Killing Che

by Chuck Pfarrer

  The electric clock in the kitchen made a low, rasping sound as it sawed through an hour and then another and Maria sat and thought about Hoyle. She wondered where he was and remembered his wounded expression as he’d handed over the envelope. He had seemed infuriated and shamed all at once, and as he had turned to leave, she’d seen in his eyes an immense and incalculable coldness. The look was frightening because she had not seen it in him before. His green eyes had been made into ice. He seemed to look on the world with a powerful, evenhanded malice, the way a tiger looks out through the bars of a cage. She did not think she would ever see him again. This fact, too, she had tried to ignore. It surprised her that the thought of never seeing Hoyle again made her feel strangely hollow. Her emotions were complex; there was uncertainty about her pregnancy and fear about her circumstances. She did not know what would happen, and already she felt angst for the lies she knew she’d have to tell. But she did not condemn herself, not for her affair with Hoyle and not for what he had seen. Life was complicated, bitterly so, and she did what she had to do to live.

  Maria brushed her hair and put on the little makeup she normally wore, eyeliner and a hint of eye shadow, a pale lipstick. She looked at her face in the mirror and did not consider herself at all beautiful. She saw complication and worry and half a dozen lies floating around her. She thought, I am a long way from the place I was raised. There was so much untruth around her, it seemed like the air that people breathed.

  Alameda turned his key in the lock and came into the apartment at a little past one in the afternoon. He was in good spirits and kissed her and cooed some compliments. A look of interest, not quite sympathy, came into his eyes. “What’s the matter?”

  Maria stood motionless, and Alameda took a step back, weighing the expression on her face.

  “I am pregnant.”

  Alameda’s hand touched the buttons of his shirt, a gesture of slight but genuine surprise. “Ahh,” he said.

  Maria’s eyes did not release him. He walked to the couch and sat. He gave her an odd look, half a smile.

  “Well, this is a complication. How long?”

  “Two months. Two and half.”

  Alameda crossed his legs and leaned his shoulder blades back against the cushions. “Have you told anyone?”

  Maria did not answer but gave a small shake of her head. She’d told only Hoyle, and that could never be admitted. Alameda seemed to find some relief in the fact that no one else knew. It occurred to Maria that there were a hundred other things he might have asked—Have you been sick, how are you feeling, are you happy?—instead, he wanted to find out who else knew.

  “I think that this will be the end of us,” Maria said.

  Alameda’s head came forward unconsciously, almost a nod. “Nonsense,” he said. “This can be taken care of. In Bogotá, I can arrange everything. It will be only a weekend away, and everything will be as it was.” He nodded, assenting to his own suggestion.

  “I don’t want it taken care of.”

  “Maria, don’t be absurd.”

  “I have thought about it, and I want to have the baby.”

  “I care for you, but there are things that I cannot allow.”

  “I am not asking your permission.”

  Alameda could see Maria’s reflection in the mirror over her dressing table. He saw also the rosary draped over the mirror. He looked at the floor for a moment. He made calculations. The basis of these reckonings was, of course, that he cared more for himself than he did for Maria or a child.

  “Don’t say foolish things. I’m not angry. Can’t you see that I’m not angry? There is a proper way to handle this, and I can arrange it.”

  “I won’t have an abortion.”

  She’d said a word that Alameda would have danced around for an hour.

  “Not in La Paz, Maria. In Bogotá or Panama City.”

  “No.”

  Maria sat and drew in a breath. Alameda could not have expected this quiet and steely determination.

  “I have had time to think about this,” Maria said. “It would be easier and better for us both if I simply went away.”

  “You can’t go anywhere. Not off by yourself.”

  “Please let me finish. I am merely an ornament to you.”

  “You are more than that.”

  “Not much more. You do not love me.”

  “The only words I have not said. That can’t be what this is about. You can’t be doing this to blackmail me into saying that I love you.”

  Her green eyes flashed. “You are a conceited man. Do you think I would do this to trap you? Do you think that’s necessary for me?”

  Alameda ignored the question. “Maria, I do care for you. Look around. Are you not provided for?”

  “You have been generous,” Maria said.

  “I have. And in return, all I am asking you to do is think a little about the future.”

  “Your future or my own?”

  “It can still be our future.”

  “I knew what I was doing when we started to see each other. I knew that this could happen. I did not know what I would do until a few days ago. I know that I cannot stay here. I know that you have a career and a family. I have always known that, and I have always put myself second.” She paused, and her voice wavered slightly. “I’m going to have the baby,” she said. “I am going to do it. All I am asking you to do is allow me to go away.”

  “Where would you go? You cannot go back to Cuba.”

  “I don’t know. To France, perhaps back to Lyon.”

  “You are not thinking clearly. And then what? How would you live?”

  “I can work.”

  “And raise a child alone?”

  A few moments passed. She’d made the decision to keep the baby. She did not care now, really, who the father was; the child would be hers.

  “You are not thinking clearly,” he repeated.

  “I didn’t expect you to change your mind about my having the baby. I never thought to have the child here in Bolivia. I am prepared to go.”

  Alameda thought briefly of allowing Maria to go away, perhaps to Argentina or Spain. If she were provided for, there would be little shame in it for him. If the arrangement were discovered, there might be trouble with his wife and her family, definitely, but the political trouble, that he could weather. This was the private business of a public man. The president himself had a daughter in Chile. But Alameda did not wish Maria gone, at least not now.

  “You need to think about this,” he said. “It’s only a small procedure. Then we can go back to the way we were before.”

  Maria was silent.

  “Were you not happy the way that we have been?”

  Had she been happy or in love, she would not have wandered into Hoyle’s arms.

  “You have been happy, Enrique.”

  “I will not stand for insolence. Not in the apartment that I pay for.” Alameda slumped against the couch. “Where does this come from? Have you been talking to a priest?”

  “It is my conviction.” Her eyes showed this.

  “An expensive one,” Alameda answered. He did not conceal his opinion very well—he thought his mistress was beautiful, but it was entirely unnecessary that she be so willful.

  “I am not asking you to pay for anything,” Maria said. “I am only asking you to let me go.”

  Alameda stood and put his hands on Maria’s face and swayed gently this way and that. He wore an expression of great affection. He ran his fingers through her hair and whispered against her ear, “You don’t want to leave me. I know you don’t.”

  Maria closed her eyes. It was as though her thoughts had given out altogether. She felt his arms move around her waist and pull her close.

  “I will take care of you.”

  She wondered for an instant if he was telling the truth or spinning a more honorable sort of lie. Perhaps he did care for her, and that was the reason he had done all he had done—fed her, clothed her, given her a job and papers. Per
haps it was only that he pitied her.

  He embraced her and kissed her neck, and Maria thought, No one can sink lower than this—to be pitied by a liar.

  48

  AT DAYBREAK HOYLE, Charlie, and Santavanes departed from the village of Pirirenda, following a ravine toward the Ñancahuazú River. Santavanes carried a complicated backpack on an aluminum frame. Deliberately and conspicuously nonmilitary, it was made of blue nylon and had two large pockets sewn on either side. Smith remarked that it was the sort of pack that hippies carried to Amsterdam. The backpack contained some food, two canteens, water purification tablets, a mosquito net, a hammock, and a rubberized poncho: things he would need to spend a few days in the valley. Hoyle carried an AK-47 rifle borrowed from Major Holland. This compensated for the fact that Santavanes was unarmed and Charlie had asked to be excused from carrying a weapon. The request had exasperated Santavanes, and Hoyle had calmly asked Charlie why.

  The answer was delivered plainly: “I don’t think that I could shoot anyone.”

  Hoyle granted Charlie’s request, as he expected no trouble; all they meant to do was accompany Santavanes through the steepest terrain and deliver him onto the valley floor. Hoyle was fairly certain that Charlie’s job description—whatever it was—did not include bearing arms during an insurgency, so he did not force the issue. Charlie nevertheless accompanied them, for reasons of prudence if nothing else, three being the minimum number of men who could go into a wild place and help themselves if one were somehow injured.

  A trail led out of Pirirenda, following its eponymous creek, switching back a number of times and twice crossing the water at steep places where rocks and fallen logs made it possible to get over without getting wet. As the ravine opened, they abandoned the trail and kept close against the hillside until they reached a finger where the forest jutted into the valley.

  The plan was for Santavanes to continue south along a hunter’s trail that went down the valley floor. Two villages were along this route, Yaquí and El Meson, and Santavanes would offer money at each place to be guided to the guerrillas. This cover was his sole protection. The guerrillas had three times encountered the army and had each time released prisoners unharmed; it was assumed that they would not mistreat a journalist.

  Hoyle checked his watch; it was eleven in the morning, and thirty kilometers upriver, Smith and Holland were preparing to set Valdéz on a similar journey. It was getting cooler, and even as the sun spread over the hills, Hoyle felt a chill once they stopped walking. As they rested, Santavanes went through his papers one last time. All were made out in the name George Andrew Roth, forming the legend of a freelance English-Argentine photojournalist. Santavanes passed his eye over the address on the documents, committing it to memory, as he did the particulars of the several visas stamped on the pages and the Buenos Aires phone number listed as an emergency contact.

  “Almost time,” Hoyle said.

  Santavanes stood and pulled on his pack. They reviewed the procedures for rendezvous after the mission, evolutions of basic importance.

  “Primary pickup will be the village of Yaquí in forty-eight hours,” Hoyle said. “Secondary meeting place will be at El Meson in seventy-two hours. We’ll check the roadside one kilometer south of town every twelve hours after that. You have your Coke can?” In Santavanes’s pack was a can of Coca-Cola; it would be discarded at the side of the road as a signal that he was hiding nearby.

  “I got it.”

  Santavanes had committed to memory the course of the river, the ravines and draws, and the locations of the crossings. He could draw the map from memory, a skill that, like the wearing of a cover, was vital to an agent in the field.

  “You have any major deviations, it’s your responsibility to get to a road or a telegraph. Contact the intelligence officer of the Fourth Division. We’ll be monitoring there if you’re overdue.”

  Charlie noticed that Santavanes’s eyes were bright and that he looked eager.

  “Okay,” Hoyle said, “you’re a go. Good luck.”

  Hoyle and Charlie remained in the tree line and watched as Santavanes passed down the trail. They were high enough on the hillside to watch him disappear and reemerge from the last stand of hardwood, and then monitor his progress as he worked his way down to the river and turned south. Hoyle stood cradling his rifle and leaning against a tree; he waited until Santavanes disappeared from view maybe eight hundred yards away, swallowed by the brush that crowded the riverbank.

  “Is this going to work?” Charlie asked.

  “He’s pretty hard to kill.”

  Charlie smiled. It had been a good morning for him. He’d expected trouble when he’d asked not to carry a gun into the jungle. Hoyle had surprised him by shrugging and sticking the rifle back under the seat of the Land Cruiser. Charlie had meant it when he said he didn’t think he could shoot anyone, and Hoyle silently agreed. Hoyle had shot people, several of them, and did not think it was for everyone.

  IT WAS COLD at night, almost bitter under a sky without clouds, and Guevara’s asthma gripped him so that he curled up in his hammock with his hands between his knees, drawing thin, shallow breaths between clenched teeth. He had given orders that the column was to continue south at three-thirty A.M., and when the time came to rise, his limbs were stiff. He imagined that the others could hear his bones creaking as he tried to rise and he felt as bad as he’d ever felt. Moro came to his hammock and shone a penlight into his throat, listened to his chest, and plainly heard the wheezing in it. There was no more Thomaquil, so he gave Guevara an injection of atrophine sulfate. It seemed to help, and Guevara was able to take down and roll up his hammock. Moro took the comandante’s pack and carried it to the place the animals were being loaded.

  “Hey, listen,” he said to Coco. “The comandante is feeling like shit this morning.”

  “Who isn’t?” Coco answered. His face was only a shadow, and the expression that framed this comment could not be seen.

  “I want you not to load up the red mare,” Moro said. “Have those comrades carry their own packs.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the comandante is too sick to walk,” Moro said.

  The red mare was led into camp and the proposition put to Guevara. He resisted at first, but Moro prevailed, speaking to him privately and asking him frankly if he thought he was well enough to keep up with the column. Guevara knew he would hold the troops back—he had hardly been able to stagger to the fire to get coffee. Finally, he relented. Pombo helped him up into the saddle, patting the flank of the horse, a docile and placid animal. She had no name, and Guevara suggested Rocinante, perhaps the most famous nag in Spanish literature.

  The column broke camp, and clouds lowered from the peaks in the hours before dawn, making the cold both damp and clinging. The night seemed to get darker, and as the moon had set to the west, Pombo led the mare by the bridle over the rougher parts of the trail. Where the column passed under tree cover, it was so dark that they had to keep together by holding on to the shoulder of the man ahead. Those on the point moved slowly by scuffing their feet forward like barefoot men crossing a strange, darkened bedroom.

  In the blackness, occasionally there was a cough, or the creak of leather, and now and again came the sound of the mules snorting behind them. For the first part of the march, Guevara felt so bad that he was thankful of the dark. His breathing was labored, and his face was twisted by a nearly constant grimace; his ears were numb, and there was a hard, burning pain around his heart. He was embarrassed to be riding, but he was too ill to resist the consideration of his men. He calmed his indignity by telling himself that when the sun came up, he would dismount and walk. The asthma always came in waves, and this wave would pass, he was sure of that. But now his head drooped and his shoulders hunched forward as he surrendered to the easy swaying of the horse.

  Dawn came slowly, and Guevara felt no better. If possible, he felt worse and twice had to dismount to vomit at the side of the trail. He let the men pass
and waved away each concerned inquiry, saying sternly that he was okay and asking that he be allowed to puke in private like everybody else. Sandoval and D’Esperey witnessed one of these occasions and gave each other a long, serious look. Pombo urged them on with a few curse words and helped Guevara back into the saddle.

  They made ten kilometers like this, stopping and starting, and at noon, under a low, drab sky, word came back that the forward detachment had surrounded a small farm owned by a Guaraní Indian couple. They blinked in terror and wonder as the guerrilla column came into their fields from the forest. The decision to rest at the farm was made by Miguel, who had replaced Marcos as head of the forward detachment. He knew that Guevara was sick and had deployed the men without asking advice from the center column. Guevara came into the first field on the red mare. He was draped in a poncho and had his rifle balanced across the pommel of his saddle. He rode right up to the small hovel and dismounted wearily.

  The house was under a stand of trees, and a scruffy cornfield spread off to the east. Pigs rutted in a wallow fenced in by long split rails, and a mangy bitch circled the men, wagging her tail vigorously. As Guevara had directed, Inti had introduced himself to the man and woman as the guerrilla column’s leader, but they saw through this and watched as Guevara’s horse was led away and he was asked quietly about where to mount the guard. The farmer wore tan pants and a wool jacket, and the woman was dressed in a bell-shaped pollera skirt; they would have been fit for a postcard were it not for their poverty, which, up close, was dirty and aromatic. The man had a fedora pulled down on his head and pretended to speak very little Spanish. He was quite anxious for the guerrillas to move on, as he feared reprisal from the army.