The Fighting Man (1993) (28 page)

The torch beam jerked in Jorge’s hand, away from his face and across the rows of sitting and squatting villagers. It caught the body and then the head. Gord blinked in the light.

‘Gaspar is with us, he is our spirit, he is our identity, he marches with us and he brings fire . . .’

And the light was off him.

An awful sadness.

He thought of the young woman, what the young woman had said.

The message was brought from Operations. It was read quietly and passed from hand to hand by the officers deep in their after-dinner chairs. They nursed their last drinks of the evening and curled cigar smoke to the ceiling, and read the report from Playa Grande. There had been no contact. The hammer had beaten on the anvil, a metal nail had not been crushed.

The Street Boy stirred. The boot ground at his ribs. He was awake. There was no flesh to cover the ribs. He was blinded by the light that beamed down at him. His body was pinioned by the boot. He felt the panic. The wallet was under the small of his back. He should have thrown the wallet, taken only the money and the traveller’s cheques. He had gained the wallet, the shove and the push, the hand darting for the inner pocket of the jacket, from the German tourist leaving with his wife from the Piccadilly on 6 Avenida and 11 Calle. He usually worked Zona 1 in the late evenings because it was there he found the best pickings. They might beat him and they might shoot him. The policeman’s boot hacked again at his skinny body. He was thirteen years old and for three years he had worked the restaurants around Zona 1 of Guatemala City. He had kept the wallet because it was embossed in old heavy leather and he had thought he might get as good a price for the wallet itself as for the AmEx card and the Diners Card and the Visa Card. He cowered away from the light and the wallet bit in his back and his hand was underneath him and clasped the handle of the knife. He had been dreaming, when the boot had woken him, of the two ambitions that sustained him. The ambitions were that he should one day ride in the aeroplane that brought the tourists with their wallets to Guatemala City, and that he should one day own a gold-faced watch such as the tourists wore. He knew how to take the wallets, shove and push and jabbing fingers, he did not know yet how to take a watch with a gold face . . . His friends had been beaten, and when he had stayed at the children’s home, the Casa Alianza, he had been taken in a washed shirt and with flowers in his hand to the cemetery for the burying of his cousin, shot by the police. The blade on his knife was four inches long, double-edged. He was ordered to stand. The torch was off his face. He squinted to see. The policeman held the truncheon ready to strike him and there was the wide smile on the policeman’s fattened face. A second policeman leaned relaxed against the patrol car. He came up fast, and he slashed and heard the scream, and he stabbed and heard the groan. He ran . . . There were three shots before he reached the corner of the street, but high and wide. The Street Boy ran . . . They had all heard the word. The word had slipped amongst the thieves and pickpockets and pimps and muggers before they had dispersed for the work of the evening, before he had gone to wait in the shadow near the entrance to the Piccadilly on 6 Avenida and 11 Calle. He ran . . . He thought that when he found them they would give him a machine gun to shoot policemen.

‘This talk I’m hearing, is it true . . . ?’

He had unlocked his door, he had staggered back to the bed. Tom Schultz sat on the bed and cursed the pain in his head. He sat on the bed in his pyjamas and across the room from him was the litre bottle, damaged, of Glenlivet malt, twelve years old.

Kramer had started to pace the tight room, and the small cigar was in his mouth.

‘I want to know if it’s true.’

There was a note beside the damaged bottle. ‘Motto of the Kaibiles:
if i advance, follow me. if i delay, hurry me. if i retreat, kill me
– but we cannot
fly
! Respectful good wishes, in admiration, Mario Arturo.’ The damage was that he had drunk a near half of the bottle.

‘What’s true?’

Kramer lit the cigar. ‘My friend says that there is an Englishman at the heart of a rebellion. The good colonel says that an Englishman, young enough, Special Forces type, is running their show. The good man says the fat cats at
estado mayor
have yet to wake up. You saw him . . .’

The pain beat in his head. ‘I saw a guy.’

He had drunk the whisky to drive himself to a torpor sleep, because that was the only sleep that could shut out, kill, the nightmare of a falling helicopter, ground impact, spreading fire, and the panic rush to break clear of the heat. It was the nightmare that had been hidden from the psychologists of the DEA. Without the whisky the nightmare would have burned him . . .

‘English?’

Anger. ‘I was flying a bird. I was taking hits. I wasn’t asking a guy a hundred feet below for his fucking passport . . .’

‘Could he have been English?’

‘Christ, I wasn’t hanging out of the hatch and gawping – he was Caucasian. Listen. He was in control. He had the flame thrower. The flame thrower would have been their top weapon. They’d done the hurt with the flame thrower. I’d never seen before what a flame thrower did . . .’

Kramer was the caged animal, tracing a track across the thin carpet. ‘And he could have been English?’

‘Did you wake me just to ask . . . ?’

‘I woke you to see if you would confirm that an Englishman is running a rebellion, because if he is, don’t doubt it, the wires are going to start singing.’

‘What the hell would he be here for?’

‘Be coming to Guatemala City, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t be shoot and scoot. Would be coming the whole way, trying to . . .’

‘And that’s not a lot to do with me.’

‘Good night.’

The cigar smoke hung under his ceiling. He opened the window. The rain slashed into his room.

Still dark when they started out. Still the beat of the rain as the column went forward.

He knew that Jorge had sat the whole night at the head of his mother’s grave.

He needed a week. It must rain for a week. On the folded and frayed map they were sixty-one land miles from the outer edge of Guatemala City. He needed the cloud cover and the rain for the days and nights of a week.

10

The rumour slithered in the high country of the Cuchumatanes mountains, a snake on its belly.

The rumour was heard in the villages of the Ixil triangle, the communities that were bounded by the towns of Nebaj and Cotzal and Chajul, and it was heard further north up the mud and stone track that reached to Sotzil and Ilom and Sajsivan. The rumour was carried by men who had gone through the night along trails that were streams of rainwater. The rumour was carried to the village and to the Pole Developments that were under the watch of the army and to the loggers in the forest and to the road repair gangs that huddled in huts and waited for the weather to change. The rumour would reach a village house and then fan out in secrecy, taken by whisper, avoiding the homes of those who collaborated. Before the dawn, in the villages of the triangle, men gathered together in the homes of the elders. Vee was in a village, and Zed in another, and Eff gathered around him a road gang. Soldiers slept, the men of the Civil Patrols manned their blocks in ignorance. The message that had been carried from the village of Acul demanded that men who would join the march should move out before first light.

The rumour spoke of
fire
.

A growing column on the move.

The column headed south and west, going slow, towards the garrison town of Nebaj.

‘I am a professor of mathematics,’ the Academic told Gord. ‘I deal with a world that is logical, quite predictable. There is no room in the world of my study for the possible or the probable . . . Will we get to Guatemala City?’

‘If I have the weather.’

‘I was a fireman in the city.’ Broken English quietly spoken, and the sloshing in mud of the heavy boots. ‘I have no knowledge of the army. Can we win?’

‘If the weather stays with us.’

They were masked by the low mist, climbing and then sliding in chaos into the steepness of the valleys. Harder for Gord because the numbers were increasing and the control that he demanded was slipping, and the breaks for rest were down now to five minutes in each hour. They stayed in the tree lines, away from the roads and tracks. Each time the march stopped, each time the rain fell sheer on his face and his shoulders, each time he peered into the blanket of the mist, he heaved a great sigh of relief. While the rain fell then the mud roads would slip and the heavy transport of the army would be blocked. While the mist cloaked them then the fixed-wing bombers of the army with high explosive and napalm and the helicopters with rockets and machine guns could not fly to find them. Driving the march forward . . .

A flash signal. Sent in code. Given
priority
designation.

Kramer alternated between his sandwich and his cigar and his Coca Cola. He watched the signal go, rolling on transmission. He grinned, a little wickedness, because he anticipated the bluster and the argument that his signal would achieve, and the hastily gathered meetings, and the summoning up of Guatemala detail, and the scratching of appointments. The signal was beamed from the roof aerials of the embassy to the Agency’s regional headquarters in Panama City, then relayed to the antennae farm serving Langley beyond the beltway of Washington, DC.

Good and choice . . .

The Archaeologist saw it all. It happened within his earshot, not twenty yards ahead of him.

They were more than two hundred men and the column stretched ahead into the trees so that he could not see Jorge who was the front-marker and it coiled away behind him so that when he turned he could not see the back-marker.

The cart wheels were playing in his mind, angering him. All the time that he pushed, shoved, dragged the awkwardness of the cart, the noise of the wheels scraped in him. They were on a track that might have been used by farm workers going to distant fields from a village, narrow and hardly beaten down now that the maize harvest had been cut and collected. He thought that the wheels of the cart owned a personal bloody-mindedness, difficult to shift over each raised stone or protruding root.

Gord came past him again, chivvying at the column, and he took a turn at the weight of the cart and there was his brusque smile, and he was going forward again. They came round the corner of the trail and the nozzles and tubes of the cart smacked into the back of Gord’s legs. Going to apologize, and the cry again . . . The apology stayed in the Archaeologist’s throat.

It was a bundle of rags.

It was in the middle of the trail. The big man was over the rag bundle and his boot scythed at it, kicked it. It was the big man, the bald head, who had shot the prisoner back on the Sayaxché to Chinajá road. It was the big man who had directed the machine-gun fire that had cut down the gate sentries at Playa Grande. The big man with the stubble beard kicked with ferocity and the bundle shrieked. The Archaeologist saw what Gord would have seen. He saw the face amongst the rags, frightened and defiant, and he saw the silver light flash of the knife blade . . .

‘What’s your problem?’ Gord’s gravel voice.

‘He’s scum.’

‘What’s your problem with that kid?’

The big man kicked again, fast, and the knife’s slash was too slow to cut the leg. ‘He’s a thief.’

‘What’s with a thief ?’

‘I don’t want scum . . .’

The big man had the rag bundle boy pinioned now on the ground and the barrel of his rifle pressed against the chest of the child.

‘Leave him.’

The march was stopped. A circle of men gathered around Gord Brown and the big man and the rag bundle child. The Archaeologist saw the nerve flicker in the eyes of the big man.

Bombast. ‘We don’t want thieving scum, we don’t want this . . .’ He went to kick the rag bundle where it was pinioned by the rifle. It was the show of the big man’s independence of Gord Brown. The boot swung. Gord going so quickly, a blur of movement, and the catching of the big man off balance, and the toppling of him. So fast. The big man on his back, and Gord walking away from him, like he had no more interest, and the child scampering after him. The march starting again . . . The Archaeologist saw the wallet that lay beside the pressed ground where the rag bundle child had been pinioned. It was a tourist’s wallet. It was the kind of large wallet that his father would have owned back in Garden City. It was a wallet for credit cards and cash and traveller’s cheques. Each volunteer who came to join the march was searched before he was allowed to go forward.

Did it matter that the kid thieved tourists’ wallets?

The Archaeologist tugged at the cart wheels to get them moving again.

The Archaeologist stumbled on, striving to match the new urgency. Ahead of him the big man walked sullenly alone, and further ahead of him Gord Brown marched under the weight of the backpack and the machine gun and the swathes of ammunition with the Street Boy dogging his heels. Gord needed a week of rain and ground-level cloud. It was the first day of Gord’s week. They were manhandling the cart across the torrent of a small river. The wheels cleared the underwater rocks, then were stuck again. Gord was on the far side of the river bank, and he seemed to clutch at the collar of the Street Boy and throw him easily into the torrent’s heart and the Street Boy ducked in the water and then surfaced and had a hold of the cart and was dragging it with them. The Archaeologist saw the excitement of the Street Boy, and the sharp pleasure grin of Gord Brown, and he saw the bitter anger stare of the big man. He wondered if they could hold together for a week . . .