Killing Che

by Chuck Pfarrer

  “Maricón. Say one word, and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

  In the front seat, the driver turned. He, too, was wearing a balaclava and had a Sten gun pointed directly at Arquero’s chest.

  A pillowcase was pulled over Arquero’s face. This was done so abruptly that the garrison cap was pushed down on Arquero’s head, and as he began to choke, he could smell hair oil. Handcuffs were clicked down on the colonel’s wrists, and he felt a stabbing pain in his thigh. He had been injected with a syringe right through his trousers. Immediately, there was a unpleasant, metallic taste in his mouth, and then he felt a rush of blood to his head and lost all sensation.

  Behind the wheel of the car, Hoyle looked at the rearview mirror and watched Arquero slump into unconsciousness. He pulled off his ski mask, as did Valdéz and Santavanes, and the tinted windows were sufficient to screen them from prying eyes as Hoyle drove out of the city to the quarry where Charlie waited.

  FOR ARQUERO, SENTIENCE returned with the splash of a bucket of slimy water. He came to, sputtering, enraged, and strapped to a chair in a darkened shed. He could make out only the shapes of two skimask-clad men; he could not see their faces, nor much of anything, as the shack had only one window admitting a thin dash of moonlight.

  Arquero’s tunic had been removed, and his boots. He sat in pants and undershirt, a piece of duct tape across his mouth. More duct tape, a roll of it, secured his arms and legs to the chair. A wave of panic seized him; he tried to struggle free of his fetters, but he was immobilized by a boot delivered full force to his chest. It knocked him over, still taped into the chair, and he fell heavily against the stone floor. Mouth straining against the duct tape, he tried to rise, and again he was kicked, chair and man sent skittering.

  Standing in the shadows, Hoyle watched indifferently as Santavanes delivered several heavy kicks to Arquero’s back and ribs before the man again fell silent.

  “Keep quiet, asshole, or I’ll stomp a puddle into you,” Santavanes said.

  Hoyle watched Valdéz and Santavanes set Arquero’s chair upright. Hoyle stayed behind Arquero, out of his line of sight, an invisible observer. Hoyle had been present at many interrogations and was adept at conducting them himself, but it was certain that Arquero would recognize his voice. He would remain silent.

  A lantern was lit on a table in front of Arquero. A face dipped into the light, or rather, a face shrouded in a mask. A carnival mask, a grinning Incan death’s head made of papier-mâché. Arquero could not know that Charlie’s face was behind the disguise. In any case, he did not know the man, nor could he recognize the voice intoned evenly in unaccented Spanish.

  “You son of a bitch,” Charlie said softly.

  Arquero blinked. In the lantern light behind Charlie was a hand-sewn red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. A metal bucket full of water was placed on the table. And a cattle prod.

  These were props, Arquero knew. He was being shown what his torturers wanted him to see; Arquero knew this because he was himself a professional. It was surprising—astonishing, really—that he found himself with roles reversed. For the first time in his life, he was the questioned, not the inquisitor. It did not make it easier on him that he knew what to expect.

  The skeleton face bent close. Charlie’s voice was even. “There’s always someone like you, isn’t there, Colonel? There’s always one person fucked up enough, evil enough, to do the job you do.”

  The flame in the lantern flickered, garishly lighting the teeth of the skeleton’s mask. The flame in the lantern guttered, the light seemed to blink, and outside, a long gust of wind rattled the shack.

  “We’re very common compared to you, Colonel,” Charlie said. “We’re just ordinary men. It takes an exceptional person to do what you do.” He sat down across the table from Arquero. He picked up the cattle prod and looked at it indifferently. “I suppose ordinary men could do what you do. Force themselves to do it—but to do it every day? To be really good at it? That takes talent. A gift.”

  Hoyle watched as Santavanes stepped forward and splashed another bucket over Arquero. Hands reached out of the darkness, covered in thick black rubber gloves.

  Arquero’s head was jerked back. The tape was ripped off his face. Leaning against the wall, Hoyle took in the scene, utterly devoid of feeling. There was no irony in this moment for him. He watched with an icy detachment as the torturer was paid in kind.

  Charlie seemed to have been made gloomy by his duty, and his voice took on a melancholy edge. “How many men and women have gone into your building and then disappeared?”

  Arquero’s eyes rolled.

  “How many would you say? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? What’s a number, really—what does it matter?”

  Without warning, Charlie jabbed the cattle prod into Arquero’s chest. The end sparked and sizzled as it made contact with the wet undershirt.

  Hoyle watched Arquero stiffen against his fetters, muscles set rigid and pulling against one another by a blast of electricity. A great pant of agony burst from Arquero’s lips.

  “What—what do you want?” he howled.

  “One person. A woman. Arrested on the Calle Max Paredes last Thursday. She’s called Tania. Whatever name you’re holding her under, you’re going to let her go. She’ll be released, and then not one of your gestapo murderers will ever come near her again.” Charlie paused. The skeleton mask inclined. “Now, how can I make you do that?”

  The colonel’s head jerked back as though raw flame were being waved in his face.

  “I could use this and make you promise to release her,” Charlie said. “But all I would get from you would be a promise. I would let you go, and then you would kill her. So what can I do? Me, just an ordinary man? And you—so important. So powerful. So extraordinary.”

  Charlie reached into his pocket and pulled out a stack of photographs. The prints were small, like those taken by a pocket camera. “I got these from a friend of mine. The cousin of a friend of mine. Go ahead, Colonel, take a look.”

  Charlie held a print under Arquero’s face. Then another. Arquero did not have to look closely. He knew what they were—photographs of himself and a child. In bed.

  “Did you promise this little boy anything, Colonel? Promise him candy? Promise to kill him if he told anyone? Maybe you made only a small promise: Maybe you promised not to kill his parents.”

  Arquero recognized the photographs to be of an apartment he’d rented in the Prado, not far from his office. A place he used to meet his “friends.” He vaguely recognized one or two of the boys; he could not recall their names. They were not people—not human beings—they were objects. From the glimpsed snapshots Arquero tried to puzzle out where the camera had been hidden. Some of the pictures were shot from above, perhaps through the transom or through the ceiling. Arquero felt little beyond surprise that his dalliances had been photographed. Like most pederasts, the colonel’s narcissism was thoroughly developed, and even at this moment, confronted with photographic evidence of his crimes against children, he thought only of himself: how thin his legs looked.

  “Can you imagine the outrage, Colonel? If someone should find out? A respected member of the National Police. A molester of little boys. It’s appalling.”

  “We can make an arrangement.”

  “You fucking piece of shit,” Charlie rasped. His fingers curled around the collar of Arquero’s torn undershirt. The vision of the mask—the teeth, the black eye sockets, a perfect death’s head—was all that Arquero could see.

  “Tonight, motherfucker, you’re going to do as you’re told.”

  HOYLE CONSIDERED HIMSELF fortunate: The evening with the colonel was short. Hoyle did not particularly care if Arquero saw through the charade of a Communist abduction. It was within the guerrillas’ capability to kidnap, and it was not unusual for them to come to the aid of a jailed comrade. It was sufficient for Arquero to think that he had been abducted by Communists. Suspicion was adequate. That Arquero might suspect Smith and Hoy
le were actually behind the abduction was also acceptable. Arquero would pay attention the next time Smith or Hoyle made a request of him.

  After Charlie had secured from Arquero the promise of Tania’s release, and assured him that if she was not set free by noon, the photographs would be in the hands of La Paz Tiempo, Hoyle drove the colonel to the outskirts of La Paz and dumped him, still handcuffed and dripping wet. Lieutenant Castañeda was served only slightly better; still drugged and stripped down to his underwear, he was deposited at the back door of the Club Caribe in downtown La Paz. The club was an after-hours bar whose clientele were aficionados of particularly rough sadomasochistic sex.

  Once the two men had been turned loose, Hoyle drove Arquero’s limousine up a mountain road and set it afire with a road flare. He watched as the fire burned orange-red; the rug and upholstery quickly took light. The fire rose into the sky, and out of the black night, it began again to rain. The shower sizzled onto the hood, and individual raindrops rolled and boiled like droplets set free in a scalding pan.

  Driving with the headlights extinguished, Smith pulled up in the Land Cruiser. He had not been present for any of the business with Arquero. His absence had not come of squeamishness, but in order to establish an alibi. Smith had conspicuously showed himself at an embassy party, even going so far as to ask the whereabouts of the colonel.

  Draped in a poncho, Smith walked up to Hoyle.

  “We got everything,” Hoyle said. “Arquero’s in our pocket.” He took out a small notebook—a rough transcript of Arquero’s interrogation.

  “Back in September, Arquero pressed Zeebus for a weapons shipment. He said it was to arm police auxiliaries in the provinces. The ambassador told Zeebus to get screwed, but he put the request through anyway. Department of State never knew, but the Company went through with the shipment. Five hundred weapons were diverted from a stash going to Laos. M1 carbines and grease guns—serial numbers ground off—along with about twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition. The same stuff the Bolos found at the farm.”

  “Is Zeebus dirty?”

  “He didn’t have a clue.”

  “What about Arquero?” Smith asked. “Did he know the guns were going to the rebels?”

  “He didn’t care. It was a cash deal. He had the weapons trucked to Ñancahuazú and buried at the farmhouse.”

  “Where does President Barrientos fit in?”

  Hoyle handed Smith the notebook. Smith ran his eyes over Hoyle’s jagged script.

  “This thing goes right to the top. The weapons shipment was Barrientos’s idea,” Hoyle said.

  “Why arm Communist guerrillas in your own country?”

  “El presidente figured if the guerrillas got a toehold in Ñancahuazú, he could leverage up U.S. involvement. Barrientos thought if he had a full-on revolution, Uncle Sam would pour in troops and equipment. Once Barrientos had a brand-new army, the guerrillas would get their asses kicked, and Bolivia would become a major regional power—all on our dime.”

  “You willing to bet your ass on this?”

  “Arquero pissed his pants. He was too scared to lie.”

  Smith got behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser. Hoyle got into the passenger seat.

  “You’re lining up a lot of maybes, Mr. Hoyle.”

  “That’s because we don’t have a lot of choices, Mr. Smith.”

  35

  TANIA WAS CURLED into a ball by the iron door, wrapped in darkness so complete that she could not see beyond her nose. The air in the cell was still and lay heavy as a curse. From beyond the darkness came a small click, the turning of a key in a lock. Tania perceived this as she lay concentrating in the dark, her hearing made keen because of the inky blackness. All her senses were sharpened save her sense of smell, which had been rendered useless after a week’s confinement with a pair of corpses. Each time the guards had returned her to the cell after questioning, or a beating, or a session of rape, the stench of the place would leap back at her, a saccharine, stomach-turning tang; and each time the smell assaulted her, it was as horrendous as the first moment when they tossed her into the cell. Heavy and inescapable, it seemed sometimes like a bubbling liquid that had been poured into her skull.

  She heard the crashing open of doors, one made of steel and then one made of bars, and then the bang of jackboots against the cement floor. The steps came closer, and the peephole on the door slid open, admitting a shaft of electric light from the hallway. The latch slapped open with a clang. Tania crabbed away from the door, shielding her dilated eyes from the light flooded dazzlingly into the room.

  She caught a glimpse of the warder, a woman this time, barely visible in the painfully strong light. Stumbling, half-blind, Tania was lifted by the wrist and steered into the hallway. Another jailer stood there, a man, one of her previous interrogators, though now he looked through her, as disinterested as if she had been a piece of litter blowing down the street. He pointed at a bucket and rag placed against a wall.

  “Wash,” he said.

  Tania responded slowly; her eyes had yet to adjust, and she feared a kick, but eventually, she took up the hard piece of soap and the small, dirty bit of cloth and started to wash the filth and shit from her skin. The water was cold and dirty but cleaner by far than she was. The male warder walked away, and the woman stood by, watching impassively.

  “Lave su kulo,” the woman said quietly.

  Tania washed her privates, the lye soap stinging where she had been penetrated. She rubbed the small rag in circles on her skin and half expected that she would soon be shot, for she knew it was easier to have a prisoner bathe than it was for a warder to wash a corpse. Tania completed scrubbing herself and stood dripping, her nipples hard and her back hunched slightly from cold and the pain in her shoulders. The warder positioned her against the wall, handcuffed her, and again an empty rice sack was placed over her head.

  Dripping, naked, Tania was led out through the several doors. Her bare feet eventually discerned wood, and her heart started to beat faster as she was led into a room with a waist-high table and a single folding metal chair. The command came to sit, and Tania obeyed.

  She was left on the cold chair for ten minutes or so, more than enough time to wonder what would come next, a beating, or more questions, or the fat men who held her down and laughed and urinated on her. Through the sack, she could see just a little. The door opened again, and the female warder came back, and Tania heard the rustling of a paper bag. The warder removed Tania’s handcuffs and pulled the cloth sack off her face. Placed on the table, the paper bag contained Tania’s clothing, stockings, underwear, her blue skirt and blouse, her shoes, and the red purse she had carried to indicate that she’d thought it safe for a meeting.

  “Get dressed,” the warder said. “You’re being released.”

  The words hung in the air, first uncomprehended and then unbelieved. The warder left, and Tania sat for a few moments, paralyzed. She thought this must be a ruse. She slipped into her bra and panties, pulled on her stockings, and zipped into her blouse and skirt. As she dressed, she was astounded by the clean and human way her clothing smelled. Her feet were swollen and blackened from the beatings and would not fit into her shoes. She stood for a moment, clutching the empty paper bag, and the warder reentered and held open the steel door. The warder again took her by the wrist and guided her on.

  The first daylight Tania had seen in a week came through the windows of the offices to the left and right. It was early in the morning, and most of the desks were empty, with officers just arriving and starting work. She was guided to a chair next to a desk where a police officer in an olive-drab uniform sat at a typewriter. The female warder handed the officer a file thick with papers. Tania slowly realized that this was her file. It contained a surprising number of documents, pages and pages detailing each one of her “interviews,” a mundane rendition of over a week’s worth of abuse and torture.

  The officer opened Tania’s folder to its first page and inserted a form into his typew
riter. His fingers moved over the machine, and each time he pressed a key, a letter was slapped into the page with a sound like leather striking skin. Tania had time to sit and think of the questions that had been put to her. A thousand, perhaps, punctuated by blows from a nightstick wrapped in newspapers, and by a nylon stocking filled with sand. She remembered punches and kicks, and groping hands on her body. She thought of the interrogators, those who had shouted and those who had asked reasonably—questions about people she did not know, hundreds of questions about Robert and Galán and surprisingly, no questions at all about Guevara or the operation in the Ñancahuazú.

  Her torturers had been focused only on events of the day of her arrest, and thereafter, the contents of her apartment, her cameras, the darkroom in her bathroom, and the shortwave radio. Tania’s answers had been vague and just consistent enough not to contradict. The things they’d found concealed in the false bottom of her suitcase, codebooks and a Minox camera, she pretended not to know about. The suitcase, she swore, belonged to Robert. She lied valiantly that she had not examined it and had no idea it contained a false bottom.

  Tania stuck to the story that she thought Robert was a smuggler, that she barely knew him, and that he paid her occasionally to carry cocaine out of the country. It was a standard technique used against interrogation: Tania admitted to a lesser offense, smuggling, but insisted vehemently that she knew nothing about spies. Under a rain of blows, she maintained that she was a smuggler, and a poor one at that. Her lies were plausible, and she clung to them fiercely, resisting night and day the crude verbal tricks played by her interrogators, and on the third night, when she was dragged from the cell and raped, she realized that they had nothing on her.

  The officer fed another sheet of carbon paper into his machine and clacked away. An overwhelming sorrow seemed to be pouring itself over Tania. The immense, all-consuming sadness gripped her, and as the policeman continued to type, she stifled a sob. The officer pulled the completed form out of the typewriter, clicked a ballpoint pen, and slid the paper to the corner of his desk.