Luis spoke to the officer in Spanish. The officer looked at the two North Americans in the Volkswagen behind. Then he waved both cars past.
As they accelerated away, Luis passed the wallet to Lyons. One plastic divider held Lieutenant Garcia's army identification. A second held an embossed business card. The engraved lettering said only:
"UNO,'s.a."
"That means," Luis told him. "UNO, Incorporated."
"This is bad news. His people are everywhere."
Luis nodded. "Everywhere."
8
Following the Pan American Highway, they drove into the high central plateau of Guatemala. A starlit landscape of shadowy mountains and black stands of forest extended into the distance. Few vehicles traveled the highway. Opening his window, Lyons put his face into the windrush. The night smelled of pines and dust and wood fires. He thought of the High Sierras of California.
They passed villages bright with lights, electric incandescence creating islands of whitewashed houses, tiled roofs, and dusty rock-paved streets. Other times, as they rounded curves, their headlights revealed fields of tangled dry cornstalks and fire-blackened adobe walls.
"What happened at these farms?" Lyons asked Luis.
"The EGP. El Ejercito Guerilla de los Pobres. The Guerilla Army of the Poor. They needed money for the revolution. They demanded taxes. But the farmers are without money. They have only corn and beans. When the farmers would not pay the war taxes, the guerillas took men from every family and killed them.
"When guerillas came again and demanded taxes, the people paid the few coins they had. I knew one woman, an Indian woman. The EGP killed her father and her husband, so she paid the tax to stop them killing her son.
"It was not guerillas she paid. They were agents of the desconocidos. The unknown men. A gang of the desconocidoscame, raped her, then hacked her to death with machetes. They carved a hammer and sickle on her face as a warning to the other Communists.
"It happened everywhere. There are villages of widows and orphans. The new president stopped it. He gave rifles to the men. Now, when the guerillas or the desconocidoscome, they die.
"But not until all the fascists die," Luis insisted, "will there be peace. We must kill them all. When the new president came, I believed all would be good. But the war continues. The rich still have their armies of desconocidos. The EGP hides in the mountains. Unomundo still lives"
Luis's voice drifted away as he stared at the highway, his face lit green from the dashboard lights. Mechanically he steered through the curves, maintaining an even speed. Lyons sat in thought. He had read of the terrorism in the remote villages, but the North American newspapers always described the attacks as "Army atrocities." He had read endless diatribes against the government, but Lyons had never really read the truth.
After a minute, Luis spoke of his own sorrow.
"I managed a trucker's cooperative. Many trucks, many drivers. Garages and gasoline stations. But we would not work for Unomundo. So his killers came for me. I was not there. I escaped death. But my wife and baby did not. With machetes"
Luis went silent. He drove by reflex, his mind trapped in a numbing nightmare. Miles later, he suddenly said: "Now I fight. Why do you fight?"
After what Luis had told him, what could Lyons say? Had he suffered like Luis? Or like Dr. Orozco? Lyons had not lost his family to psychopathic monsters. True, years before, Mafia hoods had beaten and whipped him for a week, but within a few months he had healed. The experience had scarred him, hardened his character, but he had suffered no trauma.
As the landscape of fields and mountains drifted past, Lyons reconsidered his life. Why did he fight? Memories of his years as a police officer in Los Angeles came in a rush: the scenes of felons' mindless cruelty to their victims; the elderly broken for a snatched dollar; the bank clerks with their lives draining through wounds; the workers crippled or murdered for their paycheck; the children tortured and strangled to satisfy lust; the wide-eyed, slashed corpses of women teenagers, mothers, grandmothers raped and then murdered, sometimes murdered then raped, and dumped like trash.
He thought of the parole boards that considered the families of victims annoying obstacles to the swift release of convicts. He recalled the courts that gave child-rapists five trials to perfect their defense. And the psychiatrists who excused any atrocity as a product of society's errors. And the Utopians who petitioned the government to disarm society, to leave good people defenseless against the predators. And the industries glamorizing the drug gangs and criminals.
These things explained his rages, his passion for justice. But why did he fight?
Lyons had many excuses not to fight. As a taxpayer, he paid others to fight police, teenage army recruits, air force pilots. As a robust male, no one personally threatened him. As a worker with skills and income, he could hire security guards to protect his home and office. As a man of some intelligence, he could easily rationalize noninvolvement. Why did he fight?
"Because I can. I'm strong, I'm fast, I get stupid when I'm angry, then I do brave things. I don't think about death except in the middle of the night. That's why." His explanation had come after a long pause.
"You have a wife? Children?" Luis asked.
"She divorced me. Couldn't take going to other policemen's funerals and waiting for mine. Couldn't take me twitching at night when I couldn't forget what I'd seen. Isn't easy for a woman to be married to a policeman."
"Why do you fight here?"
"Unomundo killed Federal agents in the United States. I wish my government had not waited for them to die. If we had come years ago, maybe they'd still be alive. Maybe your family would still be alive. There's a hundred places I wish I'd gone to fight when I had the chance. North America. South America. Here. Some nights I think of what I could have done and didn't and I'm ashamed."
Luis laughed. "You talk like a missionary."
"Yeah, yeah," Lyons agreed, laughing with the Guatemalan. "But they bring the Word. I bring the Wrath."
They came to a crossroads and took another highway. The hours passed. Cornfields and gardens became vertical hillsides. Winding upward through ravines, switching back every few hundred yards, the narrow road cut through a forest.
At many of the curves, their headlights revealed clusters of small crosses. Names marked the crosses. Rotting flowers indicated frequent visits by mourners. Beyond the guardrails, the wooded mountainside dropped away to darkness.
"Why the graves there?" Lyons asked.
"Not graves. Shrines. That is where they died, so their families believe that is where their spirits wander."
"EGP? The Nazis?"
"No. Buses. Cars."
The switchbacks and curves continued, the highway zigzagging ever higher. Mist swirled in the headlight beams.
Lyons awoke to see a half moon over a town, the whitewashed walls a bluish white against the night. He thought he dreamed. The image of the town surrounded by the mountains and forest seemed impossible, unreal. Then the road angled down a ridge, and they left the view behind. Lyons looked at his watch. Almost dawn.
"Where are we?"
"In the Sierra de Chuacus."
"Great. Where's that?"
"Perhaps another hour to Azatlan."
In the back seat, Senora Garcia slept. Lyons saw the headlights of the Volkswagen a few hundred yards behind them. He keyed his hand-radio.
"How are you two holding up?"
"This is the scenic route," Gadgets bantered, "no doubt about it. But the government didn't send us here to shoot picture postcards."
"The man says another hour to the town."
"Lights! Lights behind me, coming up fast!"