In Flames by Richard Hilary Weber

guest list of San Iñigo good and great, but he himself didn’t come to the opening, that would have been too obvious. His second job at the embassy was no secret to anyone.
    Elaine gathered in the usual crowd from the Saint Ignatius, Klauer and the poker players, Jimmy the golf pro, and these club members, so often blasé, threw themselves into the spirit of acres of flesh on local beaches, examining up close the photo subjects, a nondiscriminatory F and M.
    A special guest mingled among the invited worthies. An improbable priest in a clean white cassock, Padre Cardenio Morena looked almost dashing. Reg ensured that the priest made the invitation list, his instructions to me precise…the priest was my first assignment.
    “Dan,” Reg said, “the idea of two equally correct points of view is demonstrably false and plain crazy. There are right answers and tons of wrong answers, which isn’t to say slavery in San Iñigo wasn’t something terribly wrong way back when. But now we suspect this priest forgets all that business is long gone and over with. Even his own bishop or whatever doesn’t trust him. See what you can see, maybe it’s all a mirage. Or maybe not. Go with your gut, Dan…”
    The padre’s briefcase—Reg’s target for me—was in the gallery office, along with the other guests’ belongings. I met and greeted everyone, working my way around to the office in back and closing the door quietly behind me. As fastidious as a vigilant housewife or a worried mother, I searched quickly through the priest’s briefcase, careful not to disturb the natural place of his possessions. An odious task, but a necessary duty. The padre had expressed sympathies for government critics, and was a proponent of liberation theology, not the local hierarchy’s favorite doctrine, nor the new ambassador’s. All the wrong answers, in their view, and I relied on their word for something I knew little about. And then
híjole, güey
, hang on. Condoms in the priest’s briefcase. Padre, how could you. I was about to stop the search right there, thinking this would satisfy Reg Townsley’s brief,
See what you can see
…when I spotted Cuban stamps on envelopes addressed to C. Morena. Reg had made it clear, “We support free peoples all over the world, we support anyone who resists attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure…that’s official U.S. policy.” And in San Iñigo armed minorities meant rebel insurgents, and outside pressure meant Cuba or Venezuela.
    I paused, and caught sight of the priest’s face reflected in the glass of the office door. Many of the local guests—though not all—greeted him cheerily, and I could understand why. He was a warm man, kindly and charismatic in an open Latino way, a man at his ease, even when surrounded by acres of near-naked dark flesh on display in
San Iñigo Beach Beauties
. The envelopes, I discovered when extracting these from his briefcase, were bent at the corners and covered in fingerprints, the letters clearly removed and replaced in the worn and wrinkled covers dozens of times. I hurried, photographing the letters with a dedicated smartphone Reg gave me, sending encrypted pictures of the letters directly to him, before returning the dog-eared pages to their envelopes. On the tattered stationery, I spotted oaths of endearment, and words like
lealtad
and
fidelidad
, loyalty and fidelity. I had no time to translate everything. My Spanish was improving, but not fast enough. Five, six letters, one or two pages each, and I’d be done with my first small job for Reg Townsley.
    And then it happened. I was nearly finished picture taking, when Padre Cardenio entered the office. “I want to thank you for inviting—” Cardenio Morena’s soft brown eyes lost their liveliness and warmth, his gaze frozen on my hands and the letters.
    I reached for the bluff. Reg’s instructions were blunt…
If you’re caught, fuck ’em, failover to hardball, don’t pussyfoot