The Hooded Man

Eight soldiers, their faces smeared with charcoal, clambered into the rear of the two green army trucks parked on the barracks square. They waited there in impassive silence for their captain to arrive. Minutes later, he appeared in the dark archway and hurried towards the first of the trucks. Limping behind him came a hunched figure wearing a black hood, dressed in a military overcoat that reached down below the knees, covering his civilian trousers. The two vehicles revved up their engines as the two of them climbed into the cab of the first truck. The night silence was shattered as they sped out of the square, roaring, and rumbling through the darkened streets of Osorno. A curfew had been in force since sunset, it was forbidden for anyone to be out on the streets; and was being enforced by roving patrols of caribineros, wielding sub-machine guns. Passing along the Plaza de Armas, they soon sped across the bridge crossing the Rahue River. The trucks then lumbered up a narrow street that led first through an impoverished district of ram-shackle housing, but then it broadened out along the way as they entered a ‘lower-middle-class’ district of larger, well-kept dwellings. The vehicles came to an abrupt halt in front of a large, three-storey house in the middle of a block. The soldiers leapt down and one squad of them covered the front of the house, while the other hurried down an alleyway to cover the rear.

The figure in the hood got out awkwardly from the cab and, approaching the captain, pointed a glove hand at the heavy, paneled door and whispered something in his ear. The captain gave the order to smash down the carved wooden door and to arrest the man in apartment 206. Two soldiers rammed the heavy door with their rifle butts, and it slowly came away from its hinges. Others raced past them into the building. The door of the apartment, on the second floor, was less substantial than the main door, and it quickly fell inwards under the rapid, violent battering. Inside, a thirty-year old man in shirtsleeves was trying to climb out of the window but a pair of soldiers managed to grab him and pulled him back down onto the floor. A third soldier delivered him a hard kick in the crotch. The captain and the hooded man entered the apartment.

“Is this him?” the captain asked the hooded man….