Текст книги "Red Jungle"

Автор книги: Kent Harrington

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

TWENTY-THREE

He’d spent the afternoon in his room at Carlos Selva’s beach house, trying to put on paper the economic plan Madrid and the coup leaders could use for the privatization of key industries. After securing power, they would have to go to New York immediately to cajole the U.S. bankers to extend credit. They would have to convince Citibank and the rest of them that they could defend their currency if they sold off the national telephone company. The New York bankers, he knew, would be eager to get the investment banking fees from the privatization of the country’s utilities, and could be convinced to cooperate if the Madrid government persuaded them they were pro-capitalist. That was step one.

He couldn’t know what the American State Department would think of the coup, or what kind of response they would get. But because Madrid’s forces were all pro-business, it would be difficult for the Americans to denounce them publicly. After all, he reasoned, they would be doing what the World Bank and the IMF had been asking Latin American countries to do for decades: Open up their markets. The U.S. State Department, he calculated, couldn’t come out and say they supported right-wing generals over capitalist, free-market businessmen who promised to hold elections as soon as the “economic crisis” was over. The Americans would be forced to swallow the coup, he gambled.

Russell wouldn’t be going with them to Washington. He no longer had any interest in anything but Beatrice and the Red Jaguar. He would help Madrid and his party organize themselves, tell them what they needed to do, but that was all. He would take Beatrice out of the country as soon as they secured what treasure he and Mahler could. When Madrid took power, Russell would be in the jungle with Mahler. The confusion in the capital, he hoped, would allow them to get away with their treasure unnoticed. If Carlos were arrested, so much the better.

Was it why he’d suggested the coup? he wondered, stripping off his bathing suit. No. He’d been appalled by the idea of the devaluation. But he realized, turning on the shower, that the country would be too busy fighting with itself—at least for a few days—to be able to stop him and Mahler. He stepped into the shower and let the tepid water hit him. He tried to feel guilty about stealing the Red Jaguar, but couldn’t. The country owed him that much for taking his mother from him.

He saw that Beatrice had stupidly left her bikini bottom on the shower floor. He bent down to pick it up. As he bent to pick it up, he remembered something he’d read at university, something Sartre had said about Algeria. There comes a moment of boomerang when the oppressed become the violent, wild men the colonizers insisted they always were. Would his plan engender a great violence?

It was almost five o’clock in the evening when a maid tapped on his door saying that drinks would be served on the veranda. Russell closed up his computer and left his room. He could see guests coming from other houses down the beach, some of them on fat-wheeled motorcycles. He hadn’t expected it to be so pleasant, seeing his mother’s extended family, all of them excited that he’d come to the party. Several older women spoke to him about how wonderful and elegant his mother had been. Everyone reminded him that she’d owned the house they were standing in. They all spoke to him as if he had never left. He was accepted—this was his place, their expressions seemed to say.

He’d sought out his aunt, a tall, elegant woman who had lived most of her life in Miami. He sat next to her on the veranda, both of them looking out at the sea. They talked about the family plantation. She’d already forgiven him for not going to see her. She seemed to understand that it was too difficult for him.

“I’m glad you came,” his aunt said. She was wearing pedal pushers, despite her age, and an expensive-looking blouse. He imagined that his mother would look like her if she lived now, an attractive older woman. In his memory, his mother was always young. She would be, God, what—in her fifties? What would she think of her son? He would never know.

A few young teenagers played in the surf below the house. One of them had dragged out a large inner tube, riding it into the surf. The waves reflected the orange-red of the setting sun. He turned to look at his cousins and Beatrice, who had come out with the children from the beach. The slight glow of the sunset colored everything, even the faces of his family. He saw Rudy Valladolid sitting with one of his aunt’s daughters. The Senator, in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, nodded to him, and he nodded back. It was so Guatemalan that they would be planning a coup d’état while being entertained by one of its chief victims.

He reached over and put his hand on his aunt’s knee. She smiled at him. They had been talking about the Empire Room at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, how it had been his mother’s favorite place when she came to visit.

“I want to know what happened,” Russell said, suddenly interrupting her. “The whole story. Please. Uncle Pedro wouldn’t tell me the whole story.” His aunt turned to look at him. Russell saw the teenage boy, out in the surf, lifted up on a wave and then disappearing behind it. His aunt glanced at him, then picked up her drink.

“It was the Communists. It was an afternoon like this,” she said. “It happened on the road to Las Flores. We wanted you to believe it was a car crash. Your uncle lied to you. I’m not sorry. How could a little boy understand war?”

“What happened?”

“They left her by the side of the road like an animal.” His aunt reached for his hand. He didn’t really want to know the rest of it.

•••

Spring 1988

Even Isabella’s brother hadn’t had the heart to change their grandfather’s bedroom in the apartment in the capital. It looked exactly the same as the day in 1939 when her grandfather had died, asking for reports about his empire in the jungle. They said he was on the phone with General Somoza in Nicaragua when he died. Sometimes, in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, Isabella could see herself and her brother as children running in the dark corridors, unaware of what was waiting for them.

It would be, Isabella hoped, the same apartment her son would someday inherit, an apartment that said so much about their family and yet told little about the individual men and women who had passed through it. Like all the Cruz homes, it was redolent with the country’s very smell and the family history, which was one man’s fear of poverty, and the achievement of great wealth. Conversations that had changed the history of the country seemed to linger in the dining room, a room that had absorbed all the blood and lust of an entire century.

“Are you my love?” Antonio asked her. Antonio was in love with Isabella, but he was in love with a lot of girls, and she knew that. He was younger; his parents would never, ever, let him marry a divorced woman who was ten years older and had a child, even if she was a Cruz and owned the biggest coffee plantation in Central America.

Isabella looked at him for a moment. They were listening to “Ojala que te vaya bonito” on the stereo. Isabella had bought the record in Mexico, and it was her favorite right now.

There had been a lull in the fighting. The roads were a little bit safer, everyone seemed tired of the fighting, even the communists. She’d driven up to the capital from the plantation, just she and her driver and Olga, her father’s pistol in the glove compartment, the one she’d used to save them nine years before. She’d still been a girl then; now she was a woman. Running the plantation had given her a gravitas that most men found threatening. She’d faced the war without flinching. Her brother had gone to Europe.

She was wearing a white sleeveless dress and white shoes. At 32 she was still girlish, slender and tall. The years of trying to be young were almost over, and the years of running the plantation alone were printed on her beautiful face. There was an authority in her eyes now. Sometimes she’d been able to stand the war, and sometimes, missing her brother, she’d run to Paris to stay with him for months at a time. She was both good and bad. In Paris she took lovers and did drugs, because the young were doing drugs and taking lovers. Her brother, who loved her, made her feel at home in his world– the demimonde of the cinema and pretty people whose coin was sex—but it was still the world of Paris, and not the world of the jungle and the fighting that she’d come to know and rely on to give her strength. She was a very attractive woman who found in sex a power she wasn’t afraid of.

Her son was coming in a week to spend his Easter vacation, and she was planning a wonderful time for him. She’d had the apartment in the capital cleaned, the sheets pulled off the furniture. She’d had the beach house painted, the boat repaired, and hired two American mercenaries to go with them, because Tilapa was as dangerous as it gets. But the Cruzes had always gone to Tilapa in April, war or no war. She’d been there as a child on the beach, and she wanted Russell to go one more time before he was too old. He was almost a man now, and she hoped he was going to be a soldier, something the country needed. Someday, she knew, he would come home and take over the plantation and be ready for whatever life threw at him. He would be a Cruz; she felt it. A powerful man, like her father and grandfather. He would be strong. She had wanted her son, more than anything, to be strong, a man who could take the Cruzes into the new century.

Isabella listened to the melancholy strains of the song as Antonio followed her into her bedroom in the capital. The room smelled of perfume and the old waxed floors. She looked up at the photo of her grandfather and grandmother on horseback. Sometimes her grandfather would come to her like that, on horseback, while she was out with the administrator, the sounds of gunfire coming from further down, towards Mexico. She and her administrator would go out by horseback in the early morning light when it was still cool, riding out to a distant part of the plantation, not knowing who or what was waiting for them.

From where she rode she could see miles and miles of blue green hills, and here and there the red roof of a plantation house in the distance. She’d been called a whore by the men of the country club and the city. People she’d grown up with, all married, couldn’t respect her because she wasn’t married, and because she used men, they said, like a man. It was on one of those mornings, the administrator sliding from his horse and going to talk to one of the shirtless workers clearing the bush, when she turned and saw her grandfather coming up the road on horseback in his frock coat, with his high Spanish forehead and his stern look.

“Mija ven aca,” her grandfather said to her as he rode up into the cafetal. “Is it true you’re sleeping with men in my house?” He slapped her in the face and demanded an explanation. He said she wasn’t a good Catholic. She held her face and told her grandfather that she was holding onto the plantation he’d given them, but she needed men to be happy. She was a woman. She couldn’t stand always being alone. I’m no different than you were, she told him.

“You have a son,” her grandfather’s ghost said.

“I do.”

“What will he think of you?”

“I don’t know,” she’d answered. “I don’t know.”

“I had many wives,” he said. “Some I married, some I didn’t. Maybe you got this from me. I’m burning in hell for it. I don’t want you to. . . . You’re as strong as a man, I can see that. God bless you, my daughter.” He rode away.

Isabella started to cry, spurring her horse toward him to ask him if he’d seen her father. But her grandfather was gone, disappearing into the cafetales with their white flowers.

The administrator was looking at her. Later, he told his wife that Dona Isabella was talking to herself, and it had frightened him. Everyone was going crazy, he said; it was the war. He blamed the war. His wife said Isabella was a whore and would burn in hell for all the men she’d sinned with. The administrator said nothing. Three days later, he stepped on a land mine. He heard the click of the thing before he died. He saw a Piui bird in the sky. And then he was gone. Isabella went on without him.

“Olga. I’m leaving for the party.” Isabella had come into the kitchen. She didn’t always come into the kitchen. It was Olga’s place.

The two women, more like sisters than master and servant, looked at each other. Perhaps it was a premonition. “I don’t know what time I’ll be back,” Isabella said.

“Sí, senora.”

“Olga?”

“Sí, señora.” Isabella had stopped by the doorway

“Are you happy?” she asked Olga. It was an odd question. Isabella wasn’t even sure why she’d asked it. Olga had been married now for a year, and the change in her had been pronounced; Isabella was jealous. She’d never thought she would be jealous of Olga. After all, Olga was deformed, and short, and an Indian; and yet Isabella, the day after Olga’s marriage on the plantation, couldn’t look at her exactly the same way. She loved Olga, she knew that. It was a love she couldn’t have explained to anyone; it was profound, like her love for the land her grandfather had left them.

“Sí, señora.” Olga gave her a rare smile. She was normally serious, and had been that way since they were little girls.

“I’m so glad.” Isabella went back and hugged her. “I’m so very glad,” she said.

For some reason, she decided at the last moment to take her father’s pistol out of her purse. Antonio looked at her as she took the old-fashioned heavy revolver out and laid it on the table by the phone. She had carried it everywhere since the war had started.

Then they left. Five minutes later, her son called from his school, saying that he’d just heard that he was going to the military school he’d applied to in Virginia and he wanted his mother to have the good news. He’d missed his mother by five minutes.

Later, as Olga was making tortillas out in the courtyard, squatting alone, she smelled Isabella’s perfume mixing with the smell of the corn and the wood smoke, and felt uneasy.

Isabella had been at embassy parties before; many, in fact. Mostly they were rich Guatemalan boys from all the best families and American women who worked at the embassy, gold diggers in their thirties from Tennessee and New York. Women who, like Isabella, were certainly not innocent, and were of a certain age that called for certain girlish attitudes to be put aside if they wanted a man. Like the other women at the party, Isabella understood that they were alone, as women of the world are alone. It was the first time that she had an inkling of the idea she was now a woman, not a girl or a male adornment. There was something in the intense expression of one woman she met, a redhead from Chicago; the redhead was a little drunk when Jose introduced them. It was clear from the woman’s body language that she “knew” Antonio very well.

“She helped me with my sister’s passport problems,” Antonio said. Like most men, he was a bad liar. Isabella knew then it was over between them, not because of the woman from Chicago, but because she was too old now for this, and she was tired of chasing her youth. It was over. It ended there in that living room, listening to the Rolling Stones on the stereo.

The war had changed her. She was tired of men like Antonio who saw the war as only an inconvenience, and were anyway spending more and more time out of the country. She felt very alone, looking around the rococo-style mansion that belonged to the Minister of Health.

She felt as if she were meeting herself after a long absence, and the Isabella she met was a stranger. She saw herself for the first time that evening. It was bizarre. She’d never had a really clear picture of herself, not since she’d been a child in boarding school in the United States, when a store clerk– hearing her Latin accent, but not seeing her—called her a Mexican. She wasn’t a Mexican, but she understood what it meant. She was different, and would never forget that the United States wasn’t really her home. The only home she had was out there in that strange place of volcanoes and coffee and warfare and Indians and rain and ghosts. She wanted to tell her son to be something, anything but what Antonio and his kind had become—empty rich boys. She wanted to leave the party then, but Antonio begged her to stay. So she did.

It was late, and there were the loud voices of people who had drunk too much. The stereo was playing rock music from the States. It sounded foreign to her. She preferred Latin music.

She didn’t know where Antonio had gone. She sat in the living room, impassive. The Minister of Health, only forty, was going on about horse racing. Men and women sat on the couches around her. There was a great deal of blue cigarette smoke. She was drinking vodka and was slightly drunk now, and wondered how she would get rid of Antonio, because she had no interest in ever sleeping with him again. Oddly, she was thinking of what she would eat in the morning when the American girl from Chicago hit her on the side of the head with a heavy Mayan stone god. It had been sitting on the coffee table; Isabella had even picked it up and looked at it, only minutes before.

She died instantly, as Mick Jagger began to sing. Everyone who was there would remember the terrible sound of her body falling on the glass table.

Her son was asleep. He slept well and rose to the sound of a bugle, as he had for the last eight years of his life.

TWENTY-FOUR

Beatrice had gotten drunk. At times she would look at Russell across the dinner table, from her place next to her husband. He’d deliberately sat far away from her, between his aunt and Rudy Valladolid.

Alone in his room after dinner, he could hear the sound of an electric generator. The generator’s distant whir had been a pleasant sound over their dessert. They had flan and sweet German wines, the weak lights of the pergola dimming at times. The dinner conversation had been about the World Cup, and how well the American team had done, then turned to children away at college and boarding schools. Russell had barely spoken.

After hearing his aunt’s story about his mother’s death, Russell couldn’t help but spend dinner wondering what his life would have been like had she lived. His aunt told him that the guerrillas had wanted to make an example of her because of who she was.

His aunt and uncle hadn’t wanted him to know that his mother had been murdered. They were afraid that it would be too much for him, so they had made up the lie about a traffic accident. Because they had been Cruzes, the story was easy to fix. They’d even had a newspaper article planted with details of the accident, in case Isabella’s ex-husband made inquiries. He never did, of course. The only thing Russell’s father ever said about his mother’s death was that he’d heard the roads in Central America were dangerous and he wasn’t at all surprised, given how fast his mother drove, that something had eventually happened to her. Russell thought his father seemed relieved that she was gone for good.

His uncle had explained, the day he’d called Russell from Paris, that the war was making it too dangerous for Russell to go to Guatemala for the funeral. “Your mother would want it that way,” his uncle had told him. Russell had decided that his uncle was a coward. He would have gone. He hadn’t been afraid. He felt ashamed. He knew that his mother would want him to go, to be there for her.

After that call, he’d crossed the empty lawn back to his dormitory. The rest of the students were in class, the classroom doors shut. Russell could see the boys bent over their books through the windows as he made his way down the middle of the parade ground, past the flagpole with its plaque dedicated to the boys who’d died “defending” their country. The tips of his shined shoes picked up bits of grass, because they’d just run the mowers.

He’d gone up to his room, taken off his Sam Browne belt and his coat, and lay on the bed. The facts of his situation came and went as he stared out at the winter elm trees. He said “coward” out loud several times. Later, he tried to recover the pistol his mother had used to save their life when he’d been a baby. No one—including his aunt—seemed to know where it had gone.

A few minutes before, he’d heard a plane flying low over the general’s beach house. It was very loud for a moment, then the sound of the engines moved out over the water.

There was a knock on his door. He was reading. It was very late, and he was pretty sure that Beatrice was too drunk, when she’d said good night to the last of her guests, to sneak off and come to his bungalow.

“Yes?” Russell said.

“It’s Carlos.” He heard the general’s voice.

“Come in,” Russell said immediately. It was after one in the morning; he was surprised that Selva wasn’t in bed. The general opened the door and stepped into the room. Russell caught a glimpse of the moon through the open door.

“I’m going out on the lagoon. I thought you might like to come.” Carlos was dressed in shorts and a guayabera. “Just you and I,” Carlos said. “Do you have a pistol? Or something, just in case?”

“Señor Mossberg,” he joked, referring to his shotgun. “It’s rather late, isn’t it?” Russell smiled and closed his book.

“Yes. But I saw your light on,” the general said.

“It’s warm in here,” Russell said. “I suppose it would be cooler out on the water.”

“Good. . . . We don’t want to be caught with our pants down. There’s all types out at night here. You’d better bring the shotgun. I get so tired of bodyguards all the time. I thought we’d go alone,” the general said. Carlos looked at him for a moment. Russell slid his book onto the table next to his bed and stood up.

“You know what the people around here call Tilapa now,” Carlos said.

“No.”

“They call it the Red Jungle. La selva roja, because so many people are murdered either on the lagoon or out in the mangroves.”

“Why?” Russell stood up. He felt odd. The general was looking at him closely. “I suppose I should put on long pants. For the bugs.” The general nodded and sat at the end of the bed. Does he know something? Carlos’s eyes were bloodshot from drinking. Heavily brilliantined and combed straight back, his hair looked almost wet.

“The locals are all doing something illegal with their boats. Cocaine. The planes from Colombia fly over about a mile out from the beach and drop the drugs. The boatmen pick it up and take it by sea to Mexico; it isn’t far. Sometimes bandits come and try to take the coke from them on the lagoon. It’s interesting,” Carlos said. He glanced at Russell’s shotgun in the corner of the room. “Come on. I’ll meet you out at the dock. I’ll tell Beatrice we’re going out. . . . She worries.”

Russell nodded. He went to his pack and took out extra shells for the Mossberg, then slipped on a pair of running shoes and a T-shirt. It dawned on him, as he bent over tying his shoes, that Carlos had learned about him and Beatrice, and was going to kill him.

She might have simply confessed. She had drunk too much at dinner, and with the strange way she’d been acting since he’d arrived, it was certainly possible, he thought.

He walked into the dark bathroom and switched on the light. Beatrice’s bathing suit bottom was gone from where he’d hung it. Damn it. He’d meant to hide it.

The lagoon was moonlit when Carlos yanked the cord on the outboard. He’d kept Russell waiting as he stood on the beach speaking on his cell phone, his back turned. Russell sat in the boat with his shotgun on his knees, looking out at the lagoon that went for miles towards Mexico. He could hear the occasional jaguar, and once or twice heard the loud sound of twin outboard motors heading towards the narrow opening on the lagoon that opened onto the Pacific.

Coming towards the boat, the general tossed a Steyr machine gun to Russell as he climbed in. It was the same boat that Russell and Beatrice had taken out that morning.

“There’s something going on in the capital,” Carlos said, standing over the boat’s engine. He checked the gas tank, opening it and shining a small flashlight down into the reservoir. “That was the U.S. embassy.” He turned and shone the light into Russell’s eyes. “My friend, a friend on the third floor. CIA. . . . They say Madrid is planning a coup.” Carlos began pulling the motor’s cord; the boat, floating out into the lagoon now, rocked under Carlos’s weight as he pulled. His voice was punctuated by the outboard motor’s attempts to start. “Have you heard anything about this, Russell?” As if answering his question, the motor started.

Russell was holding the Steyr on his lap along with the shotgun. He thought for a moment of shooting Carlos immediately, but realized that the sound of it would draw Selva’s bodyguards, and he couldn’t possibly get away. He would be dead before he could cross the lagoon.

“No. Not a thing. But then, how would I know that?” Russell said. “It’s hardly something they’d tell me.”

Carlos sat down. The engine was idling. They looked at each other. Russell could see the beginning of a smile on the general’s face.

“My embassy friends asked me what the fuck you had to do with this. They can’t figure you out, apparently. You’ve appeared on their screen and now you’re a great mystery to them. They don’t like mysteries. They say you’re advising Madrid in regards to the economy, but maybe more,” Carlos said. He turned the throttle up and they moved away from the dock, the lagoon calm. Russell could see that a few of the houses on the spit still had their lights on, the house lights dim and yellow like yellow oil paint.

“The tide is coming in,” Carlos said. It was cool out on the water, much cooler. Carlos was still looking at him. “I suppose I should have the gun now,” Carlos said, smiling at him. “Just in case.”

“I want to thank you . . . for what you did for Katherine,” Russell said. He was gripping the stock of the Mossburg. He slid his hand on the pump end. He wanted to shoot Carlos Selva, who stood in the way of the country’s progress; he was sure of it. He’d cleaned the shotgun and oiled it before leaving his apartment. There was that feel of the oily metal he’d first experienced in military school. He heard the sound of the outboard, felt the water give way under them as the boat speeded up.

He remembered the Greek. He’s just another bully. He turned and looked at the dark shadows of the houses, along the beach.

Don’t I have to? Carlos knew now about their plan and he would, being a good army man, tell President Blanco. He, Russell, could start the coup right now. Carlos was head of the intelligence service. Why not kill him? Russell let his eyes move along the shore. Could he shoot a man in cold blood? Fuck him, he thought. He knew Carlos wouldn’t hesitate to kill him if he knew the truth about him and Beatrice.

“Where are we going?”

“There’s a bar on the town side of the beach. It stays open . . . for the smugglers,” Carlos said.

“How many people have you killed?” Russell asked. He said it over the sound of the motors. He couldn’t just shoot him. He wanted to know. He wanted to tell him that he had to die, or the country would never change.

“Why do you ask?” Carlos said. He didn’t seem shocked by the question.

“I just want to know,” Russell said. “For myself.”

“During the war, you mean? Is it for your article? Not a good idea.”

“No . . . I want to know. Just for myself.”

“Are you going to interview me now? Why not . . . I don’t know how many. Many. You can write that. I killed many communists. People will like to read that in Europe, especially in America. Why not, I’m not ashamed of it. The Americans would have been next. We aren’t that far away from Texas, you know. They’re like cockroaches—the guerillas, you see one, and you know you’ll see more,” Carlos said.

Russell’s cell phone rang. It was surreal, the sound of it now, when he was on the brink of shooting someone. He let it ring. Carlos sat facing him, his right hand steering.

“Can’t get away anymore, can you?” Carlos said. They were going fast, and Selva cut the motor down so he could take the call. Russell glanced at the screen and saw it was a number from the States. He opened the phone.

“I’m coming back.” It was Katherine. He looked at the general.

“Don’t,” Russell said.

“I have to,” she said. “I love you.”

“I can’t talk right now,” he said.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve gotten myself on the human rights delegation, a UN plane. Tomorrow. They wouldn’t dare keep me out of the country. I’m coming with the commissioner herself.”

“Please don’t. It would be a mistake,” he said.

Katherine hung up. He could see the lights now of the little town of Tilapa. They were near the mouth of the lagoon, where it met the ocean. They couldn’t be seen from either the wharf at Tilapa, or the houses on the spit. If he was going to kill Carlos, he had to do it now.

“Who was that? You look upset,” Carlos said.

“It’s the girl. The American girl. She’s coming back. With the UN Commission for Human Rights. She had herself put on the commissioner’s staff.”

“She’s a smart girl. They won’t stop her at the airport. And they won’t dare touch her as long as she stays with the delegation, either.”

“And if she doesn’t stay with the delegation?” Russell said.

“That would be a bad idea,” Selva said. “But love makes people do dangerous things,” he added. “You have to admire her.”

The place where he should have done it passed. It was where he could see the current moving out towards the mouth of the lagoon, towards the ocean. Maybe the body would have been taken out to sea, Russell thought.

The dope boats saved Selva. The first one Russell watched coming through the boiling surf, the men standing very still because they were so overloaded. Two others with twin outboard motors followed the first. They were all overloaded. The lead boat was a big twenty foot tiboronaera with three men aboard, and the words Dios Es Amor—God is Love in red letters on the prow. The gunwales of the boat hovered near the waterline as they approached. Russell could see the bales of coke wrapped in black plastic. One of the young men in the boat, an AK 47 strapped high on his chest, gave them a sardonic wave. The heavy wake rocked them violently as the boat cruised quickly by. They had all recognized Selva, and wouldn’t have dared to touch him.