‘If you’ve got more of this stuff, I know some guys who can help,’ said Leon.
‘We’ll talk about it later.’ Mingolla did a bladeful of frost and looked around. He was beginning to get used to the noise and the smell, and he wondered if the place was growing on him. He chuckled, and Leon asked what was funny. ‘Nothing,’ said Mingolla.
Leon laughed, too, as if ‘nothing’ were a hilarious concept. Sharp lines spread from the comers of his eyes, making his reddish brown skin look papery. ‘So,’ he said after a silence, ‘you’re her cousin, eh? Strange she never mentioned you. She talks about family all the time.’
‘She didn’t know me,’ said Mingolla. ‘Different branch of the family.’
‘Ah,’ said Leon. ‘That explains it.’
Mingolla had more of the drug. It was doing nice things to his head, but was tearing up his nose, and he thought he should start taking it under his tongue. Or stop taking it altogether. But he had become so used to being drugged, the indulgence seemed natural.
‘I thought all her people lived around Coban,’ said Leon.
‘Guess not.’
‘Y’know,’ said Leon, ‘it’s crazy you coming here just to kill this guy. In here, he’s dead already.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘So what’s your real reason?’
Mingolla saw that he would have to do something soon about Leon’s suspicious nature, but he felt too loose and composed to want to bother with it now. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, coming to his feet.
They set off toward Alvina’s, and Mingolla wondered if the place had grown on him, though more likely it was the drug that caused the Barrio to appear… not beautiful, exactly, but painterly. Everywhere were tableaux that had the inner radiance and important stillness he associated with the Old Masters. There, three men roughing up a woman, who was clawing, kicking, and all of them looking up as the roof above opened to admit a shaft of white sunlight that played over them, freezing and transfiguring the action. And there, almost lost in the shadow of a thatched lean-to, an old hag straight out of Goya, her ravaged face framed by a black shawl, staring with perplexed astonishment at a feather in her hand. And the whole of the place with its black divisions, its smoky orange segments of misery, leaping flames, and silhouetted imps, was a collection of pre-Renaissance triptyches. He could be like the guy who painted murals in the bombed villages, he could stay here forever and ensure immortality by memorializing a life of terror and deprivation.… A change in the noise, a wave of louder and more agitated noise rolling toward them, brought him alert. In the distance he saw a line of masked guards with whips and rifles driving a mob ahead of them.
‘This way!’ Leon grabbed his arm, yanking Mingolla toward the wall of houses. ‘We’ll be safe in there.’
Mingolla had a bad feeling. ‘Why there?’
‘They’re not hunting anybody… it’s just a sweep.’ Leon pulled at him. ‘They always do it about this time; they never check the houses.’
People were running in every direction, shouting, screaming, bright spears of sound that shattered at their peak, and Mingolla was slammed into a beam by someone’s shoulder. Diseased flowers swirling, eddying around him, all the same kind, with patterns of black mouths and empty eyes and mottled brown petals like skin, a wilted vaseful of them washing down a drain. Forked twig hand clutching his arm, wrinkled mouth saying, Please, please, and being swept away. He fought toward Leon, but was thrown off course by the tidal flow of the mob. The guards were closing, he could see the patterns of bloody muscle on their masks, hear their whips cracking, and shouts of pain were mixed in now with those of panic. A little boy clung to his leg with the desperation of a small animal hanging onto a branch in a gale, but was scraped off as Mingolla beat a path through a clot of people stopping up the flow. The screams fed into the smoky light, making it pulse, making the flames leap higher in the oil drums, and Mingolla had the urge to lose control, to begin cutting with his knife and screaming himself. He wound up beside the door Leon had entered, wedged it open, and a teenage boy slipped past him into the dimly lit room… slipped past and cried out as a knife flashed across his neck. Leon’s startled face peering out Mingolla pushed inside and backhanded Leon to the floor, and Leon rolled up into a crouch, the knife poised. But he faltered, his expression growing puzzled, then woeful under Mingolla’s assault of guilt and friendship betrayed. The knife dropped from his hand.
Mingolla bolted the door, kneeled beside the boy, and checked for a pulse; his fingers came back dyed with red. Leon had slumped against the rear wall and was weeping, his face buried in his hands. In the corner beside him, ringed by guttering candles, wrapped in blankets as gray as her skin, an old woman was trembling, staring fearfully at Mingolla. He snatched one of her blankets and used it to cover the dead boy. He picked up Leon’s kinfe, squatted next to him. ‘Who are you working for?’ he asked. Leon just sobbed, and Mingolla jabbed his leg with the knife, repeating the question.
‘Nobody, nobody.’ Leon’s Adam’s apple bobbed, his voice broke. ‘I wanted the rest of the drugs.’
Leon’s treachery brought home to Mingolla the full extent of his foolhardiness. The manchild strolling around Hell, contemplating its aesthetic, playing ineffectual good Samaritan. He was damned lucky to be alive. No more bullshit, he thought. He’d finish his business and get out. Leon’s tears glistened, he sobbed uncontrollably, and Mingolla intensified his assault, slowly elevating Leon’s guilt to a suicidal pitch. He held the knife to the side of Leon’s neck.
‘No, please… God, no!’ The old woman crawled toward him, dragging a train of blankets. ‘I’ll die, I’ll die!’ Her voice articulated and decrepit, like a grating pain, like broken ribs grinding together. Her face a gray death mask with hairy moles, lumped cheekbones. Her death an accomplice after the fact to the dead thing of her life. Mingolla looked away from her, repelled, ready to cut Leon, full of cold judgment.
‘It’s not his fault,’ whined the old woman. ‘He’s not responsible.’
Mingolla had an answer for that, courtesy of Philosophy 101, but withheld it. ‘Whose fault is it, then?’ he asked, pointing at the boy with the knife.
‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what he’s…’ A tear the size of a pearl leaked from one of her rheumy dark eyes. ‘The things they made him do, the awful things… but he fought back. Ten years in the jungles. Ten years living like an animal, fighting all the time. You don’t know.’
Leon’s sobs racked his chest.
‘Who are you?’ Mingolla asked.
‘He’s my son… my son.’
‘Did you know he was going to do this?’
She didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes, and you’d have done the same. All those drugs, so much money. You’re no different from us.’
‘No,’ said Mingolla, pointing again to the boy. ‘I wouldn’t have done this.’
‘Fool,’ said the old woman, and the screams and shouts from without, receding but still a measure of chaos, seemed to be echoing the word. ‘What do you know? Nothing, you know nothing. Leon… Oh, God! When he was seventeen, just married, the soldiers came to our village. They took all the young men and armed them with rifles and drove them in a truck to the next village, where the people were suing a big landowner. A real villain. And the soldiers ordered the young men to kill all the young women of that village. They had no choice. If they hadn’t obeyed, the soldiers would have killed their women.’ She looked sadly at the gray walls as if they were explanations, reasons. ‘You know nothing.’