I considered just taking the keys, but the instant the van’s engine died, the men would be alerted.
Withdrawing the corvo from my boot, I approached the front of the vehicle. I took the blade’s hilt in both hands and jabbed it at the tire. It twisted from my hand and clattered to the ground. I had underestimated the toughness of the radial’s black rubber skin.
A man in the dark shouted, and the other man answered. I had only seconds to act.
I snatched up the knife from the ground with both hands and drove it into the tire, which began to hiss violently, wrenched it around until it came loose, dashed to the rear of the van and did the same to that tire, and then fled into the darkness on the far side of the road. Ten meters, twenty, thirty. The flashlights came bobbing and weaving around the van. Forty meters. The lights began searching the scree. I found a hollow among the rocks and pressed myself into it. The lights peered out, passing over and around me, and moved on. I waited.
“Miss Certa,” a raised voice said in good Spanish . . . but with the telltale hard sounds of an American. Chemicals sparked in memory: the man who wanted to hail me a cab at the airport. A man who restrained himself from cursing in a foreign language. “Very well played.”
The other man began to say something and the first man hissed, silencing him. They both remained quiet for a moment, and I felt as though they were whispering to each other. The second man’s flashlight went dark. I tensed. He’d be hunting me in the dark, then.
“Step into the light, Isabel,” the first man said, giving his flashlight a little wave to punctuate the thought. “This game has gone on long enough. I have an—”
He paused and whistled, indicating something to his partner, but I could not discern what. I rose into a crouch and was surprised to still find the corvo clutched in my gloved hand. I angled south and west another twenty meters, always facing the van. Soon, I would move away from them, following the highway west and crossing back over it to reclaim my dirt bike. Until then, I could not be seen. I dropped back to the ground and breathed as quietly as possible.
“I have an associate who would very much like to meet you. You have in your possession something of his,” the man said. His voice was fainter now, with the distance. A flashlight beam darted my way and then passed by. “A very influential man. A kingmaker, you might say,” the man said, chuckling. In a lower voice, he said something else I could not hear distinctly, but I thought he might have said, “A kingdom killer.”
I had moved far enough away and was angling back toward the highway when the man said, loud enough for me to hear, “. . . questions answered. I can take you to Avendaño. He wants me to bring you to him. How else would we know you’d be here?” he said.
It took extreme amounts of self-control not to bellow But who sent the coordinates? Did you? And why? But I did not. I could not believe him about Avendaño.
I watched his flashlight beam closely. When it turned to an area of scrub and scree in the opposite direction of where I waited, I made my move, dashing across the highway and down the soft slope to the white flat plain. I could not tell if the gulley was between my bike and me but I kept moving, crouched until I was thirty meters away, and then stopped, to listen and watch.
I could see neither flashlight now, only the red lights of the van. I moved parallel to the highway, angling slightly away when I found the gulley by slipping down the side of it with a tumble of rocks. Things happened quickly then.
Heavy breathing like a dog’s approached; I heard the grunt of a man and then his own corresponding clatter of falling rocks. A black shape rose and grew and in the faint light I could make out the second man, his head pivoting about in the dark, his hands raised and misshapen. No . . . not misshapen, holding a pistol.
I made myself small, crouching, gathering myself. I centered my weight, took a deep breath, held it. What happened next would decide my fate. He had to come close enough to me without being alerted. I tried to access that pause of time that Avendaño had talked about, that I felt when hurtling through space on the motorcycle—the collapsed-time, the fermata. I felt as though I might pierce it, and then the man moved forward, close to me, and I launched myself forward and brought the corvo across his face as hard as I could. He fell backward, making a wordless, congested sound, liquid and bubbling. I threw myself upon him, lashing out with the hooked knife again, flailing at his raised hands and, when they fell away, his dim and wetly moving face.
He stopped burbling and gave a long sigh.
I put my face next to the ruin of his. No breath. The eyes gathering moonlight, open and still.
I had done this. Whatever other things I had and would become, I was now a killer.
I spent an eternity breathing into the man’s ruined visage, trying to commit it to my memory. We kill part of ourselves with each loss of innocence, Avendaño had said once, at the Café de Soto. Earlier, there had been luchadores and vampires, and a girl who went from a white rose to a blood-spattered and befanged virago.
Pushing away, I pulled my gloves off, now sticky with blood, and searched the ground until I felt something hard, with straight edges. Metal. My finger found the trigger and I rose. I tucked my gloves in my belt and moved away from the body of the second man, heading toward where I thought the motorcycle still lay.
I chose the wrong direction, switched back, and searched the other way until I found it, exactly as I had left it. A huge sigh of relief escaped me. If I had a home on this earth at that moment, it shared a point with that machine. How easily we become attached to objects. How easily we become attached to people. How easily we become killers.
I pulled my backpack on, over my shoulders, and righted the motorcycle. Legs shaking, I pushed up the rise, out of the gulley, onto somewhat level earth. The van still sat on the road, some hundred meters away, lights burning.
“Miss Certa!” the man yelled into the darkness. He stood in the lights of the van and was looking in the wrong direction. “Where do you think you’re going? We will find you! Step into the light!”
Before I could stop myself, I yelled, “There is no we!” and brought up the pistol and fired at him.
The bullet whanged off the van and the man dropped to a crouch and quickly put the vehicle between himself and me. I had the impression that he’d marked the muzzle flash. I didn’t care.
“Your man is fucking dead! I killed him!” I yelled, rage filling me. I imagined cutting him, torturing him, as if I were Sepúlveda and he were my Avendaño. I thought of opening up his body cavity and seeing what sort of thing might ride out of that red gullet into the world. I thought about the man lying in the gulley, his burbling last breath.
I was as mad as Avendaño.
I needed to leave, fast. I would kill the other man if I had to. But I did not want to.
I started the motorcycle—its roar was like some wild animal’s yawp, a vicious creature that prowled the salt flats—and tugged the helmet on, and then I fired the pistol twice more at the van and rode into the darkness.
* * *
I turned on the flashlight and returned to the highway once the van was out of sight. I couldn’t take the road past the van, so I threaded my way through the nearby town, biting my lip, hoping the Mageran army hadn’t set up a roadblock. I was a murderer now, in addition to being an exile, and possibly labeled an enemy of the state. Vidal and his regime did not appreciate the educated, and my doctorate labeled me as problematic.
Whatever had driven me through the events of earlier in the night—adrenaline, self-preservation, anger, hatred, the lure of the secrets of the Opusculus Noctis—it fled me now and I felt weak, and cold. I shivered. I searched for my gloves but must have lost them somewhere after the frantic struggle with the man I’d killed—cut to bloody ribbons, Isabel, you left him unfit for an open casket, that’s for sure—along with the weather-bleached blue dress.
Was this location something more than just a lure to get me out here? Was that why it was different from the othe
rs? Did they capture Avendaño that way, too? Did they capture him? Was it too much to hope he was alive? Was it too much to hope he was free?
I had no answers. Every part of me with reason, every fiber, wanted me to turn back toward the border. Go back to the comfort and safety of the university. Find Claudia and kiss her and tell her I’m sorry, it was a mistake, just something I had to do, and she’d be outraged but then she’d soften and we could find comfort among Moroccan tiles and Egyptian sheets and drink Avendaño’s booze and spend his money until it dried up. We could bring Laura into our bed, that gorgeous tor of a woman, and explore every crack and cranny of her. We could find all the ways smart, loving women can make their lives work.
But I didn’t.
I fell into the fugue state of motion. I was alone on the face of the earth, outside of time and light and human connection.
I found a road in the dark. I took it. And the next. And the next.
Until dawn.
10
I woke surprised my skin wasn’t crawling with scorpions. I lay in the dirt watching birds circle high above. The sun shone thin and watery and it was cold, a brisk wind ripping at my hands, my face. My lips were cracked—I had slept with my mouth open—and all of my body ached. When I shut my mouth, my teeth ground painfully on silica. Mustering what saliva I could, I spat. Coughed. Spat again.
I pushed myself up, lost my balance, and took two quick steps to correct myself. My body was a reflection of my tumbling thoughts.
Looking around, I spotted the motorcycle, turned on its side. The ground here was too soft for the kickstand. A khaki, dusty soil marked only with stunted grasses. In the distance, obstinate and solitary trees dotted the countryside. A spindly telephone line. Dun-colored hills sloping into dun-colored mountains.
Magera, my homeland. Seeing it now, I wondered why Vidal would commit the crimes he had to rule such a barren and forsaken place. But that was man, was it not? He would water the dust with blood to claim title and rule. I spat again.
I was becoming Avendaño.
I filled the dirt bike tank from the canisters, and in the first town I came to, located where I was. I bought workman’s gloves, thin but better than nothing. Tortillas, carne seca. I drank water and used the gas station’s restroom. I stripped to the waist and washed my armpits, my chest, my neck. I wet my hair and wrung it out. I made pools of water in my hands, sucked it into my nasal passages, and then blew that out too, into the sink, to clear the dust of my fugue state. I pored over the map and memorized my route to Unquera. It was less than a full day’s ride.
I reclaimed the road, almost thoughtless. Prudence and discretion were lost to me. This disregard for safety and outward concerns, a form of dumb lassitude. It seemed only moments later when I found myself following highway signs out of the heights and down turning roads to Unquera. From above, the vantage where the highway switched back and forth in its descent, the town looked very small and orderly. An elongated traza, planned and surveyed and plotted a century before, when copper was rich in these tawny mountains. A town with a workforce and a wharf on the shore, buried in the curving rind of bay. The sea gave no usable moisture for vegetation, but it was sustaining nonetheless—fish and commerce to a wharf that had seen more prosperous days. At its back, lifeless rocks sloped downward to the shore and their journey was interrupted not by any vegetation, only the construction of man: highway, house, road, wall, breakwall, wharf, pier.
I descended, back and forth on the switchback highway, watching Unquera grow below me. A white-and-blue spear tip of espadaña stood sentinel on a hilltop, its bell silent. Closer, an umber park, grassless, treeless, childless; a school, abandoned; a hut, a fishing shack. A narrow dirt path threading through bare-walled shacks. Warmer now, at sea level. Salt on the air. The desert of Magera meets the salt desert of sea.
There were more buildings—dun-colored buildings, like the land all around, dun and dun and done and Donne, I thought. A valediction forfeiting mooring. Thoughts skittering off into nonsense. I examined the buildings. Some looked industrial, some like dwellings, some looked vaguely military. One, a husk of a hotel, scaling paint and open doorway like the mouth of Pantagruel at carnival. All seemed empty, missing windows and doors. Some appeared to be warehouses, great buglike buildings with hundreds of fractured eyes as windows. There was movement north, closer to the wharf, I could see, where seagulls rode surging air drafts, feathers darkened by the rising dust of vehicles. Diesel exhaust. Soldiers. Green trucks.
I pulled my bike behind a Quonset hut between an industrial-size garbage bin and a wall, hiding it from any casual viewer. I left my helmet on the handlebar and stuffed the atlas in the small compartment under the blue seat. Down the alley where buildings pointed their asses, their most unflattering parts toward each other. I made my way as covertly as possible toward the hotel. I slipped around front, into its gullet. bienvenido al hotel elencantoquintay, a sign read. Wallpaper hung in rotting streamers, in corners piles of broken furniture. All of the light fixtures ripped from the walls. The last vestige of the hotel’s dignity was the concierge and clerk’s desk, an immovable and immemorial construction of real mahogany now beginning to striate and turn gray from the elements. The sea could strip any finish. It rises up, voracious.
El mar sueña que es el cielo.
I took the stairs by twos. Graffiti here, and the overwhelming smell of mold. I found a room on the third floor with a window that looked out over the northern part of Unquera, where the army vehicles were parked between buildings. I took a position at the window, watching. A barracks, maybe, or an arsenal.
Canvas-tarped trucks surrounded by carabineros. Men barking orders. Not many soldiers, maybe fifteen, mostly milling about. From one of the trucks came bound and blindfolded people; men, women, children. The horror Avendaño had documented in his testament went on.
The carabineros hustled the prisoners into the building, and the soldiers followed, leaving the streets empty except for an officer and another man I had not seen before. A fat man in a dark suit without a tie, his shirt untucked. He stood near the pier speaking with the officer, gesturing at the ship anchored at the pier. A gray metal boat, with pilot’s roost, radar tower, and swivel cannons on the prow and stern. The officer gestured to the building where they had taken the prisoners. He disappeared from sight, entering the building, and then returned, followed by the soldiers who had been there before, plus some who must have been in the building.
I tried counting, but lost track at thirty. They came bearing duffels and weapons, kits and chests, and moved to the ship. Fresh men to man the forsaken outpost, fresh prisoners from Santaverde or Coronada, Mediera or Los Diaz. A changing of the guard. After two hours, they had boarded the vessel and a great horn sounded and the ship retreated into the bay. As the afternoon grew long and the sun fractured on the sea, vanished in the horizon.
A few sodium lights clicked on, buzzing, casting yellow circles of light intermittently on Unquera’s streets. The sky blazed with sunset and then darkened. Another streetlight crackled to life, right outside the hotel. I sat on the floor, eating peanuts I had bought and watching shadows grow, and cursed myself afterward, parched. I wandered the hotel, going in and out of empty rooms, bathrooms, looking for sinks or even toilets that might contain a bit of water. There was none. I was just leaving one room, a room very close to where I had observed the ship’s departure, when I noticed a handprint on the wall near the door. It was crusted, and brown. Blood.
I scanned the room. Nothing, but—
On the wall, painted in blood, a crude drawing of an eye.
Avendaño.
He had been here.
* * *
My thirst was unbearable now. The cascading susurrus of the Pacific’s waves maddened me. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink. I waited, staring at the eye. I traced it with my hand. Avendaño. Something about it caused me to shrug off my pack and withdraw the sheaf of photographs of the Opusculus Noctis.
&
nbsp; A Little Night Work indeed.
I pawed through his translations. La dulce bruma del dolor. The Sweet Miasma of Pain. I sorted through my own translations. El señuelo de la inocencia. The Lure of Innocence. I riffled through the photographs. The words swam in my sight.
In the end, I focused on Un pasaje a los sueños. A Passage to Dreams.
* * *
It was not the noise that roused me, but the lack of it. The sounds of surf had died away, drawn back from the shore by the tide. My sight could not penetrate the darkness enough to see. But it had quieted. In the sodium light below I could see figures moving. Dark figures, indistinct, walking in a group. A flash of white skin. Bound hands, gagged mouth.
A mist had risen from the bay, it seemed. It hung in the air, still. A clotted artery of air, snaking down the street, between dark figures and their prisoner. Soldiers carrying devices, great packs on their backs, but absolutely silent.
I took the stairs to the ground floor on cat feet. I checked the gun in my belt to see if it was still there. I had fired it three times, and I was sure there were more rounds in it, but as I told Avendaño so long before, I knew nothing of guns. I hoped, if I needed it, it would fire again.
From the throat of the hotel, I waited for the dark figures of soldiers, and the others, the prisoners, to pass and then I followed.
Out, out of the town, past the hill upon which the church bell tower stood, a jutting angle piercing the night sky. The stars a great smear across the sky and the moon just a white haze outlining the mountains to the east. It would take it time to clear their summits and surmount the heavens.
The soldiers did not speak. They did not march in time.
Leaving the road, they followed a packed trail in the dirt, rising up, and up, away from Unquera. Lights winked on the bay from fishermen’s skiffs and then became obscured by the thickening haze. I hung back, not wanting to be spotted by the soldiers. I moved, crouching.
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 12