Start WritChildren of the Condor

Apologia

                Ever since I was a young girl, at the close of the day, I have tried to record my life on paper as a ‘chronicle’.  I call them my scribblings. First person narration has always presented difficulties for me and I have found that other people’s accounts should be allowed to nose in to my writing. What follows is my attempt to record a coherent account of all that has happened. I have a very wandering mind so this has been difficult for me, and ergo, for any unfortunate reader. Please forgive me this.

Science, in which all my faith and beliefs rest, has shown that human beings make absolutely the worst witnesses on the face of the earth and I fervently believe this to be true. It is inherent in human nature—for various reasons, typically well-intentioned—to embellish and frillify (my word) our recollection of events. As I say, ‘well-intentioned’, meaning in an attempt, not to thwart or pervert the facts but to render them true and believable, to transmit that which the observer earnestly supposes ‘really’ occurred.

               I am, however, of the conviction that as a witness to the history to which I have been exposed, I am honest and accurate. As a very young child in school, I was praised by the nuns for my virtually photographic memory, so much so that the task of room monitor, whenever the teacher was forced to vacate the class, always fell to me. It is a loathsome job—‘telling’ on one’s friends, and a position I quickly learned to avoid. The gift of near absolute recall has remained with me lifelong, and I can therefore say with complete surety that what I write and describe—in the words, the sounds, the smells, the facial tics, the smiles and the frowns, the tears, the pain . . . the all—will be true and good. Just trust that what I say, in my frequently helter-skelter, occasionally very silly way to be what really happened. I am not addressing anyone in particular—just the reader, with whom I speak frequently for this allows me to believe that what I say is credible.

               Maria Sara Torres de Escobar

Vancouver, Canada

Chapter 1

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

My Chronicles:

It’s always the same—I hear the click as the heavy pneumatic door slowly closes and catches behind me, a rather soft whisper that echoes loudly in the expansive room, so hushed and attentive is the audience. ‘Expectant’ would be a better word as my ‘family’ all await the delivery of another tale from our shared Condor past—not that of a birth but rather a death, a disappearance that we commemorate and a desaparacido whom we recollect.

I tend to over-dramatize (not just dramatize but over . . . way over). You will likely realize that by the way I write . . . stream of whatever the expression is. I’ve been told it’s a fault that I developed as a child surrounded by my imaginary friends. My older brother, Nelson, completely ignored me, so I blame him.

My family lived in a small village near the town of Dolores. That’s in Argentina, south of Buenos Aires near the Atlantic coast. I won’t name the village as I still have family there, though I have not been back since I left over thirty-three years ago. I must be careful not to go too far with my descriptions. My mother, Graciela, told me when I was a niña that people’s memories cast long shadows. Some never forget. As for me, I believe we hold fast to memories most strongly when those recollections contain much pain, not physical pain—that becomes easy to forget—but mental anguish which forever scars the soul and decays the spirit within.

 Let me begin my story by describing where our group of Condor survivors meets and let everything flow from there. We are a small and select gathering. Each of us has suffered extreme loss or torment at the hands of Condor.

At our inception, we met every two or three months to keep our tragedies alive and present. Now, it is every week, so we must be filling a role.

‘What the heck is Condor?’ you must be thinking . . . yet even as I write this, our jailers, our torturers, our rapists, our killers, all of them walk the streets of Condor lands: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Peru, all, as free men. Of course they are all men. Free to enjoy their lives, their food, their women, free from the horrors of the nightmare they inflicted on our families.

But this still does not tell you what Condor was and may still be. Bear with me and it will all come out, in a jumble I am sure, hibberty-jibberty the English say.

For the people of Argentina and all the others of Condor’s ilk, the horrors have all been buried, forgiven by Presidential decree. Reconciliation, they called it—part of a total amnesty. El Ley de Obediencias Debida—an amnesty bestowed by the same men of Condor onto themselves . . . they forgive themselves. How perfect. The world now knows what occurred almost forty years ago, but the world does not understand. The world scanned their newspapers or watched their televisions and said, contentedly nodding their heads, "Chile and Argentina have a new beginning. They have forgiven and forget all that happened." But my God, what the world will never know.

We cannot forget. The men of Condor will be repugnant forever. Our loathing fuels the fire in our souls. But now-a-days to be directed at what? At our inception, I felt we were passionate but somehow rudderless. Each of us asked ourselves over and over the same unanswerable question . . . how could this have happened? I became, I think by default, our rudder.

The people at our meetings are mainly the sons and daughters of the Desaparecidos, the Disappeared Ones. I lost my mother when I was seven years old and I still can see it all before me. I am now forty-one. Others have lost wives, husbands, lovers, and most disturbingly, young children . . . souls who had no idea why they were about to be shot or garrotted or thrown from a plane.

***

I organize these meetings. We all tell similar stories like attendees at an alcoholics anonymous meeting—my name is so-and-so and my mother or father or whoever it is . . . is a desaparacido. The story comes out slowly, always painfully. But for us, there is no twelve step program to redemption and recovery. We have no recovery. Redemption is a word without meaning. We have only our appalling memories and our incomprehensible losses. At this point, any action is inconceivable, but perhaps soon.

For some reason, I have a need to feel that everyone at our meetings belongs to me, so I always arrive late, the last one. I think it heightens the drama about to unfold. And I really think it does, and that’s important. Why?—because our meetings cannot be allowed to degenerate to the level of a social get-together.

The audience is edgy at first and then as they focus become as rigid as albescent ivory carvings. I believe it is because their minds are consumed with the horrors of the past and what they may attempt to say tonight. I know all this because where we meet is in a church basement. I like to peek in the low windows that edge the vast room to count heads before I enter, and just to watch them for a while. They are all so precious. Soon I will go in and weep with my ‘family’ once again. Each time it is always the same. And as I re-read my words, I see that you must be mightily confused.

***

My name is Maria Sara Torres de Escobar. When my father and I came to Canada, we dropped the Escobar because of Pablo. Not that we are related. We are not, but people attach such fantasies to the name of Pablo Escobar. He was Columbian, and is now quite dead, but the legends around his name linger like wisps of smoke that will not blow away. Our Escobar comes from my mother’s side. It is one hundred per cent Argentinean so perhaps I should have kept it. I think papa just wanted to forget his losses.

I am more nervous than usual for tonight it is my turn to tell my story, but first I want to dawdle staring through the window a little longer. All we do is based on trust. But who knows everything about Condor? We sometimes worry that they are still among us, still active . . . still killing. So I look at faces, mainly the older members, perhaps the ones who do not always attend or perhaps the ones who always come, and when I go back home tonight, I will go through my picture books of monsters—Condor photos I have amassed since my teens—and compare faces. This is not sick or paranoid. They have done this before, infiltrated groups such as ours to kidnap and kill, even in faraway countries. They murdered in Europe and in America, my papa said.

I gather my courage, easy for me to do when I see through the glass pane all the brave souls awaiting me. I enter.

***

"Hola, everyone and welcome.” They always respond to that. "My name is Sara Torres and I am a child of the Condor."

"Hola, Sara Torres," they all reply, just like at the AA meetings, and I begin my story after activating a small tape recorder. I decided a few weeks after hearing some of our gruesome stories that a permanent commemorative of all our Children’s tales absolutely must be made for future generations to acknowledge and exploit (perhaps ‘exploit’ is not quite the word I want here). My cassette library of horrors burgeons by the week.

 I begin.

"When I was seven years old, I lived in a small village near Dolores. It was 1977. Both my mother and father were activists in trade unions. I didn’t know that then. One Sunday in early May, we all went to a large demonstration near Buenos Aires. I think there must have been twenty or thirty different villages protesting. About what, I do not know. I remember just the colours, and the noise, and the music, but most of all, the other little children, hundreds of us, blissful, singing, playing together. Also, I remember lots of men taking pictures, pictures of everything. It was a very good day. We were all so happy.

"A few days later, five soldiers, came to our house late at night, pounding on the door and shouting ‘Your time has come’. I remember those very words. We were all asleep—my brother, my mother and I. My father was not there. I think he must have had work elsewhere."

I stop here, memories flooding back again, a recurring tide that never seems to ebb, forever rising. My eyes are moist and a tightness grips my throat. I know now what happened that night, but then I was too young to understand. The group before me have expressionless, frozen faces as if afraid for me. After I settle, I begin again.

"I remember my mother shouting at them. She was not afraid even though she had friends who were ’disappeared’. She didn’t obey their commands so one man hit her in the face with a cut-off baseball bat. Two of them dragged her into her room, then a third man went in. She began screaming. The noises I remember were like my friends at the very end of a foot race, everyone panting and groaning. At the time I did not understand why. I do now. The men were all laughing. My mother was sobbing and moaning. A little later, she was hauled out, completely naked, bleeding from her mouth where she had been struck. A man threw a sheet on her and allowed her to dress. My brother, Nelson, tried to run to her as she stooped to pull on her panties but the other two soldiers held him. The three of us were forced out of the house into the street where an open truck idled, already filled with other prisoners. Some of them were crying . . . all were terrified. Each head was covered with a black sack and their hands were taped together at the wrists. Then all became dark for me. A black sack had been tied over my head and I was tossed into the truck."

Again, I pause, not to heighten the drama but to breathe and think of what is left of the horror to tell. A little stronger, I begin again.

"The next days are all wound up together without a beginning or an end. My brother was taken with most of the others to a large house. My mother and I were then taken to a different building and separated. Along with five other children, I was kept with a woman named Carla. I was told later that it was a garage called Automobiles Orletti.  Every day I was brought up from the basement and hung upside down on the wall by ropes so that I could watch my mother below me. Then, I didn’t understand. I thought it was to hurt me. Now I see that it was so my mother could watch me, her only daughter, as my mama was violated and tortured. My presence was used to add that extra edge to her pain.”

I have to pause here for I know that what I am about to recount is, to me, so gruesomely cruel, so inhumane that I speak in a whisper as if ashamed to share the next part of my story.

“My mother always lay naked, stretched out, arms pulled out from her sides and bound like Jesus on His cross. First, she would be raped by her torturer, a very fat, greasy man. As a seven year old, I couldn’t understand what he was doing to her, ramming his body into her. She screamed, so I screamed back and the men would all laugh. It seemed to me then that I could feel her pain, every blow she suffered and it only amplified my own terror. The fat man would then put wire clamps on my mama’s nipples and vulva and make her scream and shudder—I know now it was electricity that they were using. Always the same questions they shouted into her face—‘Who? Who? Give us names’. But she had no names. She never spoke a word. She just screamed and screamed and screamed, then at the end, her eyes would plead to him—‘No more, please no more’. Her day’s pain always finished with more rapes by the other men, ‘Your reward’, the fat man would say. After that, the man the others called Guatón Osvaldo, said only one thing—’Ratones. Ellos la limpieza’.”

Somehow it’s less disgusting if I say those words in Spanish to the audience. They will understand.

"His men would bring him a rusted cage containing a few starving rats. They did terrible things with the rats to my mother. His men would put rats in my mother’s ‘secret place’. They thought it was all terribly funny. Guatón Osvaldo was afraid to touch the rats but not afraid to beat and rape a tied-up woman. A fat, disgusting coward.

"After the hurricane of torture and the men’s pleasures were finished for the day, I was cut down and taken back to my room with Carla. These men never spoke to me and never hurt me. That made it all the more incomprehensible.

“Carla was the woman who cared for me and the other small children, infants even, down in the basement of Automobiles Orletti. I wouldn’t see mama until the next day when the nightmare would begin again."

I stop again to wipe my face. There is a complete silence. Everyone stares at me, their gazes fixed upon my face, my cheeks, my forehead, my ears, but afraid to look into my eyes. They are embarrassed for me. I see that the older people’s cheeks are stained with tears. I lift my head up and take a big breath for the finale of this horrific episode of my life.

"The torture carried on for weeks it seemed . . . at least to a little girl. Time becomes stretched out as we age, infinite. But it was perhaps only three or four days until these men had someone new to torment, as if suddenly bored with my mother and me. I hoped it was over. I could not understand why this was being done to us and there was no one to whom a seven-year-old girl could speak. I asked Carla. She said that it didn’t matter, that my mother had done something bad to Argentina, but that it would soon be all over. That I shouldn’t worry. I was only a child—I didn’t know how to worry, but I was learning very quickly.

"Again it happened at night. Two men collected me from Carla’s where I slept and took me to my mother and brother who seemed very scared. My mother, I almost could not recognize despite the same faded blue dress that she wore day after day. It now hung from her arms like a scarecrow’s shirt.  She seemed suddenly very old and worn out. Her face was swollen and bruised and she talked with a slur out the right side of her mouth. I think her jaw must have been broken. The prisoners were all put back in the same truck although quite a few were now missing. Mama held me as tightly as she could. I could tell it hurt her to squeeze me close. She even smiled and told us that we were being freed. A plane was to fly us back to Dolores that very night. ‘All a terrible mistake’, she had been told. Our papers and the few valuables we had—I had only a blue smurf doll—were returned to us that day. That doll seemed so crucial to me.

"We drove for a long time on a bumpy road. Finally, I could smell rotting fish and decaying seaweed and salt. Mama said that it was the smell of the ocean. The truck took us to a wide open, flat area. It was an airfield I soon discovered. We were led to a wooden building. Most of the windows had been smashed in and none of the lights worked. Even at my tender age, I knew this was no normal airport.

"It is the smell of the place that has stayed with me for all these many years. The salt in the air imbued into the unpainted wood smelling of cedar and salt—soothing to me, so much so that I sucked against the windowsill just to get a fresh taste in my mouth after days of eating rotting potatoes and hard, black bread.

"Nelson counted us all in that room. He liked numbers and order even at the age of eleven—we were fifteen in all he said. A soldier came with fresh tunics and we were told to put valuables and papers on the small table that sat in the middle of the room. They would be returned to us in Dolores. We then changed into the plain tunics. Any sense of modesty had long been destroyed so everyone did as directed regardless of our nudity. I was half naked when I first heard the engines of the aeroplane. The noise grew so loud, so close, that I was sure the rickety building, shaking like a palsied man, would collapse and blow away. But we were about to be freed and any fear changed to joy, joy at the lovely roar that would take us home.

"We were marched outside and there before us was the most enormous machine I had ever seen. Nelson and I held mama’s hands as we were pushed up a ramp and into what for a child was the belly of a monster. Inside were only wooden benches. For our safety we were made to sit and because there were no seatbelts, our hands and feet would have to be chained to the wooden benches, ‘Just until the plane was safely in the air’. At my age, I had no idea what ‘seatbelts’ meant. The word itself sounded ridiculous. The soldiers each had a nylon rope that attached them with a carabineer on their belts to hooks in the plane’s hull. Much later on in my life, I realized why. It was a horrible realization. No one spoke to me except mama who said she loved me very much. Nelson was very excited. It was our first time in an aeroplane.

"There was a sudden jerk as the engines revved and engaged. Suddenly we were in the air.

"A soldier approached me as the plane rose. Without a word, he unlocked my safety chains and led me towards the front of the plane. I remember, just as the soldier took me away, mama looked deeply into my soul with her sad, dark eyes, and I know in my heart that her eyes said goodbye to me and to go with this man.    Towards the nose of the plane, he opened a tiny door just above the floor and, putting his first finger over his lips, he whispered, ’Ssshh, get in here and lie flat. This game is called ‘hide-hide’. If you win, I’ll come and get you. You must not come out until I let you. And you must be very quiet.’

 “I slid into the narrow space and stayed stock-still despite the filth of it, the smell of urine and old fried food. I felt a movement on my leg. It was a mouse or a rat crawling on me but I stayed rigidly still.”

This time I must stop completely. My telling has evoked for me the last image of my mother that I have, that I carry in my heart, seared into my memory as if a moment ago. I am trembling but with a subdued voice carry on again.

"For a while from my hiding place I could hear weeping and screaming, a lot at first but in a few minutes, there were fewer cries and finally none at all. Those other people, I thought, must have been so scared at their first plane ride. When the plane finally landed, my heart soared. Surely we were back home and I had won the game. I heard a shuffling of feet and men laughing. They spoke of people flying, especially of how the young boy had tried to fly to his mother. ‘Not as graceful as a Condor,’ one man said. They all laughed again. No one came for me. There was a deep silence for a very long time until finally my little hatch door opened and the same soldier took me out. The plane was completely empty. My mother, Nelson . . . everyone, had vanished. They must already be on the truck back to our village, I remember thinking. I have to get to them.

“’Where is my mother?’ I asked. ’And my brother?’”

“The soldier held my hand and bent down so his face was pressed to mine. His breath smelled of vanilla and stale tobacco.

 “’They all had to get out,’ he said. ‘It was their time’. Again those words. ‘But you, you must come with me’. He carried me in his arms. ’I will take you to your father,’ he said. I never saw my mother or my brother again.

"I do not remember how but after a day of travel, I was with my father. With the help of friends, we made our way over the mountains into Chile to the port of San Antonio. It was only later that I learned that my father and I had gone from the talons of the Condor into its very maw. Yet by luck we survived Chile and made it on a steamer bound for Vancouver where, like all of you, we now live.

“For years my father would never speak of our tragedy. I would ask but he would only turn away with a deep sigh, a sniffling of his nose, and a quiet sadness in his eyes. He couldn’t realize that, for me, not knowing was worse than knowing. When I was thirteen and a woman, my father took me for a long walk in Stanley Park along the seawall. There, amongst shrieking seagulls and crashing waves, my father revealed all to me, the source of all my nightmares—the fate of my mother and my brother. My saviour had known my father and our family. He could not save us all and chose me, the smallest, the frailest, the easiest to conceal. My father’s friend told him, papa said to me in a flat voice without emotion, that everyone had been thrown from the plane—no sedation, no pity, no mercy. He told my father that the plane was over three kilometres above the Atlantic Ocean and that they may have felt nothing . . . may have.  The soldiers called the plane El Condor Negro.”

I pause. Now, for effect.

 “I have no more."

My words stop. I feel empty and can say no more, so I just say ‘I have no more’. We all say that now at the end. Those words have become as much a ritual for us as ‘It is your time’ was for the men of Condor. I feel faint but try to be strong for these people who have become my family. They all shuffle silently to me, each gently hugging me, one by one, grasping me, holding me erect without which I would surely crumble, enveloping me in a warm cocoon of protective love and caring. Each embrace lasts for minutes. I want them to never end. This has become our custom to show our support, and I need it so very much this evening.

Chapter 2

My Chronicles:

Exactly when the idea of retributive justice entered my head, I cannot recall. I suppose the idea must have grown as naturally as an acorn into a sturdy oak (trite, yes, but I’m a sucker for cliché), a growth as unstoppable as any profound belief can be. Surely it must have been the deeper motivation behind all our meetings from the very beginning, an unarticulated, dark shadow of a thought, for some only at a subconscious level, but there all the same, just never paraded in the dazzling light of day. I think it was Jonny who first voiced what I believe we all contemplated. But who was to be our instrument? Me?

Five feet four inches tall and forty-one years old, but certainly not old, I think I am vibrant and energetic. I live in Vancouver, here in Kitsilano . . . Kits, we say. I work as a medical receptionist for a Chinese doctor in a downtown Vancouver clinic. He’s an internist although he does a lot of herbal medicine as well, which I like.

True to my Latin roots, my eyes are dark brown, ‘like two coffee beans’ one boyfriend said. And it’s true—my eyes are almost black. As black as my ebony hair. I’m proud of my looks and the Spanish heritage that has produced them. That is I. Hardly the ideal make and model for a revenge killer. I also talk too much. I was writing of Jonny and suddenly it’s all about me in a hodgepodge of my life.

Jonny is at least five years older than I. We are the two youngest of whom we call the Condor’s Children, and we think of ourselves as the children of the damned, the damned being the killers of Condor. But the damned are free and laughing. There was no justice back then and there is none now. Still, it’s all Jonny talks about after we have our ’remembrance’ ritual at each of our meetings.

He’s very hot headed. Typical Chilean. They all seem to want everything to happen right now or even yesterday. Like most hotheads, he lacks definition and planning . . . no foresight. He’s doomed, I tell him frequently. But I like his ideas. For him, it’s so evident, so plain what needs to be done.

"Sara," he said to me one recent evening after everyone had left, "the world wide web could be our guide, if I could only rationalize my becoming as immorally sadistic as were your mother’s rapists and torturers. They all went home every night to their own families after their good day’s work and played with their own kids, maybe even coached baseball or soccer. How?" he shouted the question to the ceiling and I jumped in fright. "How can a man do this? Not just once but day after day as if just another day at the office?"

"I don’t know, Jonny,” I remembered replying, once I had settled (I should have expected his outburst, a spate so sudden but so typical of him). "I don’t think anyone knows for sure what can turn a person’s ethics on or off. Most people seem to float with the mob mentality. If the leader of the mob, is armed with ethics that he or she holds of value, then usually people will behave in a like manner. If the leader is a savage, well . . ." I let my words dangle before him.

I reminded him that all Germans weren’t bloodthirsty, Jew-baiting killers and all Argentineans and Chileans are not Condors. Look at the two of us. Do you have that in you?

Jonny won’t let it go, and in truth, I don’t want him to, because we ’remember’ for a reason los desaparacidos in the naïve hope that our action will prevent a recurrence. Hah! It will not. All humans, I fear, are flawed with streaks of brutality, a tendency shaped and warped by the lives we lead. It’s happening right now in the country to the south of us where everyone in the world seems to want to live—the Americans with all their guns, their unadvertised poverty, and their great divide (and I don’t mean geologic), and their ‘me, me, me’. No, we remember because we want the haughty untouchables to be brought down and held to account. We want the contemptible, murdering autocrats of Condor punished not pardoned. And I wonder if our desires make us as bad as those involved in the phony reconciliation.

Reconciliation . . . now that is a word that I think I distrust and perhaps even hate. It seems now that every country in the world has their Truth and Reconciliation committees (what a comment those three words are on all humanity, but no one seems to make the grotesque connexion) as if their very creation suddenly, with the wave of a magic wand, forgives everything, but that is exactly what happens. T and R, as if it were a pill, the solution to all the problems, as if it would prevent slaughters from ever happening again. Here, just swallow this and everything will be fine. What a laugh! Who has the power, wields the power. The rich have the guns and they tell us all, ‘Argentina forgives Condor’. Well, who was Condor?

Condor was not just Argentina but all of Latin America from 1973 well into the ‘80’s . . . but, as well, it was Henry Kissinger, and the CIA, and the US presidents at the time. Punishment for them? . . . not bloody likely. Like all the other Truth and Reconciliations, there is damn little truth and really no reconciliation. Enmity lives forever in the hearts of men. The survivors of the Condor, we, the voice of los Desaparecidos, reject the concept of reconciliation. And the enmity continues.

How do I know all this? In my geology undergrad, I took elective courses about post-WW II history. The notions I had about justice, peace, et cetera were shattered by one prof who put it all straight. We were pushed by the Americans and their CIA to keep Latin America free from communism, but not for us . . . for them. After the war—the Second World War—we all wanted democracy. Everyone had suffered and desired what they thought the war had been all about—freedom. the Americans, though, saw a communist lurking everywhere, a phobia they have that remains alive and well, transferred now to Islam (perhaps not unreasonably). Remember Eisenhower’s domino theory? if South Vietnam falls to the North, all Asia will fall like dominos to Russia and Red China. Twenty years and almost five million lives lost, their game of dominos never happened. Never happened. Now we`re all friends, ‘cept for the five million dead, and a united Vietnam is as close to a democracy as a communist country can be. Nobody seems to get that any revolution must come from within, not be imposed from without, especially by the Americans. I don’t think they’ll ever get it.

That war in Asia was finally winding down and now Nixon and Kissinger see a new game of communist dominos in Latin America. This is Monroe Doctrine country. Not as many died with Condor but the Americans only had seven years to kill, not twenty like in South-East Asia. Still, two hundred thousand dead ain`t bad now, is it? Keep the status quo. What`s good for Dole`s is good for America. Always boils down to money and power, doesn’t it? Keep the farmers, the peasants, the indians as they have been for three hundred years, working their hearts out for us.

I tend to rant and become unifocused, as I am right now, but I must finish this so I can settle down.

The armies of each Latin state, the CIA and the American military together at one clandestine conference created Condor. The military in South America is quite the ’old boys club’. They pretend to hate each other but they all went to school together at the US Army School of the Americas in Georgia.. Today the US Army School of the Americas is called the Western Hemisphere institute for Security Cooperation, aka School of the America’s Assassins. Can you believe that? Few Americans have even heard of it. What would they think if they realized what Machiavellian machinations have gone on there for sixty years—their own government training assassins for hire?

The U.S. Army inculcated the cold war doctrine into all of their South American pupils . . . the fear of trade unions, of leftist thinkers, ’subversive behavior’ in any groups deemed dangerous, of any new political activity, of pro-democracy women’s rights groups, of radical students, of teachers, even forward thinking clergy were targeted—all of them chucked into one bin labeled communist sympathizers or Russian activists. Condor was their answer to root out and destroy all those who only wanted a fairer life in Latin America. Gaultieri, Pinochet, Videla and their ilk hated us all and would have exterminated us to a soul. But then, who would have been left to shine their shoes, to press their uniforms, to cook their meals, to pour their wine?

This was supposed to be about Jonny and my simple distillate of the past must seem very naïve but I get so involved with my own fury when I think back that I forget my focus. That focus should be Jonny. After the first time he spoke his heart to me about his concept of vengeance, he let it go for several meetings.  Last time, he approached me again. I think it is because I’m sort of the heart of the group, not because there is a sexual spark between the two of us. He just sees me as the den mother. Great, eh? Physically, Jonny is not all that appealing anyway, at least not to me. I can see why some women might be attracted to his rough features and his burning intensity but he is a scarred man both physically and psychologically. He won’t say why yet.

To describe him, I would say, well . . . dark of course—but average. He is really quite average. Average height, average weight, average everything. He doesn’t stand out if he’s motionless, except for his back, his left leg, and of course his face which could be likened to a relief map of the Andes Mountains of his own country.

His left leg is twisted a bit inward, so his gait has a slight limp. He has an imperceptible gibbus in his mid-back, not visible when he’s dressed and standing upright, but I saw it one time—we all did—after Señora Barrera (she wants us to call her Delia, but she is of a certain age and Señora always comes to my lips right away) spilled a cup of hot coffee on Jonny’s back. It was scalding and he stood up quickly pulling off his shirt. The gibbus is an almost scarlet protrusion, a huge scar, pushing from his mid-back. He covered it up immediately and turned away, but we all saw. Nobody wants to ask him about it. And it’s really none of our business. Maybe one day. I’m sure it must be part of his pain.

But where do all these words come from? Perhaps it’s my work—there’s not much to say to the patients as they come in but I guess I babble there too. The Chinese doctor says I do.

Where was I? Jonny again. And he’s talking crazy, but it’s not so crazy. The more he talks, the more sense he makes.

"Sara, how many times after you hear of a violent injustice committed by an irrational psychotic—the killings of twenty-two children in a public school in Connecticut, for example—have you wished the guilty dead and gone, knowing that there would never be justice in our system?” He lumps us Canadians with Americans. “Or the hit and run deaths of a mother carrying her infant pushing her three-year-old in a pram, run down in mid-crosswalk, the guilty party identified as a chronic alcoholic already banned from driving . . . no license, no insurance, who blew five times the limit? And what is his punishment? Fifteen months in jail less three months for time spent awaiting a plea bargain—for the killing of three innocents. Isn’t this random, wanton murder? Our system has no real justice. Have you never, ever, just for an instant, wanted someone who had the power to step in and snatch that bastard’s life away?"

Jonny’s right, though. He says aloud the very things I have thought a hundred times, what we all think, every day. We’re impotent and inadequate. I answered his question with my look, a glance which said everything—that he was quite correct.

"Sara, we know who they are. We know what they have done. We know where they live. And we also know what they all deserve."

He had painted an equation for me in the air with his expressive hands—X plus Y plus Z et cetera. So I said ‘You mean X plus Y plus Z equals M?’ to see if he really understood what I was saying. The letter M was my own little addition, so I repeated it.

"So Jonny, X plus Y plus Z equals M. Is that what you really mean?"

"M? Yes, if your M means Muerte, then yes, that is exactly what I am saying. The same as you have thought a hundred times or more. Don’t tell me different.”

What Jonny and I were discussing in all seriousness was first degree, absolutely premeditated, murder . . . death to any Condor still alive who we believed was deserving of it. A unilateral judge, jury, and executioner.

Does evil then beget evil, I asked myself that night in bed with no easy answer coming. I fell asleep dreaming of my mother flying through the air like an angel, pursued but never quite caught by her little boy, our Horatio Nelson.

Chapter 3

Nanaimo, Vancouver Island

Early Good Friday morning

Inspector J. A. Martin of RCMP E-division in the city of Nanaimo, British Columbia, a ripe fifty years old, was cautiously led by Constable Alastair MacLeod, over the slabs of precipitously dumped concrete that tumbled down to the edge of the Salish Sea. Turning, Martin glanced back at the incline just descended and wiped his forehead. The unusual heat of the early April morning and the unexpected exertion had him sweating profusely.

"It’s pretty steep, sir. You okay?" queried MacLeod.

MacLeod was known to be a caring man, craving only logic, simplicity, and morality and tried to live accordingly. He was not fond of the obliquities that others tossed his way. These very thoughts crossed Martin’s mind.

Perhaps he doesn’t have the best assets for an investigative detective but the bugger never lacks for trying.

Martin reminded himself to try to be more charitable towards MacLeod.

"What is this place, Constable?" asked Martin.

"Well sir, if you mean all these chunks of concrete, I think they’re landfill from buildings and such that have been demolished. When this ferry terminal at Duke Point was built back fifteen or so years ago, probably a little bit before your time here, this was a little jutting spit of land. I played and fished here as a kid and the access to the sea was an easy hike from up there." MacLeod pointed up towards the ferry parking lot that now held the next two hundred cars awaiting loading. "Now, it’s hell trying to negotiate these jumbo blocks of concrete."

Martin had paused above the dead man and began donning blue nitrile gloves then bent towards the body stretched prone before them upon the flat surface of a particularly large chunk of concrete.

"So how did your man find his way here, do you suppose?"

MacLeod immediately tensed, asked by a superior a question necessitating an informative, cogent response that might indicate he had already considered a number of logical possibilities. He had mentally done so, and yet, he rapidly retreated to his usual stammer.

"Dunno, sir. I’ve been, um . . . busy, talking to the guy who called this in, name of Bob Dill—he’s right over there, waitin’ for you—and establishing our perimeter. Not easy trying to find something to hang the yellow tape here. Pretty lousy job I did, actually."

"You’ve been really busy, MacLeod. Still, look around you and consider a bit. This man didn’t walk down here, beat himself black and blue and then stretch out on his belly on this slab to die, did he?"

There it was, the evident sardonic obliquity that he loathed, there in his face, and MacLeod knew he had to say something rational to his Inspector.

"Well, sir, but he could have fallen from a height—a plane maybe. That could account for his bruises."

"It’s extremely busy here, MacLeod. Not like when you were a kid. Traffic from dawn until after midnight."

"So you think his fall would have been witnessed? Is that what you mean, sir?" asked MacLeod.

Martin sighed and stood. The forensic team was taking their time arriving.

"You did call them, MacLeod?" Martin said, suddenly wondering if the constable had done as he had been asked.

MacLeod looked back puzzled before a light finally shone in his eyes.

"Oh God, yes, sir. By the book, just like my first exam. Secure the site—done. Secure the witness—done, and call the CSI’s and the doctor—done."

"Good job, MacLeod. By the book."

Martin, a logician, liked MacLeod, a priori, but was frequently discouraged by his lack of a coherent cerebral extension, the ability to take the substance of the crime one step farther, or the inability, Martin thought, unkindly.

I expect him to think like me, but a Jesuit education he did not have. A Sherlock, he will never be. Still, a solid cop.

Martin captured his eye saying, "So probably not a jumper then or someone pushed from some sort of airborne device. What then would be your next hypothesis?"          

Martin looked around him, located again the solitary witness, a doleful and discommoded man, impatiently sitting on another nearby concrete slab, lobbing rocks one at a time without meaningful precision towards some small ducks bobbing thirty metres distant. The man`s irritation was clearly evident. Martin called out to him.

"If you hurt one duck, you’re gonna be here a hell of a lot longer. So just hang on a bit . . . please, sir."

The man dropped his handful of missiles and stared impassively at a sea that was almost dead calm, sighing in an exaggerated fashion. The pure blue sky and occasional puffball cumulus did nothing to improve the dour expression his face held. Finally he looked back at Martin and MacLeod.

"Can’t you hurry it up? I’ve got a life too. It doesn’t stop for some bloody dead guy, you know."

Martin shrugged sympathetically and turned back to MacLeod, who had been thinking mightily during this brief, appreciated interruption.

"Some people just don’t understand what we’re up against, sir. The only other possibility I would think would be by water. He came here in a boat and he . . . ah . . . ah . . . ah."

Sputtering, MacLeod’s speech stumbled, stuttered and stopped, words outstripping thought. Martin felt obliged to fill in the blanks.

"And he lay down on this piece of cement after beating himself to death with a weapon which, when he was dead and gone, he must have thrown into the sea . . . because I don’t see it here, do you?"

"Well, no, sir. Come on. I’m not that dense. Why are you always so hard on me?"

Tight-lipped, Martin grimaced, thinking once again to the fast approaching Easter that had meant so much to him as a youth in Québec before the murder of his younger sister, Clothilde . . . Chloë he called her. The crime had lain unsolved, increasingly cold for ten years before its serendipitous closure, a closure that had ripped apart every foundation upon which Martin had erected his life. Rather than a season of rebirth for Martin, springtime meant only the sombre clouds of remembrance and always, the unfathomable whys of his life.

"I’m sorry, MacLeod. I’m doing it again. I don’t mean to belittle you. I’m a curmudgeon. Is that the word in English?" MacLeod nodded but thought ’Ass-hole fits way better’. “And I do value your uniqueness. Not only as my special Constable but as my friend and apprentice. Just try and let my little slipups do just that, ’Slip up and slip away’. Let’s start again. I think our victim here was brought and positioned deliberately at this spot so he would be promptly found; see how the body has been placed: not ceremonially exactly, but meant to send some sort of message. Don’t know what yet or to whom or why. I also think he’s been dead for two days or more—not so prompt. Our killer lacks the foresight to predict the moment of discovery, it seems. So we have at least one other crime scene to find and we must uncover how this corpse was conveyed here.”

“Another crime scene?” MacLeod sounded dubious.

“Constable, look at the corpse. Have you ever seen anyone so badly beaten? So bruised and lacerated? And look around. This site is otherwise pristine.” MacLeod’s ‘Ahh’ only made Martin feel further like a kindergarten teacher coaxing a child. “At any rate, the CSI’s should tell us more. Where the hell are they, by the way?"

"Should have told you earlier, sir. After I spoke with them, they decided to come by boat, what with all the equipment and personnel. PV Lindsay was in dock. Should be here any second," said MacLeod.

As if on cue, a large catamaran, the RCMP patrol vessel Lindsay, roared around the same spit of land comprising Duke Point and slowed quickly as the boat nosed towards the waving MacLeod, who had moved to the water’s edge to catch their mooring line. Vessel secured, the forensics team debarked and began their work. Dr. James Cameron, the duty forensic pathologist, approached Martin, a glint in his eye.

"Thanks a lot, Martin. Impeccable timing, as always.” The sardonics were unmistakable. “I had just finished—almost—an exquisite breakfast with a very close friend. I say ‘almost’ because I left fresh fruit, eggs Benedict, and crème caramel virtually untouched on his table—my friend’s table that is and I am anxious to get back. I have unfinished business with him."

"So have we here, Cameron. Ours has barely begun. So go do your stuff and we’ll get you back to your tryst as fast as we can.” Martin could be just as mordant as Cameron. “I’ll be over here with this self-important chap who stumbled on our battered cadaver."

***

"My name is Martin. I’m an Inspector with the RCMP. Thanks for your patience and for leaving those poor birds alone. Who might you be?"

Martin was trying to be at his placating best in the face of an apparently implacable witness.

"Look, if this is how you treat a witness, I’ll never report a goddamn thing again. My name is Robert Dill . . . Bob Dill." As MacLeod had said . . . he had had that correct.

The man was tall and spare, a couple of days growth of stubble pimpling his face. His clothing to Martin seemed nautical—thick, dark and woolly. He smelled of alcohol, garlic, and diesel. Martin did his best not to recoil but reached out instead to offer his hand. After a long and guarded look, it was taken.

"I do apologize, Mr Dill. This is a murder investigation, and there are priorities and a protocol that we must follow. I’m sure you understand.”

 Martin’s mollification appeared to work—the man’s expression of disdain melted into a more amiable mien and he nodded twice to Martin.

"Sorry if I was a bit . . . oh, brusque. I’m a bit hung over . . . a lot hung over, in fact, and I have a splitter right now."

"My condolences.” Martin only just allowed a sardonic tone. “Please give me your account of the morning’s events."

The story came out smoothly as if rehearsed.

"That’s my boat over there." He pointed to a beached zodiac thirty metres away. "I’ll be honest seeing as you’re RCMP and all. I scavenge logs from off the log booms that come in here—yellow cedar if I can find them. Not supposed to, I know, but a man’s got to live. And I do, over there on Mudge Island. I carve for a living and it ain’t an easy living, Inspector. Are you a Quebecker by chance?  You have a little accent there, the way you say your name."

Martin nodded and waited.

"I come early to this cove. It ain’t far from the mill, Harmac. You can smell it, the mill, most days. Awful stink but it’s supposed to be good for the bladder—go figure. DMSO in the air, they say. Anyways, lots of logs get washed up down here—the way the tide comes in. Easy score for me, but still, it’s kind of right under their noses so I come here real early, just before dawn, grab what I can and then vamoose. Not today. No logs but this guy was lying there."

He gestured towards the dead man.

"There was nobody else? Other boats, low flying planes, sounds, anything out of the ordinary?"

"Nothing. Ziich. There was absolutely zip. I was alone here with the dead guy and my cell phone and my boat. Can I go now? I mean, I left all my info with your man over there. I mean, if you need to get in touch, or whatever."

"Yes, you can leave. Here’s my card if you think of anything else. Please call," Martin said but wasn’t hopeful.

Dill took Martin’s card with his own little nod and hastened away nervously glancing towards the Harmac Lumber mill leaving Martin to wander back in the morning sun to survey the activities of the forensic team. He brushed an early wasp from his sleeve before bending over Cameron’s right shoulder.

"You’re in my sun, Martin," Cameron immediately said with a distinctly testy edge. "My prelim is just about done and I won’t be able to give you much aside from my immediate, salient observations. I want this man back at the morgue right away. I’d like to start on him today. There are a number of very interesting facets here."

"What about your breakfast tryst with the mystery man, Dr Cameron? And to add to our misery, we have no ID on this man, no idea who he can be."

Cameron, a sour look upon his crabbed features, glanced up at Martin. His eyes crinkled in the glare.

"Martin, do you know that you have the most amazing ability to make me extremely happy and yet deeply despondent, simultaneously. How do you do it?”

“I’ve no idea of what you are speaking," replied Martin, moving around him out of his light.

"This case before me and my, my . . . tryst, as you call it. I’ve waited over a quarter of a century to find a partner I like and perhaps, dare I say, might love. And on our very first Good Friday together, you snatch it away."    

"Well, Cameron, Good Friday holds special memories for me as well. So perhaps we could both climb up there on the cross, whine together and say a few mea culpa’s. I am truly sorry if I’ve upset your long Good Friday. Truly. I mean that."

Cameron tried to stand from his knees, staggered and was grabbed and helped up by Martin.

"But, my dear Inspector, my prelim is rather fascinating. As you can see, your man is partially dressed and bears obvious signs of an horrific beating that I am sure even you has appreciated. There are telling signs of multiple crush injuries. He was found prone here, I understand, but livor mortis indicates that after his heart stopped, he lay for some time on his back.”

“You mean rigor,” corrected Martin, a little annoyed with Cameron’s gibes.

“I said livor and I meant livor. I am not responsible for your ignorance. Livor mortis . . . the fashionable way blood seeps and settles after death. A gravitational thing. Understand?”

“Cameron, I see my corpses very fresh or rotting—seldom as this poor man presents.” 

Martin stopped, mildly chastised about rigor and livor.

“Martin, look at his back, for God’s sake—it’s purple. He lay this way, on his back, for some time, hours probably, maybe longer, after death. However, he was found on his belly, was he not? Thus, my friend, he was placed here and if his killer or killers were careless, we might get DNA from his skin or the nails. See here, these nails have almost been torn out. He very likely struggled . . . I would’ve. I think he knew what was going to happen."

Martin was about to interject, but Cameron blithely carried on.

"There are no longer signs of rigor mortis, a subject of which you know so much, so he’s been dead for more than two days, perhaps as much as four days judging by the early putrefaction about the head and neck. I’ll get prints and DNA so that should help you with the ID. . . if this man is on record. He is edentulous so our local dentists won’t help but he does have a full set of upper and lower dentures, both badly fractured. I’ll see what I can do. It’s too early in the spring despite the warmth of today for much insect activity so the entomologists will not be of much help, I’m afraid. So, best guess . . . three and a half days dead.

"But these dramatic skin changes bother me. As I say, more later Martin, including toxicology. Right now I want to x-ray this man from stem to gudgeon. This is intriguing. I’ll try and have our artists render you a likeness. Might help. As he is right now, I don’t think his own mother would recognise him."

Cameron walked towards his burly aides signalling for the body to be loaded. The photographers and the grounds-men had long finished their work and were loitering on the boat deck, some smoking. Their cigarettes were rapidly extinguished as Cameron approached. Martin smiled to himself and turned to Constable MacLeod.

"We’re done here, Alastair. Three days dead, Cameron says but I doubt he will be arising from our morgue on Easter Sunday. Let’s mount this damned hill."

"Whatever you say, sir."

Chapter 4

Vancouver

My Chronicles:

At times I ask myself if I was crazy about this Condor’s children rigmarole. It started as most things seem to at times, quite by accident. Certainly not planned.

 I learned the truth of my family’s tragedy when I turned thirteen, and only then after considerable pestering of my father. As a young man, he had worked in Argentina in the copper mines of Catamarca and slowly became involved with the miner’s union there. The conditions at that time—probably still are—for the men who slaved in those mines were abysmal. Papa also worked in a copper mine at El Pachon. The ore is right there and all the men have to do is drill long holes and blast off the rock which is then put in big trucks to be driven to the smelter. Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? Everything is, it seems, until people get involved. My father recognized how unsafe the mine was, the miners utterly expendable.

He watched seven men crushed to death by falling rock after a wall of copper ore had been dynamited without warning to the men below. The callous arrogance and absolute stupidity of management with such a futile loss of life were stunning to him. He said it made him so angry that he formed a copper miner’s union and began protesting to the owners about worker’s safety. There was some violence, and once the local union offices were even firebombed. Goons, he called them, hired by the owners to terrorize the miners.       

Things changed slowly for the better, but papa had developed a reputation as a union crusader. He was not well liked by the owners and this led to many violent encounters with management. Those were the days in rural Argentina like in the wild west of the USA where anything went and usually did. But like most fiery men, these flare-ups only made him angrier and more determined to make mining conditions safer.

He then transferred his union organizing from copper to our only coal mine at Rio Turbio. Tunnel mines, he called them, where the coal was so free and easy, and soft that it could be shaved off the surface of the deep mine walls. The first time papa described the mines to me he sounded so proud. Then he became angry again as he remembered what had happened to his men.

Again, at Rio Turbio, the owners’ eyes were on more and more production, rapid expansion of the mine . . . always the profit margin. There was always little regard for the men working, men who could be replaced as quickly as they died, so scarce were the jobs and so plentiful the labourers.

My father said that no ventilation and poor vertical support of the mines were the most grievous faults. Odourless methane gas would build up. The ‘canaries’ were the miners themselves. If a man collapsed, the mine was evacuated briefly then things started again. Men died and it was as if nothing.

In the end, he said, he had to have faith in his country—the same country that would disillusion and disappoint so many others. He told me he could never have foreseen the day when Argentina would turn against its own people . . . its own workers—the backbone of our country, a country under Condor that would torture and kill thousands to keep the status quo (and the scary communists out), and, most importantly, to allow the rich to become richer.

Despite the passage of time, my father continues to blame himself for my mother’s and my brother’s deaths, for being away that night. He told me once that he couldn’t even recall where he was that night. Guess I can’t blame him. As if he could have done anything against the Condor, the ubiquitous secret police that at the time no one even knew existed. I tell him so. He smiles at me but I see my words are no salvation for him. He’ll never forgive himself. He is who he is.

And I am who I am: a prolix girl, suddenly forty-one with no family of her own except this motley crew of Condor’s children. And I’m sure you are no further ahead in understanding.

For many years I’ve thought about the things my father told me and suddenly, after an MA in Volcanic Flux and a PhD in the geophysics of rock glacier movement, I was thirty and virtually alone. I put my geology career on hold, took a job in a medical office—I’m a superb and rapid typist—to stay close to my father and immersed myself in the recent history of Argentina and Chile, all Condor countries, and read and read and read about Condor. I could understand it all and yet I could not understand it at all. Why so many good people had been murdered for absolutely no reason. Then I wondered if here in Vancouver there were more like me—una familia de los Desaparecidos.

I thought about putting an ad in the Vancouver Sun and the Province and procrastinated for almost ten years before I did it . . . me in a nut shell, a prolix procrastinator. I worded and placed the ad without papa’s help because he made it clear he did not want this, not exactly forgive and forget, mainly just forget. I tried to make any respondents feel safe and anonymous. Here is a rough idea of what I inserted:

My name is Sara Torres, originally from Argentina. I lost my mother and brother in 1977 on a Condor death flight. I want to meet and chat with any relatives of the Desaparacidos living in the Vancouver area. I can be contacted at et cetera, et cetera.

Almost overnight I had over fifty new friends, all of whom had been just waiting for someone to do exactly what I had done.

I had collected all these poor souls and didn’t have a clue where to go next. The émigrés were mostly from Chile and Argentina. At the rather painless birth of the Condor’s children, I had, in addition, ten Columbians (and to none did I ever whisper my mother’s family name—Escobar), seven Uruguayans, ten Brazilians, five Paraguayans, and two gentle souls from Peru. On top of this, there were five Bolivians who seemed rather ill at ease and out of place. Not sure why.

So there I was with people of all ages (and I accuse Jonny of lacking foresight). Hah! I asked papa or rather explained what had happened to his brilliant daughter and what he thought I should do next.

Now my father, although he was a labour leader, is by nature, a nonviolent and pragmatic man. Not at all one of those inflammatory ‘the end justifies the means’ types. It’s an interesting dichotomy, but there must be other examples in life of a man who fights with passion for human rights, or any cause for that matter, but would never exploit the use of violence to further this goal. As I write, the only man I can think of is Albert Schweitzer, but he hardly fits the bill, does he? Couldn’t even kill a malarial infested mosquito.

Anyways, papa reluctantly suggested I have a little ’icebreaker’—a potluck in some venue so everyone could get comfortable with one another. I had reached out to them all and naturally felt responsible for the organization. I found a Baptist church, convenient but not Roman Catholic (we are mostly if not universally Romans). That didn’t really matter for it had a good sized space (the basement) and the price was right—free! The Roman Catholic Church didn’t help us much during the troubles in Latin America. At least, the Baptists are not Scientologists. That would be right out of the frying pan and into the fire. Whoops, another cliché. When one is thinking and scribbling quickly, clichés are so apt and they do come to mind so easily. I think one day I would like to devise an international cliché dictionary. I believe every language has equivalences with slight nuances, but that’s for another day, and I have to learn to shut up and focus or I’ll never get my story told!

Our ‘icebreaker’ took place last fall in the basement of the Baptist church on West 16th Avenue in Kitsilano. I sent out an advisory letter to everyone who answered my newspaper insert and scheduled our first meeting with instructions to bring their choice of canapés, salads, or postres, and to stick on identity tags à la ‘my name is so and so’ with his or her country of origin. I asked each responder to try and come up with a goal for the Familia de los Desaparacidos, as well as a plea for the ubiquitous ‘and any other ideas for the meeting that you may have’, and asked especially for volunteers.

After everyone was informed, it was a simple matter of scaring up tables and chairs and plastic cutlery, paper napkins and the usual potpourri of detritus receptacles. Again the Baptists did not let us down, always our special horn of plenty.

Amazingly, I recall, as the day of our inaugural get-together approached, I was filled neither with dread nor anxiety, but only a great sense of anticipation of the chance to share the accounts of all the Desaparacidos. Does that sound morbid? Didn’t to me. But not all were just relatives of a desaparacido—many were either escapees or innocents who had been questioned, tortured and released—and as it turned out all were broken, fragile people. This I had not counted on.

I am a t-shirt and jeans girl, your basic under-dresser, but for that special night, I scrubbed up well. As I mingled that evening with them all, listening to the various different Spanish accents and the ragingly diverse slang used, and even the Portuguese lingo from Brazil, which to my untutored ear, sounds like Germans trying to speak Spanish, I focused on snippets of survivors’ accounts, and their undiluted versions. It was enough to spur my brain to see what this diverse congregation of brave but crushed people should be about. In a way, we had all been orphaned from life by this monster called Condor. I wanted to hear everyone’s story, everyone’s tragedy like the Holocaust survivors. It was the need to safely share our stories that had brought us together and to pray that this would never happen again. Although my thinking is naïve, I believed then, and still do, that the frank exposure of our stories in their brutal rawness was the correct path, the needed way to go.

To wind up the evening, I took to the stage again and reintroduced myself—my voice was already hoarse—and proposed future reunions with one speaker each time, one of us, relating his or her particular slice of the horrors experienced to perhaps find in them some sort of hope. I suggested as well that our group be called the Condor’s Orphans, not as a tribute to the creation that epitomized the worst of what an ignorant mob intoxicated by an intransigent military could be capable, but rather as a primal scream to the rest of the world.

We are not their orphans, said one woman. She was older, a worn mamacita herself. They made us what we are. In a way, we are their children. Like you, she says, I do not wish to recognize them just to acknowledge all of us. I believe we are all the offspring of the Condor. We are the Condor’s children.

And so that evening, we became the Condor’s Children. That’s how it all began.

Chapter 5

Nanaimo, Vancouver Island

It was still Good Friday. As he waited for Cameron, Inspector Martin idly wondered about the derivation of the Good part by the English. In Québec, it had always been Vendredi Saint—Holy Friday. Did Good equate to Holy? He was unsure. The English he would never understand. Here in the late afternoon, he sat in his four-roller chair at the uncharacteristically quiet E-division headquarters staring across the street at the building that housed BC coroner’s service for mid-Vancouver Island. There in the Coroner’s morgue, Cameron was performing the autopsy on the unidentified victim. Martin had called twice, aggressively rebuffed after his second query by an obviously annoyed and somewhat sarcastic James Cameron.

"It’s still Good Friday, Martin. And I’m still working. My brunch is gone. What more do you want? Stop interrupting. Let me do my thing. I will call you. I . . . will . . . call. How’s that?"

Cameron had abruptly hung up, the dead dial tone greeting Martin’s attempt at what he had intended as an effusive apology.

"God-damn him," Martin snarled in English, transferring his gaze out the window to the homeless looking fellow meandering up the sidewalk fronting RCMP headquarters, the man’s head disappearing completely into all convenient trash receptacles as Constable MacLeod tapped on his door and tucked in his head.

"You’re still here, MacLeod?" Martin glanced over at him.

"Yes, sir. Just finishing up the paperwork on that guy. I was wondering if you’d heard anything from forensics."

"Not yet, Alastair. Not yet. Still waiting on the God almighty Wizard across the street. He is a persistent man even on a Good Friday despite a lover awaiting him at home."

“By the wizard . . . you’re speaking of Dr Cameron? And he’s dating? You told me not so long ago he was wed to his work."

Martin rocked forward in his chair and stood up.

"Yes, I do mean Dr Cameron. And yes, a lover . . . of sorts. My lips are sealed. Now I will cross this empty street and accost the good doctor to unseal his. This is taking too damned long."

A frustrated Martin pushed brusquely by MacLeod into the main office, sparsely occupied on the holiday Friday, and out the main doors. The day was still warm, hot even. He crossed the street and entered the Coroner’s Service, the glass doors yielding to his swipe card. Martin padded down the stairs to the first sub-basement and over to one of the morgue’s two necropsy rooms barging through double unwindowed doors, both labelled DO NOT ENTER. His abrupt and unexpected entrance alerted the three men at work in the far right area, who looked up curiously at him. Their focal point was a stainless steel, multi-holed table occupied by a naked, much bruised, supine corpse, chest and abdomen already opened and eviscerated. The smells of raw flesh, singed-sawn bone mixed with the lingering odours of putrefaction and the ferric smell of old blood floated to Martin’s nose but did not offend. He was long inured to the sundry scents of death in a post-mortem.

Cameron’s mood had improved a thousand fold. He seemed happy to see Martin and beamed a smile across the sterile room.

"You’ll never change, will you? I didn’t think you’d be able to wait this long."

To this point, Martin had stewed himself into an emotional cul-de-sac and was unable to leave it with good grace. Cornered, and perhaps ashamed, by Cameron’s ebullience, he took a deep breath and attempted to use the meditation methods that Beth had tried to teach him, to ’let go’ of his dissatisfactions of the day. The technique succeeded only in affixing a false smile upon his lips while his forehead still shouted an angry frown to Cameron.

"It’s not helping you, is it?  . . . Beth’s relaxation technique? Now, please come over here and watch and listen. You might learn something. God . . . you might even help me."

The facile way that Cameron could remove the barriers that Martin thought he so cleverly erected to mask himself from others was a constant miracle to him. Some days he felt Cameron could very likely walk on water.

"Cameron, you do need help sometimes, and badly. I’m here. Lay it on me, as the young now say," replied Martin.          

"As the young used to say, thirty years ago. You’re a dated Frenchman, passé I think you would say. Listen to me. The x-rays show multiple fractures, and my use of the word ‘multiple’ does not do justice. His body has become, truly, a bag of bones.

"First the feet. The phalanges—toe bones to you—are more or less intact, but the next bit of highway—the metatarsals, are all fractured, some multiply. Both calcanei, the heel bones, Martin, have been pulverized and most of the small bones of the ankle that I’ve dissected, have been avulsed from all ligamentous connections. That takes a hell of a blow . . . blows probably.

"Next level, the lower bones of the leg—both tibiae fractured, the left twice. Femurs are both similarly damaged—it becomes a litany like the Stations of the Cross—it is Good Friday after all. What is most interesting is the fact that the femoral heads have been driven into the pelvis, indeed, smashing through both ilii. He’d never have walked again . . . had he lived.

"The vertebral column shows multiple compression fractures. And here again, ’multiple’ and ’fractures’ shortchange this atrocious scenario," concluded Cameron.

“And the arms . . . the skull?” Martin persisted.

"Patience. Just taking a brief breather, Martin. A little break . . . so to speak.” Cameron smiled hoping his punnish turn would be acknowledged by Martin. It was not and he ploughed on. “Indeed both humeri were broken.”

“Oh,” recognized Martin, “a little break . . . je comprends.”

Cameron whinnied and carried on.

“The forearms and surprisingly all the bones of both hands reveal no breaks . . . signs of trauma certainly, but not like the legs. Both humeri have been disarticulated from their respective shoulder sockets. It goes without saying that there has been a tremendous amount of hemorrhaging into the soft tissues which partially accounts for his extremely battered appearance."

Martin had been sitting in a most uncomfortable metal stool as Cameron chattered, nodding, awaiting what he was sure would be another spate of harrowing injuries. He was not to be disappointed.

"And now Martin, la pièce de résistance. Multiple rib fractures as well, of course, but it’s the cranium—the skull to you . . ."

"Le crâne."

"Yes, quite. Well, there is a massive, depressed skull fracture involving primarily the vertex of the skull where the parietal bones interdigitate—the very top of the head. You may well ask how I know this, looking at him now, seemingly quite intact. First of all, the fracture has caused the contents of both eye sockets to burst forth from the skull, giving him much more than the raccoon face you see, implying a tremendous force of impact or an extraneous blow to the very top of the skull. One or the other caused both cheek bones to crumble. But here’s the odd thing . . . his killers, I say this because one man could not have inflicted what I think has been done, took pains for some unfathomable reason to pull out the depressed skull fracture to a degree approximating a normal anatomy, within reason. It’s as if someone did not want us to find out about the skull. I mean, just look at the poor bugger."

As he uttered the word ‘bugger’, Cameron blushed slightly and glanced away.

The trapped look of the buggering, or the buggered, thought Martin. Well, good for him, finally.

 Martin walked around the autopsy table trying to appear bemused and failing.

"Just don’t say what I know you’re thinking, Martin. It’s my life. I can live it as I choose. Sit down again and let me finish."

 Now it was Cameron’s turn to sigh after a deep breath.

"I have only seen foot, leg, and spine injuries like these once before in my career. I did a forensic autopsy, years ago, on a free climber who had fallen, or perhaps was pushed—I wasn’t able to tell and the witnesses were not very forthcoming as I recall—from a very dangerous climb on Mount Garibaldi. Extreme free climbing, I believe, is their jargon."

"Near Whistler?" asked Martin.

"Correct. The fall was witnessed by two other climbers, both of whom were with the victim and both agreed that the poor . . . ah . . . man fell straight down, vertically, landing on both extended feet. Dead instantly of course, but unlike this man, his skull was more or less intact."

Martin, dumbstruck by Cameron’s details, waited in silence at a complete loss.

"Your murder, Martin, was a torture killing. Planned and then executed methodically, so much so as to perhaps mimic a past killing or even killings. To send a message, perhaps? But this is your purview. By the fashion that the soft tissue damage has occurred and the lack of bleeding in certain areas, I believe as part of my theory of causation that this man was deliberately hung in the air by his arms, taken up to a certain height—possibly by helicopter—and then dropped after he had been beaten badly. The first fall surely killed him if his heart hadn’t already arrested with dread. Then, he was taken up once more and dropped again, the second time, head first. I would imagine that the killers used some sort of ballast, first attached to his legs and the second time to his neck, probably, to prevent the body from torqueing as it fell. This weight caused both shoulders to dislocate. His tormentors wanted a fall that was straight down both times and they wanted him to suffer—the Easter timing of his killing is perhaps fortuitous but indeed moot. If I were you, I would review the past . . . the future always seems to lie there, doesn’t it? Have you perchance uncovered our victim’s identity?"

"No. Christ, it’s only been a few hours. And we always start with the past, Cameron.”

Martin realized his testy tone and turned away from Cameron.

"Well then, I do have one other rather remarkable tidbit. There is a minute engraving, a sort of tattoo if you will, on the inner aspect of the right incisor describing where his teeth were made . . . in Montevideo—I have the address for you. You could follow up on this Tuesday, Easter Monday celebrated in rigidly Catholic Uruguay. Perhaps in Uruguay’s past, in her darkest hours, you might uncover other planned tortures of a similar type. The man was likely from there. This is a very interesting case. The DNA profile results will take a few days. Toxicology is all negative by the way. He was not sedated in any way. Very much awake and aware of what was about to . . . befall him. And the pun, my dear Martin, is absolutely intended."

"Oh, quite. How very droll," replied Martin.

Chapter 6

Vancouver

My Chronicles:

I’ve mentioned before that Jonny is from Chile. He is as volatile as a ghost pepper—habañeros, originally from Assam in India, but we grew them in Argentina, my father says. They don’t do well here in Vancouver unless under glass. My father now does all the cooking (and gardening, for that matter) at our small house in Kits and he likes his food spicy. So do I. That’s how I know about the ghost pepper—I just have to look at one and my mouth begins to tingle. And I’m tangentializing again. Jonny though, it’s Jonny I want to talk about.

He is habañero-hot-tempered and unpredictable although he seems so darn cool. After our Wednesday sessions, he usually stays behind to help me clean up. At our last session, we talked more about our X plus Y plus Z fantasy and between the two of us wondered how the entire nest of Condor’s children would respond if we presented the idea to them. We discussed for hours retaliation, retribution, vengeance—whichever word would seem the least harsh and most appropriate before presenting the notion to the older members. I didn’t want our group to feel that we were to become cold-blooded killers, but I had heard the mutterings of just that from our group after the very first get-together . . . the finally uttered wishes kept hidden within some of them, of how there must be a way to repay the Condor monsters in kind, but it was never my intention that we should become, in a sense, no better than they. Yet every time we talked, the inequities of Condor’s atrocities washed over us again, a never ending wave of pain, and hatred. Oh, yes, hatred . . . for some of us, loathing so profound and palpable it terrified me. So my thoughts would go back to the Holocaust once more, to the survivors and how, after decades, a cadre of Israeli Nazi hunters, spread a web everywhere throughout the world to uncover and finally bring to justice men who had mercilessly, grotesquely, remorselessly, killed eight million souls. Our three hundred thousand dead seem paltry. I hate even writing that. Numbers should not matter, but they seem to.

At some meetings, after a particularly gruesome tale, I could feel the group’s suppressed hostility and anger towards Condor, see it in their faces, and hear it in their voices. The emotion seemed so thick and so real that I could have sliced it up and stored it away to resurrect our anger should it ever wane. It was after such a grisly meeting that for me those emotions peaked. It was the night that Jonny told his story.

I’ve known Jonny since high school. He had been kept back in school because of language problems. He gets nervous before a crowd. I knew it way back then and he hasn’t changed.

As always, I chair the gathering after carefully arriving a little late. The meeting began with the usual patter.           

"Welcome everyone. My name is Sara Torres and I am a child of the Condor."

"Hola, Sara Torres," they respond once again and I introduce Jonny. He is nervous. I haven’t seen him for two weeks. He tells me he has been on Vancouver Island on business. But I know he is not ‘in business’. He is a self-absorbed and reclusive type who, although now forty-five or forty-six, has not made much of himself and still works for the city of Vancouver in their sewers and drains . . . or something or other, department. The same job since he quit high school. As I have said, he has no foresight and is surely doomed. But then who the hell am I to talk?

 His ’business’ on Vancouver Island is not the least intriguing to me as I am sure it would end as nothing, the same as always, but still it worries me. It is so unlike Jonny.

Jonny walks to the front to stand at the lectern before the microphone. I watch most of the older women follow him with hungry eyes, a look of desire and need deep within them. He sparks those feelings in older women. He begins to speak, hesitates to gather some strength and perhaps review something in his head and begins again.

"My name is Juan Girondelo, and I am a son of the Condor. I am also the son of Lieutenant Colonel Ephraim Girone."

There are audible gasps from some of the older members. They must know the name. I do not. It certainly is not the name by which I’ve known Jonny all these years. So much I have to learn.

"It was 1973 and the biggest mass murderer in Chile’s history had just seized power from the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, may he rest in peace."

I see the movement of several of the older women making the sign of the cross and bending their heads in his memory, kissing their thumbs. Jonny has paused and now resumes.

"My father was a great man . . . one of the few generals in Pinochet’s army who dared to speak out. And he became part of the Caravan of Death for his bravery. Like most of us, he could not have dreamed that Chile would turn on its own people like a rabid dog upon its own family."

Heads suddenly all leaned forward at his mention of the Caravan. Their attention is now rapt and they all rest in Jonny’s hands, absolutely craving to be molded into whatever he wishes.

"It was soon after the coup. I was ten years old and my family was military, garrisoned in the north of Chile. It was there that the Caravan began. I remember the fastest, the sleekest helicopter I had ever seen, fly into the camp. This was so important for me because my father was also a helicopter pilot for our air force, but a man who hated what was going on around him and for what he was being forced to do. He was, in a way my hero. We lived in the married quarters and that day we heard the sound of small arms fire that went on forever it seemed. That wasn’t so unusual as we often heard artillery and small arms practice at the rifle range, but this wasn’t at the rifle range. It came from the Army detention centre, where over the previous two weeks, men and a few women, but mainly men, had been dropped off, from where I didn’t know. I later learned that they were local labour leaders, pro-Allende democrats, leftist leaning teachers, and a few priests, amongst others. An old story, I know. My father came home that evening enraged and in a state I had never seen. He broke down before my mother. He was crying. I had never seen or heard my father cry before. For a little boy such as me, it was paralyzing.

In his words, he said: ’They killed them all, all in cold blood, all seventy-seven of them. Pistol shots to the back of their heads, point blank, Luisa. There was blood and brains spattered all over the room. And they made the others watch. And they did watch, watched their friends die and could do nothing. They could do nothing but wait their turn. The smell of their fear stank. It was contagious and seemed to leap from one prisoner to the next, infecting each of them . . . shaking and whimpering, some collapsing, fainting in terror as each awaited his own bullet. Luisa . . . the men who held them down, my own men, were enjoying it. I could see it on their faces and hear it in their voices.’  My father was talking to my mother in the kitchen. I heard it all. I don’t to this day know what my father did, but I believe he had spoken with General Arellano who had flown in the Puma ‘copter. The next morning, three officers came to our door and asked that my father accompany them to a ’briefing’ I think was the word they used. I learned years later that he had been sternly reprimanded, for being too lenient, too soft with his prisoners. But most of all for objecting directly to General Arellano about all the killing.

“He told my mother that Arellano had said to him, ’What killings, Colonel Girone? There were no killings. There was only the extermination of some of the vermin infesting Chile. Cockroaches crushed, but we killed no Chileans.’

"My father, it seemed, couldn’t leave it alone and went all the way to Pinochet. Two days later my father and my mother ceased to exist for me. They were made to disappear. I awoke alone in our house. I slept in an attic annex and perhaps this was how I was missed, but not for long. None of our neighbours would speak with me. All doors were suddenly closed to me, a nine year old kid. I never saw nor heard from either of my parents again. I had become a loose end, to be picked up in a truck like all the other orphans. The lot of us were placed in a detention centre somewhere in the mountains with other children, other loose ends. I was the youngest; the oldest was perhaps eighteen.

"As soon as I was taken, I was bound and hooded. It was the same for all of us, I learned. The black hoods came off only at meal time. Today, here in Vancouver, I must laugh at the word ‘meal’—rock hard old bread and boiled corn meal mixed with some sort of green leaf, added for bulk or vitamins, I suppose. Why bother? The waiting between meals was a devised torment, I am certain. We all sat silently on stools waiting for the next blow and never seeing from where it came. At night we lay on the hard wood floor in a group, still hooded—always hooded—forbidden to even whisper to each other. Nor could we move or even turn in our sleep without being beaten.          

"Try to imagine complete isolation while amidst a huge group, never seeing the faces of your tormentors or the kid beside you; never knowing when or from where the rubber truncheons would strike.. Try to envisage the silent approach of the cattle prod they used on us for their pleasure, to watch the children writhe or leap or scream at the shocks. In particular, I remember two men who had contests to see who could make a small child scream the loudest. There was so much pain that I cannot even remember the seconds or minutes between each agony. Their laughs, their taunts, their abuses are only vague murmurings to me now, and even way back then, because the pain swallowed it all.

“We were only children, after all. Small children.

“At our arrival in this camp, we were all numbered—I still remember mine, and especially this year—number forty-six. That is how old I will be next month. Forty-six was me, when I wanted to piss or shit—this was the only time I could speak. Hands up in the air—‘Number forty-six wants to piss.’ ‘Forty-six stand up,’ when I was called to be tortured—not just the beatings for their amusement but the official torture, or when I was to be moved to different barracks . . . same story, different kids, kids’ faces I could see for a short time when our hoods were removed at our ‘meals’. And those children’s faces stay with me—expressionless, or terrified, or just lifeless, hopeless, eyes as cloudy and vacant as a dead minnow’s on a beach. Through it all, I was always and was only, number forty-six.

"What was my crime? Being the only son of an Army officer who dared to take a stand, to object to the killing of innocent Chileans. This was my crime. This . . . was my only crime.”

Jonny shows me oratorical skills I never knew existed.

“My punishment . . . my hell, lasted a year—at least I think it was about a year, for time had ceased to exist for me, when again the Puma returned. We all heard the sound of it roaring in, the sound that a year before was so exciting to me. Now I prayed it had come to kill me because at that stage, I had no hope. My heart was empty. I had no one. I feared nothing . . . for what could I fear? I had experienced anything and everything that a small child fears. I just wanted death. I wanted my life to be over. A ten-year-old boy who just wanted to not be."

Jonny pauses. He has spoken for a long time, and, as is always the case, many of us are in tears. But Jonny remains so stoic. I wonder if that is how he truly is inside. I think he’s finished, but no, he starts again after drinking an entire glass of water in one gulp.

"The day the Puma came back was the day my black hood came off and the day the man said to me, ’Your time has come’. I could look at my torturers finally. And they all smiled at me. Every one of them. I was special, they told me. The son of Colonel Girone who alas is no longer with us, they said. Would I be as brave as my father, they asked? Until that point I did not understand, but suddenly, even for a ten-year-old boy without a shred of hope, I knew what they were going to do to me. I just didn’t know how. And I felt relieved . . . almost happy. It was all going to be over.

"It was by the Puma—the sleekest, whitest, fastest ‘copter I’d ever seen. My legs were bound with sisal ropes—to this day I both bless and curse sisal—and I was laid beside the Puma, a rope from my waist and legs snaking its way into the belly of the cat, its rotors already whirling, dust devils whizzing around me. For about fifteen metres I was dragged through the dirt and shale before I was in the air hanging by my legs from the helicopter. With each turn of the chopper, with each sway of my body through the air, my head for a second or two could look up, and I could see, if the ‘copter was just right, their faces. Their god-damned smiling faces.

"I was slammed into rock faces, dragged through treetops, and sometimes right along the ground. I cannot remember the pain now but all of you have seen my face and how I walk. Towards the end, I lost all consciousness of what was transpiring but I think that the sisal rope must have snapped and I fell. The state of unconsciousness is at times a great blessing—how I fell, how I must have tumbled through the air, I have no recollection . . . a blessing I call it now.

"When I revived, I do remember the pain. Such pain everywhere. I could not move my legs. I lay on a bed in a peasant’s hut. The whole family surrounded me, bathing me, touching me, caressing me. They made potions of coca and poppy and gave me both. Their brews helped. I must have lain there for days before I was moved outside to see the sun and stars which I had almost forgotten even existed. One gets so used to the black hood. I had been blind for a year. My saviour—he was a poor farmer—said that I had fallen like prey from a flying bird’s talons. They watched me plunge into a tree, a tree that held me fast with God until they came to cut me down, my back broken. No one from the Puma came back to search for the little boy who had fallen from the sky.”

His words lacerate my heart as I recall another little boy about the same age who was thrown from a plane . . . my Nelson, and my shuddering tears and shaking become unstoppable.

"How I came to Canada and to all of you is another story for another day. But before I finish, I want you all to see my back—my brand from the Condor, the cicatrix of their evil that will be visible for my life."

Jonny stops and strips off his shirt and turns awkwardly to show us all the red gibbus protruding from his lumbar spine. It seems alien to him, an oiled, red organ that is out of place, a perverse looking thing. I have to avert my eyes. Poor Jonny.

"That is all I have," he recites in what has become, as you now know, our credo to signify the end of each tale. He slowly replaces his shirt with I think a sense of pride at what he has done tonight.

We rise now as one to embrace our Jonny, our little hero, my ’average’ man who has suddenly become a giant. We each one of us kiss and hug him.

***

After everyone had left, I was putting away the cutlery and dishes, all bone china now which the Baptists permit us to use instead of their blue patterned melmac. Trust, as I said before . . . it grows with familiarity. Perhaps this is a good thing, but perhaps it is a trap. The rest of my life will tell me which.

Jonny had remained behind, as he usually does, to help. I asked him how a high school dropout had developed such oratorical talents.

He smiled grimly. “Sara, I have written what I spoke a thousand, thousand times, used dictionaries and thesauruses until the pages fell out. And then I committed it to my heart, every word. It is for my mother and my father, not for me . . . and for the rest of us.”

I could tell he was really empty so I asked where he had been for the last week and what he had been doing on Vancouver Island. He won’t tell me. He just smiled again and said, "Maybe X plus Y plus Z equals M."

Without another word, he walked up the stairs and out into the early, foggy night leaving me imagining all sorts of terrible and yet wonderful things. Damn him sometimes.

Chapter 7

Jujuy Province, Argentina

By mid-day, the air was so scorchingly hot that the words listless and lifeless evoked for Michael Townsend memories of how it was so long ago and how his throat would parch in these very hills. Townsend fanned himself with his Panama until his index and thumb became numb. The languid currents of air were of little help, and so he threw off the thick cotton jacket he’d been wearing as he had climbed the steep ridge. It hadn’t been until noon that the two men had finally attained their goal—the crest of the arid arête, Townsend in a full sweat.

"Hey, DD, you said it was cold up here. I’m bloody, fucking soaking wet," said Townsend with a bit of a pant to the fattish man who lolled limp, sagging in the shadow of a large cactus.

DD was Dionisio Diaz, born in the southern province of Santa Cruz. After joining the Argentine military at the callow, and illegal year, of fifteen, had been moved north to serve. DD’s current immense girth had outstripped even his aging, and from a solid, muscular youth he had metamorphosed into the fat imago that gringos imagine all banditos to be.

“This is the coldest part of Argentina, Meetch.”

“Not in fucking December, DD. You never could foresee the next five minutes, could you?”

DD only shrugged. Why should he care now? A rare and gifted gem in his teens, he had finished secondary school with the Jesuits three years before his time. His teachers had had great plans for their prodigy. Dionisio had other ideas.

In the early seventies, Latin America was ablaze with the liberal rhetoric of socialism, the rise of trade unions, and the fiery belief in democracy among the intellectuals who knew the system had to change. However, the crushing mailed fist of the militaries of virtually every Latin country responded in as reactionary a manner as should have been foreseen. DD saw at once in a vision where he belonged—leading the army of Argentina that would bring truth and order to his land, an army that would not only squash the rabble, the communistas, but put the peasants and farmers back to work and preserve the sanctity of his beloved country. The Jesuits had groomed him well into the man who thought that order and peace could only be attained by absolute power.

DD killed his first man in 1973 when he was just eighteen years old, at an Army camp headquarters in central Catamarca province. He also killed his second, his third . . . and his twenty-third man that same long day in late September. The organized executions were happening in every Condor country simultaneously—deaths preordained, DD believed—his murders unrolling from his gun guiltlessly without first or second thought, or indeed any thought at all.

Townsend and DD first met in 1974 in Buenos Aires at a covert Condor conference designed to prepare a targeted list of purported enemies of the state. The conference was about as covert as a doxy, nude at midday, parading herself slowly through the town square. Everyone in security in every country knew about it and why the meeting had been arranged. The two men sat beside each other by chance that day, Townsend much impressed by the young face beside him and his evident earnestness. Townsend was well aware of the killings going on in Argentina—he’d masterminded several of the more audacious assassinations of liberal and too vocal politicians. He learned of DD’s record and how he had become such a brutal killer so very young. Their similitudes drew them perhaps subconsciously to each other.

The question came out quietly at the dinner they shared that evening in a small tavern, a mutual trust lathered up and then cemented by far too much red wine. They both experienced a sensation of bonding and even confessed the same sentiment, somewhat abashedly, aloud to each other, the older Townsend already feeling like a mentor.

DD’s voiced opinions only made Townsend more sure that what he was about to ask was a decision guided by destiny.

"Would you like to work for the CIA, Dionisio?"

"Meetch”—DD had already the habit of phonetically stretching an ‘i’ into a double ‘e’—“you are an American, you are with Condor. I connect the dots. I already suspect you’re CIA. I am very young, but in truth, I am very old. And yet, if your proposition helps me and helps my country, I would be very interested in what you have to say."

"Fair enough,” Townsend had replied. “I have the power to recruit you. But I cannot ‘green light’ you, but you will be in. Your work for us, for them, will tell the tale.”

"Meaning?" DD drawled out slowly as he puffed out a perfect ring of smoke from the Winston upon which he dragged.

"Meaning, if you do well, you will be on your way to great things. If you do not . . . work out, shall we say,” answered Townsend as he thrust a forefinger through the centre of the halo of wispy smoke, “let us down, perhaps talk too much after too much wine . . ."

"Like tonight?" DD smiled.

"Not exactly. Tonight is different. Just that the Company’s reckonings, my reckonings, will always be settled, permanently settled. I hope you understand my meaning. Think very hard before you decide."

"I’ve already decided," said DD, shrugging, knowing full well that Townsend spoke of life or death.

***

That had been over thirty-five years ago and now at a plump fifty-four years of age, Diaz, still slouching in the shade, looked up at Townsend who stared intently down into the valley before them through high-powered binoculars.

"It’s very busy down there. Many small pillars of smoke. Something’s cooking in all this heat," Townsend said in a low voice, more for himself than DD.

"No one can hear us, Meetch, for God’s sake." DD had taken from his torn hip pocket a leather pouch filled with a white powder. He took two large sniffs before folding the bag up and putting it away. Townsend turned and stared down at him, displeasure furrowing his features. His frowning deepening, Townsend turned back to his quarry.

"You do too much of that stuff, DD. It’s taking you over. Know what I’m sayin’?"

"I’m not an idiot, Meetch. I can control it. Chavez, el Presidente, starts his every day with this," replied DD.

"Yes, and he’s dying of some rare cancer and that’s a fact. Not a great poster boy for coca, is he? And please no more Mitch. The name is David Lynch-Merle."

Townsend was growing increasingly impatient with his much younger friend and his tone spoke it.

"Si, si, mein fuehrer," said DD, a little mock in his voice. "We’ve been through too much together to bitch.” The word bitch came out perfectly and Townsend twitched at it, catching the intonation and wondering what DD was really all about.

"DD, we haven’t seen each other for fifteen years. That’s a lot of water . . . know what I mean?"

Townsend’s perpetually curtailed metaphors had always disturbed and occasionally baffled DD. His puzzled look revealed this to Townsend who had turned away from the valley to sit and rest beside his erstwhile amigo.

"Water under the bridge—it’s a metaphor for ’time’, DD. Time, you know. Time spent apart."

"Well, what have you done with all that time? What about the great Mitch Townsend? I thought you were in witness protection or something. Explain all that to me and then tell me again about Pinochet."

Townsend shook his head and reached for his canteen.

"You’ve become lazy, DD, a fat, lazy slob. You panted all the way up our climb. What the hell have you been doing with your life besides pushing that stuff up your nose? The clever lazy only succeed when someone else does the work for them and that’s a fact."

"Does what work?" said Diaz.

"Any work . . . anything, you lazy fucker," shot back Townsend throwing a cup of water at him. “DD, think back at what we’ve done together—our work as Condor. Always on the edge. I was always on the edge. We were always on the sharpest edge of everything.  I ate up life then. I bathed in the fear and when we won, it was so much sweeter. I need that fear again, DD. It made me alive and I need to be alive again before I die . . . with the adventure, the plotting, the planning and the kills. It’s what I am. You know what I’ve been for all these years in witness security? A plumber. I’m a fucking plumber. What kind of a life is that? You were always there with me, amigo. Here, in Rome, in Berlin, everywhere we did our duty for Condor. Now, sitting back in witness protection, picking my ass in Hicksville, Kentucky doesn’t do it for me. At this stage in my life—I’m over Goddamn seventy—who wants to kill me?. Grandsons of the desaparacidos? I doubt it. No, the good days, the Condor days, are over for me. No more killing. Well, maybe one or two. No more bombs. I want a different lifestyle for my last run at the roses."

Again DD was puzzled by the similimetaphor as he had come to call Townsend’s examples.           

"You tell me about paco and I’ll tell you about Pinochet . . . once-a-fucking-gain," continued Townsend.

"Paco is why we’re here, Señor David Lynch-Merle. What a complicated name. Why so long?"

Townsend’s eyebrows rose slowly and he feigned a long sigh, as if talking with a child.

"DD, contrary to popular belief, people are more inclined to remember simple names—John Smith, for example. It doesn’t stand out but it’s easy. Complicated, hyphenated names especially, turn off a part of the brain that recollects things . . . like names. Proven fact."

"So maybe I’ll become Pancho Villa de la Salta Laguna and nobody will know me. Tell me the story of Pinochet but first—I know, I know . . . paco, common name by the common people—it’s why we’re roasting up here, David. Just a special cocaine paste—pasta de cocaina . . . it’s cheap, it’s intense, you could smoke it, you can eat it but most importantly—it’s as cheap as fuckin’ dirt. This area in Jujuy is where it’s at—still hidden, a back water. No cops, no army, just the cartels. Even the army is afraid to come here. We’re close to Peru and Bolivia and I have friends. They grow and process it, all in this little valley. It’s made for a penny and sold for a pound." Now DD was pleased with his linguistic turn.

Townsend ignored the comment, intent more upon the future. "You still have CIA contacts, DD?"

"Not for a long time . . . David. I’m not . . . involved in that kind of stuff now. Killed a lot of people—legally, then. Wish I hadn’t, looking back, ‘specially at this time of my life.” With a shrug, DD imparted more of his rustic wisdom. “Can’t change the past, can I? People have long memories. A strong sense of reprisal is part of our heritage but I stopped caring a long time ago. I thought I would have caught a bullet by now. Okay, Dave. Your turn."

DD smirked a little and lay back to listen.

"It all began a year before the coup, my coup actually. That’s how long I told General Pinochet it would take to set up . . . a year.” DD raised his eyebrows a little at Townsend’s apparent respect for Pinochet. “For him and the others in the military, the writing was on the wall. The people really wanted Allende. They wanted the army out. The proletariat loved Allende, him with his Kennedy ideals of a new world, a new liberty, a new sharing, a new wealth for all. We had to piss off the people somehow, really piss them off, so much so that they would ask us, the army, to come back in. And Nixon wanted it so badly, it ached in his gut and when Nixon’s gut ached, everybody’s gut ached, so help you God. He told us to get rid of him. He wanted that commie dead—his words. Proven fact. In the books. And that dirty commie was . . ."

"Salvador Allende," finished DD.

Townsend smiled and nodded at the man to whom he had told the story many times before. He never tired of telling his tale and DD never tired of listening.

“Dirty commies, clean commies, fucking commies . . . that’s how Nixon talked. An idiot, a paranoid fucking idiot in the driver’s seat of the most powerful nation on earth, purchased with money. What else is new? Belly up to America’s trough, boys. Kinda scary, DD, how easily morons can get elected . . . manipulated more like. That’s how politics work Stateside. The richest, not the best, wins, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

DD smiled, wiped sweat from his neck and scratched both buttocks before answering.

“Lo mismo aqui, amigo. It’s either money in the hand or a bullet in the back. It’s life in our paraiso.”

"The CIA, your ex-boss, was already into secret negotiations with General Schneider in ‘69 to persuade him to get rid of Allende. Schneider refused and went public with the CIA story. Can you believe that? The asshole. He was dead in two days; we shot a General down in the streets of Santiago. It was glorious, DD. We were unbeatable.”

Townsend had always had a flair for the dramatic, himself front and centre as the eye of the hurricane. He felt invincible as if he were continually surrounded by lucky charms or protective amulets. And he had been. A lot of bullets dodged. Now that was past. He lusted for the money and the adventure again—that was something his American handlers would never have given back to him. It was why he had broken cover. It was why he was here . . . that and the phone call.

 DD looked hard at Townsend.

“That was you? General Schneider was you?”

“Now that would be telling, amigo. Unbelievably, we got all the blame to fall on Allende. I don’t know how stupid the Company thinks people are sometimes. I thought it was devious to the extreme at the time, but everyone bought it. Allende engineering the murder of his most powerful supporter? They all bought it. Unfuckingbelievable. Maybe the fear of a bullet in the back, as you so eloquently said.

"So I went to work and I set up two paramilitary groups—Orden y Libertad and Protecion Comundy Sobermanic. Bloody ridiculous names we dreamed up, the same way the Nazi’s used Work Will Set You Free, just above the gates into Auschwitz. Suck ‘em all in, DD. Set you free . . . right. Suck you into the ovens and up in bloody, fucking smoke.

“We started fires all over Chile . . . nothing like spontaneous conflagrations and the sounds of gunshots for no apparent reason to put the fear of God into the peasants; we agitated in the streets; smeared the head of the army—General Prats . . . remember old Carlos?—with a campaign of depraved lies and stories about his pederasty—don’t go down well in Catholic Chile with all the niñas and niños already running half naked in the streets.” Townsend affected a southern drawl and DD laughed as he knew he was supposed to. “So Prats had to quit in August of ‘73 just before that wonderful September. That wonderful September Plan. It was brilliant . . . pitting one half of the army against the other. It was me who called it the September Plan but it was formulated two whole years before. Fact! Plan, plan, plan. My motto, DD. And Pinochet, our shining knight in armour, came riding in to save the nation from the commie devil, Salvador Allende, but Allende was really me, DD . . . Mitch Townsend. I was Allende dressed in Russian red. Everyone fell for it. The same Mitch that DINA recruited the very next week, and a year later, we took care of Prats in his Argentinean exile, shot him dead with his coño of a wife. He thought he was safe there in Argentina, but he talked too much and he talked to Condor, but he didn’t even know we were Condor. What a joke! What an asshole. He was more dangerous in exile than if he had stayed in Chile under our watchful little eye. But no one was safe from Condor. Or from me. On some of those days back then, I felt I was Condor. I had so much power. Kill or be killed, DD, and we killed.

"Now, I’m just David Lynch-Merle from Ketchum, Idaho—oops, not supposed to tell you that. Now I’ll really have to kill you.”

“Yeah, sure Meetch . . . aah, David.”

“Not enough, Diaz, not nearly enough for me. That kind of life is too ‘nothing’. It’s flat like day old open Coke. I can’t fucking stand it. And those assholes don’t even know I’ve gone. Fucking Marshals, federal marshals they call themselves. But I think Idaho and a whole lot more of North America is ready for what they’re cooking up down in this valley."

Chapter 8

Jujuy province, Argentina

"Down there, amigo, lies our fortune, and perhaps our future. I have all our old contacts on board, and there’s nothing like that tight Condor web around us for confidence. Am I right?"

Townsend spoke of paco and money, loath to enlarge any more to DD. His unfinished business was not the concern of the loose-lipped immensity lying at his side.

DD stretched again in the small hollow afforded by the arête guarding the eastern flank of the narrow valley. His rotund corpulence occupied the only shadows cast by a cluster of the cleisto-cacti.

"You’re always right, Meetch.” Townsend shot a quick glance at DD, as scathing as a glance could be. “ . . . umm, David. Just a few more minutes here and we’ll go down and I’ll have you meet some friends. These are all campesinos, muy simpaticos. They all work for the cartel here—it is not Argentinian but from Bolivia . . . very nearby as the condor flies." DD narrowed his eyes, smiling.

"Funny, that’s really funny, DD. Any others? Cartels, I mean, DD?"

Diaz sat up and guzzled at his canteen, shaking it. It was almost empty.

"Only a couple of swigs left, amigo. We have to go down soon. And si, there are two smaller groups operating near here. The two work for Sinaloa but without any Mexicans here. Sinaloa is just the distributor for both gangs."

"That’s a pretty big player, DD. Perhaps they could be our distributor one day."

"You’re crazy, Townsend. Sorry . . . David. I made it this far and I still value my head. I just can’t see me hanging upside down from a highway overpass early one Sunday morning dripping blood down into passing convertibles. Comprende?"

"Elegant, DD. I had no idea you had such a poetic soul."

"Come on. I’m thirsty. Let’s head down. And your plan?"

"My plan," said Townsend, "is one of experience, my experience in playing one group against another until we, sitting back, become stronger than what remains. And then we go in for the kill. Just like I did for Pinochet. Our advantage is that none of them will know who’s going to be doing the killing. You know, now that I reconsider, maybe it’s just a little early in the game for me to give up the bombs. You have plastic?"

DD nodded enthusiastically.

"C-4. Czech. As much as you need."

***

The two men met with the campesinos who worked ‘round the clock fashioning the paco. Townsend found them dirt poor, kept cowed and dirt poor by the syndicates, a huge error fostered by greed that he knew he could easily exploit. Of course, they were all interested in more money. The conversation was deliberately vague, an explorative sally by Townsend to feel out any weaknesses the cartels may have had. There were many he soon discovered.

Townsend adjourned with DD to the only taverna in Santa Ana, a tiny village down in the valley. Abra Pampa, famous only for being the coldest town in Argentina, sat on the high plateau looking down at Santa Ana.

Townsend drank the dark Fernet-Branca, a vile, bitter-tasting liqueur that he enjoyed, its taste dramatically improving over the evening. He lectured DD quietly about his plans, now their plans.

"This will be our last kick at the cat, DD. I think five years, maybe only three and we’re out. You can retire with anything you desire. I can be happy. I have been living for twenty years with the God-damned FBI in my back pocket." Townsend called any federal agent the FBI.

DD raised his glass, toasting Townsend with the region’s dark ale. He only drank beer.

"Salud David, They kept you safe, your FBI. Both you and Mariana.”

"Mariana is over eighty years old now. She gave me up. Said she loved me and she gave me up. Did you know that? To the ever-loving, fucking FBI. She must be still alive and writing somewhere. Or maybe she’s long gone. Brilliant woman."

Townsend’s eyes grew briefly dreamy as he stared at the ceiling fan, seeing something that no one else could as its blades slashed through the cloud of flies hovering in a never ending whining circle above their table.

"Cartels," he said and smacked his lips.”You know something, DD? In reality, cartels are monopolies. Groups of like adversaries who band together to sell their goods at a fixed-price, a price fixed by the members. However, the drug ‘cartels’ are hardly cartels – just a stupid friggin’ name the DEA hangs on them. Can you imagine the so-called Mexican cartels sitting down together, let alone even inviting in the Cali or Medellin group to discuss and fix prices. They are ruled by greed and barbarity. Each group wants to exterminate the other—they do not crave a level playing field. They crave no playing field. No competition is the best incentive to make more money. It is their greed that we’ll exploit. What do we do best, DD? What have we always done well?”

DD gave a little snort and a nod.

“Kill people?”

“My clever, fat friend.”

Townsend painted him the picture of a subtle drug war in northern Argentina. He and DD, he outlined, would perform selective assassinations—it had been their modus operandi for years—learning and leaving the trademarks of the other groups at each killing. They studied at length each group—their members, their signatures, their colours, their tattoos. There would be no doubt about the author of each killing. To sow fear, they bypassed the low-level hit men at first and concentrated on an even lower level—the street gangs—the eyes and ears of the cartels, men that were a dime a dozen and easily replaced, but with many deaths, a low grade fear would be induced into the gangs. They would then move on to the cartel’s official assassins, reducing the killers’ ranks one by one, the ‘lieutenants’ who now functioned not as paramilitaries but as administrators.

As he talked, Townsend opened the ragged box of dominoes left lying on the next chair and set up a curving row of vertical pieces, gently flicked the first and watched them fall.

“One lieutenant, two . . . and so on, DD. Like dominoes. Easy.”

***

 Killing the solitary man at the top of the cartel, el lider, was left for phase three. It went as Townsend foresaw, DD and Townsend easily pitting one cartel against the other and as the casualties mounted, the three opposing drug cartels that had functioned in relative laissez-faire with each other now rapidly became embittered rivals, then enemies and finally they all went to war. Townsend and Diaz were able to stand back, drink Fernet and beer together and watch the body count mount as it only can in Latin America.

The time did eventually come to go after the top man from each group, done like in the old Condor days with two car bombs. Bullet proof Mercedes, but C-4 levels all playing fields.

In three months, the campesinos were in disarray, a mountain of paco stockpiling and no one moving it. At the correct moment, Mitch Townsend and Dionisio Diaz returned to the valley with a new proposition for the campesinos, instantly accepted. the two men, ex-DINA, ex-CIA,  had suddenly become the biggest paco exporters in Jujuy province, funneling to America and Europe their cocaine paste, padded within the empty centres of the blades of ceiling fans and a dozen other consumer goods, all reputably made in Buenos Aires. Some cocaine was converted into oxidado laced with a small amount of kerosene for local consumption. Oxidado became hugely popular in Brazil and Argentina, a fifth the price of crack and twice as potent.

In the shared farmhouse outside of Abra Pampa, Townsend was becoming more impatient with his situation, arriving suddenly at a time-worn solution. Townsend made it all happen in the blink of an eye as he sat on their sofa drinking Fernet-Branca.

"We make money in America, and we make money here," cackled Diaz. "Lots and lots of money."

"Bring me the new bottle of Fernet-Branca, will you, DD? It’s in the bag by the front door with a case of lager I got for you," Townsend asked.

"Thanks, Meetch. Right away, con mucho gusto."

DD arose and crossed to the door bending to pick up the canvas sack. Townsend reached behind the sofa, pulled up a silenced Glock and shot him, without moving from his comfort, twice in the back of the head. DD slumped over his case of beer, brain and blood leaking from his wounds to the floor, and lay still.

"You’re absolutely right, DD.  Lots of money. Lots more money. And it’s David, asshole," whispered Townsend unscrewing a new bottle of Fernet.

Chapter 9

Nanaimo,

Easter Monday

"The South American authorities are perhaps not quite as Catholic as one is lead to believe," said Martin, speaking from his office on his mobile to Dr. James Cameron currently hard at work across the street. A very smug and satisfied smile creased Martin’s face as he spoke.

"I know that voice and tone," replied Cameron slowly, closing his eyes with aggravation, innate sarcasm flickering at him, “How you have developed such a stellar reputation in RCMP law enforcement continues to astound and quite baffle me, Martin. I can further deduce,” he continued, in what he hoped was a sardonic tone, “perhaps imply would be more apropos, that, judging from your Cheshire purr, you have discovered something that I hinted would not be possible."

"Now what could that be, I wonder?" went on Cameron. "Let me think . . . hmm, the Argentine perhaps. perhaps you have discovered the identity of your victim. Not too much of a wild guess as I left no other lures upon which to strike. Let me guess . . . I would have to say, a 63-year-old man, born in Montevideo, Uruguay in July of 1950. Perhaps christened by his dutifully Catholic parents, probably the father, as one Hector Lopez de Ruiz. Am I in the ballpark, Martin? It is a popular game in South America . . . béisbol." Cameron smarmed at Martin, content with his regurgitation of the facts he had discovered. His mocking mouth was all that Martin could imagine.

Like a Pacific sunset, Martin’s self-satisfied smile sank rapidly, his merry, red gloat becoming an angry, apoplectic purple. Yet he held his temper, waiting and hoping, that he might just be wrong about Cameron’s meaning. He was disappointed and visualized the evil smile on Cameron’s lips.

“Maudite merde, Cameron. Why do you piss me off like this?"

"Martin, on Good Friday I simply made a rather undemanding observation. That is all. A foray into the realm of what could be, not what necessarily is. My motive? To try and save you a little time, no more, no less. So it’s you that has started this little brouhaha."

Martin held the mobile away from his mouth in exasperation. He wanted to stamp his feet like a child, reach through the phone and place his hands firmly about Cameron’s thin and reedy neck.

"This is an RCMP investigation. Why can we not work together?"

"Like man and wife, Martin? You started this. I am completely and nobly virtuous, almost knightly. And yes, I did call both the Argentinean and Uruguayan authorities early this morning . . . just on the off-chance, of course. The off-chance was dead on. They actually work on holiday Monday. The information from the dentures that I retrieved from the corpse has led to a name, and our forensic artist’s rendering of the battered face meshed quite nicely with the photos they had on Señor Lopez although the ears were a little more Dumbo-ish in his younger years. He may well have had them pinned back at some point in time. No DNA for you yet, but there is a brother still alive, still in Montevideo, who should be notified about his unfortunate brother’s demise. He might favour you with a sample of his blood . . . to confirm with a ninety-nine percent surety of their genetic relationship."

Martin crumpled to his chair, his features softening, his momentary anger finished. He should have anticipated Cameron’s move.         

"This is just a game for you, isn’t it, Cameron?"

"Of course, it is. It’s life . . . either you play or you sit. I enjoy the game and all its innuendos. I play. There, you see, you do get some things correct.” Martin suddenly stood. “Please don’t react to what I say and don’t come over here. I know you have just stood up in your office. I have no more for you yet. My friend . . . you are almost always correct. My little niche does lead me to areas in which I can tantalize you but that is all in the fun of it, I swear. Just simmer down and do your thing while I do mine." Cameron stopped, musing for a moment, now completely serious. "You know, if you weren’t so damned straight, I could almost love you at times, Inspector Martin. I mean that in a sexual way. We are a complementary couple. And on that note, I must take my leave. Keep me posted . . .  love."

Martin had flushed during the one-sided conversation but now smiled. Despite Cameron’s continual irritations, it was a fact of their lives that he didn’t think he would ever want to change. It made him want to know why he reacted with such extreme vituperation at goads he was well aware were coming his way. He shrugged to himself, acknowledging the truth about what Cameron had said. In a perverse way, they probably did love each other. But quite asexually, he reassured himself.

***

"You let him get your goat, Morse," said Beth Rothman later that evening. "And I think you do this deliberately, anticipating the remarks you hope to fire back at him."

Martin had finished his long discourse on the essence of his current case concluding with the morning’s call to Cameron. This for him was a recapitulation of the day’s work, a review he found invaluable.

"Get my goat? What are you trying to say?”

She laughed out loud, long and hard, as she made a cornu with thumbs and index held pointing from her ears.

“A Billy goat, Morse . . . it is symbolic, why I don’t know, of peace. We say that to mean someone who has stolen your sense of peace to make you become irrationally upset, angry. As only you can become at times, my love.”

Martin dropped his hands to his lap before raising them towards the ceiling.

“I was sure I had him, finally. So sure, Beth."

"But you did not. And you weren’t setup, were you? You phoned him—remember? No paranoia, my love. He was just doing his job and I think doing it very well. Going above and beyond, that’s all. Just to help you. He’s a good friend, Morse."

He poured her a glass of the Semillon wine she loved and tutted, feeling a small child once again.

"You’re right, of course, but I can’t help thinking it was all done to one-up me. I mean, why didn’t he call right away with the information? Is he that prescient, that cognizant of my character that he could predict that I would call Buenos Aires today, Easter Monday? Lunes de Pasqua is still a big deal there, I believe. So why wouldn’t I have phoned tomorrow when he assured me they would finally re-open? Those so, so rigid Latino Catholics, he said they were."

"Oh, Martin, he is exactly that—prescient. And, I’m sorry, my love, but in some very predictable areas you are so utterly transparent. Endearing for me. I’m sure you see it as a weakness, but you should not. He enjoys baiting you and you enjoy baiting him back. He’s just a little better at it. Ah, thank you for this."

She received her glass of wine from Martin and toasted him as he sipped his Scotch.

Beth was hardly back from Quantico, Virginia, where she had been despatched by the RCMP to a criminal profiling course, newly offered by the FBI to foreign agents considered sympathetic to America. She was excited and more than revved up to add her fresh knowledge to the local police approach to crime in general, homicide in particular.

"The case is intriguing, as Cameron has already outlined to me from the necropsy. What was done to the poor man—Hector Lopez is his name, we believe—is so grisly I hesitate to relate it to you. The name is all we have so far from the Argentinean and Uruguayan authorities. With his identification by my pathologist friend”—he rolled his eyes—“I’ll be able to get much more of his background in Uruguay. Lopez is his birth name. God only knows what he may go by now. Went by, I should say. I keep referring to him in the present as if he’ll walk through that door."

"Human nature to do so, mon amour. . . to speak as if the recently dead are still here. It’s not just a grammatical faux pas but has been shown to be an innate need to believe that the dead are not. We begin to speak in the present tense and then correct ourselves after the fact.” Her face was smilingly sympathetic but her tone, teachery.

Beth sipped and stared at Martin allowing herself the luxury of both taking in the image of a man she thought she may love, yet at the same time wondering if their bond to each other would have been different had it not been forged in the crucible of the intense emotional dramas that had enveloped them both over the past year. As a psychiatrist, she was well aware that extreme emotions could promote extreme emotional attachments. She felt secure in her ability to objectively remain aloof, her background somehow rendering her immune to these human foibles.

"Mon amour, faux pas . . . why all the French? What do you want from me?" said Martin.

"All of you, my Morse, all of you for as long as we have. And if I were much, much younger, I would say forever."

He snorted at her.

"Tell me about the FBI. Infallible as everyone seems to portray them?"

He sat back next to her on the settee both feet on the ottoman and sighed deeply, the sigh of the defeated, the emotionally drained.

"As bad as all that?" she whispered in his ear.

"Non, non. It’s fine. I value mysteries, you know that, but a string of easy crimes would permit better sleeps. It’s just my mind that, when given too many possibilities, must, absolutely has to, follow each one as far as it can, with whatever I have before I’m able to sleep . . . and do not say it’s a natural human instinct to do so. It is not!"

Beth put her glass down and held up both hands in surrender.

"Okay, okay, I give up. The psychiatrist is officially out!."

Martin quickly kissed her. After several minutes, Beth sat up, grasped the stem of her glass and drank deeply and too quickly, coughing as the sweet cloy of the Sémillon coated the back of her throat.

"As bad as all that?" mocked back Martin.

"Very funny, Martin. Shall I now tell you about the all-powerful Oz?"

He smiled and nodded. Then she was off and away, never far from shirking what she believed to be the truth, never disguising likes and dislikes, always with her rock solid beliefs front and centre.

"Martin, I was stuck with the most odious group of males that I have ever confronted. Arrogant, condescending, patronizing—the heart and soul of the new Americans, fervently believing that everyone in the entire world is their enemy. Islam in a way has destroyed the Americans without even trying. The amount of money spent in tracking Muslims around the globe could bring universal health care to their nation. Paranoia? Maybe, but in hard times they seem to turn to Mom for protection. The American populace is inculcated with this weird pathologic mother-love complex–-what Philip Wylie called ’Momism’ and it does appear to be uniquely American."

"We all love our mothers, Beth."

"No, not like this . . . not unto the loss of a mature adult outlook. I think it leads to quite a warped attitude towards everything in general . . .  oh, I’m not saying this correctly. I must sound so confused to you."

Martin tilted his head and nodded, leading her to go on, and said, "No, you’re not confused, my love. But I do think you have it in for the Americans. Maybe because of your parents? I don’t know."

"Do I? Do I, Martin? The Americans are the most bellicose, irrationally angry, population on the face of the earth and they don’t . . . won’t, even see that. A nation forged in blood and perpetuated in blood. After almost two hundred and fifty years of existence as a sovereign state, the Americans have not been at war with someone only twenty of those years. Why? Is there an answer? The people I met in the BSU course—not our teachers, thank God—were all aggressive and belligerent. Is it how they are raised? The cult of the flag and country worship? I don’t know. Honestly. For me it was most amazing to become acquainted with a country that wants to help others, or says it does every second of the day, and then produces a population that becomes the most violently unrestrained in the world. It is a dichotomy that is both palpable for me and yet completely impenetrable. I do not understand the ingrained cult of violence in the country. Can’t just be TV. I could feel it in the streets and on the back roads, anywhere I went. Sudden violent death is a fact of their life. Somehow they accept it and adjust to it without ever seeing that there is a much saner way to live."

Martin shook his head, a laugh on his lips.

"I’m afraid the question you raise not even an American could answer—why it is necessary to be armed to go shopping at Safeway’s? Now take a deep breath and settle yourself. You know there is no answer to your rhetoric. We lie, we sleep, we work beside a sluggish dragon that feels compelled to lash out at perceived enemies around him, usually much too late. So we must live quietly and carefully remain alert to the dragon. Now to the heart of the dragon—what is the BSU?"

"I asked myself the same question on day one. We were presented with all sorts of acronyms as if we should already know what they meant. An acronymic nation—AAN."

Martin could feel her revving up again and tried to divert the conversation to a higher plane.

"Not just them, my sweet. The whole world does it, but I understand what you mean. Beth, please . . . the BSU."

"Behavioral Science Unit. And you’re quite right. I need to settle down. The unit itself is quite amazing. All psychologists, not physicians but with a similar formation as mine, so I got along very well. Programs for probably anything you could dream up and then a thousand more that you could not. Profiling and victimology, is perforce, closing the barn door after the horse has bolted . . . no more goats, Martin. But then again, who can predict beforehand, when or how or by whom a crime will be committed? No one. Nobody can. So, quite rightly, profiling is an art that is always after the fact, probably not yet a science, much like psychology and especially psychoanalysis, all made up as if we truly know what is going on in the human psyche, an art but not yet a science. Never will be. The profile of a killer is a distillate of every damn thing that can be accessed from the SOCO’s, or CSI’s—there, more acronyms for you—and then analyzing the crime from aspects that I never dreamt of. Finally, computerizing all the raw data into a human profile."

Martin had never before heard her disparage her own discipline and was amazed. He had put so much faith in her deductive skills believing they were acquired with her schooling, suddenly, like the revelation it was, realized that these were her own, and very special, innate abilities.

"And then what happens?"

"And then, they take it ten steps further. I exaggerate for effect, Morse. The BSU puts tremendous faith in their computer models, but in truth, at least with regard to serial killers, who are—but shouldn’t be—the most difficult to catch or stop, the data input is based on fallacious, circular reasoning— A equals B because B equals A, et cetera, et cetera. That’s obviously too simple an analogy, but when independent analysts looked at the FBI model, there was no evidence that it helped stop anyone . . . at least with serial killers. They’re almost all caught purely by chance. What a scary thought."

"So in fact, you didn’t enjoy Quantico?"

"Enjoy it? I breathed it, I dined on it, I loved it. And I still believe that offender profiling is very much possible but it ain’t as easy as on television. In a nutshell, and in a way, it’s Psych 101, the perp’s behavior reflects perfectly his or her personality.”

“The perp’s?” queried Martin. His tone seemed skeptical with her use of unfamiliar slang.

“Yes, Martin, the perp’s. Perpetrator. Get with the game, my love. You’re the cop. The behavior is the crime—in our case, homicide. What could have gone on before? How was the murder done? Why was the murder done? What was the victim like? What happened to the victim afterwards—was the victim arranged to give a message to the police? It goes on and on. A checklist, which is scrupulously followed, leads to what this crew believes is an accurate composite of the killer . . . sometimes."

He smiled, as she finished, mouthing her word back at her—‘sometimes’.                       ‘

“Yes, sometimes," she replied. She was radiant with the memories of her recent trip.

After a long pause, Beth queried Martin.

"That’s enough of them. What about this current problem of yours?"

Chapter 10

Ketchum, Idaho

Federal Marshall Miller Cooper, ’Coop’ to both friends and hostiles—he despised his Christian name, Miller—was having a very bad day, such a bad day that every ‘bad’ thing in his life had raised its caustic head to shriek in mocking laughter at him. Or so it felt. The surname that his family had left by the wayside was ‘Miller’, dropped for the very reasons that now governed completely Cooper’s adult life. His father never did tell him why, as a child, he had been raised leapfrogging from one state to another, sudden midnight awakenings, uprooting in a frenzy, the family eventually finding a sort of sanctuary in the newly created Federal Witness Protection program. He could still vividly recall as a child of eight his deconstruction and mental reconstruction at a small farm adjacent to the nearby FBI headquarters in Virginia. All the ’Do not ever’s’ suddenly consumed his childhood. Cooper had been left with the only real connection to his parents, a memento, with his new Christian name of ’Miller’ given him by WITSEC. It felt, smelt, and tasted, just like the Miller beer from Milwaukee—flat, and insipid.

“I’m not even Miller Light,” he thought, rolling the ‘ells’ over and over in his mind. He much preferred the abbreviated Coop. When he was a teen, he would imagine himself as Gary Cooper—Coop—in the film High Noon, an antihero fighting for justice and the downtrodden. Later in life as actor Cooper was dying of cancer, Federal Marshall Miller Cooper swore that no drug would ever take him down.

As a federal marshal, in this particular area of the land of the free, he orchestrated three souls of the Witness Protection program, WitPro he called it (his own acronym, in reality WITSEC which to Cooper sounded idiotic—witless he called it). So it wasn’t the correct acronym, big deal, but it was, he thought, probably the only truly secure federal program in America, and he meant to keep his domain exactly that way. They had never had a leak, never lost a protected soul, no matter how much the Company wished that soul dead. Never had secrecy been breached.

It had been by chance that three disparate souls with three very disparate tales had ended up in Ketchum, Idaho and within his purview. The coincidence of the three, all men, all arriving at roughly the same time, ate at Coop during his often troubled sleep—a man who took his work home with him to bed and yet hated that very job. Because of Ketchum, Cooper had nicknamed his three dependants, Ernest, Margaux, and Mariel after the Hemingway trio. Long after that Coop discovered Hemingway’s middle name was Miller. He felt complete, but this fact did not help salve his parental memories nor temper the hatred of his name, but he did take eventual pleasure in the irony. Especially when he had arcanely learned that Hemingway’s Miller came from the Miller moth, a favourite of Ernest’s mother. He was sure that no one else in the world knew that.

He stared out his third-floor office window of the Federal Building at the roundish bleb of Mount Baldy, hovering before him, snowless in October, green yet barren, haphazardly chopped up by schusses now a naked brown. His gaze dropped to Sun Valley Road immediately beneath him, the main drag in the settlement. Traffic was desultory and tranquil.

"Ketchum . . . Small Town, Big Life, my ass," he muttered, alone in his office, the town’s motto just making things worse. He had just sent Madelaine to Starbucks for them both. Didn’t need the coffee, he needed time alone to think. Functioning in concert with Miller Cooper and Madelaine Burroughs were two typists who also behaved as liasers with everyone else in the small office. Both secretaries were off with some sort of virus, H1N1 Coop was told. The quietude in the offices of WITSEC was comfortingly peaceful.

"It is a small town but I have three ‘big lives’ to marionette and this fucker has to jeopardize my entire existence by deciding to bugger off somewhere. Okay, he checks in with me once a month, same as the other two. Regular as a Swiss clock . . . I’m talking cuckoo clock here, everyone." Cooper spoke and gestured theatrically to a non-existent audience within the empty office.

The three files that lay open upon his desk percolated, alive with past villainy, bubbling at him, tantalizing with their evil derring-do. His life had started like theirs but had ended in monotony. They were alive and vibrant; he felt morbid and still, babysitting the Robin Hoods that he would never be. One of the men had failed to check in with him as required by federal law, a man Coop admired and perhaps even envied. Cooper wanted this job to be his chance, God-given, a way to break the mold that encased him, suffocating him in the nothingness of his life. That little voice inside was pushing . . . Take it, be a man for once. Do God-damned something, anything.

"People get the wrong idea about all this. Exciting work, hah. Me protecting poor, innocent bystanders, witnesses of corporate crime, Mafioso victims.” The long arm of the mob was much longer than ‘the law’, more cruel, more devious. “Fuck . . . this is all bullshit! Stuck in his hiccough of a valley . . . Christ on a goddamned, fucking crutch." Do something . . . anything! Be like Mitch, Cooper, for once in your life.

Out his window, Mount Baldy didn’t exactly loom but just sort of blocked Coop’s view. Maybe if I skied, I could tolerate this place. But snow and cold had always been anathema to him. As a child, because of what his father had done or seen or not done or not seen, they had moved  . . . new names, new faces, new everything, every one or two years, each time his father, Merlin, had imagined the hot breath of revenge tracking him, until the witness protection program had been created precisely for this situation. Mother and father were now both dead, killed in a head-on . . . black ice on a North Dakota secondary road one night in a raw January years ago, deaths that had seemed predestined . . . perhaps even planned? He shrugged off that frisson, yet another memory of winter’s fear. At first, he had felt released from the purgatory of Witness Protection with their deaths, only to inevitably follow the parental tracks laid out for him: a degree in criminology at Boston U, a failure in the Bureau, and his eventual transfer to the Federal Marshals’ program of Witness Security. He had been accepted, readily, almost greedily, by this arm of government.

 “They must have known my background, my family, what has made me what I am. The bastards know everything. Full fucking circle, that’s my life in a nutshell with a big red bow." Metaphors had never been Cooper’s forte.

In the end, he felt not guided but predestined to this life . . . manipulated into it, he later decided.

Just like these three assholes, but they weren’t assholes. He enjoyed Mitch Townsend—now known as David Lynch-Merle. Brags too much. Has to be contained a lot to keep a lid on it. Now the bastard was gone. Gone . . . after over fifteen years in the program. In all those years that he had watched and guided Townsend, Cooper had seen him become more and more restless, more and more bitter, very dissatisfied with the plumbing business and the life of customer service in which he had been established by WitPro.

He goes from citizen disservice to customer service. We pay the bastard’s bills, medical and dental, and he has a business that nets a hundred and fifty grand a year . . . dammit. Dammit. Dammit. God fucking dammit . . . and he’s restless?"

Cooper spoke aloud, shouting, words bouncing back at him, not helping. He was still fuming and swearing when Madelaine flounced in with two coffees – a double venti and a double cream with three shots no sugar for her. A Breve, she called it.

"Oh, I thought you had visitors. I could hear people shouting all the way down the hall." She put the coffees down on his desk glancing at the three files that lay partially open.

Madelaine – Maddie she had insisted – a slender and tallish young woman with a long, thin face, intense steel-blue eyes erupting beside a narrow sculpted nose, and honey, shoulder-length hair, was coatless – the day was warm for the time of year. She picked up the first file and saw the edged name – Lynch-Merle.

"God, not this clown again. He seems like such an egotistical prick. Has he called in yet?” Only the briefest pause, then: “He hasn’t, has he?”

Madelaine had quickly become adept at reading Cooper’s body language, commenting with overt cynicism before Cooper could even begin to speak.

"Yeah . . . my Ernest Hemingway . . . Townsend’s not so bad, Maddie. I like him. Sure it’s always all about him and what he’s done. In fact, I probably shouldn’t let him talk so much when he checks in. It’s just that I can hear the fervor and passion in his voice when he speaks of those days. It’s infectious . . . like the flu, like a good kind of flu."

"Coop," she drawled out in a simper, "like the flu? A good kind of flu? The girl’s have the flu and they’re not at work. There is no good flu. You need help. You do know . . . or should, that client closeness breeds . . . oh, whatever the heck it breeds."

"You probably want to say ’familiarity’ but the expression you’re groping for is familiarity breeds contempt, but in fact it only does so in a long marriage,” he said, thinking back on his own failed attempt at wedlock. “But Maddie, you’re quite right. Shouldn’t get close to those guys. Townsend’s tough not to like, though. I wish you could have met him before,” he waved in front of himself, “before . . . all this bull-shit. Smooth and funny. Makes all the awful things he did seem inconsequential."

"Yeah, sure Coop. I’ve read his file. Argentina abolished the death penalty years ago. They can’t execute him for what he did . . . he’s in WITSEC because if Argentina ever gets his ass he’ll be there for a hundred years. Pretty tough row to hoe . . . an Argentinean hoosegow. He’s a psycho. All psychopaths are great guys, salt of the earth, easy to like, easy to trust, right up until the moment they slit your throat or rape your mother. For you, it’s always something that happens to somebody else. Psychopaths, sociopaths, whatever, they’re everywhere, Coop. I should know."

She stopped, had said too much and turned away.

"Okay, Maddie, okay. Enough. We’ve been down this road so often in the last three days that I know every friggin’ one of your potholes and my back’s startin’ to hurt."

"And your precious ego? So what do we do now, Cooper?” She pretended to glance at her wrist. “I’ve been doing this monotony for, oh, seventy-four hours now and I’ve already forgotten what we do next. We really should have some emergency drills for this eventuality, Coop," she said. The drill about a failed contact and what to do, she was well aware, was held as an imaginary exercise on a monthly basis with results sent directly to the DOJ in Arlington. Cooper’s record had to date been more than exemplary.

Her sarcasm was not becoming, Cooper thought. Downright contemptible, in fact.

"I want to give him a day or two; he deserves that at least,” tried Cooper.

“You’re not supposed to,” wheedled Maddie. “We should start after him today, right now . . . yesterday actually.” She gazed at his picture in the file. “Kinda cute though, in a tall, dark, woebegone way.”

 “He’s never used the panic button. Lots of years with nothing happening can lead you to forgetting. He’s just forgotten, is all. And you have an old picture of him. Gone completely grey. Dyed by now, I bet."

"Sure, Cooper, sure. Dyed by now, huh? So you do think he’s buggered off. Hah! He sure had you fooled. Month after month, year after year, always the third of the month, right? Like you told me, as per his code and suddenly it leads to forgetting? Don’t think so, handsome. It’s my turn to go on the road. I’ll find him."

Cooper bent, picked up and dumped the files of Thomas Aikenhead and Joseph Broadmoor on top of Lynch-Merle’s, sipped more coffee and sat, still trying to formulate a plan of action.

"May I have his file? Do you mind?" pinched out of Madelaine. "That’s a high paying job I wish I had instead of being stuck in Ketchum, Idaho with you. No offense, really. S’not you. It’s the job."

"Sure it is, Maddie. How much do you know about WitPro’s security? I know you’ve been trained and vetted . . ." It was only her third day with Cooper.

"Checked from head to toe. More and deeper than you could ever suspect, Cooper," she replied, already accustomed to Cooper’s WitPro acronym.

With her words, Cooper had immediately envisaged profoundly personal body searches. He found himself staring at the shallow mounds of Maddie’s breasts, made a face, a little ashamed, and averted his eyes.

"But, what do you really know about everything we do here, Maddie? Our subjects’ names are those of questionably famous criminals. That’s how the DOJ dreams up these pseudonyms . . . pseudo-pseudonyms I should say. Fact! You didn’t know that, did you? Oh, the irony of it all. This guy, the real Aikenhead here, was tried and executed by hanging for knocking the Christian faith too much in public. Preferred Mohammed to Christ . . . a man he called a charlatan who learned all his magic tricks in Egypt. Fact!"

"Good! Any Islamist is better off dead, if you ask me, Mr Cooper."

"I didn’t . . . anyways, Aikenhead’s hanging was over three hundred years ago in Scotland."

Her eyes widened a trifle. Not so much for her bland face to show a flicker of interest, just enough to demonstrate her indifference.

"Scotland the Brave, huh? Settin’ a fine precedent. Good for them. Way ahead of us."

"Did you hear what I said? Three hundred years ago!" replied Cooper.

"Same diff.  Global warming aside, Coop, our world faces three evils – cigarettes and Islam."

"I’ll admit I’m slow, Maddie, but that’s only two."

"You’re not slow, Cooper. Just male. Well . . . maybe slow, too. Number three . . . Us, Miller Cooper! US as in USA. Killing innocents all over the world, by remote control. Death delivered from deep within the Colorado mountains to anywhere in the globe, especially but not particularly . . . you know . . . brown, bearded, turbaned. Like Bierce said: War is how Americans learn geography. And he died a hundred years ago.”

Cooper looked at her out of the corner of his eye, one eyebrow raised.

"Treasonous words, Madelaine. How d’you ever get to work for the US marshals? Professional infiltrator, are you?"

Maddie rolled her eyes at this and turned to place her triple shot venti on the broad and chipped Formica, slowly leafing through the files Cooper had flopped open.

"So," she began slowly, and with the word ‘So’ he knew immediately that this would take a while. She was young, pert, and damnably clever, her mind razor-sharp and her wit acerbic, especially with men, and dammit, he was one – "This Aikenhead character . . . what was his first name again?"

He knew that she knew very well the name. This was just one of those brainless games she had begun on her very first day at WITSEC.

"Thomas. Thomas Aikenhead. Fact . . . that’s a fact," he replied instead of challenging her recall.

But Maddie was in the mood, pissed off for some reason and verbal as usual. She would not let it go.

"And why, Mr Cooper, just out of petty curiosity, do you have to end every one of your instructive sentences with the word ’Fact’, properly exclamatory of course, or ’It’s a fact’.  Like you’re challenging everyone around you to disagree." She ended slightly breathless. "You know, at the end of the day, it sounds quite inane."

Pausing for a lungful of air, she picked up her coffee and sipped . . . spluttering into the cup.

"Shit . . . sugar, this is yours. Sorry." She replaced the cup and took up hers with a long draught, sputtering again. “Shit, that’s hot. Sorry, Cooper. Hey, I vented on your venti . . . get it?"

By now, Cooper was seated beside Maddie at her desk, still staring out at Mount Baldy. Everything today irritated –Townsend who was gone, Madelaine and her growing up issues, even the name Mount Baldy irked him – such a crass, commonplace name for only half a mountain. Just a big, fucking hill.

Cooper became more serious trying hard to make his face suit his mood. Unsure if he was succeeding before the young and sarcastic Madelaine, he swivelled to face her full on. She, on the other hand, had become enthusiastic.

"It’s my turn to go after someone, Coop. You did promise . . ."

He interrupted brusquely slashing the air in a karate chop. What she wanted was not on the table.

“Your turn? After three not quite whole days on the job? Cut it out, Maddie. I’ve never even had a ‘turn’, this is brand new for me. Your turn . . . hah! Maddie, what we do here is not a kids’ game. It’s a game, sure if you like, but a game of life and sometimes death. You’ve never gone after a soul, never tracked, hunted anyone. I doubt very much you even know how to start . . . looking I mean. You’ve had basic training but there’s so much more than that."

Her reaction was in complete contradistinction to what he had expected. She didn’t rant or rave, didn’t stamp her feet, didn’t perform a faux sniffle. No lascivious eyes were made at him, promising delights that would never be delivered. She just slumped quietly and sat, a neutral face, no eye contact, and sipped her coffee.

"Ah, that’s much better now. Cooled off a bit.” Then after a pause, “I do quite understand, you know . . . Mr Cooper," a soft, cashmere voice devoid of linguistic ups or downs, soaked with nothing but an odd, sad emptiness.

Cooper turned and tilted his head at her. This was a technique he had never before faced. Sudden capitulation and resignation. After three days with her, it was a side that he completely disbelieved.

"Okay, what are you doing now? What are you up to?" he asked walking in front of her, coffee in hand.

"I don’t know what you mean. It’s . . . nothing." Face still bland, child-like and innocent.

"You damned well do know, Madelaine Burroughs.” Self-control was slipping away, liquidy mud on a steep slope. “Day one you were the epitome of politesse and correctness for, oh, what? . . . A good five minutes? Next, you were joking, kibitzing about the job, its stretches of boredom. If I recall correctly, you compared what we do to an anesthetist—ninety-nine point nine percent boring tedium punctuated by point one percent stark terror. No? Remember?"

She nodded, opened her mouth and then snapped it shut.

"Aha, I caught you. Right at the incipient moment of your sardonic self. That was what day one and day two deteriorated to. Look, I find you bright . . . extremely bright, probably much cleverer than I. You have a great future . . . not just here in Ketchum. Anywhere. Why you choose to sabotage yourself, only you can say. But you do. That’s what you do. You make people like you, get a bit close to you, and then suddenly you become detestable. What’s the deal? I’m the chief here. Why can’t we just pretend to like each other and do our job? Is that too much to ask?"

Cooper recognized he was no psychologist, despite the training he had been given at WITSEC, but he was unprepared for her next reaction. For him, the absolute soul of brevity, his words had been a polemic after which Madelaine Burroughs exploded into profuse tears and laid her head her desk, sobbing from the nadirs of her soul, her stringy chest heaving with each sharp and rapid breath. Her reaction was paralyzing and took him to his own family core. Cooper vividly recalled the same display of visceral emotion each time the Miller family, afraid for their very lives had fled once again mostly for the life of their son, Ian . . . his christened name, a name Cooper could barely remember. His mother would break down, weeping with each sudden change of venue. There was nothing his father could do to provide solace. The weeping continued for hours until, like an Arkansas whirlwind, it just suddenly stopped. No rhyme, no reason, no petering. Just stopped. Father and son became inured to her behavior and after their fourth midnight move, began to ignore Patty Miller completely.

But this woman was not his mother; this was Madelaine Burroughs from Utica, New York and at this point, she was unignorable in her apparent abject misery.

Unignorable yes, but Cooper was ill-prepared to deal with a young woman sobbing from her core. "The thoughts that go through you,” he imagined. “Attractive she is, certainly . . . cute, but she’s hardly beautiful. That probably makes her stronger. The physically beautiful slide their way through life without a care, always with the pick of the crop. Marry an ugly woman if you want to be really happy . . ."

He finished his brief reflection and blurted out unexpectedly, unable to stop, "Look, you’re not beautiful, Maddie, but you’re strong. I can feel it. Please stop. If you must blubber, wipe up the damned desk and then put into words I can comprehend what has caused this sea change. What have I said, Maddie?"

Cooper’s frustration level in these his middle years was maxed out very quickly. Life had been a nice humdrum continuum until she had arrived in Ketchum, with he doing his WITSEC time and then rushing home to write the novel that he knew was begging to be told – his childhood and the stories of all his father had done. His mother had become a footnote . . . a blubbering, teary footnote. Never weak but a footnote in his life.

"A mother should not be that," he said out loud as he tried to lean protectively over Maddie.

Her crying suddenly ceased and Maddie, obeying his commands, swabbing the scarred formica top of her tears with a paper towel, looked up with a sniff and a sort of happy face.

"What? . . . What did you just say? Not beautiful but strong . . . and a mother shouldn’t be that?"

Her run-on sentence froze him with its peculiar juxtaposition.

"No, no, no. I was trying to be nice. I don’t know how my mother crept in there. Didn’t mean to say that. I don’t know what to say to you, Madelaine. I can’t deal with all your tears. I’ve lived through too many."

Madelaine sat up and seemed to steel herself. "I’m not exactly ugly, Mr Cooper. And I apologize for my . . .  my scene." She shook her head, groping to explain. "And I’m not strong. I’m a failure in . . . in life . . . in everything. You must have read my record. Eight jobs, eight transfers in five months. Not exactly stellar. I don’t know who I am or where I’m going. To hell in a hand basket, like my mother used to say.”

As my mother, Cooper mentally corrected.

“I asked to come here, last resort I guess . . .  odd expression, that. Hardly much of a resort –Ketchum, although you have been very nice to me, Mr Cooper."

"Stop calling me Mr Cooper, for god sakes."

"Cooper . . . Coop. Is that your real name? Miller Cooper. Sounds something like Smith Smythe or Brown Browne."

She tried to smile, deflecting her true feelings he thought at once.

"I don’t wish to discuss it, Maddie. Okay? If you don’t like that, well, you have access now to all the codes. You do the work. Look me up if you must."

Maddie straightened up, exhaled sharply, and eyed Cooper tentatively.

"Oh, I did. I did already. On day one when I arrived, if you must know. Remember our rules, your rules. Know whom you work with. No fraternization. Work and social life separate . . ." she paused a long heart beat and looked him dead-on before drawing slowly out, "Mr . . .  Ian . . . Miller."

Cooper lowered himself slowly into the chair beside Madelaine and stroked his face—some stubble on his lower chin. He sniffed his right index finger . . . it smelt of ear wax. He liked that, reminiscent of bee’s wax.

"I will not say ’Now I have to kill you’. I find that quote insufferable. Perhaps I mistrust people who say it, but he . . . Townsend . . . said it ad nauseam. I’m not quite that trite. I just try to do my job, Madelaine.

"Ian Miller, hmm," he continued, "I haven’t heard my name spoken to me since I was eight years old. Ian is John in Scotland, you know that? Evan in Wales. Hmm, Ian Miller, I was. Now, am I just another John to you, Maddie?"

"Ooh, great, so now I’m a hooker, but not beautiful and I’m some sort of mother, such confusing things you say. Are you trying to cheer me, Cooper John?” She was so very adept at deflection, he thought again. “Better you stick a pencil up each nose and put your thumbs in your ears and twiddle your fingers at me. I always laughed at that when I was a child."

To Cooper, she appeared about to begin crying again. He could hear the snuffles behind her ‘laughed at that’, so he got up and took her by the shoulders forcing her to look at him.

"You know all about me. I think I need to know all about you, Madelaine Burroughs. And yes, I looked you up before you arrived here. Burroughs seemed a bit of an add-on, but they never send us an adequate biography, do they? Public school and high school in New York state . . . Utica I think it was. Father, a city planner who never planned very much. Mother,” he shrugged, “. . . just a mother. You were an above average student but not too above average, in the undistinguished range of ‘above average’. Mixed English-Scottish parentage, two generations in the States, likely, I would think. A brother and a sister, the brother four years older. The sister three years younger. You enjoyed volleyball in high school and wanted to do ballet . . . but did not. Routine American childhood. One footnote, I noticed – a pregnancy when you were fifteen, terminated.  Brother died when he was nineteen, file didn’t say why or how."

"How did you get . . ?" she blurted out, reddening then blanching, her shocked embarrassment and a new flood of tears streaking mascara down her wet cheeks.

Her passionate reaction to his words shot into him with the clarity of omniscience. The aborted fetus . . . her dead brother . . . their meaning. Cooper could speak no more. He was on his knees, arms around Maddie holding her tightly as her tears flowed and her body wracked in agonizing spasms. She withered out, over and over, the words ‘Oh, Sammy, I’m sorry’ as if she were holding the very syllables against her as an aegis.

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