“We.”
“What?”
“We leave. You said you.”
“Brother, I’m just passing through. You know me. Our father’s son.”
“I have one more thing to say to you.”
“What is it? Don’t tell me about Maria. She’s been hollering at me since I woke up.”
“No, it’s not Maria. You brought us provisions again. So I’m saying thank you.”
Emil leans back, looks down the length of his handsome nose, half-smiles, and says, “You’re welcome.”
Nacho spends the next three days getting organized. Once the damnificados vote to fight, he goes about developing battle plans. He knows the history of Favelada, knows the story of Naboo Lalloo, so he asks Lalloo the Younger about war tactics and surprise weapons. Lalloo, wallowing in a Force 10 hangover, says, “I can steal electricity for you. I can fix your car. If your coffeemaker blows up, I can repair it. But I don’t know anything about killing people. I’m not my father.”
Then Nacho goes to the ex-soldier’s room on the thirtieth floor.
“How do we fight a guerrilla war?”
The man starts shaking.
Nacho goes on, “We’re in the middle of the city. We have the tower. What do we do to defend ourselves?”
But the man’s left eye is blinking involuntarily and his breathing has changed.
“I- I- I- I- I don’t know. I’m a ci-ci-ci-civilian now. No more f-f-f-f-fighting.”
Later Nacho tells Emil, “There’s a reason these men and women are damnificados. Their lives have gone wrong. Or they’ve been unlucky. They aren’t built for war.”
Maria emerges in a microskirt and black halter top. She looks like a panther.
“Do what your enemy least expects,” she says. “Torres thinks he’ll walk into the tower and take over. What if he never gets that far? Why don’t you go to him? Kill him and all his soldiers in their sleep. Attack first.”
They pause. She looks hard-eyed at them both.
Nacho says, “Because we aren’t killers.”
“Then become killers! You think Torres is going to roll over and let you tickle his tummy? Stick a knife in him. Then see how much he wants his tower.”
Once she goes back to the salon, Emil says, “I have to return that horse. I’ll be gone a couple of days.”
“No, you don’t,” said Nacho.
“We’ve already talked about this.”
“The twins took it on the back of their father’s truck. They left at five o’clock this morning. They’ll be driving into Sangre Fría about now.”
“Christ. They’re teenagers. The cartels will rip them to shreds.”
“They’re smarter than you think. And braver. They’ll leave the horse in plain sight plus an offering in a sack and then take off.”
CHAPTER 12
Sniper—Raincoat—Waiting for Torres—Maria plans her escape—The army arrives—Carnage—Repentance—Aftermath
THE DAMNIFICADOS DECIDE AGAINST ASSASSINATING TORRES, AND FOUR DAYS LATER NACHO is face down on a bed jammed next to an open window, five floors up. Raincoat, turned sniper, is by his side, looking through the scope of a long-range rifle. Nacho glances at the plaza down below. Deserted. Further off, the traffic winds and honks its way through the day.
Behind Nacho, milling aimlessly, are the six brothers who run the bakery. They are rough-edged, broken-nosed, lavishly tattooed. “We likes a rumble,” Harry had said at the meeting. “We’re a bit punchy, us boys.” “But can you use a gun?” Emil had asked. “Use a gun? I can roll you fifteen French doughnuts in sixty seconds flat. Guns is easy, my friend.”
Awaiting eviction orders in the form of two hundred soldiers and a bully-boy, Nacho sits up and looks around the room. He sees leaning against the wall a collection of World War II rifles and a nineteenth-century Chinese musket. Heaped on the floor is an arsenal consisting of a Zapatista bullet belt full of empty cartridges, a handful of rusty-looking grenades, three revolvers, and a machete. He scratches his head, sees butchers, bakers, teachers, drunks, a hairdresser, and thinks, ‘We’re going to be slaughtered.’
As the waiting continues, Nacho ponders: was Torres bluffing? He lies there in sniper position, eyes peering through a pair of Abbe-Koenig binoculars pilfered from an army surplus store in Bordello. ‘What if there are no soldiers? What if those two colonels were actors dressed in khakis?’ Maybe Torres wanted to scare us away and that was his big bluff.
He looks to the side. Raincoat without his raincoat. Seeing the man in his shirt sleeves for the first time, Nacho thinks, ‘He may be a cantankerous idiot, but at least he’s here, holding a gun.’ He talks to the man and finds out that Raincoat spent six years in prison for stealing chickens. The other inmates nicknamed him Rooster. On his release, Raincoat traveled north to the wastelands of Izoztu, where it rains nine months of the year. He worked on the land but fought daily with everyone in sight. He said he was born angry. He fought with the boss about food rations, toilet breaks, lousy equipment, and moldy bedding, and he fought with his coworkers about card cheats, loud snorers, hat thieves, and bad debts. After a few months he got into one fight too many and, bleeding from the gut, hitched a ride to Favelada. The only thing he’d kept from his time in Izoztu was his dirty raincoat and a scar the shape of a Christmas tree on his stomach.
Nacho checks the time. 10:00 a.m. and no sign of Torres.
The tower braces itself. After the morning shift, the bakery has closed early, and Marias Beautty and Hare Salon sees off its final customer for the day at barely 11:00 a.m. before shutting its doors. The girls sweep the floor, hang up their aprons, and go home. It is a still day. Not a breath of wind disturbs the sheets and pants and skirts hanging from wooden pegs on clotheslines and draped over the iron railings of stairwells. A coven of crows gathers on the roof, black-caped witches craning their necks, and they wonder in crow telepathy if today will bring blood.
At 11:10, the tattooist shuts his parlor, bidding goodbye to the day’s one customer, a woman who asked for the names of her children to be tattooed onto her leg, four talismans to keep her safe. She leaves the parlor wincing in pain as the wounds congeal, and prepares to load the six-shooter her wastrel husband left her.
Shortly after midday, the muezzin’s voice rings out above the sounds of the traffic, calling the faithful to prayer. To Nacho it sounds like a plaint, a lamentation for the truncated lives of the damnificados. He thinks of those he has loved and tries to picture what his life could have been: traveling to distant lands, reeling off translations of great works, interpreting for heads of state. Finding love, a house on a cliff with white walls and a thatched roof where an owl periodically visits and hoots a simple song, raising children to be honest and wise. He thinks of all this and then looks again through the binoculars at the plaza that opens out beyond the atrium. An old lady walking. A student passing through. A cyclist wobbling drunkenly, zigzagging out of sight. But no Torres.
At 1:00 p.m. Harry and his brothers bring bread with a hunk of gouda and olives from Balaal. They present it on a platter like the last supper of a condemned man, but Nacho can barely eat. He picks at the food, feeling no pleasure in the salty tang of the olives, spitting out the stones and leaving the bread untouched.
Above all, he curses himself for having no plan but to fire down on the assassins. He invokes the great generals—Alexander, the child warrior, Hannibal, Belisarius, Suvorov—and imagines them conjuring elephants and flaming missiles to rout the enemy. He imagines troop movements and ground tactics, thinking in four dimensions, inventing weaponry not yet dreamed of. His mind takes him to the carnage of earlier Trash Wars, the legend of Naboo Lalloo, catapults and dragons, and the Trojan horse, a garbage truck full of hidden warriors, Las Bestias de la Luz Perpetua, a hall of mirrors to confuse attackers, and the images on the Zeffekat tapestry depicting every sorry tale of the wars. What, he thinks, will this war bring to the history books? A tower riddled with bullets. A tide of blood. The Little C
ripple who led his troops to annihilation.
He thinks of the lineage of Torres—grandfathers, fathers, uncles—killers one and all, grasping for power and land and riches, bashing their way through history. The very tower he lies in now—built on stolen land, built on the bones of damnificados, desperados, desaparecidos. The Torres men—commanders of armies and robber gangs, which end up being the same thing, corrupt from their toes to the ends of their fat cigars. He whispers to himself, “Will justice ever reach this godforsaken city?” and Raincoat, lying next to him, hears it but says nothing, looking through the sights of the rifle, itchy finger twitching.
Nacho scratches at his hair, gets up and wanders the room, sits on a chair, lies back down, looks through the binoculars, listens to his own breathing.
At 2:00 he checks on his soldiers. A motorboy takes him up and down the flights of stairs. Nacho asks his fighters if everything is OK, if they are ready. He asks the priest to go around making sure no shutters are open except the ones they’ll fire from.
“Again?” says Don Felipe. “I’ve done this four times already.”
“Please do it again,” says Nacho. “And make sure the children are inside.”
Early afternoon ticks slowly into midafternoon, the shadows growing longer, beginning to cover the plaza below. Silence descends on the monolith. Some of the inhabitants begin returning to the tower warily after a day at work in other parts of the city. They approach carefully, quietly. They pass the Chinaman, proffer their usual nods, and go upstairs to their homes.
Up on the sixth floor, Maria is barricading her windows and doors, and Emil, lounging louche and shirtless on the bed, wonders if she’s doing it to keep Torres out or to keep himself in.
“Emil,” says Maria, her black hair wild and wet, for if she is going to die she will die glamorously, “why don’t we mount that white horse and escape the city?”
“Well the thing is …” starts Emil.
“What’s a white horse for, if not escaping? I know you only have one saddle, but we can ride bareback and go to the woods. There’s a place in Gudsland, a patch of earth. My grandfather lived near there. It has shade.”
“Wait, Maria.”
“It has four apple trees and a view of the sea. There’s nothing there but the ocean. The wind blows in off the water.”
“Maria, the thing is …”
“We can start a family. Buy a goat and some chickens. Live a simple life. You aren’t a city boy. You pretend you are, but I can tell. You just want a quiet life. And the children will be able to …”
“Maria, shut up! The horse has gone! The twins returned it to the cartel! I’m staying here to help my brother! I’m not going to Gudsland or anywhere else. Take the shelves from in front of the door and put them back where they were. If you don’t, I will. Then I’m going to get my gun and stand and fight side by side with Nacho. The end. Credits roll. Music and lights. Get it?”
Maria stares at him. She’s in her underwear and heels. She prowls over to the bed and raises her hand as if to slap him. He doesn’t flinch. Instead she gets onto the bed, makes to kiss him and bites his lip so it draws blood.
“Stronzo di merda,” she says. “Make love to me!”
As evening approaches, a boy comes to the fifth floor, looking for Nacho.
“Mr. Morales,” he says.
“What are you doing here? You need to go home! Children can’t be out here!”
“But Mr. Morales. We’d like to know if there’s school today. There are ten of us waiting in the classroom.”
Nacho puts his hand to his head.
“Dammit! I’m an idiot. I’m sorry. School is cancelled today. All of you go home. Cover your windows and don’t go outside. I must have forgotten to give the message. I’m sorry. We’ll have class tomorrow.”
The boy says, “Yes, sir,” and is gone.
The sun begins its descent. The sky is stained a cadmium orange and streaked with clouds like vapor trails ghosting across the horizon. An eerie quiet reigns in the tower. Some families hold hands and pray. Others are seated for dinner. Every five or six floors a shutter remains open, a telltale gun-barrel or binoculars or telescope protruding from the gap. The men and women from Dahomey-Krill sharpen their knives. The ex-soldier prepares himself to die a good death. Don Felipe, the priest, has been holed up in his makeshift church all day, listening to confessions, giving benedictions, improvising sermons to his ancestors, should he meet them some time soon. Dewald, the psychologist, drinks himself to sleep, figuring that if he’s going to die a violent death, he may as well not be there to witness it.
It is just past 7:00 p.m. when the lookout on the sixtieth floor sees them. He rings a bell. The ringing is taken up by the lower floors until it gets all the way down to the fifth floor.
A convoy. An armored car and ten military trucks. They spread around the plaza and pull up on its edges in a semicircle. From out of the armored car the figure of Torres emerges, red-faced and rotund, trussed up in khakis and medals and a dark green beret. Ten soldiers with rifles clamber out of the back of one of the trucks and accompany him across the square toward the entrance of the tower.
“Knock knock!” he bellows, still walking.
Silence. Nacho looks on. Two beads of sweat race one another down his forehead, nestling in his eyebrows. He wipes them with the back of his good hand and lies still, watching through the binoculars. When Torres gets closer to the entrance, Nacho can no longer see him because of the angle.
“Anybody home?” shouts Torres.
Torres pushes at the door. It is locked. Then he backs up, heading for the middle of the plaza, and raises his head. He sees instantly the closed shutters and the open ones, and pulls out a cigar from his top pocket. He lights it and puffs contentedly.
“Hello!” he shouts. “Daddy, I forgot my keys! Can someone let me in?”
From the room on the fifth floor, Raincoat is trembling.
“He’s in my sights!” he says. “One shot and he’s dead. I can kill him now!”
“Wait,” says Nacho.
“Why? What the fuck am I waiting for? I can kill him!”
“No! That’s murder. We have to wait.”
Torres calls again. “Oh, Naaaaaaaaaacho! Let me in! By the hair of my chinny-chin-chin! Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down! I give you thirty seconds!”
Nacho’s mind is racing. ‘Do I sacrifice myself? But that won’t solve anything. It’s the tower he wants. Do I surrender? But then we’ll all be driven out and homeless and we lose our dignity. And maybe we’ll lose our lives anyway.’
Torres, cigar in hand, ambles back to the armored car. Moments later, the troops jump from the backs of the trucks and begin setting up their weapons: Uzis and Kalashnikovs and Puckle Guns on tripods. Beside them a host of infantrymen gets down on one knee, aiming rifles at the monolith.
At that moment the muezzin’s call to prayer rises above the city, and a flock of birds appears, arcing above the tower like bits of burnt paper on string. This is it, thinks Nacho. He hears the clanking of metal, the machinery of war being inched into place. The two colonels, Bandero and Hafeez, are barking orders in Spanish, English, Arabic, Gujarati, but the muezzin’s call drowns them out so Nacho cannot hear the colonels’ words.
The first volley of gunfire rips through the lower floors of the tower like a typhoon, lacerating wooden shutters, exploding through windows and ricocheting off walls. Screams go up as the inhabitants hit the floor. A pause. A cloud of smoke rises and the smell of cordite drifts on the air. At the center of the plaza, not twenty feet from where the infantrymen kneel, a figure rises both from the dust and of the dust, the ghost of an old woman, shouting at the top of her voice, “Kami ay labanan sa dulo!” but then the apparition is gone and the soldiers look at one another as if to say “Did you see it? What was it?” And a machine gunner growls at his comrades, “This place is cursed. Let’s finish the job and get out of here.”
And Nacho,
who also sees the apparition and hears the cry, realizes that, ghost or no ghost, Torres’s firepower is one hundred times superior to the damnificados’.
He looks around the room. All hands are on heads or over ears, all eyes closed, barely a soul still holding a gun let alone able to shoot straight under fire. Butchers, bakers, teachers, drunks. Harry and his brothers are on the floor curled up like babies. One of them is weeping and asking for his mother. Raincoat fell off the bed at the first sound of bullets hitting brick and has now crawled under it. Nacho says, “Where’s Emil?”
As if on cue, Emil bursts into the room. The others cringe and shrink as the door crashes open, thinking he’s Torres or some dread killer with a Kalashnikov.
Emil dives onto the bed, revolver in hand.
“We need to shoot back,” he says.
“Do it,” says Nacho.
A voice from the floor says, “No!”
Nacho turns and sees Harry on his elbows, in doggy position, hands over his head, eyes looking up.
“They’re too strong for us,” says Harry.
“Shut up,” says Emil. “Fight like a man.”
Emil lifts his head to glance quickly through the space where the window should be. He raises the gun and pulls the trigger but nothing happens.
“Shit. The fucker jammed on me.”
He ditches the revolver and reaches down to get Raincoat’s rifle, which is on the floor. He takes aim and fires. The barrel’s kick sends him rocking back onto the bed.
“Aaagh! I think I broke my shoulder!”
Another volley of shots blasts through the air, the clean clinical rattle of machine guns and the bullets cracking against the tower’s walls. More screams go up amid the chorus of glass breaking, wood splintering, brick shattering. In the hiatus that ensues, shouts are heard: “Give in!” “Stop!” and the staccato rattle of feet shuffling. Smaller bangs of pots and pans. And Nacho thinks, ‘What next? What next?’
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