Night of the Jaguar

by Joe Gannon

  Ajax stared for a long ten count.

  “What are you thinking, my son?”

  “I’m counting the people he murdered who will not see justice.”

  “Well, the aptly named Conquistadores certainly did all the killing, and they paid before they died. Krill saw to that.”

  “I’m going to kill Malhora.”

  “No, my son. You are not.” Horacio looked at his watch. “You could not find him if you searched from the bottom of Lake Nicaragua to the top of Momotombo. His crime, his shame, hangs over the city, and over certain political enemies, like a poisoned cloud. But the man is gone. You will have to be satisfied with having destroyed him.”

  “Destroyed him? You mean destroyed his illustrious career?”

  “You have cut out a cancer which endangered the larger organism.”

  “The Frente?”

  “The Revo. La Patria. Your country. It will have to do for now.”

  Ajax knew it would not do, now or ever, but there were more questions to be answered.

  “Is there a warrant out for me?”

  “No, that was a lie.”

  “Rhino believed it.”

  “Poor Rhino. A good compa. But the agreed official story is that the three gringos and the Nica family were killed by unknown bandits robbing Father Jerome of his gold chalice and crucifix. Deserters. Maybe theirs, maybe ours. Here.”

  Horacio shuffled to a table and picked up a copy of Barricada, dated the day before. The headlines were full of the news. Ajax scanned the main story.

  “Wait. ‘Agreed official story.’ Agreed to by who?”

  “Whom. Senator Teal and us.”

  Ajax crumpled up the newspaper. “Teal the fact-fucker!”

  “Ajax, we would not tell him the truth, obviously. He did not want to hear it was the Contra who killed three Americans as he will soon vote them a hundred million in blood money. So, we split the difference. He’s back in the States and has stuck to the agreed version. Unknown bandits.”

  Ajax felt his head might implode. He pulled off the turban and then gingerly felt the bandage over the wound and rubbed his bristly hair.

  “Sit down, mijo. You need to rest your head and I need to get off this leg.”

  He walked Ajax to the center of the room where antique wicker chairs surrounded an even older mahogany table. On that table were the Python, The Needle, a travel bag, and some kind of strongbox.

  “Where did you get those?”

  “From the Red Cross Jeep you appropriated. And in this box is what mystery writers call the MacGuffin.”

  “One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in stacks of hundreds.”

  A smile lit Horacio’s face. “That, my boy, is why it had to be you. Now, tell me what you discovered.”

  “The CIA fronted Jorge Salazar five hundred thousand dollars to bribe members of the Army High Command to overthrow the Revo. But, as a Nica, Salazar knew he didn’t need half that. So that’s all he brought to Enrique Cuadra’s gas station at Los Nubes. Half of five hundred is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Malhora, knowing he had secret orders to execute Salazar, kept the rest of the team, like me, away from the car. None of us knew there was any money. Malhora discovered it, but only turned in half. Two hundred fifty thousand divided by two is two sets of one hundred twenty-five thousand. He turned one in—that made the papers.” Ajax flipped open the strongbox. “There’s the other one and a quarter he kept for himself. With Salazar dead, his widow, who knew all about it or figured it out later, kept the other two hundred fifty thousand, which is right there.” Ajax unzipped the travel bag; it was stuffed with cash. “On her death bed she confessed it to Father Jerome, who told Enrique, and they buried the money with her in the false bottom of her coffin.”

  “From which you disinterred it and put it in your Jeep, which,” Horacio pushed himself slowly to his feet and looked outside, into the dark, “I think has just been delivered to us.” He patted Ajax on the shoulder and rubbed his cheek with warm affection. “You are the best of us, Ajax.” He gave him a little slap. “If not always the wisest.”

  “You think I want the money?”

  “Do what you want with it. It’s chicken feed, in the larger scheme of things.”

  “Yes! Yes it is fucking chicken feed. All this was over a paltry box of money?”

  “I need a drink now.” Horacio shuffled off. “Can I offer you some fresh orange juice?”

  “No.” He got to his feet and paced.

  Horacio called from his kitchen. “The Dollar store just started carrying a new American invention: alcohol-free beer. Want to try it?”

  Ajax paced, then turned to Horacio’s bookshelves. “I don’t drink oxymorons.”

  The old man chuckled.

  “So.” Ajax paced. “Malhora stole the money.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s been hiding it all these years.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s what all of this has been about? The money?”

  “You tell me.”

  Ajax stopped in front of a glass case where Horacio displayed Central American folk art. He looked at his reflection. His shaved head, the stained bandage. He looked into his eyes, but all he saw was a bloodstained shroud topped by wild orange hair. Money. She died over money? It couldn’t be so base, so cheap. He would never accept that.

  Ajax closed his eyes, and when he opened them he looked through the glass at the folk art—a rather nice pre-Columbian cup, Mayan, probably from Honduras. Some cruder clay sculptures Horacio had found himself on Isla El Muerto on the big lake. And half a shelf of Mayan Quiche dolls from Guatemala.

  Ajax froze.

  Dolls.

  One of Gloria Cuadra’s dolls sat on his shelf. No, he remembered, Gloria didn’t make them, Evelyn Salazar did!

  Ajax’s head began to pound, his blood hammered in his temples. He doubled over in pain and cried out. He heard glass break in the kitchen as Horacio hobbled out to him.

  “You fucker! You old hijo de puta!”

  Ajax grabbed the closest thing to him, a first edition of Borges, and hurled it through the glass case. Horacio appeared and Ajax went for the old man’s throat. Rage filled him, rage at a world that finally held no more surprises.

  He was wrong, again.

  With an agility that gave the lie to his infirmity, Horacio ducked Ajax’s grasp and drove the head of his cane into Ajax’s solar plexus. As Ajax folded, Horacio struck him hard on the kidney. Ajax went down on one knee. Gasping for breath.

  “I did not hit you on your head, Ajax. Please notice that.”

  “You’re not even crippled!”

  “Sun Tzu says, ‘When strong appear weak.’”

  “You knew Enrique Cuadra.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “And Evelyn, Salazar’s widow?”

  “I came to know of her.”

  “Enrique was coming to see you that night.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “You.” Ajax sat up as best he could. He did the math as best he could with a small blood clot still dissolving in his brain and a terrible ache congealing in his heart. But it now added up. There had always been a shadow over this case.

  “You.” Ajax’s eyes went to the table bearing the Python and The Needle. But with a flick of his wrist Horacio had a blade halfway out of his cane. That, Ajax realized, was why it was always so heavy.

  “Don’t, my son, please.”

  “You going to kill your boy now, Papi? Play Father Abraham? Murderer.”

  “Don’t hystericize the situation, Captain Montoya. You’re missing the big picture.”

  Ajax levered himself flat onto the floor. Horacio took a seat.

  “Ajax, we have won. Won a prize you know nothing about.”

  “Ah, the Jesuit explains it all. Go ahead, maestro. Dazzle me.”

  “Ajax, this is information so sensitive I need to know your mind before I tell you.”

  “And Gladys isn’t here
to report to you.”

  “You’d be surprised how many people I visit in my unofficial capacity. Gladys, yes. Malhora, too. Matthew. Enrique visited me, true.”

  “I have never betrayed my country or the revolution.”

  “And you never will, I know. The secret is this: peace.”

  “What?”

  “Peace. You remember peace, don’t you?”

  Ajax thought about it, and realized he did not. “Teal will give the Contra the hundred million.”

  “Let him, let him give them a hundred billion. Teal is a fool.” Horacio waved as if at a bee. “A cowboy. He thinks because America is a superpower it has superpowers. It does not. It just looks that way from inside America. The big picture is that we are on the verge of a regional peace agreement which will make the Contra orphans.”

  “The Davids will gang up on Goliath?”

  “No, the Davids will ignore Goliath. The President of Costa Rica, who I personally think is only interested in a Nobel Prize, will propose a Central American peace plan which the Central American presidents will approve at a Central American peace summit later this year.”

  Ajax sat up, slowly, but upright. “Returning El Gordo Sangroso was the first step in normalizing relations.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Why would the others help us? I understand the Costa Ricans, they’re smug social democrats without an army. But the Hondurans are toadies and the Salvadorans and Guatemalans are as savage as the Contra.”

  “True. But they are known entities. The Contra are a Frankenstein’s monster. Reagan will be gone in two years, and when the Doctor goes what happens to his monster?”

  “You tell me.”

  “There are about ten thousand Contra troops.”

  “There are?”

  “Officially, we say only two. The real number is ten, but only two or three thousand are ever in Nicaragua. The rest are sitting in camps in Honduras, armed to the teeth, getting fat and bored. Reagan has created a militia of mercenaries bigger than the national armies of some countries. The Americans have the attention span of a child. Everyone—and I mean everyone—fears what the Contra will become if they are not disarmed before the Americans drift away to pull the wings off some other fly.”

  Ajax got to his feet. He moved nearer to Horacio, who set his cane over Ajax’s weapons still on the table.

  “I will hear the end of this fairy tale.”

  “The Contra have become a danger to everyone but the Americans. We will have a Central American peace plan, the Contra will be frozen out, but only if our government will make the concessions, all the concessions, the other presidents demand.”

  Ajax sat down, and groaned. His kidney hurt more than his head. “And all of our concessions have to be approved by the National Directorate.”

  “Yes. Thank you for joining the conversation. I had to destroy Malhora not only to sabotage his candidacy, but that of his faction as well. I have. You have. And now our side has won and will control the government.”

  “Our side?”

  Horacio rapped his cane on the table. “I explained this to you! Do not be facetious with me! Every nation is divided into the civilized and the barbarian.”

  “Peaceniks and warmongers.”

  “Correct. Every nation, us, America, the Cubans, the Soviets.”

  “Really, the Soviets?”

  “More than most. This young premier they have, Gorbachev? He’s one of us, you wait and see.”

  “So the peaceniks run the asylum.”

  “Yes. Victory.”

  Ajax studied his mentor. But was he? Had he ever been? Was he just another Doctor Frankenstein, and what did that make Ajax? Ajax calculated the distance to The Needle on the table. “Kings, queens, bishops, and knights.”

  “Yes, Ajax. Politics is like chess. You have to plan your end game long in advance. Some of us have been planning this since ’82. And you have been with us all along, you just didn’t know it. It began with Chepe Huembes.”

  Ajax’s mind went blank—for a moment. “El Gordo?” His head began to ache, throb. His brain, rattled by the fracture, was screaming in pain from the new connections being made. “You? You let him escape?”

  “I arranged for him to escape into Costa Rican custody. He hasn’t been in a resort, you know. But we knew the Ticos would be the first to break with Reagan. And when they did, they would need a symbol, a gesture. But a safe one, unimpeachable. Who better, what better, than a murderer returned to justice?”

  To Ajax’s alarm, Horacio’s chess game started to make sense. But he wouldn’t let it. He dragged his mind up and out of the rabbit hole. “So El Gordo was a rook. Let’s talk about the pawns. Why did Enrique Cuadra have to die, and did you kill him?”

  Horacio touched his hand to his heart. “Of course I did not kill him. But he was coming to see me, not Matthew Connelly, the night he was killed. Possibly about the airstrip, I don’t know. But it was the way Malhora had him killed that stirred suspicion in my mind—that there might be another motive behind it besides the airstrip. And if there was, it could be the way to destroy him. And I had to destroy him. Me. And I needed you to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you carried out every mission I ever gave you and came back alive. You might have come back alone, but you always came back. And here you are again. Victorious and alive.”

  Ajax turned his head away and gazed into Horacio’s garden. That moment had arrived again—when night is gone but dawn not yet come. Horacio’s words echoed in his mind: Victorious. Alive. Alone.

  “I mean why did you have to destroy Malhora?”

  Horacio’s gaze followed Ajax’s into the garden. “Because I created him. He was my monster.”

  Ajax’s head snapped up as if struck. “It all comes back to Salazar. Everything back to him, that night. You had Malhora kill him.”

  “Execute him, yes. On my orders. And don’t tell me how you wanted to see justice done. That’s why you couldn’t be trusted on that mission any more than you could with getting El Gordo to Costa Rica. You see justice in very simple terms. We didn’t need justice for Salazar. We needed a dead agent to give the CIA a concrete lesson that they could use espionage against us, but they would never know which of their operations were their own, and which ours. And if that kept them from launching a half, a tenth of the operations they did, it was worth Jorge Salazar’s life.”

  “And your little monster rocketed to power on Salazar’s blood.”

  Horacio looked down at the table. He used his cane to poke and prod the Python and The Needle. “I never saw that outcome. I watched his rise in horror. And when he took over Seguridad, he was almost invincible. When we learned Joaquin was dying and Malhora would ascend, I grabbed at any straw. I reached out to Enrique and he told me that the night after Salazar was killed he went back to his gas station and found Malhora there. ‘Caught him,’ is how Enrique put it. He didn’t know at what, but it was the only thread there was to pull on.”

  “And you needed me clean and sober to unravel him.”

  “No. You needed to be sober to survive, as a man. But, yes, you were also my cavalry. I needed foot soldiers, too. I suggested to Matthew Connelly that he might reopen his file on l’affaire Salazar.”

  “Goddamn you. He did, too. I saw that file. He tried to tell me. I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t listen. He’s the one who figured it all out, not me.”

  “But you made it happen. You flushed Malhora. When I confronted him with the money from Evelyn’s grave, he cracked and confessed. He still had every single dollar he’d stolen. Can you imagine? Never spent a centavo. And yes, his larceny was like the plague. It felled him and everyone who was close to him.” Horacio actually rubbed his hands together in glee. “You should have seen them running. No rats ever abandoned a ship so quickly.…”

  “Connelly’s dead!” Ajax was half out of his chair. The words Amelia is too rose like lava in his throat. Horacio went for his cane again, but Ajax
dropped back into his chair.

  “And I am sorry for that. Matthew was a friend, and frankly I treated him better than you did. But he was a sandbag, not a shot caller.”

  “What about Gladys? Was she a sandbag, too? Gladys? Gladys who was as ardent a believer in your chess game, your big picture, as anyone! A sandbag? We killed her, Horacio. We killed them all as much as Malhora or anyone. You and I.”

  To his surprise, Horacio made no speech refuting him. He just looked down and rolled his cane in his fingers.

  “I don’t dispute my part in these deaths. I know Amelia Peck was dear to you. Malhora was my monster. What he did to stay in power is partly my fault. I put him there. But you’re wrong about one thing.”

  “Astonish me.”

  “Lieutenant Darío isn’t dead.”

  For a moment, Ajax felt like he’d had a stroke. He couldn’t make anything move. He couldn’t knit his brow or cock his head in a question. Then it passed. “Not dead? But they brought the bodies back.”

  “Not hers. Krill carried her off. Contra radio chatter makes us think she’s still alive. He took her into Honduras.”

  “Where?”

  “The Las Vegas salient.”

  “Show me.”

  “Show you?”

  “Show me on whatever map you use to keep track of the big picture.”

  Horacio shuffled over to a locked cabinet.

  “Stop hobbling, you’re not crippled.”

  “Habit.”

  While Horacio fetched the map, Ajax took inventory: he had the two AKs in the Red Cross Jeep, the ammo, and at least a quarter million dollars. That was a start.

  Horacio unfurled the most detailed map Ajax had ever seen of the border with Honduras.

  “Somewhere here, where the salient dips farthest south.” Horacio pointed to a triangle of land, like a thumb sticking down into Nicaragua. “From Wiwili maybe twenty-five miles as a crow flies.”

  Ajax rolled up the map. “I’m taking this with me.”

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  Ajax had The Needle unsheathed and at Horacio’s throat in the blink of one watery eye. He leaned in so close they could feel each other’s breath.

  “You listen to me now, old man. I am done with you. All these years of your feeding me poetry and politics and philosophy, they were bones you gave your dog. They were how you scratched between my ears so I would love you. And obey.”