MAMista (3 page)

‘Checkpoint,' said the driver calmly.

‘Don't speak unless they ask you something,' Inez ordered Paz. The taxi stopped at the place where the entire width of the road was barred by pointed steel stakes driven deep into it. The driver got out with the car papers in his hand. A blockhouse made from tree trunks had become overgrown with greenery so that it was difficult to distinguish from its surrounding bush and trees. Grey-uniformed Federalistas, their old American helmets painted white, manned the obstacle. One of them went to the rear of the car and watched while the driver opened the trunk. The other held a Rexim machine gun across his body as if ready to fire it. Paz looked at it with interest. He had seen them before in Spain. In the Fifties a Spanish manufacturer sold the gun as ‘La Coruña', but it was too heavy, too cumbersome and the price was wrong. They went out of business.

Two more soldiers were sitting on a log, smoking and steadying ancient Lee Enfield rifles in their outstretched hands. Standing back in the shade was another man. Dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, he wore fancy Polaroid sun-glasses. On his belt he had an equally fancy automatic pistol with imitation pearl grips. He did nothing but watch the man and woman in the car. Paz had seen such men at the docks. They were the PSS, the political police.

The taxi's boot slammed closed with enough force to rock the car on its springs. Then the driver and the soldier collected the identity papers which Inez offered through the lowered window. The papers were taken to the man in the white shirt but he didn't deign to look at them. He waved them away. The papers were returned to Inez and the driver started the car.

It was not easy to get the wide Pontiac around the metal stakes. It meant going up on to the muddy shoulder. The soldiers watched but did not help. Paz offered to get out and direct the driver but the woman told him to sit still. ‘It is all part of the game,' she said.

When the driver had negotiated the obstacle the
blank-faced man in the white shirt gave them a mocking salute as they pulled away. ‘It is all part of their stupid game,' she repeated bitterly. She felt shamed in a way that only Latins understand. She gave him his passport and put her own papers back into a smart tote bag. ‘Most of them can't read,' she said. ‘But you can't depend on that.' She clipped the bag shut and said, ‘A friend of mine – a nurse – broke curfew almost every night using a liquor permit to get through the patrols.'

‘And got away with it?'

‘Until last month. Then she ran into one of the courtesy squads that patrol the tourist section where the hotels are. The lieutenant was at school with her.'

‘She was lucky.'

‘They took her to the police station and raped her.'

Paz said nothing. Her quiet answer had been spoken with a feminist fervour; she wanted to make him feel guilty for being a man. He looked out of the window. They were passing through a shanty-town. It was unreal, like sitting at home watching a video. Children, naked and rickety, played among wrecked cars and open sewage. A big crucifix guarded the entrance to the camp. At its base stood an array of tin cans holding flowers and little plants. One of them was a cactus. The sun beat down upon the rain-soaked sheets of corrugated metal and the draped plastic that made the walls and roofs. It produced a steamy haze. Through it Paz saw the distant buildings of downtown Tepilo. They shivered in the rising air like a miraged oasis.

After another mile of jungle they came to an elaborate stone wall. They followed it until there was a gateway. There they turned off, to find a comfortable house set in five acres of garden. ‘Is this a hotel?' Paz asked.

Once it had been a magnificent mansion but now the grandiose stone steps, and the balcony to which they led, were crumbling and overgrown with weeds.

‘Sometimes,' said Inez. She got out. He picked up his
bag and followed her up the steps and into the house. A grand carved staircase led to the upper floor. She showed him to his room. Everything was grandiose, old and slightly broken like the servant who followed them into it. He opened the shutters and pulled the curtains aside. ‘You offered your services to the movement,' she said after the servant had left.

‘Yes.'

‘Do you know anything about explosives?'

‘I am an expert.'

She smiled. ‘Well, Mr Expert, I need you. Come with me.' She took him to an attic room where a kitchen table was littered with bomb-making equipment. ‘Teach me to make a bomb.'

He looked at the way the things were laid out on the scrubbed table: scissors, insulation tape and string. There were some steel ball-bearings in a tray that might have been made as a crude triggering device, also a sharpened pencil and a notebook. Only a woman would have arranged it all so neatly. ‘You are mad,' he said.

‘Teach me!'

‘With this junk?' He extended a hand but did not touch anything.

‘I'll get anything else you need,' she said.

‘What are you trying to blow up?' he asked. She hesitated. He turned to look at her. ‘You'll have to tell me.'

‘A safe. A steel safe in the Ministry of Pensions.' He studied her to see if she was serious. ‘Three times we have tried. None of the bombs exploded. This is our last chance while we still have a way of getting into the building.'

He looked at the equipment but did not touch it. He said, ‘We must wear coveralls and gloves. Just handling this stuff will leave enough smell on you to alert a sniffer dog. They use sniffer dogs in Tepilo, I suppose?'

‘Yes.' She went to a huge closet in the corridor. From one of the shelves she took freshly laundered coveralls and
cotton gloves. ‘We are not complete amateurs,' she said, and held the coveralls up to see that they would fit him.

When he was dressed, with his hair tucked into a pirate-style scarf, he picked up the wrapped sticks of explosive and looked at them closely. ‘Oshokuyaku, probably picric acid.' He sniffed at it cautiously as if the smell alone was lethal.

‘It cost a lot of money,' she said. She had expected an explosives expert to be bolder with the tools of his trade. Was he afraid, she wondered.

‘Then you were taken, honey! That stuff was obsolete twenty years ago. The only good news is that it looks like it's been stored properly.' He put the explosive down gently and sorted through a cardboard box that contained a jumble of odds and ends: rusty screws, wires, detonators, a tube of glue and more sticky tape. ‘You've got the rough idea,' he said grudgingly.

She opened a drawer and produced some brand-new batteries. ‘They are fresh and tested,' she said.

‘How are you going to set it off?'

From the closet she fetched a wind-up alarm clock, still in a cardboard box. She put it on the table in front of him. ‘I need two clocks,' he said. ‘Give me another.'

She got a second one. ‘Why two?'

‘In case one doesn't work properly,' he said. He tore the boxes open. They were an old-fashioned style: circular with a bell on top and Mickey Mouse on the face.

He placed the clocks side by side on the table and looked at it all. ‘Have you got any other explosive?'

She shook her head.

‘No American stuff? No Semtex? Russian Hexogen?'

‘This is all we have, until the next consignment comes. We had gelignite but it was oozing some sort of chemical.'

‘It's not still around here is it? That was nitro running out of it.'

‘They buried it.'

‘You people are loco,' he said again. ‘You need proper explosive.'

‘What's wrong with that explosive?'

‘You'll never make a bomb with that Japanese shit.'

‘They said it was fresh from the factory. It came in last month.' She sounded desperate. Her face was white and drawn. He thought she was going to burst into tears. ‘This task is important.'

Paz looked at her thoughtfully, and then back to the bomb. ‘It just won't explode,' he said. ‘These American detonators won't fire Jap explosive. You might as well connect it to a bundle of tortillas.' He expected her to try to laugh, or at least to speak, but she was devastated by the disappointment. He said, ‘American explosive is high-quality and very sensitive. American caps will blow American explosive but they won't make this stuff move.'

‘You must fix it,' she insisted. ‘You are Mr Expert.' She said it bitterly and he resented that. Why should this spoiled bitch hold him responsible for not performing miracles with her collection of rubbish?

‘We'd need a booster to put between the caps and the charge,' he explained patiently. ‘Then we might make it explode.'

‘You could do it?'

‘Could you get sugar?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘Sodium chlorate?'

‘Do they use it to make matches?'

‘Yes.'

‘We raided a match factory to get some once. Someone said it was for bombs. I could get some.'

‘How long would it take?'

‘I'll speak on the phone right away.'

‘Careful what you say. A whole lot of people know what sodium chlorate can do.'

‘Go downstairs and tell one of the servants to cook a steak for you. There is plenty of food here. Suppose everything you need is brought to the Ministry of Pensions? Could you do it on the spot?'

‘Who said I was going to plant the bomb?'

She looked at him with unconcealed derision. This was the showdown; the time when he was forced to come to terms with the true situation. He had placed himself under the orders of the MAMista. That meant under the orders of this woman, and of anyone else to whom the
Movimiento de Acción Marxista
gave authority.

He spoke slowly. ‘We must have coveralls and gloves and kerosene to wash with. And good soap to get rid of the smell of the kerosene.'

‘I will arrange all that.' She showed no sign of triumph but they both knew that their relationship had been established. It was not a relationship that Paz was going to enjoy.

He picked through the box to select some pieces of wire and a screwdriver and pliers and so on. He put these things alongside the explosive and the clocks. ‘I will need all those things. And a tape measure at least a metre in length.'

‘Estupendo!' she said, but her tone revealed relief rather than joy.

He didn't respond. He didn't like her. She looked too much like his stepmother and he hated his stepmother. She'd sent him away to school and stolen his father from him. Nothing had gone right after that.

 

The Spanish day takes place so late.
Tarde
means both ‘afternoon' and ‘evening'. The word for ‘morning' means ‘tomorrow'. Seated outside a café in Tepilo's Plaza de Armas, the young man was reminded of the Spanish life-style. The Plaza was crowded: mulattos and mestizos, aristocrats and beggars, priests, nuns, blacks and Indians. Here and there even a tourist or two could be spotted. There were sweating soldiers in ill-fitting coarse grey serge and officers in
nipped-waist tunics with high collars, polished boots, sabres and spurs. Paz watched a group of officers talking together: the subalterns stood at attention with white-gloved hands suspended at the permanent salute. Their seniors did not spare them a glance.

Behind the officers, a stone Francisco Pizarro, on a galloping stone steed, assailed the night with uplifted sword. On the far side of the Plaza rose the dark shape of the Archbishop's Palace. It was an amazing confusion of scrolls, angels, demons, flowers and gargoyles: the collected excesses of the baroque. On this side of the square the
paseo
had begun. Past the flower-beds and the ornamental fountains, young men of the town marched and counter-marched. Girls – chaperoned by hawk-eyed old crones – girls, smiling and whispering together, paraded past them in their newest clothes.

From inside the café there drifted the music of a string trio playing ‘Moonlight and Roses'. Across the table was the woman – Inez Cassidy – wearing a mousy wig and fashionably large tinted glasses. She was watching Paz with unconcealed interest and amusement.

‘They are not bad, those nylon wigs,' he said in an attempt to ruffle her. He had not drunk his chocolate. It was too thick and cloying for him. He was nervous enough for his stomach to rebel at just the smell of it.

She was not put out. ‘They are good enough for a job like this. You'll wear your dark glasses too, if you take my advice. The new law requires only one eye-witness to ensure conviction for acts of terrorism.' She did not use the word ‘terrorism' sardonically. She had no quarrel with it as a description of what they were about to do.

She looked at Paz. His skin was light but he was heavily pigmented. She could see he was of Hispanic origin. His hair was dark and coarse. Parted in the middle, it often fell across his eyes, causing him to shake his head like some young flirtatious girl. He had that nervous confidence that
comes to rich college boys who feel they still have to prove themselves. Such boys were not unknown here in Tepilo. They flaunted their cars, and sometimes their yachts and planes. One heard their perfect Spanish, full of fashionable slang from Madrid, at some of the clubs and waterfront restaurants beyond the town. Neither was it unknown for one of them to join the MAMista. At the beginning of the
violencia
such men had enjoyed the thrills of the bank hold-ups and pay-roll robberies that brought money the movement needed so desperately. But such men did not have the stamina, nor the political will, that long-term political activity demanded. This fellow Paz had arrived with all sorts of recommendations from the movement's supporters in Los Angeles, but Inez had already decided that he was not going to be an exception to that rule.

In the local style, Angel Paz struck his cup with the spoon to produce a sound that summoned a waiter. She watched him as he counted out the notes. Rich young men handle money with contempt; it betrays them. The waiter eyed him coldly and took the tip without a thank you.