird way, to feel invisible. I was
so visible as an object, as a curiosity in a group of, to the locals, similar
curiosities, that I felt invisible as a person, much like, as Benny had
explained to me, the crucial letter of Mr. Poe that one of his characters hid,
or unhid, by leaving it in a group of other letters tossed casually on a desk.
    I was also black, of course, which
did a lot to alter the face V. Daniel usually presents to the world. And I do
not mean paper bag brown; I do not mean high yellow; I do not mean cordovan
brown; I mean your basic black. When my ex-friend Benjamin, long may his
nefarious schemes backfire, first suggested the idea back in the swamps, I had
to admit it did have something going for it, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t be
one of the Washington Generals instead, that hapless white team who always
played the Globetrotters and whose record was then something like Won — 0, Lost
— 11,242.
    “You’re too old to be a white
basketball player,” Benny said cruelly. “Also, you wouldn’t be noticeable
enough and thus you’d be more noticeable.” Sure, sure, it all sounded