Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  Ajax actually managed a kind of strangled chuckle. “Then my damnation is complete.”

  “I need to see you, now.”

  “Please don’t. I don’t need comforting.”

  “This won’t comfort you.”

  * * *

  Ajax and Marta were in his garden. He studied the black-and-white photographs she’d brought. It’s like death has set up a waiting room in my life.

  “What’s this?”

  He looked over to see Marta trying to wiggle The Needle free of the post where he’d sunk it.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? This is The Needle; I haven’t seen this in years. You kept it?”

  Ajax held up one of the morgue photos. “Was he blind?”

  “Which one?” She walked over and took a seat at the small table in his garden. Spread out before Ajax were six photographs of two dead men; he touched one.

  “This one?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. He styled himself a blind gypsy fortune-teller.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Both of them.” Ajax touched another photo. “That’s the Hunchback.”

  “He wasn’t a hunchback. He had spinal encephalitis, a crooked spine. Painful, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Maybe that’s why he was always mad.”

  “At you?”

  “Marta, you’re sure?”

  She looked down at her photos. “Both of them. Once in the throat, twice in the heart. Just like the first one.”

  The first one. Damn, he hadn’t expected that. Enrique Cuadra, okay. But now these two, and the same MO? He traced a finger around the Hunchback’s head. “When and where?”

  “Both found today. Crooked Spine floating in the lake, the not-blind gypsy in a garbage heap at the Oriental.” She studied his face a moment. “How did you know these two?”

  “I might be the last one to have seen them alive.”

  Marta lay down in his hammock, used her ass to swing it gently. “You can’t be your own suspect.”

  “No. Maybe just suspect.”

  She rocked for a while. “Joaquin’s funeral is tomorrow,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You’re going.”

  “Am I? After the spectacle I put on at the airport? Can you imagine what the papers will make of that?”

  “Don’t have to. La Prensa put out a special edition already. You made the front page. But you have to attend, Ajax. All the old comrades will be there. Friends.”

  “Not the burial, too many grandees. But afterward, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Come on.” She got out of the hammock. “Let’s go see what detritus you’ve got in the kitchen. We’ll make a camp mash out of it.”

  “You gonna cook for me?”

  “Hell no. But I’ll slice some mangos.”

  They stood around Ajax’s stove and slowly made a serviceable meal out of whatever was at hand. They ate together, sitting on stools in the kitchen, trading remembrances of Joaquin and the old days.

  In the garden, the black-and-white photos curled in the humid night.

  8

  Ajax and Horacio silently drove south out of Managua on the Inter-American Highway. Ajax daydreamed of not stopping until he awoke drowning in the Panama Canal. Strangely, the seasonal torrential rain had skipped a day yesterday. He slalomed easily around the potholes on the dry road under the burning sun on his way to Gioconda’s house to mourn the passing of Joaquin Tinoco. The Soviet tanker had finally brought the gas, so the carretera was again busy with overstuffed Bulgarian buses, big Russian IFA trucks, Lada taxis, Toyotas, Jeeps, hawkers, and walkers.

  As the sprawl of the city thinned out, Ajax took in smaller details. He passed the city’s first and only McDonald’s, which gamely limped on even though it’d been excommunicated from the parent company for serving tacos and yucca instead of burgers and fries. The foreign aid groups and UN missions had offices here, flags flying over them. Long stretches of ugly concrete walls enclosing military barracks were covered in the graffiti of Sandinista and opposition youth groups trading insults. A long stretch of revolutionary murals and slogans was painted just north of his destination. He grunted his approval as they drove by his favorite—Que se rinda tu madre! Your mama surrenders. It was the kind of slogan Ajax like best: streetwise and not fit for polite company.

  “What?”

  Horacio was watching with a sly smile, which meant he’d been watching for some time. He had a habit of watching, which made Ajax feel both esteemed and spied on.

  Ajax nodded at the slogan-covered walls: “Leonel.”

  Leonel Rugama had been a young poet and guerrillero when he’d been caught in a safe house right here in Managua in 1970. Surrounded by two hundred National Guardsmen, he’d held them off with one Thompson submachine gun and a few grenades. The Ogre had been so thrilled to have caught an actual Sandinista he’d ordered the siege broadcast live on TV and radio. Leonel had held them off for hours as the entire nation watched, transfixed. No one, literally, had ever seen such a thing!

  Leonel would pop up in one window, fire a burst, and then weather a shit storm of lead from the Ogre’s best troops. Then the rascally bastard would pop up in another window and toss a grenade. It was during this siege that an officer had broadcast a demand for his surrender, and Leonel had shouted for the entire world to hear live on TV, “Que se rinda tu madre!”

  The Guard finally had had to call up a tank to blast the house. Still, the country watched the Guard hesitate for an hour before making the final assault. And when they did, a broken, bloody Leonel got off one final burst before dying.

  “Que se rinda tu madre.” Horacio smiled. “That brother was more than a compa. I think he was a nuclear physicist. Or an alchemist!”

  Ajax cut his eyes at the old man, wondering how he would bring that together.

  “Do you know what E = mc2 means?”

  Ajax paused to light a Marlboro. “Ah, it’s Latin for ‘your mama surrenders’?”

  “Always the vulgarian. It means that from a small thing comes a great energy. Leonel understood that. He understood in his revolutionary consciousness that holding the Guard off like that he was the smallest grain of plutonium, but he would unleash a firestorm that would make him immortal.”

  Ajax exhaled a cloud of doubt. “You think he died knowing that?”

  “None of us die knowing the good we did. But the real tragedy is that he died not knowing that as a poet he gets to be remembered for his shortest verse. It was the beginning of the end for Somoza.”

  “You think?”

  “Of course. No amount of Somoza propaganda or intimidation could ever overcome the unifying, collective grief—the sigh heard ’round the world!—when they dragged Leonel’s body from the rubble. Your mamma surrenders instantly became a cultural touchstone. College students graffitied the country with it. Children shouted it at rivals in the schoolyard. Workers whispered it behind their bosses’ backs. Henpecked husbands and neglected wives prayed it into their pillows. Farmers spelled it out in their cornfields. And all of them, every one of them, muttered it under their breath as they passed the Guardia.”

  They arrived at a windbreak of trees, and Ajax turned off the carretera into Las Colinas and Gio’s house.

  After a long pause, Horacio simply said, “It was a slogan worth fighting for.”

  And that it had been, Ajax agreed. But it was no longer the slogan they fought for.

  He had joined the war, and so he had done what the logic of war dictated. Ajax had learned early on that he had a facility for night fighting, and yes, for throat cutting. And he’d told himself, believed, that every life he took with The Needle—whether of a sleepy sentry or a lost soldier—had needed taking. He had never complained. And when it had begun to feel that each time he stuck The Needle into a man’s neck he was shaving off a bit of his own soul, he’d accepted the price. He’d had faith that if his motives were pure, then his soul would be rest
ored, either in victory or in death. That faith had been slowly replaced with rum. Now that the rum had ceased to flow, he was waking in his bed with The Needle in his hand, and something staring in his window. It only just now occurred to Ajax that the specter outside his window might be connected to The Needle’s well-worn blade.

  Been a lot of dying lately. Horacio’s words again floated through his mind, but as past or prologue he was no longer sure.

  At least all this death would get one good funeral.

  He drove on, turning left or right without thinking, to Gio’s house. Our house. There were no ugly gray walls here. No graffiti, no slogans. No compañero. Las Colinas was an upscale barrio of about twenty acres, full of diplomats, foreigners, and the upper-middle-classes of the Sandinista “nomenklatura”—a term imported from the Soviets as surely as the Lada he was driving. It was an old saw that there were three social classes in Latin America: dirt floor, concrete floor, and tiled floor. The Revo could no more change that than Christ could’ve declined crucifixion. Las Colinas was nothing but tiled floors as far as the eye could see, which was maybe why it was stashed behind the trees.

  He turned down Gioconda’s street and found it lined with vehicles. He parked at the end of the line. Their rides informed him how his old comrades had fared over the years. Some were Ladas, like Ajax’s, only in better shape and none marked POLICÍA. But most were Jeep Cherokees and Toyota pickups from various ministries: health, land reform, education, defense, State Security, the army. A dozen drivers milled around, the mark of the truly “in.”

  He pulled to a stop, but could not yet will himself to go in and join old compañeros in mourning the death of one of their greatest. He’d skipped the burial service, as he’d told Marta he would. The morning newspapers, lying on Horacio’s lap, had featured his exploits at the airport. Barricada and El Nuevo Diario had played up the government line about a desperate escape attempt by the notorious killer of young girls. But La Prensa had run an enormous headline, “Bienvenidos a Nicaragua,” above a half-page photo spread of a crazed-looking Ajax murdering the fat fuck, accompanied by one of that gringa in mid-slap. Connelly, all wide-eyed, was in the background of that one. Worse, they’d run two full pages inside—a sequence of shots from dignified VIP press conference to bedlam. The last one featured El Gordo in the choke hold, almost unconscious, Ajax’s mouth pressed to his ear, a sadistic scowl twisting his face. Carrot Head was in that one, too. Strange, but she didn’t look panicked. The worst, however, was a photo in dead center capturing Gioconda and the portly Foreign Minister running for their lives. For those not familiar with their ample backsides, the paper kindly identified them in a caption in type as large as a bullet.

  How could he face anyone, even at this more private memorial service? Especially Gio. She was so vain about her ass. What could he say? “Photos never lie, but liars publish photos?”

  He lit a Marlboro and smoked without pleasure, thinking that the Hunchback was not a hunchback, but had always been in pain.

  The sounds of a mariachi band playing a funereal “La Vida No Vale Nada” floated out from the gathering. Ajax silently cursed himself for feeling so nervous.

  “Ready, Ajax?”

  “Do me one favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Feed me what looks like rum and cokes, so I don’t have to explain, you know.…”

  “Your sobriety.” Horacio patted his leg. “Of course.”

  “Horacio, amorrrrrrrrr!” Gio trilled her R’s at him. “Come on, come in.”

  Gioconda glided toward them. Barefooted. Her face unmade. Dressed in a simple black shift. Her hair tied back in a bandana—the red and black of the Sandinista Front. That hair. It was an unimaginable tangle of curls no woman ever believed was natural. The one time in his life Ajax had waxed lyrical, he’d compared her locks to vines in the Garden of Eden. How long had it been between that sober night and the drunken one he’d stood over her with scissors determined to denude the Gorgon?

  “I see you brought the saboteur with you.”

  He and Horacio climbed from the Lada. She hugged the old man’s neck. Ajax noticed that she’d resumed shaving her armpits. Funny, she’d gotten all hairy back in ’79 when the fashion was guerrilla chic.

  She kissed Horacio on the mouth, and turned to her ex-husband.

  “Why does it seem whenever I see you there is some disaster? The last time you were here”—she swept her arm over the house—“you started a fight with that American film director and pushed Bianca Jagger into the pool.”

  “Did I?”

  “She slapped you for it.”

  “Her, too?”

  Gio put her arm through Horacio’s and led him inside, but turned back to Ajax.

  “It is my honor to host this memorial. A truce for today. Come inside, everyone is waiting for you.”

  Ajax followed a few steps behind. As they entered, Ajax slowed to let Horacio enjoy his greetings. But also to reconnoiter the walls of the entryway. They were covered in a gallery of photos of Gioconda in various places with a menagerie of the big shots she entertained as vice foreign minister—not of a nation, but of everyone’s favorite Revolución! Ajax recognized the Vietnamese general. He’d been on that trip, the furthest from home he’d ever been. He also recognized a few of the Cubans. The others were a mélange of European, Russian, and Latin American dignitaries. Pride of place, he noticed, was given to the writers and artists who came to soak up the revolutionary milieu. He’d been around for a few of those assemblages. Gio had given him Graham Greene and Gabriel García Marquez to read before their visits. That photo was dead center on the wall, showing those two lions and a laughing Gio at a table littered with food and drink. He had sat somewhere to her left, not really following the literary shop talk that had droned on for hours. Maybe the scowl on his face had got him cropped out of the trophy shot. But he spotted his pack of Reds on the table at her elbow—which, as he recalled, the other two sons of bitches had helped themselves to all night while skewering yanqui imperialism with their wit.

  It was after that visit he’d realized that all the novels and plays were not meant to enlighten him, but to make him presentable.

  He searched the wall and was heartened to see himself in one photo—a copy of the one he kept in his drawer with her makeup bag. If the gallery was a map of her life, his photo had once been closer to the equator, but had since drifted to the far northwest. Any further and it would fall off the edge of the world.

  * * *

  The lawn in back of the house was filled with people in various states of mourning and sobriety. The crowd spilled around the tasteful flower beds, and around her small, crystal-clear pool. Ajax was met by a chorus of hearty voices.

  “Ajax! Look at you, fucker, I thought you were dead!”

  “Until we saw you in the paper! You fucked that fat shit up!”

  “And scared them gringos back on the plane, man. I heard they went home!”

  “You don’t get out much, bro, but when you do, you know how to make some noise, compa!”

  “Give up them Marl-burros, Spooky!”

  Ajax handed around one of the extra packs he’d brought. He divided the mourners into two types, as he did the world, those he knew by their nom de guerre, and all the rest. El Chino was there. As were Flaco, Blondie, Isadora, Gordo, Negro, three different Gatos, El Matador, Rhino, Nora, Esteben, Cuqui, and Blue Eyes. Marta was there, too, huddled with her boys, and looking fine in jet black. These veterans—all of them the shot-callers of the Northern Front who’d survived at the expense of so many sandbags—all stood together, drunker and noisier than the other guests.

  Ajax joined them, and amid their too-loud, backslapping, ball-busting camaraderie he felt the walls of his solitude become porous enough so that he could pass through. He wondered how they dealt with their ghosts, or if they had any. He guessed that some threw themselves into the work of the Revo, some obviously drank too much, and some lost themselves in the rhetoric that
had sustained them as kids, The New this or the Socialist that, down with the yanqui something, up with the Soviet something else, or long live the Internationalist whatever.

  He felt a drink pressed into his hand. Horacio slipped him a glass of teetotal Coke with lime that all but the most discerning eye would think was the standard Cuba Libre. Ajax sipped and felt a warmth spread across his middle, which once would’ve been the liquor. He realized it must be pleasure. He was happy to be among the old comrades.

  “Be careful, Captain,” Horacio whispered. “You’re smiling.”

  “Been a while since we were all together.”

  “It’s been a while since you were together with all of them.”

  Horacio turned to the assembled mourners. “Compañeros.”

  He said it softly, but in the tone with which he’d called them into formation in the mountains. All the veterans immediately came to order, and shushed those who had not been trained to pay attention, so they fell silent, too.

  “Compañeros. Our old friend Death has harvested yet another of us. It is his manner and so we do not begrudge him. We have come to bid ‘Saludos’ to our comrade commander, Joaquin ‘El Mejicano’ Tinoco. And we do so by quoting that ancient proverb, whose still-ringing wisdom reminds us: It is a far, far better thing to have died under the care of a pretty French nurse than with any of you ugly shit-eaters!”

  The old compas let loose a roar of approval that Ajax thought loud enough to reach El Mejicano on the other side.

  Horacio raised his glass: “To Joaquin, and to Victory. Patria Libre!”

  “O MORIR!”

  Ajax tossed back his drink along with the others, and in that moment he meant it—Free country, or Death!

  It was a fight to the death. Or it had been. Someone, maybe Horacio, maybe Joaquin, had explained it to them years ago. The guerrilla fought so he could live, so that he could die in the fight to be free. And if he did not die that day, he fought to live to die another day. Fighting to live, living to die, it had been so simple.

  “Compañeros! Compañeros!” Gio tapped a knife to her glass. “We must mourn our friend Joaquin, but we must also celebrate him. Música!”