David Monnery - Guatemala – Journey into Evil

The men on the road below were speaking to each other in low voices, and Emelia thought she caught Tomás’s Tzutujil accent among them. The first hint of light was showing in the mist away to her left, above the deep and hidden valley which carried the road up from Cunen.

He should be leaving about now, if he was leaving at all. According to the reports of the compas assigned to the task of watching over him, Morales was a creature of rigid habits, and so far there had been no sign that the fate of Major Muñoz had persuaded him to deviate from any of his normal routines. Each Friday morning he left the command HQ in Cunen and drove across these mountains to the subordinate outpost at El Desengaño, where he gathered intelligence of the previous week’s operations and planned those for the following week. There seemed no practical reason for this journey by road – radio communication would have served just as well, or a helicopter could have covered the same distance in a tenth of the time – but Morales liked to impose himself in person, and from all accounts he loved to drive, and to be seen driving, his new Cherokee Chief station wagon.

And in any case, the Old Man had said, what did Morales have to worry about? His friends in the neighbouring command would have told him the guerrillas were cowering in the forest, somewhere inside the closing ring of troops thirty kilometres to the west. True, they hadn’t actually been seen for several days, but there was no way they could have broken out.

Emelia hoped the Old Man was right. He usually was.

It was getting steadily lighter now, and holes were beginning to appear in the mist, drifting holes, like floating windows. On the road below she could now see the seven compañeros in their costumes, and the glass cabinet lying on its side. At the foot of the grassy bank Jorge was setting light to the second of two censers packed with incense. Smoke from the first was already wafting up to reinforce the mist, and carrying the sweet, acrid smell to Emelia’s nostrils.

With both censers burning, the group below settled into stillness, like a film frozen on a single frame, waiting to be restarted. Emelia lay there with the rifle, watching the mist slowly clear, hearing the chorus of birdsong gradually abate, feeling the cold edge drawn from the air by the rising sun. Ten minutes went by, and twenty, and thirty, and then she could hear the sound of vehicles. As it grew steadily louder the tableau on the road below sprang back into life. She swallowed nervously, and tried not to grip the rifle too tightly.

As he guided the Cherokee Chief up the steep incline, Captain Juan Garcia Morales was thinking about what to do with his new-found wealth. He had just inherited around 200,000 quetzals from a great-uncle, and those closest to him could not agree as to how he should invest it. His wife wanted him to buy property in Florida, but his father was advising Lake Atitlán. Morales instinctively preferred the Florida option, but he had to admit that his father was rarely wrong when it came to such matters. ‘You get yourself a shoreline on the most beautiful lake in the world,’ he had told his son, ‘and in five years the value will multiply tenfold or more. Once we have the Indian business finally settled you won’t be able to see that lake for investors.’

He was probably right. After all, Lake Atitlán had continued to draw tourists no matter how bad things got. And if they could move the Indians back from the shoreline, and simply bus them in to work in the hotels and sell the stuff the tourists loved so much, then the sky was probably the limit. The place could become another Acapulco.

Morales steered the car round a bend in the slope, and drove through a small but stubborn patch of mist, emerging just above a sheer drop of several hundred metres. He could feel the nervousness of the soldiers beside and behind him, and rather enjoyed the sensation. In the rear-view mirror he was watching for the following jeep to materialize out of the mist when figures loomed out of another patch almost directly in front of him.

As he applied the brakes Morales instinctively reached for his holstered automatic, and then brought his hand away empty. It was only a bunch of Indian holy men – cofradías , they were called; he was always running into them on the roads, carrying their holy dummies to one of their countless festivals. And this bunch of idiots had managed to drop their dummy – he could see it, a child’s version of the Virgin Mary, lying face down on the road, next to the overturned cabinet in which they had been carrying it.

One of the old men was walking towards the Cherokee, probably to apologize for getting in the Army’s way. Morales took note of the ridiculous costume – the knee-length shorts and the rag wound round the man’s head – and wondered why the tourists found this anything other than pathetic.

The weather-beaten face of the old man was smiling apologetically at him as he approached the car window. And then, as if by magic, a revolver was boring into Morales’s ear.

‘If you want to live another second,’ the old man said in perfect Spanish, ‘tell your men to leave the jeep without their weapons.’

Razor closed the guidebook and tried stuffing it into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of him. This was not easy, as the slim pocket already contained his Walkman, two airline magazines, instructions on how to behave if the airliner suddenly plummeted 30,000 feet into the Atlantic, a Ruth Rendell mystery and a half-empty quarter-bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

He had learnt one thing from Hajrija’s guidebook – the rest of Guatemala had little in common with the bit he had visited in 1980. The ruins of Tikal were situated in the thinly populated northern half of the country, a mostly flat area of jungles and swamps, but most of the country’s people lived either on the Pacific coastal plain or in the vast swath of mountains, plateaux and valleys which formed the country’s backbone. It sounded like Chris Martinson’s descriptions of Colombia, and like nothing Razor had ever seen.

In the window seat next to him Hajrija was happily giggling at Blackadder , which was showing on the tiny screen. Razor reckoned he’d already seen the episode about half a dozen times, and watching the final scenes without the benefit of headphones, he found he could lip-read the dialogue.

He sneaked a glance at Hajrija’s happy face, and wondered yet again at his luck in not only finding but also holding on to her. Her lustrous black hair was pulled loosely back in a ponytail, making her look younger than usual, and her high cheekbones were faintly glistening in the sunlight. The first time he had seen her, standing in the corridor of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, those cheekbones had jutted from a face made gaunt by stress and an inadequate diet.

The credits started to roll, and she took off the headphones. ‘The English are completely crazy,’ she said, readjusting her hair.

‘It’s all we have left,’ Razor said. He retrieved the guidebook from the crowded pocket. ‘What first made you want to go to Guatemala?’ he asked.

She lifted both shoulders in the familiar shrug. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘You know how it is – some countries just seem appealing. Some don’t. Maybe I saw some pictures when I was a child, or a programme on TV. I can’t remember. But I always wanted to see Lake Atitlán. I mean, how many big lakes are there with volcanoes all around them? And I grew up in mountains. The air is so clear in places like that, and the colours. I love it. I want to see Peru as well, and Kashmir.’

She was switching channels as she spoke, in search of further entertainment. ‘Are you going to watch a movie?’ she asked.