Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  “You can’t possibly know who I am,” Che said.

  The girl said, “Shall I call you Ernesto? Or shall I call

  you—”

  “Stop,” Che said.

  Both bodyguards and I, at the same time, had put our hands inside our jackets.

  “How do you know this?” Che asked her.

  “By the stink of death on you.” She never stopped smiling.

  Che pretended to smell his armpit. “This shirt was clean only last week.”

  “It’s not in your clothes. It’s not on your body.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  She didn’t answer him, she simply went away. Her expression barely changed, her body didn’t move at all, but her focus was gone and she was inside herself.

  Che was not used to being ignored by women. “If you know who I am, come to dinner with us. You can bring your pillow and your ... thing.”

  “Ramón,” I said. Che always used his cover name on our excursions. “Don’t be a fool.”

  He gave me a look meant to push me away. “Tell me how I can find you again,” he said to the girl. “Do you have an address? A phone number?”

  After a long time, as if from a great distance, she said, “I will find you.”

  “Will you? When?”

  But that was clearly all she was going to say. I took his arm and told him, “Ramón, come away. Now. You’re putting all of us in danger.”

  He let me pull him away, but it was clear he was completely smitten. He talked about little else the rest of the night.

  He was still married to Aleida at that time. The marriage was not doing so well. Aleida didn’t like Buenos Aires and missed Cuba. She was busy with the children and had withdrawn from public life. And Che, well, Che always needed a lot of attention.

  He ordered his chief of security to find this Agochar. I didn’t interfere, because I was curious about her too. I wanted to know if she was a threat, if she was working for someone.

  My own sources learned she was French, that her real name was Veronique Jarry, that she had lived in the United States from 1970 through 1976, studying with this Yogi Bhajan. At some point during that time she converted to the Sikh religion. After that she lived in India, Nepal, Rhodesia, and Mexico, apparently supporting herself by teaching yoga. She had only been in Argentina for a few days. I decided that she was probably crazy but harmless.

  For four days Che’s people looked for her, and then on the fifth day, as Che became more and more obsessed, she arrived out of nowhere at the Casa Rosada, asking for him.

  I had instructed the staff downstairs to call me if a woman matching her description showed up. Unfortunately, they feared Che more than me, so they called him first. He refused to consider my advice, which was that we arrest her, fingerprint her, and interrogate her until we knew exactly who she was and what she wanted. Instead he took her into his office and locked the door.

  There was nothing I could do. I put half a dozen armed guards outside his door and told them to break it down if they heard anything they didn’t like.

  That was the beginning.

  How did Agochar change Che?

  She broke him. She destroyed him utterly.

  Some called her a female Rasputin.

  It was not like that. Che had always been strongly influenced by women. It was part of his charm. Growing up, he doted on his mother and ignored his father. Then there was the failed love affair that set him off traveling all over South and Central America. He didn’t really become a Marxist until Hilda [his first wife] converted him in Mexico. And as any Jesuit can tell you, there is no believer as fierce and intolerant as a new convert.

  By the time Agochar came along, he was ready for a change.

  It wasn’t just sex, he could have sex anytime he wanted. He liked powerful women, and she was all of that. She knew magical and spiritual systems, history, current events—and then there were the things she could do with her body. I think Che saw that as an expression of will, that she could turn herself into a human pretzel.

  Did Che learn yoga from her?

  He was never good at it, but he tried. He claimed it helped his asthma.

  Did you ever talk to Agochar yourself?

  Yes, several times. It was unavoidable.

  But I remember early on she had some kind of impulse to win me over. Che had installed her in an apartment with a huge courtyard, and she was growing vegetables there in enormous red clay pots. She asked me to tea and we sat outside, talking in French, there among all those plants propped up with stakes and covered by chicken wire to protect them from the birds.

  “There must be many things you want to ask me,” she said.

  I asked why she had come to Argentina.

  She said, “It was time to leave Mexico, and I saw a poster of Che, and I knew I had to come here. I knew he needed me.”

  “He needed you?”

  “He has so much energy, as much as anyone I have ever known. But it was clearly not flowing properly. For whatever reason—moving around too much as a child, his troubles with his father—he is badly blocked in his first chakra. Are you familiar with the chakras?”

  I told her I was because I did not want to hear her explain them to me.

  “Well,” she said, “then you know that makes him rootless, and very rigid.”

  “A certain rigidity is not a bad thing in a soldier,” I said.

  “He can be so much more than that. He could change the world.”

  “He has changed the world,” I said.

  “I don’t mean in the old ways. He could change the world the way Ghandi did. All the killings, all the executions, do you understand why he had to do that?”

  “Of course. To prevent a counterrevolution.”

  “I don’t mean the excuses he made. I mean the real reason, the psychological reason. When he kills a man who has betrayed the cause, or a man whose faith is weak, he is trying to kill those doubts in himself. That weakness in himself. He needed me to teach him to seek out his doubts and his weaknesses and listen to them. His strength is his weakness and his weakness is his strength.”

  I saw then that we would never agree, that we could not even talk to each other.

  Did Agochar influence national policy?

  Yes, of course she did. Or rather she influenced Che, and he began to dismantle the Revolution, piece by piece.

  It started with Bolivia. You can’t have all these separate socialist nations living cheek by jowl without some squabbling. Bolivia was trying to “adjust” their border with us—in their favor, of course. Che wanted simply to capitulate. “If all men are brothers,” he said, “what difference does it make?”

  This was early 1980, still in the heat of summer. Che was openly living with Agochar, though he had not divorced Aleida. He was making no attempt to hide his transformation. Here was Che, who had never worn anything but military fatigues, not even when he went to the OAS conference, not even when he met Chairman Mao, here he is on national TV in blue jeans, holding up his fingers in a peace sign. Or he would come to a cabinet meeting wearing sweat pants and sit cross-legged on the floor.

  What I began to realize was that Agochar was right. Che was full of doubts and questions, always had been. Until she came along he had held his doubts in check with his iron will. He was very childlike, and like many children he loved to shock people. Communism had been one way to shock the adults of the world, the rich Yanqui imperialists. But Communism was no longer so shocking, and he had found a new way to upset people, even those closest to him.

  Don’t get me wrong. Other things about him didn’t change. He never gave up his compassion for the poor and the helpless. But as Agochar said, compassion can be as much a weakness as a strength.

  As it proved to be in the case of Bolivia. We argued long into the night over the situation, and before we could come to any kind of agreement, the thing was done, the Bolivians had gotten away with it.

  Next Che began to insist on amnesty for the
former members of the Argentine armed forces still in prison. This from Che, the king of the firing squads. I refused, of course, but he went behind my back and announced it to the press. We were forced to either go along or admit to the disunity that Che had created in the government.

  This man, who used to lecture anyone within hearing distance about Marx and Lenin, was now lecturing about Ghandi and Martin Luther King.

  “Where is Ghandi now?” I asked him once. “Dead. King? Dead. King’s Civil Rights Movement? Dead. John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy? Dead, dead, dead. Assassinated, every one. When you put violence against non-violence, violence always wins. Have you forgotten who our enemy is? The United States does not believe in peace. The United Fruit Company, or United Brands, or Chiquita, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, does not believe in peace. The CIA does not believe in peace.”

  We were at a state dinner, and I’m sure I was embarrassing the others at our table. Everyone was in formal wear except for the three of us: Agochar in her white robes and turban, Che in a tie-died T-shirt, me in uniform. Agochar didn’t say a word, just smiled her little inward smile. She didn’t have to speak, because her words were now coming out of Che’s mouth.

  “Ghandi freed India,” he said. “King won support for Civil Rights that violence never would have. Sometimes you have to give your life for your ideals. You used to know that, Tania.”

  “Sometimes you have to do the harder thing,” I said, “and keep on living. What if you’d died in Bolivia in 1967, would there even be a Revolution in Latin America? Who will take your place when the CIA sees this weakness in you and shoots you down?”

  “King came forward to carry on Ghandi’s work. I have now come forward to carry on King’s work. When they kill me, someone else will come along to shoulder the burden. Because the cause is just.”

  Wasn’t he also planning to disarm the militias?

  That was the last straw. Without the militias we would have been defenseless against a US invasion. Che claimed we could stop them through non-violence. At this point it was clear that he was insane.

  Can you talk about the night of his death?

  I went to see him in his apartment. I persuaded him to send Agochar away. I spent half an hour trying once again to change his mind about disarming the militias, but it was clear that nothing would convince him.

  When I took out my pistol, he merely nodded. “You have come to kill me, then.”

  I could not meet his eyes.

  “What did the others say?” he asked me.

  “They know nothing of this,” I told him. “I’m doing this entirely on my own.”

  He didn’t fight or try to run. There was even a kind of eagerness about him. He sat up straight and said, “Be calm, and aim well. You are going to kill a man.”

  You must know that it was Agochar’s arguments at your trial that helped give you a life sentence rather than the death penalty.

  I am aware of the many ironies of the situation. Be assured that she did me no favor.

  Had you anticipated that the power vacuum left by Che’s death would lead to a second invasion by the US?

  I had considered it, yes. But if Che had had his way, the US would have invaded anyway. And the reason they were successful this time is that they were able to make use of those ex-Army officers that Che set free.

  The hold the US has now is tenuous and I don’t believe they will prevail. Because of me, Che lives on in the minds of the people as a martyr, and not as the traitor he had become.

  For that reason, if no other, it was necessary for me to execute him.

  At your trial, Agochar said, “The problem with capital punishment is not the harm it does to the one executed; it is the harm it does to those who pass and carry out the sentence.”

  Obviously I do not agree.

  There is only one judge of a person’s actions, and that judge is history. History will deliver my final verdict, and I am content with that. ¡Patria o muerte! ¡Venceremos!

  His Girlfriend’s Dog

  One day he saw himself the way his girlfriend’s dog saw him. Huge, slow, precariously built, insensitive to moods and hungers and smells, overly fastidious about privates and dung. Soon he found his girlfriend incomprehensible, perhaps even cruel. Her actions seemed deliberately meant to puzzle him. His sense of play offended her.

  After they broke up she would call him. “Ernie misses you,” she would say.

  “What about you?”

  “Of course not,” she would say, confusing him yet again. “He sees me every day.”

  Deep Without Pity

  1.

  His eyes were open and his head bobbed around at an impossible angle. He was sitting in about forty feet of water, stone dead, one arm pinned between the rocks. As best I could tell, he had been dead when he landed there. The mud and ooze around him were as serene and smooth as he was.

  The cop who was assisting me swam over and made a palms up gesture. I shrugged back at him and began to work the body loose. The corpse had only one leg, and as I worked I wondered what he had been doing in the lake. I got the arm free and kicked toward the quicksilver surface above me. The body turned bloated and heavy when I broke water with it, and it took three of us to load it into the police launch.

  I dried off and got a coke out of the cooler. It was getting to be another Texas scorcher, and the sunlight bouncing off the surface of the lake felt like it had needles in it. My mouth was dry from breathing canned air and the carbonation burned like fire. Winslow, from the sheriff’s office, sat down next to me. “I appreciate this, Dan,” he said.

  “No problem.” Sam Winslow and I had grown up together about twenty miles outside Austin in a little town called Coupland. We’d fought a lot as kids, and there were still plenty of differences in our politics and educations. But being on the police and fire rescue squad had brought me closer to him again, and I was glad of it. A private detective needs all the friends he can get. “What do you make of it?” I asked him.

  “Accidental drowning, looks like.” I raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. “He’s got a bump on the head that could have come off a rock. We’ll see what the coroner says.”

  “Any idea who he is?”

  Winslow shook his head. He’d gained weight in his face recently and his jowls vibrated with the gesture. “No one-legged men on the missing persons list. Looks like it could be a war wound, maybe. Worth a try sending the prints to Washington.”

  Sailboats like scraps of paper blew across the lake. Winslow turned to the driver of the boat. “Let’s get the meat to the freezer.”

  A burst of static and a chattering voice made me jump. Winslow went to answer the call, and I leaned over the rail and looked at the water. My reflection came back at me—stocky, tan, with a head of short sandy hair that had receded half way up my skull. I looked my age, and it was getting to where that was no bargain any more. A few gulls darted over me, complaining in harsh, strident voices. “You’re a long way from the ocean,” I said, looking up at them. “You better take what you can get.”

  Winslow came back, not bothering to hide his excitement. “You can forget nature boy over there,” he said, nodding to the corpse. “We got real news on our hands. I hope you didn’t have anything planned for the rest of the afternoon.”

  Winslow was my ride back to Austin, which meant I was along for the duration of whatever emergency had come up. “You know I don’t. C’mon, spill it.”

  “They just found Jason King,” Winslow said, and his eyes shifted to a big house above us, over the lake. “He’s been murdered.”

  2.

  The current fad was for sex scandals, so Austin had found Jason King. His story was the usual thing—a not-too-competent secretary who claimed she was kept on for immoral reasons. King was a county commissioner, which in Texas is a big legislative job, so the papers had been getting all the mileage they could out of it for the last week. Now it looked like it had caught up with K
ing in a very big way.

  Ed McCarthy had been waiting for us in the squad car while the boat was out. His baby blue uniform was drenched with sweat, and his dark glasses glinted at me evilly. “How was the swim, gumshoe?” he said.

  “Not bad, flatfoot,” I answered. Ed grinned and I grinned and we all got in the car.

  Winslow leaned back and said, “That’s the trouble with you guys. You watch too much TV.”

  The car took off with a huge billow of dust and we shot down the gravel roads with the siren cranking. Winslow had gone quiet, and I knew he was thinking about the case. Jason King was a hot item, and Winslow was just starting to realize how carefully he was going to have to watch his step. One mistake and he was a scapegoat, both for the sheriff and the people at the capitol. The smile slid quietly off his face and the burned-in wrinkles came back.

  McCarthy pulled up in front of a big two-story house. Ahead of us the road ended in a white painted barricade, then fell off a cliff into the lake. There were three or four cars already at the house, including a brown sheriff’s car and an ambulance, its multicolored lights still turning silently. We walked up the flagstones to the house, and it seemed to lean out over us. The upper story sat on a row of colonial-type columns, and the contrast they made with the ranch styling of the rest of the house set my teeth on edge.

  The ambulance attendants passed us with a stretcher, and Winslow lifted the sheet for a quick look. The bullet had come through the back of the head, at close range. The face was almost completely gone. Winslow dropped the sheet and nodded, and they carried the body away.

  The sound of voices led us upstairs. Inside, the house seemed to be trying to live down its nouveau-riche exterior. The carpets were thick, running to subdued colors and patterns. The upstairs hall was hardwood paneled, with brass light fixtures and framed lithographs on the walls. I recognized a Matisse and a Picasso.

  When we got to the door of the study everyone looked up for a minute, then went back to popping flashbulbs, dusting prints and taking measurements. Chalk marks near the door showed where King had fallen, and a rusty stain disfigured the carpet. In the background I could see an English-style library arrangement with leatherbound books and heavy furniture.