Life During Wartime (24 page)

‘I suppose so.’

‘So what’s your real reason?’

Mingolla saw that he would have to do something soon about Leon’s suspicious nature, but he felt too loose and composed to want to bother with it now. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, coming to his feet.

They set off toward Alvina’s, and Mingolla wondered if the place
had
grown on him, though more likely it was the drug that caused the Barrio to appear … not beautiful, exactly, but painterly. Everywhere were tableaux that had the inner radiance and important stillness he associated with the Old Masters. There, three men roughing up a woman, who was clawing, kicking, and
all of them looking up as the roof above opened to admit a shaft of white sunlight that played over them, freezing and transfiguring the action. And there, almost lost in the shadow of a thatched lean-to, an old hag straight out of Goya, her ravaged face framed by a black shawl, staring with perplexed astonishment at a feather in her hand. And the whole of the place with its black divisions, its smoky orange segments of misery, leaping flames, and silhouetted imps, was a collection of pre-Renaissance triptyches. He could be like the guy who painted murals in the bombed villages, he could stay here forever and ensure immortality by memorializing a life of terror and deprivation. … A change in the noise, a wave of louder and more agitated noise rolling toward them, brought him alert. In the distance he saw a line of masked guards with whips and rifles driving a mob ahead of them.

‘This way!’ Leon grabbed his arm, yanking Mingolla toward the wall of houses. ‘We’ll be safe in there.’

Mingolla had a bad feeling. ‘Why there?’

‘They’re not hunting anybody … it’s just a sweep.’ Leon pulled at him. ‘They always do it about this time; they never check the houses.’

People were running in every direction, shouting, screaming, bright spears of sound that shattered at their peak, and Mingolla was slammed into a beam by someone’s shoulder. Diseased flowers swirling, eddying around him, all the same kind, with patterns of black mouths and empty eyes and mottled brown petals like skin, a wilted vaseful of them washing down a drain. Forked twig hand clutching his arm, wrinkled mouth saying, Please, please, and being swept away. He fought toward Leon, but was thrown off course by the tidal flow of the mob. The guards were closing, he could see the patterns of bloody muscle on their masks, hear their whips cracking, and shouts of pain were mixed in now with those of panic. A little boy clung to his leg with the desperation of a small animal hanging onto a branch in a gale, but was scraped off as Mingolla beat a path through a clot of people stopping up the flow. The screams fed into the smoky light, making it pulse, making the flames leap higher in the oil drums, and Mingolla had the urge to lose control, to begin cutting with his knife and screaming himself. He wound up beside the door
Leon had entered, wedged it open, and a teenage boy slipped past him into the dimly lit room … slipped past and cried out as a knife flashed across his neck. Leon’s startled face peering out Mingolla pushed inside and backhanded Leon to the floor, and Leon rolled up into a crouch, the knife poised. But he faltered, his expression growing puzzled, then woeful under Mingolla’s assault of guilt and friendship betrayed. The knife dropped from his hand.

Mingolla bolted the door, kneeled beside the boy, and checked for a pulse; his fingers came back dyed with red. Leon had slumped against the rear wall and was weeping, his face buried in his hands. In the corner beside him, ringed by guttering candles, wrapped in blankets as gray as her skin, an old woman was trembling, staring fearfully at Mingolla. He snatched one of her blankets and used it to cover the dead boy. He picked up Leon’s kinfe, squatted next to him. ‘Who are you working for?’ he asked. Leon just sobbed, and Mingolla jabbed his leg with the knife, repeating the question.

‘Nobody, nobody.’ Leon’s Adam’s apple bobbed, his voice broke. ‘I wanted the rest of the drugs.’

Leon’s treachery brought home to Mingolla the full extent of his foolhardiness. The manchild strolling around Hell, contemplating its aesthetic, playing ineffectual good Samaritan. He was damned lucky to be alive. No more
bullshit
, he thought. He’d finish his business and get out. Leon’s tears glistened, he sobbed uncontrollably, and Mingolla intensified his assault, slowly elevating Leon’s guilt to a suicidal pitch. He held the knife to the side of Leon’s neck.

‘No, please … God, no!’ The old woman crawled toward him, dragging a train of blankets. ‘I’ll die, I’ll die!’ Her voice articulated and decrepit, like a grating pain, like broken ribs grinding together. Her face a gray death mask with hairy moles, lumped cheekbones. Her death an accomplice after the fact to the dead thing of her life. Mingolla looked away from her, repelled, ready to cut Leon, full of cold judgment.

‘It’s not his fault,’ whined the old woman. ‘He’s not responsible.’

Mingolla had an answer for that, courtesy of Philosophy 101,
but withheld it. ‘Whose fault is it, then?’ he asked, pointing at the boy with the knife.

‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what he’s …’ A tear the size of a pearl leaked from one of her rheumy dark eyes. ‘The things they made him do, the awful things … but he fought back. Ten years in the jungles. Ten years living like an animal, fighting all the time. You don’t know.’

Leon’s sobs racked his chest.

‘Who are you?’ Mingolla asked.

‘He’s my son … my son.’

‘Did you know he was going to do this?’

She didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, and you’d have done the same. All those drugs, so much money. You’re no different from us.’

‘No,’ said Mingolla, pointing again to the boy. ‘I wouldn’t have done this.’

‘Fool,’ said the old woman, and the screams and shouts from without, receding but still a measure of chaos, seemed to be echoing the word. ‘What do you know? Nothing, you know nothing. Leon … Oh, God! When he was seventeen, just married, the soldiers came to our village. They took all the young men and armed them with rifles and drove them in a truck to the next village, where the people were suing a big landowner. A real villain. And the soldiers ordered the young men to kill all the young women of that village. They had no choice. If they hadn’t obeyed, the soldiers would have killed their women.’ She looked sadly at the gray walls as if they were explanations, reasons. ‘You know nothing.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Leon. ‘God, oh God, forgive me!’

‘I know he tried to kill me,’ said Mingolla. ‘I don’t care what made him this way.’

‘Why should I bother?’ Leon’s mother gazed at the ceiling, her hands upheld in supplication. ‘Let him take my son, let me starve. Why should I live any longer?’ She turned a look of pure hatred on Mingolla. ‘Go ahead!’ she shrilled. ‘Kill him! See’ – she pointed a knobbly finger at Leon – ‘he doesn’t care, either. What’s it matter, life or death. In this place it’s the same.’ She screeched at him. ‘I hope you live forever in this godforsaken hole! I hope life eats you away an inch at a time.’ She tore at her blouse,
ripping away buttons, baring the empty sacks of her breasts. ‘Kill me first! Come on, you devil! Kill
me!
Me!’ And when he did nothing, she tried to pull his hand away from Leon’s neck, to drive the knife into her chest. Her eyes as full of bright mad life as a bird’s, her claw fingers unnaturally strong. Breath whistling in her throat. He shoved her down, and she lay panting, teeth bared, an old gray bitch-wolf gone into fear, gone beyond it into a kind of exultation, lusting for death. He didn’t feel merciful toward her; mercy would have been inappropriate. She neither wanted nor needed it. He put her to sleep to rid himself of an annoyance. Withholding judgment on Leon, he settled in the far corner among the blankets … they even smelled gray.

To fend off weariness he did more frost. He rejected the idea of returning to Alvina’s. There he would be drawn to listen to Hermeto’s reminiscences, feel renewed appreciation for Alvina, and that would only weaken him. He would wait here until midnight and then take care of de Zedeguí. Take care of him in a straightforward fashion. No diversions, no tricks. He wanted a gunfight, a test of strength. Subtlety was not his forte, and he would be prone to bouts of foolhardiness until he gained more experience; he needed to reassure himself of the efficacy of brute force. A certain lack of prudence was corollary to the wielding of power, he thought; a credential of boldness. And if this attitude reflected a diminished concern for his survival, so be it: such a diminished concern would be an asset to a killer, for if one valued one’s own life too highly, such a valuation would be difficult to dismiss in regard to other lives.

Leon’s weeping began to perturb him, and he let him join his mother in sleep. He pulled out de Zedeguí’s photograph, inspected it for clues. But that bland professorial face gave nothing away, unless its unreadability was itself a clue to subtlety. He hoped that was the case, that their struggle would be one of strength against subtlety: that would be the best proving ground of all. He dipped up more frost with the edge of the photograph. The drug was a solid form in his head, a frozen vein of electricity that soon began to prevent any thought aside from a perception of its own mineral joy. Mingolla’s nasal membranes burned, his heart raced, and he sat unmoving. He gazed at a spot on the
wall, his resolve building into anger, like a warrior envisioning the coming battle, living it in advance, yet for the moment secure amid hearth and home, with his dogs sleeping at his feet.

It began to rain shortly before six o’clock, a hard downpour that drummed like bullets on the iron roof, drowning out every other noise. All over the Barrio, sections of the roof were being lifted, allowing tracers of rain to slant through the orange gloom, the separate drops fiery and distinct. People cast off their rags and danced, their mouths open, their torsos growing slick and shiny, and others caught the water in buckets, and others yet dropped to their knees, their hands upheld to heaven. Fires hissed and burned low. Smoke fumed, and a damp chill infiltrated the air. There was a general lightening of mood, a carnival frenzy, and, taking advantage of it, Mingolla strolled up to the oil drum fire at the comer of de Zedeguí’s house and joined three old men who had gathered around it, convincing them that his presence was expected and welcome; out of the corner of his eye, he studied the four guards flanking de Zedeguí’s door. He blocked, becoming invisible to the uncommon senses of the man he intended to kill, and thought how best to deal with the guards.

The old men were roasting snakes that had been pierced by lengths of wire; the snakes were crisp and blackened, their eyes shattered opaque crystals, their jaws leaking thin smoke, and underlit by the fire, the men’s faces were made into cadaverous masks of shadow and glowing skin. They offered Mingolla a portion of the meat, but he suggested instead that they share their bounty with the guards. This struck the three as a marvelous idea. Why hadn’t they thought of it themselves? They extended whispered invitations, and de Zedeguí’s guards hurried over. When the guards slumped to the ground, put to sleep by Mingolla’s exertions, the old men expressed consternation, worrying that the meat might be tainted; but Mingolla reassured them and urged them to drag the guards off behind a pile of rubble, where they might rest more comfortably. That done, the old men returned to their snakes, paring slices of meat, tasting, and declaring that the snakes could use another turn, all as if nothing unusual had happened.

Five minutes later, de Zedeguí came to stand at his door. He wore jeans and a green shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he was more slender than Mingolla had assumed; his hair had grown long, falling in black curls to his shoulders, and his dark face was composed. He, too, was blocked, but on noticing the absence of his guards, he let the block slip. His heat was strong, but not as strong as Tully’s, and this gave Mingolla the confidence to let his own block slip. De Zedeguí sought him among the men gathered by the oil drum and spread his hands in a show of helplessness; then he beckoned, and Mingolla, committed to a concept of forth-right challenge, walked over to his side. The drumming of the rain seemed to be issuing from within his body, registering his rush of adrenaline.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ said de Zedeguí in a soft, cultured voice.

Mingolla said nothing, afraid that speech, that any interaction would undermine his determination.

‘I knew they’d eventually send someone, and I knew it would be someone strong. But you’ – de Zedeguís smile was thin and rueful – ‘it seems they’ve adopted a policy of overkill.’ He rubbed his jaw with his middle finger as if smoothing away some imperfection. ‘You have come to kill me?’

Mingolla maintained his silence.

‘Yes, well …’ Again de Zedeguí held out his hands palms up. ‘I promise you I won’t resist. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have a chance … I’m sure you’re aware of that.’ He gave a nervous laugh. ‘So unless you’re in a rush, why don’t you come inside, let me have a last smoke, some wine. I’m a stickler for the formalities, and I’ve always been of the opinion that a man’s death should be an occasion of rigorous formality.’

Nothing was going as Mingolla had imagined. De Zedeguí’s surrender had disconcerted him, and he could not help sympathizing with the man.

‘Nobody’s hiding in there,’ said de Zedeguí. ‘Check through the window if you want.’

Mingolla went to the window, flung open the shutter, and peered inside. Cot against the rear wall, cushions on the floor in the opposite corner, and hung from a ceiling hook, a kerosene
lamp that shed an unsteady orange glow. Stacked on the floor were canned goods, bottles, and a large number of books. Everything was very clean.