HE HAD GONE TO BUY A GIFT for his cook—today was her birthday—at one of those gigantic stores they had opened in the south of Guatemala City, and when he came out, he heard someone call him by his first name: Enrique? He stopped, turned, and saw a young girl in blue jeans and one of those long, military-style jackets that had become fashionable among the younger generations. She was wearing a blue beret, had pretty eyes, and smiled as if they knew each other.
“You’re Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Trinidad Oliva, no?” The girl took a step toward him, her hand outstretched, maintaining her smile.
He turned serious and replied gruffly: “You’re mistaken, I don’t know who that is.” He tried to moderate the bitterness in his tone by smiling back. “My name’s Esteban Ramos. At your service. And you?”
“I must have gotten confused,” the girl said, smiling again. “A thousand pardons.”
She turned around and walked away with an elastic gate, her hips swaying slightly.
He remained immobile, the gift tucked under his arm, paralyzed by surprise and cursing himself for reacting so ineptly. His legs were shaking, his palms damp. In his mind, he reproached himself. He had committed three serious errors: stopping when he heard his former name, getting mad when he denied being Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Trinidad Oliva, and acting at once too distant and too familiar. He should have gone on his way without stopping, then the girl would have thought she had the wrong man. You gave yourself away, idiot, he thought. As he drove his car back home, he felt a sort of vertigo, and a thousand questions consumed him: Who was the girl? Had they run into each other by chance? Had she been following him? He was certain they’d never met: she couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen, so she would have been eleven or twelve when he went to prison. She couldn’t have remembered him—he had changed a great deal. Besides, he didn’t recognize that face, those eyes, that breezy attitude. No, she had never met him before, and yes, she was following him, trying to confirm his identity. And thanks to his incompetence, she had. Could she be a cop? Doubtful. Military intelligence? Unlikely. She looked like a student, from San Carlos University maybe, a humanities or law major, from one of the departments the radicals had taken over. She must have been a member of some extremist group, communist, the type that plants bombs in a bank or in a general’s house. Those were the only kind of people who could be interested in finding out if the former chief of the intelligence services for Castillo Armas’s Liberationist government was still alive and working in the civilian world under an assumed name.
He told the Turk what had happened that same afternoon. The Turk didn’t seem to make much of it, but he told him he could find out through his contacts in the government if the police or the Secret Service were on his trail. Two days later, Ahmed Kurony said no, his informants had left no room for doubt: nobody was keeping tabs on him, not the cops and not the army. For that very reason, he couldn’t banish the thought that, if the meeting hadn’t been a chance occurrence, one of those terrorist groups cropping up all over the country was determined to chase down the former officer accused of so many horrors during the period of the Liberationist revolt.
From then on, Enrique took precautions. He went back to carrying a gun. He had quit because, with all the unrest, terrorism, and petty crime, police and military patrols were now stopping people on the streets to search them or ask for their ID. After inadvertently revealing his true identity, Enrique never left home without his revolver tucked into his belt—a gift from the Turk himself. Wherever he was, he always kept his guard up. The sensation that someone was following him, spying on him, persisted. He tried not to spend much time outside, to go from meetings to home without stopping off, avoiding bars and restaurants. He hadn’t set foot back in Ciro’s or the Casablanca, not even the night the Turk invited him to see Tongolele, the famous rumba dancer with the white streak in her long black hair. When he visited the Turk’s casinos, he now did so with Temístocles, his most trusted bodyguard.
One night, when he was making his rounds of the gambling joints, he thought he saw confirmation that he was being trailed. It was stupid, the way it happened. He had just strolled through a casino in a hidden room in the back of an antique store on Pasaje Rubio in the old city, and he saw a flash coming from behind him. He turned around swiftly and ordered his bodyguard to stop whoever had taken the picture. He and the security guards grabbed a young man, but he must not have been the photographer, because he didn’t have a camera on him. He turned out to be a traveling salesman, and he had been a regular there for years. Enrique himself had to apologize to him. And yet, despite the evidence, despite the denials of the bouncers and his bodyguard, he continued to believe that someone had taken a photo behind his back. Was he losing his mind? Having visions? No, it wasn’t paranoia—it was instinct. He’d heard the click and seen the glimmer from the flash. Probably the photographer had been faster than security. He slept badly, had nightmares, and during the day the thought tormented him that the life he’d managed to rebuild after the bottomless pit of prison could fall apart like a house of cards.
One morning, his butler, Tiburcio, came to wake him, one finger over his lips to keep him from making any noise. It was the crack of dawn, and there was little light in the sky. He got up and walked to the window, pulling the curtain slightly aside. Enrique saw a man taking photos of his apartment and the building’s front door. He wasn’t making a secret of it, and snapped pictures from all angles. Then he walked to a corner where a car was waiting for him. As soon as he got in, it took off.
Now there was no doubt. Here was the evidence. They were following him and they could kidnap him or kill him at any moment. Even today. They couldn’t be common criminals. Why would they want to kidnap him? He wasn’t a millionaire, he wouldn’t even be able to pay a ransom. He talked that same evening with the Turk and asked him to get him out of the country for a while. At first, Kurony was hesitant. He needed him there, in Guatemala. He’d given him high-level responsibilities in the businesses. Most likely he was just seeing things. People often took pictures out on the street in the morning. Maybe the guy was a tourist, one of those camera nuts out looking for just the right light at sunrise. But since Enrique insisted, he eventually told him okay. He would send him to Mexico City for a few weeks to see if he’d forget his so-called pursuers. In that beehive of a city, he could hide out and feel safe for a while.