The Last Dawn

by Joe Gannon

  But would he keep them?

  The headlines had explained why no one was home in Managua—who would want to admit knowing Ajax or Gladys? The headlines also had explained why Ajax had not been taken immediately into the bushes and shot—like the naked emperor, the Hondurans refused to admit they were hosting a CIA mercenary army in their country. But the presence of the general and the CIA station chief were like two giant genital warts, not even the Hondurans could ignore that. Still, Gladys knew, it didn’t mean he couldn’t be killed.

  She’d barely changed from her hospital gown before she was at the Miami airport. But instead of getting on a plane she’d fallen into a vortex of catch-22s. As she’d arrived without passport or papers she couldn’t get on a plane. The Nicaraguan consulate in Miami had refused to issue her a new one. The manner in which the consular officer had carefully called her señorita instead of compañera, had shown her she was in deep shit back home. The Americans also refused to help unless she’d claim asylum as a political refugee fleeing persecution—which she would never do.

  Eventually she’d gotten through to Horacio de la Vega, Ajax’s oldest friend, and his ex-wife Gioconda Targa—both well-connected big shots in the Revo. They’d confirmed Gladys’s worst fear—that Ajax had not only been slung into a Honduran hellhole of a prison, but he’d already been stabbed once and was a dead man as soon as he was discharged from the prison hospital. Gladys had gotten them to agree to have cash smuggled into him. More importantly, Horacio had reached out to a Honduran underground group the Revo had contacts with. They had dozens of comrades in the prison and had drawn a line around Ajax.

  And then, nothing.

  Her letters all had been returned. Her frequent packages, she assumed, consumed by prison guards. Her own government had not wanted Gladys back, and the Americans were interested only in a gotcha-moment of forcing a lieutenant of the Sandinista police to declare she was a political refugee who feared persecution.

  Fucking gringos! Fuck them before she’d do that. Maybe the Sandinista Front was no longer loyal to her, but she was loyal to the Revo.

  * * *

  She stepped aside on the tarmac and waited for her companions to pass her and then followed a few paces behind them. They’d decided in Miami to arrive as strangers to each other, in case one of them ran into trouble at immigration. Her companions had almost identical heads of red hair, almost comically carrot-colored, so that following them Gladys felt she was a jumbo jet being guided by ground crew with those big, orange flashlights. The ghosts of Christmas past, Horacio had called them. Indeed, Gladys had thought when she’d finally met them at the airport. A damned bloody Christmas, too, with more ghosts than old Scrooge could’ve counted on ten ugly toes. The “mission” Horacio had briefed her on seemed ludicrous. But as the first phase was Managua and Ajax Montoya, she’d agreed in a heartbeat.

  Inside, the dingy airport was delightfully cool. Not the perfectly temperature-controlled environment of a Miami mall where every square foot of air was precisely 70 degrees, Gladys thought, but an imperfectly chilled place where overworked, underpowered air-conditioning chased but never vanquished the unrelenting heat.

  As she queued in the immigration line she realized that was what she’d most missed about her country. The perfect imperfection of it. Gas shortages, blackouts, brownouts, water rationing, empty supermarket shelves, too few resources chasing too much need so that each day began not with the question, What do I need? but rather, What is there today?

  In Miami there was everything, literally, every-fucking-thing. Yet the gringos never seemed to stop looking for more. Even her mother and sisters, especially them! Their lives revolved around malls like moons around a dead planet. Bless them, she thought, and their uncomplicated infatuation with shopping. They’d taken her in with no questions asked when she’d arrived on that medevac. They’d left her alone for a month in a darkened bedroom while Gladys slept and mourned and wept and slept some more.

  And when the day came her mother couldn’t bear it anymore—couldn’t bear the silence, the brooding, the waiting for death—she and Gladys’s sisters had dragged her out shopping. Retail therapy they’d called it. They’d spent three days at spas, hairdressers, and malls, forcing Gladys in and out of so many dressing rooms that one day she found herself giggling along with her sisters when their mother stepped before a mirror in a halter top that left nothing to the imagination.

  “What are you putas laughing at,” her mother had demanded in a Nicaraguan vernacular so crude the Cuban attendant hadn’t understood. The sisters had fallen out of their chairs in hilarity. Of course, Gladys ended up on the floor weeping uncontrollably, but she had finally opened the door of Krill’s cage.

  Retail therapy, only in America.

  “Passport.”

  Shit, Gladys cursed herself, as she handed over her passport to the weary-looking uniformed officer behind the glass. In her distraction she’d lost sight of her redheaded companions. She spotted them just on the other side of immigration—so they’d made it through. They seemed to linger idly for a moment while they cast their eyes around looking for her. And they couldn’t find her because they were looking in the wrong line. Gladys was in the wrong line.

  “You can’t read Spanish anymore?” The officer was pointing at the sign which said NICARAGUAN NATIONALS while holding Gladys’s newly minted travel document.

  “Sorry,” Gladys said. Fuck! is what she thought.

  “You’re a Nica?”

  “Born here, yes.”

  “But you live in Miami?”

  “Yes.”

  “This travel document is brand new?”

  “Yes.”

  Gladys saw the officer’s hand go under the counter.

  “You’re coming home for a visit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You like Miami?”

  “Look, compañero, whoever you just called will be here shortly, no? So stop making small talk.”

  The officer flicked her papers back to her like it was a crumb fallen from his mouth. “Get in the line for foreigners.”

  Gladys reached for her documents, but the hairy hand of someone who chewed their fingernails slipped in and pulled it away from her. The officer was dressed in army fatigues, not immigration—male, five-nine, brown/brown, about twenty-five, which was young for the major’s insignia on his shoulder.

  “This way, compañera.”

  “About time.” Gladys couldn’t help it.

  “You’ve been waiting long?”

  “Three years.”

  “This way, compa.”

  The major, to her surprise, took her directly to a door Gladys knew led to the VIP lounge.

  Yeah, she thought, it was about time.

  6

  From behind, Margaret Mary and James “Big Jim” Peck, with their matching red-orange hair, going grayer in him than her, looked more like brother and sister than husband and wife. Horacio de la Vega Cárdenas had watched them from the moment they got off the plane. He’d watched them through the big window as they milled around outside on the tarmac, like just a couple more Sandalistas come to soak up the Revo’s vibe. He’d watched them shuffling through customs, all smiles and Gracias! He watched them now, through the two-way glass, sitting comfortably in the VIP lounge casually looking around, watching everything but not seeing the one thing they wanted to watch: Gladys Darío—their guardian angel.

  Poor Gladys, he thought. He’d come to admire her as a real asset in the little time they’d worked together before her kidnapping. Or, rather, she’d worked for him. But she was going to be very angry soon. The Sandinista government, which he’d served his entire life, was going to be very embarrassed soon. And the Pecks, those poor people. He’d met them briefly three years ago when they’d come to fetch home the body of their murdered daughter. Amelia. Horacio had not known her, really, but Ajax had been in love with her, and her death weighed heavily on Ajax’s soul, Horacio knew. The Pecks, too, were going to be grievous
ly disappointed at the failure of their mission.

  Almost everyone Horacio had gathered for this drama would be thwarted. So things were going well for him.

  He was an old man with a limp and a cane, and a hard lump where his heart used to be. But he slept well and was still, mostly, master of all he surveyed. He waited for the major to deliver Gladys to the VIP lounge before he emerged from behind the two-way mirror.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Peck.” Horacio put his hand over his heart. “I am Horacio de la Vega. I knew Amelia. I am a friend of Ajax Montoya. And of Gladys.”

  He turned to Gladys. Her face, as usual, was not hard to read. She wanted to show anger, disappointment, even aloofness. But the hurt, the deep wound, was there for him to see. He switched to Spanish.

  “We were friends, weren’t we, Gladys?”

  “That’s what you call it? I didn’t see you at Krill’s camp. Only Ajax.”

  “That’s because I told him where to find you.”

  “And afterward? He was jailed and you wouldn’t even take my calls.”

  “Because I was busy paying off the Hondurans to keep him alive.”

  “But you left him in prison!”

  “For a decent interval. Then I arranged his return. He’s in Nicaragua,” Horacio gestured to the Pecks, “as you know.”

  “I couldn’t get back! My own country refused me entry!”

  There it was, Horacio thought. She was a child spurned by her parents, and it wounded. Horacio reached for her hand, and squeezed.

  “That is because in the middle of a peace process that can end three wars, which have killed hundreds of thousands, you and he kidnapped a Honduran general and the CIA station chief—both of whom, oddly enough, were peaceniks. So you might ask why I helped at all.”

  He was by now making like a python with her hand. Gladys struggled to free herself, and eventually he let her.

  “Stop crying like a lost child, Gladys. Mommy and Daddy had more important things to attend to.” He turned to the Pecks and switched to English. “And you are all here now because I spoke to Senator Teal and he agreed to help.”

  The Pecks, especially Big Jim, seemed relieved the family drama had given way to recognition that they were even in the room and had their own drama.

  “Mr. De la Vega.” Big Jim held out a steelworker’s mitt that six years of retirement had done nothing to soften. He might have crushed Horacio’s hand, but he could tell Big Jim had practiced how not to mangle mere mortals.

  “Please, señor, Nicaragua has few virtues. One of them is our glorious casualness. You will call me Horacio, and I will call you Big Jim, as you are known. And you are Margaret Mary?”

  Margaret Peck said nothing. She held out her hand and in her grip Horacio could feel strength and hope. Poor woman, he thought, she would need both.

  “You have been so kind to arrange this visit, Horacio.”

  Margaret led him gracefully to the sofa where a table was already laid out with coffee and pan dulce.

  “Your daughter was a kind and sympathetic person,” he said. “I was devastated to hear your son is … missing.”

  The pause where he substituted “missing” for “also dead” had a visceral effect on the gringo couple. Big Jim bit the inside of his lip. Margaret turned her face as if slapped.

  “No one will help us.” Margaret buried her face in her husband’s boulder-like shoulder, which twitched as he, too, fought for control.

  “What can you tell me?” Horacio asked.

  “Sons of bitches say there’s nothing they can do!” Big Jim unleashed his not inconsiderable anger, the better to bring his feelings to heel.

  “Jim!”

  “It’s alright, Margaret.” Horacio patted her hand. “Our casualness allows for copious cursing. Big Jim, which sons of bitches do you mean?”

  “The government of El Salvador.”

  “They are notorious sons of bitches.”

  “But the American embassy?”

  “Forgive me, but down here they are also notorious sons of bitches.”

  Margaret almost laughed, but it became twisted, like a repressed sneeze. It unleashed her tears.

  “It’s alright, my dear. I am here to help you.” He gave Gladys a make a report, Lieutenant look.

  “James Peck, known as Jimmy, age twenty-four, been in El Salvador about nineteen months. Went missing about three weeks ago, October eighteenth, to be exact. Few witnesses to the abduction. ‘Men with guns’ was all they had to offer. The government and American embassy say he’s either run off with the guerrillas or has been killed by them. The FMLN says he was murdered by death squads—which would mean the government.”

  “Which would mean the government,” Horacio agreed. “The FMLN and the FSLN are very close, do you know the history?”

  “The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and the Sandinista Front for National Liberation,” Big Jim recited like a schoolboy making a report. “Farabundo Martí and Sandino were friends, allies. Martí was Sandino’s secretary here in Nicaragua when he was fighting the U.S. Marines…”

  “Forgive me, Big Jim, but that was when Sandino was trouncing your Marines from one side of the country to the other. I don’t mean to be rude but it is a point of national pride here. But please…” He gestured at Big Jim like a teacher who’s already assigned an A+ but wants to hear the rest.

  “Then Martí went home to El Salvador and tried to organize his own rebellion and was killed in the, the Big, the Big Manzana…”

  “Matanza,” Horacio corrected. “Manzana is apple, the Big Apple is New York. Matanza is massacre, the Great Massacre is El Salvador.”

  Big Jim kept reciting as if it was important to him to be able to account for it all. “Then Sandino was killed by the first Somoza and years later the rebels here became the Sandinista Front and the rebels there became the Farabundo Martí Front.”

  “Exactly correct, Big Jim. Thank you. You are much better informed than most visitors who come here, even our supporters.”

  Big Jim looked to his wife. “I read the books Jimmy suggested. After he got down here his letters were so full of, full of stuff I didn’t know what he was talking about, I … I…”

  Horacio reached out and took his hand. “You wanted to share his life.”

  Big Jim smiled. “When he was a kid I’d take him to all the movies. I had to know what a light saber was, the Force, a wookie. When he got older, he didn’t want to be seen at the cinema with his old man, so I used to go alone so I could keep up.”

  “‘Luke, I am your father,’” Margaret Mary intoned.

  Mother and father guffawed at the private joke so loudly it drew the attention of the other passengers.

  “He almost shit himself when I laid that line on him.” Big Jim’s face was suffused with an inner light at the memory. “He looked at me like, like…”

  “Like you were his hero,” Horacio finished it for him.

  Big Jim didn’t reply, but, rerunning the memory in his mind, he unconsciously nodded his head in agreement.

  “But then, he got into politics…”

  “Star Wars became ideological wars,” Horacio concluded.

  “I guess.”

  “And he wound up in Central America. He worked for your government?”

  “Oh no!” Margaret Mary smiled. “He hates America down here. He thought Ronald Reagan was the devil himself.”

  “A man after my own heart.” Horacio smiled with such gallantry that no one could be offended.

  Big Jim shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Don’t know where he gets it from. “He was a bit of a firebrand.”

  The VIP lounge seemed to go dead still at the simple past tense.

  “Is. Is! IS!” Big Jim’s massive shoulders—upon which, Horacio knew, the man’s son had ridden many times—rocked with emotion.

  “He works for the Democratic National Committee.” Gladys stepped in to finish the story and provide Big Jim’s pride with some cover as he failed to hide his tea
rs. “Gathering human rights reports for the certification.”

  “Ah. The semiannual farce by which the United States ‘certifies’ that the most murderous regime in the hemisphere is ‘making progress’ on human rights.”

  “He didn’t do that, though,” Gladys added. “The embassy does that. He works for some liberal American congressmen looking for counterfactual reports to challenge the certification with.”

  Horacio noted Gladys’s use of “American” instead of “gringo.” Three years in Miami was changing her.

  “So he might have been viewed by the Salvadoran government as an enemy?”

  “Enemy!” Big Jim exploded. “He’s a fucking American citizen! Without us those sons of bitches would end up just like…”

  “Jim!” Margaret took her husband’s hand in her own iron grip.

  Horacio smiled. “Just like Nicaragua, Big Jim?”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “It’s quite alright, I assure you. Your government sees us as a communist nation, an enemy, and they thought they were paying to keep El Salvador from following us into the ranks of the Evil Empire.” Horacio did his best to make that last sound like he was narrating a documentary about the perils of STDs. “But if you were to ask your average, say, Salvadoran death squad assassin who his enemies were, I can assure he would list them as”—Horacio ticked them off on his fingers—“their homegrown terroristas, meaning our Marxist brothers in arms; the Communist International, meaning the Soviet Union and Cuba; terrorist sympathizers, meaning the international press corps; and communist fellow travelers, meaning the Democratic Party and its leaders in Washington.”

  “But they are part of our government,” Big Jim protested, “my son was working for a part of the U.S. government!”

  “Not in El Salvador he wasn’t.”

  Big Jim blinked big eyes. Horacio only just then noticed they were the same green as his daughter’s had been. Their son had inherited his blue eyes from his mother. As for the freckles spotting their skin like iodine raindrops, they seemed the dominant gene of their clan.

  “I don’t understand.” Big Jim sighed.