“Macha is different, you know? He’s the only one who looks me in the eye. I wonder: Is he afraid of me? Macha, who they tell me is so courageous?. . Some afternoons he invites me out for a cold one at a bar around here, close to the market. We talk in a way we can’t talk with people who work directly with us. Because of compartmenting, you understand. I don’t know who Rat is. I know his pseudonym. I don’t know who his wife is or anything about his kids. I’m not supposed to know. Although, don’t ask me why but I get the feeling he’s fuzz. He doesn’t know anything about me either. It’s for good reason our anthem says ‘We are children of solitude.’ No one is more solitary than us, man,” and he looks at me with emptied eyes. “With so much distrust, you end up not trusting yourself. You start to think of the enemy as an equal, almost like a brother. He must be all alone, too, in some miserable room in a boardinghouse out there, living his lousy clandestine life. His presence, which is always alive in your imagination, accompanies you from afar. If it were possible. . You know: hate and love can change places. Later, you tell yourself that no, obviously it’s not like that, he is, truly and completely, your enemy. And still. .
Macha doesn’t know who Iris really is, or Chico Marín. He doesn’t know. . On the other hand, since we’re in different departments, Macha Carrasco and I can talk. Not a lot, but some. Even though we only know each other by our fake names. But I know who his son is, I do know that. We talk about soccer, we talk about his father, who was a truck driver. He drove a Ford with a trailer on it, and Macha hardly ever saw him. He carried cargo to the south, Macha’s dad did, and he was hardly ever home. They didn’t get along well. ‘My old man,’ he told me, ‘put me in military school to straighten me out.’ That way, they’d see each other less. ‘My old man didn’t take me into account,’ he says. His old man wasn’t there for Macha. Maybe that’s why he turned out so macho. That’s what I think.
“We don’t talk about work much. A little, though. He looks down on it. He looks down on our ‘fat-ass bosses,’ he looks down on the decorations, the circular commands; he doesn’t trust anyone. . If there was ever a solitary man, it’s him. I think he can’t even imagine how far his ‘fat-ass bosses’ would be willing to go. The day he least expects it, they’ll get sick of looking the other way when he ignores procedure, they’ll get tired of his habit of going off, out of an excess of ‘professional pride,’ as they say, to arrest the “Prince of Wales,” for example, on his own and with no one’s authorization — not no one’s, as Ronco would say — I don’t think a thing like that even crosses his mind. Or Iris’s, or Great Dane’s, or any of the other people who blindly follow him. Command has hardened feelings, you know. To Command, we’re all disposable, hear? Not just the terrorists. Everyone. And above all, the ones who do this job.”
He goes on chewing and chewing, concentrated. He examines the bit of sandwich he has left and he takes a giant bite right in the center.
“Macha lives with no yesterday or tomorrow. Those acts of blood and guts he’s so wrapped up in happen and they swallow him up. It’s like he dreamed them. He’s isolated in a present that’s separate, I’m telling you, from what happened before and what will happen after. Maybe he lives like he’s dead. He thinks: this has to be done; it has to be done, period. Tomorrow no one will understand us. He and I understand each other, you know? ‘Someone,’ he says to me, ‘gives the order: clean out the building’s plumbing, it’s stopped up. And someone else has to go and open it up and look at the plumbing, shine a light into the pipes and watch the shit go by in that thick and stinking water, someone has to stick the metallic tubes in there and unclog the pipe. And the hands that are feeding out the electric snake end up stinking like that sewage. Gato, we are nobody, and we always will be,’ he tells me.
“You know what he was telling me about the other day, last Thursday, I think it was? ‘The bad thing about these CZs, Gato, the down side is that they’re too fast. You shoot, and the bullets go through the man so fast he keeps on moving, right? It seems like he’s still alive, he won’t die, he goes on opening and closing his mouth, poor fucker, and so you go on shooting him. When the guy finally stops moving, you’ve already emptied a clip into him. . ’ As for me, Cubanita, you know I’ve never shot at anyone. God willing, I won’t. Macha suspects that someone higher up is protecting the terrorists, he thinks they don’t want to finish them off once and for all so we can maintain the threat, the justification, he tells me, he asks me. And he watches me. Like he’s trying to get in my head. That’s how it feels, I don’t know. . Did you know Macha has terrible aim? But he gets up close to the target, he holds the gun at eye height and shoots at the man between his belly button and his neck. He gets really close to him and that, of course, makes all the difference.”
The phone rang. Gato repeated the order I had received. Silence. “I wanted to be sure the operation was authorized,” he said.
“Understood,” he answered, submissive. “It’s just that with Macha Carrasco, you never know. . Right away,” he adds, resigned. “Right away!”
He hangs up, chastened, and he squats down to take my purse out of the drawer.
“Go on. They’re waiting for you.” And when he handed it to me: “Of course, he would do it now. I forgot: they’re doing evaluations this month. That Flaco doesn’t miss a trick!” he exclaimed.
He licked the mayonnaise off his lips, though a smear remained on his chin; he smiled at me, sphinxlike, and waved his thin little fingers in the air.
FORTY-FOUR
They intercepted him at eight in the morning coming out of a house that was being watched. He walked calmly, an ordinary man. He didn’t worry about checking for a tail. Once again, no attempt at checking his surroundings. Nothing. I watched what happened second by second through my binoculars from a fake taxi parked a block and a half away. As soon as I recognized him walking toward me, I gave the signal. Macha got out of another car parked closer, got right on top of him, and aimed at his forehead. No more than four yards between them. I would have liked to see that exchange of power in their eyes. The Spartan tried to take his gun out. But Great Dane came out of nowhere, leaped into the air, and planted a foot in his face. The Spartan fell but he got up, blood streaming down his face, and ran toward a pickup truck, ignoring Macha’s bullets as they whistled past. As I told you, they wanted him alive. He put the key in the lock. Macha shot holes in the tires and the Spartan’s truck started to lean to the side. He managed to get the door open. When he saw he was lost, he put the barrel of his SIG-Sauer in his mouth and fired.
I liked it. The guy had balls. The Spartan didn’t want to surrender: “Talking isn’t the sin, the sin is letting yourself be taken alive.” That thick paste, mixed with viscous liquids — it was hard to believe that repugnant pulp was all that was left of the head that used to lean over a chessboard and could divine moves none of the rest of us could see. And if he was only that, then so was my daughter, so was I, so was anyone. He was left shamelessly exposed, turned inside out like an animal destroyed. And I remembered the Fonseca no. 1 wrapped in rice paper that he’d given me at the restaurant in the Central Market. And I remembered the girl who was waiting for him in Quivicán, rolling tobacco leaves.