The Tattooed Soldier (25 page)

Chances were he didn't know this Demetrio. There were so many actions, after all, hundreds in Sololá alone. Anybody could have killed this man, disappeared him. Longoria would just forget about it.

Reginalda was sitting across from him, waiting for her order of spicy chicken. He hadn't spoken a word for twenty minutes, but she didn't seem to mind. She was sipping her iced tea, admiring the ambiance, smiling at him because he had splurged and brought her here.

The only names he remembered were the names of the famous people, the union leaders, the writers, the lawyers, the anthropologists, the ones who were in the news for weeks and months after he killed them. He would see the graffiti on the walls just hours after his platoon dumped their bodies by the highway: “Miguel Barón lives!” “Miguel Barón,
presente
!” The names would remain on an adobe wall or the side of a grocery store for days until the officers finally rounded up some conscripts to cover them over with a bucket of paint. Sometimes you could go to the university months later and see the man from the back of your Jeep on the wall, painted to look like a saint or an angel.

“So my boss, he tells me I'm putting too much lettuce in the orders,” Reginalda was saying. Longoria nodded to signal that he was listening. “More lettuce than the manual says. The sacred Taco Bell manual. And I told him I knew that. I told him I'm not a stupid woman. I told him I put in extra lettuce because it's good for the customers. They're all overweight and everything. They need more vegetables. It's for their health.”

It got to the point where Longoria could almost see the newspaper headlines even before they were dead, when they were still in the back of his Jeep, quivering, sick with fear because they knew what was coming. Longoria would look at the famous detainee—a schoolteacher, a writer—and then at the identity-card snapshot G-2 gave him to find the bastard, Some of them sat in the back seat of the Jeep with defiant, almost amused expressions that matched the faces in the photographs. They had real balls, and you had to admire that. Longoria wondered if this Demetrio was one of the ballsy ones. He would look at them, tied up and bruised and bleeding, and know that he'd see the identity-card photograph in the newspaper a few days later. Or in the marches, when the Communists took the photo and made it into a giant poster and paraded it on the streets of the capital. The endless eulogies, the phrases he had come to memorize:
martyr, good father, loving mother, our leader, the bright light taken from us.

After fifteen or so of these operations, Longoria could hear the whole country weeping even before he pulled the trigger, when he stood before the detainees in the dank interrogation room with the 9-millimeter pistol to their heads.

All this sympathy for the corpses irritated him. This old woman and all these people seemed to think they had a monopoly on grief. Longoria had survived and the corpses were corpses. Longoria could walk the earth and play chess and make love to Reginalda this very evening. That was something the old woman and the people in the marches never thought about. What about Sergeant Longoria? If he hadn't killed, he might be dead himself. So he would be thankful for being alive. There were reasons this work had to be done, even though you started to forget the reasons as time passed. When you actually had to do the deed, the reasons were what carried you forward, the speeches the officers made, what you learned about the enemy. A virus, a plague. An infection spread by ideas, a disease carried on the spoken word.

“Is something bothering you,
amor
? You look really angry,” Reginalda said. “Did I say something to upset you?” When he didn't answer, she shrugged her shoulders and changed the subject. “I wonder why it is that this Thai food is so popular with the Latinos. There's nothing but Latinos in here. Did you notice that?”

Longoria nodded again. One thing was certain. This Demetrio was not one of the famous ones. His name had never been painted on a wall. If he had been one of the famous ones Longoria would have remembered his name.

*   *   *

Every day before dawn Antonio slipped out of the shelter into the chilly morning air and walked the eight blocks to the tattooed soldier's building, returning to his post by the chain-link fence across the street. As the sky was losing its violet hue, he would crane his neck to stare at the windows and watch the lights come on one by one. Soon the residents began to emerge from the portal, with the harried but alert faces of people about to begin a long working day: a young woman wearing a paper cap and a pale green uniform, umbrella and lunch bag in hand; a bulky Chicano in a navy blue uniform, the words “Security Officer” on his sleeves. More lights came on.

At precisely 6:15 on the first morning, Antonio heard a window slide open and saw the shaved head of the tattooed soldier underneath a raised pane of glass on the fourth floor. Antonio watched, mesmerized, as the soldier brushed a finger along the windowsill, disappeared, returned with a sponge and a rag, and wiped the sill clean. Then he scrubbed the edges of the window frame.

The light in the soldier's apartment went off, and a few minutes later he appeared on the front steps. Dark blue sweater, khaki pants, tennis shoes. Antonio followed him to El Pulgarcito and stationed himself on the bus bench. He watched people come and go on the sidewalk and at the nearby intersection, and by afternoon he knew all about the local street life. A steady stream of buses rolled past, the same five or six drivers reappearing in regular cycles, westbound, eastbound, and westbound again. The work habits of the drug dealers, who otherwise dissolved into the landscape like camouflaged animals, became clear to him. They hid drugs in the wheel wells of parked cars and used arcane hand signals to communicate with collaborators down the block and across the street.

When the day was over, he followed the soldier back to the Westlake Arms.

In this fashion Antonio kept up his surveillance for the next few days. Tracking the soldier became easy. It was important to keep a good distance away and not to stare. You did not have to look at a man directly to trace his movements. Instead you followed the outline of him, the trail of his shadow. There were always crowds on the streets and in the buses, and it was simple for Antonio to blend in. At the Westlake Arms no one seemed to think twice about the hours he spent standing, sitting, and squatting on the sidewalk. Each night, when the light went out in the fourth-floor window, Antonio went back to his camp to sleep.

It soon became clear that the tattooed soldier kept to a strict routine. The lights came on at 6:15, followed by the ritual cleaning of the window. On the bus at 7:45,
en punto.
What else would you expect from a military man?

On the third night of his surveillance the routine was finally broken. Not long after the soldier got home from work, a small woman in a shiny green mini-dress walked up the front steps. Heavy black curls flowed onto her shoulders. A few minutes later she emerged at the front door with her arm around the soldier, who looked stiff next to the swing and bounce in her walk. Perhaps she held on to him so tightly because her heels were so high she was afraid she might fall.
A frivolous person, that's why she's with the soldier. She doesn't see who he really is.
Antonio could hear her brassy voice clearly from across the street.

“
La comida tailandés es picantísima, pero me gusta
,” she said. “It's even spicier than Mexican food.”

They walked arm in arm toward Alvarado Street. Antonio followed them to a bus stop. From his vantage point a block away he could see that the soldier's girlfriend was still talking and that the soldier was nodding his head from time to time. Such a curious couple. Even if he hadn't been trailing the soldier he would have noticed them. The tiny woman with the curls and the loud emerald dress, her arm around the stocky man with the shaved head. Antonio watched them board the bus.

It was a slap across the face to see the soldier with a woman, bathed in her obvious affection. The soldier's life was the negative image of his own. The soldier had a job, Antonio did not. The soldier had a girlfriend, Antonio was all alone.

This man who took my only love has all the love he wants.

As the bus pulled away, Antonio remembered that he had dated a woman here in Los Angeles several years ago. They had taken the bus too. On Saturday nights the
RTD
buses were filled with immigrant couples. This woman was a Mexicana he met at Dierden's department store downtown, at the appliance counter where she sold him a toaster oven. Azucena was her name. A native of Mexico City, she was smart and urbane, a lover of foreign films. They went to see a very long Italian movie called
1900.

Azucena had lasted only a few weeks. In the end she had too much life to be with someone like Antonio. Laughter came easy to her. She told jokes with those double entendres people from Mexico City were famous for. With Azucena he could discuss art and feel something like the person he had once been, but she was just twenty-two and had quickly grown impatient with his morose moods, his bouts of meanness.

Antonio was wondering what had happened to Azucena when he found himself standing in front of the Westlake Arms again. Something had pulled him back to the apartment building, even though he knew the soldier was gone.
Now I am gravitating to this place.
Looking up at the six stories of brick and terra cotta, he noticed that the soldier's window was open.

A strange sensation passed through him. If a man was daring enough, he could climb the fire escape, work his way to that open window, and break into the tattooed soldier's apartment. Something like that could happen while the soldier was out with his curly-headed girlfriend.

The longer Antonio stared at the open window, the louder it seemed to be calling to him.
Well, why not?

The hardest part, it turned out, was reaching the fire escape. Whoever owned this building had some experience with break-ins and had worked to prevent just the sort of entry Antonio was planning. The windows on the first floor were sealed with bricks, and the fire escape itself stopped well above them, a little black ladder dangling over the sidewalk far from the reach of any passerby. But Antonio noticed that the sealed windows still had sills that protruded from the wall like narrow steps. If he stood on one of these sills, the bottom of the ladder would be within a leap and an arm's reach, more or less.

Soon after the street had cleared of potential witnesses, Antonio found himself dangling from the bottom of the fire-escape ladder, swinging so violently that he was afraid his glasses might fall off. He felt like a
piñata.
The old iron ladder squeaked and moaned under his weight, but the noise was drowned out by the
ranchera
music blaring from an apartment on the second floor. Using reserves of strength he did not know he possessed, he tried to hoist himself up.
I am stronger now than I was in Guatemala.
It was all the heavy work he had done in Los Angeles, lifting and digging. His muscles were coming into play again, like when he hit the old man.
Pull! Pull harder!
He was making a spectacle of himself, but who cared. It was dark, and maybe nobody would see him.

There, I made it!
The rusty steps of the fire escape shook and rattled as he walked up past the second and third floors. Moments later he was standing on the fourth-floor ledge, inching his way toward the tattooed soldier's window. Grabbing the windowsill, fighting off a sudden spell of acrophobia, he threw himself headfirst into the apartment, landing with a bounce on a very small bed.

Euphoria. He
was
stronger, and here was the proof. He had conquered the ledge and the fire escape. Antonio relished this moment of private glory.

The apartment wasn't much to look at, just a single room with a door leading to a bathroom. A bare tile floor the color of algae, a dresser, and a set of barbells in the corner. How predictable. The man was a fitness fanatic.

Antonio stood in the center of the room, held captive by the silence of the walls. He did not know what he was looking for or why he had felt compelled to come here. After he decided to follow the soldier in MacArthur Park, each discovery had led him on to the next one. He had tracked the soldier to El Pulgarcito Express, then to this apartment building, and now he was in his room. He couldn't get any closer to the man than this, inside his private sanctuary.

He went into the bathroom but saw nothing remarkable, just the usual assembly of soaps and shampoos. The nose-wrinkling aroma of disinfectant reminded him that he hadn't bathed since his last unauthorized entry, when he and José Juan snuck into Bixel Gardens. He considered using the soldier's shower but thought better of it. Back in the main room, he looked under the bed and found a little plastic basket holding a roll of toilet paper and a box of condoms. Protex. Here too there was a strong odor of disinfectant, as if the floor had recently been mopped. On the bed itself the sheets and blankets were pulled taut over the mattress, even after Antonio's crash landing from the window.

The place felt like a barracks.

There was a small closet space tucked into one of the walls, and Antonio quickly riffled through the clothes that hung on a steel bar, spotting the navy T-shirt the soldier had been wearing in the park. Moving to the dresser, he opened the drawers and found underwear and socks in carefully ordered stacks. In the bottom drawer he found a blue album underneath a pile of books. Taking care not to disturb the order of the books, he pulled the album out.

On the first pages there were newspaper clippings about military engagements, and certificates showing the soldier had completed training at academies in Guatemala, Panama, and the United States. One name was repeated on all these certificates: Guillermo Longoria.