by Joe Gannon
“My file?”
Amelia giggled again. “Uh oh. Spilling secrets like it was jism.”
Ajax made a face. “Ewww.”
“That was gross. Sorry.”
Ajax sat up, and even though he was concerned by her revelation he still had to admire her body, sweat-soaked and glowing in the single candle she’d lit.
“Really, Amelia. My file. You had a CIA briefing on me?”
Amelia sat up, too. Her back against the headboard, she bent her legs and laid a hand on each knee. Damn! Ajax marveled. He would’ve never guessed she would lack inhibition like this. Amelia Peck seemed completely comfortable in her skin. Her naked, flawless, delicious skin. He sat back on his haunches, and although he was concerned by her slip, he still could not keep his eyes from roving over her body and down her legs to her carroty sex.
“Goddamn, you are a beautiful sexy woman.”
“And you are a beautiful man.” She ran her fingertips over his shoulders and chest, lingering on an old pucker of skin. “Complete with a manly scar or two. And you make love like a lion, or whatever big cat is appropriate.”
“Jaguar.”
“Yeah, a jaguar.”
“Didn’t say that in my file. Least I hope not.”
“Ajax, it’s not a ‘file’ as in a CIA file. They keep newspaper clippings and radio transcripts from all sorts of media. I was just curious.”
“About what?”
“About what, asks the guy who brought my carefully laid plans within an inch of carnage, gunfire, and death? About what?”
“Look, I didn’t plan it to happen like that.”
Amelia rubbed her hand through his hair. “There was a lot of talk at the embassy about it being a provocation—your, you know, ‘show.’ So I read up on El Gordo Sangroso. He was a serial killer. Preyed on señoritas de la noche.”
“Whores.”
Amelia gently took hold of Ajax’s ears and turned him around until his back leaned against her boobs and belly. She wrapped her arms around him. “Such a hard man with your bad language.”
“Hard man?”
“It’s a colloquialism for tough guy, such a tough guy with your bad language.” She ran her hands down to his sex. “And a hard man, too.”
“Well, give me a minute.”
She fondled his sagging dick and gently stretched it out. “There’s always a pause between eruptions; this volcano’s not spent yet.”
“You know, for all your prim and proper language, you’re hardly the wilting lily.”
“And for all your cursing and rudeness, you’re kind of shy, aren’t you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, talk all you want. But in all those newspaper articles about the murders there were no direct quotes, like you didn’t talk to the press even though they were writing glowing articles, even La Prensa. And the photos of you, they either looked like stock ones from some other time, or there was just one where you looked like you were dashing from a car into a building, like you didn’t care if your fifteen minutes had arrived. So, yeah. Maybe you’re shy, but disguise it with foul language and rudeness. The whole tough guy thing.”
“A la gran puta, Jugo. You’d make a good detective.”
She nibbled his ear. “Or a spy?”
“Don’t. You’ll make the volcano go cold.”
“By nibbling?”
“By saying ‘spy.’ Our nations are technically at war; more than technically. More like literally at war.”
“Okay, no jokes. Just nibbling. In your file there’s a bio sheet. It said you grew up in Los Angeles. Hollywood. How American is that?”
“North Hollywood.”
“Is that close to Hollywood?”
“Not the way you mean.”
“And what way do I mean?”
“You mean Hollywood and movie stars. Swimming pools. That’s Bel Air. I left Hollywood in ’69 when it was skanky. Junkies, runaways, drifters, and hippies.”
“Were you a child of the sixties?”
“Jesus fucked a goat. No! ‘Child of the sixties’? You had to be white to be that. Or at least American.”
“What do you mean?”
“The hippies were white, the Black Power brothers black, the Chicano Movement Mexican. We Nicas just did our thing.”
“And what thing was that?”
Ajax smiled and shook his head at the memory. Or, rather, he shook the cobwebs off the memory. It seemed to him that Amelia sensed this and began kneading his scalp with fingers whose strength he’d already admired.
“My father liked to quote the favorite line of the Mexican guys he worked with: En America trabajamos como negroes, a vivir como blancos.”
“We work like blacks to live like whites?”
“That’s good, gringa. But more like: We slave like blacks to live like whites.”
“What’d he do, your father?”
“He was a professor. Of history. At least down here he was. When he got to El Norte all he could get was gardening. Pool cleaning. Laborer at first. He ran the crews later. Didn’t my file cover that?”
She stopped kneading and gave him a playful slap on the temple. “You think your embassy in Washington doesn’t keep files?”
Ajax turned his head to look at her. “Do you know why there’s never been a coup d’état in the United States?”
“Checks and balances. It keeps the branches of government from…”
“No, Jugo. It’s a joke. Like a knock-knock joke.”
“Oh. Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Do you know why there’s never been a coup d’état in the United States?”
“Who’s there?”
“Cabrona!”
“Okay. Why has there never been a coup d’état in the United States?”
“Because there’s no American embassy in Washington.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You would if you were Nicaraguense.”
“Oh, here it comes. We’re the big bad wolf. Blame everything under the sun on los Estados Unidos.”
“And here you come with all that ‘land of the free, home of the brave’ crap.”
“It’s not crap, if by crap you mean untrue.”
“By crap I mean bullshit, which it is unless you live inside the United States.”
“Which is why so many come to our shores, to be free.”
“You think the Statue of Liberty lights the way for the huddled masses.…”
“Yearning to be free, that’s right!”
Ajax turned his face from her, looked up at the ceiling and recited: “Lady Liberty lights the way to conquest.”
“What?”
“Rubén Darío. Everything we’re going to argue about he put into a poem to Teddy Roosevelt. ‘You think the future is wherever your bullet strikes … while Lady Liberty, lighting the path of easy conquest, raises her torch in New York.’” He rubbed his hand along her thigh, perhaps in farewell, but he really hoped not. “No matter what you Americans see when you look in the mirror, Jugo, the rest of the world does not see that.”
“The emperor has no clothes?”
He patted her naked leg. “You have no clothes. You are a gorgeously naked gringa. I’m talking about perspective. You gringos stand behind the Statue of Liberty and see the ships coming into the dock full of huddled, yearning masses. Latin America stands in front of the statue and all we see are the huddled masses of Marines leaving the dock for our shores.”
“Now I’m a gringa again. Is the moment lost?”
“Magma cooling rapidly.”
She rolled Ajax onto his back, pinioned his arms, straddled him, and settled her orange-maned pussy right on his belly button.
“Didn’t you say you left the states in ’69?”
“I did.”
“That’s my favorite number.”
Her green eyes lit with a feline hunger. Ajax rocked his hips side to side until he felt his belly button grow moist from her. “Magma warming quickly.”
&nbs
p; The soft knock at the door put an end to it all. Ajax laid his hand over her mouth, then took it away and nodded for her to answer.
“Quién es?”
“Señorita Peck? Llamada.”
She looked back at Ajax. He mouthed, phone call.
“Quién me llama?”
“Dice es ‘Tony.’”
“Tony! Oh my God.” She leapt out of bed and covered her breasts and sex with her hands. “What time is it?” She shouted through the door, “Qué hora es?”
“Casi media noche.”
“Midnight! That figures. Okay señor, thank you! Ya vengo!”
Ajax laughed. “Not ‘vengo,’ ‘voy.’”
“What?”
“In Spanish ya vengo means I’m coming, but as in the kind of coming we both already did. Ya voy means literally I go, but as in I’ll be right there. So while you did already come, you are now just going because you’ll be right there.”
Amelia dropped her hands, cocked her hips. “Strangely, I understand that.”
“Amelia.” Ajax kissed her palm. “Your jefe calls you in the middle of the night. Why are you here? Really.”
She pulled on a T-shirt, sat on the edge of the bed, took a deep breath and held it a moment. When she exhaled she seemed to expel her doubts.
“It’s all on the up-and-up, but very quiet. Tony has a deal with the foreign minister to take three people with him, when we leave, to reunite with their family in Ohio. A ‘humanitarian gesture.’ They live in Father Jerome’s parish. I’m here to pick them up.”
“That’s why you’re traveling without an escort.”
“Yes.”
She stood up and Ajax watched her do a little circle dance, sliding on the jeans he had so enjoyed sliding off.
“You’ll wait for me?”
“No way. Truce is over.” He smiled as he said it, but it was true. “I don’t need to warn you, if anyone finds out you’re sleeping with the enemy your job is gone, right? Fucking Republicans got no sense of romance.”
“No worries there. No one knows I’m here but Tony. The name is Amelia D. Peck, and the D is for Discretion. And you could probably be shot. Freaking Communists got no sense of romance.”
“Not me. My job’s probably lost anyway, but I’m still a bona fide hero of the revolution. You’re just a carrot-headed gringa from Podunk, Ohio.”
She grabbed him and poured her tongue down his throat. He pinched her nipples through the T-shirt.
“When I saw you near the park and realized you weren’t wearing a bra, I knew I had to fuck you. I contemplated taking you by force.”
She pushed him back on the bed. “Hold that thought.”
She kissed him and slipped out the door. Ajax meant to dress and slip away, but a delicious sleep overcame him. There was nothing as peaceful as sleep after sex.
5.
Ajax awoke from the dream. Or, as sometimes happened, told himself he was dreaming in order to rush back to consciousness. As he crossed back into his waking life, it seemed he had time to lament that it all had been a dream—that he had not left Managua, had not hunted wolves, and had not made wild love with Amelia. The thought floated in his mind, I will awaken in my dark room, on my dry sheets. I will have The Needle in my hand and I will not be alone.
The fear of that shining black shadow, that ghost’s shadow, was, in the moment before waking, not as big as the regret that Amelia Peck had not given her body to him, nor he to her. And it had been good goddamn sex. Gio, while they’d been married, had always seemed to be trying to teach him how to be a good lover; like she was comparing their lovemaking to something she had learned or read. But Amelia had seemed mostly concerned with her own pleasure, or rather so lost in it she seemed not to worry about Ajax. The feeling that he had to take from her as she took from him—frantically, greedily—was more arousing than anything he had ever known.
But it had all been a dream.
Then he awoke, in the pitch dark. The sheets were dry. The Needle was in his hand. He sat up in bed.
“What? What do you want?”
In a corner there was movement. The hairs stood up on his arms and the back of his neck. Ajax sucked in a deep breath, fear flooded his veins and brain. He swung his legs off the bed, and made himself concentrate on the coolness of the tiles beneath his feet. But then he thought, I don’t have tiles in my bedroom.
“What do you want?”
The black shape moved toward him. But now it was clearly a human form, a man’s form. Ajax stood, shucked the blade from its sheath.
The silhouette seemed to jump at him. A coldness moved through him, not over him but through him. The physical sensation pushed him back, he put his hand on the bed to steady himself and felt the bed depress as if someone had lain in it. He heard mattress springs creak with the additional weight. He had read of Old Testament prophets who had wrestled with angels. He’d see if he could kill a ghost.
Ajax pounced. Grabbed the ghost by what he hoped was its throat.
“Now, motherfucker, one of us is going to die!”
Then the ghost struck back. Hammered him in face and he pinwheeled off the bed onto the floor cracking his skull on the tile; The Needle clattered across the floor. A light blinded him.
“Ajax what are you doing!”
Amelia Peck sat up in bed, one hand on her throat, the other on the bedside lamp, which wobbled and fell to the floor. The lightbulb popped like a pistol shot and everything went dark.
13
1.
“What happened to you?” Connelly asked, handing Ajax a cup of coffee over the back of his pickup.
“Let’s leave, we’re late.”
“Isn’t that like a classic cop’s rule?”
Ajax finished packing Matthew’s truck with Enrique’s coffin, which reeked of decay despite being double wrapped in a tarp. The sun was just over the eastern mountains, and Ajax had quietly prepped the pickup for the journey north while listening to Connelly puttering around inside his casita.
“What ‘cop’s rule’?” Ajax slammed the tailgate closed.
“That a suspect is hiding something when they pretend they’ve not been asked a direct question. You’re standing there with a shiner on your face. I ask what happened and you say, ‘we’re late.’”
“We are late. Can’t you smell your friend’s stink pouring out of that box? What happened to me is not the direct question, the direct question is, don’t you think we ought to get him in a fucking hole?”
Connelly sipped his coffee. Ajax lit a Marlboro, and realized he’d not had one nor craved one all the time he’d been with Amelia. Even better, he’d not felt the thirsty bastard begging for a drink since he’d cleared Managua.
“We should go.”
Matthew nodded at the coffin. “What do you know about Enrique?”
“Know?”
“Yes, know about him. His background. History. Did you even check?”
“Yeah. There was nothing in the Policía files, if that’s what you mean. No criminal record or court records. I know he had sons in the Frente during the insurgency and one of them was killed by the Contra in ’82.”
“I told you some of that.”
“And I told you this investigation is none of your fucking business. You got an interest in this case, who goddamn cares? So does his family. The State. Me. You’re here to get his body home. I’m here to investigate a crime. Agreed?”
Matthew went about checking the knots Ajax had already checked.
“Answer me, Connelly.”
“How’d you get the shiner?”
Ajax waved the keys at him. “I’m leaving.”
“You won’t get anywhere without an escort, Martin.”
“But you’ll just wave your American passport and magical things will happen.”
“No. Father Jerome Sanderson will be here shortly. He flies the Vatican flags on his Jeep and has both sides’ permission to travel anywhere in his parish, which includes the Cuadra finca. We’re sup
posed to meet him at eight thirty just north of town. I would’ve told you that last night—if you’d made it back.”
Ajax climbed into the truck and fired it up. He had it in reverse when Matthew jumped in. Ajax made a squealing-tire U-turn and headed down the hill and out of town. As they rolled past the center of town, Ajax scanned the front of the Hotel Ideal—he flushed at the body memory of fucking Amelia, and for a second he could smell her sex again and he regretted having washed so thoroughly. But his mind recoiled at the memory of the fear on her face after she’d awoken with his hands on her neck. He’d fled the room barely dressed, and so he didn’t know if she’d even realized there had been a knife blade against her throat.
They reached the end of the paved road just outside of Matagalpa. From here on, there would be only graded dirt roads, if even those, all the way to the Honduran border and beyond. North and east of this point was bandit country, always had been, all the way back to General Sandino’s shellacking of the US Marines in the 1920s and ’30s.
“Where the paved road ends, the war begins,” Matthew said, staring straight ahead at the road. He lit himself a Marlboro.
“Haven’t seen you smoke.”
“Don’t really.” Matthew didn’t take his unblinking eyes off the road. “Just a little ritual. I always stop here and have one before heading out.”
“What’re you nervous?”
Matthew blinked. “You know who’s out there, right?”
“You mean Krill?”
“Yeah.”
Matthew lowered the window and flicked the unfinished butt away. “Those are nasty. You know I quit back in ’79 after some Sandinista cocksucker stole all my cigarettes.”
“So he did you a favor, yet you’ve got a chip on your shoulder.”
“Speaking of chips on shoulders.”
“I don’t have a chip on my shoulder. I just don’t like pushy, know-it-all, nosy gringos, which is to say every gringo I’ve ever met.”
“That’s a little reductionist, isn’t it?”
“Oh really?” Ajax turned to look at Matthew for the first time since they’d left his house. “Why are you here?”
“We’re going to Enrique’s.…”