Something to do with the depth of their commitment to the reality of community, perhaps. An American whom Chris met had argued that Westerners here somehow just locked on to the missing piece of their own social jigsaw – a sense of belonging. Here among the Mayans, he claimed, it had somehow miraculously survived.
Chris wasn’t sure he agreed, but he had yet to hear a better explanation. Every gringo he had talked to since his arrival had felt the same sense of magic. The only people who didn’t, or so it seemed, were the Ladinos, the Spanish-speaking non-Indians who made up thirty per cent of the population and one hundred per cent of the ruling elite.
Certainly the family Chris was staying with as part of his language course had little good to say about the Indians or their culture. Their ambitions were all directed towards total submersion in the wonders of the West. Exciting memories of visiting the McDonald’s in Guatemala City vied with distress at there not being one in Antigua.
Chris finished the milk shake and paid his bill, walked downstairs and emerged from the dark corridor into the brilliance of the sunlit street. Antigua was a beautiful town, with its grids of cobbled streets, its mostly one-storey buildings painted in a pleasing variety of pastel shades, and its myriad colonial churches and monasteries. And all of it nestling beneath the three volcanoes: the towering Agua to the south, and Acatenango and the ever-smoking Fuego, ‘Fire’, to the south-west.
Chris looked at his watch and found he still had fifteen minutes before his afternoon class was due to begin. The bookshop he had noticed the previous day was just across the street, and finding a convenient gap in the one-way traffic he walked over. He was examining the window display when a reflected movement caught his eye. A man had started to cross the street behind him but then apparently changed his mind. He was now standing on the opposite pavement, staring at Chris’s back. Then, as if suddenly aware that Chris was watching his reflection he abruptly turned away, and stood gazing down the street.
Chris went into the shop and, after a minute or so of browsing among the natural history books, sneaked a look out of the window. The man was nowhere to be seen.
He decided he was being paranoid.
Five minutes later, walking across the main square, he stopped to tie his shoelaces and noticed the same man, some thirty metres behind him, staring vacantly into space.
Lieutenant Arturo Vincenzo ran a hand through his luxuriant black hair and scratched the back of his neck. ‘So how did they manage it?’ he asked his cousin. ‘How did they get the body all the way from the Cuchumatanes to the front door of the Swedish Embassy without anyone seeing anything?’
Captain Jorge Alvaro shrugged and took a slug from the bottle of Gallo beer. ‘El Espíritu works in mysterious ways,’ he said sardonically.
The two men were in a bar on Zona 1’s Calle 14, just around the corner from the Policia Nacional building, where Vincenzo’s Department of Criminal Investigation had its headquarters. Alvaro worked for G-2, and the cousins’ meetings were as often dictated by mutual business as they were by familial ties. This time, though, Vincenzo was simply indulging his curiosity – the DCI had not been invited to share in the Army’s latest public relations disaster.
The early evening hour ensured that the bar was almost empty, but Vincenzo kept his voice down in any case. ‘He is not in our files under that name,’ he said. ‘But…’
‘He is not known under any other name,’ Arturo growled. ‘Do you want another beer?’
‘Sure.’
Alvaro lifted a bottle and raised two fingers at the boy behind the bar.
‘When was he last heard of?’
‘Nineteen eighty-three. Maybe. We first heard of the bastard around 1979, but by 1983 it was looking less and less likely that only one man was involved. If there was, then he must have had a fucking time machine – his name was coming up in the Atitlán area, the Cuchumatanes, even way out in the Petén, and pretty much at the same time.’ He picked up the fresh bottle and poured it into the empty glass, shaking his head as he did so. ‘There’s no way it could have been the same man.’
‘If there’s one thing those Indians can do, it’s walk.’
Alvaro grunted. ‘They can’t fly, though, can they?’
Vincenzo grinned. ‘Thank Christ for that.’ He took another slug of beer. ‘Weren’t there any eyewitness descriptions of him or them?’
‘Hundreds of them – that was the problem. Most of them were unwilling witnesses, and no doubt most of them lied with their last breath. So El Espíritu was tall, short, dark, fair, blue-eyed, black-eyed – you name it. Absolutely fucking useless. The only semi-reliable description we had came from two English soldiers.’
‘What? How did that happen?’
‘Remember in 1980, when that guerrilla group took over the Tikal ruins for several days?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘They took about twenty tourists hostage, most of them English. The whole business lasted four days, I think. The guerrilla leader…’
‘El Espíritu.’
‘So he claimed. He would only negotiate through foreign intermediaries, and, like I said, most of the tourists were English, so they sent in a couple of their soldiers from Belize, men from that group which had handled the Iranian Embassy siege in London a few months earlier…’
‘The SAS.’
‘Yeah, that was them. Anyway…’
‘There’s one of them here now,’ Vincenzo interjected. ‘In Antigua.’
Alvaro was surprised. ‘Doing what?’
‘That’s what we wanted to know. He picked up a tail at the airport – the usual routine – and on his first night here he had dinner with the British Military Attaché, which isn’t routine for tourists. So we kept the tail on him and had the London Embassy check him out. He’s still on active service with the British Army, the SAS Regiment, but not for much longer. And he is currently on leave, improving his Spanish at one of the schools in Antigua.’
‘Your people have checked that out?’
Vincenzo looked hurt. ‘Of course. He’s doing just what he’s supposed to be doing.’
‘How old is he?’ Alvaro asked.
‘Thirty-two.’
‘Then he couldn’t have been one of the men at Tikal.’
Vincenzo smiled. ‘Now that would have been a coincidence.’
Alvaro shrugged and gulped down the rest of his beer. ‘I have to get back,’ he said as he got to his feet.
‘I thought you were finished for the day.’
‘I just remembered something.’
Alvaro walked briskly across the street to where the big Mercedes with smoked-glass windows was parked, and drove it slowly back to G-2 headquarters, his brain mulling over the idea which his cousin had unwittingly presented to him. The two English officers, whoever they were, had not only seen El Espíritu, but presumably had also heard him speak. And perhaps, in the spirit of co-operation between armed forces, one or both of the Englishmen could be persuaded to identify the voice on the tape.
Less than a mile to the north, Tomás Xicay was one of five Indians sitting in the back of an open truck, but the only one among them who was keeping an impatient watch out for their driver. Logic told him he was in no danger of apprehension – there was no Army major’s body hidden in this truck – but he couldn’t help feeling vulnerable. Beyond the cathedral, which loomed into the sky above the market, lay the city’s main square and across that stood the Palacio Nacional, which housed, among other things, the offices of the dreaded G-2.
Guatemala City was not easy on the nerves, and Tomás found himself wondering for the