Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  In the Los Angeles of his youth, Ajax recalled, if you weren’t Anglo or Black, you were Mexican. No one thought or cared about shades in the Latino crowds. Not even the Mexicans. It had driven his father crazy—the food, the holidays celebrated in schools, the ethnic slurs, all Mexican. His father had been shocked by the prejudice he’d encountered when they first fled to California after he and his coconspirators had bought their way out of the Ogre’s prison. “Even the Mexicans hate us!” he would shout and thump the table. But the Anglos could not care less, and the Mexicans all looked down their noses at Nicaragua the same way that the gringos did Mexico.

  So his father had determined to make Ajax and his siblings as Nicaraguan as possible. History and geography lessons were mandatory over the summer. Dessert was a reward for reciting poems by Rubén Darío.

  And then the puzzles.

  His father gathered topographical maps of Nicaragua, old newspapers from Managua, or portraits of the heroes like President Zelaya and Sandino. Ajax’s mother would painstakingly glue them onto old cardboard, and then cut them up into jigsaws. Doing one such puzzle Ajax read an article in an old La Prensa about a group of bandits who’d robbed a bank in Matagalpa. It was the first time he’d seen the word Sandinista.

  So Ajax had learned early to like puzzles, and the quarters his father handed out with squeezes to the neck for the first to finish. Not that his father’s puzzles had been that difficult to solve. It took Ajax a few years to realize that the puzzles were only a prelude to his father lecturing on geography, biography, history, poetry. He had been one of the youngest-ever professors in Managua before “my blindness,” as he called it, led him to his failed rebellion which he’d mourned first as tragedy, but later as folly. His daily humiliation as a gardener and pool cleaner made his exile, and heart, bitter. He hated the Mexicans who daily dismissed him as an overeducated bourgeois. And he despised the Americans who would not believe their gardener had a PhD.

  He had died while Ajax was in the mountains.

  Ajax walked the alley, an automotive abattoir, until he spotted a pickup’s radiator grill with TOYOTA on it.

  “Cuanto e’?” he asked. How much? He asked the same of the green seats Epimenio had mentioned. Two doors, a hood he was sure of, and even maybe a transmission on down the line. Each “cuanto e’?” was answered in dollars, not córdobas. In less than twenty minutes, he’d completed the jigsaw to know Enrique’s Toyota had been chopped and brought to the Oriental. To reassemble it piecemeal would’ve cost him over $2,000. So he calculated that whoever had sold it got maybe $600. Ajax earned $800 a year as a police captain. Not quite a year’s salary, but enough to make someone sloppy. What might be burned or disappeared beyond help as evidence in another country, had to be recycled in Nicaragua. The thought made him happy.

  He strolled back to Gladys and the gypsy, stopping to trade a pack of Reds for a headlight for his Lada.

  He found her looking decidedly uncomfortable. “Has your future been revealed?”

  “She is reluctant to let the art read that part of her life.” The gypsy, his eyes hidden behind oversize sunglasses, held up a tarot card. “But she pulled the ace of cups. Hers will be a rich life.”

  Ajax thrust his hand out. “Read mine, viejo.”

  “You see, señorita,” he said to Gladys. “He thrusts his hand into mine. You were hesitant, like you have something to hide. But you, señor, you have no secrets so you present your palm.”

  “I’m an open book.”

  “I haven’t seen a book since I was a boy.” The gypsy studied Ajax’s palm with his fingers. “But I remember if you couldn’t read, an open book wasn’t really open to you.”

  “You are a philosopher.”

  “And you once had a difficult job. A hard life. These calluses are old, but will never go away. And this.” He pressed hard on the fleshy mass beneath Ajax’s thumb. “This is the Mound of Venus. Yours is too full of blood.”

  “Do I need more exercise, Doctor?”

  “No. Different circulation. Your blood does not live in all of your body. Some of what’s left over hides in the Mound of Venus. Your heart is sick. Pull a card.”

  Ajax fiddled in the deck, digging for the least obvious one. He flipped it over with a snap.

  The old man felt it with his fingers. “King of Swords.” He nodded, ran his fingers over Ajax’s palm again.

  “King of Swords means something, viejo?”

  “Most definitely, señor. He is the black king. The cards have spoken.”

  “Should I buy a Lotería?”

  “Not about luck, señor. Your palm points to a sick heart. The card speaks of friendship, loyalty.”

  “I’m to be blessed with both?”

  “No, señor. Neither.”

  2.

  Matthew Connelly liked puzzles, too. He held the phone to his ear and sat in his office in the deepening darkness surveying a well-orchestrated chaos of old news clippings and spilled file folders, thinking just that thought, I like puzzles. It was why he kept his files detailed and cross-referenced. They were the pieces of the life-size puzzle of Nicaragua he could never quite get right. Of course it helped that he could pay someone to do all the clipping and the filing and the cross-referencing for him. Like he paid to have so much done—cooking, cleaning, shopping, standing in lines for gas or bread or bureaucracies. He paid Lydia, the money changer, to come to him, but not as much as he paid Patricia from the phone company, but less than Marco, the car mechanic who made house calls, as did Silvio, the Italian doctor all the journalists used—as much for his skill as the cachet that he was a fugitive Red Brigades terrorist wanted by Interpol.

  At times he thought his life was obscene, really. He lived in neocolonial splendor on not quite twenty-five thousand a year. (And a full one-third of that earned from double or even triple-billing his many strings.) In a country where even the locally grown rice and beans were in short supply, entire supermarkets could be full of nothing but light bulbs, depending what Soviet freighter had docked. Yet his biggest worry was if the Dollar store was out of pesto. In a country at war with itself, the only policy all combatants agreed upon was never to kill a journalist, and particularly not an American. Beyond the war there was very little violent crime.

  Indeed not much crime at all except for the ubiquitous thievery. And even that had its charms. Once, when a pair of favorite pants had gone missing off the clothesline, he’d confronted his washerwoman, Lola, who’d sworn it was the work of trained crows that flew them directly to the Mercado Oriental. Three days later, Lola’s father showed up for work as Matthew’s night watchman proudly wearing his new khakis. Who could get angry at such lack of guile?

  He also knew he was a bit player, a member of the chorus—a very well paid member of the chorus. Well paid and well protected—always a mourner, never a corpse. So he had appointed himself the private archivist of the Nicaraguan revolution and the American counterrevolution. If it was on paper, Matthew had a copy of it in his exhaustive files—newspaper clippings in Spanish and English represented the bulk of them, but also every press handout, white paper, and brochure ever produced in Managua, Miami, or Washington. Stacks of reports—official, unofficial, and downright dubious. And cartons of notes he’d scribbled on cocktail napkins (and even a few his colleagues had scribbled and he’d filched). Pages copied or simply yanked out of books, and folders full of typed transcripts from his own notebooks (which he also paid someone else to do). And boxes of the tapes he’d recorded over seven years.

  It was all organized by the major events since he had arrived in 1978, and the people involved in them. When someone’s name was mentioned in association with an event, that person got a file; and if that person’s biography included some event, that event got a file, and so on. He’d laid the files out for tonight’s dispatches and sidebars so he could peruse the life of tonight’s topic, the rising star of Vladimir Malhora—before the war, during, and after. Malhora was, Matthew thought with no little e
nvy, one of the few people who had more extensive files than he did.

  New York was making him wait on the phone. When he got the green light, Matthew would give them a thumb-sucker on what it all means for the folks back home. What does it all mean for the folks back home, Matthew? For Mom and Pop Main Street? His editor, Sheila, loved to issue orders like that. She thought of them as a challenge, but they were orders. Her way to let him know that his job out there in the field, witnessing firsthand the agonies of the world, was nothing compared to her job in midtown Manhattan as gatekeeper for all that news, as if the purpose of building highways was to hang traffic lights.

  On the other end of the line, he could hear the wire service Teletypes clacking away, bringing photos and new stories from all over the world. He could hear electric typewriters tapping, each keystroke like a single bee in a humming swarm. He could hear a television reporting news. Maybe that new cable channel everyone was talking about.

  A twenty-four-hour news station! Matthew liked the sound of that. Trying to reduce Nicaragua into a sixty-second news report or an eight-hundred-word story was like asking a novelist to write a haiku. This twenty-four-hour news channel would revolutionize news reporting. The only way to fill that big a news hole would be with in-depth reporting. No longer just twenty-two minutes for world news, but twenty-two minutes just on Nicaragua. Even if he got on once a week, it would be like making a documentary! A brave new world was coming in which television news would make the world a global village.

  Still, he had to plug Shelia and Mom and Pop Main Street into his world now.

  So little of what actually happened in Nicaragua was of any use to the average American. How could Matthew pull the files and link the pieces together to make a picture for the folks back home? He could barely connect the pieces himself.

  His spilled Ajax’s file on the table.

  Fucking Montoya. Treating me like a tourist.

  The Montoya file was thin—clippings from the early days about his exploits as a guerrilla commander. And fucking cigarette thief. Sidebars highlighting his American upbringing, a couple of bits about his foreign travels with his then-wife Gio. A few clippings about his role in Salazar’s execution. The foreign and local press pegged him as at the scene with Salazar, but not in charge. That had been Malhora.

  Then nothing at all until Montoya showed up making a splash as a cop, busting a serial rapist and murderer who’d preyed on prostitutes. Matthew remembered that one. El Gordo Sangroso. The Bloody Fat Man. That had been in April 1984. Salazar had been killed in June 1981. So Montoya must’ve left State Security and gone over to the policía shortly after the Salazar affair. But had he been fired and farmed out, or resigned and stormed out?

  Matthew retrieved the Salazar file, fatter than the other two combined, and spilled it on the burgeoning pile of headlines, stories, and photos. All puzzle pieces.

  And then he saw it. Flitting and quickly buried in the pile. A photo. A piece of a photo. One face in one piece of one photo. He flicked clippings to the floor until he uncovered it. A photo from Barricada taken at the gas station where Salazar had been killed. It was dated June 23, two days after the killing. The caption explained Malhora and other government officials were reenacting the incident. Specifically the moment Salazar had “gone for his gun.”

  In the background, wearing a gray felt cowboy hat, was the face. The face of Enrique Cuadra.

  It was then Matthew Connelly heard his own name being sounded over the phone. He hung up.

  7

  1.

  The moment the plane door opened, Amelia Peck gazed upon the Nicaraguan delegation through the lugubrious heat waves rising snakelike from the tarmac. She could feel her mutinous, bright red hair begin to defy the bands in which she’d trapped it. She was going to have a bad hair day. The humidity was like a clammy pillow forced over her face, and rivulets of sweat flowed instantly down the freckled skin under the ridiculous business suit she’d had to wear. But her senator had wanted her in uniform, as if dressing without regard to local conditions would convey some moral message to the people he’d come to save from communism.

  Amelia stepped off the plane to the sounds of cameras whirring and light applause from the opposition leaders gathered at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t for her, specifically, but it filled her belly with delightful stirrings. She scanned the assembly like a raptor and immediately noted the presence of a print journalist on the ground, the first violation of protocol. It had been agreed that no journalists would be on the tarmac, only photographers. All others would wait for the press conference in the terminal. She doubted it was an innocent oversight. The Sandinistas, like all Communists, were devious bastards who did their homework. They certainly knew her senator was a fountain of malapropisms, faux pas, and Freudian slips. Anthony Teal styled himself in the folksy manner of the Fearless Leader of the Free World. But Ronald Reagan sailed on a genuine sea of charm honed from years of navigating the most treacherous waters in the world: the shark tanks of Hollywood. President Reagan might be acting, but he’d long ago lost himself in the role he played, and so exuded a disarming sincerity in his cluelessness, which utterly escaped her senator. Tony Teal was precisely what he appeared to be: a moneyed frat boy with movie star looks too indolent and dim to take up anything more challenging than politics.

  But the junior senator from Ohio was her ticket out of her father’s mill town and into the towers of power. Tony’s last minute, fill-in appointment to the Foreign Relations Committee had blissfully coincided with Reagan’s equating the Contras to freedom fighters descended from the Founding Fathers. The trope had rocketed a backwater like Nicaragua both to the vanguard in the fight against Worldwide Communism, and the front page. Now Amelia Peck was lunching with the staff of senators whose names were legendary—at least among the wonks of the poli-sci club she’d been president of at Ohio State.

  She’d already shaken Reagan’s hand twice, and the second time he’d been on the verge of remembering her name when the protocol officer had filled in the blank. Now she stepped off a plane to meet head-on the newest legion of the Evil Empire, and all she needed, other than a change of clothes, was to get Tony to the embassy without embarrassing himself.

  Last week’s committee meeting in Washington with the Contra civilian leadership about this trip had been a worrying precursor. Tony had been keen to deploy the one Spanish phrase she’d drilled into his head to lavish on the freedom fighters. But he’d tongue-twisted the key word for courage and so:

  The whole world admires your courage.

  became:

  The whole world admires I shit myself.

  Spanish could be like that.

  Not one of the Contras had batted an eye. They seemed wearily accomplished at not noticing such things.

  She watched Tony shake hands with the Sandinista foreign minister, a wily rogue priest whose profile reminded her of Alfred Hitchcock. Then, with a courtliness he’d truly mastered, he kissed the hand of doña Violeta, elegant grand dame of the opposition. Tony had killer charm, no doubt. So long as you hadn’t seen it too often. Amelia had not only met doña Violeta in D.C., but had gone shopping with her. She was wearing the faux pearl rope necklace Violeta had given her. She also spotted the vice foreign minister, her true adversary: Gioconda Targa was the perfect mouthpiece for a Communist revolution. Beautiful, with a tangle of chestnut curls that should have been impossible to maintain in this climate, she was elegant in a way that Amelia could only describe as Gallic. She spoke flawless English and was absolutely a diva in her native Spanish, trilling her Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr’s in an operatic fashion that set even Republican hearts atwitter. And the TV cameras loved her. Amelia secretly wanted to splash her with acid. Not that she’d admit that to anyone. The few times Amelia had been on the news, glimpsed momentarily handing Tony some briefing paper, she’d not looked bad at all. Amelia Peck just looked like what she was: a freckled twenty-seven-year-old Scotch-Irish daughter of steelworkers with a PhD and mo
re interest in policy than in fashion. Her wild carrot-orange hair made her look like she’d stuck her tongue in a wall socket. Amelia had also met Gioconda on the cocktail party circuit in D.C. She was still alarmed by a certain timbre she’d heard in Tony’s laugh when Targa poured on her Medusa charms.

  “Amelia!”

  The delegations were finally making their way inside to what Amelia prayed was an air-conditioned terminal. Five minutes on the ground and she was at the melting point. Targa looped her arm through Amelia’s like they were sorority sisters.

  “Your Excellency.”

  “Oh please, Amelia, this is Nicaragua. Call me Gio. I was thinking of you this morning and I brought you a gift. I made it myself.”

  She slipped something into Amelia’s hand. Instinctively, Amelia checked to see if they were being photographed. They’d been warned in their CIA briefing: “You are nothing but a propaganda opportunity to the Communists. Thus the first commandment is: thou shalt assume you are being recorded and photographed at all times, except in the embassy itself. Thus the second commandment: accept no items, gifts, nothing, from a Nicaraguan national that you take into the embassy. Their holy grail is to penetrate our walls with listening devices.”

  And while Amelia would rule out nothing, she was surprised to see a spritzer of hair spray in her hand.

  “Brazil-nut oil in seltzer water. All the women with hair like ours use it down here.”

  2.

  Ajax twirled the handcuffs on his index finger like an asymmetrical propeller. The smooth, repetitive twirling stirred the only breeze in the otherwise darkened terminal of Augusto César Sandino International Airport. The monotony of it soothed him as he watched the lean Aeronica DC-10 touch down. It gently hopped three times, each feathery bounce detonating a puff of white like a spray of water. Ajax admired that something so massive could appear so nimble. He most definitely did not admire the man who would soon get off the plane.