Days of the Dead

by David Monnery

  The room looked like it was used for cockroach derbies, but the door seemed sturdy enough, and it would only be for the one night. In any case, Toscono had probably believed him when he said he had a plane to catch – it would have been too wounding for the Argentian’s ego to suspect otherwise.

  It was almost nine o’clock and Docherty hadn’t yet eaten. The market streets north of Tacuba were still full of people, and a stall provided an excellent brace of enchiladas suizas, tortillas stuffed with chicken and smothered in sour cream. He could go back to watching the cholesterol later.

  After washing the food down with a bottle of Negra Modelo – Mexico’s best dark beer – he walked back down towards the Zócalo, keeping his eye out for a public phone. He eventually found one a stone’s throw from the cathedral, on the edge of the still-busy square. Arranging a reversed-charges call to Chile was easier than he’d expected, and before a minute was up he could hear the phone ringing in their Santiago flat.

  ‘Yes?’ his wife asked briskly.

  ‘It’s me.’

  The voice had softened. ‘Jamie.’

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked. ‘How are the kids?’

  ‘Fine. Everything’s fine. Marie won her race at school.’

  ‘That’s great.’ He knew how pleased his daughter would be. ‘Tell her well done from me.’

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen Toscono again?’

  ‘Aye, I have. I had to lean on him a bit, but he was a little more talkative second time around. He told me Guillermo Macías was one of several kids arrested for being in possession of gummed labels with left-wing slogans on them.’ There was silence at the other end of the line. ‘Are you still there, love?’

  ‘I’m still here. After all this time, the stupidity of it all still takes my breath away.’

  ‘I know what you mean. Anyway, Toscono claims he doesn’t know what happened to Guillermo after he was “processed”, but he seemed pretty certain the boy ended up in either a mass grave or the River Plate.’

  ‘And?’ she asked.

  She knew him too well. ‘He also told me that his boss, Bazua, has the Army’s Dirty War files with him on Providencia.’

  ‘What? All of them?’

  ‘All the Army’s. Not the Navy’s,’ he said gently. His wife and her friends had been tortured at the Navy Mechanical School outside Buenos Aires.

  ‘My God,’ she said softly. ‘But he’s not going to show them to anyone, is he?’ she added a moment later. ‘And especially not a retired British soldier.’

  ‘He might give me the whole story on Guillermo,’ Docherty said hopefully.

  ‘Why would he do that?’ his wife wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know. Some of these bastards like to gloat. And if he just admitted to having the files…well, the Argentinian press would love the story. They might even get Menem to put some pressure on the Colombian government.’

  ‘Knowing the files were still out there would certainly frighten a lot of people,’ she agreed. ‘I don’t know, Jamie…what makes you think he’d agree to see you, or that the Colombians would allow it?’

  ‘They probably wouldn’t but…it just goes against the grain, leaving the job half done.’

  ‘You’ve got something for Gustavo, and anything else will probably just hurt him more. Why don’t you just come home?’

  Docherty sighed. By morning his welcome in Mexico would be overdue, if it wasn’t already. ‘Aye,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll get a plane to Buenos Aires tomorrow, and go and see Gustavo. I’ll call you from there, or from Rosa’s.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ she said, sounding relieved. ‘I love you,’ she added.

  ‘And I you,’ Docherty said. He hung up, wishing he was back in Santiago.

  It was probably the birds rather than the whirr of the machine which woke Shepreth. His watch told him it was only just after six, but despite sleeping for only three hours he felt wide awake. In the main room the customized fax had disgorged three sheets of already decoded material; he took both them and a carton of juice out on to the small balcony, where the sun was making the most of the pre-smog hours.

  James Docherty’s life and career made interesting reading. He had grown up in Glasgow, the only son of well-known Clydeside shop steward Campbell Docherty (‘reference MI5 file 4519/DX’, the sender added helpfully). At school he had apparently been clever, serious and unruly – not necessarily in that order – and at the age of sixteen he had joined the Merchant Navy without consulting his family. Two years later, in 1969, he had signed up with the Army. He had passed through SAS selection training at the young age of twenty-two, and had promptly seen service in Arabia. Two years later he had married Christine Jess, but she had been killed in a road accident later the same year.

  Docherty had obviously gone off the rails at this point. Reading between the lines, Shepreth guessed that his behaviour had been about to earn him a discharge when someone had shown the sense to grant him extended compassionate leave. The Scot had then spent five months travelling in Mexico.

  Could his interest in Toscono date back that far? Shepreth wondered. It didn’t seem very likely – the Argentinian had not taken up residence in Mexico until almost a decade later, after the military’s fall from power in Buenos Aires. Or could the two men’s paths have somehow crossed during the Falklands conflict?

  He was letting his imagination race ahead of the facts.

  After his wife’s death and the long leave of absence Docherty had seen service in Northern Ireland, Yemen and Oman. By 1980 he had risen to the rank of sergeant – the highest an enlisted man could reach – and in that year he had successfully brokered a hostage crisis in Guatemala. Two years later, with the Task Force poised to begin the reconquest of the Falklands, he had led one of two four-man teams inserted into Argentina. Their mission was to keep enemy airfields under observation, and so warn the Task Force of air attacks.

  Shepreth took a slug of orange juice. There had always been rumours of SAS activity on the mainland, but this was the first time he’d seen them confirmed in print.

  And there’d also been someone working for MI6, he discovered to his surprise. A woman, moreover, an Argentinian exile who had endured torture at the hands of the junta who now ruled her country.

  And Docherty had married her.

  It was beginning to make sense, Shepreth thought. The SAS man hadn’t come to see Toscono about drugs – he’d brought the Argentinian some unfinished business from the Dirty War.

  He read on. Through the rest of the 80s Docherty had seen little in the way of active service. He had been an instructor in the SAS Training Wing, and as such had spent several periods on loan to foreign governments which wanted to set up their own élite units. Mostly though, he and his Argentinian wife had lived in Hereford. She had given birth to two children – a daughter in 1987 and a son in 1989.

  Docherty’s first retirement in 1993, at the age of forty-two, had been short-lived, for only a few months later he had been recalled to lead a four-man team into Bosnia. One of his SAS colleagues, who also happened to be an old friend, had apparently set himself up as a virtual warlord in the small town where his Bosnian wife had grown up. Docherty and his team had been told to bring him out, but instead of doing so they had reappeared a week later, minus one of their number, with a lorryload of wounded children. Neither the Foreign Office nor the Ministry of Defence had been pleased, but Docherty had claimed all the responsibility for himself and then announced that he was resuming his retirement.

  Even that hadn’t been the end of his active career – later that same year he and his wife had been members of a tour party taken hostage by Islamic fundamentalists in Central Asia, and both had played a big part in securing their own and the other hostages’ survival. Since then they had lived in Chile. She was a travel writer and he was supposed to be writing his memoirs.

  Shepreth drained the last of the carton and leant back dangerously in the rickety chair. Whatever it wa
s that Docherty had wanted to ask Toscono, he might also want to ask Bazua. And if he did, then the SAS man might provide another way in, another key to the lock. He wouldn’t even need a cover story, because he already had one that was true.

  He wanted to talk to Docherty. After reading the MI6 version of his life and career he would have wanted to meet him anyway. Now he just needed Ted Vaughan to find the man.

  Only seconds later the phone rang. ‘He’s staying at the Hotel León on Brasil, under the name Kenneth Dalglish.’

  Shepreth laughed. ‘I’ll go and talk to him,’ he said.

  7

  Having set his travel alarm for six-thirty, Docherty had completed his ablutions and packed by seven. Downstairs the receptionists were changing shift, but neither young man gave him more than a cursory glance – if Toscono had traced his whereabouts they hadn’t been told.

  He left the hotel and started zigzagging his way southwest through the grid of streets towards a travel agency he had noticed the previous day, hoping it would be open by eight. It was, and he emerged a few minutes later with a booking on the evening flight to Buenos Aires via Lima. The bad news was that it didn’t leave until seven, leaving him most of the day to kill.

  Breakfast took care of the first half-hour, and a poster on the café wall offered what seemed an excellent suggestion for the time remaining. Docherty had visited the archaeological site of Teotihuacán in 1977, but only two days off the plane from England he had been in no state to appreciate it. It was only an hour away by bus, which would give plenty of time to make his plane. And it would also get him out of the city for the day, making it harder for Toscono to find him.

  His mind made up, he walked briskly back to the hotel, where he collected his bag and paid his bill. The receptionist had a shifty look on his face, but there was no one else in the lobby, and no one hanging around too obviously in the street. He set off in the direction of the nearest Metro station.

  Shepreth’s taxi was just drawing up on the other side of the road when Docherty came through the hotel doorway, bag in hand. The MI6 man passed a five-thousand-peso note to the driver, thinking he would have no difficulty catching Docherty up, but the man took an age rummaging for change. As he glanced up to make sure Docherty was still in view a young Mexican emerged from the hotel and started walking in the same direction. Shepreth wasn’t sure why, but he knew the youth was tailing the ex-SAS man.

  He joined the procession, keeping about twenty metres behind the Mexican, whose bright-red T-shirt made him easy to follow down the busy pavement. He had read about tails being tailed in thrillers, but never actually witnessed such an arrangement in real life. It felt vaguely farcical somehow, and would be even more so if someone was following him. He glanced around despite himself, and almost tripped over a loose paving stone.

  Both Docherty and the youth turned right into República de Chile, confirming Shepreth’s suspicions. The Scot, some forty metres ahead, kept disappearing from view in the bustle, but the red T-shirt was an efficient beacon. He followed it down into the Allende Metro station and the three of them stood there on the platform, still some twenty metres apart, waiting for a westbound train. Docherty obviously wasn’t heading for the airport.

  The three of them changed trains at Hidalgo and again at La Raza, before alighting at the Northern Bus Terminal. Looking like he knew where he was going, Docherty first put his bag into the left luggage and then walked through to the second-class section of the bus station, where he bought a ticket at the Autobuses Teotihuacán booth. The man was going sightseeing, Shepreth thought. The thought of a few hours at the ruins was appealing enough in itself, but, given the circumstances, felt rather anticlimactic.

  The bus was not due to leave for another ten minutes but Docherty had already boarded. Shepreth looked round for the tail – he was involved in an animated conversation on one of the public phones. The MI6 man wondered if he should tell his fellow-countryman that he was being followed and decided against it – he was more likely to learn what was going on by just watching.

  The youth was now buying a ticket at the booth. Shepreth joined in the queue behind him and waited his turn. The bus was almost full when he got on, and as he walked towards the back he gave Docherty the traditional half smile of gringo solidarity.

  The bus took them out through the rings of the capital’s growth, through overcrowded boulevards, industrial wastelands, shanty-covered hills and countryside living on borrowed time. Docherty found it profoundly depressing – the capital seemed like an unstoppable cancer, slowly consuming the country which supported it.

  The sight of the great pyramids looming in the distance banished the gloom from his mind. He could remember how on his first visit the sense of excitement had kept bubbling up through the layers of grief, making him feel almost guilty. Now, walking from the parking lot towards the sunken square of the Ciudadela and the small pyramid which covered the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, he felt the same sense of wonder swelling in his chest and wished Isabel was there with him to share it.

  He paused at the entrance to the Ciudadela, looking north up the two-thousand-metre causeway which formed the central axis of the ancient city. Teotihuacán was not built high on a mountain, nor deep in some dramatic valley, but there were few more breathtaking sights than this Street of the Dead, arrowing away across the plain to its end beneath the graceful Pyramid of the Moon. To the right of this giant’s causeway, more than a kilometre distant, early-bird tourists were crawling insect-like up the massive stairway of the larger Pyramid of the Sun.

  Once this had been a city of 200,000 souls, Docherty reflected. It had risen and fallen in the same epoch as the Roman Empire. It had been a ruin when the Aztecs found it.

  The Ciudadela seemed overrun by visitors, so he decided to bypass it and head straight up the stone causeway towards those areas of the site the crowds had not yet reached. He ambled slowly northwards, conscious of the sun’s heat beating on his head, but exhilarated by the brilliance of the colours all around him. Now that he was out from under the lid of smog which hung over the capital everything seemed brighter, more clearly defined, as if the sharpness of his senses had been turned up a notch.

  The Pyramid of the Sun slowly loomed in front of him. He reached the bottom of the steps and started to climb, grateful that he – unlike countless sacrificial victims in the past – would be coming back down. The last time he’d been here archaeologists had just stumbled over a cave deep inside the pyramid which a later Aztec ruler had used to store the flayed skins of his victims.

  The climb left him feeling glad he was still in shape, for all around him people were wheezing, massaging thigh muscles, or both. He did a slow circle, taking in the ring of grey hills which surrounded the flat, yellow-green valley, the sparse puffs of white cloud in the wide blue sky, and took a deep breath of satisfaction.

  There was a sudden movement behind him, but it was only a couple of children chasing each other along the edge of the platform. As their mother yelled at them – she’d obviously had a real fright – Docherty scolded himself for not being watchful enough.

  He walked back down and continued up the causeway towards the Pyramid of the Moon. Not many people had yet percolated to this end of the site, and the high platform’s only occupants were a couple of Mexican girls, both of whom seemed more interested in slagging off their boyfriends than enjoying the famous view down the causeway. Docherty supposed it would only be a few years before his daughter Marie started tormenting boys – she already had both the looks and the brains to be a real heartbreaker.

  The two girls started down, leaving him alone with his thoughts. The chat he’d had with Toscono was still very much on his mind, and he had to admit he’d enjoyed scaring the bastard. That probably wasn’t something to be proud of, but fuck it, the man was a mass murderer and a drug trafficker – he deserved a few clouds in his fucking sky. And as for his boss…

  The fact that Bazua had escaped payment for his crimes in Argentina di
dn’t sit well with Docherty. The fact that he was still breaking laws with impunity and adding to the sum total of human misery sat even worse. And it wasn’t just that people like Bazua had tortured his wife and her friends, though that would have been enough in itself. Docherty had been hooked on the drug of justice from an early age – it was ‘the right of the weakest’, his father had always said – and at the age of forty-five he still felt the need for an occasional fix.

  But not this time, he told himself, as he watched a hawk riding the air currents above the site. This time he was going home.

  He looked at his watch – he still had a couple of hours before he needed to take a bus back. Beneath his perch, on the far-right corner of the Plaza de la Luna, sat the restored Palacio del Quetzalpapaloti, possibly the only ruin with a roof in central Mexico. If memory served Docherty well, it offered both shade and beautiful frescos.

  He made his way down and ambled around the interior of the palace, marvelling at the decorations. A sign pointed down a flight of stone steps to the remains of an earlier, half-buried building, the Palacio de los Jaguares. He descended the rough stairway into the relative darkness, where a German couple were examining a mural depicting jaguars in feathered head-dresses making music with enormous conchs. After a few moments they left him alone, but his privacy was short-lived, for as he stared at the murals there were more footsteps on the stairway behind him. Four feet appeared, then stopped; a few brief words were exchanged and two of the feet continued on down into the half-buried chamber.

  They belonged to a tall, handsome Latino wearing blue trousers and a cream shirt. He walked forward, as if he too wanted to examine the mural. There was a friendly smile on his face, but his right hand was concealed in his pocket. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said in Spanish, looking past Docherty at the wall.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ the Scot murmured. He turned his head back in the direction of the mural, but every muscle in his body was suddenly taut with expectation. This man might be a simple armed robber, but he doubted it. Toscono’s set-up was obviously better organized than he’d expected.