They called it
El Pueblo que Llora--The Weeping Village--and common wisdom held that it was extremely haunted. The name came from a combination of the region's heavier-than-normal rainfall, and a quirk of the many bullet and mortar impacts that riddled the abandoned buildings. During the frequent storms, water found its way in through the damaged roofs, and ran down inside the plaster walls to emerge in dribbling waterfalls through the holes.
In a truly torrential downpour the effect was hardly noticeable; just one of many streams lost in the cloudy gloom. But on those days of bright grey drizzle, when the rain fell lightly, and it had time to pool and collect before emerging all at once, the impression became overwhelmingly that the sad, empty buildings were crying for what they had lost.
It was on a day like this that Alberto Maria returned to his birthplace.
He was 68 and it showed. Broad shoulders sloped increasingly downwards, and his face was more cratered than the mountainsides he had enjoyed climbing in his youth. He usually wore a patch over his bad eye, but had neglected to do so today, and the sightless organ displayed the same colour as the cloudy sky.
In the small courtyard of his parents' home he came to a full stop. It felt as though he had been in constant motion for the last 44 years, always running--ostensibly toward something, but actually just away from something else. Even after almost half a century spent building his nerve to return to the town, it had taken another hour wandering the overgrown streets before he could bring himself to stand here before the two nameless graves.
The yard looked wrong. It was crumbling, and overgrown, and his parents bodies were buried a few feet beneath it, but Alberto had expected all of that. There was definitely something else. He realized with a start that the tree planted at its centre had changed species! When last he stood here it had been a smallish ficus. Sometime between now and then its body had been coopted by the strangling vines of a banyan, and the invader had grown to supplant the ficus entirely.
Alberto wondered if the tree he remembered had had time to rot away yet, leaving the banyan hollow, or if it was still in there somewhere.
He sat himself down on the spidery roots with a grunt, and shook the rain out of his broad hat. With legs spread, he leaned forward and clasped his hands, staring at the two simple crosses in a universal posture of thoughtfulness. He remembered what had brought things to this. It had all felt right at the time. It had felt good and just.
God help him, it had felt fun.
******
12,000 feet above the Amazon Basin, a tattooed man in saffron robes swung a Morningstar at Alberto's head. He thrust up his twelve-gauge reflexively, and the weapon tetherballed around its barrel with a scream of crushed metal. Bobbing forward, Alberto delivered a swift headbutt to the excommunicated monk's nose, and splashed blood across the cream upholstery of the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser.
He was 22 and working for the CIA. It was the best time of his life.
Lin Zhao, the Buddhist anti-monk, tore a gleaming kukri from somewhere inside his robes and sliced forward. Alberto jerked backward in time with the strikes, then stepped abruptly inside the man's guard and caught his arm in mid-swing. He ducked forward so that he stood behind Zhao, dragging the arm with him, and delivered a downward kick to the man's instep. As Zhao toppled forward, Alberto twisted the already straining wrist and broke it in two places. He was about to finish him off when a slew of bullets ripped through the ceiling from the Boeing's second floor and did the job for him.
Blood dripped through the bulletholes, and 46 years in the future Alberto opined how much they resembled tears in the rain.
"Alberto! Alberto are you down there?" Cortez was shouting through the newly opened holes. The sound of martial arts and German cursing was clearly audible as well. "I have Gottlieb, but he set the bomb. Get to the parachutes if you can."
At exactly that moment a torrent of black-masked mercenaries came tumbling into the cabin, wearing combat vests and what appeared to be the plane's entire compliment of parachutes. The lead one pulled out a bloody hatchet and immediately charged Alberto with a yell.
"Cortez, take the cockpit. Put us into a climb!" Alberto shouted, then took the mercenary's axe from him in a flurry of punches and broken fingers. He reversed his grip on the weapon and punched his opponent in the face with all the weight of its sturdy wood handle, then reversed his grip again and brought the blade across his throat in a horizontal sweep.
Alberto turned to run towards the front of the plane, hopping over Lin Zhao's body as he went, and the many remaining mercenaries piled after him up the narrow aisle. The instant Alberto felt the floor begin to tilt he turned to face them, and delivered a withering hatchet blow into the shoulder of the nearest one. As the man staggered and screamed, Alberto reached forward and pulled the pin on one of the grenades strapped to his combat webbing, then leaned back and slammed a long kick into his chest.
The man fell backwards, then kept falling as the plane's angle of ascent grew steeper. He tumbled into his comrades, forcing them back, and then over their heads as they grabbed onto chairs for support. He fell a few feet more, and then exploded in a crack of scarlet that zipped out the ragged hole it made in the side of the plane as quickly as it formed.
Alberto released his own hold on an armrest and dropped straight down, landing on a startled mercenary and riding him straight out the hole in a cyclone of table trays and screaming bodies. As soon as they were in open air, Alberto loosened his grip, maneuvered around the man in free fall, and separated the parachute from his stunned body. He calmly kicked the man away from him, distancing himself from the falling debris cloud with the same motion, and slipped the parachute onto his own back.
As mercenaries falling below him began deploying their chutes, Alberto kept his own in its pack and moved among them like a bird of prey: dropping from above and severing the parachute ropes with a liberated hatchet. When the last one had been dealt with thus, Alberto finally deployed his own chute and watched their bodies fall rapidly away from him.
Riding thermals that rose from the steamy jungle, Alberto steered himself over the lip of a mountainous ridge, and down the opposite side toward the city it concealed. Within minutes he settled onto a flat rooftop patio and cut the lines of his chute so that it drifted on without him. Shortly afterward, Cortez and a terrified ex-Nazi scientist landed beside him. Looking back along their path of flight, Alberto saw the sooty smudge that marked the Stratocruiser's destruction.
"It was a nice try, Herman," Cortez was saying. "You almost had us back in Caracas. And don't think I'll forget that fact when we're in the interrogation room either."
"Movement on the street," Alberto said, all businesslike, but still quietly riding the adrenaline. "Two motorcycles and a Jeep. Looks like the Belgian." A bullet buzzed inches past his head and buried itself in the wall behind him. "Definitely the Belgian."
"That slimy prick," said Cortez, chambering a round in his Walther and taking Herman more firmly by the scruff of his neck. "I'm going to enjoy this."
******
The yellow-brown earth was painfully hot on Alberto's knees and ankles as he knelt on the ground with thirty other young men. Soldiers in olive fatigues and Castro hats watched them with AKs, and some local magistrate or functionary did paperwork under a parasol nearby. Alberto squinted through the bright sun as the man picked up the stack of documents in both hands and straightened them against the desk.
He was 17 and the papers contained his death warrant.
The officer or secretary or whatever the hell he was--even 51 years later Alberto never knew--stood before the kneeling prisoners and began speaking loudly in Dutch. They were in the courtyard of a banana plantation a short distance outside Paramaribo, and Alberto did not know the language. The words "misdaden," "uitgevoerd," and "schuldig" were repeated often, however, and he quickly decided he didn't like the way they sound.
The speech droned on, and Alberto--flush in the passions of youth and Latin blood--found himself yelling for them to just get on with it, until the butt of a rifle smashed him into the dry ground. When he rose again he was woozy, and it took a moment for him to resolve his vision of the firing line taking up position in front of him. To his spinning head the barrels of their weapons, seen dead on, seemed to arc back and forth like the curve in a hall of infinite mirrors.
The men to Alberto's left and right were crying silently. The functionary had taken up a position off to one side, safely outside splatter range. He had gotten to the second stage of the Dutch equivalent of 'ready, aim, fire,' when a strident voice cut over top of him.
The most beautiful woman Alberto had seen in his life came marching into the courtyard, and began shouting in authoritative Dutch. At first the soldiers seemed angry at the intrusion, but they quickly wilted under her tirade. Alberto followed none of the conversation, until the woman turned and pointed right at him, and two soldiers leapt to muscle him out of the line.
"Come with me," the woman said in English, then turned and walked brusquely away. Alberto turned to look at the men who had been about to kill him; they gaped at her retreating figure, and the functionary gave Alberto a bewildered shrug. Alberto hesitated a moment more, then hurried after the woman, his hands still tied behind him.
He caught her up at the edge of the plantation, just in time to hear a chord of synchronous gunshots behind him. Alberto whirled and stopped, but the woman never even slowed down, and after a moment Alberto followed her once more.
They rounded the corner with Alberto only slightly behind, only he was forced to a surprised stop once again when he saw the cherry-red 1967 Ferrari Spyder convertible waiting for them. This final shock was too much to bear, and it broke Alberto out of his silence.
"Senora!" he shouted. She turned at the door of the car. "Senora, please. Could you do something about ...?" Alberto gestured with his tied hands. The woman stared blankly at him for a moment, as though not comprehending the problem, then removed a switchblade from her pocket and tossed underhanded. The knifle clunked into Alberto's chest and dropped to the ground.
"Figure it out," she said, and began getting into the car. Alberto hurriedly dropped into an awkward crab position and scrabbled the knife out of the dirt with his hands still behind his back. He clambered back to his feet and hopped into the convertible just as it began to pull away. A clumsy few minutes passed as Alberto tried to get his feet all the way into the vehicle, and lean forward enough to bring the blade to bear against his bonds.
"Who the hell are you, lady?" he finally asked, rubbing his newly freed wrists.
"Speak to me like that again and see what happens," she said, throwing the car into a perfectly executed hairpin turn onto the main road. Alberto felt a haughty reply bubbling up, but some glimmer of common sense told him to swallow it. The woman was silent for a moment, then gave a curt nod of approval.
"My name is Anastasia but you can call me ma'am. You work for me now."
Alberto spent a moment processing this, then asked where they were going.
"The guerrilla camps," she replied simply.
"I've already been to the guerrilla camps. That's what got me a death sentence."
"No, getting caught got you a death sentence. Everything was going very well until you decided to sleep with Colonel Rodrigo's daughter."
"You know about that?"
"I know about everything, I'm CIA. And now so are you.
Alberto spent a considerably longer moment processing that. Then asked merely, "Why?"
She shrugged. "Like I said, everything was going well until you were caught. You have talent. And if you let that give you a big head, I'll take a few chunks out of it to bring you back down to size."
They drove in silence for a while, taking the curves of the Surinamese road with reckless speed. Finally, with uncharacteristic demurity, Alberto asked "If I'm CIA now, shouldn't I have a gun?"
Anastasia reached immediately under her seat and tossed Alberto a loaded Browning 1911. She then removed a stopwatch from her blouse and clicked it off.
"Fourteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds. If you ever go that long without a weapon again it's probably because you're already dead,"
She cocked an eyebrow and looked sidelong at him.
"We'll work on that."
******
Alberto sat at the scuffed laminate tabletop in his parents' kitchen as his mother bustled about. A window had been cracked over the crowded stove, and pleasant breezes blew in from the ficus-shaded courtyard. Steaming dishes and crumbly pastries were stacked in front of Alberto, who laughed at the way his mother talked and hummed to herself throughout her perambulations around the room.
He was 24 and it was the first time he had been home in 7 years.
Alberto's mother brought over another platter of empanadas and he halfheartedly pushed her away, holding his stomach and groaning.
"Mama, no, you are going to kill me! I'm not seventeen anymore!"
She smacked him sharply on the back of the head and dropped the plate in front of him with a clatter.
"You have seven years of my cooking to catch up on, and you will finish every bite. They make you soft in that big city."
Alberto patted his belly again. "The only thing making me soft is these picarones. My employer gives fitness tests you know."
"Well then your mysterious employer will have his work cut out for him. You're not leaving until you're as big as your papa."
This drew a half-awake snort from the courtyard, where Alberto's father was dozing peacefully in the afternoon sun. As he continued working his way through the massive meal, his mother sat down heavily opposite him, and cast a sharp eye over her only child. Alberto could see where this was going, and swallowed his bite of empanada, wiping his mouth with a napkin. His mother held up her hands.
"You don't visit, you don't call, you barely write. All we know is that you were alive somewhere--Argentina, Colombia, Nicaragua, Belize--a month ago when you wrote the letter. What way is this to treat your parents who love you? What sort of life is this?"
Alberto held up a hand. "Mama, please, I will not lie to you, but I cannot say more. Just that it was not safe before, and now it is." Now that General Corazon is dead, he did not say. Now that the dozen corrupt regimes that danced to his tune had been put down, and the seven Soviet nukes were accounted for.
"I could not return home until now, but believe me when I say it was the very first thing I had planned for when it became possible. Please don't stay mad at me, mama, I beg you."
His mother glowered for a few moments more, then stood up and kissed him on the forehead.
"Always such a charmer, this one," she said. She turned back to the stove. "I make you arroz con polo. Stay there."
Alberto smiled and tucked his napkin into his collar, holding his utensils in each hand with exaggerated anticipation. In his suitcase there was a Heckler & Koch MP5 and 18 inches of piano wire, which he had no intention of giving up, but for the moment he was content to wield knives of the butter and steak variety.
His mother rapped sharply on the window glass and yelled for his father to come in and eat something as well, peppered with a few choice words about how much of the day the old goat could sleep through. Alberto smiled affectionately, and felt the warmth of good food and family glow through him. Outside it was just beginning to rain.
******
Back on the roots of the banyan tree, Alberto sagged with a bone deep weariness. He had not known then--no one had known--just how many of General Corazon's loyalists still remained active, or how willing they would be to exact vengeance for their dead leader. Alberto had been in San Salvador when he heard the news, and by the time he got there even the smoke had faded.
Water gurgled out of the holes in the walls and ran across the cracked and dirty flagstones. There was a bouquet of flowers in Alberto's suitcase, along with a finely crafted icon of Santa Maria, but neither seemed appropriate to leave here now. He looked around the ruined courtyard and the simple grave markers, and suddenly he stood up.
He went around to the back of the house, where the small tool shed was practically horizontal with rot and disuse. He pulled the disintegrating door clear off its hinges and selected an axe from the mouldering pile. The head had rusted, but the handle--so carefully varnished by his father--was still sturdy. He muscled the foot-powered grindstone into position and set about sharpening the blade.
When it was keen and gleaming once more, Alberto took the axe with him back into the courtyard. He stood there a moment, then delivered a shivering chop to the trunk of the banyan. Albert's arms were still strong, and his technique was perfection, and the tree quickly quivered and split under his attentions.
Great hunks of ropy wood peeled away and clattered to the ground around him. Spurts of water, funnelled downwards through the tree's tubular interior, burst like arterial blood as he hacked steadily deeper. At last the banyan's innermost hollow lay bare, revealing the withered husk of the ficus Alberto remembered from childhood. It was a black and twisted shadow of its old self, but as he looked closer Alberto realized that a few miniscule green shoots still extended from it; soaking up whatever meagre water and light filtered this far down into the banyan.
Alberto let the axe fall to the ground, and stood for a time before the open tree; raw like an exposed nerve. Then he brushed the wood dust from his shoulders and retrieved his hat from the ground, shaking the excess water off it once more.
Alberto left the town without looking back, and behind him somewhere the ficus turned its leaves to the emerging sun.
