“Get your backs into it, you dago bastards,” the Australian foreman barked. Without the note drawing me away to business I might have gone over and smacked that bugger for spoiling my meditations.

I looked at the message. It was easy enough to decipher.

In stateroom LY (that is, the fiftieth floor, suite Y), a Plum (in other words, a drunk American) named Mr. P. Buck was creating a Mulligan (i.e., a disturbance). The codes had been established by the previous head of security at the Miraflores Hilton, an avid golfer. At some point I was going to drop the references to Mulligans, Eagles, Birdies, and the like. But I’d only been here for a few months and there were other, more pressing priorities.

I sighed, crumpled the note in disgust, and threw it in the nearest garbage can.

A drunk American, probably fighting with a prostitute.

P. Buck-I wondered if R.E.M. were in town, the guitarist was called Peter Buck and had once been arrested and acquitted of being drunk and disorderly on a British Airways flight. I shook my head. If an American rock star had been staying at my hotel, I would have known about it before now. Still, Peter Buck was one of my heroes and I crossed the street with a heightened level of expectation.

The hotel was new, tall, gleaming with glass and curved stainless steel-like something Frank Gehry might have come up with on a bad day.

Tinco, the nervous Ecuadorean night manager, grabbed me at the double doors.

“I heard,” I said before he could open his mouth.

“Stateroom LY, hurry, please, we have the Japanese ambassador arriving this morning,” he said, grasping his hands in front of him in a pleading gesture.

“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, relax, I’ll take care of it.”

“One of the girls has complained,” he said, looking sadly at the floor.

“Which girls? The hookers?”