I found my voice: “No. I don’t have a weapon.”
“We will provide you with a weapon. And when it is done, I have someone in Sololá who will deliver his body to the FBI. I don’t want to see him again, alive or dead.” He straightened up and turned away, ophidian, finished.
“How will you find me?”
He looked back over his shoulder without making eye contact. “Balam can hide in this country. Maybe he can disappear. But not you, gringo. I will always know where you are. Do this for me and I will no longer notice. Buena suerte.”
I had been assigned the task of assassinating the assassin Balam.
* * *
The next morning I took the bus back to Guatemala City and ignored the passing countryside, just staring at the TV showing The Princess Bride dubbed in Spanish. Twice. The humor of the priest’s speech impediment—mawwiage, twue wuv—was completely lost. When I arrived in the capital I walked a few blocks to a wide, dirt plaza that served as the way station for chicken buses to Antigua. The buses were used school buses from the States, yellow Blue Bird buses repainted in bright reds, blues, and greens, with garish detailing. I boarded one, and as we made our way through the city the ayudante shoved his way through the bus collecting fares.
The highway took us up out of the smog-filled bowl of Guatemala City, leading us rapidly away. In under an hour we came to the turn-off to Antigua, the scenery already green and lush, and I got off with a few other stragglers and waited by the roadside until another bus pulled over, the ayudante leaning out of the still-moving bus to shout, “Panajachel!”
We stopped at the crossroads wasteland of Chimaltenango, a dusty, chaotic smattering of faded clapboards and diesel fumes. People got on; people got off. A few young men wore blue jeans and baseball caps, but most of the passengers were indigenous women, dark-skinned, carrying large bundles and children, and dressed in the manner they’d had for centuries, ankle-length woven skirts and embroidered huípiles. Vendors came in through the back door and worked their way to the front, barking, selling bottled water, chips, homemade snacks in blanket-covered baskets. The bus was crowded now, and the passengers wedged into the benches—designed for two—in threes. I found myself snuggled up between a young man, pulling his cap down low and reading El Diario—or, at least, staring at the bikini-clad woman featured like a PG version of The Sun’s page three—and an indigenous woman. She had only one ass cheek on the bench, her weight supported by the woman with one cheek on the adjacent bench.
We wound through majestic hills, climbing steadily upward, the countryside increasingly and impressively verdant. We turned off at another crossroads, the nascent town of Los Encuentros. I jumped off the bus to take a piss behind a line of shacks. Vending carts were lined up like hot dog stands but with portable fryers behind glass. I bought some french fries, given to me in a brown paper bag with ketchup and salsa verde dumped over the top. They were magnificent.
I stood as we wound our way down from the crest of the hill, peeking out the windows to watch field workers harvesting potatoes. As we pulled in to the local capital, Sololá, traffic came to a standstill. It was market day, and as we shuddered to a stop next to the main square and the bus emptied out, I blinked at the cornucopia of color in the market, the brightly painted chicken buses, the rows of stunning vegetables, the fabric and handicrafts for sale, bright yellow chicks chirping in netted baskets, the hordes of Mayans in multicolored handmade clothing. The men wore straw cowboy hats, breechcloths over pajama-like woven pants, and long-sleeved shirts that were more like jackets, rococo in their decoration, almost Las Vegas in bright pinks and gold, some with resplendent birds stitched on the back.
My empty bus filled with new passengers, and vendors passed helados up through the open windows. I was now not just the only gringo, but the only passenger not wearing indigenous dress. I watched with amazement as a woman with two kids, forced to stand, handed off the smaller child to a stranger across the crowded bus. None of the children on board cried or whimpered, they simply stared out at the world through wide, opalescent eyes.
The road was steep and winding, crawling steadily downward, and I caught fleeting, dreamlike glimpses of the lake in its splendor, a sea of blue, towered over authoritatively by the volcanoes Atitlán and Tolimán. In the final stretch of road above Lago de Atitlán the view opened up completely, and I took in the overpowering beauty of the lake, mesmerized by its size and clarity. San Pedro, the volcano at the far end, loomed domineering and yet distant, the lake supine, rippled, reflecting the clouds in impressionistic shards, the town of Panajachel a human joke in the face of natural accomplishment.
I thought of the Old Man, and quietly thanked him for sending me to such a beautiful place.
* * *
Panajachel was a tourist trap, with too many smiling gringos for my taste. English and German crackled in the air in restaurants and cafés, and I couldn’t get through a meal without being asked to buy something by a ridiculously cute—yet infinitely annoying—young Mayan girl. I couldn’t imagine how the Old Man’s people could find me in such a place, so speckled with white faces, but I believed him, and I remembered his recommendation to find a quiet place. It was good advice for one preparing to become a killer.
On my second day at the lake I went to the public dock, got on a lancha—a small speed boat—and asked the capitán to take me somewhere quiet. The lancha was crowded, and at each stop I helped abuelitas with their innumerable packages. Villages dotted the coastline of the lake, small roads and clusters of domiciles climbing up into the hills. It was the rainy season, the capitán told me, and the lake was high, the hillsides green. The lancha pulled in amongst reeds and floating bits of volcanic rock, and I got out and, for a couple of quetzales, allowed a small boy to lead me to a hotel. It was a small room, a small hotel, a small village.
I had no idea where I was. I didn’t care. There were gringos living amongst the indigenous—shaggy, unkempt hippies in Guatemalan clothing who said little more than hola to me. The tourists, passing through for a day or two of relaxation, were either European or Israeli and didn’t speak to me at all. The local population spoke a Mayan dialect, either Cakchiquel or Tz’utujil, I assumed, and their Spanish wasn’t any better than mine. There was little reason to talk to anyone. I settled in easily into the hotel that was little more than a string of tiny A-frame bungalows, went for morning swims in the lake, breathless in the cool clarity of the water; bought fresh vegetables from women squatting at the side of a road too narrow to be called a road; found a comedor that served hot meals, a chuleta, or stringy chicken, with pitch-black beans more flavorful than beef; sat out at night staring at the lake in the moonlight, smoking Rubios and sipping at a bottle of Old Friend I’d brought from Pana.
Three days later there was a knock on my bungalow door. I didn’t have to wonder. A nondescript Guatemalan man, young enough to be a college student, handed me a small backpack. I opened it up: a Smith & Wesson .38 Special and a box of shells.
“There may not be a position for a rifle,” he said, by way of explanation. “El Viejo told me you would be more comfortable with this.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Where?”
“In two days he will be in Santa Cruz. At four o’clock, más o menos, he will come by lancha from Pana, and go to the café at la Iguana Perdida. He is coming for a job, but the job is not there. Understand?”
“I understand.” They were baiting him, making my life easier.
“Adios.” He was gone. He didn’t say, Hasta luego; he had no intention of seeing me again.
I spent the next two days resting, smoking, and thinking, with long walks up into the hills to practice on Coke bottles, getting the feel of someone else’s gun.
* * *
The day was beaming with intensity, the sun shining down in all its glorious alacrity. I wanted to be unseen, so decided not to take the lancha. I started off on the road a little before one o’clock, climbing over the first crest to look back at
Volcán San Pedro keeping vigil from across the lake. I turned my back on it, wondering if I would ever see it again. The sides of the road were cluttered with tiny yellow butterflies. They knew nothing.
I passed a few men working on a wall, and a number of women in huípiles carrying baskets on their heads. Every now and then I had to step to the side to make way for a camioneta, a pickup truck packed with passengers clutching the steel rails on the sides of the bed—an informal mode of public transportation.
At a tiny village the proper road petered out over a pedestrian bridge and I continued on a rough path that snaked past thatched houses, meandering through the foliage. I pushed on to the first big hill, and at the top of it my shirt was already wet with sweat, my smoker’s lungs gasping for breath. The path clung to the sides of the hills, moving along through coffee plants, the sun blazing.
After an hour and a half of heavy puffing, pushing myself up and down the sinewy path, I hit another village. The path had branched off a number of times, and I realized that I must have taken a wrong turn. I was near the water’s edge, at a stone pathway that led to hundreds of stone steps, the entryway to an expensive hotel. I walked up them, panting, bypassing the hotel, finally reaching the road that, I hoped, would lead me to the next village—Santa Cruz.
The thunder was rolling in the distance, and I could see menacing black clouds and their gray message raining down over the far side of the lake. The afternoon rains had begun early, and the opposite shore was now completely invisible. San Pedro had disappeared, as had the tops of the volcanoes Tolimán and Atitlán.
I had a good forty-five minutes to go, and doubted I’d beat the storm. It didn’t matter. My gun was tied up well in a plastic bag in my satchel. I put on my cheap rain jacket and pushed on.
Within twenty minutes the storm broke over my head. The thunder was deafening, ravishing, making the coffee plants shudder. The rain came down in large, cold bullets, pelting me and making percussive music on the surrounding foliage. My pants were immediately soaked through from rubbing up against the vegetation lining the path. Five more minutes and my cheap rain jacket was a clinging plastic sieve. The dirt path beneath my feet turned into a river. Every inch of me was drenched to the bone, and only pushing on kept me from freezing.
I heard a squishing and a “Buenas tardes,” and a local ran past me with a piece of plastic sheeting drawn across him like a cape. A few minutes later, as I tried to straddle the stream running under me, I saw the man ahead, pulled over and waiting for me. He told me in Spanish that the path ahead was nothing but a waterfall.
“A dónde vas?” he asked.
“Santa Cruz.”
“Vámonos en el campo.” He led the way off the path, and we stumbled over gnarled roots, tripping over errant bits of barbed wire before coming into a soccer field that had become a marsh. We trudged through, and in a few minutes we were on a paved road and he was bidding me farewell, the pueblo of Santa Cruz before me.
I followed the road up, fairly certain that I was going the wrong way. It was almost four; he would be arriving from Pana any minute. I felt like an idiot for walking. My best chance would be to catch him at the docks before he entered la Iguana Perdida, but I needed to get my wits about me.
I stopped at a little tienda, a tiny shack with an open window, operated by two little girls, probably sisters, maybe eleven and nine years old. I asked for a bottle of water and picked up a package of Chikys, apologizing profusely for the fact that I only had a hundred-quetzal note on me. The younger girl, with a radiant smile and a brilliantly colored huipil, ran off to fetch change, so I leaned against the window ledge and took a long pull of water. The chocolate cookies were delicious and had the crisp taste of a last meal. The rain had slacked off into a sporadic drizzle. The girl came back with my change, giggling as she dodged raindrops, followed by a woman who was laughing hysterically at the state of her umbrella. The fabric had slipped off the ends of the spokes, and it looked like she was holding the dried, molted exoskeleton of an oversized spider. The older girl helped her stretch it back out and the woman went off into the rain.
I was about to leave when a local authority came over with a gun in a holster at his side. I twitched a moment, relaxing when I realized that, to him, I was just another wet gringo. He bought a plastic bottle of Pepsi and disappeared around the corner of the tienda.
I pulled off my drenched rain jacket and tried to squeeze some of the water out of my shirt. The Xocomil was blowing—the afternoon southeasterly wind that chops the lake with whitecaps—and I was starting to shiver. It was time.
I stepped around the corner of the tienda and looked down the stone path, made of small rocks patched together to form a rough, semipaved pathway that wound down the hill to the docks like a miniature Lombard Street. It was a long, steep climb down to the water. I was stuffing my jacket into my satchel, keeping an eye on the path, when I caught a strange tingling sensation. There was a young man coming up the hill toward me, dressed in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a simple canvas jacket; an ordinary-looking Guatemalan. If it hadn’t been for the sick feeling in my stomach I might not have recognized him.
It was Sharkskin. Balam. The brow and the air of menace about him was unmistakable. I ducked back behind the tienda and peeked out. He hadn’t seen me; he was walking with his head slightly down, his hair damp from the rain, watching his step on the path. I couldn’t wonder about why he had come up into town; it didn’t matter. I went around to the end of the tienda and stepped off the road onto the muddy embankment. I half-slid down the side wall, coming to the back of the tienda and fumbling in my satchel. I could see him approaching through the brush, and got my hand inside the plastic bag, gripping the butt of the gun, sneaking toward the corner of the tienda as he passed by, mere feet away from me. It had to be now. He wouldn’t hesitate; I couldn’t either.
I dropped my satchel in the mud, my hand coming out with the gun, still covered by the ridiculous blue plastic bag. The weapon was dry but my hands were slick. I clicked the safety off. I stepped up out of the slop and onto the stone path, raising the gun and drawing a bead on him, when one of the stones lining the edge of the path broke away. My feet went out from under me and I slipped into the mud. Balam stopped and turned. In a flash of recognition he reached into his jacket and came out with a pistol, moving quickly toward me, flashing that familiar grin.
“Oye!”
We both flinched. The local cop was coming up the path below us, the half-empty Pepsi bottle in his hand. He dropped the bottle and reached for his gun but never got it out of the holster. Balam turned and fired off a shot, aiming too low, hitting the cop somewhere below the waist and putting him down with a bloodcurdling cry, and the little girls in the tienda screamed. The Pepsi bottle bounced down the hill in slow motion, clattering on the stones.
I raised my bag-wrapped gun from a crouch and squeezed on the inhale, putting one neatly into the front of Balam’s shoulder as he pivoted to aim at me. The impact pushed his shoulder back and spun him halfway around, but I’d hit the wrong shoulder—the gun was in his other hand, and he didn’t drop it. I managed to scramble to my feet as he spun back at me in a frantic, twitching gesture, raising his gun toward me again, the grin still in place. I put one in his chest, and the grin was just starting to fade when I made it disappear completely with another shot to the throat.
I walked toward him, holding a shredded blue plastic bag. I kicked the gun out of his hand—it was McCaffrey’s goddamned Baby Glock—and it skittered along the cobblestones and stopped in the gutter. He was twitching and gurgling; you couldn’t call it breathing.
He looked up at me, not with hatred in his eyes, but with something akin to sadness.
“For Susan,” I said. “And for Ash.”
Men had come out into the street and were standing around nervously watching the dead man on the road, as women looked on from doorways, holding their children close. I pulled my satchel out of the mud and walked over to the local cop, lying back
in the arms of an older man. He had been hit in the leg; his face was cramped in pain, but he wasn’t losing too much blood. He would live. He would have a great story to tell his grandkids. He looked up at me.
“Gracias.”
“De nada.”
I walked away. The street went from a simmer to a rolling boil, men and women running to the cop to tend to his wounds, others hurrying to throw a blanket over the dead man and get him out of the street. A crowd was forming and I felt strangely invisible as I slipped down the path, winding my way along the slippery stone walk, taking the slow bends, approaching the dock. An off-duty lancha capitán told me that the next boat would be there in ten minutes, so I went into the café and ordered a coffee. I was reaching for my money when I realized that I still had the blue bag—and the gun—in my hand. I put it away, took my coffee to the terrace, and made faces at a three-year-old English girl sitting with her parents, bored. We waited for the boat together, and the rain picked up again with a sudden fury that pelted the dock and made us pull our chairs back farther on the terrace. Then it stopped.
* * *
I’ve adopted a rhythm without even trying. I rented a small house up the hill from the lake, just a couple rooms with a flush toilet and a gas stove and electricity. Most of my days are spent idly, at the lake, swimming, lying on the rocks, lizard-like, waiting to dry, getting too hot, jumping back in. In the afternoons, before the rains come, I do a little shopping, walking slowly, hearing the clip clop of my sandals on the stone path and the swish of my mesh bag slung over one shoulder. There are always birds chirping in the trees, strange, alien birdsongs, and on the rocks, near the lake, the sporadic skitter of lizards. And the dogs—a lot of dogs, what the locals call chuchos, near-feral, wandering free, entrenched in the endless pursuit of food and the infinite allure of a bitch in heat. At night, when the village is completely dark and the lake luminescent in the starlight, the dogs bark endlessly, staking territory, fighting and snarling at each other, occasionally barking in ones and twos just to hear themselves speak, listening to their voices echo off the hills surrounding the lake. Sometimes lightning flashes behind the volcanoes, the thunder too far away to hear, the silhouette of the volcanoes starkly visible for a moment, then fading back into obscurity.
The Painted Gun Page 20