Indio Galdámez ushers me into the office. Behind his desk, Macha greets me indifferently. The room is small, and the grayish linoleum floor smells of wax. A single neon tube lights the room. I sit down. His desk is between us. I look around for any personal object. There’s no photo, no picture or paperweight, nothing that would tell me anything about him. The ink pen I see in the desk is an everyday yellow Bic that rests on a block notebook. To one side, a coat hanger holding no coats and a metal shelf with some file folders. Behind him, the radio and a solid safe built into the wall. Over the corner of the safe are his shoulder holster and his service weapon, his 9mm CZ Parabellum, and a magazine with no clips in it.
“I need you,” he says in that grave voice of his. “We’re going to blow the tracking operation we’ve been doing on the ‘Prince of Wales’ and ‘Viollier.’ Orders from above. We can’t make any mistakes. I need you there. I repeat: we can’t make any mistakes. I want them alive. Are you willing?”
“Of course,” I say. “Of course. When?”
He looks at his Rolex.
“It’s eleven thirty. We leave within ten minutes. Go have them disguise you. You have your weapon with you, right?”
“Yes,” I say, pointing to my purse.
And as I’m about to open the door:
“Did you tell Flaco or Gato that we had a tail on the ‘Prince of Wales’?”
I shake my head.
“I believe you,” he tells me somberly. “But it doesn’t matter now. Don’t talk to anyone. We’ll meet in the parking lot in ten minutes. Clear?”
In the hallway I ran into Gato. He was walking with his head down as always, moving with slow and heavy steps. I noticed his worn-out gray pants, his old tennis shoes that he wore without socks. Chico Marín passed next to me and tugged my hair, laughing with his jumpy eyes, and walked on as if he didn’t see Gato. When I could smell his garlic stench, he looked at me, grabbed my shoulders, and shoved me up against the wall.
FORTY-THREE
“Where you headed, Malinche?”
“To Makeup.”
“And? Why? Are they taking you on a mission?”
I smiled enigmatically.
“I don’t like it one bit. It’s dangerous. Your place is here, with me. Anyone can do that other thing. Macha’s bringing you, right?”
I smiled.
“Are you sure the operation is authorized?”
I nodded. He made a sudden, unexpectedly quick movement. Now I didn’t have my purse and my arm hurt terribly, twisted behind my back. He manipulated it from my wrist that was bent painfully. He did it all with an agility and skill that were unthinkable in such a fat man.
“You’re coming with me,” he whispered. “You belong to my department. Let’s go. Let’s see if this order really exists.” And he let out a laugh.
My wrist doesn’t slacken, but the pain does. We go down to the basement. I can smell the bleach from the floor. They must have mopped recently. He turns on the light and makes me sit down. He puts my purse away in the drawer of his desk, tosses an empty Pepsi can and a sandwich wrapper into the garbage, and lets himself fall puffing onto his chair. Finally, he makes an internal call.
“We’re just going to make sure,” he says. “And don’t look at me with that put-upon little face of yours. . I’m protecting you, Cubanita.”
He asked to be put through to C3.1. I knew that number was Flaco. They told him his call would be returned shortly. I explained that the operation was about to start, that I couldn’t be late, that I had no way to justify my absence.
“Are we going after big fish, here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even if they’re not big fish, it’s good for these operations to happen, you know? It’s important to maintain contact with the enemy. The terrorist network is designed to avoid contact, except when they hit us with a surprise attack and can get away. And, of course, we have to decapitate the movement. We know that. The subversives scatter when their leaders fall. ‘If you want to kill a snake, cut off its head.’ But you shouldn’t have to take part in these things, Cubanita. You’re just looking for adventure, aren’t you? The drug of danger. I know you too well, kiddo. . But no. It’s not wise and it’s not convenient.”
Gato was convinced that my comrades were about to bring me back in completely, that they had been testing me and would be giving me important missions any day now, and he wanted me to be his informant. He was expecting great things, I thought. . And then, out of nowhere, after a short silence, he put one elbow on the table and held his chin in his hand and he started talking.
“It’s like I don’t even exist,” he said, as he picked up some bread-crumbs that had fallen from the paper wrapper onto the metal top of his desk. “Even the agents I work with look down on me. They avoid me in the hallways, they look the other way if they see me crossing the lot. You just saw that asshole Chico Marín, man. . You saw how that little jerk turned away from me.” He didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, he told me. That’s why he didn’t go to the cafeteria. He had his Pepsis and sandwiches — steak with tomato, avocado, lettuce, and mayo — sent in from the shop on the corner. He devoured it all here in his office, in the same basement room where we carried out interrogations. So he wouldn’t bother anyone. . “And some of them I’ve known since we were kids. . But it’s not the bullets that’ll decide this filthy war, you know? They know it. It’s these bits of information, these dirty little jobs. This work is like being an executioner.”
He goes back to collecting crumbs with a fingernail that’s a little long and not very clean. His stomach spills in a wave over the metal surface of the desk. No one trusts anyone else around here. Is that why Gato is confiding in an outsider like me?
“Everyone knows it. Without the evil executioner,” he tells me, “society wouldn’t exist, but no one wants to see him in society. Am I wrong? Maybe it’s the little angels who create the social order? Wouldn’t that be nice! Unfortunately, you have to use terror, you have to use evil, you have to use the most vile and fucked-up parts hidden inside a human being. Later, of course, those methods are condemned and the cruelties that made it possible to move beyond cruelty are punished. Or no? They’re left behind, forgotten, not necessary anymore. Like the journalist in that old cowboy movie says, I can’t think of the name, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ What do you think?” He smiled at me, his eyes narrowing with a feline air. “Do you think, Cubanita, that the owners of the planes and ships and banks and copper mines and the pasta and ice cream factories know that someone like me exists? Do you think they know that their power would all go to shit without us, the ones down here in this damp, dark dungeon, like sewer rats? Do you think the housewife who goes out in the morning to do the shopping has any inkling that we’re protecting the long chain that makes it possible for her to find her noodles, her rice, her bottle of oil in the store? Do you think that pretty young girl in the morning light, at the lake in her bikini, sliding along on fiberglass skis in the wake of a boat with a 150hp outboard motor, you think she knows about me? Do you think she has any idea that her daddy’s gold card hangs from a thin and invisible thread that connects it to an ‘abject’ being like me? Not to mention the intellectuals who analyze the ‘political situation,’ as they call it. What do you have to say about those fuckers?”
Has my past been erased, or does he think that by talking to me this way I’ll erase it myself? I feel his breath on my neck, and that obscene closeness revolts me.