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Page 73
spond like these impoverished Mexicans if Russia shared a relatively unguarded frontier with the United States. Tensions with Poland had risen because of the movement of Russians across the Polish border, looking for better opportunities.
Many of these people had tried before to run the border. Most had been caught and returned to Mexico by the Border Patrol. Some had contributed literally thousands of dollars to the coffers of the coyotes, the racketeers who earned their tortillas and tequila by giving the hopeful more or less what they paid for.
Arkady Karmann's fifty dollars had been hard earned. There was very little to do in Mexico if one were dirty, ragged, spoke with an odd accent, and had a steel hook for a left hand. The adults in the party, even the coyotes, had been afraid of Karmann's strangeness and his hook, but the children had loved "El Gancho." They had been fascinated by the steel barb the fishermen of the Mosquito Coast had fashioned for him, and from which he now took his nickname.
That part of Karmann's journey had long since become dream-like, phantasmagoric. The days at sea had been a nightmare, followed by a bitter fantasy of cruelty and frustration until his rescue by his unlikely saviors.
Once healed enough to travel, he had worked his way eastward, along the Golfo de Honduras to La Cieba by fishing boat and by truck. The journey, scarcely begun, had already seemed endless.
Sometime in early June, he crossed the frontier into Guatemala, plodding along barely marked roads toward Puerto Barrios. The Guatemalan truck drivers were rough men, but willing enough to pick up a ragged, crippled stranger on the long stretches of lonely mountain passes. From the fishermen and from the drivers he learned to speak a pidgin Spanish. When he could not ride, he walked. From time to time he paused in his travels to earn a few quetzales in order to buy the barest necessities. The journey northward had become his obsession.

 
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