MAMista

5

EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, TEPILO.

‘No one’s perfect, kid.’

From the top floor of the American embassy building on the Plaza de la Constitución you might have seen the fifteen-storey building of shining bronze glass that housed the police headquarters. But one could not see the skyline of Tepilo from the top floor of the embassy because the window glass was frosted ever since rooftop spies had been seen with telescopes peering into it.

The top floor was the CIA floor. Even the ambassador asked permission before going there, although all concerned insisted that this was a mere formality.

Michael Sean O’Brien was a well-proportioned man of thirty-four. His unruly hair, once red, had become almost brown, but together with his pale complexion it marked him as of Celtic blood. So did his boundless conviviality and short-lived bouts of anger. His career through the Office of Naval Intelligence, the US War Academy and then as a State Department analyst had brought him to be CIA station head in Tepilo. ‘Next time, I make sure I get a post much farther east,’ he said wearily. Still holding an unopened can of Sprite, he used his finger to flick through the latest batch of messages to have come off the fax machine. It had been a trying morning as he sorted out the flood of questions that poured in from all quarters following the previous night’s raid on The Daily American. ‘Much farther east,’ he said.

His assistant didn’t respond except to smile. Even the smile was not too committal. When O’Brien was angry it was better to remain silent.

‘This place is too close to the Washington time zone,’ said O’Brien. ‘John Curl and his merry men snap at your heels all day long. In Moscow our guys can work all day knowing that Washington is asleep.’ He sighed, knowing that Latin American experts like him were unlikely to get very far from the Washington time zone. It was one of the many penalties of that specialization. Sometimes he regretted that he hadn’t worked harder at German verbs.

‘Can I get you a fresh cup of coffee?’ said his assistant, who that morning had taken quite a lot of the wrath that O’Brien would have liked to expend upon his superiors.

‘No,’ said O’Brien. He sat down behind his desk, snapped open his can of Sprite. He drank it, savouring it with the relish that Europeans reserve for vintage wine. Then he chuckled. ‘But you’ve got to hand it to these bastards. They’ve got the State Department jumping through hoops of fire for them, Pablo.’

‘Yes,’ said his assistant. His name was not Pablo, it was Paul: Paul Cohen. He was a scholarly graduate of Harvard whose difficulties with the Spanish language had made him a butt of O’Brien’s jokes. Calling him Pablo was one of them.

‘You saw the transcript of that phone call Benz took from his man in Washington. The White House said these boys here have got to straighten up and fly right, if they want aid. That was yesterday morning, right?’

The assistant treated no direct question as rhetorical. ‘Ten thirty-four local time,’ he said.

‘So Benz phones Cisneros at the Ministry. Cisneros kicks ass and the Anti-Drugs Squad raid the Daily American offices and the airport. Notice that, Pablo: not just the Daily American offices. And to both places they take with them all five of those Drug Enforcement guys the Department of Justice sent here to teach the locals how to do it. And what do they find, Pablo? They find eight Americans carrying coke.’

‘Two carrying,’ said his pedantic assistant. ‘The other six only had traces of it on their clothing.’

‘Tell the judge,’ said O’Brien, who didn’t like his stories to be dismantled. ‘The fact is that Uncle Sam reels back with egg on his face, while Benz and his boys are laughing fit to be tied.’ He finished his drink and then bent the can flat and tossed it into the bin. ‘The whole raid was a fiasco. I was there at The Daily American. I could see it was just a show. The cops told me some yarn about their guys being beaten up and tossed down the stairs. But we’ve heard that story a hundred times before.’

‘Yes, we have,’ his assistant said. ‘They didn’t try to detain you?’

‘Cisneros sent someone to get me out of there before the cops went in.’

His assistant looked at him sympathetically and nodded.

‘They didn’t even detain that Cassidy woman,’ O’Brien said bitterly. ‘I saw her getting a cab in the street outside. I told her, “I thought they were only releasing people depositing a US passport.” She said, “That’s what I did.” I said, “You’re not American.” She smiled and got in the cab and said, “That’s why I didn’t need it.” A cool nerve she’s got, Pablo. That was who that phoney US passport belonged to.’ He picked up the forged passport that had come from the police that morning for verification of authenticity. He flicked it open. Only the cover was genuine, the inside pages were forged. ‘She didn’t even bother to put her own photo into it. The woman doesn’t look anything like her,’ he said disgustedly. ‘A cool nerve. I love her.’

‘She’s a terrorist,’ Paul said.

‘No one’s perfect, kid. And what a figure!’

‘Something else came up,’ his assistant told him gently.

‘Oh yes?’ O’Brien allowed his voice to show that his exasperation was almost at breaking-point. He’d begun to hope that his troubles were over for one morning.

‘That Britisher. The one John Curl’s office asked us to make sure was free and on his way south.’

O’Brien, chin propped on his hand, said nothing.

‘The one we hoped they would forget about,’ said his assistant. Actually O’Brien had screamed something about Brits not being his damn problem, screwed-up the fax and thrown it into his burn bag. ‘Curl’s office sent three follow-ups.’

‘Three?’ O’Brien looked at the clock on the wall. He’d only been out of his office for about an hour.

‘Yes, three,’ said his assistant. ‘I thought it was rather unusual. Sounds like Washington is getting into a flap. He’s got to be important. Did you see the priority code?’

‘Look Pablo. I know you say these dopey things just to set me up, but you know that code is no more than a priority. This guy might just be doing something we’re interested in. He might not even know we exist.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Sure. I’ve seen random selected tourists get higher ratings back in the bad old days when we put things into their baggage so it would get to East Berlin or Havana.’

‘I see.’

‘It doesn’t mean a thing,’ O’Brien said. That was the end of that. ‘So how is the Spanish coming along?’ It was a standard question and usually indicated that O’Brien was in a good mood.

‘What a language. In my dictionary it defines “político” as politician but it also means an in-law.’

O’Brien laughed. ‘You’re getting the idea, Pablo.’

His phone buzzed. It was his secretary. ‘Professor Cisneros is returning your call, Mr O’Brien.’

‘At last,’ said O’Brien while keeping the mouthpiece covered with his hand. He’d been trying to talk to the Minister of Home Affairs ever since early morning. ‘Pick up your extension. I want you to hear this guy wriggle.’

‘My dear Mike,’ said the Minister of Home Affairs. His English was perfect and fluent but he had the attractive foreign accent that certain Hollywood film stars of the Forties cultivated. Slang does not always go with such accents, so when Cisneros said, ‘We have one of your buddies here,’ it sounded arch.

‘Is that right?’

‘You don’t know, Mike?’

‘We don’t have anyone missing from roll-call,’ O’Brien said sarcastically.

‘Mike, my friend. I am talking about this delightful Englishman, Lucas.’

‘Englishman Lucas?’

‘Don’t prevaricate, Mike. You were talking with him last night. And this morning someone in your ambassador’s private office has sent him a delicious breakfast and an airmail copy of the New York Times.’

Mike O’Brien capped the phone. ‘Jesus suffering Christ.’ He’d gone red with anger. To his assistant he said, ‘How can Junk-bond do these things without checking first with me?’ He hit his desk with the flat of his hand to emphasize the last word. With a superhuman effort of will, O’Brien recovered his composure and uncapped the phone to talk. ‘You’re not making sense to me, Professor.’

‘Don’t hedge, Mike, we are both busy men. And I know you only call me Professor when you are put out. If he really is not one of yours, I’ll tell my boys to lose him in the Número Uno Presidio.’

He was talking about a primitive labour camp for political prisoners. The inmates worked at clearing jungle. The climate, the conditions, and the lack of medical services and hygiene ensured that not many prisoners returned from it. ‘Anything but that, Papá,’ O’Brien said in mock terror that was easily contrived.

‘One of yours then?’

‘One of ours, Papá.’

‘You’re not a good loser, Mike. Now you owe me one, remember that.’

‘Did he really have a breakfast sent over?’

Papá laughed and hung up the phone. That’s what he liked about dealing with the norteamericanos: who but a Yankee would take a joke like that seriously?

Everyone called Cisneros ‘Papá’, even the prison trusty who came into his office each day to polish his impeccable shoes. This sort of informality in the burocracia, like the computer filing system, legal aid and the shirt and tie uniforms that he’d given to the municipales, were pet ideas of Cisneros. He’d been talking about reform ever since he was one of the most vocal elements in the opposition.

Papá Cisneros was at heart an academic. He only went into the lawcourts when there was a subtle point of law to argue. The first signs of political ambition came when he made headlines as defence counsel at the treason trials. That was long before Benz came to power. In those far-off days Cisneros had been a real professor: a law professor at the university. Protected to some extent by the privilege of the courtroom, he’d denounced the use of the Federalistas against the coffee growers who wouldn’t – or couldn’t – pay taxes. He convinced everyone, except perhaps the Tax Department officials, that the farmers were hungry. He’d criticized the way that internment without trial had been used as a political device, and the fact that rightwing groups seemed to be immune to it. At the time Papá was the spokesman for middle-class liberals who wanted to believe that there could be an end to violence without the inconvenience of reform. Or reform without higher taxes.

Papá Cisneros had become the darling of the coffee farmers. He still was. But nowadays the coffee farmers were growing coca, and Papá was not doing much to stop them. Three years before, the Municipal and Federal police had been brought together with the Political Police and Tax Police, directly under Cisneros. The figures indicated that cocaine traffic had increased sharply in that three-year period. All the changes had been announced as necessary reform. Cynics had other theories, the least defamatory being that it was simply a way of using the nice new fifteen-storey building.

In any case the present situation seemed to be the worst of all worlds. The large conscript army was ‘exercising in the provinces’ but never mustered strength enough to tackle the MAMista communists in the south. Neither did the army move against the Pekinista communist forces who had established a state within a state in the fertile Valley of the Tears of Christ where the coca and the coffee bushes flourished. In the panelled gentlemen’s clubs of Tepilo’s business district, it was said that as long as Papá Cisneros – the farmer’s friend – had control of the police, the drug barons could sleep without troubled dreams. This was said with a smile, for there was no one in such Tepilo clubs who didn’t in some way benefit from the wealth that came from the export of coca paste.

‘Bring him in,’ called Cisneros.

Lucas came into the room that Cisneros used as an office. Papá extended a hand towards the chair. Papá was dressed in an expensive dark suit with stiff collar and silver-coloured silk tie. There were four inches of starched linen, with solid gold cufflinks, around the wrist of the extended arm. The stiffness of the low bow, the full chest and slim hips betrayed the tight corset that vanity demanded. Papá was an inappropriate name for a man who looked like an Italian film star or a fashionable gynaecologist.

Somewhere nearby a door banged. It was a resonant sound, as one would expect from a building composed of prefabricated pressed steel units with glass and plastic facings. The monolithic fortress that had occupied this site in the days of the monarchy had been replaced by this tin and glass box. Yet the oppressive atmosphere remained unchanged. Lucas recalled his father’s description of the premises the Gestapo had used in Rome. It was part of a pre-war apartment block. Some carpenter must have worked overtime to convert the rooms and kitchen into cramped solitary-size cells. The interrogation room wallpaper had shown outlines of the bed-head and wardrobe. In one cell his father said there was a shelf that still smelled of Parmesan. But those domestic traces had not lessened the terror of the men brought to that SS office in Rome. And the modern fittings and office equipment did nothing to lessen the anxieties of men in this building.

Lucas brushed the cement dust off his jacket. In Spanish Guiana there were as many grades of cell as there were grades of hotel room. Lucas had spent the night in a cell equipped with heating and a shower bath. He’d been given a blanket and his bunk had a primitive mattress. It was by no means like the comfortable quarters provided for deposed Cabinet Ministers, but neither was it comparable to the stinking bare-earth underground dungeons.

Lucas had not slept well. He lowered himself into the soft armchair that Papá Cisneros indicated and felt the pain of his stiff joints. Cisneros closed the slatted blinds as if concerned not to dazzle his visitor. The sunlight still came through the lower part of the window and made a golden parallelogram upon the brown carpet.

The office was being prepared for a visit by a party of American Senators. Cisneros’ honorary doctorate from Yale, a group photo taken at the International Law Conference in Boston and the framed certificate given to those privileged few who’d flown as passengers in Air Force One had been stacked against the wall prior to being hung in a prominent position behind his desk. A large oil of a Spanish galleon anchored in Tepilo Bay, and an engraving of Saint Peter healing the sick, were to be put in the storeroom. An idealized portrait of Admiral Benz was to be moved to another wall. Papá kept changing things. Next week a large group of freeloaders from the European Community was coming to see him. It would all be changed again.

‘Gracias,’ said Cisneros, dismissing the warder with a careless wave. But it would have been a reckless visitor who believed that his ornamental mirror was anything but an observation panel or that the wardrobe was anything but a door behind which an armed guard sat.

‘This American boy: Angel Paz,’ said Cisneros very casually as he looked at the papers on his desk. ‘You say he is with you?’

‘Yes, he is with me,’ said Lucas.

Cisneros smiled. Greying hair curled over his ears, his eyes were large and heavily lidded. His nose was curved and beak-like. Papagayo! thought Lucas suddenly. Parrot, dandy, or tailor’s dummy, in whichever sense one used the word, it was a perfect description of Cisneros.

‘I wish you would not lie to me, Colonel Lucas.’

Lucas stared back at him without speaking.

‘If you would simply admit the truth: that you met him at that party for the first time, then I could probably release you quite soon.’

Lucas still said nothing.

Cisneros said, ‘Do you know what sort of people you will be dealing with, if you travel south?’

‘Am I to travel south?’ Lucas said.

‘Many young men have the same spirit of aggression, but they do not explode bombs in places where innocent people get killed and maimed. You British have had a taste of this same insanity: in Palestine, in Malaya, in Kenya, in Cyprus, in Aden and in Ireland. Tell me what I should do.’ There was a buzzer and Cisneros reached under his desk. The door opened and a man came in carrying a small tray with coffee. The man was dressed in a coarsely woven work-suit with a red stripe down the trousers and a red patch on the back between the shoulders. Papá liked to have prison trusties working here as evidence of the Ministry’s concern with rehabilitation. Only those people coming here regularly over the years were likely to notice that the trusties were always the same men. And the sort of visitors who might remark on this shortcoming of the rehabilitation policy were not the ones likely to be served coffee.

‘Thank you,’ Cisneros told the servant. Then he poured jet-black coffee into thimble-sized cups and passed one of them to Lucas.

‘Thank you, Minister,’ Lucas said.

For a moment Papá’s face relaxed enough for Lucas to get a glimpse of a tired disillusioned man trying too hard. The same dusting of talc that hid his faint shadow of beard lodged in the wrinkles round his eyes, so that they were drawn white upon his tanned face. Lucas drank the fierce coffee and was grateful for the boost it gave him.

‘Look at the view,’ said Cisneros. He moved the blind. He didn’t mean the new marina, where the yachts and power boats were crowded, nor the sprawling shanty-towns and the tiled roofs amid which this tall glass-fronted building stood like a spacecraft from another planet. He meant the hilly chaos of steamy vegetation. It startled Lucas to be reminded that some parts of the jungle reached so near to the town. From this high building it was an amazing sight. The trees held the mist so that the valleys were pure white, the ridges emerald, and hundreds of hilltops made islands of the sort which cartoonists draw. The same wind that howled against the windows disturbed the endless oceans of cloud. Sometimes it created phantom breakers so fearsome they swamped the treetops, submerging an island so completely that it never reappeared.

Both men watched the awe-inspiring landscape for a moment or two, but the glare of the sun caused them both to turn away at the same time. Papá Cisneros poured more of the potent coffee to which he was addicted. ‘You are not guerrilla material. You have nothing in common with those maniacs. What are you doing here, Colonel?’ He did not give the words great importance. He said them conversationally while selecting a cheroot from a silver box on his desk. They were made specially for him and he savoured the aroma of the fermented leaf almost as much as he enjoyed smoking them.

‘From what I have seen of your Federalistas I’ve nothing in common with them either,’ said Lucas.

Cisneros managed a slight laugh and waved his unlit cheroot as if signalling a hit on the rifle range. ‘My Federalistas are peasants – fit youngsters, ambitious and ruthless. They are exactly the same profile as your guerrillas.’ He sniffed at the cheroot.

The way he said ‘Your guerrillas’ provided Lucas with an opportunity to disassociate himself from them but he did not do so.

Cisneros picked up a cigarette lighter in his free hand and held it tight in his fist like a talisman. ‘Exactly the same profile.’ He moved the unlit cheroot closer to his mouth but spoke before he could put it there. ‘There is attraction between opposing forces. Your guerrillas want to be soldiers. They dress in makeshift uniforms, and drill with much shouting and stamping of feet. They give themselves military rank. Men in charge of platoons are called battalion commanders; men who command companies are called generals.’ He smiled and again brought the cheroot near to his mouth. ‘No longer do I hear about “revolutionary committees”; nowadays this riff-raff have meetings of their “General Staff”. They don’t murder their rivals and praise their accomplices; they shoot “deserters” and award “citations”. Don’t tell me these men are trying to overturn a military dictatorship.’ This time the cheroot reached his mouth. He lit it, inhaled, snapped the lighter closed, gestured with the cheroot and exhaled all in one continuous balletic movement. Snatching the cheroot away from his mouth he said urgently, ‘No, they want to replace this government with a real dictatorship. Make no mistake about what your friends intend, Colonel, should they ever shoot and bomb their way to power.’