The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  Now she was afraid, and this fear, like a sort of intestinal cramp, did not disappear when the plane landed and taxied up to the fanciful glass and white anodized-aluminum structure that proclaimed El Salvador’s “fine visions” of the twenty-first century. It also did not escape Barbara’s notice that this airport, so superior to so many tacky airports back home, was built with the tax dollars of the American people. Nightmarish, she told herself. I am Alice in Crazy Land, and I have not yet left this silly little airplane.

  Regana said goodbye gallantly. “It has been a pleasure, señora. We will see each other again, I am sure.”

  Clifford Abrahams, briefed by Carson, was at the airport, waiting for her, instantly recognizable from Carson’s description, a very tall, slender, almost cadaverous man, with a shock of brown hair and bright blue eyes, wearing a wrinkled tan cotton suit. He introduced himself with an impeccable upper-class British accent, took Barbara’s suitcase — “No typewriter, Miss Lavette?” — and led her toward the immigration counter, where a cluster of unattractive men in camouflage uniforms, carrying submachine guns, bleakly and intently eyed each person who came off the plane. Other armed men in wrinkled uniforms were scattered around the airport terminal.

  “Welcome and glad to see you,” Abrahams continued. “Try not to make eye contact with the local hoodlums.”

  “If you weren’t here to meet me, Mr. Abrahams,” Barbara replied, “I think I would have turned around and leaped onto the next plane home. This place scares the hell out of me.”

  “Normal. Fear here is like smog in L.A. or fog in London, endemic.”

  “Oh? That’s reassuring. No, I don’t take a typewriter, since I’m not filing. I’ll do a series of pieces when I return. I’ll just make pencil notes. Why all the soldiers? Are they expecting something?”

  “Oh, no. Normal — par for the course. I won’t try to shield you, Miss Lavette. Carson tells me that you know your way around. Nothing very nice here. Let’s do the credentials.”

  They studied her passport. No smiles, no note of welcome. After they stamped her credentials, they went through her suitcase, feeling their way through each piece of her clothing. Then they asked to look at her purse. Barbara glanced at Abrahams questioningly. He nodded. They emptied the purse, a large leather bag that she had purchased for this trip; then they went through the contents; then they returned the contents to the purse; and then slowly handed the purse to Barbara.

  “Muchas gracias,” she said sourly.

  Away from the counter, Abrahams said, “Nice accent. Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good Spanish? Easily?”

  “Pretty good. Why?”

  “Don’t. Not to any official. It gives you a priceless advantage. They’ll talk to each other on the basis that you don’t understand. I’ve been here too long to get away with it. But you can. And by the way, did you talk to brother Regana in Spanish? I saw you saying goodbye.”

  “He sat next to me on the plane. No, no Spanish. His English is remarkable.”

  “Good.”

  “Who is he? Do you know him?”

  “No pal of mine, but I’ve interviewed him.” Dropping his voice. “Bloody little bastard. They say he runs the death squads. In uniform he’s Colonel Regana, and some say he has over a thousand notches on his gun, peasants, women, children, liberals, reformers — you name it. They call him the butcher of Morazán — guerrilla territory now. He was born there in poverty, out of which he fought his way up to this high position. A stirring example to the kids.”

  “I do pick them.”

  “You didn’t say anything — like not approving of the rape and murder of nuns?”

  “I did.”

  Abrahams sighed and said, “I think I’ll call you Barbara. Call me Cliff.”

  “Instant intimacy before extinction, right?”

  “Come on, love. I’m going to lead you through a fine three weeks. Carson said he’d hunt me down and destroy me if anything happened to you. And he would. By the way, I don’t want to be pushy, but you and Carson were married once?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Forgive me for prying. Carson’s a fine fellow, and I was curious to see the lady who’d been his wife. I suppose you’d rather we dropped that subject?”

  “I would, yes.”

  The new road to San Salvador swung north from the ghostlike beach resorts, created and planned by the local bosses — or killers or tyrants, or revered leaders of the people, depending on the circumstances — to be competitive with the resorts of the Bahamas or Jamaica; but since El Salvador was the last place on earth a sane person would go for a vacation, they were for the most part deserted. The road went on inland and north, through dry hills, like the hills of a California summer. There were cars on the road, none of them pleasure vehicles, and most of them varieties of military transport: heavy station wagons with thick bulletproof side panels, the wagons fitted with machine gun mounts, small panel trucks, windowless and ominous, and once a heavy-duty United States Army half-track, its markings obliterated. There were also here and there soldiers by the roadside, sometimes squatting and eating and drinking, sometimes marching, sometimes just standing and watching the cars go by. And there were the bodies of two men, lying on the embankment and being torn to shreds by buzzards, so many buzzards and so hungry that they were jostling each other to get at the human flesh.

  “I think I am going to be sick,” Barbara said.

  “Tell me in time. I’ll pull over to the side of the road.”

  “I won’t be sick. Absolutely not. I don’t want to stop on this road.”

  They were riding in a small Toyota jeep, which Cliff Abrahams said he had bought a few months ago, at a very low price, from a San Salvador dealer. “They come here from Japan, and the local in-dealers buy them with US aid money. They want a quick turnover, so they sell cheap.”

  “How do car dealers get aid money?”

  “They’re not car dealers, love. Bless your heart, no. They’re colonels and generals turning a quick buck, and making sure, as patriots, that none of the money goes to buy food for the kids, who might just grow up to be Communists. You didn’t by any chance fetch a copy of Alice in Wonderland with you?”

  “You don’t believe in God, do you?”

  “That is apropos of nothing — or are you making a point? You’ll remember that Alice said a gent does not ask personal questions, and that’s quite personal, isn’t it? Well, sort of. I mean about God and such, I do give it some thought now and then. Not anything one talks about.”

  “No, but for a moment I had such a clear image of the old man up there with his head in his hands and weeping his heart out over the way his kids loused up all and everything, from worse to worse. I have been in this line of work since the nineteen thirties. We did think that when we finished Hitler, the bad guys had been done in.”

  “It would be a dull world without the bad guys.”

  “I suppose so,” Barbara admitted. “It would be quite a problem to live without terror. Cliff, why do you suppose I’m so damn scared? I was arrested by the Gestapo in Germany in nineteen thirty-nine, and I wasn’t as frightened as I am now. Is it being an old lady that changes things?”

  “Drop the old lady line, Barbara. Even in Germany, one felt that one was living in the twentieth century and that certain niceties of civilization remained, at least if you weren’t Jewish. They don’t exist here. A civilized nation doesn’t leave the bodies of dead men lying by the roadside, buzzards tearing them to pieces, while army lorries drive back and forth without so much as a glance. That touches the deepest and most vulnerable depths of our souls.”

  “But don’t they know back home? Don’t they have a notion?”

  “It’s your turf, love, not mine. I suppose they do and they don’t, and they’re a little crazy on the subject of Communism. They try to believe that these bloody murderers are fighting Communism. They’re not, you know. They kill anyone who irritates th
em. It’s as simple as that.”

  It’s an instructive initiation, Barbara decided, and no one but herself to blame. She wanted to come here. She had used Carson and bullied him into sending her here. She argued with herself that even if she had bullied Carson, no one but herself had been hurt, but that made it no better.

  “We’re going to the San Salvador Sheraton. It’s a new hotel, quite decent and quite clean. I engaged a suite for you,” Abrahams said, a bit apologetically. “I mean, it’s a few dollars more, but Carson can afford it, and you need a place to write.”

  “If Carson can’t afford it, I can.”

  “Good. You’ll be here just a few weeks, so buy every comfort you can.”

  “Are they available?”

  “You bet your life they are. Like Saigon. When your troops were in Saigon you could buy anything from a Cadillac to a computer. Not too many Yankee troops are here yet, but the groceries and aftershave always come first.”

  It was dark by the time they reached San Salvador, and thus Barbara’s first impressions were punctured by street lights and loud music from the houses, and what appeared to be, as well as she could make out in the darkness, large and impressive homes — a scene that for some reason recalled the single time she had been in Savannah, Georgia.

  “The best part of town,” Abrahams told her. “Tomorrow, we look elsewhere.”

  As the Sheraton Hotel rose out of the night, glassy, glistening, the first light rain of the season began to fall. There were people on the streets now, the sound of music from inside the hotel, music played very loud. The music reassured her. It chased away some of the imagined devils hidden by the night. They drove into the parking lot, where two young men raced for Barbara’s single piece of luggage.

  “Nothing doing, no way, no job here!” Abrahams snapped in bad Spanish, explaining to her, “They’re not thieves. It’s the utter hopeless poverty of the place. Better not chance losing your bag. Anyway, it weighs nothing.”

  But apparently poverty stopped at the Sheraton parking lot, for alongside Abrahams’ jeep, two Mercedes, a Cadillac and a Rolls-Royce were parked. Going into the hotel, Barbara noticed two men in uniform, uniforms that fitted so perfectly that they reminded her of Hollywood film SS men in their fine-tailored costumes, covered with gold braid in this case. Obviously officers. One of them had a holstered pistol, the other carried a small submachine gun.

  “Don’t stare,” Abrahams whispered to her. “For God’s sake, Barbara, don’t stare.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. They couldn’t take me anywhere when I was a kid.”

  “Don’t joke about this.”

  “Cliff, when you stop joking about anything — oh, the devil with it. When in hell, do as the imps do.”

  Abrahams shrugged. They stopped at the reception desk, and suddenly the reception clerk, a skinny man with a pocked face, dropped his jaw and fairly dived through a door behind him. Cliff and Barbara both turned to see the cause of his curious behavior, and there, just past them, were the two army officers they had seen outside at the parking lot, this time led by a man in civilian clothes and followed by two soldiers, both of them carrying what Barbara discovered later were Ingram .45-caliber submachine guns. They moved at a steady pace to the room from which the music came, the main hotel restaurant, and then flung open the double doors that separated the restaurant from the lobby.

  Without thinking, Barbara took a few long strides to keep them in sight. Cliff Abrahams caught up with her, and grabbed her arm. “Stay out of this, damn it!”

  But they were in her line of vision now. They marched into the restaurant, paused by a table where three men were having dinner, and deliberately, without hesitation, without a word spoken, opened fire with the submachine guns and kept firing until the three men were riddled with bullets. Then, as calmly and deliberately as they had entered, they did an about-face and marched out of the hotel.

  Cliff Abrahams grasped Barbara’s arm tightly. “Steady, steady, old girl. Don’t move quickly. Let’s just ease ourselves away from any possible line of fire, and we’ll see what happens.”

  Chaos happened. First, a mad scramble inside the dining room to get away from the blood-soaked table of the three murdered men. One of them sprawled across the top of the table; the two others lay on the floor; and this stark scene played to a background of screaming and shouting. Then people began to move in, carefully, to look at the carnage. The horror was dramatic and irresistible. At last, men in uniform poured into the hotel.

  “Police,” Abrahams said. “Calm. They may ask questions. If they do, you answer in English, not in Spanish. Do you understand? You don’t speak Spanish — oh, maybe a word or two. We saw nothing. We don’t know who went into the dining room and we don’t know who came out, because we saw nothing, not yet. Later, when we get some of the picture we can amend our position. Right now, it’s a bloody awful horror.” He looked at her keenly. “You all right, old dear?”

  Barbara nodded. “I’m all right.”

  “I know the desk clerk. I can get you your room now. Take a lie-down.”

  “Damn it, I’m fine. Now you do your thing. I’ll trail along.”

  Following Abrahams, Barbara moved into the crowd around the bodies. It was increasing rapidly now, guests, hotel workers, police, some army officers, the hotel manager. From outside the hotel, Barbara heard the sound of sirens, men shouting, and a few scattered gunshots.

  Abrahams moved out of the crowd. Barbara followed him. They walked across the dining room to where one of the waiters stood as if in shock, his back against the wall, his eyes staring straight ahead.

  “Terrible. Just terrible,” Abrahams said in Spanish. “A terrible business, Angelo.”

  “I saw nothing,” Angelo replied. “Nothing. I was looking the other way.”

  “She’s all right,” Abrahams assured him. “I’d trust her with my life.”

  “She’s Jewish?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Angelo breathed deeply and said, “You know them, señor.”

  “Yes. But who was the civilian?”

  “He eats here sometimes. His name is Fritz Oberman. He didn’t do any shooting. He brought them to the table, and then just nodded his head like this, and then the shooting started.”

  A policeman turned toward them, and noticing this, Angelo raised his voice, and cried shrilly, “I told you I saw nothing. I was in the kitchen.” He turned on his heel and walked into the kitchen. The policeman faced Abrahams and Barbara questioningly.

  “I’m a correspondent; Reuters. She was here for the Los Angeles World.” Abrahams was not at his best with the tenses, and it came out somewhat mangled, but the policeman appeared to understand.

  “It’s very confused,” he said. “I wouldn’t write about it yet.”

  “Who are the dead men?”

  The policeman shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “The lady just arrived. I want to get her registered.”

  The policeman stared blankly, and Barbara said in English, “I must check in. I just arrived.” Abrahams smiled and nodded and drew her away and then over to the desk.

  “What on earth was that all about? I’m not Jewish.”

  “Angelo grew up in a little village in the hills where his father kept a small store. His father used to tell people that he was a Jew, because only a Jew can run a store properly. Angelo admired his father, who was killed by the soldiers in one of their purges. He thinks I’m Jewish because of my name and he seems to trust me for that reason. I’m not Jewish, in case you’re wondering.”

  “I’m not wondering. Why are we staying here?”

  “I wanted to get you registered, but that seems to be impossible. We’ll do it later. Now I want to get over to the office. You might as well come with me. There’s a chance we can clear a wire.”

  “You mean I could phone this in?”

  “Possibly, but Carson could pick it up from our wire. Let’s see what happens.”

  No one stopped them as
they went out to the jeep, Abrahams carrying Barbara’s suitcase, even though the parking lot was teeming with soldiers and civilians. An ambulance had just pulled up in front of the hotel, and an army vehicle with a bright search beam had parked itself in front of the hotel and was sweeping the sky with its powerful light. To compound the insanity, two runners in tight white shorts and undershirts were in the parking lot, interrupted in their late run by the commotion around the hotel, and curious enough to remain, jogging in circles. Catching a glimpse of them in the light, Barbara realized that they were wearing new, rockered North American running shoes. A man in khaki blew his whistle again and again as Abrahams carefully jockeyed his jeep out of the parking lot into the street.

  “It’s insane,” Barbara said.

  “Oh, yes indeed, but viciously insane. It’s all mad, their lunatic army, their demented death squads, the way they go about getting rid of people they don’t care for — oh, bloody well insane, like a world seen through one of those circus mirrors. Why ever did you come down here, Barbara?”

  “I was dying up there — oh, not this kind of death, but shriveling up, being pointless and useless. But never mind that. Who were those three men? You knew them, didn’t you?”