He gazed at her through his smudged spectacles, saying nothing, sizing her up. Eventually his hand, palm down, directed her to sit. “Let’s get to work.”
Within thirty-five magical minutes, he’d organised a crew, a plane, and a face: a TV reporter who’d front the camera and take as much credit for the story as the late Mike Mandrake would have wished he hadn’t taken for his. She hadn’t noticed it before but with the window behind Mr Devine, the wisps of his hair seemed to make him radiate. The harmless old coot could call her missy, or lovey, or sweetie, any time he liked.
“You’re flying out at the crack of dawn tomorrow.” He lit up his Zippo, a signal for her to leave. “You know,” he added as he aimed the flame at his cigarette, “you get this in the can, Close-up will have more egg on their face than a year’s worth of breakfasts.” He took a long sip from his water glass, Elia watching in disgust. “Ah. That was good,” he winked and licked his wrinkly yellowing lips. “Well, off you go, sweetie.”
IN her excitement, Elia phoned Simon as soon as the Falcon tri-jet they’d chartered reached cruising altitude. She’d forgotten her boyfriend would still be asleep at home. “You won’t believe this thing. It’s got phones… well, obviously. And beds.”
Simon wasn’t impressed; he would have been if Elia had confided why she was going to an unnamed destination, or if he was the one sipping French champagne for breakfast, though Elia and the other FOX crew would have been wiser not to have indulged. By the time they were preparing to land in La Paz, even the burly cameraman—who’d guzzled more fizz than the others combined—had to pause taping the view from the air to press the sick bag up to his face.
Elia looked up in time to be sick again herself. In that instant before her head plunged into the brown bag, she noticed that the plane was on final approach into La Paz-El Alto airport, travelling at a crazy high-blower speed with the snow-capped mountains looming above them. Her eyes clamped shut as the wheels screamed along the icy runway.
The pilot ignored all the groans and, over the intercom, explained that, while fighting a thirty-knot cross-wind, she had needed to make the landing at twice the normal speed to avoid the engines stalling in the wispy thin air.
Elia reached for another sick bag.
51
YEARS AGO, LA Paz had attitude, but now, altitude was virtually all it had left to hang onto.
Spilling down the sides and across a rugged mountain bowl at around 13,000 feet, the Bolivian capital city had once held up its head, poised in a strategic sweet spot between the nation’s bountiful silver mines and its critical Pacific Ocean ports. But things turned sour over a century ago when Chile and Peru ganged up on their small neighbour, with Chile nabbing the seaboard and Peru the rich lodes of ore.
Today, La Paz’s remaining accolade—that it was the world’s highest city with the highest airport—didn’t feed the 30 percent of Bolivians living in poverty. They couldn’t give a miéchica that their airport could headbutt Switzerland’s Matterhorn on a clear day. Instead, with many scraping by on a measly five dollars a week, they hankered for the Swiss banks to reimburse the loot that some of their former kleptocrat leaders had secreted in their vaults.
In La Paz, the air was so thin that jogging would turn your legs to jelly. But few jogged here. There weren’t too many places worth going.
ELIA had organised to do the shooting up in the slums of El Alto that evening, so her plan meanwhile was to wrap herself in the traditional aguayo shawl she was about to purchase and stroll around the old part of La Paz city. With snippets from Lonely Planet that she’d read aloud to the others on the plane, she’d captivated enough of the crew to join her; all except Shannon Reynolds, the face who Mr Devine had assigned to front the interview.
Reynolds decided to stay in. The flight had been nauseating enough but when the hotel bellhop slid the van door open, the precious star’s stomach almost upended at the reek of the puddle of piss he’d stepped into. Spontaneously, he decided to leave exploring the marvels of this place to others. A market where you could buy llama fetuses, even dried ones, was suddenly of zero interest to him.