eyeball staring up at him in astonishment.
I led him here, Victor said to himself. I opened his cell and I led Labredo trembling, hardly able to walk, to an indescribable death.
He had brought Labredo, blindfolded-the prisoners were always blindfolded-out of his cell, the old man clinging to him as if he were his son. Victor had seen in his file that Labredo was not really an old man, he was only fifty-seven, but he had been in the little school for two months, and the photograph stapled to his dossier showed that he had looked very different when he had arrived.
After Victor had delivered Labredo into Sergeant Tito’s hands, there had not been much noise the first half- hour, just the usual shouts and his uncle’s quieter voice. Then his uncle had come out, grim-faced, and disappeared into his office. That was when the screams had started. Like a baby’s cry, the human scream is meant to provoke sympathy and bring help. In the little school it brought laughter.
Victor hadn’t had the courage to intervene, or even to run. He feared the bullet in the back. He feared being wounded, maimed or paralyzed; he feared capture. He feared what Tito would do to him. He feared his own screams. And so he had sat with his hands folded on the table in front of him and tried to breathe normally. The Captain had forbidden him to read, but he could not have read anyway. Labredo was begging the soldiers to kill him.
Victor had tried to concentrate on his surroundings. The guardroom was elongated, and there were holes along one wall. He had thought they were bullet holes, but that made no sense, not on this inner wall, and now he realized that what he was sitting in had been the cloakroom at the back of a classroom. The holes were where the hooks had been.
He counted the tiles on the floor, twenty-eight long, eight and a half wide. They alternated black and white, and if you looked at them quickly, they flashed in the corners of your eyes. On his left there was a large cork-board where the squad’s schedule for the week was pinned, along with various notices, some of them yellowing with age. “General Emilio Garcia will be speaking Friday night on the relationship of the army to the community in the auditorium at the Central Business Association.” General Garcia was long dead, his helicopter blown out of the sky two years ago by a remote-control bomb. A significant victory for the rebels.
The screams had stopped, but the muffled cries and continuing shouts indicated that Labredo’s mouth had been taped shut. Even the toughest soldiers could bear only so many screams.
Half an hour later the door had banged open and the soldiers’ voices billowed up the hall.
“Man, that son of a bitch was hard to kill.”
“You owe me fifty centivos, Lopez.”
“Bullshit. You taped the fucker’s mouth shut. How do you know what his last words were?”
“He was begging us to kill him.”
“Doesn’t count. You gagged the little faggot.”
“Pena,” Tito shouted, “open up! Labredo’s going back to his cell for a little snooze.”
Victor sprang up and opened the door to the cells, and Tito, Lopez and Yunques carried Labredo past him. He had a glimpse of the pulped, bloody face, the blood-soaked trousers and then the pale bare feet waving in the air.
“Clean up this faggot’s mess,” Tito grunted as they sidled past. “I want to see my face in that floor.”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“Lopez will take the guardroom. I want to see my face, understand?”
That night, they drove the Grand Cherokee through town to El Playon. There was no need for a blackout in San Salvador; it was well defended and the rebels had no planes, no helicopters. At the crosswalks, pedestrians glanced at the tinted windows and looked away, or crossed the street. The Cherokees were unmarked, but everyone knew they belonged to the security services. The vehicles intoxicated the soldiers inside as if they had been drinking.
“Look at that bitch,” Yunques said, breathing garlic across Victor’s face. He was pointing to a woman who backed away from the Jeep. “I think she’s going to shit herself. You think that’s really a baby she’s carrying?”
“Why? You think she’s carrying a bomb?”
“You never know.”
“You just want to fuck her, Yunques. I know you.”
“No, I don’t. I want to fuck that little baby.”
“He wants to fuck the baby up the ass. Fucking Yunques.”
“I don’t want to fuck it up the ass. I’m no pervert.”
Their laughing filled the truck, and Victor had a vision of the laughter as heaps of garbage-bags of sour garbage bursting inside the truck.
“Hey, Labredo!” Tito called. “How you doing back there, baby?”
“Labredo’s pissed off with you, man. He ain’t going to talk to you no more.”
Lopez put on a little voice, “Hey, somebody turn on the lights. I can’t see a thing,” and more laughter filled the truck.
“Man,” Yunques said again, “that son of a bitch was hard to kill.”
“I can’t believe you took his eyes out before you finished him off. You got to
“I tried to put one back. Fucker wouldn’t fit back in his head.”
“Pena,” Tito said when the laughter died down, “you’re pretty quiet back there. You okay?”
“I’m okay, sergeant.”
“You sure? No complaints?”
“No complaints at all, sergeant.”
“You got any complaints, I want to hear them. Don’t go yapping to your uncle, or I will personally roast your ass.”
“No complaints, sergeant. I’m just fine.”
“How you like the vehicle?”
“What? Oh, very nice. I used to daydream about owning one of these someday.”
“Stick with this unit, baby, one day you’ll own the fleet.”
Even his uncle was besotted with the Cherokees. The day they had driven away from the military jail toward what Victor thought would be freedom, the Captain had slapped the steering wheel and said, “How do you like this machine?”
“It’s beautiful,” Victor had replied, and meant it. You didn’t see a lot of new cars in El Salvador, let alone a fully loaded Cherokee smelling of new carpet and vinyl. And the tinted windows had the glamour-and anonymity-of sunglasses.
“Courtesy of the United States,” his uncle went on. “They gave us a hundred of them. You believe that?”
“It’s very generous.”
“Fuck generous. They give us the money to
Now Lopez was craning his neck in the back seat to look at a movie marquee. “Hey, anybody want to see a movie later?”
“Fuck that, Lopez. I’m tired.”
“Fucking Clint Eastwood, man!” The movie was ancient. The picture showed Clint Eastwood with a big gun and Shirley MacLaine in a nun’s habit.
“You think you’re tired? Look at Labredo.”
They had to stop as the few people coming out of the cinema crossed the street. The tinted glass formed grey halos round the street lights.
“Why can’t they show those movies in Spanish?” Lopez wanted to know. “What do they think we are, fucking diplomats?”
“Yeah. Fucking faggot diplomats.”
Tito gunned the motor and nearly ran down an old man who was slow to get out of his way. The man’s cap fell off, but he recognized the Cherokee as a security vehicle and was too frightened to pick it up.
