sipped at his coffee, wondering who Manley was trying to kid. There didn’t seem much left of the wide-eyed innocent Chris had first known in the Green Howards. Manley was a fellow East Anglian and another bird-watcher, and they had spent a lot of time together in those days, both in England and Germany. But their career paths had diverged, and Manley seemed to have acquired the blinkers necessary for following his. He hadn’t changed, simply narrowed his focus.
Maybe he had himself, Chris thought, but he didn’t think so. ‘What’s the social life like around here?’ he asked.
‘Restricted. Just the other embassies, really. Most of the locals you meet are too rich to notice you. There’s only the junior officers, really, and some of them are OK. They know where the action is, anyway.’
‘And the women?’ Chris asked.
‘Difficult. This is a Catholic country, so any female over fourteen is either a wife, a Virgin Mary or a tart. The only real exceptions are students, and you have to be pretty careful what you’re getting into with them as well.’
‘What about the Indians?’
Manley snorted. ‘Another world altogether. It’s like apartheid,’ he added, without any apparent moral judgement. ‘The two worlds just don’t mix.’
Except when it comes to hiring servants, Chris thought to himself, just as a growing roar outside announced the arrival of another flight.
‘That’ll be the Miami flight,’ Manley said, getting to his feet. ‘We’d better get down there.’
Razor and Hajrija were still on the plane when a smiling young man in a uniform arrived to escort them through the entry formalities. These consisted of a single brief conversation between their young man and another uniform in a booth, who thereupon attacked both their passports with a fearsome-looking stamp. Their bags, which included two SAS uniforms and two Browning High Power 9mm semi-automatics with extra magazines, had already reached the arrival hall, where Chris Martinson and another man were standing guard over it.
‘Look what the wind blew in,’ Chris said.
‘It’s good to see you too,’ Razor said. ‘I was wondering who was going to carry the luggage.’
Manley thanked the Guatemalan and led the other three across the cavernous hall and out through the exit. On the other side of the road Hertz and Budget car rental offices sat beneath a huge hoarding advertising Lucky Strike cigarettes. ‘I love exotic countries,’ Razor said, as Manley opened up the embassy limousine.
The Wilkinsons slumped into the back seat. ‘The hotel’s good,’ Chris said from the front, just as a huge roar sounded to their left and two Chinook military helicopters loomed above the row of offices and lifted away out of sight. They reminded Razor of Apocalypse Now. Nice omen, he thought.
A few moments later they were passing under an old stone aqueduct and entering the city. At the first major intersection a large building announced itself as Chuck E Cheese’s Centre Mall, and behind it were ranged several residential high-rises. It all looked like the Lea Bridge Road translated into Spanish, Razor decided.
Things improved as Manley turned the car down a broad, tree-lined boulevard. There were donkey rides for children in the wide central reservation, and one local entrepreneur was doing a roaring trade in Batman T-shirts. Most of the buildings lining the road seemed to be either hotels or offices, and all of them flew the sky-blue and white national flag.
‘There’s a logic to their flag,’ Manley told them. ‘The blue on either side symbolizes the Pacific and Atlantic, and the white in between is the peace the conquistadors brought to the land. Hence the quetzal holding the olive branch.’
Irony, blindness, or plain conceit? Chris wondered. Probably a combination of the last two.
‘One of the more endearing things about this place,’ Manley was saying, ‘is the number of rich crazies it seems to produce. People with more money than sense. Look at this church on the left…’
They all stared out at the bizarre building, which seemed to have been constructed as a monument to several different architectural traditions. It looked like a cross between the Kremlin, Westminster Abbey and a Venetian palace.
‘There’s a copy of the Eiffel Tower a couple of streets over,’ Manley went on, ‘and in one of the parks there’s a relief map of the country the size of a tennis court. This is a strange town.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Razor said, as they drove past a huge statue of two fighting bulls. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, as they passed a large, castle-like building, complete with battlements and armed guards.
‘Police headquarters.’
‘Figures.’
They passed under a railway bridge and across a wide open space between parks before burrowing into a narrower street festooned with advertisements.
‘This is the oldest part of the city,’ Manley said.
It looked more interesting, but not a lot more welcoming. There didn’t seem to be many people on the streets, and most of those seemed to be hurrying along, heads bowed down, as if keen to reach home before something bad happened. There was something distinctly shabby about the capital of Guatemala, Razor thought. And perhaps sinister as well.
‘Most of the guidebooks tell tourists not to waste any time here,’ Hajrija said, as if sharing his thoughts.
The hotel, though, was as good as Chris claimed. A small corridor led into a covered courtyard, whose walls were lined with samples of the woven designs of different Mayan tribes. Razor and Hajrija sat down at one of the tables and looked at them while Manley and Chris checked them in.
Having done his job, the embassy man left, and a hotel employee showed them to their rooms. The doors were numbered, and on the wall beside each one there was a small painting of a Mayan god. ‘That’s Ixchel, the Goddess of Medicine,’ Hajrija said, looking at the one by their door.
Razor was impressed.
‘Some people sleep on planes, some read,’ she told him.
‘I’m going to have a stroll around the main square,’ Chris announced. ‘You two probably want to get some rest.’
‘Yeah…’ Razor began.
‘We’ll come,’ Hajrija said. ‘I need to stretch my legs after all that sitting.’
‘How far is it?’ Razor asked hopefully.
‘Just round the corner,’ Chris said.
Five minutes later they were crossing the road which surrounded the square, and entering an expanse the size of two football pitches. At the end away to their right a large, twin-towered, cream-coloured church seemed to glow against the darkening sky, while directly ahead of them a much larger building of similar vintage was already brooding in the twilight shadows. More noteworthy than either, the square itself was packed with people, some selling a variety of wares but most simply taking the early-evening air. The majority were in Western dress, but there was also a significant number of people wearing traditional Indian costume. After the half-empty streets of their drive from the airport this much life seemed almost intoxicating.
