Everything's Eventual

   "You'll be on the first Delta flight back to Miami," the Bride of Frankenstein said. She spoke without a trace of Spanish accent. "Your passport will be given back to you once the plane has touched down on American soil. You will not be harmed or held here, Mr. Fletcher—not if you cooperate with our inquiries—but you are being deported, let's be clear on that. Kicked out. Given what you Americans call the bum's rush."

   She was much smoother than Escobar. Fletcher found it amusing that he had thought her Escobar's assistant. And you call yourself a reporter, he thought. Of course if he was just a reporter, the Times's man in Central America, he would not be here in the basement of the Ministry of Information, where the stains on the wall looked suspiciously like blood. He had ceased being a reporter some sixteen months ago, around the time he'd first met Núñez.

   "I understand," Fletcher said.

   Escobar had taken a cigarette. He lighted it with a gold-plated Zippo. There was a fake ruby in the side of the Zippo. He said, "Are you prepared to help us in our inquiries, Mr. Fletcher?"

   "Do I have any choice?"

   "You always have a choice," Escobar said, "but I think you have worn out your carpet in our country, yes? Is that what you say, worn out your carpet?"

   "Close enough," Fletcher said. He thought: What you must guard against is your desire to believe them. It is natural to want to believe, and probably natural to want to tell the truth—especially after you've been grabbed outside your favorite café and briskly beaten by men who smell of refried beans—but giving them what they want won't help you. That's the thing to hold onto, the only idea that's any good in a room like this. What they say means nothing. What matters is the thing on that trolley, the thing under that piece of cloth. What matters is the guy who hasn't said anything yet. And the stains on the walls, of course.

   Escobar leaned forward, looking serious.

   "Do you deny that for the last fourteen months you have given

certain information to a man named Tomás Herrera, who has in turn funneled it to a certain Communist insurgent named Pedro Núñez?"

   "No," Fletcher said. "I don't deny it." To adequately keep up his side of this charade—the charade summarized by the difference between the words conversation and interrogation—he should now justify, attempt to explain. As if anyone in the history of the world had ever won a political argument in a room like this. But he didn't have it in him to do so. "Although it was a little longer than that. Almost a year and a half in all, I think."

   "Have a cigarette, Mr. Fletcher." Escobar opened a drawer and took out a thin folder.

   "Not just yet. Thank you."

   "Okay." From Escobar it of course came out ho-kay. When he did the TV weather, the boys in the control room would sometimes superimpose a photograph of a woman in a bikini on the weather map. When he saw this, Escobar would laugh and wave his hands and pat his chest. People liked it. It was comical. It was like the sound of ho-kay. It was like the sound of steenkin batches.

  Escobar opened the folder with his own cigarette planted squarely in the middle of his mouth with the smoke running up into his eyes. It was the way you saw the old men smoking on the street corners down here, the ones who still wore straw hats, sandals, and baggy white pants. Now Escobar was smiling, keeping his lips shut so his Marlboro wouldn't fall out of his mouth and onto the table but smiling just the same. He took a glossy black-and-white photograph out of the thin folder and slid it across to Fletcher. "Here is your friend Tomás. Not too pretty, is he?"

  It was a high-contrast full-face shot. It made Fletcher think of photographs by that semi-famous news photographer of the forties and fifties, the one who called himself Weegee. It was a portrait of a dead man. The eyes were open. The flashbulb had reflected in them, giving them a kind of life. There was no blood, only one mark and no blood, but still one knew at once that the man was dead. His hair was combed, one could still see the toothmarks the comb had left, and there were those little lights in his eyes, but they were reflected lights. One knew at once the man was dead.