January Justice

by Athol Dickson

  Vega shook his head. “You cannot seriously believe that silly female shot him? After all his years in combat? Ridiculous. One of the junta’s men shot Fidel, and they left him there to discredit the URNG once and for all. And if I had not left town immediately, they would have found a way to kill me too, and make it look like I was resisting arrest or some such thing.”

  I said, “I need you to prove it.”

  “I tell you it is impossible.”

  “You’re lying. Get up. We’re going to the embassy.”

  “Wait. Let me think. Possibly there is another way…”

  “Hurry up, Vega.”

  “I have an idea. Your theory is that Fidel and Alejandra Delarosa attacked the Montes’s on my orders, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if I could prove to you Alejandra Delarosa was never part of the URNG? Would you then believe me when I say the home invasion was not our doing?”

  “If you can prove that, why did you hire me in the first place?”

  “Of course you are right. I cannot prove it legally, which is what I wanted you to do. No judge would accept the proof I have to offer, but you, as a good man, you will understand it and believe.”

  He seemed confident of that, so I considered the situation.

  If Vega could convince me that Delarosa had never worked for the URNG, then my theory fell apart. I’d have to come up with another explanation for the Montes’s home invasion. It might mean she simply wanted the Montes’s money. After all, kidnapping had worked for her before. Or maybe she was still jealous of Doña Elena’s relationship with her old lover, Arturo Toledo, and wanted revenge. Even after so much time, it wasn’t unprecedented for jealous rage to lead to such a crime.

  Or maybe Delarosa was working for the junta. Maybe she had been working for them all along. It would explain why she had forced Doña Elena to make those famous videos claiming responsibility for the URNG. Ransom notes would have been safer, but the videos of Doña Elena begging for her life had done more than anything to turn American public opinion against the URNG and engender sympathy for the old men of the junta. If that was true, it might also explain why Alejandra Delarosa had settled for two hundred thousand dollars. Maybe money was never the point. And if she had been working for the junta all along, it would explain how she had managed to elude capture for seven years.

  I said, “What is this proof you’re talking about?”

  Vega said, “It is not a what; it is a who. And you must hear what he has to say with your own ears.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  37

  The man who had restrained my wrists earlier still had several twist ties in his pocket. I covered Vega with Ernesto’s gun as he bound the other men’s wrists and ankles. I made sure the ties were tight, and then I listened as Vega used a handheld radio to call for the van to return to pick him up. When he was done, I took the radio and put it in my pocket.

  The walk down the mountain to the road was uneventful. Vega seemed comfortable. I assumed that meant he either expected his people to take me out at some point along the way, or he really was confident that I would be satisfied with the evidence he planned to offer.

  When we reached the road, the van wasn’t there yet. I directed Vega to a spot about fifty yards downhill along the road, where we would be concealed from anyone who emerged behind us from the path up to the shed.

  A few minutes later, I heard the whine of the van climbing the road in first gear. It passed us, went to the same place where it had stopped earlier, and parked. I warned Vega to be silent and placed the muzzle of the gun against his skull. I watched the van, wondering how many men might be inside. After a moment the driver emerged. He lit a cigarette and walked a few feet away to stand looking down on the city.

  I gave Vega the radio. I put my mouth against his ear and whispered. “Call and tell him you’re running late. Tell him to be ready with the doors open when you get here.”

  Vega called. The man heard his radio and hurried back to the van. He got inside and responded. Vega said exactly what I told him. The man got out of the van and opened the side door. I could see inside the van. It was empty.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Walk in front of me. Don’t say anything. If he speaks to you, just wave and smile. If you speak at all without permission, I’ll kill you.”

  We stepped onto the road and headed toward the van. The driver stood on the far side and didn’t hear us coming until we were almost there. I clutched the back of Vega’s shirt with one hand and jammed the muzzle of the gun into his ear with the other. “Tell him to throw his sidearm into the bushes.”

  The driver did as he was told. One minute later, we were rolling downhill, with the driver at the wheel, Vega in the passenger seat, and me sitting on the floor behind them with the gun.

  Vega stared straight ahead through the windshield. “We are the same, you know. Both of us are fugitives because of crimes we did not commit. And we both know what it is to suffer the burden of a shame we do not deserve.”

  I said, “All those mass graves in the mountains, and you expect me to believe your hands are completely clean?”

  “I expect you of all people to know what it is like to be accused of wartime atrocities that you did not commit.”

  So even there in Guatemala, they knew about the butchers of Laui Kalay. I sighed. I watched the back of his head for a few minutes. Then I said, “What makes you think I didn’t do it?”

  “You just overpowered me and four of my men. You did that alone, although all of us fought in the mountains for many years. All of us are warriors. You could have killed us. You could have killed Fidel when he came for you. But you exercised restraint. You used only the necessary force, and no more. A man with that kind of self-control does not do what they say you did.”

  “They convicted me.”

  “I am sure you had your reasons for allowing it.”

  As before, I couldn’t tell much about our route, since there were no windows in the back of the van, but I did make an effort to rise to my knees and look forward through the windshield whenever we turned. The return trip to the city seemed a little faster. Maybe that was because we were going downhill, or maybe it was because I was the one with the gun this time.

  I did my best not to think about Laui Kalay, but Vega’s words had stirred the memories again….my captain coming over to the hooch that morning to ask questions about a video on the Internet. When he had described it to me and told me who was in it, I had flatly denied that such a thing was possible. Then he had played it for me on his phone. I saw marines crouched over a haphazard pile of Afghan bodies, my comrades baring their teeth like ghouls, laughing, cutting away fingers, cracking teeth. I recognized those marines, my men, and knew that I had failed them. I hadn’t seen the signs. I should have sensed it in them. I should have saved them from the madness. I should have sent them home.

  My captain had paused the video and pointed to the screen. “We’ve identified that one there as Simpson, and that’s Wallace, Pierce, and Edwards. Who’s the one behind the camera?”

  The Afghan dust had never been so thick inside my throat. I swallowed, but the dryness wouldn’t go. My voice cracked when I said, “I don’t know.”

  My captain slipped the phone into the right front pocket of his blouse. “Gunny,” he’d said. “I know this is tough. If I was in your shoes, there’d be a strong temptation to close ranks. But it won’t do. This thing is already all over the Internet. These guys’ families have seen it. The press has seen it. Congressmen and senators have seen it. The president has probably seen it, or he will, you can bet on that. These guys are done, and so is the one who filmed them. There was nothing anyone could do for them after the knucklehead who filmed it posted it on the web. Tell me who he is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think I’d run interference if I could?”

  “Yes, sir. I know you would.”

  “You need to
get on the right side of this, Gunny. Who shot the video?”

  “Sir, I really do not know.”

  He sighed and stood up. “All right. Doesn’t matter. We know it was Ford. I just wanted confirmation before I sent the MPs over to his hooch.”

  After the captain left, I sat on my bunk thinking about Ford. He was an E3, a lance corporal, with a little under two years in the Corps. We’d been on tour together for nearly five months. He had turned nineteen on that tour. It had only been a week since a couple of the men and I had arranged a little surprise for him. We had sneaked Ford into the command center of our forward operating base and there, courtesy of a satellite uplink, he had enjoyed almost ten minutes of conversation with his teenaged wife, who was at home in California smiling at him from the computer screen.

  Before the men and I had left Ford in the room, his wife had held their son, Tommy, up to the camera. Little Tommy was seven days old, wrapped in a white blanket, with a scrunched-up pink face and baby-blue eyes and a little crocheted beanie on his head. The guys and I withdrew and waited just outside. When Lance Corporal Ford emerged a few minutes later, his eyes were red and swollen. “Thanks” was all said before walking off alone.

  I sat on my bunk that day after the captain left, and I thought about that baby. I thought about what it had been like to grow up in a small town in south Texas, ashamed and afraid to speak my father’s name. I had been taken in by my mother’s parents after my father murdered their daughter, my mother, when I was six years old. I knew what it was like to live with unrelenting shame, to wonder if the taint was on me, too, if the wicked thing had been passed down.

  I thought about that and about the baby, little Tommy Ford. I thought about his father turning nineteen in that hellhole of a country, and the way the things a man saw there could attack his mind. The damage done could be as deadly as a bullet. The rage. The guilt. The horror. You had to beat it back or it would own you. I had fought that battle myself, years before, on my first combat tour. Every soldier does. But I was the seasoned veteran. I was Ford’s sergeant. I should have seen it coming. I should have gotten out in front of it, talked him through it, saved Ford for his son.

  One Christmas in Uvalde, I had gone outside to get mesquite wood for the fireplace and found my grandfather sitting on the front porch swing, alone. He hadn’t noticed me in time to wipe his eyes. The sight of that strong man’s cheeks awash with tears had stopped me in my tracks.

  “What’s the matter?” I had asked.

  “Nothing, son. Don’t worry.”

  “What is it, Grandpa?”

  “Oh, you know during the holidays sometimes, I think about your mom.”

  It was my thirteenth Christmas. She had been dead for more than half my life.

  I had watched his rugged profile as he looked away across the valley. The sun had been about to set.

  He said, “Your father came to me that day, before he did it. He was always in some kind of trouble. That time he had got crossways with some El Paso boys. He said he needed money. If I’d given what he wanted it would’ve nearly wiped us out. But money would’ve fixed things. Maybe if I hadn’t been so stubborn…” My grandfather shook his head and wiped his eyes again. “God help me, it was only money.”

  Twenty years later, sitting on a bunk in an Afghan war zone, I knew that there are moments when the flow of life presents a choice between an awful sacrifice and a future of regret. Ford had a wife and a newborn son. I had nobody to shame. It was too late for the other men in that video. But maybe there was still a chance for little Tommy. They couldn’t know for certain who had been behind the cell phone’s camera. I decided that they must not know. They would not know.

  I stood up and went looking for the captain.

  38

  “This is it,” said Vega.

  From behind him in the van, I rose up to check the situation through the windshield. It was a residential neighborhood of three- and four-story apartment buildings on each side of a narrow street. I saw trash standing in the gutters, the grime of air pollution coating everything, cracked stucco and concrete walls defaced by graffiti, six or seven kids kicking a ball, lots of clothing hanging out to dry on balconies above us, cars and trucks parked with two tires up on the sidewalk, and a pair of mangy-looking dogs trotting toward the van with their tails tucked tight between their legs. Both of the dogs cast furtive glances toward anything that moved. I knew exactly how they felt.

  I said, “What’s the plan?”

  Vega pointed toward a second-story apartment above us on the right. “The man you want lives there.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Emilio Delarosa.”

  It took a moment to sink in. “Alejandra’s husband?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Give me the car keys.”

  The driver passed them back.

  I gave a twist tie to Vega. “I want one of his hands sticking through the steering wheel, and then you tie his wrists together, understand? Then I’ll get out first, and then You’ll get out.”

  “I cannot go with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Delarosa would not speak freely if he knew I was involved.”

  “He’s afraid of you?”

  “He is afraid of what would happen if the junta knew I had been to his house. Everyone fears that.”

  It made sense. I said, “Okay, strap this guy’s wrists through the steering wheel like I said before.”

  Vega did as he was told.

  “Now put your left hand through the wheel beside his.”

  I leaned forward and strapped Vega to the wheel with another plastic tie. Then I got out of the van. The children’s ball came rolling down the sidewalk. I kicked it back and waved at them. They grinned and waved back. I walked to a steel gate that was standing open, then climbed the stairs to the second floor of the building Vega had indicated. There were four doors along a corridor that was open to the air on each end. The stairs continued up. I knocked at the door that looked as if it must open on the correct apartment. A man’s voice called through the door.

  “What?”

  I said, “Mr. Delarosa? Emilio Delarosa?”

  “What do you want?”

  “My name is Malcolm Cutter. I am here from Los Angeles, California. I would like to talk to you about your wife.”

  The kids yelled loudly in the street below. I waited. I was about to knock again when the door opened.

  According to the file I had received from Congressman Montes, Emilio Delarosa was about ten years older than I, but while I’ve been told I look a little younger than my age, the years hadn’t been kind to him. Dark brown bags hung underneath his eyes, and a pair of deep creases descended from each side of his nose. His forehead was a ladder of horizontal wrinkles. His white cotton shirt was stained by something brown, and his thick black hair was matted on one side, as if he had just gotten out of bed.

  “What about my wife?” he said.

  The scent of alcohol billowed from his mouth. Ignoring it I said, “I have some information, and I thought you would be interested.”

  Emilio Delarosa stared at me with rheumy eyes, and then he turned and walked back into the apartment. He left the door wide open. I took that as an invitation and followed.

  He sat on a chair near an open window that faced out toward the street. The chair was the only piece of furniture in the room. On the floor beside the chair were a bottle of rum and a plastic cup. He picked them up and poured some rum into the cup. He put the bottle back down on the floor, then took a drink from the cup. I heard a gurgling sound as the rum passed down his throat.

  On the floor near where I stood I saw a document in a simple black frame. The glass that once protected the document had been shattered. I took a step closer and saw it was a license to practice civil engineering in Guatemala.

  “How long has it been since you saw Alejandra, Mr. Delarosa?”

  Gazing out the window, he said, “Seven years.”

 
; “How long since you spoke with her?”

  He drank again. He turned back toward me. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Cutter. I am trying to find your wife.”

  “Everyone is trying to find her.”

  There was a sudden burst of cheering from the football game in the street below. He didn’t seem to hear it. He stared through the window as if the view went on for miles instead of being blocked by the raw concrete of the apartment across the street. He swallowed the last of the rum in his cup, bent over, picked up the bottle, and poured himself some more.

  “Why do you say that, Mr. Delarosa? Has someone else come by?”

  “I told those Communists to go to the devil.”

  “Communists? You mean the URNG?”

  “Of course. Are you a fool?”

  “But the URNG must know where Alejandra is since she works for them.”

  “Works for them? Works for them?” He laughed. It was a bitter sound. “What are you, American? You must work for the government.” He shook his head and muttered, “Fascists.”

  “Your wife is not with the URNG?”

  He turned to look back at me again with obvious disdain. “You go back and tell your bosses she is innocent of everything. For the thousandth time, tell them we only wish to live our lives. We are not political. We are not Communists. We are not Fascists. I hate them all. My angel hates them all. We are not political. You go back and tell them that, Mr. American.”

  Vega was right. Nothing the man said would stand up and court, but I did believe him. Nobody could have faked so much contempt for the URNG, or the junta. He and his wife were not Communists and they weren’t operatives for the government. Which meant they were just victims caught up in the conflict like a million others. But I needed proof, or a lead at the very least. Something I could take back with me to California.