Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  Amelia looked down at the palm she’d used on him. She smiled without meaning to, and so quickly looked away.

  Ajax Montoya. She’d gone through the embassy’s files and pulled the original clippings. The obese man was a serial killer and the cop had cracked the case. The killer had escaped and just been returned yesterday after three years. So it hadn’t been a provocation. She’d tried to brief Tony on it, but stopped after he asked why someone would name their child after a cleaning product.

  Then she saw him. As if her thinking made it so. Ajax. Not a cleaning product, but the Greek hero. He sauntered into the dining area trailed by a woman, also in uniform. A pretty young woman with close-cropped hair. Kind of butch, Amelia thought. She tried to discern their relationship from their body language.

  The two of them bent their heads in conversation, he handed her some keys, and the young woman left. Ajax gave the diners the once over, and before Amelia could react he was looking right at her. He seemed to need a moment to recognize her, as if he’d been looking for a particular someone else. But when he did, she was sure he smiled, or at least his eyes did. He rubbed his left hand over the cheek she’d smacked.

  Then she realized Ambassador Lackley was making kissing noises at her.

  “It’s how you call your waiter in Latin America,” he explained. And sure enough, a smiling—semi-terrified?—waiter appeared.

  “That policeman by the door,” Lackley said. “Ask him to join us.”

  “That’s a bad idea.” The words went right from mind to mouth without passing through Amelia’s finely meshed editor. “I mean, Mr. Ambassador, maybe it would not be appropriate.”

  “Nonsense. What do you say, Senator, shall we dine with the enemy?”

  “Of course!”

  Amelia studied her senator again. Tony had inherited that patrician’s gene which allowed old money to suppress the glassy-eyed look of the inebriate. Amelia hoped the heat on her face was the night air and not a blush. The waiter returned with Ajax. Lackley rose.

  “Ambassador Lackley.” He held out his hand.

  “I know you from your photos. Captain Ajax Montoya.”

  “And I know you from yours. This is Senator Anthony Teal.”

  Tony took his hand, Amelia thought, like he was glad-handing a beat cop in Columbus. “Glad to meet you, Captain. Join us, please.”

  “I’d enjoy that, Senator, but I’m afraid duty calls.”

  Lackley turned to her. “You know Miss Amelia Peck, of course, the senator’s senior advisor for foreign affairs.”

  Amelia hoped she had carefully calculated her expression—amused but not too much, friendly but not joking. She stuck out her hand and spoke the lines she’d prepared.

  “Yes, we have met.”

  And the son of a bitch left her hand hanging there! His eyes were smiling, again. Damn it! She could feel her expression slipping. He leaned his head back, as if to get his face out of range, and then took her hand.

  “A memorable meeting.”

  He shook her hand beyond the usual three-pumps-and-release, until she really was not sure of her expression. Now the son of a bitch won’t let go!

  “Señorita, my apologies for ruining your press conference.”

  “Well, it was really my press conference,” Tony piped in.

  “And my apologies to you as well, Senator. It was unforgivable, but things got out of hand. Literally.”

  “And I’m sorry my aide slapped you. Amelia’s from the rough part of Cleveland.”

  Now she was sure her cheeks burned. Tony was oblivious to the slight, of course. Lackley noticed; so did this captain.

  “She shouldn’t be.” He turned those smiling eyes on her again. “You shouldn’t be, Miss Peck.”

  “Why not?” Lackley was leaning his doughy chin on his suety hands, but Amelia could see the fire in his eyes.

  “Because I’m sure that slap is playing pretty well at home, isn’t it Mr. Ambassador? In fact, Miss Peck, I’m sure the ambassador has already told you, you are likely to be the only American to ever lay hands on a Sandinista official.”

  “That’s exactly what he said!” Tony was delighted by Ajax’s deduction, and he was the only one not to register the incredible faux pas of saying so.

  “Well, I must be going, I’ll leave you to your dinner. Enjoy it, Miss Peck, you are at the Hotel Inter, the Rick’s Café Américain of Managua. Everyone comes to the Inter. And everyone who does is either a spy, a refugee, or a crook. And by refugee I include all journalists, tourists, aid workers, and the like.”

  “Which one am I, then?” She spoke before she’d really decided to.

  “While here, you and the senator are diplomats, and diplomats are by definition spies. Isn’t that right, Mister Ambassador?”

  Lackley bowed his head.

  “Then what are you?” She’d spoken again without deciding to.

  “Me? I’m a crook.”

  Amelia laughed, like a burp escaping her esophagus, and threw a hand over her mouth. He leaned so close to her that she could smell him. He stage-whispered, “I come here to buy black market cigarettes from the bartender.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I used to extort them from a hunchback, but no more.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died.”

  He was joking, Amelia was sure, yet there was something in those eyes again.

  “A hunchback?” Tony finished the latest mojito, and despite his genes his glassy eyes began to show. “What a character you are! Sit down here. I want to pick your brain!”

  Amelia flinched inwardly as Tony grabbed Ajax’s wrist with too much frat boy bonhomie and tried to pull him into a chair. “The politics in this country is complicated and I want to discuss it with a local, for once.”

  She wasn’t sure how, but with a move so fast and strong, yet so deft that Tony didn’t notice, Ajax slipped his grip and turned it into a cordial handshake. Ajax leaned over Tony as if to whisper in his ear. Amelia pretended to reach for her drink so she could listen.

  “Senator, politics here is very simple. The world is divided into two hostile camps and the weak must choose.”

  “Us or the Russians.”

  “Yes. Two giants that stride the world, and if we don’t choose correctly they will grind our bones.”

  “To make our bread.”

  “To make your bread, Senator.”

  Amelia took a sip, dumbfounded that Tony actually followed the allusion.

  Ajax let go of Tony’s hand. “So for us, Senator, the formulation is simple: politics is the art of choosing which dick to suck so we don’t get fucked twice.”

  Lackley threw his head back and laughed. So did Tony. So did Amelia. But she’d just taken a drink and the mojito in her mouth exploded out just as Ajax turned away from Tony. He took most of it in the face.

  She’d slapped him again.

  2.

  The Stolen Car King didn’t live very far from the hotel. Barrio Bolonia was full of foreigners, mostly journalists who liked the convenience of being close to Government House and its press conferences, and the Inter and its mojitos. But a few well-off Nicas lived among them. Ajax felt sure the King lived here to be close to his client base.

  He and Gladys walked down the middle of the street, dressed in civvies. The sidewalks were too crumpled and treacherous to use at night. Curbside was no safer, as the iron grates covering the city’s gutter drains had all been pilfered for their metal, and many a pedestrian had disappeared down those dark holes, feeding, it was widely believed, the Ogre’s many exotic pet reptiles he’d fed into the sewers as his last “Fuck you” before fleeing. So, the middle of the street was the safest place to be.

  They stopped in front of don Augustino’s house—a pretty two-story place with two tall jacaranda trees out front with twin tire swings dangling in the dark. A long, high-walled patio lined the upper floor. Big “buena vista” windows downstairs faced the street. The house was in complete darkness.
The King was clearly not home.

  “Too not home, don’t you think, Gladys?”

  She stepped away, relieved, he was sure, to get his arm off her after he’d insisted they pretend to be strolling lovers. But it had been that goddamned gringa he’d been thinking of. Son of a bitch. She’d slapped him and spit her drink on him. But instead of being outraged, he felt his face smile. Pobrecita. She’d looked so mortified, he’d been a bit charmed; the scarlet flushing her face had highlighted all those freckles and made her green eyes just pop. What color do you call that kind of green anyway? Emerald? Jade?

  Then he realized Gladys was talking to him. “What?”

  “I said, I’d never go out without leaving some lights on. There’s two swings. He’s got kids, where’s the nanny? The maids? They’d leave lights on.”

  He smiled in the dark. She was getting the hang of it. “And no cuidador.”

  Cuidadores were the ubiquitous night watchmen who, in some parts of Central America, were organized gangs of thieves paid protection not to rob you. In Nicaragua they were often the brothers or uncles of your maids, paid to hang around out front from lights-out till dawn. He’d seen cuidadores up and down the street. Don Augustino, a well-to-do thief and racketeer, had none?

  Gladys checked the street. “Should we just try knocking?”

  The door wasn’t open, but neither was it bolted. Ajax was pleased at how quickly Gladys popped the spring lock. She went in first. They stood in what felt in the pitch black to be a foyer. He took Gladys’s arm and guided her into a crouch while he counted to ten to let their eyes adjust. When he could make out the inner door, he put his lips to her ear.

  “Find the light switch, but don’t turn it on.”

  Ajax could hear her hands searching the walls while he went through the inner door. After two steps, the smell of blood stopped him dead.

  It was not as heavy as it had been at the morgue emptying out Enrique Cuadra, but it was unmistakable.

  Suddenly Gladys was at his side. He knew she’d drawn the Makarov from her purse the moment before he heard the hammer click. Maybe he could trust her, and should have all along.

  She handed him a penlight.

  It took only a few seconds to find don Augustino. The Lord of Car Thieves was sprawled in a chair in the middle of his sala, his head thrown back, mouth and eyes wide open, a stream of blood from each slit wrist ran down his legs, spread across the floor, and merged into one, like streams feeding a lake. A hunting knife lay at his feet.

  “Turn the lights on Gladys. Check the house.”

  Even with the lights on, he used the penlight to get the best view of Augustino’s wounds. By the time Gladys got back he knew what was to be done.

  “Look close at his wounds.”

  She did. He was reassured to see her carefully but thoroughly examine the wrists, even touching a hand to pull it back and reveal more. “Damn, he really sliced himself, these are deep.”

  “What do you see?”

  If she got this right, he knew he would tell her everything. She looked over the wounds again, the knife, the streams and pools of blood. Then the lightbulb went off in her head.

  “The blade is long enough to cut that deep. But the wounds are almost identical. He couldn’t have made the second one as deep as the first.”

  “So it’s murder made to look like suicide. Like Enrique Cuadra was murder made to look like robbery and/or the Contra.”

  Her head snapped up. “The Contra?”

  “Yeah. Once to the throat, twice to the heart. Their MO. Marta recognized it, too.”

  “You didn’t mention that before.”

  “Just did.”

  Gladys stood up from the corpse. “How are they connected?”

  “The Hunchback and Gypsy from the Oriental are both dead. We talked to two of them and were looking for the third, and now they’re all dead.”

  “Who the fuck is doing this?” Gladys looked around the room as if the murderer might materialize.

  “Not who, Gladys. Why. Who killed these three is hidden now with them dead—which is why they are dead. But they were killed because we were looking for Enrique’s pickup, I’m sure of that. So, why was Cuadra killed? Find out why he was killed and we’ll find who killed him. Whoever killed Cuadra, killed these three.”

  “I follow that.”

  “So the question is: Where do we find the answer to the why of Cuadra’s murder.”

  It took a moment for her to do the math; when she had, she took a step in as if she might grab his shirt. “You can’t go up there. It’s the hottest front in the war. You can’t go there! No one goes in less than battalion strength.”

  “Captain Ajax Montoya can’t. You’re right.” Ajax looked at the bled-out white of Augustino’s face. “But if I’ve got this right—I know how I can get to where the answer to the why is. And that will lead me to who.”

  “How do you get there without joining the dead?”

  Ajax looked around for a telephone. “Journalists can go anywhere in our country. Connelly wants to stick his nose in our business? Good. He’ll be my cover, hide me in plain sight all the way to Cuadra’s farm.”

  “And me?”

  Ajax scanned her face, like a tracker cutting for sign. But what does trust look like?

  10

  1.

  The Carretera Norte up to Matagalpa split the Sébaco Valley, which, this rainy time of year, stretched away in such a luxuriant green it challenged even Ajax’s thesaurus reading. The valley, in the foothills of the northern mountains, stippled in the sharply angled light just after dawn, like now, drew an almost hallucinatory response from Ajax’s eyes, so long accustomed to the flat dull colors of the city. He combed his mind for some synonyms but couldn’t find them. In his haste to leave he hadn’t packed the thesaurus.

  He stole a glance at Connelly, who had blessedly dropped off to sleep almost before they’d cleared Managua. Ajax was relieved to have time to enjoy the view, and even the driving. Connelly’s pickup was a dream—power steering, power brakes, power windows, the airconditioning whispering coolness in his face and the radio softly playing music with a static-less clarity he’d forgotten was possible. The truck seemed to run the gauntlet of the highway’s potholes of its own accord. He felt at one with the machine in a way he only did when rolling the Python’s cylinder over his palm. Through the steering wheel he could feel the miles falling away as he fled the raucous capitol, as if the alien city pushed him away from it, while the mountains in the distance drew him to them.

  He picked up the wallet with his new identity, which was his disguise. Connelly, Ajax almost hated to admit, had come through in a short time. An ID from the Foreign Press Association identified him as “Martin Garcia, translator and fixer.” And, for this trip, driver.

  He and Connelly would be safe as far as Matagalpa, the last stop before the war zone. After that it was wide-open country in one of the least populated regions in all of Central America. His disguise should get him through any Sandinista checkpoints on the way to Enrique’s farm. But if they were stopped by the Contra? Cuadra’s farm sat right in the middle of a free-fire zone often occupied by the Contra’s Jorge Salazar Command—the singularly most effective combat unit in an otherwise ineffectual army. Most Contra units and their commanders would leave their bases over the border in Honduras, make a raid or quick strike, usually against soft targets, and bolt back over the border. But the Jorge Salazar Command was run by a scrappy and wily veteran called Krill, a former sergeant in the Ogre’s National Guard who, while maybe not the best military mind, was widely known as the Contra who most liked to fight. It was his men who most often went after the Sandinista army rather than schoolteachers or health workers.

  It wouldn’t be hard answering their questions, he knew, as most of the Contra were campesinos who wouldn’t know how to question someone. His survival would hang on that first impression. He’d sell the disguise in an instant or die right there on the roadside. The thought m
ade him check the rearview mirror—in the truck bed, where he’d tied it down, was Enrique’s casket. That, he knew, was the best “beard” he could have. No one really wanted to mess with a corpse bound for the boneyard.

  That’s when he saw the little girl in the road dead ahead.

  The pickup was just rounding a curve and the girl was just, suddenly, there, like a ghost.

  Ajax stomped on the brake pedal, trying to drive it through the floor. He kept his eyes on the girl. She was dressed all in white, in her first Holy Communion dress. He could see the tin can in her hands and the rope stretched across the road behind her. Ajax tried to stand up on the brake, but he could feel the road sliding away under the locked-up tires. He ripped the hand brake up and slewed the pickup sideways, the girl seeming to move from the windshield into his side window. “Goddamn STOP!!!”

  “What the fuck!” Connelly awoke to find not the road in front of him but the countryside, and braced his arms on the dashboard.

  And then the world did come to a stop. The pickup rocked back and forth as if it, too, was confused. The world inside the truck was silent. Somehow the radio was off.

  “What the fuck?” Connelly was still straight-arming the dashboard.

  Ajax looked the little girl in the eye, peeled his hands off the steering wheel, and lowered his window. She was close enough for him to reach out and pat her head. So he did.

  “Para la Santa Madre.” She held up her can for a donation as cool as if the Holy Mother had stood between her and hurtling death.

  In a country like Nicaragua, charity was rare enough in the city where red lights at least held up traffic long enough to beg. But in the countryside people made their own stoplights: dress a few kids in their Sunday best, give them a can, and stretch a rope across the asphalt. A charity roadblock.

  “What just happened?” Connelly almost whispered.

  “Charity roadblock. Give me some money.”

  Connelly seemed to finally notice the girl in white, and reached into his pants for some bills. Ajax spotted the old woman sitting near the handful of huts that comprised the nameless village. There was always an abuela somewhere nearby keeping an eye on the kids, and her cut.