by Mike Bond
“We have aguardiente − want some?”
Arena nodded, eyes wide, sweat and tears pouring down his cheeks. Pablo uncorked the bottle.
“Wait.” Murphy took the rum. “Tell me right, the first time. I know most of the story, just need you to fill me in. Tell it right the first time and you can have rum. Tell me one lie and I pour it down the hole in your leg.”
“You’re not even Guatemalan.”
“The Americans − who?
“Me duele mucho! Wait!”
“Who!”
“Advisors, Jesus!”
“Who?”
“Counterinsurgency. The Agency. You know this!”
“Who burnt my village?”
“God it hurts.” Spittle ran down Arena’s chin. “Want to know who burned your lousy little village, wherever in hell it is? You did.” He coughed; it sounded like a laugh. “Your own country. God did, then − maybe you like that better?”
“I want the names.”
“Who pays your taxes? Who votes? How many times have we been invaded by your Marines? Who changes our government like a whore changes underpants! Who changes your own government, whenever it wants? Kills your president and his brother and gets away with it?” Again the croaked laugh stiffened by pain. “It’s fools like you, make the world such a dangerous place.”
“Tell me. Or to hell with it all I’ll kill you.”
“Easy, amigo,” Pablo said.
You really are a fool,” Arena gasped. “Don’t you know, what really runs things?”
“Who’s telling you to hit the drug flights?”
“Can’t you see − same answer... snuffing the independents.”
Wind guttered the lantern; the trapdoor opened and daylight dived down. “Pablo!” Lupe whispered.
“SHE’S NOT in here.” Lyman shoved the folder of photos back at Vodega. “Not the one who trapped Arena.”
Vodega opened a new dossier, tossed another photo across the table.
Lyman sipped his coffee. Beyond the window soldiers were doing an arms drill in the yard. The photo was a young woman, hair cropped, face and lips puffy, eyes bruised, nearly closed. “Not her, either.”
Vodega smiled. “This one we’ve got. Murphy’s chica.”
“The doctora? Lyman dropped the photo and stared at it. “Just think − his whole world’s come down around his ears. She was all he had left −”
“Sad.”
“− except Arena.”
“They want a Mexico exchange. Theirs released first.”
Vodega peeled down a fingernail, gnawed it.
“Tell them legally you can’t. Offer them close to the border.”
Vodega smiled. “If it’s provisional Mexico will get very pissed.”
“Fuck them. Don’t you want Murphy?”
“Not like you do. I think you have a screw loose about this dude.”
“We all need him dead, Angelo. He’s in everybody’s way.”
“Yours more than anyone else’s. Why?”
Lyman looked at Vodega. Yes, he thought, sometimes you can be frank even with people you don’t like. “I want out, Angelo. The Agency won’t let me go until the pilot’s done.” Lyman tipped up the photo, smiled at the swollen gaze of one who knows all that’s coming is unending agony then death. He felt his sex stir. “Do you suppose he knew her, from before... ?”
“He was shot up, she fixed him. In that village where we got the priest.”
“He never gave you much, that priest −”
“He’s not done yet.”
She could have been pretty, the one in the photo. Nice small tits, slim waist, nice hips and long legs with one thigh raised trying to cover herself. Sweet bruised skin. Key to Murphy’s heart.
THROUGH A CRACK in the shed wall Murphy watched the patrol coming house to house down the hill. “Three more below!” Lupe said. “No, five.”
“We’ll tell them to pull back,” Murphy said, “or we kill him.”
Pablo came up, took the Uzi. “Beat it!”
Lupe looked at Murphy distractedly, back at Pablo, gripping his hands. “At the end, please, let them take you? You’ll be on the list.”
Pablo clasped her face in his hands for an instant, like a prayer. She reached for him but he pushed her away, toward the rope ladder. “Go!” he told Murphy, his eyes fierce.
“Better we cover them from here.”
“There’s a tunnel down there and you’re taking him through it. Go!”
Beneath the ladder Lupe had pushed aside the dirt to a second trapdoor, a black core down into the earth. “You’re going to have to crawl one-legged,” she yelled at Arena. She turned angry eyes on Murphy. “You first!”
“What about Pablo?”
“Somebody’s got to stay behind, cover this up, stall them.”
With a roar Murphy leaped back up the stairs. Pablo was watching the soldiers climbing from below.
“Get down there!” Murphy yelled. His chest was shaking, he couldn’t breathe. “I’ll shoot you! Get down there!”
Pablo ran to the other side of the shack, peered at the soldiers coming down through the huts. “We’ve got two minutes.”
“You son of a bitch I’ll shoot you!” Murphy’s gun was shaking badly and he held his right wrist in his left hand to steady it.
Pablo looked into his eyes. “Perhaps it’s better.”
Lupe went first, Arena dragging his leg and moaning through his gag, then Pablo. Murphy shut the trap and shoved the loose dirt and straw back over it, scattered dirt and straw over Arena’s blood.
“Hola!” A man’s voice. “Anyone in this house come out!”
Murphy went up, shut the top trap. “Men!” The voice called, “I’ll count ten then you fire on the hut. Cut it apart! One...”
Smooth snicks of steel as the soldiers readied their guns. Murphy dragged the first banana clump back over the trap.
“Three...”
He threw them one on top of the other.
“Seven!”
“Hola!” Murphy yelled, stacking the last ones, “Hola! Hola!”
“Get out here!”
He shoved the Magnum into the banana clumps and opened the door. Hands up, he went out into the bright hot sun waiting for the bullets to hit.
60
“YOU’RE NOT going to believe this!”
“Not if you tell me, Howie.”
“We have him.”
“Fantastic! Safe?”
“Not Arena, goddammit, Murphy! His chickie, too.”
Merck said nothing, then, “Where?”
“Right under my feet.”
“Where the hell’s Arena?”
“Murphy may know. Where we got him there was a tunnel. We think some others, maybe Arena, went out it.”
“Where?”
“Goes uphill to empty houses.”
“You mean you didn’t secure the area?”
“I wasn’t there, Curt. Be happy with what you get.”
“What’s he said?”
“That he was hanging out in this deserted hut.”
“Crush his fucking nuts!”
“He’s holding.”
“He made us a lot of trouble in San Francisco, this guy.”
“Soon as we finish talking with him it’s over.”
“We need Arena back, Howie. They took him right from under your nose.”
“I’m not his bodyguard.”
You trained those two guys! And they’re jerking each other off while your friends go out the window with Arena. How you think that looks up here?”
“I’m not your PR guy, either.”
Merck caught his breath. Like a puppy, Lyman thought, that’s been tearing at something. Pant pant. “For now be happy with what you got,” Lyman said. “You got Murphy, his chickie. She’s one of their best doctors, a fucking surgeon.”
“I don’t care from no doctors, Howie. I c
ertainly don’t care from no pilot. What I care about’s Arena. Think what we’ve invested. What we have to gain. He’s too good to lose, and you lost him.”
“He’s not lost yet.”
“Even if he isn’t, you gotta give up a whole lot of people. People you ain’t finished with.”
“Not if we get Arena first.”
“If you do have to trade, Howie, don’t fight too much about the numbers. If they want two hundred people then give them two hundred...”
“Lotta people they’re asking for don’t live here anymore.”
“Give ‘em others. Go get new ones and give them to them. Trick is, get back Arena. We get him back we can ride a sympathy vote in Congress to more appropriations.”
“I don’t know what’s worse, Curt. The guerrillas or the Hill.”
“How we talking with the ones who have Arena?”
“Pay phones to pay phones. They’re moving too fast to catch.”
“Think of what we been through, this Soviet Union thing. Think what I been through, my family. Seventy years of lost lives, millions of lost lives. All because back in 1917 we didn’t grab ourselves by the balls and jump in!”
“Like Nam?”
“We took Nam, Howie! For over ten years we kept the wheels turning! Kept a stable balance.”
“I thought the idea was win.”
“Win? That’s what we got now, Russia, all that. You call that a win?” Merck stopped, to sip his coffee maybe, three thousand miles away. “Nam taught you all the wrong lessons, Howie. You go slow where you should run, and run where you should hide. I wonder maybe the Agency’s too into you. Maybe I shouldna given you, you know, such a hand up?”
“It’s your nuts I’m saving down here. Long before this Arena thing. This pilot thing.”
“You’re not saving anybody’s nuts. You could lose yours. It happened under your nose. You playing for their team?”
“You’re beginning to piss me off.”
Merck laughed. “Being pissed off counts for nothing in this world.”
IN THE PINE GROVE was a spring between black rocks where blue sayune flowers, violets, and red wild begonias grew. There were water spiders on the spring and the water was achingly cold and the cool resiny air rose up the bronze trunks into the golden day.
“Tell me,” said the first G-2 man. “Where are Lupe and Pablo?”
“She’s stalling again,” said the other. “Let’s do some teeth.”
“YOU FLEW SLICKS for the United States of America! That’s your country! What you doing tied up in this shit?”
He was tall and very black, trace of southern accent, Levis, muddy running shoes, a work shirt.
“You’re the one that hit my village. I know you. You’re the one.”
“Man, you’re not making any sense.”
“The whole village. Little children, old people, everybody.” Murphy pulled himself along the bars till the chain stopped him. “The people in the river. A woman and a brand-new baby and a fourteen-year-old boy...”
The black man drew up a stool in the corridor, tilted his head to see between the bars. “I don’t know you from Adam. I know nothing ‘bout no village and people in no river. I’m just Second Secretary at the American Embassy, and I’m the one gets called when some American gets his ass in deep shit. But to get you out of this very deep shit you’re in, I first need to know why you’re in it.”
“There was an old woman, Consuela. Little children...”
“You getting crazy ‘gain, brother. I don’t know anything ‘bout none of this old woman stuff.” The black man leaned into the bars. “But I do know you’re in some very deep shit up in the States, in addition to the very, very deep shit you’re obviously in down here. So what the fuck you done?”
“Who are you?”
“I told you.”
“You don’t even know who you are! Oh yes you do.”
“I know I got to hustle to keep the Guatemalan Army from just wrecking you. That’s understandable, they want Arena. But instead of ripping you apart they might be persuaded to free you, wherever you want to go, with some money to go on. If you help them find Arena.”
61
THERE WERE THREE and they wasted no time. They tied her hands to the steel bar behind her. They stretched her tight between the bar and the wires round her ankles and two held her mouth open while the third took a Black & Decker drill and drilled into the root of one lower molar. He curled the end of an electrode and shoved it down into the root. He went behind her and drilled a second hole into the base of her spine and twisted an electrode into it. They locked down her head so she couldn’t shake it and snapped on the gray US Army field telephone clamped to the electrodes, and turned up the current.
“I JUST TALKED with the top guy here,” the black man said to Murphy through the bars. “They’ve got your doctor lady in custody down in Antigua. They were going to let her go − you should’ve kept your mouth shut. Now they know she’s with you, that she’s part of this Arena thing.”
“Let her go. Then I’ll tell you whatever you want.”
Two soldiers unlocked the door and the black man and a smaller younger man in a maroon blazer came in, trying to step lightly in the muck. “This’s Carmen here,” the black man said, “he’s the Embassy translator. My Spanish ain’t so great...”
“Jesus,” Carmen said, “what they do to you?” He bent down, looked into Murphy’s face. “Oh my God Jesus, what they do?”
“We gotta move quick,” the black man said. “They’re going to ruin him.”
“Pigs.” Carmen bit his lip. “Goddamned pigs!”
The black man knelt down. “Listen, pal, you gotta come straight.” He shook his head. “Otherwise I can’t help you.”
“Have to get him out of here.” Carmen glanced round. “You!” he said to one of the soldiers. “Get a stretcher. We’re going to move this man upstairs.” The soldier backed away, shook his head.
“I’ve tried,” Lyman said. “The Guats say no. Their jurisdiction.”
Carmen leaned near. “You want me to tell them not to hurt her? To be ready to let her go, with you? That you’re going to tell them where to find Arena?”
Murphy’s words were like chunks of splintered stick coming out of his mouth. There was cool air all over his skin, as if he were going to faint. After a while, he thought, pain is its own drug. “First let her go.”
The black man’s face came at him. “Tell us and they’ll send you and her to Mexico, Cuba, anywhere you want. They do it all the time, these trades.”
“They’ll even broadcast an amnesty,” Carmen said, “so your friends can give up Arena without bloodshed. So they can go with you.”
“No one knows who you are except us,” the black man said. “We’re the only friends you have.”
“Guatemala’s gone through too much,” Carmen added, “it’s on the road to democracy now, doesn’t need this suffering, this reminder.”
“I’m afraid they’re going to hurt somebody else,” said the black man. “I’ve seen how these people work. If you don’t talk.”
“They’ve got somebody,” Carmen said. “Somebody you know. You probably shouldn’t have told them about that village, where you were... Now, I’m afraid, they’re going to do him harm.”
“They killed everybody there.”
“When it comes to torture,” the black man whispered, “the Guats can’t be touched. For thirty years now they’ve been trained by the best. Can make you suffer endlessly and never die. Remember your Revelations: you’ll long for death, but death will elude you?”
THEY DRAGGED HER from the white soundproof room down a cement corridor of white solid steel doors through a cellblock where naked, beaten women gripped the bars whispering but she could not hear, down another corridor of mould-green damp concrete to a rancid stone room with a steel door in the center of the floor. One knelt beside her. “Last chance. We need names.”
He yanked open the steel door, dragged her over the edge. Her head fell into the hole; she scrambled for the memory that was all, that made it all true, tumbled down and slammed head first into icy muck, thought the steel door shutting was the noise of her head hitting. Her head was under; she pulled it up. There was air, mud cool against her skin. Oh God, she thought, I’m saved. I’ve got away.
THE PAIN was bigger than his body, than this corroded sweating room. He saw the curve of the earth from the sand spit – the pain was bigger than the sea, the earth, filled all space, erased the stars; you could scream it louder than the universe but it would never go away.
They asked him questions and were very angry and others came and asked the same questions and he begged them for answers to give them, the answers they wanted, these men with their crisp uniforms and white coats and hard hands, but he didn’t know the answers they wanted and wouldn’t tell the ones he had, thinking they won’t know, but they knew, they kept knowing, even when he did not say they seemed to know.
The black man came in. “One o’clock,” he said in Spanish. He rubbed his face, a whiskery sound.
THE DARKNESS was absolute, the air like mud. A gurgle of new sewage cascaded into the pit; Dona held her breath, wiped the muck from her face. The sides of the pit were too slimy to climb, even if her hands could do it.
Something moved, a snake, in the sludge. Kill me quickly. Moving − an arm? Yes an arm, a face. Long hair thick with muck. “You,” Dona said. “Speak to me!”
A hand touched her face, the pain intense. The woman mumbled.
“Who are you?” Dona said.
Again the mumble.
“Can I move you, help you?” She slipped her arms under the woman’s, pushed her up. “You’ve been here how long? Tell me!”
“—”
“I can’t understand you. Here, let me feel your mouth, it’s clogged with mud.” She wiped muck from the woman’s face; there were no eyes. The woman’s head jerked back as Dona felt inside her mouth: no teeth, no tongue. Dona skimmed water from the muck and washed the woman’s face, brushed back her hair. “I will ask you questions, yes or no questions. Make a sound if it is yes. You are Quiché? No? Ladino? Yes?” She tilted back the woman’s head, cleaned the mud from her ears. “Not long will they keep me here. So tell me what I can do for you.”
