He looked over the top of the cab, but all he could see was the face of one of the two officers; they spoke with the driver, and some papers were handed back and forth, and then the two officers walked to the rear of the truck and pulled open the tailgate. One officer was a major, and the other was a captain. The captain wore his garrison cap, but the major did not.
“Get them off the truck,” the major said.
Charlie noticed that the major limped badly and was missing a finger on his left hand. The soldier prodded Estlano and the boy out of the truck, and they jumped down onto the road. The soldier came to attention and saluted awkwardly. Charlie stood in the truck but did not jump down.
“These are the prisoners?”
“Yes, sir.”
The major with the mutilated hand pointed up at Charlie. “Who is this man?”
“I work for the American embassy,” Charlie said.
“He is the gringo’s ass worm,” the captain said. Charlie noticed a slight slurring of his words. He jumped down from the truck, and as he did so, he caught the distinct odor of chicha. The officers had been drinking.
The major drew a pistol from the shiny holster on his belt.
“The prisoners are going to Lagunillas for questioning,” Charlie said.
The major acknowledged nothing and, in a smooth, concise movement, placed the muzzle of his weapon against the boy’s face and pulled the trigger. The sharp bang of the weapon stunned Charlie. The boy’s legs buckled under him, and he collapsed straight down on the road, folding up where he’d stood. Blood gushed from a hole above his right eye, an astonishing amount of blood, and the road grew black in a widening pool.
Charlie moved toward the major and tried to deflect the pistol. “What are you doing?”
“Get back, you fucking indio,” the major spat. He pushed Charlie against the truck. “Get back or I’ll shoot you, too.”
Estlano choked and knelt in the dirt next to his son. The captain pulled him up by the arm and wheeled him around, shoving him against the truck. Charlie could see plainly now that the officers were drunk. Their eyes were wild.
“Why are you doing this?” Estlano sobbed. “We are only farmers.”
“You are insurgents. Bandits.”
“No. No. You are wrong—”
The major with the mutilated hand stood with the soldier and watched the captain jerk Estlano about.
“This man is in my custody,” Charlie said.
The major hit Charlie in the face with the butt of his pistol. “Fuck you and your custody.”
The captain slammed Estlano against the fender. “Tell me, pendejo, why you betrayed your country. The foreigners, I can understand, the Cubanos—they are Communists, mercenaries.”
“I am not Cuban, Excellency, I am Bolivian.”
“You are a Communist. A homegrown enemy. You betray the country that has nurtured you, protected you.”
“Please, don’t kill me…please…I have done nothing.”
“How can decent people, loyal citizens, expect to have liberty and peace while traitors like you are allowed to live?” The captain was livid. His eyes were wide, and there was saliva collecting in the corners of his mouth.
“Oh, Jesus, oh, Mary, Mother of God, please help me…”
Estlano dropped to his knees. The captain aimed the pistol, and the report of the gun was a sharp, hard bang. Blood spattered on the front of Charlie’s shirt with a whiff of gunpowder and brains. The shot echoed and rolled over the hillside. The officers walked back to their jeep, the major limping and the captain rolling as he walked like a sailor turned ashore. A welt had opened under Charlie’s eye, and blood dripped onto his shirt, mingling with the blood of Estlano.
Charlie stood trembling in shock and rage. Absurdity was added to brutality when the soldier called after the officers: “Your Excellencies? Should I shoot the other one?”
The major put on his cap and looked back at Charlie. “No. Don’t shoot him, take him to Lagunillas.”
The jeep drove off, and somewhere a pair of crows called out from above the road. Then it began to rain.
32
THE FOURTH INFANTRY Division had companies billeted all over Lagunillas, and there were a number of detachments assigned to roadblocks. Santavanes had spent an hour on the radio, trying to locate the prisoners and Charlie. All of his inquiries were met adamantly with the statement that the military district had no one in custody, and it was not until Hoyle suggested that Santavanes ask if the battalion was keeping any guests that they were told Charlie was being questioned at a military police detachment outside of the city.
The road led to the fringes of the town and to the ruin of a church, or rather, a half-constructed cathedral that looked as though it had long ago been abandoned and forgotten. A warren of shanties had sprung up on the hillside around the site, a sort of parasitical annex made from parts of the uncompleted church. It gave the neighborhood a Neverland quality, as though the ants had somehow made off with the picnic. Some of the shacks had windows made of leaded glass; others had walls of cardboard but roofs of red tile, or doors cut together from wood taken out of pews and confessionals. Mud was splashed waist-high on the walls, and metallic blue flies took off and landed in a yellow trickle of sewage that ran down the middle of the street. The furtive nature of the buildings added a sense of heresy to what was already a heartbreaking little slum.
Hoyle pulled the Land Cruiser up to a place that might once have been intended to be a cloister. Charlie was seated on a pile of flagstone stacked under a set of half-completed arches. Hoyle could see that Charlie’s eye was appallingly blackened and that there was blood on his shirt. His legs were crossed, as a prisoner might do to reduce the anxiety of his captors. There were two military policemen standing by the door to the church. One went inside, and the other marched away as Hoyle and Santavanes walked toward Charlie. None of the soldiers appeared the least concerned about their guest.
Hoyle came close, and Charlie did not stand up. His eyes met Hoyle’s and said everything. The blood said everything. Hoyle did not need to ask what had happened.
“Get the first-aid kit,” Hoyle said to Santavanes.
“Where are the prisoners, Charlie?”
“Out back,” Charlie said. He shook his head. “I tried to stop it.”
Santavanes returned from the truck, knelt down, and tended to Charlie’s eye. His face was bruised the color of wine, and the cut below his eye could have probably taken a few stitches. Clotted with blood, it had started to ooze over, and it was too late to stitch it.
“Who hit you?”
“Putos,” Charlie said quietly. It was the first time anyone had heard him curse.
Hoyle walked into the church. Under the half-constructed apse, radios hissed and orderlies sat back in chairs, as unmoving as if they were made of stone. A few military policemen sat against the naves, their white helmets balanced on the muzzles of their rifles.
“Who’s in charge here?”
No one answered. Hoyle finally walked up to a corporal slouched indolently next to a radio. “Where are your officers?”
“They are eating dinner.”
“Where are the prisoners who were brought from the valley?”
No one answered, and the men seated against the walls averted their eyes. Hoyle felt for a moment like a schoolteacher asking about a forgotten assignment.
“Where are the bodies?”
One of the military policemen said, “We put them behind the building.”
Hoyle walked through the church with the roof opened to the sky. Blocks had been cut and laid along what was once to be the transept, but now weeds and a few struggling saplings stuck up from between the stones. Where the shadow of the building gave way to sunlight, Hoyle could see the bodies wrapped in green waterproof tarps and bound about with rope. They had been tossed into tall grass. A pair of bare feet stuck from one lump and a smaller pair from the other, man and boy, father and son, swept into war on a whim and kil
led for half a reason.
For a moment Hoyle just stood. His mind was blurred.
He did not feel anything for these people. He did not know them and did not even know about them except to believe that they had nothing at all to do with the business in the Ñancahuazú. There was no reason for Hoyle to be affected, but he was. He had seen bodies before, untold hundreds, and even counting the ones killed for good reason, he had seen enough to be unmoved. But these two struck him with pathos, perhaps because he’d tried to vouchsafe for them, perhaps because he had not expected Charlie to be beaten and these people murdered, or perhaps because Hoyle was beginning to have had enough. Flies buzzed and crawled around the toes of the dead men. Thirty miles from the place they had been captured, and maybe fifty miles from their home, their bodies would probably never be claimed. It was certain the army would not admit to their murder. Guests of the Bolivian army often went missing.
Somewhere across the road, Hoyle heard the sound of children laughing and calling to one another. There was some daylight left, and after the officers had finished their meal, one of the corporals would be told to dig a hole, and two of the privates would do so, and then the bodies would be dumped in and covered over, and it would be as though the man and boy had never lived. Hoyle turned and made his way back through the church, and as he passed them, the orderlies and the military policemen all came to their feet. Not out of respect, or condolence, or any other reason except self-preservation.
The look on Hoyle’s face was stone-cold murder.
THE OFFICERS’ CLUB of the Fourth Division was a former plantation house, stucco and red-tiled with wide verandas that looked across Lagunillas and its hillsides. It was set away from the main highway, and around it were gardens and terraces, tended not quite immaculately but kept up enough to be verdant. There were two tennis courts and several smaller outbuildings that had once been offices for the works and quarters for the managers and administrators. For all its desperately coveted luxury, the place had about it a feeling of crash and bankruptcy, for the sugar no longer grew and the mill that stood beside it was a vast, rusted derelict, grown up through the middle with trees and frequented only by bats and crows.
Hoyle drove up the long gravel drive past private soldiers who’d been set to raking and slow-moving sergeants who oversaw them. He parked, and as he walked up the steps into the mansion, he could not help but marvel at a view that commanded every direction. The long day was not yet over, and slivers of clouds rode the valley beyond. A bit north, the mountains of the Ñancahuazú were first low and green and then higher and blue and the sky above them bluer still now that evening lurked in the east. Back over Lagunillas, the sun was surrendering peacefully in a few patches of red.
There was a sentry posted on the terrace, but he did not even make eye contact with Hoyle. The fact that he was gringo was apparently reason enough for Hoyle to be there, so the sentry clicked his heels and opened the door. The foyer was stark though elegant, with a sweeping staircase and terra-cotta floors. Laughter echoed off marble and crystal as Hoyle walked into the first floor, where white-jacketed stewards walked in hush, switching on electric lights and fussing over immense silver candlesticks.
At a long bar near the veranda, Hoyle found the source of the laughter: Colonel Arquero and about a dozen officers, perfect in crisp linen and field gray, looking like they’d never done a day of dirt-soldiering in their entire life. As Hoyle entered, the laughter stopped instantly, and every eye in the place was on him. Hoyle wore rumpled khaki trousers, work boots, and a furrowed jacket, the same outfit he’d worn into the field that morning. If it was disrespect he meant to communicate with his clothing, he succeeded at once. The officers at the bar individually and collectively took offense that anyone would join them so slovenly dressed.
Hovering in the air was also the question of an invitation, and Hoyle unquestionably lacked one. Nevertheless, he sauntered up and found a seat. “Bourbon, please,” he said.
Nobody spoke. Not a word of greeting or a word of derision, though that note held strongly in the air.
“This is nice,” Hoyle said, looking around. “Very posh. Who wants to go crashing around the bush when you can spend time in a place like this?”
The bartender’s eyes were wide, and he seemed paralyzed. It was only after Arquero nodded that the man found a bottle and poured Hoyle a neat shot and placed it on the bar. The silence extended as Hoyle lifted the glass and downed it in several long swallows. He set the empty glass back down on the bar and sought out the barman’s gaze.
“Un otro,” Hoyle said, pursing his lips and giving back insolence for silence.
The barman poured again, in the absence of any negative guidance.
“That’s the taste I’ve been missing.” Hoyle managed to smile, though no one else did, not even the usually facetious Colonel Arquero.
One of the officers, a major, leaned toward Hoyle; the man seemed prepared to say something, but Colonel Arquero made a slight gesture, and the officer retreated to his bar stool. Hoyle noticed the limp and that the man’s left hand was shattered. A finger was missing, but the deformity seemed more like a birth defect than a combat wound. From Charlie’s description, Hoyle was certain this man was one of the murderers.
“To what do we owe the pleasure, Mr. Hoyle?” Colonel Arquero asked.
“Nothing special. I was out all day, Colonel, and I got thirsty.”
Hoyle gave back the long, blank gazes. Beyond the veranda, a chorus of insects began to sing, as loud as the noise of a thousand alarm clocks.
Hoyle sipped at his drink. “You know, when I was in Laos,” he said, “I knew a man who really loved whiskey. He was a military adviser. He had a C-130 parachute in a bulldozer—a Caterpillar D9, a big one—right into the jungle. Crashed through the trees, triple canopy; this was just outside Mu Gia. Somehow it landed upright. This guy, he got together a bunch of villagers and used machetes—he hacked his way through the jungle. It took two whole days, but they got to the bulldozer and started it up. And he scraped the top off this hill, cut it right out and made a helicopter landing zone. An epic piece of civil engineering, and he did it all so he could have cases of Jim Beam flown in.”
The silence was excruciating. Colonel Arquero shifted on his stool. “What you did in Asia is of no interest to us here.”
“Well, see, I think it could be,” Hoyle said. “Once we had that landing zone, we started flying in a doctor once a week. And then we built a clinic. And the Kha tribesmen, they’d bring their children. Their sick, you know, to get treated. And pretty soon we had volunteers. We pulled together a militia—they elected their own officers and organized companies to fight the Pathet Lao.”
The major with the crippled hand pushed his drink away and leaned close. His voice was a rasp. “If you were so successful, Mr. CIA Man, why don’t you just go back there?”
“I didn’t catch your name, sir.”
“Placido,” the man said, sharply, abruptly, like a challenge to a duel.
Hoyle looked the major full in the face. “Funny thing is, Major, I volunteered to come here.”
“And do what, Mr. Hoyle?” Colonel Arquero asked. “Give us the benefit of your funny stories? We need arms, we need ammunition and aircraft. We were promised these things before you came. And now—nothing. You have consistently opposed the arming of our military. Why?”
“I think you need to use what you have, Colonel.”
“How would you know what we need?” Placido hissed. “I have just served in Abapó. I saw what was done to a company of my men.”
“And what happened today, Major? What happened to the two people who were captured at Yaquí?”
“They were traitors,” Placido said, “vermin. If Bolivia is to survive, it needs hard measures. And you need countries like mine to resist communism. To keep it away from you—out of Latin America—out of Mexico. Off your doorstep, so you can have your hamburgers and television.”
Placido jammed a finger in
to Hoyle’s chest. “We fight because you haven’t got the guts to.” He shook his finger in Hoyle’s face. “How dare you come in here with your Yankee courage—”
Hoyle’s hand moved from the bar rail so quickly that it was a blur. His open hand struck the major in the throat just below the chin, and his thumb hooked into the muscle above the man’s Adam’s apple. This blow was struck full force, without thought or self-control, and the power of it lifted Major Placido from his feet. As the major was thrust back, Hoyle levered his elbow and smashed the officer down onto the bar. Placido’s hand went quickly to his holster, and he managed to extract his pistol, a blue-steel Walther PPK. Hoyle punched the heel of his palm under the major’s nose and just as quickly slapped the weapon from his hand. The gun went skittering across the bar and crashed into a rack of glasses behind the barman. The instant of violence was so profound and astonishing that a second or two seemed to pass before the sound of breaking glass could be perceived. Hoyle had struck Placido very nearly a killing blow, and now his arm looped under the man’s chin and he held the major’s head in the vice formed by forearm and bicep. Eyes bulging, Placido choked off a muffled gasp. No one dared come to the major’s aid, and Hoyle’s hold was so obviously deadly that a jerk would be enough to break the man’s neck.
Hoyle’s face was against Placido’s ear, and his voice was hoarse, choked with a slow-burning and thoughtful rage. “I didn’t come down here to watch you assholes play Nazi. Every time one of your stormtroopers shoots a prisoner or burns a cornfield, you make the enemy that much stronger.”
Hoyle’s chokehold tightened, and something like the mewing of a cat came from the major’s throat.
“Outside that door, children are eating rats. They don’t have clean water to drink. They can’t read. And you can’t understand why there’s a war on. You don’t like gringos—tough shit. We’ll pull out, the CIA, the Green Berets, everybody. In three days, assholes like you will be hanging from the streetlights.”
Hoyle shoved Placido back against the others. He fell to the floor, legs sprawling, and a bar stool fell on top of him. Hoyle’s jacket was open. The officers could plainly see a .45-caliber Colt automatic hanging in his shoulder holster. Hoyle turned to Arquero. “What about you, Colonel? You want to kill some traitors, too? Or is that little pistol of yours just for show?”
Killing Che Page 25
