Read The Fighting Man (1993) for Free Online

the lieutenant’s eyes. He had never been told but it was obvious to him. The lieutenant was an interrogator. It was late in the evening. The Cherokee Chief station wagons would be out and tasked and cruising for the lift. A suspect would be brought to a safe house. Of course it was necessary for the interrogator to prepare himself for his work.
    The lieutenant was looking over his shoulder, down to the yellowed sheets of paper from the files, down onto the new photographs that had come that afternoon from Havana.
    He liked the boy. He respected the lieutenant’s attitude to work.
    The clerk’s forefinger, taken away at the upper joint, jabbed at the photograph that showed a coffin on a trestle at a graveside. He peered into the lieutenant’s face and smiled.
    ‘The end of the old whore Ramírez. It was taken eight, nine, days ago, from Havana . . . You had heard, lieutenant, of the whore Ramírez . . . ?’
    It was good coffee that the lieutenant brought in his flask. He could smell the quality. He saw the shaken head.
    ‘. . . From Acul, from the Ixil triangle. He was a Ladino , he ran a hardware shop in the village. He was the big man there. He reckoned himself the leader of the Indians in that village. There was a poison in him, and he spread the poison through the villages around Acul, right to the towns of the triangle. A cunning old whore because he had learned the matter of defence. The army came to destroy him, but not with enough force and could not take the village. He was successful against the campaign of Victory ’82. In the campaign of Firmness ’83 he was again permitted to survive. It was not until Institutional Re-encounter ’84, when the Kaibiles were used against the village, that he was defeated. The village of the whore was the last in the triangle to be taken. It was a big battle, a day and most of a night, the whore had taught them to fight well. It was where my leg . . .’
    The clerk grimaced. It was always in the evenings when the wasted muscles around the shrapnel wound had stiffened that he felt the greatest pain. It had been a small mine, made in the village, positioned off the road in the cover beside a track, well sited. It was the rusted nails in the mine, scattered by the explosion, that had torn into the calf muscle of his right leg and caused the secondary gangrene. It was where he had lost the tip of his right-hand forefinger.
    ‘. . . He is still remembered, a little of the poison remains. He went into exile. He went to the clown fantasy land of Cuba. I have it here . . .’
    The clerk flicked at close-typed pages, some corrected with ink, of a file half covered by the twin piles of photographs.
    ‘. . . It is said that the old whore dreamed only of returning to the triangle, that he sat in the cafés in the Campeche quarter of Old Havana and played the game of fighting his way back to his village – just the dream of an old whore. You know how it ended, the dream? Not at the head of a column, not in the jungle in the Petén, not in the mountains of the Cuchumatanes – it ended when he was hit by a bus that had lost its brakes, when he was crossing the road to go for his coffee with the other fools who believed he would take them back. I suppose it was possible, in the shithouse of Havana, to believe that one day he would return and that the Indians, dumbfucks, would follow him again. He had a good funeral . . .’
    The lieutenant’s breath played on the back of the clerk’s neck. The lieutenant’s hand rested loosely on the clerk’s shoulder.
    ‘. . . All the old men who went into exile with him were there, look at them, raddled, wrinkled, hair gone, all cretins. There are just three that I can’t locate. Too old, too changed. I tell you what I think, I think it would be a worse death to be in exile in Havana, than to face the guns of the Kaibiles. Look at them, if they were in the Petén, in the jungle, they would be gone in forty-eight hours. They are pathetic . .