Killing Che

by Chuck Pfarrer

  Hoyle looked down and saw the red dirt of the Vallegrande airfield heaving up under the skids; dust blew into the sky, and the helicopter settled. A panel truck rolled to a stop in front of the still-churning helicopter. The Huey’s engine faded in a protracted whine. Hoyle slid from his seat and stood on the port skid as Guevara’s body was pulled from the aluminum deck of the cabin and loaded into the truck.

  As the corpse was handed over, a thick black trickle of blood oozed from a sag in the tarp and spilled into the gasping dirt. The doors of the van were held open, and a Bolivian officer gestured for Hoyle to come into the back of the vehicle with the body.

  Hoyle lifted his fingers to the bandage across his eye and said to Valdéz, “You go with them.”

  Valdéz got into the van and pulled closed the doors. The truck rolled away toward the Señor de Malta Hospital, at the edge of town. There, Guevara’s corpse would be washed by the sisters of the hospital and laid out on the sinks in the laundry. The face that had been haunted by frustration and passion was now calm; they sponged the thin, almost skeletal body and combed the hair out of his face. A hundred photographs would be taken of Che Guevara hauled out onto the cement sinks with his mouth ajar and his eyes open and bright. Townspeople, journalists, and military officers would all file past to make certain that the phantom of the Ñancahuazú had been after all only a man of flesh and blood.

  In the night, after the pictures had all been taken, a fat-faced colonel came from La Paz to see that the body was buried in a secret place off the runway. Under a small moon, Guevara’s hands were sawed off and placed in a jar of formaldehyde, a ghastly trophy for the generals. The bodies of Guevara and the others were tossed into a slit trench and bulldozed over. No marker or stone would be placed over their common grave. The story would be put about that Che Guevara had been cremated and his ashes dumped into the Rio Grande. To the killers in La Paz, deceit on top of murder did not seem a very great offense.

  Hoyle walked half a mile from the helicopter to the casita at the far end of the airfield. He found the small house empty. The Green Berets were gone, their tents struck and their weapons and radios all scooped up and borne away. The place howled of abandonment.

  Hoyle stumbled in. His head pounded, his limbs were stiff, and he collapsed on the cot and stared with one bleary eye at the ceiling beams. Somewhere a beetle crashed against the walls, flew in circles, and hit the stucco again and again.

  After a few moments of gloomy silence, a flicker of self-loathing clutched at him; it took hold like a flame creeping over dried kindling. A cold, bitter light was put out by this flame of judgment. Hoyle imagined the serial failures of his life, his childhood, his marriage, his career in the agency. A succession of small and large calamities loomed behind his eyes; his life seemed to be a train of self-inflicted disasters instead of accomplishment. For his sins, he’d been sent to the end of the world and made an accomplice to shameful murder.

  Why hadn’t he done something? Why hadn’t he taken Guevara away?

  The men in the ravine and what they’d set out to do had been blown away, and there was nothing else to be done; no way for slaughter to be undone or for the dead to be made to walk upright and smile and go home to their families. Hoyle thought of the three prisoners marched behind the ambulance and of the corporal who’d calmly placed a muzzle against the back of their heads. Guevara had heard the shots before Hoyle came in with Merán; he had heard the shots that killed his companions, men loyal unto death, and then death came for Guevara, too. Hoyle had carried it in like an errand boy delivering a bill.

  A useless idea of suicide came, and Hoyle remembered all at once the letter that had been found concealed in Guevara’s backpack. His hand went to the pocket of his shirt, and he unrolled it.

  The paper was jagged at the top, where it had been pulled from a spiral pad, and the handwriting ran across the lines in a fluid cursive. The ink was smeared on the edges where water had soaked through it, and stains worked along the folded creases. Hoyle held the paper up in the orange light that came through the open door, the last light of a day filled with dust and blood.

  8 October 1967

  My Aleida,

  If one day you read this letter, it will be because I have come to the end of my journey. I have tried to be a man who acted according to his beliefs. Many will call me an adventurer, and I am, but of a different type—of those who place their lives in the balance to demonstrate the truth.

  If my modest efforts have freed one person—saved one mind from enslavement—I will have succeeded. I depart a country and a people who received me as a son. And now I must leave you, the one perfect and beautiful thing in this world, and that wounds my spirit. Know always that I have loved you, only I have not known how to show my love. With you remains the purest of my hopes and the most precious part of my life.

  If this final hour finds me under other skies, my last thoughts will be of you. Remember once in a while the tender lover who held you in moonlight. Remember the tears you have kissed from my eyes. My love to our precious children. I embrace you through eternity.

  Che.

  59

  HOYLE STOOD ON the stairs and looked into the alcove of Maria’s apartment. The door was off its hinges, and what he could see inside was the debris of looters. He felt that someone was watching him from the street and turned to see a pair of small, intense faces, with dark eyes and frowns, glinting up at him from the stairs. Two neighborhood kids stood with their hands on the metal banister. The silent children knew what Hoyle was just apprehending, that after Maria had been attacked, her neighbors had come into the apartment and taken what they wanted, furniture, plates and pots and pans, the curtains, even her clothing. The children had climbed the stairs behind him, and they turned and ran back down onto the sidewalk and away.

  Hoyle stepped from the landing into the apartment. He’d never been inside, he’d only seen a glimpse of the place, a corner of it through the window on the night he’d seen Maria and Alameda. He could not imagine that neat, bright room now. It did not seem possible to even remember the bolt of emotion that had torn through him that night; his pain and humiliation seemed like an small, meaningless fact committed to memory.

  Hoyle’s shoes crunched shattered glass. The light through the broken windows came unevenly around him. The place was smashed up beyond the violence necessary for looting. Daubed in red paint on the wall were the words COMUNISTA, TRAIDORA, PUTA. He knelt and lifted a photograph from the floor; it was in a cracked wooden frame, and he poured the shards from the print and angled it into the light. What remained of the picture showed Maria standing on a beach, the sea the color of lapis lazuli. With her stood an older woman, her mother, definitely, for the lines of her face were the same, and the green eyes held the camera. In the photograph Maria was smiling, but her mother was not. She had about her an unsettled, anxious look, as though she had been troubled by a premonition. The photograph seemed like a mirror held up to a mirror of calamity.

  “Hello?” he said into empty space.

  A small sound came from the kitchen. It did not even at first seem to be a voice, merely the echo of wreckage.

  “I’m here,” Maria said.

  Hoyle moved to the small room Maria used to prepare her meals. The cabinets hung open and had been swept empty; the stove had been pried away from the wall. Maria leaned against one of the counters by the water tap. Her lip was cut at the corner, and there were the yellow smudges of bruises on her throat and arms.

  When he saw her, Hoyle felt as though he were a small scuttling creature, absurd and empty of anything. He did not try to escape by turning away his gaze. He looked directly at Maria, and she at him. There were a few long seconds when their silence was a curtain behind which anything could happen.

  Maria saw the cuts and the bandage over his eye. Beyond his obvious injuries, there was something anxious and defeated about him. He seemed like a man who needed hope no longer: His end had come.

  Maria
remembered too well the things that had happened to her, the beating that had nearly killed her, her surreptitious convalescence, and the doctor from the embassy who’d helped her, but she had no idea what had happened to Hoyle. She inclined her head and started to form a question. Hoyle shook his head.

  “I missed you at the safe house,” he said. “The doctor said you left yesterday.”

  “I appreciate all they did for me. I couldn’t stay there any longer.”

  “I’m sorry, Maria. I’m sorry this has happened.”

  Her eyes closed for moment, a gesture like surrender. She said, “Other people did this, not you.”

  Hoyle had dreamed of her so many times since the moment in the café; he’d wished ten thousand times that things were different, and until this moment, he had not specifically known what it was that he wanted. A thin strip of light came through one of the windows—it was ocher-colored, city light, and it lay like a discarded bit of crepe paper on the floor between them. With difficulty, Hoyle took a step toward her. His foot came down on a bit of broken glass, and it snapped under his shoe. Hoyle lifted up his arms, and Maria staggered into the space between them.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so goddamn sorry,” he said.

  He held her tightly and pressed his face against her hair. Something seemed to break in her, and she began to weep. Her face was buried in his shoulder. She was saying something; he could not hear the words.

  It had seemed so simple once, love and its opposite, and for a moment he pretended he understood, then he felt empty with the effort.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Three simple words, and for the first time in his life, he expected nothing in return. His keenness to possess her had imploded. He did not expect her to say that she loved him, or even acknowledge his feelings. He said it because it was one true thing; he did not think she loved him, or had ever loved him.

  It did not matter.

  As he held her, his brain burned with the smell of her skin, and what he had in his heart for her he understood would not be given back. Hoyle knew that even if she did say the three words, they would be empty. He still loved her, more, much more, than he loved himself; the emotion inside him had come through everything—violence, jealousy, self-conscious grieving, and bitter hopelessness. He knew she did not love him. She had never pretended; she had affection for him, but it was not love. And it would not become love, not now.

  How could it? Look at what had happened. He had caused this.

  “What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?” he whispered. “You can’t stay here, Maria.”

  “I was only a small part of this. Of things that were…bigger than my life. And now…I’ve lost everything.”

  Hoyle closed his eye and rocked her in his arms.

  He felt the bandage on his eye press against her face, and he thought, We are all lost.

  THE AIRPORT WAS a white cement building with a short glass-sided control tower perched in its middle. Its only ornamentation was a vaguely Incan frieze above the rectangular black-trimmed windows: masks with empty, pining expressions and grinning teeth. Hoyle pulled the Land Cruiser to the curb and slipped a few Bolivianos to a porter at the sidewalk.

  “Uno momento, Señor. Y entonces me piro,” he said.

  Hoyle opened the trunk and dragged out a small overnight bag and an attaché case. He placed these on the curb and helped Maria from the passenger seat. A pair of grim-faced military policemen watched him lead Maria into the terminal. The building inside was low-ceilinged, with a gray terra-cotta floor and fluorescent lights. The counter for Pan American Airways was a small three-agent affair, with one line reserved for first class. Hoyle walked to the head of this line and placed the overnight bag on the scales. “Madrid y Vienna.”

  He waved the tickets at the agent, who looked vexed and started to say something about the flight’s imminent departure. Hoyle’s good eye rolled over the small, aggrieved woman, and she clammed up in midsyllable. There were tickets only for Maria, and the agent thought that both these people must have been in some kind of accident.

  Holding Maria’s hand, Hoyle took her toward a customs desk under a blue sign near the back of the building. A gray-suited immigration officer took the papers from Hoyle, opened the cover, and ran his eyes over the document. Maria’s picture was affixed to an Austrian passport bearing the name Michel Nemick. The officer noticed at once that Maria was wearing the same dress as in the photograph and that her face was bruised in exactly the same manner. He noticed, too, that the passport was uncreased, though there were several visas stamped into it. As the officer examined her papers, Maria held her breath and heard a roaring in her ears. Two crisp fifty-dollar notes were tucked into the cover, and pretending to examine the visas, the customs officer placed the passport on the shelf under the counter. As he inked the stamp, his thumb glided the money from the pages. The bribe was not technically necessary. Maria’s passport was of extremely high quality, the finest Soviet forgery, but the officer had already processed the flight’s passengers and was not disposed to do anything else. Like everyone, the officer had a price, and exigency was factored into it. He handed the passport back to Maria.

  “Goce del vuelo.” The officer gave a faint, insincere smile of complicity.

  After the muted light of the terminal, the sky above the tarmac seemed astonishingly bright and the runway flat and vast. Outside the awning, a gaggle of passengers stood around the apron, waiting to be called forward by the stewardesses. As she stared about at the other passengers, Maria realized, slowly, that she really was going to leave Bolivia. She could not smile, even though she felt a great lightness of heart building in her. She could not trust the circumstances, she dared not, and thus she did her best to push down the emotion. She was still shaken from the brush with the customs man; she looked around and saw another policeman standing off to the side of the terminal. He carried a short, deadly-looking weapon—it frightened her like a broken promise.

  Maria had experienced an odd sense of liberation when the officer handed back the passport—a snare that she had slipped through. And until this moment, none of the preparations or Hoyle’s sincere reassurances during the long drive up from La Paz had meant anything to her. Now she saw the airplane, heard it, and she began timidly to hope again. Hoyle walked Maria out onto the tarmac and steered her toward the edge of the crowd. She listened to the whine of the engines starting one by one, and she smelled the sharp tang of kerosene as the plane began to make ready.

  A woman in a plaid coat eyed them with the same wary disgust as the ticket agent. Hoyle’s size and the gauze stuck over his eye gave him the menacing look of a pirate, something his intense demeanor did nothing to dispel. He waited until the plaid coat moved away, and he handed Maria the attaché case.

  “There’s five thousand dollars sewn into the lining. When you get to Vienna, contact the name in the address book. Tell her you’re a friend of the organization. She’ll get you new documents and an Austrian identity card. Pick a name and start a new life.”

  Maria held Hoyle and felt tenderness and gratitude, but also a building and gnawing sense of dread. Tears ran off her nose. She lifted her eyes toward the airplane, now humming and blowing and ready to fly, and fear clutched her. She felt like she was standing on the edge of a yawning, empty chasm.

  “Please come with me.”

  “No. You deserve more than I can give.”

  Maria kissed him, and as she held him, she said again, “Please, Paul, please come with me.”

  Hoyle kept his arms about her, and though he’d been certain his heart was past being broken, he felt it divide inside him.

  “I am afraid,” Maria said. She could hardly see through her tears.

  Hoyle held Maria and pictured her walking on a street in Vienna with snow falling around. He imagined a gray sky spread over her and snow clean and white and covering everything. He would no longer have the comfort of her; he said inwardly to himself that he must not even thi
nk of her any longer.

  A stewardess descended the wheeled staircase placed against the plane. She waved a white glove at the crowd, and it edged forward, businessmen in jackets and ties and women in hats.

  “Go. Make yourself a home, Maria. Give yourself a new life. Go and never think of this place again.”

  Hoyle embraced her one last time and then opened his arms to let her go, as he had let go of every other precious thing in his life. “Just go.”

  Maria reeled toward the airplane. As she climbed the stairs, she tried to remember what she had felt for Hoyle, but these recollections all seemed so distant that they cast no light into her mind. She knew he loved her; she’d heard him plainly when he said the words. She thought, How wicked I must be. She was leaving behind a man who loved her, and perhaps she was abandoning all love forever. Once she might have taken a different path, but it was too late now. She began to hate herself for accepting safety—hers was to be the unwavering guilt of a survivor. She was being allowed to go on living, though the wound in her heart was so great that it did not even occur to her to thank the man who’d delivered her from evil.

  Hoyle stood alone on the tarmac and watched as the door of the airplane closed. As he turned, he saw Cosmo Zeebus walking toward him as fast as he could. “What’s the hurry, Cosmo?”