by Joe Gannon
“It must be Saturday.”
“Saturday, yes, Gladys, it is. We’re going dancing.”
“No, idiota. Saturday is for confessions. Epimenio and now me.”
“Sure, Gladys, no problem.” He got up on one knee. “KRILL! KRILL!”
Gladys grabbed him and the feel of her bony hand in his nearly broke his heart.
“They put me with you to spy.”
“I know. Don’t talk. Krill!”
“They wanted to know your state of mind, your drinking. I reported on you. Malhora knew. Horacio knew.”
“I know. That’s good Gladys. That’s good. Horacio’s my friend. You did good. You want a confession? When you came to my house I was going to blow my brains out. I was gonna eat my gun and you saved me. You saved me! Okay? We’re even. Krill!”
“Yeeees, Marrrrrtin! I am holding my fire. I need you alive so we can talk.”
Ajax scanned the bush for signs they were moving on him, but all was still.
“Krill, I can stay here and fight it out with you all fucking day. The army will get here eventually.”
“I’m listening.”
“You want me for an upside-down party. I’ll give me to you. You leave my friend and Gloria alone. Me for them.”
“Interesting.”
Gladys squeezed his hand. “You called me your friend.”
“You are my friend. Maybe the only one I’ve got left. Poor you.”
She smiled. “Poor me.”
“Krill!”
“It’s a deal, Martin!”
Gladys let go of his hand.
“Gladys, Gladys?” He gently slapped her face. “Come on, look at me. Look at me.”
Her eyes fluttered open. She reached up and weakly slapped his cheek. “You’re a good man, sister.”
Her eyes rolled into her head, and she was gone.
“No! No! No! KRILL!!” He leapt to his feet, hands in the air. “Krill! Me for her, you take me and we go. She stays!”
Krill rose from his hiding place and signaled his men to come in. Ajax walked halfway to him.
“You take me. You leave her alive.”
“We will take you back to our base in Honduras. I always like to take a present for the muchachos when we return. And you are a much better present than some broken dyke. Get it? I can’t stop making that joke. But, Martin, you are too much trouble awake.”
Krill signaled to someone behind Ajax. He lowered his hands and let it come. The blow sank him to his knees. He saw stars. As all the world faded to black, he had time to notice that while he had seen stars before, they had never been accompanied by fireworks, for he was sure he heard pyrotechnics all around him. The second blow sent him falling, tumbling, plunging into oblivion. Upside down.
20
1.
Captain Ajax Montoya had a pain in the ass. He didn’t know where the pain was, or even where he was. But wherever and whatever, it was a pain in the ass. Then he heard his name being called.
“Ajax. Ajax Montoya. Ajax.”
That was the pain in his ass. He just wanted them to shut up and let him alone.
“Ajax? Ajax Montoya?”
Black oblivion gave way to light as the night had to dawn. He needed a winch to raise his eyelids, but eventually they rolled up. A woman’s face loomed over him.
“Amelia?”
“Gloria.”
“Gladys?”
“Gloria, Ajax. Gloria Cuadra.”
A man’s face slid into view. Ajax tried to rise.
“I’ll kill you, Krill.”
Gloria rubbed his face. “Shhhh. Krill’s gone. The army’s here. This is Colonel Garcia.”
“What? You’re Martin Garcia?”
“No. Josecho Garcia, Seventeenth Light Hunter Battalion.”
In the unfocused grayness of his gray matter, Ajax was beginning to understand. “The cavalry saved the Indians.”
“I guess. You must have powerful friends, Captain. We got orders from Managua to not come back without you, alive.” Colonel Garcia laid a comradely hand on Ajax’s chest. “I heard of you; your reputation’s deserved, Captain. If you’d lost five minutes we would’ve missed you.”
Through the fog of a blood-clotted brain, Ajax realized that what he’d heard when Krill’s man had knocked him out had not been fireworks, but a firefight.
“What about…”
“Shhhh, Ajax.” Gloria rubbed her smooth hand over his face again; it felt cool and clean. “The colonel got here just as Krill was taking you. The others are all gone, all gone. They took the bodies back to Managua. We buried Epimenio yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“You’ve been out a day and a night.”
“Señora, we’ve got to go. He’s got to come with us now.”
“All right, Colonel.”
Ajax did not like people talking about him as if he wasn’t here. And he was going to give them a piece of his mind but the cable on the winch holding his eyelids snapped, and down they went.
“Ajax? Take this.”
Gloria pressed something into his hand.
“They’re going to take you to the clinic in Matagalpa. They’re going to take you in the Red Cross Jeep. Can you hear me? I packed your things, everything, into the Jeep. Can you hear me?”
Of course he could. He just couldn’t keep night from rushing back.
The rest was brief days and long nights, like an Arctic winter. He heard voices, felt himself lifted, set down, lifted again. He saw another woman’s face, maybe more than one. But not the woman he wanted to see. The women.
2.
When at last he could open his eyes without a winch, it was night and another woman looked down at him.
“Hello, handsome.”
“Marta.”
“That’s good. You’ve got some brain cells left.”
“I…”
“You want to interrogate the world again. Here”—she lifted a large bowl from a bedside table and tucked a straw into his mouth—“drink this. It’s Mami’s special broth. Drink and I’ll tell you what I know.”
He did as ordered and the soup seemed to pass directly from the walls of his mouth into every cell of his body.
“You’re in Managua, in your own bed at home. Your skull was fractured four days ago.”
“Four…”
“Shhh. Just keep sucking it down, compa.”
He did, greedily. When the broth was gone, she gave him a tall glass of chilled sweet orange juice that seemed to cool the fire in his brain. Greedily, he finished it. Finish it. Somewhere in his still fuzzy mind he realized that was the mantra he needed: Finish it, finish it, finish it. But the earth seemed to open yet again, and he was falling, sinking, descending.
* * *
When Ajax finally awoke as himself, it was night again. He lay for a while, eyes closed, listening. Sensing. A line from somewhere floated into his mind: The more you sense everything, the more sense everything makes. He tried to open himself to sense as much as he could, if not everything. Everything. I packed your things, everything, into the Jeep. Can you hear me? Yes, he could hear Gloria. And now the smell of putrefaction in the Jeep on the long rides to Pantasma and Managua made sense. She must’ve packed the money. Two hundred and fifty thousand stinking yanqui dollars. Not a hundred and twenty-five, but twice that much, half of five hundred thousand.
Then, quite suddenly, as sometimes happened, he could, fleetingly, sense it all—and it all made sense.
He snapped his eyes open. He half expected to find the ghost looming over him again, and felt a small pang that he did not. A candle burned on the bedside table—it must be Wednesday. Again? Marta slept curled up on the far side of the bed. He sat up slowly, swung his legs over the bedside, and felt the cool concrete under his feet. His head was swaddled in a turban of bandages. He pushed his fingers underneath it and felt the sharp little bristles of his shaved head. He stood slowly. He felt okay, satisfactory, tolerable. He went to his closet and his hand
hovered over the clothes there. He knew what he was going to do and he would not do it in his police khakis. He dressed in black pants and a dark T-shirt. He slipped on leather sandals, paused to watch Marta’s sleeping face, and then slipped out of his house.
He opened up the Red Cross Jeep and found the two AKs, the ammo pouch, and the reeking money in the rear compartment. One of Gloria’s dolls was on the front passenger seat. He searched the rest of the Jeep but did not find the Python or The Needle. Damn. He was a carpenter without tools. He hurried back into his house, retrieved Fortunado Gavilan’s Makarov and two clips of 9mm’s from the hidey-hole where he kept such things. He paused for a moment: if he’d lost the Python and The Needle, had he lost the ghost? And if he had, had he lost an ally, or a tormentor?
It didn’t matter. It was time to finish it.
3.
He parked three blocks away from Sub-comandante Vladimir Malhora’s house and watched the street. The house sat behind high walls with a guard post next to iron gates that led to a courtyard. The bad news was that rich neighborhoods like this were the only ones in the entire country with working streetlights, so a stealthy approach on foot was almost impossible. The good news was that with armed guards on patrol few of the residents kept dogs for protection.
The thought of snarling dogs brought back his night with Amelia. The yapping mutts, her pealing laughter, the feel of her arm pressing her to him as she flailed away counting coup. No! No! He scolded his weakness. You’ve got a lifetime to hate yourself. Finish it. Finish it.
He rolled up the Jeep’s floor mats, rolled down the window, and slipped out. He tucked the floor mats under his arm, the Makarov into the small of his back, and crossed the street. Behind the houses opposite Malhora’s ran a darkened alley lined with garbage cans. In Nicaragua, only the rich had alleys in which to store their garbage out of sight. Ajax watched until he was certain there were no strays—dogs or people—lurking about. He made his way in a crouch down the alley until he was behind the house he calculated was directly across from Malhora’s. Calculate. Do the math. The wealthy might not use dogs, but everyone topped their walls with shards of glass. He tossed the Jeep’s floor mats over the glass, then launched himself. This next part was delicate—he’d have to hoist his leg over and straddle the wall without castrating himself. He did so, but his weight crushed some of the glass, which sounded to Ajax like pistol shots.
He lowered himself into the garden and crouched in the darkness. Don’t hurry. It wasn’t the owners he worried about, undoubtedly deeply asleep with visions of Malhora’s guards dancing in their heads. But the maid’s room was right off the garden, and the maids took robbery as a personal insult, no matter that none of it was theirs and never would be. He crept through the open veranda doors and tiptoed into the house. A light was on outside the front door. He used what illumination it cast inside the house to find the owner’s liquor cabinet. He’d decided on a Trojan Horse strategy. He took a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label and slipped out the front door. He was in a clear pool of light and had to act fast now—fast and natural.
He began to whistle the Sandinista national anthem.
He walked quickly through the main gates, right into the street, made immediate eye contact with Malhora’s guard, and waved the bottle at him, whistling the whole time. What nefarious purpose could a man whistling an anthem and waving a whiskey bottle have?
“Compañero, a gift for the lonely guard whose vigil protects us all.”
The guard’s AK stayed slung on his shoulder while Ajax got within inches. The Makarov was pressed under the young man’s chin before he could blink.
“Silence or you will not even hear the bullet I put into your brain. Silence. Hold this.”
The guard seemed baffled into paralysis.
“Hold the bottle.”
He did. Ajax used his free hand to slip the magazine from the AK and eject the chambered round. Then he pressed the Makarov into the confused guard’s pecker.
“Got children?”
“No.”
“Want them?”
“Yes.”
“Your cooperation guarantees you will have them. What’s behind that door?”
“Courtyard.”
“Guards?”
“No.”
“In the house?”
“Two more.”
“The Comandante in?”
“Sleeping.”
“Can you open this door?”
“Yes.”
“Then open it, walk in front of me to the front door, and announce I am just a neighbor dropping off a gift for the boss. I’ll have this gun pointed at your asshole and if you fuck up I will shoot you in such a way that you will never have children to help you change the bag you will shit into for the rest of your life. Comprendes?”
“Comprendo.”
“Go.”
The guard opened the door and Ajax nudged his ass forward to remind him of his options. The courtyard was empty save for two white Land Cruisers and a silver Mercedes. They had not walked four paces when the gate was slammed shut—the metal clang echoing up and down the neighborhood. Six armed men popped up from around the cars and Ajax knew there was a seventh behind him who’d shut the door.
“This is what is known as a Mexican standoff, I believe.” An eighth man came out the front door.
Ajax was startled to recognize him.
“Captain Montoya, we are not enemies. Do you remember me? Colonel Garcia-not-Martin?”
It was.
“Josecho Garcia.”
“Correct. I was assured that if I gave you the message ‘I am commander of the Seventeenth Light Infantry Battalion and Fortunado Gavilan was my radio man,’ there would be no gunplay. Well, I am commander of the Seventeenth Light Infantry Battalion and Fortunado Gavilan was my radio man.”
Colonel Garcia signaled his men, who lowered their rifles.
“Will there be no gunplay?”
Ajax saw now they were dressed in the distinctive jungle camo fatigues of the elite hunter-killer troops. But more, he recognized in their eyes and faces that they were combat veterans. He lowered the hammer on his Makarov and raised his hands. The guard stepped away from him, laughed nervously, and adjusted his ball sack for good luck. His compañeros laughed, too. Ajax presented him with the Johnny Walker.
“There will be no gunplay, Colonel.”
“Good.”
“Where’s the Comandante?”
“I’m under orders not to answer any questions. You are to come with me now.” The colonel approached and waved a set of keys. “Shall we take the Mercedes?”
4.
The colonel drove them in silence through nearly empty streets. The Mercedes was as quiet and comfortable as a cloud. Ajax ran his hand over the genuine leather, as soft as anything he had felt in recent memory. But then a voice reminded him: Not as soft as her skin. He could tell Colonel Garcia was stealing glances at him.
“My orders are not to answer your questions. Will you answer one of mine?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to Fortunado?”
“Technically? Sleep deprivation psychosis.”
“And untechnically?”
“Guilt. He thought he was being persecuted by the ghosts of friends he’d killed.”
“Killed?”
“Krill forced him into a devil’s bargain: go on watching his friends be tortured or kill them and end their misery.”
The colonel grunted in reply. Ajax knew he was putting himself in Fortunado’s place.
“Or he could’ve broken and talked.”
Now it was Ajax who grunted. “Yes.”
The colonel stopped at a corner. “So he could not forgive himself for doing his duty as a soldier.”
“I guess not.”
“He died insane?”
“I don’t think so. He charged a line of sharpshooters with an empty gun.” Ajax drew the Makarov. “This gun.”
“It still empty?”
> “No.”
Colonel Garcia smiled. “Fortunado was a good soldier. Suicide is a bad end.”
He turned right.
“If you take the next left, Colonel, you’re taking me to Horacio de la Vega’s house.”
The colonel smiled.
“It wasn’t a question.”
“That old man seems very fond of you.”
“So he likes to remind me.”
5.
Horacio was waiting at the door.
“Ajax! Mi hijito! Again you have returned to me.”
Ajax hugged him and felt the old man’s frail embrace in return.
“Maestro.”
Horacio took the colonel’s hand. “Thank you, Colonel Garcia. You have returned my boy to me.”
Garcia returned a casual salute. “We’ll drop your Jeep by later, Captain.”
Horacio took Ajax’s arm and led him inside the house. Horacio’s sala was well appointed with wicker and leather furniture. What walls were not covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves were hung with Central American folk art. In one small, elegant glass case were a few mementos of his days with the guerrilleros: one of the original FSLN flags, the first edition of the Sandinistas’ insurgent handbook, and a matched pair of .45s said to have belonged to Sandino himself.
It was Ajax’s favorite room in all the world, more home than any he had known, maybe ever.
“How’s your head.” Horacio gently touched the bandage.
“Still on my shoulders.”
“I’d like to offer you a drink, but hope I should not.”
“You should not.”
“What can I get you?”
“Vladimir Malhora. Dead or alive.”
Horacio stopped and leaned on his cane. “He’s gone.”
“Gone as in fled?”
“Gone.”
“Gone dead?”
“Gone.”
“Gone to a cell in El Chipote?”
“Just gone, Ajax.”
“You’re going to make me hunt him down?”
Horacio said nothing. He did not move a hair, just stared into the middle distance, the kindly eyes in his grizzled head suddenly gone cold. Shark eyes, Ajax had called that look. He’d seen it many times before in the mountains, huddled around small fires. It meant it was time, once again, to suck it up and suffer. There was no appeal from the verdict.