Giles Blunt: Breaking Lorca

That night, the storm finally broke, flinging bucketfuls of rain at the windows. Victor sat at the tiny desk in his hotel room, struggling to put his thoughts on paper. He badly wanted to be with Lorca, but he wanted to write everything out before his natural cowardice took control of him once more.

For an hour, nearly two, he floundered. He wrote things down and crossed them out, wrote them differently, crossed them out again. How did you tell the world that you had helped to break a young boy’s leg? How did you testify in the clear light of day that you had been in the car that drove that boy to his death? What was the proper way to say, I fastened the electrodes to her breasts? Even the least of his actions seemed an enormity when written out: I mopped up the teeth, the blood, the hair .

A drop of sweat splashed onto the paper, blurring the word blood . Victor was sweating profusely, even though the room was cool. Another drop fell, smearing the word screams . He slid open the balcony door a little, letting the rain hit his face. Lightning briefly lit up the street below like a flashbulb. He breathed in the cool night air; smells of concrete and rain and car exhaust filled the room. Somewhere a horn was stuck, and angry voices shouted.

He read over what he had written. I turned the power up past three. Her screams were terrible . He tried to write in point form, in chronological order, but his brain flashed with images, as if illuminated by the storm outside.

A knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.” Strange, how he had come to love her cracked, unattractive voice. “It’s Lorca.”

He opened the door a few inches.

“I was nervous,” she said. “The storm. May I come in?”

“Let me come to your room in a little while. An hour or so. Just now I am writing my testimony. Trying to work up some courage.”

“I won’t disturb you. I will sit quietly.”

Those terrible sentences-he would never be able to write them with Lorca in the room. “Give me one hour,” he said. “Maybe not even so long.”

The brown eyes went hard and cold. She left the doorway, and a moment later her door slammed.

With hesitations and crossings out, honesty took much longer than he had anticipated. He wanted to write simple statements of fact, but the facts were disgusting. We starved her for three days, and then I fed her a meal full of cockroaches .

He rewrote everything in chronological order, from his induction into the special squad to his desertion at Fort Benning. Point by point, he described what had been done to Lorca, to Labredo and to the real Ignacio Perez. By the time he was finished, he had filled eight foolscap pages. He signed the last one with his real name, Victor Pena.

“Victor Pena,” he muttered to himself. “Victor Pena, coward and torturer.” Victor Pena. Victor Pena felt numb. Victor Pena felt like a man whose home has exploded before his eyes. Destruction beyond his comprehension.

He sat in silence for some time.

“Nothing,” he said aloud, he didn’t know why. And a little later, “Zero.”

Through his reflection in the window, he saw that the rain had slowed. He switched off the desk lamp and his face disappeared. Now he could see clearly into the hotel across the street. On the second floor there was some sort of fancy party in progress. Black waiters in white jackets served champagne from silver buckets. No one had told Victor that Washington was such a black city; he had never seen so many black people in his life, not even in New York. Whenever you saw Americans in El Salvador, they were white.

Music drifted over from the party, Brazilian music it sounded like. He could see some of the horn players on a stage at one end of the ballroom, and several couples dancing. The scene was framed in the window like a painting, and wishing you were in it was futile. The happy scene was inaccessible to anything but longing.

The higher floors were mostly dark. Perhaps it was a slow week, perhaps everyone was at the party. In a corner room a man in shirt sleeves was talking on the phone. In another, a room-service waiter arranged a vase of flowers. Then a light went on, two rooms over, revealing a man with binoculars.

At first Victor thought the man was looking directly at him, and he shrank from the window. His own light was out-the watcher could not possibly see him-but Victor moved behind his curtain anyway. The man was wearing a cream-coloured suit and a red tie. He had a moustache, and he was talking to someone, gesticulating with his free hand. The binoculars were trained to one side, on the corner of Victor’s own hotel or on something beyond it.

A peeping Tom? Such a creature would not be likely to chat with a confederate as he stared, however. Perhaps a thief, sizing up a prospective target.

The man jabbed the air for emphasis. He does that just like my uncle, Victor thought. Then the man turned slightly, lowering the binoculars.

“Mother of God,” Victor said. “Oh, dear Mother of God.”

The man watching his hotel was Captain Pena. Victor had no sooner recognized him than the room across the street went dark and a second man joined his uncle at the window. The light from the street below distorted their features, but it was bright enough to see that the second man was about six inches taller than the Captain.

“Mother of God,” Victor muttered again. It made perfect sense, of course, if Captain Pena were planning to kill someone. Oh, yes. If the Captain intended to kill someone, Tito would be the man to bring. Tito would be just the man you’d want.

How he yearned for peace. Here he was in this great city-he could only compare it to visiting Rome at the peak of the Roman Empire-and instead of seeing the sights with his wife and children at his side, he was holed up in a hotel room with a thug.

“It looks like she’s gone out,” Tito said.

“She has not gone out. She is taking a shower, fixing her makeup, who knows. She has not gone out.”

“So, why don’t we pay her a visit right now. Give her the business. Take the rest of the night off.” Tito put on a waiter’s voice. “Good evening, senorita! Room service!”

Captain Pena shook his head, keeping his eyes on the corner room across the street. “We’ll stick to the plan. We do it outdoors.”

“Why that bitch is still alive I will never understand.”

“She is still alive because the former Corporal Pena is a world-class idiot. Not too many soldiers could miss a prisoner at point-blank range.”

“He is your nephew, Captain. Otherwise, I would cross the street and kill the little scum right now. On the spot.”

“Sergeant, we will stick to the plan, and you will follow my orders.” This constant reining in of thugs with guns, it got to be exhausting. How he hated the war.

“Where is that coward now? His light’s gone out.”

“He was writing at the desk for two hours. Now he is taking a nap. Gone out somewhere. It doesn’t matter. It’s the woman we want.”

“I still say we go over there, fix that bitch right now. Take care of it quick and dirty. Fuck this waiting.”

“It’s too early. There are people everywhere. We will visit Miss Viera in due time, sergeant. Take over for me now.” He handed the binoculars to Tito and went into the bedroom to use the phone. He called his embassy first and by prior arrangement had them patch the call through. That way, the Hilton’s phone record would show only a local call. “Hello, my sweetheart,” he said. “What are you doing up at this hour?”

“Mommy said we could stay up until you called.”

“She did, eh? Things have taken a liberal turn in my absence. I’ll have to talk to your mother about that.”