The Penalty

  Diego closed his tired eyes and nodded. That was almost the perfect Two Wallets statement. The guy had a sort of stupid genius for self-justification. That was why he’d got himself a paid-off early retirement rather than the jail sentence he so richly deserved.

  “See?” Morales now said, gesturing at the screen with his beer can. “We kick off, three passes later, the ball’s back with our keeper. I mean, what the hell is that?”

  “I guess you’re right, Wallets,” Diego said. “Maybe you should go into management.”

  He couldn’t stand the guy. Ten days ago, he’d only disliked him. And, yeah, feared him, just a bit. But the best part of two weeks out in this godforsaken spooky dump with only him, mostly, for company: that had made the difference. The way, for instance, he would lift up out of the chair a bit and noisily break wind without any apology. You could come back into the room and it would stink like a farm where all the cows had dysentery or something. And it had never been part of the deal that he, Diego, would do all the cooking. Well, not cooking, but putting the lousy canned and frozen food together. Still, better that way, maybe; he’d never seen Wallets wash his hands.

  Think of the money, that was the only way.

  One hundred and fifty thousand US dollars.

  Thinking about it was like a drug, an anaesthetic, a drop into sweetness. As soon as Varga had said it, pronounced the figure, it had started to work. Three days, the captain had said; fifty thousand a day. Wow.

  And he’d known, straight away, what he’d do with it.

  A couple of years back, he’d gone south, down to the islands. One of them, one of the small ones with no hotels or clubs or any of that crap, was Paradise. With a capital P. Palm trees leaning over white sand that was silver at night. No traffic, nothing. Nice laid-back people.

  He’d got talking to an old hippy-type guy who ran a bar on the beach. The guy had said, “You know what? I love it here. But I gotta quit, one of these days, soon. The thing is, I can live, okay, but I don’t really make any money. I need to do this, do that, buy stuff, improve the place, you know? And I can’t do it on what I make. I’m like just ticking over. You know what would be beautiful? If I didn’t have to depend on it. If I had a stash of money put away somewhere, so I wasn’t always thinking what the hell do I do if the going gets rough. You know what I mean? So I could just do this for pleasure.”

  Too right.

  And ever since Varga had pitched the scam to him, sitting in the cruiser up the far end of San Pedro, Diego had been dreaming, industriously. He wouldn’t do the place up much. Keep it slightly rough, ethnic, the way the tourists on the boat trips like it. Driftwood furniture. Serve barbecue fish (a boat, he’d have a boat) and lobster, salad, cold beer, not much else. One of those quiet little Japanese generators to run the nice soft lights and the fridge and the music. A house out back behind the trees. A hammock. Yes.

  Except it hadn’t been three days. It had been fourteen, with this farting numbskull extortionist for company. Still. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. God is good, but He makes you wait.

  He checked his watch. An hour since the call from Varga saying that the da Silvas had quit fooling around and come up with the money. Diego was glad that they wouldn’t, after all, have to cut off one of the kid’s ears or some other piece of him. So only three, maybe four hours before he could get the hell out of here.

  He kept going back and forth about Marcia and her kid, whether to take them with him down to the island. She’d love it, of course, cooking and running the joint. Wearing a bikini top and one of those sarong things, the gringo tourists looking at her. And the climate would be good for the kid’s lungs. Get him swimming, and all. Build him up, no more of those doctors’ bills that are the price you pay for sleeping with his mama.

  On the other hand, there was, well, freedom. Freedom from complication. From responsibility. And there are always plenty of girls.

  And it was a girl’s voice he now heard.

  “Hola, Señor! Señor?”

  He swung his feet off the table and grabbed the shotgun.

  Wallets turned away from the TV.

  “What?”

  “Shuddup,” Diego hissed.

  “Hola, Señor! You at home?”

  Wallets got up and pulled the Colt automatic from his shoulder holster and said, “Who the…?”

  “Wallets, for Chrissake.”

  Diego fumbled the table lamp off and pumped the gun. He went to the window and tweaked aside the sugar sack that they’d rigged for a curtain. Wallets went to the door and leaned beside it with the Colt up against his cheek.

  The clear space in front of the house was awash with moonlight and there was a girl, a kid, standing in it.

  She called again. “You in there, Señor?”

  Diego looked at Wallets with a question on his face and Wallets shook his fat head.

  “Señor,” the girl called again. She was starting to sound bored or uncertain. “Señor, if you in there I got a message for you.” Dragging out the last word: yoo-oo.

  Before Diego could do anything about it, Wallets yelled through the door, “Who the hell are you?”

  Diego watched the girl sort of cock her head.

  “Ah, Señor. Good evenin. I brung you a message.”

  Wallets looked over at Diego, whose face was coming and going in the glow from the television. “Who is it?”

  “A girl. I dunno, man.”

  “See anyone else?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay. Poke that damn cannon out the window an’ keep watchin. No, maybe you should slip out round the back. No, wait. Stay there.”

  “Jesus, Wallets, which?”

  “Stay there,” Wallets said, trying to sound professional, and he slipped the door chain along its slot and opened the door a crack.

  “Who are you, girl?”

  The girl said, “Me name Maria, from the village. I brung you a message.”

  Wallets moved round to the other side of the door so that he could see her.

  “What message?”

  “I dunno, Señor. Is written on this piece a paper. I dunno what it say.” She held a hand up level with her face. There was something white in it.

  “I think you should shoot her,” Wallets said.

  “Aw, man,” Diego said. “No. Come on.”

  “Señor?”

  Wallets looked heavy at Diego, then put his mouth to the opening again. “Who give it you?”

  “Some guy. We was hangin out down the dock an’ this boat come in, an’ the man say ten dollars for someone to come up here an’ give this message to the man at house number six.”

  Wallets looked at Diego and Diego looked at Wallets and while they still didn’t know what to do Espirito Santo scored again.

  “Shit,” Wallets said. “You on your own, girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come? You ain’t scared comin up here by yusself?”

  “Fuh ten dollars I ain’t scared. I don’ wanna stand here all night, tho. You want this or not, man?”

  “Okay, girl, just you wait there a minute while I get my pants on.”

  To Diego he said, “What you think?”

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

  “No.”

  “Well, I don’ like it,” Diego said.

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

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

  He went out through the kitchen and unlocked the door and pushed it open with the palm of his hand while he stayed against the wall with his backside against the warped worktop. When n
othing bad happened he went out. He heard the girl call, “Hey, Señor. You find them pants yet? C’mon, man, I ain’t got all night. Jesus.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Faustino lit one of his cigarettes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Blood an’ salt,” Prima said.

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

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

  She glanced up at Faustino uncertainly, then away again.

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

  “How do you know this, Prima?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So who would? Who could do that?”

  Prima looked down at the ground. She muttered something.

  “What?”

  “Paracleto,” Bakula said.


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

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

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

  “Not in here, Paul.”

  “What?”

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

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

  “Okay. So what happens now?”

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

  “And when might that be?”

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

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

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