by Robert Stone
Lieutenant Campos came forward and looked her body up and down. His attitude was not in the least jocular or flirtatious.
“Sister Justin” was all he said. She tried to find his eyes behind the reflecting glass.
“Good afternoon, Lieutenant.”
He passed by her and examined the provisions in the rear seat.
“We understand you’re leaving our poor country.”
“Yes,” she said. “Before long.”
“You’ve been ordered to go.”
“By our provincial,” she said. “As soon as is convenient.”
The lieutenant leaned against her jeep and looked out to sea.
“Twenty pounds of beans. Going to take them back to Yanquilandia with you?”
“We still have people to feed.”
“Hippies,” Campos said.
Justin was at a loss for words. It was true that some of the long-haired foreign travelers had been turning up around the mission grounds and some of them looked like settling in. She was aware that Egan had taken to spending his evenings out back and that this visitation somehow involved him. As far as she knew—and she kept close accounts—the kids in the ruins never stole. They brought in their own provisions. But the business could not have come at a worse time; somehow she would have to put a stop to it. Since Godoy’s departure she had received no further orders.
“We didn’t ask for these people,” she said, “and we’re not feeding them. The ruins are a natural tourist attraction. We’re not responsible for our location.”
“Hippies aren’t tourists,” Campos told her. “They repel tourists.”
Justin had the sense that a great deal depended on her behavior at that moment. It was necessary for her to seem confident and also necessary for her to determine what Lieutenant Campos had on his mind—never an easy enterprise. Justin had little knowledge of policemen in general but through Campos she had discovered that being crazy did not stand in the way of one’s being a good cop.
“So this doesn’t help the country as a mission should. But the contrary.”
What now, she thought, rational discourse? She had no idea how much he knew or suspected, except that she was somehow subversive. Was he simply upset further about hippies in his jurisdiction? Was this new apostolate of Egan’s a weakness that he was seizing on to hurry them out of Tecan? Or was it much more, a little cat-and-mouse before he brought the whole sorry structure down—the foco that might or might not be, her, Godoy—with his simian Guardia fist?
By God, she thought, if he knows what I’m up to he knows more than I do.
“If you wish,” she said, “we’ll advise them to move along. On your recommendation.”
“They’re murdering children,” he said. “Six children have died.”
Justin let go the wheel, which she had held to like a steersman throughout the encounter, and stared at the lieutenant in horror.
“No!” was all that she could manage. Her combatant’s poise deserted her.
Campos smiled. “Yes. Murdered. Six.”
“These killings,” Justin said, “these killings … they began months ago. If we had the slightest evidence or suspicion … the slightest … we’d report it.”
“How do I know that?” Campos asked.
Justin fought to keep her temper in bounds.
“We have all been horrified by these murders, Lieutenant.” Her fury grew, but as it did she came to realize that something more frightening and more fatal than simple harassment was going on. “We have all been puzzled by the Guardia’s lack of success in solving them. You can be sure we’ll help in any way we can.”
“You’re puzzled by the Guardia’s lack of success?”
“Disappointed.”
“Ah,” said Campos as though soothed. “You know,” he said, “it’s funny. We both have uniforms to wear. I wear mine. But you—never. Are you still a nun?”
“You can consult the church authorities and the Interior Ministry in regard to that. I’m a nun. This is not the capital and we’re permitted to dress for work.”
“Only a confusion of traditions, then?”
“I suppose,” she said.
“Then you may be sure,” Campos said, “that in this jurisdiction you’ll be treated as what you are.”
She made herself smile. Whence came the smile and how she had mustered it she had no idea. It pleased her then to smile at him.
“We thank you, Lieutenant.”
He stood about for a moment whistling tunelessly through his teeth.
“Now, Sister, have the goodness to back up your vehicle and let me pass.”
She put the jeep in reverse and backed into soft sand hard by the water’s edge. For a moment, the wheels spun; she cursed softly. The rear wheels spun free of the slough.
“Excuse me, Sister,” Campos asked, “did you speak?” He had backed his own jeep onto higher ground and was straightening out to pass.
“No, I didn’t,” she said.
He threw his jeep into gear and gunned the engine briefly.
“Nuns don’t curse,” he shouted at her. “Not at me.”
And then he was off at his customary speed.
“Que le vaya bien,” she said to herself as she eased back onto the track. Driving the rest of the way, she kept her attention and her mind on the road. She was very frightened and she wanted nothing more than to go back to her quarters, close the shutters and stretch out in the cool darkness. Things would come clearer to her there.
Back at the mission, she showered and lay down; for a short time, under the weight of her fear and exhaustion, she actually slept. Awaking from a confusion of dreams, she found herself confronted with a simple certainty. The notion that the Devotionist mission at French Harbor could be used as a tactical location in the coming struggle represented a coincidence of fond fantasies. It had been compounded of her own egoism and the Tecanecans’ naïve confidence in the protection afforded by the American flag.
If the Movement was dismissive of Campos as a venal thug, then they had not understood his obsessiveness. To them, presumably, he was simply a sly and brutal timeserver—the ideal enemy. She herself was convinced that there was more to him than that; he had a spider’s-web aura of schizoid insights around him, an odor of unclean appetites that seemed to concentrate on her. He was always asking Charlie Egan about her, asking the merchants, the campesinos. It was beyond suspiciousness. In a peculiar way, he seemed more intelligent than a social agent of the Guardia should be; it was as if he had succeeded in becoming everything that the other swaggering sneering bastards of his organization pretended to be. Then, if he was as unsoundly intelligent as she suspected, he would be as attached to the idea of a foco on the coast as the rebels were. He would have planted the idea on his superiors in the capital and he would, of course, have connected it with the straggling Devotionists. It would be, in a sense, his project too. Captain Campos. General Campos.
The whole thing suggested internal betrayal as well. Tecan was full of police informers; they would have penetrated the Movement, perhaps to its highest level. A fiasco that dissipated the Republic’s revolutionary energy would buy the government ten years. Or longer.
Can it be, she wondered, that I have come to understand this country? Impossible, she decided. It was only one of her brief attacks of common sense. A periodic seizure.
She dressed and had a drink of cold well water. She would get them a message immediately. That the scrutiny was more than routine, that something was up that would mean disaster and there would have to be an alternative plan. She had to presume that the Tecanecan Movement had developed the concept of alternative plans.
Sensible or not, the thought of abandoning her part in Tecan’s liberation was bitter to Justin. They needed so much, she thought, and they had asked her for so little. To keep the dock lights on—there was nothing very suspect in that—many of the fishermen went out at night with torches, sometimes they asked her or Egan to run the generator late and keep th
e dock lights lit to guide their passage in. To be available for the wounded—she would have done that unrequested. But the obscene attentions of Campos made everything a hazard. The Guardia would be observant of late-burning lights. Wounded men who came to the dispensary would be drawn into a trap. Egan, who was her charge now, would not survive it all.
Decision then—hard but necessary. There were other battles and she had a life before her to fight them. She went into the office beside the kitchen where the small radio set was and sat down in front of it. She would have to call Sister Mary Joseph for help in closing, get a telegraph to the provincial, notify the consulate and the Ministry of the Interior.
She began to draft the appropriate messages in longhand, but after a moment she set her pencil down.
Campos. She had once had an erotic dream about him. His presence now bestrode her thoughts and as she thought of him a notion struck her that stayed and as it stayed, ripened into certainty. It was he who was killing the children! The notion was utterly without foundation but she felt sure of it. How could they have told her not to be afraid of him? If they had planned to kill him—she had surmised so much as long ago as her dinner conversation with Godoy but had put the idea out of her head from weak scruples—why had they not done so before? Now, from a tactical standpoint, it was too late. Or was it? Could there be some element of blackmail in the thing, could the Movement be somehow aware of his killings and consider him thus neutralized? Impossible, she thought, they were not cynical, not that way. But someone would have to do for Campos; if not, he would go on killing. Everyone, every mother and child on the coast was in his hands, living and dying through his sufferances. The torture and murder of children was something more important than even the establishment of revolution, surely. But was it not all of a piece—Campos on the coast, the President in his mortar-proof palace in the capital, the American interests that kept everything in place?
She stared down at the draft paper before her and leaned her forehead on her hands.
From outside, from the small plantain grove through which the creekside trail led inland, she heard voices. She went to the window, opened the shutter and saw the first groups of young foreigners heading for the stelae. They were mainly in couples, mainly fair, sunburned and bleached, in cutaways or sailcloth pants, in halters or bare-chested. They seemed to her incredibly innocent, vacant. But the oldest of them could not be many years younger than she herself. They passed like ghosts. None of them saw her.
Out on the veranda, Father Egan was still asleep on the hammock. His gut was swollen with sickness but his face was thinning, hollows beginning to show under his eyes and cheekbones. He had been hale and portly when Justin arrived in Tecan; now she saw for the first time his long chin and fine features. His face was a gray replica of what it might have been in his youth, the death mask of a handsome delicate young priest who could quicken a pious lady’s pulse with the resonance of First Corinthians.
She did not want to bury him here, she thought, under a twisted-wire cross. There was a stone vault for him under the lime trees in California, where he could sleep with all those other shadows who had worn down their steps on carpeted altars by candlelight. Broken their hearts, minds, sex and entrails in the imperfect service of their Holy One, their Hanged Man.
He woke and saw her looking down at him.
“What’s wrong, dear?” He sat up on the hammock and his belly hung down over his belt, almost to the hammock’s edge.
“You’ve got more of them coming,” she said.
He looked at her blankly.
“Your parish,” she said, “is assembling.”
Egan yawned. “You’re disapproving of me again.”
“Well, they have to go, that’s all. One of us has to tell them to move on. I’m trying to get the two of us out of here with a minimum of trouble and Campos is making a stink over them.”
“He was here today,” Egan said. “He never mentioned them. He asked about you.”
Justin shivered. “Asked what?”
“Vague questions—you know how he is. He asked me man to man if I thought you were a virgin. Man to man, he said. Then he asked me if you had ever been in California or in Paris.” He stood up and brushed the hair from his forehead. “It made me think.”
“And what,” she asked, “did it make you think?”
The priest went past her into his own quarters and began to pump up water for his shower. He spoke to her through the open door.
“About humanness. He asked me these strange questions and I began to wonder if he was human. Then I began to wonder if I was. And you, dear, whether you were. Then I thought: What do we mean by it? Humanness. Does it mean being real and in the world and not an animal? Is it running thin, so to speak? Whatever it is—is there less of it? And is that good or bad?”
The pumping stopped and she heard him move the bottle from the shower stall and turn the water on.
“Then I ran out of categories, so to speak. Meanings just faded. I thought—a word might as well be a little plant. I thought, well, silence will do. Not thinking will do. But I’m incapable of silence or not thinking.”
“You’re still capable of taking a shower, Charlie,” she said. “There’s merit in that.” He would not have heard her for the running water.
She stood for a moment looking at the blank message sheet by the transmitter and wandered into the kitchen. Immediately she saw that the stores had been broken into. The last sack of beans, which had been half full, was missing. The larder’s only padlock had been broken and half of the frozen fish was gone. And the biscuit tin.
“The useless sons of bitches,” she said aloud. On the next thought, she hurried to the dispensary; sure enough—a jar of codeine tablets gone, half of the Percodan. Her store of morphine was still intact, they had failed to find it.
In a rage she ran out to the edge of the veranda to confront Egan’s troops, shouting as she went.
“We have real pain here, you people! People suffer here, they get hurt!”
Three young men in turned-down white hats looked up at her as though she were mad, startled from their serenity. A couple behind them actually smiled at her.
“This is a medical dispensary!” she was shouting. “Our medication is not for you fucking rich kids to get high on!” At the height of her outrage, she found herself eye to eye with the peculiar young Mennonite she had been seeing around the place.
The strange young man only stared at her with his doll’s face. His eyes were blue and very bright. She could have sworn in that moment that he had painted cheeks. Justin’s angry words stuck in her throat. She held to the railing of the porch, turned her head away and then backed off. Out of his sight.
As she went back inside, his image stayed clear in her mind’s eye. And with it came a verse which she had always loved but which now filled her with revulsion.
“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not …”
She felt overthrown. Why was there so much suffering? How was it she could never do anything? Tecan. It was an evil place. Accursed.
In his quarters Egan had finished with his wash and was dressing. Justin walked in on him, took a swig of Flor de Cana and sat down in his desk chair.
“I’m going crazy, Charlie. Like you. I think we’ll have to send up a rocket.”
Egan tucked the tails of a clean white shirt under his belt.
“You’re just afraid, dear. I know all about that, I can assure you. Remember how afraid I was?”
“I don’t scare easy, do I, Charles?”
“You certainly don’t.”
“What am I scared of?”
The priest went to the mirror and began combing his hair.
“There’s a great deal to be scared of here. I suppose mainly you’re scared of Campos. He’s after you, you know.”
Justin looked at him in the mirror. “Charles,” she said, “is he killing those children?�
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Egan did not answer her. He finished combing and took a net shopping bag from beneath his bed in which there was a Bible. Then he took the rum from where Justin had laid it and put it in the bag.
She followed him out into the office.
“Is Campos killing those children, Charles?”
“I thought,” Egan said, “you suspected me of it.”
“No,” she said. “Campos.”
“Well, it isn’t me,” he said. “You’re right about that. I don’t kill. I can’t imagine any circumstances in which I’d kill anyone ever.”
She watched him look off toward the hillside until she thought he had forgotten where he was.
“I thought it was Campos,” he said after a while. “I was fairly sure it was. But it’s not.”
She felt weak, almost unable to breathe.
“Then I know who it is,” she said. “It’s that …”
“It’s the Mennonite kid,” Egan said. “He came in over the border from Nicaragua. The police are looking for him there. Grew up on one of their farmsteads down there and lost his mind. Religious. Hears voices.”
“You’re hiding him.”
“That’s about it.”
She walked up to him and seized him by the arm, trying to keep calm.
“You can’t do that, you fool! He’s killing little children.” She was crying unawares, tears spilled down her cheeks, gathering at her chin.
“Not since he came to me. I’m talking him down. When I give him the pills Mary Joe gave me he doesn’t hear the voices. And I’m going to replace his voices with mine.”
Justin wiped her face with a handkerchief. “I was sure it was Campos.”
“I was too,” Egan said. “But no.”
“What fools we are,” Justin said. “This place just beat the shit out of us.”
“They all will,” Egan said. “All of ’em. Every time.”
“The thing about that boy,” she said, “he doesn’t look real to me. He doesn’t look human.”
