The Rules Of Silence (9 page)

He shrugged and drank from his bottle of beer. “But then, that’s really a human irony, isn’t it. Maybe there’s a peculiar Colombian twist in these instances, but they certainly aren’t alone in their lack of a moral imagination. Tano isn’t Colombian, but his tactics were learned there and are the same.”

One of the Indian girls floated in to check their bottles of beer to see if they wanted fresh ones. No sooner did she leave with the empty ones than the other girl arrived with the new ones, the bottles cold, a fresh lime slice sticking out of them. Burden went on.

“Well, it was in this environment that Tano Luquín came to maturity in the art of kidnapping, and then surpassed his training and became the maestro of his own kind of abduction.”

He squeezed the lime into his beer, almost reluctant to get to the anecdote about Luquín that he’d promised.

“This man—his name was Artemio Ospina—who had to be punished had three children, ”he resumed, glancing after the girl who had left the room, “all under the age of twelve. The oldest was his only daughter, and Artemio adored her for tender reasons. ”He shook his head. “Anyway, Artemio was abducted off the street and taken to his home. There he and his daughter were placed side by side and forced to watch while his wife and the remaining children were … dismembered … their body parts were … intermixed, reassembled into savage and surreal re-creations like horrible Hans Bellmer dolls.”

He paused. “I was there afterward. I saw it”—he pointed two fingers at his eyes—“with my own eyes. Unbelievable.”

Another pause. “You never see it all. The human mind’s capacity for bestiality is boundless. You never see it all. There’s always something even more unimaginable, out there, waiting for you. Just waiting.

“That night Artemio was given his freedom, allowed to go on living, as best he could, with those insane images. But Tano wasn’t through with him.”

They had finished eating and were sitting there, sipping their beers. Burden glanced toward the kitchen.

“Come on, ”he said, picking up his beer. Titus accompanied him up the stone stairs to the balcony and around to his study. They returned to the places where they had sat before, and Burden resumed his story.

“That same night, Artemio’s daughter was taken away. But Tano made sure he continued to see her. Every few months after that, Artemio was hunted down wherever he was and forced to look at photographs of his little daughter in various acts of unspeakable humiliation. She was now working in the child sex trade.

“There were torments in these photographs too brutal to speak. The imagination recoils. Her soul rotted away in little pieces right before her father’s eyes.

“This would have gone on forever, but after nearly a year the man destroyed himself. I don’t know how he lasted that long.”

Titus sat in silence, appalled. He heard the canaries in the courtyard below, their tiny voices crisp and light on the air that floated up to them.

“What in God’s name had he done? ”Titus asked. The punishment, as Burden called it, had to have been provoked by something terrible.

“He was one of my agents, ”Burden said. “A common man, an intelligence officer. An extraordinary man. And that’s not a contradiction. Ordinary men are capable of unbelievable heroics. There’s something transcendent about it.”

Burden stopped. He almost went on, and then he stopped himself again. Then he said:

“And Luquín never even knew for sure that Artemio worked for me. He only suspected it. Artemio never admitted it.”

“Not even to save his family?”

“To save his family? That was never a possibility. That’s not the way Luquín works. To fall under his suspicion is to have been judged guilty. Artemio knew that. Confession. No confession. It made no difference. The truth was the only thing Artemio had that Luquín couldn’t get, and even in the midst of the horror of his misery and grief, Artemio clung to that one scrap of dignity. Luquín would not have it.”

Titus was speechless. The enormity of Luquín’s bestiality came more alive with every image provoked by Burden’s story.

“The point of telling you this, ”Burden said, picking up one of the many women’s portraits lying around, “is to help you understand what is happening to you.”

He looked a moment at the woman’s picture and then put it down and leveled his eyes at Titus.

“Your ordeal has begun. This is no time to be indecisive. This is no time to deceive yourself into believing you can avoid what is about to happen to you by negotiating with this man.”

Titus’s stomach tightened. It was the second time Burden had used the word
ordeal
.

“Look, ”Titus said, feeling his fear and his frustration commingling into a confusing impatience, “I don’t want anyone to die, but … You say, don’t make the mistake of thinking I can negotiate with this man. Okay, well, that doesn’t leave me many other choices.”

Burden had been lounging in his armchair, but as Titus spoke he gradually straightened up and sat forward, and Titus saw something happen in his face, something subtle but unmistakable that expelled the equanimity that had seemed to define him.

“There’s the question, ”Burden said, “of whether or not you should go to the FBI and risk the consequences of Luquín finding out that you’d done it. ”He paused. “I’m telling you, he will find out. It’s impossible that he won’t. You have to ask yourself: How many people am I willing to let him kill before I accept this?”

He looked at Titus with an expression drained of politesse. “You need to know, Titus—”

His use of Titus’s first name had an effect on Titus that was sudden and totally surprising. It immediately brought them together in alliance, as if they were banded together by heart and blood and ideal.

“—one or two are already dead. I don’t mean literally, but I mean that they’re as good as dead. He’ll have to do it, so that he’ll know that you know. He understands that you won’t be able to comprehend him in the correct way until you know the shock of that.”

“That’s inconceivable, ”said Titus, who was also leaning forward on the sofa now. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Burden looked at him as if he were trying to see something in Titus that hadn’t yet been made apparent to him. It was almost as if he were trying to determine whether Titus himself could be trusted.

“It would be a mistake, Titus, for you to believe that this is only about you and Luquín. Right now the lens is focused on you, but only because Luquín has focused on you. There’s more to this picture than you can see from your vantage point. You are only one detail among many, but for now you’ve become a very important detail.”

Burden stopped and sat back in his armchair. But he didn’t resume his formerly languid posture.

“In the next hour or two we’ll have to decide many things, ”he said. “I believe you’re a good and honest man, Titus. I believe you’ll be honest with me.”

Burden waited, sobriety returning to his eyes, deepening the lines that gathered there.

“I should tell you, ”he said, “the end of the story of the little girl. ”He paused, his gaze distracted toward some invisible place across the room. “I finally tracked her down, a few years later. Her grave, that is. It was … only … three weeks old. Just three weeks. I had”—he turned his eyes on Titus again— “I had her exhumed. I wanted to see her … with my own eyes. I had to know … beyond any doubt, that her hell was over for her.”

He swallowed. He was still looking at Titus, but he wasn’t seeing him. He swallowed again.

“But she had suffered so … and that changes a person physically. Still, I’m almost … certain … that it was her.”

Chapter 13

Charlie Thrush’s land was a dozen miles southwest of Fredercksburg. His home, made of native stone, sat near the center of a small valley laced with spring-fed streams and was heavily wooded with chinquapin and live oak. A thread of sycamores crowded the banks of the largest creek that ran the length of the valley.

Even though Charlie was not a rancher, he’d always liked the idea of it, and after he and Louise had lived in their new home for several years, he’d quickly settled into the life of a gentleman rancher.

This afternoon Charlie had a fairly simple problem to deal with. For the last four years an old dead sycamore had stood solitary and forlorn near the back corner of Charlie’s office, a three-room building nestled in a sycamore stand seventy-five yards from the main house. Charlie had been meaning to cut it down every year after it died, and now its skeletal presence had become symbolic, a kind of nagging reminder of his procrastination. Finally he put it on his “to do ”list for this month, and today was the day he had set aside in his mind to finally get the job done.

He had meant to get started early while the day was still cool, but he had gotten sidetracked in the peach orchard, and by the time he thought of the tree again it was late morning and he realized he wouldn’t get to it until after lunch.

It was a hot postnoontime, with the sun standing still in the meridian, when Charlie headed for the tool shed with a couple of Mexican laborers who had come through a few days earlier looking for work. They’d heard that Charlie was clearing the underbrush around an oak mot spring several hundred yards from the house. Charlie had put the men to work and was letting them live in a shack not far from the spring. But the truth was, they’d turned out not to be very good workers, and he’d decided he was going to let them go. But yesterday he’d told them he wanted them to help him cut down the old sycamore. He’d let them go tomorrow.

With the men carrying the sixteen-foot ladder and Charlie lugging his twenty-inch Stihl chain saw, they headed for the tree. The Mexicans raised the ladder as high as it would go and leaned it against the sycamore in the fork of one of its largest bare branches. They steadied it while Charlie serviced the chain saw and then clipped the saw to the harness he’d made for carrying the saw up into trees when he worked alone.

Working a chain saw from a ladder could be exhausting, so he had rigged the harness so that he could turn off the saw and let it hang from the strap, freeing his hands to reposition himself and steady his footing when he started on another part of the tree. For a man his age, it was slow work.

He climbed up the ladder, steadied himself, and started the saw. He revved the throttle trigger a few times until the saw idled easily, and then he started cutting, reaching up to cut the higher limbs while his energy and muscles were still fresh.

As the limbs tumbled down, the Mexicans gathered them on the ground and dragged them over to one side. It went fast since the limbs were bare of foliage, and he was soon ready to shift the ladder to another position. But then something went wrong.

Just as he was about to cut off the saw, the throttle trigger snapped and the saw revved up to a whining full-throttle scream. Bracing himself against his thighs on the ladder, he reached over with his other hand to the kill switch. But it didn’t work. It slipped back and forth freely without cutting off the engine.

With the engine screaming, he moved the chain brake forward with his forearm, but the chain kept churning; the brake bolts were too loose to engage it.

Then Charlie felt his ladder move.

He looked down and saw that the two Mexicans had attached a rope to one of the legs of the ladder and were standing back out of the way. One of them was slowly pulling the ladder out from under him. It was like seeing a bird fly backward or a coyote climbing the sky. It didn’t relate to anything logical at all. It just looked ridiculous.

He yelled at them: What the hell are you doing?! What the hell?? Hey!!

In an instant, with the heavy chain saw screaming in his hand, the horror of possibilities flew at him:

If he dropped the saw to hang on to the tree limb with both arms, the saw would swing from the harness and the torque of the whining engine would pull the chain into him, spinning crazily, cutting his legs off… .

If he hung on to the limb with one arm and the chain saw with the other, eventually his strength would give out and he’d fall, and from this height he’d surely tumble onto the churning chain… .

If he could step up another step and rest the saw on the limb before the ladder was pulled out from under him, he could unclip the saw from the harness and let it fall free… .

He stepped up one step even as he felt the ladder going sideways out from under him, and for an instant the screaming saw teetered on the limb and then slipped over on the other side as the ladder was jerked away.

It all happened in one smooth, fluid stream of action, not in discrete moments, but in one continuous flow of time. It is said that at the moment of death the sense of hearing is the last to go. He couldn’t really say. The sensation of the shrilly whining chain ripping wildly into him was startlingly painless. It eviscerated him, thrashing about inside him, the torque of the engine whipping it about like a frenzied, live thing, reaming him out as if he were a gutted deer hanging in a tree.

He smelled the hot engine spewing oil and gasoline.

Numbness came quickly, and he wasn’t sure how or when he let go of the limb with his arms. He was aware of his body whirling around and around, entangled with the pitching saw. He was aware of being whipped about. He actually heard the liquidy sound of himself being flung and splashed.

He thought an arm went with a swipe of the chain.

He saw sunlight and earth and the Mexicans looking up and watching, their expressions curious but not surprised. He saw the trees and the woods and sunlight and even dark spatters flying through the air.

Somewhere in his midsection something separated and pulled loose and fell away.

The whining was vicious and deafening. His lungs flew out of his mouth. His sight failed. It wasn’t so bad; and the screaming faded away, too, and though he felt nothing, he was aware of the sensation of swinging.

Chapter 14

The roan-haired woman from Burden’s archives room brought over two thick ring binders containing Cayetano Luquín’s dossier. Burden cleared a space on the round library table and left Titus with the two volumes while he returned with the woman.