The Assignment

20

The cellar was large and cold with a concrete floor and whitewashed walls. Along one of the walls stood a wooden table on trestles and under it was an old ammunition box with rope handles and metal edges. To the right of the table was a gray steel door.

Along the opposite wall stood the six Communist delegates. They were still bound, but the police had now fastened the handcuffs to staples in the wall and they could no longer leave their places. The woman was leaning with her head and shoulders against the wall, but the rest were standing more or less upright, rocking on the soles of their feet.

In the middle of the room Lieutenant Brown was standing with his legs apart and his hand on the butt of his revolver, and along one wall stood three policemen in white uniforms. Their machine guns lay in a row on the wooden table a yard or two away from them.

The steel door opened and the Chief of Police came into the room.

He was bare-headed but otherwise was dressed according to regulations, in boots and newly pressed uniform with his gun in his belt and the strap diagonally across his chest.

"Good day," he said. "My name is Behounek."

He placed himself a few yards from Lieutenant Brown and looked at the prisoners with benevolent interest.

"You are condemned to death," he said. "The execution will take place by firing squad but without military honors. It’s due to take place at nine-thirty, that is, in …"

He looked at his watch.

"… exactly twenty-five minutes. The formal sentence will be read out to you immediately before the execution."

He looked at the floor for a moment and rubbed his lower lip with his right forefinger.

"Well," he said. "Which of you is El Campesino?"

The Cuban raised his head and looked at him. The man had watchful brown eyes; he was frightened, but not without a trace of defiance and expectation.

"Set him free," said Behounek.

Then he turned around and went over to the table, pulled out the box, and selected something from it-a lead pipe about a foot long and two inches in diameter. He weighed it in his hand.

The Cuban was free and had taken three steps away from the wall. He was standing with his head bowed, massaging his wrists to get the blood circulating normally again.

Behounek walked across the floor, very calmly, and without taking his eyes off the man for one moment. One step away from him he stopped, bit his lower lip, and rocked his body a little with his heels off the floor. Then he hit the Cuban a tremendous blow on the back of his neck with the lead pipe.

The man fell headlong and for a few seconds lay still on his knees and forearms. It looked as if he were alive, but he was probably already dead; he fell at once onto his side and lay immobile with his eyes open and knees drawn up.

Behounek turned around, took two steps toward the wooden table, and threw the lead pipe back into the box. Then he returned to the wall.

It was absolutely quiet in the room.

Again he rubbed his forefinger along his lower lip and looked at the prisoners in turn. Finally he stopped in front of the woman, who was standing farthest to the left in the row.

"Carmen Sánchez," he said absently. "Beautiful Carmen Sánchez."

The girl had short black hair and was wearing faded jeans, Wellington boots, and a dark-blue blouse.

Behounek gripped the front of her blouse and ripped it down so that the buttons spun off. Underneath she was wearing an ordinary bra, clean and white against the dark skin. He stuck his forefinger in the middle and tore it apart. She cried out in pain as the straps cut into her sides and back. The cry was shrill and childish. Then he thrust his hands between her trousers and the brown elastic skin and jerked. He did not succeed at first and a vein in his temple swelled as, with a tremendous effort, he tore her jeans and pants apart.

The only sound to be heard in the room was the noise of rending material and ripping seams.

He took a step back and looked at her. Her breasts did not look especially firm and her nipples were round and small and pale brown. She was not as thin as one would have thought, seeing her dressed. The skin of her stomach was a trifle slack, as if she had once given birth to a child, and the hair below was sparse and reddish brown.

From her body rose a faint smell of sweat and enclosed body warmth.

"Not much," he said.

Then he looked at his watch and said to the policemen: "You’ve got nineteen minutes. Do what you like with her."

Lieutenant Brown leaned over the man on the floor and said: "I think he’s dead, sir."

"Shoot him anyway," Behounek said, and left the room.

Manuel Ortega was sitting in the visitor’s chair in the Chief of Police’s room. He was pale and sweating and his hands trembled as he struck a match and tried to light one of his dust-dry cigarettes.

Behounek came into the room, unbuttoned his tunic, and flung himself into the swivel chair behind his desk.

He bit his thumbnail thoughtfully and seemed to look beyond the other man to a point far away. Then he said: "Have you ever killed anyone? I mean actually-by force?"

"No."

"Then you’ve got something to be thankful for."

Manuel stared at him.

"You see, the first time one kills, one burns one’s boats in some way. One deprives oneself forever of the right to what one has left behind on the other side. One cannot gather any of it up. It’s lost and gone."

"What is lost and gone?"

"It’s hard to explain, and besides, it’s supposed to be the same for everyone, but I find that hard to believe. If I say that you can never live again as you lived before, that you can’t love, can’t feel you’re yourself and be happy about it, not even sleep with a woman or get dead drunk, then of course you won’t believe me. Nevertheless it’s true. You can, of course, do all that, live, be happy, sleep with women, whatever you want to do, but you can only do it in a technical sense. Your technique can be improved, but it’s all a bluff. You can never deceive yourself, at least not for long. You soon realize that."

"You’re really destructive."

Behounek rose from his chair, laughed, and walked around the desk.

"Isn’t it absurd?" he said. "Isn’t it absolutely ridiculous to think that I was once a happy man? Yes, it’s true. I remember it very well. Together with a woman. Sometimes I wake in the night and think I remember what it feels like."

He paused.

"Now it even seems absurd that I still have a wife and children sitting in a house somewhere, having a good time, and even thinking about me occasionally. But it’s true. I have a wife and children."

"I, too," said Manuel Ortega.

"You’re right of course. I am destructive, in my way. Often I feel as if I had for months and years vegetated in a mad distorted picture of the world, in which all meaning is perverted and where everything is wrong or must soon become so. But which of us do you think is the most destructive, I with my monomania or you with your sick desire to please everyone? Although you know all the time that you’re inadequate? There are perhaps a hundred thousand people in this province whom you’ve led astray with your talk and your actions. You’ve built a tall lookout tower for them. From up there they could see in perspective an existence and a future which will never materialize. Where is that building today?"

"It’s collapsed."

"And who knocked it down?"

"I did."

"Have you thought that if your crack shot on the ledge hadn’t been so quick on the draw, you would have been, for ten years or more, a martyr and a hero of this province? Perhaps they’d have put up a statue of you in the middle of the plaza."

The sound of a distant salvo of shots penetrated through the stone walls, and then another. Behounek pricked up his ears and counted on his fingers. Then he mumbled: "El Campesino, Irigo, Carmen Sánchez, El Rojo Redondo. They’ve lived with me for eight months. So palpably, here in this room. Now they’ve gone. And I am left."

He began buttoning up his tunic and then he picked up his belt from the desk.

"Well, Ortega, where shall we eat? At the club?"

"I suppose so."