The Penalty (16 page)

“Hell, I dunno. Did Varga say anythin about this?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’ like it,” Diego said.

“Nor me. Okay, lissen, here’s what we do. You go out back, round the side, stay close to the wall, okay? Go round left, where the bushes is. I get the chick to give me the paper. Anythin, just anythin, don’t look right to you, you blast off a coupla rounds an’ get your ass back in here, right?”

“I dunno. Well, yeah, okay, I guess so.” Diego took a deep breath and held the shotgun up against his chest. “Count to twenty before you get the girl to walk up, all right? And not too quick.”

He went out through the kitchen and unlocked the door and pushed it open with the palm of his hand while he stayed against the wall with his backside against the warped worktop. When nothing bad happened he went out. He heard the girl call, “Hey, Señor. You find them pants yet? C’mon, man, I ain’t got all night. Jesus.”

Prima saw a hand come out through the narrow gap in the door and make a clutching gesture. She heard the man’s voice say, “Okay, kid. Sorry to keep ya waitin. Gimme the message an’ get the hell outta here, okay?”

So she stepped up to the door and put the tightly folded page from Faustino’s notebook into the man’s hand. She saw flickering light on the metal of a gun and one eye.

She said, “You took your damn time, man,” and then got out of the way.

Wallets pushed the door to and one-handedly fumbled the piece of paper open, looking to read what was on it by the light from the television. He was trying to figure out why someone would pay ten dollars to deliver the single word
Hello
when he heard a muffled grunt from the direction of the doorway into the kitchen. He looked up and saw Diego Samuel standing there. He had a red and black striped bandanna across his mouth and a big heavy-bladed knife against his throat. His eyes stood out of his face like two eggs. The man behind him was a huge dark shape with a hood, like a monk or something.

Wallets dropped the note and lifted the Colt; then the front door crashed inwards onto his back. He fell, firing once into the floor, then lost his grip on the gun because a foot slammed down onto his arm. Something heavy, a body, came down on top of him and prevented him from moving. When he got free of it, he understood that he and Diego were lying on the floor and three large men were aiming guns at them.

He cried out, “Don’ shoot! We’re police officers!”

Mateo smiled down at him. “We know that, man,” he said. “You think that gonna make us less likely to kill you?”

Faustino, aghast, had watched the proceedings from inside the shell of a house thirty metres away. When Prima walked back to where he and Bakula were crouching she had said nothing at all. When Juan stepped into view and called, “It sorted, Edson,” she said, “Thank you for the paper, Señor Paul. Like I said, it didn’ make no diff’rence what was on it.”

Faustino lit one of his cigarettes.

F
AUSTINO FOLLOWED BAKULA
and the girl among the buildings which, he now realized, were long abandoned. What had seemed in that first moonlit survey a small village was actually a disorderly cluster of tumbledown bungalows and roofless sheds. Number six was, it seemed, the only habitable place. But now they approached another, much larger one. Like the others, its walls were concrete blocks coated with fractured and time-stained mortar. Unlike the others, it had several large glassless windows, some with their wooden shutters open. On the ground close to one of these openings, incongruously, a television satellite dish stood on a tripod, aimed at the moon.

When they were some twenty paces from this building Bakula stopped and held a murmured conversation with Prima. She nodded, her face lowered. Bakula rested his hand briefly on her head. Faustino waited, standing a short distance away. He could not hear what was said. What he could hear, faintly, was a rising and falling sound like waves collapsing onto a beach. It was overlaid by a continuous excited babble. Football commentary.

A hand touched Faustino’s shoulder, and he turned.

“Come,” Bakula said. Prima stood beside him; she was trembling and holding her lower lip between her teeth.

The entrance was a pair of big doors, almost like those of a church. They were standing open. Stepping just inside, Faustino could see that the building had been erected around a much smaller, far more ancient structure. The irregular rectangles of moonlight and the single low-wattage light bulb that illuminated the space made it difficult to make out clearly what it was; but gradually Faustino realized that he was looking at the skeleton of a small wooden house, or hut. Its uprights were stout, roughly hewn timbers. All manner of things had been fixed to them: scraps of paper, shapes of limbs and animals cut from tin, strings of beads, clay medallions, banknotes, ribbons, crutches. The place was, he realized, some sort of shrine. The surviving rafters were thick tree branches stripped of their bark. Only part of one wall remained: a frail-looking screen of mud bricks. Somehow it supported a large window divided randomly into panels, some empty, others glazed with cracked stained glass.

More or less in the middle of this ruin was a single bed, iron-framed, with a mattress, a sheet and a pillow. A young man sat on it watching a television set that stood on a wooden box; a long extension cable snaked away from it into the gloom. He was hugging a football that rested on his lap. The light from the screen wavered on his face.

“Rico,” Prima said. It was scarcely more than a whisper, but the boy on the bed turned his face towards the doors. His expression was blank, as if he was aware of the presence of others but was unable to see them or make any connection between them and himself. After a moment or two he turned back to the television.

The boy’s mournful isolation had a surprising effect upon Faustino. It filled him with a kind of dread, a sense of desolation, as though this inexplicable captivity were happening to him. Or had, or would, happen to him. It was a horrible and intense empathy that made him want to cry out, to fall to his knees. He turned to Bakula and saw that the guide was studying him with cool, almost cruel, interest.

“So why doesn’t he leave? Why doesn’t he just walk away? There’s nothing stopping him.” Faustino’s voice was harsh, angry.

It was Prima, not Bakula, who answered him. “Yeah there is,” she said, and pointed. “Look.”

The floor surrounding the remains of the hut was smoothed concrete. On it, a metre or so inside the doors, a line of what looked like dried and crackled dark paint ran the width of the building. As far as Faustino could make out, it continued unbroken around the other three sides. Inside this great rectangle was another continuous line of some whitish substance.

“Blood an’ salt,” Prima said.

“What?”

“Blood an’ salt. Rico can’t cross it. Not unless he want to be lost to hisself f’rever.”

She squatted on her haunches and rested her chin on her hands, staring across at her brother the way you might gaze at a sad animal in a zoo.

Faustino glared down at her, then stepped across the two lines, turned, and stood with his arms out. Prima and Bakula watched him, expressionless. He stepped back over.

“Hey, Brujito! You see that? Come
on
, kid. Let’s get out of here. It’s over.”

Prima sighed. “It no good. He can’t hear you.”

“Can’t? Or won’t?”

Prima was looking into the dim sepulchral space again. “Either. Both. Same thing. See, Señor Paul, that there’s Rico but like gone. Like a torch or somethin someone took the batt’ry out of, yah? It don’t really matter ’bout them guys back there. Wasn’t them stoppin Rico leave.”

She glanced up at Faustino uncertainly, then away again.

“Rico’s spirit come from his ancestor called Achache. Achache sometime called the Magician, sometime the Dancer, on account of he’s nimble and playful. It from him Rico get his skill at football. That why Rico not got a big head ’bout it, like some others. But now Rico think Achache have left him. Been taken from him. An’ the only reason why that happen is Maco is angry with him. Have punish him.”

“How do you know this, Prima?”

“Look what in front of your eyes. You got some other way to explain this?”

Faustino did not, and realizing it suddenly made him very tired. He felt himself slump inside, felt something within him give up.

“Okay,” he said. “So why? Why does he think Maco is angry with him?”

“I dunno. Someone must of persuade him. I dunno how. Rico can’t of done nothin.”

“Who could have persuaded him? Someone in the police?”

She shook her head. “Nah. They wouldn’ know how.”

“So who would? Who could do that?”

Prima looked down at the ground. She muttered something.

“What?”

“Paracleto,” Bakula said.

Faustino spun round, startled. He had almost forgotten the guide was there. He was leaning in the doorway with his arms folded.

“Paracleto,” he said again. “That’s why, we think, Rico came here, to this particular place. And he cannot leave until Paracleto returns. To intervene with Maco on his behalf. To allow his estranged spirit to cross these barriers that you find so unimpressive, and re-enter his body.”

“Jesus Christ,” Faustino muttered. He fished his crumpled cigarette pack from his pocket.

“Not in here, Paul.”

“What?”

“Please step outside if you want to smoke.” Bakula softened his tone, gestured apologetically towards the wooden husk of the shrine. “It’s a bit of a fire hazard.”

Faustino exhaled a blue cloud. The moon was directly above them now, and smaller, but intensely bright. He and Bakula stood on their small and sharply defined shadows.

“Okay. So what happens now?”

“We wait. I’m afraid Ricardo will have to remain the tethered goat until the tiger arrives.”

“And when might that be?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go and see if we can find out.”

T
HE SUGAR-CANE
press was a fairly simple device. It was taller than a man and built of heavy hardwood timbers that were old, weathered, split in places, and greyish in the moonlight. In the middle of a square frame, a column like a massive screw passed between two thick wooden plates. The lower plate was a slab above a trough into which the juice from the crushed cane once ran. The upper plate was driven down the screw onto the cane by revolving two long wooden arms, bent poles. They would have been turned by a pair of oxen; in the absence of such beasts Lucas and Juan stood ready to do the job. It seemed to Faustino that they were the ideal substitutes.

Two Wallets Morales and Diego Samuel were brought over to the press. They both had their wrists bound in front of them with heavy grey gaffer tape, and another swipe of the same stuff across their mouths. Their trousers were down around their ankles so that they had to shuffle along. Mateo urged them along, poking them with his gun now and again, clucking his tongue like a man rounding up chickens.

When they were close to the press, Mateo told them to stop and said to Bakula, who was standing in the moonlight with his hands in his pockets, “Which one you wanna do, Edson?”

Bakula looked up. “The one with the stupid hair.”

“Okay,” Mateo said. He tapped Diego on the top of his head with the gun. “On your knees, man.”

Diego kneeled.

“You,” Mateo said into Wallets’ ear. “Over here. C’mon, now.”

One of Wallets’ eyes, the right one, was puffed up; it looked like the buttocks of a sleeping piglet. The other one was wide and full of terror. Mateo forced him into a kneeling position with his head on the lower plate of the cane press: the posture of a French aristocrat at the guillotine.

Bakula nodded.

Juan and Lucas leaned stiff-armed against the handles of the press, grunting and going, “Whew, hey, how long since someone use this thing?”

They moved forward, pushing, starting to circle. The timbers groaned, then squealed. The upper plate came down, reluctantly at first, then more easily. When it touched the top of Morales’s head he twisted so that the right side of his face was against the lower plate and his one good eye was looking straight at Diego Samuel. The upper plate continued to descend, pressing his left ear into his skull. He managed to make a faint sound.

Faustino looked away. Beside him, Prima was an intent black shape. Only her eyes were distinct, and they were focused on Bakula.

The creaking stopped.

Lucas said, “Hold on there, bro. Let me ease me shoulder. Damn, this thing stiff.”

Juan also let go and straightened. “Yeah,” he said. “Edson, it okay we take a short break? Reckon the next bit gonna be the hardest.”

“You’re right,” Bakula said.

Mateo went over to Diego and ripped the gaffer tape off his face. Faustino winced at the sound it made coming away from the skin.

Diego inhaled gasps, moving his head from side to side. When he could speak he said, “You bastards. What the hell’re you doing? What’s this for?”

Mateo jabbed his gun into the top of Diego’s head and said, “What you think we doin, mister kidnapper policeman? We squeezin information outta you.”

Diego lifted his head up against the pressure of Mateo’s gun and let out something like a sob; it was among the saddest sounds that Faustino had ever heard.

“What you expect the man to say? You still got his mouth taped, you sick mothers.”

Mateo sighed like a deeply disappointed man. He said gently, patiently, “It ain’t difficult, man. We don’
want
your ugly friend there to talk. We want
you
to talk. But we figure that once you seen the way his head pop, you gonna be much more cooperative, know what I mean? Cos you seen how unpleasant it is. Thought about havin the same thing done to you.”

Diego stared back at him.

Juan said, “How that shoulder, bro? You ready for the last heave?”

Lucas said, “Yeah, I reckon. C’mon, then. Les’ get it done.”

He leaned against the pole and it inched forward. Morales’s legs shot out backwards and his toes pressed the ground, raising his body. His slack belly sagged.

Diego yelled, “Okay! Okay! Jesus! What? What, damn you?”