The Devil's Deep

by Michael Wallace

  Wes looked down at the check and his eyes widened. Ten thousand dollars.

  “I’ll write you another check at the end of the summer. Another at, say, Christmas, if you need it.”

  “I didn’t come here for money.” Nevertheless, he couldn’t stop looking at the check.

  Uncle Bill continued as if he hadn’t heard Wes’s objection. “Point is, you’ll finish law school and come work for Northrock. You know, I’m not married and I don’t have anyone to train for the business. That could be you, Wes. We’ll build roads together.”

  Wes took the check, folded it and put it in his pocket. “Thank you, Uncle Bill. That’s very generous of you.”

  Uncle Bill smiled, held out his hand for Wes to shake and said, “Good. Now get back to Harvard and show those prep school pricks how a Carter man can work.”

  Wes pushed his way outside in a daze. His uncle hadn’t bought it, not entirely. Or else why had he gone on that rant about building roads, the Romans, and all that? And yet, Wes had been caught up in the moment, and yeah, the temptation of the money. He pulled the check out of his pocket and read it again to make sure it was real, and not post-dated to his graduation.

  He’d charged two expensive last-minute plane tickets to Costa Rica yesterday. His plan had been to charge the rest of the trip costs and then make minimum payments on his cards until he got things settled out with the clerking he still hoped to do that summer. No more worries on that front.

  “Thanks, Uncle Bill,” he said to himself as he started the car and turned on the heater, “for funding your own investigation.”

  #

  Dr. Alan Pardo pushed Carolina against the wall. He lifted the Peruana’s scrub top and slid a hand under her bra, pinching her nipple between two fingers. His mouth found her neck. He hooked his other hand around her butt and pulled her against his crotch. He loved the tension in her body, the pleasure mixed with anxiety in her movements.

  “Not here,” she said in Spanish. But she didn’t push him away. “Not at work.”

  “It’s ten-thirty. And the door is locked. It’s the safest place in the world.”

  Pardo had eight different nursing homes and care centers as clients, so he spent little time at each one, but required that they give him an office as part of his contract. He couldn’t stand to work in someone else’s space. This particular office he’d found useful for other reasons, first with Rosa and now with Carolina.

  In a few moments he had Carolina naked and straddling his lap. Still fully clothed himself, he put his hands on her breasts and squeezed her nipples between his fingers. He unzipped his pants to free himself and pulled the girl down onto his body. Carolina gasped as he entered and leaned her head back with eyes closed.

  She was a brown girl and he could see the Inca in her face. That wide, peasant face you found throughout Latin America. Black, thick hair. Dark nipples. Pardo had known a thousand girls like that in El Salvador. Features a little different, end result the same.

  Damn campesinos. Damn his father for trusting them.

  The Pardos had owned a ranch in the Salvadoran highlands. A thousand head of cattle. Two thousand manzanas planted with coffee. Fruit, nuts. It had been a good living for generations and should have continued that way for generations more. But the leftists had taken power and the junta started confiscating land. It became illegal to own more than 200 manzanas—about 300 acres. No way to make a living off that.

  They were idiots, all of them. Families like the Pardos had built El Salvador, had always run her economy. The campesinos were good for labor, but anything that required planning or foresight was beyond them. Dr. Pardo’s father, Diego Pardo, had tried to work with the junta at first, then allied himself with the other families of the highlands in their struggle against the government. Nevertheless, he’d continued to work alongside his campesinos, to eat with them, and educate their children.

  Alan Pardo had been away in Costa Rica, looking at land in case the family needed to leave the country. On the day he’d returned, bombs tore apart the agricultural ministry in San Salvador, and the bodies of two nuns had been found in Cuscatlán. As he drove onto the plantation, sullen faced campesinos lined the road with machetes in hand. He didn’t recognize any of them.

  He parked his truck in front of the fountain and stepped out with a gun in hand and another tucked into his belt. Maquilishuat trees interlocked their branches around the courtyard. It was October and they’d shed their leaves to cover themselves with pink-tufted flowers, some of which showered onto the courtyard to cover the violence evidenced therein. Disemboweled mattresses and clothing lay strewn about. A hand-crafted rocking chair, now kindling. Smashed picture frames and slashed paintings. His mother’s plates, brought by his grandmother from France before the war, lay in shards. Any culture, anything of beauty, trashed.

  A cloud of flies lifted into the air as Pardo passed from the outer courtyard to the inner. They buzzed around his face and the tang of blood hit his nostrils, now overpowering the smell of Maquilishuat blossoms. A body lay on the flagstones in a pool of blood. A dark blanket covered it, which he realized were flies as he got closer. Another day or two and it would be crawling with maggots. Boots gone, shirt stripped off. They’d hacked off one arm, nearly decapitated the body. But he recognized the iron-gray beard. His father.

  Sick with rage and fear, he strode to the front door of the house itself. The heavy oak and iron-bound door lay on its hinges, with axes and crowbars discarded in front. Voices shouted inside, a high pitched scream. He saw movement at the foot of the great stone staircased that curved toward the upper level.

  Dios mio, no. Graciela!

  Pardo’s wife lay at the foot of the stairs, throat cut, her beautiful eyes dull and glassy. Her dress was above her head, her underwear lying to one side. They’d raped her first.

  And two campesinos stood next to her body, looking up the stairs. More shouting from upstairs. One man held a cigarette to his lips. The other casually swung his machete back and forth as if anxious to join the business above.

  “You!” Pardo shouted, pointed at the men with his free hand.

  They turned with eyes glittering and teeth bared, like wild animals. He’d seen men like this every day of his life, short, brown men with leathered skin. They took directions from people like Pardo. They did not stare back with defiance.

  Pardo shot the first man in the head. The second man took a step back, then reached for the fallen man’s machete. Pardo found it first. He dropped his gun and swung the heavy blade. The first blow almost severed the man’s hand. The second, his head. Pardo turned back to the man he’d shot, who was somehow still alive. Not for long. Animals.

  Upstairs, Pardo found five men outside his father’s bedroom, swinging a chest against the door in an attempt to break down the heavy oak doors. Women’s voices screamed inside. Pardo shot two of the men, hacked two others to death, while the final man fled, bloodied, but alive. Inside the room, his mother, his two sisters, and his two young sons. They’d been barricaded inside for more than thirty-six hours and the room smelled of shit and sweat and urine. The campesinos had caught Pardo’s wife trying to escape to look for help.

  The living members of the Pardo family fled before the campesinos returned in force. Soon, they fled the country. Pardo went back to the hacienda once, after the civil war. The finca had returned to forest, save for a dozen squatter families and their chickens scratching an existence from the land. He hadn’t expected any different.

  So what was it that made Pardo keep coming back to peasant girls like Rosa and Carolina? Self-loathing? A fetish for animal-like sex that he could only satisfy by bringing girls back to his office and taking them without so much as fully removing his pants?

  Carolina came with shuddering gasps that heightened Pardo’s excitement even as they repelled him. He finished and pushed her off, while pointing to her clothing. “You’d better get dressed.”

  As she pulled on her panties, he found himself wa
tching her with disgust, much of it directed toward himself. He kept coming back to these peasant girls. And why, after everything they’d done to him? He was like a dog eating its own vomit.

  His phone was vibrating in his jacket pocket as he pulled it on. It was his oldest son. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Why haven’t you been picking up?” James asked.

  “I was busy.”

  “They went to the airport.”

  “Did they board already?”

  “Yes,” James said. “Flight just took off. Newark.”

  “Damn.”

  “David wanted to stop them. Thought we should call in a bomb threat to keep the plane on the ground until you told us what to do. He wasn’t happy when I let them go.”

  “You did the right thing,” Pardo said. Thankfully, he’d sent his sons together this time. He needed James to reign in his younger brother’s impulsive behavior. David had already tried to run Rebecca Gull off the road when Pardo had clearly told him to just follow her car. A bomb threat would have been a disaster.

  And David, though reckless, was a check on James’s ambition. Neither boy had any memory of El Salvador, but by the time Pardo had returned from South America, they were old enough to have digested their grandmother’s stories of the finca and the hacienda and the injustices suffered by the Pardo family. Pardo had shaped this anger over the years until both boys were committed to regaining the family’s land and honor.

  “What now?” James asked.

  “Stay at the airport until I make a few calls. I’ll get back to you soon.” He hung up. Was Newark just a stop on the way to somewhere else?

  He turned to Carolina and switched to Spanish. “Why don’t you go. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Okay.”

  She straightened her clothes and returned to the floor. He found himself softening as his self-disgust faded. Carolina, he thought, would be more reliable than Rosa. So long as he kept paying her rent and her son’s daycare. And so long as she was illegal. She was afraid. It was fear that kept the campesinos well-behaved. Rosa, unfortunately, had not been enough of a campesina. He knew that now.

  Alone now, Pardo dialed Bill Carter’s number.

  Pardo had met Davis and Bill in 1985 at a dairy farm in Costa Rica. The young men had just survived the death of their father and were traveling for several months before returning to take control of the family business. It had seemed like an odd time for an extended trip, but Pardo later caught undercurrents of a struggle between the brothers and pieced together their story. This was the Carter brothers’ attempt to build a relationship that would keep them from tearing apart the family company. Davis and Bill left the business in the hands of a trusted associate while they spent the New England winter in Latin America.

  Chaos submerged most of Central America at the time. Paramilitaries and death squads fought leftists in El Salvador and Guatemala. Communists had taken over Nicaragua, and southern Honduras was awash with Nicaraguan contras and CIA advisors. Costa Rica formed a wall of stability on the southern edge of this madness. Pardo, his fortune gone, his residency in the U.S. not yet granted, left his sons with their grandmother in Panama while he looked for opportunities in Costa Rica. He found his way to the Quaker settlement of Monteverde, in the highlands north of San Jose. He worked for the Quakers, who were happy for his expertise with cattle and land management.

  He met Bill and Davis when they came to explore the cloud forests of Puntarenas. There wasn’t much tourism infrastructure in those days, so they paid the Quakers for lodging. They stayed several weeks, working with the Quakers during the week and exploring the mountains on weekends. Pardo had never seen anyone work as hard as these two brothers, certainly not Americans. It was all the more surprising when he learned they came from a rich family and didn’t need money to support their travels. Pardo and the Carters became friends.

  Bill spoke some Spanish—he later mastered it—but Davis spoke little, and so they conversed in English. They’d just finished school, Bill with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, and Davis with a master’s in civil engineering. When the two brothers left Monteverde, Alan Pardo went with them.

  The three young men hitchhiked the Panamerican Highway to Panama, then took a boat to Ecuador and continued south. In Peru, Shining Path guerillas stopped their bus as it hugged a cliff edge through the mountains. The bus came around a bend and there was a pickup truck blocking the road with three men carrying AK-47s and a fourth waving a pistol. No masks, Pardo noted with alarm.

  The bus could not turn around on the narrow road, and the men boarded, pistol-whipped the driver, and threw him from the bus. The attackers let out a torrent of curses and half-baked revolutionary slogans and ordered the terrified passengers off the bus. They lined up Pardo and the two Americans with everyone else.

  A cliff loomed on the left side of the road and a steep slope dropped into the brush and trees on the right. Buses sometimes went over that slope; there was no shoulder and little room to pass vehicles coming from the other direction. It was cold in the open and the air was so thin that Pardo gasped for breath from the simple exertion of forming a line with the others.

  A woman with a wide, peasant face stood next to Pardo. She carried a baby at her breast, who cried and rooted for its mother’s nipple. The woman helped the baby latch on while retying the wool cap on its head. The absurdity of her actions struck Pardo. Nursing, while waiting for her execution.

  “They’re going to kill everyone,” Pardo told the two brothers.

  “How do you know?” Davis asked. He sounded calm, but for a certain tightness in his voice.

  “No masks. If they were taking hostages, they’d have covered their faces. Look at everyone. They know it.” The Andean campesinos, be they old women, mothers with children, or workers returning from the field, looked stricken, but did nothing. There had been dozens crammed onto the bus, and if they’d charged the four men, they’d have easily overwhelmed their captors. He glanced at the woman with the baby and her eyes met his, pleading with him to do something.

  “Then why are they just standing there?” Davis asked.

  “Because they’re campesinos. They can do nothing without a leader.”

  “Hell with that,” Bill said. “Start shouting on three.”

  On Bill’s count, the three men shouted in English and Spanish: “Corran! Run! Nos van a matar!”

  Chaos erupted among the Peruvians. Children screamed. People ran in every direction, while others threw themselves to the ground. Two men charged the nearest guerilla who turned his weapon just in time. The first man’s body jerked and jived as he fell to the ground, punctured with bullet holes. The second grabbed the gun, but the other guerillas were firing wildly and cut down both the attacking campesino and their comrade. The woman with the baby fell in front of Pardo, and her baby rolled away like a discarded package. Her breast flopped loose, and milk still dribbled from her nipple even as the breast bloomed red.

  Pardo, Bill, and Davis threw themselves over the edge of the road. They slid, fell, and staggered into the brush below. Branches sliced at Pardo’s face. He kept staggering down, letting gravity do the work, following his two friends, until they collapsed, exhausted and gasping for air.

  “Oh, god,” Bill said. “Oh, god.” He spit. His face looked as though someone had dipped a brush in red paint and then flicked it in his direction.

  Davis tried to climb to his feet. “The baby. They shot the baby.” He clutched something in his hands. The baby’s wool cap. Somehow, he’d scooped it up before they’d gone over the edge. The man stared at it, gaping, as if he was holding the baby’s head itself. Meanwhile, Bill kept yammering, “Oh, god,” and spitting someone else’s blood from his mouth.

  Pardo grabbed Davis and yanked him back to the ground. “Shut up, both of you.”

  They quieted down, crouching to stay hidden among the trees. From the hillside above, gunfire, screams, more gunfire. The sound of the pickup truck driving off. Finally,
silence.

  “We have to go back and help those people,” Davis said. It didn’t surprise Pardo that he was the one who’d suggested it. He’d grown increasingly sentimental as they’d traveled south, his brother harder, more realistic.

  “And what?” Pardo asked. “Clean up the dead bodies? So that when the Sendero Luminoso comes back they can shoot us, too?”

  “Thought you were going to be a doctor,” Davis argued. “Aren’t you supposed to help?”

  “I’m supposed to stay alive.” He looked to Bill for confirmation. “Right?”

  Bill looked conflicted. He looked back up the hill, then into the woods below. “They’re probably all dead, anyway. I don’t think we should go.”

  Davis had continued to argue, even tried to assert his right to decide for both brothers, being the older of the two. Pardo told them straight out that they could go or not, but he wasn’t going up the hill to check out a bunch of dead peasants. In the end, they would have to go back up anyway, because there was no way they’d get out of this ravine if they went any further down. But they decided to wait out the night, for the army to come collect the bus and the dead bodies, then climb to the road and flag down another bus.

  That evening, that horrible, endless night, wrapped in leaves and hugging each other to conserve warmth on the hillside below, Davis said, “All those dead people. They were helpless.”

  “What do you expect?” Pardo asked. “They’re campesinos.”

  “What does that mean, anyway?” Davis asked.

  “Peasants.”

  “So? That’s not a permanent condition. My mother’s father was an illiterate French Canadian, and my mother’s mother was born an Irish peasant. Poor, superstitious, uneducated.”