You couldn’t have looked lovelier.
“’Bye you guys,” said Flor the Wellesley Girl, getting on her bicycle, her nearly black eyes shining with a happy integrity, a gleaming inside joke she’d been speechlessly cooing to herself ever since she became an orphan child, uprooted from the Chiquimula desert—
Dad was chortling. Ho ho ho. “’Bye, Floorie, you kid you. Knock ‘em dead.”
Standing over her seat, giving her hair a toss, she rode away, the yellow safety reflectors on her pedals bobbing up and down, the bicycle lamp projecting a dim, chalky (ghost flea) beam ahead. My father had to feel a bit tender and generous to me then, and he gave me a brief, one-armed squeeze around the shoulders, and said something about what a good job I’d done raking the leaves that morning, and that there was still time to catch the last quarter of a football game on TV. My mother had stayed inside, finishing up cleaning the kitchen, though Flor and I had rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher and washed the pots and pans together.
“. .. The embassy never hands out judgments, oh no. Just riddles,” and I remembered Flor’s soft laugh, the striking, insider’s delight she seemed to take in saying it. That was during one of her last visits to New York. She knew what went on in the U.S. embassy in Guatemala, or had an idea about it anyway. Often she had to go there to arrange the papers for adoptions to the States. It even turned out that she’d known Consul Simms—socially, as he put it.
We’d driven there directly from the morgue. We had to make arrangements for flying Flor’s body home, and the consul was going to tell us what he knew. The embassy, on Avenida La Reforma in Zona 10, looks more like some sixties-style elementary school in the suburbs, a massive one, with a high steel fence and concrete barricades out front; Consul Simms’s office was on the third floor, at the end of a long, cream-colored corridor lined with rooms full of Americans busy, all in their own specialized ways, with Guatemala. No one even glanced up at us as we passed by the open doors, but I couldn’t help thinking that Flor was the problem at least some of them were working on that day, her murder and instant notoriety and its possible local consequences at least. It surprised me and made me feel incredibly apprehensive, the rarefied laboratory silence in that corridor, that atmosphere of trained meditations and calculations—made me remember “riddles” and what Flor had meant by that. So that it was as if I suddenly understood, or if I couldn’t really understand then suspected or felt, that here in the embassy Flor’s case was already being quietly and inexorably dissolved into a larger design that was all about rendering such shocks, any and all shocks, survivable by never forcing them or even allowing them to come to a definitive end—by processing them into “riddles.” Right from the start, it felt like a horrible place to have to come to for a revelation about a person you loved.
The consul’s office was small, cramped, rectangular, with just one sealed, oblong window full of limpid sky. Consul Simms took off his blazer and hung it on the back of his desk chair, undid his tie, then turned the chair towards us and sat down, his long, summer-flannel-clad legs extended so far into the room that he had to tuck his crossed ankles under the coffee table. My father was sitting in the couch on one side of the table, his rump sunk in soft leather cushions, bringing his knees up too high, his hands clamped over his knees. In this ludicrous posture he had to look up, like a penitent child, at Consul Simms. I was in the stiff-backed armchair. There were magazines in two neat stacks on top of the coffee table, and a glass ashtray with an inlaid ace of diamonds. I didn’t ask if anybody minded before lighting a cigarette, though it felt somewhat shabby to do that, like smoking in a doctor’s waiting room. But the formaldehyde-carrion stench of the morgue was with me now in a way I hadn’t quite noticed before—in my nostrils, on my tongue. And I could feel my heart beating as if it was a labor now to keep the drained, frightened rest of me going.
Consul Simms was about forty, with the face of an adult cherub, handsome but infiltrated by mundane decay beneath his tan-drenched complexion: curly golden hair, blue eyes, pomular cheeks hard and sagging at once. Career foreign service. A consul, charged with, among other things, the often ambiguous business of looking after Americans in one kind of trouble or another. Flor wasn’t his first dead American.
“Mr. Graetz, Roger,” began Consul Simms. “Often people have the impression, the mistaken impression I’m afraid, that we here in the embassy somehow know everything that goes on in Guatemala, that we have some kind of direct pipeline into the Security Forces, the National Police, and so on. But it just isn’t that way . . .”
He proceeded then to invoke the autonomous, sovereign nature of Guatemala’s military government and security institutions, and then he recapped the details of Flor’s case as presented by the National Police spokesman, as published in the Guatemalan press, though without any echo of their malignant hysteria. It didn’t even occur to us to ask him why he thought the press was being that way, because my father and I, of course, thought Flor’s death was every bit as significant as they were making it out to be, despite the angle they were taking.
But Consul Simms’s voice had a still youthful resonance in it, and his eye contact was earnest and surprisingly baleful at once. After a while he reminded me of one of those moderators or journalists you see on public television sometimes: serious-minded, professional, every word carefully chosen, but not at all indifferent. Their messages always get through, and so did Consul Simms’s—something in his subtle shifts of tone and expression more than what he actually said. But these messages of the consul’s had a delayed effect, and, because they were usually hard ones, when they did finally kick in it was awful. I’d sit there feeling like I was drowning, while the consul just tacked on. If these were riddles, they weren’t the kind I’d braced myself for.
I think he was affecting my father in much the same way. Because when the consul paused in his narration, we sat in stunned silence for a moment, though he’d said nothing we hadn’t already heard. And then my father looked up at him from the couch, and said, with a wincing note behind his deliberate pronunciation:
“And is that what you think, Consul? That Flor was murdered by these so-called partners of hers.”
Consul Simms said, “Mr. Graetz, I can’t say with any certainty that I do know who was responsible,” and then he shifted, briefly, his truthful blue gaze from my father to me. “There will be a police investigation, and hopefully some arrests, trials, and we will monitor all of that closely. Though, of course, we don’t ordinarily interfere in the Guatemalan judicial process, such as it is.”
Then there was a silence. But for me it was an unbearable one, and finally I blurted: “You think she was selling babies.”
My father’s expression cleared—he looked at me, appalled.
“Well,” said Consul Simms calmly, pulling his legs in then, sitting up straight. For a long moment he seemed to be thinking hard.
“You know,” he finally said, “Americans working with NGOs in Guatemala are here as private citizens, and—”
“NGOs?” I interrupted.
“Sorry,” he said. “Nongovernmental organizations, which Flor’s orphanage, loosely defined, is. We don’t interfere, which isn’t to say we aren’t interested in the work they do, or that we don’t think it very important. But we don’t have many official dealings with them.
“Now it so happens that I was quite aware of Flor’s orphanage. And, of course, in every evident way she was running an excellent program, what with the infant malnutrition clinic, the health care abroad project, and even the legal adoptions she was doing. I knew Flor, Mr. Graetz, Roger, I think you should know. I, and my wife, knew Flor and liked her very much. I had a lot of respect for the work Flor was doing, I thought it was important work. In fact, less than a year ago we had a problem here concerning an American child, a little girl abandoned here in Guatemala, and I had to place her in an orphanage for a while ...”
And he’d placed her with Flor, because he’d thought tha
t Flor would treat her just great, and she did. Flor had written to me about that girl, Belinda Towne was her name, and her father, some incredibly irresponsible hippie drifter type, had abandoned her up in Panajachel, and then she’d stayed with Flor a couple of months—
“And that little girl was sold, I take it?”—just a stupid fucking remark to make, because of course she hadn’t sold her, not that one. Oh man! But I didn’t feel like listening to the consul go on about how much he’d liked Flor, and how great she’d been with some little girl.
My father was looking at me now with total dismay, and the consul was looking at me too. Then, “No,” said the consul, a soft and matter-offact, kind of rising, two-syllable no. So subtle then, the tiny shift in the consul’s eyes as he decided to absolve me; a very professional little absolution there. Consul Simms, remember, was familiar with overwrought family members. And I’m sure he’d heard even more annoying remarks than mine before: grief-muddled relatives automatically and bitterly implicating the U.S. government in their loved one’s death—when the poor, romancing gringo fool had really been killed by some love-struck puta’s jealous pimp-boyfriend, and if that young pimp had an uncle who was a magistrate and got him off for a supposed lack of evidence, even though the pimp’s own horrified mother had turned him in and later recanted—as in one case Flor had told me about—well then, what was the embassy supposed to do about it? Bring all diplomatic relations to a halt?
But there have been other cases too, to tell the truth, where family members might have had good reason to think that the embassy had decided against putting the Guatemalans in an embarrassing position. The priest from Oklahoma is one that everybody talks about—soldiers went into his rectory one night and put a bullet in his head. Nothing was done about that. It occurred soon after the shift in administrations, and the Republicans had come in eager to repair relations that had been damaged by all the harping on human rights and the military aid cutoff, and were trying to get their whole Central American hard line in place. And it may have been Consul Simms who’d had to deal with that family.
But I did eventually feel that Consul Simms, in his own way, was being pretty straight with us. It didn’t even enter my mind that the embassy could have a political motive for hiding anything from us. Flor, after all, had been murdered with a knife, maybe even a common carving knife, gashed just once, if deeply and with improbable effectiveness, across the throat, and everyone said and they still say that that is just not the army’s or any other death squad’s way of doing it. So you’d have to get pretty elaborate in your paranoia to think they’d change their whole modus operandi just for Flor.
“I’m sorry,” said my father, apologizing for that remark of mine. “This is very tough stuff for us, Consul.”
“Of course,” said Consul Simms.
“It was a stupid thing to say,” I said quietly. “I apologize.”
“Really, I understand.”
“Flor wrote to me about that little girl,” I said. “Her name was Belinda, right?”
“Yes, Belinda,” said the consul, and he told us that Belinda had finally been placed in a foster home in Texas, and that then her father had turned up in Guatemala again, with a new wife, and had been surprised not to find Belinda being cared for by somebody in the Panajachel expatriate community, many of whom had cleared out in the past year, when the war had begun to affect even that town.
“Well, the long and short of it,” said the consul, “is that her father went up to Texas too, and they’re going to court for custody with the claim that it was really some other foreigner they’d left Belinda with who abandoned her. Flor, as I understood it, was thinking of going up there to testify for the state.”
“That’s pathetic!” I said, part of me honestly astounded, the other part trying to win points of ambiguous significance with Consul Simms. “I bet they’ll win too.”
And the consul shrugged slightly, as if in resigned agreement with my indignation.
“Consul, well then,” blurted my father, “couldn’t there be a motive there, a possible motive?”
“Oh no, I don’t think so,” he said. “Her testimony might not have been crucial, and I’m not even sure they even knew she might go up. I really don’t see it, Mr. Graetz.”
My father waved his hand in disgust. “You reach for straws,” he said.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But the way we got into this, about Belinda, is that we were talking about ...” I couldn’t even say it now.
“About Flor,” said Consul Simms, with a nod. “I’m going to tell you the little that I do know. But I want you to know, also, that no hard evidence regarding her . . . alleged involvements ever reached us here. But I’m not sure what that evidence, to be actually incriminating, would have to be even if it did exist. Apart from a directly involved witness, like that girl the police arrested at the house, the one who did supposedly mention Flor. This so-called illegal adoption business, at least by Guatemalan legal standards, often turns out to be more a matter of ethically disturbing activities, say, than an actual violation of the laws here, because those laws just aren’t very clear.
“But I do have to tell you, Mr. Graetz, that we had received inquiries, and in some cases allegations, about Flor, from people in Guatemala and sometimes from prospective adopting parents and even adoption agencies abroad. Usually it was just, you know, to adopt a child legally Flor, in the name of Los Quetzalitos, of course charged a fee. Not more than fifteen thousand dollars, I think, and sometimes even less, which supposedly included legal costs and other things. So some people just wanted to know where, exactly, their money was going. Supposedly it was going back into the general operations of the orphanage. That’s what we’d tell them, that the orphanage was registered at the embassy and entitled to arrange adoptions to the States and that if Flor said that about the fee, then that was all we knew about it. Now, I don’t know what kind of accounting Flor kept. I guess that’s something the police will be looking into. Though none of this, the fee, though somewhat high, was exceptional here, or in itself illegal; there’s nothing on the Guatemalan books that says a person isn’t allowed to profit from a legally processed adoption. But naturally some of the people who pay those fees just want to be sure everything is aboveboard. Probably they’ve heard things about the adoption racket here and elsewhere in Central America, about people just pocketing the fees or, much more troubling of course, about stolen infants and others who’ve been bought cheaply, infants who are not actually orphans being illegally processed for adoption with the complicity of the courts and lawyers here.
“And often people, particularly here in Guatemala,” he went on, “just like to talk. Rumors here carry substantial weight; they are like another kind of media that everyone finds themselves plugged into. So a number of the allegations we received about Flor struck me as just that kind of talk. Certain people here feeling offended or even shamed by illegal adoptions and Guatemalan involvement in that business, and wanting to implicate Flor if only because she was a U.S. citizen. And some even feeling a resentful envy towards her just because she was a Guatemalan who’d gotten away and really come up in life.
“But, Mr. Graetz, the persistence of these rumors was troubling enough that we did discuss looking into it, before finally deciding that it wasn’t our jurisdiction . . . And, I don’t know, I guess I wish now that we hadn’t made that decision.”
Then Consul Simms sighed, and ran his hand back through his hair. He wanted us to see that he did not feel at all indifferently about what had happened to Flor, and I believed that he didn’t.
“What were these rumors?” I asked.
“Well, I never put much stock in them, and I don’t think you should either.”
My father said, “I’d rather hear them from you than elsewhere, Consul.”
That issued in a pretty extraordinary litany, one it obviously pained the consul to deliver: telling us how not only Guatemalans but Americans too were rumored to have been going up into the
war-torn highlands to buy hungry and endangered infants from families in dire conditions; and that others were said to have been paying juvenile delinquents to snatch healthy, lighter-skinned, and thus much more valuable babies from their mothers’ arms on the streets of Guatemala City.
“I’m afraid to say there actually has been a rash of that kind of thing here,” said the consul. “Those children are being sold to somebody. So you can see how someone like Flor might have been vulnerable to certain kinds of rumors?
“My God,” he went on, “there’s even been one going around, not only about Flor but about anyone doing adoptions to the States, that children are actually being sold to hospitals there so that their organs can be used in medical transplants. The one rumor we never heard, though, was that she was involved with a clandestine house. Though there are said to be not a few of those places.”
As inwardly foul as the last cigarette had made me feel, I lit another. My father was staring down at his lap, one of his hands slowly fisting and unfisting on his knee. Consul Simms watched him for a moment, and then, with a change in his voice that was almost electrifying compared with the wary monotone he’d just been using, he spoke up again:
“Despite everything else, whether Flor was doing anything wrong or not, none of this should distract from the fact that her death was a crime. That’s primary.”
“She was murdered by people much worse than her,” I answered, unpremeditatively and not really knowing what I meant.
“It was a terrible, terrible waste,” said the consul, dropping his voice into a tone more intimate and grave. “She was a very remarkable person in lots of ways, I know that.”
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 8