The old man squinted at the glittering sea. “It was nineteen eighty-three. The summer the army went up into Olanchito. When all the drug dealers came running out of the mountains, she came with them. She stayed five months.” He gave a mournful shake of his head. “Your way is best, my friend. A few days, a week, then adios.”
“You’re a cynic, Tomas,” the colonel said; and Tomas said, “Not at all. I have reached a venerable age and am secure in the things I know. Yet like a fool I fall in love every day. I am merely too old to be a consummate fool. It is you who are the cynic.”
“I?” The colonel laughed. “First you accuse me of being a romantic, then a cynic. Surely there is a contradiction involved?”
“Perhaps ‘cynic’ is not the correct word. Though I can think of no better word for someone so obdurate as to deny the tradition that bred him.”
The old man was referring, the colonel knew, to their Indian blood and to his skeptical attitude toward Tomas’s mystical bent, his magical interpretation of the world, a view he believed that Colonel Galpa would do well to adopt.
“Must we always argue about this?” the colonel asked.
“No,” said Tomas, giving the colonel’s hand a fatherly pat. “I merely find it amusing to do so.”
The colonel spent the day reading in his room; the telephone rang on several occasions but he did not pick it up. At twilight he lay on his bed and watched the rain-swept peaks in the west darken from gray to a soft purple. Once night had settled over the town, he dressed and went forth to do his duty, to mingle with the whores and journalists and bureaucrats who would be gathered at the Club Atomica, a discotheque on the edge of Barrio Clarin.
By the time he arrived the dance floor was overflowing with a confusion of men and women whose clumsy movements made them appear to be struggling to keep their feet, as if dazed by the flashing lights and deafening music. He found a stool at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka rocks from a pretty girl wearing a mesh blouse through which her breasts were visible. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. On turning he was pleased to see Jerry Gammage, an American journalist whom he found generally agreeable, apart from Gammage’s habit of addressing him as “Maury.”
“Hey, Maury!” Gammage clapped him on the shoulder. “They still got you out riding the circuit, huh?”
The colonel shrugged as if to say, “What else?” and had a sip of his drink. He watched Gammage, a big sloppy blond man in jeans and a faded “Just Say No” T-shirt, lean across the counter and flirt with the barmaid, making a clownish face when she playfully pushed him away.
“Every fucking year this place gets a little more like Vegas,” Gammage said, settling beside the colonel. “It’s a damn shame. But what the hell. These are the end times. Can’t sweat the small stuff, right?” He clinked glasses with the colonel and drank. Judging by the slackness of his features and the expansiveness of his gestures, Gammage was a good ways along the road to being very drunk.
“Got any hot flashes for me?” Gammage asked, wobbling on his stool. “Any pews that’s nit to frint?”
“I saw a manta ray near the point this morning,” the colonel said. “It may have been the shadow from a school of mackerel, but I don’t think so.”
Gammage drank. “I’d love to write it. Beats the hell out of shit like Six Priests Found Murdered With Brains Missing. Wha’cha think about all that, anyway?”
“About what?”
“About Six Priests Found Murdered With Brains Missing.” Gammage leaned close, as if inspecting the colonel’s face for unsightly flaws. “Aw, man! Where you been? It’s the big story out of the capital.”
“Six priests were murdered in the capital?”
“And found with their brains missing, no less. If we luck out, we’ll get a shot at seeing the man s’posed to be responsible tonight. Word has it he’s in town.”
“The man who killed them? Why isn’t he in jail?”
“Because”—Gammage leaned close again—“he’s a fucking hero. Not like you, Maury. This guy’s your basic New World Order hero. A specialist in what’s being billed as ‘internal security.’ These honchos don’t get the free lunch treatment, but they know the secret handshake. And nobody fucks with ’em.” He signaled the barmaid with his empty glass. “I don’t know why I’m giving you grief. You’re one of the good guys. I’m just tired of this shit. You come to expect it in Salvador, Guatemala, Panama. But somehow I thought this place would be immune.”
The colonel thought of the new addition to Tomas’s mural. “What is this man’s name?” he asked, but Gammage did not appear to have heard.
“Y’know”—he accepted a fresh drink from the barmaid—“I’m ready to become a card-carrying freako. Know what I’m saying? Get my hand mirror, stand out on the desert at noon and heliograph the fucking mother ship.”
The colonel was accustomed to Gammage’s despairing tone, but this outburst appeared to signal a new and unhealthy level of disillusionment.
“Speak of the devil,” said Gammage. “Here’s the man of the hour now.”
Hector Canizales, the portly owner of the cantina, was pushing his way through the crowd, and in his wake, walking with immense dignity, as if he were the actual owner and Hector merely a flunky, came a pale heavyset man resplendent in a dark blue uniform that bore a colonel’s insignia. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the club; his hair was black and oily, combed straight back from a forehead so high and smooth and white, like a slab of marble, it seemed to warrant an inscription, and his thick eyebrows were so dark by contrast with the pallor of his skin, they appeared more decorative than functional. His face was squarish and had a soft, hand-carved look; his nose was aquiline, and his eyes large, set widely apart, and his full mouth put Colonel Galpa in mind of portraits he had seen of the old Spanish court—the mouth of a voluptuary, vaguely predatory and given to expressions of contempt. More to the point, he had no doubt that this was the face Tomas was painting on the wall of the Drive-In Puerto Rico.
“Colonel Mauricio Galpa,” said Hector, mopping his brow with a paisley handkerchief. “Allow me to present Colonel Felix Carbonell.”
“Mucho gusto,” said Carbonell, shaking the colonel’s hand. “I am honored.”
“Wow,” said Gammage, gesturing with his drink. “This is fucking massive. The veritable confluence of past and future.”
As he stood there enveloped by the overpowering sweetness of Carbonell’s cologne, the colonel was mesmerized by his opposite number’s face; despite its calm expression and regularity of feature, he derived from it a sense of tension, as if there were another face beneath it, one fiercely animated and straining to shatter the pale mask that held it in check. Though he had never before met the man, he had met with his reputation. The name Carbonell was associated with the worst excesses of the regime. With brutality and terror and slaughter.
“You might even say it’s kinda mythical,” Gammage went on. “Or do I mean mystical? Whatever. I’m talking the meeting of the twain, y’know. Yin and yang. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.”
Carbonell’s eyes slid toward Gammage.
“I’d love a shot of this.” Gammage gave Carbonell a jolly smile. “You do show up in photographs, don’tcha?”
“Excuse me!” A slim brunette in slacks and a white blouse grabbed Gammage by the elbow and yanked him away from the two colonels. “Jerry, I need you over here!”
Carbonell watched them disappear into the crowd; when he turned back to the colonel, he said. “Drunks, gringos, journalists. The new trinity.”
Colonel Galpa felt a gulf between them, as palpable in its own right as he might feel standing at the edge of a deep canyon, struck by a chill vacancy inspired by the thought of a misstep. He pretended to be amused by Carbonell’s comment and sipped his vodka.