Chris and Emelia continued their southward journey, walking through the nights and, when granted the cover of mist, deep into the grey light of morning. For Chris it was the strangest trip he had ever taken, a matter of birds singing in empty forests and winds whistling across mountain slopes, of strangers who materialized out of the mist to offer news and guidance, of nights both impenetrable and bursting with stars, of the woman he travelled with, who said nothing and seemed like an angel in the process of turning to stone.
On the upper slopes of the Toliman volcano Hajrija helped with the chores, counted the hours until Chris would be joining her, and looked forward to the return of the two compas whom Mariano had sent to investigate the prison camp. This guerrilla unit, the comandante had told her, was only about twenty strong, and that only at the best of times. The Army’s local depredations had thinned the numbers of the working population, and even those who had joined the guerrillas had to spend time helping on the land. This unit could not afford to be particularly aggressive, and its main purpose was to stay in being until such time as a peace agreement was signed. In the meantime its mere existence acted as a deterrent against the Army’s more blatant excesses.
Hearing all this, Hajrija wondered at Mariano’s willingness to help her, and wondered still more at the welcoming smiles and unfailing kindness which all the people in the camp continued to demonstrate.
In Hereford Barney Davies watched the rain sweep across the parade ground, conducted the routine business of the day, and waited for news of the negotiations that were apparently underway between the respective governments. He had spent periods like this before, worrying about men he had sent into danger in far-off places, but always in the past there had been the possibility of contact by radio. This time he felt the powerlessness of the complete bystander, and he didn’t like it one little bit.
It was just before dawn on the Thursday, with the faintest of glimmers in the eastern sky, when Chris and Emelia reached the crest from which Hajrija and her escort had looked out over Atitlán and its guardian volcanoes.
‘That is where my village is,’ Emelia said, extending an arm towards the far side of the lake. ‘It is called Santiago Atitlán,’ she added, and for the first time in three days Chris could hear emotion in her voice. Glancing sideways at her he thought he could detect a loosening in the facial muscles, and even in the way she held herself. It was as if she had needed the sight of home to let herself feel again.
They dug a scrape just below the tree line, and this time she allowed him to take the first watch. Minutes later she was asleep, her face softening with each passing moment, until he imagined that once again he could see the young woman with whom he had listened to the laughing falcon.
Was he falling in love with her? Or did he just feel a mixture of desire and pity? Whatever his feelings, they seemed somehow inappropriate, both too strong for their current predicament and too weak for the world in which she lived.
The morning went by. He watched the wind slowly disperse the halo-like clouds above the volcanoes and begin to ruffle the glassy, blue-green surface of the lake. Boats began to appear, criss-crossing the lake between the villages on its shore, and around ten o’clock a couple of windsurfers appeared, but there were no signs of a military presence.
It was hard to believe this was a country in which 150,000 men, women and children had been killed by the armed forces in a little over fifteen years. Ten thousand a year, or nearly thirty a day. According to Tomás several hundred victims had been dropped alive into the cones of those three smoking volcanoes which rose up behind the distant shore, beyond the brightly coloured sails of the windsurfers.
Once darkness had fallen Chris and Emelia worked their way down to the lake and began making their way across the fields and tree-covered slopes which lined its eastern shores. It took a little under three hours to reach an observation point above the sprawling village of Santiago Atitlán, and another fifteen minutes before they felt completely confident that no unpleasant surprises were waiting for them in the town below.
The narrow streets were much darker than the hillside, but Emelia led the way through the familiar labyrinth without hesitation, and soon she was softly rapping on a chosen door. A smiling face appeared in the crack, and they were drawn in out of the darkness.
Inside there was light, both the warm glow of burning fir cones and the harsher glare of a bare sixty-watt bulb. There was also a host of people: two men, two women, and more moving children than could easily be counted. The adults seemed to all begin talking at once, in that language that Chris had only previously heard spoken between Emelia and her brother. Every now and then someone would turn to look at him, as he stood there feeling far too big for the room.
After a few minutes Emelia turned to him. ‘Gaspar will take us to the camp where your friend is,’ she said. ‘But on the way I must go to Maximon,’ she added, as one of the women pressed what looked like a whisky miniature and a packet of cigarettes into her hand. ‘You must come too,’ she told Chris. ‘It will not be many minutes.’
They set off again through the dark and empty streets, with Gaspar in the lead, Emelia behind him, and Chris bringing up the rear, wondering who the hell Maximon was. It took only a couple of minutes for them to reach their new destination – another one-storey house, larger than most, with yellow light seeping out through the curtained windows. Gaspar knocked on the door, and they were ushered into one of the strangest rooms Chris had ever seen.
The walls and ceiling were almost completely covered with various-coloured paper decorations, and to one side a long table supported a coffin which was liberally appointed with winking Christmas lights. Flowers were strewn across floor and coffin, and tin cans loaded with incense were filling the air with sweet-smelling smoke. In the centre of the bare stone floor there stood or sat – it was hard to tell – a wooden effigy swathed in shawls and scarves. It was only about a metre tall, but both the highly polished boots and the wooden face mask beneath the wide-brimmed hat were life-size, giving the overall impression of a child in adult clothing.
‘That is Maximon,’ Gaspar told Chris, as he shepherded him towards a long bench that ran along one wall. Emelia had taken a throne-like seat opposite the effigy and was talking to one of the two men who had welcomed them. Both were wearing the same traditional costume – a length of woven cloth wound turban-like around the head, ordinary shirt and tunic, and bermuda-length shorts in woven material of a different pattern. By all rights they ought to look ridiculous, Chris thought, but they didn’t.
The second of the two men had already lit around twenty of the candles in front of the effigy, and was now scattering orange flower petals among them. Satisfied with the arrangement, he opened the packet of cigarettes Emelia had brought, wedged a cigarette between the effigy’s lips, and lit it. To Chris’s surprise the cigarette stayed alight – the effigy obviously had an in-built draught which served to simulate inhalation.
‘Death flowers,’ Gaspar whispered in Spanish, his finger pointing at the scattered marigold petals. ‘They are a prayer for the soul of the departed one.’
The cigarette was now removed, and the opened bottle of brandy applied to the wooden lips, a cloth held beneath them to collect the spillage. The first man was now kneeling in front of the effigy, addressing it with great seriousness, as if he was explaining something. He was the go-between, Chris realized. His job was to speak for Emelia, and to elicit Maximon’s blessing or understanding or whatever else it was he was offering in return for the smokes and booze.
And it seemed to be working. In the chair behind her interlocutor, Emelia seemed more at peace, as if a vast weight was slowly being lifted from her shoulders and placed aboard those of the cigarette-puffing, brandy-guzzling effigy.
‘Maximon understands,’ Gaspar whispered beside him. ‘He knows that to free the soul of the dead is also to free the soul of the living.’
Chris was still pondering this when the audience came to an end. Eve
ryone smiled and shook hands, and Gaspar led the way out into the street. Chris had one last glimpse of Maximon, the cigarette burning in the wooden lips, before the door closed behind him. As the threesome made their way up the dark street he tried to make sense of what he had just seen, but his mind couldn’t seem to pull it all together. It had been like a bizarre therapy session, a trip back in time, a shuffling of cultures, and all at once.
The journey up the volcano, along paths which wound to and fro across the steep, wooded slopes, took about two hours. For much of the way Emelia talked with Gaspar in their native language, and listening to her voice Chris marvelled at the transformation which the visit to Maximon had produced. It was as if she had been brought back to life.
They passed the outer sentries at around one-thirty in the morning, and reached the camp itself ten minutes later. One of the figures in olive-green uniforms ran towards Chris and threw her arms around him, tears sparkling in her eyes. Her face looked almost as drawn as it had at their first meeting in the Sarajevo hotel, but this time the cause was more likely to be anxiety than malnutrition. ‘Is there any news of him?’ Chris asked.
‘We know where he is,’ Hajrija said. ‘And it’s not far away – only twenty-five kilometres. It’s a prison camp. Some of the compañeros have been checking it out for us – they’re expected back tonight, any time now.’ She filled him in on the events of the last few days, and recounted the message that had come from Hereford via Chile. ‘We’re his only hope,’ she said.
Listening to her, reading the fear behind the excitement, Chris offered a silent prayer that the hope was a realistic one.
He introduced her to Emelia, and the two women spontaneously hugged, as if in recognition of the fact that the sacrificial bond between the one’s brother and the other’s husband had automatically created a bond between them. Chris was introduced to Mariano and the other compas who were present, most of whom seemed even younger than the men and women in the Cuchumatanes.
The food was better in this camp, though, presumably because there were farms nearby. They were halfway through a plate of stew when the two compas returned from the reconnaissance mission to San Pedro Norte. The young woman, whose name was Elena, unfolded a map she had drawn of the prison camp, and they all gathered round to examined it by the light of Mariano’s pencil torch.
‘We watched for two days and two nights, and we talked to the people in San Pedro La Laguna,’ she began, pointing out the lakeside village on the map. ‘There are only about forty men in the camp – ten or twelve prison guards, four or five administrative staff and twenty-five to thirty soldiers. The only prisoner we saw was the Englishman, but the villagers think there may be two or three more of their people being held there.’
She paused for a moment, then went on to describe the camp and its situation. It was surrounded by a wire-topped wall, and there were guard towers with mounted searchlights at each corner, though only two of these were regularly occupied by guards. There was a single gate in the wall, but this was hardly ever used, since nearly all movement of men and supplies was done by helicopter.
‘A hundred compas would have no trouble in breaking in through the gate,’ her male companion interjected, ‘but fifteen minutes later the reinforcements would arrive from other bases and there would be no escape. There are trees near the camp, but the hills all around are mostly bare. If more than ten out of a hundred got back to the volcano it would be a miracle.’
The other compas began asking questions, and it was some time before Chris managed to get his own in. ‘You said the gate was hardly ever used – so when is it used?’
Elena smiled. ‘Three mornings a week a truck is driven to San Pedro La Laguna with the soldiers’ laundry, and it returns late that afternoon,’ she answered.
‘It might get you in,’ Mariano said, ‘but how would you get out?’
‘A good question,’ Chris murmured. ‘But there’s one obvious answer…’
13
The truck seemed to be looking for the deepest ruts in the track as it climbed the fifteen kilometres from the lakeside village to the prison camp. Chris, one wrist and both ankles strapped to the underside of the chassis, thought the journey gave a new meaning to the phrase ‘shaken not stirred’, and was reminded of the scene in one of the Bond movies in which the hero had been almost pulled apart on a health-spa rack. When the truck finally jolted to a halt at the gate to the compound, the sense of relief was almost strong enough to obliterate his feelings of apprehension.
A few moments later he heard the whirr of electronic gates opening, and the truck started up again. There was a shouted exchange between cab and gatehouse, and a brief glimpse of booted feet as the driver pulled into the compound. Almost immediately the brake was reapplied, and the truck came to a halt.
He was inside.
The cab door opened, the driver’s legs swung down to the ground, and walked around to the back of the truck. Chris had seen the man’s chubby face when he first arrived in the lakeside village for the prison laundry, and had heard him flirting with Emelia as Hajrija hurriedly tied three of his own limbs to the truck’s chassis.
He was unloading the baskets of laundry now, and making more than enough noise to cover the sound of Chris’s breathing. A door opened, a new voice spoke, more boots appeared, and hands reached down for one of the large baskets. The four feet moved away out of sight, and when they returned a minute or so later the driver was telling his friend about a new girl in the village. This time Chris heard the tailgate being pushed up, and the sound of bolts going in, before the hands lifted up the remaining basket. The feet receded again, and a door slammed.
The light was definitely fading now. He hung on, listening to the competing songs of a western wood-pewee and a distant radio. The former seemed more musical, but there wasn’t much competition – his time in Colombia had been enough to convince him that Latin American pop music was easily the worst the planet had to offer.
He waited another fifteen minutes, until the risk of disabling himself with cramp seemed greater than the danger of being seen, and then began the job of untying himself. First he released the other wrist, shifted the Uzi around to his front, and slowly lowered his head and shoulders on to the gravel beneath. From this position he could see that the gatehouse was unlit and presumably unmanned, but that the bare ground visible through the gate was now illuminated. He couldn’t see the top of the guard tower, but assumed that was where the light was coming from. Away to his right there was the line of one-storey buildings which supposedly housed the prison offices, communications centre and officers’ quarters. Two of the windows were lit, but he could see no movement inside.
Pulling himself forward as if he was doing sit-ups, Chris slowly untied his ankles, and gently lowered his whole body to the ground. There he lay motionless for several minutes, watching the buildings which had previously been out of sight behind him, and which according to the guerrilla recon team housed the prison guards. He could hear a faint buzz of conversation coming from inside, but none of the visible windows showed any light.
Five metres separated him from the corner of the building and he crawled rapidly across them, knowing that the bulk of the truck would hide him from any watching eyes in the guard tower. Once beside the building, he pulled himself into a crouch, and began slowly making his way around to its rear. From the next corner he could see the camp football pitch stretching away towards the distant wall, and the fixed lights shining out and down from one of the two unoccupied guard towers.
Hearing the familiar sounds of a football match on TV, he noticed a bluish glow emanating from a couple of the back windows. With any luck the guards would be too engrossed to hear or see anything else.
He moved on past these windows, towards the shelter of the two trees which stood between the large water-tower and the corner of the football pitch. He was now close to the perimeter wall, and about thirty metres from the gate and gatehouse. One of the two occupied guard towers l
oomed beyond the latter.
He settled down to wait. The sentries were relieved on the hour every three hours, and the next change would be at nine o’clock, but it was the one at midnight which they planned to make use of. Chris pictured Mariano and the two women walking up the track from the lake – they would have covered about five kilometres by now, with another twenty to go. He thought about what he would have to do when the time came, and about his partner sitting in a cell no more than a hundred metres away. He thought about Emelia and the future he couldn’t see them having.
The hours went by. The sentry in the guard tower stirred only twice, on both occasions standing up to stretch and light a cigarette before sinking back out of sight. Chris wondered if the man would later appreciate how lucky he had been to draw this particular shift.
At nine o’clock the man’s replacement emerged from the other side of the guard quarters, walked across the open space between the gate and the prison offices, and wearily pulled himself up the perpendicular ladder which clung to the supporting structure of the tower. A few words of conversation were barely audible, a louder laugh echoed in the night air, and the guard who had been relieved climbed down the ladder and walked away, yawning as he went.
Chris was just settling down to wait another three hours when a muffled scream sounded from deep inside the camp. As if in reply, someone immediately turned up the volume on the TV in the guard quarters.
He crouched there, knowing it hadn’t been Razor screaming, though not at all sure how he knew. Even if it had been there was nothing he could have done on his own, not without wrecking their chances of eventually getting his partner out and away.
Guatemala – Journey into Evil Page 22