A Flag for Sunrise (2 page)

“Where is the nun?” the lieutenant asked with distaste. “The earnest nun?”

“Gone to bed, I would suppose,” Father Egan said cheerily. God save us, he thought. We’re being arrested.

“No no,” Campos said. “Because, see, her light is on. She’s staying awake. And who knows what she’s thinking?” The lieutenant had raised his voice over the distant music but from Sister Justin Feeney’s room there was no sound or stirring. Campos belched sadly and turned his attention back to the priest.

“Come with me,” he said in his policeman’s voice. “We’re going.”

“It’s so late,” the priest said. “Does it have to be now?” He was aware of the lieutenant’s insane intelligent eyes smoldering in the moonlight.

Campos laid a hand on his arm.

“Come!”

“Lieutenant,” Egan said, “please. A moment.” He went inside to get his stole and breviary, in case there might be some emergency.

They went down the steps to the beach in silence. Campos stood by the side of his jeep and held the door open for the priest.

The road, such as it was, followed the packed sand of the beach, descending now and then into a sea-flooded hollow that splashed phosphorescence as they forded it. Egan sat with the stole in his
teeth, the missal between his legs, holding fast to the sidebar of the jeep. The lieutenant drove as fast as the vehicle would move; now and then he muttered something in a low voice which the priest could not understand.

He did not brake for animals. If a cow, transfixed in the headlights, was too slow in heaving its flyblown bulk from the roadway, the lieutenant would unhesitatingly ram it bellowing into a ditch, throw the jeep into reverse and charge forward.

In twenty minutes or so they came to the peninsula on which the lieutenant maintained his residence. In a country of frenetically gregarious people, Lieutenant Campos lived alone, without family or servants. The turnoff that led to his compound was barred by a chain link fence, its gate secured with a padlock. Campos kept his jeep motor running as he opened it; when they were inside he got out again and locked it behind them.

Breathing deeply, Father Egan followed Campos from the jeep and stood by while he unlocked his front door. The lieutenant used more locks than one was used to seeing along the coast.

Egan went in first; the presence of Campos, entering behind him in the darkness, touched the priest with terror.

The lieutenant had electric light and his bungalow was very neat. There was a picture of the President of the Republic on one wall—the President appearing as the apotheosis of the nation-state, his full cheeks pink with retouching, his uniform inked in pastels, his peculiar ears unobserved—the whole swathed in the furled colors of Tecan. Beside it was a framed copy of the lieutenant’s commission, then a framed shot of a younger—perhaps a more reasonable—Lieutenant Campos, posing with his buddies at Guardia school.

Below the pictures were two bookcases. One held bound logs and law books; the shelves of the other were stacked with American detective magazines arranged by name.
True, Startling, Inside, Master
and
Underground Detective
—Egan thought there must be a thousand magazines in the stacks. On the other wall was a picture of John Kennedy, below it was what appeared to be an electric freezer and next to that the only glassed window between Puerto Alvarado and the frontier, overlooking the moonlit ocean. In an alcove near it was the Guardia’s Hallstadt radio transmitter. The circuit was open, now and then picking up a Caribbean voice.

“… up in Belize, mon.”

“… well, you know … dat de British port, mon … dey goin’ to come down haard …”

Egan turned toward his host and saw that the lieutenant had produced a bottle of Flor de Cana and was offering him a drink. He accepted with gratitude but the rum did little for him. Campos sat down in a wicker chair by the transmitter and asked him in strained English if he required another.

“Yes, please,” Father Egan said, ashamed.

Campos poured it slowly and as he proffered it, Egan had the sense that he might suddenly snatch it away again to torment him. Just as he was imagining the dreadful smile that might appear on Campos’ face if he did in fact snatch the glass away—the smile appeared.

Egan polished off his rum.

“You …” the lieutenant asked, “you are a queer? A
maricón
?”

Egan was jolted stone sober. He stared at the lieutenant in outrage. He had been in the country for ten years and never—never had anyone, not even a drunken Baptist—addressed him in that manner.

Yet the horrible word brought to his recollection a desperate sodden night. He had been in town, in Alvarado, and he had gotten tight. Something had happened in the bar of the Gran Atlántico hotel; he remembered the lights of the bar and the lights of the street outside—a boy in a death’s-head motorcycle cap, a European-looking boy with greasy long hair falling to his shoulders and the boy shouting at him scornfully—
Maricón! Eres maricón!

Was it memory? Had such a thing happened? Egan was not clear.

“Lieutenant,” he asked humbly, “why are you speaking to me like that?”

“I know what I know,” Campos said. “I know you’re good. You’re O.K. I want to confess to you.”

Father Egan tried to clear his head.

“Now, Lieutenant.… Is this the time? When you’ve been drinking?” He attempted a sympathetic chuckle. “I think you should reflect a little.”

Lieutenant Campos raised his hand in a slow gesture that indicated the frivolousness of further conversation.

“No,” he said. “I want to confess to you. It will be under the seal.”

“I can’t …” Father Egan began. He had been going to tell the
lieutenant that he could not give absolution to a man who was drunk. Contrition and resolve would be questionable. He took another drink.

Lieutenant Campos was standing up; he was staring at Egan with a dreadful intensity. He walked to the red freezer by the window and lifted its top door open. With a slight raising of his chin, he signaled Father Egan to draw near. The priest advanced slowly, his eyes fixed on Campos’ face. The lieutenant looked down into the open freezer with an expression of stoic grief.

Fearfully, Egan followed the lieutenant’s gaze and saw that the freezer contained an unplucked turkey and a great many bottles of Germania beer. Beneath them was a bolt of green cloth. Puzzled, he turned to Campos but the lieutenant had closed his eyes and was biting his lip, as though to control his emotions. Egan reached down, moved a few of the bottles of frozen beer and his eye fell on the maple-leaf flag of Canada. Father Egan was a native of Windsor, Ontario, and for the briefest moment he entertained the idea that Lieutenant Campos had devised some drunken ceremony of appreciation for him, some naïve filial gesture of esteem that might one day be the basis of a pleasant story. He glanced at the lieutenant and was confronted with the extreme unlikeliness of so innocent a notion.

He scanned the surface contents of the chest, amorphous cubes of ice, the enormous turkey, the bottles of beer with their peeling labels, and saw at last—in one corner, partially concealed by ice—a human foot. Looking more closely, he saw that it curved downward from a turned ankle on which there was a small cut gone black. The outer side of the foot was visible, its callused edge pressed against the top of a South American sandal. The thong of the sandal divided the darkly veined front of the foot; caught between two of the toes was a tiny cotton pompon of bright red. Father Egan looked down at the foot and understood only its beautiful symmetry, its functional wholeness, the sublime engineering that had appended its five longish toes. The top of it, he saw, was suntanned.

Then his knees buckled under him. As he reached out to steady himself, his hand clawed across the ice cubes and revealed a moist matting of yellow hair, then a tanned forehead. Then below, the freckled bridge of a nose and an eye—blue with a foliate iris—the whites gone dark, an eye so dull, so dead with sheer animal death that Egan received the sight of it as a spiritual shock.

He staggered back from the ice chest.

“Oh my God,” he said. He reeled to the wall and leaned under the picture of the President, trembling with disgust and fear.

A sad smile had appeared on the lieutenant’s face. He turned to Egan and the smile broadened until his features quivered to contain it. Looking back at him, Egan had the sense that he was in the presence of a man who, though obviously mad, understood him thoroughly.

“Father,” the lieutenant said, “do your duty. You have to be cool and brave. You have to have mercy.” He moved closer to Egan. “The power of Christ commands.”

Father Egan realized that he had no idea what the power of Christ was. Christ, it seemed to him, had no more power than he himself did and he had hardly the power to stand up. Panic rose in him like a sudden fever and he fought for his reason.

“What happened?” he heard himself ask.

Lieutenant Campos raised his eyes, yielding the question to heaven. Egan made himself go to the freezer. With a gentleness that he realized was only a studied part of his priestcraft, he moved some of the ice and beer from over the corpse.

It was a young blond girl in khaki shorts and a Boy Scout shirt with the maple-leaf flag sewn to the back of it. Jackknifed into the chest.

Egan’s revulsion was tempered by sorrow. He supposed she had been dead for a long time. Far from the lakes, he thought, trying to master his trembling, the tamaracks, the elm-lined streets.

“How did she die, Lieutenant?”

“I’ll tell you that,” the lieutenant said. “You’ll find out how.” He poured himself another glass of rum and extended the bottle toward Egan.

“No, thank you,” the priest said.

He saw his stole and breviary on a bookcase where he had set them and absently picked them up, and sat down in the rocking chair, clasping his forehead.

“Who was she?”

“She was a hippie,” Lieutenant Campos said solemnly. “Drugs. Whoring.”

You swine, Father Egan thought.

“But I mean her name, Lieutenant. Didn’t she have a passport? Surely you realize that she has a family?”

Campos went to his desk beside the transmitter, sat down at it and began to write. When he was done, he handed Egan a yellow message form with block letters on it.

JANET FOGARTY ALBERTA
, the paper read.

The lieutenant pronounced the words with difficulty.

Egan fingered the edges of his stole. From her name the girl might well be Catholic. Yet first, he thought, glancing again at Campos, it would be necessary to minister to the living. He kissed the stole and put it around his neck.

“All right then, Lieutenant. Make your confession.”

To his embarrassment, Lieutenant Campos came and knelt on the floor at his feet. The lieutenant crossed himself and clasped his heavy hands prayerfully. Egan looked away.

“She was a hippie,” Lieutenant Campos declared, his hands clasped.

“I see,” Egan said in a quavering voice. The dreadful question lay squarely before him. Asking it, he was sure, would eventually cost him his life.

“Did you kill her?”

“No!” Campos shouted, startling the priest utterly. He climbed from his knees, brushed them off and began to pace the floor of his office.

“She was spearing fish, understand? That’s not allowed. Everyone knows it’s not allowed.”

“Of course,” Father Egan said.

“Listen,” the lieutenant said, setting his chair beside Egan’s, “listen to this! She hid the spear gun under the dock at Playa Tate. The mayor there told us. We went out and we saw her. She had the spear.”

“Yes,” the priest said.

“We called her to come in. She pretended to be afraid. She teased us like a little whore. We said O.K., if she’s going to act like that we’ll tease her back a little.”

Egan could see the scene quite clearly—the frightened girl in the water trying to ease over the inshore coral to the narrow shelf of sandy bottom, the drunken Guardia along the beach with their M-16’s unslung, Campos standing on the rotting pier, laughing at her.

“And she drowned?”

“She died,” Campos said vaguely.

“I see.”

“So I took command,” the lieutenant said. “It was my responsibility. I dismissed them. You see—I dressed her. These little clothes, they’re all she ever wore. I preserved her for ceremony.”

“What ceremony?” No ceremony else, he thought. Her death was doubtful.

Campos only laughed quietly, tears coming to his eyes.

“How long ago was this?” Egan asked, feeling that he had wasted a question.

“The winter.”

“It was certainly wrong of you,” Egan said, “to keep her here like this. Her family has no knowledge of her, so think how they must feel. As a policeman and especially as a social agent, you should reflect on the violation of your responsibilities involved.”

He looked into the warning that was composing itself in Campos’ eyes.

“Don’t believe,” the lieutenant said, “it was easy for me to have her here. It was hard. Listen—it was very hard to have her in there all the time.”

Egan found himself listening to the steady hum of Campos’ generator.

“Why did you keep her, then?” He felt that it was important to put the question correctly, reluctant though he was to impute to Lieutenant Campos any further suggestion of weakness or dereliction. “Was it loneliness?”

The delicacy of the priest’s question was lost on Campos. His features went cold.

“What do you know about it?”

Egan only nodded.

“When I ask you a question, Father, I require you to answer it. What do you know about it?”

While Father Egan was reflecting on what he knew about loneliness he saw Campos stagger toward him.

“You—you
maricón
, you know nothing about it! You
maricón!
How can you question me?”

“You’ve asked me to hear your confession,” Egan said mildly. “It’s necessary that I ask questions.”

“Confession is right,” Campos said. “It’s under the seal, understand? That means you keep your mouth shut. You keep it shut, understand me?”