Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  “Abuela!”

  She waddled over while Connelly counted out a million córdobas in hundred-thousand cord notes. The bills themselves were laughable. They were older thousand-córdoba notes that had become so ravaged by inflation that the government simply had recalled them, stamped the three extra zeroes on, and reissued them. The makeover was so poorly done the bills screamed their uselessness even to counterfeiters.

  “Only in Nicaragua can you make someone a millionaire every day.” Matthew handed the bills to Ajax. “Even if it is only twenty bucks.”

  Ajax grunted, but took the wad and stuffed it into the girl’s can. The smile she gave him was a mixture of gratitude and relief. Ajax reckoned she’d probably just made her monthly quota and could now go home.

  Connelly reached into the backseat and took a bar of soap out of a boxfull he’d loaded back in Managua. He leaned across Ajax and gave it to the girl. She took it, pressed it to her nose, and inhaled until her eyes practically rolled up into her head as if in ecstasy.

  “Gracias, señores.”

  She took off running, handing off the can to the abuela. The old woman called another little girl over, gave her the can, and set her at her post on the road. Ajax, who had for a moment just before the near fatal accident shed his cop’s skin, slid it quickly back on.

  “Abuela, you move this rope and these kids either a hundred meters in front of the curve or a hundred meters back that way.”

  “Yes, señor.”

  “Granny, I’m policía, don’t let me come back here later and find these kids in the same place.”

  “Yes, compañero.”

  He felt a tap and found Connelly passing another bar of soap. Ajax handed it over. Like the little girl, the old woman inhaled it as if she might snort it right up her hairy nostril. Then she smiled with genuine, toothless cheer, and ordered the kids to relocate up the road.

  The horn blast of an IFA truck clambering up behind them made Ajax pull off the road while a convoy of six laden trucks passed. They were full of soldiers.

  Ajax gave a sideways look at Connelly.

  “What is it, Martin?”

  “I was wondering what all that soap was for.”

  “Let me guess, you thought I brought them because I’m a dirty gringo journalist.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Or just a dirty gringo?”

  “Something like that, too.”

  “Soap’s for charity roadblocks; soap’s even gotten me through military roadblocks. Usually after I interview some campesino or a family in the war zone. My little rule, ‘Take someone’s time, leave a bar of soap behind.’”

  “Why not money?”

  “That, my dear Martin, would be paying for information. A mortal sin in journalism. The soap’s more of a treat.”

  Ajax had noticed several cartons of Reds in the back with the soap. He’d helped himself to a pack.

  “Why not Marlboros?”

  “You’re a fucking addict. Cigarettes are for soldiers. For dirt farmers, perfumed soap is a gen-u-ine luxury.”

  The last IFA truck passed. Ajax started the pickup, rolled up the windows, and waved at the old woman and kids as they rolled by. As he turned on the AC it occurred to Ajax that this gringo might not be a complete asshole.

  * * *

  The idea died a quick death thirty minutes later at an abandoned gas station just inside the hamlet of Los Nubes. Back in Managua, while Ajax had waited for Connelly to ready his disguise, he’d studied the map of their route. His attention had lingered over Los Nubes, and the gas station he’d known would be there. It had been the one stop Ajax did not want to make—too many ghosts.

  “Look!” Connelly pointed to the soldiers’ convoy that had stopped in the ruins of the gas station. “Pull in. Pull in!”

  “Why?”

  “Pull over when I tell you to!”

  When Ajax didn’t slow, Connelly reached for the hand brake.

  “All right!” Ajax distressed the brakes again but missed the gas station. He reversed fast and slid the pickup to a halt. “You think this is funny?”

  “Jesus, Martin, not everything is about you!” Connelly scrounged in the crew cab and came up with a carton of Marlboros. He hung a Canon 180 camera around his neck and loaded a micro tape recorder with a tape. “It’s a military convoy pulled over. I’m a war reporter.”

  “They’re not going to tell you anything.”

  “Of course they’re not going to tell me anything. They’ve been trained not to talk to reporters and certainly not some foreigner on the side of the road. We all agree they’re not going to reveal mission information, so that lets me spread some smokes around and find out what I do need to know.”

  Ajax felt the ghosts crowding around him in this place. Still, he was curious about Connelly’s interrogation method. “Like what?”

  Connelly stuck the tape recorder in his shirt pocket. “Questions like, are they conscripts or volunteers. See that last truck? The flap’s closed, so it’s full of gear. A convoy of conscripts is most likely militia, but volunteers might mean a hunter-killer unit. And five trucks of specialized troops and one of gear could signal a fight in progress or one to come. If they complain about riding the trucks all day, they might be coming up from the south, so reinforcements. If they’re not ass-sore they might be from the base in Pantasma moving to a new post, in which case if I ever run into them later they’ll remember me for the smokes I hand out now.”

  Ajax had to admit he was impressed by Connelly’s interrogation style.

  “Impressed, Martin?”

  “No. Pressed for time.”

  Connelly smiled and got out, slamming the door with as much pique as he could muster. He took two steps and opened the door.

  “And, yes, Captain Montoya, I notice where we are, and why you wouldn’t want to stop here. So sit and ruminate with your ghosts or get out and help.”

  As he watched Connelly walk away he pulled out the Reds he’d caged. Ajax read the side: MADE IN MEXICO. The tight-assed gringo. He lit one anyway. He watched Connelly approach the trucks and pass out cigarettes. He had to admit the closed, blank faces of the soldiers cheered and opened. Ajax lowered the power windows so he could overhear them. He rolled the tawny-colored filter between his thumb and forefinger and studied the sky; fat black clouds were rushing in from the west to match Ajax’s mood.

  Connelly was right, he thought. This ruined gas station held more ghosts than Ajax cared to wrestle with—more than just Jorge Salazar died here. He climbed out to retie Cuadra’s coffin against the fast approaching storm; but really, he wanted to eavesdrop on the reporter.

  “I know you wish these were pillows,” Connelly said, handing out butts to the soldiers in the closest truck. “Ass sore as you must be coming all this way.”

  The soldiers made no definite reply, but it was clear to Ajax that they had come far, as Connelly wanted to know.

  Fat drops of rain the size of small tortillas slapped onto Cuadra’s coffin. The first splash took Ajax in the eye and he retreated to the truck cab.

  Matthew climbed in after the rain burst drove the soldiers back under their tarps.

  “I love this rain, man. You ever come up here in March or April? This whole valley is like a desert; two months of rain later, it’s as lush as the Garden of Eden.”

  Ajax stared out the window, recalling, as he often did when safe inside from the rain, all those years in the mountains when a deluge like this would catch him and his men far from their base, from any shelter at all.

  “Tree stumps.”

  “What?”

  “Tree stumps!”

  “I heard you.” A long, low rumble of thunder whooshed in on the wind. “It wasn’t the volume I queried after but the enigmatic nature of the comment.”

  “When we were in the mountains, we’d get caught in this kind of rain, there was no shelter, no ponchos, and we’d just have to sit in it until it was over. Endure it. It could drive you insane, a r
ain like this. We sat like tree stumps. No mind, no awareness. A tree stump. You could see it in their eyes, how far away into themselves they went, the compas, to endure it. Not easy to come back all the way after that.”

  “Well, if it was as a coping mechanism, it seems a good tactic.”

  “No.” Ajax cracked his own window a bit so the tormenta’s wind song drowned out the radio, which he shut off. “It was a dangerous time. The compas were shut down, not paying attention to their surroundings, if the Guardia had had more balls, they’d have caught us out every time.”

  “You, too? A tree stump?”

  “Somebody had to keep watch.”

  “The privilege of command.”

  “Or the price.”

  Matthew put away his camera and tape recorder.

  “You know, I always assumed that you weren’t in command that night here.”

  Ajax blew a cloud of smoke into the reporter’s face, but Matthew just lolled his head back and the smoke was sucked out the window.

  “The papers said you were.”

  Ajax smiled. “You say that, ‘the papers said you were,’ like you were saying, ‘God wrote on a tablet.’”

  “Do I?”

  “You ever wipe your ass on The New York Times?”

  “It’s my absolute favorite. There’s something about the texture that…”

  “Shut up about it. Okay.”

  “Look, Ajax. I’m not judging you here. I think it could’ve been a beautiful operation.”

  “What?”

  Matthew spread his hands to encompass the ruined gas station, invisible behind the curtain of rain that beat on the roof like hands demanding shelter. “The Salazar Operation.”

  Ajax turned on Matthew, and for once his innate hatred of all that was gringo gave way to an actual curiosity.

  “What the fuck, exactly, could some fucking clown like you know about any of that?”

  “More than you might think. It’s about mid-1981, the Revo’s not even eighteen months old, but America’s got a new president and Reagan wants to cowboy-up something bad. He’s called out the Russians, the Evil Empire, and he needs to beat up on them a little, but not head on, and here is a nice little country, just down the road, piss-poor in everything but Marxist-Leninist rhetoric.”

  Matthew paused for confirmation of his accuracy. “Tablet or toilet paper?”

  Ajax smiled. “So far, tablet.”

  “So all the black-ops guys have hard-ons like no tomorrow and they come up with Jorge Salazar. I knew him. Before the Revo he was a nothing cotton farmer under Somoza. Afterward, he sets up his own cotton-growers union and he’s a big cheese.”

  Matthew paused.

  “Tablet.” Ajax said.

  “Then someone gets word he’s sniffing around the Americans for backing and that same someone gets the idea to feed Salazar some rope to see if he’d not only hang himself, but the CIA, too.”

  “Tablet.”

  “So someone from the Revo, they get the word to ole Jorge, or, better, he overhears a ‘private’ conversation about discontent in the Estado Mayor. Rumors of mutiny in the Army High Command! Salazar thinks it’s a thread he can pull to unravel the Revo, but I think it was the first inch of that hangman’s rope someone was feeding him.”

  Ajax took a drag on his butt. Matthew tilted his head back to let the smoke cloud escape out his window. Instead, Ajax blew it out his own window and rolled it up so that the storm outside receded. “Tablet.”

  Matthew smiled, actually pleased to receive the man’s approval.

  “But it’s a misinformation campaign, so no one feeds Salazar any more info. They make him go sniffing around. Make him pull the next thread. He reports it back to his CIA contacts and they, duped by their own propaganda about the Evil Empire, think they’re onto something and give him the green light to spread some cash around, lots of cash to what they think are a bunch of unhappy colonels ready to stage a coup.”

  “Tablet. Very tablet.”

  “You were a colonel in State Security then, and I think you were in charge of that operation.”

  “Toilet paper.”

  “Toilet paper? Or no comment?”

  “Okay. No comment.”

  “Okay. But then it must have gotten tricky. Salazar is pulling in that hangman’s rope as fast as he can. But, what to do? What should Salazar’s puppet masters do with him? How would the lesson best be learned? Catch him, try him, convict him, and let the whole world see the CIA had been duped, suckered like country bumpkins right off the bus in the big city, or…”

  “Or?”

  “Kill him and be done with it.”

  Ajax looked out the window. The storm was weakening, some light in the western sky forecast its end. “Rain’s going, we should get going.” He turned the engine over.

  “I think you were in charge of that first operation, the capture one.” Matthew reached over and turned the engine off. “But someone changed the orders, they made it an execution. And they didn’t tell you. Which means they knew you would not carry out such orders. And it means they knew that before you did.”

  Ajax had his fingers on the keys; the lightest pressure would turn the engine over. Put it in gear and drive, he thought. Drive, push, propel! But Matthew had so touched the needle, had counted every angel squatting on the rusted pinhead of Ajax’s life.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Files, my friend. I keep files on everyone. Before l’affaire Salazar you were popular, you show up in my files regularly—hero of the Revo, travels with your beautiful wife, on the American news shows, the Gringo Sandinista they called you. Then, that night here, at this gas station in Los Nubes. After that you disappear from my files for three years, when you turn up a lowly police captain. Admittedly, you had caught El Gordo Sangroso, so you were back to the hero stage.”

  The rain had stopped and Matthew rolled the window down.

  “I meant it when I spoke of your ghosts. I think that night here haunted…”

  Ajax turned the engine over, gestured to the army trucks just doing the same.

  “Let’s follow them, in case the road’s washed out.”

  “Okay. They’ll go as far as Pantasma. That’s the Seventeenth Light Hunter Battalion.”

  Ajax turned off the engine. The Seventeenth was the suicide soldier’s unit. He grabbed a pack of Marlboros and dashed to catch the trucks.

  “Oyen! Compañeros!” He held up the Marlboro pack and jogged after one of the trucks. “Any of you know Fortunado Gavilan? Fortunado Gavilan!”

  One soldier leaned forward when he heard Ajax call the name of the boy Ajax could not save.

  “Did you know him?”

  The soldier leaned out the back of the truck; Ajax broke into a run to hand off the smokes to him.

  “Did you know Fortunado Gavilan?”

  The soldier stared at Ajax a moment, stared hard, and then shook his head, no. He crumpled the pack and lobbed it at Ajax’s feet like a grenade. The trucks growled in low gear as they climbed the foothills into the mountains from which more than a few of them would not return.

  Ajax studied the crushed smokes. He kicked them just in case they might go off. The road to Matagalpa was proving a strange one.

  It would only get weirder.

  * * *

  They hadn’t gone more than ten miles, Ajax flooring it like he might catch something, when they rounded another curve and had to swerve to avoid a white Toyota half sunk into a pothole the size of a moon crater. There was already a yoke of oxen trying to drag the broken vehicle out. Ajax slowed as he swerved but pushed the pedal to the metal as soon as he was clear of it. But watching the wreck in his rearview as they sped away, he noticed a very familiar head of carrot-colored hair appear, and a milky white arm signal the oxen to pull.

  11

  1.

  Ajax didn’t notice Amelia Peck until it was too late. He should have seen her right off because he’d stationed himself in the patio restaurant of M
atagalpa’s Hotel Ideal to do just that. He’d spent no little time thinking about her the night before as he tossed and turned in a bed in the casita Connelly kept near the center of town. What the hell would someone like her be doing so far from Managua, and without handlers? At least the visible kind, which would mean she either was trained to elude handlers, or, worse, had unseen handlers tracking her, which could mean agents from State Security who might recognize Ajax.

  But she didn’t seem the spook type, so he’d come to the one place someone traveling in the open would come to in Matagalpa—the Ideal’s restaurant.

  But he’d been distracted by the Hula Hoop Queen doing her morning workout on the patio.

  He and Connelly had passed the one-ring Soviet circus tent set up in Matagalpa’s main park yesterday as they’d cruised into town just before sunset. Indeed, the vision now before him, with her implausible white gold hair, and cobalt eyes, was prominently depicted on the socialist-realist mural advertising the show. The Hula Hoop Queen! He and Connelly had wondered what kind of main event that was. But Ajax could see now that every male over thirteen and every female under thirteen would line up to see this wonder. More than once.

  He counted again the hula hoops spinning before him like so many hypnotists’ pendants. Six on each arm, eight around her waist, and three around her neck, all on a figure clothed in a form-fitting second skin like a gymnast might wear. The hoops spun harmoniously, the left side clockwise, the right side counterclockwise. All of them kept in perfect, perpetual motion by the most subtle flick of her hips. The energy from that undulation flowed through her torso and limbs like the tremors of some benign earthquake, which, rather than topple buildings and kill people, turns down your bed linens, or picks the mangoes from your trees.

  This was the kind of fraternal socialist exchange his country needed.

  The Hula Hoop Queen slowly stripped the hoops off, one at a time, until there was just the one left, dizzyingly spinning around her waist. Her rhythm changed, morphed, and she moved that one hoop up and down her body like a snake slithering over her skin. Ajax thought what he had been watching was the kiddy matinee, but this was a belly dance for the grownups.