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there were those little lights in his eyes, but they were reflected lights. One knew at once the man was dead.
The mark was on the left temple, a comet shape that looked like a powder burn, but there was no bullet hole, no blood, and the skull wasn’t pushed out of shape. Even a low-caliber pistol like a .22, fired close enough to the skin to leave a powder burn, would have pushed the skull out of shape.
Escobar took the picture back, put it in the folder, closed the folder, and shrugged as if to say You see? You see what happens? When he shrugged, the ash fell off his cigarette onto the table. He brushed it off onto the gray lino floor with the side of one fat hand.
“We dint actually want to bother you,” Escobar said. “Why would we? This a small country. We are small people in a small country. The New York Times a big paper in a big country. We have our pride, of course, but we also have our . . .” Escobar tapped his temple with one finger. “You see?”
Fletcher nodded. He kept seeing Tomás. Even with the picture back in the folder he could see Tomás, the marks the comb had left in Tomás’s dark hair. He had eaten food Tomás’s wife had cooked, had sat on the floor and watched cartoons with Tomás’s youngest child, a little girl of perhaps five. Tom and Jerry cartoons, with what little dialogue there was in Spanish.
“We don’t want to bother you,” Escobar was saying as the cigarette smoke rose and broke apart on his face and curled around his ears,
“but for a long time we was watching. You dint see us—maybe because you are so big and we are just little—but we was watching.
We know that you know what Tomás knows, and so we go to him.
We try to get him to tell what he knows so we don’t have to bother you, but he won’t. Finally we ask Heinz here to try and make him tell.
Heinz, show Mr. Fletcher how you try to make Tomás tell, when Tomás was sitting right where Mr. Fletcher was sitting now.”
“I can do that,” said Heinz. He spoke English in a nasal New York accent. He was bald, except for a fringe of hair around his ears. He wore little glasses. Escobar looked like a movie Mexican, the woman looked like Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein, Heinz looked like 125
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an actor in a TV commercial, the one who explained why Excedrin was best for your headache. He walked around the table to the trolley, gave Fletcher a look both roguish and conspiratorial, and flicked away the cloth over the top.
There was a machine underneath, something with dials and lights that were now all dark. Fletcher at first thought it was a lie detector—
that made a certain amount of sense—but in front of the rudimentary control panel, connected to the side of the machine by a fat black cord, was an object with a rubber grip. It looked like a stylus or some sort of fountain pen. There was no nib, though. The thing just tapered to a blunt steel point.
Below the machine was a shelf. On the shelf was a car battery marked DELCO. There were rubber cups over the battery terminals.
Wires rose from the rubber cups to the back of the machine. No, not a lie detector. Except maybe to these people it was.
Heinz spoke briskly, with the pleasure of a man who likes to explain what he does. “It’s quite simple, really, a modification of the device neurologists use to administer electric shocks to people suffering unipolar neurosis. Only this administers a far more powerful jolt. The pain is really secondary, I find. Most people don’t even remember the pain. What makes them so eager to talk is an aversion to the process.
This might almost be called an atavism. Someday I hope to write a paper.”
Heinz picked up the stylus by its insulated rubber grip and held it in front of his eyes.
“This can be touched to the extremities . . . the torso . . . the genitals, of course . . . but it can also be inserted in places where—forgive the crudity—the sun never shines. A man whose shit has been elec-trified never forgets it, Mr. Fletcher.”
“Did you do that to Tomás?”
“No,” Heinz said, and replaced the stylus carefully in front of the shock-generator. “He got a jolt at half-power on the hand, just to acquaint him with what he was up against, and when he still declined to discuss El Cóndor—”
“Never mind that,” the Bride of Frankenstein said.
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“Beg pardon. When he still wouldn’t tell us what we wanted to know, I applied the wand to his temple and administered another measured jolt. Carefully measured, I assure you, half-power, not a bit more. He had a seizure and died. I believe it may have been epilepsy.
Did he have a history of epilepsy, do you know, Mr. Fletcher?”
Fletcher shook his head.
“Nevertheless, I believe that’s what it was. The autopsy revealed nothing wrong with his heart.” Heinz folded his long-fingered hands in front of him and looked at Escobar.
Escobar removed his cigarette from the center of his mouth, looked at it, dropped it to the gray tile floor, stepped on it. Then he looked at Fletcher and smiled. “Very sad, of course. Now I ask you some questions, Mr. Fletcher. Many of them—I tell you this frankly—
are the questions Tomás Herrera refused to answer. I hope you will not refuse, Mr. Fletcher. I like you. You sit there in dignity, do not cry or beg or urinate the pants. I like you. I know you only do what you believe. It is patriotism. So I tell you, my friend, it’s good if you answer my questions quickly and truthfully. You don’t want Heinz to use his machine.”
“I’ve said I’d help you,” Fletcher said. Death was closer than the overhead lights in their cunning wire cages. Pain, unfortunately, was closer yet. And how close was Núñez, El Cóndor? Closer than these three guessed, but not close enough to help him. If Escobar and the Bride of Frankenstein had waited another two days, perhaps even another twenty-four hours . . . but they had not, and he was here in the deathroom. Now he would see what he was made of.
“You said it and you had better mean it,” the woman said, speaking very clearly. “We’re not fucking around, gringo. ”
“I know you’re not,” Fletcher said in a sighing, trembling voice.
“You want that cigarette now, I think,” said Escobar, and when Fletcher shook his head, Escobar took one himself, lit it, then seemed to meditate. At last he looked up. This cigarette was planted in the middle of his face like the last one. “Núñez comes soon?” he asked.
“Like Zorro in that movie?”
Fletcher nodded.
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“How soon?”
“I don’t know.” Fletcher was very aware of Heinz standing next to his infernal machine with his long-fingered hands folded in front of him, looking ready to talk about pain-relievers at the drop of a cue.
He was equally aware of Ramón standing to his right, at the edge of his peripheral vision. He could not see, but guessed that Ramón’s hand would be on the butt of his pistol. And here came the next question.
“When he comes, will he strike at the garrison in the hills of El Cándido, the garrison at St. Thérese, or will he come right into the city?”
“The garrison at St. Thérese,” Fletcher said.
He will come to the city, Tomás had said while his wife and daughter now watched cartoons, sitting on the floor side by side and eating popcorn from a white bowl with a blue stripe around the rim. Fletcher remembered the blue stripe. He could see it clearly. Fletcher remembered everything. He will come at the heart. No fucking around. He will strike for the heart, like a man who would kill a vampire.
“He will not want the TV station?” Escobar asked. “Or the government radio station?”
First the radio station on Civil Hill, Tomás had said while the cartoons played. By then it was the Road Runner, always gone in a puff of dust just ahead of whatever Acme Road Runner–catching device the Coyote was using, just beep-beep and gone.
“No,” Fletcher said. “I’ve been told El Cóndor says ‘Let them babble.’ ”
“Does he have rockets? Air-to-ground rockets? Copter-killers?”
“Yes.” It was true.
“Many?”
“Not many.” This was not true. Núñez had better than sixty.
There were only a dozen helicopters in the country’s whole shitpot air force—bad Russian helicopters that never flew for long.
The Bride of Frankenstein tapped Escobar on the shoulder. Escobar leaned toward her. She whispered without covering her mouth.