turned to one of the two newspapers he had just bought in the square, the one printed in Spanish, and started reading the lead story.
According to the Guatemalan Daily Planet an elaborate hoax had recently been played on those members of the international press corps who liked to defame the nation’s security forces. Subversivos responsible for the murder of Army Major Alfonso Lujan Muñoz had fabricated a tape purporting to contain an interrogation of the young major, and a counterfeit admission of guilt in regard to certain crimes, all of which were known to have been committed by the subversivos themselves. Unfortunately for the perpetrators of this vicious hoax, voice identification experts had been able to establish that the speaker on the tape was not in fact Major Muñoz.
‘And there goes another flying pig,’ Chris murmured to himself. He reached for the Daily News, the English-language newspaper for tourists and Guatemala’s resident British and American community, and looked for another account of the affair. He expected to find at least a different slant – the Daily News, for reasons which no one seemed able to fathom, was allowed a unique latitude when it came to criticizing the authorities.
Sure enough, the writer managed to pour scorn on the official version of the story without directly contradicting it. ‘We can only wonder,’ he wrote, ‘that after forty years of incessant defeat the subversivos should still have the leisure time, the technology, and the system of communications necessary, to mount such an elaborate hoax.’
Chris smiled to himself, and cleared a space for the arriving chicken sandwich and papaya licuardo. The trouble with Guatemala was that most of the time it was hard to believe the evidence of your own ears and eyes. The accounts of atrocities committed by both sides were probably exaggerated, but he had no reason to believe that they were imaginary. And yet the country was so eye-achingly beautiful, and not just in the matter of landscape. Costa Rica, which Chris had visited several years earlier, had beautiful countryside, but compared with Guatemala it seemed somehow bland, two-dimensional.
It was the people who made Guatemala magical, the Mayan Indians, though how they did it was hard to say. They certainly looked picturesque in their colourful traditional costumes, and their religious ceremonies seemed like a fascinating glimpse into an earlier world, but it was more than that. Something to do with the depth of their commitment to the reality of community, perhaps. An American whom Chris met had argued that Westerners here somehow just locked on to the missing piece of their own social jigsaw – a sense of belonging. Here among the Mayans, he claimed, it had somehow miraculously survived.
Chris wasn’t sure he agreed, but he had yet to hear a better explanation. Every gringo he had talked to since his arrival had felt the same sense of magic. The only people who didn’t, or so it seemed, were the Ladinos, the Spanish-speaking non-Indians who made up thirty per cent of the population and one hundred per cent of the ruling elite.
Certainly the family Chris was staying with as part of his language course had little good to say about the Indians or their culture. Their ambitions were all directed towards total submersion in the wonders of the West. Exciting memories of visiting the McDonald’s in Guatemala City vied with distress at there not being one in Antigua.
Chris finished the milk shake and paid his bill, walked downstairs and emerged from the dark corridor into the brilliance of the sunlit street. Antigua was a beautiful town, with its grids of cobbled streets, its mostly one-storey buildings painted in a pleasing variety of pastel shades, and its myriad colonial churches and monasteries. And all of it nestling beneath the three volcanoes: the towering Agua to the south, and Acatenango and the ever-smoking Fuego, ‘Fire’, to the south-west.
Chris looked at his watch and found he still had fifteen minutes before his afternoon class was due to begin. The bookshop he had noticed the previous day was just across the street, and finding a convenient gap in the one-way traffic he walked over. He was examining the window display when a reflected movement caught his eye. A man had started to cross the street behind him but then apparently changed his mind. He was now standing on the opposite pavement, staring at Chris’s back. Then, as if suddenly aware that Chris was watching his reflection he abruptly turned away, and stood gazing down the street.
Chris went into the shop and, after a minute or so of browsing among the natural history books, sneaked a look out of the window. The man was nowhere to be seen.
He decided he was being paranoid.
Five minutes later, walking across the main square, he stopped to tie his shoelaces and noticed the same man, some thirty metres behind him, staring vacantly into space.
Lieutenant Arturo Vincenzo ran a hand through his luxuriant black hair and scratched the back of his neck. ‘So how did they manage it?’ he asked his cousin. ‘How did they get the body all the way from the Cuchumatanes to the front door of the Swedish Embassy without anyone seeing anything?’
Captain Jorge Alvaro shrugged and took a slug from the bottle of Gallo beer. ‘El Espíritu works in mysterious ways,’ he said sardonically.
The two men were in a bar on Zona 1’s Calle 14, just around the corner from the Policia Nacional building, where Vincenzo’s Department of Criminal Investigation had its headquarters. Alvaro worked for G-2, and the cousins’ meetings were as often dictated by mutual business as they were by familial ties. This time, though, Vincenzo was simply indulging his curiosity – the DCI had not been invited to share in the Army’s latest public relations disaster.
The early evening hour ensured that the bar was almost empty, but Vincenzo kept his voice down in any case. ‘He is not in our files under that name,’ he said. ‘But…’
‘He is not known under any other name,’ Arturo growled. ‘Do you want another beer?’
‘Sure.’
Alvaro lifted a bottle and raised two fingers at the boy behind the bar.
‘When was he last heard of?’
‘Nineteen eighty-three. Maybe. We first heard of the bastard around 1979, but by 1983 it was looking less and less likely that only one man was involved. If there was, then he must have had a fucking time machine – his name was coming up in the Atitlán area, the Cuchumatanes, even way out in the Petén, and pretty much at the same time.’ He picked up the fresh bottle and poured it into the empty glass, shaking his head as he did so. ‘There’s no way it could have been the same man.’
‘If there’s one thing those Indians can do, it’s walk.’
Alvaro grunted. ‘They can’t fly, though, can they?’
Vincenzo grinned. ‘Thank Christ for that.’ He took another slug of beer. ‘Weren’t there any eyewitness descriptions of him or them?’
‘Hundreds of them – that was the problem. Most of them were unwilling witnesses, and no doubt most of them lied with their last breath. So El Espíritu was tall, short, dark, fair, blue-eyed, black-eyed – you name it. Absolutely fucking useless. The only semi-reliable description we had came from two English soldiers.’
‘What? How did that happen?’
‘Remember in 1980, when that guerrilla group took over the Tikal ruins for several days?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘They took about twenty tourists hostage, most of them English. The whole business lasted four days, I think. The guerrilla leader…’
‘El Espíritu.’
