A Flag for Sunrise

by Robert Stone

  “It’s happening tonight.” Her eyes widened. “Do you know what that means? What we’ve all been waiting for. The rising, Frank. They’re going out tonight.”

  “Good Christ,” he said.

  “They need me,” she said. She met his fearful look. “I asked them and they said they did. They expect me at the company clinic at eight o’clock. They have the guns and the people and they’re going to take the coast.”

  “May, can’t you see how crazy this is? For you?”

  “Don’t, Frank,” she said. “I’m so happy, see. I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

  He turned from her and began to walk the length of the dispensary. The bed where they had been was stripped.

  “It must be that your friends don’t understand the heat that you’ve attracted.”

  “The spooks are out of luck,” Justin said. “There won’t be any secrets tomorrow.”

  “There are agents and police all over the place,” Holliwell said. “For all you know they may be just waiting for you to make a move so they can come down on you.”

  She did not answer him.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, May. They can have their goddamn revolution without you. If they win, they’ll expel you anyway.”

  “I didn’t come down here to see the world or make my fortune or be educated. I came in my simpleminded way to help people. I’m not going to pull out now.”

  “Ah, shit,” Holliwell said.

  “I don’t decide what the people here need from me. They decide and I try to do it. Those are the rules. I’ve always accepted them.”

  “You’re just being used.”

  “Damn right,” she said. “At last, thank God.”

  He found another miniature brandy and opened it.

  “I’m going to tell you something now, May, that I didn’t want to tell you. I’m telling you so you can have some idea of your situation.” He forced himself to look at her as he spoke. Her face still held a pale defiant smile. “When I came down here I was asked by a man I know to be in the intelligence community to check this place out. I was supposed to find out what you were up to. Do you know what that means?”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “It means that someone’s been reporting on you—all the way to Washington. Not very long ago I was sitting in a restaurant in New York talking to that man about you. Now go ahead and figure out what your chances are.”

  She put her hand over her eyes and leaned against the window casing.

  “Well,” she said after a while, “you’ll have a story to tell, won’t you? And a dirty joke to go with it.”

  “I refused him, May. I said I wouldn’t do it. Then I was approached in Santiago by another agent. You again. You’re public property, you and your friends.” He finished the brandy and tossed the bottle into a metal GI can. It rang against the ribs of the can with an ugly sound that hung over the long room. “I refused them all. It was for my own purposes that I came here, believe it or not. Maybe I wanted to see somebody doing something they believed in. Maybe I was just curious. They came to me because I did a job for the Company in Vietnam. I don’t work for them now. I’m not making any reports.”

  She was crying silently. She took her hand from over her eyes and walked up to him.

  “You’re very convincing, mister,” she said. And then she punched him across the bridge of his nose, a hard stiff-armed punch that numbed him. She hit him twice more, right hooks with a windup. His nose began to bleed. He put his handkerchief to it.

  “I’m telling you the truth. You can have me killed if you want to, you’ve got time.”

  “Do you know something?” she said. “I almost went with you. I almost did.”

  “I wish you had, May.”

  “You’re just another one of those bastards,” she said. “I can see that now. I don’t care what you say.”

  “You’re wrong. I told you I was in love with you and I meant it. I’m not sure what falling in love is. It’s probably something trivial and foolish. But for what it’s worth I love you, I swear.”

  “I thought I was dumb,” she said. “You’re worse than me.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you. I wasn’t going to. Apparently it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Oh, but I’m glad you did. So we know who we are—just a little.”

  They stood in silence, both of them looking at the scrubbed wooden floor of the dispensary.

  “There’s not much I can do for you at the hotel. Just be warned. The people over there think they know why I’m here but they’re not taking me into their confidence.” He smiled. “I suppose they don’t trust me.”

  “Well,” she said, “you’re in a bit of a spot. If you’re telling me the truth.” She looked at him as though she were ashamed. “I have to presume you’re telling me the truth about not working for them. I wouldn’t know what to do otherwise, I’m new at this.”

  “I’m in a bit of a spot, yes.”

  “We’re going ahead, Frank. I’m going where I’m told. This place is going to blow up and it’s you that better be out of it.”

  She went to a refrigerator in one of the closets, brought out a shard of ice wrapped in gauze and handed in to him. He held it under his nose and brushed at the congealing blood.

  “God doesn’t work through history, May. That’s a delusion of the Western mind.”

  “Too metaphysical for me,” she said. “I don’t know how God works.”

  “The things people do don’t add up to an edifying story. There aren’t any morals to this confusion we’re living in. I mean, you can make yourself believe any sort of fable about it. They’re all bullshit.”

  “Like love,” she said.

  “Yes. Like love.”

  Justin smiled. She was looking at the ocean.

  “When I was a little girl I was riding my pony up along the wire one time—and I saw this thing coming down the road and I couldn’t tell what it was. So I stopped and got down and watched and what I saw was an enormous house being pulled along by a truck. It was a big old farmhouse, Frank, it was set on a flatbed that took up the whole road and these old boys were pulling it along taking it somewhere else and all of them looking so tickled with what they were doing. Tickled at me watching them.” She turned toward him and laughed; his heart rose up as he watched her. “I was so thrilled! I couldn’t believe that men could move a house. It was like they were moving a mountain. It made me feel proud. It made me feel like people could do anything in the world if they put their mind and their strength to it.” She looked at him amused. “You don’t know what I mean, do you?”

  “No,” he said. He laughed himself. “I don’t have a clue what you mean.”

  “We don’t think much alike,” she said. She shook her head. “God, that was crazy of us hopping into bed like that. Strangers. Like a couple of rabbits. My fault, I guess. Land, that was unconscious.”

  “I didn’t think so,” he said.

  “You see, I don’t have your faith in despair,” Justin said. “I can’t take comfort in it like you can.”

  He wet his handkerchief on the melting ice and threw the ice and the gauze into the GI can.

  “It was a dishonest thing you did to me, Mr. Holliwell. You really ought to be ashamed.” He saw her passing beyond him, out of reach, out of life.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m not sorry.”

  “I believe everything you say,” Justin told him. “I don’t pretend to understand you though. Are you always going to be the way you are?”

  He shrugged and she put out her hand and touched his face. He was surprised at the tenderness with which she touched him.

  “I think despair and giving up are like liquor to you. You get high on it. But it’s not for me, Frank. I don’t have the temperament. I don’t have the sophistication to bring it off.”

  When he started toward the door she came with him. She took hold of his hand for a moment and then let it go.

  “We’ll both have to explai
n your being here if anyone saw,” she said. “We’ll both have to think of lies.”

  “So you won’t denounce me to the revolution?”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t denounce you. I want you to come back when we’re finished. I guarantee you won’t know the place.” She stopped and he stopped with her. “I’m trusting you now. Please tell me I’m doing right.”

  “You’re doing right to trust me,” he said. “I love you, don’t I? I told you that.”

  “What a funny word,” she said.

  Holliwell learned that the Río de la Fe would bear no passengers that day. The boats had not come through from the city on the lake and in the tin-roofed offices of the steamship company there were not two who would agree as to the reason. A clerk from the offshore islands said the problem was paperwork. An Indian from the mountains said the river was bad that day. It was all in the hands of God, the Indian said.

  The Vietnamese woman at the airlines office told Holliwell that there were no planes. She invited him to imagine there might be one on Thursday. He drove his jeep back to the hotel and found its precincts quiet; the spies and the contractors were in cover. He bought a bottle of light rum at the bar, went to his bungalow and drank himself insensible.

  Sometime after dark a group of men came into his room to awaken him. There were three of them; they turned on his bedside lamp and shook him. In the warm lamplight he recognized Mr. Heath and Soyer. There was a Guardia officer with them, a short, broad-shouldered man with soft eyes.

  “Hello, Holliwell,” Mr. Heath said. “Sorry, but we’ve some work to do.”

  Holliwell swung his feet onto the floor. The three men who had come into his room watched him as he sat, blinking and nauseated, on the edge of his sweated mattress.

  “Dress, will you?” Heath said. “We’re going out.”

  Holliwell helped himself to some water from the pitcher on the night table and stood up. The Cuban took a tin of Anacin from his own pocket and offered the pills around. Holliwell took two.

  “What’s the difficulty?” he asked them as he put his shirt on.

  “Just,” Heath said, “that the job’s over where you’re concerned.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by the job.”

  “I should pack if I were you,” Mr. Heath told him. “You won’t be coming back here.”

  Holliwell discovered that he was still fairly drunk.

  “Am I being turned out of the country?” he asked.

  The Cuban answered him.

  “You’re in danger. We protect our friends. You are our friend, sir.”

  When he had packed his bag, he followed them outside; the clamor of night creatures was almost alarming. There was a Guardia jeep at the door.

  “What about my bill?”

  “Let’s make it quick, Holliwell,” Heath said. “There’s a good fella.”

  Holliwell climbed into the rear seat; Heath got in beside him. The Cuban and the Guardia officer sat in front, the officer at the wheel. As they rolled past the main building, Holliwell saw that it was darkened, the tables stacked, the bar closed. When they made the road, a second Guardia jeep fell in behind them, carrying three men in helmets and camouflage fatigues. It carried a mount with a 7.62 machine gun.

  “What’s going on?” Holliwell asked Mr. Heath.

  “Treason,” Mr. Heath said, in a mock-heroic manner.

  “I’m not sure what it has to do with me.”

  “Well, you’ll have to be debriefed before you leave. Then we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  On the way to town, they passed a Guardia roadblock which had established itself behind two wooden sawhorses and an Aduana sign. Two lines of young Guardia troopers crouched Indian fashion along the edges of the road, squinting into the jeep’s headlights as it approached them. Seaward, a helicopter with a spotlight dodged between the beach and the reef line in figure-of-eight patterns, its light sweeping like a tentacle.

  Along the riverfront of Puerto Alvarado there were half a dozen LCVM’s tied up at the docks. The town itself appeared to be going dark although it was only just after seven; the Syrians were locking fast their shutters and the few small neon signs around the plaza were dimmed and the shops closed. The square itself was jammed with soldiers turned out for combat, standing in loose ranks or crouching on the grass. Above them, the cathedral was dark and unavailable behind its great oak door.

  At the west end of the plaza, upwards of twenty trucks were parked in rows, and as Holliwell watched, new ones would pull up carrying yet more Guardia. The trucks would be coming from the airport or from some disembarkation point upriver. There were very few civilians on the street.

  The jeep in which Holliwell rode pulled up in front of the Municipalidad, escorting jeep behind. As he stepped out, he saw that a crowd of women had gathered in front of the doors of the police station; a Guardia sergeant was addressing them in a low voice. Heath got out after Holliwell, then the Guardia officer and Mr. Soyer. A trooper ran across the street from the square, got behind the wheel of their jeep and drove it out of traffic. The escort jeep pulled out after him. It was all peculiarly efficient.

  The crowd of women was blocking the doors of the police station and the sentries began, fairly gently, to clear a way for Holliwell and his party. The sergeant was telling the women that the people they inquired after were not to be found. They were town women of mixed blood for the most part and though it was hard to tell, they appeared to be mainly over thirty. Holliwell glanced over the crowd and recognized among them the young woman who had visited Justin that morning and whom he had taken for a Carib. She was staring at him and her stare was intense, its informing emotion uncertain. As far as he knew she had never seen him before but the look she gave him betrayed recognition. It was a troubled stare and trouble, he thought, was what it portended. The company he was in would not recommend him to associates of Justin.

  There were more men on guard inside the police station; its spare outer office looked readied for a siege. Sandbags were stacked around the barred shuttered windows and the Guardia detachment on duty were in jungle fatigues and carried grenades on their belts. The non-com in charge saluted as Holliwell and his acquaintances came in. Holliwell reflected that he had taken a few too many Guardia salutes to be altogether uninvolved in Tecanecan history. The door to the street remained open behind them; their Guardia lieutenant was in a state of some agitation over someone he had seen outside. Holliwell thought it must be the young girl in braids.

  Heath went back to see what the trouble was and the Guardia lieutenant pulled him outside.

  “Happen to see anyone you know out here?” the Englishman called to Holliwell. Holliwell walked to the door and looked over the sentries’ helmets at the dispersing group of women. He did not see her any longer.

  “No. I don’t know many people here,” he said.

  “No?” Heath asked.

  The Guardia officer jogged across the street to the square and out of Holliwell’s sight. The sentries held the door open until he came back in, then bolted it down.

  Holliwell followed them through the barricaded outer office and into a strange windowless room in the center of the building. The oddness of the room was disorienting and it made him even more uneasy. It had stone floors and damp walls of whitewashed brick, the roof was of corrugated metal over a netting of barbed wire that made it feel like a cage. There were two overbright institutional lights in green-painted housings at the center of the metal ceiling such as one might see on factory fences or prison yards. In one shadowed corner was a litter of what appeared to be electrical equipment—extension wires, hand generators and disused batteries lay in a cluster on the slimy floor. Looking more closely at the walls, he saw that there had once been windows along the two longer walls, but the window space and casements had been plastered over. Blackened chips of spackle lined the edges of the floor. There were two desks in the middle of the room—on one was a telephone.

  The odd room smelled of mildew
and disinfectant and of other things as well, familiar but unpleasant things which he could not quite identify. As soon as it struck him that the room was in fact the central patio of the building nailed down and sealed off from air and light, he realized that the dark stains on the stone floor were bloodstains.

  Soyer had Holliwell’s suitcase on one of the desks. He thrust a hand toward Holliwell’s face and rubbed his fingers together.

  “He’d like the key,” Heath said helpfully.

  “I hate to spoil his number,” Holliwell said, “but he’ll find it’s open if he tries it.” Holliwell was drunk and disgruntled but he was growing more and more fearful.

  The Cuban looked at Holliwell and then at Heath. Heath had a soothing half smile.

  His suitcase was indeed open and Mr. Soyer examined the contents deliberately. The contents were innocent enough; there were only toiletries, cigarettes and clothes. The clean clothes were neatly folded, the soiled ones in their hotel laundry bag. But Mr. Soyer took his time.

  “You’re impatient with us,” Mr. Soyer said. “Anxious to be on your way. We understand.”

  “He’s a bit pissed in the bargain,” Heath said.

  “Yes,” Soyer said, affecting to sound the suitcase for false bottoms, feeling the lining, messing about with the laundry bag. “There is something—about our part of the world—that makes the North Americans—reach for a glass. Isn’t there, Holliwell?”

  “Could we have it straight, Soyer? Without the flourishes and games?”

  Soyer closed the suitcase.

  “Straight?” he asked. “Straight is how you would like it?” The man’s eyes drifted to a point behind Holliwell’s head. Holliwell remembered that the Guardia lieutenant was behind him.

  “I don’t think I want to talk to this man,” Soyer said to Heath. “I find him crude and insolent.” Heath grinned.

  “In technology they are giants,” the Guardia officer behind Holliwell said in Spanish, “but in culture—pygmies.”

  Mr. Heath spoke.

  “Know what happened to Ocampo, Holliwell?”

  “What?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “He was a friend of mine,” Holliwell said after a moment. “I was very fond of him.”