Breaking Lorca (16 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

T
HE BIZARRE LANDSCAPE OF
N
EW
J
ERSEY
was behind them. Victor had never travelled on an eight-lane highway before, and he found the intricate turmoil of expressways, parkways, tunnels and bridges frightening—especially at seventy miles per hour. But the vast networks of pipes and vats, the chemical smells and the whoosh and roar of eighteen-wheelers, were over now, and the road that unfurled before them was the most beautiful Victor had ever seen.

Wyatt had borrowed a car for this trip—a cramped, rusted vehicle with a bad rattle in the engine and a powder of cigarette ash and what looked like cat litter covering every surface. Lorca sat in the back, and Victor, feeling it would be rude to leave Wyatt alone up front like a bus driver, sat in the passenger seat besside him.

“It makes sense,” Victor said. “They make the roads to Washington the best possible. You have to give people a sense of importance when they drive to their capital.”

Wyatt glanced over at him. “I don’t get you.”

“We have travelled at least fifty miles, and there has not been a single hole. No patches, no dirt sections. All your highways cannot be so perfect.”

Wyatt had been uncharacteristically subdued ever since they had met at the church. He just shrugged. “Most of the interstates are pretty good.”

“Not like this, I am sure.” The surface was so smooth, the curves and inclines engineered to such perfection, they seemed to waft the car along on a cushion of air.

“Look,” Bob said, in a different tone of voice now. “What I said at the church about Graciella and the others making other travel arrangements? It’s not true. The fact is, they backed out.”

Lorca sat forward in the back seat. “Graciella is not going to testify?”

“No. None of the others is going to testify. There will be a few people coming from Los Angeles. Some from Minneapolis. But they’ll be testifying about village raids, and about the disappeared. We don’t have anyone else talking about clandestine jails. So, Lorca, your testimony is more important than ever.”

“I am the only one from our group?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I misled you.”

“You lied to us,” Victor said sharply.

“I’m sorry,” Wyatt said—quietly, for him. “I was afraid Lorca would change her mind too.”

“She has a right to change her mind. Maybe she
should
change her mind.”

Lorca was still leaning forward, gripping the backs of their seats. “No, I will not change. I will testify.”

“Good girl,” Wyatt said, and gave the steering wheel a light slap with his palm.

Victor cursed under his breath and looked away.

Half an hour later, Wyatt pointed at the passing landscape. The hills were bigger and deeper green, with patches of yellow and blue flowers. “This is Delaware we’re in now. One of the smaller states.”

They travelled another thirty miles or so in silence.

Then Victor felt Lorca’s hand on his shoulder, the warmth of her fingers through his shirt. He turned in the seat, and she raised her eyebrows in a quizzical expression. “What?” he asked.

But she shook her head and said, “Nothing. Nothing at all.” And sat back to watch the green parade of hills, the dark clouds gathering above them.

“This is Maryland,” Wyatt announced a while later. “Richest state in the union. Great for sailing—not that I’ve ever been sailing. Hope that rain holds off till we get off the highway.”

Victor fixed his eyes on the interstate’s vanishing point that shifted with each hill, each curve. “Perhaps I will write something out, Bob. Something for the hearing.”

“Write what? Instead of testifying, you mean?”

“I could tell them what I did at the little school.”

“If you want to testify, Ignacio, just testify. A piece of paper isn’t going to do it.”

“Why not? It is the same as the things I would say.”

“It’s not, I’m afraid. The committee allows written testimony, but it’s not as effective. They can’t question a piece of paper. They can’t test its credibility.”

“But suppose there was another witness. Another person who saw all of the things I wrote down. Who could say, ‘Yes, this happened. Yes, that happened.’ Who could swear that every word I wrote was true.”

“They could corroborate it, you mean. That would help. That might work.”

“What do you mean?” Lorca said from the back seat. “There was another prisoner with you? Someone who will give evidence before the committee?”

“There was someone there. Someone who can testify to the truth of what I write. I don’t want to say any more right now.”

“But there’s only the two of us, Bob said. Who else do you know?”

“It’s not a soldier, is it?” Wyatt asked hopefully.

“No. Not a soldier.”

“Man, that’s what we really need. A Guardia deserter. Someone who knows all about these jails from the other side. That would blow this thing wide open.”

There was some confusion at the hotel, which was a Quality Inn high up on Connecticut Avenue. Only one room had been booked for the three of them, and it took Wyatt twenty minutes to straighten things out. Victor and he ended up sharing a room on the third floor; Lorca got a corner room at the end of the hall.

Although the room was very plain, all of the furnishings looked new. “Have you seen the bathroom?” Victor asked Wyatt with excitement. “Take a look at it.”

Wyatt dropped some socks into a drawer and went to look. “What about it?”

“It’s so clean! I’ve never seen such a clean place.”

“Hotels are like that, Ignacio.”

“And they have put soap and shampoo out for us. Isn’t that nice?”

“Real thoughtful. I better check in with security. Told them we’d be here by noon, and it’s nearly three now.” Wyatt was already dialing the phone.

Victor went down the hall and knocked on Lorca’s door.

“Ignacio, look at this place!” Lorca’s corner room was three times the size of the other. “Have you ever seen a bed this big? It’s like something for a giant. Two giants.”

“Truly. That is a big bed.”

Lorca had pulled the covers back, so that the crisp white sheets resembled an acre of snow. She knelt on the white expanse and trailed her fingers over the material as if it were a tapestry.

“Bob and I have two normal beds. Very good quality, though.”

“Come and try it.” She patted the bed, and he sat beside her. The bedspread, he saw, had been draped over a large mirrored vanity. Noticing his glance, she said, “I hate mirrors. I don’t like to see myself.” She lay back, propped against four pillows.

Victor lay on his side. He was about to touch her when she pointed at the windows. “I have a balcony too. Do you have a balcony?”

“Yes. A small one.”

Lorca jumped up and pulled back the balcony door; a damp gust blew in, carrying sounds of traffic and the smell of imminent rain. Victor joined her outside. The hotel faced another hotel across the street—much bigger and grander than the one they were in. “Very nice,” he said. “Bob says the White House is on the other side of those hills. The White House, can you imagine?”

“The White House,” she said softly. “It sounds so pretty.”

“Bob says we can take a tour. They let people visit.”

“The map says there is a zoo just up the street, too. I think I would rather go to the zoo.”

To the east, storm clouds had massed into a dark wall. The wind tugged at Lorca’s hair, flicking strands across Victor’s face. He stood behind her, placing his hands on either side, gripping the guardrail. “Now you’re trapped,” he said, but she didn’t move.

“Are you really going to write about what happened to you at the little school?”

“Yes. Tonight, I will write it all down.”

“Why don’t you just testify, Ignacio? That is much simpler, no?”

“Perhaps I will testify. I have to work myself up to it. Writing things down may help.” The first heavy raindrops hit the balcony. By this time tomorrow, Victor thought, she will hate me. This was the way it should be; it had been stupidity to expect anything else. “I love you,” he said in Spanish.
“Te amo.”

Lorca stiffened slightly, saying nothing. She raised an arm and pointed to a black bird that hovered in the air, hanging motionless on an updraft. Victor kissed her hair, so gently she did not feel it.

She said something he did not hear.

“What was that? What did you say?”

“Si muero,”
she repeated. If I die.

“Don’t worry, sweet one. You are not going to die.”

“Si muero,”
she said again.
“Dejad el balcón abierto.”
If I die, leave the balcony open.

“You are not going to die. Not while I am here. I promise.” This might even be true, he realized with a kind of wonder. He would rather die than see her harmed again. Was this where bravery had its roots, then, in love?

“It is a poem, Ignacio. A poem by the real Lorca—Feder ico García. ‘
Si muero, dejad el balcón abierto
’!”

Goosebumps had formed all up her arms.

“You are cold,” Victor said. “We should go inside.”

TWENTY-SIX

T
HAT NIGHT, THE STORM FINALLY BROKE
, flinging bucketfuls of rain at the windows. Victor sat at the tiny desk in his hotel room, struggling to put his thoughts on paper. He badly wanted to be with Lorca, but he wanted to write everything out before his natural cowardice took control of him once more.

For an hour, nearly two, he floundered. He wrote things down and crossed them out, wrote them differently, crossed them out again. How did you tell the world that you had helped to break a young boy’s leg? How did you testify in the clear light of day that you had been in the car that drove that boy to his death? What was the proper way to say,
I fastened the electrodes to her breasts?
Even the least of his actions seemed an enormity when written out:
I mopped up the teeth, the blood, the hair
.

A drop of sweat splashed onto the paper, blurring the word
blood
. Victor was sweating profusely, even though the room was cool. Another drop fell, smearing the word
screams
. He slid open the balcony door a little, letting the rain hit his face. Lightning briefly lit up the street below like a flashbulb. He breathed in the cool night air; smells of concrete and rain and car exhaust filled the room. Somewhere a horn was stuck, and angry voices shouted.

He read over what he had written.
I turned the power up past three. Her screams were terrible
. He tried to write in point form, in chronological order, but his brain flashed with images, as if illuminated by the storm outside.

A knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.” Strange, how he had come to love her cracked, unattractive voice. “It’s Lorca.”

He opened the door a few inches.

“I was nervous,” she said. “The storm. May I come in?”

“Let me come to your room in a little while. An hour or so. Just now I am writing my testimony. Trying to work up some courage.”

“I won’t disturb you. I will sit quietly.”

Those terrible sentences—he would never be able to write them with Lorca in the room. “Give me one hour,” he said. “Maybe not even so long.”

The brown eyes went hard and cold. She left the doorway, and a moment later her door slammed.

With hesitations and crossings out, honesty took much longer than he had anticipated. He wanted to write simple statements of fact, but the facts were disgusting.
We starved her for three days, and then I fed her a meal full of cockroaches
.

He rewrote everything in chronological order, from his induction into the special squad to his desertion at Fort Benning. Point by point, he described what had been done to Lorca, to Labredo and to the real Ignacio Perez. By the time he was finished, he had filled eight foolscap pages. He signed the last one with his real name, Victor Peña.

“Victor Peña,” he muttered to himself. “Victor Peña, coward and torturer.” Victor Peña. Victor Peña felt numb. Victor Peña felt like a man whose home has exploded before his eyes. Destruction beyond his comprehension.

He sat in silence for some time.

“Nothing,” he said aloud, he didn’t know why. And a little later, “Zero.”

Through his reflection in the window, he saw that the rain had slowed. He switched off the desk lamp and his face disappeared. Now he could see clearly into the hotel across the street. On the second floor there was some sort of fancy party in progress. Black waiters in white jackets served champagne from silver buckets. No one had told Victor that Washington was such a black city; he had never seen so many black people in his life, not even in New York. Whenever you saw Americans in El Salvador, they were white.

Music drifted over from the party, Brazilian music it sounded like. He could see some of the horn players on a stage at one end of the ballroom, and several couples dancing. The scene was framed in the window like a painting, and wishing you were in it was futile. The happy scene was inaccessible to anything but longing.

The higher floors were mostly dark. Perhaps it was a slow week, perhaps everyone was at the party. In a corner room a man in shirt sleeves was talking on the phone. In another, a room-service waiter arranged a vase of flowers. Then a light went on, two rooms over, revealing a man with binoculars.

At first Victor thought the man was looking directly at him, and he shrank from the window. His own light was out—the watcher could not possibly see him—but Victor moved behind his curtain anyway. The man was wearing a cream-coloured suit and a red tie. He had a moustache, and he was talking to someone, gesticulating with his free hand. The binoculars were trained to one side, on the corner of Victor’s own hotel or on something beyond it.

A peeping Tom? Such a creature would not be likely to chat with a confederate as he stared, however. Perhaps a thief, sizing up a prospective target.

The man jabbed the air for emphasis. He does that just like my uncle, Victor thought. Then the man turned slightly, lowering the binoculars.

“Mother of God,” Victor said. “Oh, dear Mother of God.”

The man watching his hotel was Captain Peña. Victor had no sooner recognized him than the room across the street went dark and a second man joined his uncle at the window. The light from the street below distorted their features, but it was bright enough to see that the second man was about six inches taller than the Captain.

“Mother of God,” Victor muttered again. It made perfect sense, of course, if Captain Peña were planning to kill someone. Oh, yes. If the Captain intended to kill someone, Tito would be the man to bring. Tito would be just the man you’d want.