Do They Know I'm Running? (29 page)

Puchi turned back to Godo, eyes glazed with fury. “Vasco’s gonna have your balls for that.”

EL CHUSQUERO, AS HIS HENCHLINGS CALLED HIM—THE COMMANDER
—took great pride in his wooden English. “I ask only, you know, because it look so, yes? You …” He winked, flourishing his hand back and forth between Roque and Lupe. “And she …”

He had a meaty face with sleep-lidded eyes, an oft-broken nose that sloped back to a glistening forehead. His thinning black hair rustled in the downdraft from the ceiling fan. He wore a blue guayabera and khaki slacks, the crease as straight as a blade.

They were seated in his office, painted a stark white and located at the back of a traditional thick-walled house, his headquarters. The only furnishings in the room were his desk with its leather swivel chair, a huge Guatemalan flag hanging behind him on the wall and two wood chairs for Roque and Lupe.

He was the leader of the gunmen who’d come to their rescue out at the roadblock in the hills. Who he and those men were, exactly, remained somewhat foggy, though it seemed obvious by now they weren’t exactly Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

The desk was arrayed with a yard-long cord of rope with two close knots in it—the better to crush the windpipe of your victim, or so the Commander had explained during their leisurely afternoon together—plus a stretch of piano wire tied to two blocks of wood, a modest if chilling collection of knives, a bayonet honed to
razor sharpness, a machete similarly seasoned, a set of nunchuks, even a length of chain he called a
pirulo
. An overreliance on firearms was the mark of an amateur, he’d remarked at one point, wanting to be thought of as
muy matón
, a real killer, a point he’d driven home with an anecdote from his days with the Kaibil corps, the Guatemalan special forces. They gave each recruit a puppy at the beginning of basic training, he’d said, and that puppy was your sole responsibility until the end, when you were commanded to slit its throat. Some recruits wept, others vomited. “But I,” El Chusquero intoned with exuberant pride, “I not shame me.”

He’d been studying Lupe’s face with unsettling fascination throughout the afternoon. Clearly he thought Roque was the culprit—and, judging from the tone of his winking insinuation, approved.

“Honestly, it wasn’t me,” Roque told him, trying to sound more humble than moral. He sat tuning the impossible guitar. They’d been serenading the man for hours now, ever since he’d learned they were musical.

The Commander sat back in his chair, rocking pensively, contemplating Roque’s disavowal. Sunlight drilled the window ledge. The putrid, sickeningly sweet stench
of cáscaras de café
, the husks stripped away from coffee beans, thickened the stifling afternoon air, like a mix of rotting chocolate stirred with human shit.

Roque strummed the guitar to test the tuning, deciding it wouldn’t get better with more fussing. Distraction had become its own kind of focus as they’d run through song after song. Luckily the Commander’s tastes were unoriginal. He preferred many of the same
ranchera
ballads that Roque had played in San Pedro Lempa; what others he requested were easy enough to fake after hearing him or Lupe hum a bar or two. They tended to be about defiant pride in the face of feckless betrayal. Women came off badly in them—shrewish, cruel, duplicitous, needy—thus his fascination, Roque supposed, with Lupe’s face. Meanwhile
she was growing hoarse from the nonstop performance and even with the additional requests the repertoire was tediously thin. Roque had played some songs a dozen times. But there was no thought of stopping.

“This is your woman, do not tell me no.” The Commander eyed Roque tauntingly. “I can see. I have eyes. More—I have ears. You play, she sings, like
lovers.”
It came out with a baiting smile, an insult wrapped in a dare.

Roque was aware that, while playing, he’d thoughtlessly stolen a glance now and then at Lupe as she’d lifted her face, eyes closed, concentrating on the lyrics and her pitch. Her voice, as always, kindled something inside him and perhaps that had come out in his playing, though he’d only tried to match what he’d heard as she sang, like any good accompanist. As time had passed and the repetitions multiplied he felt he’d become increasingly attuned to the nuances of her phrasing. Now all that seemed a hopeless mistake.

Lupe broke in.—
Music is intimate by its nature
, she said. Roque had learned over the past two hours that she had an awkwardly functional if limited command of English that permitted her to pluck out certain meaningful words—like “lovers.” She also had a knack for reading faces, gestures, tone of voice.—
A song can make anyone seem amorous, even two strangers, if it is done properly
.

El Chusquero squirmed. To keep from having to show Lupe any attention whatsoever and to continue hacking away at his English, he spoke to Roque: “Strangers? No. Not possible. You think I’m stupid—I no have eyes?”

For some reason, Lupe kept at it.—
I can see you too are a romantic
.

She was either daringly brilliant, Roque thought, or fiercely stupid. The Commander trained his gaze on her. The silence felt like a shroud.

—
I think you’re being generous
, she continued.—
Too generous
.

Seriously. We barely know each other
. She flicked her hand back and forth, herself, Roque.—
It’s the songs. The songs bring the feeling out of me, out of him. Out of you
.

Rather than respond, El Chusquero turned his attention to the laptop resting on his desk among the weapons. He’d shown them a website earlier, explaining it to them, feeling it would prove instructive. He’d kept the screen averted since then but now he tapped the space bar so the screen saver melted away, revealing the background slide show, then glanced up at his two visitors with a truculent smile.

The website belonged to an incarcerated colonel named Otilio Rubén Villagrán Pozuelos, under whom the Commander said he had served in Petén during the civil war. The reasons for Colonel Villagrán’s imprisonment were left vague, though it was clear the dutiful El Chusquero considered them a travesty. That didn’t keep the colonel from living in relative opulence—in his earlier tutorial, the Commander had shown them pictures of his old superior’s prison quarters posted on the site: a spacious and freshly painted room with a refrigerator, an entertainment center with cable TV and a stereo, a brass bed, elegantly appointed bookshelves, rugs on the floor, even a few tasteful watercolors adorning the walls. But for the lack of natural light, it almost seemed more a condo than a cell.

The slide show now in progress, however, was horrific. The pictures had been taken with cell phones during a riot inside the prison: one group of
cholos
cowing another within one of the prison sectors, wielding machetes and dart guns called
chimbas;
a prisoner trying to escape through a hole in the wall; a
cholo
grabbing the would-be escapee by the hair, raising a machete to hack at his neck. In the background, torchlight reflected the glimmer of row after row of empty mayonnaise jars, and Roque remembered Happy’s letter, recalled his story of nightlong humiliation in La Esperanza, the Salvadoran prison. Roque’s imaginings of that night could not come close to what
he was now obliged to watch. Lupe turned away; this was permitted since, after all, she was merely a woman.

El Chusquero, meaningfully turning to Spanish:—
You see the fate of our enemies
.

—
I am not your enemy
, she said.

—
You see what happens to those who mock us
.

—
I would never
—

—
Don’t contradict me!

Lupe sagely dropped her glance to the floor. A tremor fluttered along the hollow of her throat.—
I’m sorry, El Chusquero
.

Responding to an impulse from God knew where, Roque began playing softly the opening refrain of “Canción de Cuna”—Song of the Cradle—the Cuban lullaby he used to practice endlessly when he first began playing guitar. It drove Godo crazy, the constant repetition, but then gradually he always calmed down, often despite himself, succumbing to the insidious languor of the melody.

Eyes still trained on Lupe, El Chusquero reached down to a lower desk drawer and took out a small glass cage. At first Roque could not make out what lay inside, except for a quivering shudder of small black forms, two dozen or so, swarming across mounded beds of sand, in the midst of which lay a rubbery lump of hairy flesh, prey of some kind. Gradually he recognized the armored bodies, the glossy pincers, the uniquely coiled tails.

He stopped playing.

El Chusquero, employing Spanish again, so Lupe could not pretend to misunderstand:—
Let us call this the lovers’ test. These, you may or may not know, are a particular kind of Guatemalan scorpion. They’re not as deadly as those one encounters farther north but the sting is still quite painful, especially if there is more than one. Right now they are feeding on a tarantula we found out in the firewood. But they can always be tempted to eat whatever we give them
. He gingerly lifted the cage’s glass lid.—
So here is the test: Which one of you is willing to put a hand inside? You cannot both refuse
. He
stared at her bruised face.—
One must suffer so the other does not. Such is love, no?

For some reason, Roque suddenly became acutely aware of the groaning rumble of flatbed trucks loaded high with sugarcane laboring through the village’s modest
zona urbana
, that and the sulfurous smell of the
cáscaras de café
. His tongue and throat had turned stone dry. Still, after a labored swallow:—
Why are you doing this?

Before the man could answer, Lupe jumped to her feet, approached the desk and reached out with her left hand.—
You are mistaken about us, El Chusquero. I don’t know why you won’t believe me. But if one of us must be the victim, let it be me. A guitarist must look after his hands, no? And we may well need to play and sing again as we make our way north, to earn a little money here and there
.

Her face was a mask of stoic indifference. Roque realized she’d understood instinctively what he hadn’t, there was no way to negotiate out of this. He sat gazing at her, feeling unmanned. El Chusquero eyed her too, but with an almost merry suspicion, while the chittering mass of black bodies continued boiling over one another in their glassed-in world.

Suddenly the Commander reached out, snagged her wrist—not roughly, more like the father of a reticent bride.—
And what else, for the sake of your lover’s hands, would you be willing to do for money?

For what felt like an eternity neither of them moved, eyes locked, her breathing feathery from terror, his smile gradually draining away. Finally he tossed her hand aside and slammed the glass lid shut.—
You think I’m a sadist, a fool. That tells me who you are. What kind of woman you are. You know nothing of me, what I think, what I feel. Sit the fuck down
.

Lupe drifted back to her chair, a terrified sigh trembling up from her belly as she clasped her hands in her lap. The Commander watched, saying nothing. Finally, he turned to Roque.
—
Play something, asshole. And not that weepy little number you were fucking around with before
.

Roque formed his left hand around the guitar neck, searching out an intro chord, but nothing came. Every tune that entered his mind seemed charged with some secret insult. Thankfully, he was spared a decision as a knock came softly at the door. One of the henchlings peeked in, a member of the crew of riflemen from the encounter on the road, a young Mayan named Chepito.—
El Chusquero, a moment, please
. He was small and coiled tight, dressed in a bleached-out work shirt and jeans, a pistol tucked in his waistband.

The Commander took one last look at Lupe, then without comment left the room, closing the door to the hallway behind him.

Roque and Lupe turned to each other as though unsure the other was really there. Before he could say anything, she lifted a finger to her lips, darting her eyes toward the door. Always the wise one, he thought, doubly ashamed. Unable to help himself, he glanced at the scrum of small black scorpions one last time, imagining her hand in there, swarmed, stung, piped with venom. For his sake.

The Commander burst back into the room, a cell phone pressed to his ear. Gesturing curtly, he ordered Lupe and Roque out. Wasting no time, they obeyed.

They had known that while the Commander sat with them, indulging his taste for
rancheras
, his men had been busy trying to determine who the four strangers they’d saved really were. For fear of the consequences if they were discovered holding anything back, Roque had explained their arrangement—the payment to Lonely and his network of smugglers, all aligned with Mara Salvatrucha. El Chusquero had responded that the gunmen at the roadblock had been members
of the salvatruchos’
main rival, Mara Dieciocho. Someone had tipped off the
pistoleros
about the border crossing and they’d hoped to kidnap the four of them, kill them in
some strikingly memorable way, post the video on the Web and discredit their enemies’ operation, show that Lonely and the
salvatruchos
could protect no one, the better to move in, claim their share of the lucrative racket of moving people and product north. But none of this was entirely clear. So much of what the Commander said came larded with a caustic if dull-witted irony, as though anything he actually chose to tell you was in essence a kind of joke. And he’d said nothing about how his own men happened to come along at just the right time, nor about any
mara
affiliation of his own. Roque suspected the man had no such ties except to the incarcerated Colonel Villagrán, which brought to mind the hideous prison-riot photos. You see the fate of our enemies. But who, exactly, were those enemies? Who wasn’t?