LITMIR.BIZ

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from their positions around the sleeping town, slipping back up the hillside towards the spot where Geraldo and Alicia waited beside the mortar. Once gathered, the unit began its return journey, moving uphill as fast as the terrain allowed, the higher reaches of the Cuchumatanes looming above them like a huge rampart beneath a swiftly clearing sky. In the middle of the column, like an animal incapable of understanding the terrible depth of its unhappiness, Major Alfonso Lujan Muñoz stumbled along, a continuous soft mewling emanating from his gagged mouth.

      Five days later, Colonel Luis Serrano, Operations Director of G-2 Military Intelligence, was standing at the window of his study, staring out at the garden. It was a beautiful dry-season afternoon, with hardly a trace of smog to besmirch the clear blue sky, and for once the brilliant colours of the various flowering plants seemed to justify all his wife’s battles with a never-ending series of new gardeners. She was away at the moment, visiting her sister at the Lake Atitlán villa, but their only daughter was with him, supposedly studying for upcoming examinations. From where Serrano stood, he could see her hard at work on an even tan, lying face down on a towel beside the pool, the top of her bikini untied.

      Behind him, in the shadowed study, the tape continued to roll.

      ‘Do you remember the man Miguel Ustantil, who you ordered arrested in July last year?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Why was he arrested?’

      ‘He was a troublemaker.’

      ‘Can you be more specific?’

      The interrogator’s voice was so calm, Serrano thought, almost Buddha-like. There was no anger, or at least none on the surface. It was as if he had accepted everything on the general level, and was only now concerned with getting the details right. But was he really ‘El Espíritu’, ‘The Ghost’?

      ‘Did you personally supervise the flaying of his facial skin?’

      ‘Yes.’

      Why had the idiot admitted it all? Serrano asked himself. He had been over Muñoz’s service record, and found nothing to indicate such a level of stupidity. He wondered what the bastards had done to turn the man to jelly and make him sound like an I-speak-your-weight machine. Whatever it was, it had left no marks on the body, and the subversivos’ choice of dumping ground – on the steps of the Swedish Embassy – had not given Serrano’s men the chance to add any.

      In PR terms the whole thing had been a disaster. Copies of the tape had been delivered simultaneously to a dozen or so embassies and all the prominent human rights groups, leaving G-2 with very few options in the matter of damage limitation. Serrano’s superiors had not been amused.

      He found himself wondering once more if it really could be El Espíritu. The man was supposed to have died over ten years ago, though admittedly his body had never been properly identified. Even so…The most reliable witnesses had estimated his age at over sixty in 1980, and the average life expectancy of the most docile Indians was not much more than fifty. It was hard to believe…

      But the tape certainly bore the man’s mark. It wasn’t just a catalogue of Muñoz’s overzealous interrogations and punishments – in several of the incidents under discussion the man asking the questions was very careful to draw out why the Army had become involved, and exactly which interests – or, to be more precise, the interests of which landowners – they were seeking to promote.

      But then again…

      Serrano smiled to himself. The foreign press were not interested in why – they were too busy wallowing in hacked-off hands and breasts and gouged-out eyes. None of them got the point, which was that keeping a primitive people under control necessitated the use of primitive methods.

      It was possible, of course, to go too far…

      ‘Why did you take the six men back to San Benito?’

      ‘To show the villagers of the region what lay in store for them if they made trouble.’

      ‘You had them stripped naked, and each man was held erect while you pointed out the various wounds on their bodies – the wire burns and cigarette burns, the severed ears, the split tongues, the hands with no nails and the feet with no soles …’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And then?’

      ‘They were executed.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘They were burnt.’

      ‘You had your men pour gasoline over them and set fire to them?’

      ‘Yes.’

      That was Muñoz’s last word on the tape, and for all Serrano knew his last on this earth. Guerrilla voices read brief extracts from the Geneva Convention and some UN-sponsored accord on human rights – the pompous bastards! – before the voice of the questioner pronounced sentence. There was an eerie gap of several seconds, and then the sound of a single gunshot. Serrano had heard the tape through twice before, and was expecting it, but the report still made him jump.

      In the garden outside, his daughter had turned over, and was treating her bare breasts to the afternoon sunshine. Behind her the Indian gardener was absent-mindedly scratching his behind as he directed the hose at the scarlet bougainvillea.

      Serrano decided he needed to know more about the history of ‘The Ghost’.

      The following day, shortly one o’clock, Chris Martinson was sitting in Antigua’s Restaurant Dona Luisa, waiting for his lunch to arrive. The place was as crowded as usual, with a clientele about equally divided between locals and gringo tourists, but Chris had managed to get the seat he wanted, on the terrace overlooking the interior courtyard. On the previous day a bird he had not recognized had paid an all-too-brief visit to the ornamental palm below, and he was hoping for a repeat performance.

      He turned to one of the two newspapers he had just bought in the square, the one printed in Spanish, and started reading the lead story.

      According to the Guatemalan Daily Planet an elaborate hoax had recently been played on those members of the international press corps who liked to defame the nation’s security forces. Subversivos responsible for the murder of Army Major Alfonso Lujan Muñoz had fabricated a tape purporting to contain an interrogation of the young major, and a counterfeit admission of guilt in regard to certain crimes, all of which were known to have been committed by the subversivos themselves. Unfortunately for the perpetrators of this vicious hoax, voice identification experts had been able to establish that the speaker on the tape was not in fact Major Muñoz.

      ‘And there goes another flying pig,’ Chris murmured to himself. He reached for the Daily News, the English-language newspaper for tourists and Guatemala’s resident British and American community, and looked for another account of the affair. He expected to find at least a different slant – the Daily News, for reasons which no one seemed able to fathom, was allowed a unique latitude when it came to criticizing the authorities.

      Sure enough, the writer managed to pour scorn on the official version of the story without directly contradicting it. ‘We can only wonder,’ he wrote, ‘that after forty years of incessant defeat the subversivos should still have the leisure time, the technology, and the system of communications necessary, to mount such an elaborate hoax.’

      Chris smiled to himself, and cleared a space for the arriving chicken sandwich and papaya licuardo. The trouble with Guatemala was that most of the time it was hard to believe the evidence of your own ears and eyes. The accounts of atrocities committed by both sides were probably exaggerated, but he had no reason to believe that they were imaginary. And yet the country was so eye-achingly beautiful, and not just in the matter of landscape. Costa Rica, which Chris had visited several years earlier, had beautiful countryside, but compared with Guatemala it seemed somehow bland, two-dimensional.

      It was the people who made Guatemala magical, the Mayan Indians,

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