Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“Yes,” she said. “Before long.”

“You’ve been ordered to go.”

“By our provincial,” she said. “As soon as is convenient.”

The lieutenant leaned against her jeep and looked out to sea.

“Twenty pounds of beans. Going to take them back to Yanquilandia with you?”

“We still have people to feed.”

“Hippies,” Campos said.

Justin was at a loss for words. It was true that some of the long-haired foreign travelers had been turning up around the mission grounds and some of them looked like settling in. She was aware that Egan had taken to spending his evenings out back and that this visitation somehow involved him. As far as she knew — and she kept close accounts — the kids in the ruins never stole. They brought in their own provisions. But the business could not have come at a worse time; somehow she would have to put a stop to it. Since Godoy’s departure she had received no further orders.

“We didn’t ask for these people,” she said, “and we’re not feeding them. The ruins are a natural tourist attraction. We’re not responsible for our location.”

“Hippies aren’t tourists,” Campos told her. “They repel tourists.”

Justin had the sense that a great deal depended on her behavior at that moment. It was necessary for her to seem confident and also necessary for her to determine what Lieutenant Campos had on his mind — never an easy enterprise. Justin had little knowledge of policemen in general but through Campos she had discovered that being crazy did not stand in the way of one’s being a good cop.

“So this doesn’t help the country as a mission should. But the contrary.”

What now, she thought, rational discourse? She had no idea how much he knew or suspected, except that she was somehow subversive. Was he simply upset further about hippies in his jurisdiction? Was this new apostolate of Egan’s a weakness that he was seizing on to hurry them out of Tecan? Or was it much more, a little cat-and-mouse before he brought the whole sorry structure down — the foco that might or might not be, her, Godoy — with his simian Guardia fist?

By God, she thought, if he knows what I’m up to he knows more than I do.

“If you wish,” she said, “we’ll advise them to move along. On your recommendation.”

“They’re murdering children,” he said. “Six children have died.”

Justin let go the wheel, which she had held to like a steersman throughout the encounter, and stared at the lieutenant in horror.

“No!” was all that she could manage. Her combatant’s poise deserted her.

Campos smiled. “Yes. Murdered. Six.”

“These killings,” Justin said, “these killings … they began months ago. If we had the slightest evidence or suspicion … the slightest … we’d report it.”

“How do I know that?” Campos asked.

Justin fought to keep her temper in bounds.

“We have all been horrified by these murders, Lieutenant.” Her fury grew, but as it did she came to realize that something more frightening and more fatal than simple harassment was going on. “We have all been puzzled by the Guardia’s lack of success in solving them. You can be sure we’ll help in any way we can.”

“You’re puzzled by the Guardia’s lack of success?”

“Disappointed.”

“Ah,” said Campos as though soothed. “You know,” he said, “it’s funny. We both have uniforms to wear. I wear mine. But you — never. Are you still a nun?”

“You can consult the church authorities and the Interior Ministry in regard to that. I’m a nun. This is not the capital and we’re permitted to dress for work.”

“Only a confusion of traditions, then?”

“I suppose,” she said.

“Then you may be sure,” Campos said, “that in this jurisdiction you’ll be treated as what you are.”

She made herself smile. Whence came the smile and how she had mustered it she had no idea. It pleased her then to smile at him.

“We thank you, Lieutenant.”

He stood about for a moment whistling tunelessly through his teeth.

“Now, Sister, have the goodness to back up your vehicle and let me pass.”

She put the jeep in reverse and backed into soft sand hard by the water’s edge. For a moment, the wheels spun; she cursed softly. The rear wheels spun free of the slough.

“Excuse me, Sister,” Campos asked, “did you speak?” He had backed his own jeep onto higher ground and was straightening out to pass.

“No, I didn’t,” she said.

He threw his jeep into gear and gunned the engine briefly.

“Nuns don’t curse,” he shouted at her. “Not at me.”

And then he was off at his customary speed.

“ Que le vaya bien, ” she said to herself as she eased back onto the track. Driving the rest of the way, she kept her attention and her mind on the road. She was very frightened and she wanted nothing more than to go back to her quarters, close the shutters and stretch out in the cool darkness. Things would come clearer to her there.

Back at the mission, she showered and lay down; for a short time, under the weight of her fear and exhaustion, she actually slept. Awaking from a confusion of dreams, she found herself confronted with a simple certainty. The notion that the Devotionist mission at French Harbor could be used as a tactical location in the coming struggle represented a coincidence of fond fantasies. It had been compounded of her own egoism and the Tecanecans’ naïve confidence in the protection afforded by the American flag.

If the Movement was dismissive of Campos as a venal thug, then they had not understood his obsessiveness. To them, presumably, he was simply a sly and brutal timeserver — the ideal enemy. She herself was convinced that there was more to him than that; he had a spider’s-web aura of schizoid insights around him, an odor of unclean appetites that seemed to concentrate on her. He was always asking Charlie Egan about her, asking the merchants, the campesinos. It was beyond suspiciousness. In a peculiar way, he seemed more intelligent than a social agent of the Guardia should be; it was as if he had succeeded in becoming everything that the other swaggering sneering bastards of his organization pretended to be. Then, if he was as unsoundly intelligent as she suspected, he would be as attached to the idea of a foco on the coast as the rebels were. He would have planted the idea on his superiors in the capital and he would, of course, have connected it with the straggling Devotionists. It would be, in a sense, his project too. Captain Campos. General Campos.

The whole thing suggested internal betrayal as well. Tecan was full of police informers; they would have penetrated the Movement, perhaps to its highest level. A fiasco that dissipated the Republic’s revolutionary energy would buy the government ten years. Or longer.

Can it be, she wondered, that I have come to understand this country? Impossible, she decided. It was only one of her brief attacks of common sense. A periodic seizure.

She dressed and had a drink of cold well water. She would get them a message immediately. That the scrutiny was more than routine, that something was up that would mean disaster and there would have to be an alternative plan. She had to presume that the Tecanecan Movement had developed the concept of alternative plans.

Sensible or not, the thought of abandoning her part in Tecan’s liberation was bitter to Justin. They needed so much, she thought, and they had asked her for so little. To keep the dock lights on — there was nothing very suspect in that — many of the fishermen went out at night with torches, sometimes they asked her or Egan to run the generator late and keep the dock lights lit to guide their passage in. To be available for the wounded — she would have done that unrequested. But the obscene attentions of Campos made everything a hazard. The Guardia would be observant of late-burning lights. Wounded men who came to the dispensary would be drawn into a trap. Egan, who was her charge now, would not survive it all.