Victor kept his eyes on the white arc of numerals, the pointed dial. He remembered where he had seen such an instrument before. It was in a shop window-the transformer of a toy train set that circled over and over again around the window.
The doctor took the woman’s pulse once more before he snapped his black bag shut for the last time and left. Captain Pena went with him, leaving Tito in charge.
“Fucking asshole doctor,” Lopez said. “Changing his appearance every time he comes. What’s he think they invented blindfolds for?”
“Stop yapping,” Tito said. “We got a new toy today.” He pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and dangled them in the light like a necklace. These were not the simple loops of thong they were used to; these were shiny steel handcuffs.
Lopez whistled. He took the cuffs from Tito and looked them over. “Smith amp; Wesson. Nothing but the best for little Miss Sanchez.”
“We’ll hang the bitch up there.” Tito pointed to a heating pipe that ran along the ceiling near the blacked-out windows. They had to stand her on a table, which was not easy since she could barely stand at all. They unclasped one of the handcuffs and slipped it over the pipe, then closed the cuff once more around her wrist. Then they took the table away and she was hanging from both wrists.
“Now let me show you how an expert does it,” Tito said. He shoved Victor aside and sat self-importantly at the controls, as if he were about to pilot a jet. “Write down everything she says. Everything I say and everything she says.”
Victor opened the pad and took a pencil from the jar. It needed sharpening, but he didn’t sharpen it because he remembered what Labredo had suffered at the point of a pencil. Yunques attached the electrodes to her feet.
Tito had apparently decided the way to get an answer out of the woman was not with long shocks but with lots of short, hard bursts. Every time he turned the dial, her feet jerked in a froglike spasm, causing her to swing from the overhead pipe.
Between the sounds of her screams and the shouted questions, Victor’s pencil rasped on the paper. What he took down was repetitive.
Victor took it upon himself to remove Tito’s expletives from the questions. And nothing he wrote conveyed the woman’s screams, her choking, her tears. The agony of Miss Sanchez would not be part of the official record, he realized, because he did not know how to spell the sound of a scream.
And so the transcript continued, for ten pages.
After each jolt, between each question and each answer, she swung back and forth from the pipe like a side of beef. The jolts Tito administered were so short that there was no hope of her losing consciousness, but each shock kicked the breath out of her. Eventually a vein opened in her wrist. Blood ran in dark scarlet ribbons down her left arm, formed red squiggles over her rib cage and down her legs, until it fell in big constant drops from her left foot.
The woman was probably not even aware that she was bleeding, but Victor could see that the gore frightened Tito-he had no orders to kill her, or even to mark her.
The sergeant ordered her taken down, and she collapsed in the blood at her feet. He kicked her, not hard. “You piece of shit. You’ve messed up my nice clean floor. I want you to clean it up, or I’ll string you up again.”
She could neither talk nor move. She was adjusted so that she was leaning against the wall, and water was brought for her to drink. A cold cloth was placed on her forehead.
“Clean that floor, you bitch. We’re making you our cleaning lady, got it? Take the cuffs off before she totally destroys them.”
The cuffs, no longer shiny, were undone.
Tito grabbed her hand and slapped it into the crimson puddle. “You feel that? That’s your mess, and you’re going to clean it up right now.”
“Give me a rag,” she moaned. “Something to wipe it up.”
“A rag? Who said anything about a rag? You don’t get no rag.” The sergeant’s boot was on the back of her neck. He pushed her forward, forcing her face down to the floor in the Muslim attitude of prayer. Her face was an inch from the blood. “You don’t get no rag, bitch. You got to use your imagination.”
Under the humming fluorescent lights, as the small pointed tongue lapped at the floor, the woman’s face was reflected in the dark red blood, the blindfold a black rectangle across her eyes, like a censor’s mark.
NINE
That day was a day of visitors. First the doctor and then, after they had forced the Sanchez woman to lick up her blood, Victor was summoned to the Captain’s office to meet with an American who was introduced as Mr. Wheat.
Mr. Wheat, Victor thought, must be of Irish descent. He reminded him of a Jesuit who had taught him history in the ninth grade. He had the same straw-coloured hair that flopped boyishly over one eyebrow. He had the same serviceable-looking glasses, nothing fashionable about them. He looked like a man who read a lot, a man who liked books.
Despite this intellectual appearance, Mr. Wheat carried with him an invisible cloud of toothpaste and aftershave. He had a ready smile, flawless teeth and a strong hand with which he squeezed Victor’s in greeting. Victor wished he could impress this man somehow, and knew sadly that he could not.
“Mr. Wheat is with the American embassy.”
“I’m very honoured to meet you, sir.”
“Glad to know you, soldier. The Captain tells me you have someone I ought to meet.”
“The so-called Sanchez woman,” the Captain said. “Bring her in so Mr. Wheat can speak to her himself. Clean her up first.”
Victor got Yunques to help him drag the woman up the hall past the Captain’s closed door. He wondered what would happen to that flawless smile if Mr. Wheat could have seen them. The woman’s heels left bloody streaks along the floor.
She couldn’t stand, so they filled the tub in the soldiers’ bathroom. He and Yunques lowered her into the water, and she fell back against the tiles.
“Wake up,” Yunques snapped. “Wash yourself.” But the woman only moaned in response. He turned to Victor. “You deal with her. I’m going for a smoke.”
Pink streaks threaded into the water from the woman’s body. Victor soaped up a cloth and put it in her hand, but she only let the hand fall into the water. He lifted her left foot from the water and began to wash it. There was a burn mark on her big toe where the electrode had been attached, and he found another burn when he rinsed the blood from her chest.
