Face Blind

by Lance Hawvermale

  Gabe nodded and then withdrew, giving her space to reach down and work her fingers under the shallow handle.

  “And as the deities of Mars looked on,” Ben said, “Tilanna entered the proper code, and from within the steel wall came the sound of piston-sized bolts retreating.”

  Mira opened the door.

  * * *

  The cave exhaled dead air.

  Crouching at the head of the stairs, Gabe waved away the smell as decades of stale atmosphere drifted from the darkness. The steps were concrete and chipped with age, descending into the unknown.

  “What is this?” Luke asked.

  “All that’s left of Aceda,” Gabe said. “When a ghost town gets wiped off the map, the only things remaining are the basements.”

  “The fraidy holes?”

  “Those, too.” He slipped the silver lighter from the pocket of his button-flys. He’d been out of smokes and unofficially cold-turkey quitting for at least a full day now, but he was thankful he’d held on to what would now be his only torch in the underworld. “This is what Lepin wanted me to find. Whatever’s down here … hopefully it’ll help us stop the rifleman.”

  Ben cleared his throat. “I trust that you’re going to lead the way.”

  “If Alban Olivares was here, I’d make him go first. And he would. But instead you’re stuck with me.” Yet saying this didn’t make the actual doing any easier. He hesitated to take that first step, not because he thought someone was waiting for him below, but because he wasn’t sure he wanted to see what Lepin had been hiding all this time. A man like that had secrets that would probably make Satan squeamish.

  “Ancient iron,” he said to himself, then struck the lighter’s wheel and started down.

  Had these ten stone steps been located anywhere else, Gabe imagined they’d be strewn with tapestries of cobwebs and puddled with limestone-tainted water. But in the vacuum that was the Atacama, a world without water or insects, the concrete bunker was devoid of both vermin and moisture damage. Gabe walked into a time capsule, a place likely unchanged since Lepin closed its door. “Everybody stay topside for a sec. Let me check it out.”

  He thrust the lighter into the chamber at the bottom of the stairs.

  Shadows lurched and shifted as his tiny flame revealed an earthen cavity lined with shelves. Gabe glanced quickly around the cramped room, his imagination having already built moldering skeletons here, and bloody knives and corpses chewed up by experimental nerve gas. He saw nothing of the kind. But what rested on the shelves was even worse.

  A doll with black button eyes sat next to a woman’s purse, its contents arrayed beside it: lipstick, tampons, and a brush tangled with blond hair. Nearby were a man’s wedding band and a carefully folded pair of white cotton underwear. A dozen necklaces dangled from screws inserted into the edge of the shelves.

  “Everything kosher down there?” Ben asked.

  Gabe moved the light, revealing more accoutrements of the dead. A pair of dentures. An open kit of diabetic syringes. Wristwatches. A single wrapped condom. A plastic bin of men’s wallets. A prosthetic lower leg.

  How many lives were represented here? How many people had been murdered, their private effects turned into trophies?

  “Gabriel? Say something. You’re spooking us spectators.”

  On yet another section of plank shelving, neatly displayed, were eight sets of eyeglasses, one of which was tortoiseshell, while another had a shattered left lens. A clump of credit cards and driver’s licenses was rubber-banded together, sharing space with a small mechanical device that Gabe suspected was a pacemaker that had been removed from someone’s chest.

  “Jesus.”

  “Dammit, Gabe, if you don’t say something—”

  “They’re all here.” His mouth was as dry as the desert. “Everyone that Lepin experimented on, all their things…”

  Ben led the others down the steps.

  Photos stripped from billfolds and handbags revealed glimpses of loved ones left behind, smiling relatives with outdated hairstyles and snapshots of places never to be visited again. Two neckties dangled like snakeskins from a hook. A hatbox held a miscellany of passports, theater tickets, shopping lists, and receipts. On the floor beneath the shelves lay a single brunette wig.

  Ben put both hands on his head. “Goddamn.”

  Mira whispered something Gabe couldn’t quite make out.

  He shifted the flame again. Standing in the corner was a pristine file cabinet, its three drawers alphabetically labeled. Next to it was a fifty-five-gallon blue plastic barrel, its lid held in place with a metal clamp.

  “Are they all dead?” Luke asked.

  Gabe wished he’d had the foresight to bring a bottle of water from the car. His throat ached. “Fontecilla told me that Lepin was convicted of torturing and killing two people. Only two. They didn’t have evidence of anyone else.”

  “They sure have it now,” Ben said.

  Gabe considered the bundled stack of licenses and credit cards. With the exception of the children, who carried no such IDs, here was the complete roster of Lepin’s experimental subjects. Here was a roll call of the desaparecidos, the ones who were taken away with blindfolds over their eyes and never brought back.

  Luke shook his head several times. “I don’t like it here. It’s creepy.”

  Mira remained at his side. “It’s okay. We’re here together. Just like always.”

  “This ain’t like always, Gretel. It’s creepier than always.”

  Gabe thought about the rifleman. Somewhere in this museum of the murdered was a clue to the man’s identity.

  But where?

  “This is the point at which we call the police,” Ben suggested.

  “No cell service out here,” Gabe reminded him.

  “Then we’ll drive to ACEF. Or that observatory of yours. Or anywhere as long as they have a phone.”

  “In a minute.”

  “What do you mean, in a minute? Luke’s right. This is creepy shit. And it’s also a mountain of evidence that we risk contaminating the longer we stay here.”

  The light went out.

  “Not good,” Luke said. “Notgoodnotgoodnotgood.”

  Gabe thumbed the wheel and rekindled the flame. “Sorry.” He took a step toward the back of the cellar, where the steel cabinet and barrel had been standing for the last twenty-plus years. The filing cabinet was still strapped to a two-wheeled dolly; whoever had deposited it here, presumably Lepin, hadn’t bothered untying it.

  Gabe swung the lighter toward the barrel.

  “Don’t open that,” Mira said. “I don’t want to see whatever’s in there. Please, just leave it for the police.”

  Gabe didn’t argue. He returned his attention to the cabinet.

  “We start going through that stuff,” Ben said from behind him, “and when the cops do arrive, they’ll know. And if word gets out that we messed up a crime scene—”

  “It won’t matter,” Gabe said. “Lepin is in prison until he’s dead. None of this stuff changes that. There won’t be another trial. All of these things”—he swept his hand around the cellar—“they’re good only to finally bring some peace of mind to those who lost somebody. They get some closure, if there is such a thing. Either way, the fact that we open those file drawers doesn’t change anything.”

  “Then why bother? Oh, wait, never mind. I remember. You’re bothering because you think you’re avenging this Olivares guy who you never actually met. Whatever.”

  Gabe turned on him, the anger surprisingly real behind his teeth. “You think you know me? Is that it? As it turns out, you may be right. When I look in the mirror, I don’t even know myself. So you may be able to see me, but you didn’t see Lepin’s daughter with her tits cut off, no arms, no legs, and her lips sewn shut. Or her son who’d had three limbs amputated. No, Cable, this is no longer just about the Midnight Messenger. This is about the rifleman dying and me pissing on his fucking corpse.”

  He spun around and jerked op
en the top drawer.

  The silence choked the little chamber as he set the burning lighter on the top of the cabinet and flicked his fingers through the row of manila folders. The tabs were labeled in a handwriting so precise it looked tooled by a machine.

  It was a roll call of the victims. Cesar Barros, Alexia Duran, Luciano Encalada …

  Gabe slipped one out at random and opened it. Ricardo Gamboa. The photo paper-clipped to the corner depicted a graying man in a blazer, standing in front of a wall of books. “I can’t read most of this.” He offered it to Ben. “Would you mind?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because it’s in Spanish.”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

  “Please. Just give me a few more minutes, and then we’ll drive straight to the observatory and borrow the phone. I promise.”

  “I don’t know you well enough to trust your promises.”

  “You want to see this guy stopped, don’t you?”

  “What I want is to stay out of jail for meddling in all this evidence. I have a book to finish, in case you haven’t heard.”

  Luke tapped Ben on the arm. “People write books in jail.”

  “That’s not what I want to hear.” He looked at Mira and sighed. “I suppose you’re party to this madness, being that you’ve taken on the headdress of our widowed Amazon.”

  Mira only stared at him.

  “Yeah.” He shook his head. “That’s what I figured. Team up on the resident Negro.” He took the folder, smiling faintly, and shook his head again. “I guess this beats growing old in the Santiago snooker halls.” He returned to the stairs and advanced up the first few steps in order to take advantage of the rising sun. “Uh … looks like Gamboa here was a history professor at the Universidad de Chile.” He spent a minute skimming the pages. “Judging by this, my guess is that some of the professor’s publications and lectures ran contrary to the official government line. He was censored a handful of times, gave some speeches that were probably inflammatory … and then I suspect he didn’t come home from work one night because he was stuffed in the trunk of a car en route to Lepin’s lab.”

  “Does it say what they did to him?” Gabe asked.

  “Unfortunately, yes. Here at the end … damn.”

  “What? What’s it say?”

  “That they put him in a glass booth and introduced small amounts of carbaryl into his air.”

  “Carbaryl?”

  “Insecticide.”

  “Christ.”

  “It didn’t kill him. Apparently his body was able to metabolize it. When he wouldn’t tell them the names of possible dissidents on the university faculty, they peeled the skin from his left arm and dumped a kilo of table salt on the exposed meat.”

  “Enough!” Mira shouted. “We get the picture already.”

  “The man wanted to know what was in the file,” Ben said.

  “All we need to know is the name of the guy in the too-big coat. That’s it. So I say we concentrate on finding that and let the police worry about the victims. Can we do that, please?”

  Gabe needed no more encouragement. He loosened the dolly’s strap and opened the second drawer. Working in such anemic light, he had trouble making out the writing on the folder tabs. “I think this is Lepin’s personal information, his dossier. Here.” He handed a thick folder to Ben. “See if there’s anything worth knowing in here.”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  Gabe ignored the sarcasm and tried the third and final drawer. Like the two above it, this one sported crisp folders that had been arranged alphabetically and marked in the same exacting hand. The topics varied, from simple handwritten supply requisitions to dot-matrix printouts of obtuse demographical reports.

  “Lepin was married twice,” Ben reported from the stairs. “He did a short military stint, was right-handed, and was considered something of a polymath.”

  “A what?” Luke asked.

  “He was good at a lot of things,” Ben explained. “He had one son, Julian, but the child was apparently born out of wedlock while old Micha was still hitched to honey number two. Maybe that accounts for the divorce. He holds two master’s degrees and had several boring jobs until Pinochet scooped him up in ’71. Is any of this crap pertinent to what we’re doing here?”

  Gabe stopped with his fingers above a tab marked SILENCIO.

  “Silence.”

  Mira knelt beside him. “Pardon?”

  Gabe removed the folder and opened it. Mira held the lighter close.

  The folder contained only a single sheet of paper. In a column on the left side were as many as two dozen names, printed in an outdated typeface. On the right was a hand-drawn map consisting of nothing more helpful than five lines that might have represented roads from any country on Earth. Printed below the map in Lepin’s efficient penmanship was a set of coordinates, followed by the legend El Lugar de Silencio.

  Gabe realized he was holding his breath. He let it out in a rush. “That’s what Lepin meant, this is it, this is what he was saying when he told me that the rifleman knew about silence. He wasn’t talking about being quiet. He was talking about a place.”

  “Where?”

  “The Place of Silence. The burial site. Probably a cemetery or … or a mass grave.” He tapped the coordinates. “That’s where we’ll find the victims.”

  Ben recited more details from the dossier. “In addition to the bastard son born in his later years, Lepin also had two daughters, Carella and Artemis. I assume that one of them was the woman you found below Mentiras.”

  “The wagon lady,” Luke said.

  Ben closed the folder. “There’s nothing in here as important as a potential pit full of murder victims. If you think you found such a thing, then it’s high time to mosey on over to the observatory and ring up the boys in Chilean blue.”

  Gabe agreed. The rifleman had used Lepin’s stolen journal to locate a place by the code name of Silence, where Pinochet’s stormtroopers had buried the tortured dead, probably covering their bodies in quicklime to conceal the stench. Though this failed to explain the impetus behind his quest for revenge, it was one more tile in the mosaic of his ultimate motive.

  Lepin also had two daughters, Carella and Artemis.

  Gabe looked up. Ben’s words, delayed, sounded a note in his memory.

  Mira saw the look on his face. “What is it?”

  “Lepin’s daughters.”

  “What about them?”

  Gabe couldn’t elude the image of the woman in the wagon. The moment the stitches were cut from her lips, she had told him to run. Corra.

  “Her name must have been Carella.”

  “So?”

  “The other one … where have I heard that before?”

  And then he knew. He stood up. “Vicente.”

  “What?”

  Gabe clenched the folder so tightly that he nearly folded it in half. “Lepin said he had one more grandson still alive, Nicky’s cousin. He asked me to protect him, to keep him safe before the rifleman got him, but … Shit, my friend Vicente, the guy who was with me when we found Nicky and when I first met you. He works as maintenance chief at the observatory. Remember him?”

  “What about him?” Mira asked.

  “He told me that his wife is named Artemis, like the Greek goddess. Lepin’s other grandson is Vicente’s boy.”

  He looked at their faces as he said it, these empty, black-hole faces. For once in his life he didn’t wonder what expression he might see there. He knew it was the same as his own.

  “We need to go,” Ben said. “We need to go now and make sure that kid is safe.”

  “Keep that file,” Gabe said. “We’ll read it on the way.”

  “Got it.”

  “This won’t be over until that bastard’s dead.”

  Ben took the steps two at a time. “Agreed.”

  Luke’s voice stopped them midway up the stairs. “What about the barrel?”

  They t
urned as one and looked at Luke, then at the dark corner where the barrel stood.

  “Hell,” Gabe said, and hurried back down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  In order to distance himself from the sight of whatever that fifty-five-gallon drum might contain, Ben projected himself to the prisonlike headquarters of the Kanyri rebellion. There was Tilanna, guarding Vanchette as the old man placed the last few meters of det cord. There were her guns, one held in each hand, metal winking coldly in the dim light. There was the resolve etched on her cheeks, her skin as fair as a Botticelli Venus but her eyes like a comic-book heroine’s, too large and too full of loss.

  Gabe popped the steel ring loose and heaved up on the barrel’s lid. He stepped aside as the lid clattered to the floor, hands over his nose and mouth.

  Ben’s first thought was, It’s not so bad … not so … fleshy. He cringed, but a moment later he realized this wasn’t the wrenching stink of rot he’d expected. Had a body been shoved into that blue container, all these years of decomposition surely would’ve made his eyes water when it was finally let loose in the air. The odor was bad, but it wasn’t death. Instead, it was multilayered and … antique.

  Gabe reached into the barrel and extracted a white cotton dress.

  A few stray hairs clung to the soft fabric that still smelled of the woman who’d been wearing it the day she was abducted. Other scents marked other clothes, a pungent strata of perfumes and body odors.

  Ben stepped closer. Gabe braved the pile and pulled out a rhinestone belt, a twill cap, and a pinstriped suit coat with blood on the collar.

  “It smells bad,” Luke said. “Smells like people.”

  Ben agreed. Like people standing in a crowded bus. Like people in line for the toilet and some of them not able to hold it.

  Gabe found a police uniform.

  It was all there: badge, belt, radio with batteries long since dead. Pinochet’s bagmen had kidnapped a cop. The man had probably refused to walk the regime’s rigid line, or he’d spoken out one too many times against corruption. Whatever his crime, he’d been handed to Micha Lepin and used as a lab rat.

  Gabe found a little girl’s dress.

  “That’s enough,” Mira said. “Please, I don’t want to see any more. Besides, I thought we were in some kind of hurry.”