Death of the Guatemalan Colonel Guillermo

The Death of the Guatemalan Colonel Guillermo is the second of the ex-Times man's accidental killings, a scene of grotesque, almost farcical violence that unfolds in a deserted mall restaurant. Having pursued the notorious death squad commander across the globe, the ex-Times man finally corners him, only to find that his vengeance takes a form he neither planned nor fully comprehends. The event stands as a dark meditation on the nature of retribution, chance, and the strange physics of violence, where a single reflexive gesture—a spit—becomes the instrument of death.

The Confrontation in the Empty Restaurant

The scene is set in a room otherwise empty of diners, the waiters having disappeared, leaving the two men alone with the restaurant's owner. The owner, who introduces himself as Guillermo, crushes his cigarette, stands, and saunters over to sit opposite the ex-Times man, smiling a bright, blinding smile of capped teeth. "I am Guillermo your host," he says, a greeting that immediately establishes his control over the space. The ex-Times man, feeling bold and suicidal, responds, "And I am the avenging angel." The claim is met with derision. Guillermo, tilting his chair back on its rear legs, laughs and tells him, "You are not the first to make this claim, but certainly, of those, the least prepossessing." He is genuinely amused by his own wit, and his laughter cascades from his mouth of white teeth, so much so that the ex-Times man can see his pink palate and the fleshy flap of his uvula.

The Spit and the Fall

The confrontation turns physical in an instant. The two young government men who accompany the ex-Times man, without appearing hurried, are suddenly standing behind him, one at each shoulder, pinning his shoulders to his chair. In a mindless rage, the ex-Times man strains against their grip, half rises, lunges, and spits in the face of the notorious death squad commander. Guillermo instinctively jerks backward, and the motion carries him over, his chair tipping. For an instant, the ex-Times man sees the new unscored leather soles of Guillermo's shoes. What follows is a cacophony of chair splinterings and shouts, a lungful of breath bassobelched from a body, and then the sound of a skull cracking against a mall restaurant floor of wood-grained plastic affixed to a concrete base.

The Two Sounds of Death

The ex-Times man later reflects that the sound of a skull cracking against the mall restaurant floor is less resonant than the sound made by a skull cracking against a brick lawn-retaining wall. They are different sounds, of different pitch, and he wonders whether the quality of skull bone may have something to do with it. This comparison is not idle. It connects this death to an earlier one, the old man in Cincinnati, whose skull cracked against a brick lawn-retaining wall. The distinction matters because of what it reveals about the ex-Times man's knowledge: whereas he knew immediately that the old man in Cincinnati was dead, he did not know, running through the mall parking lot toward the L.I.E., that he had spit the Guatemalan colonel to death. The violence is so reflexive, so much a product of mindless rage rather than deliberate intent, that its fatal consequence escapes him entirely.

The Aftermath and the Revelation

The ex-Times man learns of his own act of killing not through any immediate awareness but through the newspaper. It is not until he reads his Times the next morning that he learns he had struck again. The detail is crucial: his identity as a killer is mediated by the press, by the public record, rather than by his own experience. He is, in a sense, a reader of his own crimes. The event thus becomes a strange inversion of the avenging angel persona he claimed in the restaurant. He announced himself as an instrument of divine justice, but his actual deeds are chaotic, accidental, and only legible to him after the fact, through the same journalistic medium he once served as a Times man. The death of Guillermo is not a clean execution but a messy, unintended consequence of a gesture of contempt, and the ex-Times man's flight through the mall parking lot toward the L.I.E. is the flight of a man who does not yet know he is a killer again.