The Mulberry Bush (10 page)

Now this man had seen the other side of vengeance. Military intelligence had arrested his wife. He showed Father Yuri a picture of a breathtakingly beautiful woman, as if seeing her perfect face would help the priest understand his desperation. If he had married a plain girl, would his loss have been smaller? The young man's estranged father, a member of parliament, had confirmed that she was being interrogated at a military base. This meant beatings, electric shock, repeated near-drowning, broken bones, torn flesh. It meant rape and every form of sodomy by many rapists. Because she was guilty—she was a devoted comrade and had killed to prove it—it meant, in the end, painful death. The young man, though he was an atheist, thought it possible that God had punished her in order to punish him, and that He wasn't done yet. The couple had a daughter, now twelve years old. Was she next?

God had come back to this young man in wrath, showing him that He existed. He had made him understand how he deserved the punishment meted out to him. The young man felt that Jesus was waiting for him to make amends, that some great penance was expected of him, that perhaps his wife would be spared further suffering if he understood what was expected of him. He wanted to be told what that was, what he had to do to end this nightmare.

Father Yuri, who knew that everything he was hearing might well be a lie this supplicant was telling himself but also that it might not be, asked what he thought his wife's torturers wanted.

“They want names,” the young man said. “She will never tell them.”

“Will you tell them?”

“Never. It would betray her and everything she is.”

“God understands that. That doesn't mean He will forgive your rejecting the penance you think He is demanding. Do you pray?”

“Not since I was a child. But since she was taken, yes.”

“Has your daughter been raised in the faith?”

“No. Just the opposite.”

“Then you have put a child's soul in peril. Have you considered the possibility that this is the reason for His anger?”

“No. The idea terrifies me.”

“Your penance is this: a hundred Our Fathers every day you remain alive. A hundred thoughts each day about how to give God what He wants. You know what it is. You must find a way to give it to Him. You cannot keep the faith with evil and with Him, too. You must pray for a Good Samaritan to raise you up and make you see the way. There
is
a way. Begin to believe by believing that.”

“What is that way, Father?”

“I am not the Good Samaritan,” said Father Yuri. “God will send him to you. But you must recognize him, accept him, do as he asks.”

At this point I had asked Father Yuri if this had in fact happened.

Father Yuri said, “Only God knows that.”

In the restaurant, Tom Terhune listened to Father Yuri's story without interrupting. He was amused.

“Actually,” he said, “Amzi was the Good Samaritan.”

Terhune advised me to read the Headquarters file on Father Yuri's young man in torment. After that we'd talk to Amzi.

After all my scheming, it was as simple as that. It was a thick file. It confirmed what Father Yuri had already told me and a good deal more besides—names, photographs, details. Father Yuri's supplicant was named Alejandro Aguilar. In photographs his wife, Felicia, was indeed beautiful—a Madonna with the fierce eyes of a hater.

Both had genteel parents, distinguished ancestors. The difference between them was at the same time trivial and profound: Felicia was penniless, Alejandro had a trust fund. They named their daughter Luz because communism had shown them the light when she was still a fetus. There were pictures of her as a child and as the striking twenty-nine-year-old woman she was now. She was not as photogenic as her parents, how could anyone be? I wondered how much of this information was fiction or guesswork or wishful thinking—not least because Alejandro Aguilar himself was the source for most of it and he was a zealot who subscribed
to a belief system in which virtuous lies were authentic truth because any evil act or intention ascribed to the class enemy was almost certainly true and even if it was not, served the purposes of the revolution.

At the time in question, almost twenty years in the past, Amzi had been chief of the Latin America division. He had seen in Alejandros's distress an opportunity to take possession of a terrorist commander. Because Amzi wanted the chief of station in Buenos Aires to stay out of this for the sake of future relations with the locals, whose toes would be stepped upon by the operation he had in mind, he had flown down from Virginia to handle it himself.

“It wasn't rocket science,” Amzi said. “We knew the military had taken this guy's wife. We knew this was driving him crazy. We overheard him saying so over and over again on wiretaps. His wife must have been one hell of a piece of ass, because he just lost it when they took her away. We were listening to him. He had some nutty idea he could rescue her, storm the military base or something. This guy thought he was a pimpernel. He never spent two nights running in any one of the hidey-holes he used. We knew this because one of our techs sneaked into one of his dumps while he slept—Alejandro didn't believe in lookouts. He knew the military's goon squad, if it found him, would just shoot the guards and blow the door and grab him. The only defense was to make it impossible for the enemy to find him.

“He had this rucksack he carried at all times. Some people thought it had a bomb in it so he could blow up himself and anyone who tried to capture him, but the tech said it was just an overnight bag with a couple of guns inside. The tech bugged the rucksack. Also one of Alejandro's shoes—he only had one pair because he lived in poverty like the downtrodden masses. So we knew where he was every minute and most of the time we could hear him talking if we stayed close enough to pick up the transmission. Which we did. I took a whole surveillance team with me, faces the locals didn't know. Very costly. But we had to get there first.

“Alejandro was right: The army would just grab him and torture everything he knew out of him,” Amzi said. “They had faith in their methods, but there was no possibility he'd tell them anything but lies. He'd die with Felicia and the two of them wouldn't even tell Saint Peter or the devil, depending on which one was handling the interrogation of their immortal souls. What we wanted was people we could turn and work with in the future. The military just wanted to exterminate the bastards. They weren't stupid enough to think we'd ever tell them everything if we got our hands on Aguilar, but something was better than nothing and they might find him before we turned him and made him untouchable because he belonged to us.”

One night when Alejandro was returning from interrogating an enemy of the people, Amzi stepped out of the shadows.

In Spanish he said, “Hello, Alejandro. I mean you no harm. I think you know where I come from and what I do for a living. If you want your wife back, you'll listen to me.”

Aguilar moved his hand toward his belt. Amzi stabbed him hard on the chest with a blunt forefinger. “Don't even think about it. Guns are pointed at you from every direction by men who can see in the dark. If you make a move on me, you're a dead man. Ask yourself how that would help your wife.”

At these words, four of Amzi's men, standing within ten feet of him and Aguilar, whistled the first four notes of “Yankee Doodle.” An Amzi touch—a night without ridicule was a night wasted.

To me Amzi said, “My guys were wearing night-vision goggles, but there were no guns pointed at him. In a situation like this, the sound of gunfire is the sound of failure. But he thought he was in the presence of the Big Bad Wolf, so he believed me.”

Amzi told Aguilar the deal. Aguilar would give him the names of his fighters. Amzi would trade some of the names to the military in return for the release of the wife. Headquarters, which Aguilar, like a lot of
other brainwashed nutcases, thought was omnipresent and omniscient and possessed unlimited power and wealth, would get him and his wife and daughter out of the country and give them a new identity with genuine-false credentials and an introduction to a world-class plastic surgeon, and pay all the bills. They would be protected, and paid, for the rest of their lives.

Aguilar said, in English, “Never, you son of a bitch.”

“OK,” Amzi said. “Then what's happening to your wife will go on happening and in the end, trust me, they'll beat her and gang-bang her until she tells them everything. They won't let her die until she does that, even if it takes years. Then the same thing will happen to you and you will break, too.”

“So you say.”

Amzi said, “Has your daughter reached puberty?”

“WHAT?”

“It's something to consider, my friend, knowing what you know about your enemy's interrogation techniques. If your wife won't break and you won't use your head, what do you think they'll do next to encourage you to change your minds?”

The night sky was overcast. It was pitch-dark—no moon, no stars, no glimmer of streetlight in the blighted neighborhood where they stood. The two men had not seen each other's faces, only heard voices. Now Amzi pointed a small flashlight at his own face and turned it on. Aguilar he left in the dark, because he already knew what he looked like.

He said, “That's so's you'll know who I am the next time we get together. Think it over when you calm down, Alejandro. I'll find you again. Soon, in daylight, because one way or another, you may not have much time left. You can tell me then what your decision is and we'll go from there.”

Three mornings later, in a different part of the city, Amzi was waiting for Alejandro when he emerged from a different lair he thought only he
knew existed. When he caught sight of the North American he looked, Amzi said, like his heart had squirted out of his asshole. He brushed past Amzi, ignoring him, and walked rapidly down the street. Amzi followed. Two of his men shadowed them on the opposite sidewalk. Alejandro didn't seem to pick up on them.

Amzi said, “I was surprised he didn't see them, this guy supposedly being such a Moriarty, but I thought maybe he figured he was safe with us—not because he realized what pussies we really were, but because we wanted something from him and wouldn't whack him until he gave it to us. Or even then, but how could he believe that? He thought he was swimming in the sea of the noble workers he was always talking about and they would protect him. The fact is they would have taken one look at him and known he was a rich kid in disguise, so they would have just stood back and let him be grabbed, hoping he'd get what was coming to him.”

After ten minutes or so during which Amzi determined that no one was following
him,
he closed the gap between him and Alejandro and in his shittiest Spanish (Amzi's phrase) he said, “Yes or no or don't know?”

Alejandro, eyes front, trudged on in silence.

Amzi said, “OK. I'm going to go around you and lead on. Don't shoot me in the back unless you think this is a good day to die. If you stay with me, I'll know you want to talk business.”

Alejandro stayed with him. A couple of blocks ahead, a van was parked at the curb. As they approached, the rear door slid open. Amzi got in. Alejandro followed him.

I said, “What if he hadn't done that?”

Amzi glowered at the interruption.

He said, “There was no Plan B because Plan B is a fucking cop-out.”

Amzi didn't search Alejandro. He was a guest, a possible colleague and future friend, not a prisoner. They drove in silence to the countryside. Alejandro showed no fear but he refused to speak inside the van.

“He thought the vehicle was bugged,” Amzi said. “How right he was, for a change.”

It was a long ride and for all Alejandro knew he was being kidnapped. His behavior was stoic. Amzi gave him no credit for this. He figured Alejandro was just another college-educated, which was to say
indoctrinated,
upper-class brat who thought he was untouchable.

“To eliminate any idea that I was wired,” Amzi said, “I suggested we both take off all our clothes and go for a walk bare ass. He nodded and stripped, and off we went into the woods like the odd couple. He took his
pistola
with him—a Makarov, naturally. Don't ask me why. There were four of my guys within earshot. He must have known he wouldn't live long if he fixed his weapon. Maybe he planned to shoot himself if I led him into an ambush. I didn't say a word about it.”

When they were out of earshot of the van, Alejandro said, “Tell me exactly how this would work.”

Amzi repeated what he had said in the dark.

Alejandro said, “
All
the names?”

“That's right. If you're as smart as I think you are, you've kept your troops in a state of ignorance so they can't do you much harm if they break. For this thing to work, though, I'll need two who can tell them everything or almost everything.”

“Why two?”

“In case one of them dies while refusing to answer questions. The military has to get the information it wants or they'll never let your wife go.”

“Why would they let her go?”

“Because they'll get zip from us if they don't promise to let her go.”

“They'll lie.”

“Not to us.”

Alejandro said, “What happens to the people you don't hand over?”

Amzi knew Alejandro would save his friends, men and women of his own class, and born commissar that he was, put the peasants and workers
on the death list with godlike indifference. That was why he was interested in the survivors. They would be welcomed home by their families. All they had to do when playtime was over was get a haircut and show up, put on suits and ties, and accept their elders' blessing. They would go back to respectability as if nothing had ever happened.

Amzi said, “We'll take care of them. Your friends will be our friends.”

“Good luck. You can't buy them.”

Amzi, whose experience had taught him you could buy anyone if you made the right offer, let that pass. He knew Alejandro's crowd didn't need the money. But they had other needs.

He said, “You'll be long gone before they can figure everything out. They'll think you're dead and your wife, too, if that's what you're worried about.”

“What I'm worried about,” Alejandro said, “is trusting you.”

“There's no eleventh commandment that says you have to trust anybody except the Almighty, and like the Bible tells us, that's usually a mistake. But what other choice have you got? If you do nothing, your wife will die and so will you. Same thing happens if I screw you over. But if I don't screw you over, and I won't, you get her back, you live to a ripe old age in a country of your choice where nobody knows who you are, and after a while nobody in Argentina will remember who you were anyway. So what have you got to lose?”

“Except my honor.”

Amzi said, “I wanted to ask this shithead what the fuck he thought
that
was and how much it would bring at auction, but I just smiled sympathetically, like I understood all too well how hard it was for an idealist like him to sell out his principles.”

Amzi drank coffee from the mug on his desk.

“Coffee's cold, goddam it,” he said.

He picked up the phone and told Rosemary to bring him another cup.

When the new, steaming coffee arrived he gulped half a cup of it as if it were ice water.

Then he said, “Meanwhile, back at the nudist camp, Alejandro walked away into the woods to think things over in solitude. I stayed where I was. Where was he going to go with no clothes on? After half an hour or so he came back.

He said, “All right. But if I don't get her back, I'll kill you, and if you kill me first, somebody else will kill you and your entire family if it takes twenty years.”

Amzi said, “You've got a deal. Let's get back to the vehicle where you can make out the list.”

At this point, Amzi stopped talking. He drank the rest of his coffee in two or three swallows, his cold eyes on me all the while—honest Amzi, tough as nails, gruff as Zeus, all-business.

He said, “Questions?”

“Only one,” I said. “Then what happened?”

“He gave me the names. I gave the military the ones I had no reason to keep for myself. The military arrested the whole bunch in one big raid. After they pumped them out, they let Alejandro's wife go as agreed. She led them straight to Alejandro. Before the happy couple could kiss, they arrested him and rearrested her.”

“They broke their word to you?”

“They hadn't promised not to rearrest her or to let him go.”

“You stood aside and let them take them?”

Amzi answered this question by not answering it.

“They disappeared,” he said. “In those days that was like saying the military threw them out of an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean—from a mile up, so they'd have time to think on the way down.”