Kitabı oku: «Days of the Dead»

2

The road arrowed into the distance across the flat Pampas countryside. Farmland stretched away to either side, the farms themselves mostly pinpoints of light on the low horizon. In the vast sky a full moon was playing hide-and-seek with an armada of clouds.

They couldn’t be much more than forty kilometres from the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Jamie Docherty reckoned, and soon he would be able to see a red glow in the sky above the highway. He remembered nights as a young man driving back down from Loch Lomond to Glasgow – a close friend had always insisted that the glow was nature’s way of warning people that cities were bad for their souls.

Docherty took a glance in the rear-view mirror. Both nine-year-old Marie and seven-year-old Ricardo were fast asleep, which wasn’t exactly surprising. Between them, he and Isabel had driven nearly eight hundred kilometres that day, and over four hundred and fifty the day before. The two children had certainly started out hyperactive, but they just hadn’t been able to stay the course.

Beside him Isabel was also more than half asleep. She was in her mid-forties, a couple of years younger than he was, but she seemed just as beautiful as the day they had met, more than fifteen years ago.

Docherty smiled to himself as he remembered the first time he’d seen her, striding in through the doors of a hotel in the southern Argentinian town of Rio Gallegos. It had been at the height of the Falklands War – in the immediate aftermath of the landing at San Carlos – and Docherty had been leading one of two four-man SAS patrols which had been secretly airlifted on to the Argentinian mainland for the purpose of observing enemy activity at the Rio Gallegos and Rio Grande airfields. Having done everything which was required of it, his patrol had been on the point of heading for the Chilean hills when a complication arose. Two members of the other patrol had been captured, and there were fears that they would be tortured into revealing the name of MI6’s only agent in the area, an Argentinian woman based in Rio Gallegos. So someone had to warn her of the danger.

Docherty had taken the task upon himself, and changed his life in the process. The two of them had ended up escaping together across the mountains and falling in love along the way.

Now here they both were, driving towards Buenos Aires on a warm winter evening. It wasn’t the first time they had been across the Andes since setting up home in Chile two years before, but it still felt vaguely akin to putting their heads in the jaws of a lion. Of course, as far as the Argentinian authorities were concerned, Docherty was just a retired English soldier who happened to be married to an Argentinian national. And though his wife had once been exiled for involvement in terrorist activities, that had been long ago, in the time of the ‘Dirty War’, which nearly everyone but the still-active ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’ was so keen to put behind them. No one in authority had any inkling that husband and wife had met on Argentinian soil, midway through a military action which had probably helped to swing the Falklands War decisively in Britain’s favour.

After Docherty’s retirement from the Army they could even have settled in Argentina if they had wanted, but neither of them had. There were too many painful memories for Isabel, and Docherty preferred Chile. There wasn’t much to choose between the behaviour of the two armies in recent decades, but he found the people west of the Andes more friendly – more Celtic in spirit than the Anglo-German-oriented Argentinians. The climate was better too, and the mountains, lakes and islands of the south were like Scotland revisited.

Isabel still had friends and relations in her homeland. Her father had died during her exile in England, and her mother had cut all ties, but there were a couple of her father’s sisters with whom she still kept in touch and one cousin to whom she had always been close. Rosa lived with her academic husband and three children in a large, rambling house in Recoleta, and it was she who had invited them to the capital. Just for a holiday, she had said, but the two women had known each other a long time and Isabel suspected an ulterior motive. She had told Docherty as much, but neither of them had any idea what it might be.

Maybe she wanted Isabel’s help with her elder daughter, who seemed to have inherited her wider family’s interest in left-wing politics. The country might be run by a president more interested in cars and women than politics, but the same bastards as always lurked in the shadows.

It could be anything, Docherty thought, as a Mendoza bus blared by in the opposite direction. A holiday was a holiday, and any excuse to take time away from the damn word processor and his wretched memoirs was more than welcome. He’d been working on them on and off for over a year, and on a more or less nine-to-five basis for several months, but he didn’t have much more to show for his efforts than a huge pile of handwritten notes. When he tried actually writing it never seemed to come out the way he intended, leaving him to mutter ‘you had to be there’ at the annoyingly unresponsive screen. And when he had finally managed to put together a coherent chapter on the Bosnian business his publishers in London had come back with a long list of suggestions for alterations, most of which seemed designed to either obviate the risk of Her Majesty’s Government taking exception to Docherty’s version of events or to encourage Jean-Claude Van Damme to accept the movie part.

Docherty was well aware that a Van Damme movie might make him rich, but the thought of faking his own life story didn’t sit too well. If he was going to write the damn thing, he wanted it to tell the truth. He wanted his children to see him as a man who knew he had lived and worked on a moral tightrope, not as some glib action hero pumped up with either Hollywood cynicism or gung-ho fascism. A month had passed since Docherty and Isabel had seen Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning Braveheart, and he still felt angry about how bad it was.

Well, at least he didn’t have to think about any of that for another week. And the sky was growing red above the highway ahead. He leant over to nudge his wife awake, as she’d asked him to. ‘Not far now,’ he said.

Isabel yawned and reached for the tube of mints on the dashboard. ‘I wonder what Rosa really wants,’ she murmured.

In the Colombian city of Cartagena it was almost five-thirty in the afternoon and the lengthening shadows were throwing the crenellated walls of the old fortifications into dramatic relief. Carmen Salcedo, who had just finished her spiel on the era of piratical sackings and let her tour party loose to explore the walls on their own, watched the mostly American tourists happily ambling away, camcorders whirring, cameras poised.

It was certainly a beautiful evening. She stood leaning against one of the abutments, enjoying the blues of sea and sky, the gold-flecked waves and the buildings of the old city glowing in the evening sun. For all its problems – which ranged from drug traffickers through political corruption to air pollution – Cartagena was still a magical city.

Carmen had lived there for all of her twenty-six years. Her parents still lived in the hills behind the city, but she now shared a two-bedroom flat with Pinar, a fellow tour guide. They were going to the cinema that evening, she remembered, and looked at her watch. She should have given her charges twenty minutes, not half an hour.

But it was too late to worry about that now, and so far this group had proved more reliable than most. She walked back across to the bus and found Mariano squinting at a sex comic which he was holding only a few inches away from his eyes.

‘Getting short-sighted?’ she asked sweetly, making him almost jump out of his seat.

‘Don’t do that!’ he half shouted, glaring at her.

She didn’t think he had ever quite forgiven her for turning down the offer of a date, but he was a good driver, and on the streets of Cartagena that was no small matter. ‘Sorry,’ she said with a smile.

He huffed and puffed, then went back to the comic.

The Pearsons, an American couple in their sixties who had commandeered the front seats of the minibus on day one and, despite several heavy hints, never surrendered them to anyone else, had left a Miami newspaper to guard their precious space. It was almost a week old, but better than nothing, and Carmen sat down to improve her already near-perfect English.

She read the entertainment section first, hoping for a preview of the films which she would be able to see later that year in Cartagena, but they all seemed to be the same old boring hi-tech thrillers. She hadn’t heard of any of the bands mentioned in the music section, and if their music bore any relationship to the way they looked in their photographs she doubted if she was missing much.

She ignored the sports section, and was just skipping through the local news when she saw the headline ‘COLOMBIAN GIRL KILLED BY DRUGS’. Underneath it the sub-head claimed that ‘Traffickers cut her open to reclaim shipment’. Jesus, she thought, and then the two names stopped her in her tracks, and she could suddenly hear her own heart beating. She read the whole paragraph:

‘Another girl, whose Colombian passport identified her as Victoria Marín, was taken into custody by police last night. She was carrying a second passport, which enabled police to identify the dead girl as Placida Guzmán, but was either unwilling or unable to further help the Miami Beach PD with their investigation.’

She read on, but there was nothing else, no mention of the other three, no mention of her sister.

‘Could you take a picture of us, dear?’ someone asked, disturbing her reverie. It was one of the Englishwomen, with her husband hovering behind her. Carmen nodded dumbly, climbed down from the bus, pointed the camera and pressed the button, still in a state of shock.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ the woman asked, a concerned look on her face.

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Carmen replied, smiling. ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘Well, you’ll soon be rid of us for the night,’ the woman said with a twinkle.

Carmen smiled again, and looked at her watch. Ten minutes more.

They went slowly, but everyone was on time. On the drive back to the hotel she went through the next day’s itinerary – they were visiting the nearby Corales del Rosario National Park – and then asked the Pearsons if she could borrow their newspaper for the evening to help brush up her English.

Mr Pearson seemed a bit reluctant, but his wife was only too happy, probably seeing it as a down payment on their continued tenure of the best seats. At the hotel she counted them all out, remembered to re-check the next morning’s pick-up time with Mariano, then headed for a phone. Pinar was upset that their evening at the cinema was off, but she could tell from Carmen’s voice that something serious had happened. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Carmen explained, and rang her parents’ home. Her mother answered.

‘I’m coming up,’ Carmen told her. ‘I have to talk to you both.’

‘But we’re going out at eight…’

‘Just wait for me,’ Carmen insisted. ‘It’s about Marysa.’

‘What about her?’ her mother asked, sounding almost angry.

‘I’ll tell you when I get there.’

It was an hour’s journey on the bus, maybe even more at that time of day, so she decided on the luxury of a cab, as much for the privacy as the gain in speed. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to immediately ring her parents, but the tone of her mother’s voice had given Carmen cause to wonder. Should she have sat on this information for a few hours, thought about what she wanted to do with it, before putting herself at the mercy of her father’s stubbornness and her mother’s selfishness? What were they going to say to this? The last time she’d raised the issue with them they’d both been really angry with her, as if somehow it was her fault that their other daughter had been taken from them.

The trouble was, their instinctive approach to anything potentially disturbing was to ignore it, in the hope that it would go away. And it worked for them, or at least it did in the sense that they managed to avoid most of the disturbance which other people called living. But it had never worked for Carmen.

The traffic seemed worse than ever, but shortly after seven the taxi deposited her at the foot of the bougainvillea-bordered drive. Her parents were fairly rich by legal Colombian standards, her father having inherited the family footwear business. It was the combination of this wealth and the lack of a ransom demand which had eventually convinced them all to accept the police investigator’s conclusion that Marysa was dead.

They had likewise assumed that Placida Guzmán and Victoria Marín were dead. And Irma. And Rosalita.

Carmen let herself in through the front door, and a few moments later found her parents putting the finishing touches to their evening’s apparel in the enormous bedroom.

‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t tie your hair back like that,’ were her mother’s words of greeting. ‘Can’t you afford a proper styling?’

‘I don’t want a proper styling,’ Carmen said, running a hand over her severely pinned black mane.

Her mother just looked at her.

Carmen laid the newspaper out in front of her on the dressing table. ‘Read that,’ she ordered, pointing out the item with a finger.

Her mother sighed and started reading, still fiddling with her earrings as she did so. Then her hand suddenly stilled, leaving the filigree ornament swaying in mid-air. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said softly.

‘What is it?’ her husband asked, leaning over her shoulder to read.

‘Guzmán and Marín are common names,’ Carmen’s mother said in a small voice, as if she was arguing with herself.

‘Not that common,’ Carmen said gently. ‘And Victoria Marín and Placida Guzmán together – it’s too much of a coincidence. It even says that Victoria is twenty-three, which would be right.’ She looked at her parents, both of whom seemed to have been suddenly aged by the news. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she said. ‘This means there’s hope.’

‘We understand,’ her father said, and the look in his eyes seemed to add: we’ve lost her once and now we’ll get the chance to lose her all over again.

Carmen felt like slapping them both. ‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked her father abruptly.

He looked at her for a moment. ‘Talk to the Chief of Police, I suppose, and get him to contact the police in Miami.’

‘Don’t you think you should go there yourself? I’ll come with you,’ she added – his English had never been good.

He shook his head. ‘The police in Miami are more likely to listen to a fellow-officer than a Colombian civilian.’

Which might well be true, she thought. ‘So will you call now?’

He smiled wryly. ‘He won’t be in his office.’

‘His home then.’

‘I don’t have his home number, and even if I did…Carmen, the newspaper article is a week old. Putting the man’s back up to save a few hours is not worth it.’

‘And we’re going to be late,’ his wife added, earrings finally in place.

‘You’re still going out?’

‘What do you expect us to do – spend the evening wringing our hands?’ her mother asked.

‘No, I suppose not, but…You will ring first thing in the morning?’

‘I’ll go and talk to him in person.’

‘Good.’ She felt relieved.