“Presidents have to be protected from some things.”
“Why do you have to kill me?”
“You were aiding the rebels. It’s called treason, and the punishment is death. It’s simple justice.”
“Then why are we all blindfolded? Justice does not hide its face.”
“Don’t lecture me, whore. I don’t care who your father was.”
“Will you let the boy go now? He has served his purpose, hasn’t he?”
“I haven’t decided yet about the boy. In any case, it’s none of your business.”
In the end, they took the boy with them. Tito had insisted. The boy had seen faces at the plantation; the sergeant could not risk the security of his men. More important, Victor knew they could not forgive the boy the evil they had done him. When he was safely dead, the wound they had inflicted on their own consciences would heal over.
“Stop here.”
Victor pulled to the edge of the road and switched off the motor. Rain hammered at the Jeep and slid in sheets down the windshield.
“Please,” the woman said. “I know my life is over. But don’t kill the boy.”
After her final interrogation, she had been no longer kept in solitary. She and the boy had been thrown in a cell shared by half a dozen others. Through the peephole, Victor had seen her comforting the boy, and she had repeatedly requested medical attention for him.
“You can let him live,” she said now. “Surely you remember how young you were at thirteen?”
“Don’t talk,” Tito said-softly for him. Then he turned to Victor. “Listen, baby, you don’t do a lot of the heavy work, do you?”
“Sergeant?”
“I just volunteered you. You take that bitch to the edge of the cliff and you kill her.” Tito was pure force, his black eyes implacable. “Lopez, you do the boy. Well? What are you waiting for?”
Victor forgot to put up the hood of his poncho. Rain poured down his neck and into his shirt as he went around the back of the Jeep and opened the door. The woman stepped out of the Jeep without being pushed or pulled.
“Which way?” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”
He took her arm with absurd gentleness and led her the twenty paces to the edge of the cliff. The lake was hidden by curtains of rain, but he could hear the waves sloshing seventy-five feet below.
Victor took out his service pistol and pulled back the hammer.
“Mother of God,” she said. “What are you waiting for!”
He stood behind her and raised the pistol to the back of her head. Her hair clung like seaweed to her small, round skull.
Ten yards away, Lopez leaned down and fired into the head of the prone boy. Once, twice. The rain absorbed the noise, making the shots sound like the tinny pops of a cap gun.
Victor’s finger tightened on the trigger. The woman shifted her weight, and suddenly the mud gave way beneath her. The gun popped, there was a muzzle flash, and she was gone. Victor was frozen to the spot. He had missed her, he knew he had missed her. Shooting anything that close up, he would have felt the flash on his hand, but the gun had discharged into empty air.
The mud had collapsed beneath her just as he had fired. He did not hear her hit the rocks below. She was probably still alive. Had the others seen? Would they suspect?
Apparently not. They heard the shot, they saw her fall.
All the way back to town, Victor’s hands trembled on the steering wheel. The rain clattered on the Jeep and reflected the headlights, all but blinding him. He nearly missed the turnoff that would take them back along the service road toward the little school.
PART TWO
Forgive me, if you are not living
If you, beloved, my love,
If you have died
FIFTEEN
The rain that fell in New York City eighteen months later was of an entirely different character. It was March-the weather was gloomy and rainy-but here the drops were tiny, as if they had been squeezed through a sieve, and seemed to hover in the air rather than to actually fall. This was not the driving natural force of Victor’s homeland, but a thin, dirty mist that clung to his skin.
Living in the vast grey metropolis of New York was like taking up residence inside a colossal machine. It pressed, pulled, squashed, and stretched you with out regard for what you might choose or not choose to do. In this one respect, it was not much different from the army. Victor’s feet seemed to carry him auto matically from the Thirty-fourth Street subway station and through the impossible crowds outside Macy’s. He had thought about coming to this intersection with Seventh Avenue-he had thought about nothing else for the past eighteen months- and yet he could not have said at what moment he had made the actual decision to do it.
Perhaps it was the time of year, with the last chill of winter still in the air, but the city planners of Manhattan seemed to have given no thought whatsoever to trees or flowers. Not in midtown, anyway. In every direction the vistas were grey, grey, grey-an endless monotone interrupted only by the hordes of lurid yellow taxicabs.
The address on Seventh Avenue was not at all what he had expected. The term “New York lawyer” had conjured in Victor’s mind something far grander than this grubby building on this grubby corner. The plate glass of the front door was cracked, and the tiny vestibule smelt of urine. As Victor examined the roster of names peeling from the directory, his heart began to pound. One was a coward at all times and in all places, not just in wartime.
He remained poised before the directory with a sense of foreboding, the sense that he had been carried to this intersection, this building, as part of some cosmic plan, the sense that all his actions were now and always had been out of his control. The same feeling had engulfed him when he had faced the court martial. He had known from the first moment he had faced the tribunal-known with absolute certainty-that he would be found guilty, that he would be sentenced to death.
As Victor stood in the vestibule of this dirty building a world away from the little school, cowardice took hold of him once more. He turned from the roster of names and was pushing at the handle of the cracked front door when the elevator door rattled open behind him and a short, square man-a Mexican, Victor thought at first glance- came bustling out. He was wearing a rumpled shirt and tie and, seeing Victor, he clutched the tie nervously. “Are you by any chance Mr. Perez?”
Victor nodded. Perez was his name now; he had Ignacio Perez’s birth certificate to prove it, and they had been close in age. That was why Victor had stolen his papers from the Captain’s office. The actual Perez, he reasoned, was dead and buried and beyond caring.
“Mike Viera,” the man said, giving him a handshake that was damp but firm. The resemblance was obvious; he had his sister’s hollowed-out face, the same deep lines from nose to chin. “A thousand apologies. I hadn’t
