6. The Ceramicist

Dr. Vandyck explains the "additional capabilities" of John Spillers

Previously—In episode 5, The Hawk’s Bells, we learned that in 1518, John Spillers went to a small Taino village in Aymamio to collect gold (what is now Aguadilla, Puerto Rico). When he discovered there was none to be had, he killed every man, woman, and child. Brutally. All except the young boy Hayuya, who we learn, is actually the teenage version of Santiago (a mysterious old jibaro who, in 1950, was sent to la Princesa prison San Juan). Observing the events of 1518 through an aperture portal at Area J, Dr. Vandyck explains that the event stream is not simply a mathematical construct, but more like a highly complex biological system—what she calls a consciousness producing biome. Further, that some humans have the ability to alter their energetic luminescence in ways that are not fully understood. One example of this is Spillers, who she describes as an aberration threatening to destabilize the event stream. Another example is Santiago, who she mentions is a shape shifter. Her theory is that these two men are on a collision course, and that the event stream has deployed Santiago as a sort of countermeasure to Spillers, in an attempt to set itself back into equilibrium.

In this episode—We find out about one of Spillers additional capabilities, alluded to by Dr. Vandyck in the previous episode. We also watch as Captain Sepulveda greets a visitor to building one—an FBI interrogator sent by station chief John Spillers. On the face of things, the purpose of this man’s visit is to demonstrate interrogation techniques, but Sepulveda doesn’t quite trust him. For good reason.

Area J

Dr. Vandyck looks out at the audience members in the dark meeting room—rows of Easter Island heads, stiffly bowing and leaning this way and that. They need more time to process this information she thinks. Gripping the lectern, she speaks. “I’d like to follow up on something from a moment ago. If you’ll recall, I mentioned that Mr. Spillers has access to additional capabilities. I’d like to show you exactly why I hold that belief.”

She pivots to face the aperture, shifting her stance again, into neutral position. The white galaxies of spiral dots come back into view up on the viewport, warping and reconstituting into different arrangements of clumpiness, until eventually, everything stabilizes to render a view that appears to show an office. Something is off. A long leather couch has been pushed out from the wall, and a man is lying down on a carpet.

“This is Sunday, August 27, 1950.” Vandyck begins. “We’re looking at the office of FBI Station chief John Spillers. The man on the floor has just been killed. We’re not here for him. I want you to take a look at the man standing up, holding the gun. Anton Ramler. He’s just shot Mr. Spillers six times, and realizes he’s about to die.”

They watch as Ramler stares directly into the aperture viewport. It’s a hurried gesture of defeat, lasting longer than a moment—eyes flitting around, parched and sad, attempting to drink in every last drop of his surroundings—trying to piece together answers. Vandyck’s mouth curls downward as her eyebrows crinkle up. She knows what comes next. The others do not. Spillers clamps his hands around Ramler’s skull in a vise-like gable grip, crushing his head like a grape. They see coils of pink matter shooting out of his ears, like a pimple bursting open. Vandyck feels another itch from the second row. 

“We’re not here to see this,” she says flatly, not moving her eyes from the aperture. “We’re here to see what happens next.”

Up on the viewport, Ramler’s body goes limp, falls to the floor. For a moment, Spillers stands above him, motionless, his long fingers barely swaying as they dangle down low by his sides. Ramler’s face is frozen in a half smile, his lips slightly parted. Spillers kneels down next to him on the floor, squashing bits of brain below his knees in the process. He pushes Ramler’s head away, so that his right ear faces up, and with his left hand, presses down on the dead man’s head, just above the ear. For a moment, it looks as though he’s going to flatten his head. Instead, he leans in close, his face maybe a foot away from Ramler’s head, and peers into his ear as though expecting to find something. Without breaking his gaze, Spillers’ right hand reaches back, and those spindly meat probers search the floor for ravioli-sized pieces of brain. He scoops one up, brings it to his mouth, and holds it there, softly breathing on it. He mouths a word, then pushes it into Ramler’s ear. Using his left hand, he spreads apart Ramler’s outer ear—to widen the opening. And with his right index finger, pushes a piece of brain back in, then leans in and blows softly into the hole.

Afterwards, he straightens up, still gazing into the ear, and sends his right hand back to search for another piece of Ramler’s brain. Spillers moves quickly, methodically—at times breathing for a full minute or longer on a specific piece, turning it over and over in the palm of his right hand with his thumb—working it, kneading it—like a ceramicist. The Area J operators watch in complete silence for several hours as Spillers goes about this work. There are times when a single piece takes several minutes, and Spillers recites what seems to be a weighty tomes of words into a scrap of pulpy matter no bigger than a peanut, as though whispering poems into a tiny microphone. Everyone in the meeting room, watching this through the aperture, including Vandyck, is baffled.

Spillers, of course, is the only one who understands how it all works—that this process, so unduplicatable and bespoke, is uniquely tailored to a specific individual, crazily unscientific—like the work of a Champagne riddler—energetically depleting also, with steep consequences if done improperly. The return on investment though, can be enormous. 

After all of the exploded brain matter has been recovered and stuffed back into Ramler’s ear, there’s a long period of silence. Spillers hasn’t budged, but his fingers have retracted back to their normal length. Ramler’s eyelids begin to twitch. Then his lips. Until there are words that everyone at Area J can hear, coming out of the viewport. One thing over and over: Fuck Minnesota nice.

Vandyck pauses the aperture, and turns to face the audience. “This is why we’re watching Mr. Spillers.”

Wednesday 25 October, 1950: Building One

It’s Wednesday, 25 October, 1950. Captain Sepulveda sits in his third floor office of building one, staring out the window toward the helipad, on the phone with Pedro Alvarez, warden of la Princesa prison.

“You kept Santiago in a calabozo?” Sepulveda says, sitting straight up in his chair. “For three weeks? Pedro, he's an old man.”

“Old man my ass!” says the warden. “He's a lot stronger than he looks. Maybe you forgot how people are on this island—the ones who work on the parcelas, swinging a machete all day long with a mouth full of mosquitos.”

What the hell would that fat bastard know about hard work? the captain thinks. He shakes it off, not wanting to argue over something small. “Three weeks. And he didn't say anything?”

“Three weeks. Nothing.” The warden says flatly.

“And he didn't—I mean, did he need a doctor?” Sepulveda taps his right boot up and down.

“Relax.” the warden shoots back. “Anyway,” he adds with a taunt, “he's your problem now.”

Sepulveda's cheeks get hot. “Why did you have him in the first place?” he asks.

“Couple months ago, there was a break-in at New York Presbyterian hospital.”

“Presbyterian.” Sepulveda says intoning something between a question and a statement. He closes his eyes and crumples up his eyebrows, which form into angry caterpillars. “You’re saying Santiago, an old farmer… an old farmer, broke into a hospital?”

“No, no, no.“ the warden replies, irritated now. “Santiago’s about as stupid as they come. Insular police arrested the guys who did the break in. Two young brothers. The FBI has them now.”

“FBI?” Sepulveda says, surprised.

“Yeah. Two guys came to the station and scooped them up as soon as they got word.” Pedro says.

“But they didn’t get Santiago?” Sepulveda asks.

“No. The FBI just came to get the brothers. They didn’t even know about Santiago. They picked up an old wooden crate too.”

“Hold on.” Sepulveda says, even more confused. “How’s Santiago involved in this?”

“He owns the land where the stolen hospital stuff was found.” the warden says. “It was all there, boxed up in a wooden crate. FBI got the crate plus the two brothers. It was all at the station in San Juan. Thing is, they came into the place like a pair of Billy Badasses—pissed everyone off. A skinny one and a big one. The big one had a Nazi name—sounded like… Himler? I wrote it down somewhere.”

“Don’t bother.” Sepulveda says.

“Well, those two FBI guys questioned every policeman who got close to that crate.”

“So what’s in it?” Sepulveda asks.

The warden laughs. “No idea. Probably not fucking band-aids.” This crack brings on a small coughing bout. There’s the sound of something opening and shutting, then a brass drawer-pull banging against wood.

“Be serious for a minute Pedro.” Sepulveda adds.

“Yeah yeah. I get it. OK.” Pedro says contritely. He hawks something up into the handkerchief he just pulled, then continues. “So after the cops get all riled up by the FBI guys, they figure… maybe there’s something else to this crate business. And you know how the cops are. As soon as they see the FBI is interested in something, they get the message loud and clear—maybe the nationalists are up to something. So they drove into a couple towns, up in the mountains around Yunque, poking around, asking questions. Eventually, they figured out who owns the land the crate was found on. Some old jibaro—a coffee farmer by the name of Santiago. So they arrested him, and dropped him off with me. Quietly… without telling the FBI.”

Of course they didn’t tell the FBI, Sepulveda thinks, leaning back in his chair. The San Juan cops trusted no one—not even the feds. “OK,” Sepulveda says, wanting to move things along. “Does Santiago know about the crate? I’m sure you asked right?”

“Of course we asked.” replies the warden sharply. “Son of a bitch clammed up right away. So we asked not so nice.” This induces a fresh round of wet coughing, after which Sepulveda hears the warden hawk up two or three heavy lungfuls of material. When things quiet down again, he says, “When we started beating him, he just—” Pedro doesn’t want to say out loud that the old man called him a punchungito, so instead says, “he just kept cracking jokes, so we threw his ass into a calabozo. Figured a couple days in there would change his mind. Like I said, he was in there for a while.”

Sepulveda runs his fingers along his desk. “I’m still wondering why an old coffee farmer is at my facility. What is this about?”

After a moment of throat clearing, the warden answers, “Serious shit. Remember that gringo doctor who they say was putting cancer into people?“

“That was twenty years ago Pedro.” Sepulveda adds with strained politeness.

“Look, you asked me.” Pedro shoots back, annoyed. “You know, I used to be a police officer.”

Sepulveda looks away from the phone and tries to yawn quietly.

“Somehow,” the warden starts, sounding cooler now, “the FBI found out I had Santiago. I got a phone call from that puto station chief, with orders to transfer him to you guys at Ramey.”

Sepulveda knows Pedro is talking about Spillers. Leaning back in his chair, his eyes wander a bit, mulling over why the FBI would take an interest in Santiago. As though reading Sepulveda’s thoughts, the warden says, “I think this is about money. Blackmail. The two brothers who broke into the hospital—I think they were looking for documents about all that cancer business back in '31. The kind of shit most people would prefer to keep buried. I'm talking about pendejos with real power—you know. The Rockefellers, New York Presbyterian, Time magazine.” The warden starts coughing again.

Sepulveda, who’s frowning, waits for the warden’s retching to stop before steering back to the old man. “About Santiago. Did you question him after the calabozo?”

“Are you fucking crazy?” he asks, amused. “After three weeks in there, he smelled like a swimming pool of baked shit. No one wanted to touch him, not even the bedbugs. I’ve never seen it before, but there wasn’t a mark on his skin. Not even a mosquito bite.”

Odd.

There’s a long silence, followed by the sound of metal chair legs scraping against concrete. Then footsteps, and the tall clerk, the one with pimples, pokes his head in the captain’s doorway and says, “Boss, he just got in.”

“What? Who?” Captain Sepulveda asks, looking up from behind his desk, cupping the phone's transmitter with his left hand.

“The gringo from San Juan.” says the pimple-faced clerk in the doorway.

“Are you Montoya or Torres?” Sepulveda demands.

“Montoya sir.”

“Right.” he says, absently looking at the face in the doorway. Sepulveda’s eyes move down toward the young man’s shoulders, notices the tear-shaped chevrons—private first class. He can’t be older than nineteen. Montoya, pimples. Torres, teeth, he thinks. Gotta’ get that straight. Montoya disappears before the captain thinks to ask for the gringo’s name, leaving him staring at a now-empty doorway, telephone handset drooping from his hand. He’s about to shout out to Montoya, then snaps his fingers—Ramler. Anton Ramler, whose name was brought up a week earlier—part of an FBI joint task force. Something related to enhanced interrogation techniques. At least, that’s what the paperwork said.

Suddenly remembering the warden, Sepulveda’s hand uncups the transmitter. “Pedro, is there any reason to believe that this crate business has anything to do with, you know—”

The captain’s ears perk up at the not-too-distant whining of a diesel engine. Swiveling around in his chair, he looks out the window and sees a jeep pulling in. “Thank you warden.” he adds hastily. “There's a visitor I need to attend to, just pulling up now.”

“A visitor?” asks the warden cagily. “Who?”

“FBI interrogator, in from San Juan.” Sepulveda answers, instantly regretting having said this.

“Hijo de puta!” the warden blurts out. “Have you been listening to me?”

This is the cue Sepulveda’s been waiting for. He thanks the warden again, exhausting the last scraps of professional courtesy he’s squirreled away, then sets the phone softly onto its cradle and turns around—this time for a longer look downstairs, at the man from San Juan. He’s dressed in khakis, a short sleeve white shirt, and work boots. Tucked in the side of the jeep down by his right leg, there’s a briefcase. It reminds Sepulveda of the suit-wearing pendejos cruising around San Juan in their shiny Fords. But this man is different. His face looks like it came out of a page from the Sears catalog—sporty beardless metropolitan lumberjack, handsome squarish features, light brown hair, parted along the side and held in place with pomade. His skin is tan for a white man’s, and he’s smiling; not in the carefully practiced way that the FBI smiles—more of an unselfconscious I just broke wind, and don’t give a shit if you heard kind of smile. Sepulveda’s seen it plenty of times before, just not on the face of a white man from the mainland. More unafraid than cocksure.

“Montoya!” Sepulveda shouts at the open door, over the sound of a typewriter.

“Sir?” comes the reply, followed by the scrape of metal chair legs against the floor.

“Is Ramler cleared to quarter with us here?”

“Yes sir.” says Montoya, again standing in the doorway at parade rest.

The captain dismisses him, and stares outside again, down at ground level. He pries open the window blinds with his thumb and forefinger to get a clearer view of Ramler, who’s now exiting the jeep, speaking with the driver. Well well, the gringo speaks Spanish, Sepulveda thinks, watching his mouth move. Something funny is said because both men are laughing. And now that he can see him stand next to the driver, he’s able to compare them. Ramler stands about six foot two, two hundred and ten, maybe two hundred and twenty pounds. The way he sits, moves, kicks out his legs and cracks his neck—he probably spent some time in an infantry unit before joining the FBI. Sepulveda stands up, pats down and flattens the front shirt pockets of his fatigues, then heads for the concrete stairwell, a mug of coffee clamped to his hand.

A minute later, he’s on the ground floor as the visitor from San Juan is shouldering the front doors open, gripping a briefcase and an extra large OD green canvas aviator’s kit bag. Sepulveda’s eyes go down to the man’s feet, toward his instep. A small detail he didn’t notice from up in his office—Ramler’s boots each have two small vented holes with perforated mesh. What he thought were work shoes are actually jungle boots.

“Captain Sepulveda, I’m Anton Ramler, from FBI headquarters, San Juan,” he says, then sets his things down and extends his right hand. The kit bag emits a woody clunk as it hits the floor.

Sepulveda stares at Ramler’s open hand, not saying anything at first, then shifts his weight back on to his heels, then shakes Ramler’s hand. “Oh god damn, I forgot—you’re not in the Army. The uh… jungle boots threw me off.”

“Oh yeah, these…” Ramler says, looking down at his feet, smiling. “That was a long time ago. I’m with the FBI now—special task force under the direct supervision of station chief—.”

“Let me guess, ” Sepulveda interrupts. “John Spillers.”

“Yes sir,” replies Ramler, smiling. “That’s the name on the paperwork.” 

“I see,” Sepulveda says, wondering if that’s Ramler’s way of reminding him… this is Spillers’ house, you’re just keeping an eye on things. He considers asking about Spillers, but instead says, “Welcome to building one. It’s not finished just yet. You’ll see what I mean as we make our way further in.” He lifts his right arm toward the staircase. “My office is upstairs this way. Maybe you can explain along the way, why Mr. Spillers sent you here. Something about interrogation?”

Ramler picks up his things. “Right, right. He filled me in on your work here. You and your men—you train the insular police, is that right?”

Sepulveda, whose back is to Ramler, grunts something that sounds affirmative. He walks down a short hallway toward some double doors, and once through, into a fully enclosed concrete stairwell column. Like the outside of the building, everything is new. The stair treads, each treated with skid strips, are wide enough to allow both men to ascend, shoulder to shoulder. Ramler looks up and sees a thick shaft of light streaming in from a rectangular skylight a few flights up. The smell of pine oil and moist cement hangs in the air, amplified by the warmth of the light. They move slowly enough so the captain can sip his coffee every once in a while.

“Well,” Ramler begins, “I’m here to demonstrate some interesting new procedures I had a chance to observe in person at Fort Hunt.”

Sepulveda thinks a moment. Fort Hunt is where they sent all the German scientists after the war. He starts to mouth a question, but clamps his jaws shut and shakes it off.

Ramler continues, “At Hunt, we had a team of shrinks and philosophers who studied all sorts of stuff. Interrogation methods from all over. Long story short, they figured out you have to destroy a man’s sense of reality, piece by piece—make him stop believing in the dependability of… what’d they call it… his external world. That’s key.” As they reach the top of a landing, Sepulveda takes a sip from his coffee, and glances down at the vein running down Ramler’s right bicep. Whatever’s in that aviator’s bag is a lot heavier than clothes. He wonders if there might be a few things from Fort Hunt in that bag. As they round the corner landing, Ramler continues describing the techniques they’d implement to slowly erode a man’s sense of reality—small things, like setting clocks forward and backward, disrupting sleep schedules, rearranging furniture, lowering the heights of chairs that prisoners were allowed to sit on, removing windows and mirrors—subtle atmospheric changes. There were big things too, more theatrical, requiring planning. Ramler rattled off a list of various rooms and protocols—the cold room, the upside down pyramid, the spider box, the tank, the tool shed. Sepulveda, not quite sure what to make of it just yet, takes a sip of coffee. “It sounds clever and everything—what you’re describing.” Then, raising his left fist up to his nipple, moving it in tiny circles as though winding up for a short-range hook, he adds, “But why not skip all the tricks—just get right to the point?”

Ramler sees how Sepulveda cradles his fist, notices the tilt of his hips, and how he brought his chin down. He smiles. “Understood. I hear you sir. But interrogation is always a contest between one man and another man. And, well… there’s always a risk you know?”

“What do you mean?” Sepulveda asks, lowering his hands.

“That you’ll wind up in a situation,” Ramler replies, “with a man who doesn’t care how hard you hit. If you meet that kind of man, any effort to inflict more physical pain—this only serves to intensify the man’s will to resist. It actually helps this kind of man. Fortifies his defiance.”

Sepulveda wonders what happened with Santiago over at la Princesa—what he said or did, right before the warden put him in the calabozo.

As he and Ramler round the last stair landing, and begin climbing up the final flight, Ramler says one last thing. “When you systematically destroy a man’s belief in his reality, you force him to go deeper into himself—because he’s no longer sure of what’s real and what’s not. Over time, doubt seeps into the man, and the doubt becomes the primary source of pain. It becomes unbearable. And since the man is the one inflicting this pain on himself, he’ll do anything to make it stop. It’s all very logical if you think about it. What men crave most is certainty of their knowledge. With the system I’m describing, men under interrogation willingly share secrets they’ve been keeping. Because they need to. In order to hold on to their sanity.”

Certainty of their knowledge—really? Sepulveda thinks. That’s what men want more than anything? All men? More than a fine piece of ass? More than a steak dinner? More than watching the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the world series?

Sepulveda, who had been hooked on Ramler’s words a moment ago, now squints his eyes, unsure if he should start laughing or kicking this gringo down the stairs. He feels his ears go warm. Then a memory pops loose from 1938. The Condado Vanderbilt Hotel on Ashford Avenue.

The Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, 1938

Hustling bags and cocktails, when you’re a dark skinned boy from la Perla, offers a unique perch of invisibility—a sort of one-way mirror through which you can observe the inner workings of those who stand on the tippy top of the world. When Bunny Bancroft—debutante, philanthropist, planner of cotillion dances—strode into the lobby of the Condado Vanderbilt, it was like a visitation from Napoleon. The concierge had talked it up for weeks, giving the service staff periodic briefings. “You must address her as BB” he explained without a trace of joy—educating them about her mannerisms, favorite discussion topics, the names of her poodles, and the recent charity balls she had hosted. Then BB arrived. Sepulveda, who helped carry her bags, watched closely and studied how this stiff slender woman from West 59th Street moved through the world, constantly patting at her elbows and neck, as she made ironic sounding pronouncements on the state of whatever caught her fancy. Be a doll and fetch me some champagne… Good grief, that man smells like carrots… Light my cigarette doll. Sepulveda, through his one-way glass, observed how BB grasped the world—as though piloting a bespoke magical carpet, forever unfurling and materializing beneath her feet, underwriting her frivolity while at the same time covering up holes, dismantling boobytraps—a sort of permanent get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing her to skip upon the frothy tendrils of the greatest superpower that ever was—existing inside the inner orbit of the Great White Males of the moment. The heat he felt along the tops of his ears, which started out as a kind of early warning system for lousy tippers, had evolved into something more advanced: a silent BB detector.

“Looks like we’re almost there.” says Ramler.

Arriving at the third floor landing, Sepulveda gestures with his chin, and the men pass through two sets of double doors separated by a rubber-matted windowless vestibule, then finally into a forty by twenty cement-floored room. The walls, which look to be freshly skim-coated with plaster, were recently painted a flat dull white. Ramler looks around for photographs or citations, but sees only smooth paint. Running along the vaulted ceilings, there are exposed steel i-beams painted in the same dull flat white. The floors are light grey and smooth—more concrete. Across the room there are two men—one tall, one stocky—both wearing OD green fatigues, seated on swivel chairs in front of metal desks, separated by a pair of grey file cabinets arranged back to back. On top of each desk is a pencil caddy and an Olivetti typewriter.

“Like I said downstairs,” the captain begins, “we’re finishing up the construction. Ramler looks around. Aside from the desks and file cabinets, there’s no furniture to be seen—just an American flag and a few stacks of construction material strewn around in neatly arranged piles—toolboxes, cinderblocks, bags of mortar and plaster, tarps, trowels, paint brushes, lumber, and at least a dozen gallons of paint. The smell of rubber, pine oil, and faint notes of vomit waft throughout this large opening. 

Sepulveda, palm-gestures toward a metal door painted burgundy, with a black name placard on it. “Right this way.” As the men approach, Ramler sees it’s not a name on the placard, but a word: Visitante. Sepulveda turns the round brass knob to swing it open. “You can use this office Mr. Ramler. There’s a desk and a typewriter. If you need any supplies, just see my clerk, Montoya—the tall one with pimples.” 

Ramler smiles, thinking it odd to describe a person in such plain language—the one with pimples—then looks over to where the two young soldiers are, and sees Montoya banging away at his typewriter. The shorter one is on the phone, boots propped up on the desk, body draped along the chair in a drooping banana-shaped sag, looking very relaxed and comfortable.

“Torres!” Sepulveda belts out.

Torres looks up from the phone with amused drowsy looking eyes, looks in the direction of the captain’s voice, then turns to smile at el visitante, showing a top row of pearly white teeth. The captain rattles off a list of commands that seem rehearsed.

“Go to the motor pool, see sergeant Owens. Ask him for all the PMCS reports on all our vehicles. Bring them back here before lunch.”

“Yes sir.” Torres says smiling, with practiced deference, feet still up on the desk. Then he mumbles something over the phone, and brings the handset down softly on the ringer without taking his eyes off Captain Sepulveda. All the while, Montoya’s keystrokes go on undeterred—babap, bap, bap, babap. Torres brings his feet down, starts to open the middle drawer of his desk, but Sepulveda cuts this off at the get-go.

“Don’t take the jeep. Hump it over there on foot. In fact, you better range-walk because I’m going to need those reports before lunch.” 

Nothing but babap, bap, babap, babap, bap, bap from Montoya.

Sepulveda remains frozen in place, chest slightly puffed up—his entire body having settled into a double-dog-dare postural alignment, waiting for Torres to say one stupid thing. Instead, the young man slides the desk drawer shut, stands up, puts his field cap on, and shuffles quickly toward the stairwell, disappearing behind the double doors. Ramler marvels at Torres’ sinewy and effortless retreat—not a morsel of wasted kinetic energy. The man is like a jaguar, zapped with some kind of magic beam that turned him into an unproductive office worker.

“Let’s talk in my office for a minute.” Sepulveda says, smiling and gesturing toward his desk.

Once in the office with the door shut, the two men face each other, seated—Sepulveda at his desk, Ramler directly across from him—his briefcase and bag down by his feet. After some chair jostling and polite smiles, the captain leans in, fingers folded, speaking in a soft teacher’s voice. “Why are you really here?” he asks. 

Ramler turns to his right, and takes a long look at the bookshelf, mouthing the words along a few of the spines.

“I mean really,” the captain adds, after a long silence.

“Yes—” Ramler says. “There’s a detainee you have at this facility captain. Transferred from la Princesa a few days ago—Jesus Santiago.”

The captain blinks a few times and says, “Right, Santiago. The warden at la Princesa filled me in.”

“Oh?” Ramler says, rising up half an inch out of his chair.

Sepulveda clocks the subtle shift without moving his eyes, and says “Yeah, he told me they questioned him briefly. Which produced nothing. Then they put him in isolation. Which also produced nothing. We've only had him since Wednesday, so… haven't gotten around to interrogating him yet. From what the warden says though, Santiago is—how did you put it before? The kind of man who takes a beating and becomes more defiant.”

Ramler is beaming. “Well. I’m looking forward to meeting him. And of course, I’d like to review the interrogation transcripts from the prison.”

“I’m sorry, but there are none.” Sepulveda says, a little too quickly.

Ramler picks up on that quickness. “Oh? You already asked?”

“No, I didn’t bother.” Sepulveda replies. “I know how they operate. They don’t keep written transcripts at La Princesa. It’s just not done.”

“I see.” Ramler says, smiling. “Probably better that way any way. Well, Mr. Spillers believes Santiago may have information useful to multiple parties.”

Multiple parties, Sepulveda thinks. “Really—what do you mean by that?” he asks, crossing one leg over the other, not sure if Ramler is leading him down a dead end, or making a mistake.

“Are you familiar with the Presbyterian hospital?” Ramler asks.

“The big fancy place in San Juan?” Sepulveda says in his best oh that one voice. 

Ramler seems pleased. “Yes, Ashford I believe you call it. It’s in San Juan. Santiago worked there as a medical assistant. FBI thinks he was involved in the theft of some expensive cameras. Research related.”

Sepulveda’s ears go hot again. “Well that’s unusual. Research related to cameras… in a hospital?” 

Ramler leans back in his chair, “I can’t give you all the details, but I can tell you it’s for the war department. Sorry… department of defense.”

Sepulveda says nothing.

Ramler shifts around a bit in his chair, shaking his head. “Look, captain. I can’t say that much, but it’s probably not what you think.”

Sepulveda’s ears are burning now. His eyes dart left and up, to the spot on the wall above the bookcase. He takes a moment to focus and recalibrate himself. He leans back in his chair, waits for his ears to settle down, then sets his eyes back on Ramler who’s now drumming the fingers of both hands along the tops of his knees. The captain grins. “Ramler. Let me be completely honest with you. When you pulled up in that Army jeep, before we even met, I assumed you were 99% full of shit. And the things you’re telling me now are…” he trails off, then watches as Ramler’s fingers stop moving, and flatten out into palms.

“Don’t take that the wrong way.” he continues. “Gringos have historically not been good with details. I mean, you didn’t even bother to correctly spell Puerto Rico for thirty years.” He chuckles and grins wider. “So when I figured out you could speak Spanish, oh boy. I thought, wait wait wait. This guy Ramler is maybe only 95% full of shit. Tops. By the way, I figured out you could speak Spanish by reading your lips from up here, right through the window. Yeah. Then I went down and met you—sized you up in person. And you instantly went down to 85% bullshit.”

Ramler narrows his eyes as Sepulveda continues, “Then you mentioned all those things about Fort Hunt, and I thought WOW! Isn’t that where all those nazi engineers went after the war? Maybe you know that I know that. To be honest, when you started talking about those psychologists and philosophers, I got worried I might not be able to keep up. Me, being a dumb islander—I did my best to imagine in my little coconut brain what a conversation between a psychologist and a philosopher might sound like—all those egg heads in lab coats working to figure out how to interrogate people. I just imagined a big room of levers and gizmos like in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons. So of course, your bullshit went down by a LOT more. I lost track of the numbers, but let’s just say it went down all the way to 50%.”

“Sir—” Ramler starts to say.

“No. Wait until I’m done.” Sepulveda says with polite firmness. Then the smile comes back. “I should mention, anyone below 50% bullshit in my book—they get the benefit of the doubt. Automatically. Right after you were telling me all that Fort Hunt crap, you were right on the edge. Right at 50. But you weren’t done.” He shakes his head from side to side with a frown, then adds, “You went ahead and mentioned Santiago. Which made me think back to my conversation with Pedro, the warden over at La Princesa.”

Ramler’s sitting up straight now, both hands resting flat on top of his thighs.

“Good old Pedro—my friend from camp Las Casas, who got a cushy job as prison warden because of two well-timed hand rolled cigars and a great bottle of pitorro. Pedro told me all about Santiago and a recent call he got from the FBI. Just this morning. Then you show up on the same morning… which can’t be a coincidence right? Of course not.”

Ramler is motionless.

“But then—” the captain continues. “You told me Santiago was a medical assistant. Up until that crack, I thought you were someone I could work with.”

“Sir—” Ramler starts, but again is interrupted, this time with Sepulveda’s right forefinger. A full second goes by before the finger comes down.

“You might know some things about what happens around here… from what you read in your FBI carpetas and New York Times articles. But there’s a lot you don’t know. Things about this place.” When he says place, Sepulveda’s head shoots left and right and up, full of suggestive and boundary-less ambiguity—as if maybe insinuating all of this office; or all of this building; or all of Aguadilla; or all of this fucking island; or just… everything there is. “You don’t even know what you don’t know,” he adds. “About me, my men, even that cabron Torres who looks like he ought to be playing for the Dodgers—no, fuck that, the Yankees—and filming toothpaste advertisements. You don’t know why he’s a fucking idiot. I do. There’s history there.”

Ramler laughs, and squeezes his thighs which makes Sepulveda’s grin disappear.

“History my man. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen. Can’t outrun it. Can’t unknow it.”

Sepulveda’s hand tugs at the lower right hand drawer of his desk, where he keeps his medium quality cigars, reaches in, finger-walks along the top of the small cedar box, and feels for the grip of the ‘45. He pulls it out, and points it at Ramler’s chest.

“There’s a lot you don’t know Ramler. So I’m going to give you a history lesson about Presbyterian hospital so things become crystal clear for you. Then you’re going to tell me what you know about Jesus Santiago.”

Ramler’s eyes go from the gun down to the floor. He hadn’t planned on this sudden rise in complexity. Not so soon anyway. No matter. He’d work the situation his way for a while. Somehow figure out how to fix this right up, make the captain calm down. Otherwise, there would have to be a… what was it his predecessor used to say? Hell, he was so forgetful these days. Oh yeah, an on-the-spot-correction from up north.