The Viper Squad (4 page)

“Mike, are you holding back on me? Are you in training for some kind of mission?”

“No. I swear it. I’m not.”

“You wouldn’t tell me if you were,” she accused.

“Wrong. I always tell you when I’m leaving on a mission. I just don’t say where or why or when.”

She knew this was true. He never lied to her. He just refused to tell her anything, insisting it had to be this way for her
own protection.

“You really are only going to Switzerland to look at their army?” she asked.

“When I do tell you where I’m going, don’t doubt it.”

She wiped off some of his mud from her tank top. “It hasn’t rained here for three months. Where did you find this stuff?”

He didn’t bother to answer that. Instead he ran his hands inside her tank top and caressed her smooth skin with his fingertips.
He held her right breast firmly in one palm and felt its nipple harden.

“You’re going to get mud all over me,” she murmured.

“I will,” he promised.

“Hello, Adolfo,” Lt. Col. Cerezo Ramirez greeted the cadaverous man.

A heavy growth of dark stubble covered Adolfo’s wolfish jaws. He wore matching sunglasses to Turco’s and the same style loose
shirt—although, whereas Turco’s shirt was barely able to cover his huge gut, Adolfo’s shirt threatened almost to smother his
emaciated body. He did not respond to the colonel’s greeting and placed himself on a chair next to Turco before the rosewood
desk.

The colonel ran his eyes over the first two pages of the report Turco had handed him. “Your typing has improved.”

“Adolfo did it,” Turco said, as if anxious to point out that such office skills were not to be looked for in him.

Gradually the pleased look on the colonel’s face faded as he turned the pages. Finally he put the report down. “Bermudez wasn’t
killed by the grenade. He died of natural causes. A heart attack. A second grenade was thrown. It landed right next to Bermudez
and these two Americans but didn’t go off.”

“Who carried out the attack, sir?” Turco asked. “Theirs or ours”

“Ours, I’m afraid,” the colonel said. “Damn, I wish our side would only have the sense to let the leftists take care of him
for all of us. The rightist cause has enough blood to answer for as it is. No need to take on extra work if the Marxists will
do it for us. Stupid.” The colonel looked defiantly up at Turco’s menacing disagreement. “You can tell your friends that,
Turco.”

A muscle twitched in Adolfo’s hollow cheek, but Turco’s heavy jowls remained unmoving.

The Treasury Police officer went back to the report. “The girl’s father, Dwight Quincy Poynings, owns a chain of television
stations and a baseball team. We can’t touch her, no matter what she does, not with those norteamericano television stations
and millions of dollars behind her.”

“She’s not the problem,” Turco said.

“I agree.” The colonel read some more. “Bennett Ward’s father is a prominent Boston doctor. This young man won an award for
a documentary film on the return of whales to Cape Cod.” The colonel looked up, puzzled. “Whales? Can that be right?”

“Yes, sir,” Turco said in his flat, certain tones.

The colonel read more and nodded. “So this millionaire’s daughter pays the bills for the doctor’s son to make movies. He’s
finished with whales, so now it’s us Salvadorans. But we can’t spout water through the tops of our heads for him. However,
this time he’s after deadlier stuff than that us cutting each other to pieces. No doubt he’ll make contact with the rebels
and present things from their point of view, like all his sort do. I would normally
say a warning to him would be enough: Leave the country in so many hours. But look what he has done already in a single day.
In the morning he filmed idiot soldiers taking campesinos into custody and then he filmed the bodies of these same campesinos.
Women and children, naturally. Damn communists, all of them. I’d say let these soldiers take the consequences, except I promised
the general I’d take care of things.”

“The general has always worked closely with us,” Turco pointed out.

“Absolutely,” the colonel said hurriedly. “But that was only this norteamericano’s morning work. In the afternoon, as you
relate in these pages, he filmed the attack on Bermudez. You do not mention how he came to be with Bermudez.”

“I don’t know,” Turco said. “He’s got contacts.”

“Know who he could have caught on film in that garage attack?” the colonel asked. “The Hernandez Martinez.”

Turco looked startled. The Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez Anti-Communist Brigade was perhaps the best financed and most effective
of all the ultra-right-wing death squads. It was named in honor of the military dictator responsible for
la matanza
in 1932, the massacre that had left a deep mark on the country to the present day.

“You know me for a circumspect man, Turco,” the colonel continued. “I abhor rash and senseless acts of violence. Yet I do
not hesitate to strike when the enemy is within the walls. Do not forget the film.”

Turco nodded and got to his feet. Adolfo stood also. Turco headed for the door, and Adolfo followed.

“But not the girl,” the colonel called after them.

Turco raised a single finger in acknowledgment.

“My God, if that grenade had gone off, we’d be dead now,” Sally said. “Blown to bits.”

“Either that happens or it doesn’t,” Bennett replied with a shrug.

“I’ve other plans.”

“So, go ahead,” he told her.

“You bastard, now you’ve got my money to make your film, you no longer care whether I’m around anymore.”

“Sally, that’s not how I feel.” He seemed genuinely upset by what she said and took her in his arms. “I want you with me,
but not down here. Remember why I asked you not to come? Because it would be dangerous. Now you want me to leave here. Why?
Because it’s dangerous. But I knew that before I came here and I’m willing to accept the risks. You’re the one who didn’t
think this thing through before you came here. You came because I did. I appreciate that. Yet I can’t help feeling that you’re
being unfair to me by telling me now what I told you before we left the States.”

“I just don’t want us to get killed,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “And I want to stay here with you. But I’m afraid.”

“I’ll be more careful in future,” Bennett said and squeezed her to him.

As she always did, Sally let him calm and charm her out of her misgivings.

“I’m going to go to that shopping mall before it closes,” she said in a while. “Want to come?”

“I hate shopping malls.’

They had seen earlier an American-style shopping mall on the Boulevard de los Heroes. Sally felt the need of something familiar.
She didn’t know what she needed there. Perhaps nothing except its reassurance.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll be molested by guerrillas on my way there?” she asked.

“I think those guerrillas had better watch out you don’t molest them. Specially the cute cuddly ones.”

She stuck out her tongue at him, picked up her purse, checked herself in the wall minor and left.

When a knock sounded on the door a minute later, Bennett said aloud, “What did she forget now?”

He opened the door. Turco stepped in fast and kneed him in the groin.

It was more than two hours before Sally got back. When Bennett didn’t let her in after she knocked on the door, she had to
set down her packages and search in her purse for her key. She opened the door and saw the long ribbons of movie film strewn
like fallen party decorations all over the room. She brought her packages in and closed the door.

“Bennett!”

What could have come over him, she thought. She had brought up the subject of her money financing the film when she had been
upset earlier. Had he done this just to show her he didn’t need her or her money? No. He would do something else, but never
interrupt or damage his film.

“Bennett?” Her voice was more uncertain now.

She crossed the room and peered into the bathroom, afraid of what she was going to see. There was no blood on the tiles, no
body hanging in the shower. Bennett had disappeared.

Back in the room, she searched about for a note, stepping over the black streamers of film. She wouldn’t have been worried
at all by his absence had it not been that every inch of film they had brought with them now lay exposed over the chairs,
bed and carpet. Something had gone wrong. The two movie cameras were empty but intact. So was her sound equipment. None of
the tapes were missing. Then she noticed that the locks on her suitcase were open. That was where they had stored papers,
tickets and other things they did not want to leave lying around casually in the hotel room. She had the key to the suitcase
in her purse. Its locks had been forced open. But nothing inside was missing.

Another two hours elapsed before she decided to call for help. She had kept hoping that Bennett would walk back into the room
with a smile on his face and an explanation. Yet she knew deep down that this was not going to happen.
She even preserved everything as she had found it, leaving the film draped about the room.

Sally called Room Service and ordered coffee. When the waiter knocked, she called, “Come in. The door is open.”

The young man’s eyes widened in surprise as he looked at the pretty blond American amid the unraveled black film.

“My husband is gone,” she said, recalling that they had registered in the hotel as man and wife. Bennett had said it was a
Catholic country and they might be forced to stay in separate rooms unless they claimed to be married.

“Your husband gone?” the hotel employee asked warily. “Back to America?”

“No. Disappeared.”

The expression on his face changed, and he now looked at the strewn lengths of film as if they told the whole story. “Call
the United States embassy.”

“I don’t want to do that yet.” Sally knew that her father would hear of it within hours. He would make it impossible for Bennett
to continue with his film here in order to force Sally to leave. Of anyone, her father had to be the last person to know.

“I will give you the phone number of the Human Rights Commission, but you must call yourself.” He wrote it for her on a piece
of paper. “I hope it goes well for you, senora.”

She saw pity for her in his eyes.

Sally sat up in the chair all night after she got back from the American embassy, hospitals, police stations, army barracks.
The woman she had spoken to on the phone at the Human Rights Commission had provided her with a list of places to visit without
delay. No one had seen Bennett. So they said. It was after two in the morning when she got back to the Sheraton, dropped off
in a National Police car. As she sat in the hotel room, she stared at the door, dozed, stared at it some more, dozed off
again. She was sure she had not closed an eye all night when she took a shower at dawn and went to hire a car at Avis. The
Ford came with a press card in the windshield that read in large letters: PRENSA INTERNACIONAL.

The Human Rights Commission was the popular name given to a church group, the woman had told Sally over the phone, and was
not the same as the government’s Commission on Human Rights, whose job was to deny there were any problems. The building was
small and on church grounds. While Sally waited for the woman, she looked through one of the books of photographs of “the
disappeared.” They were mostly young men—just a photo, a name and a date for each. She shut the book when she could no longer
bear to look at their smiling faces in these family photos.

Alicia—she did not tell Sally her last name—was in her early fifties. She wore no makeup, perhaps in keeping with the grimness
of her work. Sally suspected she might even be a nun, because of her simplicity, directness and lack of pretension.

“You have the car?” Alicia asked.

“Yes.”

“I have phoned the hospitals, the police forces and the army. They all acknowledged—having spoken to you last night, which
is something. But they claim they know nothing.”

“Thank you.”

“They all mentioned also that you speak Spanish very well. Did Bennett?”

“None at all.” But Sally now knew the answer to this unspoken question. “He had a movie camera. All the film in our hotel
room was exposed.”

Alicia nodded. “First we drive to the morgue.”

Sally took a sharp breath.

Alicia touched her arm. “It will not be easy. But you have to be sure he is not there before we try elsewhere.”
She was aware that Sally and she probably meant different things by the word
elsewhere.

There were five new bodies of young men at the morgue. None matched Bennett’s description, and Alicia spared Sally the trial
of looking at them by doing so herself. Sally gave her a photo of Bennett.

Alicia came out to the car, shaking her head and smiling. Sally breathed more freely again.

“Where do we go now?” Sally asked. “The hospitals again?”

“El Playon and Puerta del Diablo.”

Sally’s face tightened. El Playon she had heard about—a lava field where assassins dumped the bodies of their victims. The
Devil’s Gate was new to her.

“What is Puerta del Diablo?” Sally asked.

Alicia took this as Sally’s choice of destination and gave her directions. After they got going, she added, “Puerta del Diablo
is more than just a body dump. The locos in some death squads use it as a kind of ceremonial execution place.”

Sally had a cold foreboding about the place. An overall view of the city could be had from the surrounding hills, called Los
Planes de Renderos. She drove to the highest peak in Balboa Park. There was a space for cars at an overlook on the top.

“They shoot them here,” Alicia said, standing at the edge, “and the bodies tumble down.”

The city lay spread out beneath them in a shroud of smog. Sally looked down the steep slope of angular rocks on which grew
clumps of ferns and mountain plants. “We have to climb down to see?”

Alicia nodded. “Follow me.”

Sally tried not to look down at the huge drop below her. It was not a sheer drop; and if she had slipped, she would have fallen
fifty feet at the most. The two women climbed down slowly, and Sally carefully followed Alicia’s directions about footholds,
handholds and slippery places.