Days of the Dead

by David Monnery

  Maybe she wanted Isabel’s help with her elder daughter, who seemed to have inherited her wider family’s interest in left-wing politics. The country might be run by a president more interested in cars and women than politics, but the same bastards as always lurked in the shadows.

  It could be anything, Docherty thought, as a Mendoza bus blared by in the opposite direction. A holiday was a holiday, and any excuse to take time away from the damn word processor and his wretched memoirs was more than welcome. He’d been working on them on and off for over a year, and on a more or less nine-to-five basis for several months, but he didn’t have much more to show for his efforts than a huge pile of handwritten notes. When he tried actually writing it never seemed to come out the way he intended, leaving him to mutter ‘you had to be there’ at the annoyingly unresponsive screen. And when he had finally managed to put together a coherent chapter on the Bosnian business his publishers in London had come back with a long list of suggestions for alterations, most of which seemed designed to either obviate the risk of Her Majesty’s Government taking exception to Docherty’s version of events or to encourage Jean-Claude Van Damme to accept the movie part.

  Docherty was well aware that a Van Damme movie might make him rich, but the thought of faking his own life story didn’t sit too well. If he was going to write the damn thing, he wanted it to tell the truth. He wanted his children to see him as a man who knew he had lived and worked on a moral tightrope, not as some glib action hero pumped up with either Hollywood cynicism or gung-ho fascism. A month had passed since Docherty and Isabel had seen Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning Braveheart, and he still felt angry about how bad it was.

  Well, at least he didn’t have to think about any of that for another week. And the sky was growing red above the highway ahead. He leant over to nudge his wife awake, as she’d asked him to. ‘Not far now,’ he said.

  Isabel yawned and reached for the tube of mints on the dashboard. ‘I wonder what Rosa really wants,’ she murmured.

  In the Colombian city of Cartagena it was almost five-thirty in the afternoon and the lengthening shadows were throwing the crenellated walls of the old fortifications into dramatic relief. Carmen Salcedo, who had just finished her spiel on the era of piratical sackings and let her tour party loose to explore the walls on their own, watched the mostly American tourists happily ambling away, camcorders whirring, cameras poised.

  It was certainly a beautiful evening. She stood leaning against one of the abutments, enjoying the blues of sea and sky, the gold-flecked waves and the buildings of the old city glowing in the evening sun. For all its problems – which ranged from drug traffickers through political corruption to air pollution – Cartagena was still a magical city.

  Carmen had lived there for all of her twenty-six years. Her parents still lived in the hills behind the city, but she now shared a two-bedroom flat with Pinar, a fellow tour guide. They were going to the cinema that evening, she remembered, and looked at her watch. She should have given her charges twenty minutes, not half an hour.

  But it was too late to worry about that now, and so far this group had proved more reliable than most. She walked back across to the bus and found Mariano squinting at a sex comic which he was holding only a few inches away from his eyes.

  ‘Getting short-sighted?’ she asked sweetly, making him almost jump out of his seat.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ he half shouted, glaring at her.

  She didn’t think he had ever quite forgiven her for turning down the offer of a date, but he was a good driver, and on the streets of Cartagena that was no small matter. ‘Sorry,’ she said with a smile.

  He huffed and puffed, then went back to the comic.

  The Pearsons, an American couple in their sixties who had commandeered the front seats of the minibus on day one and, despite several heavy hints, never surrendered them to anyone else, had left a Miami newspaper to guard their precious space. It was almost a week old, but better than nothing, and Carmen sat down to improve her already near-perfect English.

  She read the entertainment section first, hoping for a preview of the films which she would be able to see later that year in Cartagena, but they all seemed to be the same old boring hi-tech thrillers. She hadn’t heard of any of the bands mentioned in the music section, and if their music bore any relationship to the way they looked in their photographs she doubted if she was missing much.

  She ignored the sports section, and was just skipping through the local news when she saw the headline ‘COLOMBIAN GIRL KILLED BY DRUGS’. Underneath it the sub-head claimed that ‘Traffickers cut her open to reclaim shipment’. Jesus, she thought, and then the two names stopped her in her tracks, and she could suddenly hear her own heart beating. She read the whole paragraph:

  ‘Another girl, whose Colombian passport identified her as Victoria Marín, was taken into custody by police last night. She was carrying a second passport, which enabled police to identify the dead girl as Placida Guzmán, but was either unwilling or unable to further help the Miami Beach PD with their investigation.’

  She read on, but there was nothing else, no mention of the other three, no mention of her sister.

  ‘Could you take a picture of us, dear?’ someone asked, disturbing her reverie. It was one of the Englishwomen, with her husband hovering behind her. Carmen nodded dumbly, climbed down from the bus, pointed the camera and pressed the button, still in a state of shock.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ the woman asked, a concerned look on her face.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Carmen replied, smiling. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  ‘Well, you’ll soon be rid of us for the night,’ the woman said with a twinkle.

  Carmen smiled again, and looked at her watch. Ten minutes more.

  They went slowly, but everyone was on time. On the drive back to the hotel she went through the next day’s itinerary – they were visiting the nearby Corales del Rosario National Park – and then asked the Pearsons if she could borrow their newspaper for the evening to help brush up her English.

  Mr Pearson seemed a bit reluctant, but his wife was only too happy, probably seeing it as a down payment on their continued tenure of the best seats. At the hotel she counted them all out, remembered to re-check the next morning’s pick-up time with Mariano, then headed for a phone. Pinar was upset that their evening at the cinema was off, but she could tell from Carmen’s voice that something serious had happened. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Carmen explained, and rang her parents’ home. Her mother answered.

  ‘I’m coming up,’ Carmen told her. ‘I have to talk to you both.’

  ‘But we’re going out at eight…’

  ‘Just wait for me,’ Carmen insisted. ‘It’s about Marysa.’

  ‘What about her?’ her mother asked, sounding almost angry.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I get there.’

  It was an hour’s journey on the bus, maybe even more at that time of day, so she decided on the luxury of a cab, as much for the privacy as the gain in speed. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to immediately ring her parents, but the tone of her mother’s voice had given Carmen cause to wonder. Should she have sat on this information for a few hours, thought about what she wanted to do with it, before putting herself at the mercy of her father’s stubbornness and her mother’s selfishness? What were they going to say to this? The last time she’d raised the issue with them they’d both been really angry with her, as if somehow it was her fault that their other daughter had been taken from them.

  The trouble was, their instinctive approach to anything potentially disturbing was to ignore it, in the hope that it would go away. And it worked for them, or at least it did in the sense that they managed to avoid most of the disturbance which other people called living. But it had never worked for Carmen.

  The traffic seemed worse than ever, but shortly after seven the taxi deposited her at the foot of the bougainvillea-bordered drive. Her parents were fairly rich by legal Colombian sta
ndards, her father having inherited the family footwear business. It was the combination of this wealth and the lack of a ransom demand which had eventually convinced them all to accept the police investigator’s conclusion that Marysa was dead.

  They had likewise assumed that Placida Guzmán and Victoria Marín were dead. And Irma. And Rosalita.

  Carmen let herself in through the front door, and a few moments later found her parents putting the finishing touches to their evening’s apparel in the enormous bedroom.

  ‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t tie your hair back like that,’ were her mother’s words of greeting. ‘Can’t you afford a proper styling?’

  ‘I don’t want a proper styling,’ Carmen said, running a hand over her severely pinned black mane.

  Her mother just looked at her.

  Carmen laid the newspaper out in front of her on the dressing table. ‘Read that,’ she ordered, pointing out the item with a finger.

  Her mother sighed and started reading, still fiddling with her earrings as she did so. Then her hand suddenly stilled, leaving the filigree ornament swaying in mid-air. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said softly.

  ‘What is it?’ her husband asked, leaning over her shoulder to read.

  ‘Guzmán and Marín are common names,’ Carmen’s mother said in a small voice, as if she was arguing with herself.

  ‘Not that common,’ Carmen said gently. ‘And Victoria Marín and Placida Guzmán together – it’s too much of a coincidence. It even says that Victoria is twenty-three, which would be right.’ She looked at her parents, both of whom seemed to have been suddenly aged by the news. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she said. ‘This means there’s hope.’

  ‘We understand,’ her father said, and the look in his eyes seemed to add: we’ve lost her once and now we’ll get the chance to lose her all over again.

  Carmen felt like slapping them both. ‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked her father abruptly.

  He looked at her for a moment. ‘Talk to the Chief of Police, I suppose, and get him to contact the police in Miami.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should go there yourself? I’ll come with you,’ she added – his English had never been good.

  He shook his head. ‘The police in Miami are more likely to listen to a fellow-officer than a Colombian civilian.’

  Which might well be true, she thought. ‘So will you call now?’

  He smiled wryly. ‘He won’t be in his office.’

  ‘His home then.’

  ‘I don’t have his home number, and even if I did…Carmen, the newspaper article is a week old. Putting the man’s back up to save a few hours is not worth it.’

  ‘And we’re going to be late,’ his wife added, earrings finally in place.

  ‘You’re still going out?’

  ‘What do you expect us to do – spend the evening wringing our hands?’ her mother asked.

  ‘No, I suppose not, but…You will ring first thing in the morning?’

  ‘I’ll go and talk to him in person.’

  ‘Good.’ She felt relieved.

  ‘There’s food in the kitchen if you want some,’ her mother told her, and once they’d gone she toyed with a plate of warmed-up fish risotto for a while before deciding to head back into town.

  On the bus she found her mind running through the events of that fateful August. The five young women, all from good families, all in their last year at college, had taken a picnic a few miles down the coast, in an area which had always hitherto been considered safe. In the early afternoon they had been seen by several other picnickers, as well as joggers and courting couples, but after four o’clock the record of sightings came to an end, and the party had not returned to the college that evening.

  No suspicious groups or vehicles had been seen in the area, but when after several days the women had still failed to reappear the assumption had grown that a new guerrilla group must be holding them to ransom. Once two weeks had passed without any demand for money being received, the betting had shifted in favour of either some catastrophic and completely unfathomable accident or what seemed an equally improbable mass rape and murder.

  Now it seemed likely that they had been in the hands of drug traffickers all this time. Placida was dead and Victoria was ‘unable to help’, whatever that might mean. Where were the other three, and what had their lives been like for the last two years?

  The answer to the last question was too horrific to contemplate.

  Victoria would know, Carmen thought, and she was more likely to talk to a friend than a gringo policeman. If her father didn’t get anywhere with his contacts, she decided, then she would go to Miami herself, with or without her parents’ blessing, and find out what had happened to Marysa.

  Docherty and Isabel didn’t discover the reason for Rosa’s summons until three days after their arrival in Buenos Aires. On that Tuesday Docherty and Rosa’s husband, Giorgio, a second-generation immigrant of Italian descent, had driven to the university, where the media unit’s satellite link-up was being put to good use, showing England’s final group game against Holland in Euro 96. England outplayed the Dutch and Docherty, a true Scot, duly lamented the Auld Enemy’s victory. But as they drove home to Recoleta he had to admit that England seemed to be playing football these days, rather than just kicking it upfield and running after it like headless chickens.

  The two men arrived back to find the children running riot in the house while their wives were preparing the ingredients for a barbecue on the patio. Rosa gave the task of igniting the charcoal to Giorgio, collected a bottle of chilled white wine from the fridge and poured glasses for the four of them on the patio table. ‘A toast,’ she said. ‘The future.’

  They all drank. Here it comes, Docherty thought.

  ‘Though it’s the past I want to talk to you about,’ Rosa began carefully. Behind her the evening sun glinted on the waters of the River Plate estuary, and the panorama of Recoleta’s famous brightly coloured houses seemed like a child’s drawing. ‘I have something to ask you – you, Jamie, though of course it concerns Isabel too.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t even know if I should ask you, but I promised I would. And you can always say no.’

  His SAS bosses used to say that, Docherty thought.

  ‘Do you remember Gustavo and Eva Macías?’ Rosa asked Isabel.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Gustavo was a close friend of my father. He and his family used to visit us quite often when I was a child.’

  ‘I do remember one friend of your father’s,’ Isabel said. ‘A tall man, stood very straight. He had a beard, I think.’

  ‘That’s him. He and Eva had three children – two daughters and one son. The son’s name was Guillermo – he was about three years younger than us, I think. I probably didn’t pay much attention to him, but I seem to remember he was nice enough.’ She took another sip of wine. ‘He was arrested by the Army in 1976 – he was a student at the university in Rosario – and never seen again. He wasn’t interested in politics, apparently, and no one knows why they took him away.’

  ‘Except the Army,’ her husband said drily.

  ‘True. But I’ll leave Gustavo and Eva to tell you the details, if you’re willing to talk to them.’

  ‘Why now?’ Docherty asked. ‘After so long.’

  ‘Two reasons, as far as I can see,’ Rosa said. ‘Are you two aware of what’s been going on here the past couple of years? With the Disappeared, I mean.’

  ‘Only vaguely.’

  ‘Well, basically, when Menem became President he made a few noises and sat back to wait for the whole business to just fade away. But it didn’t, the Mothers were still at his gates, and then for reasons best known to themselves, a few of the beasts broke ranks and started talking. The old Navy commander not only admitted that up to two thousand people had been dropped in the Atlantic, but even went into details – how those who’d been weakened by torture had to be helped on to the aircraft, and were then given sedatives by Navy doctors befo
re being stripped and thrown out. A little while later the Head of the Armed Forces actually admitted responsibility for human rights abuses in the late 70s and early 80s, although of course no individuals were called to account, and the files have still not been produced.’

  ‘They’ve probably lost them,’ Isabel said scornfully.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Giorgio said. ‘They may not be very good at fighting other soldiers, but they know how to keep records.’

  ‘The Eichmann syndrome,’ Docherty murmured.

  ‘Something like that. A lot of people have claimed that the military kept meticulous records of each and every person they tortured and killed.’

  They all sat silent for a few seconds. All these years on, it was still hard to accept the enormity of what had happened.

  ‘Anyway,’ Rosa said, ‘the other thing that happened was that the graves started coming to light. A group of young people calling themselves forensic anthropologists have started digging in many of the rumoured locations, and they’ve already found several mass graves. One of them was outside Rosario, and I think that was what set Gustavo off. From what I can gather, both he and Eva have been busy pretending that they never had a son for most of the past twenty years, but the discovery of that grave…’ She sighed. ‘And then there’s the fact that he’s dying himself. Some sort of cancer, and I don’t think he’s expected to last many more months.’ She ran a hand through her hair. ‘But whatever his reasons – mostly guilt, I suppose – he seems hell bent on making up for lost time. Over the last year – and much to his daughters’ annoyance, I might add – he’s spent a small fortune trying to find out why Guillermo was arrested and what happened to him. It’s become an obsession. He has to know.’

  Docherty looked at Isabel, whose face in the shadows seemed drawn with pain, and he knew that she was reliving the traumas of her own arrest and torture, the loss of so many friends. For her sake he wanted to leave the surface of the past undisturbed. ‘Death will heal the man’s need to know,’ he said, the words sounding harsher than he intended.

  Isabel looked up at him. ‘What does he want from Jamie?’ she asked.