Their table was ready. A waiter gestured for them to follow him.
Benny drained his glass, spluttered on the gin. ‘It was true, wasn’t it? Brown told that Yank jerk he was talking bullshit?’
‘Too true, but brigadier generals don’t exactly like that sort of chat . . . So, how’s the old world treating you?’
‘Can’t complain . . .’
They headed for the dining room.
‘. . . poor old Brown.’
‘Forget him. If he goes into Guatemala, within a month he’ll be dead. Worse than dead would be captured. Best to forget him. I’d give him a month, maximum, not a week or a day or an hour longer. If he’s lucky, dead . . .’
The helicopter that had swooped low over the former village was long gone.
The high grass that had been beaten down by the rotors stood erect again.
The former village was a place of sadness and avoided by the Ixil people now housed in the Model Village of Acul. Ten years since the battle, and the grass had grown high, and the weed had flourished, and the small maize fields that had been worked by the women were lost to sight. The remnants of the former village would have been clearer from the air, but at ground level, if a man had tried to push his way through the vegetation, there would have been little to see that showed what had once been home for a thousand people. The roads of the village, where the pigs had grubbed along with the dogs and hens and ducks and turkeys, were gone under the undergrowth’s advance. The plaza in the heart of the former village, where the men had played the marimba on fiesta evenings, was buried by dense green foliage.
The soldiers and the Civil Patrollers would have chased away the people if they had tried to come back to the former village.
It was not necessary . . .
The church, that had been of white adobe, remained, high outer walls rising above the sprouting trees and bushes of flowers and steepling grass. The roof was gone but the tower that had held the bell was still in place. The outer walls and the tower, daubed each year in white under the supervision of the Father from the Jesuit order, were stained black from the fire that had destroyed the church. Nearby, close to the back entrance, visible neither from the ground nor the air, was the head of the well. It was because of the well, and what it held, that the men and women who had survived the battle of ten years before would not return to their former village. It was into the well that the burned bodies from the church had been tipped. The well shaft was dug too deep for the living to retrieve the dead, and the soldiers anyway would not have permitted it.
Across the open space from the scorched front facade of the church was the shape of a compact building that had been constructed of concrete blocks around an inner courtyard. The building had been destroyed by explosives and the vines that were alive with a mass of rich red flowers obscured most of the inner and outer walls. The building had been the general purpose and hardware store to the former village of Acul, once the home of a Ladino of mixed race, and of his wife who was trained in nursing, and of his daughter, and of his son who was Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. Where the walls could be seen, below the height of where the windows had been, the spatter of the bullet marks was visible. The building had been the last strongpoint in the former village.
Surrounding the village, where they would have been seen by the passenger in the low-flying helicopter, were the defence ditches, now bedded with green . . . Only one path still led to the former village, and it came close to the defence ditches on the south side. The path was clearly trodden but seemed to end abruptly in the wilderness growth. Overgrown now and overwhelmed were the old graves. On one grave, covered over by the grass and undergrowth, fresh-picked flowers had been placed, and when those died more flowers would be brought, and laid where they would be seen neither from the ground nor the air.
A place of death, and of memories.
A place of silence after the low-flying helicopter had powered away, a place of close-kept secrets.
Gord paid off the taxi and walked into the terminal.
Before looking for them he went into the lavatories and again rinsed the rawness of his knuckles in a basin filled with water as hot as he could bear it. An hour earlier he had scrubbed his fists in the toilets of a pub in central London.
He wiped his hands, winced at the keen pain.
They had told him of the man they had been to see in London, and how they had been mocked. They had told him, phrasing with care the story, of the sneers of the man who sold mercenary contracts. They had told him of the way they had been called back, dogs to heel, to be given a name and an address. Gord understood. Another bastard having fun with them, and getting amusement from sending the flotsam trio on the goose chase to Scotland, and them taking the train north because it was the last chance to avoid failure. They had told him enough . . . He had gone to the office of a man who placed mercenaries where there was a bid and a percentage . . . It was nineteen months since the dismissed colour sergeant of 2 Para had tracked him and propositioned him and been told to go put his tongue up his arse. Gord understood. They had been sent to Scotland because the man had been certain enough that they would have been sent packing, double fast. Big laugh . . . He had smashed the office, spilled and mixed the files, and he had beaten the face of the one-time colour sergeant and taken the grin from it.
Gord’s hands hurt, and he felt the better for it.
He went to the telephone rank and dialled a number from memory and heard the bleeps of an answerphone, and rang off.
He saw them.
They were with a fourth man, tall and elegantly dressed, suit and light raincoat. The fourth man was Latin, and glanced twice at his wristwatch. Gord came forward.
Relief on all their faces, because he had shown. Surprise on the Latin’s face, because he had come as they had said he would. Introductions made by Vee. Gord reckoned the Latin, Cuban, would be from the Military Attaché’s office. Not the Attaché himself, bloody hell no, not the top man getting his hands dirty. He assumed that the Cuban Military Attaché would be routinely trailed round London by the watchers of the Security Service. They gripped his hand, each of them. He felt the rough calluses of working hands hold his tightly. No, they couldn’t have known that he would show . . . The Latin passed him back his passport, and there was the puzzled questioning in his eyes . . . Gord smiled at him, didn’t help him. He flicked the pages of the passport and came to the visa for Havana.
No doubts. There was no future for him.
No hesitation. There was nothing to keep him.
They were the ones who had come for him . . .
‘Let’s go then.’
Zed gave him his ticket. He went through Emigration separately from them. They had forty minutes before take-off to Madrid.
No other bastard did, but they valued him. He was wanted.
What he saw, what took his eyes first from the road ahead, was the dog pulling at the arm of the body.
Foot onto the brake, and the clamour of a horn behind him, and another, and a cacophony. He could accelerate or he could swerve to the hard shoulder.
A man threw a stone at the dog. The dog howled, released the arm.
Cars and a truck swept past his Chevrolet wagon. He looked at other drivers and none seemed to have seen a dog pulling at the arm of a body. The first flight in the helicopter was gone from his mind. The dog had backed off, tail arched under its sunken belly. The excitement of the first flight was lost . . . For Christ’s sake, it was a fucking dog at a fucking body beside the fucking road. He pulled over.
He dropped down from the driving seat, slammed the door behind him. The traffic was spearing past him, like no other driver cared.
The man who had thrown the stone at the dog stared at him in hostility. Seemed that he hadn’t noticed the other people standing around and near the body. There were men and women and children, and beyond them were the low roofs of the shanty town that was built on the ground falling away from the highway. They didn’t look at the body any m
ore; he held the attention of all of them. It was fast, the highway behind him. His assumption was made, the assumption he would have made back home in St Louis, a guy trying to cross a six-lane highway, and not making it across, and the bastard who’d hit him not stopping, leaving him at the roadside for the fucking dogs.
Tom Schultz had learned the language, at State’s school in San Diego.
‘Can I help? – I’d like to help.’
When he took a step forward, towards the body, they moved away, all of them, like he was a danger to them.
There was a siren far down the highway and closing.
No expression for him to gauge on the faces of the men and the women and children who backed off from him. He went to the body. The dog had already torn the shirt back. The waist of the trousers was halfway down over the buttocks. There was one shoe in place, a second shoe was a half-dozen paces away. He bent to look more closely at the body. He could see the bruises on the back and on the buttocks. He thought the poor bastard would have nearly made it across the six lanes, been running when he was hit, lost his shoe as he’d been tipped onto the rubbish-strewn side of the highway. The siren had cut behind him.
He stood and turned.
He saw the fire engine, and the men climbing down slowly. There was a police car behind the fire engine, and only one of the crew stepping out. He stood back. He knew the procedure for traffic fatalities, didn’t know it well but he knew the basics of it. The crewman from the police car had not produced a notebook. Two of the fire engine team had reached the body and they spilled it over, turned it onto its back. A man, young, Latin. One had hold of the arms and one had hold of the legs. Tom Schultz watched. The body was dragged, bare buttocks scraping the grit stone and the rubbish at the side of the highway, towards the fire engine. There was a square of paper fastened to the shirt. He read. He could only make out the largest written words, ‘El Buitre Justiciero’. He read it as the ‘Hawk of Justice’. He saw the wounds. He had done the homicide course. He knew a knife wound, and he knew a bullet wound. There were knife wounds in the upper chest and across the cheeks of the face and there was a blood mass in the groin. He saw the ants in the blood. There was a bullet wound in the centre of the forehead. He knew how to read the signs, because that was a part of the course at Quantico, and there was a powder stain at the entry that meant a close-quarters shot from a hand gun. The body had been tortured, then executed. No fucking commendation for Tom Schultz for recognizing fact.
The body was thrown through the hatch into the back of the fire engine. The fire engine drove away. He heard the door slamming on the police car. He saw the small crowd drift away, scramble down the steep fall towards the shanty town.
He looked back to the ground where he had first seen the body. Just the side of a highway that was loose stone collecting garbage.
When he was back in his Chevrolet wagon, glancing a last time at the place, the dog had crept close again to where the young man had been and sniffed the old blood on the ground.
He was the new guy in town. His fingernails ground at the scar tissue at the side of his face, where the stubble didn’t grow. Just taking a ride back from the military side of La Aurora airport, where he had flown the Huey bird for the first time since getting himself to Guatemala City. Just the new guy in town . . . He concentrated hard on the traffic all the way into the embassy compound.
On another course, at headquarters in Washington DC, he’d been lectured that he wasn’t paid to make judgements on the set-up where he was posted . . . Great, and the lecture had been shit.
He showed his pass to the marine and took the elevator up to the third floor and strode down the corridor, and punched the security code and let himself into the cramped office space that housed the Drug Enforcement Administration agents.
‘Hi, Tom, go well?’
‘No problem, the bird handled sweet.’
An Iberian airliner slammed onto the runway at Havana International, jolted Gord Brown awake.
3
They were surrounded by tourists as they came off the bus and into the terminal.
Germans and Spaniards and Portuguese and Italians, the tourists were the faithful, travelling for a conscience holiday to Cuba before the worker state went under. They had the light in their eyes, the way pilgrims were, he supposed, when they first came close to the Almighty. Gord didn’t have religion, and it was only what he supposed. And he didn’t have politics either, had never voted in a British election, but the light in their eyes was adoration. There was not much that he believed in, not politics and not religion. Before the ‘ignominy’ he would have reckoned that he believed in himself, his own qualities and his own capabilities, and since the ‘ignominy’ he had believed in nothing – until three Ixil Indians from Guatemala had come to the hotel beside the sea loch.
A way was forced through the crush for him by Eff and Vee and Zed. Rats up a drainpipe and going there fast. They pushed and heaved and used their knees and elbows, manoeuvred him to third place in the queue at the passport desk, and grinned at him. The black plastic bag was squeezed against his legs and was ripping apart. He had taken the bag into the airliner’s cabin and ignored the protests of the stewardesses that it was too large. The concourse was dismal. Only three of the row of passport desks were occupied. There must have been a bad storm because there were damp stains on the roofing above him, and the holiday posters on the wall were curled from moisture. He offered his passport.
The official’s shirt was grimed at the collar. The man hadn’t shaved, not for that shift and not for the shift before. The fingers that took the passport, slowly and as if a favour were being given, were dirty under the nails.
Spoken slowly, a struggling American accent, ‘What is your business in Cuba?’
He’d assumed, why not, that he would be met, no immigration and customs, taken through as if he was important. Gord gagged.
‘To enjoy myself . . .’
‘Enjoyment is tourism, this is not a tourist visa.’
‘It’s what I was given.’
The official studied the passport, looked for meaning in the stamps and handwriting of the visa. Gord looked round. Vee shrugged, not his fault. Eff rolled his eyes, nothing could be done. Zed hung his head, took personal blame. He was beckoned to follow. He left the three of them behind him. He was shut in a small room and it was twenty-five minutes before the door was opened again. The doorway was crowded. The official sourly gave him back his passport and a man in a laundered uniform of better-quality material hissed spite into the ear of the official, and there were three more men, older, in slacks and shirts hanging behind. He smiled sweetly at the laundered official, hoped the bollocking was severe, and was taken to the customs benches. He tipped out his plastic bag onto the table surface. Underpants and vests, dull green shirts, a pair of camouflage trousers, thick woollen socks, a pair of old hiking boots. There was a cloth sack, drawn tight with cord at the neck, that clattered onto the table and he opened it to show the bottles and the sprays and the packet of pills. The customs woman would have had her fingers into the bottles and sprays and pills if the laundered official hadn’t snapped at her. The laundered official turned away, stalked off. Gord stretched on his toes and looked back and couldn’t see Eff and Vee and Zed.
There were the three men around him. He heard a jargon of names, said fast, too quick for him, and he could not bother himself to stop them and tell them to do it all again, and slower.
Funny guys . . .
Zeppo had wide braces that held tented trousers up to the width of his stomach, hung over a good gut.
Harpo was the tallest and the ceiling banks of lights shone on the perspiration of his hairless scalp.
Groucho smiled with steel-capped teeth and wrung together the palms of wet hands.
The way he imagined it, wasting the in-flight hours, he would be met by fit young men. Right, the young men would be heavy with crap and the ideology of the armed struggle, but they would be ready to learn f
rom a fighting man. They went out into the blackness of the night and he carried the bag, wouldn’t let Groucho get his hands on it. Harpo spoke fair English. Harpo said there was a power cut and that the airport had its own generators. He was ushered into a car that he rated as veteran, more than thirty years old, a Pontiac, big enough for a small bus. He sat in the back with Zeppo and heard the wheeze of hard breathing. Before they turned out of the airport they went past a bus stop and Gord saw Eff and Vee and Zed far down a queue. He asked Harpo, why were they not riding into Havana, why were they waiting at the bus stop; no answer. He asked how often there were power cuts in the capital city; no answer . . . Few cars on the broad avenue, and those that he did see were as old as the one in which he rode, all chrome and wings. Groucho was driving, and needing to concentrate because of the cyclists that loomed from the darkness and wobbled away from their path as they swept by. Harpo had lit his own cigarette and passed another to Zeppo, and not offered a smoke to Gord, and neither had asked him whether he’d had a good flight . . . Good bloody start, Gord, useful bloody beginning. He closed his eyes. Not much to keep them open for in a Havana power cut. He thought that he disliked all three of them, disliked them most because they had left the Indians, Eff and Vee and Zed, at the bus stop.
The Fighting Man (1993) Page 5