“Just so,” said Marder.
* * *
He was awakened by the firing. He jumped from his bed, dressed, and armed himself. He took his Kimber and his Steyr rifle and a box of bullets for the rifle and two extra magazines. Then he ran down to the living room headquarters to see what was going on. Amparo greeted him with a glowing smile.
“It’s the army. They’ve come, and they’re attacking the Templos. That place on the beach road where they have all their trucks—they’re all exploding. And Father Santana is here. We are saved!”
Besides the torrent of small-arms fire, Marder could hear intermittent loud bangs. But they were the wrong kind of bangs. He said, “Get Ortiz! I’m going up to the roof to take a look.”
He ran up the stairs and onto the roof. To the west the sea was buried in a blanket of mist; to the east the sky showed the faintest blush of the rising sun. It was the hour when a white thread could just be told from a black one, the traditional time for military assaults. The men of Alpha platoon were all gathered at the parapet to watch the fireworks. Red tracers flew back and forth, and it was easy to tell that the Templos’ base was being overwhelmed by a much larger force, an enormous force. This force had probably moved into the surrounding hillside by stealth in the hours before dawn and now was directing torrential fire down into the closely packed vehicles. Other forces had blocked the road on either side, and from these arose an occasional bright flash and then a blazing line, whose terminus was a violent explosion. Marder had not heard the characteristic bang-whoosh-BANG of an RPG-7 in a long time, but it was not something one easily forgot.
Ortiz arrived, out of breath, and Marder clasped his thick arm and drew him away from the others.
“You have to pull back to the secondary positions. We might not be able to hold even those for very long. Also, it would be—”
“But, Don Ricardo, we are saved. The army has arrived.”
“It’s not the army, my friend. It’s La Familia. They mean to wipe out their rivals and then take the colonia.”
“I don’t understand. How do you—”
“They’re using RPGs. And, look: you can see there are no military vehicles, no armored cars. No, it’s La Familia—they must have pulled troops in from the whole region. There must be a thousand rifles. I think—”
A little tune sounded.
“Answer your phone, Ortiz.”
The man pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. “Alpha actual,” he said, even though he was now Casa actual. He listened, asked a few questions, gave a brief order, and switched off.
Marder could barely see his features in the dim light, only the flash of eyes and teeth, but Ortiz’s voice was shaky.
“It’s what you said, Señor. They’ve beached a trawler under the cliffs and men are pouring out. Dionisio says many men, as many as fifty. I told them to go back to where the big machine gun is.”
“Good. As to that, there’s only one place where they can come over the lip of the cliffs, and you can shoot them down like bowling pins, one at a time. When the 12.7 is out of ammo, tell them to pull the bolt and smash the receiver with a hammer. Do they have a hammer?”
“I will get one to them.” Ortiz looked around the roof and saw a small figure standing on a pile of sandbags, enjoying the fireworks. He called out and Ariel came trotting over. Ortiz told the boy to go to his shop and get his big hammer—not the sledgehammer but the smaller one with the chisel end—and take it to Hector Sosa at the big machine gun on the golf course. And hurry.
Marder saw the flash of the child’s grin before he dashed off, and he thought it was wise of Ortiz to use the kid for an errand like that and not deplete his defenses by detailing an armed man.
The sun now crested the top of the mountain, sending picturesque shafts through the smoke at the foot of the causeway, but it hardly required sunlight to see what was happening. Dozens of vehicles smoldered and blazed there. The Templos had literally circled their wagons, but almost all of them were ablaze, and very little return fire issued from them in response to the continuing fusillade from the Familia positions. Soon the return fire ceased entirely, and Marder could see through his binoculars hordes of men, many wearing camouflage outfits, pouring down out of the brush and along the roads to overwhelm the Templos.
He heard the 12.7’s characteristic roar from the north and he trotted across the roof terrace in that direction, reaching the sandbag palisade only to find that the scrubby growth of Jalisco firs blocked his view of the northern end of the golf course. He used a ladder to climb up onto the roof of the northwest square tower and lay prone at the roof peak, looking through his scope.
He was focused on the place where the trail through the woods joined the main road of the colonia. The 12.7 fell silent, and in another minute a Felizista appeared, then another. They took up a position behind tree trunks and began to fire back along the trail. A group of their comrades ran past them down the road, clumped up in a group running for their lives. Some of them were burdened by wounded, although Marder couldn’t see who they were. The rear guards fired until they were out of ammunition, then they ran too.
A Familia sicario appeared at the head of the trail and Marder knocked him down with a single shot, then another and another. No more appeared, and Marder imagined that they would take another route out of the woods—it was no impenetrable jungle, but … no they were trying it again, a group of men in a rush. Marder shot two of them, but the others were able to reach shelter in the alleys between the houses of the colonia. He simply could not fire fast enough, proving yet again that the fellow who invented the machine gun was no fool. He was about to drop down from his perch when he saw a movement in the field of his scope and paused.
Skelly was standing there at the head of the path, walking slowly onto the road, as if taking a constitutional. He was wearing his pistol but was otherwise unarmed. He looked up, as if he knew he was being watched through the crosshairs of a rifle scope and didn’t much care, and then he walked after the sicarios and disappeared among the houses.
Well, yes, of course Skelly would go to La Familia. Where else could he go? And he’d reserved the RPGs that had come in the shipment as a bargaining chip. Marder found that he couldn’t hate him for the betrayal. Pepa had been correct. Skelly was not like a regular person; he was more like weather, as amoral and deadly as a hurricane.
Motion caught Marder’s eye. A man had climbed onto the flat roof of one of the colonia structures, in a place where he could not be seen from the roof parapet. He had a rocket launcher. Marder yelled for everyone to take cover and then heard the rocket go off, and the next moment the roof tower that held the cell-phone equipment blew to pieces.
Marder shot the man down and then scrambled off the roof. Someone else must have brought up another rocket, because the tower Marder had just occupied now erupted in dust and flying shards of stone and tiles. Wounded men lay all around, groaning or crying, some for their mothers, and some others lay still. Marder abandoned his rifle and spent the next minutes helping to carry the wounded men down to the sick bay. Every few minutes the house shook with the explosion of a rocket or the blast of one of the defenders’ homemade mines.
On his last trip down to the sick bay, he heard the air torn by an unearthly banshee shriek, and there was Amparo, her fine intelligent face destroyed by inconsolable grief, kneeling by the black and bloody corpse of her little boy. She kept shaking it, slapping at the lolling face, issuing howl after howl, until the other women led her away.
Marder went to find Father Santana. He waited while the priest annointed the head of a dying man, one Henriques, a man who made small glittering glass animals. When the priest looked up, Marder said, “Come with me. I want you to do something.”
They moved to a corner of the sick bay. Marder looked Father Santana in the face. His skin and the crow-black hair above it was frosted with plaster dust, like everything else in the room. His Roman collar had flecks of blood on it. His expression was that
of a terrified man being brave. Marder thought he looked a little like Patrick Skelly did in battle, and it made him more confident in the man.
“I’m happy to see you here, Father. How did you get through?”
“I arrived before this new attack. The Templos were happy to see me. They have a number of dying men, and they made no objection to me coming here and doing the same for you.”
“Well, good. I’m glad you’re here. Look, Father, this can’t go on. The secondary positions are being pushed in one by one as the men run out of bullets. We haven’t the ammunition to keep them away from the house for more than a few hours. I want you to go out there and negotiate a truce.”
“What kind of truce? If they’ve won, what do you have to negotiate with?”
“Me. Cuello will want me alive. He’ll want to torture me, display my body with a sign on it, as an example to anyone who thinks of defying him. If not, tell them we’ll hold out to the end. He’ll have to clear the house room by room. We have plenty of ANFO explosives left. He’ll lose hundreds of men, and he’ll be so weakened that he’ll worry about another gang or another jefe taking over his operation. Also, you can tell him I’m prepared to sign over the property to him.”
“Really? I heard you’d set up an ejido.”
“I did, but he doesn’t know about the ejido. Anything I sign will have no validity under Mexican law. We’re buying time, Father. As soon as Pepa’s video gets released, there’ll be an enormous public pressure to send in the army. Every man Cuello has is on the island right now. It could be a clean sweep.”
“But they’ll kill you. They’ll torture you.”
“They might. But as we Felizistas like to say, victory or death. And, also, they might just shoot you. So will you do it?”
Marder saw the priest’s throat move as he swallowed heavily. Then he grinned. “We’ll be fellow martyrs, perhaps. San Miguel and San Ricardo of Michoacán, joined for eternity like Saints Perpetua and Felicity. Tell me, I’ve always wondered—does a name like Marder predispose you toward martyrdom? Some tiny subconscious message?”
“But my name has nothing to do with martyrdom. Marder is the German for ‘marten,’ a kind of large weasel. Which you may think is much more appropriate.”
Father Santana laughed a laugh that was a little too shrill. Then he let out a long breath, as if expelling some toxic gas. “My Lord! This is interesting in itself. I’ve been terrified of them for so long, so long, and now I’m not. It seems so awfully stupid to be afraid of death, especially in my profession, and now that I’m not, it’s hard to recall the fear. I suppose it’s like learning to swim—or, no, like acquiring speech—and not recalling a time when you couldn’t. Well, Don Ricardo, my only real regret is not having the long conversations about such elevated subjects that I would’ve liked us to have had.”
“We’re not dead yet, Father,” said Marder. “You should see about getting yourself a big white flag.”
22
Statch kept time by counting her strokes, and this gave her some idea of distance too, since she’d swum eight hundred meters so often that she had a good sense of how many strokes would move her approximately that far. After five of these intervals—four kilometers—she seemed to be fine, at least physically. She’d never swum long distances in the sea before, but she’d thought it wouldn’t matter, water was water, and salt water actually buoyed her up more than fresh, a slight advantage. As she swam, she thought of the classic long-distance swims—the English Channel was just about forty of those eight-hundred-meter laps—that had been done hundreds of times, by swimmers of no particular competitive talent. She could do it, twenty-one miles, not a problem. Or twenty-eight and a half, which was the distance around Manhattan, and plenty of duffers did that too.
One the other hand, those people were not entirely alone, in the dark, and at an unknown distance from the shore. How far could it be? As much as thirty miles? Could she swim thirty miles, without months of training, dragged down by a bulky shirt with a pistol in its breast pocket, throwing her balance off at every stroke? Probably not. But the distance was surely less than that, far less. She’d boarded the yacht while it was still in sight of land, she’d been on the tender for less than an hour, surely, and how far could the yacht have traveled afterward? She recalled her time in the blank room. If the vessel had been hurrying along, she would have heard the vibration caused by faster revolutions, and she had not. Or had she? She couldn’t recall.
But at least she was swimming in the right direction. She rolled onto her back, resting in an easy float, moving up and down on the regular swells. The stars were all out, burning in their ordered patterns. The Dipper was in the right place and Polaris on her right, and the moon was in the right place too, with a line dropped through its horns touching the southern horizon. She was definitely swimming east; all she had to do was keep swimming and she would strike North America before long.
But her stomach hurt. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday, and she was ravenously hungry. She could burn three thousand calories in a day of hard practice, and even though she was taking it easier now, the drain on her glucose reserves would be enormous. She could burn fat, but she didn’t have much fat to begin with. Long-distance ocean swimmers tended to be a little heftier, their fat also providing insulation from the cold. Which was going to be a problem if she didn’t see some town lights pretty soon. The water was more than eighty degrees, she estimated, but that was still a lot cooler than the human body. Every minute she spent in the water drained heat from her, which had to be cooked up from food or fat, but she was using too much energy for this to work properly, and in the middle of the tenth eight hundred meters, she felt the first stab of a cramp in her thigh.
She rolled over on her back and floated, trying to will the muscle to relax, the fibers to stop their futile, agonized contraction. She should get out of the pool and massage the cramp away. She actually had this thought, and this increased her panic. The chill was starting to steal her mind, her body was resigning the struggle to regulate temperature, the cooling brain was beginning to generate fantasy. She stared at the sky. Polaris was in the wrong place, on her right, not her left. Had she been swimming out to sea? For how long? And did it matter?
She reoriented herself and swam for some minutes, until the cramp hit again and she had to stop and roll onto her back and stare up at the stars. One of her first memories floated into mind. She was sitting on a dock at night—it must have been at that place they rented on the south shore of Long Island for a few summers—and her mother had told her that the stars were little holes in heaven through which the light of God shone. Even at four, this was an unsatisfying explanation, and when she discovered the truth somewhat later, it had instructed her that her mother was not to be trusted in matters concerning the real world. The stars were gigantic balls of flaming gas, their numbers, their distances, stupefying, and God had nothing to do with it, with anything at all; the universe spread in spangled glory above her remained utterly indifferent to her fate.
So she declined to pray, as she knew many people, even atheists, did in the last extremity. Or not for herself: she did stare up at the universe and say out loud a prayer for her father, the true believer, that if there was a Something that cared, it would care for her father, that it would help him through her death, that he not blame himself for it, that he be comforted in whatever way religious people found comfort.
That concluded, she had a spate of shameful self-pity, and salt tears leaked from her eyes and mixed with the salt sea. She’d fucked up her life; no one loved her, nor she anyone; she had not made the slightest real contribution to human happiness or advancement; she would shortly sink and fall down the miles of black water and be consumed by scavengers, and she would dissolve and be nothing again.
After that, she bobbed like flotsam on the rollers, waiting for the cold to rob her of consciousness, for a period of time she could not have measured, minutes, hours—time itself had become meaningless, s
he had always been here, floating on a sea treacherously warm, waiting helpless for the life in her to depart. The cramps eased, but she had no strength in her limbs anymore; she barely had the energy to hold the float position. She let the pistol slip away, its value now less than a marginal increase in buoyancy; her determination to hold on to it seemed the absurd extravagance of a person she no longer was. Getting sleepy, images from her past, lines of poetry she’d memorized, classroom scenes, the usual embarrassments, bubbling up. She looked up at the star directly overhead. It got blurry, became a looping line, went out; she was underwater, sinking.
Something touched her leg.
As if it were an electrical contact, the touch sent a shot of galvanic energy through her body. Her limbs made the practiced and automatic motions that drove her to the surface. A single light shone above the sea, casting a dim cone of yellowish illumination on the working deck of a shrimp boat and the water around it. They were pulling in their nets—that’s what had touched her. Three feeble strokes brought her over to the bight of the net, thick with shining shrimps. She hooked her fingers into it, and in a few minutes she was lying on the plywood deck, staring up at the wondering faces of the fishermen.
* * *
“Can I borrow your cell phone?”
Pepa Espinoza turned from her computer screen and there was Carmel Marder. For a moment she did not recognize her, so gaunt was her face, so red and crazy were her eyes.
“Jesus Maria, Carmel! What the devil happened to you? Where have you been?”
“Please, I just want to call my father.”
“You can’t. The cell service is out at the casa. My God, sit down! You look like you’re about to collapse.”
Pepa had been working at a small table at El Cangrejo Rojo, a table off to the side, an area not clearly visible from the central square of Playa Diamante. She pulled out a wire chair and Statch collapsed into it.
The Return: A Novel Page 42
