Angels in Heaven

road.
    We were, Benny told him.
    Not, the owner hoped, to visit some
unfortunate friend or—and it pained one to even contemplate it—some relative?
    “Luckily, no,” said Benny. “A small
business matter was all. But merely out of idle curiosity, is it a difficult
matter getting in to visit a dear one?” He winked at me and said in an
undertone, “I think we just saved us a phone call.”
    With his customary adroitness Benny
elicited the following interesting information over the next five minutes:
there were at present some six hundred men and twelve women in Fe-brero
Segundo; normal visiting hours were from two till four weekdays, all day
Saturday, and Sunday afternoon; permission for nonfamily to visit seemed to depend
on the whim of el commandante', and visitors were permitted to take in
food, clean clothes, and soap and the like but naturally no alcohol, drugs, or
provocative reading material.
    “I should hope not,” said Benny,
affecting to be deeply shocked.
    As all this was going on, I was
observing four off-duty guards, with their jackets off, making their way up the
dirt road from the prison toward us. They crossed the main road without looking
both ways and went into the even more dilapidated cantina next to ours. A
minute later four others left the cantina and headed without excessive speed
back to the prison.
    “Must be lunchtime,” said my friend.
“Not a bad idea.” He ordered a plate of delicacies from the owner, who bustled
off to consult his cookbook.
    A few moments later Benny was
liberally sprinkling hot sauce on the third of whatever it was he was eating.
“Chili today, but hot tamale,” he said. At that moment a Jeep left the prison
and headed toward us; as the driver wheeled into the main road with a flourish,
I noticed the vehicle was brand-new and sparkling clean. A man in a neat gray
uniform complete with cap sat in the backseat looking through a report of some
kind.
    “¿El commandante?” Benny asked the owner.
    “Himself.”
    “Does he ever stop here for lunch?”
    The owner laughed. “Not him,” he
said, “he prefers his tacos served by a pretty maid.”
    “No offense intended,” Benny said,
“but who doesn’t?”
    The owner showed us his gold inlays
again.
    I sprung for the repast and
refreshments, we got back into the boiling hot Chevy, this time me in the
backseat, and we drove up the dirt road to Febrero Segundo. As we got closer,
we saw the dirty white concrete block walls were even higher than we’d guessed.
    “There’s a wall not built to scale,”
Benny said.
    “What’s come over you, kid?” I said.
“That’s two awful! puns in five minutes.”
    “You’re not the only one who’s
nervous,” he said.
    “I didn’t know it showed.”
    The front entrance was a massive
wooden door with a I curved top, above which the turret loomed for another
twenty feet or so. We stopped at the door, and Benny tooted the horn. A guard
looked down at us from the turret and then turned away again.
    “Why did you do that?” I asked him.
“There doesn’t seem to be all that much traffic around.”
    “That sign there told me to,” he
said, pointing with a thumb.
    “Oh,” I said. “Pardon ma mouf'.”
    After a minute an elderly guard in a
gray uniform unbuttoned at the neck peeked out through a grille in the door,
then swung the main gate open for us. In we went, slowly, into a sort of
tunnel. The gate swung shut behind us. Up the tunnel in front of us was a
second gate, this one made of iron bars, through which we could see a bare
space with a soccer goal. The first guard disappeared into a small room on our
left. After another moment, a second, younger man emerged, the butt of what
looked like an antitank gun showing in his unbuttoned holster; he came over to
us and asked us politely to please state our business.
    I handed him my card. It read, simply
but elegantly: V. Blackman. U.S. Dept, of the Interior.
    Benny handed him his, which read,
simply but elegantly:
    B. Keith. U.S. Dept, of the Interior.
    The guard looked them over, on both
sides, then returned them to us. Then he asked Benny to pardon his ignorance,
but what exactly was the business of the U.S. Department of the Interior?
    Benny kindly relayed the question to
me, so I said smoothly, “Our business is concerned with the internal security
of the nation.”
    The guard thought that one over and
then, out of boredom or—who knows?—genuine curiosity, inquired precisely what
was our interest with