The Fighting Man (1993)

by Seymour, Gerald

  The car stopped. Doors slammed. The entrance to a hotel of concrete walls, and he could see the candles burning inside the windows.

  There was shouting from Harpo at the cash desk, and pleading from Groucho, and Zeppo banged the width of his fist onto the desk. Gord thought they were negotiating the rate. The foyer of the hotel was marble-floored. He carried his plastic bag up three flights of stairs. No marble left over for the corridor. A shit awful cramped little room, and the sheets smelled stale. The window onto the street was open and blew darting shadows from the low candle that Zeppo lit.

  They closed the door of the room on him, and he fell onto the bed, and none of them had hoped he felt welcome, and none of them had wished him a good sleep. Faith sinking. From the thin pillow he followed the line of the crack that ran ceiling to floor on the wall in front of him.

  He had always been volunteered before. Never had a staff officer ask him – Want to go? Don’t bother if you don’t want to. Could be a bit rough down there. Pass it by if you’d rather – if he was inclined to take the military flight to Belfast, or to Germany, or south to Dhahran. Soft old life it had been, where the decisions were made for him . . . It had been Gord Brown’s choice to listen to Eff and Vee and Zed.

  The listening might just have been a mistake. He lay on the bed and wondered how long the candle would last.

  She drove the Land Rover off the street and parked close to the main entrance to the city’s judicial mortuary.

  She helped the two women and the man down, and squeezed tight on the older woman’s hand. She called to the dog, tethered in the back of the vehicle, that she would not be long.

  It was the third successive morning that Alex Pitt had taken the mother and the father and the sister to the judicial mortuary. It was the only place to search for the ‘disappeared’ student. She was nine months in Guatemala and had slipped already into the local vernacular. She thought in the terms of the language of the city in which she lived. It was Guatemala’s own word, given with authority to the rest of Central and Latin America; a missing person was a ‘disappeared’. The disappeared was a student at the University of San Carlos, from the mathematics faculty. There had been witnesses to the lift. The student had left the campus late and told his friends that he intended to walk along the main road back towards the city, and that he would try to hitch a ride. Two other students, on a motorcycle, coming later, had seen the big station wagon pull up alongside the walking student. The two other students had seen the men jump from the station wagon, grab their friend before he thought to run, heave him inside. The two other students had seen the station wagon drive away into the night.

  She was taller than any of the family. She was sturdily built, powerful in the hips and shoulders. If she had taken the trouble to mind it then the flow of her hair, ripe wheat blonde, would have been attractive, but she wore it uncombed on the nape of her neck, bound with an elastic band. She was good with the language, should have been because she had the grades at school and in the first year of the university course, and she talked softly to the mother of the disappeared all the way into the flat-roofed, single-storey building. The dog, the tethered German shepherd, barked in frenzy from the interior of the Land Rover as she led the family into the mortuary.

  Each time she came she had to catch her breath.

  The forensic doctor, almost a friend, had told her that in the bad black days they had received an average of a dozen bodies each day, so many that they were stacked on the tiled floor; now they took in a body every other day. Each body would be held, refrigerated, until it was collected by a family. She didn’t know whether she would have had the strength to come to the mortuary in the bad black days.

  Whispered voices.

  A cradle pulled back.

  The shrouded shape revealed.

  The technician who smoked dropped his cigarette to the floor and stamped on it. The family were braced and Alex held the hand of the mother and the hand of the sister. The technician lifted the shroud from the face. She saw the bullet hole in the centre of the forehead. The sister crumpled. She heard the father whimper and sensed that he turned away. It was the mother who had the control. The mother reached forward with her free hand and pulled back the shroud. The bruising and the stabbing and the burning on the hosed body were clear against the skin pallor. She felt the hand tightening in hers, and the nails digging in the flesh of her hand.

  Before she had come to Guatemala, Alex Pitt had been lectured at the training seminars of the Peace Brigades on what she would see and how she should react. She thought that nothing at the seminars had prepared her for what she would find.

  She swallowed hard. The trolley was slid back into the steel cupboard. The technician lit another cigarette.

  The mother was staring at the closed door of the cupboard.

  A high voice. ‘Can something not be done . . . ?’

  The forensic doctor gestured with his hands, hopeless. ‘They have immunity.’

  ‘When will something be done . . . ?’

  The forensic doctor went to the drawer of his desk and he took out a see-through cellophane folder. He held it in front of the family. He showed the family the message of the Death Squad, the Hawk of Justice . . . Alex Pitt made the arrangements, as she had done before, for the collection of the body for burial. After she had taken the family back to their home in Zona 4, dropped them, kissed each of them in turn, seen the car with the smoked windows at the end of the street, she drove to the Zoo Park. She stopped off the road, in the shade of trees. She wriggled into the back of the Land Rover, and she huddled against the tail door and the weight of the dog was across her legs and she held the body of the dog against her, and took comfort from the warmth of the dog.

  The dog, its weight and its warmth, was her weakness. Alex Pitt, serving with the Peace Brigades in Guatemala, believed sincerely and with passion in the Bible of the turned cheek. She despised violence, but the dog was the symbol of protection and retaliation. The pretence of her colleagues was that the dog was her company, and it was the small lie in her life.

  When she had blown her nose hard, when she had wiped her handkerchief across her eyes, she hugged the dog a last time, then climbed forward into the driving seat.

  It was a hell of a good machine, the Land Rover, with 103,000 miles on the clock, but then she had been taught well how to keep a vehicle on the road that should have gone to the scrap yard. She tried to whistle something of a tune, to close her mind from the body of a student who had been ‘disappeared’. It was necessary for her to have regained her toughness before she returned to the Peace House.

  ‘When will something be done . . . ?’

  Haunting her . . .

  Driving away from the Zoo Park, each time she looked into the centre mirror, she saw the car behind her with the smoked-glass windows, holding back but following.

  ‘It will not be what you require, Mr Brown,’ Zeppo said.

  ‘It will be what you request.’

  ‘What I was trying to say . . .’

  ‘We know what is available,’ Harpo said. ‘We know what can be taken.’

  ‘I had merely drawn up a list of the necessary . . .’

  ‘We are able to write ourselves,’ Groucho said. ‘We are able to make our own list.’

  He had barely slept. Gord had drifted off just before the dawn came, and he had bites all over his body from the bed. He had gone downstairs and into the hotel’s dining room and waited more than an hour to be served with thin coffee, good orange juice, and bread rolls. He had gone back to his room and ripped the sheets off the bed and taken them to the window and shaken them outside as hard as he was able. He had gone out into the corridor, not asked, but taken the mop and bucket from the two gossiping room maids. He had scrubbed the floor of the room and of the small shower and lavatory cubicle, and done the walls afterwards. He had made his bed, then returned the mop and bucket to the room maids. He had sat on the bed with paper and pencil and drawn up a list of w
hat he reckoned would be needed for the launching of a revolution. He knew about revolutions. If he hadn’t watched, eye witness close, the failure of a revolution, the slaughter, then he wouldn’t have told a brigadier general, starched up in best uniform, that the brigadier general was talking bullshit.

  He tore up into small pieces the sheet of paper on which he had written his list.

  The list, front side of the paper, had been assault rifles, machine guns, heavy mortars, rocket launchers, military explosives and detonators, and a TPO-50 wheel-based flame thrower.

  He dropped the pieces of paper onto the floor that he had scrubbed. The list on the second side of the sheet of paper had been portable communications radios, combat rations, anti-mosquito sprays, anti-malaria tablets, field dressings, basic surgery equipment. Consigned to the shining floor . . .

  ‘Please yourselves.’

  No, he had not expected a red carpet, nor a band, nor a little girl in a party frock to offer him a bouquet of flowers, no. Yes, he had reckoned that his expertise would be respected, too damn right, yes.

  Harpo said, ‘It was not every member of our group who thought it necessary to bring a foreigner to Havana. We understand fighting, we are capable.’

  Zeppo said, ‘We do not need a foreigner to tell us what we must take. We have fought on the mountains and in the jungle. We are veterans of warfare.’

  He said nothing. He kept his eyes on the torn pieces of paper on the floor. They let themselves out. Groucho looked back at him, furtive, before closing the door. He sat again on his bed.

  It had not just been stupid, it had been a mistake . . . There was something his father used to say to him, something about making footprints on life’s path. It was the sort of thing his father used to say when he was drunk. It was necessary to make footprints, leave a mark. The last time his father had come home and had to be helped from the taxi and talked about footprints, with Gord back on a forty-eight-hour leave and waiting half the night to see him, had been after the last sacking. Good story his father had told, told it well for all the drink. The new computer system in the newsroom, and the old hack had been on the familiarization weekend a month before to learn state-of-the-art technology, and a pissed-up finger had pressed Delete, lost the whole of a hell of a story, lost a big one, and the print run about to go, and no copy. His father, the way he’d told it, had ripped the VDU from the desk cables, not been able to open the windows because the newsroom was state-of-the-art-technology air-conditioned. His father had thrown the VDU straight through the plate-glass window, and the newsroom was on the ninth floor. His father had been fired, gone down the pub, and come home to tell his son of the need to make footprints. His father had been dead a year later . . . Gord thought that, in Havana, he walked on concrete. No footprints, no marks on life’s path.

  He dragged open the door of the wardrobe, had to pull it hard because it was warped on the hinges. He lifted out the black plastic bag.

  He heard the knock at his door, faint.

  He saw the rips in the plastic bag. He would need a new plastic bag if he were catching the flight home.

  The knock at his door was repeated.

  It had been a mistake.

  ‘Yes?’

  In the open doorway, Groucho cringed, and kneaded his hands together.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘There is so much that you have to comprehend, Mr Brown.’

  ‘I think I comprehend pretty well.’

  ‘Please, hear me.’

  Gord said, ‘I doubt there is much to say.’

  ‘Please . . . It was a fantasy that was lived here. The fantasy was that we would return to the villages of the triangle, that is the place in the Cuchumatanes between the towns of Nebaj and Chajul and Cotzal. It was only fantasy. We had followed Ramírez in battle, and we followed him in exile. He was dying, perhaps delirious, perhaps his last joking. He told his son, Rodolfo Jorge, that he should return and fight and win. Right to the funeral there was the argument, none of the old men would go to Europe as Rodolfo Jorge demanded. It was why the Indians were sent . . . How can there be any more fantasy, now that you have come? You are a fighting man, I assume it. After the fantasy is reality. To be in exile is comfortable. There are some who would wish that you had never come . . .’

  Groucho knelt on the floor and began to pick up the small pieces of paper that had carried the list.

  He had the plastic bag in his hand. Gord said briskly, ‘I think I should go home. I think that is best.’

  ‘I was a professor of history. My special area of research was the Conquest. I have not been comfortable. I want to walk again in the corridors of the university. I want to teach again at San Carlos. I want to know a life, in my home, where my students are not disappeared, tortured, killed . . . Please, Mr Brown, do not go home.’

  ‘It has to get better, and soon,’ Gord said.

  They had escaped the third floor of the embassy.

  Lunch was served in the American Club. It was the first lunchtime since Tom Schultz had arrived in Guatemala City that hadn’t been Cokes and fast sandwiches, eaten at the desk, taken during a meeting. It was the Intelligence Analyst’s birthday. Five of them, all eating the same, all chewing into rye bread and salad with Stilton dressing over the crab and prawn and tuna. Tom thought it good to be out from the third-floor offices that were always dull grey gloomy because of the shield of heavy mesh wire bolted outside the glass windows. Tom and the Intelligence Analyst and the Chemist and the Treasurer, and the Southern Command Liaison who was regular army and down on secondment from Panama, all with Stilton dressing and crab pieces and half-prawns and tuna shreds on their shirt fronts and ties. They sat away from the door and had arrived early enough to take a table where they weren’t hemmed in. They could talk their own talk, clear of the American Chamber of Commerce loud-mouths.

  Gentle talk, spoken quiet, and Tom learning the ways of the men that he would work with. All equals, and all with their specialized field. The gentle talk was of a new airfield that was used for refuelling by light aircraft carrying the cocaine powder from Bolivia, on via Colombia, through Guatemala, up into the Caribbean for a sea drop to a fast launch; gentle talk of the new capabilities of the vacuum machine that had been made available to them by headquarters that could suck micro-particles from the interior of an aircraft and tell a chemist not only that coca compounds had been there, but where they’d come from; gentle talk on Washington’s bitching at the money being thrown at the Confidential Informants and the headaches that gave a field station treasurer; gentle talk about when the paper could be shifted to get the black boxes, the parabolic saucers for satellite communication, from SouthCom. He wanted to belong. Might just be getting there. None of them had cared to question the cause of the wide scar running down the right side of his face from his ear to the jawbone. They did what every man and woman did, what he was getting used to, they stared at it and looked away. He thought he might just be getting there because the glances, furtive, were less frequent than on the first two days inside the office area. He needed to belong. Tom’s own gentle talk was of the UH-1H, the Huey bird, out at the La Aurora base, and what he reckoned he could get in distance and speed from her.

  He’d found they worked a dozen hours a day, and it was good to be wound down.

  ‘Hi, you’re Tom . . . ?’

  Talking night flying, night navigation over jungle . . . He turned.

  ‘. . . Good to have you with us.’

  There was the hand of friendship thrust at him. In DEA talk, the slightly built man, thinning hair, quiet eyes, light suit, was the Country Attaché. He shook the hand of his bossman, found the grip firm.

  An open smile. ‘Hope you haven’t learned their table habits. Christ, my kids eat neater . . .’

  Laughter round the table and the paper napkins grabbed.

  ‘. . . Sorry I wasn’t around when you came in, we’ll catch up when the food’s been scrubbed off you. Well, guys, Washington sends its love, wants t
o know when we’re going to stop sleeping and do some work . . .’

  Tom had heard about him. Everyone on the third floor had had their piece about the Country Attaché away at a meeting at headquarters. Green Beret in Vietnam in the last years before the scuttle. In position undercover in Tehran when Desert One had fiascoed and taking two weeks to walk out and over the Iraqi border. Joined the Drug Enforcement Administration. Big in Bolivia before getting the Guatemala City posting. Everyone on the third floor said that he knew how to lead a team.

  ‘. . . Guys, I think you’ll remember from the first meeting, Colonel Mario Arturo, new military liaison for us. Be providing the firepower back-up when we need it. In harness from tomorrow . . .’

  The man was short, squat. His jacket was too tight for his chest. He was the intruder. He straightened, he stood for a moment at attention, then ducked his head. The mood of gentle talk over lunch was changed.

  It happened too fast.

  Tom Schultz was caught, not thinking the way he should have.

  ‘. . . Colonel, I think you met everyone else at last month’s briefing, except our new flier, Schultz, Tom Schultz . . .’

  He was caught, and he wasn’t thinking, and he just seemed to see the cold, the contempt, in the little bastard’s face. He had taken the colonel’s hand.

  ‘Very pleased to meet you, Mr Schultz. I hope you are enjoying the hospitality of our capital city. What have you seen so far of the delights of Guatemala?’

  ‘Well,’ Tom said loudly, ‘I’d say top of my sight-seeing has been a dog trying to run off with the right arm of a body. Most interesting thing about the body was that it had been knife-slashed, cigarette-burned, beaten, shot in the head . . .’

  They were three feet apart.

  ‘. . . Second most interesting thing was that the police who picked the body up made no attempt at the basics of homicide investigation. Third, the “Hawk of Justice” left their calling card . . .’