“What happened?”
Zeebus looked tired and a bit put out. “She’s in the bedroom.”
Hoyle pushed past Cosmo and opened one of the bedroom doors. The room was empty, which increased his sense of apprehension. He turned in the hallway. The doctor had placed himself in front of the other door. He said, “Be careful not to wake her, please.”
Hoyle’s mind pushed into fast-forward. He opened the door to find Maria lying on her back, blankets pulled up to her chest. A bottle of plasma hung from the bracket of the overhead light. A thin rubber tube spiraled down to an IV in her arm. A desk lamp was atop the bureau, with a handkerchief placed over it to cut the light. Long shadows went across the room. Hoyle noticed all of these things first because he did not want to look at Maria’s face. It was lopsided. Her hair was pulled back, and there was a square of thick gauze taped to her forehead. Her eyes were closed, swollen and blackened. Her upper lip was split, and there was a livid purple bruise across her chin. Her throat was dappled with bruises—the brown-yellow blotches corresponded with the grip of a strangler.
Hoyle felt as though the floor was lurching under him. He held on to the door frame, looking at the woman in the bed. She was breathing, he could see that; her chest rose and fell steadily under the covers, and he noticed that she gripped at the blanket, the fabric knotted between her fingers as though she had clutched at the covers in a nightmare. Hoyle felt sorrow, agony; he wanted to embrace Maria and to cry like a child. He stood frozen, closed his eyes, and then opened them, but the scene stayed the same; behind him, Zeebus and the doctor said nothing. The apartment was still. He stood for a few long moments looking at Maria, the shadows across her face making her injuries seem even more disfiguring. The ugliness was like an arrow shot into Hoyle’s guts.
“What happened?” he asked.
“A couple of goons kicked in the door to her apartment. I’m guessing they were Policía Nacional. They used a baton on her.”
Hoyle was having difficulty focusing his thoughts, but words surfaced in his brain: The police were sent to do this.
“I’ve given her something to sleep,” the doctor said. He wore the professionally concerned expression that was particular to the field of medicine.
Hoyle robotically stepped back, and the doctor closed the door. Hoyle staggered into the living room and lowered himself onto the couch. Something in him started to churn: fear and grief, then revulsion and anger.
“You know her.” The inflection of Zeebus’s voice was flat. The words had not been formed into a question.
Hoyle nodded. “I know her.”
A few moments passed. Hoyle sat, just short of fury.
“Doctor, could you leave us for a few moments?” Zeebus asked.
The doctor put his empty glass in the sink. “Sure,” he said. “I’m going to turn in.” He walked down the hall into the empty bedroom and clicked the door shut. When they were alone, Zeebus poured out two bourbons and put one on the table in front of Hoyle.
“The neighbors heard the beating. They thought it was a robbery,” Zeebus said.
Hoyle looked down the hallway to Maria’s room. He had a bitter, fleeting memory of his own cruelty and the look on her face. He remembered the events that led to this moment, his own decisions, the things he had left undone. Now they were ordered neatly and in hindsight they pointed straight and inevitably to this calamity. He knew what had happened, and he mostly knew why. He did not know what would happen next. An emotion without a name welled up in his guts—just as quickly, it evaporated, leaving behind a residue of mockery and grief.
“How did you know to call me?”
“The French put Alameda under surveillance a couple of months ago. They found out about her, and then they found out about you. I got a call.”
Hoyle said nothing and planned to say nothing. He stared at the floor.
“Look, pal. It took a lot of bullshit to get her here. She was left for dead. Whether or not she stays under protection depends on my getting the straight stuff from you. I don’t give a shit about your operation up-country. But this impacts my little world, right here. You want a favor from me, then I get what’s going on. Is she an asset?”
“She was working for me.”
“That all?”
“No. That wasn’t all.”
Hoyle looked at the blood on Zeebus’s shirt and realized that he must have helped carry her up the stairs.
“How did she get found out?”
“I don’t know,” Hoyle said. “I don’t know how she got blown up.”
“I don’t normally get involved when things are personal. I try not to let them get personal.”
“She was pregnant.”
Zeebus shook his head. “She lost the baby.”
Hoyle thought of murder. And then he thought carefully, as he did when he crafted an operation, and in his mind he began to put together an untraceable act of violence.
He stood, and Zeebus pushed himself out of the chair. His face looked gray in the way fat people look when they are tired. He stood between Hoyle and the door. “Don’t do anything idiotic,” he said.
Hoyle’s words came slowly. “This was my fault.”
Zeebus looked at him like a man who was owed a big favor.
“Alameda doesn’t know where she is?”
“Nobody knows,” Zeebus said.
“I owe you.”
“Big-time.”
Hoyle opened the door, and Zeebus said again after him, “Don’t do anything idiotic.”
THE BARBERSHOP OFF the lobby in the Hotel Cochabamba was a three-seat affair, brightly lit, although a glass partition and venetian blinds screened its patrons from the traffic in the lobby. There was a mirror running the length of the interior wall, and above a trio of immaculate stainless-steel sinks, tiers of beveled glass held bottles of aftershave. His Excellency El Ministerio de Información sat in the chair closest to the wall, draped in a crisp linen apron with his hair pinned up in clips. The barber sat reading a newspaper by the door while a pretty female assistant applied dye from a plastic bottle to the minister’s scalp. Alameda spent ten minutes looking at himself in the mirror, and after assuring himself that he looked like Warren Beatty, he closed his eyes. It was eleven in the morning; a sign on the door of the shop said CERRADO, and the venetian blinds were drawn and lowered. The shop would be closed to the public until after the minister’s dye job.
The door opened swiftly. The barber did not have time to look up from his paper and could do nothing to stop the man who crossed the shop in three large steps and yanked the minister’s chair around. The assistant stepped back with a squeaky shout of alarm. Alameda opened his eyes and saw Hoyle standing over him. Alameda tried to stand, but Hoyle kicked back the lever on the side of the chair, reclining it fully. With one hand, he shoved the minister back. Alameda’s windpipe was nearly crushed, and his eyes bulged as Hoyle slammed him back against the headrest.
“Remember me?”
Alameda struggled, but the angle of the reclined chair immobilized him, and Hoyle struck him between the eyes with a clenched fist. Alameda’s head snapped back. The blow was terrific, and its shock was magnified by the fact that he could not draw breath. Hoyle struck him three more times, and Alameda’s eyes rolled back in his head. He slumped down, on the verge of unconsciousness, his legs sprawling off the footrest. The force of the blows had knocked him out of one of his shoes. Hoyle twisted a handful of apron tight around the minister’s throat and levered him out of the chair. The man’s legs were rubber, his body lopping about like a scarecrow, and Hoyle shoved him across the room and slammed him into one of the sinks. Shelves against the mirror shattered, and bottles and cans scattered across the floor. Talcum powder burst into clouds, and the piquant smell of aftershave gushed into the room. Alameda’s nose spurted blood, and hair dye ran in rivulets down his face. Hoyle smashed him into the sink and then lifted him to within nose-biting distance.
“I guess the trouble with working fo
r both sides is that you never know what shoulder to look over.” He dabbed a finger into the hair dye running down Alameda’s forehead. He wiped it under both of the man’s eyes, then shoved him face-first into the mirror.
“See that? See that? That’s what Maria looked like when they left her.” Hoyle pushed Alameda down into the sink. Alameda stammered, choked. He could not form words. If he could, he would have begged for his life.
“You couldn’t even do it yourself.”
Alameda’s senses were fleeing him; he was on the verge of blackout. “What?” he croaked. “What business of yours?”
Hoyle shook him like a terrier would a rat. “I ought to beat you to death. I ought to stomp out your heart.” He jammed Alameda back down into the sink, pushed his head underwater, and held him there. After a moment he ripped him up by the hair. Alameda came up sputtering. Hoyle shoved him away, disgusted. Alameda sprawled on the floor, panting.
Hoyle drew his pistol and aimed it down.
“Jesus, no…No, please…I beg you…”
“This is what’s going to happen. You are going to stay away from the woman. Forever. Nothing, nothing is ever going to happen to her. And here’s why.”
Hoyle fired a shot into the floor an inch from Alameda’s head. The sound of the pistol exploded in the room. The report of the weapon rattled the glass, broken and unbroken. A grunt escaped Alameda’s lips. The stunning, painfully loud noise of the shot echoed in his head.
“Pay attention,” Hoyle said. “I’m going to tell your Communist friends that you’ve been keeping a list. All the passports you’ve sold them. I’m going to tell them that you’ve offered to sell this list to me. To the CIA.”
“They’ll know…I wouldn’t…”
Hoyle fired another shot into the floor between Alameda’s legs. He yelped like a little girl on a playground.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll sell them my own list. You’re as good as dead. Every day another Party member gets arrested. I’m going to put the word out that it’s you providing the names. And then maybe I’ll stop off at the DIC and tell them you’re a Communist agent. Man, I’m gonna be busy, just trying to keep people informed of the shit you’ve been up to.”
Alameda swallowed and choked. His lip was cut open, and his mouth was full of blood.
Hoyle put away his weapon. Alameda panted, trying to gather a lungful of air. His head pounded. The entire world he’d built and balanced so flawlessly was going to pieces. He had no idea what to say or do. A hundred half-thoughts flashed in his head. The Party would not take kindly to being informed upon. Even suspected informers were liquidated. But there was a deal to be made here. There was always a deal to be made.
“No,” Alameda stammered, “wait, don’t go. Don’t go—” He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t do as he asked. His hand came down on the shattered end of a bottle, and he added more of his blood to the wreckage.
“Good luck,” Hoyle said.
Alameda heard the crunching of Hoyle’s shoes on the broken glass and the oddly gay tinkling of the bell on the door as he left the shop.
52
AN HOUR AFTER dawn, the sky remained troubled and yellow; surly-looking clouds snatched at the hilltops as the column splashed across the Mosquera River and went into the forest again, men and pack animals alike made wide awake, then chilled and irritable, by the cold water. Guevara had been among the last to ford and did so with his feet dry on the back of the old red mare. Crossing dry-shod made him feel faintly guilty, and as the column reassembled on the far bank, he give his place in the saddle to Coco, who had an abscess behind his knee and was limping badly. Willy helped shove Coco up onto the back of the mare, and Guevara shambled along at the rear of the column.
An hour or so later the trail leveled and they came to the spot called Gálavez on the map. It had been marked by a small circle, the symbol for a village, but the place was only three huts on a hillside overlooking the river. As the army increased its presence in the valley, it spread rumors of Communist atrocities—lately peasants fled at the approach of the guerrillas. This was the case in Gálavez. The forward detachment found the first house abandoned. At the second, no one was home. At the third was a nervous peasant, his wife, and three children. The farmer said that the neighboring family had gone to Abapó to buy supplies, but he was obviously lying. In the first house, a fire was smoldering in the hearth, and chickens pecked at a bag of feed dropped in a doorway. When the scouts returned, they reported finding tire prints in the mud along the two-track road on the near side of the river. The peasant again said he knew nothing, though the tire tracks were fresh and the road was under half a mile away.
Guevara was certain the army was about. As a precaution, he ordered that the farmer’s son, a gangling adolescent of fifteen, accompany the column until it reached the other side of the road leading to Abapó. The kid was named Tomás, and though his mother wept, he at first seemed flattered to be taken as a hostage. Guevara made certain he was treated well by the comrades. Tomás walked all morning, looking about the forest as though he had never seen it before. Guevara did not doubt that the father would inform the army that the guerrillas had passed; he could only hope that the man would not do so until his son was returned. If all went quietly, they would release the boy in the evening.
Guevara’s guts rumbled, and these pains, in addition to his labored breath, made him melancholy and distracted. As they walked uphill from the river, the boy stayed close to him, following like a dog. Guevara had a premonition that there would soon be contact with the army. This was less clairvoyance than an assessment of warnings and indicators. There was the farmer’s obvious nervousness and the tire tracks along the river road and something about the forest. The day was still, and the air hung between the trees like a thing pulled taut. Guevara sent Begnino up through the column to warn the forward detachment to be alert for ambush. This was done, and the remains of morning passed slowly, the column bunching up and spreading out as they negotiated some difficult terrain following the river north.
The boy became increasingly sad the farther they walked from his farm and by the middle of the afternoon, he skulked along with his hands in his pockets. As the trail climbed up past the headwaters of Suspiro Creek, the trees parted, and the column emerged at a shabby break in the forest. Stumps and ashes were scattered where brush had been burned and the clearing opened onto a series of neatly tended fields planted with corn and pumpkins. Clinging to the tree line, the column moved forward.
From down the valley came a growling sound, the noise of an aircraft engine, and without command, the column edged away from the open ground and took cover under the trees. The noise of the engine became louder and echoed off the hillside, a deep, throaty resonance. Guevara fished the binoculars out of his pack and pointed them up at the sky. The aircraft was not one of the slow spotter planes but a World War II–surplus Mustang fighter. The aircraft was sleek, and a shark’s mouth had been painted on its nose. Slung under its wings were very modern bombs and canisters of napalm.
The column remained under the trees and watched the aircraft strafe and then napalm a hillside a mile away. Pillars of smoke blossomed up from the forest, and several seconds after the blasts, the sound rolled over them like stuttering thunder. The boy began to cry, and as the plane circled, the guerrillas watched their commander intently. He remained impassive. The burning hilltop was neither somewhere they had been nor a place they were going, and it did not matter if the Bolivians wanted to strafe empty jungle. When the aircraft at last flew off, Guevara ordered the column forward. Word was passed that they would stop in Piray, and the fact that the day’s march now had an objective and an ending point lifted morale slightly. The comrades moved out with a purpose.
When they continued the march it took every bit of Guevara’s strength to bear the weight of his pack. He stood panting and watched as the center group passed, and then he staggered a few paces after the mules and the horse. The trail was uneven, but once ac
ross the open space the cover was good overhead, and he did not worry any longer about the airplane. He walked about a mile, and his pack seemed to grow heavier. He had been without his regular medicine for days and he was nearly stupefied by the effort it took to draw breath. The column moved steadily, and he tottered under the pack, numbly placing one foot in front of the other. His lungs could not give him the air he needed, and his thoughts gradually began to come apart. What he sensed around him, the trail and the trees, the call of birds and the chatter of insects, all of it became a sort of hallucination, a perception close to what was happening but not reality. As he plodded along, his ideas reduced themselves to causes and remedies, to blacks and whites. Twice he nearly staggered off the trail and tumbled down the slope.
The column had moved on, and after a while, Guevara and Tomás found themselves alone on the trail. Only the boy noticed; Guevara was reeling and trembling, muttering gibberish and sweating profusely. An agony blossomed in his guts, a sharpening cramp that doubled him, and he lurched onto his knees at the side of the trail and vomited heavily. Light seemed to be going out everywhere after he’d puked, and when he tried to pull himself back up against a tree, his knees buckled. His rucksack pulled him over, and he was dragged onto his back.
Tomás watched indifferently as Guevara toppled over. Half-conscious, he tried to come to hands and knees. “Help me up,” he gasped, but the boy did nothing. He looked up the trail. There was no one else in sight. The forest was silent, and there was only the sound of Guevara panting.
“Help me—”
Guevara vomited again, and Tomás took a step backward. He seemed astonished at himself, liberated by one small step toward his home. There was no one to stop him. As Guevara waved his arms for help, the boy ran away through the jungle as fast as he could.
Choking on puke and gasping for breath, Guevara sprawled on the trail and as he lost consciousness, the light came through the tops of the trees and rippled over him. This light became like the reflection of sun off the ocean, and a vastness bigger than the whole world seemed to yawn under him. He felt himself slipping off and down. The emptiness seemed to expand around him; his body had betrayed him cruelly, and these agonies propelled him deeper into empty space. Incredible shapes moved in front of his eyes, designs that could never be real, things he should have known were fantastic and absurd. For the rest, he remembered nothing, though his eyes remained open, and the sun shone into them and through them into his soul.
Killing Che Page 41
