The Tattooed Soldier (30 page)

Antonio was planning to kill a man within two hundred feet of this patrol car, but its presence barely registered.

He wanted to see the soldier's face again, to hold the man's image in his eyes without fear.
I will look at him and I will remember Elena and Carlos and I will avenge them with one blow from this pipe in my pocket. I will do it for the peasants in his photographs, the anonymous dead. Remember Frank's advice. Strike at his head. What will it feel like? Will it be like hitting a rock? A melon? Will his skull crack and splatter?
He needed to go to the bathroom, but he would hold it until after he killed the soldier.

At the chess tables a half-dozen men were engaged in three games, to the insistent asynchronous ticking of their clocks. The air around the tables smelled of tobacco and cologne. The soldier was not here. Feeling bold, Antonio approached a gray-haired heavyset player chomping on a cigar, the man he recognized as the soldier's opponent from last Sunday. Antonio tried to speak in a casual voice as though he were looking for an acquaintance.

“Excuse me,
señor
, but do you know the younger man who comes here to play chess? A man with a tattoo on his arm? His name is Guillermo, I think.” The name turned out to be of some use after all.

“You mean
el sargento
,” he said without looking away from the board. “I know this man. A soldier, or so he says.” He moved a black bishop forward, picking up his opponent's knight. “And a terrible chess player. He plays too defensively. Never willing to risk anything. I hate playing against him. So boring. He takes forever to move. Afraid to lose, that's the problem.”

“He's afraid to win,” said a man at another table. “You have to be aggressive at this game.”

“Like with a woman!” a player wearing a black beret chimed in, his palm landing on the clock with a loud snap. “Aggressive!”

“We call him Longoria,” the man with the cigar said. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“No. Just somebody I met once, in Guatemala.”

“That's right. He's a
chapín.
He has that slow, funny way of talking, just like you. When you talk it's like you're singing,
bien cantadito.
” He gave out an ancient smoker's scratchy guffaw. “So he's your
compatriota.
Well, if you wait around awhile, he'll show up for sure.”

“I hope he plays me,” a voice called from two tables away. “I haven't won in a long time.” There was scattered laughter around the chessboards.

Antonio put his hands in his pockets and began to shift back and forth as if he were trying to ward off the cold, even though it was halfway to noon and much warmer now. He would wait. The pipe was in his back pocket, sticking out several inches, like a signpost announcing his intentions. The man with the cigar seemed to notice it and gave Antonio a puzzled look. Antonio smiled at him, as though having a two-foot-long pipe in your back pocket was nothing out of the ordinary.

If only the soldier was here like I expected all this would be over now.

As time passed, Antonio began to feel absurd, lying in wait to kill the murderer with a pipe, with all his friends around him. The act had to be done today, quickly, without failure or hesitation.

Let the bastard get here soon.

All these chess players would be witnesses to the attack. They would gather around the tattooed soldier's body just as the neighbors had gathered at Antonio's front door in San Cristóbal Acatapán, to look at Elena and Carlitos. Vacant stares at the corpses, a group of people joined together by the lurid, tragic scene before them.
The chess players will be entertained, they will tell others about the soldier's death, but they will not know why it happened, the precise reasons, just like the neighbors in San Cristóbal never knew why Elena and Carlos were killed.
Only Antonio would know the truth.

The soldier ate an ice cream in the park afterward. Antonio walked over to a
paletero
standing nearby, bought a strawberry ice cream, and devoured it in less than a minute.

*   *   *

Sunday mornings were chess days, days to relax. After the confusion caused by the old woman, after seeing Lopez reduced to tears, it would be good to slip back into his old routines. Breakfast first. He had read somewhere that coffee helped the brain's cognitive functions, so he had a cup or two on chess days, even though he didn't normally drink the stuff. Anything to give you an edge over the competition. He walked to a restaurant on Alvarado where he liked to eat when he wanted to treat himself. Sitting at the counter, a fat American omelette before him, he read
La Opinión.
The front page was preoccupied with the trial of some police officers accused of beating a black man, a case Longoria found only moderately interesting. He skipped to the international news: the United States had recognized the independence of a country called Bosnia.

After breakfast he walked a few blocks up the gentle slope of Alvarado, past the crack addicts' motels, past the rows of pawnshops and the street vendors, until he reached the palm trees of MacArthur Park. The line of snakelike trunks climbed into the air, each leaning to the east, the sky behind them wiped clean of its customary brown tinge by the cold winds of the night before.

*   *   *

Antonio waited an hour by the chess tables, and still the tattooed soldier did not come. The pressure on his bladder became too much, so he walked over to an embankment of pepper tress that shaded this corner of the park and peed into the dirt. Mud splattered up onto his shoes. He returned to the chess tables and watched a game between a Cuban man in a rider's cap and a man with a long Christ-like face and a mane of wild white hair. They were at the endgame, each with a king and rook, each trying to outwit the other, until the man with the hair finally threw up his hands and said, “It's a draw.” More men came to play chess, some bringing sets of plastic pieces in little leather bags, others with rolled-up checkerboard mats that they opened and spread out over the stone tables.

The day wore on, and Antonio began to think that the tattooed soldier wasn't going to show up. The park filled with families, soccer balls, balloons, baby strollers. Bored with the chess matches, he decided to sit on the lawn.

Children riding bikes, a boy throwing stones into the green lake. His violent plan stood in stark contrast to so much normality around him.
I am going to kill a man.

He sat there for another hour or so, long enough to watch at least six people wander by to inspect the contents of the nearby trash barrels and remove an aluminum can, plastic bottle, or discarded newspaper. A waiflike little girl approached him and held a box of Chiclets in his face, asking if he wanted to buy some, two for a quarter. The girl's mother, wearing a pink blouse, came walking up behind her, pushing a baby carriage with a Styrofoam ice cooler sitting where an infant should have been, offering sodas for seventy-five cents. As she left, rolling the carriage down the asphalt path with the girl at her side, she passed a small man with pointy features who was walking in the opposite direction.

Antonio felt as if someone had punched him.

The soldier was wearing a windbreaker. It covered his tattooed arm, but there was no mistaking the narrow face and the shaved head, the thin layer of jet black hair that looked like it was painted on his scalp.

Antonio rose to his feet so quickly he nearly stumbled and fell to the lawn again.

Now is the time. Strike at his head. Shatter his skull.

*   *   *

Feeling liberated from the worries of the past few days, Longoria walked into MacArthur Park with a little more bounce in his step. If García was here he might beat him today. He would play black, try the Sicilian opening, then take the offensive at the earliest possible opportunity.

As he neared the chess tables, Longoria noticed a police cruiser parked on the lawn. He wondered if the outline of his new gun showed in his windbreaker pocket. But the officer was looking in the other direction, toward a group of men standing suspiciously by the lake, and Longoria went safely past him.

When he reached the chess tables, he saw García there waiting for him, the old fart, ready for the next match.

“García! I'm going to beat you today.
¡Hoy sí vas a perder!
”

García shook his hand, and they moved to one of the empty boards. They were sitting down, arranging the pieces, when someone shouted from one of the other tables. “Hey,
sargento
, there's a guy here looking for you!”

“What?” Longoria said absently. How annoying. One of the black pawns was missing.

*   *   *

Antonio stepped toward the stone bench, the crimson square of the tattooed soldier's windbreaker in the center of his vision. “Hey,
sargento
, there's a guy here looking for you,” one of the chess players called, and that was Antonio's cue, there was no turning back. He reached for the pipe without taking his eyes off the man's head, his target. The day was exceptionally clear, the sky summer-bright. The grass was shimmering, the benches aflame with sunlight. He could hear himself telling Frank, “I did it,” see the devilish smile when Frank realized it was true.

He was walking across the grass, stepping toward his target, no one was stopping him.
The old men, they don't see me.
The chess clocks sang their tick-tick, tick-tick. Antonio wanted to laugh out loud. It seemed like years since he had done something that made him feel so alive, and he wanted to cry from the happiness of it, the rush of life in his limbs.
I am walking with the multitudes now. Justice with a lead pipe, for the unknown thousands.

Just a few feet from the soldier he raised the pipe in the air, lifting his arms and rotating his shoulders like a baseball pitcher in his windup, gathering a wave of strength in his muscles to kill the man once and for all, to rid the earth of him.

*   *   *

Longoria was still looking for the pawn when García yelled, “Watch out!” He turned and caught a swift movement, the whistling displacement of air by some narrow object, the sound of a man grunting. Reflexively he raised his right arm in front of his face. The object struck his forearm, sending a pulse of pain through his body.
Under attack. Someone is trying to kill me.
He dove for the grass and rolled away, a flash of memory from his military training kicking in, a maneuver he practiced at least one hundred times in a sandbox in Panama.

The two men were facing each other now, Longoria lying on his back on the grass, eyes open in a look of dazed fear, Antonio standing on the lawn, confused by the picture before him, the tattooed man breathing heavily but still alive.
Finish him. For Elena and Carlos.

Longoria's brain was screaming, “Who is this man, what does he want?” But one good look and he could tell his attacker was Guatemalteco, and suddenly no other explanation was necessary. This was the war again, and thankfully he had a weapon in his jacket, but there was a small problem. He had lost all feeling in his right hand—the arm must be broken—and it would be awkward to take the gun from his right pocket with his left hand. But there was no other choice. He had to act quickly, because this crazed man was moving toward him with that metal club, holding it over his head like a caveman.
He looks like he really wants to kill me.

Antonio felt only anger now. He looked at the soldier lying on the grass, and he could tell that even though the first blow hadn't killed him, he was seriously hurt. The soldier was not invulnerable, he was in pain.
I have wounded him. I have him where I want him. Now he will suffer. He will die. The head. Concentrate.
Now that they were just a few feet apart, Antonio realized for the first time that he was almost a foot taller than his enemy. The soldier was pipsqueak.

Antonio had a pounding headache. He was trying to clear his mind of a thick haze when he was distracted by voices from the crowd that was beginning to circle around them, chess players and passersby gathering to watch the spectacle, shouting and cheering and egging the combatants on. This was not the execution he had expected, calculated and quick.

“Kick his ass, Longoria! Do it.”

Antonio raised the pipe for a second blow. Longoria, trying to reach into his pocket for the gun, rolled away again. Finally he pulled the gun out, but he had trouble wrapping his finger around the trigger because he wasn't left-handed. He felt clumsy and unnatural when he pointed the gun in the air, but the people around him didn't seem to notice as they dove for cover. Shock and disbelief rippled from them as they fled.

Longoria aimed for the man's torso. At this range he couldn't miss, not even shooting left-handed. The attacker was standing frozen with the pipe in the air. Longoria pulled the trigger.
Goodbye, you son of a bitch. Goodbye, whoever the fuck you are.

The gun clicked loudly.

There was no ammunition. Longoria was feeling curiously impotent.
How stupid of me, how silly. That idiot in the gun store made me take out the clip. I haven't made that mistake since the first day of target practice in basic training, when I forgot to load the gun and the sergeant slapped me so hard on the ear I couldn't hear a thing for a week.

The man with the pipe in his hand was moving toward him again. He could already taste the blood in his mouth. He was finished.

Antonio saw that the soldier would shoot him if he didn't finish him off fast. He was about to inflict what he was sure would be the killing blow when he heard a commotion behind him. Someone yelled, “Freeze!” and he turned to see a police officer jogging toward him across the lawn, panting under his bulletproof vest, his badge, and the rest of his equipment, his face red from the exertion. The officer saw Longoria's gun and drew his own, pointing it at him on the run.