La Vida Doble (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Fontaine, Arturo

  “Let’s see, Chico, put your head in.”

  It didn’t fit.

  “Just four or five more turns and we’re there,” Chico said.

  “You’re sure you can get through there, Chico?” Great Dane asked him. “You sure?”

  Chico Marín assented with his restless eyes, and Indio Galdámez put away the jack with the same calm with which he did everything. Chico traced a rectangle on the glass with the diamond-tipped glass cutter. Great Dane held up the suction cup. Macha and I watched, smoking. He pulled me farther away. He was serious and grim, even more than usual.

  “You didn’t say anything about this to anyone from Analysis, right?”

  “No, of course not. Not to them or anyone else.” I’m surprised. “Why do you ask?”

  Great Dane removed the glass with the suction cup. Macha threw away the cigarette butt, which gleamed as it fell. He took hold of my shoulders.

  “Don’t fail me,” he said, locking his terrible eyes on mine.

  “Why?” I asked him. “Why are you trying to hurt me?”

  “It’s just that we can’t fail. Not this time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I violated procedure,” he said mockingly.

  “When? Is this about the ‘Prince of Wales’?”

  “Yes, well, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” And, seriously: “This is my last mission. They demoted me. They fucked me. Fucking pencil-pushing, fat-ass, scared shitless generals!”

  SIXTY-ONE

  He didn’t wait for me to react. Without looking at anyone he gave the order to go in through the window, and he jumped through. Great Dane tried to go behind him, but his corpulent body wouldn’t fit. Chico Marín tried next. Great Dane let out another roar.

  “Hurry up, shithead! Put your head and your ass through right away.”

  Chico Marín was more frightened than ever and all the color had gone out of his face. Though he was short, he was solid and had a big head—a cube, as I’ve told you.

  “Motherfucker!” shouted Great Dane, containing the shout in a whisper. He tapped Chico’s forehead with the calloused edge of his hand. Chico’s big, shaved head bounced against the bars of the window. A few inches lower and unleashed with Great Dane’s precision and strength, and that blow would be fatal.

  “Come on, boss, don’t be like that,” Chico complained.

  We heard a noise at the front door. According to plan B we would open it from inside. I slipped quickly between the bars behind Iris, who had drawn her formidable CZ. Outside, Great Dane, enraged, ordered Galdámez to put the car jack back in and widen the gap. The light of a streetlamp illuminated the living room of that old house. I stopped. I took cover behind the empire sofa, which was the closest thing to me. I made out some dark red plush armchairs, a big oval mirror with a gold frame hanging on the wall, which was papered in a light green color, I think; there were bronze lamps shaped like flowers affixed to the wall, a blurry painting of a hunting scene, an immense crystal chandelier that hung from the molded ceiling . . . Then we heard a shout. A woman’s shout and a roar.

  “Shit. Dogs.”

  It’s Iris.

  “Stupid motherfucker!”

  It’s Great Dane. He and Indio Galdámez are still in the street, apparently.

  “How could you possibly not mention the dog, you idiot?”

  “There were no dogs here,” Indio apologizes.

  “I gave you the order, shithead, to check every detail.”

  “I carried out the order, but there weren’t any dogs . . . At the house next door, yes, but . . .”

  “Dumbass! You didn’t realize they had a dog, Indio, mother-fucker. You didn’t realize, right? What’s in that head of yours? Sawdust and cat piss?”

  Before we’d set out, Great Dane had explained to us that Bone slept in that house, plus two trained and armed bodyguards. Their alibis were driver and caretaker. The driver slept in the room next to Bone’s, at the end of the hall. The caretaker was in an exterior room, attached to the garage in the courtyard. A door connected the courtyard with the hallway that led to Bone’s room, and another door led to the kitchen. We saw them in the blueprints. There were those three and Bone’s mother. Her room was on the second floor. Plus the cook, who slept below in a room off the kitchen. Of dogs, no one said a word.

  Behind the empire sofa, I pressed my face, I pressed my entire body to the floor. A gunshot rang out. Then another, then machine-gun fire from an AK. I saw Iris running. Something flew from her hand to the floor. A bright and violent light flashed and illuminated the enormous crystal chandelier and reflected in the big, gold-framed mirror of the living room. Then came the explosion with its deafening blast. The room filled with smoke. From that moment on everything was sudden, simultaneous, and impossible to follow. Every tenth of a second is a minute, every minute, an hour. The gunshots filled my ears and blotted out the world. I heard machine-gun fire and bits of plaster and molding falling, leaving the brick walls exposed; tables, lamps—if they were in fact lamps—blown to pieces, all very close by. The thunder of the bullets filled my ears until they felt as if they would explode. There was no room in my brain for that maddening jackhammer.

  Macha, it must have been Macha, went running past toward the bedroom at the back. Great Dane’s blond mane was behind him. I seemed to sense a shadow moving near me, close to the wall. I looked at the shadow and then it jumped. It leaped off the ground. And it immediately sank down, leaving behind it a slight pink halo of pulverized tissue that floated in the air for a split second. Iris was coming toward me, firing. I was terrified. She jumped over the empire sofa and over me and she slid along that wall. The silence of a tomb. The gases burned my throat and nose. The smoke was clearing.

  Chico Marín cut off the passage to the kitchen and the patio; Iris controlled the hallway that led to the bedroom at the back, Bone’s room, and she was looking upward. No one moved. The shootout hadn’t lasted more than three seconds. When the order came, I crawled out from my hiding place behind the sofa and over the floor, following the light from a flashlight. That was according to the plan. Then, by the light of the streetlight, I saw very clearly on the floor a Kalashnikov that I almost stepped on, and, no more than two yards away from me, a shape; spreading out over the parquet, a pasty and pinkish pulp dotted with white lumps.

  At that moment, I tried to comprehend what was happening, to interpret reality according to the plan. I couldn’t do it. And I knew why: the explosion of light up above, close to the ceiling, its tremendous crash, the cloud of smoke, the footsteps of several attackers shooting and running in rigorous accord in opposite directions, it all confounds the observer, leaves him bewildered. With his attention so fatally divided, the only thing he can do, if he manages to do anything, is to shoot at the shape. They had explained it to us many times in Rinconada de Maipú, we had practiced, but it was quite another thing to live it. I’ll describe it now in order: Iris, whom I lost sight of in the noise and smoke of the explosion, neutralized the first of the defenders. The man emerged, as we had foreseen might happen, through the kitchen door. But Macha was already running past with his pistol held in both hands toward the hall at the back, Great Dane following. Chico Marín rushed over, firing, to take up the position Iris had left. And there I saw his shaved head now, next to the door to the kitchen. In the meantime Iris threw herself toward the wall at my back. An unexpected fighter had appeared, firing an AK. Iris unloaded her CZ into him. From there she dominated the entrance to Bone’s room. Iris had saved my life.

  I stopped next to the window. Iris approached the stairs, staying close to the wall as she moved. They ordered me to go up. At that moment I saw a loose, severed foot with its black Nike in a pool of thick blood, and a hand missing three fingers with a light blue shirt cuff still intact. The smell was unbearable. I forget a lot of what I saw. But I can’t forget that smell. What could be in that stench I couldn’t help but breathe? Shit, of course, and the sweat of fear, and dust a
nd plaster and gunpowder and paint and smashed bricks and smoke and gases, I guess, and tiny particles of blood and human tissue suspended in the air. I breathed it all in, reeking as it filled the hollows of my body. At the end of the hall I could hear gunshots and silences. Nothing sounds louder than the silence between gunshots. A bullet whizzing past much closer paralyzed me. I thought it had grazed my arm. Chico Marín’s shaved head bounced against the wall. He looked at me, moving his eyes that were terrifyingly wide-open. He opened his mouth to say something to me, but he suddenly fell silent and collapsed against the wall, smearing its blue-green wallpaper. What is left of a person killed in combat is impossible to align with what he was in life. Something had changed. By now it was clear that nothing corresponded to the plan. They’d been waiting for us and there were more fighters than we expected. They were shooting at us from the second floor and the shots from the end of the hallway were coming faster and faster.

  “Cover me! Cover me!” shouted Iris.

  I started to shoot while she climbed the stairs doubled over. A short gun fell to the floor. It came from upstairs. I waited. “Come up!” It was Iris. I recognized the Andean profile of Galdámez on the landing of the stairs. “Not yet! Don’t come up yet!” Iris shouted. The noise was unbearable. Pieces of glass were falling and shattering as they hit the floor, fragments of stucco and plaster molding were returning to white dust. The enormous chandelier in the living room suddenly plummeted with a crash of metal and shattering crystal. With that crash, Indio Galdámez rushed upstairs, firing. I went up behind him. They were still shooting at us. I recognized the clatter of an AK-47. A body slid down the stairs past me, leaving a trail of blood. It was a woman. It wasn’t Iris. Silence again. I waited. Nothing. “Now!” Iris shouted to me. Lit clearly by the streetlight, she was standing on the threshold. She was panting and her eyes were full of fear. There were bloodstains on her pants and her left running shoe. Galdámez was checking the second floor, slamming doors and pounding.

  I went over a leg wearing blue Levi’s that ended in a natural leather boot. There was beauty in that old contact of jeans with the leather of the Texan boot. I saw that, where my eyes fell. I remembered the Gringo dead in Plaza Concha y Toro the night I gave Rafa up, his cowboy boots. Half of that man’s torso had ended up under a colored pane of glass. And in the skin of his anemic face, the encrusted shards shone like crushed ice. The skylight is destroyed, I thought. An idiotic thought, right? His fingers and arms were still moving. Sparks, electric reflexes.

  It took no effort at all to overpower the poor old woman. She had practically fainted. “There’s no one else on this floor,” shouted Indio Galdámez. “Those three who were shooting at us must have come in from the house next door,” he shouted, his voice high and uneven. “And they brought the dogs, I’m sure.”

  She was in bed but dressed in street clothes. Iris blindfolded her and tied her up with expert knots; I put a rag in her mouth, and a strip of plastic tape sealed her lips. We waited. No more shots were fired. I was still panting, and I had a crazy desire to smoke. Iris told me no, not a chance.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Do you want to believe me? Because we’re here in this hospice home in Ersta, Stockholm, and if you don’t want to, I’m not about to try to convince you. I have no way to. As for me, I don’t give a shit about the truth. Am I telling the truth when I tell you I don’t give a shit about the truth? It’s my story, after all. But does such a thing exist? As I talk to you, I look at you and calibrate your reactions. Everything I’m telling you is formulated for you. I would be saying this in a different way to Roberto, in another tone, with other things emphasized and other omissions. Understand? What you want to do with my story, and above all your gestures—the way you suddenly raise your eyebrows or twist your mouth or interlace your fingers—I assimilate them, and it all gives shape and content to what I say and don’t say. The same thing happens in an interrogation. Who is asking, what they ask, and how they do it all gives shape to what you say and what you hide.

  I didn’t find out about the attack itself, its objective, the date and time, until half an hour before we left. Macha summoned us that night to the lot at Central, he ordered us to come armed for a mission. I remember that Pancha, when she got there, took out her little bottle of Christian Dior and perfumed herself. I think she did it to piss me off, and it worked. I felt bad. Once we were all in the parking lot, Macha told us that Operation “Night of the Wild Boar” was about to commence, and he explained what we were going to do, spreading out the blueprints of the house. He took his precautions. Then? Do you want me to tell you the story, or should I simplify things and get to the point? You know, in reality all this happens very quickly and later it’s told very slowly. You can’t imagine everything that can fit in a minute.

  I heard Indio Galdámez walking on the roof. Why Galdámez? Weren’t Mono Lepe and Pancha Ortiz the ones who were supposed to cover the roof? He must have climbed up through the hole left by the shattered skylight. His steps resounded on the zinc shingles. The ancient old lady tried to say something. I knew from the movement of her head and the contortion of her mouth obstructed by the piece of black cloth. Iris kept her at gunpoint. A burst of machine-gun fire pierced my ears. There was a dull noise. I went over to the window and looked through the opening between the curtains. A motor running. Iris got close to the edge of the window. A white Volkswagen van that I recognized was backing up over the driveway at full speed. It fit its rear against a doorway to the house.

  “Careful!” Iris shouted at me, “Careful!”

  She pushed me back, opened the curtain, and with one burst of fire she shattered the window. She dragged the old woman over to the window, holding the gun to her head.

  “Give me some light! Shine the flashlight on me!”

  Bone’s mother was struggling, she was desperate and moaning, but Iris, skinny as she was, had her hostage well under control. I obeyed. Iris was shouting that she was going to kill her, she was going to kill Bone’s mother if they didn’t throw down their weapons and surrender immediately. I think she gave them a time limit, I think she started counting to seven. A man ran across, hugging the wall of the yard, and opened the van doors. Iris counted louder and louder. No one heard her. You don’t see that in movies, do you?

  And of course, the gate was starting to open now. It obeyed a remote control order. You could see the light from the street. My heart gave a leap of joy: they were getting away. Why? I’m contradicting myself. But that was how I felt at that moment. I heard Pancha on the radio, requesting backup from Central. She must have been close to the broken skylight.

  I thought: it’s her. And I had no doubt about it. She arrived first, in time to warn someone as soon as she got there, some contact in Red Ax. It was before Mono Lepe met up with her on the roof. Of course, they’d only had time to prepare their escape, not to carry it out. The mother they had to get dressed, was that what slowed them down? Because they didn’t want to leave her behind? And who was Pancha’s connection in Red Ax? Since when? Had it been Pancha, then, who had given us the address of Macha’s lover, which turned out to be bad information and had cost the life of some unimportant agent? And was Pancha the source of the address—correct, this time—of the kindergarten Cristóbal went to? How much did they know about me? Was it her information, incomplete as it was, that had caused the Spartan’s reticence with me? And how much had she wheedled out of Flaco about me? Did she have help in Central, another mole?

  And then I thought: If there’s anyone who’s really suspicious here, who would have warned Bone about that night’s attack, it’s me. Not Pancha. Obviously: they all must be thinking it that very instant.

  A crash made me turn around. A cornice of the building had fallen, bringing a gutter along with it, and it landed right in the space between the house and the Volkswagen. The van gave a jump and lurched forward, tires squealing, toward the half-open gate. But it got there too soon and collided with the black metal that still hadn’
t receded. Iris threw the old woman onto the bed, ordered me to guard her, changed her clip, and, crouching down, started to fire shot after shot. She wanted to hit a tire, but she didn’t have the angle. The same thing must be happening to them on the roof. Was that Mono Lepe down there, those remains of a fallen human animal, the open and exposed flesh immobilized in an unnatural position?

  “Why aren’t reinforcements here yet?” Iris yelled.

  Her bullets left cracks in the back windows of the van but didn’t destroy them, or they rebounded, maybe, inside its bodywork.

  “It’s bulletproof, you stupid fucking idiot!” she told me when I asked.

  The Volkswagen was still stopped and two shadows were approaching it, keeping close to the wall of the house. Finally, the gate was open. But the van didn’t leave. The sudden silence surprised me. Iris lowered her CZ. The shadows stayed immobile against the walls. No one dared take a step. Then the driver’s side door opened and an inert body was shoved out. The Volkswagen started moving. The bullets shattered that tense silence. They returned fire. I saw one, two men running. Iris shoved me away from the window.

  “Watch her!” she ordered me and went on shooting, unhurriedly.

  I made the woman as comfortable on her bed as possible without lowering my gun. I tried to think back. In my life as a clandestine fighter I’d had to maintain some M16A1 caliber 5.56 weapons. Since they were too long—986 millimeters—sometimes their stocks were shortened. They were kept in bags sealed with tape that we stuck into a drum of Motrex oil. We hid the drum in a hiding place in a wall, behind a bookshelf, in a safe house. It was an M16 like those that were now shredding the night. A fighter from Red Ax. I was sure of it. The clatter didn’t let up, punctuated by those short, suctioning silences. And I kept trying to imagine what the hell was happening down there in the yard.