Open Pit

by Marguerite Pigeon

  The men obey, continuing on. The mountains cast longer shadows over the land. In the early evening, the two trackers take rest. Just enough. Just what they will need to keePMoving through the night, under Sobero’s orders, closer and closer to their targets.

  8:00 PM. Trattoria Al Ceppo, San Salvador

  Mitch imagines facing all the people whose cars are parked outside. This is not the kind of notoriety he has spent his life building toward. He takes a deep breath and repeats to himself what Carlos told him: now, more than ever, he has to seem relaxed. A week ago, that would’ve been as effortless as breathing. But as the maitre d’ leads him through the arched brick entrance and into the restaurant, Mitch has to fake it.

  Two tables on, a refined-looking gentleman stands, startling him. He takes Mitch’s hand and shakes it thoroughly. “We are so, so very sorry for what you’re going through,” he says, in good English. “Gracias, Señor,” says Mitch, taken aback. The maitre d’ smiles and urges Mitch on to his table, where he sits and checks his messages. Every so often, he glances around and sees someone smiling and nodding at him.

  Carlos enters not long afterwards, a newspaper under his arm. He shakes hands with several people along the way, elicits whispers from others. When he’s settled, Mitch recounts his own entrance, but Carlos shows no surprise. “People here, this kind of people, they take your presence as a sign of strength,” he says. “They are like you — and they will like you.”

  Mitch smiles, but receives this explanation with a twinge of annoyance. He has never once thought of any Salvadoran as being “like him.” No matter how well-dressed and mannered the people are here, he’ll be hard pressed to start now. None of them know what it feels like to have a deadline looming like the one haunting his mine. Neither does Carlos, for that matter, who is looking less than inspirational on the eve of it. Unshaven. White crust in one corner of his mouth. When he unbuttons his suit jacket, there’s a large, reddish stain on his shirt. “You feeling alright?” Mitch asks, trying to sound casual before turning to accept a taste from the bottle of red he’s ordered. He nods to the waiter that it’s fine, though he’s had better.

  “I am working very long hours right now,” says Carlos without looking up from his menu.

  So this dinner is a waste of his time? It was Carlos’s idea to meet up! Mitch stares at his companion, trying to reinterpret the comment, but he can’t read his blank expression. Carlos is a foreigner, any way you slice it. Fundamentally different from him. The whole country is. Mitch taps his BlackBerry, which is resting on the table. The image he uses as his wallpaper appears: his twin daughters huddled into the jogging stroller. He works to mentally transport himself to their safe world of naps and tickling, to his own house in Vancouver, good BC wine, the everyday Canadian things he loves. But the voices from the table nearby, speaking a mile a minute in Spanish, and the Latin music being pumped into the room keep nudging him back. The screen on his device goes black, into power-save mode. How did he get here? Mitch never intended to work abroad as much as he has. But the government makes it practically impossible to turn a profit at home. Red tape and treaty negotiations over supposedly traditional lands are a uniquely Canadian kind of bullshit. Catharine Keil is the long arm of that nonsense. “They’re betting against me,” he hears himself say.

  Carlos looks up. He’s placed his newspaper atop his menu and has become absorbed in it. “Who?”

  “Keil and your Attorney General. Schiffer. They’re betting I’ll give in.”

  Carlos sighs deeply, his whole upper body lifting and falling. The waiter takes their order and leaves. “Whatever happens now, Mitch,” he says, “at this time, I see damage for you. You’ve lost some investors, I expect.”

  “A handful,” says Mitch, his back up. That’s no one’s problem but his own. “But if the police went in right now, we’d pull up our nose.”

  “If they find them in time. If they free the hostages. Those are not certainties. Maybe there are problems. Casualties. Then people ask why you didn’t save these lives by just opening your gate. All you had to do: unlock a single gate to the mine.”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “That was before. Today, you are in a different position. How will your name remain separate from the murder of these tourists after tomorrow?”

  Mitch is about to say that he doesn’t have a fucking clue how, but Carlos reaches across the table and touches his arm to hush him while casting around the room, as if checking that it’s safe to go on.

  “There might be another way.”

  All of Mitch’s senses open towards Carlos. These are the words he’s been waiting for all week. “What way?”

  “I have received some information.” Carlos curls his index downward to tap the photo that appears on the newspaper. It’s a grainy black-and-white image of a haggard-looking woman with light-coloured, ratty hair. The caption reads: “Rita Guadalupe Canales de Santos, identified by police as a person of interest in the abduction of five Canadian tourists.”

  “You know where she is,” says Mitch, guessing. He pictures the police bursting through a door and finding this woman and some man named Enrique sleeping it off while the hostages sit bound at the hands, like in the movies. He sees the police cutting their bindings, sees himself at the mine, receiving the call that everyone is home safe, sees his top investors at the next meeting in Vancouver reviewing the strong numbers from Pico, and him and Carlos, toasting success together at this very restaurant.

  Carlos shakes his head impatiently. “No. I don’t know anything about her.”

  Punctured, Mitch’s hopeful vision dissipates.

  “I’m talking about the deadline the newspapers have made so much of. The one you cannot evade. The information I have could make it irrelevant. But it absolutely requires you to close the mine.”

  Mitch rubs his forehead, feeling that a conflict could be coming between he and his friend. “You’ve wanted that all along, haven’t you? Are you afraid to be associated with someone who’s crashing and burning? Is that it? You turning yellow in your old age?”

  “Mitch, listen to me.”

  “Thinking of your goddamn election, then? Can’t afford to be pulled down by a drowning man!”

  “Listen, Mitch —”

  “You want to be the hero again. Like the old days. Blowing up helicopters, right? Well, guess what? Your war’s long —”

  Carlos reaches over, grabs Mitch’s BlackBerry and pulls it out of his reach. “Calm yourself,” he says.

  “What are you doing? Give me that!”

  The waiter approaches. Carlos nonchalantly hides Mitch’s phone under the table as the server places a nicely arranged plate of salad before each of them: octopus for Mitch, tomato for Carlos.

  As soon as the man withdraws, Mitch leans in. “Give me back my phone.” He feels surprisingly violated by Carlos’s move.

  But Carlos just shakes his head. “You don’t understand. I need your attention. You are no longer in control. Not on the outside looking in. I have heard of evidence linking a certain member of the Committee for the Environment to this abduction. The police can get this evidence. Tonight. But things will still take time to sort out. The police will need to get there. This person will need to say where the hostages are. In the meantime, you must meet the kidnappers’ deadline and take away their incentive to do harm to any of these Canadians or it will be perceived as your fault when they’re dead. Close your mine. Right now. Let the exhumation team onto the property. Nothing will come of it. Twenty-four hours from now, it’s over.”

  Mitch lets his fork and knife down slowly onto the plate. There’s a lull in the restaurant and a line from a song wafts from the sound system: “Cielos adentro, cielos adentro.” For a moment he hears the lyric as cielo abierto — the Spanish for open pit mine — and he wants desperately for this to be the sign that, no, he should never let the shutdown happen or anyone else tell him what to do with his mine, that he should punch this man in the chin for
yanking away his phone. But Mitch isn’t superstitious, or much prone to physical violence. “Adentro” means within. The sky within? That makes no sense. There are no signs.

  Carlos doesn’t let up. “Everyone will see the news of your decision in the press. To your backers, it makes you gallant, the good guy. The Committee will be under suspicion. And politically, Mitch, this will count. Because there will always be more investors, but those tests they’ve done of the river water are not going away.” He pauses. “I have the number for the Attorney General’s private line. If you speak to him, man to man, he will listen.”

  Mitch watches as Carlos returns the BlackBerry to the tabletop. He uses the keypad to punch in the digits and pushes it across the table until it touches Mitch’s fingertips.

  8:15 PM. 60 KM south of the Salvadoran-Honduran border

  The hostages eat off the floor. Two spoonfuls of watery, oversalted beans each, served with lumpy, rubbery tortillas and odourless coffee, extra sweet.

  They’re in another house, a dimly lit hut erected on a slanting piece of scrubby land at high altitude. The owners are a young couple with five children and a grandmother. The ceiling is low, patched here and there with black plastic, but imperfectly, so that earlier in the day when the light was strongest, it splashed bright gold pools on the floor, making Danielle wonder how much water falls directly into the house during the rainy season.

  The cooking and heating facilities are equally limited. Just one large plaster wood-burning oven with a single bare branch stuck into it to burn. Danielle recognizes this kind of stove as typical of rural Central American households of the past, but she’s mostly seen them built into a separate alcove. Here the stove is in a corner of the main living area and its smoke lingers, chokingly low and dense. The children all have red eyes and snotty noses, and Danielle is glad to be sitting on her tarp at floor level, rather than in one of two hammocks, both soiled and torn, that are slung higher up across the length of the hut. Cristóbal has been in one of them for some hours, lying with his gun at his side, unbothered by the pungent smoke hanging around his nostrils.

  The grandmother appeared sometime in the afternoon with a few eggs tied into a kerchief, which she went to store protectively in a frayed basket. She eased herself onto a plywood shelf supported by two wooden stumps and fell asleep, then woke up and left again. The children, three boys and two girls, all under age ten, sit practically on top of one another right on the ground and alternate between whispering and staring nervously at the strangers.

  Danielle, who woke up earlier than the others, spent some of the sweltering afternoon hours exchanging looks and a few smiles with them. When the tallest approached to show her a shapely stone he’d been scraping the earthen floor with, and which he obviously treasured, his mother sucked her teeth, shooing him back towards his siblings. This woman has attempted no conversation with the hostages, or even with the kidnappers as they’ve come and gone on their watch duty, and from this Danielle guesses that the arrangement to have foreign hostages staying in her house was made by the woman’s husband, who left at sunrise, also without a word, swinging his machete, followed by his bag-of-bones dog.

  Danielle hasn’t witnessed such grim poverty since her last time in El Salvador and it discourages her. She feels guilty for taking part of these people’s meager supper. She knows, though, that if she refuses it, there won’t be anything else, and she can’t afford hunger. She makes herself swallow bite after unpleasant bite.

  After the last of her food is down, there’s nothing left to do except wait for Pepe to tell them it’s time to walk. She returns to the line of thinking that has been dominating her time for more than a day. Danielle dreads these thoughts because they relate to Rita, whom she knows is due to switch shifts with Cristóbal shortly. Every time Danielle looks around at the other hostages, who are all doing as she just has, eating their meals because they have no choice, she knows Rita has become like a cancer that will spread to them all if she doesn’t do something. But Danielle has no idea what. No one around her offers clues. Not the mother, with her eyes turned away, her faded red skirt brightened somewhat in the light from one of two lanterns that keep the household from total darkness; certainly not Pierre, stony and sullen as he rips a chunk from his tortilla with his straight teeth; not the children, who seem so uncomprehending about the drama unfolding around them that it makes Danielle’s heart break.

  Eventually, the mother comes by and takes away the hostages’ plates, still without looking anyone in the eye. Pepe will be here anytime. Danielle needs to think fast. To act. But she has no plan, and time grinds to a halt against this lack. Silently, dejectedly, she swats flies. By now, they are used to bites of all kinds, from moscas, arañas, pulgas. These creatures are nearly as relentless as thoughts of Rita, which buzz ceaselessly in her mind. Danielle tries to emulate the mother’s studied detachment, to ignore the pests, real and internal, and wait for a strategy to pop, fully formed, into her head. It is only very slowly, then, almost imperceptibly, that something finally surfaces into her awareness.

  Everyone was worried last night about Tina’s ability to keep up on the walk, so the kidnappers have finally begun to administer some antibiotics. The drugs haven’t worked yet. If anything, Tina’s moans are getting louder. She’s lying on Martin’s lap, stuck there by a heavy gravity. The pain must be pretty bad, because presently Tina lets out a loud groan.

  “What’s the matter?” says Cristóbal, climbing from his hammock.

  Danielle feels herself becoming alert. She is approaching a juncture, an opportunity. “She’s got cramps. She needs to be taken out,” she says. Cristóbal hesitates, but Tina’s need is obvious. He looks over at Delmi and each takes one of the young woman’s twig-like arms and puts them around their neck. As they lift her to a standing position, Tina’s stomach rumbles audibly and she pukes, spraying their pant legs, Antoine’s arm and beyond with half-digested beans and corn. Her brow instantly un-creases with relief, and Danielle nearly smiles: Tina is pleased to have thrown up on her captors. In the corner the children gape and one points at the vomit, fascinated.

  Martin, on the floor, seems stricken. He and Tina look hard at one another. They have formed some new bond Danielle can’t interpret. Meanwhile, Delmi and Cristóbal do exactly as Danielle has hoped: they haul Tina outside and towards the area where they’ve all been ordered to shit for the day. Cristóbal yells back for the group to “Stay where you are and keep your mouths shut,” but it’s half-hearted. After so many days of obedience, and with the family there to warn the kidnappers of anything unusual, he can’t really believe they’ll do anything stupid.

  As soon as he’s out of sight, Danielle proves him wrong. She startles Pierre by crawling quickly towards him and Antoine. “You can’t do it — whatever it is Rita’s suggesting. She just wants to get to the States. She isn’t trying to help. Give it up.” Danielle takes a breath and glances over at the mother, who’s by the stove. Her dirty apron sags at the chest. Her whole demeanor says she doesn’t want to get involved. “Rita told me so herself, that she wants to leave,” says Danielle, pressing on. “And Pepe doesn’t trust her. I saw them get angry with one another — Tina was there. You can check with her. I know he’ll be watching for anything strange. He’s a violent man. He’ll hurt us.”

  Pierre, who has developed a heat blister on his upper lip, stares at Danielle a moment while Antoine and Martin look on. Martin doesn’t understand the context, Danielle knows. He was sleeping when Rita approached the francophones. Pierre leans forward very quickly towards Danielle and says in an angry, choppy whisper, “You have all the information, enh? From your special meetings. But we don’t. We hate relying on you. You have no authorité.” Even as he utters the last word, Pierre is straightening back up because someone is coming.

  Delmi. She walks back through the hut’s door in her heavy way. Danielle freezes, but Delmi, who’s still rubbing vomit from the front of her pants, doesn’t seem to notice that she has change
d spots. Danielle looks to Antoine and then to Martin for support. Surely they’ll listen. They’ll believe her. She whispers to Antoine, “Don’t do anything.”

  Fear crosses his face, but he masks it almost immediately, tightening his own chapped lips and lifting his chin in what looks like patriotic resolve, a commitment to his old friend Pierre. Bits of grass are stuck in his hair. “We have to try,” he mouths.

  “I’m not biased towards Pepe! I’ve only been taking down his stories. I —”

  “Da — nie — la,” says Delmi, in an annoying sing-song that makes light of her total control over them. “Silencio.”

  Danielle ignores her. “I’m warning you about her because I care what happens to each and every one of you.”

  Her statement is met with dispassionate looks, Pierre’s tinged with satisfaction, Antoine’s with guilt. Martin is still perplexed and holds out the palms of his hands like he wants to know what they’re going on about. It’s too late to inform him, though, because through the door now comes Rita, awkwardly assisting Tina back inside and ordering Danielle and Martin to help the girl to a lying-down position.

  “She’s a leaky tank, that one,” says Rita. “I wonder what will happen if she can’t walk. Hopefully, this won’t last much longer,” she says, her eyes going wide, waiting for Danielle to translate her innuendo. Danielle does, but stares at Rita angrily. She’s become very good at reading Rita’s face, despite its mask. It’s all she feels she’s been looking at for a week. Rita’s resentments. Rita’s petti-nesses. Rita’s glimmers of humanity in the presence of Cristóbal and how quickly they vanish. What she sees now is Rita communicating with Pierre and Antoine. She’s waiting for something from the men: an answer. And waiting to make Danielle suffer.

  Rita laughs. “What’s the matter, Daniela? Feeling sick too?” She turns to the woman of the house. “Mujer! More tortillas to take with us. We leave soon. And clean up this mess.”