The woman gave Escobar a small nod. Fletcher had seen her around the building, always garbed in shapeless dresses like the one she wore now. She had been with Escobar often enough for Fletcher 120
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to assume she was his secretary, personal assistant, perhaps even his biographer—Christ knew that men like Escobar had egos large enough to warrant such accessories. Now Fletcher wondered if he’d had it backward all along, if she was his boss.
In any case, the nod seemed to satisfy Escobar. When he turned back to Fletcher, Escobar was smiling. And when he spoke, it was in English. “Don’t be silly, put them away. Mr. Fletcher is only here to help us in a few matters. He will soon be returning to his own country”—Escobar sighed deeply to show how deeply he regretted this.
“. . . but in the meantime he is an honored guest.”
We don’t need no steenkin handcuffs, Fletcher thought.
The woman who looked like the Bride of Frankenstein with a very deep tan leaned toward Escobar and whispered briefly behind her hand. Escobar nodded, smiling.
“Of course, Ramón, if our guest should try anything foolish or make any aggressive moves, you would have to shoot him a little.” He roared laughter—roly-poly TV laughter—and then repeated what he had said in Spanish, so that Ramón would understand as well as Fletcher. Ramón nodded seriously, replaced his handcuffs on his belt, and stepped back to the periphery of Fletcher’s vision.
Escobar returned his attention to Fletcher. From one pocket of his parrot-and-foliage-studded guayabera he removed a red-and-white package: Marlboros, the preferred cigarette of third-world peoples everywhere. “Smoke, Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher reached toward the pack, which Escobar had placed on the edge of the table, then withdrew his hand. He had quit smoking three years ago, and supposed he might take the habit up again if he actually did get out of this—drinking high-tension liquor as well, quite likely—but at this moment he had no craving or need for a cigarette. He had wanted them to see his fingers shaking, that was all.
“Perhaps later. Right now a cigarette might—”
Might what? It didn’t matter to Escobar; he just nodded understandingly and left the red-and-white pack where it was, on the edge of the table. Fletcher had a sudden, agonizing vision in which he saw himself stopping at a newsstand on Forty-third Street and buying a 121
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pack of Marlboros. A free man buying the happy poison on a New York street. He told himself that if he got out of this, he would do that. He would do it as some people went on pilgrimages to Rome or Jerusalem after their cancer was cured or their sight was restored.
“The men who did that to you”—Escobar indicated Fletcher’s face with a wave of one not-particularly-clean hand—“have been disciplined. Yet not too harshly, and I myself stop short of apology, you will notice. Those men are patriots, as are we here. As you are yourself, Mr.
Fletcher, yes?”
“I suppose.” It was his job to appear ingratiating and frightened, a man who would say anything in order to get out of here. It was Escobar’s job to be soothing, to convince the man in the chair that his swelled eye, split lip, and loosened teeth meant nothing; all that was just a misunderstanding which would soon be straightened out, and when it was he would be free to go. They were still busy trying to deceive each other, even here in the deathroom.
Escobar switched his attention to Ramón the guard and spoke in rapid Spanish. Fletcher’s Spanish wasn’t good enough to pick up everything, but you couldn’t spend almost five years in this shithole capital city without picking up a fair vocabulary; Spanish wasn’t the world’s most difficult language, as both Escobar and his friend the Bride of Frankenstein undoubtedly knew.
Escobar asked if Fletcher’s things had been packed and if he had been checked out of the Hotel Magnificent: Sí. Escobar wanted to know if there was a car waiting outside the Ministry of Information to take Mr. Fletcher to the airport when the interrogation was done.
Sí, around the corner on the Street Fifth of May.
Escobar turned back and said, “Do you understand what I ask him?” From Escobar, understand came out unnerstand, and Fletcher thought again of Escobar’s TV appearances. Low bressure? What low bressure? We don’t need no steenkin low bressure.
“I ask have you been checked out of your room—although after all this time it probably seems more like an apartment to you, yes?—
and if there’s a car to take you to the airport when we finish our conversation.” Except conversation hadn’t been the word he used.
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“Ye-es?” Sounding as if he could not believe his own good for-tune. Or so Fletcher hoped.
“You’ll be on the first Delta flight back to Miami,” the Bride of Frankenstein said. She spoke without a trace of Spanish accent.
“Your passport will be given back to you once the plane has touched down on American soil. You will not be harmed or held here, Mr.
Fletcher—not if you cooperate with our inquiries—but you are being deported, let’s be clear on that. Kicked out. Given what you Americans call the bum’s rush.”
She was much smoother than Escobar. Fletcher found it amusing that he had thought her Escobar’s assistant. And you call yourself a reporter, he thought. Of course if he was just a reporter, the Times’s man in Central America, he would not be here in the basement of the Ministry of Information, where the stains on the wall looked suspiciously like blood. He had ceased being a reporter some sixteen months ago, around the time he’d first met Núñez.
“I understand,” Fletcher said.
Escobar had taken a cigarette. He lighted it with a gold-plated Zippo. There was a fake ruby in the side of the Zippo. He said, “Are you prepared to help us in our inquiries, Mr. Fletcher?”
“Do I have any choice?”
“You always have a choice,” Escobar said, “but I think you have worn out your carpet in our country, yes? Is that what you say, worn out your carpet?”
“Close enough,” Fletcher said. He thought: What you must guard against is your desire to believe them. It is natural to want to believe, and probably natural to want to tell the truth—especially after you’ve been grabbed outside your favorite café and briskly beaten by men who smell of refried beans—but giving them what they want won’t help you. That’s the thing to hold onto, the only idea that’s any good in a room like this. What they say means nothing. What matters is the thing on that trolley, the thing under that piece of cloth. What matters is the guy who hasn’t said anything yet. And the stains on the walls, of course.
Escobar leaned forward, looking serious.
“Do you deny that for the last fourteen months you have given 123
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certain information to a man named Tomás Herrera, who has in turn funneled it to a certain Communist insurgent named Pedro Núñez?”
“No,” Fletcher said. “I don’t deny it.” To adequately keep up his side of this charade—the charade summarized by the difference between the words conversation and interrogation—he should now justify, attempt to explain. As if anyone in the history of the world had ever won a political argument in a room like this. But he didn’t have it in him to do so. “Although it was a little longer than that. Almost a year and a half in all, I think.”
“Have a cigarette, Mr. Fletcher.” Escobar opened a drawer and took out a thin folder.
“Not just yet. Thank you.”
“Okay.” From Escobar it of course came out ho-kay. When he did the TV weather, the boys in the control room would sometimes superimpose a photograph of a woman in a bikini on the weather map. When he saw this, Escobar would laugh and wave his hands and pat his chest. People liked it. It was comical. It was like the sound of ho-kay. It was like the sound of steenkin batches.
Escobar opened the folder with his own cigarette planted squarely in the middle of his mouth with the smoke running up into his eyes. It was the way you saw the old men smoking on the street corners down here, the ones who still wore straw hats, sandals, and baggy white pants. Now Escobar was smiling, keeping his lips shut so his Marlboro wouldn’t fall out of his mouth and onto the table but smiling just the same. He took a glossy black-and-white photograph out of the thin folder and slid it across to Fletcher. “Here is your friend Tomás. Not too pretty, is he?”
It was a high-contrast full-face shot. It made Fletcher think of photographs by that semi-famous news photographer of the forties and fifties, the one who called himself Weegee. It was a portrait of a dead man. The eyes were open. The flashbulb had reflected in them, giving them a kind of life. There was no blood, only one mark and no blood, but still one knew at once that the man was dead. His hair was combed, one could still see the toothmarks the comb had left, and 124