Human beings — much larger than ants — went by. Valerie’s working eye swiveled upward, sighted over her hulking shoulder, and glimpsed the two men moving away, talking. Camouflage uniforms. Curved knives in black leather sheaths at their waists. Gurkhas.
It was coming back, slowly and erratically. The eye swivel had been unexpectedly painful, so Valerie shut the lid, retired into darkness, and permitted memory to work its will upon her.
Indian village. Airplane with Kirby Galway and Innocent St. Michael. Flight, with tortillas. Great confusion as darkness settled, her mind adrift — what had that all been about? Had terror unhinged her? But she didn’t remember feeling that frightened, certainly not after she’d gotten some distance from the village. She’d even paused beside a stream, she remembered, sitting there a few minutes to catch her breath and drink water to wash down her first tortilla. After that...
After that, wandering in darkness, much of it mere confused imagery in her mind. Had she been laughing uproariously, pretending to be an automobile, talking out loud like Donald Duck? Surely memory was wrong. Or had there been something in the stream? “Don’t drink the water,” isn’t that what they say?
But then— Rescue! A Gurkha patrol, bivouacked for the night, and she had literally fallen among them. So now, after all the perils and dangers of the last weeks, finally she was safe, amid her rescuers, whose murmuring voices were all around her. Not speaking English, of course. What would it be? Something Asian. Nepalese, was that right, for people from Nepal?
“... kill...”
Weariness spread through her body, a kind of outflowing unconsciousness, padding all around her aches and sores, moving toward her brain.
“... attack the village...”
Awake too early, wrong to be conscious before her body had knit up its wounds. Soothing, soothing sleep. The darkness flowed.
“... take no prisoners...”
Strange. Understanding their words, but not in English. She’d never understood Napalese before.
“... kill them all...”
Valerie’s right eye shot open. Kekchi! She could understand them because they were speaking Kekchi! Not the dialect she’d originally learned, nor the somewhat muddier version they spoke back in South Abilene, but some other sharper version, more guttural and glottal, but comprehensible nevertheless.
Why would Gurkha soldiers speak Kekchi to one another?
“When do we kill the woman?”
Valerie’s entire body clenched. Her open eye stared at her wrist, her ear dilated.
“When we get there.”
A slight unclenching, but eye and ear both still wide.
“Why not shoot her now? She’ll slow us down.”
“No shooting. What if somebody hears and comes to look?”
“I could cut her with this knife.”
“And if she screams?”
(Oh, I’d scream, yes, I would.)
“I know you. You’re just in such a hurry to kill her because she scared you so much last night.”
“Me? Who had to change his pants? Was that me, or was that you?”
“Yeah, I thought you were gonna drop dead, you were so scared. You thought a real old-time devil came to get you.”
“I didn’t go run and hide in the woods like some people.”
They discussed this further, bristling a bit, each accusing the other of being more superstitious, more prey to fears connected with the old Mayan gods and devils, while Valerie lay silent and unmoving, taking little pleasure in the irony: They had been afraid of her.
Then at last they got back to it, one of them saying, “So what do we do about the woman?”
“She thinks we’re Gurkhas, taking her back to camp. So she’ll come along, no trouble. When we get to the village, we gag her, wait till the people come out from the city. When we shoot the villagers, we shoot her, too.”
“What about the people from the city?”
“We kill the driver. We wound one white man, it doesn’t matter which one.”
“Why don’t we kill them all?”
“Because they’re the people who write the stories.” (There is no word for reporter in Kekchi.) “When they go home, they’ll write all about how the Gurkhas killed all the people in the village.”
“Then we go back across the border?”
“And the Colonel gives us our money.”
Valerie continued to lie there, feigning sleep, while the false Gurkhas continued to talk. They discussed for some time whether to rape her, finally deciding not to do so yet but wait till they got to the village and then play it by ear. (The idioms are somewhat different in Kekchi.) Then one of them said something about how they should get started soon, the village was a good hour’s hike north of here, and Valerie decided it was time to wake up. She made a moaning sound, stretched, rolled over, sat up, looked around wide-eyed at the group of men seated and standing all about her, and said, “Oh, my gosh!”
They looked at her. One of them said, in Kekchi, “Smile at her. Show her we’re friendly.”
A cluster of ghastly smiles were beamed her way. Valerie smiled back and said, “You rescued me!” Her performance was based on Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz”.
They nodded and smiled. Apparently, none of them spoke English.
With some difficulty, Valerie struggled to her feet. The dozen men watched her, smiles still pasted on their faces. Looking around, she said, “Where can I wash up?”
“What does she want?”
“Food, maybe.”
Valerie made hand-washing gestures and face-washing gestures.
“She wants the stream.”
“She wants to piss and wash her face.”
Three or four of them pointed past some trees at the edge of the clearing.
“Oh, thanks,” Valerie said, her own ghastly smile still firmly in place, and turned away.
“I say we definitely rape her.”
“Not before we get to the village.”
Valerie paused at the first trees to look back, smiling and wagging her finger. “Don’t peek now,” she said.
17
The Secret Road
Vernon couldn’t eat. He pushed the fruit around in the bowl and looked gloomily at the coffee, while over at another table the seven journalists wolfed down everything in sight, Scottie going so far as to pretend to bite the waitress’s arm. She offered him a professional smile, refilled his coffee cup, and came over to ask Vernon if everything was all right.
“Fine,” Vernon said.
Vernon was at a small table to one side of the large dining room at the Fort George, with the ravenous correspondents in front of him and the view of the timeless sea beneath a timeless sun off to his right. (The black freighter still stood at anchor in the offing, the paperwork on its eventual auction suffering the usual timeless bureaucratic delay.)
What is going to happen in the village?
I didn’t ask that question, Vernon told himself. I don’t want to know the answer. I only want to survive to the other end of the tightrope. I don’t want to know what links together the Colonel’s various demands of me.
Refugee settlements.
Photos of Gurkhas.
The refugees flee Guatemala, flee the Colonel and the government he serves. They become lost to the Colonel, protected by borders, by international law, by the British, by the wandering Gurkha patrols. The refugees come to trust the Gurkhas, short dark men who come from so far away but who look so like themselves. British intelligence in this part of the world is excellent, mostly because the refugees and the other Indians will tell things to the Gurkhas that they won’t tell any normal Brit. (When, in 1979, Guatemala started a secret road westward through the jungle into southern Belize, it was the Indians who told the Gurkhas, and the Gurkhas who advanced through the jungle and stopped the road.) Faith and trust in the Gurkhas emboldens the refugees, protects the refugees, swells the tide of refugees, and at the same time increases the embarrassment and frustration of the government the Colonel serves.