The Last Dawn

by Joe Gannon

  Gladys’s mother had given him the spare room. She’d hardly spoken a word to him since he’d arrived, thinking him, he was sure, as bad an omen as could be imagined. Or maybe she blamed him for what had happened to her daughter.

  It was a nice house. Done up with a tasteful mix of Central American and Spanish design. Panamanian rattan chairs, old-forest mahogany from decades ago, Mayan-style pottery from Honduras, and beautifully framed prints by Spanish old masters. On the wall over his bed was a print of a Goya, The Third of May 1808, from the Napoleonic Wars. The massacre in Madrid. A clutch of Spanish men, civilians but maybe anti-French guerrillas, stand in a slaughterhouse of corpses. Opposite them a firing squad of faceless French dragoons, muskets leveled, about to shoot. The central figure, clad in white, arms raised, not so much in surrender, it seemed to Ajax, but rebuke or resistance. The last act of a doomed man? Or maybe he was stepping forward to speak for himself and the others, who cower behind him.

  Ajax, too, had once believed that it was better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. He’d killed a lot of men, and sent even more to their death, believing that. But looking at the Goya he found nothing heroic in the pose. He wasn’t sure why.

  He finished packing, drew the curtains on Coral Gables with its manatees and malls, stripped to his skivvies, and slid between the sheets, which filled him with as erotic a feeling as that first banana split had.

  * * *

  Ajax awoke in the dark. Naked. Cold. The sheets off. The Needle in his hand, as naked out of its sheath as he was. The curtains were open and moonlight flooded the room.

  And he knew he was not alone.

  “So you’ve finally come.”

  He didn’t have to look, to strain in the pale light to make out who stood at the end of his bed. There was no doubt the boy with the long eyelashes was standing there. Ajax hadn’t seen him since the airplane, but he knew he’d come, or maybe feared he wouldn’t. But he’d had the feeling when he’d slid the blade out to oil it that the boy would visit, or materialize or whatever ghosts do. He’d rubbed the Needle’s long, elegant blade like a lamp and his genie appeared. But this genie was a specter of nightmare—the ghost of a young boy, a soldier, who in death still bore the horrid gash across his neck where Ajax had slit his throat and bled him out ten years before. The front of his fatigues, saturated in blood, appeared as wet with the gore of death as the night Ajax had murdered him.

  And Ajax had always thought of it as murder.

  Well, in truth, no, he hadn’t. He hadn’t thought about the boy much at all for years, what with the Ogre’s downfall, the Revo’s triumph, and that cocksucker Reagan unleashing the Contras on Nicaragua like a pestilence. But of all the killing Ajax had done, God help him, there was only the boy with the long eyelashes whose death had filled him with shame the moment he’d slipped the Needle into his jugular and sliced out.

  That had all changed three years ago when Ajax had gotten sober and initially confused his haunting with insanity. The ghost had materialized slowly over a few weeks, appearing first as a formless entity outside Ajax’s window, but by degrees he (it?) had taken shape. Until that night in Krill’s camp after he and the journalist Matthew Connelly had deliberately been taken prisoner while solving the murder of a coffee grower. Krill had planned an elaborate and gruesome death for Ajax, but the ghost, whom Ajax had assumed had come for revenge, instead came to his rescue. In a trick Ajax still did not want to think too long on, the ghost had appeared in Krill’s camp in the dead of night and actually passed the Needle to Ajax. Put it in my hand! It still made no sense, but one moment Ajax was tied to a tree and doomed to an auto-da-fé worthy of Torquemada, and the next he held the Needle and had become the Angel of Death. He’d left a dozen butchered corpses behind in Krill’s camp.

  And the boy had stayed with him until he’d gone into Honduras to get Gladys. Then, nothing, until that night on the plane from Managua.

  The boy stood at the foot of the bed, his gaze, it seemed to Ajax, lingering on the painting. Ajax threw back the sheet and dropped his feet heavily to the floor. The cool tile sent a tingle up his legs so he walked to the window, his eyes scanning the night, sweeping left to right and back again. For what? For whatever was there.

  “Crazy, right? That’s what you think? Crazy?”

  Finding no danger outside, Ajax turned to the boy.

  “Three years. Was it?” He shook his head. “I can’t find them, can’t feel them. It’s like, it’s like chess pieces when the players walk away. Does the earth turn? Or is it just play or not play?”

  Ajax retrieved his bag, dropped it on the bed, and slipped into his trousers.

  “All that time, it was like sucking water out of a needle. All those months listening to El Gordo talk. And then three days ago—three fucking days ago!—he starts talking murder.” Ajax turned to the Goya print and threw his arms out like the figure in white. “Three days ago! And then the next second,” he snapped his fingers, “they show up. Horacio, Gladys. Her parents, bearing her letter. Her voice.”

  Her voice.

  He dropped his hands to his sides. “And no more time. Touch the pieces, the game resumes. It’s yesterday, in the cathedral. I cut her hair, put some in my pocket.” He slipped his hands into his pockets, expecting the orange relic to be there. He looked at the boy’s face and for the first time Ajax considered the ghost as a presence, an existence.

  “Is that what it’s like for you? You wait to be touched, summoned?”

  The boy just stared at the Goya print. What did he see? Was it a warning to Ajax? Did the ghost foresee Ajax standing before that firing squad? The boy seemed transfixed by the print, then he got it: “That’s you, isn’t it? The man in white? I thought it might be me.”

  Then footsteps in the hallway. A knock.

  “Ajax? You ready?”

  15

  El Salvador, November 2, 1989

  El Salvador from above, like all of the Central American land bridge, is an immense green steppe in the rainy season. But as with so much about the country, it is all packed into a too-small place. It is blessed with more rivers, lakes, and water than much of the region, but cursed with more active volcanoes than most places on earth.

  Ajax reviewed all this in his mind as his charter plane began its decent into Ilopango Airport outside San Salvador. For luck, or nervousness, he fingered his new American passport and reviewed his cover story. For the sake of ease, or maybe superstition, he’d taken the name Martin Garcia—the same pseudonym he’d used in Nicaragua when traveling with Connelly and Amelia. Gladys had taken Gladys Batista—her phony surname the same as the last dictator of Cuba.

  Amigos de America was the front group created by Reynaldo Gavilan back in Miami and Ajax carried paperwork and brochures—repurposed from the plethora of anti-Castro groups in Miami—to further cement the cover story. At almost the last minute Reynaldo, insisting on maximizing their safety, had chartered a smallish Gulfstream jet and filled the belly with “donations for the victims of communist aggression” to be distributed upon arrival.

  Ajax had made sure he watched the cargo get loaded. There were barrels of what looked like vitamins, crates of assorted other odds and ends—cold remedies, aspirin, hydrogen peroxide, mouthwash, toothpaste, some of which were already opened and only half full. The sad look of whatever people had grabbed out of their medicine cabinets and tossed in a donation box. Then there were other crates of toys for the children. He’d opened a few at random and was struck by one in particular: a “Mr. T Water War Toy.” It looked like a plastic bust of a black man and the instructions said if you filled him with water and hit him in the face with a wet sponge he would spit water back at you. All you needed was a garden hose and sponges.

  Ajax had no idea who Mr. T might be, but he made a mental note to count how many garden hoses he came across in the barrios and refugee camps.

  But he didn’t begrudge Reynaldo his skinflint ways. He and they knew it was a front. But he did worry
his hosts might sniff the miserly nature of the donation.

  Ajax studied Gladys who was studying the landscape from her window seat.

  “Looks just like home, doesn’t it?”

  “Everything looks the same from up here.” She turned from the window and shut the shade.

  “All good?”

  “I’m fine, Ajax, good. Just trying to remember about the Spanish.”

  The accents among Latin Americans were as pronounced, as identifiable, as the English of a New Yorker or a Texan in the States. Cubans were famous for rapid-fire Spanish. Nicaraguans spoke it slower and tended to eat their S’s, so that a phrase like, Asi es, pues—so it goes—became Asi e’ pue. They would have to mind that difference.

  The captain’s voice came over the intercom telling them to buckle up for landing.

  * * *

  Maximiliano Hernández Martínez III had what in El Salvador passed for a blueblood pedigree: his grandfather had been the General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, a notorious nut job, a voodoo practitioner, alchemist, and occultist who—regularly during his bloody reign in the 1930s—would strangle the capital in miles of colored lights to fight off the smallpox that just as regularly would kill hundreds in the multicolored glow, leaving San Salvador looking like a plague tent in Santa’s Village. It was the general who had launched La Matanza in 1932, the greatest single slaughter of human life in the Americas since Cortez had wiped out the Aztecs. The general’s army had exterminated almost the entire Indian population of El Salvador in a matter of months, and only using machetes and bolt-action rifles to do it. When asked by a foreigner about the slaughter, the general, a great believer in reincarnation, had said, “It is a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, for when a man dies he becomes reincarnated, while an ant dies forever.”

  If you translated it into Latin, Ajax thought, it’d make as good a motto as any for today’s El Salvador as well.

  But the general was still a hero in his homeland, the same way, Ajax thought as he eyeballed the grandson, Himmler would’ve been a half-century later had the Nazis won.

  And Himmler’s grandson might dress as ridiculously as the dandified mosaic of a man waiting for him and Gladys at Ilopango Airport. They’d agreed in Miami that one of the biggest dangers in the mission was being spotted by a journalist on a commercial flight, so they’d chartered this small Gulfstream, courtesy of Senator Teal.

  The plane taxied to a stop on the military side of the international airport where Little Max, as Ajax now named him, waited with a small entourage and three Jeep Cherokees with smoke-blacked windows.

  “Jesus Christ, would you look at that!” Gladys leaned over Ajax to get a look out the small window. “That him?”

  “Gotta be.”

  He understood her incredulity. Little Max wore his clothes and styles like a map of all the places he had been, but also as proof that he was not some yokel but a sophisticated jet-setter, just like a yokel might line their walls with all the swag they’d bought in airports around the world, but without ever having left the terminals.

  Little Max wore a white sport coat just like that cop from the TV show in Miami, only Max’s was made of a fine leather, probably European Ajax guessed, and that clung to him in the heat so that Max sweated rivulets down his face behind big sunglasses which screamed Beverly Hills. His hair was done in the perm style Ajax had noticed in Miami, but his pants had a narrow, skinny cut that made Ajax think of Italy for some reason. His shiny shoes—reflecting the tropical sun back into his face so that he really did need those shades—were made by some actual human hands somewhere—London?

  Each bit of wardrobe was like a stamp in his passport. Ajax guessed Little Max had been schooled in the States and then topped off at some finishing school in Europe, probably civilizing Switzerland, before coming home exactly as uncivilized as he had left it.

  “What the fuck does he think he looks like?” Gladys almost giggled.

  “You can take the Himmlers out of Bavaria but you can’t take Bavaria out of Himmler.”

  “What?”

  “He only looks like a clown, Gladys. I’d be more encouraged if he actually was more sophisticated.”

  Their Gulfstream came to a soft stop. The pretty stewardess who’d kept them comfortable and Ajax in cold Cokes unfastened the door and lowered it down to unveil the stairs.

  “Be careful with these types, Gladys. He’s come to meet some big-shot Miami Cubans, which makes us cubanos-gringos, and he’s putting on his best to show us he does not feel inferior to us, which shows us just how inferior he does feel. Follow?”

  “Yes.”

  “But if we embarrass him, show him just how unsophisticated he is? These types will slaughter you to prove they’re as good as you. Follow?”

  “He’s flamboyant, but also flammable.”

  They stepped off the plane.

  “Welcome my friends, welcome to El Salvador!”

  Little Max greeted them with an excess of bonhomie that Ajax would later diagnosis as borderline psychosis. He seized Ajax’s hand in a manly crush and engulfed him in a bear hug that left Ajax impregnated with the man’s cologne, which was as subtle as his attire. He gave an elaborate bow to Gladys, then planted a kiss on her cheek, which Ajax knew would have her rubbing it down with towelettes at the first opportunity, but on the tarmac she took it in stride.

  “We are honored to the depths of our soul to have such guests visit us. How was your flight?”

  “Short,” Ajax said.

  “Ah yes, only two hours from Miami, but as you will see, you have been time traveling as well. My country is two centuries behind yours. Let my men get your things.”

  And it was his “men” who most interested Ajax. Little Max had an entourage of twelve, bodyguards he was sure, in three Jeep Cherokees and a covered pickup truck. The bodyguards were dressed more sanely than Little Max, but each had a bulge where a sidearm was concealed, and Ajax could see the muzzles of automatic rifles peeking over the dashboards of their Jeeps.

  Those Jeep Cherokees with smoked windows were the vehicle of choice for El Salvador’s notorious death squads—and were as sure a sign of your demise as the Reaper himself knocking at your door.

  Two of the men relieved them of their luggage and led them to Little Max’s Jeep. Max got in the front and Ajax and Gladys in the back. From the heft of the door when he shut it, Ajax could tell the Jeep was armored.

  “My men will unload your generous gifts and see them safely to the camps.” Max smiled.

  Ajax was sure he meant refugee camps, or hoped he did.

  Little Max kept up a polite patter as they and a second Jeep pulled away. The third Jeep and pickup rolled toward the Gulfstream to unload it. Ajax couldn’t see what was in the pickup, but he had the feeling it wasn’t empty.

  They drove from the military side of the airport, with its rows of American helicopters, gunships, and a handful of newish-looking jets, if Ajax guessed right, all heavily patrolled by soldiers and dogs, to a gate so loaded with iron spikes and sandbagged machine-gun nests it might’ve been the Gates of Hell. He also noted a large cargo plane with AIR AMERICA painted on the side. He tapped Gladys’s knee so she saw it too.

  At the approach of their little convoy the guards snapped to attention and saluted. Max dismissed them with a wave and they rolled through without stopping and were soon doing better than eighty down the highway to the capital. Fast-moving targets are harder to hit.

  “We don’t have to go through immigration?” Gladys seemed to ask more out of curiosity than concern.

  Max turned and smiled. “Allow me to say that I am immigration. These are all you’ll need.”

  He handed them ID cards identifying them as members of ORDEN. Ajax felt Gladys’s eyes briefly flick to him and back. He understood. ORDEN, Spanish for order, was the original political party all the death squads had united under ten years ago, lorded over by a genuine Prince of Darkness—Roberto D’Aubuisson. But ORDEN had become so blood-spat
tered, so synonymous with murderous terror, that to actually stand candidates for political office they’d had to change their name to ARENA, Spanish for sand.

  It wasn’t a perfect analogy, Ajax knew, but if ARENA was like the Nazi party, which included as many regular folk as it did psychos, ORDEN was like the SS—only psychos allowed.

  It was a testament to how tight their cover was that Little Max thought they would be flattered by the gesture.

  “You show these to anyone, with your passports, and you will see what honored guests you are.”

  Ajax took his and expressed his gratitude, but he was alarmed to see the IDs already had their photos on them. Gladys noticed, too, and gently banged his leg with hers.

  “So, you’ve never been to El Salvador before, eh?”

  “No, never had the pleasure.” Ajax slipped the ID into his passport.

  “Well, why should you have?” Little Max waved, dismissing the entire country just as he had done the airport guards. “If I couldn’t get to Miami three or four times a year, I’d blow my brains out.” He produced a .44 revolver and pointed it at his head.

  “You have a visa for the States?” Ajax meant it as a pop quiz for Little Max.

  “Oh no, I have a green card.”

  And there it was. A flash of pride at having that most coveted of objects—the American green card. It was a function of the highly confused Central American psyche. In a certain class of people one’s loyalty to one’s own country was tempered with a desire to ditch the poverty and the violence of your patria, no matter how high your status, for a green card that guaranteed you entry to America, no matter how low your status there would be.

  The Contras in Nicaragua were the same way, or at least the leadership in Miami and Honduras were. Play the gringos’ game however they wanted it in exchange for unimpeded access to El Norte. And if the gringos’ best-laid plans went south? You just had to up stakes and go north. But how loyal could you be to a cause from which you had a first-class ticket out? The foot soldiers didn’t have such a pass. People like Krill, they had to stay and die—either in battle or in the revenge killings after defeat. Their leaders were all guaranteed a seat on the last plane out.