by Mike Bond
“He says NoCal sent him down for Southern Air, out of Petén.”
The big man looked with interest into Murphy’s face. “Impossible.”
Murphy stood. “You guys’ve really screwed me up!”
“Hold it, trooper!” the big man rumbled genially. “You got to start from the States if you want to fly for Southern Air.”
“Listen, I got data, too, on the guerrillas − I need to talk to somebody.”
The man rubbed his jaw. “What kind of data?”
“I’ll make a trade − I need to interrogate someone who’s just been captured, on another matter, I’ll trade some data...”
“What other matter?”
Murphy looked into the friendly, blank face. “Drugs.”
The man looked back at him, and Murphy saw the black widow he’d seen in the chopper pilot’s skull in the jungle so long ago. It was big and very black and moved on dancing cables from side to side. “Nobody trades info here, trooper,” the man said. “I’m beginning to think you’re in a real bad place.”
Murphy stood. “Then you’re just wasting my time.”
“You can’t hop down here, just run all over us. You got to play by the book, trooper. Channels, like anybody else. Who you think you are, Galahad or something?”
Not waiting for them Murphy took the white corridor and down the elevator to the main floor, to an anteroom guarded by Guatemalan soldiers with MAC-10s and Uzis. There was a steel box at one side with a woman answering a telephone behind bulletproof glass. “What is this place?” he said.
“This?” she had a pleasant Alabama accent. “Why this’s USAID. ROCAP.”
“What the hell’s that?”
She looked at him in surprise. “We’re foreign aid. We organize urban work, agricultural self-help, educational projects.”
Behind him Murphy heard the elevator open. He went out the front door and down the marble stairs guarded by Guatemalan soldiers and through the electric sliding gate.
In the shade of great trees on La Reforma Indians were selling flowers, blankets, and willow baskets; chubby men in hundred-dollar running shoes jogged past skinny kids hunting the sidewalks for butts and gum, past lovely fifty-dollar girls and hobbling old women, the road full of flashy cars and Microfé vans with their windows crammed with faces. There were rattling smoky buses tilting their ragged human burden, children pushing bicycles stacked with Coke crates, black-windowed Jeep Wagoneers and Chevy Suburbans, symbol and tool of the death squads.
56
A CINDERY sediment was silting down between the buildings that wobbled in the ochre heat. He drove across the Río Barranca and down the slope of shacks and garbage, left the car and ran through the dump with the caves of rotten garbage and the trash huts, found the chicken wire shack where he’d stayed. It was empty; he climbed up through the trash to the next hut and knocked on the wall. A skinny little girl looked out, up at him.
There were two babies on a blanket on the floor, no one else. The girl did not know where her mother was. He went to the next hut, recognized the woman who had killed the rooster, days before. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “There’s no compañeros here.”
He tried three other huts, then in an alley asked a wiry girl with a scarred face. “Don’t talk about it,” she said. “Go back to your hut and wait.”
He stood by the plank door of his shack, out of the way of the flowing sewer. After perhaps an hour Lupe came. “If you’ve lost her I’ll kill you,” she said.
His hand itched to take out the Magnum and shoot her. He told her about the priest, the rings, the death squad. “You’re insane,” she said. “You deserve to die.”
“What are they doing to her?”
Lupe clasped her face in her hands, her back to Murphy. She knelt down on the ground and he did not know if she was crying or praying or simply thinking. “They’re torturing her,” she said. “When she tells them everything they’ll kill her. Unless she figures out how to kill herself first.”
“We can still get Arena, and trade him for her, the others!”
She shook her head, her face a mixture of pain and fury. There was perspiration, or tears, in her eyes. “It’s too late, now. You were supposed to meet others.”
“Let’s go, meet them!”
“It was for this afternoon. By now Arena’s on his way back to Guatemala City.”
“We’ll meet him here then.”
She stood. “Stay here.” She went out the door, came back. “You’re just worrying about her! Don’t you realize every word she says will cost a life!”
“So hurry!”
She vanished up the path and he stood at the end of the alley watching the hazy sun sink behind black pillars of trash smoke, the first breeze of evening rising through the dump of huts and tunnels, bearing the chatter of children, a woman’s laugh, the odors of garbage and tortillas, the wistful songs of radios and seagulls, and the chirr and swoop of swallows after flies.
He realized he was incredibly thirsty. Hungry. The world of your body goes on, he thought sadly. Each step, everything that had happened, he could see how he’d done it. Even the rings. Each step had made sense at the time and each had led to ruin later.
After midnight Lupe came with a bottle of water and two tortillas. “Sorry, this’s all there is.”
“What next?”
“You have clean clothes?”
“In the car.”
“Go up and sleep in your car. In the morning wash and shave with some of this water and change clothes. Make yourself presentable.”
“And?”
“Wait.”
Where the car was parked the sewers from the City above had backed up into pools where mosquitoes bred, so he had to sit with the windows rolled up, sweating, barely breathing.
At dawn he washed and changed. At ten Lupe and Pablo came down the hill behind him and got in the car. “Drive,” Pablo said.
He drove back across the Río Barranca into Guatemala City. “No critiquemos Guatemala!” screamed a yellow billboard above a highway abutment.
“Get out on the next corner,” Lupe said. “Three corners ahead you turn left on La Reforma and walk to the El Camino Real Hotel. It’s a big building on your left in one kilometer. Use your Arizona license to register. They don’t file room booking data by telecom so there’s no danger for forty-eight hours. Take a room on the south side with a clear view of the pool, at least four floors up. Don’t take any room that doesn’t meet all three of those qualifications. Stay in the room. Don’t go out. When you’re hungry use room service.”
“What the hell for?”
“Someone’ll get in touch. If in three days nothing happens, go home.”
FROM THE WINDOW of Room 708 he could see the long turquoise pool and its ramps of sunbathers like dead seals flayed over deck chairs, others sprawling under palm-frond umbrellas, white-coated waiters wandering among them like medics looking for survivors on a battlefield. Beyond the pool a thick wall shut out La Reforma. Between the buildings the noon sun hung thick as lead.
The room had two king-sized beds and a color TV and a red telephone and a desk and a bar with a small refrigerator. On the coffee table was a bowl of fruit and fresh orchids and a fan of brochures for the hotel sauna, coiffeur, massage, manicure, tennis, room service, luxury shops and chapel. In the bathroom were double sinks set in a long pink marble slab, a pink marble bath and a separate marble shower with a rubber floor mat, a bidet, toilet and white telephone. There was a complimentary kit of shampoo, a shower cap, laundry bag, shoe polish, sewing supplies, toothpaste and tanning lotion. Over the faucets a sign said “Purified Water” in English.
He turned on CNN, stories of death in the Middle East. He pushed a button and a college football player was speaking about today’s game: “It’s life and death for us.” The player leaned down to speak into the microphone, his shoulder pads blocking out the light. If it’s college football, Murphy
decided, it must be Saturday.
A man in a red jacket and cap brought him eggs and bacon and tasteless white bread and a thick steak with coffee, orange juice, milk, and a lime pie. He slept till three, ordered newspapers and magazines from room service. GUATEMALA KILLINGS RISE,” said a New York Times headline, “BUT OVERALL GAINS NOTED.” El Grafico listed yesterday’s twenty-one known deaths of the death squads, another article on a visiting US official:
“The democratizing process operating in Guatemala is extremely significant,” said Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz of New York yesterday after visiting the Armed Forces Chief, General Mejía Victores. “It is imminent and sure the US government will extend new military loans to Guatemala...”
On an American game show, housewives groveled for kitchen accessories. The phone shrilled.
“Sí!”
“Señor Bultz? In the man’s accent it sounded like “Bullets”.
“No. Sí!”
“This is reception,” the man said. “May the maid clean away your lunch?”
He held the Magnum hidden under a towel when he answered the door. The maid was a little Indian woman with a bowed back and a smile. He went into the bathroom and put the gun back in his belt under the shirt. In the mirror it swelled his stomach.
He switched back to CNN. The city of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, was burying its pet alligator. A thousand citizens, many weeping, marched in the funeral procession. A new alligator had already been caught to replace it.
He paced the room, twenty-seven steps from bathroom door to far window, round the beds and coffee table and back again. She could be dead now. Maybe they just shot them and didn’t torture them. You could always hope for that. Whatever Lupe and Pablo were doing they’d better do it fast. Or what? What was he going to do?
The daylight failed like a bad dream. Car lights were like snails’ eyes on La Reforma.
Three sharp knocks on the door. He ducked into the closet beside the door aiming the .357 through the wall. Again three knocks. “Si!”
“Señor Bultz? It’s Guadalupe.”
He let them in, Lupe and Pablo, she in a short silky pink dress and black stockings, he in a tuxedo. “Arena’s downstairs,” she said. “He may be coming up with me, to another room one floor above this.”
“That’s nuts!”
“You have to wait up there, outside the window. There’s a little ledge, you and Pablo.”
“We’ll never...”
“He’s here often, the bar’s full of Americans from the Embassy. He likes the hookers here, always likes new ones; he’s never seen me before. If I can get him to come to the room upstairs, we’ll try to take him out the window, down to this room, then down to the car. We’re keeping you with us, in case we need the chopper, a way out...”
He backed away, to see them better. “You’ve been working this all out, never letting me know?”
She brushed his hair forward, almost affectionately. “What good would it have done, except cause you more suffering if they ever catch you? And other people too.”
“I won’t do it unless I know what’s going on.”
“She’s told you what she can, hombre,” Pablo said. “Take it or leave it. We’re not even sure we need you.”
“Where’s Dona?”
Lupe took his face in her hands, looking right into his eyes like a mother with a beloved belligerent child, and he saw with shock how beautiful she was, how deep her jade eyes, how her presence glowed through her skin. “We don’t know.”
“You must!”
“We think she’s been taken to Cobán for interrogation. The three others we think were found this morning near Escuintla.”
He could hear his own words through a thick fog, as if he were alone in the room. “You think?”
“There’s been over twenty found today. Most of them don’t have heads.”
There was no air to breathe. “How do you know she...”
“There’ve been only five women. They all were bigger.”
He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, seeing the five headless women found today, thinking of their lives, thought how willing we are to trade others’ lives for those we love. “She’s dead. You just haven’t found her yet.”
“The people who took her, they’d have identified her right away. Just bringing her in is worth ten thousand quetzales.”
Everyone was ordered to hold out for forty-eight hours after capture to give the compañeros time to adjust, but no one could. Very soon you told your interrogators everything, anything, to stop the pain. They’d know she was trying to hold for forty-eight hours and would find a quicker way to break her. Right now. Right this very second. Every second.
Lupe opened the window. “Let’s go! You still have bullets for the Magnum?”
“Eleven.”
They took the stairs up one floor to Room 809. Lupe opened that window. “Wait on the ledge, here. Watch carefully. Come in when I call you, not before. Remember this: if I don’t call you, don’t come in. If Arena is here, do nothing. His bodyguards will be waiting for him outside the room door. If anyone comes in, I will pretend to faint if there’s danger. If I do that then shoot everyone you can except me and Pablo.”
LYMAN WATCHED the chick come down the wide stairs into the bar, with her short pink dress showing lovely long legs in black stockings. There was something about the way she walked that let him imagine her cunt right there, moving under the silk as she walked, and he could feel it warm in the hollow of his hand.
She gave the room a professional glance and sat at the bar behind him. “Gin y tonica,” she said, a girl from the barrios trying to sound chic. He felt his penis throb like a thick rope.
“And also, the bulls of Finca las Golondrinas,” said General Arena, “will outperform all others in Guatemala, for wisdom and for speed. That I have proved, have I not, Deputado?”
“The General always said the bulls of Izabel are best,” Deputado Calejes Cruxiero said to Newbury, “until he bought this hacienda down by the coast.”
Newbury jiggled the ice cubes in his glass. “Management. All depends on management.”
Arena’s hand slapped the table. Lyman shifted his eyes from the girl in the pink dress to Arena’s fat dark fingers with the gold Citadel ring biting into one. “Management,” Arena said.
“That’s why I’m here,” Newbury said. “I want to improve your management.”
Lyman snickered. “Progress’s our mos’ importan’ produc’.”
Newbury cracked a grin. “That’s why I asked Howie to join us, always says what he thinks. He’s your advisor and he wouldn’t recommend that you contract for this matériel unless you need it.”
“But isn’t it the Japanese who progress,” said Deputado Calejes Cruxiero, “while the Americans consume?”
“I talk to many people about my bulls,” Arena said, “but I am the one who decides what to do with them.”
“And Howie’s one of our people.”
“How much is he getting?”
Newbury’s chin rose. “Getting?”
“How much does Señor Lyman make on delivery of five hundred of these RPG-7 launchers and ten thousand rockets which he thinks I need?”
Lyman sat forward. “I don’t get nothin’.”
“Come on, Señor Lyman. I’ve been to your house. I see what you drive. You don’t do that on GS 14 Agency pay.”
“Expanding infrastructures,” Newbury said. “Electricity, roads, getting them to watch television, controlling information properly, gaining unanimity through dependence: that’s your task here, General. This will help you do it.”
“Give ‘em a good tit to suck on,” Lyman said, “and few people ever raise their heads to look around.”
Deputado Calejes twirled his cigar against the ashtray, breaking off an even section of ash. “It’s those few...”
“Give them a little more tit to suck on,” Lyman answered, “and they’
ll be eating out of your hand.”
“So your manual says.”
“And it’s good advice,” Newbury said. “So listen up. Same way Howie’s telling you, invest in these launchers − you won’t regret it.”
Arena pushed out his lower lip. Like a bull’s, Lyman thought. Put a ring in it. “My problem with your matériel,” Arena said, “is that I have to pay for it.”
“Life’s a bitch, General.”
“I need more credits.” Arena was watching the bar. A tall gangly man in a too-tight suit was trying to talk to the girl in the pink dress, but she was facing away. Grabbing for her wrist he spilled her glass.
“And the ones that won’t suck on your tit,” Newbury was saying, “them you just have to excise. Sounds cruel but you really have no choice. Kindest thing, best thing, for the society as a whole.”
“You tried that,” Arena said. Lyman noticed that his voice made the table shiver. “Don’t you remember,” Arena said, “Vietnam?”
The girl snatched her drink and handbag and moved to the next stool. The man followed, tripped, tugged her arm.
Arena moved like a cat in one motion up from the table across to the bar. “You want to talk to this guy, Señorita?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then, hombre, why are you here?”
The man looked at Arena’s medals and stripes, his bull neck and round thick face with its crushed-in wide nose and tiny merry eyes. “She’s here to be taken.”
“Apparently not by you. You have ten seconds.”
The man scowled drunkenly. “You don’ mean it!”
Arena glanced at the soldiers guarding the door. “Assuredly I do.”
The man steered a course for the door. “Gracias, mi General,” the girl smiled.
“You’re expecting someone?”
“No. I just told him that, to make him go.”
“It wasn’t working, your strategy. May I sit?”
57
MURPHY SLID his back slowly up the wall. Between his feet on the tiny night-lit pool eight stories below a swimmer trailed a threadlike silver wake.
