Garcia's Heart (4 page)

He waved a goodnight at the barman and got up to feel the full, gravitational effects of the alcohol. An empty elevator led to an empty hallway, conduits to a room he didn't recognize when he turned on the light. He opened his computer to feel the brunt of Edwin's wrath. He. Had. Messages. Too many to count. His partners in Boston accounted for the bulk of them, of course, testing his promise of accessibility, correctly predicting he'd do a “Helen Keller” and turn off all his wireless devices–he could just imagine how it would be if he hadn't: text messages continually scrolling across the display like a hysterical stock ticker. No, it was saner to maintain radio silence; let his messages land and deal with them all at the end of the day. But, as if to punish him for his lack of response,
each of his partners had sent him multiple e-mails. This was their plan, he realized, a strategy of constant digital harassment. It probably wasn't even
a
plan but three identical plans, each hatched around the same time, responding to the same stresses. Even though the other founding board members of Neuronaut all came from different backgrounds, Patrick had noted that there was something about their business school education that caused them to come out with identical responses to any problem. And not a collective response either. These three budding masters of the universe were definitely not “one plan-one mind” or “all on the same page” or whatever cliché they used this week; you could put these three in separate soundproof rooms for six months and they would still emerge ending each other's sentences with a frightening certainty. It was as though any differences in intelligence or culture or gender–Marc-André was ostensibly French and Jessica was at least genetically a female–had been shimmed away by their
MBA
training, giving the impression that they'd instead graduated from a military academy or a theological college. He liked to think that Bancroft could see this too, and Patrick imagined Bancroft–whose pedigree in business was simply that of a man who made money wherever he went–as more of a throwback, a gentleman privateer in the midst of an army of corporate automatons.

He scrolled down past the messages:

And so on. Twenty-one messages, most concerning the uproar that the marketing arm of Globomart was making about the studies not being as conclusive as in the previous campaign. They were demanding to know why. “Tell them that we're still evaluating the data,” Patrick typed. “Talk to Sanjay.” Simple. The second question was “The Olafson brothers want to know–what are Talairach coordinates again?” and it took him a minute to come up with an answer that was accurate and Globomart-appropriate, respectful enough for Lyle and Henrik, but not too patronizing. “It's a 3-D map for the brain, lets you know where you are in the brain with reference to certain landmarks. Like a
GPS
for the brain. Tell them that. You should be asking Sanjay,” he wrote again. Sanjay's message was, of course, that no one was talking to him.

His colleagues had been, from the start, in a state of constant perplexity about the science, and he didn't know whether this offended him–they should know
something
about the basic premise of what they did and if they didn't it reflected poorly on him as a teacher–or gave him that sense of power that allowed him to do things like disappear just as their biggest project was entering a critical juncture.

Bancroft's message was refreshingly different. Human, actually. He sent his best wishes and hoped that things would go well and mentioned that the Gemeentemuseum had a Kandinsky exhibit that he should check out if he could, but that he should still answer his e-mails at least once or twice a day. Point made. Thanks, he replied. He looked through the other messages, hoping for one from Heather. Anything. He'd settle for an accusation or even one of those cryptic quasi-girlfriend haiku pronouncements. But nothing. The screen blinked through a familiar sequence as the computer shut down.

He'd been too tired to unpack completely the night before, so he spent the next ten minutes transferring his clothes to a sleek chest of drawers, pleased to accomplish something tangible before the day ended. On his bedside table he placed the two books he'd brought along–
The Angel of Lepaterique
, Elyse Brenman's primer for what was about to come under discussion, and
Moby-Dick
, a book of Marta's that Hernan had sent to him after her death, the only memento he had of the Garcías. In the last few weeks, aside from what he needed to read for work, he'd read little else. Packing the books was a reflexive act, but seeing them now, companion guides to the Garcías' decline, made him wish he were the type of person who preferred the comforts of a fat airport novel.

He washed, and swallowed a Valium and a capsule of his antidepressant's generic equivalent (the benefits package at Neuronaut hadn't yet caught up with its stock price) and then went to bed, where he tossed for another hour, the sheets roped like a python holding him some distance short of sleep. Finally, five time zones away from a normal night's rest, he turned on the television. The news was an endless loop of coverage of a
funeral service for a Dutch politician gunned down the week before in Amsterdam by some North African on a jihad with hints of ties to a larger organization.
This
he had heard about, even in Boston. News like this from Europe made the radar now; no matter what your opinion was, there was something in the story to bolster any bias. The funeral was followed by footage of uniformed men breaking down doors with a truncheon, and police cars–making that uniquely European whee-oh, whee-oh siren sound–careening through darkened streets. Then the square-jawed Dutch anchorman appeared and even though Patrick couldn't pick up a word of it, it wasn't difficult to derive the rest: arrests have been made, clash of cultures, fundamentalism versus a modern sensibility, tolerance sorely tested, etc. It all trailed into an ellipsis that ended most sentences now. He changed the channel, hoping that the taped replay of a soccer game between two Dutch club teams chasing the ball around would usher him off to sleep, but the action on the pitch was strangely compelling and even the television commercials had that odd quality he'd noticed in other cultures of being kitschy and riveting at the same time. He turned out the lights after
PSV
Eindhoven finished off Groningen and in the dark felt only worry gathering around him like a greatcoat of Den Haag fog, a weariness that he knew would not be eased by sleep.

 

TWO

The indictment against Hernan García was laid out on the tribunal's Web site, a discovery Patrick had found both helpful and heart-rending. The information was there for anyone to find. Patrick had clicked on “case information sheet,” and scrolled down to
GARCÍA DE LA CRUZ
, Hernan Eduardo–IT-03-8/1. Another click and, off in the corner, a window had appeared with a summary of the case:

THE ACCUSED
HERNAN GARCíA DE LA CRUZ
BORN ON 14 JULY 1940 IN TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS
VOLUNTARY SURRENDER:4 JUNE 2005
TRANSFERRED TO ITCH:6 JUNE 2005
INITIAL APPEARANCE:22 JUNE 2005
FURTHER APPEARANCES: PENDING
OCTOBER 2005, PLEADED “NOT GUILTY” TO ALL COUNTS
SENTENCING JUDGMENT: PENDING

 

The factual allegations followed, in trade-manual language, and then the charges:

THE INDICTMENT CHARGES HERNAN GARCÍA DE LA CRUZ ON THE BASIS OF HIS INDIVIDUAL CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY (ARTICLE 4(2)) OF THE STATUTE OF THE TRIBUNAL WITH:

TWELVE COUNTS OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
(
ARTICLE 7–PERSECUTIONS ON POLITICAL, RACIAL, AND RELIGIOUS GROUNDS; TORTURE, INHUMANE ACTS).

The indictment was modest in tone and detail. The facts of Hernan's involvement were related in far greater detail in
The Angel of Lepaterique
, which in turn owed much to an investigation by the
Baltimore Sun
published in the mid-nineties. The newspaper uncovered details of events that occurred in Honduras more than a decade before, breaking the story of state-sponsored,
CIA
-backed torture, tracking down and interviewing victims and their alleged torturers who had fled to North America in hope of anonymity and a new life.

It was shortly after the
Sun
report that a Montreal journalist named Elyse Brenman stumbled onto the story of Hernan García, a local grocer who would come to be one of the faces of the trial. The account began innocuously, as a dispute between García and a customer who wanted to buy a lottery ticket along with his groceries. García informed the customer that his store did not sell lottery tickets on principle. This drew a sarcastic response from the customer, which led to a spirited verbal exchange that took place in Spanish, as the customer, like García, was also from Honduras. It was during this argument that the customer stopped short, not as some
admission of rhetorical defeat, but because he suddenly recognized García. Perhaps it had been a gesture, or tone of voice, but the man later said it was a word García used–
rídiculo
–and the way he said it, that cued his memory. The customer left the Garcías' store immediately, but came back the next day after a sleepless night, wanting to confirm that this sanctimonious grocer was the same man he'd crossed paths with fifteen years earlier, under very different circumstances. A call to the local newspaper followed, and because the receptionist who answered the phone thought the story was little more than an argument between two people in a grocery store, the customer was referred to the Community News Desk. It was Elyse who'd answered the phone.

It was eventually alleged that between 1981 and 1983 Hernan García spent a cumulative total of six weeks away from his family in Tegucigalpa and his post as professor of medicine at the National Autonomous University. Until Elyse's inquiries revealed his whereabouts during that time, many, including his family, believed he had been away on university business or academic meetings. When formerly classified documents were made publicly available by the Honduran government, it became clear that Hernan García de la Cruz had been one of many involved in the activities of what had come to be known as Battalion 316, a covert operation headquartered in the small town of Lepaterique, not twenty miles west of Tegucigalpa. It was here, from 1981 to 1983, that Hernan García was accused of participating in the torture of subversives undergoing interrogation.

Patrick first read the details in Elyse Brenman's articles in the newspaper, archived and mailed to him by his mother. At that time, he remembered dismissing the accusations; it all
seemed so ludicrous, the names of covert organizations and places piling up like the details of a bad spy novel. But then
The Angel of Lepaterique
came out in the spring of 2001 and Patrick had to admit that she'd done something more than simply libel a friend. She'd done something larger, more ambitious and impressive, framing the allegations in a well-researched and compelling history of Honduras. He'd read the book in a single, fevered weekend.

She laid the groundwork in the first chapter, explaining that with the Reagan administration waging war against leftist insurgents in El Salvador and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Honduras became a convenient base of covert operations. The
CIA
understood that it needed a willing local presence; this was more than amply provided in the person of General Gustavo Álvarez, chief of the Honduran armed forces.

It was Álvarez, a name Patrick would come across again, in another setting, who created and directed Battalion 316, using American counter-insurgency experts and the Argentine 601st Intelligence Battalion to train Honduran forces in how to deal with communist subversives. Álvarez's brutal techniques were already well known, Elyse continued on page 17 of
The Angel
: