Bel Canto(9)

What the General was asking was, did he have a mole in his organization, did the President receive word of an attack? But the Vice President was dazed from the blow and feeling bitter besides, bitterness being a first cousin to the truth. “He wanted to watch his soap opera,” Ruben Iglesias said, and in the hushed and obedient room his voice traveled to every ear. “He wanted to see if Maria would be freed tonight.”

“Why were we told he would be here?”

The Vice President gave it up without hesitation or remorse. “He had agreed to attend and then he changed his mind.” There was an uneasy shifting of bodies on the floor. The people who didn’t know were as appalled to hear it as the ones who had known all along. Ruben Iglesias had at that exact moment ended his own political career. There had been no great love between him and Masuda to begin with, and now Masuda would ruin him. A vice president worked hard because he believed someday the office would be handed down, like property passed from father to son. In the meantime he bit his lip, took the dirty jobs, the ceremonial funerals, visits to earthquake sites. He nodded appreciatively through each of the President’s interminable speeches. But on this night he no longer believed he would someday be the President. Tonight he believed he would be shot along with some of his guests, possibly all of his guests, possibly his children, and if that was the case, he wanted the world to know that Eduardo Masuda, a man barely one centimeter taller than himself, was home watching television.

The Catholic priests, sons of those murdering Spanish missionaries, loved to tell the people that the truth would set them free, and in this case they were exactly correct. The General named Benjamin had cocked his gun and was prepared to make an example by dispatching the Vice President into the next world, but the soap opera story stopped him. As much as he was sick to know that five months of planning for this one evening to kidnap the President and possibly overthrow the entire government were worthless and he was now saddled with two hundred and twenty-two hostages lying before him on the floor, he believed the Vice President’s story completely. No one could make it up. It was too petty and small-minded. General Benjamin had no qualms about killing, believing from his own experience that life was nothing more than excruciating suffering. If the Vice President had said the President had the flu, he would have shot him. If he had said the President was called away on urgent matters of national security, he would have shot him. If he had said it was all a ruse and the President had never planned on attending the party at all, bang. But Maria, even in the jungle where televisions were rare, electricity sketchy, and reception nonexistent, people spoke of this Maria. Even Benjamin, who cared for nothing but the freedom of the oppressed, knew something of Maria. Her program came on in the afternoons from Monday to Friday, with a special episode on Tuesday nights which more or less summarized the week for those who had to work during the day. If Maria was to be freed, it was not surprising that it should happen on a Tuesday night.

There was a plan, and that plan had been to take the President and be gone inside of seven minutes. They should be out of the city by now, speeding their way over the dangerous roads that led back to the jungle.

Through the windows, bright red strobe lights flashed across the walls accompanied by a high-pitched wailing. The sound was nagging and accusatory. It was nothing, nothing like song.





two

all night long the outside world bellowed. Cars skidded and sped. Sirens arrived, departed, flicked off and on and off again. Wooden barricades were dragged into place, people were herded behind. It was surprising how much more they could hear now that they were lying down. They had the time to concentrate—yes, there went the shuffling of feet, that was the sound of a baton being smacked into an open palm. The ceiling had been memorized (light blue with crown molding that was elaborate to the point of being tasteless, scrolling and spiraling and every inch of it leafed in gold, the three chipped holes left by bullets) and so guests closed their eyes to settle into the serious business of listening. Voices, exaggerated and mangled through the bullhorn’s amplification, shouted instructions towards the street, made demands towards the house. They would settle for nothing short of unqualified, immediate surrender.

“You will put your guns down outside the door,” the voice raged, loud and distorted as if it had bubbled up from the ocean floor. “You will open the door and exit before the hostages, hands on the backs of your heads. Next, the hostages will proceed through the front door. For the purposes of safety, hostages should keep their hands on the top of their heads.”

When one voice had completed its pitch the bullhorn was handed off to another, who began it all over again with subtle variations of the threats. There were a series of loud clicks and then an artificial blue-white light spilled through the living-room window like cold milk and made everyone squint. At what point had their problems been discovered? Who had called these people in and how was it possible that so many of them had assembled so quickly? Did they wait together in the basement of some police station, wait for a night just like this? Did they practice the things they would say, shouting through bullhorns to no one, making the pitch of their voices go higher and higher. Even the guests knew that no one would put down his guns and walk out the door simply because he was told to do so. Even they understood that every time the demand was issued the chances of it being answered favorably receded. Each of the guests dreamed that he or she was in possession of a secret gun, and if they had such a gun they would certainly never throw it down the front porch steps. After a while they were so tired they forgot to wish that this had never happened, or to wish that they had never come to the party. All they wished was for the men outside to go home, turn off the bullhorns, and let them all have a night’s sleep on the floor. Every now and then there would be a few free moments when no one was speaking, and in that false and temporary quiet a different kind of noise would come forward, tree frogs and locusts and the metallic clicking of guns being loaded and cocked.