January Justice (2 page)

As each of them bent to enter the car, I saw bulges underneath their shirttails. I never understood why a man would holster a weapon at the small of his back. It makes sitting in a chair or a car very uncomfortable.

I closed the door, walked around the limo, and got in behind the wheel. Before shifting into drive, I touched the button that lowered the darkly tinted glass between the front and rear compartments.

“Where to, gentlemen?” I said after the glass was down.

“North,” said the man who had spoken earlier. Not the pockmarked one; the other one. Mr. Brown, I supposed.

“No particular destination?”

“We were thinking of a visit to your Hollywood. You have possibly heard of the Musso and Frank Grill?”

I smiled and said, “Of course.”

“It is a place where famous movies stars are seen?”

“Sometimes.”

“Good. Then we will go there.”

“Yes, sir.”

As we followed the driveway to the street, I touched the button again. Before the glass closed completely, the man said, “Leave it open, please.”

“All right,” I said.

“We might need to ask you something.”

“Certainly.”

We were on the 405 rolling north before he spoke again. “You are Malcolm Cutter?”

“That’s right.”

“The gunnery sergeant, Malcolm Cutter?”

I looked in the rearview mirror. “I haven’t been a sergeant for some time.”

“In the United States Marines.”

I stared at him a little longer. So it wasn’t Geronimo he reminded me of after all. I said, “Where was it? Guatemala?”

He nodded.

Speaking Spanish, the man next to him said, “I tell you, we cannot trust him.”

“Idiot,” replied the one called Mr. Brown, also speaking Spanish. “He can understand us.”

“That is true,” I said, also in Spanish.

“Please forgive my friend,” continued Mr. Brown in his native language. “He finds it difficult to believe Americans can be trusted.”

“Sadly,” I said, “I must admit not all of us are trustworthy.”

“Do you remember me?”

“I think so. It was Chiquimula, was it not?”

“Chiquimulilla.”

“My apologies.”

The man in the mirror shrugged. “A common mistake.”

I changed lanes to avoid a dump truck trickling gravel onto the freeway up ahead. I gently pressed on the accelerator, gradually increasing speed. In the mirror I saw the bouncing pebbles hit a black Chevrolet Suburban. The Suburban swerved and ended up in the lane behind me.

I thought about my time in Chiquimulilla. There had been a clearing at the edge of the mangroves that line the Rio Los Esclavos, just north of town. In the center of the clearing was a long depression in the soil, perhaps one hundred feet by ten. In the depression, underneath the soggy soil, had been about two hundred bodies.

“If it was Chiquimulilla,” I said, “then you must have been with the URNG.”

“Yes.”

“Comandante Valentín Vega, was it not?”

“That was a long time ago. You have a good memory.”

The Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, or Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit, was an unlikely combination of organizations, Marxist rebel groups, and liberation theology Catholics. Each group had been too small and poorly organized to have much effect on the Guatemalan military individually, so they had banded together with the support of the Sandinistas and the Cubans.

On my first deployment to Guatemala, back in 1996, I had been a corporal in a squad that briefly encountered about twenty URNG guerrillas in a jungle clearing. Valentín Vega, the man in the backseat, had been there. It had been a green-ops mission, covert intelligence gathering only, during the final year of Guatemala’s bloody civil war. Although the Marine Corps and I parted later on decidedly uneasy terms, I still couldn’t discuss a mission that had been conducted without the knowledge or consent of the Guatemalan government. I decided to change the subject.

Still speaking Spanish, I looked into the rearview mirror again. “I do not recognize your unhappy friend.”

“You may call him Fidel. Or Castro.”

I was amused.

Vega apparently saw my smile in the mirror. “It is not the name his parents gave him. He chose it to honor Comrade Castro.”

“I am sure your friend has made all of Cuba proud.”

“It would be better if you did not mock Fidel.”

In the mirror I saw Fidel Castro’s namesake twist in his seat and reach behind his back. Since he didn’t appear to be scratching an itch, I assumed he had removed his handgun from its holster. Or maybe I was imagining things again. It was hard to tell the difference. But the better part of valor is discretion, so I decided to accelerate a little more.

Comandante Valentín said, “It is an honorable name.”

“In certain circles, I suppose. Not in mine.”

“Seriously. You should use more care in your choice of words.”

“You do realize I am going ninety-five? about a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour.”

“Perhaps it is too fast.”

“Perhaps. But it also makes it inconvenient for Señor Castro to fire his weapon.”

“Shooting you would not be inconvenient,” said Señor Castro.

“In that case,” I said, “I will drive a little faster.”

I took us up to one hundred and ten miles per hour. It involved a lot of rapid lane changes, but somehow I found enough holes in the traffic to keep going, which was a minor miracle in LA at that time of day. The signs and barricades and other vehicles left long trails of color as they flashed past on either side. I was pretty sure the trails of color were not real.

“Please,” said Vega. “This is not necessary.”

“Neither is Señor Castro’s weapon.”

“He will replace it in his holster.”

“If you do not mind…” —I swerved to avoid a beer truck in the lane ahead—“I would prefer he dropped it on the seat up here beside me. Yours, too.”

Vega sighed and turned to look out the window at his shoulder. “Do it,” he said.

Castro made no move.

“Do what he said, Fidel,” Vega repeated.

I glanced into Castro’s yellow eyes in the rearview mirror. Then I had to pay attention to the traffic up ahead. The glance had been enough to confirm my earlier suspicion about the man’s hatred. It isn’t paranoia when it’s true. I focused on what I knew to be true.

I cut left into the HOV lane to pass three cars, and then back to the right to barely miss the rear bumper of a van we were approaching fast. The van honked as we roared by. It sounded distant in the heavily insulated cocoon of the Mercedes’ interior. I could barely hear the engine, and there was only a hint of wind noise. By virtue of impeccable design, the outside world had almost no effect on my passengers in the Mercedes. But I had modified the suspension personally, so my sense of contact with the road was excellent. Even at one hundred ten miles per hour, the limo handled as well as some sports cars. Still, it would only take one driver changing lanes without warning, and we’d be finished. I didn’t enjoy putting the other drivers in danger.

I was hoping for a patrol car or a CHP motorcycle in the rearview mirror, when Valentín Vega’s hand appeared in my peripheral vision. A Glock 26 dropped onto the leather seat beside me. I heard heated whispering in back. After a couple of seconds, another pistol joined the Glock, also a 26, the smaller size, convenient for concealed carry.

I removed my foot from the accelerator and touched the window button.

As the glass began to rise between us, Vega said, “Please leave it down. We did as you suggested.”

“Your friend Señor Castro might have a knife.”

“He does not.”

“In that case, he might try to stare me to death.”

“But we must talk.”

“Do not worry. I will leave it open just a little.”

When the gap at the top of the glass was too small for them to reach me, I touched the button again to stop the window. “All right,” I said. “Please explain why Señor Castro felt he had to draw his weapon.”

The one with the yellow eyes spat out a few Spanish curses and suggested that I was a homosexual. He didn’t use the polite word for it in Spanish.

I spoke to Vega in English. “Does he understand me now?”

“No. Fidel speaks very little of your language.”

“Your friend doesn’t like me very much. Why is that?”

“It is not only you, Mr. Cutter. I am afraid Fidel hates Americans. He is a little bit… what is your expression? Obstructive-compulsive?”

“Obsessive.”

“Ah yes. He is obsessive-compulsive about this hatred.”

“Are you trying to say he’s crazy?”

“I think he is a little bit. Yes.”

“Your travels might be easier if you left him at home.”

“That is true, but what can I do? Fidel is my wife’s brother, and he saved my life many times during the war.”

I drove on, thinking about insanity, about men—friends—driven to embrace brutality by the unrelenting fear and grief of war. I thought about loss and guilt, and the psychedelic impulse to flee into midair. I thought about where I had spent the past seven months, about straitjackets and psychotropic drugs and solid steel doors and tempered windows reinforced with wire. If it were true that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, it was doubly true for padded cells. I decided not to judge Señor Castro too harshly.

I said, “Maybe you should tell me what you want.”

2

“You were in the first force recon company,”
said Comandante Valentín Vega.

I changed lanes, preparing to take the next exit off the freeway. “That’s right.”

“You visited my country another time, more recently. You commanded Colonel Kyle Russell’s personal security detail.”

He shouldn’t have known that, and I couldn’t confirm it, so I said nothing.

“When the tyrant Ríos Montt was nominated as the Guatemalan Republican Front candidate in my country’s 2003 presidential election, Colonel Russell visited us to collect information for a report that your Pentagon delivered to your government’s committee on Latin America affairs. Because of your influence, Colonel Russell suggested an assassination, arranged to look like an accident. Unfortunately, that did not occur. It was an excellent idea.”

Vega had it only partly right. Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan politician, a former general and a dictator and cofounder of the military junta in the early eighties. During his brief dictatorship, thousands of Guatemalans had been “disappeared,” which was what Guatemalans called it when their government murdered them and buried them in unmarked graves. Ríos Montt, a self-professed Pentecostal preacher who had never been convicted of the genocidal crimes committed while he controlled the country, had resurfaced to run for Guatemalan President in 2003. Probably because of my experience in Guatemala a decade before, I had been assigned to Colonel Russell’s security detail when the Pentagon ordered him to assess the impact of a potential Ríos Montt victory on the military situation in Central America. A contingent of Drug Enforcement Administration guys had also tagged along to look into the narcotics trafficking situation.

Russell and I had served together at Camp Rhino during the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and we had a certain level of mutual respect.

During my second deployment in Guatemala, Russell had often asked for my operational opinions. We spent six weeks traveling the mountains and coastal lowlands of Guatemala with the Marine detail and our the DEA agents, hearing horror stories and seeing mass grave sites and the physical scars of torture on survivors of the junta’s interrogations. I came to believe that a Ríos Montt political comeback could destroy the fragile stability of the region. If I had been a Guatemalan, and he had been elected, I would most certainly have come down from the mountains in a killing frame of mind. To avoid a return of the bloody Guatemalan civil war, it had seemed to me that Ríos Montt’s candidacy for presidential office should be stopped by whatever means necessary.

I said as much to Colonel Russell when he’d asked, and it was possible my comments had some slight influence on his report to the Pentagon. But I had no idea how the man in the backseat of my limo knew any of this. And if Russell had actually suggested a black operation against Ríos Montt to his superiors, I didn’t know a thing about that either, except that it wasn’t based on my suggestion. The United States of America doesn’t base its foreign policy decisions on the opinions of gunnery sergeants.

As these memories arose in my mind, I also considered the fact that I was thinking lucid thoughts. At least it did seem as if I was thinking pretty clearly. Assuming that was true, assuming I was remembering things the way they had really happened, it was a relief to know my damaged brain could still collect facts from that far in the past and line them up in order. But regardless of whether I remembered those weeks in the Central America mountains correctly, or whether past and present still swirled unconnected back and forth between my synapses, I couldn’t talk about it with civilians, and certainly not with a pair of Guatemalan ex-revolutionaries.