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discouraged. We were too obvious, and I had not been able to make even one miserable contact.
    It was seven on a bright Sunday morning when the woman manager of the hotel knocked on my door. In a low voice she said, "I thought you should know -- some detectives are downstairs looking for you." It was precisely all we needed.
    I telephoned Henry and we decided to walk boldly downstairs. It wasn't difficult to pick out the two detectives (let God be my witness) because they were standing behind two potted palms!
    ***
    There was always this Keystone Cops/banana republic aspect of Guatemala, but I knew all too well how lethally "comic" it really was: how many hundreds of mutilated bodies of prominent and not-so-prominent people appeared in alleys in the dark of the night, some killed by the Left, some by the Right, some through the intervening providence of some private passion that often did not answer to, but used, any ideology around.
    The two skinny, illiterate kids behind the palm trees had obviously been given the job of following us everywhere. We'd be walking down a street and suddenly Henry would pivot around and snap their pictures, while they would break out into peals of laughter. They hid behind bushes for us, waved through the leaves, and flirted with me.
    We would walk in one side of the cathedral with appropriate dignity, then dash out the side door and lose them.
    It was all endlessly diverting, but it was a deadly, defeating diversion. I understood their tactics all too well: no one from the guerrillas would dare to contact us so long as the skinny ones were about. That was their final card in this strange game.
    And it was precisely then, during that already irksome period, that the desk clerk one morning handed me a letter. I opened it and saw the outline of a hand drawn across it. It was a letter from the "White Hand," the infamous "Mano Blanca," the rightist killer organization directed clandestinely by the big landowners and by the military and in particular by Colonel Carlos Arana, later to become president of the country. The "Mano" killed and mutilated everybody it suspected even of sympathizing with democracy, much less with Marxism.
    And the letter? Naturally it was filled with dirty sexual references -- this is the way Latin men deal with women who get in their way or break from the macho's cosmic plan for them.
    "We are speaking to you as we speak to the men of America; we are telling you the entire truth so that you believe what we say and not just to frighten you," the letter began. "Since you arrived in the country before the elections in March, the services of security, the A1, the G2, the army, the Interpol, and the private espionage of the MDL and the White Hand knew that you had arrived in the country to spy .... " (At this point I paused to notice that I was even a little pleased by the sheer weight and variety of the attention I was receiving.) It went on, with frequent references to me as a "puta" or "whore," something that also rather pleased me since I had always resented my Illinois corn-fed looks. Then it went on to warn: "Now you are being watched, body and soul; wherever you go, there are eyes following you. Only a few days ago, four men were waiting for you to take you to a night interview, but you did not trust them, and it was a shame that you didn't go because we would have given you chase, you spy, and we hope you will go to a guerrilla camp because upon leaving the city for the mountains, you will never again return and your death will appear an accident during a gallant adventure." But I was considerably aggravated by the fact that they then accused me of also being the "mistress" of the former rightist dictator, one Colonel Peralta. It is one thing to have one's politics attacked, but Colonel Peralta, a little, gray-haired gnome of a man, was one of the least attractive men I had ever seen.
    Now everyone in Guatemala City obviously knew where we were, who we were, and why we