“We are certain of it.”
“And you think if you can prove the URNG wasn’t involved, the congressman will stop opposing the funding?”
Vega shook his head. “Who can say? But it is impossible to discuss the funding with him and his committee while he continues to believe we attacked his wife. That much I know for certain.”
I stared down the street. The schizophrenic woman had progressed to the middle of the next block west. She stood shouting at a couple of men who sat inside a black Suburban, which was parked at the curb. The snakes among the woman’s things had disappeared, at least for the moment. I wished I knew why. Then maybe I could stop them from returning.
I thought maybe it was because I was distracted by the men in the Suburban. They interested me. Their vehicle was the one that had been behind us on the 405 when I swerved to avoid the leaking gravel from the dump truck. I had no doubt of it. After a few firefights, you develop instincts. And even if it was a coincidence that the their destination was so close to ours, considering my speed of travel while I had been preventing the apparently insane Fidel Castro from shooting me, it seemed strange that the Suburban had arrived so soon after us.
I said, “A few minutes ago, your friend there wanted to put a bullet in me. You have a funny way of hiring people.”
“Mr. Cutter, I am truly sorry that he drew his weapon, but as I have explained, he is a patriot. He has been slightly damaged in his mind because of the sacrifices he made for his country. If you had fought beside such a man, would you not make allowances?”
“All right,” I said. “So you keep him around for old times’ sake. But why are you so gung ho on hiring me? I mean, why me in particular?”
“We have this problem which I have explained, and when I tried to think of who could help us, you were the first person who came to mind. You were the only person, actually, because I remembered what you did while you were in Guatemala.”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Comandante Valentín held up a hand. “Please, I am not asking you for confirmation. I only mention it as part of the answer to your question. I know no other sympathetic person in Los Angeles who might be able to provide this particular service. Or perhaps ‘sympathetic’ is the wrong word. You were not sympathetic to our cause, but you were fair. You listened. You believed your eyes. You opposed Ríos Montt, even though you disagreed with our politics.
“A moment ago you were correct to say I know nothing of what really happened to you in Afghanistan, the reason for your court-martial, but I do know you behaved honorably in Guatemala. You spent enough time there to perhaps begin to understand us. Your Spanish is very good. I know you were attached to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service for a while in some capacity, and now you investigate crimes privately in your country. I also know you have connections with the motion-picture industry, because you work mainly for people in the movie business. That could prove helpful in approaching Doña Elena Montes. You also know some people in your government, but you have no reason to trust them blindly. In all of this world, I think there is no one as well qualified as you to help us with our problem.”
I said, “It’s good to know you like my resume. But I still don’t get it. Why now? Why wait seven years to prove the URNG’s innocence?”
Vegas shrugged. “That is simple. Congressman Montes did not become a problem until this year, when he married Doña Elena.”
“All right. So the congressman is outraged at what he thinks your people did to his brand-new wife. Why not go to the police instead of me?”
“We tried. But they have no interest in proving we are innocent. They say the case is… I believe the expression is ‘cold,’ yes? And they care only about capturing Alejandra Delarosa.”
“Call me crazy,” I said, “but since Delarosa is the woman in the video, the one holding a gun to Doña Elena’s head and wearing a URNG uniform, it kind of makes me think the police have their priorities in order.”
“Yes, of course she is guilty of the crime. We do not disagree. We only say she is not one of us, and she has never been one of us, so she did not kidnap Doña Elena or kill Toledo on our behalf.”
“Okay. If your reasons are so honorable, tell me why you’re using this Mr. Brown alias.”
“It is said the war is over in my country, Mr. Cutter, but it has only slipped beneath the surface, as your cold war with the Soviets once did. As a leader of my party, I remain a target. There have been three attempts on my life in the past two years alone. And if our enemies among the military junta knew that I was here, they would stop at nothing to prevent me from succeeding in my mission. It is they who have provided asylum to the drug traffickers, you see. That is why we need that money from your war on drugs. We are still fighting for the life of Guatemala, and it is still a fight to the death. So I am forced to hide my presence here, as I am forced to hide most of the time in my own country.”
The poor sick woman down the street had stopped harassing the two men in the black Suburban and was now sifting through a trash can near their front bumper.
Watching her I said, “All right. I’ve been having a little trouble concentrating lately, so let me make sure I have this straight. The Delarosa woman kidnapped Doña Elena before she was a big movie star and murdered Doña Elena’s first husband, Arturo Toledo, who was some kind of war criminal, in your opinion. You say Delarosa was only pretending to do it for the URNG. That didn’t bother you much until Doña Elena married a congressman who got his feelings hurt because he thinks your group mistreated his new wife. Now he’s threatening to withhold foreign aid to your political party in Guatemala. You think maybe you can get the congressman off your back by proving Alejandra Delarosa had nothing to do with the URNG. You tried to get the police to help, and when that didn’t work, you thought of me.”
Vega drew himself up, or tried to draw himself up, to look down his nose at me. It wasn’t easy, since he was quite short. He said, “You make it all sound very trivial, Mr. Cutter, but this is a matter of justice. The Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca has been falsely implicated. We did nothing to Doña Elena, and we did not kill the criminal Toledo, although of course he did deserve to die.”
I flicked my fingers just a little, waving his statement away. “Maybe so. Maybe not. Either way, I can’t help you.”
Vega seemed to shrink as quickly as he had drawn himself up. “Please, Mr. Cutter. Ours is a poor country, and our movement is a movement of the people. But we can offer you twenty thousand dollars.”
“You’d be wasting your money. There’s nothing I could do that wasn’t done already by the police seven years ago when the evidence was fresh.”
“But as I said, they were focused on capturing the kidnapper, Alejandra Delarosa. They were not interested in proving that she has no connection to the URNG. Your questions will be different.”
“I have other commitments.”
“Surely not, since you were just released from the hospital.” He cocked his head slightly, looking at me as though the distance between us was much greater than it was. I looked back at him, not liking how much he seemed to know about me. He continued, “There is also your last client to consider. Can you truly have so much business after making a mistake like that?”
I felt the swirling distance rise behind my eyelids. The numbing unreality. I tried to remember the sessions, the advice from the professionals in lab coats. Focus on the truth you know. Be in this world now. Find what’s real and cling to it. I recalled something a marine chaplain had sent me on a get-well card, all the way from Afghanistan: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” But the simple fact was that I had sat by doing nothing on the night Haley died.
Haley had been forty-nine. I was thirty-four. Because of the age difference between us, I had known that she would probably die before me. But I had never seriously considered
that her life might be in danger. I would live the rest of my life regretting that. I had been her bodyguard as well as her husband. I should have been ready. It didn’t matter that the same drugs that killed her had also driven me insane. It only mattered that I hadn’t been there for her in the end.
I looked down the street at the men inside the parked Suburban, the two of them still sitting there, still facing us. They didn’t seem to realize that the pile of junk in the shopping cart beside them was alive with serpents. Inside my head I fought back.
Vega said, “Everybody makes mistakes, Mr. Cutter. We are not interested in yours. We believe in you. Surely you can spare us just a few days? Think of it as a way to… what is that excellent expression? Ride again the horse that dropped you?”
Over by the limousine, Vega’s so-called bodyguard ground his cigarette butt into the sidewalk with a slow rolling motion of his toe. Castro’s yellow eyes were still hidden behind dark lenses, but his lips had curled into something ugly, which he probably thought of as a smile. I was pretty sure I knew what he was thinking. What I didn’t know was whether he was right. If it made me nervous just to drive, was I up to the rest of the job? The doctors didn’t think so. I shivered at the possibility that the awful disconnectedness might still take me too far.
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to walk back to the car.
Behind me, Vega said, “It is possible you may reconsider. If you do, you have only to ask for Mr. Brown at the Renaissance Hotel. I will be there for some time, attending to other business.”
A minute later, as I rolled slowly past the two men in the Suburban down the street, neither of them turned to watch me pass. I stole glances at them in my rearview mirror until the traffic cut off my view. Their vehicle remained parked at the curb, so I figured they were Castro’s problem. I had problems of my own. I turned left at Hollywood and Vine, heading for the 405 and Newport Beach, and the cool, dark comfort of my bed.
4
In a northern African nation where our armed forces never did officially exist, I once led a squad of five good men into a village of mud-brick buildings. We’d been assigned to extract a couple of marines who had been kidnapped the day before. Our primary mission was supposed to be peaceful. We were in country only to escort some diplomats who had come to negotiate with the commander of a rebel force that threatened oil fields in the region. The rebel commander had denied involvement in the kidnapping, blaming it on “hooligans.” But he had also warned us not to enter the village to search for our marines. He had claimed such an action on our part would be offensive to his men.
This was unacceptable, of course. Our captain sent us into the village as soon as local informants told us where the marines were being held.
The intelligence had estimated a force of about twenty, but as we moved through narrow alleys, we soon realized there were at least one hundred hostiles firing on us from the rooftops. Two of my men were wounded in the first five minutes. One of them was still mobile, but we had to carry the other. Our extraction point was a sort of plaza several blocks away. By the time we understood our true situation, it was just as far back to the insertion point at the edge of the village. Since those were the only two locations where we could get the wounded men into a helicopter, we had nothing to gain by turning back. And besides, the building where the captured marines were being held was between us and the central plaza. In spite of the heavy resistance, we decided to proceed as planned.
As we made our way deeper into the village, the enemy fired from doors and windows. They fired quick bursts from around corners. They hurled Molotov cocktails at us. We were outnumbered twenty to one, but they were amateurs and we were marines. We remained calm. We killed them by the dozens as we moved steadily on. We reached the objective, but when we entered the building without resistance, I knew it was too easy. We found the two marines. They were already dead. The condition of their bodies filled me with a quiet rage. It was obvious their deaths had been long and painful.
When one of my men suggested that we remain in town a little longer, I agreed. We went back outside. We went hunting. And by the time we left that village, not one armed man in it remained alive.
I got a nickname in the Corps. They called me “the Artist,” not only because I used to spend a lot of time on liberty drawing sketches of my surroundings, but also because I became very good at bringing my men back alive from missions with suicidal odds. There hadn’t been one moment when I didn’t know the odds, and not a single moment when I was fool enough to think I was invincible. The missions might have been suicidal, but I wasn’t, so fear was always there. But fear was just another enemy to vanquish. I had been a different man back then, a man in nearly perfect control. Whenever my boots had hit the ground, fear became the first to die.
Part of special-operations training had involved teaching us to find a hidden place inside our minds where we could go to endure desert heat, arctic cold, sleepless nights, thirst and hunger, and even slow and agonizing torture. As long as a man has that calm and distant place inside, he can face almost anything. A marine in special-ops needs one place where he absolutely, positively cannot be overcome, one place where he is always in complete control. That place must travel with him wherever he is sent. It must be inside his mind. He goes there when he’s in a helicopter or a Humvee or a medium tactical vehicle replacement, a MTVR, heading for a hot insertion. It’s not a question of escapism. He only reminds himself that such a place exists, and that alone is good enough. In Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and half a dozen other situations that never made the headlines, it was always good enough for me.
But ever since the night I lost Haley, there had been no such place of safety in my mind.
After that, while I was in the hospital, I dreamed I was drifting alone in the infinite vacuum of space, utterly devoid of hope, unable to speak to anything except myself, unable to listen to anything except myself, unable even to feel anything except the terror of my own vast emptiness. Indescribable demons and visions came to taunt me. Random chaos swirled around me. Even my most cherished memories betrayed me. From all directions, unconnected ideas came and trailed away again before I understood them. Everything I tried to cling to vanished through my fingers. So total was the bedlam and confusion that eventually I forgot it was I myself who was adrift within it. I forgot I was alone. I forgot I was a man. In the end, the thing that swallowed me wasn’t the space I saw when I looked out to the stars. It was the even vaster space within my skull.
It took the shrinks nearly three months to awaken me from hell.
It took them two months more to help me face the fact that there was no longer any calm and distant place where I could go to hide from such a nightmare, because the nightmare was everywhere inside my mind. I would always carry it with me, wherever I was sent. It left no hint of me within my interior universe. That was the entire point. When there is no hint of yourself within your mind, it is the very definition of insanity.
Although I had no memory of how I fell into that madness, they told me it had come upon me at a motion-picture set, during a night shoot on location at a turnout on Mulholland Drive, high up on a cliff above Topanga State Park, with the sparkling lights of Los Angeles below us in the distance. The director had given Haley forty-five minutes while they reset the cameras for the next take. She had asked the caterer to grill a swordfish filet for her and a sirloin for her bodyguard. We also had asparagus, Caesar salads, sourdough rolls, and a half bottle of a Paso Robles pinot noir. We had eaten the dinner alone in her trailer, as we sometimes did when she was working and the press wasn’t around.
Again, I had no memory of that night. In fact, I remembered nothing of a space of many days before it, and nothing of the months it took for me to return to sanity, if I had indeed returned. I only knew what the detectives found in their investigation, and what the doctors at Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital told me later, when I finally stopped screaming.
It seems the director had sent his pe
rsonal assistant over to let Haley know the crew was ready. When nobody answered her knock, the assistant assumed Haley wasn’t in the trailer, so she started back toward the area where the crew was waiting. Then she heard the door swing open and bang against the trailer wall behind her. The director’s assistant turned and saw Haley running across her field of vision from left to right, heading flat out toward the edge of the cliff. Haley wasn’t screaming. The only sound was her feet pounding the earth. As the director’s assistant watched in uncomprehending terror, Haley charged without a pause into thin air and dropped silently from sight.
The director’s assistant later told the police that at first she didn’t believe what she had seen. It took her several seconds to accept it. Only then did she run to the edge of the cliff to look down and call for Haley. But all she saw was darkness in the park below, and beyond, the yellow galaxy of city lights spreading to the horizon. The cliff at that spot was nearly one hundred feet high.
The crew didn’t wait for the police, of course. Everybody scrambled for their vehicles and drove down to the bottom of the cliff on a fire road, where they fanned out with flashlights and began to search. A rigging grip found Haley about an hour later. She had landed among a cluster of small boulders at the base of the cliff, in a position that was hidden from view lower down the hillside. Because the schedule for that night had included some stunt work, there were two paramedics in the crew. One of them checked her body, but it was only a formality. Everyone could see that she was dead.
Due to the time it took to find her in the dark, and the shock, nobody thought to check her trailer until the police finally searched it nearly three hours later. That was when they found me. I had stripped off all my clothing. I was on a settee, trying to push the fingers of my right hand through the wall. I had broken two of my fingers with the effort, but I kept trying. One thing about me: I do persevere.
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