“And you get rich from it,” the guard scoffed.

Brooks gave him a thin smile. “That’s another one of the great things about this country.”

The room was windowless and bare. Vincente Carpio sat motionless on the chair on the far side of the metal table, which was bolted to the floor. His hands were cuffed and folded on his lap. His shackled ankles were close together, his feet flat on the floor. Brooks was taken by how young he looked, even with the skulls tattooed all over his bald head.

Brooks walked over and put the pad and pencil on the table, pulled out the chair across from Carpio, and sat down. The two men regarded each other in silence for what seemed like a long time.

“You my lawyer?” Carpio said at last.

Brooks felt a small sense of victory that he’d not been the one to break the silence. “Your brother hired me.”

“And you are willing to defend me?”

“Your brother was very persuasive.”

“He paid you upfront.”

“He did.”

“What is your name?”

“Joshua Brooks.”

Carpio looked closely at him. “You’re Jewish.”

“Is that a problem?”

Carpio considered the question for a moment. “No,” he said at last. “Jews make good lawyers.”

“You flatter me.”

“I flatter no American,” Carpio said. “I kill Americans.”

“That won’t be in my opening statement.”

“You have no idea what your people have done to the world, do you? Like everyone else here, you sit in your safe homes and talk to the world about freedom while your country lets the violence go on far, far away. It spreads that violence. It pays for that violence.”

“Is that why you do what you do?”

Carpio’s gaze drifted past Brooks, into some distance that only he could see. “There are many reasons I do what I do,” he said.

Vincente Carpio had never known a world without war. By his sixth birthday, civil war had ravaged El Salvador for more than a decade. His town of El Calabozo had seen the worst of the war nearly ten years before, when U.S.-backed government forces slaughtered more than two hundred people. Since that time, though, the war had only touched the town in indirect ways, siphoning off boys into various factions to fight in other towns and cities, coming back with the thousand-yard stare of those who saw the ghosts of those they’d killed looming in the distance of every field and forest.

Vincente’s mother, Maria, had kept him safe by involving him in the local Catholic church. Javier, her older son, had already been recruited by the local insurgents, and been off at war for more than a year, but she had vowed that she would not let her youngest, who was more sensitive, fall prey to the same fate.