Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  Again his name.

  “Ajax!”

  This time followed by a low whistle. Just a two-note whistle so quiet most people would not hear it. It had been the universal password up in the mountains. Only one person still hailed him that way. Horacio. Ajax rolled onto his back. What the fuck was happening?

  “Ajax!”

  It didn’t matter just then. He could not be found crawling around naked in his garden with a knife in his hands, and especially not The Needle. He went back through his bedroom window as silently as he’d gone out, and stashed The Needle under the bed.

  “Ajax?”

  It would be like the old fucker to barge into his bedroom. Horacio claimed that his sense of privacy had been twisted by the communal living of the mountains, but Ajax knew he was just nosey. For once he was glad Horacio was almost lame.

  “Viejo!” Ajax yelled through his door. “Momentito! Sit down.”

  “Where’s the bottle?”

  The what? The bottle. Shit! In the drawer where The Needle should be.

  “I’ll get it! Just grab some glasses!”

  “How about some light?”

  “It’s Wednesday. Light the candle.”

  Ajax could hear him shuffling around, the cane tip tapping in the dark. His hands shook as he fumbled for his police khakis. What the fuck was happening? What had he just seen? Seen again, he remembered. It didn’t matter just then. He had to pull himself together. He had to be squared away in front of Horacio. His only friend, shit, his only visitor for the last two years. Horacio was not in the government, per se, had no portfolio to speak of, yet he was rumored to be everywhere and to know everything.

  Some simply called him El Viejo. The Old Man. His admirers called him El Poeta, for the poetry he’d published since he was a guerrillero. His detractors called him The Jesuit, for his allegedly Machiavellian ways. But to Ajax he was always El Maestro.

  Ajax had been a teenager in Los Angeles when he’d first met Horacio. It was Horacio who had got him buying guns for “los muchachos,” then smuggling them south, and finally it was Horacio who’d convinced Ajax to “come home” to Nicaragua. Had recruited him to the Sandinistas, and been his first commander in the mountains. Horacio had taught him how to fight. How to kill. How to survive. Then Horacio had been badly wounded and evacuated to Havana, and later to Moscow for treatment. Two years later, when they met again in Managua, Ajax was leading Horacio’s old command, had become “the great hero.” And the vigorous graybeard—now poking around his kitchen in the dark—had become the fragile, gentle man with black beret, mahogany cane, and all-seeing yet always smiling eyes who was determined to save Ajax from drink, from himself.

  Ajax would never say it out loud, but he felt loved by that old man. And Ajax was devoted to him in return.

  Ajax opened his mouth wide to quiet his breath, and then gave his body over to panic, knowing the trembling, the shaking, the spasms would soon stop. As they always had.

  4.

  Horacio de la Vega Cárdenas felt his way into Ajax’s kitchen and found two glasses. Knowing his protégé, he sniffed them for cleanliness. Satisfied, he made his way to the garden, sat in his chair, and arranged the glasses and candles on the table with the two pistols. He heard Ajax’s approach.

  “Captain Montoya.”

  “Maestro.”

  “Am I too late for that drink?”

  “No, no. Just in time.”

  “You were sleeping?”

  “No. Reading.”

  Ajax set the bottle of rum between them and Horacio saw the slight tremor in his hand.

  “Reading in the dark?”

  “No, no. By flashlight. The batteries died and I must have, I dunno, drifted off.”

  Ajax thought he was a complicated man, but Horacio knew how simple he really was. That’s why he preferred it when Ajax lied.

  “So you were sleeping?”

  “I guess.”

  Horacio picked up the bottle. “It’s just I’d hate to intrude on your sleep. You get so little. How’s the thesaurus?”

  “Good. I’m on the Ms—makeshift: improvised, provisional, temporary.”

  Horacio knocked his cane over, and as Ajax bent to retrieve it the old man checked a tiny mark he’d left on the bottle to ensure it was indeed the one he’d presented to Ajax, with no small ceremony, to mark the end and the beginning.

  “My new book of poems is coming out.”

  Ajax handed him his cane. “Yes, I’ve still got the manuscript in the bedroom. Just don’t have the concentration for it yet.”

  “Gioconda’s got a new one coming out soon.”

  Ajax snatched up a glass and wiped it with his shirttail. Horacio felt the need to update him about her. Ajax carefully set the glass down. A little too carefully, Horacio thought.

  “Really?” Ajax wiped the other glass off with his shirttail. “Anyone in this country not publishing a book of poetry? Not penning a volume of verse? Not crushing out a little canto?” He slammed the glass down. “You can’t swing an iguana by the tail nowadays without hitting either a foreigner or a poet.”

  He checked the glasses, both now cloudy from the cleaning on his soiled shirt. Horacio smiled. Poking Ajax in the old wound was one way to check his overall well-being. Sarcasm in connection with his ex-wife’s name was a good sign.

  “Well, that we are a country of poets is the one national vanity we can actually afford.” Horacio tapped the two pistols on the table with his cane. “Lots of weaponry lying about this evening.”

  Ajax picked up the rum bottle and turned it in his hands. “That one,” he said of the Makarov, “belonged to the soldier who got killed today.”

  “Fortunado Gavilan. I heard. I’m very sorry.” Horacio lifted the Makarov, held it, weighed it as he was weighing Ajax for the deepest truth he could discern. For the Makarov it was easy: “Was it unloaded then, too?”

  Horacio watched the lips turn in just slightly as Ajax’s teeth bit at their insides. “Yeah. He charged Gladys with an empty piece.”

  “In America, they call that suicide-by-cop.”

  Ajax dropped his head into his hands and seemed to Horacio to try to wipe something away. “Who cares what the goddamned gringos call anything.”

  Horacio regarded Ajax for a moment. “You used to like Americans.”

  Ajax looked up. Horacio watched a wry smile wrestle with a deep fatigue.

  “I knew some good ones. Once. In L.A.”

  “You almost were one, when I found you there. American teenager English. Perfect Nicaraguan Spanish.”

  Ajax sat back, turned his face to the cloudless night sky. “I don’t know who that kid is anymore. He’s like someone I read about. I swear, Maestro, I have no memories before that day we marched into camp and you put that .22 peashooter into my hands.”

  Horacio studied Ajax’s face. He seemed to drift back to that long-ago arrival at a pitiful camp of half-starved dreamers. But he needed him in the here and now. He used his cane to sharply rap the Python’s chrome.

  “And the snake? Still just the one bullet?”

  Ajax pulled his gaze from the stars. “The Python. Yeah.”

  “The same bullet?”

  “So what?”

  “You didn’t used to court danger unnecessarily.”

  “Danger?” Ajax snatched up the Python. “Horacio, what is my job? Ninety-nine percent of the perps are piss-poor mestizos ground down by misery, hopelessness, until they snap one night while on a bender and kill whoever is at hand. Wives, children, drinking buddies. Then they get sober and are so full of self-hatred they sit at home and wait for me to arrest them. I don’t need bullets. I hardly even need a mind. I’m a street sweeper. That’s one thing the Revo hasn’t changed. The debris in this country has always been the dark-skinned, the morenos.”

  “Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us.’”

  “That was easy for Jesus. I don’t have omniscient patience.” Ajax spun the Python’s chamber, pointed
it in the air, and pulled the trigger. Click. “Eighty-seven. I need that drink now.”

  Horacio was not alarmed by the Russian roulette. Ajax had always appeared crazier than he was. It was how he’d handled the boredom and the bloodletting of their long insurgency.

  Horacio upended the unopened bottle and pretended to pour Ajax a large glass of rum. Then did the same for himself.

  Ajax lifted his empty glass. “To all those who have died.”

  “And all those who will.”

  Ajax tipped his glass. Held the imaginary liquor in his mouth. Seemed to savor it. He “swallowed” and let loose a deep, sensual sigh.

  “Ohhhh. I can feel it Horacio. That deep, wonderful burn, the blaze, the glow of the first one of the day.”

  “Have another?”

  “No thank ya sin-your. I prumised a good ameego of mine to watch mah drankin’.”

  Horacio smiled, gave a little bow, laid his cane across his lap the way the soldier had his AK. “This Gladys you spoke of. Lieutenant … Darío? What do you make of her?”

  Ajax answered without hesitation, “She’s green. But she’s a shot-caller. Not a sandbag.”

  Horacio nodded. It was an old and cruel distinction he’d taught Ajax in the mountains. You divided your troops into two types, the sandbags who were expendable, and the shot-callers you needed to lead. Ajax had found the delineation barbarous, until he’d taken command. Then it had become indispensable.

  “I’m actually glad she brought those robots from State Security.”

  “Robots?”

  “Sharpshooters.”

  Horacio needed another measurement. “Is State Security really so different from the Policía?”

  “You ask me that!”

  “Well, you’ve been both…”

  “Is there a difference between cops-and-robbers and spies-and-assassins? I thought we were clear on this subject!”

  Ajax slammed his empty glass down. Horacio pretended to pour another, and Ajax knocked it back.

  Horacio felt some slight guilt, poking his son in another wound, for the more he’d put Ajax in harm’s way, the more he’d thought of him as a son. “Of course we are clear on the subject. I apologize.”

  “Anyway. If Gladys hadn’t brought the robots, she’d’ve had to shoot the kid. That’s no way to start a career.”

  Horacio could see that Ajax was still shaky, but there was no time for rest. There never had been. He had to move Ajax to the business at hand. “Yes. There’s been a lot of dying lately.”

  Ajax sat up straight, his face golden in the candlelight. Horacio saw the recognition. Ajax knew it was not El Maestro who’d come to comfort him. Nor El Poeta. But The Jesuit.

  “Who? Who Horacio? Who else has died?”

  Horacio almost laughed at his hooting. Then he remembered that the owl was a night predator—with talons that slay and a beak to shred.

  3

  “Mira, Harri! Harri Sucio! No dispare Dirtee Harri!”

  Ajax stopped rolling the Python’s chamber over his palm and holstered it, to the groans of disappointment from the clutch of children who thought the .357 was a .44. They were the front ranks of the scrum around his crime scene. Or what was left of it. There wasn’t a single television in a thousand homes in the poor barrios. So a corpse in a sewage ditch drew everyone from a mile around and provided conversation for a week. Ajax had had a good long look at the body before he’d covered it with some trash bags. He was fairly certain it hadn’t been poked and prodded before he’d arrived.

  The barrio was just off the Carretera Norte, the Northern Highway that ran past the airport on the way to the mountains. Seven years ago, Ajax had ridden down that very road through cheering throngs, past this very barrio, in a triumphal procession. The barrio wasn’t as big then. Now a vast, dense maze of dusty, trash-strewn tracks was lined, cheek-by-jowl, with shacks. Most of them were jigsaw puzzles of discarded pieces of who knew what. The lucky residents had “acquired” a gargantuan packing crate or two—in which a tractor or crane had arrived—and cut windows and doors into it. The Russian, Bulgarian, or Romanian letters stenciled on the sides were still visible, like very neat graffiti. Those with hustle or connections had prized zinc roofs. The adversary of the poor in Nicaragua was not the cold to be kept out, but the torrential rains. Part of Ajax cringed with an ulcerous despair at so much life revolving monotonously around so much scarcity, like a cold planet endlessly circling a weak sun. There would never be enough. He hadn’t grown up poor in Los Angeles, but North Hollywood was close enough to it to see it, go to school with it. Poverty in a rich country, though, was a different universe from poverty in a poor country. The poor will always be with us, Horacio had reminded him. Bullshit. Only someone whose Daddy was the Creator of heaven and earth could be so blithe about a broke-ass existence in a broke-ass country.

  It made Ajax want to slap Jesus.

  But the other part of him marveled at the tireless ingenuity, the valiant innovation of making something from nothing. After all, each family here had constructed a home; an impossible tangle of jerry-rigged wires ran from utility poles to each shack where lights kept out the night and radios brought in the world. Impossible vehicles with no glass, doors, or springs, just five-gallon gas jugs sporting a hose plugged directly into carburetors patrolled the streets as “People’s Taxis.”

  It was an ingenuity born of necessity which never overcame the scarcity—like harvesting water from fog. You’d get enough to drink, but only just.

  Ajax stood in the shade of a chilamate tree and studied the children. Few things happened in the barrios populares to break the routine, so this corpse, “their corpse,” would give them bragging rights in the ramshackle school they would eventually return to. But they were all out of school today. Three days of national mourning had been declared for the death of Joaquin “El Mejicano” Tinoco. And like all the barrios of the capitol, this one was already draped in black flags. Flags as black as the trash bags that covered the corpse at his feet.

  “Been a lot of dying lately.” Ajax had been shocked to learn from Horacio last night that the news of Joaquin’s death would be made public today.

  Joaquin Tinoco had been one of the nine comandantes of the National Directorate that actually ran the country—the men behind the president. Ajax had not even known he was sick. But he’d been dropped from the need-to-know list when he’d stopped going to Frente meetings. Still, it would’ve been nice, it would have been proper, to have visited Joaquin before the cancer ate him up. Joaquin wasn’t really Mexican. But the old noms de guerre stuck to you like grafted skin. Joaquin had been born in Mexico and moved to Nicaragua as a child—a mirror image of Ajax, who’d been conceived in Nicaragua and born in the States. Joaquin was one of the oldest living founders of the Sandinista Front. In 1969, Joaquin had marched in with a squad of men to give the oath when Horacio had put Ajax up for full membership. Ajax smiled to remember how solemnly he had taken the vow—“Patria Libre o Morir!”—Free country or death. He’d even memorized a little verse from Nicaragua’s national saint, the poet Rubén Darío, to consecrate the moment. But before he’d opened his mouth to recite, Joaquin had cuffed him upside the head. “Don’t fuck up, chico. I don’t want to have walked all this way for nothing.” And the veterans had gone off laughing to scrape together a meal. Por nada, for nothing, had instantly become Ajax’s nickname.

  That was the first time he’d seen El Mejicano. The last time was two years ago when Ajax had awoken in a hospital bed after wrapping his Lada around a palm tree. Like most drunks, he had an uncanny ability to survive wrecks less damaged than his car. El Mejicano had been in his room—the old comandante still looked after his boys. Ajax had pretended to be out, and watched him a while. Joaquin’s face had seemed blank, eyes half-closed, the stupefied look all the old veterans had developed whiling away countless hours of waiting—for food, ammunition, battle, victory, death.

  When Ajax had finally “come to” though, so had Joaquin. He�
��d pitched Ajax’s things around the room, the bloody uniform, his battered shoes. When he’d found the Python, Joaquin pulled it from its holster, shucked five bullets out, spun the chamber with the sixth still in, and stuck the pistol into Ajax’s hand. You wanna gamble with your life, Spooky, play for real. Stop wrecking the Revo’s cars!

  That one bullet was still in the Python.

  A breeze off Lake Managua snaked through the warren of the barrio, rustled the black flags hung for a hero, and lifted the black trash bags covering the corpse at Ajax’s feet. It was “his” corpse now.

  Ajax watched the crowd. Girls held hands to their mouths and whispered to each other. Boys talked excitedly and pushed each other toward the body, inciting the usual dares.

  But Ajax ignored the children. At least the excited ones. He was looking for the quiet kid. The one standing apart, observing, watching with interested eyes. The cadaver was still fresh, no decomposition but just enough stiffness in the joints to make Ajax think it was maybe twelve hours dead. If the perp was local, he’d not be hanging around. But if something bad had gone down at home last night, if an adult had brought guilt into the house, then one of these kids might be wearing a worried look. It took a few minutes, but Ajax spotted him. A skinny, gangly boy with a shaved head, hanging back behind the adults. The only one watching Ajax more than the corpse. Ajax signaled to one of the traffic cops who’d called it in.

  “Compa,” he said to the man, turning his back to the kid. “Look over my shoulder. You see the boy at the back of the crowd with the shaved head? I need to talk to him. Go up to the road and circle around behind. Bring him here.”

  The traffic cop walked off, just as Gladys emerged from the crowd.

  “Any luck?”

  “No one knows him. No one reports anyone missing.”

  “Didn’t think they would. He’s not local.”

  “But you wanted me to ask anyway?”

  “Canvassing’s always a good idea. Show the flag. Let ’em know we’re on the job, that we care. Come on, time to see.”

  He walked her down to the corpse. The body lay facedown in the muck, still dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, shoeless, beltless, one limp black sock half off the right foot.