The Tattooed Soldier (24 page)

Antonio was afraid that if he stood there staring at the soldier for too long he would be conspicuous, so he stepped up to the counter and picked up a small flyer that listed the company's rates and special discounts. His hand trembled slightly as he reached for the slip of paper, which was in a dispenser less than an arm's length from the soldier himself.

“We only guarantee money orders if you buy them here,” the soldier said in a weary voice. “Otherwise we're not responsible. That is what our
jefe
says.”

Antonio was startled to hear the killer's voice so close to his ear. It was not a strong voice. Not a confident voice. He had known teenagers who had deeper, throatier voices. The killer spoke like a peasant, in a voice Antonio associated with wooden shacks and men who carried heavy loads of firewood on their backs. This was a surprise.

“I told you, the
jefe
says those are the rules.”

For the briefest of moments, Antonio felt something resembling pity for the soldier. It was the most abstract of emotions, a reflex. In Guatemala's capital, where Antonio came from, you were supposed to feel superior when you heard a peasant speak with this provincial lilt; you were supposed to feel a sort of paternalistic sympathy. It was the way he said “
jefe
,” something submissive in the way he said the word.

Antonio turned to leave. Almost out of the corner of his eye he saw the soldier's brown arm resting on the white counter, the tattoo facing up. Antonio was close enough to read the small black letters just underneath the animal itself, written inside a tiny scroll: “
Jaguares
.”

Antonio drifted out of the office in a daydream. The soldier, the killer of his wife and son, was a peasant. Circling aimlessly around the busy intersection, carried along like driftwood by the current of pedestrians, Antonio wandered into a grocery store, a
discoteca
, a shoe store, and then, unaccountably, into a bridal shop bursting with waves and waves of lacy fabric. Someone said something to him in a harsh voice, but none of it registered, because Antonio could only think about how the killer of Carlos and Elena was a peasant who spoke in a child's whiny voice.

This discovery had thrown Antonio off course and derailed his impulse to revenge.
I should have known from the first moment I set eyes on the man. I should have seen the
campesino
when I first saw him sitting at the tables in MacArthur Park.
Antonio was not sure what he expected, but not this. His rage had fled, and now there was only a vacuum in its place. He walked out of the bridal shop into the glaring sunlight of the street.

God knows what led this peasant to join the army, to become one of the army's hired killers. God knows the person he was before and who he has become since.

The easiest thing would be to forget about the man.

Antonio followed the lines on the uneven sidewalk, head down, staring at cracks that looked like rivers on a map, bumping into someone every few minutes. It did not seem fair that the situation presented him with these additional complications. He had drifted several blocks away from El Pulgarcito Express when he realized that he hadn't seen a
campesino
sitting at the table in MacArthur Park because he had been riveted by the man's tattoo and his haircut. That ugly scar on the soldier's arm, that painted animal, that was nothing natural. It was not something a
campesino
would do. His anger began to rise again. No simple peasant would paint himself in such a way. The tattoo told Antonio that there was more to this man than could be heard on the surface of his voice, something beyond his servile “
jefe
.”

Jaguares.
That was what the tattoo said. Now Antonio remembered that the Jaguars were some sort of special unit of the Guatemalan army. Yes, the Jaguars were synonymous with the terror the army spread through the countryside. They burned houses and left decapitated heads at the entrances to the villages they destroyed. The Jaguars had carried out a holocaust in the mountains.

If the soldier was a Jaguar then he was the negation of what Antonio had just imagined him to be. He was a professional killer of peasants. Whatever he had been before, he now wore a jaguar tattoo. The tattoo was the key to everything. Because the soldier had that animal on his skin, he had been sent to murder Elena. Because he had that tattoo, he could kill a two-year-old boy and sit down to eat an ice cream as if nothing had happened.

Antonio circled back toward El Pulgarcito Express. That was the place to be, close to the soldier, in pursuit. Returning to the bus bench, Antonio resumed his vigil.

No sooner had he sat down than he heard a confusion of voices coming from the office, shouts of “No!” and “
¡Ay!
” and “
¡Por el amor de Dios!
” Then there was a sudden quiet. Not long afterward the front door opened and a flat-nosed old woman in a baggy sweatshirt appeared, supported by a much younger woman. The old woman was very poor, Antonio saw. She held a cloth to her mouth, and she was bleeding from her lip. “
Qué bárbaros
,” the young woman repeated as she inspected the wound. “
¡Qué bárbaros!
” Apparently someone had struck this woman inside El Pulgarcito Express. There must have been a fight over the line. What kind of office was this, where someone would strike an old woman over a place in line?

Antonio stayed on the bus bench for most of the day. One of the advantages of looking as shabby as he did was that no one paid much attention to him. A Latino man in slacks with frayed hems and a pale blue shirt that had taken on the brownish gray tinge of a smoggy sky: no one would think twice about such a man, even if he did wear an intellectual's circle glasses. There were so many strange people on the street, after all. Pico Boulevard, Vermont Avenue, Alvarado: all these places were convention centers for the homeless and mentally ill. He could melt into the landscape along with all the schizophrenic babblers, the shiftless immigrants, the paranoid wanderers and pushers of shopping carts. When he began to talk to himself softly, his lips mimicking his thoughts, it only made him more invisible.

In the late afternoon, just as Antonio began to feel the first downward pull of drowsiness, the tattooed soldier emerged from El Pulgarcito Express and made a beeline for the bus stop. As he approached, Antonio stepped away from the bench, shoulders hunched and head bowed, his best impersonation of a street person. When the bus came, he boarded two passengers after the soldier, for what turned out to be a relatively short trip to a neighborhood not far from MacArthur Park.

A few blocks after getting off the bus, the tattooed soldier turned onto a side street that rose at a slight incline and was lined with old brick buildings and vacant lots in equal numbers. He walked up a wide stone staircase and disappeared through a black security door that closed behind him with a crash Antonio heard half a block away. Antonio rushed to the door and looked up at the letters etched into the old pink portal above him: The Westlake Arms. Did the soldier live here? There was nothing to do but wait until he came out. Antonio walked across the street and leaned against a cyclone fence that sealed off a vacant lot between two apartment buildings. A man with dreadlocks was asleep on the sidewalk, lips puckered against the concrete.

Antonio decided to wait for the soldier here, next to the man who kissed the sidewalk, a spot where no one would bother him. He measured time by counting the people who went in and out of the building. At sixteen, there was still no sign of the tattooed soldier. Antonio would wait all night if necessary. A sense of purpose filled his spirit: the enemy was real and alive, right here in this building. Antonio was no longer adrift because he had attached himself to this small man who was heavy and bulky like an anchor.

I will make myself sharper. I will train my eyes to see everything, to remember everything about this street and this man.

He didn't have anything to write with, so he repeated the address in his mind until he had memorized it: 665 South Bonnie Brae Avenue. The building was tan, with terra cotta cornices and a brick fringe at the base, a structure with hints of long-faded elegance. In several spots the bricks had been painted over with black or red paint. Feeling bolder, Antonio crossed the street and climbed quickly up the front steps. In the lobby he inspected the panel of buttons where the names of the tenants should have been listed, but found that most were missing. There were only three names: Martinez, apartment 3B; Longoria, apartment 4F; Greenwood, apartment 6C. Antonio glanced through the inner door and into the hallway, a narrow corridor of arsenic green walls. An apartment door started to open, and he scurried back outside, returning to his post next to the sleeping man with the dreadlocks.

A few minutes later an old Anglo with a cane emerged and began working his way down the front steps. His bald skull was covered with angry red veins. He looked like a man setting off on a valiant expedition for food and water, muggers and addicts be damned. As he vanished around the corner, a group of thin teenagers appeared, their arms etched with fleshy frescoes of the Virgin of Guadalupe, gaudy pictures of homegirls. They camped out on the steps of the Westlake Arms, talking loudly and forcing everyone who entered or left to go around them. People tiptoed past carefully, as if walking through a minefield.

The flow of people from the building slowed, the afternoon grew old, the canyon between the lines of tenements filled with shadow. The wind grew colder, more penetrating. The man on the sidewalk woke from his long sleep and looked at Antonio with a startled expression.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said. “Where's Cindy?”

The man brushed himself off and wandered away, listing to one side, as if he might fall back asleep on the ground at any minute.

Antonio turned back to the building and examined the windows, six stories' worth, wondering whether he might be able to spot the soldier if he looked hard enough.
From a distance, the military haircut is what distinguishes him. Look for the man with the black skullcap.
Some of the windows were draped with faded curtains, others were covered with towels, blankets, cardboard. Thirty people had passed through the building now, and not one of them looked anything like the tattooed soldier.

Hours later, after the only streetlight on the block came on and began to cast a humming yellowish nimbus, the murderer stepped out of the Westlake Arms wearing a gray jogging suit and a new pair of tennis shoes. He looked like he was ready for a healthy session of exercise, perhaps at a gym or a body-building place.

If the soldier had changed clothes, he must live here. This was his home.

Antonio watched the soldier walk toward Wilshire Boulevard. There was no need to follow him any longer. Antonio could come back whenever he wished.
I've found the killer. I know where he lives.
He felt a sense of personal triumph.
I was afraid, but I didn't let him get away.

When Antonio finally returned to Crown Hill, he found José Juan standing in the orange glow of a campfire, demolishing a wooden wine crate marked “Product of Spain” and throwing the pieces into the flames.

“Finally, he reappears,” José Juan said.

Antonio crouched next to the fire with his arms around his knees, his face a portrait of stunned contemplation. Several seconds passed before José Juan asked, “Well, what happened? You left me in the park. I woke up and you were gone.”

“I saw somebody I knew.”

“Who?”

“Somebody I knew in Guatemala.”

“A friend?”

“No,” Antonio said, in a tone that let it be known he did not wish to discuss the matter further.

Antonio slipped into the snug cave of their shelter. He wanted to ponder what to do about the soldier. Instead he could only go over the events of the day like a man watching himself in his own home movies, replaying his pursuit of the soldier from MacArthur Park through the commerce-clogged streets to the apartment building. Huddled against the plastic walls of the shelter, he savored the details of the chase, the drama at the chess tables, his patient vigil at the portal of the Westlake Arms.

There was only one thing to do: he would return to the soldier's apartment building tomorrow morning. For the foreseeable future Antonio would go where the soldier went, attach himself to the man and learn everything he could about him. Surely Antonio was entitled to know everything there was to know.

*   *   *

They were eating at a Thai restaurant on Vermont Avenue that was very popular with the Salvadorans and Mexicans in the neighborhood, the Spanish chatter of the customers overwhelming the exchanges of the cooks and waitresses. It was a rare Tuesday night date, and this was the most expensive restaurant Longoria had ever been to with Reginalda; he was trying to forget the events of Sunday, the old woman's bony hands and her tooth, a straw-colored pebble on the floor. Reginalda liked this spicy food, hotter than the hottest jalapeño dish, strong enough to numb your entire jaw. Every few minutes the Mexicanos in the next booth slapped their thighs in pain, laughed, and asked for a new pitcher of water.

Longoria picked up his own water glass and studied the slice of lemon on the edge, wondering if he really had crossed paths with the old woman's son. He doubted it. He didn't remember any Demetrio, but then again, he didn't remember many names, period. He tried to forget the names, though it wasn't always easy. When he went on these “operations,” they handed him the names, along with an address, a photograph, and a few notes from G-2 military intelligence. A dossier, they called it. He drove out to the location and carried out his orders.

“Where is my son's body?” the old woman had said. How was Longoria supposed to know?
Am I their father, am I responsible for them after they're dead? Am I supposed to bury them too? No, of course not. I am a soldier, a sergeant in the Guatemalan army, not a gravedigger.
The funerals weren't his responsibility. As far as Longoria knew, the Department of Public Sanitation handled the corpses.