by Joe Gannon
Ajax modestly gathered some bubbles around his chest. “It’s called priva-fucking-cy.”
“What were you doing with the hair dryer while you’re still in the goddamn tub, anyways?”
“Can I finish?”
Gladys should’ve been mortified to be in his naked presence, but somehow her assumption he’d done himself harm made her feel disloyal, and she still wasn’t sure all was well. She collected her electronics, and as she did, she noticed the soapy spires rising up out of the tub like pyramids.
“You making soap sculptures with my hair dryer?”
“Get out!”
“Teal’s here.”
“What?”
“Senator Teal. He’s in the courtyard.”
Gladys fled as he rose from the tub.
She found the two pencil marks on top of the fridge, which marked where the TV had to sit. She returned the clock radio to her bedside table and set it at a 45-degree angle, set the volume to 4.5 and made sure the alarm was still set to 6:55. Then she gave them both a good wiping down. When her world was restored enough to reestablish her elusive calm, she fetched Teal from the courtyard.
* * *
The last time Ajax had seen Senator Anthony Teal was outside a cathedral in Nicaragua where he’d gone to collect Amelia Peck’s bullet-ridden body. Back then he’d been the kind of gringo Ajax despised: rich, powerful, and clueless. Three years ago he’d treated Ajax’s country like a game of Monopoly. The man before him still had his frat-boy good looks, but there was a touch of salt in the pepper that made him seem a more serious player.
“Senator Teal.”
“Captain Montoya.”
“Just Ajax.”
Teal blanched. Ajax assumed he knew the history.
“I hope I didn’t have anything, I mean … well…”
As articulate as ever, Ajax thought. “How can we help, Senator?”
“The Pecks called when they got back. They said, well, I’d hoped, we’d hoped, but…”
“They told you I was a useless shell.”
“Yes. I’m glad you’re not!” Teal threw up his hands. “But…”
“You called Gladys anyways.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’d heard, no, I mean, I’d hoped … hoped.” Teal dropped his head. “I owe the Pecks so much. Amelia, too, she…”
Got me reelected. Ajax kept that one to himself.
“You want us to go find their son.”
“Yes! Please! I mean, I know you don’t owe me anything. But, still, you … she…” Teal shook his head in surrender, defeated by the complexity of it all.
Ajax checked in with Gladys—the slightest of nods and she was in.
“We have to move fast, Senator. Do you know what this will take? Passports, cover story, money? You have that kind of pull?”
“I do. I mean I can. There’s a guy … well, that sounds … but he’ll contact you in two days. He’ll arrange all that. Has arranged it.”
Ajax looked Teal over. He seemed out of his depth, out of his element—a second-term Republican senator playing snakes and ladders with someone like Ajax. It didn’t add up. Still, guilt was a harsh overseer, Ajax could witness that.
“Senator, you keep the Pecks misinformed of my condition. The chances of finding their boy alive are slim. And if he’s dead there’ll be no body. You keep them believing it’s hopeless, they won’t be disappointed.”
“Yes! I can, I will. Thank you.” Teal almost leaped to his feet and, it seemed to Ajax, was relieved to have it done with. He shook their hands, lingered, Ajax felt, a bit too long.
“You know, Captain, uh, Ajax, it’s still, you know … our countries … I mean even with Eastern Europe, our countries, your country … well actually our countries, umm, I don’t want you to think I don’t…”
“Our countries are technically still at war and we should not contact you directly. When we get back we will inform the Pecks, they’ll let you know.”
“Yes! Thank you. Thank you.” He shook their hands again, the politician’s reflex—when in doubt, press the flesh. He looked around Gladys’s apartment like there might be a baby for him to kiss. “Well, thanks again. God bless Ameri … I mean, God bless you both.”
Senator Teal left, taking, it struck Ajax, far too much care closing the door. He and Gladys stood in silence a moment.
“You drove him here, Gladys?”
“Yep.”
“How long you think he’ll stand outside before he realizes he doesn’t have a ride?”
“Maybe all day.”
“That man might be president someday.”
“God bless America.”
Ajax laughed. “Get him to the airport.”
* * *
Horacio de la Vega Cárdenas gripped the day’s Miami Herald and used it for camouflage, its front page frenzied with news from Europe where old borders and old orders were coming undone faster than belt buckles in a whorehouse. He’d watched Tony Teal settle into the VIP lounge at Miami International and order a double single-malt on the rocks. He needed Teal just off-kilter so he waited until the senator had that first long sip, and had exhaled in satisfaction before he approached.
“My operatives are on board?”
Teal almost baptized himself in Glenlivet. “Why are … we … I can’t be seen with you.”
“You’re not being seen with me, Senator. You’re having a rather early drink in the VIP lounge, and an old man has sat down next to you to read the paper. Calm yourself. Time is important here, are my operatives on board?”
Teal looked around the lounge. “They’re not coming with me.”
Horacio took a long, quiet breath and said a silent, secular prayer for patience. “Not on board the flight, Senator, on board with the plan?”
“Yes. Yes. They’ll go.”
“Good. And the rest? Their papers? Passports?”
“Two days, it was the fastest I could, you know, get them.”
“That will do. Now, if all goes to plan we won’t meet again.”
Horacio folded the paper, he thought to toss it—the Herald had been no friend to the Revo for all these years—but reconsidered. Capital H history was happening in the old Soviet Bloc, maybe he should keep it for his files.
“Wait!” Teal set his scotch down with a splash. “I need a body for this to work, at least that. You promised.”
“And you have promised six votes on the Contra Relocation Bill.”
“You’ll have them!”
“And you will have young Peck—or at least his body. If anyone can accomplish this it is them. It’s why I chose them.”
Teal took a long pull on the scotch, sucked an ice cube into this mouth, and cracked it, searching, Horacio knew, for resolve.
“Senator, it is not easy for us to trust, but you reached out to me. Time is of the essence so unless you want the Pecks’ only remaining child also to be devoured by the cannibal of collateral damage, then trust we must. And the risk is mine: I must act now but this Contra vote might not be for weeks. Correct?”
Teal’s eye darted around the lounge, which was whisper quiet and smelled of citrus. He nodded. “Alive would help.”
“But in any event, his body.”
Teal took another drink, and swallowed rapidly.
12
Ajax slid the long tool between the two white flanks and into the sweet goop buried inside. The flanks yielded to his by-now expert technique. Once all the way inside, he slowly twirled his tool until it was covered, drew it out with excruciating patience, and used his mouth to clean off the dripping ooze.
It was his second banana split in a row, yet no less satisfying for it.
He and Gladys had been waiting for an hour on the mezzanine in Miami’s South Beach mall for their contact to show. Ajax was killing three birds with one stone: air-conditioning, ice cream, and immersion in an America he’d not seen for twenty years.
“You make that look…” Gladys didn’t
finish.
Ajax slowly drew the spoon out of his mouth. “Delicious?”
“I was gonna say repulsive.”
“Oh come on, Gladys! This is doctor’s orders.”
Ajax swept his hand over the mall—the pride of South Beach, which was the pride of Miami, or so he’d been told. They’d been two days in the city and Ajax allowed himself a moment of giddiness at the casual excess of America.
Gladys, he’d noticed, was less giddy. The more they were around each other the more awkward she became.
“Actually you suggested it to the doctor,” she noted.
Ajax had had a full physical that morning. The doctor pronounced him fit if a bit malnourished. Gladys had asked what to do, and the doctor had asked Ajax: he’d said three things and now here he was, at a Ben and Jerry’s getting them all. He was delirious. Families of Anglos and Cubans idly patrolled the floors, their kids crying or smiling as the fleeting truth of their lives dictated. Teenagers flirted and gossiped, and monitored their reflections in the shop windows. And the shops! Ajax could almost literally not believe, not factor or fathom the seemingly infinite shit for sale. And every single thing, the walls and floors, every item arrayed in endless displays, even the air itself was perfectly cooled—temperature and humidity flawlessly controlled. A catchy salsa tune by Gloria Estefan, the Cuban-American pop singer, quietly enlivened the place, while reruns of Miami Vice filled an entire window of the electronics store across from the ice cream parlor.
Ajax found it glorious.
As lasciviously as possible, he spooned another heap of banana, chocolate-mint ice cream, and hot fudge into his happy mouth.
Gladys shook her head disapprovingly, but not really.
“Well at least this trip isn’t a total waste.”
Ajax smiled. She hadn’t spotted him.
Reynaldo Garcia was their contact for all things Cuban in Miami, which was saying a lot. The Cubans had arrived by their thousands thirty years previous when Fidel Castro and his band of raggedy-ass guerrillas had driven out their dictator. They had come for the refuge but stayed for the lifestyle. It was rumored the white Anglos viewed them much the way the original Seminoles had the Spanish—with much late-night gnashing of teeth that they’d not killed them all on the beach when they had the chance.
Ajax smiled.
Gladys frowned, she knew that look. “Where?”
“Next level up, white guayabera, Panama hat with a black band, and an unlit cigar.”
Gladys discreetly reconnoitered the gallery above them. “Don’t see him.”
“He’s walking the floor, when he gets to that pillar to your right, he’ll stop and eyeball us. I make him as our man, he seems pretty cagey.”
“Well, strictly speaking it’s treason for him to help us, at least among the gusanos.”
Gusano was Spanish for worm, it was how the Cuban government referred to anyone who’d fled to Miami, as if only such a low form of life would abandon subsistence living in revolutionary Cuba for, well, Ajax thought, for ice cream and shopping malls.
“He better have what we need.” Gladys ripped open a Handi Wipe from the ice cream store and gave her fingers a thorough cleaning. It was the third time that day Ajax had watched her do so.
“They say he’s the man.”
They were an oddly powerful group of people to be surrounding a couple as ordinary as Margaret Mary and Big Jim Peck. But Teal had proved he had the pull. Ajax, Gladys, and the Pecks had been met at the airport by unmanned “officials” and hurried through customs—Gladys sweating the whole way with the satchel full of money and the Needle. No one had even checked. Ajax wasn’t sure why Teal was so keen on helping the Pecks, unless it truly was guilt over the death of Amelia.
Amelia Peck.
Ajax bore her death heavily. He could understand why Teal did as well. Amelia had been on a straight PR mission in Nicaragua during Teal’s first visit as a freshman senator and disciple of the Great Cowboy Ronald Reagan. Amelia’s job had been to find a family of Nicaraguans that Teal would “take out” of the country to reunite with family already in her home state of Ohio. It was pure propaganda for the newspapers back home—get the new guy a little bloodied down south with the tropical commies. Show the folks back home he was serious about keeping them safe from the impoverished Marxist children of farmers and fruit sellers.
But Amelia had only started out that way. She’d gone into a war zone for PR, but she had stayed for Ajax. Stayed that one fatal extra day.
Fucking fool!
Fortune’s fool.
He and Amelia had tried to hew a stolen season out of their accidental meeting. And like other star-crossed lovers it had ended in death all around.
“There he is.” Gladys spotted their contact.
Reynaldo Garcia was a classic example of a Cuban caught in time. He was in his late fifties, silver-haired, clean-shaven, wearing a well-pressed white guayabera, tan slacks, and coffee-brown loafers, carrying an unlit Montecristo in a tortoiseshell cigar holder. He could’ve been in a Havana café in 1959, as well as a Miami mall in 1989.
Reynaldo sat down with them, smiled a real charmer’s smile.
“We’ll speak in English here,” he said, shaking hands with each of them. “Your Nicaraguan Spanish is very, well, let’s say very identifiable and rumors are out that some Sandinistas have arrived in Miami.”
“And how do rumors get out in this town?” Ajax asked.
“We Cubans run Miami.” He turned his palms up. “We’ve had the local muscle for some time, but your revolution, Captain Montoya, the horror of another communist nation menacing the land of the free and the home of the brave gave us national power for the first time these past ten years. Our people dominate the best jobs, too, so your little party arriving at the airport late at night, no papers but a lot of VIPs, needed five minutes before our eyes and ears passed on the word.”
Gladys and Ajax exchanged a look. Not for the first time Ajax was wishing Horacio had passed him his chrome-plated .357 Colt Python rather than the Needle. Not that they could cover him in a shootout, it was rather that Ajax felt naked since his arrival—he wore no weapons, no uniform, nor any disguise, and that, oddly, was taking some getting used to. Miami was like a very hip nudist colony—he liked it, but being bare-assed around civilians would take time to adjust to.
“Do not fear.” Reynaldo patted their hands. “We Cubans are too middle-aged now to do any real violence other than with words, and usually at dinner after a bottle of good Cuban rum.”
“You can still get that?”
“Oh yes! Montecristos.” He held up his cigar. “Havana Club rum, smuggling the old pleasures in is about as clandestine as most of us get these days.”
“Really?” Ajax slipped another spoonful of cold orgasm into his mouth. “I thought you Cubans spent most of your time prepping to parachute into Havana.”
Reynaldo smiled, shook his head, and lit his cigar, slowly rolling the end in a flame. “Miami is like Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution. Full of white Russians with money and a deep ache for revenge, but no idea whatsoever what’s going on back in Moscow. They were too in love with Paris, like we are with Miami, to ever actually go home again, except to visit and sniff at how déclassé home has become. The white Russians bled the Americans for funding for every harebrained scheme they concocted for fifty years. In the war against communism you could sell to the gringos anything you can imagine and for any price you had the balls to ask for.”
“And so you run Miami and have the American dog by the tail,” Ajax said.
Reynaldo smiled. He rolled the cigar in his fingers, as if reading a scroll. “It’s a fickle thing, getting what you wish for. We thought you Sandinistas would relaunch the war we lost at the Bay of Pigs. We couldn’t lose twice, could we?”
“You sound nostalgic.”
Reynaldo spread his hands wide. “It seems rather than relaunch the Cold War, your revolution was the last battle of that war.”
; “Was it?”
“Oh yes, look at the Soviet Union, you read the papers.”
“Not recently.” Ajax smiled.
“So I’ve heard. The Berlin Wall is gone, can you imagine? The icon of the Cold War is gone. People pulled it down with their bare hands. And no one shot them. Breaching the wall was supposed to set off World War III, nuclear apocalypse. Instead? Fireworks! Dancing in the streets. Communism is collapsing under its own load—no mushroom clouds, just an old man in the corner wetting his pants.”
“Is that why you’re helping us?”
Gladys seemed impatient with Reynaldo’s eulogy. The Cuban smiled ruefully and re-lit his intractable cigar.
“One must prepare for the post-communist world and you two have friends, it seems, who cannot be ignored.”
“But if communism is collapsing,” Gladys challenged, “doesn’t that mean the war in El Salvador has an end date?”
Reynaldo laughed, heartily and loudly, then abruptly stopped. “No. Look, I know these Salvadorans, the hardliners, the death squad Charlies who come to Miami for R and R to wash off the blood. They think Miami is what they’ll get if they kill all the communists. If they think the clock is ticking down on their war, they will only ratchet up the killing before the glory days are over. Trust me. El Salvador is still the hottest of hot wars, and you two are going into the inferno. And you might not be the only Nicaraguans pitching up in El Salvador these days.”
Ajax saw the twinkle in his eyes. Reynaldo just adored hoarding intelligence. “Meaning what?”
“Your government…”
“Not really mine, but go ahead.”
“The Sandinista government concluded a truce with the Contras not that long ago. Word is some of them, the Contras of course, were getting fat and bored and decided to freelance around the region. El Salvador, for example.”
“You wouldn’t think they’d be needed,” Ajax said.
“What? Freelancers? The Contras may not have made an effective war in your country, but some of them are effective…” Reynaldo paused, and in that pause Ajax knew he knew about Gladys and Krill.