by Stephen King
The woman who looked like the Bride of Frankenstein with a very deep tan leaned toward Escobar and whispered briefly behind her hand. Escobar nodded, smiling.
“Of course, Ramón, if our guest should try anything foolish or make any aggressive moves, you would have to shoot him a little.” He roared laughter—roly-poly TV laughter—and then repeated what he had said in Spanish, so that Ramón would understand as well as Fletcher. Ramón nodded seriously, replaced his handcuffs on his belt, and stepped back to the periphery of Fletcher’s vision.
Escobar returned his attention to Fletcher. From one pocket of his parrot-and-foliage-studded guayabera he removed a red-and-white package: Marlboros, the preferred cigarette of third-world peoples everywhere. “Smoke, Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher reached toward the pack, which Escobar had placed on the edge of the table, then withdrew his hand. He had quit smoking three years ago, and supposed he might take the habit up again if he actually did get out of this—drinking high-tension liquor as well, quite likely—but at this moment he had no craving or need for a cigarette. He had wanted them to see his fingers shaking, that was all.
“Perhaps later. Right now a cigarette might—”
Might what? It didn’t matter to Escobar; he just nodded understandingly and left the red-and-white pack where it was, on the edge of the table. Fletcher had a sudden, agonizing vision in which he saw himself stopping at a newsstand on Forty-third Street and buying a pack of Marlboros. A free man buying the happy poison on a New York street. He told himself that if he got out of this, he would do that. He would do it as some people went on pilgrimages to Rome or Jerusalem after their cancer was cured or their sight was restored.
“The men who did that to you”—Escobar indicated Fletcher’s face with a wave of one not-particularly-clean hand—”have been disciplined. Yet not too harshly, and I myself stop short of apology, you will notice. Those men are patriots, as are we here. As you are yourself, Mr. Fletcher, yes?”
“I suppose.” It was his job to appear ingratiating and frightened, a man who would say anything in order to get out of here. It was Escobar’s job to be soothing, to convince the man in the chair that his swelled eye, split lip, and loosened teeth meant nothing; all that was just a misunderstanding which would soon be straightened out, and when it was he would be free to go. They were still busy trying to deceive each other, even here in the deathroom.
Escobar switched his attention to Ramón the guard and spoke in rapid Spanish. Fletcher’s Spanish wasn’t good enough to pick up everything, but you couldn’t spend almost five years in this shithole capital city without picking up a fair vocabulary; Spanish wasn’t the world’s most difficult language, as both Escobar and his friend the Bride of Frankenstein undoubtedly knew.
Escobar asked if Fletcher’s things had been packed and if he had been checked out of the Hotel Magnificent: Sí. Escobar wanted to know if there was a car waiting outside the Ministry of Information to take Mr. Fletcher to the airport when the interrogation was done. Sí, around the corner on the Street Fifth of May.
Escobar turned back and said, “Do you understand what I ask him?” From Escobar, understand came out unnerstand, and Fletcher thought again of Escobar’s TV appearances. Low bressure? What low bressure? We don’t need no steenkin low bressure.
“I ask have you been checked out of your room—although after all this time it probably seems more like an apartment to you, yes?— and if there’s a car to take you to the airport when we finish our conversation.” Except conversation hadn’t been the word he used.
“Ye-es?” Sounding as if he could not believe his own good fortune. Or so Fletcher hoped.
“You’ll be on the first Delta flight back to Miami,” the Bride of Frankenstein said. She spoke without a trace of Spanish accent. “Your passport will be given back to you once the plane has touched down on American soil. You will not be harmed or held here, Mr. Fletcher—not if you cooperate with our inquiries—but you are being deported, let’s be clear on that. Kicked out. Given what you Americans call the bum’s rush.”
She was much smoother than Escobar. Fletcher found it amusing that he had thought her Escobar’s assistant. And you call yourself a reporter, he thought. Of course if he was just a reporter, the Times‘s man in Central America, he would not be here in the basement of the Ministry of Information, where the stains on the wall looked suspiciously like blood. He had ceased being a reporter some sixteen months ago, around the time he’d first met Núñez.
“I understand,” Fletcher said.
Escobar had taken a cigarette. He lighted it with a gold-plated Zippo. There was a fake ruby in the side of the Zippo. He said, “Are you prepared to help us in our inquiries, Mr. Fletcher?”
“Do I have any choice?”
“You always have a choice,” Escobar said, “but I think you have worn out your carpet in our country, yes? Is that what you say, worn out your carpet?”
“Close enough,” Fletcher said. He thought: What you must guard against is your desire to believe them. It is natural to want to believe, and probably natural to want to tell the truth—especially after you’ve been grabbed outside your favorite café and briskly beaten by men who smell of refried beans—but giving them what they want won’t help you. That’s the thing to hold onto, the only idea that’s any good in a room like this. What they say means nothing. What matters is the thing on that trolley, the thing under that piece of cloth. What matters is the guy who hasn’t said anything yet. And the stains on the walls, of course.
Escobar leaned forward, looking serious.
“Do you deny that for the last fourteen months you have given certain information to a man named Tomás Herrera, who has in turn funneled it to a certain Communist insurgent named Pedro Núñez?”
“No,” Fletcher said. “I don’t deny it.” To adequately keep up his side of this charade—the charade summarized by the difference between the words conversation and interrogation—he should now justify, attempt to explain. As if anyone in the history of the world had ever won a political argument in a room like this. But he didn’t have it in him to do so. “Although it was a little longer than that. Almost a year and a half in all, I think.”
“Have a cigarette, Mr. Fletcher.” Escobar opened a drawer and took out a thin folder.
“Not just yet. Thank you.”
“Okay.” From Escobar it of course came out ho-kay. When he did the TV weather, the boys in the control room would sometimes superimpose a photograph of a woman in a bikini on the weather map. When he saw this, Escobar would laugh and wave his hands and pat his chest. People liked it. It was comical. It was like the sound of ho-kay. It was like the sound of steenkin batches.
Escobar opened the folder with his own cigarette planted squarely in the middle of his mouth with the smoke running up into his eyes. It was the way you saw the old men smoking on the street corners down here, the ones who still wore straw hats, sandals, and baggy white pants. Now Escobar was smiling, keeping his lips shut so his Marlboro wouldn’t fall out of his mouth and onto the table but smiling just the same. He took a glossy black-and-white photograph out of the thin folder and slid it across to Fletcher. “Here is your friend Tomás. Not too pretty, is he?”
It was a high-contrast full-face shot. It made Fletcher think of photographs by that semi-famous news photographer of the forties and fifties, the one who called himself Weegee. It was a portrait of a dead man. The eyes were open. The flashbulb had reflected in them, giving them a kind of life. There was no blood, only one mark and no blood, but still one knew at once that the man was dead. His hair was combed, one could still see the toothmarks the comb had left, and there were those little lights in his eyes, but they were reflected lights. One knew at once the man was dead.
The mark was on the left temple, a comet shape that looked like a powder burn, but there was no bullet hole, no blood, and the skull wasn’t pushed out of shape. Even a low-caliber pistol like a .22, fired close enough to the skin to leave
a powder burn, would have pushed the skull out of shape.
Escobar took the picture back, put it in the folder, closed the folder, and shrugged as if to say You see? You see what happens? When he shrugged, the ash fell off his cigarette onto the table. He brushed it off onto the gray lino floor with the side of one fat hand.
“We dint actually want to bother you,” Escobar said. “Why would we? This a small country. We are small people in a small country. The New York Times a big paper in a big country. We have our pride, of course, but we also have our …” Escobar tapped his temple with one finger. “You see?”
Fletcher nodded. He kept seeing Tomás. Even with the picture back in the folder he could see Tomás, the marks the comb had left in Tomás’s dark hair. He had eaten food Tomás’s wife had cooked, had sat on the floor and watched cartoons with Tomás’s youngest child, a little girl of perhaps five. Tom and Jerry cartoons, with what little dialogue there was in Spanish.
“We don’t want to bother you,” Escobar was saying as the cigarette smoke rose and broke apart on his face and curled around his ears, “but for a long time we was watching. You dint see us—maybe because you are so big and we are just little—but we was watching. We know that you know what Tomás knows, and so we go to him. We try to get him to tell what he knows so we don’t have to bother you, but he won’t. Finally we ask Heinz here to try and make him tell. Heinz, show Mr. Fletcher how you try to make Tomás tell, when Tomás was sitting right where Mr. Fletcher was sitting now.”
“I can do that,” said Heinz. He spoke English in a nasal New York accent. He was bald, except for a fringe of hair around his ears. He wore little glasses. Escobar looked like a movie Mexican, the woman looked like Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein, Heinz looked like an actor in a TV commercial, the one who explained why Excedrin was best for your headache. He walked around the table to the trolley, gave Fletcher a look both roguish and conspiratorial, and flicked away the cloth over the top.
There was a machine underneath, something with dials and lights that were now all dark. Fletcher at first thought it was a lie detector— that made a certain amount of sense—but in front of the rudimentary control panel, connected to the side of the machine by a fat black cord, was an object with a rubber grip. It looked like a stylus or some sort of fountain pen. There was no nib, though. The thing just tapered to a blunt steel point.
Below the machine was a shelf. On the shelf was a car battery marked DELCO.
There were rubber cups over the battery terminals. Wires rose from the rubber cups to the back of the machine. No, not a lie detector. Except maybe to these people it was.
Heinz spoke briskly, with the pleasure of a man who likes to explain what he does. “It’s quite simple, really, a modification of the device neurologists use to administer electric shocks to people suffering unipolar neurosis. Only this administers a far more powerful jolt. The pain is really secondary, I find. Most people don’t even remember the pain. What makes them so eager to talk is an aversion to the process. This might almost be called an atavism. Someday I hope to write a paper.”
Heinz picked up the stylus by its insulated rubber grip and held it in front of his eyes.
“This can be touched to the extremities … the torso … the genitals, of course … but it can also be inserted in places where—forgive the crudity—the sun never shines. A man whose shit has been electrified never forgets it, Mr. Fletcher.”
“Did you do that to Tomás?”
“No,” Heinz said, and replaced the stylus carefully in front of the shock-generator. “He got a jolt at half-power on the hand, just to acquaint him with what he was up against, and when he still declined to discuss El Cóndor—”
“Never mind that,” the Bride of Frankenstein said.
“Beg pardon. When he still wouldn’t tell us what we wanted to know, I applied the wand to his temple and administered another measured jolt. Carefully measured, I assure you, half-power, not a bit more. He had a seizure and died. I believe it may have been epilepsy. Did he have a history of epilepsy, do you know, Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher shook his head.
“Nevertheless, I believe that’s what it was. The autopsy revealed nothing wrong with his heart.” Heinz folded his long-fingered hands in front of him and looked at Escobar.
Escobar removed his cigarette from the center of his mouth, looked at it, dropped it to the gray tile floor, stepped on it. Then he looked at Fletcher and smiled. “Very sad, of course. Now I ask you some questions, Mr. Fletcher. Many of them—I tell you this frankly— are the questions Tomás Herrera refused to answer. I hope you will not refuse, Mr. Fletcher. I like you. You sit there in dignity, do not cry or beg or urinate the pants. I like you. I know you only do what you believe. It is patriotism. So I tell you, my friend, it’s good if you answer my questions quickly and truthfully. You don’t want Heinz to use his machine.”
“I’ve said I’d help you,” Fletcher said. Death was closer than the overhead lights in their cunning wire cages. Pain, unfortunately, was closer yet. And how close was Núñez, El Cóndor? Closer than these three guessed, but not close enough to help him. If Escobar and the Bride of Frankenstein had waited another two days, perhaps even another twenty-four hours … but they had not, and he was here in the deathroom. Now he would see what he was made of.
“You said it and you had better mean it,” the woman said, speaking very clearly. “We’re not fucking around, gringo.”
“I know you’re not,” Fletcher said in a sighing, trembling voice.
“You want that cigarette now, I think,” said Escobar, and when Fletcher shook his head, Escobar took one himself, lit it, then seemed to meditate. At last he looked up. This cigarette was planted in the middle of his face like the last one. “Núñez comes soon?” he asked. “Like Zorro in that movie?”
Fletcher nodded.
“How soon?”
“I don’t know.” Fletcher was very aware of Heinz standing next to his infernal machine with his long-fingered hands folded in front of him, looking ready to talk about pain-relievers at the drop of a cue. He was equally aware of Ramón standing to his right, at the edge of his peripheral vision. He could not see, but guessed that Ramón’s hand would be on the butt of his pistol. And here came the next question.
“When he comes, will he strike at the garrison in the hills of El Cándido, the garrison at St. Thérese, or will he come right into the city?”
“The garrison at St. Thérese,” Fletcher said.
He will come to the city, Tomás had said while his wife and daughter now watched cartoons, sitting on the floor side by side and eating popcorn from a white bowl with a blue stripe around the rim. Fletcher remembered the blue stripe. He could see it clearly. Fletcher remembered everything. He will come at the heart. No fucking around. He will strike for the heart, like a man who would kill a vampire.
“He will not want the TV station?” Escobar asked. “Or the government radio station?”
First the radio station on Civil Hill, Tomás had said while the cartoons played. By then it was the Road Runner, always gone in a puff of dust just ahead of whatever Acme Road Runner–catching device the Coyote was using, just beep-beep and gone.
“No,” Fletcher said. “I’ve been told El Cóndor says ‘Let them babble.’ “
“Does he have rockets? Air-to-ground rockets? Copter-killers?”
“Yes.” It was true.
“Many?”
“Not many.” This was not true. Núñez had better than sixty. There were only a dozen helicopters in the country’s whole shitpot air force—bad Russian helicopters that never flew for long.
The Bride of Frankenstein tapped Escobar on the shoulder. Escobar leaned toward her. She whispered without covering her mouth. She had no need to cover her mouth because her lips barely moved. This was a skill Fletcher associated with prisons. He had never been to prison but he had seen movies. When Escobar whispered back, he raised a fat hand to cover his own mouth.
&nbs
p; Fletcher watched them and waited, knowing that the woman was telling Escobar he was lying. Soon Heinz would have more data for his paper, Certain Preliminary Observations on the Administration and Consequences of Electrifying the Shit of Reluctant Interrogation Subjects. Fletcher discovered that terror had created two new people inside him, at least two, subFletchers with their own useless but quite powerful views on how this was going to go. One was sadly hopeful, the other just sad. The sadly hopeful one was Mr. Maybe They Will, as in maybe they really will let me go, maybe there really is a car parked on the Street Fifth of May, just around the corner, maybe they really mean to kick me out of the country, maybe I really will be landing in Miami tomorrow morning, scared but alive, with this already beginning to seem like a bad dream.
The other one, the one who was merely sad, was Mr. Even If I Do. Fletcher might be able to surprise them by making a sudden move— he had been beaten and they were arrogant, so yes, he might be able to surprise them.
But Ramón will shoot me even if I do.
And if he went for Ramón? Managed to get his gun? Unlikely but not impossible; the man was fat, fatter than Escobar by at least thirty pounds, and he wheezed when he breathed.
Escobar and Heinz will be all over me before I can shoot even if I do.
The woman too, maybe; she talked without moving her lips; she might know judo or karate or tae kwon do, as well. And if he shot them all and managed to escape this room?
There’ll be more guards everywhere even if I do—they’ll hear the shots and come running.
Of course rooms like this tended to be soundproofed, for obvious reasons, but even if he got up the stairs and out the door and onto the street, that was only the beginning. And Mr. Even If I Do would be running with him the whole way, for however long his run lasted.
The thing was, neither Mr. Maybe They Will or Mr. Even If I Do could help him; they were only distractions, lies his increasingly frantic mind tried to tell itself. Men like him did not talk themselves out of rooms like this. He might as well try inventing a third subFletcher, Mr. Maybe I Can, and go for it. He had nothing to lose. He only had to make sure they didn’t know he knew that.