The Fighting Man (1993) (37 page)

He bent for it. His fist clasped it. The first boot went in.

Tom Schultz clung to the wallet. The fists battered him and the boots belted him. He was the punchbag and the football. Pain climbing through the drink. He found the strength. It was the strength that had taken him from the Apache when the fire was spreading. He pushed himself up. He saw a knife and he saw a small club with a nail set in it. He flailed around him. He had seen it on the television, the jerks around a bull in the stadiums in Mexico, darting with knives and with spears, that sort of shit.

He spun in drunk giddiness and lashed at them.

Tom had driven them back. They were a ring around him. He caught the taunt words.

‘Heh, gringo, heh, fuck
yanqui
, you’re going home . . . Keep your shit out of Guatemala, gringo . . . All over for you, fuck
yanqui
. . . Coming out of the mountain, gringo, coming with fire to burn you . . .’

Spinning and losing control, and the hands closing at him, and the knife nearer.

‘Heh, gringo, the fire’s coming for you . . . You like the fire, bastard
yanqui
? . . . Get off our streets, get out of our place . . . You wait, gringo, till the fire comes for you and for all the fat bastards . . .’

The circle around him was tightening and the club caught at his hand and the nail slashed his fist. His mind was blurred from turning and turning and turning. He saw the boldness of the street kids and the music of Michael Jackson beat in his ears, amplified from the bars. A hand had his neck. Beyond the circle was a crowd of older men, watching, passive. A boot caught the tendon of his ankle. He started to crumple. The kids had no fear of him. Going down. If he went down . . .

There was the battering of the shots.

The gunfire crashed around him.

He was alone on the pavement.

He was on his knees.

He looked at the open window of the car and the pistol and the face of Arturo.

Deliberate action. He put the wallet back into his hip pocket. Deliberate action. He wrapped a sodden handkerchief around the cut in his hand. Deliberate action. He walked round the car and opened the door and slipped down to the passenger seat. The car pulled away.

‘Do I ask . . . ?’

‘No.’

‘Do I ask what an esteemed pilot of the Drug Enforcement Administration is doing in the red light quarter of our capital city?’

‘Thank you . . .’

‘It is a short cut for me, my friend. It is the fast way between the G-2 files library and my home.’

‘Thank you, I was gone.’

‘Would you walk alone at night in south-west Los Angeles?’

‘I say it again. Thank you. Can we cut the shit?’

‘Turn it on its head. I am in south-west Los Angeles, I have gone for some tail, I am in trouble. The man that I call my friend drives past, the man I admire. Would I not have the right to expect him to stop, try to intervene, to hazard his own safety . . . ?’

‘Close the windows, lock the doors, foot on the gas.’

Arturo grimaced. ‘A friend, a man you admire, you would leave him?’

‘Cut it. And don’t think that I go round carrying gratitude debts to people who bail me out of holes. You want to get up my nose then you walk round and parade that I’ve debts owed you. I said thank you, and that’s end and finish.’

‘As you please . . .’

‘What they said, they said the fire was coming to Guatemala City. They said the fire was coming out of the mountain and coming to Guatemala City.’

Arturo drove easily. One hand on the wheel. The rain peeled from the windscreen. Lighting a cigarette casually. ‘You saw our scum. It is what is at stake. The scum believe that the rat vermin are coming. Up in the country, in the mountains, the rat vermin are moving as if in sewers, hidden from us. We have a country of tolerable sophistication, and our country will be destroyed if the rat vermin win and let loose the scum . . . It is not where I would have expected to find an esteemed pilot of the Drug Enforcement Administration . . .’

‘Don’t categorize me.’

‘I merely expressed surprise.’

‘I am not your categorized American. I wasn’t brought up behind a white-painted picket fence. My mother spent more time screwing round than baking apple pie. My father spent more time selling spiv insurance than taking me fishing. I wasn’t reared like it was in Disneyland. I don’t care to leap to my feet just because it is God Bless America time, just because the goddamn flag is going up. I make my own way. I want to fly big birds, and this is the best way I know . . .’

They were at the embassy. The floodlights lit them in the car. Arturo leaned across him and had his handkerchief out and wiped Tom’s face, where the pavement dirt had smeared it. It was a good suit that Tom wore, four hundred dollars, and it was grimed and soaked.

Outside the warmth of the car the rain beat onto the road, spattered back up. The smile was off Arturo’s face.

‘These conditions, is it possible to fly?’

‘Thank you . . . Only if you have to.’

‘But
possible
. . . ?’

He went through the gates. The car drove away. He thought the marine on the desk, best dress, looked at him like he was shit.

13

He had a table that the clerk had allocated him and, with only the clerk shuffling between the filing shelves on his dead leg for company, he burrowed into the yellowed material collected when the whore Ramírez had raised rebellion in the triangle. For two years the files had fattened on the whore Ramírez and the men who had collected around him, and fastened with sellotape on the wall in front of him were the photographs of a funeral in Havana. It was the first time that Arturo had been to Record Section in the basement of the G-2 annexe and he had thought he might be blocked, so he had bullocked his way in and had worn the flap of his holster open on his belt. He had been given what he wanted, poor grace but given it, and as the hours had passed so had the frequency of his visits from the clerk increased. The clerk would come with more files, flip them open, point and walk away.

He had been there since dawn.

There was a professor of history at the University of San Carlos who specialized in the period of the Conquest by Pedro de Alvarado, ruler of Guatemala from 1524 to his death in 1541 . . . There was an engineer from Guatemala City, middle-class
Ladino
, would have been a government supporter, until his son joined the rabble vermin and became a cell commander, captured, died. The engineer had gone to join the whore Ramírez . . . There was an attorney, practising in company law, in Puerto Barrios, a good living. He had had no reason to be involved in subversion, and he had appeared in court to argue the case for better wages for the dock labourers, imbecility. A death threat, an equal imbecility, and a man of obstinacy had hiked off to join the whore Ramírez . . . Others, of course, had been round the whore Ramírez, and held influence. The files charted them. The one who had been burned in the church at Acul, the one who had been hunted down and shot running near the Mexican border, the one who had been captured in the safe house in Zona 5 of Guatemala City, all of them dead now . . .

He studied the photographs. He squinted and lowered over them. A man sitting in an academic gown at a graduation ceremony, a man in shirtsleeves leaning against a heating turbine generator, a man in an evening suit posed with his wife.

Digging deeper into the old files of three men, and cross-referencing reports from G-2 and the Treasury Police and the Department of Criminal Investigation and the Mobile Military Police and the National Police Special Operations Brigade. The daughter of a professor, working in Guatemala City for an American bottling company. The brother of an engineer, driving the slow sugar train from Escuintla to Champerico on the Pacific coast. The mother of a lawyer, living out the last years of life in a villa home close to the rusted cranes of the Puerto Barrios seafront. He put the files on one side, the files on a professor and an engineer and an attorney, the files on a daughter and a brother and a mother. He had the photographs from the old files. He had the interrogation report of an Indian in the Petén, and the Indian had witnessed the landing of an aircraft. He had the photographs of mourners at a graveside.

He made the match.

War had always been dirty in Guatemala.

He had no fear of the dirtiness of war in Guatemala.

Colonel Arturo thought dirt could always be washed away.

There was a clear written notice beside the desk of the clerk that no photographs or files were to be taken away from the basement. He took what he wanted.

He drove away from the G-2 building.

He headed out towards the far side of the city. He wondered how it would be that morning for his wife and his daughter. The previous night, a poor line and little to say, they had told him that there was nothing in the papers in Florida of
problems
in Guatemala, and nothing on the radio stations and nothing on the CNN bulletins. But then there was nothing on the stations he had heard as he was dressing, eating, driving. There was a vacuum of information except for the brief announcement from the
estado mayor
that over the next week there would be widespread military exercises. Rumour bred in vacuum, and the rumour creep was there for him to see as he drove. The middle of the morning and gangs of the street boys lounging on the intersections, and the police had not dispersed them. The middle of the morning and queues already formed outside the bread shops and the meat shops and the supermarkets. The middle of the morning and a scurry of men and women making their way up the steps of churches. He could not know how deep was the cancer that fed from the rumour of fire.

He came to the Guatemala Club. Fewer cars than usual. His wife had, in the last year, twice appealed to him to get them family membership of the Guatemala Club. Groups, small and male, sitting in the bar area, watching the soaked courts and dropped nets, drinking and sombre. His daughter had sulked at him that all her friends were members of the Guatemala Club, didn’t he know? It was where he had been told that he would find the lieutenant, codenamed Benedicto. He hated them. Smug. Fat. Digesting the rumours, swilling in their gin and their Scotch, playing while the fire approached. He walked through the bar, down the long corridor past the trophy cabinets and the honours boards. He pushed open the double doors onto the indoor court. A rally in progress. A dark girl, might have been attractive if she had dieted, catching a backhand lob attempt on the wood. The ball looping up. He walked beside the net. He caught the ball, one-handed, and threw it back at the girl, and he gestured for the lieutenant to follow him. No apologies. The lieutenant trailed him off the indoor court of the Guatemala Club. No explanations.

In the car, Arturo tossed the files from his attaché case onto the lieutenant’s lap.

He said, ‘We will fight dirty, or we will lose . . . We have to search for the weakness around the fire. There is always a point of weakness.’

They moved in pace and in silence. They had gone west of San Bartolomé Jocotenango, east of Tzujil. They had been in forest. The beat of their feet had been softened by the pine needle carpet. West of Santa Rosa Chujuyub, east of San Pedro Jocopilas. They had forded rivers that would have been a dribble before the rains had come, and they had clung to ropes and struggled against the force of the water drive. They had stampeded down the slopes into the valleys, careering and running and falling. They had fought up the valley walls, used the tracks of wild goat, and the march had been strung out. The pace was set by Jorge.

They climbed again. They stood astride the high ridge that was 8000 feet above the sea level of the Pacific and the Caribbean. Jorge had told them it would be the last time they climbed at mountain height. A man could not see a dozen yards ahead of him in the cloud fog of the ridge.

Jorge led, and around him were the men who had come from the exile life with his father.

Gord was behind.

The group with Gord formed the back-marker for the march, between the fighting men and the women with the children. As if he had handed the sword forward. As if the light were slipping from him. The group was close to him, supporting him, and he moved in the middle of them with a shambling stride. They were the men who were always with him now. There was the Archaeologist wheezing encouragement in the thinned air to the Academic. The Fireman had charge of the cart and drove it and pulled it and cursed it, and the Priest helped him. The Civil Patroller, no talk, had made the wheelbarrow his own. The Street Boy, keeping his mischief, had the weight of the machine gun on his shoulders. Always they were around him.

The column snaked away from the ridge, descending.

The group paused, took their own five minutes of rest.

The Academic stood beside Gord and he allowed Gord’s arm to rest on his shoulder. He already had the weight on his shoulders of five mortar bombs and two boxes of belt machine-gun ammunition and a food basket. He looked with a reverence at the young man that he knew as Gord. When his student had been disappeared, before the body was found, he had telephoned the personal number of the American Ambassador. The telephone had been picked up by the Ambassador’s wife. He could remember it, the small hours of that morning when he had telephoned in his desperation. He had had the personal telephone number of the Ambassador because once he had been invited to dinner at the residence, and he had later been asked to punch basic mathematics into the Ambassador’s son through the heat of the summer vacation, so that a high school grade back in a Vermont boarding school should not be dropped . . . He had blurted the circumstances that he knew of to the Ambassador’s wife and hoped, prayed, that the life of a student could be saved . . . He had been to the funeral. He did not know, would never know, whether the Ambassador had taken the message from his wife, had intervened, had been rebuffed. He had been to the funeral of a disappeared student. He thought, and the weight of Gord bent him, that the Englishman was the sole man he knew on whom he would rest his life. All through the day, through the climbs and the descents, and this last climb to the last ridge of high ground, the greater worry had nagged in his mind.