January Justice

by Athol Dickson

  “If you do not mind…” —I swerved to avoid a beer truck in the lane ahead—“I would prefer he dropped it on the seat up here beside me. Yours, too.”

  Vega sighed and turned to look out the window at his shoulder. “Do it,” he said.

  Castro made no move.

  “Do what he said, Fidel,” Vega repeated.

  I glanced into Castro’s yellow eyes in the rearview mirror. Then I had to pay attention to the traffic up ahead. The glance had been enough to confirm my earlier suspicion about the man’s hatred. It isn’t paranoia when it’s true. I focused on what I knew to be true.

  I cut left into the HOV lane to pass three cars, and then back to the right to barely miss the rear bumper of a van we were approaching fast. The van honked as we roared by. It sounded distant in the heavily insulated cocoon of the Mercedes’ interior. I could barely hear the engine, and there was only a hint of wind noise. By virtue of impeccable design, the outside world had almost no effect on my passengers in the Mercedes. But I had modified the suspension personally, so my sense of contact with the road was excellent. Even at one hundred ten miles per hour, the limo handled as well as some sports cars. Still, it would only take one driver changing lanes without warning, and we’d be finished. I didn’t enjoy putting the other drivers in danger.

  I was hoping for a patrol car or a CHP motorcycle in the rearview mirror, when Valentín Vega’s hand appeared in my peripheral vision. A Glock 26 dropped onto the leather seat beside me. I heard heated whispering in back. After a couple of seconds, another pistol joined the Glock, also a 26, the smaller size, convenient for concealed carry.

  I removed my foot from the accelerator and touched the window button.

  As the glass began to rise between us, Vega said, “Please leave it down. We did as you suggested.”

  “Your friend Señor Castro might have a knife.”

  “He does not.”

  “In that case, he might try to stare me to death.”

  “But we must talk.”

  “Do not worry. I will leave it open just a little.”

  When the gap at the top of the glass was too small for them to reach me, I touched the button again to stop the window. “All right,” I said. “Please explain why Señor Castro felt he had to draw his weapon.”

  The one with the yellow eyes spat out a few Spanish curses and suggested that I was a homosexual. He didn’t use the polite word for it in Spanish.

  I spoke to Vega in English. “Does he understand me now?”

  “No. Fidel speaks very little of your language.”

  “Your friend doesn’t like me very much. Why is that?”

  “It is not only you, Mr. Cutter. I am afraid Fidel hates Americans. He is a little bit… what is your expression? Obstructive-compulsive?”

  “Obsessive.”

  “Ah yes. He is obsessive-compulsive about this hatred.”

  “Are you trying to say he’s crazy?”

  “I think he is a little bit. Yes.”

  “Your travels might be easier if you left him at home.”

  “That is true, but what can I do? Fidel is my wife’s brother, and he saved my life many times during the war.”

  I drove on, thinking about insanity, about men—friends—driven to embrace brutality by the unrelenting fear and grief of war. I thought about loss and guilt, and the psychedelic impulse to flee into midair. I thought about where I had spent the past seven months, about straitjackets and psychotropic drugs and solid steel doors and tempered windows reinforced with wire. If it were true that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, it was doubly true for padded cells. I decided not to judge Señor Castro too harshly.

  I said, “Maybe you should tell me what you want.”

  2

  “You were in the first force recon company,” said Comandante Valentín Vega.

  I changed lanes, preparing to take the next exit off the freeway. “That’s right.”

  “You visited my country another time, more recently. You commanded Colonel Kyle Russell’s personal security detail.”

  He shouldn’t have known that, and I couldn’t confirm it, so I said nothing.

  “When the tyrant Ríos Montt was nominated as the Guatemalan Republican Front candidate in my country’s 2003 presidential election, Colonel Russell visited us to collect information for a report that your Pentagon delivered to your government’s committee on Latin America affairs. Because of your influence, Colonel Russell suggested an assassination, arranged to look like an accident. Unfortunately, that did not occur. It was an excellent idea.”

  Vega had it only partly right. Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan politician, a former general and a dictator and cofounder of the military junta in the early eighties. During his brief dictatorship, thousands of Guatemalans had been “disappeared,” which was what Guatemalans called it when their government murdered them and buried them in unmarked graves. Ríos Montt, a self-professed Pentecostal preacher who had never been convicted of the genocidal crimes committed while he controlled the country, had resurfaced to run for Guatemalan President in 2003. Probably because of my experience in Guatemala a decade before, I had been assigned to Colonel Russell’s security detail when the Pentagon ordered him to assess the impact of a potential Ríos Montt victory on the military situation in Central America. A contingent of Drug Enforcement Administration guys had also tagged along to look into the narcotics trafficking situation.

  Russell and I had served together at Camp Rhino during the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and we had a certain level of mutual respect.

  During my second deployment in Guatemala, Russell had often asked for my operational opinions. We spent six weeks traveling the mountains and coastal lowlands of Guatemala with the Marine detail and our the DEA agents, hearing horror stories and seeing mass grave sites and the physical scars of torture on survivors of the junta’s interrogations. I came to believe that a Ríos Montt political comeback could destroy the fragile stability of the region. If I had been a Guatemalan, and he had been elected, I would most certainly have come down from the mountains in a killing frame of mind. To avoid a return of the bloody Guatemalan civil war, it had seemed to me that Ríos Montt’s candidacy for presidential office should be stopped by whatever means necessary.

  I said as much to Colonel Russell when he’d asked, and it was possible my comments had some slight influence on his report to the Pentagon. But I had no idea how the man in the backseat of my limo knew any of this. And if Russell had actually suggested a black operation against Ríos Montt to his superiors, I didn’t know a thing about that either, except that it wasn’t based on my suggestion. The United States of America doesn’t base its foreign policy decisions on the opinions of gunnery sergeants.

  As these memories arose in my mind, I also considered the fact that I was thinking lucid thoughts. At least it did seem as if I was thinking pretty clearly. Assuming that was true, assuming I was remembering things the way they had really happened, it was a relief to know my damaged brain could still collect facts from that far in the past and line them up in order. But regardless of whether I remembered those weeks in the Central America mountains correctly, or whether past and present still swirled unconnected back and forth between my synapses, I couldn’t talk about it with civilians, and certainly not with a pair of Guatemalan ex-revolutionaries.

  Valentín Vega’s voice came over the glass behind me. “You have nothing to say?”

  “I do not.”

  “Are you not curious about why I arranged this meeting?”

  “I’m not paid to be curious.”

  I had already taken the Cahuenga Boulevard exit. We were creeping along behind a guy on a bicycle who wouldn’t get out of the center of the lane. He wore nothing but flip-flops and a Speedo. Welcome to Hollywood.

  There was a taxi in front of the restaurant. I circled the block, steering with one hand while I checked the two Glocks for chambered rounds with the other ha
nd. When we approached the restaurant again, the curb in front was open. I paralleled into the spot, always an interesting process in a stretch. I emptied both of the weapons’ magazines. I lowered the glass between the front and back seats an few inches. Then, one at a time, I passed the pistols back through the narrow space above the glass partition behind me. I got out, walked around the car, and opened the rear door on the sidewalk side.

  “Gentlemen,” I said.

  Both of the men emerged, adjusting their shirttails over their empty weapons. They stood blinking in the sunshine, looking around at Hollywood Boulevard. Both of them were nearly a foot shorter than me, but Castro was nearly as wide in the shoulders.

  “This is Hollywood?” said Vega, speaking Spanish. “It is not as I imagined.”

  I replied in his language. “Lots of people say that.”

  “It is less…something.”

  “Yes.”

  Still looking around, but not at me, he said, “Would you like a job?”

  “I have a job.”

  “Excuse me, I mean, perhaps, a case?”

  “This guy pulls a gun on me”—I gestured toward Castro—“and now you want to hire me to protect you?”

  Castro slipped on a pair of sunglasses and then tried to stare me into submission. I would have tried it with the glasses off. “While I am here,” he said, “Comandante Valentín needs no other protection.”

  I looked him up and down. Mostly down. “If you say so.”

  “I do say it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He thrust his broad chest out and took a step toward me. “What do you mean?’”

  Vega reached between us, gesturing toward a tree in a sidewalk grate beside the restaurant’s entrance. “Perhaps we could speak over there?”

  I headed for the tree, with Vega at my elbow. When Castro tried to follow, Vega said, “Please comrade, if you would wait by the car?”

  “But this idiot—”

  “Fidel, this matter was decided long ago. Exercise the necessary self-discipline.”

  The man aimed his sunglasses at me for another moment. When I failed to collapse from fear, he said, “As you wish,” then turned and walked back to the limousine, where he lit a cigarette.

  Vega and I reached the shade below the tree. It was a welcome relief from the unseasonal January heat.

  He wiped his forehead. “I apologize. He was a fine soldier, but he has very strong feelings now. Sometimes they overcome him.”

  “We’ve all seen things we wish we could forget. It’s not an excuse.”

  Vega stared at me. “I am surprised to hear you say that, Mr. Cutter. You, in particular, I mean. Were you not court-martialed and discharged from your Marine Corps because of… how did they put it? Conduct unbecoming a noncommissioned officer? Desecration of the dead? Oh yes, and failing to properly prevent or report misconduct by junior marines under your command?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Vega nodded. “Possibly. And there are things about my friend and comrade you do not know.”

  I thought about Haley, out of her mind and flying toward the rocks. It was the single most important fact in my life, yet I knew almost nothing about it. There was a lot I didn’t know, a lot I would give my life to learn, if that was what it took.

  Vega continued, “Now that you are a private citizen, you provide security? You drive people and keep them safe?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And sometimes you conduct investigations?”

  “I’ll look into things for my regular clients when it’s connected to the security services I offer. But it’s not something I do on a stand-alone basis.”

  Vega nodded, his eyes focused on something across the street. “I understand. But I hope you will make an exception in our case.”

  “Are you saying you want to hire me for some kind of an investigation?”

  “I do. May I explain why?”

  “If you like.”

  “There was a man, Arturo Duarte Toledo Ramos, who was the mayor of Cobán. That is a city of about one hundred thousand, and as you may recall, it is the capital of our state of Alta Verapaz?”

  “Go on.”

  “Toledo claimed to be a coffee grower, but his main business was politics. Which is to say, of course, that he was a thief and a murderer. Over the years he imposed many unofficial taxes on the people, which he called ‘fees,’ and he confiscated much property. Those who spoke against him were disappeared, or if their presence remained necessary to the junta for some reason, members of their families disappeared. Either way, nobody opposed Toledo for very long. Ríos Montt was Toledo’s original patron, of course, but nothing changed when Mejía overthrew Ríos Montt, or when Vinicio Cerezo took over after that. Our dictators came and went, but Toledo was a master politician and managed to survive no matter who was in control. He preyed on the people of Cobán for over twenty years. Finally in 1999 we had truly free elections. Like all the other cockroaches running from the light, Toledo left Guatemala. But there were rumors he had amassed a fortune worth more than sixteen million by that time.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Yes, Mr. Cutter. And every bit of it was stolen from the people.”

  It was a lot of money for an impoverished country like Guatemala. I said, “Go on.”

  “We do not know where he went at first, but he showed up in Mexico City in 2001. There he met Doña Elena Trujillo, the actress. You have heard of her, perhaps?”

  “Of course.”

  Vega nodded. “Yes, she has become quite famous in your Hollywood. But at that time, she was merely acting in what I believe you call a Mexican soap song?”

  “Opera.”

  “Ah. I knew that was not right. A soap opera, yes, on the Mexican television. She was not as famous then, at least not yet famous in the United States, but she was always very beautiful, of course, and Arturo Toledo was known to be quite rich, so it surprised no one when they were married. Then they moved here. Many people said it was so Doña Elena could become a movie star with her beauty and his money.”

  “It’s coming back to me. I think I was out of the country at the time, but wasn’t her husband murdered?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that was this husband? Toledo?”

  “Exactly.”

  A woman passed us on the sidewalk, pushing a grocery cart piled almost eight feet high with a collection of seemingly random items tied in place with a spiderweb of different lengths of rope and cord. I saw plastic garbage sacks overflowing with clothes, a boom box lashed in place, a table lamp with the shade crumpled, a pair of hedge shears, and many other unrelated objects.

  The woman could have been twenty, or she could have been sixty. It was impossible to tell beneath the grime; and the very large sunglasses she wore; and the purple hat with a wide, floppy brim; and the filthy pair of men’s penny loafers; and the red-and-white-striped leggings under a Lakers T-shirt, which hung like a dress to her knees. She argued with thin air as she pushed the cart along. A schizophrenic, probably. I recognized the symptoms. Where I had been lately, I had seen a lot of that.

  I noticed that the ropes and cords around her worldly possessions had begun to move. I watched as they writhed in and out among her things like snakes among a pile of rocks. I told myself it wasn’t true. The ropes weren’t really writhing. I looked away.

  I said to Vega, “It was a kidnapping gone wrong, if I recall. The kidnapper took Doña Elena. Her husband was killed when he delivered the ransom money, and they never caught the guy.”

  “It was not a guy, Mr. Cutter. It was a woman. Alejandra Delarosa, who was Toledo’s mistress.”

  “With a sex symbol like Doña Elena as his wife, he also had a mistress?”

  Comandante Valentín shrugged. “It is not uncommon.”

  Now that I had remembered some of the story, the rest began to come in bits and pieces. I remembered seeing pathetic videos that had been released by the police a
nd posted on the Internet. Doña Elena begging for her life. Mascara running down her cheeks. Dried blood at the corner of her mouth. And her masked captor, in an olive-drab uniform, standing behind her, forcing her to state demands, pressing an old Colt automatic against her temple.

  I looked hard at Vega. “They said it was you guys. They said the URNG did it to get Toledo’s money back.”

  “They lied.”

  “The kidnapper claimed to be with the URNG.”

  “Our movement was not involved, Mr. Cutter. And we want to hire you to prove it.”

  3

  I made the mistake of looking down the street. Down there, snakes were still writhing on a mound of treasures. I told myself it was only ropes and cords restraining a homeless woman’s worldly possessions. I forced myself to look back at Vega. I forced myself to speak normally. “There have been at least a hundred thousand unsolved murders in your country over the last three decades, and the drug cartels have taken up the killings where the military left off. It’s become so bad, even the coffee and banana growers are getting out. Why should you care about one old kidnapping and murder in the USA?”

  Comandante Valentín replied, “You have perhaps heard of Doña Elena’s second husband, Congressman Montes? Hector Montes, chairman of the Congressional Caucus on Central America? He has been building a career in the media over the last year, complaining about the war on drugs.”

  I said, “I’ve heard of him.”

  Vega went on. “Ever since URNG became a legitimate political party in our country, we have been assisting your Drug Enforcement Agency and standing for policies that make it difficult for the narcos. In return, we have been receiving dollars from your government. We need your money to win political campaigns and to influence public opinion. But your congressman Montes wants to reduce funding for the war on drugs. If he gets his way, there will be no more money sent to Guatemala.”

  I said, “You think the congressman is campaigning against more funding for Guatemala because he thinks his new wife was once kidnapped by the URNG?”