Twenty-Five

I SAID, “HOW DID YOU LEARN about Cathryn Bigelow’s death?”

She took another deep drag from her cigarette, exhaled. The room was foggy now with smoke and my eyes were beginning to sting.

“A friend in Los Angeles,” she said. “A Salvadoran. She knew of my connection to Melissa. The television and the newspapers in Los Angeles, they made of it a very big thing, the death of Cathryn. She was Melissa’s sister, and Melissa was still missing.”

I’d glanced through the newspaper clippings about Cathryn’s death, in the material I’d received from Ed Norman. The papers had covered the death heavily because Calvin Bigelow was such a honcho in Los Angeles money circles, and because he and his wife had already been forced to deal with the mysterious disappearance, only months before, of their other daughter. Like the L.A. police, the newspapers had downplayed, or ignored, the possibility of any connection between the two events.

Juanita Carrera said, “My friend telephoned to me because she was afraid I might be in danger.”

“When was this?” I asked her.

“Last Wednesday. In the evening.” She took a drag, leaned forward, ground out the cigarette, and leaned back, exhaling.

“And you left that night.”

“Yes. I knew some people who were safe. Here in Santa Fe. I went to them.”

“You were certain that Cathryn had been killed on orders from El Salvador.”

She moved her shoulders lightly. “Of course.”

“But why would they kill her at the beginning of October? Melissa disappeared in August.”

“Melissa told me, when I saw her, that she had written to her sister, to tell her that she was safe. Cathryn must have spoken of this to someone. And that someone told someone else. And someone in El Salvador sent a killer to learn from Cathryn where Melissa was.”

“Who would Cathryn have spoken to?”

She shook her head. “I do not know. I never met Cathryn. But it must have happened in this way.”

“You met with Melissa on the twenty-third of September?”

“Yes. A Monday.”

Melissa’s card had been postmarked in Santa Fe on the same day. Cathryn was killed on the second of October. Santa Fe mail could sometimes take a week to reach L.A. The timing was right.

I asked her, “Does the phrase ‘The flower in the desert lives’ mean anything to you?”

She frowned as though surprised. “Where did you hear of this?”

“It was what Melissa wrote to her sister, on the postcard.”

“Ah.” She took a deep breath, and frowned again, sadly now. “Melissa was making, in a way, a joke.”

“How?”

She leaned forward, slipped another Kool from the pack, lit it, sat back. “The death squads, sometimes they warn you before they come for you. Sometimes they do not. And sometimes they send only the warning, and they never come. For many people, to receive the warning is enough. The warning is a letter that says, ‘The flower in the desert dies.’ It is signed E.M.”

“For Esquadron de la Muerte.”

“Yes.” She inhaled, then exhaled, cigarette smoke.

“And Melissa knew this?”

“Yes. I had told her of it. I had received such a letter myself, before I left Salvador. It was the reason I left.”

“Who else would know what the phrase meant?”

A small shrug. “Any Salvadoran. It was common knowledge. There are Salvadorans who have received such letters even while they lived in Los Angeles.”

“Tell me this. Why would a death squad come after you?”

“My husband was a fighter with the FMNL. The national liberation front. But, really, you see, they need no reason.” She paused, frowned. Finally, she shook her head. “You would not understand.”

“Try me,” I said.

She inhaled again on the Kool, exhaled, leaned forward, tapped the ash into the ashtray, sat back. She nodded. “I shall tell you a story. Three years ago, before I left Salvador, I went to visit a friend in the countryside. Constancia is her name. I knew her from school in the capital. Her parents had disappeared while she was in school and she had gone back to their village, to live with her aunt. I had seen her only two times since the time of school, when she had come with her uncle to San Salvador.”

Another drag on the cigarette. “On this day, I met her family. Her aunt, Tomasina, and her two cousins—these were young girls, not yet sixteen. Constancia had a young son, Gilberto. A baby, eighteen months old. I had met her uncle, of course, before this. Juan. A good man. The husband of Constancia, Carlos, he was gone, off in the hills with the National Front. The others, the seven of them, they lived in a house not much bigger than this room.”

Another drag. She leaned forward, tapped off her ash, sat back. “There was work to do, but Tomasina and Juan sent us off, so that we might talk. And we did. We talked for a long time, perhaps for several hours. There was a small river not too far from the village, and we sat there on the rocks, in the shade of the trees, and we talked. Not very much about the war. We talked about small things, unimportant things. The girls we had known in school. What clothes the women wore now in the capital. Constancia always had been fond of fine clothes. She had not owned any herself since she left the capital.”

Another drag. “When we returned, the village was silent. There were still some animals in the streets, some chickens and an old dog, but the people were gone. The children, the old people. We went to the house of Juan and Tomasina. I could smell the blood even before we went inside, and I could hear the flies.

“Constancia’s family were sitting at a small table in the center of the room. Their heads had been cut off, and each head had been placed in front of the body, and the hands had been placed on top of the head. To make it appear, you see, that they were caressing it. But this had not worked with the hands of the baby, Gilberto. His hands and his arms were too small. And so they had used nails to attach the hands. The hammer was lying on the table. It was beside a plastic bowl, a large plastic bowl, and the bowl was filled with blood.”

I took a deep breath. My chest was tight. “Why?” I asked her. Even as I asked it, I knew that this was, finally, the same question that Melissa Alonzo’s mother had asked me in California, and I knew that once again it was, finally, unanswerable.

She shrugged her bleak, empty shrug. “To terrify. To exercise their power. All the power in my country is held by the landowners, and a small portion of this they hand over to the government. Which in turn hands over a small portion to the security forces. The National Guard, the Treasury Police. Do you know how the security forces recruit new members?”

I shook my head.

She leaned forward, slipped another cigarette from the pack, lit it with the one she was already smoking, stubbed out the old one in the ashtray. She sat back. “No one, none of the sons of the farmers or the workmen, will join them voluntarily. So they kidnap young boys, boys fifteen and sixteen, and they rape them. Some of these brave soldiers enjoy this, of course. It is their sexual preference. Others do it coldly, deliberately, as a part of their job. Sometimes they use wooden instruments. It sounds grotesque, I know. It sounds impossible. But Salvador is a country of the grotesque and the impossible.”

She sucked on the cigarette. “By doing this, they steal from these boys their sense of themselves, of their humanity, and they give them a sense of shame. The only way the boys can wipe this away is by doing to someone else that which what was done to them. And they are indoctrinated to believe that doing this, inflicting this brutality, is patriotic and noble. The boys are first shown how powerless they are, then given a small measure of power, and then encouraged to take their revenge. Not upon the people who shamed them, but upon their own people.”

Another drag from the cigarette. “This small power of theirs conceals their shame from themselves. But it is an insidious thing, this power. It must be exercised in order to be felt, and the more it is exercised by brutalizing others, the more they brutalize themselves. At last they are empty entirely. They become monsters.” She shook her head. “It is sick. It is insane.”

I agreed with her. It was insane. But as with most of the insanity in the world, there was little I could do about it at the moment. At the moment, my concern had to be somewhere else.

“About Melissa,” I said. “When you saw her on the twenty-third, did she tell you where she was staying?”

“With a young couple, she said. Here in Santa Fe. I did not ask her their names and she did not give them to me.”

“She came back to Santa Fe to see you.”

“Yes. She wished to speak with me about Maria. To tell me what had happened.”

“Did she talk with you after the twenty-third?”

“She telephoned me one time. To tell me that she had left the couple and that she would soon be moving to another safe place, nearby. She did not say where this was.”

“When did she call you?”

“On the twenty-seventh. A Friday.”

“Did she say where she was calling from?”

“No. We were always careful on the telephone.”

“If Melissa had seen you and said what she had to say, why didn’t she leave the area?”

Juanita Carrera frowned. “I believe, now, that she should have. It is my fault, perhaps, that she did not.”

“How?”

“I know of a reporter. A good man, I think. He works in Los Angeles, and we had talked some time ago, when I first arrived from Salvador. He was writing then a story about refugees from my country. Melissa knew of my friendship with this man, and wanted me to contact him. She wanted to leave a written account of what she had seen in Cureiro. She thought that he could publish this, and the truth would be known. I agreed. I thought then that this was a good idea. But the man was in Central America, Honduras, and he would not be back in California until the first week of October.”

“Did Melissa give you the account?”

“No. She was to call me at the end of September, on the thirtieth. She did not. I was worried, of course. And then, on the second of October, I learned of her sister’s death.” She shrugged. “I think now that Melissa, too, is dead.” She said it as flatly as she had said everything else, and then she inhaled on the cigarette.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “The man who killed Cathryn is still looking for her.”

“If she were still alive,” she said, exhaling smoke, “she would have contacted me.”

“She has no way to contact you. You’ve been hiding since last week. Is there anyone else she might contact?”

Another drag. “She spoke once of a woman friend. An artist. I cannot recall the name.”

“Deirdre Polk. She’s dead. Killed the same way Cathryn was.”

She closed her eyes. For a moment she didn’t move.

I said, “Yesterday. Last night.” It didn’t seem possible that the woman had died less than twenty-four hours ago.

Juanita Carrera opened her eyes. “These people never stop,” she said.

We talked for a while longer, but she possessed no information that might help me locate Melissa. As I was about to leave, I asked her, “Your friend. Constancia. What happened to her?”

She inhaled on her cigarette. “It was she who called me from Los Angeles.”

“She came with you when you escaped from Salvador?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” I said.

She shrugged. Emptily. Blankly. “There were many others,” she said, “who could not escape.”

I spoke with Norman Montoya, told him what I’d learned, and told him I was on my way to Taos to see if I could pick up Melissa’s trail. I asked him if Juanita could stay in the guest house for a while longer. He said that she was welcome to stay for as long as she liked. Afterward, I called Rita and told her that she’d been right about Melissa Alonzo and El Salvador. She was kind enough not to point out that she was usually right. She said that Roy Alonzo had called, several times, asking for me to call him back.

I left Las Mujeras at a little after eight, and arrived in Taos a little before nine. Taos is smaller than Santa Fe and has fewer motels. I stopped and asked questions at only three of them before I found a night clerk who thought he recognized Melissa from the picture I showed him.

He’d seen a woman who looked like her, except that her hair was shorter and darker. She had been with a small girl, and she had stayed at the motel at approximately the right time. It cost me twenty dollars to learn that the woman had checked in on the twenty-seventh of September and checked out on the thirtieth. She had paid cash and she had used the name Linda Lattimore. She had described her car as a Honda Civic.

Melissa.

It cost me another twenty to learn that she’d made no phone calls from her room. If it was from Taos that she’d called Juanita Carrera, she hadn’t called from the motel.

The clerk told me that it had probably been the day clerk who checked the woman in and out. The day clerk was unavailable until morning, and the clerk wouldn’t give out her home telephone number or her address, no matter what I offered him. He seemed afraid of her. I bought a room for the night, drove the borrowed Jeep over to it, took possession. When I finished my shower, the time was nearly ten thirty. I called Rita, told her where I was, what I was planning to do. Then I called Roy Alonzo.

“Croft,” he said, and I could hear, over the line, the long sibilant intake of his breath. “Can you tell me what’s going on?” He sounded like someone who was trying hard to keep his emotions in check, or like someone who was trying hard to sound like that. I couldn’t tell which it was, and just then I didn’t much care.

“I haven’t found her yet,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, man. First Cathryn and now this Polk woman up in Hartley. What’s happening here?”

“I’m not sure. It looks like someone else is looking for Melissa.”

“Why?”

“Apparently she may’ve seen something when she was in El Salvador.”

“What, for God’s sake?”

“A murder.”

“Jesus Christ! What the hell is this?”

“Where were you last night between seven thirty and ten thirty?”

“What?”

“Sounded like a fairly simple question to me.”

“It’s the same goddamn question the state police asked me. And it’s none of your goddamn business.”

“Fine. Goodbye.”

“Hold on, hold on. You don’t really think I killed that woman?”

“I’m tired,” I said. “Right now I’m not capable of thinking anything. If you don’t want to answer the question, don’t answer it. But do me a favor and get off the phone so I can go to sleep.”

“I was at the Palace last night, for dinner. With Shana. Shana Eberle. I told you about her.”

“Shana’s in town, is she?”

“I resent your tone, Croft.”

“A lot of people do. I stay up nights, sometimes, trying to change it. When were you at the Palace?”

“From about seven till about ten. Look, Croft, why are you being so hard-headed about this? I’m just trying to find out what’s happened to Melissa and Winona. I’m worried, goddamn it. Does that make me such a total putz?”

“No,” I admitted. “It doesn’t. If I learn anything, I’ll get it to your uncle. In the meantime—”

“But who’s killing these people?”

“A Salvadoran, I think. I don’t know anything for certain right now. I—”

“Is anyone doing anything about this? Have the police been notified?”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.” I felt uncomfortable apologizing to Alonzo: as though the apology signaled a forgiveness for the things I had come to believe he had done. But if he were faking his concern now, he was a better actor than he’d ever been on “Valdez!”

“Maybe if I talked to someone,” he said. “I know people in this town. Important people.”

“I remember. But I don’t think that in this case they’re the right people. Like I said, as soon as I know anything, I’ll get it to your uncle. You’re just going to have to hang in there.”

I heard him take another long breath. “All right. All right. But if I can do anything, you let me know.”

“I’ll do that. Good night.”

Despite my exhaustion, I had thought that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. But as soon as I turned off the light, the long day caught up with me, and I was out.

I dreamed of people walking down the narrow dirt road of a village in a clearing in the jungle. Tiny whitewashed shacks, roofed with thatch, leaned one against the other. The people, men and women of all ages, children of all sizes, wore the tattered clothes of impoverished farmers—cheap huaraches, frayed serapes. They went, all of them, about their business—tending chickens, leading goats to the stable, grinding corn—as though nothing were wrong, as though there were nothing unusual going on. But the eyes of all of them were narrowed, and all their mouths were stretched wide open in an agonized but absolutely silent scream.

The dream woke me up, and for a long time I couldn’t get back to sleep.