expecting trouble then all but the eldest could be sent into the mountains, at least for a time. Tomás didn’t argue with her, but he did insist that Jorge escort them out of the hotel and through the town’s backstreets to the Champul road.
Having forced a shirt over Muñoz’s head, pulled a pair of trousers up his legs, and tied his hands behind his back, José was now looking around the room, an angry expression on his face. A portable television sat on a small table next to a pile of glossy American sex magazines. There were empty wine bottles everywhere, and there seemed to be enough items of food scattered across the floor to feed most mountain villages for a week.
‘Ready?’ Tomás asked, picking up the major’s belt with its holstered handgun and fastening it around his own waist.
José nodded, and grabbed Muñoz by one of his pinioned arms. ‘Any sound and your life is over,’ he whispered in Spanish, and two eyes stared blankly back at him. The man was in shock, Tomás realized – he couldn’t believe that this was happening to him. In a matter of minutes Muñoz’s future had turned from bright to non-existent.
They walked down the stairs, the major none too steadily. The soldiers outside were still playing their game, oblivious to events within, but the sleeping staff had been awakened, by either the noise or some instinct of solidarity. They watched wide-eyed as the prisoner was led through the lobby and kitchen and out by the back door.
A few minutes more, and all the compas were withdrawing from their positions around the sleeping town, slipping back up the hillside towards the spot where Geraldo and Alicia waited beside the mortar. Once gathered, the unit began its return journey, moving uphill as fast as the terrain allowed, the higher reaches of the Cuchumatanes looming above them like a huge rampart beneath a swiftly clearing sky. In the middle of the column, like an animal incapable of understanding the terrible depth of its unhappiness, Major Alfonso Lujan Muñoz stumbled along, a continuous soft mewling emanating from his gagged mouth.
Five days later, Colonel Luis Serrano, Operations Director of G-2 Military Intelligence, was standing at the window of his study, staring out at the garden. It was a beautiful dry-season afternoon, with hardly a trace of smog to besmirch the clear blue sky, and for once the brilliant colours of the various flowering plants seemed to justify all his wife’s battles with a never-ending series of new gardeners. She was away at the moment, visiting her sister at the Lake Atitlán villa, but their only daughter was with him, supposedly studying for upcoming examinations. From where Serrano stood, he could see her hard at work on an even tan, lying face down on a towel beside the pool, the top of her bikini untied.
Behind him, in the shadowed study, the tape continued to roll.
‘Do you remember the man Miguel Ustantil, who you ordered arrested in July last year?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why was he arrested?’
‘He was a troublemaker.’
‘Can you be more specific?’
The interrogator’s voice was so calm, Serrano thought, almost Buddha-like. There was no anger, or at least none on the surface. It was as if he had accepted everything on the general level, and was only now concerned with getting the details right. But was he really ‘El Espíritu’, ‘The Ghost’?
‘Did you personally supervise the flaying of his facial skin?’
‘Yes.’
Why had the idiot admitted it all? Serrano asked himself. He had been over Muñoz’s service record, and found nothing to indicate such a level of stupidity. He wondered what the bastards had done to turn the man to jelly and make him sound like an I-speak-your-weight machine. Whatever it was, it had left no marks on the body, and the subversivos’ choice of dumping ground – on the steps of the Swedish Embassy – had not given Serrano’s men the chance to add any.
In PR terms the whole thing had been a disaster. Copies of the tape had been delivered simultaneously to a dozen or so embassies and all the prominent human rights groups, leaving G-2 with very few options in the matter of damage limitation. Serrano’s superiors had not been amused.
He found himself wondering once more if it really could be El Espíritu. The man was supposed to have died over ten years ago, though admittedly his body had never been properly identified. Even so…The most reliable witnesses had estimated his age at over sixty in 1980, and the average life expectancy of the most docile Indians was not much more than fifty. It was hard to believe…
But the tape certainly bore the man’s mark. It wasn’t just a catalogue of Muñoz’s overzealous interrogations and punishments – in several of the incidents under discussion the man asking the questions was very careful to draw out why the Army had become involved, and exactly which interests – or, to be more precise, the interests of which landowners – they were seeking to promote.
But then again…
Serrano smiled to himself. The foreign press were not interested in why – they were too busy wallowing in hacked-off hands and breasts and gouged-out eyes. None of them got the point, which was that keeping a primitive people under control necessitated the use of primitive methods.
It was possible, of course, to go too far…
‘Why did you take the six men back to San Benito?’
‘To show the villagers of the region what lay in store for them if they made trouble.’
‘You had them stripped naked, and each man was held erect while you pointed out the various wounds on their bodies – the wire burns and cigarette burns, the severed ears, the split tongues, the hands with no nails and the feet with no soles …’
‘Yes.’
‘And then?’
‘They were executed.’
‘How?’
‘They were burnt.’
‘You had your men pour gasoline over them and set fire to them?’
‘Yes.’
That was Muñoz’s last word on the tape, and for all Serrano knew his last on this earth. Guerrilla voices read brief extracts from the Geneva Convention and some UN-sponsored accord on human rights – the pompous bastards! – before the voice of the questioner pronounced sentence. There was an eerie gap of several seconds, and then the sound of a single gunshot. Serrano had heard the tape through twice before, and was expecting it, but the report still made him jump.
In the garden outside, his daughter had turned over, and was treating her bare breasts to the afternoon sunshine. Behind her the Indian gardener was absent-mindedly scratching his behind as he directed the hose at the scarlet bougainvillea.
Serrano decided he needed to know more about the history of ‘The Ghost’.
The following day, shortly one o’clock, Chris Martinson was sitting in Antigua’s Restaurant Dona Luisa, waiting for his lunch to arrive. The place was as crowded as usual, with a clientele about equally divided between locals and gringo tourists, but Chris had managed to get the seat he wanted, on the terrace overlooking the interior courtyard. On the previous day a bird he had not recognized had paid an all-too-brief
