“A very dark character. If they ever find a file on him, they will see how many ugly deaths have his name on them.”

I make a face of hostile disbelief, and he continues:

“It is very ironic,” he says, “that he would be the one who is sniffing around his enemies’ Archives, no? He is himself a murderer.”

Uncomfortable, wanting to change the subject, I mention Fouché, and the anecdote told by Zweig about his end ‘at peace with men and with God’: with men, because shortly before his death he decided to burn the police files for which many powerful people feared him, and which he had taken with him when he left Paris, and with God, because he had time to confess and receive the lasts rites.

“I am not a Francophile,” he comments scornfully. “The biography that I want to read is Kissinger’s, but it is a seven-hundred-page tome and I have not had the time.”

We say goodbye.

Of course (I think, once I am back in my car, as I watch the stocky author agent walk away with long strides, in his navy-blue suit, down Avenida Las Américas), in his current job, he inspires mistrust.

The chief has not called back.

Mechanically, with suppressed fear, thinking I shouldn’t, I dial Lemus’s number. No one answers.

Friday. Seven in the evening.

I meet with Mejía again, this time at a Mexican restaurant. (I wanted to ask him on what he based his reckless judgment of the chief.) I found a pretext for meeting: to give him one of my books, which he had told me he wanted to review. He arrives with a friend, a linguist and literary critic, who studied in Paris. Bref: a fop.

Mejía insists:

“Your chief is, or was, Comandante Paolo,” he tells me, and laughs. “Didn’t you know?”

I did not know, and I feel a little naive, a little dumb. What I did know is that “Comandante Paolo” was part of the court that sentenced the young guerrilla women captured in the eighties in Guatemala and later executed in Nicaragua; they were the ones that Dr. Novales referred to during his lecture series.

We argue about the definition of war crimes. Mejía compares the executions attributed to the chief with the crimes committed by the Guatemalan military. I do not see, I say, the symmetry.

I think Mejia’s anger toward the chief at the Archive Recovery Project is of a personal nature. (As a young man, Mejía was an active member of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, in which “Comandante Paolo” was a leader.) The amusing part is that Mejía now works for the government and finds it reprehensible that the chief is in charge of the Archive Recovery Project.

When we say goodbye, he surprises me by handing me an article that he is preparing, about the ensemble of all the books I have written. He would like to publish it, he tells me, in a foreign magazine. I read it when I get home. He surprises me again: the tone is slightly complimentary.