“Are you all right?” Smith asked.
“Great,” Hoyle said. He was off slightly—he’d downed two bourbons with his dinner—but Smith did not know if it had to do with the booze, the failed ambush, or something else.
“They do okay?” Smith asked, nodding back toward the casita, where the Green Berets still ate.
“They were solid,” Hoyle answered. This was about as high as he praised fieldcraft. It was his first patrol since his wounding, and it might have been more on the mark for Smith to ask how Hoyle had done. The “failure” of the ambush was not as ruinous as a layperson might think. In spec ops, there was accomplishment in just getting in and out. The discovery of Guevara’s main trail, though the result of simple good luck, was also something to sweeten the mission.
“I’m going to fly down tomorrow and see if I can get the Fourth Division off its ass. Major Placido’s been transferred there as chief of staff.”
“It wouldn’t do much good to send me,” Hoyle said.
“No, it wouldn’t. I’m going to send you into La Paz. If I can get the Bolos to move up the valley, I expect they’ll get their asses kicked.” Smith’s pessimism was blandly professional. “What we need to do is stay ahead of the news story.”
“Do you want me to talk to the minister?” Hoyle asked. He could not bring himself to say Alameda’s name.
“No. Use the public affairs people at the embassy. No matter what the results are, have the U.S. press officer put out the straight dope—killed, wounded, and missing—and make sure it gets to Voice of America.”
The goal was to make Presidente Barrientos face the music; if he wanted good news on the radio, he would have to make it in the jungle.
“Are you going to cut out the Ministry of Information?” Hoyle asked.
“No. What I need from Alameda are press credentials,” Smith said. “Clean ones.”
“Alameda’s dirty,” Hoyle said. “He’s meeting regularly with Selizar Galán, the head of the PCB.”
“How do you know this?”
“I know it.”
“Tell me how you know it.”
“The woman in his office. The Cuban woman.”
Smith ignored the issue of the source for a second, and the fact that Hoyle had been warned away from Maria. “If Alameda’s working both sides, how are you going to get press credentials out of his office?”
“I’ve got cooperation—I think.”
“Think?”
“I’m pretty sure I can get a couple of blank credential sets.”
“I told you I didn’t want any sexual-cowboy shit.”
Hoyle looked at his feet and then back at Smith. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
“How are you going to make the woman do it?”
“I’ve got leverage.”
“I don’t need this fucked up, Hoyle. I need Alameda in my pocket, singing our music when I want it. If you can’t get blank creds out of his office—in the black—I don’t need them. I’ll do something else.”
“Let me try.”
“Don’t fuck this up,” Smith said.
He walked back to the casita. Hoyle stood out in the wide open. The long day was not over; the night was an hour or an eternity away. Hoyle did not know what he would do when he saw Maria again. It occurred to him that the catastrophe in his heart was widening its grip on the entire world.
HOYLE FLEW INTO La Paz and first sent a note to the post office box. It was curt but said that he needed to see her, and instead of the hotel, he asked if she would meet him at a small café off the Avenida Camacho at seven P.M.
Hoyle went back to the safe house at the Plaza España and waited. He was not at all certain that she would be able to keep the appointment. He stalked around the apartment, restless and apprehensive. He thought to mix himself a drink and finally did so at five o’clock. Then he had another.
Hoyle drove across town toward the café, found a spot down the block, and waited in the car. At seven Maria appeared, looked around the tables on the sidewalk, and then stepped inside. Hoyle watched, knowing that she would ask for a table just inside so that they could meet and not be seen from the street. He knew also that she would be a bit nervous that he wasn’t there, but he deliberately waited ten minutes before walking to the café.
Maria smiled as she saw him and Hoyle felt hot in the face. She was more beautiful than ever, and sitting down at the small table, he felt awkward and fretful.
“Hello,” she said.
Hoyle did not say anything but smiled dimly, a false, meaningless expression.
“Should we go somewhere else?” she asked. “I have a couple of hours.”
“We can stay here.”
Maria looked about. The place was busy and was likely to fill completely. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t have much time,” Hoyle said.
The waiter came by, and Hoyle ordered coffee.
“Have you had time to think about what I asked you?” Hoyle asked.
An emotion more than disappointment showed in her voice. “I wanted to talk to you, not just stuff words in a mailbox.”
Maria noticed that he looked her in the face but not in the eyes. Someone in the crowd laughed loudly, and others joined in. It was remarkable that this happiness seemed to sputter out when it reached their table.
“Why did you ask to meet here? Why not the hotel?”
“You don’t like it here?”
“It’s not so private…” She paused.
Hoyle’s coffee was placed in front of him, and the waiter turned away.
“Please, can we go someplace else?”
“I only have a little time,” Hoyle said. “I have to ask you about the things we talked about.”
Maria’s eyes narrowed slightly. “The things you wanted from my office?”
“The press credentials.”
“I put four blank sets in the post office box on the way over here,” Maria answered. “I thought that would be safer than carrying them around town. Is that all you came for?”
“No,” he said. He felt again a pinching in his chest.
Maria looked out at the crowd; she understood his behavior now. The fact that the credentials were in the post office box seemed to harden Hoyle’s eyes. There was nothing to hold him back.
“I saw you on Saturday,” Hoyle said.
Maria shifted unconsciously in her chair and put both her hands on the table. It seemed to Hoyle like a gesture of grief.
“We went to dinner. I didn’t see you at—”
“At your apartment.”
A few moments passed.
“I don’t like to think of you peeking in on me.”
“I didn’t intend to.”
Maria was unsure what Hoyle might have seen. She assembled as much dignity as she could. “You know that he pays the rent. He buys my clothing and food.”
Hoyle started to say something, but it expired in a sound like a rattle.
“I am pretty much his possession,” Maria said.
“You seemed willing enough.”
“What do you want me to say to you? I am sorry that you watched me be a whore?”
Hoyle watched her expression become somber. He was expecting other words, but Maria said, “I am pregnant.”
Hoyle’s mind seemed to skip. He had mapped out what he wanted to say to her, but the words piled up in his head like a wrecked train, word upon word, sentence upon sentence. He sat rigidly in his chair, his jaw set. Maria saw in his eyes a coldness that she had never imagined.
“Who is the father?” Hoyle asked.
Maria averted her eyes and exhaled. She gathered herself and said in an even voice, “I’m not sure.”
“How many of us are there?”
Maria bore this with as much poise as she could muster. “I don’t think that you are trying to be cruel to me. Maybe you are.”
“What have you told Alameda?”
“Nothing. Yet.”
Hoyle imagined the
sleek Alameda driven to rage. It would strain him, Hoyle thought. It must be all but impossible to keep it all straight, and now a pregnant mistress. Hoyle let this cruel thought evaporate in his mind; the force that made it disappear was a vestige of human sympathy.
“Now I wish I had not told you,” Maria said quietly.
“Why would that matter? I would eventually know.”
“I should have gone away. But I can’t even do that.”
Hoyle heard an American couple talking at another table. The man was in his twenties and had longish hair cut straight off about two inches above his shoulders. This made him look like a Saxon vassal. He was with a woman who had a pretty though unremarkable face and long, straight blond hair. They seemed to be lovers, perhaps they were on their honeymoon. Hoyle’s gaze fell on them with envy and then a bland sort of derision. At their table, there were no problems, and at Hoyle’s, there were many, piled up like dirty snow shoveled from a sidewalk.
“Do you love Alameda?”
“No,” she said.
Hoyle surprised himself. “Do you love me?” he asked.
The words were let go from the middle of his brain out into the air. All at once, terribly, Hoyle felt like a buffoon, an idiot wandering without a village. The words could not be taken back, and Maria’s expression was so pained it could not have been further from the word “yes.”
In this silence, Hoyle looked away. To Maria, it was almost as though he had vanished. There was no expression on his face, or none that she could decipher, and he placed his napkin on the table. The gesture seemed conclusive, like a judge putting gavel to bench. Hoyle reached into his jacket pocket and put an envelope beside his cup.
“What is this?”
“A thousand dollars,” Hoyle said.
Maria looked at the envelope as though it were a snake. She shook her head silently.
“Take it.”
“I didn’t come here to ask you for money.”
“I brought it anyway.”
Light from the street came in behind Hoyle, and beyond, a bus passed noisily. It sounded to Maria like a metallic thunderclap, as though all the machinery of the world were crashing to pieces. The noise overwhelmed her, and the envelope seemed to squirm before her eyes.
“Take it,” Hoyle said. “It’s what I would have paid anyone else.”
The words pierced her, the way she had been pierced when she returned to Playa Baracoa from Lyon after the revolution. She felt as she had when the men from 26 de Julio told her that her father had been a swine and a murderer and that was why he was dead and that they had taken Consuela Madre and her brother to La Cabana. They’d shaved her head and hung a sign around her neck—PUTA Y PARÁSITA—and had denounced her before the entire town assembled at the mercado. Not one voice had been raised in her defense, not one person of the hundreds she knew had done anything but stand and stare at her. They had made her feel filthy, and she felt that again now. Maria looked again at the envelope, and the room about her turned darker. At the table across the café the American couple was laughing again; the sound seemed a long way off.
“I’d better go,” Hoyle said.
“Don’t do this to me,” she said.
Her words came tragically up through the noise of the crowd. But something within Hoyle had broken, something hard and cruel had snapped off inside him, sharply and evenly, the way hard things break.
45
RENE D’ESPEREY HAD not slept well. When night closed over the encampment, he was awed by the complete and consuming darkness. It had taken him a long while to get used to the hammock; he was a restless sleeper anyway, and his movements were magnified by the hanging sheet of canvas. Twice he almost tipped out of it, and a few hours after sundown, he dared not even stir. He hung suspended between the black above and the black below, fully awake and listening to the sounds of the jungle—a grinding noise like a gigantic mill wheel. Finally, exhausted, he’d succumbed to a scrap of unconsciousness just before dawn.
Even in sleep, D’Esperey had been aware that around him spread a hostile place. The peril of armed conflict, that was something D’Esperey could grasp. In a small way, the danger posed by the army gave him comfort; he understood human conflicts, their roots, measures, and outcomes. What troubled him was the forest. The more he experienced it, the more the jungle was beyond his conception. It thwarted the senses, confused them with sight and sounds and smells. In places, the double canopy made it dark on the forest floor, even after sunrise, and last night it had been what the blind saw. He concealed his unease as much as he could, but he did not like being here.
Breakfast was coffee and chankaka, lumps of brown sugar. Bearing parties came and went from the camp all day. The bearers sneaked down into the valley to a number of hidden storage caves and brought supplies back to Camp 2, which was being configured as the main base of operations. Sandoval shared a tree with D’Esperey—their hammocks hung side by side—and Tania’s hammock was across a small thicket by itself. She spent almost all of her time there, alone, and few of the comrades seemed to notice her. She was, as they all were, invisible at night, and when the sun came, she completely withdrew. She did not engage in the banter of the camp; she sat apart and joined only reluctantly for meals.
D’Esperey and Sandoval had been given their orders, and for the two urban revolutionaries, it would soon be time to go home. Scribbling notes in his hammock, D’Esperey was constantly reminded that in the jungle, a political philosopher was useless. He wrote earnestly in his notebook so the others would see him doing something. No one asked him to help carry supplies. He continued to look extremely engrossed as he copied out the list of contacts he would make and the things he would do for Guevara once he was delivered out of the jungle. The list was his ticket out. He wrote and rewrote, and overhead somewhere, an airplane droned. The men in camp ignored the sound of the aircraft, as they did D’Esperey.
They also ignored Sandoval. After rising, he spent the morning sitting on a fallen log, but he did not feel it necessary to compile notes for the comandante. Sandoval shared with D’Esperey the concern about how and when they would be delivered out of the combat zone. After breakfast, Joaquin had seemed impatient when Sandoval pulled him aside to discuss an escort party to lead them back to one of the main roads. The big man had been quite abrupt and Sandoval thought to mention it to Guevara.
In the late part of the morning, Coco came running into camp—the army had fallen into one of the ambushes set by the river. The initial reports were encouraging. Coco said that seven Bolivian soldiers had been killed, fourteen captured, including a captain and a major, and many arms taken, automatic weapons and three mortars. The news stirred the camp. Sentries were redoubled, and Guevara lifted himself out of his hammock and took up his rifle. Pombo and Inti went with him toward the scene of the action. It seemed incredible that there had been a firefight within a mile of the camp and not a single whisper of it had made it through the trees. D’Esperey asked to go along, but Guevara waved him back. Moro was put in charge of the camp guard, and for an hour or so, there was nothing to do but wait tensely and swat flies.
Guevara went along the path to the place in the steep canyon where the ambush had been laid. He reinforced the ambush party, and Pombo and the whole forward detachment swept the scene, gathering up Bolivian weapons and equipment scattered along the riverbanks and the forest floor. The entire action had taken less than six minutes. The number of weapons captured—sixteen Mauser rifles, three Uzis, one .30-caliber machine gun, two BZ rifles, three 60mm mortars (and sixty-four rounds)—indicated that the unit was probably company-sized. About half of the group had fled, carrying their weapons. The haul was still impressive. The ambush had been initiated by seven guerrillas. Seven men against forty.
The prisoners were herded into the jungle back to camp. The Bolivians were made to carry their wounded, and the officers were separated and placed under guard. As the prisoners were marshaled along, Guevara was careful to remain in the backgroun
d, as low-profile as possible. He let Inti give all the commands, and Pombo supervised the counting of the weapons.
Back at camp, Inti acted as the guerrilla commander; he interrogated the two officers at length. Sandoval and D’Esperey were allowed to listen and take notes. Throughout the interrogation, the commanding officer, Major Baigorria, wept and sniffled embarrassingly. Kept in a group twenty feet away, his soldiers watched. Now and again a voice would come out of the group—“Shoot the fucker!” “He’s mistreated us! Kill him!” This dirge went on most of the afternoon; it put the major into a depression. His nose red and his eyes puffy, he said to Inti that he planned to retire from the military. Separately, the captain commanding the infantry company claimed to have rejoined the army at the request of the Bolivian Communist Party. When this did not seem to impress, he gave the names of two other serving officers who, like him, would be willing to cooperate. It was obvious he was talking to save his life, and D’Esperey did not even bother to write down the proffered names.
As this happened, Tania sat in her hammock, staring out into the jungle; by and by, she curled up and began to shiver noticeably. Moro came by to check on her and discovered that she had a fever and was quite sick. He noticed the bruises on her arms and back. Her abdomen was rigid and extremely tender. Moro immediately suspected a bruised or ruptured spleen. It amazed him that she had been able to walk into camp. Her injury would only get worse unless she received proper treatment. Moro tended to her as best he could. There was little else to do but give her another blanket and some fresh water. As evening fell, he brought her some rice, but she would not eat. Moro saw that the comandante was studying, so he did not interrupt; he would tell him soon that he thought Tania needed to be taken to hospital.
Across camp, Guevara pored over the maps taken from the major. The typed orders found on the captain corroborated the story that two companies were based at the Zinc House. The major told Inti that an entire company was closing on Yaquí from across the valley, but it made no sense that the Bolivians would commit all their forces with no reserve. In this assessment, Guevara was correct, but he had vastly overestimated the tactical sense of the Bolivian army.
Killing Che Page 36