The Immigrant’s Daughter (35 page)

“Oh, no. I'm a correspondent for the
L.A. Morning World
.”

“Really? I would think—”

He clipped the sentence, and Barbara said, “You would think they'd send someone younger.”

“Forgive me. A thousand pardons.”

“Not at all. One of the advantages of my age is that I can strike up a conversation with anyone, while a young and attractive woman, unfortunately, would do so at her own risk. I have been a writer and a correspondent for many years — indeed, my first assignment predates World War Two. My name is Barbara Lavette. I dislike long flights where one sits next to a stranger in grim silence.”

“Then we shall have no grim silence.” He motioned to the stewardess, who apparently knew him. “May I offer you champagne?”

“Some ordinary white wine.”

“And I'll have a perfect Manhattan,” he said, which Barbara translated in her mind as his statement that he was no ordinary inhabitant of an unhappy banana republic, but a very knowledgeable and sophisticated citizen of the international set.

“Do you have any trepidation about going home?” Barbara wondered.

“Ah, there speaks the voice of someone whose knowledge of my country comes from your media.”

“Not entirely. I have read a good deal — Anderson and Penny Lernoux and Richard Millett —”

“Yes. Biased, very biased. The Maryknoll influence.”

“Really?” Barbara never argued in such situations. Argument changed nothing, provided only a sop to the ego, and, worst of all, as she had learned long ago, cut off a source of information. “I never thought of it that way.”

“But you must, if you are to write the truth. If you will forgive a most personal question — are you Catholic?”

“Well, that is getting right to the root of things, isn't it? I suppose you have a good reason for asking. More than curiosity, I trust?”

“Much more, Miss Lavette, believe me.”

“No, I'm not a Catholic. I don't have very much religion, but I was born and raised an Episcopalian.”

“I ask only because,” he explained, “so many Catholics have very strange ideas and are not Catholic in any true sense. They have taken Communism into their bodies instead of the Host. Maryknoll. You will never see El Salvador as it is if you listen to the Maryknoll. They are not Catholics. They are an abortion —”

“Which was why the nuns were murdered,” Barbara said softly. “Is that what you are saying?”

“Never, never so many lies as about that accident.”

“Yes, and I imagine that the killing of Father Grande and taking over his church was also an accident.”

“He was a spoiled priest, a Communist.”

“Yes, I suppose so, but then they took his church in Aguilares and turned it into a pigsty. And Archbishop Romero tried to go to the church, and as much as he pleaded that he only desired to remove the Sacred host, they would not let him pass. Then he persuaded the National Guard chaplain to go and remove the Host, but the soldiers stopped the chaplain and dragged the priest into the church, and forced him to watch while they shot the tabernacle to pieces and then ground the Host into the filth on the floor.”

“And you believe this?” Regana snorted.

“Should I?” Barbara asked. “I mean, one reads these things and one doesn't know whether to believe or not. Consider the murder of Archbishop Romero. Was it connected?”

Regana studied her shrewdly. He was no fool, Barbara decided; he was not taken in. He was indexing her for the future, and perhaps she had overplayed the fool simply by referring to the incident.

“To believe what the Communists say —” He shrugged. “You believe and you become their tool.”

No more waves, Barbara told herself severely. She had made too many gaffes and she had said too much. Here was a man who obviously knew everything about his own land, and except for what she had read and heard, she knew nothing. He was equipped to play the devil's advocate; she was not equipped to prosecute.

“Would you like another drink?” he asked, still smoothly polite.

“That would be nice. Yes.”

She made no more references to nuns raped or priests murdered, and gradually their small talk died away. All her indirect attempts to discover what kind of business had brought Mr. Regana to Los Angeles were of no avail, and she carefully refrained from pressing the point. Left to her own thoughts, she composed a story that would simply detail the essence of her two meetings on that same day, first with the arms dealer and now with this somewhat blood-chilling purveyor of a new kind of Catholicism, where priests and nuns were murdered, their death sentence based on their unwillingness to limit the practices of their religion to the rich. It would certainly be a most interesting story, and as yet she had not set foot on the soil of El Salvador. And as the story shaped itself, she felt a cold needle of fear. Until now, she had been on a sort of high, her spirits lifted hugely by the fact that she had been accepted back into the real world, where people work and are paid for their skills. It had partly returned her to youth, and the aches and pains were washed away in the excitement of the new project. Until now, she had not been afraid.

Now she was afraid, and this fear, like a sort of intestinal cramp, did not disappear when the plane landed and taxied up to the fanciful glass and white anodized-aluminum structure that proclaimed El Salvador's “fine visions” of the twenty-first century. It also did not escape Barbara's notice that this airport, so superior to so many tacky airports back home, was built with the tax dollars of the American people. Nightmarish, she told herself. I am Alice in Crazy Land, and I have not yet left this silly little airplane.

Regana said goodbye gallantly. “It has been a pleasure, señora. We will see each other again, I am sure.”

Clifford Abrahams, briefed by Carson, was at the airport, waiting for her, instantly recognizable from Carson's description, a very tall, slender, almost cadaverous man, with a shock of brown hair and bright blue eyes, wearing a wrinkled tan cotton suit. He introduced himself with an impeccable upper-class British accent, took Barbara's suitcase — “No typewriter, Miss Lavette?” — and led her toward the immigration counter, where a cluster of unattractive men in camouflage uniforms, carrying submachine guns, bleakly and intently eyed each person who came off the plane. Other armed men in wrinkled uniforms were scattered around the airport terminal.

“Welcome and glad to see you,” Abrahams continued. “Try not to make eye contact with the local hoodlums.”

“If you weren't here to meet me, Mr. Abrahams,” Barbara replied, “I think I would have turned around and leaped onto the next plane home. This place scares the hell out of me.”

“Normal. Fear here is like smog in L.A. or fog in London, endemic.”

“Oh? That's reassuring. No, I don't take a typewriter, since I'm not filing. I'll do a series of pieces when I return. I'll just make pencil notes. Why all the soldiers? Are they expecting something?”

“Oh, no. Normal — par for the course. I won't try to shield you, Miss Lavette. Carson tells me that you know your way around. Nothing very nice here. Let's do the credentials.”

They studied her passport. No smiles, no note of welcome. After they stamped her credentials, they went through her suitcase, feeling their way through each piece of her clothing. Then they asked to look at her purse. Barbara glanced at Abrahams questioningly. He nodded. They emptied the purse, a large leather bag that she had purchased for this trip; then they went through the contents; then they returned the contents to the purse; and then slowly handed the purse to Barbara.

“
Muchas gracias
,” she said sourly.

Away from the counter, Abrahams said, “Nice accent. Do you speak Spanish?”

“Yes.”

“Good Spanish? Easily?”

“Pretty good. Why?”

“Don't. Not to any official. It gives you a priceless advantage. They'll talk to each other on the basis that you don't understand. I've been here too long to get away with it. But you can. And by the way, did you talk to brother Regana in Spanish? I saw you saying goodbye.”

“He sat next to me on the plane. No, no Spanish. His English is remarkable.”

“Good.”

“Who is he? Do you know him?”

“No pal of mine, but I've interviewed him.” Dropping his voice. “Bloody little bastard. They say he runs the death squads. In uniform he's Colonel Regana, and some say he has over a thousand notches on his gun, peasants, women, children, liberals, reformers — you name it. They call him the butcher of Morazán — guerrilla territory now. He was born there in poverty, out of which he fought his way up to this high position. A stirring example to the kids.”

“I do pick them.”

“You didn't say anything — like not approving of the rape and murder of nuns?”

“I did.”

Abrahams sighed and said, “I think I'll call you Barbara. Call me Cliff.”

“Instant intimacy before extinction, right?”

“Come on, love. I'm going to lead you through a fine three weeks. Carson said he'd hunt me down and destroy me if anything happened to you. And he would. By the way, I don't want to be pushy, but you and Carson were married once?”

“A long time ago.”

“Forgive me for prying. Carson's a fine fellow, and I was curious to see the lady who'd been his wife. I suppose you'd rather we dropped that subject?”

“I would, yes.”

The new road to San Salvador swung north from the ghostlike beach resorts, created and planned by the local bosses — or killers or tyrants, or revered leaders of the people, depending on the circumstances — to be competitive with the resorts of the Bahamas or Jamaica; but since El Salvador was the last place on earth a sane person would go for a vacation, they were for the most part deserted. The road went on inland and north, through dry hills, like the hills of a California summer. There were cars on the road, none of them pleasure vehicles, and most of them varieties of military transport: heavy station wagons with thick bulletproof side panels, the wagons fitted with machine gun mounts, small panel trucks, windowless and ominous, and once a heavy-duty United States Army half-track, its markings obliterated. There were also here and there soldiers by the roadside, sometimes squatting and eating and drinking, sometimes marching, sometimes just standing and watching the cars go by. And there were the bodies of two men, lying on the embankment and being torn to shreds by buzzards, so many buzzards and so hungry that they were jostling each other to get at the human flesh.

“I think I am going to be sick,” Barbara said.

“Tell me in time. I'll pull over to the side of the road.”

“I won't be sick. Absolutely not. I don't want to stop on this road.”

They were riding in a small Toyota jeep, which Cliff Abrahams said he had bought a few months ago, at a very low price, from a San Salvador dealer. “They come here from Japan, and the local in-dealers buy them with US aid money. They want a quick turnover, so they sell cheap.”

“How do car dealers get aid money?”

“They're not car dealers, love. Bless your heart, no. They're colonels and generals turning a quick buck, and making sure, as patriots, that none of the money goes to buy food for the kids, who might just grow up to be Communists. You didn't by any chance fetch a copy of
Alice in Wonderland
with you?”

“You don't believe in God, do you?”

“That is apropos of nothing — or are you making a point? You'll remember that Alice said a gent does not ask personal questions, and that's quite personal, isn't it? Well, sort of. I mean about God and such, I do give it some thought now and then. Not anything one talks about.”

“No, but for a moment I had such a clear image of the old man up there with his head in his hands and weeping his heart out over the way his kids loused up all and everything, from worse to worse. I have been in this line of work since the nineteen thirties. We did think that when we finished Hitler, the bad guys had been done in.”

“It would be a dull world without the bad guys.”

“I suppose so,” Barbara admitted. “It would be quite a problem to live without terror. Cliff, why do you suppose I'm so damn scared? I was arrested by the Gestapo in Germany in nineteen thirty-nine, and I wasn't as frightened as I am now. Is it being an old lady that changes things?”

“Drop the old lady line, Barbara. Even in Germany, one felt that one was living in the twentieth century and that certain niceties of civilization remained, at least if you weren't Jewish. They don't exist here. A civilized nation doesn't leave the bodies of dead men lying by the roadside, buzzards tearing them to pieces, while army lorries drive back and forth without so much as a glance. That touches the deepest and most vulnerable depths of our souls.”

“But don't they know back home? Don't they have a notion?”

“It's your turf, love, not mine. I suppose they do and they don't, and they're a little crazy on the subject of Communism. They try to believe that these bloody murderers are fighting Communism. They're not, you know. They kill anyone who irritates them. It's as simple as that.”

It's an instructive initiation, Barbara decided, and no one but herself to blame. She wanted to come here. She had used Carson and bullied him into sending her here. She argued with herself that even if she had bullied Carson, no one but herself had been hurt, but that made it no better.

“We're going to the San Salvador Sheraton. It's a new hotel, quite decent and quite clean. I engaged a suite for you,” Abrahams said, a bit apologetically. “I mean, it's a few dollars more, but Carson can afford it, and you need a place to write.”

“If Carson can't afford it, I can.”

“Good. You'll be here just a few weeks, so buy every comfort you can.”