“I don’t think so. By then I will be dead.”
“Get her out of my sight,” Wheat said.
The Captain snapped his fingers, and Yunques led her away to the cells.
“She has a real attitude problem,” Wheat said when she was gone. “Real hard case, that one.”
“To tell you the truth,” the Captain said, “we don’t suspect this prisoner of any connection to the embassy. We only suspect her of taking food to the enemy.”
“But we had this Sanchez at the embassy. We were sure she was the leak.”
“And now you’re not sure?”
“Little Miss Sanchez was killed, see. But the leaks started up again.”
“You killed her?”
“I resent that, Captain. What kind of outfit do you think we run?”
“Forgive me. You thought she was a spy, she was killed, naturally I thought ….”
“She was raped and murdered on her way home one night. Terrible thing.”
“Terrible.”
“Of course, the fact that the leaks started up again after she died doesn’t necessarily put her in the clear.”
“No. There could be more than one leak.”
“I want you to hang on to this Sanchez prisoner. You understand, I’m under a lot of pressure to plug that leak.”
“I understand.”
“And if I can ever do anything for you one day, well, one hand washes the other, right, Captain?”
“Right. We will keep on her, Mr. Wheat. Don’t you worry.”
TEN
The American’s visit was so brief as to seem hallucinatory. One moment he was there, the next he was nothing but a memory of blond hair and a whiff of aftershave. When he was gone, the soldiers had their lunch, and then in the afternoon the woman was brought back to the interrogation room, where they left her alone, tied to the chair. Tito liked to make her wait like this, knowing the torture would come but not knowing when or what form it would take. After half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes, they connected her up to the machine as if she were herself an electronic device without which the little school could not run.
Once again Victor took down a record of the interrogation while Tito worked the dial. All through the woman’s screams and the shouted questions, Victor felt a growing thickness in the back of his throat like an oncoming cold. And at the crown of his head there was a sore spot as if he had been tapped with a small, hard object there. Much of what he wrote was blurred with sweat.
Then Tito shocked the woman too hard and she fainted. When they could not revive her, Lopez and Victor carried her to her cell.
“Too bad the whore is not on our side,” Lopez muttered. “She is one tough bitch.”
Victor was glad to be on guard duty while his colleagues interrogated other prisoners. He could hear the mutter of gunfire from the nearby rifle range, and the odd sergeant’s shout from the garrison. He sat at the little table, his head in his hands, feeling himself sink into a fever as if toward the bottom of the sea. He hardly noticed when they came for Ignacio Perez, the man in the cell across from the woman’s. Perez was the only prisoner there who seemed to Victor as if he might actually be a guerrilla. He was not much older than Victor, short but powerfully built, and he resisted the soldiers like a wild dog, kicking and screaming at them.
Victor’s brow was hot as an iron in his hand. He barely heard the shouts and cries coming from what used to be the little school’s playground. They were playing Submarine with Perez. So far, Victor had not had to participate in that particular game, where one or two soldiers would toss the prisoner into the tank of water that had been fouled with every kind of filth the school could produce. The prisoner was then forced beneath the surface at the end of a restraining pole, and held there until he near drowned in the shit and piss. Who thought these games up, Victor had wondered when it had first been explained to him. But this day he hardly noticed Tito’s laughter or Perez’s terrified, choked cries.
Later, when Lopez came to relieve him, he sat down at the table with a weary sigh. He looked Victor up and down. “What’s wrong with you, Pena?”
“Nothing. Except I just ….” Victor had to lean on the back of the chair to steady himself. His words were slurring like those of a drunk. “I think maybe I’m getting a cold or something.”
“You’re shivering like a-”
Victor didn’t hear what Lopez said next, because a gauzy curtain closed between them. He felt a smile spreading like butter across his face, and then his legs folded beneath him.
For the next three days he lay in bed, clenched in a fever, except for the times when he dragged himself to the barracks toilet. At his lowest point he perched on the toilet while at the same time leaning over a bucket, discharging violently from both ends.
In bed, dreams and memories intermingled. He dreamed of his uncle’s appearing to him like an angel of deliverance at the military prison. He dreamed of Mr. Wheat walking among the bodies of El Playon amid a scent not of death but of aftershave. Spirits rose like steam from the bodies, calling Victor to join them-death wasn’t so bad, it wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. It was better than being afraid all the time. In the dis tance, a woman called a name he couldn’t quite make out.
The doctor visited him. Later, Victor wasn’t sure if it had been real, because the doctor had grown a small moustache and his hair was black again. But it must have been real, because there was a bottle of medicine on a small wooden box that was his bedside table. It tasted like licorice and made the dreams even more vivid.
That night he climbed out of bed, the fever gone, and tiptoed through completely deserted classrooms that glowed pale as marble in the moonlight. After slitting the throat of the night guard, a boy of fifteen, he opened the last door and lay in bed with the Sanchez woman. What they did together was indistinct, but he had a wonderful sensation of warmth and comfort, as if he were curled in a den of warm animals.
When the Captain and the others burst in on them, Victor pulled out his service revolver and fired before they could even draw their pistols. Bodies tumbled at his feet. He pulled the Sanchez woman along the corridor, fighting hand to hand with the soldiers who now leapt out at him from all sides. It was amazing what strength and cunning he had. Bullets swarmed in the air, but he ran through them with supernatural courage. It should have been a terrifying dream, but it was not; the sense of victory was too thrilling.
But the thrill dissolved when he awoke and remembered he was a coward. A coward who, far from saving the Sanchez woman, had done his part to split open her flesh.
He lay in bed trying to persuade himself that he was not evil. He was not doing it by choice. He was here under threat of death. If he tried to help her escape, they would both be shot; that was not good. If he tried to escape himself, he would be shot, and
Victor suffered three days of fever before he was pronounced fit to return to duty. He went back to work feeling thin and ethereal, no match for the harshness of his fellow soldiers.
“Hey, Pena junior,” said Yunques. “How was your vacation?”
“Not much fun, thanks.”
“You’re lucky the Captain’s your uncle, Pena.” Tito made a throat-slitting gesture. “Me and the boys here get the feeling you’re a slacker. A malingerer.”
“That isn’t true. I was sick. Lopez, you saw.”
Lopez shrugged and looked out the window. “So you fainted. So you have a weak stomach.”
“Tell me, Pena,” said Tito. “What do you have in mind for a career after you leave the army?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it much.”
“Because, to tell you the truth, I get a very negative feeling from you. You don’t participate here like you should.”
