The Last Dawn

by Joe Gannon

  A security guard nearby—a Haitian, if Ajax guessed right—ambled over to the table.

  “Sorry, sir, but there is no smoking in the mall, you have to put it out or I have to ask you to leave.”

  “Of course, I’m terribly sorry.” Reynaldo stuck the cigar into the leftovers of Ajax’s banana split.

  “I wasn’t finished with that.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The security guard picked up Ajax’s ruined dessert and slipped a manila envelope from his jacket and left it on the table as he went.

  “A friend of mine,” Reynaldo explained and slid the envelope to Ajax. “Inside are your passports, letters of introduction, and your cover stories—you are two right-wing Havana-born gusanos with lots of money to spread around among the victims of communist terrorism in El Salvador. Of course, as you are not actually going to donate the money, I don’t actually have to give it to you.”

  “And the Salvadorans would buy that story?” Gladys asked.

  “Buy it? They threw themselves at it! El Salvador is like the plain girl at a school dance—she desperately hopes a boy from the football team will cast a glance her way. And America, you know, is the handsome quarterback. But El Salvador is the plainest of the plain, downright homely—crooked-toothed and unibrowed.” He spread his hands to take them in. “If the water boy asks her to dance, she will feel like Cinderella.”

  “You do like to talk.” Gladys wasn’t asking.

  “Gladys, the ruling clique in El Salvador has no friends anywhere in the world other than the American government, and, well, I think we all know what a mixed blessing that can be.”

  Ajax smiled. Not for the first time he found himself united with what should be a political enemy agreeing on the mixed blessing of being America’s pet. It seemed no matter the ideology, all Latin Americans had the same lament as their credo: So far from God, so near to the United States.

  Reynaldo reached into the envelope. “Your flight leaves in the morning. Your passports are only good for travel to El Salvador. If they are used in any other port they will be canceled within forty-eight hours. But that is also your escape plan. If you need to flee by any, let us say, unofficial route, you will have two days to get back to the U.S. After that you are stateless. In El Salvador I have arranged one friendly contact for you—the code name is Mata Sofá.”

  Ajax laughed. “Couch killer?”

  “I’m sure there is an amusing story behind the name,” Reynaldo said, but to Ajax he didn’t look amused. “They will make contact with you using that name. Also, in the American embassy a political officer named Michaelson is aware of your mission, the official cover only, should you need a contact there.”

  Gladys reached for the envelope, but Reynaldo slapped his hand down on it.

  “There are also, as of early this morning, three photographs that have just come into my possession that might make your trip unnecessary.”

  “Then why didn’t you start out with that information?” Gladys seemed anxious, or angry. She forced the envelope from Reynaldo’s hand.

  “I was paid for what else is in this envelope. The photographs I include for free, out of friendship.”

  “Friendship? Between us?”

  Now Ajax could hear the true believer in Gladys—no matter how badly the Sandinista government had treated them both, Gladys was still with the Revo, and this right-wing Cuban hijo de puta was still her enemy.

  Reynaldo stood up, placed his hand over his heart. “Gladys, the old world order is gone.” He turned both palms up, like weighing something on a scale. “Balancing between left and right, the Soviets, the Americans, all gone.” He hid one hand behind his back like a magician at a children’s party. “And what happens when the United States no longer has to bid for the loyalty of its friends? No longer has a bogeyman to shake at you? No longer has a rival for its power and dictates?” He brought his hand from behind his back—in it was a fresh Montecristo. “We Latin Americans will soon be looking to each other. Time for us to be friends, or the Goliath to the north will devour us all.”

  Gladys ripped open the manila envelope and spilled the contents onto the table.

  “Oh shit!”

  She blanched at the three eight-by-eleven color photographs of a brutally mangled body, dead many times over from the looks of it. One was a close-up of a pulped face, unrecognizable. Another, a full-length body shot revealing severe lacerations on the buttocks and legs, the victim’s thumbs tied behind his back. The final photo was full frontal. The corpse was not much tortured on the front, except for a sickening swelling around the genitals.

  The body was of a young, white Anglo with orange-red hair.

  Young Peck.

  He had not died well.

  “Goddamn it!” Gladys looked away.

  Ajax, however, could not take his eyes off the gruesome images. That pale white skin, the same as Amelia’s. That same red hair so orange Ajax had called her Jugo for jugo de naranja—orange juice. Looking at the photos took Ajax back to that terrible moment in the church in Matagalpa when he’d said good-bye to Amelia’s bullet-riddled body.

  There had been six of them, the three Nicas she was taking out, a journalist named Connelly that Ajax had partnered with, and a priest named Father Jerome. They had all been at a coffee finca in one of the worst war zones in northern Nicaragua. The farm had belonged to the man whose murder Ajax had been investigating. It’d been too dangerous then, as it would be even now, for Ajax to travel alone to, so he had pretended to be the journalist’s driver and fixer as a disguise.

  At the time three years ago, everyone had wanted to insist the victim was murdered by the Contras. Ajax hadn’t bought it so he and Connelly had trooped off into the bush to find the local Contra commander and eliminate them as a suspect.

  That’s when he’d met Krill.

  Ajax had thought he’d figured out the whole mystery and rushed off back to Managua to bust Malhora, and in doing so left Amelia and the rest at the finca.

  The next time he saw them all was in the nave of the cathedral in Matagalpa, ripped from corona a culo with bullets. He’d cut a lock of that orange hair of hers and carried it until the Hondurans tossed him naked into his first jail cell.

  For three years he’d chased away the why? of his fate in prison, in the madhouse, with that image of Amelia’s body. He knew what his penance was for. There even had been times at night, in his dreams, when he’d relived their stolen season: her voice, her laugh, that mad hair. The pale skin, the freckles speckled over her body like chocolate flakes on strawberry-vanilla ice cream.

  Those freckles.

  “So.” Reynaldo held out his hands. “Maybe your mission is not so pressing.”

  Suddenly Ajax found this Cuban very interesting.

  “Dead or alive,” Gladys said.

  “Who?”

  “We bring him home, dead or alive. That’s the mission.”

  “Very well, my friends.” Reynaldo stood. “Good luck.” He shook Ajax’s hand. “God bless.” He offered a hand to Gladys who, to Ajax’s eyes, only pretended to study the morgue photos so closely she did not notice. Reynaldo strolled away and Ajax saw the Haitian security guard follow at a discreet distance. For some reason Reynaldo made him think of Horacio de la Vega.

  “What do we tell the Pecks?” Gladys was turning the photos facedown.

  “Nothing.” Ajax turned the photos back over, but did not take his eyes off Reynaldo’s back. “That’s not young Peck.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the photos, Gladys. Don’t see the gruesome death, see the body. You met Amelia?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And her parents.”

  “So?”

  “They share that dominant Celtic gene: red hair, pale skin, blue or green eyes, and freckles. Amelia was covered in them.”

  Gladys checked the photos again. She finally saw. “Freckles?”

  “No freckles.”

  “No freckles.”

  “No freck
les, no Peck. It’s not him.”

  “But…”

  “And no buts. Come on!”

  13

  Ajax had sent Gladys sprinting for her car while he took a spot out front to watch for Reynaldo’s car. It had taken her a couple minutes to pull up. In that time, Ajax had felt the change come over him. His step had quickened, his senses sharpened, like some great telescope coming into focus after years of disuse. A slow broil of anger warmed his guts. He had a mission. He was coming back to life.

  When they saw Reynaldo drive past, they pulled out behind him. Their two cars said a lot, Ajax thought. Gladys was driving a Yugo—a Yugoslavian compact and one of the most ridiculous cars ever made. It reminded Ajax of his old Lada back in Managua. The Lada was the Soviet Union’s answer to the “people’s car”—an affordable model for every member of the proud proletariat. It was also a complete piece of shit, which was of little import in a country where customer service was run by the KGB.

  Reynaldo, however, drove a Chevy Impala, almost as old as Gladys was.

  “Don’t lose him.”

  “I know how to tail someone. You think your Cuban’s dirty?”

  “He’s not my Cuban, and we don’t know his game.”

  “The passports looked legit.”

  “Exactly. His job is to get us there, and he lays these photos on us and a reason not to go?”

  “Maybe it is young Peck.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Now you say ‘maybe.’”

  “No, you said it. I know it’s not him. So why does this Cuban drop another dead body on us?”

  “Another? You said ‘another.’”

  “If young Peck’s been taken by the death squads, he’s dead.”

  “Then why are we going?”

  “It’s the mission. Watch him now.”

  Reynaldo’s car left the expressway and headed into the heart of Miami. They rode in silence a while. Ajax was trying to get comfortable in the Yugo’s cramped bucket seat. “Jesus, Gladys, you just can’t let go, can you?”

  “Me? Me!” She exploded. “I can’t let go? Look at yourself! Three years in hell and first thing you think you can go back and fight old battles? I’m sorry, Ajax, but she’s dead. Amelia is dead. The people with her are dead. The men who killed her are dead. Look at the fucking photos! Peck is dead. There’s no reason for you to put yourself in danger. But no, Ajax Montoya knows different because of the Case of the Missing Freckles. Who can’t let go, Ajax!”

  There was a long pause as oxygen came back into the cramped space.

  “I was talking about your car.”

  “My what!”

  “The Yugo, Gladys. It’s like the Ladas back in Managua. You come to the capital of capitalism and buy a fucking socialist Yugo is what I was talking about.”

  Ajax actually counted to six before Gladys’s eyes cleared and she understood.

  “My car?”

  “Yeah. Get yourself a Mustang.”

  “Fuck Fords.”

  They followed Reynaldo, but the signs pointing to Calle Ocho told Ajax they were headed to Little Havana. Ajax watched the homes and mini-malls go by his window, the restaurants and small businesses, the soaring palm trees lining the streets and the palmetto bushes squatting in every yard. It wasn’t hot in Miami in November, just like in Managua, so Ajax rolled the window down. Air gusted into the car. The breeze, Ajax realized, might have begun in the actual Havana, only ninety miles away.

  Inside the bubble of her car, Ajax had the feeling all of Miami was under glass, the terrarium of some giant kid who enjoyed watching the neat comings and goings of his pets. He knew there had to be another Miami, or other Miamis, darker, dirtier, poorer. But he’d not seen them yet. Gladys turned west onto Calle Ocho, Little Havana, where you might not ever hear English spoken. They’d cruised it a few times since their arrival, but as they were trying to keep a low profile in case any blowback followed them from Managua, they’d not dared more than just cruising.

  Cruised it.

  Ajax had forgotten how much time Americans spent in their cars, or rather how much driving itself was thought to be a social end, rather than a means of transport. He’d certainly spent his early teens cruising L.A.—the drive from his family’s North Hollywood home to the skanky streets of the Hollywood was often the only action he and his friends saw.

  Still, Little Havana enchanted him. It was like a small Latin American theme park at Disney World—as if all the best bits of the continent had been swept clean and put on display: Cuban coffee houses with crowded tables and domino boards, hole-in-the-wall Dominican restaurants, Argentine parrilladas brimming with beef and Mendoza wines. But all Disneyfied, scrubbed clean of the homeland’s blood, sweat, and tears. No potholes or broken sewer lines, no crumpled sidewalks, corrupt military police, nor the flotsam of third-world poverty hovering everywhere like memento mori.

  Suddenly, Gladys made an illegal U-turn and parked a half block past an upscale Cuban café in the heart of Little Havana, the sidewalk in front crowded with small tables. She adjusted her rearview mirror to catch the sidewalk customers.

  “There he is.”

  Ajax adjusted his own mirror to watch.

  Reynaldo pulled over in front of the café. A squat man detached himself from a chair and greeted Reynaldo as he hit the sidewalk. Reynaldo gave him the keys and the guy drove the car off.

  “Valet parking?” he asked.

  “Not likely.”

  “Then he’s got another meeting set up.”

  Ajax nodded out the window. “You knew the real Havana, didn’t you? I mean the Cuban one. I mean, you know…”

  “Sure. The police academy was near the Malecón. Class of eighty-five.” She shifted in her seat to face him. “So, you ever meet the comandante?”

  “Fidel? Sure. Back in the seventies, before the triumph. All the factions showed up. He laid on quite the feast and we all lined up like kids in a locker room while Babe Ruth shook our hands. When I got introduced, Fidel goes, ‘Ah, the gringo.’”

  “No way!”

  “Right there in front of everybody. It was funny Gladys, ’cause I’d forgotten all that … growing up in L.A.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing. Horacio put his arm around me and said, ‘Not this one, Comandante, we reclaimed him from exile.’”

  “So it was cool?”

  “Thought it was ’til this colonel from State Security slid up on me and asked for a word.”

  “Goddamn. You and State Security. They interrogate you?”

  “He took me into a side room off the banquet hall where these two dough-colored KGB agents were hip deep in mojitos and cigars.”

  “No shit? They thought you were a spy?”

  “Not really.” Ajax saw Gladys clocking the action behind them at the café, so he readjusted the Yugo’s itty-bitty side mirror to take in a better view. Doing so, he let a warm breeze fill the car. “They were vetting us, the Cubans and Russians, for later use. Which really was a good sign. If they didn’t think we would win they wouldn’t’ve bothered to vet us. I was an American-born compañero, I suppose we would’ve done the same. Anyway, one of the KGB was an old World War Two vet, Anatoly Shermanov.” Ajax smiled at the memory. “His family had been kulaks, rich peasants purged by Stalin. They recruited him out of a Siberian labor camp, sent him to Stalingrad. We got to swapping war stories, his specialty had been cutting Nazi throats.”

  Gladys recoiled a little. “So you had that in common.”

  “If you wanna call it that.” He turned to her. “He gave me the Needle.”

  “No!”

  “Yeah. Took me back up to his room. Showed it to me. Said he never was without it.” Ajax shook his head. “Funny, but he held it and told one story after another about creeping up on Germans while they were sleeping or shitting, sipping tea. And all the while he poured us one shot of Havana Club after another. After a while, I got the feeling it was him talking but the Needle telling the stori
es.”

  He looked to catch her reaction, not so much because he’d said too much, but because he hoped she might understand.

  “Bloody goddamn thing that blade.”

  “That it is,” he said.

  She adjusted her rearview mirror, pointed. “There’s his meeting. Guy in the white jacket, sleeves pushed up.”

  Ajax found him in the mirror. Early thirties, five-six, black/brown, muscled, tanned, with a jangle of gold around his neck, and a tangle of shining curls. He was talking on one of those new cellular phones that were about as small as a coffeepot with an antenna as long as a riding crop.

  “Oily-looking puto, ain’t he?”

  “Jheri Curl.”

  “Who?”

  “His hair, it’s called Jheri Curl. Black dudes use it mostly, but some Cubans, too, if they got kinky hair.”

  “He looks like that guy from Miami Vice.”

  “Which one?”

  “Your man there.”

  “Which character?”

  “Oh. The white guy’s jacket and the black guy’s hair. Who is he?”

  “The white guy? Don Johnson.”

  “Not the show, the café guy.”

  Gladys drew binoculars not much bigger than opera glasses from a bag on the backseat. She slumped down and peeped the oily Don Johnson.

  “Puta!” Gladys said it in the Nicaraguan fashion, drawing out the Us so it came out Puuuuuta! “I know that guy.” She peeped him again through the glass. “He’s a coyote. Human smuggler.”

  “I know what a coyote is, Gladys. How do you know him?”

  “I’ve been working with this church group.” She shrugged like it was a small thing. “Sanctuary movement. Refugees come in, mostly Salvadorans and Guatemalans. They make landfall, the churches take them in—sanctuary. I help reunite them with families. Mostly long-haul driving, but if they don’t know where their family is I find them, treat it like missing persons work.”

  Ajax smiled. “Gladys Darío, you’re a private dick!”

  She shot him a look that could sharpen a knife.

  “A detective. Missing persons work, you’re a P.I.”

  “Yeah.” She studied the coyote and Reynaldo through the glass. “Except for the part where I don’t get paid.”