Night Work

by David C. Taylor

  He went back to where they had left the cars and stopped there for a moment to try to reconstruct where Fuentes’s Jeep had taken them the day before. That road, or the one that went to the right? Why hadn’t he paid more attention to where they had gone the day before? All right, that way, if not, then think again.

  He walked quickly, not so fast that someone would remark on his pace, but with purpose, a man with a briefcase and a place he had to be, perhaps a bit late, or maybe he just wanted to be on time. Nothing remarkable in that. No reason to pay attention.

  Two lieutenants in SIM uniforms stood talking and smoking outside an office door. They watched him cross the plaza. One said something and pointed toward Cassidy. Would they call him over and ask him what his business was? It’s the prerogative of power to stop someone and demand an accounting. What’s the point of having the power if you don’t demonstrate it? The other one said something, flicked his cigarette away, and turned back into the building. The first one watched him for a while. Was he worth the trouble? No. He followed his friend inside and Cassidy walked on.

  The road slanted down between gray walls. At the bottom three narrow roads, little more than alleys, branched from a small square. Which one? He had some vague memory that the Jeep had followed the one on the left. A hundred yards along he discovered he was wrong. The road made an abrupt right angle that no Jeep could have navigated. He went back and tried the one on the right.

  The walls rose high above him, and the stone roadbed was in deep shadow. He was a hundred yards along when he heard gunfire. He stopped to listen. It had not been the individual shots of men on a firing range, but a ragged volley of half a dozen rifles. Moments later he heard three spaced shots. Snap. Snap. Snap. Coups de grâce. First the firing squad, and then three pistol shots to make sure. His heart jumped.

  The narrow street widened out into a plaza. On the left he recognized a building, a long two-story block of cut stone with deep-set barred windows and a red tile roof. The wooden double doors were banded with black iron. The cellblocks were in its basement. Gunfire rattled from somewhere past the end of the building. It was followed by two spaced single shots.

  Four civilian workmen in cotton jumpsuits came around the corner. They carried a ladder, paint buckets, and long-handled brushes, and they walked fast with their heads down. They knew Cassidy was there, but they refused to look at him, and they hurried into the narrow road, eager to get away from whatever was happening past the end of the plaza.

  Cassidy touched his gun at the back of his belt under his jacket. What the hell was he going to do with it? Six shots against a firing squad with rifles. If it came to that he might do better to shoot himself.

  Beyond the building the wide pavement ran through a low wall to broad steps. The steps descended into a wide, dry moat that was backed by the exterior walls of the fortress that rose thirty feet from its floor. This was part of the old defense architecture. If you breached the outer wall you were faced with the deep, wide moat. If you made it up from the moat you faced the thick walls of the cellblock. If you made it past its defenders you were channeled into the narrow high-walled street where no more than five or six men could walk abreast. If you made it down the street, maybe you deserved to have the fortress.

  Voices came from the moat, but Cassidy could not make out what they said, only that some of it had the weight of command. He moved to where he could see. Uniformed soldiers carried the bodies of two men in rose-colored shirts from the wall where they had been shot to a truck. The tailgate was down. They heaved the bodies like sacks up into the truck bed to lie with the three who were already there. The soldiers of the firing squad leaned on their rifles and smoked cigarettes and talked. Colonel Fuentes and Sergeant Lopato stood together in the shade of the wall. The facing stones of the wall were bullet shattered and pocked from years of executions. New blood darkly oiled the pavers at the foot of the wall. One of the soldiers came back from the truck and sluiced a bucket of sand onto the blood pool, and flies rose in a cloud.

  Fuentes handed Lopato a piece of paper, and Lopato crossed the moat and disappeared from view. The colonel took a leather case from his pocket and selected a thin cigar. He rolled it in his fingers, bit off the end, lit it, and blew a plume of smoke into the still, warm air, a man taking a break from a tedious job. He started to turn, and Cassidy stepped back. Fuentes was one of those dangerous men with antennae others did not have. He heard what he should not hear, sensed the unseen threat in a vague shift in the air.

  Cassidy waited until he heard voices and then moved to where he could see. Below him Lopato and a guard escort led three men out into the sun. They were all dressed in the faded red shirts of the condemned, and two of them appeared to have already passed out of the world. They stood slumped, heads down, slack and dull, as if uninvolved in what was happening. The third man was slim and straight and charged with energy. He shook off the hands of the soldiers who escorted them and marched to the wall. He inspected it for a minute as if reading the history of men who had died here in the scars and gouges. Then he turned and scuffed the ground with the side of one shoe to clear it of pebbles and broken stone so that he had a solid, level place to stand. He waved as if to say, come on, come on. What are you waiting for? Here I am. The soldiers pushed the other two forward. They went as long as there was a hand on them and stopped when the hand came off. They turned when their escorts pulled them around by their shoulders. They did not raise their heads, and they paid no attention when the man in the middle spoke to them, offered them comfort and courage. At Fuentes’s command, the firing squad shouldered their rifles and aimed. The brave one raised a fist and shouted “Viva la revolución!” The volley cut him off, and the three men were driven back against the wall. They crumpled onto each other and lay entangled and unmoving. The firing squad grounded their rifles. Colonel Fuentes, still smoking his cigar, took his pistol from its polished holster, walked to the bodies, and shot each one in the head. Sergeant Lopato called a command, and men stepped forward to carry the bodies to the truck.

  These were the men from the dream of Dylan surrounded by featureless rose-colored figures falling at the sound of gunfire.

  There was a corporal on duty at a counter just inside the big entry door. He looked up when Cassidy came in, but before he could speak, Cassidy flashed his badge and held up the briefcase and said, “Documentos importantes para Coronel Fuentes,” and rushed on by as if the fate of the nation depended on rapid delivery of those papers. He braced for the command to stop, but it did not come. He went down the worn stairs to the coolness of the lower level and stopped by the wooden door that led into the cellblock. He put his head against the wood but heard nothing but the thump of his own heart and the pulse of blood in his ears. He pushed the big iron handle down and eased the door open. There was no one on the other side.

  He opened the door wide and stepped through.

  “Oyé.” A guard he had not seen rose from a small desk in an alcove next to the door. “¿Quién es usted? ¿Qué quieres?”

  “Estoy buscando Coronel Fuentes.” But Cassidy could see that the man did not really believe that he was looking for Colonel Fuentes. The guard put his hand on his gun. Cassidy stepped in and slammed the briefcase against the man’s head. He bounced against the alcove wall and stumbled forward, and Cassidy hit him twice in the face and once in the throat with his fist. The guard sprawled across the desk, gagging for air. Cassidy jerked the big .45 automatic out of the man’s holster and hit him hard on the side of the head, and he slid to the floor. Cassidy dragged him around and crammed him into the kneehole of the desk, and then stood and listened for sounds of alarm. He heard nothing.

  Down the block eight cell doors stood open. Eight empty cells, eight dead men. He tried to remember which door led to Dylan’s cell. Where had he been when the prisoners came in the day before? She passed him without seeing him when he was about here. And then he had turned and watched as the prisoners took up positions, in front of their cell
doors. Which was hers? Think. Which one? That one or that one. The twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth from the end. Somewhere in there. There was no movement behind the small windows in the cell doors, no hands grasping the bars, nothing that would draw the attention of Lopato and his men. Maybe they’ll go by me. Maybe they’ll forget.

  A door banged open at the end of the cellblock and light flooded in and Sergeant Lopato and two soldiers entered. They stopped just inside the door, blind in the dimness of the cellblock after the sunlight. Cassidy stepped into the guard’s alcove and thumbed the safety off the .45. He should have checked to see if there was a round in the chamber. Too late now. The sound of the slide would draw them. Lopato opened the next three cell doors. Two men stepped out without urging, but the soldiers had to go in and get the third. They pulled him out of the cell. He made no protest, did not struggle, but his legs did not work, and they had to drag him through the sunlit doorway while Lopato herded the other two.

  When the door closed, Cassidy searched the desk in the guard alcove and found a ring of keys in the top drawer. How much time did he have before Lopato was back? They take the men outside. They put them against the wall. The squad is brought into place. Fire. Maybe two minutes after the gunshots, six or seven minutes in all. He went down to the three cells he thought might be hers and called out, “Dylan. Dylan, where are you? Dylan.” Fingers gripped the bars of the cell where he stood, but they were a man’s hands. “¿La mujer, adonde esta?”

  “Allí, en ese lado.” A gesture with his head.

  Cassidy stepped to the next cell. “Dylan. Dylan, are you in there?” No answer. He ran through the keys with clumsy fingers until he found the right one and opened the door. A dim caged bulb in the ceiling showed him the cell, eight feet by twelve feet, the pallet on the floor, the toilet bucket, and Dylan standing with her back against the wall, braced, wide eyed, hands curled like claws.

  “It is you.” Her voice sounded rusty. “When I saw you in the corridor yesterday, was it yesterday? I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I was finally going mad. But it was you.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? Why? It can’t be.” She stepped forward and touched him to make sure he was real.

  “I’ll tell you afterward. We don’t have time.” He opened the briefcase and took out the clothes he had bought that morning on La Rampa, a dress, underwear, the clothes of a tourist, a silk scarf to cover her distinctive hair, and rubber-soled shoes in case they had to run. “Put these on.”

  She looked at him for a moment as if trying to grasp what he had said, and then pulled off the rose-colored shirt and cotton pants and began to dress.

  God, she was thin, and there were bruises on her arms and back where someone had beaten her.

  He stepped to the door in time to hear the ragged volley of the firing squad. A couple of minutes until Lopato came in for the next group. “Hurry.”

  She came out of the cell tying the scarf over her hair and took the keys out of the lock and stepped to the next cell and began to search for the key that would unlock it. “What are you doing? We have to go.”

  “I can’t leave them in here.”

  “Dylan, we have to go now. They’ll be in here in a minute.”

  “I can’t.” She had the door open and was working on the next. She got lucky and opened it with the second key. Now there were two men with rose shirts in the corridor, and she handed each of them some of the keys and told them to get to work. Cassidy took three keys and moved up the line looking for the doors they fit. Soon there were twenty men in the corridor, and their voices rose as they talked about what to do. One of them moved to the door to the killing ground and slid a bolt across to lock it.

  “They’re not going to make it.”

  “They’ll try, and if they don’t, well, it’s better than sitting in a cell waiting for them to come take you. Do you have a gun?”

  Cassidy handed her the .45 he had taken from the guard. She passed it to the man from the cell next to hers. They hugged, and as she pulled away, she said, “Suerte, hombre.” He smiled like a man who knew that all his luck was behind him. Someone tried the door from the killing ground, and the man turned and fired a bullet through it. Someone outside yelped with pain.

  Cassidy hurried Dylan up the stairs and out into the plaza. Gunfire sounded from below the wall. The soldiers there would be firing back through the door. He led Dylan to the narrow street, and as they turned the corner he looked back in time to see four soldiers and Sergeant Lopato come up the stairs from the killing ground. A shot came from the front door of the prison building. One of the soldiers spun and went down, and the others threw themselves flat and began to return fire. The men in the prison block were not going to get out, but they would buy Cassidy and Dylan time. How long before the general alarm was raised? How long before they blocked the gates?

  The two drivers were standing in the shade by the cars smoking and talking. Cassidy led Dylan to the one closer to the gate. The driver flicked his cigarette away and walked over.

  “We have to go now,” Cassidy said.

  The driver looked around. “And the others?”

  “They’ll be a while. You can come back for them.”

  “Are you sure?” Did he hear the distant snap of rifles?

  “I’m sure.” Cassidy put his arm around Dylan’s waist, and she leaned in and kissed the side of his neck and rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m sure.”

  The driver nodded and smiled. “Ahh, yes. Of course. Of course.” He understood the urgency of love in the afternoon. He opened the back door and ushered them in with a flourish, got in behind the wheel, revved the engine to show his appreciation of the need for haste, circled the plaza fast enough to make the tires squeal, and drove out through the gate.

  Dylan put her head against his chest. He could feel her body shake. He felt her tears through the cloth of his shirt.

  3

  Cassidy asked the driver to take them to the Nacional, but Dylan had him pull over on La Rampa, and they got out and watched him drive on. “They’ll know you were at the hotel. They’ll go there first.” She led him around a corner and hailed another taxi and asked the driver to take them to the old town and to drop them at the Cathedral plaza where they walked through the beggars displaying their wounds and deformities. She warded off the vendors who took her for a tourist with a smile and a shake of the head. They turned down an alley where the old stucco buildings leaned toward each other and laundry in all colors hung from the wrought-iron balconies and got on a bus and rode ten blocks with the people headed home from work. At a corner where the bus turned, two gray police cars nosed together into the curb. Four young men, college age, stood facing a white wall, their hands high, their legs spread, as the cops patted them down. The people on that side of the bus turned away from the windows. Cassidy and Dylan got out at the next stop and he followed her down narrow streets that smelled of grilling meats, flowers, the sea, and open drains. Music played from radios near open windows, drums and guitars, brass and maracas, a heavy tropical beat. She walked with purpose, and he followed without comment. He was in her world now, the covert, the clandestine, and she would lead them where they had to go.

  She stopped at a wide arched gateway on a narrow street near the port and reached in through the slats and fiddled with something until she got it right and half the gate swung open and he followed her into a courtyard. It was paved with worn cobblestones and surrounded on three sides by a two-story building and on the fourth by a high wall and the gate they had entered. The building was old, the stucco discolored and broken in places. The ground floor under the two wings had been built as stables, but now they were crowded with cars in various states of repair. Pieces of car bodies, fenders, doors, bumpers were piled in corners of the yard.

  Someone beat on metal with a hammer in one of the stalls.

  * * *

  “Your descriptions have been on the radio. Very accurate because, of course, your hair is eas
y. We should do something about that. And him too. Very accurate. Hair, height, weight, everything. Someone was paying attention. Who is he?”

  “An old friend.”

  He waited for more but Dylan gave him nothing.

  “We must do something about your hair, Selena. I’ll ask Veronica. She works at a hair place for women.”

  Selena, the cover name she was using.

  The man’s name was Tomas. He was broad and thick and bowlegged, and his dark face was cheerful until you got to his eyes. His English was good, learned, he explained, during six years he worked as a mechanic for a Ford dealer in Fort Lauderdale. He carried a shotgun up from the garage and put it behind the door where it would be easy to reach. His hands were ingrained with oil and dirt even after scrubbing in the stone sink in the kitchen on the second floor. There was no sign of a woman here. The sink was stacked with dirty dishes. The towel he used to dry his hands was gray. The windows were opaque with years of stove smoke. One of the counters was littered with bits stripped from cars, radio tubes and knobs, a gearshift, unidentifiable pieces of metal, a wind wing in its frame. The wood table where they sat was scarred on the edges from where people had rested cigarettes.

  Tomas lit a Chesterfield and blew smoke at Cassidy. “You’re sure of him?”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, then. On your head if it goes wrong.” He took a long barreled .38 revolver from his waistband and put it under a cloth at his elbow and got up and found an unlabeled bottle in a cabinet above the old kerosene range and poured rum into mismatched tumblers. He served them bread and plates of olives and hard cheese and small grilled fish. Dylan ate as if she had not seen food in days. Tomas ate the fish with his fingers, crunching heads and all and washing them down with rum.