“A traitor, not an old man!”
“An old man!” The colonel bunched his fists. “But what does it matter? An old man, a child, a pregnant woman…”
“Enough!”
The feral face that the colonel had glimpsed behind Carbonell’s polished exterior at the Club Atomica now surfaced. His teeth were bared, his eyes pointed with black light.
“There is no war? What could you know of it? A drunken fool who wanders the hinterlands in search of pleasure! You have no idea of the enemies I confront!”
He gestured sharply with his pistol, signaling the colonel to come inside, then instructed him to sit on the stool next to Tomas and ordered the sergeant to secure him.
“This is my fault,” Carbonell said as the sergeant lashed the colonel’s legs to the stool. “I failed to take you seriously. I so enjoyed watching the birth of your little conspiracy. I wanted to see who else would be pulled in. When I learned you had left the hotel with the black woman, I realized I had miscalculated. My men were fools not to follow you, but I should have expected them to be fools. I should have taken you into custody earlier.”
The sergeant finished his work, and Carbonell told him to return to his post. Once the sergeant had vanished into the dark, he rolled down the door and, his back to the colonel, asked, “Where is Gammage?” As he turned from the door, Tomas groaned. “Ah!” said Carbonell, as if delighted by this sign of life. He lifted Tomas’s head. One of the old man’s teeth had pierced his lower lip; his eyes were swollen shut. Fresh blood oozed from a cut at his scalp line.
“He’s not doing so well,” Carbonell said in a tone of mock concern. “Without medical treatment, I doubt there’s hope.”
The colonel started to vent his outrage, and Carbonell back-handed him with the butt of his pistol. White light shattered behind the colonel’s eyes, and he slumped toward unconsciousness, his mind filled with questions—then he realized the questions were all the same. Carbonell was asking about Gammage. Groggy, he said something, an answer, maybe the truth… he wasn’t sure what he had said. The words reverberated in his head, mushy, sonorous, like someone very large talking in his sleep. But if he had spoken the truth, it was apparent that learning the truth was not Carbonell’s primary motivation. Blow after blow rained upon the colonel’s face and chest. Pain no longer occurred in separate incidences; it was a continuum, a dark passage configured with intervals of hellish brightness. At one point he felt a burning in his knee, and at another he believed that his cheek had been bitten. It was as if he were being mauled, not interrogated. Carbonell had become a dimly perceived giant, an immense otherness that shouted and surrounded him with pain. In his mind’s eye he saw a black mouth opening, rushing to swallow him, and when he emerged from darkness into a ruddy orange glow, he noticed that the metal door had been raised and Carbonell was standing beneath it, smoking a cigarette, talking—it seemed—to no one in particular.
“…will not tolerate a traitor,” he was saying. “That’s the big story, not Gammage’s…” He smiled. “Gammage’s archaeological finds. No, the story that will enthrall our people is that their hero has betrayed the nation. Betrayed them. What I have done will be buried in the shadow of that betrayal. But it is always best to avoid trouble, even if it is no great trouble. Tell me where Gammage is, and I will allow the woman to return to the United States.”
Margery was alive. Carbonell had her. Striking those two bits of information together produced a spark that nourished the colonel and restored a vague semblance of ambition and intent; but he could not build it to a blaze. Pain surged in his leg, and he understood he had been shot. Blood was leaking from the side of his knee.
“There was a time,” Carbonell said, “when I wanted to know you, Colonel Galpa. When I hoped to understand what sort of man it required to do what you have done. But it is clear to me that you no longer are that man. You have been made decadent and weak by constant adulation… constant indulgence. There is nothing left of you that I would wish to understand.” He grasped the handle of the door. “I am offering you a chance to be that man again. If you want to save the woman, tell me about Gammage. Otherwise I will give her to my men.” The door made a grating sound as he rolled it down behind him. “Take some time to think about it. But not too long, Colonel. Not too long.”
Alone, the colonel felt weaker and more clear-headed, as if Carbonell’s presence had been both a confusion and a strength. With effort, he lifted his head to Tomas and spoke his name. The old man gave no sign of having heard. The colonel’s left eye was filmed over with blood, making half the world red. He struggled with his bonds, but could not loosen them. The exertion left him dizzy. Something cooled his chin. Spittle, he realized. Then blackness. A curtain of it was drawn across the light, then opened again. They were going to die. This notion, poignant though it was, seemed nonsensical. A verity. He edited the thought. He was going to die, Margery was going to die, Tomas was going to die. Gammage, too… perhaps. There was nothing he could do about it. He lifted his head a second time, and, trying to ignore dizziness, the whining in his ears, the sense that his head contained a volume of liquid sloshing back and forth, he did his best to focus. After staring at Tomas for several seconds, subtracting his wobbliness and the general spin of things from what he saw, he became certain that the old man had stopped breathing. The blood seeping from his scalp had congealed. Weighted down by despair, the colonel let his head fall, and became without thought, his consciousness directed toward twinges, aches, fluctuations in pain. He resolved not to tell Carbonell anything. It was the only choice that remained. Not an easy resolution to keep, but Tomas obviously had done so. His eyelids drooped, and he thought he might be slipping away; then he felt a delicate pressure on his chest, a pressure unrelated to pain, and saw the indigo lizard clinging to his jacket, its orange eyes less than six inches away from his own.
“Go away,” said the colonel, not rejecting the lizard so much as embracing rejection, recognizing this to be his sustaining principle.
The lizard scooted closer. Comical in its wide-eyed fixation. Provoked by some deep systemic injury, the colonel’s body triggered a wave of numbness; his breath sobbed forth. The lizard stretched toward him, as if attracted by a new scent. The colonel did not know what he should do. Something, he felt, was required of him. The word “Magic” appeared on his mental screen. Orange letters outlined in pink and radiating a neonlike glow. Then a thought about Tomas dragged its shadow across the word, erasing it. He suddenly hated the lizard, perceived it as emblematic of his guilt. Unable to shout for fear of alerting Carbonell, he bugged his eyes, hoping to infuse his stare with sufficient venom to frighten it. The lizard inched closer yet, and the colonel pushed his face toward it, going nose-to-nose. This particularized view of its miniature saurian snout and pebbly skin defanged his hatred. He had a giddy apprehension of kinship, of life confronting life. What do you want? he thought. He made a mantra of the question, repeating it over and over. As suddenly as he had hated it, he now desired the lizard to be what Tomas had said it was: a singular event that was his alone to explore.
“Whatever…” he began.
He had been about to say something on the order of, “Whatever thing you want of me, whatever you must do, now is the time to let it be known,” more a foxhole utterance than a devout entreaty. Before he could finish the thought, however, as had happened that first night in Puerto Morada, a lightness pervaded his body and he was blinded by a flash of orange radiance, and he saw a pair of enormous eyes, the bridge of a huge nose. But this time, instead of being restored to a more typical perspective, his field of vision began to shift, changing so rapidly that he barely registered the details. He found himself moving at a jittery pace, heading toward a red column that angled up on the diagonal from a rough wooden surface. Then he was ascending the column; then he was turned briefly upside down; then he was atop a wide red wooden expanse, proceeding toward a tall pale man in his shirtsleeves, standing in front of a corrugated metal door, smoking a cigarette.