Read The Fighting Man (1993) for Free Online Page A

.’
    The lieutenant reached forward and pushed away the corners of photographs so that one was left clear. The clerk shrugged.
    ‘. . . His son. That is Rodolfo Jorge Ramírez. There was a daughter but she had already gone, she is in Europe. The wife of the whore was killed. The whore took his son with him when he fled. They went in the last light of the second day of the battle . . . Yes, a good-looking young man, I don’t mind saying that. Perhaps now that he is free of the chains of the old whore he will go to Europe to his sister . . .’
    The lieutenant poured what was left of the coffee into the plastic beaker of the clerk, and picked up his attaché case from the floor. The clerk shuffled after him, dragging the damaged leg, and cleared him through the outer barred door of the basement. Not for him to ask the business of the lieutenant now that darkness had fallen on the city, not for him to remember which file had been begged by the lieutenant for study. He slammed the door shut again. He called cheerfully to the lieutenant’s slim back.
    ‘It was a real war then. Not this shit of today. There was a time when it was thought they might win, the communists, might actually march into the Plaza Mayor, right to the Palacio Nacional. You know, all the flights, every day, to Miami, they were full then . . . a long time ago. Good night.’
    Just the sound of light footsteps slipping away up the basement’s staircase.
    He cackled his laughter. He was afraid of none of them, not the generals nor the field commanders nor the interrogators, all of whom would recognize the gold-dust value of the material he had assembled.
    The clerk returned to his desk. He packed up the file of a father who had died in exile and tied a length of string twice round the file and knotted the end of it. From the drawer of his desk he took a new file cover and slipped the photograph of the young man at a funeral into it, and he wrote carefully on the outside of the file ‘ RODOLFO JORGE RAMIREZ ’.
    The silence of the basement was around him. His company was the files of the dead and the living. He drank the coffee that had been left for him.
     
    He rang the bell.
    The doorway was beside the shop’s window.
    There was a mist off the harbour but the rain had stopped. The narrow street was deserted. Gord shivered. He rang the bell again, and was rewarded. A light came on behind the curtains drawn across the sash window above the shop front. There was a sign in the window, written in biro on cardboard, stating that the shop would be reopening in Whitsun week. The window was empty and the shelves in the interior gloom were bare. The sign above the window was Torbay Crafts, and flaking. He had come off the slow train that brought the mail and the newspapers from London, catnapped for two hours on a platform bench at Newton Abbot, and taken the first train of the morning on to Paignton, and then a taxi. He had walked twice round the harbour, seen the fishing fleet prepare to sail, and then climbed the steps to the street and the shop with the accommodation above it.
    He had been there once before, another dawn, the visit before he had flown out to the Gulf. Twelve hours’ leave, and most of it spent getting to and from Torbay.
    Gord was there, on that bloody wet doorstep, because he had thought that it was what his father would have wanted.
    There was the lock being turned. Not the opportunity to bring his mother flowers, nor a present.
    A man in the doorway. The man had grey thin hair sprouting uncombed and he wore a vest under a woman’s dressing gown that was fastened only at the waist and below long spindle legs he wore a pair of crushed carpet slippers. The sleep was becoming anger on the man’s face.
    ‘What’s your bloody game then . . . ?’
    Gord stood in the clothes of the fish farm, and of the bar beside the sea loch, and of the train to London.
    ‘. . . What time of the bloody day do you reckon this is?’
    Gord didn’t know his